Vincent Alo was born in East Harlem, New York on May 26, 1904, the son of immigrant parents from the Calabria Province in Southern Italy. He came of age as a prominent bootlegger, gunman, and racketeer during the “Roaring Twenties” era.
By the early 1930s, he was a formally inducted “original” member of what became the Luciano Family, headed by boss Salvatore (Charlie Lucky) Luciano. By the early 1940s, Alo was bumped up to a “capo di decina” and put in charge of a large Bronx-based regime that grew to include dozens of soldiers and hundreds more criminal “associates” of various ethnicities who dabbled in a diverse criminal portfolio.
Alo was considered to be an intimate and contemporary of such iconic Mafia figures as Luciano, Vito (Don Vitone) Genovese, Francesco (Frank Costello) Castiglia, Giuseppe (Joe Adonis) Doto, Anthony (Little Augie Pisano) Carfano, and Frank Erickson.
Around 1936, he migrated down to South Florida along with his close friend and partner, Jewish mob boss and gambling kingpin Meyer Lansky. Once there, Alo and Lansky went about expanding and consolidating their gambling interests by opening up a string of illicit, but wide-open, gambling casinos they operated in both Dade and Broward Counties as well as developing and controlling legalized hotel and gambling casinos in Las Vegas, Nevada; Havana, Cuba; Nassau, Bahamas; San Juan, Puerto Rico; and other Caribbean islands.
“Jimmy Blue Eyes” was so respected and so important a member that Luciano entrusted him to watch over the “casino skim” for the Luciano/Genovese Family. The “casino skim” entailed overseeing the borgata’s far-flung casino interests both domestically and internationally to make sure that Cosa Nostra received their fair share each month of the tax-free gambling profits being siphoned off each casino operation.
He and Lansky would then use trusted couriers to systematically ferry hundreds of thousands of dollars monthly back to New York City and Florida for redistribution among the Mafia hierarchy. There were many various “couriers” utilized through the decades for this purpose, but among the more prominent was a regime soldier named Nicholas (Bobby Blanche) Belangi.
Aside from his gambling interests with Lansky and his Jewish associates, Alo controlled a very large and lucrative crew that controlled extensive territory in The Bronx and Westchester sections of New York City. He numbered among the members of his regime some of the most notorious and deadly Mafia figures in the Luciano/Genovese Family.
Collectively, these soldiers and associates in his regime ran some of the largest gambling operations in the city, including a multimillion-dollar-a-year policy-numbers operation that had a virtual “lock” over certain sections of East Harlem and The Bronx, and multimillion-dollar horse and sports bookmaking businesses spanning Westchester County.
