When you click on links to various merchants on this site and make a purchase, this can result in this site earning a commission. Affiliate programs and affiliations include, but are not limited to, the eBay Partner Network.
Offered is a typed letter of recommendation bearing the original ink signature of Frank Costello — one of the most powerful organized crime figures in American history and widely acknowledged as a primary inspiration for Mario Puzo’s Don Vito Corleone in The Godfather. Dated March 14, 1952, and typed on Costello’s personal business letterhead at 799 Park Avenue, New York, N.Y., this single-page foolscap document (Weston Bond, Fluorescent, 25% cotton fiber, 8.5” x 12.25”) is addressed to the Secretary-Treasurer of Teamsters Local 808, Long Island City, and introduces a Brooklyn associate as a candidate for union business agent — written in the careful, measured prose characteristic of Costello’s known communications, formally worded yet unmistakably authoritative.
A veiled reference to “those with whom I am acquainted in the Central States” places this document squarely within the documented overlap between Costello’s National Crime Syndicate network and Jimmy Hoffa’s eastward Teamsters expansion during the early 1950s — a period extensively examined by Senate investigators and organized crime historians. The document bears the period secretarial notation “FC/rs” at lower left, consistent with mid-century business correspondence convention, with Costello’s signature in black ink at lower right. Paper is clean and intact with light age toning consistent with seven decades of storage, no tears, losses, or restoration.
