5
Andrew’s mother Patrina was no stranger to having criminals in the family. Her husband Vincent was in federal prison from 1966, the year following Andrew’s birth, to 1971 after being convicted of hijacking a truck and criminal possession of a weapon. And, of course, Vincent’s uncle Paddy Macchiarole had been a Genovese family capo.
Patrina and Vincent never got back together after he was released from prison. She remarried in 1975. In 1984, the family, consisting of Patrina, her husband Morris, Andrew, and his twin sisters, lived near the intersection of East 72nd Street and Bergen Court in Brooklyn.
“My mother knew what I was doing and she didn’t approve. But I was on the cusp of becoming a man and my course was laid out. There was nothing she could do about it. She had no choice but to accept what I was. She was my confidant, very protective and always worried about my safety.
“My sisters were three years older than me. They knew how I made my money too. I’m not saying they were happy, but they never hassled me about it. One of them got married and moved out in 1983. The other one got married the following year.
“My father remained in Brooklyn after serving his sentence. We saw each other from time to time. We never had a normal father-and-son relationship. It was more of a big-brother type. He was a career gambler with a gift of gab who was in and out of my life.
“As a boy and young man I craved my father’s attention and acceptance. As I got deeper into the life with each passing year, I hoped he’d look upon me with the same respect I’d seen him show for Paddy. I never saw my father talk so highly of anyone as he did his uncle.
“With that idea in my head, I tried to follow Paddy’s footsteps into the world of organized crime. I carried myself in the same manner and my reputation grew. But my father was still years away from seeing me the way I wanted him to.”
Although Andrew’s relationship with his father in 1984 wasn’t exactly the way he hoped it would be, his association with the Corozzo faction of the Gambino family became rock solid.
For Andrew, the year 1984 literally began with a bang as he tended to some unfinished business from 1983. The matter involved an ongoing feud with a crew from another organized-crime group, the Lucchese family. This particular Lucchese crew operated in the same areas as Nick Corozzo’s. It was run by Anthony “Gaspipe” Casso and his friend Vittorio “Vic” Amuso. Both men were known killers and extremely dangerous to have as enemies.
The trouble began in 1983 when Vic Amuso’s nephew had an altercation with Andrew’s friend and fellow Corozzo crew member, Sal “Sally the Lip” Bracchi.
“Vic’s nephew and some of his friends from Gaspipe’s crew tuned Sally the Lip up [beat him] pretty good. We wanted to retaliate and send a message that you didn’t fuck around with our guys. The kid knew we were after him and kept a low profile. It took a long time, but in early 1984 we found out that he was gonna be spending the night at a home right around the corner from the sixty-ninth police precinct on Foster Avenue in Canarsie.
“That night me, Anthony Gerbino, and Albert Lattanzi went to that house and broke into the garage, opening the overhead door just enough to crawl under. There were two cars inside. We’d brought gasoline with us and doused both cars. As we left, we let the gas run down the driveway and make a stream leading to the vehicles. Once we were safely outside, we lit a rag, threw it into the little river of gasoline, and got out of there.
“Somehow the garage door closed when we left, so all the gas fumes were confined inside. When the flame reached the cars, there was a tremendous explosion. The garage door was blown all the way across the street. The heat was so intense that every one of the tires blew out. Nobody in the house got hurt; it was property damage only. But we’d sent a message and figured it was just a matter of time before Gaspipe’s boys figured out who had delivered it.”
After putting the Lucchese crew on notice, Andrew had another obligation to take care of: working off his debt to Jo Jo Corozzo in Florida for the 1983 road-rage shooting incident. That trip took place in mid-April and lasted for three weeks or so.
“Me and several of the crew flew down,” Andrew recalls. “There was Mike Yannotti, Albert Lattanzi, and four or five other guys. Jo Jo treated all of us great. If he was pissed off at me, he didn’t show it.
“We had a lot of fun and did a lot of partying. But we worked too. We did some major credit-card fraud and made some big money.”
The fraud involved buying stolen credit cards, then making purchases or taking cash advances on them. In addition to the profits, the scam carried an element of risk and excitement.
“We bought the hot cards for three hundred apiece. Back in New York, guys we knew who had credit card machines swiped the cards and told us how much credit was available. We didn’t have those connections in Florida, so we operated blind. When we presented these cards to a merchant or a bank, we never knew for sure what was going to happen.
“We used them to cover our hotel rooms. Sometimes we’d come back to the hotel and be locked out after the card went over the limit. When that happened, we just tried a different card. Other times we found out the cops were looking for us, because when the hotel ran the card, it came back as stolen. In those cases, we had to clear out and find a different hotel.
“The same thing could happen when we bought stuff at a store. The merchant might tell us the sale exceeded the credit limit. If the card had already been reported as stolen, we could usually tell by the clerk’s expression and body language. Once in a while one of them tried to get us to hang around until they could get the cops there. They said something like, ‘Excuse me for a minute while I go in the back room and check on something. I’ll be right back, so don’t leave.’ That was pretty transparent and we were long gone before the door to the back room even had a chance to close.
“And not all the store clerks were honest either. I remember one decided to do some stealing for himself. He told us the card was bad after we tried to charge twelve hundred dollars worth of clothing. But I’d seen him write the authorization number down on a sheet of paper, so he could use it after we left. I jumped across the counter and wrapped the phone cord around his throat, while my partner in crime gave him a beating. He confessed what he was up to. After that we owned him and he worked for us from that point on running the hot cards.”
Andrew and his friends finished their stay in Florida and made it back to New York without incident. But the bad blood between them and Gaspipe’s crew hadn’t cooled during their absence. If anything, it had heated up.
When Andrew left New York to visit Jo Jo Corozzo, Sr., in Florida, the feud with the Lucchese crew was in the Gas-pipe gang’s court. The next move was theirs. Shortly after his return to the Big Apple, he got their response.
“On a Friday night, I was at a bar we ran on Avenue L in Canarsie. Somebody told me Nicky was outside in his car and wanted to see me. I went out and found Nicky and his driver sitting in their car. I was standing beside the passenger door with my head inside the window talking. Rocco Corozzo, Nicky’s nephew, came outside and joined us. We were engaged in conversation when out of the corner of my eye, I noticed a figure standing on the sidewalk fifty or so yards away. Then I heard what I thought were firecrackers, but they turned out to be gunshots.
“One round struck the windshield right in front of where Nicky was sitting. I shoved his head down and Rocco jumped in the back seat. After Nicky’s car sped away, I pulled my gun [a 9mm] and started running toward the shooter, firing at him as I ran. He took off down the block and at that point, I went down on one knee and aimed. I call that my T. J. Hooker position, after the old television series where William Shatner played a cop. I fired and missed. I reloaded and started chasing the guy, but I couldn’t catch him.
“A few days later we got information on who the shooter was and why. It was one of Gaspipe’s guys. I was the target in retaliation for the incident at the house where Vic Amuso’s nephew had been staying.
“I took the information to Nicky. I told him we wanted to pursue it and asked what he wanted us to do. Nicky was a very cunning man. He’d never come right out and tell you to murder somebody. But he made the sign of a gun with his index finger and thumb. He said to me, ‘Go and teach this guy a lesson.’
“That night we went out and stole two cars and stashed them. One would be used in the attack when we found this kid and his buddies. The other would be left where we could get to it for use as a getaway car after the shooting. After a while we learned they hung out at a bar on Flatlands Avenue in Canarsie. Across the street from the bar was a funeral parlor. Albert Lattanzi, Anthony Gerbino, a kid named Richie, and me drove one of the stolen cars to the funeral parlor and parked in the lot. A U-Haul truck was already parked there. It turns out the guys we were looking for left the bar and all of them loaded into that U-Haul truck. The shooter who had tried to kill me was identified as being in the group. That was it. The target was acquired and we were going after them.
“We followed them until they rolled up to a stop sign. We pulled alongside the truck. Anthony was driving and Richie was in the front seat with him. Albert was in the back seat driver side and I was on the passenger side.
“Richie opened fire first with a shotgun. He shot out the front tire and the engine. The truck was stopped dead in its tracks. I fired next, throwing a couple of rounds into the back of the truck. I was far enough back that I couldn’t get a good shot at the guys in the cab. I leaned out the window as far as I could and let a couple of rounds go at them anyway. After I emptied my clip, Albert sat on the driver-side rear window sill and fired at the truck across the roof of our car. We then drove away to where we had left the getaway car.
“During the drive, Richie went into a panic. He started whining, saying things like, ‘Andrew, what did you do? We’re gonna go away for murder.’
“I told him, ‘What the fuck did you think we came here for tonight? You threw the first shot.’ After a while he calmed down.
“We made it to the second car and drove that back to our hangout. Mike Yannotti was waiting there and we told him what went down. He then torched both of the cars we’d used to destroy any evidence.
“At that time I assumed we’d killed one or more people. And then we got word that nobody was dead. Our main target was injured, but he’d survive. It was disappointing at the time. But looking back at it now, I thank God it turned out that way.”
Following that incident, Gaspipe Casso made his displeasure with Andrew known to Nicky Corozzo. He wanted Andrew dead and expected Nicky to agree that his young crewman deserved to be executed. When the two bosses got together to discuss the matter, Nicky played his trump card.
“Mob protocol says that you can’t kill a made man without getting permission for the hit,” Andrew explains. “Up until that meeting, Gaspipe wasn’t aware that Nicky had been sitting in the car that night and a bullet had struck the windshield right in front of him. When Gaspipe said he wanted me for the torch job on the house Amuso’s nephew was at and the U-Haul thing, Nicky said, ‘You want this kid for that? Let me tell you something. I was sitting in the goddamn car the night your guy started shooting. One of the bullets hit the windshield right in front of my fuckin’ head. I was lucky not to be killed. What about that?’
“That was the end of the conversation. Nicky had made his point. And under the circumstances, Gaspipe had nowhere else to go with his beef. That should have been the end of it. With a guy like Gaspipe, though, you always had to wonder if it would be.”
Gaspipe Casso didn’t get Andrew. But the law eventually got Gaspipe and Vic Amuso. Both are currently in federal prison serving sentences of life without parole for racketeering.
That same year, Andrew suffered the loss of two people he was very close to in a two-month period. The first came in June when his paternal grandmother Amelia Macchiarole DiDonato passed away. Her death hit Andrew particularly hard.
“My sisters, my mother, and I lived with her while my father was incarcerated. She was the best there was. She took care of all the kids. She had seventeen grandchildren, but we were the only three grandkids that lived with her. She was the glue that held the family together. There were always a lot of people at her house and she fed everybody. She was very generous. When she died, it affected everybody.”
Andrew was still grieving over the loss of his grandmother when the second shoe dropped in August. This time it wasn’t a blood relative, but the death was equally devastating. His close personal friend and crewmate Albert Lattanzi, one of the neighborhood guys Andrew first stole cars with, was murdered.
“Because of the trouble we’d had with Gaspipe’s guys, Nicky told us to lay low until he could make sure everything was taken care of. He wanted to calm us down, so to speak. Mike Yannotti, Anthony Gerbino, Richie, Albert, and me were moving around a lot, staying in various places and with different friends around Brooklyn.
“One night Albert said he wanted to go out. I told him to hang around the house we were at. I said we were going to order some Chinese food and rent a couple of movies. He said the rest of us were having girlfriends over and he just needed to get out. He planned to go out on Long Island where he wasn’t likely to run into anybody that knew him. I couldn’t force him to stay at the apartment, so he went. He usually carried a gun, but on that night he went unarmed.”
Albert hooked up with a guy from their crew named Mario and a Lucchese associate named Bobby. Bobby wasn’t with the Gaspipe crew and he was friendly with Andrew’s crew. But instead of going to Long Island, they went to a new dance club on Coney Island Avenue in Brooklyn.
At the club, Albert met up with a girl; she was Mike Yannotti’s cousin. They talked for a while and she said she needed a ride home when the club closed. Albert told her he’d make sure she got home okay. She then left Albert to socialize.
Later on, she started dancing with a guy named Evan, a drug dealer for the Lucchese family. They’d muscle him into working for them the same way Andrew did with dealers in his neighborhood. She and Evan hit it off.
When it was time to go, Albert and Evan got into an argument over who’d drive the girl home. That deteriorated into a fistfight. As they rolled around on the ground, Todd Alvino, one of the Lucchese guys Evan was dealing for, walked up, drew his gun, and shot Albert dead. Alvino had a bad cocaine problem and it’s likely he was hopped up at the time.
Andrew picks up the story. “After Alvino shot Albert, he turned the gun on Mario. The gun either jammed or was out of rounds and didn’t fire. Mario was a legitimate tough guy and he was armed. For some reason he froze. He never pulled his gun to avenge Albert or defend himself. He was damn lucky to get out of the place alive. Alvino commandeered a car and got away.
“When we got the call that Albert had been murdered, we wanted Alvino bad. Mike, Anthony, Richie, and me geared up [armed themselves]. We stole a car from a neighbor and headed out looking for revenge. We knew Alvino’s father ran a newsstand in the neighborhood and that he’d be there in the morning to open up. We decided to kill him for starters. But as we calmed down and began thinking more clearly, we discarded that idea. We all had fathers. They were civilians and Alvino’s old man didn’t have anything to do with Albert’s death. We went out looking for his son, though, but couldn’t find him. Alvino surrendered to the cops a few days later, then got out on bail.
“From that point forward, the hunt was on. We literally worked in shifts and stalked him night and day. We went to known Lucchese hangouts, bars, social clubs, and after-hours joints. We kept an eye on his house on Ralph Avenue. We came close a couple of times, but couldn’t catch up with him.
“Alvino and the Luccheses knew we were looking for him, of course. Nicky was onboard with what we were doing, but in order to prevent the Lucchese bosses from requesting a sit-down that would have stopped the hunt, Nicky had to deny that Albert had been part of his crew. That way he could say the whole thing was none of his business.
“Even though we were after Alvino around the clock, he dodged us month after month. Nicky mentioned the amount of time it was taking. He said, ‘If this happened to a friend of Lenny and me, the guy that did it would be dead already.’
“Another time I was talking with Nicky in a small social club we hung out at on East Ninety-Third Street at Avenue L in Canarsie. The Luccheses had a club in the back of a laundromat right across the street. Nicky pointed to a car parked out in front and said, ‘What if I told you I know that by the end of the day, the guy you’re looking for is going to get into that car?’
“I said that I’d stay right there and shoot him when he showed up. Nicky said, ‘No you won’t. But I’ll tell you what you will do. You’ll take him down the block and shoot him. But you won’t shoot him in front of our club.’ I waited around, but Alvino never came.”
In spite of the best efforts of Andrew and his friends, the elusive Todd Alvino remained alive.
In the world of organized crime, problems can arise from inside the family as well as from outside. Later in the year, Andrew made an honest mistake that could have had serious consequences.
One Friday night, Nicky called a meeting at the Seaview Diner on Rockaway Parkway in Canarsie. Anthony Gerbino, Mike Yannotti, Richie, and Andrew drove out there in their work car, which was registered and insured in the name of a dead woman. When they pulled into the parking lot, they noticed a guy talking on the pay phone on the street and a Mercedes convertible at the curb next to him, engine running.
They went inside the restaurant. Nicky wasn’t there yet, so they hung around, talking with some of the other guys. Pretty soon, a made man with the Gambinos they knew came in and asked if they were still in the car business. He mentioned the Mercedes and figured they’d be interested in it.
“The four of us went back outside. Mike would grab the car. I’d get between the car and the guy on the phone. Richie and Anthony went to the work car. As soon as Mike got away, I’d hop in with them and we’d follow Mike back to my place.
“Mike had just gotten in the car when ‘Pay Phone’ spotted him. He made a dash for the car and I gave him a hip check that sent him rolling into the street. He got up and made a grab for the passenger-door handle, but Mike pulled away before he could reach it. I got in the work car and we took off.
“We got to my house and barely got inside when the phone rang. It was Nicky. He said, ‘Have you guys still got that thing you took from the diner?’ I told him yeah, we’ve got it. He said, ‘We’ve got a little problem. Just stay there and don’t do anything. I’ll get back to you in a few minutes.’
“As soon as I hung up the phone, we went through the car. We found a wallet in the glove compartment and a satchel in the trunk and took them inside. Inside the satchel were a bunch of white envelopes and a ledger book with a thirty-eight revolver on top of them. I opened the first envelope and there was fifteen hundred in cash in it. We opened the rest and the total came to eighty-seven thousand dollars. It was obvious that the Mercedes didn’t belong to some ordinary citizen. There was a clue on the envelopes; the logo on them said Meats Supreme. That was one of Paul Castellano’s legitimate businesses. But in our excitement over all that money, we didn’t pay any attention.
“About then Nicky called back. He said, ‘There’s a bag in the trunk of that car. Whatever you do, don’t open that bag.’ I hung up the phone and when we got done laughing, Nicky called for the third time. He said, ‘I found out there’s a book in that bag too. That book’s gotta be kept safe, understand? Don’t look in it and don’t let anything happen to it.’
“You know what we did next, right? The book was full of names and dollar amounts and phone numbers. It was becoming clear that we’d taken a car used to collect payoffs and had something to do with Paul Castellano. But what?
“We checked the license plate and looked through the wallet from the glove compartment. The Mercedes belonged to a relative of Paul’s and no doubt some or all of the money was intended for Paul. As much as it hurt, there was no doubt we’d have to give back the car and the cash. The question was would the Castellanos let it go at that or would they want to teach us a lesson.
“We met up with Nicky late that night at Sally the Lip’s house. Nicky told us, ‘I’d never ask you to give back something you stole. But this is the one time I’m going to. Everything’s gotta be returned.’ He said he’d set up a meet for the next morning at a luncheonette at East Ninety-Third Street and Avenue L across from our social club.
“We didn’t know how pissed the Castellanos were and we weren’t about to take any chances. We went to the meet armed to the teeth in case we had to shoot our way out. Mike Yannotti and I went first with the money, the book, and the wallet. We emptied the bullets out of the gun and took that too. Anthony Gerbino brought the Mercedes over a few minutes later.
“Nicky was there and so was Paul’s relative Pay Phone. He had a couple of guys with him, but they were okay. Pay Phone hugged Nicky and thanked him and us for doing the right thing. There was even one thing that got a chuckle from everybody. That was when we told Pay Phone the cash was ten dollars short. He was running the Mercedes on empty when we took it and we had to put gas in it to get it back to him. We figured that was his expense and not ours.
“Mike, Anthony, and I were a little pissed that all we got was a thank you. The next day we had our Saturday meeting at the club. Nicky said he’d gotten a phone call. Paul Castellano told him we’d earned a feather in our cap for doing the honorable thing, and we had personal favors coming if we ever needed them.
“I said to Nicky as a joke, ‘Favors don’t pay the bills. Maybe he can give us that eighty-seven thousand back.’ A couple of days later a fruit basket was delivered to my house. The card said, ‘You did a very honorable thing. Your friend Paul.’
“Although I would have preferred the money, there were a few times over the next several months that having that connection with Castellano came in handy.”
As the year passed, the intense focus by Andrew and his crewmates to find and kill Todd Alvino eventually hurt them in the wallet.
“When you’re not out there stealing, you’re not earning,” Andrew explained. “We were spending more time looking for Alvino than we were working. It came to a point that the lack of income was noticeable.”
In order to compensate, they changed how they shook down the pot dealers. Rather than handing over $500 a week, the dealers now gave them two pounds of marijuana. A friend of Andrew’s stood in Utica Park at Utica Avenue and Avenue N, selling dime bags of marijuana. Pretty soon he was making $500-$600 a day. His cut was three bags out of every 20 he sold, $30 out of the $200. Andrew also got permission to have another friend deal in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn.
“I was making four or five thousand a week. But I shared that with Mike, Anthony, and Richie, and I had to send Nicky an envelope every week. The four of us ended up with about eight hundred a week each. But we were still extorting money from some of the big drug dealers. We kept that as kind of a slush fund, in case we needed bail money or something. Nicky got a piece of that too, only it was on a monthly basis.”
As 1984 drew to a close, Andrew, not yet 20 years old, was keeping his head above water financially. But the frustration over not being able to locate Todd Alvino was growing by the day.