FOREWORD

USA OR BUST

That life is all gone now,” I’m frequently reminded by motion-picture actor Butch “the Hat” Aquilino, recalling the rough-and-tumble schemes of mobs and men who once monopolized the five boroughs. “There’s nothing left.”

A native of Mott Street, Butch the Hat has been a fixture of New York City’s Little Italy district long enough to remember Don Vito Genovese strolling its concrete sidewalks like a bloodthirsty pope, and even long enough to have run the occasional errand for an elderly Samuel Levine—nicknamed “Red” on account of henna-colored hair and a big round face full of freckles—who in decades past was an iron-fisted enforcer for the Brooklyn Combination and who, or so it’s been committed to Judaica, refused to commit an act of homicide during Shabbat, even if you paid him.

As though it happened over breakfast, Butch the Hat remembers an inauspicious morning during the late 1950s when Red Levine strolled into Ratner’s famous delicatessen on Delancey Street—a spot where he and his most senior crime associates had been dining for nearly half a century—and went completely unrecognized by the fresh-faced new employees who greeted him. Made to wait for service like a schnorrer, Levine felt slighted, and fueled by equal parts fury and frustration, he acted out. Gripping the closest serving tray, in one nimble movement he riddled the pastrami-scented airspace with three dozen freshly baked pastries, and until the day he died, he swore he’d never return. Already, it was a new day dawning, and Red Levine, like the assorted mutts with whom he once ran these same streets, wasn’t going gently into night.

Butch the Hat is a world-class reminiscer. When little more than a teenager, he witnessed an underworld slaying that later figured prominently in Martin Scorsese’s classic film Mean Streets. Today, the place where it happened is reimagined as a Chinese market, but the men’s room where gunshots rang out is still there, calling Butch back to events that few but he can remember. In Hollywood’s version, the bloody-shirted victim was portrayed by actor David Carradine, but Butch the Hat knew the true-life versions of both victim and killer—one a degenerate alcoholic and the other a deranged Mafia aspirant who was himself later eliminated, his body deposited in the trunk of a stolen car. Before that car trunk, though, home was an apartment across the hall from Butch the Hat. To say the shooter knew where to locate a potential eyewitness would be a gross understatement. Butch lived and breathed just one cup of sugar from catastrophe.

The incident rattled him; day and night, Butch the Hat worried he’d be hauled in by police detectives spotted swarming the crime scene and then nailed on a charge of guilt by association. Too often for his comfort, those cases had a clever way of sticking, and Butch the Hat began to sweat. He knew the killer’s identity, and that was much more, very possibly, than he’d care to admit to police. Weighing it out, he sought the counsel of an elder statesman of the neighborhood, finding him in his usual spot on Mulberry Street, near the entrance of a social club known as the Alto Knights. There, Butch told his story while his uncle, Peter DeFeo, the Genovese crime family’s official armorer, listened in silence.

“Did you do it?” DeFeo asked casually as his nephew concluded his monologue. The older man scanned the opposite sidewalk for familiar faces, occasionally nodding or waving. Butch admitted he hadn’t.

“No? You didn’t? Then let the ones who did it worry.”

And that, as it were, was that. With a few carefully selected syllables, the case was closed, and Butch the Hat hardly spared it another thought. If the cops hauled him in for questioning, he had nothing to hide. So why be in hiding?

Afterward, Butch the Hat came to recognize the value of his uncle’s advice, soliciting it more often, and while doing so, he couldn’t help but be awed by the degree of reverence with which full-grown men would approach DeFeo—it rivaled the veneration of Saint Gennaro in the annual street festa, which DeFeo was rumored to control. But even then, in his youth, Butch knew the stories that had coined his uncle’s reputation—how DeFeo went into hiding when a woman coveted by Vito Genovese was widowed, her husband strangled on a Greenwich Village rooftop; and how he fled once again, this time to a resort hotel in the Catskills, when an associate nicknamed “the Shadow” was shot dead on the floor of a Brooklyn pool hall. Thirty years later, Butch read in the New York Times that the hoodlum who had accused his uncle of the crime was towed from Jamaica Bay, his hands bound together and a block of concrete hardened around each leg. Butch knew all about the dice games, the shylocking and how DeFeo would use his brother-in-law’s name, or even wear his clothes, to throw off investigators. And there were other stories, too—even less flattering ones—but this was Peter DeFeo’s world, and the fact that he had stayed in it so long translated to mean one thing: he knew what it took to survive.

A couple of years before Joey Gallo was gunned down on Mulberry Street, however, something happened—something never fully explained to Butch the Hat. His uncle may have sensed a sea change coming, something in the air that made him uneasy about the future, because he abruptly whisked his family away from the neighborhood, sequestering them all in a luxury hi-rise along Park Avenue. And there they stayed, in some sense never to return.

Instead of following them to the Upper East Side, though, DeFeo stayed put, satisfied to carry on his daily routine until, predictably enough, he was nudged to the sidelines by ambitious underlings and permitted to “retire” into relative seclusion. But even then, Pete DeFeo kept the law guessing: for several years after his passing, rackets detectives of the New York City Police Department were still openly speculating about his criminal activities.

But that’s all over now, and Butch the Hat is among the first to concede that men like DeFeo went out of fashion with the stingy-brim fedora, an institution Butch the Hat tries to single-handedly resuscitate, both in cinema and in life.

Or maybe those customs died in a symbolic blaze of gunfire, as Butch the Hat has suggested at times, alongside “Crazy” Joe Gallo, lying sprawled and bleeding in Hester Street, staring blindly skyward in terror, astonishment or a blending of both. During that pre-dawn shootout in Little Italy, when Gallo’s birth and death so sleekly intersected, some of gangland’s most sacred codes of conduct were shattered. Some say forever.

“Those days are gone,” repeats Butch the Hat once again—as if to persuade himself as well. In private, Joey Gallo seemed to have known it, too.

“Do you remember Ali Baba’s favorite saying?” Gallo asked wistfully in a letter to his younger brother, lamenting the loss of a trusted friend, bushwhacked by rivals while Gallo was stuck behind bars.

“One Hundred Fifty Million Thousand Dollars!”

If he’d been home, Crazy Joe wrote, they’d have been together—“Alive or not.”

“Kid Blast,” perhaps sensing his older brother’s resignation, wrote back reassuringly. “Yussel,” he penned, playfully adopting the Yiddish for Joseph. “Our name, which was always synonymous with honor, loyalty and manhood, if anything, has become an irrevocable fact. Remember, and be at ease to know that whatever your Machiavellian mind comes up with, we have the same parents.”

Again it would be, he promised, like it was in the good old days.

Arthur Nash

ARTHUR NASH has worked as a crime beat reporter, and his photographic essay “New York City Gangland” (2010) was praised by Selwyn Raab as the “Eye-Catching Crown Jewel of Mafia History.” Nash is a key contributor to the National Museum of Crime & Punishment in Washington, D.C., as well as the City of Las Vegas’s Museum of Organized Crime & Law Enforcement, also known as “The MOB Museum.” His image library has been sampled by the Discovery, History and Biography Channels. He currently resides at the landmark Hotel Chelsea.