Lanza contacted a few other underworld figures and put the likeness of Fred Vickers on the street before it reached the papers. The feds didn’t want publicity; they just wanted Vickers, who was a huge liability, knocked off very quickly. Besides, if we do them this kind of favor –he said --there’s no tellin’ what we can ask for later on in return. A fleet of fishing boats started looking for anything suspicious up and down the East and Hudson Rivers. Nothing turned up for hours; no sign of anyone remotely like Fred anywhere. A kid working in a coffee shop near the bridge in Long Island City reacted to the picture showing Vickers with a mustache,
“Yeah, I seen that guy. He used to come here months ago late at night to have coffee. Came only a few times and was looking outside all the time, never talked. Most guys like to talk but not him. Never said a word.”
“You think he was from around here?”
“No, I thought he had to be on a night job. Not far from the bus stop down there.”
“He took the bus?”
“Yeah, to and from Manhattan, I’m sure of that. But he didn’t look like a worker, he was more like a tough guy, you know… like you!”
The gangsters concentrated on the neighborhood around the Queensboro Bridge. They went knocking quietly on doors and kicking them in when necessary. A few places were shut down and they used crowbars to bust the doors down. Finally they reached the old taxi garage with the “For Rent or Sale” sign and noticed how all the windows were boarded up as if the place were abandoned. The men thought the garage looked suspicious and they pretended they weren’t interested driving away while discreetly keeping the place under observation from the rooftops of neighboring warehouses. Then Lefty decided to get up close and approached the window on the side.
He began attempting to move the glass open then took a knife from his pocket and was prying loose the hinges until he finally decided to smash the window. By the time he was placing his arm inside to undo the latch he could see the double string of wires running along walls connecting to the doors and grouped neatly into a bundle that fed directly to a timer and then a detonator. These observations only took a fraction of a second and then it was too late. A tremendous explosion of 2000 pounds of TNT killed everyone within two blocks of the warehouse destroying three adjacent buildings up and down the street. A total of 22 people were killed including two FBI agents, five city cops Lefty Gargiulo, and several Mafia soldiers. They had no evidence that Fred Vickers had also been killed.
The coffee shop also shook violently followed by a short circuit and an electrical fire caused by the explosion. The young man behind the counter was wounded and for many years he wondered what had really gone down just three blocks south, but nobody would say. The Daily News carried a short piece next to dispatches about the fighting in Tunisia: “A Taste of War” was the title and it went on to explain how a freak gasoline fire had caused a massive explosion in a taxi garage in Long Island City, Queens and how it now looked like a war zone. Fortunately, it went on to say, there were only a few victims, mostly firemen and policemen. In order to avoid drawing any kind of attention, ONI and FBI investigators were at the scene dressed as city cops sifting through the debris and placing every suspicious piece of scrap metal in small canvas bags for later analysis. The area was swept clean of any vestige of both the SLC and the mines. A massive cover up of what had been a major attack on American soil and a potentially disastrous sabotage operation succeeded perfectly.
Anderson offered the final word in J. Edgar Hoover’s office a week later,
“We dismantled the operation and the leader is presumed dead but we can’t be absolutely sure!”