Vincent Rizzo’s turf was the few blocks of deteriorating tenements, bars and small stores on Avenue A just below Fourteenth Street. But that seedy neighborhood, hemmed in on the north by Stuyvesant Town, Metropolitan Life Insurance Company’s monument to the success of privately owned middle-class urban redevelopment, was home ground, as well, for a lot of small-time hoodlums trying to make some kind of reputation and win favor with the Mafia families. Those who noticed him at all considered Rizzo just another one of those hoods. He might be a member of the Genovese family, then ruled by Tommy Eboli and Jerry Catena, but he was obviously, outsiders thought, on a very low level, just another soldier without much power or standing. It was an impression Rizzo had carefully cultivated in the world outside the syndicate. Within the organization, however, he was recognized as an earner, a man on the rise, a man for whom great respect must be shown, a man to fear.
If rumors about Rizzo reached the ears of investigators, they tended to be ignored. After all, Rizzo was not some newcomer sent into the neighborhood by the bosses as their regent, nor was he one of those who had risen through the ranks, amassed wealth and power, moved to a large home on Long Island or in New Jersey and returned only to conduct his business. He had been born on Avenue A in 1931, had been raised there and had never left. If his world was the world of crime, then that surprised nobody, for crime had been the norm of Rizzo’s life since the day he was born. His parents had fled the poverty of Italy only to find more and equally grinding poverty in the new world—food and clothes almost luxuries rather than necessities. His father turned to crime when he could make out no other way, and was unsuccessful even at that; for him, the prison gates were swinging doors, and when he wasn’t in the small, dingy tenement apartment, everybody knew he was back in prison.
In that environment, Vincent Rizzo learned early that what you got was only what you took, and that to take by force was both necessary and pleasurable. He began before he was six. In kindergarten, he attacked his teacher with his fists and with a baseball bat, was sent to a psychiatrist by the school system. The help didn’t take. Until he finally quit school in the tenth grade—and he was given a choice that year, either to leave on his own or be thrown out—there was hardly a time when he was not in some kind of trouble. In that closely knit Italian neighborhood on Avenue A, he earned the reputation as a petty thief and bully, wound up as a young teen-ager in the hands of the police for a minor theft, got a warning and was sent back to his family with the advice that he straighten out or find himself in very serious trouble and in a very unpleasant place. Warnings and advice had no more effect on him than the help offered by the school psychologist.
At sixteen, out of school, he was back on the streets—back at the old trades and getting better at them. But the scrutiny of the cops, who had begun to notice this swaggering neighborhood bully and some of those battered victims who were afraid to talk about him, and the urging of his mother persuaded him that perhaps, at least for a time, he ought to find a job—at least as a cover. Over the next few years, he delivered newspapers, worked as a butcher’s apprentice, an auto mechanic, a longshoreman, an unskilled factory hand. He never lasted more than four months at any job. By the time he was nineteen, it really didn’t matter; he was making a reputation in the right places as a strong-arm man and thief. But he was still just a punk kid and those who came to know him, who held but promises of the future to him, who encouraged him, laughed when he approached and put him off. He had a lot to learn before they would take him on, he was told, and a lot more to do. Maybe he showed promise, but promise was not enough. He would have to ripen, perform.
A month before his twentieth birthday, the Korean War boiling at a violent heat, demanding more and more men, he enlisted. The idea of engaging in direct action, in being given a license for violence, appealed to him, and since he was certain that the Marines was where the real action was certain to be, he became a Marine.
With an unintentional irony, the Marine Corps sent him, after boot camp at Parris Island, not across the Pacific into the battle he craved, but to stateside duty as a guard at the brig at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. Giving Vincent Rizzo a rifle or a shotgun and telling him to keep the peace was like sharpening the claws of a lion and then putting him into a cage with a herd of deer and telling him to see that no harm came to them. Rizzo’s career as a prison guard lasted only a few months. A prisoner said something to him he didn’t like, gave him an argument. Rizzo took his shotgun and beat that prisoner senseless with the butt, nearly killing him. The only reason he hadn’t shot, he told Marine Corps superiors, was because the gun jammed when he pulled the trigger.
Relieved from duty and confined to barracks while the corps tried to decide what to do with him, he paused only long enough to collect a few belongings and go over the hill, back to the streets of New York’s Lower East Side. Something happened on those streets within days of his return, something serious enough, he said later, though never explaining precisely what, to convince him that the cops would be after him. His mother persuaded him that his only course was to return to the Marines and turn himself in. Six days after departing, he showed up at the gates of Camp Lejeune, was promptly put into the brig, and now was the one under guard instead of doing the guarding.
In the brig, he snarled at his superiors, fought with the guards, refused to obey any orders, tore apart the seclusion cell into which he was confined. The warden had him put under restraint, then moved him to the brig hospital for psychiatric observation. There, he fought with the corpsmen, began to rant and rave that he had been tricked, that everyone was putting a noose around his neck, that everyone in authority was a Communist, part of Stalin’s NKVD. And then, when the medical personnel finally managed to calm him, he began telling a doctor that he had invented a secret weapon that would revolutionize close-in combat and proceeded to diagram the weapon—a combination pistol, knife and brass knuckles.
Anyone in the streets who had dealt with him could have told the Marine Corps what now became apparent to psychiatrists: Rizzo was not ideal Marine material. Said one psychiatrist: “… he sounded off too much … losing his temper often got him into trouble … he displayed inappropriateness of his affect in that he laughed in a silly fashion at his transgressions of regulations and social rules.” Added another: “This patient is definitely paranoid and psychotic.… He has a longtime asocial personality with strong delinquent trends and was definitely a threat to society because of his behavior.” Said a third: “He is sullen, surly and almost snarling in his responses.… The man was immature, impulsive, motivated solely by a pleasure-pain principle.”
He was studied and analyzed and tested, and the tests found that his IQ on the Wechsler-Bellevue Intelligence Scale was a mental defective 58. But long conversations with him convinced the doctors that the IQ score was meaningless. “The patient shows very inadequate judgment and reality testing,” they said. “He is confused and disorganized and his reasoning is schizophrenic-like. Much bizarreness of content is noted. Social intelligence is grossly impaired as is the ability to differentiate between essential and unessential details. Projective tests reveal a strong paranoid trend … has made a poor social adjustment and has developed into an adult with low sexual drive.… Confusion and disorganization predominate.… His form and verbalization indicate a much higher IQ than that obtained.… His inappropriate affect is better described as ‘wise’ and there, does not seem to be any gross disturbance of his affect in conversation with him.”
This “delinquent,” this “asocial personality,” this “threat to society” was, then, considered not fit to be a Marine. The thing to do with him, it was suggested, was to turn him over to a social-service agency somewhere, anywhere but in Marine jurisdiction, and let them try to deal with him. And so, in September 1952, eleven months after his enlistment, Vincent Rizzo was given a bad-conduct discharge and shipped back to Avenue A.
His adventures as a Marine had toughened and sharpened him. He was no longer a punk kid; he was a driven man, and those in power soon saw it. So did the police. Between 1952, when he returned to New York, and 1967, his name appeared on police records a dozen times, and his yellow sheet ran to several pages. He was arrested for car theft, transportation of stolen bonds in interstate commerce, robbery, possession of guns and, on several occasions, for felonious assault with his feet and fists, with blackjacks and guns.
What apparently escaped any searching notice, though, was the slowly accumulating evidence, some subtle, some not so subtle, that Vincent Rizzo had gained entrance into a wider and more profitable world, an organized world, and was on his way up. The clues were there had anybody bothered to look for them:
•Despite all those arrests—and in several the evidence against him was overwhelming—he did not spend a single day in prison. In every case but one, the charges against him were dismissed, and in that sole exception, when he was arrested for transporting stolen bonds (a federal offense), he was merely put on probation for five years and his constant violations of that probation were ignored.
•He had found powerful patrons, was often at their side, but his presence in such company, along with the signs of his increasing importance and closeness to those high in the syndicate, was neither recognized nor understood by those on the outside. He had been discovered and his value appreciated by the de Lorenzos—Matteo, the elder statesman, the earner, the man satisfied with his position of safety just beneath the top in the Genovese family; Uncle Marty’s nephews, Gerardo “Jerry” de Lorenzo, a man who seemed to turn up everywhere and in everything, and Anthony “Hickey” de Lorenzo; as ruler of the Metropolitan Import Truckmen’s Association, Hickey had a near monopoly on hauling air freight, gasoline and food to John F. Kennedy International Airport, and had been spreading his influence nationwide through his close and working friendship with Jimmy Hoffa and other leaders of the Teamsters Union; he had also become instrumental in leading the syndicate into Wall Street, showing the profits that could be made in stolen and counterfeit securities; and he was considered the man most likely to succeed Tommy Eboli as head of the Genovese family until, in 1971, he was sent to prison as the mastermind behind the theft of more than $1 million worth of IBM stock. (Prison did not hold him long, however. A year after going behind the walls, he was given permission to visit his outside dentist, unaccompanied by guards; he was not seen again for several years.)
•Those on the inside were whispering his name as a central figure in a dozen different deals of increasingly larger scope, though somehow the whispers rarely got to the authorities, and even when they did they were dismissed. Rizzo was, it was said, behind a ring that moved stolen weapons to South America. He was one of the city’s major loansharks, supplying money to businessmen, restaurant owners and other big borrowers all over New York, and he employed a crew of strong-arm men to make sure that the payments came in on time. He was dealing in a very large way in the importation and distribution of narcotics, especially cocaine. He was into stolen and counterfeit securities, as well as counterfeit money, and he had outlets all around the world.
•Though he did not dress particularly well and kept his wife in meager circumstances in their apartment at 201 Avenue A, he had become very rich. He owned the building in which he and his wife lived, and owned a country estate in Wurtzboro to which he rarely brought her. He drove a Mercedes, though it was registered in the name of a Philadelphia underling. In suitcases and attaché cases in his Avenue A apartment and on his Wurtzboro estate, he kept hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash, not to be spent except in an emergency. In the syndicate, he was mentioned, though not directly to his face, as a cheapskate, a man forever looking for a bargain, who, as one of his associates later said, squeezed the dollar until the eagle screamed.
What was moving Rizzo ever upward in the syndicate, and what had brought him the favor of the de Lorenzos and won him their patronage, was a golden touch. As the Marine Corps had noticed and commented upon twenty years before, his interest in women was not great; he took them as he needed them and discarded them casually when he was finished, without much passion. (He made no secret of his occasional affairs, and told his wife if she didn’t like it, she could move out, but she’d better not expect a penny from him if she did.) Rizzo’s passion was stirred by money, and the things that fascinated him most were those things that implied big money—stocks and bonds, loansharking, narcotics. He knew where the best deals were to be found; and he knew how to develop them, it seemed, better than anyone else.
Vincent Rizzo had become a man to know, a man to see, a man to fear. For years, that had been something of a secret from the world outside the syndicate. Now it was to come into the open.