Joey the Hitman

Joey Black

In the 1970s, author David Fisher was introduced to a man named Joey who purported to be a numbers king and loan shark who also worked as a hitman for the Mob. Although as a Jew, he could not become a made man, he knew the Mafia from the inside They had been introduced by a highly regarded crime reporter. Fisher had Joey checked out, as far as he could, and became convinced that Joey was the real deal. Fisher relates an occasion when he was dining in a restaurant in Los Angeles with Joey and a friend. Fisher’s friend asked Joey what he would do if someone doubted he was what he said he was. Joey grabbed a fork and jammed it against the man’s neck, forcing his head back. “I’d ask him to say it again,” said Joey.

“It was a nasty moment,” said Fisher.

Joey sat down with Fisher to write the book Joey the Hitman: The Autobiography of a Mafia Killer. His motivation, he said, was to debunk films like The Godfather.

“Members of organized crime have been made to look like animals,” he said, “and actually we’re not such bad people. We are the caterers of society. We just give people what they want. We don’t set out to hurt anybody. I want people to understand that.”

This came from a man who admitted to thirty-eight murders.

Joey kept in touch with Fisher after the book was published. Years later, he heard from a reporter in San Mateo, California, that Joey had been killed, shot in the back with a shotgun – Mafia style – when on his way to the nearby race track. After his death, a detective showed Fisher Joey’s rap sheet. There was little doubt he was, as he claimed, a hitman. He had been picked up a number of times on suspicion of murder and was well known to the New York City Police Department and the FBI. However, he had always been released after a few hours, without charge. It turned out that Joey was, in fact, an informant for the FBI. He did not volunteer any information, but he would confirm what the FBI already suspected or give broad hints about things that detectives might like to look into.

It turned out that Joey – real name Joey Black – had also engineered his own murder. In fact, he had put out a contract on himself. Shortly before he died, Joey had been diagnosed with terminal cancer. He took out an insurance policy that would pay double if he died of unnatural causes. The beneficiary would be his sister. On the application, Joey had said that his occupation was “construction worker”. If that was not true, the application was fraudulent and the insurance company would not have to pay out. Fisher told the claims investigator that he only knew what Joey had told him. Whether he was really a hitman or a construction worker he couldn’t say.

Maria Puzo’s book The Godfather, and the movie they made from it, did for the organization what silicone does for tits. They both make their respective subjects stand out. We needed The Godfather like Joey Gallo needed another portion of clams. Many people think because they saw the movie or read the book they know everything there is to know about organized crime. This is like saying you know everything there is to know about politicians because you watch “Let’s Make a Deal”. One thing has absolutely nothing to do with the other.

Don’t misunderstand me, I thoroughly enjoyed The Godfather. I thought it was a very entertaining, very funny movie. It was also a wonderful piece of fiction. Things just don’t happen in real life like they did to Marlon Brando and family.

Let us begin at the beginning. The whole thing starts when Sollozzo goes to see Don Corleone to get financing and political protection for a narcotics operation. He’s got the whole fucking Mob backing him up, so what does he need Corleone for? The political connections? Any man in his business who is politically connected will help anybody else. That’s why it’s called an organization. What does this mean to Corleone? The politicians on his payroll do what he tells them to do. Why such a big deal? Besides, Sollozzo did not need Corleone’s contacts that badly, he could have gone out and bought his own.

Second, all of a sudden Corleone gets some morals and decides that he doesn’t want to deal in narcotics. Ridiculous. When you are controlling a family there is no such thing as not getting involved. Isn’t it kind of stupid? Here’s a man into bookmaking, shylocking, numbers, fixing, a man who will kill everybody and his brother, and yet he’s not willing to sell narcotics. These people are in business to make money, and any man that is a big boss, a controller, he doesn’t give one fuck where the money comes from. He’d love narcotics because there’s more money being made there than in anything else.

Third, assuming he didn’t want to sell narcotics, which no one with his head on his shoulders will believe, he is simply not going to go against a commission meeting, a meeting of the Board of Directors. If a certain thing has been decided there is no reason in the world he’s gonna go out of his way to cross them. The commission is too powerful; if it wants something to happen, believe me, it happens.

Next, the shooting of Don Corleone. In every instance I have ever known that a boss was shot, it is because his bodyguard double-crossed him. And a bodyguard does not double-cross him by calling up and saying he is sick. He is there when you get killed. All he does is step aside. He does not leave himself in a position where he will be killed by his own family. Any boss that I’ve ever known got killed because his bodyguard helped to get him, because he had been offered an improvement in his financial status.

Fifth, the bit about the hired guns “taking to the mattresses”. That just doesn’t make any sense at all. I couldn’t stay locked up in a room with eight other guys for one day, and neither could anybody else. You’ve got eight tense personalities crammed together waiting for a gunfight, how long can you play gin rummy or poker without going crazy?

During a gang war most people live at home. They just kind of lie low and stay as close to the house as possible. During the Colombo-Gallo War, for example, I met this old friend of mine who was hooked up with the Colombo people. He said, “Why don’t you come out to the house for dinner this week? I’m home every night now. But I hope you don’t mind if I don’t walk you to your car.” The home is a sanctuary. You can hit people outside the house, but you can’t go inside; it’s just not considered proper etiquette.

Even more, no family can afford to keep hired guns locked up in a room for any length of time. An organization that is not earning cannot afford to pay its people, and in order for you to earn you’ve got to be out on the street. What do you think is going to happen if they stop working and stop earning money? Listen, if people can’t earn they leave you. Now, in this so-called gang war they had, these people who “hit the mattresses” were not earning any money. And – there is just not enough money to continue paying these men.

Another thing, you are not gonna kill a cop, no matter how crooked he is, and get away with it. No matter how bad he is. There is simply no way in the world the police department is going to allow it. They will hunt you down, they will get informers on the street, they will pay money, they will get you no matter how long it takes. You are not going to kill a cop; believe me, you are not going to do it and get away with it. The cops who get gunned down in the city are hit by crazy addicts, black-power people and other nuts.

Now we come to the murder of Sonny Corleone. To refresh your memory they drew him to a deserted tollbooth area and then about a dozen guys all armed with submachine guns popped out from behind the booth and killed him. Wrong. No way in the world you’re going to have that many guys there when a murder is committed. You want as few people as possible to know you’re connected with the crime to begin with. Then, if you’re going to set up a guy you don’t have to go through all that planning, like taking over an entire roadway. There are so many different ways to hit a man. Any professional will pick his time and place; he can sucker you out, find you out or seek you out. You don’t have to go through an elaborate plan to hit a man. It’s very simple to catch him leaving a barbershop, or catch him coming out of his girlfriend’s house or catch him having dinner in a restaurant. Nobody is going to be able to stay behind walls forever, and when he comes out you’ve got him.

If you remember your book and movie, after Sonny got it the Corleone family killed all the other bosses. No way. It cannot be done. As ruthless as you want to be, you wouldn’t last. I don’t care how careful your plans are, it is a physical impossibility. And no one can afford to hire an entire army of killers to do the job. The price is just prohibitive. The planning is incredible and the undercover work, getting to every bodyguard, is impossible. When that many people know something is going to happen, it doesn’t happen. In 1931 the young turks eliminated many of the old bosses in one day and night. That was more than forty years ago and simply could not happen again today.

I thought the most convincing character was Sollozzo, the guy who tried to force the issue of narcotics. He epitomized what a man is in this business, completely ruthless, he doesn’t give a fuck.

The character of the Godfather himself, Don Corleone, was a composite of a number of people I know. (I personally thought Brando was good despite the line going around that “The Italian who played Marlon Brando did a good job.”) But there were some problems in his portrayal. No boss wants to be referred to as a Godfather. Most people prefer to be anonymous. The men in this business who have gone to prison are men who have allowed themselves to become too well known. The quieter a man lives, the better off he is. And when a boss does have an affair, like the Corleone wedding, he tries to hold it in an out-of-the-way place. He does not invite public figures to these affairs, because he knows the embarrassment it would cause them.

Even the relationship between Corleone and his button men, in particular Clemenza, was ridiculous. A button man is in control of an area and he may see his boss once a week, if that often.

I rated it three stars, a great comedy, and almost everybody I know in the Mob agreed. For a while the movie was the main topic of conversation. Everybody was running around threatening to “make you an offer you couldn’t refuse”. The most popular joke in the Mob had this guy Funzi asking his friend Tony, “Have you seen The Godfather?”

And Tony answered, “No, I went over to his place but he wasn’t home.” A big game that everybody was playing was trying to figure out who the different characters were supposed to be. There was one character I had no problem recognizing: the horse who had his head cut off. I think I bet on him out at Aqueduct the day before I saw the movie.

We shall now see how it is done in real life.

Everybody loves gang wars whether via television, radio, newspapers, magazines or movies. Everybody, that is, except the gangs. While the general public finds gang wars exciting and fascinating, the gangs find them expensive and dangerous. They could live without them, so to speak. But they do erupt, and when they do there is little anyone can do but try to finish on his feet.

Gang wars are caused by many things: young hotshots trying to push older people out, personal dislikes and, most of all, territorial disputes. In most cases these wars can be settled relatively peacefully, but sometimes both honour and money are involved, and then you have people shooting other people. The biggest war of all time, the one which set the standard by which gang wars are judged, was Chicago’s Al Capone–Bugsy Moran War during Prohibition, which lasted until the entire Moran organization was destroyed. In reality there have not been too many real out-and-out fights since I’ve been in the business. The last big one, the Colombo-Persico-Gallo War, had all the elements of the classic gang confrontation and made headlines all over the country. As far as I know, the entire story has never been told from beginning to end. I was there, I was approached by all three parties and I know exactly what happened.

This thing had been building for years and there had been some fighting a few times earlier. It actually started in 1957 when Joey Gallo killed Albert Anastasia under a contract let out by Joseph Profaci. As a reward Profaci gave Joey some territory in south Brooklyn. But Joey was very ambitious and wanted a bigger area. In 1959 the Gallo group, headed by Joey and his older brother Larry, broke away from the Profaci organization and started to fight. Although the Gallos were badly outnumbered they fought pretty tough, and bodies kept turning up until 1962.

Actually Joey and his eventual enemy, Joseph Colombo, had started out together in the Profaci organization. They even worked together on a few hits. They both did good work and climbed up the ladder until they split into different factions and organized their own small groups. In 1959 Colombo stayed loyal to Profaci when the Gallos split with him.

At the same time Carmine (the Snake) Persico was also starting to get some power. He was known as a man who could be depended on, even though he blew one of his biggest jobs: Profaci gave him the contract on Larry Gallo and he messed it up. He had suckered Larry into a bar in Brooklyn and was strangling him when a police sergeant happened to accidentally walk in. This was the biggest break I ever heard a man getting. But this attempt caused a great deal of bitter hatred between the Gallos and the rest of the Profaci organization.

Normally the police don’t care what happens in these things, unless innocent people get hurt, but they brought this one to a halt by getting Joey on an extortion rap. Peace was more or less made before Joey went to the can, and the shooting stopped. I always felt that Colombo and Persico could have avoided a lot of problems by hitting Joey at this time, which they could have done because he just didn’t have that many people. They would have saved themselves a lot of grief.

Of the three of them, I knew Joey Gallo best. Joey was one of the shrewdest and funniest people I ever met, and he was far from crazy. He knew rackets. He knew what made money and what didn’t make money. He knew what he wanted to control. And he knew how to convince people that his way of thinking was best.

He once kept a lion in the basement of his social club on President Street in south Brooklyn. If a guy was giving him a hard time, or if someone defaulted or came up short, he would bring them into the cellar where the lion was tied. He would explain what solution he had in mind and then say, “If it doesn’t work out, guess who’s coming to dinner?” and laugh like crazy.

Joey was short, about five foot six, and had a medium build, and he was a very violent man. But it was controlled violence; he always knew what he was doing. And he was funny, a lot of laughs to be with, what you’d call good company. Years ago, when I was just getting started, we ran some muscle together. I remember one day I was driving along and I look at him and he’s staring into the rear-view mirror. He kept contorting his face into the meanest looks he could make. “Hey, moron,” I said to him, “what the fuck do you think you’re doing?” He looked at me with a sneer splitting his face and said, “What do you think I’m doing? I’m practising to look tough!”

He didn’t have to practise too hard, he was tough. But his problem was that, from the very beginning, he wanted power. He needed it desperately. When I left New York to go to California he was just on his way up. A few years later he made a big splash when he killed Anastasia. He never talked about the killing, but I knew he had done it.

He had one thing in him that somewhere along the line I’ve lost: Joey could hate. He was a brutal ruthless man when he hated somebody, and he found it easy to hate anybody who got in his way. I once saw him work a guy over. He really put his head and his muscle into it. He just kicked this guy until his eye popped out of his head, and then he kicked him in the balls maybe thirty times. He just made himself hate this poor sucker.

We were friendly until the day he died. One of the last times we had dinner together he seemed very wistful. I think he knew he didn’t have long to live. “I wish you had thrown in with me,” he said. “We could have done some great things together.”

I said, “Joey, you went your way, I went mine. You’ve done good and I’ve done good and everybody’s happy.” Joey never really made it as big as he wanted to; he didn’t really control too much when he died. But right up until the very end he was trying. That’s the thing you always remember about Joey, he never knew when to lay off.

When Joey went to prison in 1962 Larry took over the President Street Mob and the south Brooklyn area. Larry could have handled things until Joey got out because he was tough and smart and people respected him. Unfortunately, he died of cancer and the third brother, Albert, took over. Albert just didn’t have the power or strength or the smarts to keep control. When he first took over they called him Kid Blast . . . after a while it became Kid Blister.

Meanwhile, sitting quietly on the sidelines, carefully watching all this, slowly gathering the real power, was Carlo Gambino. He had been in competition with Profaci and when Profaci died in the summer of 1962 he just kind of eased in and took it. He took over whatever he wanted and consolidated his gains because there was no one to stop him – everybody was busy fighting within the Mob. Finally it got to a point where it was a toss-up who was more powerful, Gambino or Vito Genovese.

Vito Genovese was the most ruthless man I have ever known. He desperately wanted to be the Boss of Bosses and was willing to kill anybody who got in his way. He set up the Albert Anastasia hit (which helped Gambino, an Anastasia lieutenant, move into power) and also tried to get Frank Costello. Chin Gigante did the job, but his shot just wounded Costello and he recovered. It didn’t matter, Frank knew enough to take the hint and he retired, leaving Vito in the top spot.

Even after Vito went to prison for fifteen years on a narcotics conspiracy rap he wouldn’t give up any of his power. Anthony Strollo, better known as Tony Bender, tried to take a little and one night he went out for a newspaper and never came back. Vito gave the order from his cell.

Anyway, Genovese and Gambino were the big bosses of the New York area in the early 1960s. Between the two of them they controlled everything there was to control. They also had enough influence to make things happen anywhere else in the country, but even they had to first receive the permission of whoever the boss of the territory was.

The period just after Joey went to jail saw a lot of power changing hands. Colombo was busy building an organization out of what had been the Profaci family, Persico emerged as the most powerful group within the Colombo organization, with his own men and area, and Vito Genovese went to jail, leaving the active control to Carlo Gambino. Although there was some manoeuvring for power, things generally stayed quiet while Joey was in prison.

In April 1970 Colombo’s son, Joseph, Jr, was arrested by the federal government and charged with melting down silver coins, a federal offence.

This is where it all started again. Claiming that his son was innocent and his entire family was being persecuted because they were Italian, Joe Colombo announced the formation of the Italian-American Civil Rights League. This idea, this “League”, had been discussed beforehand with Gambino, with Buster Alai (Alloy), Carmine Tramunti, Tony “Ducks” Corallo, and almost anybody else of importance in the New York organization. The deal was that Colombo would be the titular head of the whole thing. The income was to be derived from memberships, which cost ten dollars per person. The idea was to get every Italian in New York to join, which could come out to be a couple of million people, or $20 million.

The $20 million was what the whole thing was all about. The League was more or less a shakedown operation, and a lot of people were convinced to join and pay their ten dollars. The money was to be split among the New York families.

Mr Colombo’s problems began when he forgot that there was a Carlo Gambino, Buster Alai, Tramunti and Corallo, and he put the money in his own pocket. The newspapers wrote that the Mob was angry because the Civil Rights League was attracting publicity to its operations, but that was bullshit. The League was a laughing fucking joke. Nobody cared about the publicity; organized crime had gotten publicity for years, whether we wanted it or not. Anyway this was good publicity, you might say. What got them mad was they weren’t getting their fair shares. They were getting double-crossed, and they kept warning Colombo that there was going to be serious trouble if he didn’t come through with the coin. While this was going on, Joey Gallo got out of jail.

In public Gallo said he had been reformed in prison, that he had read a lot of books and learned a great deal, and that from now on he was going to play it straight if the Mob would let him. In private the first thing he did was go to see Carlo Gambino. “Listen,” he told him, “south Brooklyn is mine and I ain’t giving it up.” He wanted the dock area, the President Street area, the bookmaking, the shylocking, the muscles, everything he had before he went to prison. The old man agreed, and Joe Colombo agreed. Colombo was not thrilled but he had no choice. Gambino said that was the way it was going to be, and you do not go against Gambino and live too awfully long.

The final straw with Colombo and Gambino came when an audit of the League’s books showed it was bankrupt. Everybody knew there was plenty of money around and it was obvious that Colombo was keeping it. A meeting was held at Buster Aloi’s house and word filtered back to me that Carlo sat there and said very explicitly, “I want Joe Colombo hit in the head like a pig.”

Guess who they offered the job to? Joey Gallo would have given anything to set this deal up and so he was given the contract. Joey did not instigate this at all, he didn’t have the power. Only bosses can approve the killing of another boss. But Colombo had to go because he had gotten to the point where he believed he was bigger than the Mob, that he was indestructible. Wrong.

Hitting a boss is a very complicated undertaking, if you’ll excuse the expression. In order to get him you have to have people within his own organization who are willing to double-cross him. Joe Colombo’s chief bodyguard at this time was a man by the name of Gennaro (Fat Jerry) Ciprio, and he was the man who had to be gotten to put Colombo in a position where he could be assassinated. He agreed – I assume he was promised more money and power – and the arrangements were made through him. Colombo was to be killed at his own giant Civil Rights League rally in Columbus Circle, right in the middle of Manhattan. They decided on the rally because it was the perfect place to cause mass confusion, which was exactly what they wanted.

Gallo also had to find a man to pull the trigger. He didn’t want to use one of his own people because he knew there was no way the killer could get away after the shooting. Through the connections Gallo made while he was in prison he was able to find a black man stupid enough to believe that he was going to get $100,000 or so for committing this particular crime. In reality all he was going to get for his efforts was a bullet in the head. He was dead the minute he agreed to do the job. The Mob couldn’t afford to let him live, he simply knew too much. It was a real sucker job.

Ciprio, Colombo’s bodyguard, was responsible for the actual details of the plan. It took about a month to set the whole thing up. Ciprio had to get press credentials for Jerome Johnson, the killer, to get through the dozens of cops that were in the area. Again, these credentials had to be provided by someone with the organization. And Ciprio had to manoeuvre Colombo into a position where Johnson would have a clean, clear shot at him. Usually, if you’re a bodyguard you shield your man with your own body. If you are out to let him get hit you step aside. Ciprio stayed up on the grandstand and watched the whole thing happen. Colombo should have been killed but he wasn’t – although for all practical purposes he’s dead because he isn’t anything but a vegetable now. Johnson blew the job (the consequences of hiring an amateur) but he didn’t live long enough to know that.

The minute he pulled the trigger Ciprio leaped off the stand and headed for him. A New York City cop, who had no knowledge of the plan, wrestled the gun away from Johnson and had him on the ground. The cop never saw Ciprio come up from behind and blow Johnson’s brains out. If that cop had been a little quicker, or Ciprio a little slower, Johnson would have lived to tell a very interesting story.

When the shooting took place both Gallo and Gambino were miles and miles away from Columbus Circle. All they had to do was sweat it out that everything went right. Fortunately for them, it did. But there was no doubt who set the whole thing up, and had Gambino not backed Gallo, Joey would have been dead within forty-eight hours. There is no doubt about that. But the fact that Gallo was seen with Gambino after the shooting was enough to stop everybody. No matter how much people would have liked to take care of Joey they didn’t dare. It was obvious he had the old man’s approval and therefore had to be left alone.

That didn’t mean there wasn’t going to be a fight. As I said, some potential wars are settled peacefully, but this one didn’t have a chance once Joe Colombo got hit. Forget about it. Blood had to run. It had to.

But not right away. Gang wars are expensive and people go out of their way to avoid them. So a very uneasy peace settled over the New York organization. Joey, of course, started getting more powerful. He was busy pretending he had gotten out of the rackets, he was on parole at the time, which had something to do with that act, and was getting chummy with show-business people. According to newspaper columnists, he was also writing a book. As he should have realized, the worst thing you can do in this business is become publicity-conscious. Unfortunately, Joey Gallo liked to read about himself in the newspapers.

Businesswise Joey started to consolidate his gains. Now he had had a hard-on for Carmine Persico ever since Junior (the Snake) had tried to kill his brother. So Joey cried no tears when Carmine got fourteen years in a federal penitentiary for hijacking. Now the positions were reversed, Joey was out and the Persico Mob was being run by Alphonse Persico and Lenny Dell. Joey simply told them he was taking over. The Persico people realized there was nothing they could do, they weren’t strong enough to hold the organization together without Junior. So they went to see Carlo Gambino.

Gambino owed Joey something, so when Dell and Persico went to see him he just shrugged his shoulders and said that this was between Gallo and them. That was his way of protecting Joey, his way of letting the Persico people know that he wasn’t going to help them, that Joey would be allowed to do whatever he was strong enough to do. He didn’t believe for a second they would be strong enough to knock Joey off and he figured, like everyone else, that they would have to capitulate and give it all up. It didn’t work that way.

The Persico people went to Tony Colombo and Joe Colombo, Jr, and acting boss Joseph Yacovelli and explained the situation. The way I understand the conversation, they told the Colombo people that if Gallo took over Persico’s organization he would be strong enough to take over the Colombo people next. This made a great deal of sense all around, and both groups went back to the old man. If Gallo took them over, they said, he would eventually have to go after Gambino. And everyone knew Joey was a very ambitious man. They finally told the old man that they were going to fight Joey Gallo and, if they did, they would fight him too. That’s when Carlo decided he could live without Joey. Colombo and Persico were threatening all-out war, and since he, Gambino, was fighting extradition at that moment, all-out war was something he could do without. So he agreed to let them kill Gallo.

But the Colombo people wanted more than permission. They knew they were now doing Gambino a favour and, in return, wanted the names of the people within the Colombo organization who had set up Joe Colombo to be killed. This was their price, and Carlo agreed it was a fair one.

I was told Joey Gallo was going to be killed about three weeks before it happened. I was sitting in an Italian restaurant on 86th Street in Brooklyn, and Lenny Dell said to me, “There’s going to be an open contract on Gallo. Do you want it?”

I said, “No, I’m not thrilled about it.”

He said, “Okay, but then we’re gonna need guns, you like to come to work?”

No way. “Look Lenny, let’s be realistic,” I told him. “I know you and I know Joey and I know the Colombo people. I’ve been doing business with you people in one form or another for years. I don’t want to offend nobody. If I take sides now, that means I got to take sides for the rest of my life. I just don’t want to do it.” I had the right to refuse the job, which I did. But it is also understood that I must keep my mouth shut; I can’t discuss the fact that the contract was out with anybody. An open contract means that anybody who has the balls can do it, and anybody with brain shuts up about it.

I wasn’t afraid to see Joey Gallo, even though I knew there was a contract out on him, because when Joey went out in public he always had at least one bodyguard with him who could be trusted. Number two, I always carried a cannon, and number three, the man was my friend. So what was I going to do? I had dinner with Joey twice between the time I knew the contract was out and the night the actual hit took place. I never even felt an urge to tell him what was happening. I didn’t have to, he knew something was up. I just looked at him and thought, “Well, sucker, you took your best shot, now they’re going to take theirs.” I never even thought about telling him. I figured he had to know they were looking to hurt him, but he made the same mistake Colombo made, he figured he was Joey Gallo and nobody would dare do anything to him.

His real mistake was not keeping closer tabs on Gambino. He figured Carlo was his man, and he was, but Carlo just didn’t want a big war breaking out. What Joey should have done was, instead of talking with Dell and Persico, he should have killed them. Had he done that he would have eliminated all his problems. Their people would have either walked away or come into his organization. Remember, all most men want is a chance to earn a living and he really doesn’t care much who gives it to him.

Again, if you are going to hit a boss you have to have help. Even if you are going to hit Joey Gallo. Now, when Joey was killed his bodyguard Pete the Greek was with him and made a legitimate attempt to guard him. Pete used to be with Colombo, but since he himself was wounded and did some shooting trying to defend Joey, it’s obvious where his loyalties were. But there was a second bodyguard, a guy named Bobby, who had also been to the Copa with Joey and Pete and Joey’s family that night. When he was asked to go along to Umberto’s Clam House he refused, saying he was going with some broads. I would have to say this was probably when the phone call was made telling where Joey Gallo would be.

To this day I really don’t know who did the job. The story seems to be that this guy Luparelli saw Gallo going into the restaurant and went to the social club where he picked up Carmine DiBiase. They contacted Yacovelli, who was running the Colombo Mob and making the payment, and he said go ahead. DiBiase, or whoever, then walked into Umberto’s, killed Gallo, and shot Pete the Greek. After finishing the job, he ran out and hopped into the car Luparelli claims he was driving. They drove to Nyack, New York, and laid low. Eventually Luparelli got the idea that they were trying to poison him in his hideout and split.

I can’t buy this whole story, there are just too many contradictions in it. I’m not saying DiBiase didn’t pull the trigger, I just doubt it happened like Luparelli says it did. Believe me, I’m not trying to defend DiBiase. He and I almost had it out in a social club on Mulberry Street one sunny afternoon.

I didn’t really know Carmine very well, but we had both been involved in a business deal and it annoyed him that I kept the best piece for myself. When we were making the cash split he made some nasty remarks about my ethnic background and I smacked him in the mouth. Then I went home.

The next day I got a message that Carmine was sitting around his social club threatening to kill me. I could see that if he tried to follow through it would put a terrific strain on our friendship, so I decided to beat him to the punch, so to speak. I picked up my .357 magnum, which is one mighty big cap gun, and I drove down to the social club. I walked in and pulled the gun out of my belt and stuck it right between his eyes. “I understand you don’t like me,” I said.

One look at Carmine’s eyes told me he was upset that this rumour had gotten around and he felt this was the proper time to dispel it. “Like you?” he replied. “Like you? I love you!”

It was nice to know the rumours were unfounded. “Fine,” I said, “and if I were you, I’d make sure the romance lasts.”

So you understand I never received my membership card in the Carmine DiBiase Fan Club. But let us assume you have a hit going. I’m sitting in my social club and you come and tell me so-and-so is in such a place. Now, I have to get permission before I can go ahead, so I’m gonna pick up the phone and call a man at his home or at his girlfriend’s, right? Wrong. Wherever he is, no two ways about it, that phone has got to be tapped. Second, I’m not gonna have you sitting in the car while I go inside and shoot it out myself. Third, I’m not gonna take you to a hideout I got and, all of a sudden, try and kill you. And if I was going to kill you, why would I bother poisoning you? What the fuck do I want to do that for when I can just as easily pull the trigger? I mean, the whole story doesn’t hold water with me. But I don’t know a better version. It doesn’t really matter anyway; the end result was the same. So long, Joey.

The newspapers made a big deal out of the fact that Gallo was hit in front of his wife and daughter, which is a clear violation of Mob rules. But they forgot that Joe Colombo was hit in front of his family. Tit for tat. One thing about the Mob, they’ll even things up, one way or another.

The shooting really started after Joey was killed. I met with one of the Gallo people who asked me if I wanted to throw in with them until the shooting was over. “I turned the other people down,” I said, “why should I join you?” I wanted nothing to do with it. What did I need it for? I’m not some young punk looking to make a reputation.

Normally it is easy to recruit guns during a war. First of all, you know the people who have worked with guns before and you contact them. You offer them X dollars to remain with your people for the length of the shooting. It’s not going to last more than a couple of months because there is nobody that can afford it; it’s a physical impossibility. You hire a good gun and you’re going to have to pay him a minimum of $5,000 a week plus a bonus for everybody he shoots, $20,000 or so, just to keep him there. No professional will risk his life – which is what he is doing – for less. And business is severely curtailed during the fighting. You have to send someone around to protect your people as they make their rounds, and even then they may see only half their regular customers. And you’ve got to have some people patrolling the neighbourhood, riding around making sure there are no strange faces in the area. A gang war is when you find out who your friends are.

During a war everybody in the organization automatically becomes a gun, even though they really can’t handle anything. But on paper they are considered a gun. Plus you have whatever you can grab. You try to have thirty or forty people who can pull the trigger, and if you’re paying them $5,000 a week it is going to get very expensive. So it won’t last too long.

Once the war breaks out it’s easy to see who is siding with who. Just take a ride through their territory and see who’s hanging out in the area. And as for the people who have been paying off one boss, if they stop he knows they can’t be working with him. That only leaves one other side.

As it turned out the Gallo people couldn’t get enough men together to make a fight of it. You have to have something to pay people with, and they evidently didn’t have it. There is no longer a Gallo organization. It was completely destroyed when Joey died. It was taken over by Colombo-Persico. The people in Joey’s group were drafted, almost like they do in sports, first one family making a selection and then the other and so on. The Gallo people had two choices: either do business with the new people or be completely cut out. Albert Gallo, for example, threw in with Colombo. Business, as they say, is business.

In all, a total of about twelve people went down. They were turning up in car trunks and vacant lots all over the city. Once they had the names, it was a simple process for the Colombo people to eliminate those men within their own organization who had double-crossed Joe Colombo.

The day before Gallo was killed Thomas Edwards (Tommy Ernst) was shot to death on his father-in-law’s porch.

That same day Bruno Carnevale was shot in Queens. He had $14,000 on him when the cops found him.

Ciprio was shot three days after Gallo died. He owned a restaurant in Brooklyn and he walked out one night and was gunned down.

Richard Grossman, who I never heard of and who I doubt was involved in this thing, was found the same day, stuffed in a trunk of an abandoned car in Brooklyn.

Frank Ferriano went down the same day. William Della Russo went down five days later.

Rosario Stabile was shot in his car a day after Della Russo.

I think you get the point. Gang wars are about as much fun as walking through a plate-glass window. There is no excitement, no adventure, only a lot of time spent laying low. It always seemed to me that, if your average citizen finds them so exciting, he should choose up sides and go at it himself. But please leave me out of it.

 

Contract Killer

Donald Frankos

Donald “Tony the Greek” Frankos was a freelance hitman for the Mafia for forty-five years. This put him centre stage in the underworld. He claimed to have killed union leader Jimmy Hoffa, the former president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters in 1975. In 1964, Hoffa had been convicted of attempting to bribe a member of a grand jury and sentenced to fifteen years in jail. However, President Richard Nixon commuted his sentence . Hoffa was last seen in the parking lot of the Machus Red Fox Restaurant in Bloomfield Township, Oakland County, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit, where he was expecting to meet two Mafia leaders, Anthony “Tony Jack” Giacalone from Detroit and Anthony “Tony Pro” Provenzano, vice president of Teamsters Local 560 in Union City, New Jersey. Daniel Sullivan, a former Teamster official and reformer, remembers that some time before, Hoffa had told him: “Tony Pro threatened to pull my guts out or kidnap my grandchildren if I continued to attempt to return to the presidency of the Teamsters.”

“I pumped two slugs into Hoffa’s forehead,” said Frankos.

Tony the Greek was brought up in a violent home in Pennsylvania. After a stint in the US Navy, he went AWOL in Manhattan, hooking up with a prostitute with a long-term heroin habit. He murdered a troublesome pimp. In jail, his reputation as a tough guy and his ease at death-dealing brought him to the attention of the Mafia and Frankos was soon making big money as a hit man. Along the way, he met a Who’s Who of crime including John Gotti, Joey Gallo, Frank Costello, Harlem kingpin Nicky Barnes, crime boss Fat Tony Salerno – who, Frankos says, ordered not only the hit on Hoffa but also an aborted one on Frank Sinatra – and legendary Irish mobster John Sullivan, who Frankos billed as “the outstanding contract killer of his generation”. Finally Frankos was sentenced to twenty-five-to-life In the penitentiary at Attica, upstate, he turned government witness and began writing Contract Killer: The Explosive Story of the Mafia’s Most Notorious Hitman – Donald “Tony the Greek” Frankos with William Hoffman and Lake Headley. In the book, he details the day-to-day life of a hitman.

The phone rang early on this summer 1973 afternoon, and right away I recognized the gruff voice of John Sullivan, an important Irish mobster and a contract killer for Genovese crime family boss Fat Tony Salerno.

“You free today?” Sullivan asked.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Meet me at Wolf’s Deli in an hour.”

At this time I maintained two residences: an apartment reserved for privacy on 15th Street; and a suite to conduct business at the Hotel Wilson. Sullivan phoning me at the apartment boded an urgency not normally associated with our business together, since we saw each other three or four times a week in the regular course of affairs. I suspected he wanted somebody hit.

I pulled on a fresh pair of slacks, topped them with my favourite grey silk shirt, and decided to walk the forty-two blocks from my apartment to the deli at 57th and Sixth Avenue.

Sullivan waited for me at a corner table, wearing a dark business suit, starched white dress shirt, and maroon silk tie. He’d started his lunch: a corned beef sandwich and a bottle of imported beer. About 5’ 10” and blocky, in his late forties, John never smiled, never lightened up. He asked me how I was doing, and whether I wanted something to eat.

“No thanks. I’m trying to lose a few pounds.”

“I need you for a job,” Sullivan said. He didn’t fool around much, a quality to my liking.

“Who?” I asked.

“Buster DellaValle.”

“I know Buster.”

“Makes no difference.”

“Right,” I said.

“So you’ll do it?”

“Yeah.” I took pride in giving definite answers. No maybes or I’ll think it over.

This normally would have ended our conversation, except for Sullivan suggesting likely places for the hit, maybe supplying a picture or two of the intended victim (not necessary here), and providing whatever helpful intelligence he had gathered.

Not the case today. John wanted me to know the pressing reason for the murder contract, so I would act accordingly. I soon sat entranced listening to this veteran gangster explain the twisted course of events leading to the decision that Buster DellaValle had to die.

Buster had been a bodyguard, drug dealer, and hit man for Joey Gallo right up to the time Joey had been killed on 7 April 1972, at Umberto’s Clam House in Little Italy. Buster bought the heroin he’d sold for Gallo – and later for himself – from Philip John Manfredi and Philip D. Manfredi, first cousins who operated out of Fat Tony Salerno’s neighbourhood in East Harlem. The Manfredis, each in his early twenties, filled in while their uncle, narcotics kingpin JoJo Manfredi, did time for the Feds.

“You know what happened to JoJo’s nephews,” Sullivan said.

Yes, I did. On the night of 9 August 1972, they had driven their Oldsmobile to a deserted parking lot in the Clasons Point section of the Bronx, where police found their bodies early the next morning. P.D. Manfredi rested in the front seat of the car, shot three times in the head from a distance of less than six inches. P.J. Manfredi, also hit three times, sprawled on the pavement twenty-five feet from the Olds.

I didn’t need to see a police reconstruction to know how the murders came down. Someone those kids trusted had sat in the backseat of the vehicle and without warning had opened fire on P.D. Manfredi. Undoubtedly the killer considered him the more dangerous of the two and eliminated him first. P.J. Manfredi had run for his life, but hadn’t made it far before a .38 bullet shattered his hand and two more slammed into his back.

“That cocksucker DellaValle whacked them,” Sullivan said. The police professed to have no idea of the killer’s identity, and they probably told the truth, but John knew who did it.

DellaValle, like other members of Joey Gallo’s crew anxious to avenge the death of their beloved boss, had known the Manfredis were close to Fat Tony Salerno, one of the key players in Joey’s assassination, and had waited patiently for the right time to strike. He had continued to purchase heroin from the cousins, as if nothing had changed, until he’d won such a degree of trust that they’d let him sit in the back of their car in that isolated Bronx parking lot.

JoJo Manfredi, seeking his revenge, had reached out from prison to Fat Tony Salerno, who in turn had called on John Sullivan. It seemed pretty straightforward for a Mob contract – DellaValle whacking the Manfredis as vengeance for Gallo’s death, and allies of the drug dealers striking back. But then John Sullivan added a twist that cast a whole new light on the situation.

“Junior Persico and Jerry Lang,” he said, “have already taken a shot at Buster.”

Then why wasn’t he dead? Carmine “The Snake” Persico, known as Junior, boss of the Colombo crime family, and Jerry Langella, his underboss, ranked among the most dangerous Mafiosi who ever lived. I’d met Junior Persico, who ran his gang from a prison cell, and knew he hated everything about Joey Gallo. It was Persico’s gang of top-of-the-line killers who had waged a bloody war against Joey’s crew in the early 1960s, and won.

“You heard about that restaurant,” Sullivan said.

The Neapolitan Noodle. A fancy, newly opened place at 320 East 79th Street. Yes, I knew about it, just like every New Yorker and, no, I didn’t have an insider’s view of what had happened there. On 11 August 1972, less than two days after the Manfredi murders, four legitimate businessmen, standing at the Noodle bar, had been gunned down in a hail of bullets. Two of them, Sheldon Epstein and Max Tekelch, were killed, and the event became the talk of the town. A lone gunman had blazed away with a pistol in each hand, and police brass speculated that these had been mistaken-identity murders. The cops had it right.

The killings inflamed much of the citizenry and became a hot topic for politicians, none more prominent than Mayor John Lindsay. It was one thing for criminals to kill one another, but quite different to murder ordinary people. The usually staid New York Times, under the headline “Run Gangsters Out of City, Angry Mayor Tells Police,” quoted Lindsay: “The recent murder of innocent citizens – allegedly the result of mistaken identity – by gangland executioners is an outrage which demands that the romanticization of the Mob must be stopped and gangsters run out of town.”

The Mafia hated this type of publicity, which focused attention on its activities and guaranteed hundreds of harassment arrests. Even police officers the Mob had in its pocket, bought and paid for, were forced to bring Mafiosi in, albeit with profuse apologies, for questioning. Many criminals had to alter the rhythm of their extremely lucrative rackets until the heat cooled.

“Junior passed the order from the joint to Jerry Lang,” Sullivan said, “and Jerry was at the restaurant to see that everything went right. Instead, everything went fucking wrong.”

The hitter, Sullivan explained, was a guy who’d opened fire before adequately identifying his targets. The intended victims – DellaValle and Bobby Bongiovi, a Gallo soldier – had agreed to a meeting at the Neopolitan Noodle with Alphonse Persico, Sr (Carmine’s older brother, known as Allie Boy), Alphonse Persico, Jr (Carmine’s son, known as Little Allie Boy), and Jerry Langella, who as an underboss should have performed better. DellaValle and Bongiovi had been told to wait at a specific spot at the bar; they never showed up. Those businessmen had sat down in the wrong place.

The police never solved the Manfredi murders, nor those at the Neapolitan Noodle, nor scores of other hits through the years that a single good informant could have put them wise to. Not nearly as many rats existed then. Savvy detectives admit that a knowledgeable snitch is worth a battery of computers and an army of cops.

John Sullivan ordered a slice of cheesecake and a cup of coffee. Whether planning it or committing it, murder made him hungry.

“You gotta be careful with this guy,” John said. “He always packs a pistol.”

“Right,” I said. I had done time with DellaValle at Dannemora and knew him as a dangerous character. “You might look for him on Lafayette Street. There’s a bank there, and two small Greek restaurants. Buster does business out of those restaurants. In the afternoons.”

“Okay.” I already had plotted how to do it.

“Fat Tony don’t want no delays. This Buster situation’s been agitating him for a long time. He couldn’t move till now because of the pressure over the Noodle.”

Sullivan handed me a package. “That’s half,” he said. When I later opened it at my apartment I found $5,000, which meant, with Sullivan keeping 50 per cent for himself, this was a $20,000 contract. Big money for a hit.

Often a crime boss paid an independent hitter like me $5,000 total, or less. Sometimes he wanted it done for nothing, and I obliged – a professional courtesy, so to speak – to open up other avenues of making money.

“The heat’s on,” Sullivan concluded, getting up from his chair. “Don’t make no mistakes.”

The next morning in my suite at the Wilson I carefully prepared for the kill. I spread a yellow-tinted makeup on my face and neck, stuffed cotton balls inside my cheeks, and donned a medium Afro wig. I put on a tank-top undershirt, then applied makeup to all the exposed skin of my upper torso. Next I placed a sawed-off shotgun in a large hollowed out radio I intended to carry. Wearing a faded pair of Levis and dirty high-top sneakers, I was almost ready to hunt for Mr John “Buster” DellaValle.

First I went to see a friend who owned a vegetable store near 12th Avenue, which served as a repository for a wide variety of hijacked merchandise and stolen goods, especially cases of guns swagged off the docks. When I walked in, my friend didn’t recognize me, nor did he stare as if startled by a bizarre apparition. Good. I needed to be disguised, without calling attention to myself. I greeted my friend and told him I once again wanted to use the back of his store to chop up a body, then handed him a thousand dollars, the agreed-upon price. He didn’t want to hear a name and I didn’t give one.

For six straight days I repeated the same prey-stalking routine: don the disguise; drive the stolen Buick with the phoney licence plates to Lafayette Street; park a block away from the Greek restaurants; unload the bicycle I’d folded on to the backseat; place the hollowed-out radio on the handlebars; and pedal by Buster’s supposed hangouts. He was never there.

I hated having to psyche myself a mile high each day, then crash down. It was like getting ready to play the Super Bowl and learning the other team hadn’t shown up.

John Sullivan, furious, came to my place at the Wilson. “What the fuck is the delay, Greek?” he wanted to know.

I got hot. For years I had maintained my independence, anticipating times exactly like this, and I didn’t have to answer to Sullivan. “Fuck you,” I said. “You don’t talk to me that way.”

“Fat Tony wants this guy dead.”

“Tough shit! Buster ain’t where you said he’d be.”

“Well, he’s gotta be there,” John said. “Fat Tony talks about nothin’ else.”

“Fuck Fat Tony, too,” I groused. Ever since I’d started running with Mob people, more than a dozen years earlier, I’d recognized that freelancing held the secret to maintaining sanity, and I insisted they respect my independence. In return, I did hits the Mafia considered too risky, didn’t want their soldiers to handle, or had botched miserably in the first place. Like this one, the DellaValle contract. I showed the wiseguys respect when they showed it to me, and didn’t worry that I might become a hitter’s target. I had a rule about that sort of thing: if the killer didn’t get me, I’d go after his boss.

“I have to tell Tony what you’re doing,” Sullivan said, cooling down.

“Tell him I’m working on it. That it’s all I’m working on.”

“You want a machine gun? I can get you a machine gun. You know, don’t you, that whoever’s with Buster, they go too.”

“Right. No, I don’t want a machine gun.” Years before I had practised with one but hadn’t felt comfortable with it. Too often the gun misfired, which could mean bye-bye Greek. I would have no second chance with DellaValle.

John finally said, “What the hell, do it your own way. Just do it.”

I already had everything set up in the Buick: twenty large black garbage bags, surgeon’s gloves, chainsaw, and goggles to shield my eyes from flying tissue, blood, and bone chips. I knew there would be a mop and bucket in the vegetable store.

On my second trip to Lafayette Street after John’s visit, my luck changed. As I pedalled by the first Greek restaurant, there sat Buster, stationed in a booth with his back against the wall, gazing at the door. I pedalled back to the car and got in, but in my haste I left the bike on the sidewalk propped against a parking meter. I drove directly toward the Greek restaurant, double-parked the car just out of sight of anyone looking through the front window, and stepped on to the street.

That’s when I felt a nervous spasm in the pit of my stomach. My hands grew cold, clammy. It always happened this way, when I went after another killer, when I knew it would be his life or mine, no other result possible. I told myself, you have the advantage, you’re the offence, a true enough appraisal; but a single mistake with the guy who had killed the Manfredi nephews and I’d be as dead as they were.

Then another feeling, only present when I went to kill someone who might kill me: a powerful wish to be back in the protection of my “mother’s” arms. The desire then vanished as suddenly as it had appeared. The time had come.

I entered the restaurant and locked my eyes with Buster’s for just a second. I looked away, and with the radio on my shoulder walked straight to the men’s room. My heart quickened as I checked the sawed-off shotgun. I calculated the distance from where I sat on the toilet to where Buster sat in the booth as thirty feet. Placing the shotgun back into the radio, which I left slightly ajar for quick access to the weapon, I was momentarily startled by my reflection in the mirror. I didn’t recognize me, so surely Buster hadn’t. You got the offence, Greek. Take him. Calm and fast.

I came out of the restroom at a normal pace, picking up speed on my way toward DellaValle. Goddamn! I thought, someone’s sitting with him! A guy about sixty-five years old, his back to the front door, previously obscured from my view by the high-back booth. This old man could be dangerous, I told myself. I had known hitters in their seventies, unstoppable tough old cobs, much harder to ice than their young counterparts.

But now, charged with excitement and determination, I could not consider turning back. Not even heroin supplied a rush as powerful as the moments before a kill, adrenaline pumping, senses transmitting messages of astounding clarity, and fear. I had reached the top of my profession as a contract killer, living a luxury-filled existence, receiving respect from the crime families; and bone-deep I was afraid of losing it all, a guaranteed denouement if only once I hesitated, lost my nerve, or just plain fucked up. Every time I went on a job I had to psyche myself up, whip my mind and guts into an internal frenzy. Always, acute fear provided the motivating, driving force.

I set the radio down on Buster’s table, pulled out the shotgun, and pressed it against his head. We weren’t even noticed by the few late-lunchers still scattered in the restaurant. Buster himself had watched me approach, but his warning system had failed him.

“You make the slightest move, you fat piece of shit,” I told him in a heavy New York wiseguy accent, “and I’ll blow your head off your shoulders. Old man,” I growled to Buster’s companion, “you keep your hands on the table, or my partner will blow your brains out.”

I said all this in a low, calm voice. I didn’t want a panic that would necessitate doing the killing here; killing in public is always bad. The newspapers would cover a restaurant murder – as they had the killings at the Neapolitan Noodle – forcing the cops to react more energetically than usual. Mayor Lindsay, grandstanding with that “run gangsters out of the city” order (a command impossible to carry out, given the thousands of threads connecting the “upperworld” – judges, politicians, police, prosecutors, businessmen – to the underworld) could make life uncomfortable for Fat Tony and his ilk, and the mobsters would blame me.

“There’ll be no problem,” I said, “if you do what you’re told. All I want is your money and jewellery.”

Although his instincts screamed at him that I lied, DellaValle wanted to believe me. I never met anyone who accepted that his life was moments away from ending. I saw the calculating going on in Buster’s fearful eyes, watched him convince himself that maybe I told the truth.

“Get up slowly and walk out the front door,” I said. “I’ll be right behind you. Do what I tell you and you live. Make a break for it and you die right here.”

I placed the shotgun against my right side, so it was hidden by the radio, and escorted Buster and his companion out to the sidewalk. From the corner of my right eye I could see a waitress looking at me, but I knew she’d never be able to make an identification. Buster and I had been close at Dannemora, and he hadn’t recognized me.

I paraded the men the few yards to the car. “Keep moving, motherfucker,” I told the old man. “My partner will meet you up the block.” To hell with Sullivan’s warning – “whoever’s with Buster, they go too” – this guy was no threat. I hated leaving the bike behind, but had no choice. I wasn’t going to drive back to retrieve it.

Opening the Buick’s door on the driver’s side, I ordered Buster to get in, then slid him over to the passenger’s side with my body, maintaining constant pressure on his rib cage with the shotgun. I reached over, opened the glove compartment, and removed a set of handcuffs. Seeing them, DellaValle’s face turned white. I assured him they were only a precaution.

“Where you taking me?” he asked.

“Someplace quiet. Where I can check what you’re carrying.”

“I can give you everything I’ve got right now No problem.”

“I’ll do the looking, cocksucker, when I want.” It was good to throw in the bad language: it let him know he didn’t deal with an amateur. The speech of a professional gangster, including his tone, deliberately sets him apart. Cops have their way of talking. So do doctors.

I pushed the shotgun hard into his ribs. “This I’ll take right now,” I said, reaching inside his belt and snatching out a .22. “Now lean forward, you motherfucker, and put your hands behind your back.” I handcuffed him, pushed him down on to the floor, and felt my breathing start to return to normal. It was virtually all over now, though I reminded myself to remain alert for the unexpected.

My hands nevertheless trembled as I inserted the key into the ignition, started the car, and drove off toward the west side of Manhattan. We travelled perhaps a half-dozen blocks before it dawned on Buster. “I know you,” he said. “From upstate. You’re the Greek, aren’t you?”

It didn’t matter if he knew. “Yeah. I’m the Greek.”

This terrified him, but also somehow provided hope. “Donald . . . you’re Donald . . . Donald . . .”

“Frankos.”

“Right! The Greek Frankos. Tony the Greek. Jesus Christ, Greek, we were friends.”

“Business is business, Buster. Just stay calm. I won’t hurt you if you do what I say.”

I could sense DellaValle thinking this over as I drove. He was recalling what he knew about me, and found none of it encouraging. He had been in my shoes when he’d worked for Joey Gallo – there could be only one reason I had him stuffed on the floor of a car.

I let myself imagine what he felt, wondered what would go through my mind in the not unlikely event that I got shanghaied on a similar ride. I didn’t think I would beg, as I expected Buster would, but who could know?

“What’s going on, Greek? What are you up to? Please. Tell me.”

“I already told you.”

“You’re going to kill me, aren’t you, Greek?”

“Where do you get that, Buster? I’m going to rob you.”

But DellaValle had been around too long, knew my reputation too well, to buy any nonsense about robbery.

“What are they paying you, Greek?”

“Shut up, Buster. Nobody’s paying me.” I pulled on to the Westside Highway.

“Greek, please. Listen to me. I got a lot of money. Stashed away nice and safe. It’s all yours. I’ll take you to it. You can have it all. Just let me go. Please, Greek.”

I reached down to my right ankle where I kept a .22 Beretta. I placed the gun in my lap so Buster couldn’t see it.

He started to cry. Sobbing and shaking, he pleaded for his life.

“I’m not going to kill you,” I repeated. If he died expecting to live, just all of a sudden went to sleep, then he’d die happy. Besides, I wanted him to calm down.

He offered me his loan-shark business, his drug business, “tall stacks” of money he had hidden away. “I’ll leave town, Greek. Nobody will ever know you didn’t do the job, and you’ll be a rich man. Be smart, my friend, tell them you whacked me and take everything for yourself.”

A few guys had saved themselves this way: gave up all they had and moved far away. But it was too risky for the individual with the contract; too many things could go wrong. Anyway, the offer had no appeal to me. At this time my reputation as a good fellow, as a stand-up guy, a hitter (and none ranked higher in the eyes of mobsters than a hitter), meant more than anything in the world to me.

At 30th Street I pulled over to the right and stopped. Traffic was light, and the tension in the car was unbearable. Buster defecated all over himself; the sudden, awful stink filled the car.

DellaValle’s last words were an apology for shitting in my car. I shot him twice behind the head, and his head bounced back up and almost tore off the dashboard. Then he slumped down, real peaceful, dead.

I pushed Buster’s body down closer to the floor, covered it with a blanket I kept in the backseat, and drove the reeking vehicle to 12th Avenue. Too many people were milling about, so I ran the Buick over the kerb on to the sidewalk and parked the passenger side against the vegetable-store entrance. The proprietor and I carried DellaValle to the back.

“It’s done,” I told John Sullivan over the phone.

“Where you at?”

“Swanee’s.” A code name we used for the produce market.

“I want to see.”

While I waited for John to arrive, I stayed busy. I uncuffed and undressed Buster, an unpleasant job; checked his pockets for money; got help hoisting him on to a table; carried the garbage bags, gloves, goggles, surgeon’s smock, and chainsaw in from the car; and, finally, reparked the car. I permitted myself a smile, knowing that when I finished no one could ever put Buster back together again – and the cops would have a helluva time identifying him, if by some odd chance they found any of the body.

A knock on the back door. “Who’s there?” I asked.

“Me. John.”

When I let him in, he took one look at the naked body and almost knocked the wind out of me. He grabbed me, pounding my back, hugging and kissing me. “Nobody can do it better than you,” he said. “You’re a master at killing. You’re the best, Greek. Even Trigger Burke in his grave is smiling at your killing.”

Trigger Burke was John’s hero. An infamous West Side Irish gangster who went unrepenting and swaggering to the electric chair at Sing Sing in 1957, Burke reputedly murdered more than 100 people. The highest compliment John Sullivan could pay was comparison to Trigger Burke, who had been his mentor.

John then noticed the plastic bags and chainsaw. “Fat Tony decided he don’t want Buster chopped up,” he said. “He wants the world to see him, as a warning to anyone who tries to kill a member of his own crime family.”

Technically, I suppose, John Sullivan was right. Joey Gallo’s crew (including DellaValle) belonged to the Colombo organization, with which the Manfredis had been associated, though mainly Gallo had warred against the gang Junior Persico now headed. Fat Tony’s connection was the cut of the drug profits his Genovese organization received for permitting access to its territory.

John said, “Just cut Buster’s arms off at the elbows and tape them to his stomach.” The message: if you kill one of your own with your hands, then you lose the hands that once picked up the pistol.

That night, we dumped DellaValle’s body in a shallow grave in the farming community of Jewett, New York, about 150 miles north of Manhattan in Greene County. It took longer than we expected for someone to discover the body. Hunters stumbled upon it 7 March 1974.

John paid me the second part of the contract, $5,000, the night after the hit, plus I had another $3,000 I’d lifted off Buster.

We went to a belly-dancing joint, stuffed ourselves with Arab food, and drank heavily as we watched the dancers undulate in perfect rhythm with the intense Middle Eastern music.

I thought about Buster buried upstate as I left the nightclub with one of the girls. John followed me outside and gave me one last hearty hug. “Fat Tony slept good last night,” he whispered into my ear. “You satisfied his thirst for blood.”

“I’m happy for Fat Tony,” I said. And for you too, Greek, I thought. Your belly is full and your pockets are stuffed. You’ve come a long way.

 

Illustrious Corpses

Tommaso Buscetta

While Mafiosi in America began to speak out, the Sicilian Mafia maintained its silence – until Tommaso Buscetta broke the omertà. His testimony led to numerous Mafiosi going to jail on either side of the Atlantic. Once known as the “Godfather of Two Worlds”, Buscetta knew the inner workings of the Sicilian Mafia, as well as its connections to the Five Families of New York.

Born to a poor family in Palermo in 1928, Buscetta was the youngest of seventeen children. In 1945, with the Mafia riding high in Sicily again, he joined the Porta Nuova Family under Giuseppe “Pippo” Calò and went into the lucrative business of smuggling cigarettes. By 1957, Buscetta had climbed high enough up the tree to attend a meeting between the American Mafia bosses and the Sicilian godfathers in a Palermo hotel. Both Lucky Luciano and Joe Bonanno were there.

After the death of Lucky Luciano in 1962, power struggles developed between the Sicilian crime families. The result was the First Mafia War, which claimed the lives of sixty-eight Mafiosi. It reached its bloody climax with the Ciaculli Massacre. A car bomb was intended for the head of the Sicilian Commission and godfather of the Ciaculli Family, Salvatore “Ciaschiteddu” or “Chichiteddu” Greco – the epithet means either “little bird” or “wine jug”. It went off, killing seven police and military officers sent to defuse it after an anonymous phone call. This turned the Mafia War into a war on the Mafia. Some 1,200 Mafiosi were arrested. There were massive show trials – one with 114 defendants. Most walked free. Even those convicted of multiple murders rarely spent more than a few years in jail.

Many had fled the country to Argentina, Brazil, Venezula, Canada and the United States. Buscetta, who was wanted for a double murder, turned up in New York where the Gambino Family helped him set up a pizza business. In 1970, he was arrested, but the Italian authorities did not ask for his extradition and he moved on to Brazil. In 1972, he fell foul of the authorities there, who tortured him. He was then extradited back to Italy where he faced a life sentence.

Out on parole, he found that a Second Mafia War was brewing and fled back to Brazil. After two years on the run, he was arrested again and was returned to Italy in 1983.By then many of his Mafia allies – including Stefano Bontate and Salvatore Inzerillo – were dead and two of his sons were dead, along with a number of leading policemen, prosecutors, judges, prominent businessmen and investigative journalists who had all become “illustrious corpses”. To avenge his murdered family and friends, Buscetta began talking to the crusading anti-Mafia judges Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino and became the first of the pentiti. The result was the “Maxi Trial”, held in a specially constructed bunker next to the Ucciardone, Palermo’s prison. Built from reinforced concrete, it was designed to resist rocket attacks and had a 24-hour air defence system. The accused were held in cages flanked by armed guards. There were 474 defendants, though 119 had to be tried in absentia. They were charged with drug trafficking, extortion and 120 murders. In all, 360 were found guilty and sentenced to a total of 2,665 years in prison plus nineteen life sentences handed out to the top Mafia bosses and killers. However, there were a large number of successful appeals. Michele “the Pope” Greco was sentenced to life. He died in prison in 2008, still protesting his innocence. Giuseppe Marchese also got life, but in 1992 became a pentito. He admitted twenty murders, including those of Stefano Bontate and Salvatore Inzerillo. L ike other pentiti, he suffered again when members of his family were murdered in revenge.

Salvatore Riina and Bernardo Provenzano were sentenced to life in absentia. While a fugitive, Riina arranged the murder of former allies who were trying to unseat him as head of the Sicilian Mafia. He also had Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino killed. Eventually he was betrayed by his driver Balduccio Di Maggio, whose brother was then killed. It is also said that Bernardo Provenzano “sold” Riina in exchange for compromising material he held in his Palermo apartment. Although he already had two unserved life sentences, Riina was tried and convicted of over a hundred counts of murder, including sanctioning the slayings of Falcone and Borsellino. In 1998, he was also convicted of the murder of Salvo Lima, a politician in league with the Mafia who had been shot dead in 1992 for failing to prevent the Maxi Trial. In 2006, he was tried for the murder of journalist Mauro De Mauro who disappeared in 1970.

With Riina in jail, Bernardo Provenzano took over as head of the Sicilian Mafia. After forty-three years in hiding, he was arrested in April 2006. Having already been convicted of numerous murders – including those of Falcone and Borsellino – he was sent to serve out his life sentences with Riina and other convicted Mafiosi in the high security jail at Terni in central Italy.

With Provenzano in jail, another power struggle broke out between Salvatore Lo Piccolo and Matteo Messina Denaro. A gang boss from the Resuttana district of Paler mo, sixty-three-year-old Lo Piccolo was the closest to Provenzano and considered “old school”. Denaro was just forty-six. From the impoverished western Sicilian provincial city of Castelvetrano, he was known as the “playboy boss” because of his passion for gold watches, fast cars and beautiful women. Like Riina and Provenzano, they had both been on the run for some time – Lo Piccolo since 1983 and Messina Denaro since 1993. Other key players in the power struggle were Totò Riina’s physician Antonio Cinà, builder Francesco Bonura, pioneer of the heroin refineries Gerlando Alberti and Nino Rotolo, a henchman of Luciano Liggio and convicted gangster who was kept under house arrest due to a medical condition.

Liggio himself had been acquitted in the Maxi Trial of running the Corleonesi Family from behind bars and ordering the murder of prosecutor Cesare Terranova in 1979. However, he was already serving life sentences for murders stretching back to 1979.

When it was clear that the “Pax Mafiosa” which had held since Provenzano took over in 1993 was falling apart, the police swooped on fifty-two bosses and forty-five “capimandamento” (district bosses) and acting bosses – including Rotolo who had passed a death sentence on Lo Piccolo and his son, Sandro. In September 2005, Rotolo was heard saying he was looking for barrels of sulphuric acid to dispose of their bodies. The two families had clashed over the remnants of the Inzerillo family who had been exiled in the US since the Mafia war of the 1980s, where they had become involved with the Gambinos. Now they wanted to return to Sicily. Lo Piccolo was for their return, Rotolo against it.

Rotolo was sentenced to twenty years for drug trafficking, though faces further charges. Lo Piccolo and his son Sandro were arrested in November 2007. They are currently in jail in Milan.

Buscetta then gave testimony in the New York “Pizza Connection” Trial. He gave evidence on drug trafficking and money laundering, resulting in the conviction of twenty-five Mafiosi. They were largely Sicilian-born and many could not speak English. One of them was the former boss of the Sicilian Mafia Gaetano Badalamenti, who was sentenced to forty-five years in jail. He died in a prison hospital in Ayers, Massachusetts in 2004, aged eighty.

As a reward, Buscetta was allowed to live in the US under the Witness Protection Programme. While the Pizza Connection Trial was going on, Buscetta sat down with authors Tim Shawcross and Martin Young to write Mafia Wars: The Confessions of Tommaso Buscetta. It gives a shocking insight into the Mafia at work on the lawless streets of Palermo.

Once the Mafia had recovered from the chaos of the wars of the 1960s, the Commission came back into operation led by the triumvirate of Salvatore Riina, representing the Corleone family, Stefano Bontate, boss of the Santa Maria de Gesù family and a close friend of Tommaso Buscetta, and Gaetano Badalamenti, capo of the Cinisi family. Representatives of the different families were given a place on the Commission under the title “district bosses”.

While Buscetta had been in Brazil, Liggio had murdered his way to the top of the Sicilian Mafia, investing heavily in the kidnapping industry and the heroin trade. A stockily built man, with a taste for large cigars and dark glasses, his reign was frequently interrupted by bouts of illness caused by Pott’s disease (tuberculosis of the bone). Despite this he managed to hold on to power even when in prison. He took care to appoint district bosses who would support him, a move which was deeply resented by Bontate and Badalamenti.

Badalamenti was appointed head of the Commission but, for reasons that have never been explained, he was ousted and his place as head of the Cinisi family was taken over by his cousin Antonio. This coup d’etat was almost certainly orchestrated by Liggio and the Corleonesi. Although Buscetta has not revealed why his friend was expelled, he has this to say about the procedure:

“A Man of Honour can be expelled for reasons relating to the family he belongs to or the Mafia organization as a whole. It is considered a very grave mistake for a Man of Honour to continue to deal and even to talk to a member expelled for not being worthy.”

Badalamenti’s seat on the Commission was taken by Michele Greco, a close friend of Liggio and a relative of the Grecos who had been caught up in the first Mafia wars. His Ciaculli family became, along with Liggio, the dominant power in Sicily, with connections to the highest political and financial circles. His nickname was appropriately powerful – “the Pope”.

The Commission guarded its powers of life and death jealously, and there were many rows over the way decisions were being reached on assassinations.

One of the first state officials to be murdered was the procuratore generale – the chief public prosecutor – of Palermo, Pietro Scaglione. Scaglione’s career was riddled with allegations of corruption, and although he was investigated for links with the Mafia, the tribunal declared him innocent. He had custody of numerous dossiers relating to Mafia crimes which were mysteriously shelved or lost. One of them was a report from the carabinieri on the involvement of all the Mafia families in the narcotics trade. Nothing was done for four years until the carabinieri agitated for a Mafia trial, and the entire Mafia from Castellamare, Joe Bonanno’s birthplace, was charged, including Bonanno’s lieutenants Frank Garofalò and John Bonaventre and his associate Frank Coppola. After a long and tedious trial, all were acquitted for lack of proof. Scaglione’s position was a powerful one, from which he could threaten those he chose to protect. But when he chose no longer to serve the Mafia’s interests, they decided to kill him.

On 5 May 1971 he made his daily visit to his wife’s graveside in a Palermo cemetery. As he turned to leave, he and his driver were shot dead. No one saw anything, though of course plenty of people knew what had happened.

“The murder in question took place on Via Cipressi in a section controlled by the Porta Nuova family, whose head was Pippo Calò. No murder, in particular the murder of Pietro Scaglione, chief public prosecutor, could have been committed in that area without the consent of the family boss – and this is not just for reasons of prestige, but because this sort of murder inevitably arouses strong pressure from the police authorities in the territory where the crime has taken place and that may have repercussions on the family’s operations in their territory.”

In this case the rule was observed and, according to Buscetta, Calò’s power and status grew after the murder.

Scaglione’s death came almost a year after the Milan summit of July 1970 which Liggio and Buscetta had attended. As well as discussing the drug trade, the meeting may have been held to authorize that murder. It may also have arranged for the murder of Mauro de Mauro, a journalist who worked for Palermo’s crusading newspaper L’Ora.

The disappearance of de Mauro remains a mystery. No one doubts that he was murdered, but Buscetta claims it had nothing to do with the Mafia. The mystery is further clouded by the fact that de Mauro was mixed up with the neo-Fascist movement. He had been investigating the mysterious death of Enrico Mattei, the Italian oil magnate whose plane crashed in Sicily, possibly as a result of sabotage. At the time, Mattei was seen as a threat to the American oil companies and it was alleged by some that the Mafia was contacted to carry out his assassination on behalf of “political interests”. The disappearance of de Mauro and the death of Mattei were the first of the long list of what have become “cadaveri eccelenti” – the “illustrious corpses”.

Over the next decade the Grecos and the Corleonesi eliminated anyone who seemed to threaten their interests, from the most insignificant Palermo villains to the highest officials of the state. Corpses, illustrious and not so illustrious, would become an everyday sight on the streets of Palermo.

Giuseppe Russo, a dedicated carabinieri colonel, was drafted into Sicily from northern Italy in 1977 to investigate into the murder of Pietro Scaglione and the disappearance of Mauro de Mauro. But Russo was to die. As Buscetta has now revealed, he was shot by Pino Greco.

After Russo the murders became more frequent – frequent enough to establish a pattern. They usually took place in broad daylight in Palermo, and involved anyone who threatened the Mafia’s heroin trade. Their monopoly of the business had been confirmed when they built a number of refining laboratories. Anyone who knew about these laboratories and was foolish enough to broadcast the fact was effectively signing his own death warrant. And anyone trying to investigate the millions of dollars which were being “laundered” back and forth from Italy to America was also likely to be killed.

The powers of investigation available to the judiciary were very limited. The Mafia’s political protectors had ensured that their bank accounts, like those of the law-abiding citizen, remained strictly private. The power to investigate finances would inevitably lead to discovery of the drug traffickers. It might also reveal the politicians and financiers who supported them. Those who were brave enough to attempt investigation into the sources of finance and the location of the refineries realized that they were no longer dealing with a Sicilian problem. The narcotics trade was international, and the police and investigating magistrates would require major assistance from overseas in order to tackle it.

Boris Giuliano, the leading detective in Palermo’s escuadra mobile – flying squad – was one of the first to realize that law-enforcement agencies throughout the world had to co-operate if they were going to defeat the Mafia. In particular he recognized the value of working with the Americans, and was involved in the investigation of a major heroin case with the US customs and the DEA [Drug Enforcement Agency].

On 19 June 1979 a cheap blue plastic suitcase had arrived at Palermo’s Punta Raisi airport, twenty-five kilometres outside the city. The case had come via Rome from New York. When Giuliano intercepted it he found $497,000 in small denomination bills – the currency of the narcotics trade. The money was wrapped in several pizza aprons. They were later traced to a pizzeria in New Jersey run by a Sicilian called Salvatore Sollena.

Sollena was the nephew of the recently deposed Palermo Commission boss, Badalamenti. When the DEA in New York infiltrated the operation they discovered that Sollena had not only lost the money confiscated at Punta Raisi, which was payment for drugs he had already received, but that he had recently suffered another blow when a twenty-four-kilo shipment of heroin had been seized at John F. Kennedy airport in New York. His supplier had been his uncle.

Badalamenti was not the only Mafioso to suffer from the attentions of Boris Giuliano. In the months before his death Giuliano and his associates were getting dangerously close to the centre of another smuggling ring. It could implicate not only criminals in Sicily but respectable leaders of society in Rome and elsewhere.

From 1976 to 1980 the heroin trade between Sicily and New York was dominated by the smuggling network controlled by the Inzerillo-Gambino-Spatola ring. Between 1977 and 1979 the Italian police tracked $4 million which had been transferred from New Jersey to a bank in Palermo. They also discovered a $1 million transfer made by Frank Castronovo, owner of the Roma restaurant in New Jersey (who in 1985 would be one of the principal defendants in the Pizza Connection trial). The money was used by Salvatore Inzerillo for a property transaction, the favoured method of recycling Italian drug money – the “narco lira”. This operation was easy because Rosario Spatola ran a construction company as a front. Among the public contracts he was awarded was the building of a local school. Inzerillo’s company specialized in porcelain and lavatories.

But other connections were about to cause problems. In the 1970s, Michele Sindona had been a useful man with his skill in setting up front companies, but when his Franklin National Bank crashed the reverberations ran deep into the Mafia. As the shattered pieces of his financial empire were put into receivership, traces of the recycling of heroin money from the Inzerillo-Gambino-Spatola ring were uncovered in Italy. It was “black” money, which ran into billions of lire. Shortly after the seizure of the suitcase at Punta Raisi, Giuliano met Giorgio Ambrosoli, the government-appointed liquidator of Sindona’s financial network. It is thought that Giuliano provided Ambrosoli with proof that Sindona was laundering heroin money through Swiss banks. Three days after their meeting Ambrosoli parked his car outside his Milan apartment, got out and locked it.

“Are you Giorgio Ambrosoli?” asked a voice from behind him. He turned around and said, “Yes.”

Three gunmen then shot him five times in the chest . . .

On 21 July 1979, Giuliano left his apartment for his usual early morning cappuccino in the Bar Lux. It was eight o’clock on a Saturday morning and there were not many people on the street. He had received a phone call from someone he knew and arranged to go down to meet him a little earlier than usual on this particular morning. According to the only witness in the bar who came forward, this is what happened:

“I noticed a man who was trembling. He was white in the face. He must be ill, I thought. My first impulse was to offer to help. When the Commissario Giuliano went towards the door the man followed him. He drew a pistol and shot him three times in the neck. Signor Giuliano fell face downwards, and the man then shot him four more times in the back.”

Giuliano did not even have a chance to pull his own gun.

The killings went on. Michele Reina, the Provincial Secretary of the Christian Democratic Party, was murdered in 1979. A political murder such as this was clear evidence of involvement between the Mafia and the local Christian Democrats. It is suspected that Reina refused to make the necessary accommodations to the Mafia. Someone more amenable would have to be found. Cesare Terranova, a crusading judge who had devoted himself to the fight against the Mafia, was the next victim in the same year. He had single-mindedly pursued Luciano Liggio, whom he branded “Public Enemy No. 1”. Like Giuliano, he realized that the only way to defeat the Mafia was to attack their money. He told his wife: “If only I could have the power to investigate, to go into banks and investigate the finances of the people I know three months ago were pushing a cart and are now millionaires

– then I could really do a lot.”

It was Terranova’s courageous stand against Liggio which sealed his fate. Signora Terranova recalls an occasion when her husband had gone to the Ucciardone prison to interrogate Liggio:

“He was told that Liggio was ill and couldn’t come down. He realized that Liggio – which means Little King – the Little King of Corleone – couldn’t accept the concept that he would come down to be interrogated by a magistrate. It had to be that the magistrate would go up and interrogate him. Just to make doubly certain, he asked the guard, ‘Well, is Liggio in bed? Has he been in bed? Is he ill?’ And the guard answered, ‘No, actually, he’s been out in the yard to take air in the courtyard up until ten minutes ago.’

“So at this point, of course, he insisted that Liggio be brought down. He said, ‘I don’t care how he’s brought down but he’s got to come down to be questioned.’

“So he sees Liggio arriving on a stretcher on which he is being brought down. The judge starts questioning him – going through the purely bureaucratic things, like ‘What is your name?’ And Liggio answers, ‘I don’t remember.’ ‘Who is your father?’ ‘I don’t remember.’ ‘Who is your mother?’ ‘I don’t remember.’

“So without batting an eyelid, the judge turns to the person who is taking all this down and says, ‘Right, this man does not remember his name; he does not remember who his father was and he doesn’t remember who his mother was.’”

Terranova was insulting Liggio. He seemed to be implying that Liggio was admitting he was a bastard. Such was Liggio’s rage that he was on the point of spitting at Terranova. He restrained himself, but did not forget:

Judge Terranova was shot at point-blank range less than a hundred yards from his apartment.

As Buscetta has revealed, assassinations, especially those which produced “illustrious corpses”, could not be carried out independently by individual Mafiosi. They had to be approved by the Commission:

“The Commission will then form the team that is to carry out the decision. They have the power to choose the executioners from any family without informing its boss; organizing the crime is, therefore, the exclusive province of the Commission and it is supposed to remain a secret from all the others; with the exception, of course, of the executioners themselves. In practice, however, it usually happens that a Commission member will inform his most trusted colleagues of the decision – but this has very little impact either on the planning or on the execution of the murder.”

In the case of Terranova, however, Liggio himself was out for blood. He steamrollered the decision through the Commission, bypassing the members who would have opposed him. Buscetta is keen to stress the lack of “propriety” in Liggio’s haste to carry out murder. His lack of consultation with the other members of the board caused great resentment and would in the end help to precipitate the second Mafia war. This is what Buscetta told Falcone about the murders of Reina and Terranova:

“I know for sure, because I heard it from Salvatore Inzerillo, that these murders were decided upon by the Palermo Commission, without any knowledge on the part of Inzerillo himself or of Stefano Bontate . . . These murders further widened the breach that already existed between Bontate and Inzerillo on the one side and the rest of the Commission on the other. In particular, Salvatore Inzerillo told me that the killing of Cesare Terranova had been committed on orders from Luciano Liggio. He didn’t indicate the reasons, but it was quite clear that the motive for the killing was Terranova’s legal activity against Liggio.”

The police investigation into the murder of Terranova was pursued with about as much vigour as if it had been a traffic offence. Although Liggio was charged with the murder, the prosecution in the trial was hopelessly inadequate. As so often in Sicily, witnesses’ memories miraculously faded once they appeared in court. Although the shooting had taken place in the centre of Palermo, no one had seen anything and no one had heard anything. The law of omertà was again invoked to shield the assassins . . .

Boris Giuliano’s investigation into the Mafia’s finances was taken over by a captain of the carabinieri, Emanuele Basile. He had been investigating links between the Mafia and Sicily’s top bankers and financiers, some of whom were “washing” millions of dollars of heroin money from the United States. By the early 1980s laundering money for the Mafia had become a major industry. There were more banks in Sicily than in any other part of Italy. In the town of Trapani in western Sicily, with a population of only 70,000, there were more banks than in Milan, Italy’s financial capital. Between 1970 and 1980, banks in Sicily increased their turnover by 400 per cent. Even the smallest towns in the most remote parts of the Sicilian countryside had their own banks, while in Palermo they competed for customers on almost every street corner. It was an unedifying display of greed by the banking fraternity attracted like sharks to a city awash with money from a trade based on blood.

Although still deprived of the legal powers he needed to investigate bank accounts, Captain Basile became far too persistent for the Mafia Commission. On 1 May 1980 three gunmen put an end to him and his inquiries by shooting him on the street as he was returning home with his wife and young daughter. Within minutes the police picked up three Mafia soldiers for questioning. They had found two of them racing away in a car belonging to the third, who was arrested a few hundred yards away, trying to climb a high wire fence. He was “searching for lemons”, he explained to the police. The three men were already suspects in the murder of another police officer, and while none of them could account for their flight from the scene of the crime, they all gave identical alibis. They were, they said, returning from secret romantic liaisons with young married women. They could not possibly disclose their names as they were all “Men of Honour”. One of them was from the Ciaculli family of Michele Greco, and the other two were from Inzerillo’s family, the Passo di Rigano. It appears that Inzerillo and Bontate had opposed this killing, and the presence of two of Inzerillo’s men suggests that they had been given the contract without his knowledge.

Inzerillo and Rosario Spatola were already being investigated and many arrest warrants had been issued against members of their organization. Inzerillo was so outraged by the warrants that he became almost deranged. Without consulting the Commission, he ordered the execution of the chief public prosecutor of Palermo, Gaetano Costa. On 6 August 1980, as the sixty-four-year-old prosecutor was preparing to abandon the heat of the city for his summer vacation, a young man approached him in the street, pulled out a .38 revolver from beneath the newspaper he was carrying and shot him five times at point-blank range.

Inzerillo’s manic reaction was designed to show the Grecos and their allies on the Commission that he was as tough and ruthless as they were, but it was an act of pure insanity and it broke one of the fundamental rules of the Commission . . .

In 1979 a new killer had joined the Commission – as if they needed one. He has acquired a reputation as the most bloodthirsty psychopath that even the Mafia has ever seen. His name was Giuseppe “Pino” Greco, known as “Scarpazzedda”, meaning “Fleet of Foot”. He delighted in being present at Mafia executions. On one occasion he got so carried away that he chopped a man’s arm off. He was a frequent visitor to a dingy basement room just outside the centre of Palermo. It was the Mafia’s torture chamber, where victims would be garrotted and their bodies either cut up or dissolved in acid. Michele Greco was the head of the Commission and his protégé Pino Greco, although not related, became head of the Ciaculli family. The Greco-Corleonesi faction was assuming all the positions of power, and Bontate and Inzerillo, fellow members of the Commission, found themselves increasingly isolated and humiliated. For example, to talk to Michele Greco they were forced to go first to Pino Greco, the newest and most junior member of the Commission. It was a calculated insult.

At the beginning of 1980, the Corleonesi, now fully in control, began to step up their challenge to the power of the state . . .

At the end of 1979 Tommaso Buscetta was released from prison on the Italian equivalent of parole. He went to live in Turin, and took up his old trade of glass engraving once more. Although he had to report to the local prison every night, he still managed to make frequent trips to Palermo and Rome. The seven years that he had spent in Ucciardone prison had greatly increased his stature as a Man of Honour. He had been treated with tremendous respect. Fellow prisoners would actually bow in his presence or kiss his hand, and on one occasion his word was sufficient to avert a potential riot.

The Mafia virtually control Ucciardone. Many inmates have their food delivered from Palermo’s finest restaurants, and carry on their business and personal affairs almost uninterrupted. When Buscetta’s daughter Felicia was about to get married she visited her father in prison. He arranged for her to see Pietro lo Iacono, Stefano Bontate’s deputy, who ran a shop selling fabrics and trousseaus. Lo Iacono gave her a trousseau for her wedding free of charge. Buscetta himself married, for the third time, in 1979, shortly before his release. Christina had been both loyal and patient.

On his release Buscetta emerged into a different world. Sicily and the Mafia had been radically changed by the profits from the heroin trade. One kilo of morphine base could be bought for $6–9,000 depending on the total quantity; once refined by the Mafia in one of their laboratories, the same kilo at 90 per cent purity would be worth $40–50,000. When sold in New York its wholesale price would be $200,000; its street value would be over $2 million. The Mafia would deal on average in shipments of between twenty and a hundred kilos, each transaction being worth between $4 and $20 million dollars.

According to a secret DEA report a major supplier of morphine base from Turkey, much of it destined for the Pizza Connection, was the Yasar Musullulu organization . . . Musullulu would guarantee delivery of morphine base, usually in 500-kilo consignments, to an area within seventy nautical miles of Sicily. He would dispatch his representative to Mazzara del Vallo, a village near Trapani in Sicily, where Michele Greco’s refining laboratory was hidden. The morphine base would arrive on a Turkish freighter and be transferred to a speedboat, which would in turn rendezvous with a fishing boat sent from a remote part of the Sicilian coastline. One of the favoured transfer points was the island of Marittima between Sicily and Sardinia. Payment for each shipment would be made in Zürich. Mafia cashiers would make regular flights to Switzerland to settle with Musullulu. The two men he dealt with most frequently were Nunzio la Mattina and Antonio Rotolo, known as “Carlo”.

Early in 1983 Nunzio la Mattina was murdered. He had arranged for $1.5 million to be “stolen” en route to Switzerland. Despite his claims that it really had been stolen, his fellow Men of Honour decided not to afford him the benefit of the doubt and he was duly eliminated. His place was taken by Rotolo, who proved to be much more efficient and, perhaps noting the fate of his predecessor, more than anxious to convince his colleagues of his honesty. On his regular visits to Zürich, Rotolo was always accompanied by “six Sicilian-looking males” – who, true to Sicilian tradition, remained silent throughout each meeting with Musullulu. Rotolo brought suitcases with him containing between $3 and $5 million in $50 and $100 bills. He attended at least fifteen meetings of this nature, dealing in a minimum of $45 million worth of morphine base. At a conservative estimate that was worth $500 million wholesale in New York. Street price: an astronomical $5 billion.

It was a serious business.

Rotolo commuted back and forth to Zürich until April 1984. One of the last deals he did with Musullulu took place there in the spring of 1984. He arrived as usual in Switzerland with his escort and suitcases. This time he was paying the Turk $5.2 million for 500 kilos of morphine base. The Sicilians were actually in credit for $1.3 million and were buying the base at $13,000 a kilo. Shortly after the meeting Musullulu disappeared – taking with him over $6 million of Mafia money. He is now in hiding, although he is keen to get back to Turkey and is known to have offered a bribe of $750,000 to an official of the Turkish secret police for a safe passage back to his own country. Shortly after his flight from Switzerland he went to Bulgaria. There, in a bizarre incident, one of his henchmen set fire to him and he was badly burnt. Somehow he managed to survive the attack and is probably still in Bulgaria.

The fact that the Musullulu organization was only one of a number of major suppliers of morphine base to the Mafia laboratories in Italy gives some idea of the sheer scale of the trade. No wonder that, as Buscetta reveals, everybody wanted to get in on the act:

“When I arrived in Palermo, as well as this incredible amount of wealth, I also found a great deal of confusion among the various families and their Men of Honour, so that I soon realized that the principles that inspired the Cosa Nostra were definitely a thing of the past and that it would be best for me to leave Palermo as soon as possible, since I could no longer see myself in the organization that I had believed in since I was young.”

His first contact in Palermo was Giuseppe Galeazzo, whom he had met in prison. Galeazzo approached him on behalf of the head of their family, Pippo Calò . . . Calò operated from a base in Rome, where he was known as “Mario”. In one of his several apartments he kept millions of lire in cash and precious works of art which other Mafiosi would sometimes buy from him. In his other apartments he would store heroin and explosives. His influence in Rome, especially his financial contacts, allowed him to act both as the Mafia’s ambassador in the Italian capital and also as their chief accountant.

In Rome he had developed contacts with some of the leading gangsters and financiers, including men linked to Roberto Calvi, whose Banco Ambrosiano was used by the Mafia and by Michele Sindona to launder millions from the Mafia’s narcotics trade. Calò also had “business” interests in Sardinia with one of Calvi’s associates, Luigi Faldetta, a wealthy building developer. Two men who were common to both worlds were Ernesto Diotallevi and Danilo Abbruciati, gang bosses of Rome’s underworld. They were on good terms with Flavio Carboni, a millionaire property developer from Sardinia with an extensive network of friends ranging from government ministers to gangsters. Carboni was a leading member of P2 and close to the P2 grand master Lido Gelli. He was also a close friend of Roberto Calvi. When the Banco Ambrosiano became embroiled in a series of scandals involving the Vatican, during which it was discovered that Calvi had made a series of highly suspicious loans to Carboni for millions of dollars, there was an attempt to kill the deputy chairman of the bank, Roberto Rosone. The assailant was shot by a security guard. He turned out to be none other than Danilo Abbruciati, underworld associate of Carboni and Calò. As for Calvi, a few days after Carboni organized his secret flight to London, the banker was found hanging beneath London’s Blackfriars Bridge.

Through friends like these, the head of the Porta Nuova family had acquired power, influence and money. He had become a multi-millionaire while Buscetta had been languishing in prison. Buscetta was resentful because Calò had apparently done nothing to help his (Buscetta’s) family, something a capo was obliged to do under the Mafia code.

When Buscetta abandoned his semi-parole in Turin, he responded to Galeazzo’s message and received word from Calò to contact him in Rome, which he did. Calò suggested that they forget about the past, saying that he had not realized how hard up Buscetta had been. Buscetta should stay in Italy, where they could make a lot of money together. The reason, he confided, was that the Mafia had the mayor of Palermo, Vito Ciancimino, in its pocket. Luciano Liggio’s deputy, Salvatore Riina, who had taken over the leadership of the Corleone family after Liggio was imprisoned in 1974, had total control of the mayor. Calò explained that there would be another massive redevelopment of Palermo which would make a lot of money for everyone – and that Buscetta could share in this bonanza with Calò, without having to go through a capodecina. Buscetta would deal directly with Calò and no one else. It was an offer that most Men of Honour would not have refused.

In addition, Buscetta was offered a house in Rome so that his children could go to the best schools. The offer made, Calò turned to “family” business. He told Buscetta that Stefano Bontate was behaving badly; he had formed an alliance with Salvatore Inzerillo against the rest of the Commission.

Back in Palermo Buscetta met Bontate and Inzerillo to hear their side of the story. The Grecos and the Corleonesi, they claimed, were undermining their power on the Commission. Bontate told Buscetta that for his own self-preservation he was planning to kill Riina. He claimed to have the support of an unaligned Commission member, Antonio Salamone, but he admitted that Salamone would not publicly declare his support for Bontate until after the event, at which point he promised to confirm in front of the Commission that Bontate had acted “with right on his side”.

It worried Buscetta that Bontate would fall for such an empty promise. He warned him that to all intents and purposes it was a worthless agreement. Bontate was effectively on his own. Buscetta asked how he was going to kill Riina and Bontate replied that he was personally going to shoot him at a Commission meeting. Buscetta must have wondered about his sanity . . .

His violation of parole seems not to have been taken very seriously. He was able to move around with a minimum of anxiety – as he explains in his confession, it is a well known fact that between 1.30 pm and 4.30 pm in Palermo it is impossible to find a policeman! . . .

Although Buscetta is understandably reticent on the subject, his sons had become involved with some of his criminal associates. Benedetto had already got mixed up with his father’s dealings in New York and South America, and although there is little evidence that they committed any crimes, an incident involving Antonio occurred in the late summer of 1980 which gives some indication of the life they were leading.

Pippo Calò, who was still waiting for Buscetta to reply to his offer, told him that he had heard that Antonio was getting into trouble locally by paying for supermarket groceries with suspect cheques. Calò was annoyed, either because this was happening in an area controlled by the Porta Nuova family, or simply because petty crime of that nature was frowned on by senior Mafiosi. In front of Buscetta he called Antonio “a swindler”. Buscetta was surprised and angry. That same evening Antonio was summoned to see his father in the presence of Calò. Buscetta told his son in no uncertain terms what he thought of his behaviour. Antonio apologized but pleaded that he had been in such desperate financial straits that he had been forced to pawn his wife’s jewellery. Calò seemed to relent. In a gesture of sympathy, the Mafia boss pulled out a wad of notes from his pocket and peeled off 10 million lire in 100,000 lire bills. He pressed the money on the grateful Antonio, saying that, as it was his birthday the following day, this was his present. Antonio went next day to the pawnshop in Palermo and paid 5,400,000 lire to retrieve the jewellery.

A few days later he was arrested as an accomplice in a kidnapping case: Calò’s bills had been part of the ransom. When Buscetta found out he was furious. He confronted Calò, demanding to know how he could have done something as stupid as that. Calò attempted to justify himself with the excuse that he had been paid for a shipment of smuggled cigarettes and had no idea it was traceable ransom money. Buscetta did not believe Calò’s story. He deduced that his capo had probably organized the kidnapping and then set up Antonio.

For Buscetta it was the last straw. He turned down Calò’s offer and told him that he was now finally convinced that the best option for his family and himself was to leave Palermo and return to Brazil. Calò accepted Buscetta’s decision and promised that he would pay for Antonio’s defence. Buscetta remained in Palermo for the rest of 1980.

Before he left, his old friend Bontate threw a grand farewell dinner for him at his $500,000 villa. The house was protected by electronically controlled gates and closed-circuit television cameras monitored by soldiers from his family. The dinner was a grand affair with the finest Sicilian wines and local dishes. Among the guests were Antonio Salamone, Salvatore Inzerillo and Salvatore Contorno, one of the toughest and most loyal members of Bontate’s Santa Maria di Gesù family. In January 1981, equipped with a false passport, Buscetta look a car-ferry from Palermo and drove overland to Paris. From there he flew to Rio de Janeiro. Christina and the children travelled separately by air from Rome.

Once again, Buscetta had got out just in time. Three months after arriving in Rio he read in the newspapers that Bontate had been murdered. It really had been a farewell dinner.

Sorrow at the death of a friend was tempered by the knowledge of what the cost of that friendship might now be. Buscetta arranged to visit Salamone, who was also in Brazil. Salamone was head of the San Giuseppe Iato family, which included some of the most important Italian and American operators of the Pizza Connection – Alfredo Bono, Giuseppe-Ganci and Salamone himself. Salamone must have had some of the same misgivings as Buscetta. He was the man who had made the tentative alliance with Bontate to kill Salvatore Riina of the Corleone family.

The two met in San Pedro, Brazil. Salamone told Buscetta that he had already telephoned “the Pope”, Michele Greco, who claimed to know nothing about Bontate’s murder. Salamone had also taken the precaution of contacting Inzerillo, who told him that he was in no doubt that the killing had been arranged by the Corleonesi and that Michele Greco’s claim of ignorance was utter nonsense. Inzerillo was highly suspicious of Greco, but he was not too worried about his own safety. He was in the middle of a major heroin deal involving fifty kilos, which he had obtained from Riina. He still owed Riina the money. No one, he was sure, was going to kill him until he’d paid up.

Inzerillo had told Salamone about the circumstances of Bontate’s murder. Shortly before he was killed, his deputy, Pietro lo Iacono, the man who had provided a wedding dress for Buscetta’s daughter, had been to see his boss. Bontate mentioned to lo Iacono that he was planning to go to his country house that same evening and stay the night there. It was his birthday Armed with this information, lo Iacono left and alerted Giuseppe Lucchese, a soldier in Michele Greco’s family who was waiting outside in a car. Lucchese relayed the message by walkie-talkie to the occupants of another car, which lay in wait further up the road.

A few minutes later Bontate emerged from his house on Via Villagrazia and set off for his country retreat. He was preceded by an escort car driven by Stefano de Gregorio, his bodyguard. When they reached the intersection of the Via della Regione Siciliana, the lights were just changing to red. De Gregorio sped on, failing to notice that his boss had been caught at the lights. Bontate was a sitting target. The killers opened fire. Although Bontate was armed, he never had a chance to use his gun. His car and his body were riddled with bullets from the automatic fire of a Kalashnikov assault rifle. He was mortally wounded but he still managed to steer the car for a few yards down the street. It crashed into a wall. De Gregorio got all the way to Bontate’s country house before he realized that his boss had not caught up with him. He drove back six kilometres to the scene of the assassination. He took one look at the bloodstained body – de Gregorio knew that there was nothing he could do – except get out fast before the police arrived . . .

Bontate’s funeral was poorly attended. The only two women who turned up wearing the customary black veils were the wives of Michele Greco and Tommaso Spadaro, Bontate’s godfather. Another mourner was Salvatore Contorno. Although not well educated in the formal sense, Contorno was an intelligent and resourceful mafioso who was respected by his friends and feared by his enemies. He had a reputation as a “man of courage”, a euphemism for a Mafia soldier who has become an expert killer . . .

The low turnout at Bontate’s funeral confirmed his [Contorno’s] suspicions that his boss had been set up. One man whom Contorno felt he could still trust was Mimmo Teresi, the sottocapo of the Santa Maria di Gesù family. Teresi had been told by Michele Greco that he had nothing to fear and should continue as if nothing had happened. Teresi then had a secret meeting with Inzerillo at an iron warehouse in Palermo, on the Via della Regione Siciliana – the same street on which Bontate had been ambushed. The next time Teresi saw Michele Greco, “the Pope” asked him why he had gone to the iron warehouse. Teresi realized that he was under surveillance by the Corleonesi. He admitted to Greco that he had met Inzerillo. Greco warned him not to meet Inzerillo again. He also told him that Pietro lo Iacono would now become the regent of the Santa Maria di Gesù family . . .

On 11 May 1981 Inzerillo was driven in his new bulletproof car to a rendezvous with his mistress, who was installed in a block of flats on the Via Brunelleschi which had been constructed by one of his companies. As soon as he entered the house his driver, Giuseppe Montalto, signalled to a group of men parked across the road. When he came out of his mistress’s apartment, Inzerillo was killed by a burst of rifle fire before he even had the chance to dive into his car. The murder weapon was the same Kalashnikov that had killed Bontate. Inzerillo’s body was found with a loaded .357 Magnum in his pocket. His sense of security because of his heroin deal with Riina had proved to be false. To the Corleonesi the loss of a few hundred thousand dollars was a price well worth paying for the elimination of their most powerful enemy. In the event, they had not even had to shoot him through the bullet-proof glass.

As with Bontate, the Corleonesi had accomplished the murder of Inzerillo by ensuring his betrayal by one of his own family. They had now killed the two leaders of the opposition and installed their own men in their place. They then set out to dissuade those loyal to Bontate and Inzerillo from entertaining any thoughts of revenge. High on the list was Mimmo Teresi, who had ignored Greco’s instructions and had arranged to meet Inzerillo at the exact spot where he was killed. His late arrival saved his life. Later, when he met Salvatore Contorno secretly and told him about his narrow escape, Contorno replied that Teresi was a “dead man” and that he must not make any move which would make the situation worse.

In Brazil, Buscetta knew that he too could be a candidate for the Corleonesi death list. He was in considerable danger as both he and Antonio Salamone had known about Bontate’s plan to kill Riina . . .

Mimmo Teresi and Salvatore Contorno were invited to a “peace” meeting by Pietro lo Iacono. Contorno was suspicious and immediately sensed a trap. He decided not to attend and advised Teresi not to go either. Teresi was never seen again. It was the beginning of an orgy of bloodletting which claimed the lives of many of those who were thought to be supporters of Inzerillo and Bontate, or enemies of the Corleonesi. Presiding over the bloodbath was the psychopath Pino Greco.

Inzerillo’s son, Giuseppe, was top of his list. Although Giuseppe was only seventeen years old, Pino Greco considered him a threat, having heard that the teenager had boasted, “I will kill with my own hands that dog Salvatore Riina!” Pino Greco could not allow such open boasts to go unchallenged. He personally supervised the murder of Giuseppe Inzerillo. Before he killed him, he tortured him. As a final moment of horror, Greco cut his arm off and jeered at him, “With this arm you will no longer be able to kill Totò Riina!”

The vendetta spread from Palermo to New York. Inzerillo’s brother, Pietro, was discovered dead in the boot of a car with dollars stuffed in his mouth and his genitals cut off. These Mafia trademarks suggested that he might have been running around with the wife of another Mafioso (a capital offence) and had been too greedy into the bargain.

Pino Greco next set out to hunt down Contorno, who was in hiding both from the police and the Corleonesi. But Greco’s intelligence network passed word that Contorno was going to visit his parents. He moved swiftly to set up an ambush.

On 25 June 1981, at 7.30 in the evening, Contorno set off from his parents’ apartment in the Via Ciaculli, driving his mother-in-law’s Fiat 127. In the car with him was a cousin, Giuseppe Faglietta, who had insisted on coming with him. His wife and son had left before him in a separate car. They drove down the Via Ciaculli and approached the overpass that leads to the Via Giafar. As they did so, Contorno saw someone he knew, Pino d’Angelo, driving in another Fiat 127. Contorno waved at him and let him pass. D’Angelo waved back, overtook and then started to slow down. Contorno was puzzled by that. He was now driving along the highest point of the overpass running parallel with the top floors of the apartment buildings by the roadside. Ahead and to the right, Contorno noticed another familiar face behind a top-floor window of a building beside the overpass. It was a man called Vincenzo Buffa. Contorno began to get alarmed. Alarm turned to fear when a few seconds later he saw a powerful motorbike racing towards him. The rider was Giuseppe Lucchese, one of the team which had killed Bontate. Another man was riding pillion.

It was Pino Greco.

The motorbike pulled in front of Contorno’s car. Greco raised his Kalashnikov, took careful aim and opened fire, emptying a full magazine in Contorno’s direction. Contorno threw himself against Faglietta to protect him. Miraculously, they survived the hail of bullets. Faglietta was hit in the cheek; Contorno was totally unscathed.

The motorcycle raced off down the road. Greco needed time to reload his magazine.

A few moments later, Contorno saw in his rear-view mirror that the motorbike was coming back at high speed. Reacting quickly, he stopped the car, pushed Faglietta out and crouched beneath the car headlights. In his hand was a .38 calibre revolver with five rounds. Greco opened fire again with the Kalashnikov and Contorno aimed carefully at his would-be executioner. He was sure that he hit Greco in the chest because the second burst of automatic fire went wild and Greco recoiled. Behind the motorbike was a Volkswagen Golf containing a back-up for the hit-team. Contorno recognized only one of them. Badly outnumbered and outgunned, he decided to make a run for it. Amazingly, both he and his cousin escaped.

Later, Contorno’s cousin told him that he had seen Pino Greco on the beach in a swimsuit. His body showed no trace of any bullet wounds. He had been wearing a bulletproof vest.

Contorno escaped with nothing more than a scratch from a splinter of glass and a shock of hair torn out by a bullet. He had had the narrowest of narrow escapes. He fled at once to Rome. There he thought of contacting Pippo Calò until he remembered that Bontate, shortly before he had been killed, had become increasingly uneasy about Calò’s friendship and that Calò’s visits to Bontate’s house had noticeably diminished immediately before the murder. Contorno decided to lie low and let as few people as possible know where he was.

Soon after arriving in Rome, he received some disturbing news. His wife’s uncle had been murdered. A bricklayer unfortunate enough to have been with him at the same time was also killed. Contorno was shocked. This was not some fellow member of the Bontate faction but a distant relative who was not connected with his Mafia activities. Contorno realized that the senseless killing could have only one purpose – to draw him out of hiding and turn everyone against him. There followed a series of brutal murders of his friends and relatives. Contorno continued to hide until he was arrested by the police. The arrest probably saved his life. He emerged as one of the few survivors of the Mafia war. He would follow Buscetta’s example and write his own confessions. By the time they talked, both men had seen their families brutally murdered . . .

Partly because of increased pressure from the police in Italy, partly because of the growing trade in cocaine, much of the Mafia’s trade in narcotics was now being run out of South America. Because so many Latin American countries had major cities with large Italian immigrant populations, it was an ideal location for Mafia activity. It was also easy to fly from South America to New York or back to Sicily. With false passports readily available and hardly any police surveillance, the mafiosi could move around undetected. Now that the French-Corsicans were out of the picture, it was a free market for the Sicilians. Also, the deadly conflict in Palermo could be more or less ignored in South America – there was no Commission to enforce loyalty and execute contracts . . .

In the autumn of 1981 Buscetta received some ominous news from Italy. Mariano Cavallaro, the brother of his first wife, Melchiorra, had been murdered in Turin. It looked as if Buscetta’s worst fears were coming true, and that he was now implicated in the Sicilian power struggle. Desperate for news he called Pippo Calò, but Calò claimed to know very little about the killing. He tried to reassure Buscetta that it was just a local matter involving Turin and had no connection with events in Palermo. Calò invited Buscetta back to Palermo, offering to pay for the flight since Buscetta said he had no money . . .

Salamone had warned Buscetta that Badalamenti might contact him . . . Badalamenti was still a man of considerable stature. His message to Buscetta was simple:

“I am here to try and convince you to come back to Sicily because you are the only person who has enough influence to be able to direct a counter-attack and lead a revolt against the Corleonesi.”

Buscetta was unmoved. As far as he was concerned the situation in Palermo was beyond redemption . . .

Badalamenti confirmed that “mopping up” operations by the Corleonesi were continuing. Amongst the victims was his cousin, Antonio Badalamenti, who had been installed as head of the Cinisi family after Gaetano was ousted. Another friend of Bontate and Inzerillo, Alfio Ferlito, the head of a family in Catania, eastern Sicily, had also been murdered by his sworn rival and a staunch ally of the Corleonesi, Benedetto “Nitto” Santapaola.

Santapaola was involved in a bitter feud with Ferlito, who had been a close friend of Inzerillo. It was a friendship which caused great tension and suspicion between the two. When Ferlito was arrested Santapaola planned his revenge. On 16 June 1982 an armed escort of the carabinieri accompanied Ferlito as he was being transferred by car from prison in Enna to one in Trapani, but they were no match for the professional killers of the Corleonesi. Ferlito and his escort were wiped out in a carefully planned ambush – the latest victims of the Kalashnikov.

 

Blood Oath

George Fresolone

George Fresolone was one of a new generation of mafiosi. The son of a bookmaker and numbers runner, he was born in Newark, New Jersey in 1953. From an early age he knew he wanted to be a gangster.

“It was really simple,” he said. “In that kind of working-class world, everyone else broke their backs at some job they hated, trying to make a buck. But the wiseguys just hung around, and the money seemed to roll downhill into their pockets And they were respected. Next to the parish priests, they were the most respected guys in the neighbourhood.”

While still at high school, he began hanging around with Pasquale “Patty Specs” Matirano, a made man with the Philadelphia Crime Family. As Matirano’s driver, he learnt the ways of the Cosa Nostra. By the mid 1970s, he had his own bookmaking and numbers business, and did business with Joe “the Butch” Corrao, a Gambino family captain and an important member of John Gotti’s crew. On Wednesday nights, he and Matirano would go to Manhattan to pay Corrao off. That was the night the Gambinos threw dinners at Taormina, a restaurant on Mulberry Street across from the club where Gambino boss Paul Castellano hung out. A couple of hundred guys from various crews would usually be there. They would eat and drink, and Fresolone met a lot of guys he would work with later. After dinner Fresolone would hand Corrao or one of his men a very fat envelope with anywhere from $20,000 to $50,000 in it.

Through Matirano, Fresolone got involved with the Cosa Nostra in Philadelphia which was run by Angelo Bruno. His consigliere was the ambitious Antonio Caponigro – “Tony Bananas”. Fresolone was in a crew with Joseph “Scoops” Licata and Anthony “Slicker” Attanasio, both made guys After Bruno and Bananas were killed, Nicodemo Scarfo took over When Fresolone was arrested, he became disillusioned with the Mafia as they did not look after his family The New Jersey State police put pressure on him to turn state’s evidence. They wanted him to rat on Matirano, but he refused to do so. However, it became clear to Matirano that the heat was on. He fled to Argentina. Fresolone then received a phone call from Matirano, saying that he wanted to move to Calabria but was afraid that he would be arrested entering Italy. Fresolone made a deal with the police He would co-operate provided they did not put out an international warrant on Matirano.

By the time Fresolone became a made man, he was wearing a wire to meetings The evidence he gathered led to the indictment of thirty-eight mobsters, including “Little Nicky” Scarfo. In 1994 his autobiography, Blood Oath: The Heroic Story of a Gangster Turned Government Agent Who Brought Down One of America’s Most Powerful Mob Families, written with Robert J. Wagman, came out. In it, he explained how Nicky Scarfo took over the Mob in Philadelphia.

Under most circumstances Patty was about as easygoing and as nice a guy as you would ever want to meet, but if you pushed him too hard, he would push back even harder. He was “willing to do what had to be done” on occasion. It was near Christmas when a friend of ours who ran a numbers bank for Patty was being hassled very hard by a guy who wanted to muscle in. He knew the numbers bank operator was around Patty, but he pushed anyway. This was a major affront to Patty and something he had to deal with strongly and immediately. One day we were over at the Upstairs-Downstairs Club when Patty heard that this guy had just come into the 3-11. Patty called me and told me to take a couple of the guys over to the 3-11 and hurt the guy, hurt him real bad. “Georgie, don’t kill him,” Patty said, “but make sure he don’t walk too good anymore.” So four of us got into the car and went speeding over to the club. I ran in, and this guy was sitting there. I jumped him and started to bang on him real good. I remember I used a bat on his legs, and then I was banging his head against the jukebox for what seemed like ten minutes. The other guys finally came in and pulled me off him. I guess I lost my head and went too far. They took the guy to the hospital. The guy then ran to Bananas. By this time Bananas had become the Bruno family consigliere, the number three man in the organization after the boss and the underboss. Patty was an important man among all the families operating in northern Jersey, but he was under Bananas and had to answer to him. Bananas had long commanded respect and fear – even when he was only a made guy – because of his power and because he was a stone-cold killer. He had started out in the early days as a killer with Albert Anastasia in Murder Inc. Over the years he had built up his own mini-family, guys who were loyal to him first and foremost. In time he became a multi-millionaire, but he still liked to kill people and did it as a kind of hobby. He killed people for all the New York families, and he was the one guy who was feared by even the most powerful bosses. So when Bananas sent Joey Scoops to bring Patty and me to him, all the way over I was quaking. Patty kept telling me not to worry, that everything was square; but I honestly didn’t know if I would be coming back alive.

Bananas was really angry. He screamed at me, and he screamed at Patty. He wasn’t so much angry that we had beaten on this guy, because he agreed with Patty that that was business, but he was angry that Patty had not cleared it with him. He was even angrier that I had done the beating in what he considered “his” club – the 3-11. Coming into his club to do that kind of business made him look bad. I remember him screaming: Would I go into his house, into his living room, to do that kind of crap? If not, why then did I think I had the right to do it in a joint he owned? Patty ended up calming him down, and the whole thing eventually blew over. I found out later that Bananas actually liked me, and I ended up doing a lot of things for him. But his temper and his habit of killing people to solve problems would eventually catch up with him.

As 1979 passed into 1980, things could not have been going better as far as I was concerned. I was making good money. I had a wonderful wife and son at home. I wasn’t a made guy yet, but when I was, I knew I would be set for life.

Then on Friday night, 21 March 1980, Angelo Bruno was whacked in Philly, and Mob life would never be the same. According to many so-called Mob experts, the hit was done because the New York families were feuding with Angelo over Atlantic City. That is completely wrong, exactly 180 degrees backward. Angelo was not killed because he was keeping the New York families out of Atlantic City. He was whacked because he was letting them in.

Patty and I had seen it coming. As soon as we heard the news on the radio, we knew it was Bananas who had whacked Angelo, and we knew why. Bruno was never a strong leader. During part of the 1970s he had spent three years in jail for refusing to testify before the New Jersey State Commission on Investigation. Then, too, it was simply not in his nature to be aggressive. Known as the “Docile Don”, Angelo hated violence and valued negotiation and peace above all. So Bananas was pretty much allowed to do his own thing in northern Jersey. Bruno simply did not bother to worry about his consigliere’s empire building. Any of the other bosses would have seen it for what it was – a direct threat – and would have had Bananas killed, but as long as money continued to flow down the New Jersey Turnpike from Newark, Bruno let Bananas have his way.

In 1976, Bananas went to jail for assaulting an FBI agent. Ducking a federal warrant, he had been an absent figure, hiding out with his girlfriend in New York City for almost a year. I used to drive Patty into the city to meet with him, and sometimes Patty would send me with messages or money, or to pick stuff up. Finally, during the Christmas season in 1975, the FBI staked out his house, guessing correctly that he would try to visit his family during the holidays. He came out, and when he saw the Feds, he tried to run. A car chase ensued, and it ended when he crashed his car into an FBI car. That’s how they got him for assaulting an agent.

When Bananas got out in 1978, Bruno did not simply make him a captain, he promoted him to consigliere, the third most powerful position in the family. For the first time Patty and our guys officially had to report to him. Bruno hoped that the promotion would buy Bananas’ loyalty. It didn’t. Bruno’s low-key ways frustrated any number of the powerful family members. Bananas was constantly angry, and so was Bruno’s underboss Phil Testa. And there was one thing in particular that really made them mad: Bruno was renowned for his dislike of the drug trade. He even gave interviews and said that all he did was make gambling available to people who wanted to bet and that he would do almost anything to keep drugs off the streets of Philadelphia. A lot of people thought that Testa and the other “young turks” in the family were angered because Angelo wouldn’t let them go into the drug business. Well, not exactly. Angelo was personally against drugs, and he would never personally profit from the drug trade, but if drugs were going to be sold, he saw no reason why some people in his organization shouldn’t profit.

What actually was happening was that, with Angelo’s permission, a number of Carlo Gambino’s blood cousins – including three brothers, Rosario, Giuseppe, and Giovanni Gambino – opened pizza shops in Cherry Hill, Philadelphia, and Delaware. They were actually fronts to move heroin, and many of the sales were to Bruno family members in Philadelphia. They in turn sold the drugs to non-Mafia distributors who sold it to street dealers. The problem was that the Gambinos were making huge profits on the transactions. Many of the Bruno family members, especially those buying the drugs from the Gambinos, believed that if our family had been in the drug trade in an organized manner, we would have developed our own lines of supply directly through the old country and be making two or three times the amount.

That was at the heart of Bananas’ problem with Bruno. He was simply too complacent, too willing to go along with what Gambino and the rest of the New York families wanted. That was especially true about what was happening in Atlantic City. The Bruno family had long controlled Atlantic City when it was a down-at-the-heels resort town not worth much Mob interest. But then along came legalized gambling, and suddenly Atlantic City was a prize. Bruno realized that he did not have the muscle to keep the New York families out, so he closed his eyes and let them in, and asked almost nothing in return. To Bananas, this was cowardly, and he believed being spineless was in Bruno’s genes. Bananas was a Calabrian; Bruno was from Villalba. Generations of old-country feuds required that Bananas look down on Angelo, so finally he had enough.

But you don’t kill a boss like Angelo Bruno without permission.

Patty told me that Bananas had told him he went to Frank “Funzi” Terri, the head of the Genoveses, to get the Commission’s permission for the hit. He did not move until he got it, and for the last weeks before the hit, Bananas was telling Patty that he was going to become the new boss and that Patty would become his underboss. Patty said if this happened he would straighten me out first thing and make me the youngest captain our family had ever had. But in the meantime we should keep a very low profile.

Actually, a couple of days after Bruno was whacked, something happened that confused both Patty and me. The night that Bruno was killed, he had had dinner with three other guys at Cous’ Little Italy, a small, butpopular restaurant in South Philly. Bruno never drove himself, of course; he arrived with Raymond “Long John” Matirano, a family associate who owned a large vending machine business that carried Angelo on the payroll as a salesman. A lot has been made of who ended up driving Angelo home that night, as if it was somehow a part of the grand scheme, but the reality was that Angelo’s driver that night was the result of absolute happenstance. Angelo went to dinner knowing that Long John had an appointment after dinner and would not be able to drive him home. He assumed that one of the other guys at the table would, but they begged off, saying they wanted to get home to listen to a live opera broadcast on the radio. An opera lover like Angelo understood that, and it said a lot about his docile personality that he would not think twice when a guy in the family said he had somewhere else to be and could not take him home.

Actually, Angelo knew all he had to do was ask and half the guys in the place would fall all over themselves to drive him. What happened was that Long John went out to the bar to see who was there who could drive Angelo. Several guys volunteered, but Long John chose John Stanfa, who had just come in and was having a drink. Stanfa was relatively new to Philadelphia, having arrived a few years earlier from Sicily where he had been connected. He had come to Philly because he was being sponsored by a relative who lived there. Carlo Gambino, who apparently knew Stanfa’s people back in the old country, had personally called Angelo and asked if we could take him in. Angelo said sure, we would be happy to, so Stanfa came, began a small home repair business, and was starting to be with our guys.

The two drove away in Stanfa’s old Chevy. After making a stop to let Angelo buy a paper, they pulled up in front of Angelo’s brownstone at 934 Snyder. John later told me that they sat there for a few minutes talking about Sicily when suddenly the shooter came up behind the car, stuck a double-barrelled shotgun through the window, put it to the back of Angelo’s head, and pulled both triggers. Some of the pellets passed through Angelo into John, but the moment he heard the shots, John was out of the car and running. He was young, and I guess he had really good reflexes. In any case, the shooter did not go after him, and John spent a day or two in the hospital and was questioned by the police.

Much was made later out of the fact that the window had been open, it being a cold March night and all. Stanfa had supposedly been in on the hit and had lowered the power window on Bruno’s side with the controls on his side. This was a nice theory, but the problem with it is that Stanfa’s car did not have power windows, and the window was not wide open. It was down only a few inches, but that was enough. As anyone who had ever driven with Angelo knew, he had a habit of lowering the window a few inches and then hooking his fingers over the top. I’m sure that is exactly what happened that night.

Despite the fact that Patty and I were sure Stanfa was not involved, a day or so later Patty got a call from Bananas telling him that Stanfa and Frankie Sindone, a family captain in Philly, were coming up. He told Patty to bring them to him, and they would go together into New York to meet with Paul Castellano. The Gambino boss had been close to Angelo and, we were told, was very angry about his being whacked.

That made no sense. Based on what he had been hinting at for weeks, we just assumed it was Bananas who whacked Angelo. It was natural to suspect Stanfa, because he was driving; as for Sindone, if I hadn’t known what Bananas had been saying the past weeks and had to guess, Sindone would have been among the top two or three guys I would have picked to have made the hit. Logic does not always rule in the Mob, and reasoning can get very cockeyed. But I picked Sindone because he was very close to Angelo and might be considered the best choice to succeed him.

The family had been badly fractured for a long time. Angelo had not spoken with his underboss, Phil Testa, for almost two years. Testa was the leader of the faction that was not happy with the way Angelo had been running the family. That obviously would make Testa suspect number one; but right behind him would be Sindone because if the Bruno faction retained control, he would likely be chosen the next boss.

Given what we knew about the hit and our assumption that Bananas had cleared it with the Commission, Patty and I could not understand why Castellano would now be leaning on Stanfa and Sindone. Even stranger was that Patty told me to be prepared to do some “work” that night. “Bananas says that if Paul does not believe these guys, they ain’t going back to Philly,” he told me. “We’ll have to do it, so I want you to be ready by the time we get back.”

The two of them drove up from Philly and met Patty and me at the 3-11. Then the four of us went over to a diner on South Street owned by a guy who was with us. (At that time the diner was still under construction and not yet open for business.) There we met Bananas, and I stayed behind while the four of them got into one of Tony’s cars – with one of his guys driving – and they all headed for New York. I went back to the 3-11 and got a couple of heavy plastic tarps, the kind house painters use, and I went to Happy Bellini, a guy who was connected to us, and picked up a couple of guns. I waited for Patty to call. Several hours later they all came back laughing and carrying on like no one had a care in the world. We had a couple of drinks, and they headed back to Philly. Patty later told me that Castellano had been ready to have Stanfa and Sindone killed, but Bananas saved them by assuring Paul that neither of them had been involved. So I returned the guns to their owners and put the tarps away for another day. John Stanfa is now the boss of what is left of the Bruno-Scarfo family. I wonder if he knows how close he came to dying that March day in 1980.

As for me, I had come pretty close to spending probably the rest of my life in jail. I later found out that the Feds were following Stanfa that day because they, too, thought he was connected with the hit. They followed him up from Philly right to the door of the 3-11. They had surveillance photos of Patty and me coming out with them, and they followed us to the diner and then tailed Bananas’ car into New York. The plan Patty and I had made was that, if Castellano ordered it, when Stanfa and Sindone came back to the diner, we would kill them right there, roll up their bodies in the tarps, and dump them somewhere. If we had done it – and I’m sure I would have been one of the shooters – the whole thing would have been played out almost in front of the FBI cameras.

But Stanfa and Sindone went back to Philly, and I kept wondering what was going on. I half-wanted to ask Bananas, but Patty had long ago warned me, “When one of our friends leaves us suddenly, don’t talk about it, and above all don’t ask questions of nobody. You can keep your ears open and take in everything that is said, but don’t ask questions because you never know who you are talking to and whether he might think you’re butting in where you don’t belong.” I remembered that and kept my lips buttoned. But keeping your nose out of things did not mean that you were prevented from speculating quietly about what was happening. Two things didn’t make any sense to Patty and me. Number one, why would the Commission okay the whacking of Angelo when he had opened Atlantic City to them? He was so easy to get along with, and he never stepped on anyone’s toes. The New York families would have to be crazy to want to have to deal with Bananas as boss. And number two, if they had given Bananas permission to make the hit, why call Stanfa and Sindone in and rake them over the coals? We couldn’t figure it out – that is, until we saw how it all ended, and then it made perfect sense.

On the night of 17 April, when I heard over the radio that the cops had found an unidentified body in the trunk of a car in New York, I knew right away it was Bananas. It was a Thursday, and I had spent the morning at the 3-11 playing gin rummy with him. In those days Bananas may well have been the richest gangster in the metropolitan area, richer than most of the big bosses. But even though he was a man worth millions, he loved playing cutthroat gin, and he revelled in winning. He loved to beat me, and although I often saw him carrying $50,000 or $100,000, he would collect every cent I lost to him – and then he loved giving it away in front of me. That morning I lost $200 to him. Then he asked me to drive him to the train because he had to go to New York. On the way to the station he explained that his no-good brother-in-law Freddy Salerno was in some kind of trouble over a jewellery booth he owned in the diamond district, and he was going into the city to meet with some guys and straighten it out. The last thing Bananas said to me as he got out of the car was “I’ll call you about what time I’m coming back so you can be here. And take the $200 you owe me and give it to the barmaid back at the 3-11 from me.”

Bananas always hosted a major Mob dinner at the 3-11 on Thursdays. Guys would come from Philly, Atlantic City, and New York for an evening of good Italian food and drink, and sometimes we fed forty or fifty guys. It was the high point of Bananas’ week, and he wouldn’t miss it for the world. But he did miss it that Thursday night. We sat around waiting for him to call for his ride from the train, but he never did. When I heard on the car radio, driving home from the dinner, that a body had been discovered, shot gangland style, I just knew it was Bananas, but it would be almost two weeks before anybody knew for sure. For reasons that have never been entirely clear, the FBI identified the body almost immediately but didn’t notify the family for eleven days. All we knew was that Bananas had disappeared. We were reasonably sure it was his body that had been found, but there was some possibility he had simply gone underground.

We later learned from the undertaker, who was a friend of ours, that as many as a half-dozen guys must have opened up on Bananas the minute he walked into that meeting. But the FBI guessed that the initial barrage had not stopped him. He was in terrific shape for a man over sixty, and he went after some of his attackers. That accounted for numerous stab wounds on the body as well as the dozens of bullet holes. Bananas had been shot so many times, his body was almost not identifiable. Then they had stuffed money in his mouth and other body cavities, the sign that the murder victim was too greedy. And to wrap things up, they shot Freddy, too, and stuffed him with money. They were sending a strong signal.

Actually, Freddy getting whacked along with Bananas was quite an irony. Even years later a lot of people thought that it was Freddy who was the shooter in the Bruno hit, and that was why he was whacked. That’s nonsense. Angelo Bruno was personally whacked by Tony Bananas. Tony himself was the shooter. That’s how he grew up. He loved that kind of stuff, and he wasn’t about to let anyone else do something he wanted to do so badly. Besides, as he told me more than once, Tony absolutely hated his brother-in-law The guy was always getting into scrapes that he had to bail him out of. Time and time again Bananas had to call some guy or go to New York, to get Freddy out of some jam or another. About the last thing in the world he would do was trust Freddy to whack Angelo. In fact, as we drove to the train the day he was killed, Tony was bitching about having to save Freddy once again. “I’m going to whack that son of a bitch one of these days,” he told me. “I’m getting tired of him screwing up.” It was ironic that in dying, Bananas got his wish. Freddy was killed, I’m sure, just because he was there. And he was there because they needed him to lure Tony.

I was scared to death the night I heard that Bananas had been whacked and for the week or so following because we still didn’t know what had happened. Since Patty and I assumed Bananas had the Commission’s permission to whack Angelo, then Bananas’ death in New York could only have meant that one of the New York families was moving in on us and perhaps was trying to take over the entire Bruno family as well. If that was true, then Patty was a prime target. In times like this a family is supposed to stick together, but I began to get an inkling of exactly how many of the guys around us thought of themselves above all else. Basically, most of them simply disappeared. They should all have gathered around Pat, but instead they went into hiding. Patty and I armed ourselves and went into hiding, too, but only for a couple of days. Finally, Patty said the hell with it; if they want us, they’re going to find us. So we went back to the club and resumed our normal schedule. Truthfully, we were not as calm as we wanted to appear, but we began to relax after Patty was ordered down to Philly about three weeks after Bananas was whacked.

This meeting of all made Bruno family members had been called by the Commission – the heads of the five New York families – so no one dared miss it. It was held in the back of a restaurant – with no little irony, Cous’ Little Italy, the same South Philly joint where Angelo had eaten his last meal the night he was whacked. Everyone tried to appear calm and casual, but the tension in the air was thick. Since I was not yet made, I couldn’t get into the back room for the meeting itself, but Patty told me what had happened as we drove back to Newark.

The meeting was run by Bobby Manna, the consigliere of the Genovese family. He first tried to settle everyone down by guaranteeing that none of the New York families was trying to make a move against the Bruno family. He indicated that the killing of Bananas had been a personal thing and that nothing extended to the people who had been around him. He said that the Commission approved of Phil Testa assuming the role of boss and that as far as the Commission was concerned all other matters were a closed issue. There was some grumbling among the old-timers that it was up to us and not the New York families as to who should be our boss. If it had been left up to them, they probably would have chosen Sindone. But since Testa had been underboss and this naming of him by the Commission prevented any kind of war breaking out over succession, it was grudgingly accepted.

A short time later Patty and I found out how Bananas had effectively been tricked into signing his own death warrant. He had gone to the Genoveses and told them of his problems with Angelo. The answer he got was “Take care of your problem.” Bananas understood this to mean that he had a green light to kill Bruno. But after he did it, the Commission met, and Funzi Terri said he had told Bananas to work things out with Angelo. So as far as the Commission was concerned, Bananas had made an unauthorized hit on a boss, and that was an automatic death warrant. The bottom line was that the New York families knew Bananas was a danger to them and would be even more so as the boss of the Bruno family. But he was simply too powerful to hit without a reason. He had a hundred soldiers in his crew, and there would have been an ugly war. So Funzi simply let him have more than enough rope to hang himself.

Bananas’ whacking of Angelo had a big impact on our family. Maybe Angelo wasn’t aggressive enough for Bananas, but everyone was making money and there was peace. Now peace was something we would be without for quite some time.

Once Testa took over, he moved quickly to cement his hold. First he had Angelo’s cousin, Johnny DeSimone, whacked. Then in a move that almost anyone could have predicted, he had Sindone killed. A lot of people speculated that these two guys were done in retaliation for Angelo’s hit, that somehow they were involved. Again, that was exactly backward. DeSimone and Sindone were hit because they had been close to Angelo and now might pose a threat to the new leadership. Phil Testa was simply house cleaning.

He might have expanded this to other guys who had been close to Angelo, but they got him first. Just a week short of a year after Bruno was killed, Testa was also killed. He was whacked by his underboss Pete Casella. Casella had served a seventeen-year prison sentence for drug dealing. He had done his time in a stand-up fashion, not ratting on anyone, not agreeing to any of the many deals he had been offered by prosecutors. He thought this entitled him to some consideration, including being named boss instead of Testa for whom he had little good to say. He was also a friend of John McCullough, the longtime head of Local 30 of the Roofers’ Union. Testa had McCullough whacked when he tried to organize in Atlantic City and wouldn’t take no for an answer. Casella planted a bomb on Testa’s front porch and blew him up late one night as he returned home from making his rounds. The killing threw the family into turmoil, and it looked as if a war was in the offing.

Actually, when Testa was killed, Patty and I were hiding out in Florida. The New Jersey Crime Commission had gotten it into their heads to investigate Bananas’ murder, so they issued a subpoena for Patty, who didn’t want to talk to them or appear in front of any grand jury. So he ducked the subpoena, and we screwed to Florida where we were sitting in the sun at the Thunderbird Hotel when the call came telling us that Testa had been whacked.

Several weeks went by with not much news out of either Philly or Newark. We heard that “Harry the Hunchback” Riccobene, an oldline Bruno captain and ally, was pushing to succeed Testa. Harry, who was heavily into the drug trade, had started to talk with other family captains, drumming up support. We assumed since Testa had left no clear-cut successor that the family captains would meet to select the new boss. It looked as if the Hunchback was gathering the necessary votes.

Then suddenly the phone started ringing. Another meeting had been called in Philly by Bobby Manna. Patty considered going, but he assumed the meeting would be staked out by the Feds and by local police, and that he would be picked up if he showed his face. He considered sending me as his emissary, but since I wasn’t made yet, this would not have been well received. So we sat in Florida and waited. Within minutes after the meeting we got a call with the startling news that Little Nicky, Nicky Scarfo Sr, was our new boss.

Manna had told the meeting that the Commission was extremely unhappy over the whacking of Phil Testa. Given the abrupt nature of Testa’s leaving, there was no clear-cut successor. This was a bad situation, and the Commission was therefore stepping in to prevent a war. Manna told the gathering, just as he had with Testa a year before, that he was there to indicate that the Commission was “recommending” Nicky as the new family head. A lot of guys thought this was wrong. It was the second time in a row that a new boss was being named from New York, and it was starting to look as though the Bruno family was being run by the New York families. But things were so unsettled they didn’t feel they could challenge Manna. And in a way he was correct: If things were left to work themselves out, there probably would have been a war between Scarfo and Casella. But they were angry because they believed that Manna had manipulated the whole thing with the Commission. He and Nicky were very tight.

In a show of good faith and out of deference to the stand-up way he had served his time, Casella was allowed to retire to Florida (where he died of natural causes). His brother Tony, also involved in whacking Testa, was allowed to retire, too. He became a virtual recluse, rarely leaving his house in South Philly. The guys who actually planned and carried out the hit, including Chickie Narducci, were told they owed their total loyalty to Nicky, or else. So it was now the era of Little Nicky, and things were never the same.

In a way Nicky Scarfo became Angelo Bruno’s worst mistake. His parents were Calabrian; they had emigrated to Brooklyn, where Nicky was born. Shortly thereafter they moved to Philly, and Nicky and his two uncles, who were actually about his age, grew up in the Bruno family. All three were made while they were still in their twenties. About the kindest thing you could say about Nicky was that he was completely crazy. Maybe it was because he was so small, but he was deeply paranoid and liked to kill people, which made for a bad combination. Bananas liked to kill people, too, but at least he was rational.

Bruno learned about Nicky one day in 1963 when the then thirty-two-year-old Nicky walked into a crowded diner in Philly. All the seats at the counter were taken, so Nicky marched up to one Joseph Duggan and demanded that he give him his seat. Duggan quite naturally said no. Nicky then reportedly screamed, “Don’t you know who the fuck I am?” Duggan said he couldn’t care less. Nicky pushed him. Duggan threw a punch. Nicky pulled out a knife and plunged it into Duggan’s heart, killing him instantly.

Bruno was enraged when he heard of the incident. You simply did not kill civilians in public for no reason other than their resisting your throwing your weight around. But since Nicky was a made member, Angelo felt he owed him some measure of help. Strings were pulled, and the case landed before a very friendly judge. Nicky’s plea of self-defence was rejected out of hand, but he was allowed to plead to a lesser offence and received three years. When he got out, Angelo effectively banished him, sending him to Atlantic City, which in those days was a virtual wasteland. Angelo could have saved himself and the world a lot of grief – and a lot of guys would still be alive today – if he had simply had Nicky killed back in 1963 when it became apparent how out of control he was.

Nicky was gone and all but forgotten in his exile. He had put together a small crew aided by his nephew, “Crazy Phil” Leonetti, and the Merlino brothers, Salvatore, called “Chuckie” by everyone, and Larry, called “Yogi”. These guys eked out a small living by charging protection to bar owners, running some gambling operations, loan-sharking, and labour racketeering. But then Nicky caught a break by going to jail.

At the same time the New Jersey State Commission on Investigation called Angelo to testify about his knowledge of organized crime, they also called others from various families active in Jersey, including the Genoveses, the Bonannos, and the Gambinos. Among the guys dragged before the SCI were both Nicky and Bobby Manna. Like Angelo, they also refused to talk, and they, too, were sent to jail. At various times a total of nine guys went to jail for contempt of the SCI. The assumption was that they would serve only a year or so, but the state meant business, and all of them ended up serving anywhere from three to seven years. They did their time housed at Yardville, the New Jersey state prison system’s reception centre in Trenton. Although nine men were eventually sentenced for contempt, only seven were in Yardville at the same time. A newspaper story of the day dubbed them the “Yardville Seven”, and they have been known by that handle ever since.

All of the Yardville Seven grew very tight, and being a member of that elite group boosted Nicky’s standing in the eyes of almost everyone else in the family. And because Nicky did his time in a stand-up fashion, Angelo was forced to allow him back into family affairs even while keeping him in Atlantic City. Quite probably Nicky would have abandoned Atlantic City and gone back to Philly if legalized gambling had not been on the horizon. On the day in 1977 that it was approved, Nicky emerged as a major player, not only in our family but in organized crime on the East Coast.

Nicky was quick to respond to this newfound stature. After years of keeping a Bruno-enforced low profile, he and his crew began to act the part of Mob big shots right away. First they killed a local judge, Edwin Helfant, whom they had paid off to give a light sentence to one of the crew and then saw him throw the book at the guy. Then Crazy Phil Leonetti whacked a guy who owed him loan-sharking money and was refusing to pay. The cops had an eyewitness, and they put Crazy Phil on trial. But he walked when the witness suddenly had a serious and complete memory loss. Then Nicky ordered a Philly dope dealer who owed him money killed, with the hit carried out by Chuckie Merlino and Salvy Testa, Phil Testa’s son.

Finally, Nicky got into a beef with a guy who was associated with the family, Vincent Falcone. It got back to Nicky that Falcone had called him crazy – actually an astute observation. Nicky went nuts. He called and invited Falcone to a Christmas party, and he sent Philip Leonetti and Yogi Merlino to pick him up. When Falcone got to an apartment in Margate, just outside Atlantic City, he found out that he was the party. Crazy Phil shot him in the head while Nicky stood there laughing and screaming at the guy. Then when it looked like Falcone was still breathing, Nicky tried to take the gun away from Philip and finish the job himself. But Philip pulled away and shot Falcone again in the chest. Philip later told me he had looked down at the guy and shouted, “If I could bring the motherfucker back to life, I’d kill him again.”

People have always tended to write Little Nicky Scarfo off as a stupid thug. Sure, he was a thug, a killer utterly without conscience, but he was not dumb. I first met him one night at the 3-11 in Newark in the mid-1970s. He had come to town to meet with some union guys. He cut quite a figure, a cocky and dapper little man always dressed in a very expensive suit. You knew right away that this guy was no dummy. Nicky was quick and he was cunning, and he proved it by the way he outsmarted the New Jersey Gaming Commission.

When legalized gambling was first suggested in the state legislature, there was an immediate outcry that it would be taken over by organized crime. So the legislature went to extraordinary lengths to protect against the Mob through a complex and rigid system of licensing and oversight. If the Mob had tried to go into Atlantic City through the front door, it would have been met with force, and the effort would likely have failed. Nicky was smart enough to realize that it was probably fruitless to buck the system head-on, so he decided that if he couldn’t go in through the front door, he could find a back door. The back door Nicky found into the Atlantic City casinos was through the labour unions.

Nicky reasoned that within a short time there would be thousands of workers in the casinos and hotels, and these workers could be quickly organized. He also reasoned that if he controlled the union that controlled these workers, he could hold the work stoppage sword over the heads of the casino owners. And as a plus, he would get access to all the health and welfare funds that would be flowing through the new union.

The key was Frank Lentino, a retired Philadelphia Teamsters’ Union executive who was an associate of the Bruno family and for years was involved in the systematic shakedown of contractors in Philadelphia. At seventy Lentino retired and moved to Atlantic City. There he was recruited by Nicky, and it was arranged for him to sign on as a consultant to the existing Bartenders’ Union, which was run by Al Daidone and closely allied to Bartenders’ Local 170 in Camden, which was run by Ralph Natale, a Bruno family member. Within short order the small Atlantic City local was expanded into Local 54 of the Hotel Employees’ and Restaurant Employees’ International Union, and when membership climbed from about 4,000 hotel and restaurant workers in the pre-gambling days to more than 30,000 with the arrival of the casinos, Nicky was on his way.

Nicky was not subtle. With control of the union he had the power to call hotel or casino workers out on strike. Since one night’s wildcat strike could cost a casino a million or more, the owners were very anxious to avoid any labour problems. Nicky was anxious to accommodate them. But he wanted a few things in return, service contracts foremost among them. In exchange for labour peace, hotels and casinos made Mob-connected companies the providers of everything from garbage hauling to supplying meats, poultry, and liquor.

Nicky also made another decision, and that was to stay out of the construction trades. With the coming hotel-building boom, it would have been a natural to try to tie up the building trades unions. But Nicky knew that the New York families were into the construction trades, so he left these for them. Obviously millions could be made from construction contracts and shakedowns, but in showing deference to the New York families in the area, he won for himself the right to be left alone with the employees’ union. And as Nicky told me once, “The employees’ union is going to be around long after all construction has been completed.”

But Nicky was not left out of the building boom altogether. He owned and Phil Leonetti ran a company called Scarf, Inc., that was in the cement business. Much of the cement that was poured in the new hotel and casino construction came from Scarf. Then Nicky had a big piece of two other companies, Batshore Rebar and Nat Nat, Inc., that were in the steel and steel-reinforcement business. They were run for Nicky by the Merlino brothers, and these companies provided the structural and reinforcing steel for most of the new casino projects.

When Angelo Bruno made the decision in 1978 to allow the New York families into Atlantic City, Nicky made a big scene of being enraged. He complained to Bananas and Phil Testa. But here again Nicky showed how cunning and smart he was. He effectively played both ends toward the middle. If the New York families were going to be allowed in, they would have to come to him if they wanted into the unions. He used his old Yardville Seven connection with Bobby Manna and his Calabrian heritage to set up a working arrangement with the Genoveses and the Gambinos.

As Nicky explained to me and Patty, this move was crucial to winning over the Commission to back him for boss of our family. He told us this a few days after the Philadelphia meeting when he and Phil Leonetti went down to Florida to pay a courtesy call on Patty. He explained that the moment he heard Testa was dead, he was on his way to New York to meet with Manna. Through Manna, Nicky posed a question to the heads of the New York families: Did they want to risk a new boss of the Bruno family declaring Atlantic City a closed territory? The New Jersey Gambling Commission had gone to such lengths to try to protect against organized crime that the last thing the families needed was some kind of war over Atlantic City. The New York families would undoubtedly win, but at what price? Back me, Nicky said, and the arrangements we have been working on will continue. Manna agreed, and the Commission agreed with Manna. Little Nicky was now the man.

 

Donnie Brasco

Joseph Pistone

Joseph Pistone was brought up in Paterson, New Jersey. He was of Sicilian stock and learnt enough about the ways of the Mafia to infiltrate the Mob as a special agent for the FBI. Pistone joined the New York truck hijacking squad in 1974. Two years later, he went underground, posing as a jewel thief from Florida named Donnie Brasco. He spent six years working undercover in the Colombo and Bonanno Families. His undercover work also took him to Miami where he worked alongside Joe Fitzgerald, another undercover FBI agent. Through his connections, he got to know the Bonanno capo Dominic “Sonny Black” Napolitano, Michael Sabella, Anthony Mirra and Bonanno soldier Benjamin “Lefty Guns” Ruggiero. The undercover operation ended in 1982 when Napolitano ordered Pistone to murder Anthony “Whack Whack” Indelicato, who was supposed to have been killed along with his father Alphonse “Sonny Red” Indelicato, Philip “Philly Lucky” Giaccone and Dominic “Big Trin” Trinchea in 1981. This forced him to abandon his undercover role and turn evidence he had collected to the FBI. It led to over 200 indictments and over 100 convictions of members of the Mafia.

After Napolitano was told that Pistone, alias Brasco, was an FBI agent, he refused to turn state’s evidence and enter the Witness Protection Programme He told his girlfriend that he bore no ill will against Pistone and that, if anyone had to bring him down, he was glad it was Pistone Knowing he was going to be killed, Napolitano went to a meeting in Flatlands, Brooklyn, where he was shot dead by Bonanno captain Frank “Curly” Lino and Ron Filcomo. Bonanno boss Joe Massino was convicted of ordering Napolitano’s murder. When Napolitano’s body was found on Staten Island, the hands had been cut off A contract was put out on Ruggiero too but, by then, he had been taken into protective custody by the FBI. Nevertheless, he refused to become a government witness and join the Witness Protection Programme, and the contract on him was cancelled. He was convicted of three counts of murder and drug trafficking in New York, and extortion, planning a bank robbery and illegal gambling in Florida. He died of cancer in jail in 1994.

A contract was also put out on Pistone With author Richard Woodley, Pistone wrote the book Donnie Brasco, which was made into a movie in 1997, starring Johnny Depp and Al Pacino. In the book, Pistone writes of the constant battle to maintain his assumed identity when surrounded by suspicious Mafiosi who had usually known each other since childhood.

One morning not long afterward, I walked into the store. Everybody was there, but nobody was saying much. Jilly took my elbow and said, “Don, let’s take a walk.”

We went outside. He said, “Look, Don, nothing for nothing, but Patsy and Frankie, they don’t feel comfortable around you. They got a beef.”

“What’s the problem?”

“They feel like they don’t know you well enough. They don’t want you involved in any more jobs until they know more about you. They want the name of somebody that can vouch for you down in Miami where you said you did a lot of work, so they can feel more comfortable with you.”

“Well, how do you feel, Jilly?” I said. “We’ve done stuff together, right? You know who I am. You got any problems with me?”

“No, I got no problems with you.” Jilly was uncomfortable. “But I grew up with these guys, you know? They been my partners for years, since before they went to the can. So they got this little beef, and I gotta go along with them. Okay?”

“Fuck them, Jilly. I’m not giving them the name of anybody.”

“Let’s just take it easy, okay, Don? Let’s go in and talk it over, try to work it out”

Jilly was the made guy, the boss of this crew. I had rubbed these other guys the wrong way, and they had gone first to Jilly and put the beef in with him, which was the right way to do it. He had to respect their wishes because of the proper order – he had known them longer than he knew me, even though he had faith and trust in me. It was their beef, but it was his responsibility to get it resolved one way or the other. He was handling it the proper way. He came to me and talked to me first.

Then, when I hard-nosed it, said no right up front (I couldn’t give in right away, I had to string it out and play the game), he said we had to sit down and talk about it. When you sit down, everybody puts their cards on the table and airs their beefs out. And Jilly had to lean toward them in granting their request about getting somebody to vouch for me in Florida. At that point I wasn’t worried: because things were being handled in the right way, according to the rules,

We went back in the store. I went over to Patsy and said, “You got a beef?”

“You say you pulled off all those scores down in Miami before you came here.” Patsy said. “But we don’t know nothing about that. And you seem to want to say a lot around here. So Frankie and me wanna know somebody you did those jobs with, so we can check you out.”

“You don’t need to check me out,” I said. “I been around here five-six months. Jilly and the other guys are satisfied. I don’t have to satisfy you just because you were in the can.”

“Yeah, you do,” he said. “Let’s go in the back and sit down.” Everybody walked into the back room. Patsy sat down behind the desk. “You could be anybody or anything,” he said. “Maybe you’re a stoolie. So we want to check you out, and we need the name of somebody to vouch for you.”

“I’m not giving you any name.”

Patsy opened a desk drawer and took out a .32 automatic and laid it on the desk in front of him. “You don’t leave here until you give me a name.”

“I’m not giving up the name of somebody just to satisfy your curiosity,” I said. “You don’t know me? I don’t know you. How do I know you’re not a stoolie?”

“You got a fucking smart mouth. You don’t give me a name, the only way you leave here is rolled up in a rug,” he said.

“You do what you gotta do, because I ain’t giving you a name.” It was getting pretty tense in there. Jilly tried to be a mediator.

“Don, it’s no big deal. Just let him contact somebody. Then everybody feels better and we forget about it.”

I knew all along, from the time he pushed it to the gun, that I would give him a name. Because once he went that far in front of everybody, he wouldn’t back off. But even among fellow crooks you don’t ever give up a source or contact easily. You have to show them that you’re a stand-up guy, that you’re careful and tough in protecting people you’ve done jobs with. So I was making it difficult for them. I acted as if I were really torn, mulling it over.

Then I said, “Okay, as a favour to Jilly, I’m gonna give you a name. You can check with this guy. But if anything happens to this guy, I’m gonna hold you responsible. I’ll come after you.”

I gave him the name of a guy in Miami.

He said, “Everybody sit tight. I’m gonna go and see if we can contact somebody down there that knows this guy of yours.” He left the room and shut the door.

I was nervous about the name I gave him. It was the name of an informant, a thief in Miami who was an informant for another agent down there. It had been part of my setup when I was going undercover. I had told this other agent to tell his informant than if anybody ever asked about Don Brasco, the informant should say that he and Brasco had done some scores together, and that Brasco was a good guy. The informant didn’t even know who Don Brasco was, just that he should vouch for him if the circumstance came up.

So now I had a couple of worries. That had been seven months before, I wasn’t absolutely sure that the informant got the message, and if he had been told, would he remember now, seven months later? If the informant blew it now, I was going to get whacked, no doubt about it. The other guys in the crew here didn’t care; they were on the fence. But Patsy or his pal Frankie would kill me, both because of the animosity between us and because they had taken it too far to back down.

While Patsy was gone, I just sat around with the other guys playing gin and bullshitting as if everything were normal. Nobody mentioned the problem. But I was thinking hard about how the hell I was going to get out of there at least to make a phone call.

After couple of hours I figured everybody had relaxed, so I said, “I’m gonna go out and get some coffee and rolls. I’ll take orders for anybody,”

“You ain’t going anywhere,” Frankie says, “until Patsy comes back.”

“What are we here, children?” I say, “I got no reason to take off. But it’s lunchtime.”

“Sit down,” Frankie says.

If it came to it, I would have to bust out of there somehow, because I was not just going to sit there and take a bullet behind my ear. There was a door out to the front, which I figured Patsy had locked when he went out. There was a back door, which was nailed shut, never used. And there were four windows, all barred. I didn’t have many options. I could make a move for the gun on the desk; that was about it. But I wouldn’t do anything until Patsy came back with whatever the word was, because I might luck out. And if I could stick with it and be lucky, I would be in that much more solid with the Colombo crew.

We sat there for hours. Everybody but me was smoking. We all sat and breathed that crap, played cards, and bullshitted.

It was maybe four-thirty when Patsy came back. Instantly I could see I was okay, he had a look on his face that said I had beaten him again.

He said, “Okay, we got an answer, and your guy okayed you.”

Everybody relaxed. Everybody but me. With what had gone down, I couldn’t let that be the end of it. You can’t go through all that and then just say, “I’m glad you found out I’m okay, and thank you very much.” The language of the street is strength; that’s all they understand. I had been called. I had to save some face, show everybody they couldn’t mess with me. I had to clear the air. I had to smack somebody.

The gun was still lying there. But now we were all standing up, starting to move around and relax. I wanted to take Patsy first. But Frankie was the one between me and the gun. I circled around, casually edging over to him. I slugged him and he went down. Patsy jumped on me and I belted him a few times. Then the rest of the crew jumped in and wrestled us apart. I had counted on the crew breaking it up before it got out of hand, so I could make my point before the two of them got at me at once.

Patsy was sitting on the floor, staring up at me.

“You fucking punks,” I said. “Next time you see me, you better walk the other way.”

Guido, the toughest of all of them, stepped in front of me and looked at everybody else. “That’s the end of it about Don,” he said. “I don’t want to hear nothing else from nobody about Don not being okay.”

I had met Anthony Mirra in March of 1977. He invited me downtown to Little Italy. He had a little food joint called the Bus Stop Luncheonette at 115 Madison Street. We used to hang out there, or across the street at a dive called the Holiday Bar.

Mirra also introduced me to Benjamin “Lefty Guns” Ruggiero, like himself a soldier in the Bonnano family. Like Mirra, Lefty was known as a hit man. He had a social club at 43 Madison Street, just up the street from Mirra’s Bus Stop Luncheonette. Mirra used to hang out there. He introduced me to Lefty on the sidewalk outside the club. “Don, this is Lefty, a friend of mine. Lefty, Don.”

Lefty was in his early fifties, about my height – six feet – lean, and slightly stoop-shouldered. He had a narrow face and intense eyes.

Mirra turned away to talk to somebody else. Lefty eyed me.

“Where you from?” He had a cigarette-raspy voice, hyper.

“California,” I said. “Spent a lot of time between there and Miami. Now I’m living up at Ninety-first and Third.”

“How long you known Tony?”

“Couple months. Mainly the last few months I’ve been hanging out in Brooklyn, 15th Avenue. With a guy named

Jilly.”

“I know Jilly,” Lefty said.

Prior to that introduction, I was never invited into Lefty’s club, and you can’t go in without permission when you’re not connected. From that time on, I would go down to Lefty’s almost every day to meet Mirra. So I got to know Lefty.

I then began dividing my time between Mirra, Lefty, and the Bonanno guys in Little Italy, and Jilly and the Colombos in Brooklyn. Since I wasn’t officially connected to anybody, it was permissible, if not encouraged, to move between two groups. But it was also a lot to handle when you’re trying to stay sharp on every detail.

Agent Joe Fitzgerald had set himself up with an identity, an apartment, and the rest, just as I had, and we did basically the same thing. Fitz was doing a good job working the street in the Miami area; and he fingered a lot of fugitives for arrest. But for whatever reasons, the operation there didn’t catch on as readily. Most of the guys Fitz was able to get involved with were guys that were chased out of New York, small-time dopers, credit-card scammers, and the like. No real heavyweights.

Now that I had some credentials with both the Colombo and Bonanno people, we thought that maybe I could help stimulate some contacts in Miami. So from time to time I would go down there and hang out with Fitz, letting people know that I was “connected around Madison Street” and in Brooklyn.

I had a dual role, hanging out with Fitz. First was to help him if I could, by being a connected guy from New York who he could point to for credibility. Second was to build up my own credentials. I would tell people in New York that I was going down to Miami to pull some sort of job. I would be seen down there hanging out in the right places. Word always gets back. So you always had to stay in character.

One time we were at an after-hours joint named Sammy’s, where a lot of wiseguys hung out. We were at the bar. Fitz was talking to a couple of women to his right. I was sitting on his left, at the L of the bar, and around the corner of the L were three guys talking together. One of them was drunk, and I recognized him as a half-ass wiseguy from New York.

This drunk starts hollering at me. “Hey, you! Hey, you, I know you.”

I ignore him, and he reaches over and grabs my arm. “Hey, I’m talking to you!” he says. “I know you from somewhere. Who you with?”

“I’m with him,” I say, pointing to Fitz.

Not only is he drunk, but he is also saying things he shouldn’t be saying around wiseguys, asking things he shouldn’t be asking – such as about what family I was with. I signal to the two guys with him. “Your friend is letting the booze talk,” I say. “He’s out of line, so I suggest you quiet him down.” They shrug.

I call the bartender over. “I want you to know that this guy is out of line here,” I say. “And you’re a witness to what he’s saying, if anything happens.”

The drunk keeps it up. “I know you from New York. Don’t turn away from me. Who you with?”

I lean over to Fitz. “He grabs me again, I’m gonna have to clock him,” I say.

“No problem,” Fitz says. He is standing there, all 6’5” of him.

“When you’re ready, let me know, I’ll take care of those other two guys.”

The drunk grabs me by the shoulder. “Hey! I’m talking to you!”

“Okay, Fitz,” I say. I reach over and belt the drunk, and he slides off the stool. At the same time Fitz clocks the second guy, and then the third guy, one right after the other. All three of them sink to the floor.

Everybody in the joint turns away. Where wiseguys are concerned nobody wants to know anything.

I say to the bartender, “You saw and you heard, right?”

“Yeah,” he says.

“So if anything comes down regarding this, just say how this guy was out of line. Fitz knows how to reach me and my people in New York.”

It turned out the guy was a member of the Lucchese family. Word did get right back to New York. Everything was smoothed over. It helped my image.

Fitz and I cruised the Miami-area hangouts that had been identified as likely places for contacts: Sneaky Pete’s, Charley Brown’s Steak Joint, the Executive Club, Tony Roma’s, Gold Coast up in Fort Lauderdale.

But we weren’t able to lure the big-timers into conversation.

For several months I went back and forth between the Colombos and the Bonannos, between New York and Florida.

Fitz and I were out one night in a nightclub near Fort Lauderdale. We were sitting at the bar. Fitz introduced me to a lot of people he knew in there. “This is Don from New York.” Guys were going into the john to snort coke. I was just sitting at the bar bullshitting with a couple of half-ass wiseguys and their girlfriends.

Then this one guy comes out of the john and comes over to me holding this little open vial. He holds it out to me and says, “Here, Don, have a snort.”

I smack his arm, sending the bottle flying and the cocaine spraying all over the place. I grab him by the lapels and hoist him. “I don’t do that stuff,” I say, “and you had no business offering it to me. Don’t ever offer it to me again. I make money off it, but I don’t use it. I keep my head clear at all times.”

“But look what you did,” he whines, “all my stuff!”

“Write it off to experience,” I say. “You wanna fuck up your head, that’s up to you. Don’t bring it around me.”

I didn’t do these things to be a tough guy. But with things like drinking and drugs, you can’t be a fence-sitter around these guys. If you smoke a joint or take a snort the first time – maybe just to show that you’re a regular guy – or if you say, “Maybe later,” it gives the impression that you do drugs. If you’re a fence-sitter, then you’re in a bind. You just invite people to keep offering it to you. And if you say, “Not now,” and then keep refusing and refusing and putting it off, they begin to wonder: What’s up with this guy? But if you draw the line right in the beginning – I don’t do it; I ain’t ever gonna do it – then that’s it, nobody cares anymore.

A lot of people have the misconception that Mob guys are all big drinkers or dopers. Some of them are – a greater proportion of young guys do drugs than older guys. But so many guys don’t do anything that you don’t stand out by saying no – it’s no big deal. Tony Mirra killed twenty or thirty people, and he drank only club soda.

The thing is, even though it’s a fake world for you as an undercover agent, it’s a real world for the people that you’re dealing with. And you have to abide by the rules in that world. And those rules include how you establish your own standards, credibility, and individuality. I know one or two guys that drank or did drugs while they were undercover just because they thought they had to do that to blend in or show they were tough guys. It was an enormous mistake. You can’t compromise your own standards and personality. Smart wiseguys will see right through your act. You look like somebody that has no mind of his own, hence no strength . . .

I was down in Miami one time working with Fitz for a week. I had told Jilly and his guys that I would be down there. But I didn’t call them back with a telephone number where I could be reached.

As it turned out they had tried to find me because they wanted me in on a big job they were going to pull down there.

They had connections in Florida. Guido told me that he had been dealing drugs in Florida for nine years, especially in the Key West area, where he had the fix in with the police department and the district attorney’s office. Vinnie told me that he had a friend who owned a nursery on Staten Island where he was growing a big marijuana crop, and that when it was harvested in August, Guido would take it to Florida for sale.

In this instance they had information about a house in Fort Lauderdale where they could pull off an easy $250,000 cash score. It was a four-man job. When they couldn’t locate me, Jilly joined Guido and Patsy and Frankie. When I got back to New York, they filled me in on what had happened. They had pulled off the job and it had been a disaster.

The information their Florida tipster gave them was that an elderly lady kept the cash and diamonds in a safe. Guido bought safecracking tools for the job in Miami. They went to the house, flashed their detective shields to the lady, and said they were on an investigation and needed to come in. They handcuffed the lady. But there was no safe. And there was no quarter of a million in cash.

What they found were bullet holes in the ceiling, bank books showing that a huge deposit was made the day before in a safe-deposit box, and a little cash lying around. By the time they accounted for plane fares and tools and other expenses, they came out of the job with about $600 apiece.

Their information had been good, but late. Later their tipster filled in the story. The lady’s husband had died and left the quarter mill. He had promised a large chunk of that to his nephew. But the widow didn’t like the nephew and didn’t want to give him the money. The nephew came to collect. He tried to frighten the lady. He pulled out a gun and fired two bullets into the ceiling. But she didn’t give up the money. The next day she put it all in a safe-deposit box. That was the day before Guido and Jilly went there to steal it.

“If I’d’ve known all this ahead of time,” Guido told me, “I never would have pulled the job.”

Jilly got 1,200 ladies’ and children’s watches from a job at the airport. He brought samples into the store. As usual, he offered me a piece or all of the load if I could find a market. He gave me a sample to show, a Diantus.

Meanwhile he had located a potential buyer. A couple of guys were interested in part of the load. The next afternoon, we were in the back room when these two guys walked in.

I recognized one of them as a guy I had arrested two years earlier on a hijacking charge, back before I went undercover and I was on the Truck and Hijack Squad.

I had worked on the street only a couple of months up in New York. So it wasn’t as if I had arrested thousands of people. When you arrest somebody like that, you usually remember him. I remembered the face; I remembered the name: Joe. Just like the crook, he usually remembers the cop that arrests him. It’s just something that stays with you. There we were.

I was introduced. Joe knew the other guys but not me. I watched his face. No reaction. I wasn’t going to excuse myself and leave, because something might click with this guy, and if it did, I wanted to see the reaction so I would know. If I left and something clicked with this guy, I could come back to an ambush. I watched his face, his eyes, his hands.

They talked about the watches, the prices. I decided to get the guy in conversation. Sometimes if a guy’s nervous about you, he can hide it in his expression, just avoid you. I figured if I talked to him, I could get a reaction – either he would talk easy or he would try to avoid conversation with me. I had to be sure, because there was a good chance I would run into this guy again.

“By the way,” I said, “you got any use for men’s digitals?” I had one and showed it to him.

“Looks like a good watch,” he said. “How much?”

“You buy enough, you can have them for twenty each.”

“Let me check it out, get back to you. Where can I reach you?”

“I’m right here every day,” I said.

The conversation was okay. There was no hitch in his reactions. They chatted a few more minutes and left. The whole thing took maybe twenty minutes. The guy simply hadn’t made me. Those situations occur from time to time, and there’s nothing you can do about them, except be on your toes.

A couple days later I asked Jilly, “Joe and that other guy, did they buy the watches?”

He said. “Yeah, they took some of mine, but they didn’t have any market for yours.”

From time to time somebody in Jilly’s crew would ask me if I had any good outlets for marijuana or coke. I was noncommittal. At that time I wasn’t trying to milk the drug side, other than to report back whatever I saw and heard. The FBI wasn’t so much into the drug business then. We didn’t want to get involved in any small drug transactions because we couldn’t get authority to buy drugs without making a bust. We were still operating on a buy-bust standard, meaning that if we made a buy, we had to make a bust, and that would have blown my whole operation. So in order not to complicate the long-range plans for my operation, I pretty much had to steer clear of drug deals.

Guido came up to me at the store. “You got plans for today?” he asked.

“No, I’m just gonna hang out. I got nothing to do,” I said.

“Take a ride with me. I gotta go to Jersey.”

We took Jilly’s car, a blue 1976 Coupe de Ville. We drove across the Verrazano Narrows Bridge to Staten Island. We drove around Staten Island for a while, then recrossed the bridge back to Brooklyn.

I said, “I thought you said you had to go to Jersey?”

“I do,” he said. “I gotta meet a guy.”

We drove up the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, crossed the Brooklyn Bridge to Manhattan, and headed north on the FDR Drive. Obviously Guido had just been cleaning himself, making sure nobody was following him with the run to Staten Island. We crossed the George Washington Bridge into Jersey. We took the Palisades Parkway north.

A little after noon we got to Montvale, New Jersey. At the intersection of Summit Avenue and Spring Valley Road, Guido stopped to make a call at a phone booth. He got back in the car and we just sat there.

“We wait,” he said.

About a half hour later a black Oldsmobile pulled up beside us. The driver motioned for us to follow him. We followed him north for a few minutes, across the Jersey line into New York. We pulled into a busy shopping centre in Pearl River. Guido and the other driver got out and talked. The other guy was about six foot, 180, with a black moustache. Guido signalled for me to get out of the car.

The guy opened his trunk. There were four plain brown cardboard boxes in there. We transferred the boxes to Guido’s trunk.

Guido asked, “How much is in there?”

“You got ninety-eight pounds,” the guy said. “That’s what you gotta pay me for.”

We got back in the car and headed for Brooklyn.

“Colombian,” Guido said, referring to the marijuana in the trunk. “We should get $275 a pound. On consignment, I got access to another 175 pounds. The guy said he could also supply us with coke, but not on consignment. Money up front for blow.”

I unloaded the boxes and put them in the back of JiIly’s store. The next day when I came in, the boxes were gone. They didn’t keep drugs in the store. Guido handed me a little sample bag. It was uncleaned – stalks, leaves, seeds. “Think you can move some of this?” he said.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I never moved any of this stuff through my people. I’ll ask around.”

I held on to the sample for a couple of days, then gave it back.

“Nobody I talked to could use it,” I said.

None of these guys used drugs themselves, so far as I could see. To them it was strictly a matter of business. If these guys had been dopers, it might have been a different story. They really might have tested me. But the fact was that the way you proved yourself with these guys was by making scores, making money.

According to the Mafia mythology, there was supposed to be a code against dealing drugs. In the old days there wasn’t a huge amount of money to be made in drugs, and they didn’t do it. Now that’s where the money is, forget any so-called code. Like anything else with the Mafia, if there’s money to be made, they’re going to do it . . .

Another day I got to the club and Jilly wasn’t there. I asked Vinnie, “Where is everybody?”

“Jilly and Guido got a contract,” he said, “and they’re out looking for the guy they gotta hit.”

You don’t ask questions about a hit. If they want you to know, they’ll tell you. But my job was to get information if possible. When Jilly came back, I asked him, “Where were you guys?”

“Me and Guido had to look for somebody,” he said.

“Anything going on?” I asked, as if it might be some kind of score.

He proceeded to talk about an upcoming hijacking. I tried to wrangle the conversation back to the guy they were looking for, but he wouldn’t talk about it. It wasn’t unusual that he wouldn’t tell me. Who was I? At the time I was just a guy who had been hanging around a few months, let alone an FBI agent. You don’t just tell anybody if you have a piece of work to do.

I don’t know if that particular hit came off or not. Whacking somebody is something that you don’t talk about. In my years with the Mafia guys sometimes they would sit around and discuss how much work they’d done in the past – “work” meaning hits. But ordinarily they never discussed openly any particular individual they hit, or an upcoming one. If something went wrong, they might sit around later and laugh about it.

One time I was hanging out with Lefty Ruggiero at his social club in Little Italy, and he and a bunch of guys were laughing about a job. They had gotten a contract to hit a guy. They tailed this guy for a week, looking for the right opportunity. Then they were told the contract’s off, don’t hit the guy. And it turned out it was the wrong guy they were following. They would have hit the wrong guy. To them it was the funniest thing in the world. “What the fuck you think of that? We’re following the guy for a week and it’s not even the right guy – ha, ha, ha! We’re out every fucking night following this jerk-off. Piece a fucking luck for him, right? Ha, ha, ha!”

All this time I was trying to remember everything. Since I didn’t take any notes – didn’t dare to take any notes or write anything down, even in my apartment – I had to remember. Anything of a criminal nature discussed in conversation, any new guy that came through the clubs, the different deals and scores and the different guys involved and amounts of everything – I had to try to remember it all. Eventually federal court cases would depend on the accuracy and credibility of my memory.

It was a matter of concentration. That and little tricks. Like remembering licence-plate numbers or serial numbers on weapons in series of threes. The frustration always was that I couldn’t ask a lot of questions, which is one of the things I was trained to do as an FBI agent. A lot of the things I had to remember were things I overheard, and I couldn’t ask for these things to be repeated, or for what I thought I heard to be confirmed. When swag came in and out, I couldn’t ask to look it over more closely, or where it came from, or who it was going to, I had to hope those facts were volunteered. I had to be just a hang-around guy who wasn’t more interested than was good for him.

Concentrating on conversations is draining. Most of the talk was idle, simplistic bullshit about the most mundane things – getting a haircut or a new pair of Bally shoes; how the Jets or Giants were doing; how the Chinese and Puerto Ricans were ruining neighbourhoods; how much better a Cadillac was than a Lincoln; how we ought to drop the bomb on Iran; how we ought to burn rapists, each guy would gladly strap the perverts in and pull the switch himself. Most of these guys, after all, were just uneducated guys who grew up in these same neighbourhoods.

But they were street-smart, and the thread of the business ran through everything all the time, and the business was stealing and hits and Mafia politics – who was up, who was down, who was gone. Somebody might be talking about a great place to buy steaks at a cut rate and in virtually the same sentence mention a hit, or somebody new getting made, or a politician they had in their pocket. These tidbits would lace conversation continually but unpredictably, and they flew by. If I wasn’t always ready, I would miss something I needed to remember. And I couldn’t stop them and say, “What was that about paying off the police chief somewhere?”

What’s more, to be above suspicion I had to adapt my conversational style to theirs. Occasionally I would change the subject or wander away from the table purposely, right in the middle of a discussion about something criminal that might be of interest to the government – precisely to suggest that I wasn’t particularly interested. Then I would hope the talk would come around that way again or that I could lead it back, get at it later or in another way. It was a necessary gambit for the long term.

And then I would have to remember facts and names and faces and numbers until I could call in a report to my contact agent.

That’s why when I would get home for my one day or evening in two or three weeks, it would be difficult to adjust and focus deserved attention on my family. Especially when they didn’t know what I was doing and we couldn’t talk about it.

One hot August afternoon I was in the store when they came in from a job. Jilly, Guido, Patsy, Frankie, and a couple of other guys, one of them named Sonny. Jilly was nervous as hell. I had never seen him so nervous.

“We hit this house in Bayonne this morning,” he told me.

“The guy was a big guy [I wasn’t sure whether he meant physically big or important] and I thought I was gonna have to shoot the motherfucker because he wouldn’t open the safe. I had my gun on him, and I said I was gonna shoot him if he didn’t open it up or if he tried anything. I really thought I was gonna have to shoot him. Finally he opened it and we handcuffed him and the woman and taped his mouth shut.”

He was visibly shaken, and I didn’t know why, because he’d been out on any number of similar jobs.

They had opened a black attaché case on the desk in the back room, Without making a point of sticking my nose into it, I could see jewellery – rings and earrings and neck chains – some US Savings Bonds, plastic bags of coins like from a collection, a bunch of nude photographs of a man, and a man’s wig.

Also in the case were sets of handcuffs of the type you can buy in a police supply house, several New York Police Department badges they probably stole someplace, and four handguns.

“We posed as cops to get in,” Patsy said. “Tell him about the priest.”

Sonny said, “I was in the getaway car across the street from the house, with the motor running. I happened to be in front of a church. I’m sitting there waiting for the guys to come out, and this priest comes walking by. And he stops to chat! ‘Isn’t it a lovely day,’ this priest is saying to me. And he goes on about it. I can’t get rid of him. I don’t know how the guys are gonna come out of the house, running or what, and this priest is telling me about the birds and the sky. I couldn’t leave. Finally he said goodbye and walked away. I could still see him when the guys came out.”

Jilly handed me a small bunch of things. “Get rid of this junk, will you? Toss it in a dumpster in Manhattan when you go back.”

It was stuff from the robbery they didn’t want, and didn’t want found in the neighbourhood: a pink purse, a brooch and matching earrings, the nude photos, a US passport.

What I wanted was the guns. They were stolen property that we could trace back to the score and tie Jilly’s crew to it. And we always wanted to get guns off the street.

“If you want to move those guns,” I said to Jilly, “I got a guy that I sold a few guns to from my burglaries, so maybe he’d be interested in these.”

“We should get $300 apiece for them,” he said.

“I’ll see what I can do.”

He gave me the guns: a Smith & Wesson .45; a Smith & Wesson .357 Highway Patrolman; a Rohm .38 Special revolver; a Ruger .22 automatic. Whatever else the owner was, he was not a legitimate guy. Two of the guns had the serial numbers filed off. They were stolen guns before Jilly’s guys got ahold of them. Generally, filing the numbers off doesn’t cause us too much of a problem. Most of the time the thieves don’t file deep enough to remove all evidence from the stamping process. Our laboratory guys can bring the numbers back up with acid.

The next day I put them in a paper bag and walked over to Central Park at Ninetieth St. My contact agent, Steve Bursey, was waiting for me. I handed him the bag. We decided we would try to get by with offering Jilly $800 for the guns. You never give them all that they ask in a deal. First, it’s government money, and we don’t want to throw out more than we have to. Second, you want to let them know that you’re hard-nosed and not a mark.

The next day I went back to the club and told them that my man offered me $800.

“That’s not enough,” Patsy said. “You said you could get twelve hundred bucks.”

“I said I’d try,” I said. “The guy is firm at eight hundred.”

“No good.”

With some deals I would have just said okay and given the stuff back. But not with the guns. I didn’t want to give the guns back. “Look, I got the guns, I got eight hundred on me. You want it or you don’t.” I tossed the money down on the desk, trusting to their greed when they saw the green. There was some squabbling.

“We could have got more somewhere else,” Patsy said.

“Hey, if you can get more, take the fucking guns and bring them somewhere else. But who’s gonna give you more than two hundred apiece for guns that are probably registered and have been stolen and the numbers filed off? You think I didn’t push for all I could get? There’s eight hundred of my own money. You want the deal, I’ll just collect from him.”

“Okay,” Jilly said. He picked the money up and gave $100 each to Guido, Frankie, and Patsy as their share, and $100 to me for peddling the guns. I handed in my $100 to Agent Bursey. So the guns cost the FBI $700.

Guido was bitching about a bunch of people that had recently been made in the Colombo family. He mentioned both Allie Boy Persico and Jerry Lang. Allie Boy was Alphonse Persico, the son of Carmine “The Snake” Persico – sometimes referred to as junior – who was the boss of the Colombo family. Jerry Lang was Gennaro Langella, who some years later would become underboss of the Colombo family and acting boss when Carmine The Snake went to prison.

“I’ve done more work than half the guys that were made,” Guido said, meaning that he had been in on more hits, which is one of the prime considerations in getting made, “and I ain’t got my badge. That kid Allie Boy is just a wiseass punk. He never did a bit of work to earn his badge. The only reason he got made is because his old man is boss.”

“You better shut up,” Jilly said. “People walking in and out of the store all the time, we don’t know who hears what. We’re gonna be history from that kind of talk about the boss’s son.”

I was standing outside Lefty Ruggiero’s social club on Madison Street in Little Italy when Tony Mirra came by and told me to drive him to Brooklyn.

That set off an alarm in my gut. Although it was known that I was moving between crews of two different families, that kind of freewheeling eventually draws suspicion. Pretty soon, if you don’t commit to somebody, they think you can’t be trusted. Suddenly Mirra, a Bonanno guy and a mean bastard, wants me to go with him to Brooklyn where I have been hanging out with Colombo guys. Was he taking me there for some kind of confrontation?

In the car Mirra said he had an appointment with The Snake. Recollections came rushing into my head. The guy in Jilly’s that I recognized as somebody I had once arrested – had he known me, after all? Guido’s remarks about Allie Boy Persico – had those remarks about his son gotten back to The Snake? The recollections didn’t make me feel good. Was I going to be grilled about Jilly’s crew, things I had heard, what I was doing there?

If The Snake had heard about the complaints, was I going to be pressured to rat out the people doing the complaining? If I were pressured for information, would it be some kind of test?

My mind was racing as we crossed over the Brooklyn Bridge. I tried to sort out the possibilities and options. I definitely would not rat anybody out. That was for sure. If I turned rat on anybody to save my own skin, I would have to pull out of the operation, anyway, because my credibility would be blown. So if I was pressured to rat anybody out, I would just take the heat and see what happened. If they were testing my reliability, I would pass the test, and that would put me in solid.

Unless, of course, they really wanted me to talk, and decided to hit me if I didn’t. They could whack me out over there and dump me in the Gowanus Canal where I wouldn’t be found until I was unrecognizable. Nobody would know.

Mirra was silent. We drove to Third Avenue and Carroll Street in the Park Slope section of Brooklyn, not far from Prospect Park. We parked and waited. Carmine Persico drove up in a white Rolls-Royce convertible with New Jersey plates – 444-FLA. I recognized him from pictures. A sturdy guy in his middle forties, with thinning hair, a long neck, baggy eyes, and a fleshy nose and mouth. He and a much younger man, maybe in his early twenties, got out of the Rolls and talked to Mirra for a few minutes.

When Mirra got back in the car, he said, “That was his son with him, Allie Boy. He just got straightened out.”

“Straightened out” means made. I didn’t say anything. “Tommy LaBella’s supposed to be the Colombo boss,” Mirra said, “but that’s in name only, because he’s so old and sick. The Snake is the real boss. I had to talk to him about a shylock business we’re trying to put together with him.”

A shylock business between the Bonanno and Colombo families was all it was. I was so primed, I actually felt a letdown. Given the options, I’ll take a letdown.

You could never relax with these guys, because you never knew what would be heavy-duty and what would be light.

By midsummer of 1977, we had enough information on hijackings, burglaries, and robberies to bust up Jilly’s crew any day in the week. But I wasn’t moving up. I was making more inroads with Mirra and Ruggiero and the wiseguys in Little Italy than I was with the fences in Brooklyn.

I began to think, instead or concentrating on fences, what about a direct shot at the Mafia?

I brought this up in a telephone conversation with my supervisor, Guy Berada. It intrigued us both. We even risked a rare meeting in person, for lunch at a Third Avenue Manhattan restaurant called Cockeyed Clams, near my apartment.

We re-evaluated our goals. The more we thought about it, the more we thought, if I get hooked up with a fence, that’s all I’m hooked up with. But the Mafia had a structure and hierarchy; if I could get hooked up with wiseguys, I had a chance at a significant penetration of the Mob itself.

It would mean a greater commitment from the Bureau, an increase in risks and pressures. So far as we knew, the FBI had never planted one of its own agents in the Mafia.

Finally the opportunities outweighed all other considerations. It was worth a shot to abandon the fence operation in Brooklyn and “go downtown”, throw in with the wiseguys in Little Italy.

I would continue to operate alone, without surveillance. Little Italy is a tight neighbourhood, like a separate world. You couldn’t park a van with one-way glass on a street down there without getting made in five minutes. I would continue to operate without using hidden tape recorders or transmitters because I was still new, and there was always the danger of getting patted down. The Bureau had informants in Little Italy. They wouldn’t know who I was, I wouldn’t know who they were. I didn’t want to risk acting different around somebody because I knew he was an informant, or having somebody act different around me.

Having made the decision, I couldn’t just abruptly drop out of the Brooklyn scene. I still had to use the Brooklyn guys as backup for credibility. In all likelihood, sooner or later the downtown guy would check me out with the Brooklyn crew, and I didn’t want any of Jilly’s guys to say I just disappeared one day. I wanted to ease out gradually.

I hung out more and more with Mirra and Ruggiero, less and less with Jilly’s crew. Gradually it got to where I was just phoning in to Jilly once in a while. By August I was full-time around Little Italy.

Jilly stayed loyal. Agents routinely show up to talk to wiseguys like Jilly, show pictures of people they’re interested in, see if you have anything to say, let you know they’re keeping tabs on you. One such time, agents came out to talk to him. They showed him several pictures, including a picture of me. These agents didn’t know who I really was. They told him that I was a jewel thief and burglar, that they had information that I was hanging out around there, and they wanted to know what he knew about me.

Jilly wouldn’t acknowledge whether he knew me or not. Even though I wasn’t around there anymore; he wouldn’t give up anything about me.

Two years later Jilly got whacked. He was driving his car near his apartment. He stopped for a red light and some guy on a motorcycle pulled up beside him and pumped a couple of .38 slugs into him. It was a regular Mob hit. Our information was that they thought Jilly was talking. But he wasn’t.