Underboss

Sammy Gravano

The name of Sammy “The Bull” Gravano came to public attention during the trial of John Gotti in 1992. Gravano had been Gotti’s underboss in the Gambino family and had turned state’s evidence against his boss. As a result of Gravano’s testimony, Gotti was convicted of thirteen counts of murder, a long with conspiracy to commit murder, racketeering, illegal gambling, loan-sharking, obstruction of justice and tax evasion. Gotti died in jail in 2002. Ironically, Gravano, a career criminal, himself admitted nineteen murders.

Born in Bensonhurst in 1945, Salvatore Gravano did not do well at school. He suffered from what was later diagnosed as dyslexia. By the time he left school at the age of sixteen, the one thing he had learnt was to assert himself through violence. He began stealing at the age of eight. By thirteen, he had joined the local street gang, the Rampers. He came to the attention of the local mafiosi through his fighting ability and they nicknamed him “The Bull”. He was soon in debt to them when they arranged for the return of a stolen bike.

After a period in the Army, he married Debra Scibetta, whose brother he arranged to have killed seven years later. He quickly graduated through larceny, hijacking and armed robbery, and made contacts in the Colombo Family. After Gravano murdered Joe Colucci, Joe Colombo indicated that he would become a made man as soon as the Cosa Nostra’s membership book opened again – it had been closed since 1957.

By then, Gravano had fallen out with the family of his sponsor Tommy Spero and switched his affiliation to the Gambino Family. Under the wing of long-time capo Salvatore “Toddo” Aurello, Gravano went into the construction industry, extracting huge kickbacks for every ton of concrete poured. He also took up boxing and bodybuilding, allegedly consuming large amounts of steroids which resulted in a short temper and a tendency to kill on a whim. Paul Castellano, head of the Gambino family, had to discipline him several times for murdering other made men without permission.

Eventually, Gravano fell in with John Gotti, an ambitious Gambino captain in Queens. Together they planned the assassination of Paul Castellano and his underboss Thomas Bilotti. This was done against the rules without reference to the Commission. In retaliation the Genovese and Lucchese crime families set out to murder Gotti. However, the car bomb intended for Gotti killed his underboss Frank DeCicco instead. Gotti was soon arrested on racketeering charges, leaving Gravano and Angelo Ruggerio to run the Family, while he called the shots from prison. Gravano and Ruggerio fell out, while Gravano went on an unauthorized killing spree, even murdering his own men. However, Ruggerio fell from favour when he was indicted for distributing heroin on the evidence of Federal wiretaps. He died of cancer soon after.

Gravano was appointed consigliere. When Louie Milito, a friend of Gravano’s since his days in the Rampers, objected, he was killed. He also set up Tommy Spero and capo DiBernardo. Even though Gravano had been promoted consigliere then underboss, Gotti still used him as an assassin, even having him drive the getaway car on one occasion.

When Gotti was tried for assault and racketeering in 1986, Gravano paid a juror to find him not guilty. Gotti then earned the nickname “the Teflon Don”. The newspapers were also calling him the “Dapper Don” because of his sharp suits, hand-painted ties and expensive haircuts. M embers of the Gambino family began to worry that he was attracting too much attention to their activities, particularly as he very publicly held court in the Ravenite Social Club in Manhattan’s Little Italy.

On 11 December 1990, FBI agents and New York City detectives raided the club and arrested Gravano, Gotti, Gotti’s new consigliere Frank LoCascio and Thomas Gambino. The FBI has wiretaps of Gotti denigrating Gravano, accusing him of creating a “family within a family ”. It seemed to Gravano that Gotti was going to make out that Gravano was a crazed killer who he had tried to restrain. This impression was reinforced when Gotti told Gravano that he was not to speak to his lawyers unless he was present.

Gravano then turned state’s evidence in exchange for a reduced sentence. Gotti was sentenced to life without possibility of parole. Gravano was sentenced to twenty years, but was soon released into the Witness Protection Programme. He left that to relocate to Arizona. There, through his son, he got involved with a white supremacist gang known as the Devil Dogs and began trafficking ecstasy. He was arrested and sentenced to nineteen years in Arizona state prison. More murder allegations were made against him by Richard Kuklinski. But the “Ice Man” died before the case came to trial. Meanwhile Gravano sat down with the author Peter Maas to write Underboss, where they described in detail the art of the Mob hit.

On 19 September 1980, the body of reputed high-ranking member of the Philadelphia family named John (Johnny Keys) Simone was discovered in a secluded, wooded area in Staten Island with a gaping gunshot wound in the back of his head. It was not the first time a body had turned up in Staten Island that was the obvious result of a Mob execution. The mystery was what Simone’s body was doing so far from home and why the body was without shoes.

Sammy had the answers.

For decades, the Philadelphia family had been a model of stability, first under Joseph Ida and then the boss who succeeded him, Angelo Bruno. Carlo Gambino and Bruno had been very close. Both had become bosses at approximately the same time and both had seats on the Cosa Nostra Commission. So close was the Gambino/Bruno friendship that the Philadelphia vote on Commission matters was usually sent in via the Gambino family and almost inevitably took the same side. After Don Carlo’s death, Paul Castellano continued this relationship. FBI surveillance observed him dining with Bruno in New York as well as in Philadelphia.

Mob dynamics in Philadelphia changed with the emergence of legalized casino gambling in neighbouring Atlantic City. Bruno, wealthy, getting on in years and fearing the federal attention it would bring him, had little interest in Atlantic City. This not only caused unrest in the family but it created a vacuum – the plum of construction deals, of moving in on union organizing, gambling junkets and casino service operations – that especially attracted the Genovese family.

Bruno was shot to death in March 1980. “For the record,” Sammy said, “the Genovese family had manipulated a Philadelphia family member, Tony Bananas, to murder Bruno. Then they sacrificed this Tony Bananas. Right away, there was a Commission meeting, and to cover themselves the Genovese people volunteered to track down Angelo Bruno’s killer. And soon after, Tony Bananas was found in the trunk of a car.”

But peace never returned to Philadelphia. The anarchy was such that Bruno’s successor as boss, Phil Testa, was blown apart by a remote-control bomb, packed with roofing nails, that had been placed under his front porch; a method of assassination strictly forbidden under Cosa Nostra rules.

The continuing battle for control of the family pitted the family consigliere, Nicky Scarfo, against another faction now being led by a powerful capo, John Simone.

Sammy’s involvement in the hit on Simone began with a completely unrelated event. “It just shows you,” Sammy said, “the reality of an all-out mob, any mob, war, how complicated it gets, all the twists and turns, all the plotting and deception driven by greed and the quest for power, all the murders!”

For Sammy, it began when Toddo Aurello said: “Take a ride with me up by Paul’s.” Two aging members of Aurello’s crew, Nicky Russo and “Pal Joey”, operated in New Jersey. “Toddo told Paul that this Nick Russo’s son was killed in some dispute by a Frankie Steele, who headed up a powerful Irish gang over there. Russo naturally wanted to avenge his son’s murder. One night down around Philadelphia, he comes on Steele, who is alone in a car. He took a shot at Steele and misses. Steele comes back at him and shoots Russo in the leg. When Steele moves in to finish him off, his gun jams. He starts beating Russo on the head with it. He’s gonna beat him to death. Somehow Russo manages to get in another shot and hits Steele in the stomach. Steele took off and Russo is still alive by the skin of his teeth.

“Toddo told Paul that Russo and Pal Joey are old guys. They can’t win. They are outnumbered, outgunned and out-everything. They need help.

“Paul listens and says, ‘All right.’ He looks at me and says, ‘Sammy, you want to go on this?’ I said, ‘Of course, Paul, whatever you want.’ He tells me to choose anybody I need. Paul said, ‘Whack him out and anybody in his gang who gets in the way.’

“I go down to Jersey and meet with Nicky Russo. But Steele wasn’t stupid. He wasn’t making it easy to find him. I knew he’d been shot and I had all the Philadelphia-area hospitals checked out to help get an address. But there was no record of any hospital admissions. Then I found out that he had made a visit to an undertaker to remove Russo’s bullet. Jesus, I thought, this guy has balls. But the most important thing I found out was that some made guys in the Philadelphia family got him to the undertaker. Steele is hanging out with them. This changed everything. If and when I find him and start shooting, suppose he’s with a wiseguy? I won’t know who’s who. I could take some made guys out and this could cause big trouble.

“I report this to Paul and he agrees. In the Philadelphia war, Paul has sided with Nicky Scarfo. He tells me to notify Scarfo of what was going on. I explained the situation to Nicky Scarfo and he says, ‘Sammy, let me do this. Tell Paul I’ll take care of the problem.’ And he does.

“This still don’t satisfy Nicky Russo. He says that Steele had a baby son, or a baby brother, I forget which, and he wants the kid killed, like they do in the old country. I told him, ‘You got to go back to Paul on this one. I am not killing a baby. I don’t give a fuck about what they do in Italy or any of them antique bullshit ways they have there. Not only am I against it, I’m not doing it, period. I ain’t killing no kid.’

“When Paul is told about this, he becomes real irritated with Russo. He tells him that it’s over with, Steele, the guy who killed his son, is gone. Enough is enough. Case closed.

“I figure that’s it. I go back to my business. But before I know it, I’m up to see Paul about some construction stuff. He is fuming. The veins in his neck are popping out. His face is as red as a pepper. He’s just been to a meeting of the Commission, which has already voted to back Nicky Scarfo in Philadelphia, and he’s told that Scarfo is protesting that his main competition, that this Johnny Keys – John Simone – had been seen huddling with a made member of the Gambino family over in Jersey. And who is it but Nicky Russo and Pal Joey. Scarfo assumed the worst. The Gambino family is secretly supporting a bid for power by Johnny Keys. Talk about how being in Cosa Nostra distrust breeds distrust!

“It’s a major, major embarrassment for Paul. The Commission sanctioned a hit on Johnny Keys and gave the contract to the Gambino family.

“Paul wants to see Russo. Toddo and me bring him to Paul’s estate. We’re out by the Olympic-size swimming pool he has in back. Russo saves his life by convincing him that his meetings with Johnny Keys was innocent. He said they had been friends for a hundred years. He swears that anything they had to do with each other was purely social. No family business was ever discussed.

“Now, deception is at the core of a clean Mob hit. It’s absolutely essential. It knows no bounds. And Paul has learned that Johnny Keys had reached out to an old friend, the boss of the Cleveland family, for support. But the old friend betrays him and reports the overture to the Commission. The Cleveland boss is advised to pass the word to Keys that Paul was interested in being on his side against the Scarfo faction.

“Paul is still fuming. He looks directly at me. It’s like Toddo is hardly there. He says, ‘Sammy, you’re in charge. I want this done right.’ I should use Louie Milito and whoever else I wanted.

“He told Russo to go back and to repeat to Johnny Keys what the Cleveland boss said, that Paul is looking for ways to help him. But he is going to have to deal with an emissary straight from Paul. Russo is to cite his advanced age and that his memory isn’t as sharp as it was. Russo is old. He has to have a cane to get around because of that bullet from Steele. Paul wants a younger set of ears and a mind that remembers everything. So he’s sending a newly made member, not especially ballsy but a good talker and listener and a good relayer of messages. The name of the go-between is Sammy Gravano.

“Russo will do this to perfection. But right then he’s dying to get this Keys hit over and done with as quickly as possible. His meeting with Paul has left him nervous and flustered. Getting the hit done will prove his innocence.

“Russo says to me that he can set it up right away. His plan was going to be very simple. Him and Pal Joey meet with Johnny Keys a lot at this ice cream place in south Jersey called Friendly’s. They always sat in the same booth in the back. Now Keys don’t know me and he don’t know Louie. The idea is that the two of them will be waiting in a rear booth where they usually are, and I’ll be sitting near the front door at one of the fountain stools with my .357 magnum. Louie will be in a booth halfway between where I am and they are.

“They’ll wave to Keys when he comes in. That will be my signal. As he walks by me, I get up. I follow him and shoot him as he’s walking towards Russo and Pal Joey. Then Louie Milito will jump up, take out a sawed-off shotgun he has hidden under his coat, fire a couple of shots in the ceiling and yell at everybody in there to hit the floor. And Louie and me would stroll out to a waiting getaway car.

“It sounded good, but you never know. I wanted to check this out from every angle. ‘Let’s do a dry run,’ I said.

“The minute I was in this Friendly’s, I saw it would be a disaster, it wasn’t doable. There was a whole bunch of people in there. Families. And lots of kids. There was no way I was going to jeopardize them. And I’m not going to shoot the guy in front of a bunch of kids. I told Russo the plan was nuts.

“The first meeting between myself and Johnny Keys took place right after that. It was at a luncheonette in the Trenton area. He was ecstatic to be with Paul Castellano’s messenger. I was treated to an in-depth recital of all the events preceding, surrounding and after Angelo Bruno was murdered. He was direct. He wanted Paul’s approval in his quest to gain control of the Philadelphia family.

“He talked to me alone in the luncheonette. But I saw that he arrived with bodyguards, who stayed outside. He apologized for this and said he hoped that I wouldn’t take any offence. He apologized for frisking me, but there was a war going on and he had to take precautions. He apologized again for being armed himself and showed me his gun.

“I could see he desperately wanted to believe that I was Paul Castellano’s eyes, ears and mouth. But it was obvious he was also careful and shrewd. And I wasn’t careless, either. I didn’t have a gun on me. I didn’t know what to expect at this first meeting, but I did know I wasn’t going to hit him then. When he was sure I was unarmed, he visibly eased. We talked some more. I told him that we should plan another meeting after I reported back his messages to Paul.

“There had to be another meeting if I was to lull him into a complete sense of security. When I left that first one, I told Louie Milito and Stymie, who I also picked for the hit, that this guy was very sharp. We are going to have a tough time here.

“The next meeting was at a very public bar and restaurant in Jersey. He followed the same security procedures and searches as he did the first time. Of course, I was unarmed. He came with bodyguards. This meeting was to put the icing on the plan’s cake. So I brought him welcome news. I looked him straight in the eye and told him that Paul Castellano has decided to back his bid to take over the Philadelphia family. I really laid it on thick. I said that the Gambino family support was not limited to moral support. Paul’s pledge of support included money, guns and Gambino family shooters.

“Johnny Keys was, like, delirious. He got almost speechless as I went on to tell him that Paul Castellano was going to get the Commission’s backing for him once Nicky Scarfo was dead. I was on such a roll that I couldn’t stop. I had more good news. I told him to think of a real secure place for another meeting because Paul Castellano wanted a once-only face-to-face meeting with him. At this meeting, Paul would confirm everything I had just related.

“I watched Johnny Keys as he tried to come up with a suitable place. Suddenly his face lit up. He announced that he had the perfect place. It was a country club he belonged to around Yardville, near Trenton, just off the turnpike from New York. Nobody there would recognize Big Paul. I told him that sounded good. I would get back to him.

“Nick Russo was against the country club. He knew where it was. He thought it was too public, plus he warned me about the club’s own security staff. I made Nicky Russo take me there, so I could check the place. I argued the other way. The site was good because Johnny Keys would be comfortable there. He had picked it himself. He would drop his guard completely. I contacted him and said the country club would be fine. But I told him he couldn’t have his goons around him when he was meeting with Paul Castellano.

“According to the arrangements made amongst us all, me and Nicky Russo and Pal Joey met with Keys in Yardville before going on to the club. The three of us did not have guns, but I had hidden one deep under the front passenger seat of the car we were in. Keys joined us. Pal Joey was doing the driving. I was up front with him. Keys got in the back with Russo. He went through his usual litany of apologizing because he was armed. He was concerned about Paul’s reaction. I soothed him by saying that Paul understood a war was going on. Once again, he apologized for having to frisk us, which he did, patting us down. But I could see that he didn’t have no bodyguards with him. Nobody was tailing us.

“This country club had a big parking lot. The clubhouse was some distance away. As we pulled into a parking space, I saw the van parked between us and the clubhouse. In that van I had Louie Milito and Stymie. My crew was in place. As we got out of the car, I looked at my watch and told Keys that Paul should be arriving any minute. I was still unarmed. I hadn’t got the chance to grab my hidden gun.

“We walked towards the clubhouse, taking a path that would lead us past the van. We walked in pairs. I was with Keys. Pal Joey and Russo were ahead of us. It looked like nothing appeared out of the ordinary to Keys. But he was keeping his hand on the butt of the gun that was under his coat. And he kept looking around. As we got to the van, he turned his head towards it. Something had attracted his attention. I had slowed down, so I was a half a step behind him. All of a sudden, he said, ‘Hey, Sammy, that van’s engine is running.’

“He looked back at me, concerned. I leaped right at him and wrapped him in a bear hug. I had caught him by surprise. He didn’t have time to react. I was holding him so tight that he couldn’t move his arms. For sure, I didn’t want him bringing up his gun.

“All this was happening real quick. But in my mind, it was like slow motion. I felt a tremendous surge of power and confidence. This was going to work. The van’s side door opened and Louie and Stymie came out and the two of them grabbed Keys’ legs. We all lifted together and Keys was in the van. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a few people on a putting green looking at us kind of curious, like they were wondering what was going on. But it was over so fast; they didn’t know what was going on.

“Now my mind wasn’t in slow motion. Keys was on the van’s floor. It wasn’t graceful. I was still holding on to him. Stymie was on top of me, holding down both me and Keys. It was like the three of us were one person. Louie gets in the driver’s seat. Pal Joey is next to him.

“I yell to Stymie that Keys is still trying for his gun. Stymie pried his thumb from the butt. He nearly broke it and we got the gun. Louie takes off. The van jumps the parking lot kerb, goes right over part of the club’s lawn and out on to the street. Nicky Russo is left behind to bring back the car we came in.

“When we finished tying Keys up with heavy plastic ties, I was feeling pretty smug. Everything looked like it was working according to plan. The original idea was to kill Johnny Keys at an isolated spot near the club. Then Pal Joey reached into his pocket and realized that he still has the keys to the car Russo was supposed to drive away. The car is stranded in the lot and the gun I had hidden was in it. I knew that bystanders had seen our moves, so there were potential witnesses. We had to get Russo and the car out of there.

“I had Louie stop the van. We let Pal Joey out. I gave him specific instructions. He was to make his way back to the country club as best he could, meet up with Russo and get the car out of the lot. They should go to Russo’s home and wait for a call from me to determine if everything was clean and there weren’t any problems that would cause more changes in the plan.

“After Pal Joey left the van, we got on the turnpike and headed for Staten Island. Along the way, Johnny started having some sort of seizure. He claimed he was having a heart attack. I had to bend close to him to hear him whisper to reach into his jacket pocket for his nitroglycerine pills. He begged me to put a pill in his mouth. ‘Don’t let me die from a heart attack,’ he said. He knows we’re going to kill him and he is saying something like this? That’s when I realized that we were dealing with a real man’s man here!

“His stature got even bigger in my eyes when we got to the toll plaza at the exit for Staten Island. I naturally assumed that he would start some sort of commotion to get the attention of the tollbooth cops, to try and save himself. I was convinced of this. I whispered to Stymie to be prepared in case Keys tried to pull something. But I was wrong. Johnny didn’t try a thing. He didn’t refuse to try and help himself because he had given up all hope. It was because he was true Cosa Nostra. This was a family matter. There would be no police.

“We get to Staten Island without incident. We drove to a gas station that some guys with Louie Milito own. We lay over there. The hours go by. I’m calling Russo’s house. I’m not getting an answer. I got to know that they got away. Because if they’re pinched, they’ll be pinched for murder if I kill Keys. He ain’t dead yet and I would have gone to Paul and said, ‘Things got fucked up. Guys have got pinched. It’s your decision what to do now’

“It was the longest wait in that gas station – I don’t know, ten, twelve hours. Johnny Keys don’t know what’s delaying things. He figures he’s been kidnapped to be killed. As a cover, I explain that a decision was being made by the bosses about whether he is to live or die. Each time I left the van to telephone the Russo home, I told him I was phoning the bosses to see if a decision had been reached.

“Johnny Keys was a cousin of Angelo Bruno. During that long wait, he lashed out against the Genovese family. He blamed it for all of the troubles the Philadelphia family had gone through, the war that was raging, all the troubles that not only came to him but to the whole family. How he now knows it was the greed of the Genovese people that caused this. How the Chin – Vincent Gigante – had conned this Tony Bananas that the Commission sanctioned the hit on Bruno. How the Chin conned the Commission by volunteering to do an investigation and taking out Tony. It was brutal the way Tony went, shot in the arms and the elbows first. You could feel Johnny’s hatred as he talked about how this life we led was being poisoned. How many more good people would die? But there in that van he continued to act like a man.

“He asked that, if he lost with the bosses and was sentenced to die, that a made guy do it. He said he always promised himself and his wife that he would die with his shoes off. If the decision came against him, would I take them off? ‘Of course,’ I said. I never asked him what the reason was. The more we talked, the more impressed I was. I really respected him.

“When I sent Louie and Stymie out for food and coffee, he tells us to hold the sugar for him! Afterwards, I heard a noise outside the van. I drew my gun. Maybe a cop was nosing around, checking out the van that was parked there so long. He must have guessed what I was thinking. He whispered, ‘If it’s a cop, shoot him before you shoot me.’ His resolve shook me up. It was like at the tollbooth. There would be no police involved in family business. But it wasn’t a cop. It was Louie and Stymie coming back from the food and coffee run.

“Louie and Stymie told me later that during one of the times I was trying to phone Russo, Johnny said to them he underestimated me all along. He said this was the first time in his life that he was caught unawares of a plan hatching around him. I’d completely sucked him in. He told them that he’d been responsible for about fifty hits himself, but that Sammy did the best piece of work setting this up he ever saw.

“I finally did make contact with Nicky Russo. Him and Pal Joey were safe. I told them where we were and to come. I was outside the van when they showed up. They said there was a lot of confusion back at the country club. Nobody was exactly sure what happened. Pal Joey was able to return and drive Russo away without any problems.

“This was bad news for Johnny Keys. I went back into the van and told him that the ‘decision’ had come back against him. He had lost. He had to go. Like the man he was, the man I had come to understand him to be, the man I had learned to respect over the past hours, he accepted this without comment. Me and Stymie and Louie – none of us – were happy with what was to come. I felt terrible that a man with such balls had to be hit. But this was Cosa Nostra. The boss of my family had ordered it. The entire Commission ordered it. There was nothing else I could do.

“We drove to a section of Staten Island that had a back road running along a wooded area. We stopped the van. I remembered his request about his shoes. I took them off.

“Pal Joey went to grab him and pull him out. He kicked out at Joey right in the chest. He said, ‘I’ll walk out on my own. Let me die like a man.’ He took five or six steps away from the van. Without a word, he lowered his head, quiet and dignified.

“I nodded at Louie Milito. As requested by Johnny Keys, he would be killed by a made member. Louie put a .357 magnum to the back of Johnny’s head and fired. The shot immediately levelled him to the ground. He died instantly. He died without pain. He died with dignity. He died Cosa Nostra.

“I sent Russo and Pal Joey back to Jersey. Louie, Stymie and me drove away in the van. There was total silence in that van. Nobody spoke a word.

“The next morning it was all over the news that John Simone’s body was found by two sanitation workers.

“I went to see Paul Castellano. He knew that the original plan was for the hit to be down in Jersey. I told him why it had to be changed. I explained everything that happened.

“Paul smiled and put his arm around my shoulder. He said he was proud of Sammy the Bull.

“I had to tell Paul that I was literally sick about this. We had just killed a guy who was the epitome, in my opinion, of our life, everything we were supposed to be. I looked Paul straight in the eye. ‘This is one hit I’m never going to be proud of,’ I said.”

Gravano also detailed the planning of the audacious assassination of Gambino Family Boss Paul Castellano. It was to take place in broad daylight in rush hour in the middle of a busy street in midtown Manhattan outside Sparks Steak House on 46th Street between Second and Third Avenue.

“The more we thought about it, the better it looked,” Sammy said. “We concluded that nine days before Christmas, around five to six o’clock at night, in the middle of Manhattan, in the middle of the rush hour, in the middle of the crush of all them shoppers buying presents, there would be literally thousands of people on the street, hurrying this way and that. The hit would only take a few seconds, and the confusion would be in our favour. Nobody would be expecting anything like this, least of all Paul. And being able to disappear afterwards in the crowds would be in our favour. So we decide this is when and where it’s going to happen.

“The day before, we have a meeting in the basement of my office on Stillwell Avenue. John comes down with Angelo and the entire hit team. John is supplying them, because it’s basically his problem. If everything gets fucked-up and the team is killed, whatever it may be, why should we take down our own guys, put them at risk?

“Frankie DeCicco comes down with Joe Watts. Altogether, there are eleven of us. There are the four shooters, all from John’s crew. Only one of them, John Carneglia, is a made guy. They’ll be waiting for Paul at the front door to Sparks. Another guy with John, Tony Roach Rampino, will be a backup right across the street from Sparks. Sparks is on East 46th Street between Third and Second Avenue, closer to Third. Up the street towards Second as backups will be Angie, Joe Watts and another associate with John, Iggy Alogna. John and me ‘Will be in a car on the other side of Third Avenue. If it comes down to it, I’ll be the backup at that end.’ So we had Sparks Steak House sandwiched in.

“John, Angie, me, Frankie and Joe Watts know who’s going to be hit. John just says to everybody else that there’s gonna be two guys killed. He says he ain’t saying who they are yet, but it’s a huge hit. John tells them that no matter what, don’t run, even if there are cops around. These two guys have got to go. ‘Don’t worry about the cops, he says, ‘because if you run and these guys ain’t dead, we’ll kill you.’”

“The following afternoon everyone except DeCicco gathered in a park on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Frankie will be inside Sparks making sure that Jimmy Brown and Danny Marino – all the people there for the meeting with Paul – don’t do anything.

“Joe Watts drove me to the park. The shooters were there. The four of them wore long white trench coats and black fur Russian hats. You couldn’t tell one guy from the other. I don’t know whose idea that was. I guess John’s. But I thought it was brilliant. Nobody would pay any attention to them. I mean, in New York you could practically walk down the street naked and nobody would notice. Besides, Sparks was only a couple of blocks from the United Nations. You saw all kinds of different clothes. But the big thing would be confusing the witnesses. ‘Well, what was their weight, their height?’ ‘I dunno.’ ‘What did they look like?’ ‘I dunno, they all looked alike.’ And these would be people who don’t even know what was going on, who weren’t prepared for it. All they would remember were the outfits.

“Walkie-talkies were handed out so we could communicate with one another. Then John told everybody that it was Paul and Tommy Bilotti who were going. We went over real quick what everybody’s position would be. I left the park with John in a Lincoln. He owned a Lincoln, but I don’t think this one was his personal car. Frankie had told us that after court, Paul was first going to go to the office of his lawyer, Jimmy LaRossa, so we figured he wouldn’t get to Sparks before five o’clock.

“I don’t think we said hardly anything on the way uptown. Our minds were on what was going to happen. John pulled the Lincoln in on the northwest corner of Third Avenue and 46th Street. People were swarming all around, just like we thought. I could see the canopy that said Sparks. The shooters in their white coats were already waiting by it. I could see Tony Roach across the street. The other guys up towards Second I couldn’t see. The problem was our parking spot on the corner wasn’t too good. We were sticking out into the crosswalk. So John said he was driving around the block again. There was the chance that Paul would arrive while we were doing this, but a cop might come over to ticket us the way we were parked and might recognize John. Besides, if it went the way we wanted, we were just observers.

“John circled the block. When we came back, the spot was a little better, and we pulled in again. A couple of minutes later, another Lincoln came up next to us and stopped for the light. The dome light was on in the Lincoln and when I looked into it, I saw Tommy Bilotti and Paul. They were talking to each other. Tommy wasn’t three feet away from me. I turned and told John. I got on the walkie-talkie and warned the guys outside Sparks that Paul would be there any second. I reached for my gun. I said to John if Tommy turns towards me, I would start shooting.

“ ‘No, no,’ he said. ‘We got our people in place.’

“ ‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘but if Tommy sees us, maybe they won’t go there.’ Just then the light changed, and Tommy pulled up in front of Sparks. I didn’t see Paul getting out, only the white coats moving towards the Lincoln. But I saw Tommy get out from the driver’s side. All of a sudden, he was squatting down, like he was seeing something, which was Paul getting shot. And then I saw a white coat come up behind Tommy, and Tommy went down. The white coat was bending over him. I looked to see if any of the people on the street was doing anything. They weren’t.

“John slowly drove across Third Avenue into the block where Sparks was. I looked down at Tommy Bilotti laying in a huge puddle of blood in the street and I said to John, ‘He’s gone.’ I couldn’t see Paul. John picked up speed, and we took a right down Second Avenue and headed back to Brooklyn, to Stillwell Avenue. I didn’t see any of the shooters or the backup guys.

“We had the radio on, 1010 News, I think. On the way, we heard the report that there was a shooting in midtown Manhattan. And next that one of the victims was the reputed Mob boss Paul Castellano. But I was in such a haze that I don’t remember anything else about that ride. If you offered me two million dollars, I couldn’t tell you.

“Frankie DeCicco came to my office to meet me and John. He said one of the waiters at Sparks came over to him and Jimmy Brown – Jimmy Failla – and said Paul had been shot. He said Jimmy turned white and told him he could have been in the car with Paul, and Frankie said, ‘Don’t worry, you wouldn’t have been hurt.’ And Frankie said when they left the estuarial they ran into Tommy Gambino. Frankie told him that his uncle just got shot and to go back to his car and get the fuck out of there.

“I don’t know who shot who. You don’t ask. I only heard later from John that one of the shooters, Vinnie Artuso, didn’t get a shot off. His gun jammed. Everything else went according to plan. It was, like they say, ‘Elementary, my dear Watson.’

“We made an agreement that nobody involved in this from here on out would ever speak to each other about it at any time under any circumstances and wouldn’t admit anything to anybody else in our family or in any of the other families.”

The manner and place of Castellano’s death catapulted him from relatively minor media interest to the sort of coverage reserved for the assassination of a head of state. Not only did the tabloids go all out – “Big Paul, Chauffeur, Take Their Last Ride” – but the New York Times featured it on the front page above the fold two days running.

Castellano and Bilotti were each reported to have been shot six times, each also the recipient of a coup de grâce to the head.

The city’s police commissioner said that according to witnesses it was uncertain whether two or three men had carried out the gangland executions. No one remembered seeing four. What eyewitnesses most recalled was ‘that the assassins were wearing identical Russian fur caps and long coats, variously described as either dark- or light-coloured.’ They were then seen fleeing on foot toward Second Avenue. A witness said that one of the gunmen had been holding a walkie-talkie immediately prior to the shootings.

The head of the state’s organized crime task force declared that Castellano’s violent death would have required the formal approval of the bosses of the other four families in the city.

Bruce Mouw knew better, but he wasn’t available for interviews. Sammy owned a quarter interest in Caesar’s East, a restaurant on 58th Street off Third Avenue, twelve blocks due north of Sparks.

“We had to have a meeting of the captains in the family,” Sammy said. “Frankie DeCicco spoke to me about doing it in Caesar’s East. We rushed the meeting. It was a couple of days after Paul went down. After the regular customers cleared out, all the captains met downstairs at a long table. Except Tommy Gambino, who I don’t believe we called. The drivers and anybody else that was brought stayed upstairs. The only ones down there who wasn’t a captain was Angelo and me. We stayed behind everybody at each side of the table. We had guns. You could say we were there for intimidating purposes. Joe Gallo was at the head of the table. Frankie and John were on each side of him. He was our consigliere. With Paul gone and Neil being dead, he was now in official control of the family.

“He was an old-timer, and he’s playing this game with the captains. He knew what to say. He knew the ins and outs of Cosa Nostra. He told them that we had no idea who killed Paul. He said he was going to use Frankie and John to help him run the family and to investigate what happened. He told them not to discuss anything with anybody outside our family about the hit and not have any members carry guns or overreact to anything. Anything they heard or found out, they were to report it back through John Gotti or Frankie DeCicco. I think they were all shook-up. They knew we probably did it, but they didn’t know for sure and they could see Joe Gallo was not saying, ‘Arm yourselves and get ready for war.’ He was communicating that they would be all right. Nobody was in trouble. Nobody was going to get hurt. We’re going to have an investigation.

“Officially, this is how we went to the other families. We told them we didn’t know what happened with Paul, but our family was intact. We weren’t in a position that a war would break out. We had no internal trouble. And we didn’t want anybody to get involved in our problems.

“A couple of weeks later, all the captains were called in again. The meeting was held in the recreation room of some big housing project in downtown Manhattan. Somebody knew somebody who gave us access to that room. Joe Gallo reiterates that we still don’t know what was going on, we’re still investigating. But the time had come to put our family together and vote for a new boss. Everybody has got the drift by now. It’s all over the newspapers that John Gotti did the hit. And they can see the closeness of Frankie DeCicco, Sammy the Bull, Joe Piney, Joe Gallo.

“Between themselves, before Paul was hit, Frankie and John have agreed that John will be the boss and Frankie the underboss. At the meeting, Frankie gets up and votes for John Gotti. It zips right around the room. Nobody opposes. It’s unanimous. At that point, John announces that Frankie will be his underboss and that Joe Gallo will stay on as consigliere of the family. He says he’s making Angie Ruggiero the captain of his old crew. Frankie’s uncle, Georgie, will replace Frankie.

“Now I’m going to be made an official captain, too. But I don’t want it announced there and then. Toddo Aurello was at the meeting, and he knew I was part of this whole move. I want to give respect to Toddo and not have anything like that done while he’s sitting there. I went to him afterwards and I told him that if he wanted to stay on as captain of the crew, I would start up a new crew. I said, ‘It’s completely up to you. Whatever you want,’ and he said, ‘Sammy, I’m tired. I been using you as acting captain. I’d like to step down.’

“I said, ‘OK. You have been like a father to me. I’ll take the crew, and you’ll be dealing directly with the administration of the family.’ ‘That’ll be great,’ he said. He shakes my hand and gives me a kiss and says, ‘Be careful.’ I set up an appointment with John, Frankie and Toddo, where Toddo asks official permission to step down. They give it, and that same night they make me a capo.

“John makes some other moves. He appoints his brother Genie a captain. And he breaks Tony Scotto down from being a captain to a soldier. Scotto had been away for payoffs and tax evasion. I happened to be at Paul’s when Tony had recommended Sonny Ciccone to be acting captain to run the dockworkers in his absence. Tony had mixed in with a lot of celebrities – politicians, like that guy running for president, Eugene McCarthy, entertainers, whatever – and John wasn’t too fond of him. So he replaced him officially with Sonny.

“Now was the point to see if we were gonna get retaliation from any of the other families. If there would be a war. So we sent out committees to notify them that we had elected a new boss, who our new boss and underboss was, who our new captains were. We said, ‘This is our new administration. We’re still investigating the Paul situation. There are no problems in our family. We don’t want no sanctions against us. And we want our Commission seat.’

“We got recognition from every family, including the Genovese family. Except the Genovese people said that there was a rule broken, that this situation “With Paul had to be put to rest, and someday somebody would have to answer for that, if and when the Commission ever got together again. We said, ‘Don’t worry. As soon as we find out, we will retaliate. Until then, we’re just going to run our family.’

“We had our Commission seat, and from what we thought, it didn’t seem like there was going to be any war. There wasn’t going to be anything. It had gone up as high as the Commission level and there wasn’t any opposition in any way, shape or form. Frankie and me had still been hiding out with guns in a safe house set up by Joe Watts. We were still tight, but after about a month, we started to loosen up somewhat. And then, about three months after this, it happened.”

On Sunday, 13 April 1986, like politicians rallying loyal supporters, Gotti and DeCicco planned to visit the Veterans and Friends Club in Bensonhurst, the headquarters of the family’s private trash-collecting capo, Jimmy Brown Failla. Sammy also would be on hand.

“We’re doing our little stops,” Sammy said, “gathering power and strength, building momentum. Me and Frankie get there. We have coffee, see the boys, do a little ‘Hey, how you doing? Good to see you.’ And then John gives a call. He can’t make it. He’ll meet us in the city. Frankie tells me this. So we plan to go to the city in Frankie’s Buick Electra, but we stay for a while doing our thing, talking to the boys.

“Then this guy, Frankie Hearts – Frank Bellino – comes over and asks Frankie DeCicco, ‘Hey, do you have a card for that lawyer, Alaroni?’ And Frankie says, ‘Yeah, I think I got it.’ He looks through his wallet; all the other cards he’s got in his pocket. But he doesn’t have it. He says, ‘You know what? It’s probably in the fucking car, in the glove compartment.’

“I said, ‘Frank, you want me to get it?’ And he says, ‘No, you’ll never find it. There’s a lot of shit in there. Come on,’ he says to Frankie Hearts, ‘I’m sure it’s there,’ and they both walk out of the club.

‘I’m still inside the club. From what I heard later, as they walk across the street, they could see a bag under the car. A paper bag. Frankie DeCicco joked with Frankie Hearts. ‘Look at that bag. There’s probably a bomb under my car.’ He don’t think anymore about it. It’s an absolute rule in Cosa Nostra that you don’t use bombs.

“Frankie DeCicco opens up the door and slides in on the passenger side and he’s looking through the glove compartment while Frankie Hearts is standing there. That’s when the bomb went off. Frankie Hearts goes flying backwards. The blast blew his shoes off. And his toes.

“When I heard the explosion, I didn’t think of a car. It was so fucking powerful, it sounded like a whole building blew up, a boiler or something. I came out of the club, and Frankie’s car is in fucking flames. And there’s Frankie Hearts with the blood shooting out of his feet.

“I go flying across the street. I saw Frankie DeCicco laying on the ground beside the car. With the fire, it could blow again. I tried to pull him away. I grabbed a leg, but he ain’t coming with it. The leg is off. One of his arms is off. His uncle Georgie came running over with another guy, Butterass, and a guy named Oscar. They’re trying to help me. I got my hand under him and my hand went right through his body to his stomach. There’s no ass. His ass, his balls, everything, is completely blown off.

“Just then a police van comes by on patrol. It backs in and they lower the tailgate and we pick Frankie up, holding whatever we can of him together, and put him in the van. Then they got Frankie Hearts and put him in the van and they shoot off for Victory Memorial Hospital.

“I was wearing a white shirt. I looked at my shirt, amazed. There wasn’t a drop of blood on it. The force of the blast, the concussion, blew most of the fluids right out of Frankie’s body. He had no blood left in him, nothing, not an ounce. I told my brother-in-law, Eddie Garafola, who had tried to help me with Frankie, to get going right away and go to John’s club. I said, ‘He’s supposed to meet us in the city, but he’s in Queens still. Tell him what happened.’ Then I told him to get all my guys to meet at my place, Tali’s, and to come heavy.

“Everybody who was in the club is out on the street. I looked over and I thought Danny Marino had the strangest expression on his face. He’s with Jimmy Brown’s crew and him and Jimmy were waiting at Sparks for Paul. But I thought then that he was just scared. I’m telling them all to go to Tali’s. Jimmy Brown said he’d be at home if I needed him. Danny Marino said the same thing. A guy named Paulie, a made guy in the family, comes near me and says, ‘What the fuck good are they at home?’ That remark never left me. In my head, I was thinking it was true, who needed them at home? But I didn’t even answer. I was too busy.

“My brother-in-law had come back and said, ‘John wants to see you right now, immediately.’ I got in the car and go to this restaurant in Queens, where John is. He says, ‘Well, we got problems.’

“ ‘I know,’ I said. ‘I don’t know what the fuck is going on, but we definitely have problems.’ For four months, since Sparks, we figured it was over. No problems. And here’s Frankie, all at once, blown to bits. I’m still at the restaurant when one of John’s people walked in and said, ‘John, Frankie’s dead. They said he died on the way to the hospital.’ He was already dead on the street, I thought. He had nothing left in him.

“John said the only thing was to stay on full alert and see what comes next, what we could find out. It looked like there could be a war after all. Our first thought was the Genovese family. But the Chin was a real stickler for the rules of our life, and one of the rules was you don’t use bombs. Nobody had pulled off a bombing in New York since the beginning of Cosa Nostra. Would Chin break this kind of rule? Was Frankie fucking some guy’s wife that we didn’t know about? Maybe greaseballs from Sicily did it. Paul had a lot of connections over there, and in Sicily they bomb all the time.

“When I went back to Tali’s, I told everybody to keep their eyes and ears open. Report anything they picked up. But there wasn’t anything. Not a peep. Everything stayed quiet. It seemed like whoever was behind this was willing to settle for the satisfaction of taking down Frankie.

“It was only a long, long time afterwards that I found out what happened and that it was Frankie and John they were really after. The ‘they’ being Gas Pipe Casso from the Lucchese family and Chin Gigante. I was shocked. It goes to show how Cosa Nostra was just one double-cross after another. We had reached out and got Gas Pipe’s tacit approval about Paul. Maybe Chin don’t know this. But after Paul goes down, Chin grabs Gas Pipe – they had a relationship – and says, ‘Well, Paul’s out of the picture, let’s take out John Gotti and Frankie DeCicco. It’ll be a real hit parade.’

“They tell Jimmy Brown and Danny Marino what they’re gonna do and that Jimmy and Danny will be appointed by the Commission as a committee to run the Gambino family for Chin. Let me tell you what a stand-up guy Jimmy Brown is. If some black guy walked in and said he just killed Paul Castellano and was the new boss, Jimmy would say, ‘Gee, great. What do you want me to do, boss?’ So basically the Genovese and Lucchese families would control our family.

“Gas Pipe was a couple of blocks away when the bomb went off.

“The mistake was using a couple of West Side guys, meaning they were associated with the Genovese people. I still don’t know who they were or even if they’re alive. One of them put the bomb under Frankie’s car. The other one was on the remote control. When he sees Frankie come out of the club with Frankie Hearts, he thinks Frankie Hearts was John. Frankie Hearts has kind of the same build as John and the same greyish hair. And he presses the button. Boom!

“I got along good with Gas Pipe. I still like him. For him, it was business, a master Cosa Nostra double-cross scheme, nothing personal. The only thing I didn’t like was the bomb. I would have more respect for him if he used a gun, according to the rules. I think the bomb was probably a devious Chin idea to make us think the Sicilians done it. I heard when my name came up, Gas Pipe said, ‘Forget it. We’re not gonna kill Sammy.’ That would’ve been another mistake. If John had been in the car and they put in Jimmy Brown and Marino, I would have killed them both. They were the true betrayers. They knew what was going to happen. And then I would’ve gone after Gas Pipe and Chin. I don’t think I could’ve won, but I would’ve fought until my death.

“Besides his toes, Frankie Hearts got mangled up a little. But he survived. That was how I found out what was going on just before the blast. I decided one thing. I used to drive myself. I was getting a driver. Not to say that joke line like in the movies, where the old boss tells his wife, ‘Go start the car.’ But to never leave my car alone anymore, so nobody can fuck with it.”

 

Born to the Mob

Frankie Saggio

Frankie Saggio was born in the Bensonhurst district of Brooklyn on 7 September 1964. The neighbourhood was home to many Castellammerese. His uncle Philip Giaccone – Philly Lucky – had been born in Ridgewood, Queens, but his mother came from Castellammarese del Golfo. It seems that Giaccone had not wanted to join the Mafia, but he had no choice. His father died in the middle of the Depression, leaving Philly Lucky to provide for his mother and sister. He was recruited by John Bonaventre, who ran most of the local rackets for the Bonanno Family. Philly Lucky got to run all the business coming out of Kennedy Airport. He even got Frankie’s father a no-show job at the airport, while Saggio Snr ran his own auto body shop. His father did not get involved in the hold-ups and other criminal activities because he was a haemophiliac and was in and out of hospital having blood transfusions.

From an early age, Frankie would sit out on the stoop of his home and listen to the stories Uncle Philly and other wiseguys would tell him. These men were contemporaries of Al Capone who himself had been born in Brooklyn. After school Frankie would play outside the Italian social clubs on 18th Avenue and watch the gangsters go in and out. And Philly Lucky preached violence. “Frankie,” he told the young boy, “if someone bothers you in school or out on the street, you pick up anything you find – a baseball bat, a brick, a garbage can – and bash their skull in.”

From the age of seven, his uncle would take him over the East River to have a haircut, a shoeshine and lunch in Little Italy. It was there that Frankie got a detailed education in the ways of the Cosa Nostra. Uncle Philly was steeped in the Mafia ethos. His father-in-law was Carlo Gambino, head of the Gambino crime family. If one of his men turned up at his house with his girlfriend, the door would be shut in his face. He would be told to come with his wife, or not at all.

Frankie was warned never to gamble. The idea was to run the games and never to be a player as the house always wins. Uncle Philly knew what he was talking about. He ran a horse room – an illegal off-track betting shop – and a shylock business, loan-sharking. According to Frankie Saggio, it was his uncle who “taught him the value of a dollar and how to steal it from someone else”. Young Frankie also noticed that people were always giving his uncle envelopes, including one, he noted, with 25K written on it.

Uncle Philly was from an era when being in a Mafia family meant being bound by blood and honour, but by the time Frankie was growing up, those days were coming to an end. By the 1970s, their only concern was money. One of the most ruthless and ambitious Mafiosi at the time was Carmine Galante, whose parents had been from Castellammarese del Golfo. Carmine was born in East Harlem. At the age of fourteen he had been arrested for petty theft, quickly graduating to grand larceny, robbery and assault. At nineteen, he was involved in a gun battle in the Williamsburg district of Brooklyn after committing an armed robbery. A six-year-old girl and her mother were injured in the shoot out. Galante was arrested and spent eight years in Sing Sing. When he got out, Galante became a made man after assassinating the Italian labour activist Carlo Tresca in 1943, possibly on the orders of Vito Genovese, and quickly rose to be an underboss in the Bonanno family.

Over the next twenty-five years, he worked his way up to becoming the biggest drug supplier on the East Coast. This made him enemies. Frank Costello set him up for a drug bust in 1962. After surviving several assassination attempts, Costello died of natural causes in 1973. Still thirsty for revenge, when Galante was released on parole the following year, he ordered the bombing of Costello’s mausoleum, blowing the brass doors off.

By then Joe Bananas had been forced to step down as head of the Bonanno family and Philip “Rusty” Rastelli had taken over. Rastelli then went to jail on Federal racketeering charges. Galante seized the opportunity to take over the Bonanno family. At the same time, he was conducting a vicious gang war against the Gambinos, killing at least eight members of the family. Galante’s activities were now inviting the attention of the Federal authorities and the Commission decided that he had to go. This was done in true Mafia style. As Galante lit his trade-mark cigar after dining with his two bodyguards in Joe and Mary’s Italian-American restaurant in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn, three men walked in and blasted him in the face and chest with a shotgun. After the bodyguards had been taken care of, they blasted Galante’s dead body again to show that no one was bigger than the outfit.

As Philly Lucky had not been involved in the assassination, he had been nominated to take over as boss of the Bonanno family. But Rastelli was not going to be pushed aside. From behind bars, he ordered Giaccone’s death. The contract was given to Donnie Brasco, the pseudonym of FBI agent Joseph Pistone who had penetrated the Mob. However, the contract was cancelled when Rastelli loyalist Dominic “Sonny Black” Napolitano suggested that they take care of Alphonse “Sonny Red” Indelicato and Dominic “Big Trin” Trinchara at the same time.

There was an awkward scene at the wedding of Philly Lucky’s daughter Corinne to Peter Clemenza. A number of senior Mafia figures turned up. At the reception afterwards, Uncle Philly wanted the guys who had filmed the wedding to video guests saying a few words about the happy couple. Frankie did not understand, at the time, why Paul Castellano, John Gotti, Sammy “The Bull” Gravano, Carmine Persico, Sonny Napolitano, Joey Massino, Stevie Cannone and Sally Farrugia all pushed the microphones and cameras away. They did not want to be caught on camera wishing the bride and groom a long and happy life. By this time, Frankie was known to one and all as “Little Gangster” and the name “the Gangster” began to turn up in FBI files.

On 5 May 1981, Philip Giaccone was called to a meeting concerning a dispute involving Alphonse Indelicato. Philly Lucky knew that they were using Sonny Red to get to him. He was probably going to his death, but he was loyal to his men and would not let one of them face the music alone.

Giaccone, Indelicato and Trinchera turned up at 20/20 Night Club in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, where they were met by Gerlando Sciascia who handled the Bonannos’ drug operations in Canada. He ushered them through into a storeroom where Joseph Massino and other gunmen were waiting. The bodies were taken to a vacant lot near Ozone Park in Queens where John Gotti and his brother Gene had arranged to have them buried. However, a few weeks later some children found something “green and brown” that smelled awful oozing out of some canvas sacks. Their parents identified the odour as that of rotting flesh. The newspapers reported that the bodies had been accidentally uncovered by heavy rain. Frank Saggio says that nothing concerning the Mob ever happens by accident. He believes that the Mob wanted there to be a funeral for Sonny Red in hope that his son Anthony “Whack Whack” Indelicato would turn up, so they could whack him too.

The death of Uncle Philly did not put Frank Saggio off a life of crime, but he decided that, to avoid the modern Mob treachery, he would not sign up to any single Mob family. Instead he would work freelance for all five . He could do this because he was one of the biggest earners in the business, pulling down millions and kicking a share upstairs to the bosses. He quickly graduated from sticking up drug dealers and stealing cars to bankrupting Wall Street brokers, providing protection for porno rackets and overseeing the Mob forays into movie production. But those in power decided that he could not stay freelance forever. He was after all tied by blood to the Bonanno family – the family that had murdered his uncle.

Soon after joining the Bonannos, Frankie narrowly escaped an assassination attempt and was busted for a major scam. As he had no loyalty to the Bonannos – who were now trying to kill him – Frankie turned himself over to the Feds on the one condition. He would not squeal on his own relatives.

Saggio told them everything else he knew. He was protected by the FBI and US Marshals, then handed over to the Federal Witness Security Program. He was a fugitive from the Mob and, later, a fugitive from the government. However, in the early 2000s, he took the time to sit down with the crime writer Fred Rosen. Together, they wrote Born to the Mob, which explains how Saggio had got into a life of crime and what he had learned about the old-style Mafia from his Uncle Philly.

The Warner Brothers crime films of the 1930s – particularly 1931’s Public Enemy starring James Cagney in his career-making role and any film with Humphrey Bogart or Edward G. Robinson – succeeded in showing the kind of poverty and social conditioning that produced the original group of gangsters that ruled the rackets in the first part of the century to 1931. Reality intruded in 1932.

That year, on the boardwalk in Atlantic City, three men took a walk. What they discussed was a blueprint for organized crime in New York. If executed well, it would ensure that the operation would eventually control a network that would infiltrate all fifty states. The story may be apocryphal, but there is no denying the facts.

At some point in 1932–33, Charles “Charley Lucky” Luciano (aka Lucky Luciano), Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel, and Meyer Lansky came up with the idea of organizing crime. The “Outfit” was Lucky Luciano’s name for this brand of crime that the three men introduced into the US. The two tough Jews and their brilliant Italian counterpart came up with the rather civilized concept of killing only for monetary gain: monetary gain was everything. Eventually, Luciano’s “Outfit” would become a nationwide group of well-organized criminals run by the Five Families of New York.

With Mob family ties that stretched back to his greatgrandfather Joseph, Frankie’s career path was as good as chosen. And while Philly Lucky was dead, his name still translated into respect. Frankie was a restless young man and wanted to start making a name for himself within the Outfit.

Using the juice that his uncle’s reputation still carried, Frankie formed his own crew of young independents: Mikey Hollywood (“as handsome as a Ken doll”) from the Genovese Family; Larry Zano and his brother Junior, also from the Genovese; and Chris Cappanelli, his brother Anthony, and Mikey Paradiso from the Gambino Family.

“Everyone was tied in and we all hung out and did stuff together,” Frankie recalls. “We all had thousands in cash in our pockets from the sale of the [stolen] goods. We started hanging together. We did armed robberies of drug dealers – never civilians. See, Chris was selling pot, coke – stuff like that. We’d make ten to fifteen K on the sale of the drugs. But it wasn’t enough. Why bother buying the shit when we could steal it? Instead of making ten or fifteen, we’d get thirty. We’d rob the dealer and unload the shit ourselves. We didn’t care who we robbed, if they were connected or not. And that started it. That was our specialty. That became our full-time job: findin’ guys who were buyin’ from the dealers, getting their routines down and goin’ in when they’d have the most cash or product.

“Our main guy for getting rid of the stuff was Tony Armente, who was a Bonanno soldier. Sometimes, when we didn’t have anybody lined up to take off, we’d buy from Tony. You gotta understand; this guy would kill you, stab you in the heart (to stop you from bleeding), cut your throat, hang you upside down in the shower to drain your blood, cut you into ten different pieces, and carry them out in a bunch of American Tourister luggage. Tony would bury you out in this bird sanctuary on Staten Island also called ‘Boot Hill’. Tony was on America’s Most Wanted. Tony’s now doing about 400 years in jail.”

Of all the wiseguys Frankie met in this period of his life, the one he formed a lasting friendship with was Michael “Mikey Hollywood” Groak. Mikey had an unusual background for a wiseguy. His father was a New York City detective, first-grade, who became the president of the Patrolman’s Benevolent Association, the chief negotiating arm of the NYPD. Mikey had rebelled against his father’s life as a lawman. Instead, Mikey chose the fast, dangerous, monied life of a gangster.

“Mikey was as tough as they come. We started scheming, robbing. We got into the cigarette, cigar, and liquor business. Sometimes we’d take a truck down to North Carolina where we’d scam wholesalers outta a $100,000 of cigarettes, then bring it back and sell ’em. Most times we’d place orders at cigarette wholesalers. We’d come up with some phoney name for our restaurant or club or tell them we were opening up a bunch of newsstands, give them an address of an abandoned building, and then have them ship hundreds of cartons of cigarettes to it. We’d pay them with phoney certified checks that we printed up ourselves on a regular check writer.”

Through such scams, Frankie and Mikey started racking up the dough and Frankie’s criminal career as an independent started to take off.

“Then Tommy D came over. He said he’d heard about how well I was doing, that I was a good earner. The bottom line with these guys is money. He wanted me with him ’cause I had a reputation as a mover. Fuck him – I couldn’t stand the son-of-a-bitch!”

Frankie wanted to steer clear of the Bonannos, not just because they killed his uncle but because the politics of the Family were in such disarray. With Rastelli in power, the Family had lost face. The idea of associating with just one Family seemed to have its liabilities.

“I didn’t want to end up like my uncle. He had been a Bonanno his whole life; he’d been loyal to them then they clipped him and buried him somewhere. I began to think about going a different way. I wanted to move around freely. I didn’t want anybody bustin’ my balls. I wanted to do business with any crew. Everyone stuck to their own crew. If I wasn’t with any crew, I could move around and not answer to anyone.”

Frankie never read any of the self-help books of the 1980s, but he followed some of their best advice: make money doing something you love. Only he didn’t quite do it in the way the self-help gurus had in mind.

“Basically, it really was a body shop. Continental Auto Body was the name of it. We started out actually doing collision work in Islip. I used to paint cars. I actually liked it; it was very relaxing. Did that for a while. My firm was doing very well. Then I started seeing there was a lot of money in parts, especially bumpers.”

Bumpers?

“Do you remember at the time in the early eighties in New York when there were all these Caddies riding around without front bumpers? It was the biggest thing to rob; people just wanted them – I don’t know why. Who cared? I was getting $1,000 just for the bumper. Corvette t-tops [the glass roofs] were also huge at the time. You couldn’t park your Corvette anyplace without having the Hap stolen.”

Frankie had his own crew of car thieves roaming the night streets, shadows passing through the orange sodium streetlights. Frankie followed the old adage: waste not, want not. These were kids restless to make their way up in the Mob’s chain of command. Frankie sold them on his scam as a way of making the bosses sit up and take notice. Working for Frankie was the path of career advancement. The bigger their earnings, the more the bosses noticed.

“The parts business brought in a lot of money but there was a lot of labour involved. It’s easier to just sell the whole car. Trans Ams, Camaros, Corvettes – they were real big then. And also at the time, I had a guy. He was a good friend, name of Patty Testa. He was a made guy with the Gambinos. He actually had an auto body place in Flatbush on Utica Avenue.

“Patty was exporting stolen cars out of the country. Patty and his brother Joey were with Roy DeMeo, who ran a crew for Nino Gaggi, a skipper with the Gambinos. My Uncle Jimmy Clemenza was friends with Roy. That’s how I met that whole crew. They were my friends since I was a kid. I did a ton of business with Roy, Patty, and Joey – all of them.

“The way it worked, Patty’d call me up and give me an order. ‘I need two Lincoln Towne cars, Frankie. I need a black Coupe DeVille. I need a Buick Riviera,’ Patty would say.

“We’d agree on the price, which was usually 2,500 a car. I’d get my guys to go out and get ’em at night and the next day I’d go down to the Gemini Lounge where Patty worked. We’d park the cars on Utica Avenue, Avenue M – whatever – and leave ’em with the keys under the mat and he’d give me ten, twenty thousand – whatever it was.”

The Gemini Lounge had a reputation.

“The Gemini Lounge. A fuckin’ wild joint,” says Frankie, laughing. “You didn’t want to be in the Gemini Lounge at the wrong time when anybody was on drugs or fucked up. That crew killed a lot of guys: everyone knew they were nuts. I don’t think they ever killed anybody for money. When Nino Gaggi needed work done, he went there. They fucked up a lot of guys. Roy was shooting to get his button; if you got in his way, you went.

“The Gemini, it was, like, a lot of knotty pine – that old beamed look. Bar on the right, tables on the left. When I’d walk in, I’d see Joey Testa sitting at one table. He was a fucking homicidal maniac. Sometimes I’d see Richie the Ice Man there. He was another one.”

Richie did a lot of “contracts” for the Gambinos.

“There was a door that led to the back; there was an apartment back there. I never saw the Gorton Fishermen outfits [that protected the gangsters’ clothes from victims’ blood], but I heard the stories. But see, you don’t ask questions. There are no daily gangster announcements: ‘Who’d you clip this week?’ These guys are friends of mine; I never looked at it in a frightening way. I was going to see Joey – we’re all friends. And Roy? He was always a gentleman with me. I didn’t worry about his temper or any of that shit. I was a kid – what did I know? I thought I was invincible. If it was today, I would still do business with them, but I’d have a fuckin’ pistol on me, safety off.”

Frankie’s business dealings with DeMeo and his crew came to an abrupt end on 10 January 1983. Skipper Nino Gaggi allegedly clipped DeMeo, then stuffed the corpse in the trunk of DeMeo’s own car. The killing had supposedly been carried out at the behest of Gambino boss Paul Castellano, who had grown tired of DeMeo’s arrogance and indiscriminate killing, which was bad for business. Castellano had first asked his underboss John Gotti to do the job, but the future “Dapper Don” politely refused. Gotti would eventually kill Castellano and supplant him as boss.

“I fucking hated Gotti and so did everyone else. The son of a bitch brought more attention to wiseguys than anyone did. Every time [federal prosecutor and later NYC mayor] Giuliani prosecuted him, we kept rooting for his conviction.”

But that was in the future. Frankie still had to make a living in the present. With DeMeo out of the way, he needed a new outlet for his car theft business.

“I started dealing with a guy on the Island – Bones. He had a Nissan dealership in front and a used body shop in the back. Whatever their suspicion, the legitimate workers at the dealership kept their mouths shut. You didn’t have to be brilliant to figure out that if you opened your mouth to the cops, you’d wind up in Gravesend Bay. The water was so foul there, it actually dissolved metal; flesh was no problem.

“Now, I’m dealing with Bones and another guy who worked there – Sally Regina – overheard that I was the guy who got all the cars. He came up to me and started talking to me about cars and shit and I didn’t trust him too much. I don’t really want to deal with this guy. I really wouldn’t talk to him. I just didn’t trust him; there was something about him, like he’s listening too close or something. But fucking greed takes over. I let Rico handle him. I wouldn’t talk to him. But my partner Rico – man, did he talk.”

At the time, Frankie’s partner in the parts and stolen car business was Rico Marino.

“Rico starts dealing with Sally Regina. I’d go to Regina’s house and I really wouldn’t talk. But my partner Rico starts asking, ‘What do you want? Tell me what you need. We can get you anything.’ He put us in such a hole, that kid, with his mouth.

“One time we were over at Regina’s house where we’d drop the cars off and we’re in the garage. And Regina says, ‘Oh, my phone’s ringing,’ and he runs back in the house. [I find out later] the batteries are fucking up on the wire he’s wearing. I find that out later on when my lawyer gets the tapes. The only thing they have me on tape saying is, ‘To be honest with you, I really don’t want to deal with you, you look like a cop to me.’ The guy, of course, denies it.”

Six months went by. On a bright July day in 1984, Frankie and Rico went to Sally Regina’s house to make a delivery.

“We go to his house with a brand new stretch Caddy with five hundred miles, a T-1 Porsche, and a 1984 Riviera. We’re in the driveway and the money’s about to change hands when all of a sudden this guy pulls up in a white Caddy wearing – I’ll never forget – a black Members Only jacket. A grey-haired guy. Regina introduces him.

“ ‘Oh, this is my partner Terry’ I said, ‘Partner? What are you talking about?’ ”

Frankie was angry. And suspicious. Suddenly, after dealing with Regina for a while, he suddenly has a partner that crawls out of the woodwork? Something just wasn’t right.

“I walk away. Rico stays there and he’s talking to the guy. I’m telling him, ‘Are you out of your fucking mind? Look at that guy. That guy’s a cop!’ So after a while, this guy Terry drives off. And I’m standing in the driveway and going to get my car to leave. And I see a squad car come down the street and I’m, like, ‘What the fuck? Nah. You know, this can’t be.’ You know how you get that feeling? ‘Nah, this can’t be for real.’ ”

But it was.

“Sure enough the fucking police car pulls right into the fucking driveway. I go to turn and run and all I see are guys coming from everywhere. About ten cops run through a neighbour’s yard, destroying his plants, and jump over the back fence and some hedges, and then they jump me – about ten of them – cuff me, and get me up. Unmarked cars pull up.”

Usually, when a suspect is arrested in Suffolk County on Long Island, they are taken to the closest precinct for booking. But not Frankie and Rico.

“They take us directly to the District Attorney’s Office in Hauppage and right up to the Rackets Bureau. They read us our rights and started questioning us – Rico too. They gotta make a production out of it so we don’t think he set us up. They tell us how bad they got us, how they got us transporting stolen cars interstate, which is a federal beef.”

The cops were making Frankie out to be the mastermind of a major car ring. Which he was. But at the time, Frankie didn’t have the perspective to see that. He simply considered himself a guy on the way up, just trying to make a living any way he could. As far as he was concerned, he wasn’t hurting anybody. Everything he stole, he figured, was insured; everything he stole was new. Who cared if the insurance companies had to pay up?

“The outcome was they took us and arraigned us. I had gotten arrested a few years before when I was still a juvenile for a burglary. I got probation. At the time, my record from my first case was sealed. My father had made sure it was, because I’d been a minor; I got the [mug] pictures back and everything.

“So now this looks like my first arrest, not second. I know my first arrest was a ‘B Felony’ – I’ve had a little experience. And the cops start talking and saying this shit about wanting to help me and I stop ’em cold.

“ ‘Listen, I want a lawyer.’ Soon as I said that, everything stopped.”

Which is the way it’s supposed to be. Once a suspect asserts their constitutional right to an attorney, by law the questioning has to cease. But in Suffolk County, as a state commission would discover, that wasn’t always the case. Suffolk County detectives were infamous for beating confessions out of suspects, regardless of what rights were invoked. With Frankie, though, there would have been no point. Uncle Philly had ingrained the code of omertà on Frankie’s soul: there was no way he would talk. The cops, though, continued to try.

“They’d still come into the interrogation room where they were holding me – you know, the kind of place with a battered desk and chairs, and walls painted puke green? They’d try and scare me into talking: ‘Oh, you’ll get thirty years.’ Stuff like that. Fuck that. Finally, they take me for arraignment. We get outside and what do I see out front? Parked in front of the DA’s office are the stretch Caddy, the T-1 Porsche, and the 1984 Buick Riviera. They were fucking with us.

“ ‘Hey, Frankie – does that look familiar? What do you think of that limo?’ one of the cops asked.

“ ‘That’s nice, is it yours?’ I asked him.”

They drove Frankie and Rico to the arraignment “out east”, as Long Islanders like to say, into the furthest recesses of Suffolk County, to the drab State Supreme Court Building in Riverhead – the county seat.

“Listen to this. The judge is Michael Mannone, my father’s first cousin. He knows my name; he knows who I am. I go for arraignment and all they get me on was fifty counts criminal possession of stolen property in the first degree. The fucking judge – I got no criminal record now – the judge who’s my cousin sets bail at half a million dollars! So my father gets this lawyer, Hal Jordan, a wiseguy lawyer out of the Woolworth Building in Manhattan. He comes back to the bullpen.

“ ‘Frankie,’ he says to me, ‘Frankie, what the fuck was in the trunk of these cars?! What did you have, bodies in the trunk?’ I tell him the judge must have a hard-on for me. I can’t figure it out.

“ ‘Look Frankie,’ he says, ‘I got another bail hearing scheduled for next week, so you’re gonna have to lay up a little bit.’ I go the next week for the bail hearing before Judge Mannone and he reduces my bail to 40,000 cash and I get out.”

Frankie was only out for two days before he went back down to the Nissan dealership to talk to the owner, Bones.

“I grab the guy and tell him, ‘You got a fucking rat, bro. This guy’s wearing a wire and everything.’ The guy didn’t want to hear it; the guy’s blowing me off. ‘You gotta be a fucking rat too, then. I come here to do you a fucking favour and you’re blowing me off and telling me to be quiet?’

“Now I end up thinking that Bones was involved too. So what happens is, I see that the kid, Sally Regina – he’s in the back working in the shop, that muthafucker. Sally wasn’t a cop; he was just a guy who got pinched for something and was setting guys up to get out of trouble. I go in there, I got a fucking crowbar, and I beat the fuck out of him. I bashed his skull in.”

A person can easily die from being beaten with a crowbar, but Frankie “didn’t really give a fuck at the time. I get home. By the time I get there, my lawyer already called. They were charging me with first-degree assault and revoking bail. I go down to turn myself in. My lawyer tells me, ‘We take this to trial; there’s no way we’re gonna win. They got too much on you.’ ”

So Frankie did what he’s good at: he made a deal.

“It was a score, actually. In return for dropping most of the charges against me [including the assault charge], I plead guilty to three counts of criminal possession of stolen property in the first degree. I went up before my cousin, Judge Mannone for sentencing, and he gave me four years.”

Every prisoner in the New York State Correctional System has to go through preliminary processing at the Downstate Correctional Facility in Fishkill, NY. The place is about 100 miles north of Long Island.

“I wait in the Riverhead jail until October – about four months before they took me to Downstate. After I sign in and everything, they assign me to Clinton State Prison. It’s in an upstate town called Dannemora; most cons just call the prison Dannemora. So for a non-violent felony, first offence, they send me to a Max A joint with perverts and murderers. There were guys doing 300 years there.”

He had merited such unusual first-time treatment because the Rackets Squad – whose chief target consisted of mobsters – prosecuted him. In other words, did Frankie receive a more severe punishment because the cops and court perceived him as a “known associate of organized crime” rather than an independent? Likely. Which is ironic, considering he was an independent. From the time of his uncle’s murder he had remained unaffiliated. So far it was working – he didn’t have to kick upstairs.

“A month before, I’d had my twenty-first birthday on 10 September. And it’s my first time in prison – it didn’t feel too good. A fucking twelve- or fourteen-hour bus ride up to Dannemora and stopping at all these jails to pick up guys along the way.

“What they do is they shackle your feet and they have this thing they put around your waist and they handcuff you without any chain so there’s no play. Then they take the handcuffs and clip ’em to this little black metal box around your waist. You can’t move; you have no fucking movement. So I ride for fourteen hours on a bus like that. Fucking torture, bro – torture. They give you a fucking sandwich, right? Try to get the fucking sandwich into your mouth.”

Frankie had been on the bus since the early morning. Even inside the bus with its closed windows, he could tell that the air had gotten colder. When they reached Plattsburgh, which is a little south of the Canadian border, the driver took a hard left. The bus rumbled along a dark, two-lane road – Route 374 – for ten miles through the small town of Cadyville, then climbed the Cadyville Hills. At the top of the hill, the driver looked out his windshield. There, built into the side of a mountain, was Clinton State Prison. With a crackle of gears, the bus descended into hell.

The first building on the right is currently called the Annex. Large coils of razor wire surround it. Not long ago, it was the State Hospital for the Criminal Insane; the town residents called it “The Bug House”. Now it’s used to house inmates. When the bus finally arrived inside the prison walls at about midnight, Frankie got out and looked around.

The moon was half full and he could make out a series of buildings of all shapes and sizes. At the top of the buildings, silhouetted against the dark night sky, was the unpleasant image of barbed wire, twisted into ugly coils.

“This way,” said a guard, and marched the prisoners inside a low-lying building.

Frankie marched, but kept looking around. He saw armed guards patrolling the grounds. He noticed the towers, set up at intervals around the prison; he could see the bare outline of the guards inside of them. He figured they must be marksmen carrying rifles fitted with sniper scopes, in case inmates were stupid enough to attempt an escape. He later found out that he was right.

“They took me in, processed me – name, prints, pictures, shit like that. Then they took me up to the cell block. It was fucking huge: an old maximum security cell block with one-man cells. Looked like something from one of those old movies. I start walking down the catwalk and everyone starts screaming, ‘New jack, new jack,’ throwing shit. For a twenty-one-year-old, it was a pretty wild experience.”

When Frankie got to his cell he stopped for a second and then the guard pushed him in. In the four-by-six-foot cell he saw a bunk and a sink attached to a toilet. The overhead light was just a bare bulb and was so dim, he couldn’t see. Basically, it was useless, “fucking dead”. Frankie turned and faced the catwalk and that’s when he heard the sound for the first time.

“The cells were cranked closed. There was a chain that went through every cell, attached to a wheel at the end of the gallery. The guard turns a crank and you hear ‘Crrrrrr,’ and the bars start moving, then, ‘Bang.’ ”

The bars hit home, sunk into the three-foot thick walls. Frankie looked around at his new home, out at the other cells, and listened as the screams died down until all that could be heard was snoring. He sat down on his bunk and suddenly, he began to think about his Uncle Philly, who had never been arrested in his life. Yet here he was in one of New York State’s worst prisons for a non-violent felony.

“I just didn’t get it,” says Frankie. “My uncle, he did so many things and never once got jailed. I really needed to figure it out.”

Frankie would have time to do just that.

Saggio did figure to stay out of jail, but not how to stay out of trouble. Despite his lucrative career as a freelancer, organized crime has to be just that – organized. The Five Families decided that he would have to join one of them. Frankie did not want it to be the Bonanno Family, but it did not look like he would have any choice.

The first part of the discussion between the rival capos To ugh Tony from the Genovese Family and Tommy D from the Bonanno Family centred on Philly Lucky.

Despite the fact that the Commission had sanctioned his assassination – only the Commission could authorize the death of a capo – and despite the fact that he had been officially disgraced within the Bonanno Family, Philly Lucky, in death, was still a Bonanno.

“Think of it,” Frankie says. “The sons of bitches had killed him, chopped his body up. And they still owned him and his family. That was the beauty of the Outfit: once you were in, they owned you and yours for generations.”

Which meant it looked like Tommy D had won before the contest even began. And Tough Tony? Tony knew Frankie had held back on the kick with the brokerages. He didn’t care; there’d been enough to go around for everyone. Frankie had said he would make money for everybody and he had kept his word.

The conversation would then have turned to Frankie’s great-uncle Suvio Grimaldi. Suvio was Castellammarese. He had crossed the Atlantic in the early part of the twentieth century during the same wave of immigration that had brought Salvatore Maranzano and Joe Bonanno to the United States. Maranzano had worked his way up the criminal chain, and became one of New York’s two big crime bosses; the other was Joseph Masseria. Both were eventually assassinated by men in the employ of Lucky Luciano, who would go on to create the Five Families with Bugsy Siegel and Meyer Lansky.

Joseph Bonanno worked his way up the ladder from soldier to boss and eventually ran his own Family. During 1965, Bonanno attempted a power play in order to become the most powerful Mafia boss – and lost. He was forced into an early retirement in Arizona where he died in 2002.

And Suvio? He became part of the Profaci Family, which would later be renamed the Colombo Family. Suvio married a woman named Octavia Glaizzo; she had a brother, Joseph.

“My grandfather Joseph was a handsome man with dark hair,” recalls Petrina Saggio. “He was stocky and a sharp dresser. My grandfather had a ride, a portable whip.”

During the summer in Brooklyn, a man would drive a trailer around. Attached to the trailer was a multi-armed octopus that whirled around with terrific centrifugal force. Kids would pay him a nickel and hop in for the ride. Joseph Glaizzo was the gentle man whose fingers were on the ride’s power control.

“He also had an ice business. He carried the ice up the steps into people’s homes when they still had iceboxes. He wasn’t emotionally demonstrative to my grandmother, but he was a good man,” Petrina says.

In 1932, Joseph’s brother-in-law Suvio, later Frankie’s maternal great-uncle, was charged with illegal possession of firearms. Suvio, however, wasn’t about to go to jail.

Petrina recounts Suvio’s craftiness. “Suvio told his brother-in-law Joseph, ‘Look, Joe, if I’m convicted, I’ll get a long sentence.’ My grandfather asked him why.

“ ‘Because I got a record. I’ll get a long sentence. But you, Joe, you got no record. You take the rap; you’ll be out a year – two, tops.’ My grandmother, she loved her brother Suvio, so my grandfather did it for her.”

And that’s how an innocent, good man named Joseph Glaizzo pleaded guilty to a crime he did not commit and served two years in the same state prison system that would house his great-grandson. In manipulating the situation, Suvio showed that he had mastered the real lesson of the gangster’s trade: survival. And Joseph?

Frankie says, “When I heard that story about my greatgrandfather Joseph, I thought, ‘This guy has got balls. A stand-up guy!’ Later I realized he’d been duped too. But by that time there was no way out.”

Suvio Grimaldi gave Frankie his first tie to the Profaci/ Colombo Family. His Uncle Jimmy Clemenza gave him his second. Outside in Spaghetti Park, Frankie was thinking of his Uncle Jimmy too. He knew Tony was going to mention Suvio and Jimmy; they were his only chance to stay clear of the Bonannos. He didn’t want to be put into a situation where he had to constantly be watching his back.

As Frankie waited in the park, he remembered the story the Saggio family told about the one time Uncle Jimmy went to kill somebody and things didn’t go right. It was such a famous story that Francis Ford Coppola and Mario Puzo used it for the pivotal scene in The Godfather, Part II . . .

The Corleone family has a disgruntled, old-line capo named Frankie “Five Angels” Pantangelo. He hates “those pimps the Rissoto Brothers”, who have no respect and are butching in on his action. He goes to the Don, Michael Corleone, to ask permission to kill them, but Michael refuses. He’s too involved in other business deals with Hyman Roth to want the attention that would result from the Rissoto Brothers’ assassinations.

Shortly after Michael turns down his request, Frankie Five Angels is in a bar back in New York when two guys come in and try to garrotte him. They have the piano wire wound tightly around his throat and are squeezing the life out of him when a cop stumbles in and sees what’s happening. Before he can react, the two assassins gun him down and flee. Frankie Five Angels recovers, thinks it was Michael who arranged his death, and decides to testify against him before a Senate committee that is looking into organized crime.

Michael eventually discovers that it was Hyman Roth who planned Frankie Five Angels’s assassination. Through a series of deft manoeuvres, not only does Frankie Five Angels fail to implicate Michael, he absolves him of any criminal responsibility. He then conveniently takes his own life, which seals his lips forever. Michael is left to rule his criminal empire unimpaired.

The actual story has none of the movie’s glamour, but the real drama.

During the Depression, James “Jimmy Brown” Clemenza was a gangster. He wasn’t some newspaper hound like Baby Face Nelson, Pretty Boy Floyd, or Bonnie and Clyde, the gangsters who robbed and killed for kicks and headlines. Jimmy was in it for the money: he did his job without the headlines.

To Clemenza and the professional thieves and murderers in the Mob, headlines meant attention; attention meant cops; cops meant prison. Prison was a fate to be avoided if possible – and it was always possible.

Jimmy bootlegged quietly in Cicero, a suburb of Chicago, with another boy from the Brooklyn Mob named “Scarface” Al Capone. While officially attached to what would become the Profaci Family, Jimmy was on loan to Capone’s Mob. When Prohibition was repealed in 1932, Jimmy came home to Brooklyn.

Over the next three decades he would do all kinds of jobs for the Profaci Family. Jimmy Brown had served the Profaci Family faithfully since its inception and he would continue to do so until he died. He was a true old-liner, a skipper who believed in keeping your word and your place, which is why he watched with distaste as the Gallo Brothers kept trying to butch in on the Profacis’ action.

Throughout the 1950s, Larry Gallo, Joseph “Crazy Joe” Gallo, and their youngest brother, Albert “Kid Blast” Gallo, worked as assassins for Nicholas “Jiggs” Forlano. The New York State Commission of Investigation would later identify Forlano, a member of the Profaci Family, as the biggest loan shark in New York City.

The Gallo Brothers got tired of waiting to move up the Mob ladder. In 1959, they formed their own gang of about twenty with guys in the Profaci Family who were equally dissatisfied with Profaci’s leadership. While Crazy Joe was the one to be feared in any encounter – he had been certified as insane by a psychiatrist at Brooklyn’s King’s County Hospital in 1950 – it was Larry who was the brains. If Larry were out of the way, Joey, Kid Blast, and the rest would fall into the gutter.

Before anything like that could happen, the Gallos, with their ranks swelling to one hundred disaffected, got some of their guys to kidnap four of Profaci’s closest advisers. Held for ransom, they were eventually released. Profaci then convinced most of the one hundred insurgents to come back into the fold. The Gallos, though, were a different story. Profaci believed they deserved retribution for the rebellion they had fomented.

The neighbourhood was Flatbush, a mostly Jewish area of Brooklyn. A few Italians lived there too, in real middle-class splendour. Flatbush was a step up from Bensonhurst.

There were fewer attached four-family houses there; Flatbush had mostly semi-detached twos and stand-alone singles. One of the main access roads to the neighbourhood that gangster Larry Gallo walked on was Eastern Parkway, the sedate, tree-lined street designed back in the early part of the century by the famed architect Frederick Olmsted, the same man who designed Central Park.

On 25 August 1961, Larry Gallo went to the Sahara Restaurant – a tavern that served only wine and beer – on Utica Avenue, a busy shopping street in the heart of Flatbush. In the dark interior, Larry lounged at the bar over his Pabst Blue Ribbon draught. Outside and down the block, a white sedan pulled up to the curb. Still drinking in the tavern, Gallo had no idea it was there.

Inside the sedan were three men: Frankie’s uncle Jimmy and his brother Peter Clemenza, and an associate named John Scimone. Jimmy Clemenza got out of the car and quietly walked down the street. He approached the Sahara steadily but warily, making sure there were no cops around, no witnesses. Then, he turned and quickly walked in the door, his porkpie slouch hat covering his face.

Gallo was swallowing some of the beer when a rope wound around his throat; one moment it wasn’t there and the next, it was. As Gallo reached up to try and pull it off, the person holding it, Jimmy Clemenza, pulled harder and the fibres of the rope sank deeper into Larry Gallo’s flesh.

Gallo knew he was being garrotted. He knew the action had to have been ordered by the Profacis, with the Commission signing off on the assassination. He also knew there wasn’t much he could do. The person strangling him – he still didn’t know who it was – had incredibly strong hands. Despite his struggles, he was dying.

Clemenza was literally choking the life out of Gallo. He knew from having done it before that Larry Gallo would stay conscious for at least the first minute and a half. Then Gallo’s brain would suffer oxygen deprivation and he’d black out. Until then, it would be sheer, unrelenting agony. Even when Gallo went limp in his hands, Clemenza would know he was unconscious, but not dead. If he stopped strangling him at that point, there was a possibility that Gallo could be revived. Clemenza would keep up the pressure until he heard his hyoid or throat bone crack and than apply still more pressure until Gallo was clearly, definitely, absolutely dead.

Larry Gallo was just on the verge of passing out when Sergeant Edward Meagher stumbled on to the scene. Meagher had been in a radio car at 2.45 p.m. with Patrolman Melvin Biel when he decided to go into the tavern for a “routine inspection”. Jimmy Clemenza, seeing Meagher coming in, dropped Gallo to the floor and hid.

When Meagher got inside, it took a second for his eyes to adjust to the gloom. Then he saw a man lying motionless on the dirty floor and heard him groaning. Meagher crossed the room and bent down to assess the man’s condition. Just then, Jimmy Clemenza raced out of the shadows to the waiting getaway car.

Outside, Biel saw Clemenza running and gave chase. Clemenza turned and ran up the street. The white sedan, the getaway car, followed. Someone inside the car, either Peter Clemenza or Scimone, stuck a revolver out of a window and fired a shot that hit Biel on the right cheek. Jimmy Clemenza jerked open the car door and hustled inside. For a man who weighed over 250 pounds, he moved quickly when he had to.

Hearing the shots, Meagher fled the bar, saw the automobile escaping, pulled his service revolver, and fired two shots as the sedan turned north on Utica Avenue and sped north. He didn’t hit anything.

Four blocks away, at the intersection of Snyder Avenue and East 49th Street, the sedan slowed down. As bystanders watched in surprise, John Scimone was pushed out of the car and unceremoniously hit the street. Apparently, the Clemenzas felt he was expendable. Scimone, who had been arrested thirty years before for assault and robbery, made a good patsy: he could be blamed for the attempted murder.

Larry Gallo survived, though his voice was a little hoarse after that. As for Jimmy Brown, it was the only time he failed to clip someone. No one held it against him, however; it was just dumb luck that the cop showed up. By the following year, Jimmy Brown once again had to adjust to changing times.

On 6 June 1962, the twenty-eighth anniversary of D-Day, Joseph Profaci died in the South Side Hospital on Long Island. The cause of death was cancer. There is always an immediate rush to fill the vacuum created whenever a family head dies. But Profaci had no heirs. His brother-in-law, Giuseppe Magliocco, stepped up to fill his shoes and assumed control of the family enterprises.

Looking on with a gleam in his criminal eye was boss Joe Bonanno. Profaci had been his close friend. Nevertheless, his death gave Bonanno an unbelievable opportunity to become the most powerful crime boss since Maranzano. Bonanno devised a scheme that involved clipping family heads Carlo Gambino and Tommy Lucchese and Tommy’s cousin, Buffalo, NY family boss Stefano Maggadino. Unfortunately, Bonanno was relying on the young capo Joseph Colombo to take care of the killings.

Colombo was actually in tight with Carlo Gambino. He looked at Gambino like a father; he would never betray him. When Gambino found out from Colombo about Bonanno’s scheme, he called the Commission into session. Bonanno was asked to explain himself. The deceitful boss was able to talk his way out of having his body carved up and distributed throughout the New York Metropolitan area and retired to Arizona in the late 1960s.

As for Colombo, with Gambino’s backing, he became head of the old Profaci Family, newly christened the Colombo Family. Jimmy Clemenza would continue to do jobs as demanded by his Family and also become a capo until he retired to Florida in the late 1970s.

“My Uncles Jimmy and Philly bought in Hallandale [Florida] in 1978,” says Frankie. “The building was all Italian and Jewish gangsters – funniest thing you ever saw. They would argue day and night. They had a clubhouse where they played cards. All they did was make Hallandale into Brooklyn. They’d been playing cards back home in New York for thirty years.

“Let’s see, who else was there from New York? Scottie DiAngelo; Joe Sausage, who owns GS Sausage in Jersey; Angelo Ponti, who owns Ponti Carting. He just went away on extortion. My Uncle Jimmy used to curse every one of them.

“I remember standing in a parking lot talking to Scotty DiAngelo. I’m eighteen or nineteen and these condos all have catwalks and my uncle yells down, “What you doin’ talking to that cheap Bastard?” I was embarrassed. I couldn’t understand why Scotty’s name was ‘Scotty’ until someone explained ‘Scotty’ means ‘cheap’ in Italian.”

Besides Hallandale, Clemenza had a home in Florida, NY, where he raised horses. When Jimmy wasn’t at home either at the farm or at the Florida condo, he could usually be found in North Carolina.

“Uncle Jimmy used to go to Duke University in North Carolina for the Rice Diet,” Frankie says. “He was a big guy – really fat – and he needed to lose weight.”

Lina Saggio, Frankie’s sister, takes up the story.

“My cousin Corinne told me about the Rice Diet. She said that Uncle Jimmy went down there for years to lose weight. ‘Boy I’d love for you to go,’ she said. I needed to lose some weight then, so I went down in 1984 with the agreement that my Uncle Jimmy was there and he’d take care of me.

“ ‘You’re here to do one thing and one thing only: you’re going to lose weight and forget about anything else,’ Uncle Jimmy said to me as soon as I got off the plane. He was heavy and had a rough voice from all the cigars he smoked. He said whatever he felt like and you just had to take it.

“We stayed at a hotel where he was head honcho. Every day he took my arm and we’d have to walk eight miles a day to get our meals. He had a driver down there too and him and the driver would follow me with the Caddy, to make sure nothing happened.

“Uncle Jimmy, he was respected everywhere. Even when he was doing the diet and went in the hospital to give blood and urine samples, it was always ‘Good morning, Mr Clemenza,’ ‘How ya doin’ Mr Clemenza,’ from the staff.”

But even Jimmy Clemenza’s considerable influence was not enough to stop love from blooming.

“What happened was, he used to watch me from his window when I’d go out. He was afraid I’d go and eat something or meet the wrong kind of person. One day, I met my husband-to-be, Kelly Scott, at a convenience store next door to the hotel. I was there buying cigarettes and started talking to him.

“ ‘Come to the hotel and have lunch,’ I suggested.

“ ‘OK, I’ll come over,’ he said. When he walked in the front door, he was stopped by Uncle Jimmy.

“ ‘You go in the dining room,’ Uncle Jimmy told me. But I stayed to listen.

“ ‘Do you know who I am?” he asked Kelly.

“ ‘No,’ Kelly answered.

“ ‘This is my niece. Leave her alone and stay away from her.’

“ ‘I like her and I think she’s nice,’ Kelly said.

“ ‘See the leather on your shoes? Keep walking,’ said Uncle Jimmy and his chauffeur escorted Kelly out.

“I was crying. I called up my father. He talked to Uncle Jimmy. My father told Uncle Jimmy not to hurt him. My brother, he talked to Uncle Jimmy and got him to cool off and leave me alone. But Uncle Jimmy was still giving Kelly the business so a couple of days later, I took off with Kelly and left Uncle Jimmy behind.”

Eventually, Lina married Kelly and her family accepted him as one of their own. A few years later, Uncle Jimmy died a peaceful, natural death. He had managed to live his life the way he wanted: as a true outlaw who, in the end, died in bed. But Uncle Jimmy also knew he was one of the few who actually fulfilled such a wish.

After carefully evaluating all of Frankie’s family tree, Tommy D and Tough Tony came to the conclusion that, if anywhere, Frankie belonged with the Colombos. Two of his uncles had been in that Family compared with only one in the Bonanno Family. But the Colombos did not have a representative at the sit-down and a Bonanno and Genovese were not about to give the Colombos the Five Families’ prime earner.

To ugh Tony was forced to admit that he held the losing hand; there was no blood relationship between the Genovese and Frankie. Tony had just taken him in, while Tommy and the Bonannos could show a direct link to Frankie Saggio through Philip Giaccone.

From across the street, Frankie watched as the door to the Parkside Restaurant opened and Tony emerged, grim-faced. Frankie hoped that Tony had won and was just putting on an act for Tommy’s benefit. Frankie remembers how Tony broke the news.

“ ‘You belong with the Bonannos, kid. There’s nothing I could do,’ Tony told me. Tony felt bad. He knew how much I hated Tommy D. I was being forced to go back to work with the crew that killed my Uncle Philly.”

And now, Frankie Saggio really needed to start watching his back.

 

For the Sins of the Father

Albert DeMeo

Albert DeMeo was the son of Roy DeMeo, ranking member of the Gambino Family. Born in 1942, in Bath Beach, Brooklyn, DeMeo Snr had begun loansharking as a teenager. By twenty-three he became owner of the Gemini Lounge which became the headquarters of his crew. A large number of murders occurred there and bodies dismembered. By the time Albert was five, his father was taking him on some of his Sunday errands. And crime was the family business. One of Roy’s crew was his cousin Joseph “Dracula” Guglielmo.

While DeMeo had links to the Lucchese Family, he also worked with Anthony “Nino” Gaggi, a soldier with the Gambinos. He became involved in car theft, drug trafficking, money laundering and hijacking. With the money he made he bought into other businesses. In 1973, Paul Rothenberg, the proprieter of a pornographic film lab DeMeo and Gaggi had a share in, was arrested. Fearing that he may talk, DeMeo invited Rothenberg to meet him at a local diner and shot him twice in the head in the alleyway outside. In 1975, members of DeMeo’s crew stabbed Andrei Katz, the owner of a body shop they had a dispute with, and dismembered his body.

Throughout the 1970s, They claimed more victims. Usually the target would be lured in through the side entrance of the Gemini Lounge, then taken upstairs where DeMeo would be waiting. He would be carrying a gun with a silencer and a towel. He would shoot the victim in the head, then wrap the towel around it to staunch the blood. Meanwhile, another member of the crew would stab the victim in the heart to stop the blood pumping. The body would be stripped of its clothes and left in the bathroom until the blood had congealed. Meanwhile plastic sheets would be laid out on the floor. The body would then be cut up. Parts were put in bags which were, in turn, placed in cardboard boxes that were taken to the Fountain Avenue Dump in Brooklyn. Hundreds of tons of garbage were deposited there every day, so finding body parts was almost impossible. Even when the police tried it once, they had to abandon the attempt when it proved too costly.

DeMeo went into prostitution and pornography. He dealt cocaine and marijuana out of the Gemini Lounge, even though those higher up in the Gambino Family said they did not approve. Even so, Gaggi continued to take his cut.

In May 1976, DeMeo was punched in the face by Joseph Brocchini. As Brocchini was a made man, DeMeo was told he was not allowed to retaliate – or, if he did, he was not to be found out. Soon after Brocchini’s used-car dealership was raided. The staff were handcuffed and blindfolded, and Brocchini was shot five times in the back of the head. The office was ransacked. To all intents and purposes, it was an armed robbery gone wrong. The following month, DeMeo shot Vincent Govemara, a young man with no connections to organized crime, after Govemara annoyed Gaggi. In July, DeMeo flew to Florida to murder George Byrum, another man Gaggi had targeted for revenge. He had sawed Byrum’s head half off when disturbed by construction workers nearby. An FBI informant who reported that DeMeo was a ruthless killer was murdered.

When Carlo Gambino died and Paul Castellano took over, Gaggi was promoted to capo and DeMeo hoped to become a made man. However, Castellano looked down on DeMeo as a cheap hoodlum. DeMeo then made an alliance with an Irish-American gang called the We sties, doing a hit for them. The Westies then became an arm of the Gambino Family. As DeMeo had set up the alliance, he was formally inducted into the Gambino Family, but warned not to murder anyone without permission and avoid drug trafficking. Even so, he continued selling drugs and committing unsanctioned killings. He did not even hide the fact. He killed car thief Jonathan Quinn, who was a suspected informer and his nineteen-year-old girlfriend Cherie Golden. When taken to task by his superiors, DeMeo said that it was too risky to leave her alive.

By 1978, DeMeo was bragging that he had killed a hundred people and solicited contracts from the Five Families, which he fulfilled for as little as $5,000 – or even for free as a “professional favour”. He even killed and dismembered one of his own crew, Edward “Danny” Grillo, after Grillo fell into debt and Gaggi thought he might be susceptible to police coercion. He also killed his second-in-command Chris Rosenberg, after Rosenberg had murdered a Cuban drug dealer who had connections to the Colombian drug cartel. The Colombians threatened to declare war on the Gambinos unless Rosenberg was killed.

Before Rosenberg was killed, DeMeo shot Dominic Ragucci, a student who was paying his way through college as a door-to-door salesman. When he parked his car outside DeMeo’s house in Massapequa, Long Island, DeMeo assumed he was a Colombian assassin who had come to kill him. After a car chase, Ragucci’s car became too damaged to continue and DeMeo killed him. Gaggi then ordered DeMeo to kill Rosenberg before any more innocent victims were killed. Rosenberg, who claimed he had no knowledge of the Colombian situation, was then killed and his body left in his car at the side of a road in Brooklyn where it would be found. The Colombians wanted proof that Rosenberg had been disposed off, so his body could not be dismembered and disappear on the Fountain Avenue Dump. According to his son Albert and two of his crew who eventually turned state’s evidence, DeMeo was genuinely upset by the death of Rosenberg. He had never exhibited remorse before. But that did not stop him killing. He murdered a car dealer who discovered that DeMeo was selling stolen cars and threatened to inform the police, along with an acquaintance who was not involved.

James Eppolito and his son James Jnr, two made men in the Gambino family, complained of DeMeo’s drug dealing to Paul Castellano. They were members of Gaggi’s crew. Castellano gave him permission to handle the situation. DeMeo and Gaggi murdered the Eppolitos in a car on the way to the Gemini lounge. A witness reported the murder and, after a gun battle in which he was wounded in the neck, Gaggi was arrested. He was charged with murder and the attempted murder of a police officer. But through jury tampering, he was only convicted of assault and sentenced to five to fifteen years in the federal penitentiary. DeMeo killed the witness shortly after.

By then, the FBI had a huge file of people linked to DeMeo or the Gemini Lounge who had disappeared. A bug in the home of Gambino soldier Angelo Ruggiero picked up Angelo telling Gene Gotti that Castellano had put out a contract on DeMeo, but was having trouble finding anyone to take it as DeMeo was surrounded by an “army of killers”. Gambino soldier Frank DeCicco eventually took the contract, but could not get near to DeMeo. Eventually DeCicco and John Gotti handed it on to DeMeo’s own men.

On 10 January 1983, DeMeo went to crew member Patrick Testa’s bodyshop for a meeting with his men. On 18 January, his body was found in the trunk of his car, which had been abandoned. He had multiple gunshot wounds to the head. It was thought that Gaggi might have pulled the trigger. Crew-members Joseph Testa and Anthony Senter were there too. However, Iceman Richard Kuklinski claimed to have killed DeMeo, having earlier carried out several contracts for him. He even claimed to have pistol-whipped the corpse.

Gaggi was never charged with the murder and died of a heart attack while standing trial for other murder charges. Testa and Senter were given life for a total of twenty-five murders, plus car-theft, drug trafficking and extortion, on evidence supplied by fellow crew-members Frederick DiNome and Dominic Montiglio. Paul Castellano was indicted for the murder of DeMeo. It was thought that he had ordered the murder because DeMeo was set to be jailed for his stolen-car operation. But Castellano was out on bail when Gotti had him gunned down.

It was thought that at least seventy people had been murdered by DeMeo and his Gemini-Lounge crew, though the number of victims may be as high as 200. For Albert DeMeo, who idolized his father, this was a lot to live down as he explained in his book For the Sins of My Father: A Mafia Killer, His Son, and the Legacy of a Mob Life published in 2003.

It was my father himself who slowly began cracking the window to give me glimpses of the world he inhabited outside Massapequa. Just as other fathers took their sons for a tour of the fire station or insurance office, so my father began showing me the way his business functioned, the tools of his trade. Neither my mother nor my sisters shared in the knowledge he began to impart to me. It was a man’s thing, passed on from father to son.

I started learning about guns when I was six. My father imparted these lessons as matter of factly as he taught me to build shelves or install decking. My dad bought and sold guns regularly, and he was an educated collector. He particularly liked the antiques, pistols from the Civil War and before. Sometimes he would bring home an entire bag of guns and empty them on to the workbench to disassemble and clean in the garage workshop. The mechanics fascinated me; and by the time I was eight, I could disassemble and reassemble virtually any gun like an expert. Dad was careful and precise when handling a gun, and he made certain I never touched one carelessly. He always wore gloves when he handled a weapon. Isotoner gloves were the best, he told me, for it enabled a person to work efficiently without leaving fingerprints.

My father also taught me utter respect for the power that a gun implied. I learned to assume that a gun is probably loaded, that if I picked one up, I should point it down away from others, that I should never point a gun at anybody unless I was prepared to use it, that using a gun was a serious thing. If it became necessary to shoot someone, the safest thing was to aim for the head and get off at least two bullets.

If you aimed for the torso, the other person might shoot you back before you got off a second shot. I understood the gravity of what he was telling me, and it never occurred to me to aim a gun at a human being myself. I knew that Jimmy’s father used a gun at work, and I sensed that shooting must form some part of my father’s job. I never handled a gun without my father’s permission. I knew that my dad kept a gun under the bed all the time, but it never occurred to me to touch it. It was a given that the weapon was off-limits. My father got me my first gun when I was six, a little .22, and took me upstate to a friend’s farm to teach me how to fire it. I was allowed to shoot only at targets. One day I shot a chipmunk while I was practising in the brush, and my father was furious. “What did that chipmunk ever do to you?” he asked me. “You don’t shoot nothing without a good reason.”

My father began taking me with him into the social clubs in Manhattan, especially in Little Italy, about the time I entered the third grade. His business was taking up more and more of his time by then. I would kiss him goodbye when I left for school in the morning, but I was often in bed long before he got home at night. So the weekends became more important than ever. When there was business to conduct on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon, I would make the long drive across the bridge and into the crowded streets of the city with him.

The first social club I remember going to was in Manhattan. I was about eight years old at the time. I don’t remember its name. What I do remember is the sense of overwhelming noise and confusion as the men who guarded the entrance opened its doors for us. The place was crowded with small tables where men were playing cards; in a corner another group watched a horse race on a TV mounted above the bar. They were all screaming at the television, either cheering or cursing the horses they had bet on. Almost everyone seemed to know my dad. Guys called, “Hey, Roy!” as my father shook the occasional hand and said hello. Within moments of our arrival other men started approaching my dad to ask him about balloons. The one who got to us first said, “Roy, how ya doin? I need to borrow fifty balloons. Think you could help me out?”

Dad replied, “Sure, no problem, I got fifty with me. Let’s take a walk.”

All three of us went back outside and started walking down the sidewalk as Dad and the man chatted vaguely about their families. I stretched my legs to keep pace with them, filled with curiosity. Balloons? Dad had balloons? Where were they? In the trunk? Or were we going someplace else? A few blocks away we came to a small café and went inside to sit down. Dad ordered espresso and pastry for all three of us. I grimaced as I sipped the hot, bitter liquid, proud to be included as one of the men. Dad and the man continued to chat about their families, the weather, how the Yankees were doing that year. Finally Dad said, “The usual arrangement.”

The man replied, “Sure, no problem.” Dad signalled the waitress for the check, and as he reached in his pocket to peel off a twenty from the roll he carried, I noticed him pulling out some envelopes. As he laid the twenty on the check with one hand, I saw him deftly pass five envelopes under the table with the other. The other man, also without looking at them, slipped the envelopes inside his jacket pocket as we rose to go. Back out on the sidewalk, Dad and the man shook hands good-bye, and we walked back toward the car.

Puzzled and a little disappointed, I reached up to touch my father’s sleeve.

“Daddy?”

“What, Son?”

“Could I have one of those balloons?”

My father burst out laughing and then stopped walking and turned to me. Bending down, he said, “We weren’t talking about real balloons. We were talking about money. A ‘balloon’ means one thousand dollars. That man wanted to borrow money.” . . .

I was halfway through the fourth grade when I finally put a name to what my father did for a living. The first two Godfather movies had been released while I was in kindergarten and first grade, and by the time I was ten, every kid in school had heard of the Mafia. One day during a visit to the joke store, I saw some fake ID cards that said, “Member of the Mafia,” with a place to sign your name. I thought it would be funny to buy one and carry it around to show the other kids.

I showed the card to my father that Saturday. I expected him to chuckle and say, “Pretty funny, son,” but instead he roared with laughter. My mother didn’t seem to think it was so funny. Their reactions puzzled me. That afternoon, when we left for a trip to Mulberry Street, my father told me to take my ID card with me. When we found Uncle Nino at the Ravenite, Dad told me to show him my card. It was the first time I had heard Nino laugh really loud. Something strange was going on. I liked the card, but it wasn’t that funny. Nino told me to go show it to my friends in the other room. Every time I showed it to someone, he started laughing like it was the funniest thing he had ever seen and handed the card to a friend. One of the men told another guy, “Hey, Tony, maybe we should get ourselves one of these. Whadda ya think?” An idea started to dawn on me. I had to find out if I was right.

I was reading at the eighth-grade level by then, and I had begun reading the morning newspaper along with my dad that summer. Usually I preferred the comics. Now, however, I started paying attention to what my father read. Each day he pored over the New York Post and the Daily News religiously. I noticed he always went to the obituaries first, then to the crime section. I began to read the same sections of the paper when I came home from school every afternoon, holed up in my room after I finished my homework. The papers were filled with detailed descriptions of murders and robberies, along with references to “reputed mobsters”, sometimes by name. The descriptions of the murders were often frightening. But what frightened me far more was the familiarity of some of the names they mentioned. Some of the men I knew from the social clubs had the same last names. Could they be the same guys? I didn’t dare ask anyone, not even my father. Once the idea began to germinate, however, it started putting down roots, deep poison roots of terror. I had to know the truth. And no one could find it for me, but me.

My father was gone more than usual the next couple of days, and he seemed preoccupied. He didn’t smile as much as usual, and when I talked to him, his mind seemed to be a million miles away. When he left the house late one afternoon, I saw that he was dressed in a black suit and tie. Every instinct told me that something had happened, and my suspicions were further heightened when my mother abruptly turned off the television in the den before the evening news came on. I was already in the habit of watching the news, but on this night, my mother told me to go to my room and leave the television off. I went through the motions of obeying, but the minute she went back upstairs, I crept down the hall to the den and turned the TV back on with the volume down low. The news broadcast showed a church with tall brass doors and a circular stained window, and the broadcaster’s voiceover informed viewers that they were watching the funeral mass of Carlo Gambino, godfather of New York’s most powerful Mafia family. While the cameras rolled, the doors opened and the mourners filed out of the church, ducking their heads to avoid the cameras. Suddenly time stopped. My heart rose up and choked me as the camera caught two men emerging from the church: Uncle Nino, wearing his sunglasses like always, and right behind him – my father. My entire body went numb. I hurriedly switched off the television and rushed back down the hall to my bedroom. Images from the newspapers swirled through my head, a kaleidoscope of brutality, of swift and brutal death. Somewhere in the blur of those images, everything I had heard and seen for the last five years came into focus. My father was a mobster. He was part of the Mafia. I was dizzy with fear.

I had always made a point to tell my father goodbye when he left the house. Each time I would put my arms around his neck to kiss him and say, “I love you, Daddy.”

And he would scoop me up in his arms and reply, “I love you too, Al.” Now, however, the ritual took on a new urgency. From the night I saw his face on the television set, I lived in constant terror of losing my father. My greatest fear was that I would never see him again, and he would die without knowing I loved him.

I lay alone in the darkness that night, watching the dial on my clock creep around until three in the morning, When my father’s headlights finally hit the wall beneath my window, I cried with relief, I would lie awake the next night, and the night after that, always waiting to hear my father’s car in the driveway.

I never slept through the night again . . .

I had been in training for my father’s death since I was twelve years old. I thought I was prepared for it, and from a practical point of view, I was. What I was not prepared for was the abyss of pain that opened beneath me with his passing. My father’s final advice to me had been to forget him and to have a good life. The problem was that I didn’t have the faintest idea how to do that. So instead I did what most people do in the aftermath of sudden loss: I carried on in the way I was accustomed to. And that meant taking care of business for my father. Not his Mob business. My father had started down that path at the same age I was, seventeen, and I knew where the journey ended. It was a journey I did not want to take. It was the other business of his life that I shouldered.

I bought my first car that spring, a black Corvette, after getting my first legal driver’s licence. My father and I had planned to pick the car out together. My family occupied most of my attention. I made it a point to be home as much as possible. Like a protective father, I brought home videos to keep my sisters occupied, took them and my mother out to dinner and to the movies. I even stopped by my mother’s favourite diner now and then, to pick up a hamburger and fries for her as my father had once done. She patted me sadly, unable to eat what I’d brought her, but I knew she appreciated the gesture.

I also tried to take responsibility for people who had depended on my father. I had watched my dad take care of people all his life. It was clear that Cousin Joe could not survive on his own; it was equally clear that he would never be able to stay out of trouble. I knew my father would want Joe to be cared for in his old age, so I told him to pack his things and get ready to leave New York permanently. Then I put a sizable bundle of cash in a paper bag and told Joe I was taking him to the airport for a final goodbye. I told him that I didn’t want to know where he was going, but that I wished him well. I also told him that I never wanted to hear from him again. To my surprise, when I started to tell him goodbye at the airport, his eyes filled with tears, and he told me he wanted me to have something to remember him by. It was the only thing he had to give me in the way of a legacy, he said. Then he handed me a battered copy of an old journal, filled with notes and handwritten copies of his special recipes. He knew I liked his cooking and hoped that I would use the recipes and remember him. Along with the recipes were little anecdotes, funny stories and comments about the men he had cooked for. It was the last I ever saw of Cousin Joe.

I also felt a sense of responsibility for Freddy, who was still inside. Freddy was devastated by my father’s death. Unable to read and capable of writing only his name, Freddy was like a lost child in the wake of my father’s murder. Things got even worse for Freddy when his brother Richie was murdered shortly after my father was killed. Richie had worked for my father on and off for several years as part of Dad’s auto theft ring. Richie DiNome was an upscale version of Freddy – dark, handsome, smarter, younger. He was a talented thief who could steal twenty cars in a single night. The FBI was pushing Richie hard to turn informant, offering to make a deal for Freddy if Richie turned. One night Richie disappeared, his body turning up a week later with bullets through the back of his head. Someone in the Mob had gotten nervous. Richie knew too much.

Several weeks after our father’s funeral, Debra and I went to visit Freddy in jail to see how he was doing. It was a strange visit, for I knew immediately that something was wrong. In all the years I had known Freddy, I had never seen him behave so oddly. He kept asking me, as though he had memorized the questions, “So Albert, who do you think murdered your father? Do you think it might have been one of his associates?” Freddy never talked like that; it was clear he had been coached. It didn’t take a genius to realize that Freddy had made some kind of deal to turn informant, but he wasn’t bright enough to carry it off believably. Freddy would have gone to the grave for my father, but with Richie dead and his family in need, I knew it would be simple to turn Freddy if he thought he was helping to catch my father’s killer. I told him I had no idea who had performed the hit and cut the visit short. Debra asked me why Freddy was acting so strange. I told her I didn’t know. The change in Freddy made me very uncomfortable. If I couldn’t trust him, whom could I trust?

From the night I saw my father’s blood on my hands, I became obsessed with finding his killer’s identity. No ounce of common sense, no pang of conscience, no dying warning from my father’s mouth had changed my resolution. I needed a cause, and avenging my father’s death gave me one.

Despite my unwillingness to discuss it with Freddy, I knew as well as he did that my father’s murderer was probably one of his associates. Everything about the murder pointed to an inside job. The question was, who? In the weeks following my father’s death, that question had haunted my every waking moment and often followed me into sleep. Paul Castellano was the obvious choice for sending the order, but who had carried it out? Experience told me someone in my father’s crew had been involved, though I didn’t want to believe it. The afternoon I went by the Gemini to pick up Cousin Joe for the ride to the airport, Anthony and Joey were sitting around the table with some of the minor players. Anthony was sitting in my father’s chair, with Joey on his right in my old spot. I felt my stomach tighten, but the Twins just smiled lazily and said, “How ya doin’, Albert?”

While I debated which of my father’s old crew, if any, I could trust, they made the first overtures and got in touch with me. They needed to tie up some loose ends, they told me, and they needed some of my father’s things to do that. They wanted his “Shylock book”, a leather ledger where he kept the information on his loan-shark collections. They told me they were going to collect the additional money owed to my father for “us”, but they couldn’t do that without the book. I knew they were lying. They had no intention of sharing anything they collected; their primary motive was lining their own pockets. Among them all, my father’s crew owed him hundreds of thousands of dollars, which they certainly weren’t going to pay my family. The crew always spent more than they made, borrowing against the next big score. And finally, they wanted my father’s tagging tools, worth a potential fortune if they continued stealing cars. I knew that none of them had either the brains or the discipline to run the operation without my father, but they hadn’t figured that out yet. I agreed to meet with them and discuss the details, hoping it would give me a chance to size them up in person.

I suggested we meet at the diner where they used to meet my father. The diner was a nice, family-style restaurant on the main road through Massapequa. It seemed like a safe enough place for such a meeting. I had no idea where Freddy had kept the tagging tools. The ledger was hidden in the cabinet at home. I’d used it to make collections when Dad was in hiding, but I had no intention of turning it over to the crew.

They were all waiting for me in the parking lot when I drove up that afternoon. The Gemini Twins were there, along with a couple of other guys I barely knew. When they motioned me into the car so we could drive while we talked, I climbed in between Joey and Anthony without a second thought. I assumed they were worried about eavesdroppers in the diner. It wasn’t until we pulled out of the parking lot that I realized my mistake. As the driver merged on to the highway, Anthony and Joey pulled their coats back so I could see. Both of them had guns sticking out of their belts. I looked at the back of the driver’s head and the man riding shotgun up front, and my heart stopped. I had walked into an ambush. “Holy shit,” I thought, “this is a hit, and I walked right into it.”

As we drove through the fading Long Island afternoon, Joey and Anthony began questioning me about the tagging tools. I told them I didn’t know where they were. They seemed to believe me. But when they asked about the loan shark book, I denied knowing anything about it. “I don’t know anything about any book,” I insisted. “Dad kept all the accounts in his head as far as I know. He told me who to collect from when he needed me to do a pickup, but that’s all I know. I don’t know anything about a book.” They knew I was lying. I guess it was stupid, but I was trying to buy some time. And if they killed me anyway, I certainly wasn’t going to hand over something worth that much money first.

“We’re trying to help you, Albert,“ Anthony kept saying. He tried to look sad, but he couldn’t quite pull it off.

It was nearly an hour later when I realized, with an indescribable sense of relief, that they had decided to take me back to the diner. I’m still not certain why they did it. I think they were testing me, hoping I would come up with what they wanted if they played me right. They reminded me of the police with their good cop, bad cop tactics. As they pulled into the parking lot and stopped to let me out, Anthony looked me right in the eye and said, “Oh, Albert – our deep condolences on your father’s tragic death. You need anything, you call us.” I felt a chill go through me. I knew I was talking to my father’s murderers.

Stepping into the parking lot, I replied, “Sure, guys, take care of yourselves. I’ll be in touch.”

And with that I strode back to my car as my father had taught me to – confident, fearless, arrogant. It was only when I had pulled out of the parking lot and headed for the relative safety of home that I allowed the relief to wash over me. I knew how close I had just come to being killed.

So began the cat-and-mouse game I played with my father’s old crew for weeks to come. We each wanted something the other had: they wanted any money-making tools my father had left in my possession, and I wanted a clearer understanding of who had been involved in my father’s murder and how. Trying to stay one step ahead of them, I agreed to continued meetings at the diner, but not in the car. I sometimes met them inside for a meal; usually, though, I stood in the parking lot to speak with them. Only yards away from where we stood, a steady stream of suburban traffic flowed by and women took their toddlers for walks in strollers, blissfully unaware of the negotiations taking place within their view.

I had some extra insurance the next time. I knew that a public setting wasn’t enough to guarantee my safety. I’d told my friend Nick what had happened, and he’d insisted on coming with me the next time. Nick was no wiseguy; he was just my friend, and he had been backing me up since junior high school, no questions asked. I didn’t try to talk him out of it. I’d have done the same thing for him. I told him to arrive in the parking lot a few minutes before I did, where he could keep an eye on me from a distance. I also gave him a loaded rifle to keep trained on all of us – just in case. I was in completely over my head, but I hadn’t realized it yet.

The Mob wasn’t the only game I was playing. I was also targeted in an FBI investigation. Someone – probably Freddy – had told them how close I’d been to my father. At this crucial point in their investigation of Paul Castellano and Nino Gaggi, they saw me as a potential gold mine of information about my father’s criminal enterprises, someone who could put most of his associates behind bars. And they assumed that, because my father’s associates were implicated in his murder, I would be willing to cooperate. They were wrong.

It is difficult to explain to an outsider why I was so reluctant to turn informant. After all, I was infinitely more intent on identifying my father’s killers than the government could ever be. But the reality was that my options were limited. To begin with, I did not have much of the information they believed I had. I knew quite a bit about the loan-shark operations, as well as bits and pieces of his auto theft and pornography enterprises. But, except for the murder of the college student and some uncomfortable intuitions that he might have been involved in hits on other mobsters, I knew nothing about the violence they hinted at. The most obvious drawback to cooperating with the authorities, though, was fear for my own safety. If I became involved in their investigation in any way, I knew that the Mafia would murder me long before any case went to trial, and my father’s killers would go free.

My refusal to cooperate with the authorities did not sit well with them. In the weeks following my father’s murder, they did everything they could to force me to work with them. They couldn’t subpoena me, since I was still under age. But they could call me in for “just a few more questions” about my father’s death. When I left the house, they followed me, and when veiled threats didn’t work, they tried sympathizing with me about my “poor murdered father”. They couldn’t have cared less about my father. They loathed him. They were glad he was dead, and I knew it. So they continued to question, and I continued to deny knowing anything, always in the politest possible terms. Finally I called a lawyer who’d been on my father’s payroll, and the harassment stopped. Until I turned eighteen, there was little else they could do.

As the grey winter days melted away, the internal pressure gradually became intolerable. I continued going through the motions of living, but I couldn’t hold anything in my mind but my father’s dead face. I considered my options. I had a local mechanic build a hidden compartment into my new car where I could keep a gun and had him supercharge my car in case I had to make a fast escape. If I was going to act, I needed to do it soon, but the one-man army I had formed lacked the firepower to do the job. My entire stock of weaponry consisted of a sawed-off shotgun, a Browning 9mm, two .38s, and a pile of ammunition. It would not be enough, I reasoned, not nearly enough. I considered the vague plan I had formed a suicide mission. If I had asked Tommy and Nick, they would probably have helped me, but I was not willing to take my friends with me to certain death. My only hope of taking out my father’s betrayers lay in greater firepower. I had heard my father refer to hidden arsenals that included not only stores of automatic weapons but also C-4 grenades and bullet-proof vests. I needed access to those arsenals now, but I didn’t know where he’d kept them. After weeks of agonizing, I decided to make a call to the one person I believed I could still trust: Nino Gaggi. Uncle Nino had been avoiding me for weeks, but I told myself that was for his own safety. After several attempts, I finally got through to him. I told him that I thought I knew who had killed my father, and I needed my dad’s old weapon supply to take care of business. Did he know where it was? He told me he’d look into it and get back to me.

Two days after I made the call, I went out on a date with my steady girlfriend. We had become more serious after my father’s death, when I needed comfort. I knew it might be our last date, for I was planning to do the hit as soon as Nino got back to me: somehow that knowledge gave me peace, for I believed I was doing the right thing at last. I had nothing more to lose. I savoured every moment with my girl. She was so beautiful, so gentle. We had a wonderful evening: dinner in my favourite Long Island restaurant followed by a long walk on the beach, holding hands and sinking our bare toes into the sand. Moonlight shone on the water, and for the first time since my father’s death, I felt like I could breathe. There was a glorious sense of seclusion as we walked together that night, her fingers twined in mine and the taste of salt on my tongue. Afterward I drove her home through the dark, silent streets and shared a lingering kiss on the front porch of her parents’ home, breathing her into my heart. Driving down the deserted highway afterward, the lights of suburbia asleep for the night, I rolled down the car windows and let the warm wind blow through my hair. My whole body sighed in the relief of that moment.

I never saw it coming. One minute I was cruising down the darkened highway listening to Frank Sinatra on the tape player; the next, four cars came out of nowhere, surrounding me and forcing me off the road. I saw only a blur of green as my Corvette careened off the highway and down an embankment, coming to rest with a loud splintering sound as it hit the trees. My head hit the windshield, shattering the glass, and in the chaos I instinctively popped the catch and grabbed my gun, rolling out of the car on the passenger side. Hitting the ground shoulder first, I managed to fire two shots blindly into the darkness, in the general direction of my pursuers. I couldn’t see anything. Someone stepped on my wrist, pinning it against the ground, and I felt my gun pulled from my hand. Hands reached down to grab me from two different directions, and someone slammed me up against the side of my car. Dark figures were on either side of me, pinning my wrists back against the roof, my arms splayed in a mock crucifixion. Blood ran into my eyes, and I struggled to make out shapes in the darkness.

I think there were four of them. All wore dark clothing and black ski masks pulled over their heads. I could barely make out their eyes, but I knew who they were. The Gemini Twins. A familiar voice said, “We’re not going to kill you this time, Al, out of respect for your father. But you make any more threats, we’ll do what we have to do.” He hit me with the butt of his gun, hard, in my left eye socket. I heard a splintering sound, then felt a blow from the other side. The last thing I remember is confusion and pain as I slipped into unconsciousness.

Several hours later I gradually became aware of someone shouting my name. Hands shook my shoulder, gently but urgently. I tried to blink through the blood caking my eyes. “Dad?” I whispered. I knew that voice. “Nick?” I murmured from a red cave of pain. There was something horribly wrong with my body. I was ice cold, and I couldn’t seem to move.

I could hear the panic in Nick’s voice, and I knew he was crying. “Al? Al? Are you all right? Al?” Incredibly, Nick had spotted my smoking car on the side of the road on the way home from work, glimmering through the trees. Slowing down to look, he thought he could make out the shape of a familiar vehicle. Slamming on the brakes, he had leapt from his own car and slid down the shallow embankment toward the lights. It was there that he found me, motionless in a pool of blood. My body was stiff and cold from shock and from hours in the night air, and at first he thought I was dead. Dizzy with relief to hear me answer him, he gathered me in his arms and laid me gently in the back seat of his car.

I only wanted to go home, but he insisted on taking me to the hospital. He went by my house to get my mother, and minutes later he carried me into the emergency room, my mother weeping a few feet behind. The last thing I remember is whispering urgently to him, “Don’t tell her anything.” He had nothing to tell, for I was in no shape to give any information, but he nodded nonetheless. Then I slid into the blessed relief of unconsciousness.

The surgery took over eight hours. My cheekbone, eye socket, and most of the left side of my face had been shattered. The surgeon inserted a small wire cage to replace my eye socket and did his best to rebuild my face. Miraculously, my eye had been spared permanent damage. I would not lose my sight. I was going to need several more operations to restore my face cosmetically, the doctors told my mother, but I would be all right. When I regained consciousness late the next day, the doctors informed me that I had been incredibly lucky. If Nick had come along even thirty minutes later, I would have died from shock and loss of blood. Nick was there when I came out of the anaesthesia and for part of every day afterward, until I was finally able to leave the hospital.

So were the feds. Federal agents had showed up within hours of my admission and stayed in the operating room for most of the surgery, ready to take notes in case I said something under anaesthesia. They came and went regularly from my room, sometimes questioning me openly, other times posing as attendants or orderlies. Their faces swam in and out of my view. I had told no one what really happened that night; as far as anyone knew, I’d had a bad car accident and smashed my face on the windshield. Yet the officers were suspicious and used the opportunity to try once again to secure my cooperation. It was easy enough to evade their questions, in spite of my being a captive audience in the hospital bed. Between the pain, the pain medicine, and the weakness, I slipped in and out of consciousness for days. It was simple enough to pretend unconsciousness when I wanted to be left alone. Besides, it was difficult for me to speak with the extensive damage to my face, so they didn’t press the issue.

I had not been in the hospital since I was four years old, for the surgery that helped correct my vision. I thought about that first surgery as I lay there with bandages covering one eye. This time, though, my father wouldn’t be there when the bandages came off. The long weeks of recovery in the hospital gradually began to bring a clarity I hadn’t had since my father’s murder. Pain and immobility served as a kind of truth serum, producing not the truths the government wanted, but the truths I needed. I’d told myself that I owed it to my father to take revenge, but I had been deluding myself. My father’s “friends” had murdered him and nearly killed me on behalf of an organization that glorified loyalty. My friend Nick, on the other hand, with nothing to gain but at genuine personal risk, had put himself on the line once again to save my life. When the room swam back into focus following my surgery, his face had been there next to my mother’s and sisters’ anxiously peering down at me. I owed it to all of them never to put myself in that kind of danger again. They had already suffered enough.

When I finally got out of the hospital, I did my best to leave the past behind. Searing headaches hit me sometimes, but each time one did, I used it to remind myself how useless vengeance was. The crew, their warning delivered, left me alone, and I never contacted any of them again. I even stopped visiting Freddy. It was time to bury the past.

The school year ended while I was hospitalized, and summer came to Long Island. I did my best to return to the business of being seventeen years old, swimming in the backyard pool and boating on the canal with Tommy and my girlfriend. College was only a year away, and I began filling out applications. I did not want to spend the rest of my life as the mobster’s son.

Unfortunately, the government had other ideas. The federal task force that had been pursuing the New York Mob under the RICO statute for so many years had reached a crucial point in the Castellano investigation. With convictions multiplying and top mobsters turning informant, they scented victory. District Attorney Rudolph Giuliani and his prosecutors were waging a holy war, and as in all wars, personal rights were expendable in the conflict. I became collateral damage in the all-out assault on the crime families of New York.

With my father gone, I thought the surveillance on our family would fade away. Instead it shifted focus, from my father to me. Every time I left the house, someone followed me. I assumed that once the officers saw I had no further contact with my father’s associates or enterprises, they would leave me alone. I was wrong. They followed me everywhere: to school, to the movies, even on dates. Like my face, my car had been restored after the wreck and was almost as good as new. It became a beacon for local police. Cops repeatedly pulled me over for imaginary traffic violations, searching my car for God knows what. It was humiliating. I found myself standing on the side of the highway next to my girlfriend while agents rummaged through my car and passing motorists slowed down to stare. My girlfriend was supportive and patient, but it was deeply embarrassing. The only illegal item I was transporting remained untouched, hidden in its compartment under the dashboard. I still didn’t feel safe leaving the house without my gun. The superchargers I’d installed on my car enabled me to escape the surveillance vehicles at times, but they also led to a long string of speeding tickets and a suspended licence. As summer turned into fall and I returned for my senior year of high school, I became increasingly angry and frustrated. Why wouldn’t they just leave me alone? I wasn’t doing anything wrong.

Driving with a suspended licence eventually landed me in court. Angry and unrepentant, I faced the judge ready to do battle. I knew I was guilty only of driving with a suspended licence. When I was told to approach the bench for a plea, however, I realized that I knew the court officer sitting in front of me. He had been on my father’s payroll for years, making cases disappear. About the same time I recognized him, he recognized me. Telling my lawyer I wanted a private conference with the officer, I went aside and said to him, “Now we both know these charges are going to be dropped. Don’t we?” The unspoken threat was clear. He would be prosecuted if the authorities knew about the favours he’d done my father.

Shifting uneasily, he nodded and said, “Certainly, Mr DeMeo.” The charges were dropped, and my mother was furious. She thought that I was spinning out of control and deserved to be punished. She was right, of course. For me, though, it wasn’t that simple. I’d watched the legal system talk out of both sides of its mouth all my life. Many of my father’s associates were judges or cops. If the government persisted in treating me as the mobster’s son, I thought, so be it. They couldn’t have it both ways. They were bending all the rules to get to me. Why shouldn’t I bend a few of my own?

As the months went by and the harassment continued, I became angrier and angrier. Any hope of a normal life was long gone. The government would never let me shed my father’s identity. I felt like Exhibit A in the court of public opinion. One afternoon I was pulled over again and told that I was wanted for several outstanding traffic warrants; I was handcuffed and put into a police car for the ride down to central booking. They had cuffed me tightly, but the physical pain in my wrists was secondary to the psychological misery I felt during the ride.

“Well, well, well, if it isn’t the mobster’s son,” the officer said as he shoved me in the car. “Don’t hit your head!” he cautioned as he cracked my skull against the cruiser’s roof.

His partner chuckled as he took his place up front. “What do you say we take a little ride down to the station, you arrogant little piece of shit?”

All the way down to the station, they taunted me about my father as I sat trapped behind the steel mesh of the patrol car. When they jerked me out of the car to go inside, I started demanding my lawyer, shouting. “You can’t do this to me! I want my attorney!”

“Can’t do this? Who the fuck do you think you are? We’re cops. We can do anything we want.”

Something burst inside, and blind with rage, I lost control completely. I tried to head butt the officer, kicking wildly as they subdued me. One of them pepper sprayed my face while they shackled me, and I collapsed to the ground, blind and writhing in pain. I felt like a trapped animal.

A few minutes later I was thrust into a jail cell where I was shackled to the wall, still cuffed. The struggle had aggravated my skull injuries, and the pain in my bad eye was agonizing. The rank smell of the man they chained me next to nearly gagged me. There were nearly twenty men crammed in the cell with me, most of them ranting and raving, spitting, and urinating on the floor. It was like being plunged into a nightmare. When a police officer walked by the cell a short while later, a tall black man a few feet from me unzipped his pants and began urinating on the officer. Within seconds a barrage of officers descended on the cell, and all hell broke loose. The man they were after squatted and filled his hands with his own excrement, then began throwing it at the officers. Other prisoners followed suit. I sat against the wall, sickened. How had I ended up in this madhouse? Eventually officers restrained the men they were after, but no one attempted to clean up the pool of urine and bowel movements that littered the floor. The stench was overpowering.

With the troublemakers quieted, I became the main attraction for passersby. Officers and jail workers lined up on the other side of the bars to point me out like I was some bizarre species of animal. “Hey, wiseguy!” they called out. “Having fun, little gangster?” The hours dragged on, and I kept asking for a lawyer, asking why I wasn’t being booked or taken in front of a judge. Eventually I started talking to the other men in my cell and found out that some of them were pretty good guys, just frustrated with the way they were being treated. They advised me to be patient, said making a scene would only make things worse for me. I knew they were right, and I settled down to wait as best I could.

I remained shackled all day and most of the night. The arresting officers “forgot” about me for more than twelve hours, finally rediscovering my paperwork shortly before dawn the next day. When I was taken before a judge at last, he informed me that the original arrest was for failing to appear in response to a series of traffic tickets. The odd thing about this was that I had never seen any of the tickets they showed me. God knows, I had been guilty of speeding, but I always paid my tickets. But the pile of citations they put in front of me – these, I had never seen before, and I didn’t recognize any of the cars I had supposedly been driving. When I pointed this out to the judge, he sarcastically inquired if someone else had been driving other cars while using my name. I was finally released to my lawyer, but I was very disturbed by what had happened in that courtroom. What was going on here? Who was making up charges against me?

A psychological war was being waged against me, and I was losing. I wasn’t yet eighteen, but I had already developed bleeding ulcers. Home once again, I spent over an hour in the steam room and shower trying to feel clean. Afterward, as I lay in bed, I mentally listed every crime I had ever committed. Speeding and carrying a concealed weapon, yes. Collecting packages for my father? Yes, probably a crime, for some of them had undoubtedly contained illicit cash or stolen property, though I never opened any of them. Aiding and abetting a felon? But my father hadn’t been a felon at the time; he’d never even been charged. Failing to report crimes I had known about? Was that illegal? Did it make any difference that I was a minor during all of it? I didn’t know. Drenched in fear, confusion, and guilt, I struggled to sort out the nature of my misdeeds. I had never thought of myself as a criminal; I had thought of myself as a son helping his father. Had I been wrong? And what if I had? I knew that if given the same choices tomorrow, I would help my father again. Did that make me a criminal, too? I didn’t know. How long was this going to go on? How far would they go? Sometimes I wished they’d just sentence me and get it over with. Anything was better than this constant anxiety.

The real question that haunted me, however, was not what I had done, but why they hated me so much – and they obviously did. I knew that in their eyes, I was a junior wiseguy, an obnoxious adolescent with a chip on his shoulder. That much I understood, but it didn’t explain the passionate contempt they treated me with. One night, sleepless as usual, I went into the bathroom to rinse my face with cold water and caught my own reflection in the mirror. It startled me. Funny, I thought, I never realized how much I look like my father. And that was when it hit me. It wasn’t me they hated. They hated my father, and every time they looked at me, they saw my father’s face. In their eyes, I wasn’t just the mobster’s son; I was the mobster. I had spent a lifetime trying to walk, talk, and dress exactly like my dad. In a moment of wrenching clarity, I realized I had succeeded.