10

21 SPRING STREET

While Al was still at Ray Brook, a veteran gangster named Vincent Beltempo asked him if he wanted to go in on a heroin deal.

Beltempo grew up across from the DiPalermo brothers on Elizabeth Street. He was also a lifelong friend of Ralph Cuomo, whose name he invoked when introducing himself to Al. Beltempo’s nickname was “Jimmy Balls” and he was associated with the Gambino family. He was already a two-time loser on heroin convictions. He was arrested with Cuomo back in 1969 when they were caught with twenty-five pounds of drugs. After his release, Beltempo had engineered an even bigger babania deal, smuggling forty pounds of heroin into the city from Palermo, Sicily, in false-bottomed suitcases. Nabbed again, Beltempo was given fifteen years and a lifetime special parole.

That’s the sentence he was serving when he whispered to Al one day in the prison yard that he could move fifty kilos of “French goods” with the right help. Did he want in?

“I chased him. I said to get away from me. I had enough trouble with drugs.”

That was one reason. There was also the putative ban against narcotics he had sworn to uphold when he’d been inducted as a soldier of the Cosa Nostra. Violation of the rule was a death penalty, Tony Ducks Corallo had said.

That was mostly mob make-believe, he knew. But a rule was a rule, and his old-school sensibility, ingrained in him by Jimmy Alto and again by Joe Schiavo, told him it was worth upholding, even if few others in the Mafia felt the same.

What he’d never really thought about before was what drugs might do to families. In fact, he’d given no thought at all to where the drugs he sold or, more often than not, tried to sell wound up. A few old-timers, like crazy Chalootz, had abused heroin and opium. But they were holdovers from another era. There were also neighborhood kids who had come back from the Vietnam War with serious habits. The son of a local drug dealer, who was involved in the original French Connection crew, returned from combat addicted to junk. What goes around, comes around, Al remembered thinking at the time.

But he hadn’t seen needles going into the arms of friends, or rent and food money going to feed the addictions of parents instead of their children. He’d been spared the robberies and break-ins afflicting many neighborhoods where desperate junkies did anything for a fix.

Whatever he heard or read about it, that was someone else’s world. Not his own.

But now it was in his own family, flowing into the veins of his firstborn son. And as he walked the streets of the neighborhood he had been away from for four years, he saw that his son wasn’t alone.

“The neighborhood was saturated. Saturated. There were kids all over the place doing drugs. I couldn’t believe it. The way it was before was that if you ever sold drugs in Little Italy, you got killed in a minute.”

Joseph insisted his problem wasn’t that bad. He told his father he’d take care of it, and not to worry. But the problem wasn’t just Joseph. His wife was also a junkie.

Louise Musillo’s family came from Elizabeth Street, the same block as the DiPalermo brothers. Her uncle was Charlie Musillo, a captain in the Bonanno crime family who ran bus junkets to Atlantic City casinos.

She and Joseph had met on the night of July 13, 1977, in the midst of the power blackout that darkened the city. Their romance was fast and furious. A few weeks later, they were married. Joseph had $10 in his pocket the day they wed at the city clerk’s office. “I bought us each a drink and then I was broke,” he said. His solution was to rob a drug dealer. He was soon dealing drugs himself. Eventually, curiosity got the better of him.

“I believed I was invincible. All these people got hooked. I said, ‘It won’t happen to me,’” he said of those days. He was soon an addict, his wife along with him. While his father was doing prison time for heroin sales, both Joseph and his wife were doing their own drugs, supporting themselves by dealing and robberies.

At the same time, Joseph saw himself as the protector of his fatherless family. He carried a gun with him wherever he went. On Mother’s Day weekend of 1985, Joseph was enraged to learn that his fourteen-year-old sister, Dawn, had stayed out all night with a nineteen-year-old, a Puerto Rican. Spotting the youth on Mott Street with two other young girls, he threw him against a wall. “I pistol-whipped him. One thing led to another, and I lost my temper. I shot him.” One bullet grazed the teenager’s head. The other struck him in the chest. Badly wounded, the victim staggered into traffic. Joseph fled, tossing the gun down a sewer grating.

Detectives later came looking for him. Dolores told them her son didn’t live there anymore. That part was true. He was on the Lower East Side, robbing drug dealers. A couple of weeks after the shooting, he was arrested while banging on a dealer’s door in a housing project. He was packing a new weapon and police charged him with gun possession.

He wasn’t so far gone that he couldn’t see where he was headed. Not long before his father’s release from prison, he decided he needed to get off of heroin. “I said enough of this nonsense. I got to get off of this shit.” He and Louise both entered a methadone maintenance program. They were still addicts, but at least their habits were manageable. He won a favorable plea disposition to the gun arrest: five years probation and a promise that his criminal record would be expunged if he stayed out of trouble.

When Al got home, he was furious that the drug scourge had hit his own family. Even Dawn, his youngest, was using. He looked around for someone to blame. He didn’t have to look far. “I blamed the Prince Street crew, Petey Beck, his brothers, and all of them.”

He wasn’t the only one. Drugs had been sold out of a small Puerto Rican–owned bodega down the street from St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral School, the Catholic grade school on Prince and Mott Streets. “They were selling drugs out of that store and their own grandchildren were going to the school on the corner. This nun from the school went out and screamed at them, right in front of their club there on Prince Street.”

He wasn’t about to become a crusader. He was a gangster. Drugs sold and consumed elsewhere, he rationalized, had nothing to do with him. But the line had been crossed when his gangland pals had let it be peddled on their own streets.

“When I found out what was happening in the neighborhood, the first guy I grabbed was Petey Beck. And I took him to a luncheonette on the corner of Mott and Spring. I told him, broadly like, ‘You know, if I ever get the fucking cocksuckers pushing drugs through these Puerto Ricans in this neighborhood, I am going to kill every fucking one of them.’”

DiPalermo knew who Al was talking about. “But he was a made guy. A captain. I wasn’t going to say nothing direct at him. Him and his brothers and Raffie, because of all their gambling and need for money, were pushing it to the kids. How could you do that?”

The warning had little effect. A few weeks later, Ralph Cuomo called Al into the club next to the pizza parlor. “Raffie tells me he has four kilos of heroin to sell. I didn’t scream at him. He was a made guy too, just like me. I just looked at him and said I wasn’t interested. That I was on the special parole and couldn’t take the chance.”

Al left the club feeling like he was surrounded by addicts. Raffie Cuomo was addicted to gambling, so he pushed dope to support his own habit. In turn, his son and daughter-in-law had both gotten hooked. Al walked home wondering where this was headed.

*   *   *

Drugs weren’t the only neighborhood ailment. Little Italy had been down at the heels for years, with most of its housing ailing, century-old walk-up tenements like the one where Al’s family lived at 32 Spring Street. “We had rats running around there. Dolores was terrified of them.”

In the 1970s, residents protested when the city sought to replace the old Public School 21 that had sat for more than a hundred years on the north side of Spring Street between Mott and Elizabeth with a new school. What the neighborhood really needed, they said, was new housing. Chinatown, they pointed out, which was steadily taking over the old Italian district, had gotten its own new housing, the soaring Confucius Plaza next to the Manhattan Bridge. Italians deserved as much.

It took the better part of a decade to get it, but in 1983, a brand-new seven-story brick building stretching the entire length of the block opened its doors to new tenants. Even better, the 152 apartments at 21 Spring Street were all subsidized by the federal government’s Section 8 program, which held rents to no more than 30 percent of a tenant’s income. The government covered the difference between what tenants could afford and the market rent. The complex included a center courtyard with a sitting area, a bocce court, and community space.

Tenants were supposed to be carefully screened, with entry limited to displaced former residents of the block, needy senior citizens, and families with low income.

But given its location in what was still the Mafia’s central business district, wiseguys went to the front of the line. Al D’Arco’s family was one of the lucky group that made it inside.

“The mob started it and the mob built it. So naturally we got some of the apartments. Petey Beck got one, so did Joe Beck. He was upstairs with his girlfriend.” Overseeing the project, Al said, was Pete DeFeo, the Genovese family power who had a strong hand in most things in Little Italy, especially its most famous event, the annual Feast of San Gennaro on Mulberry Street. Alex Morelli, one of DeFeo’s top lieutenants and a heavy gambler, had an apartment above Al and Dolores.

The building project was sponsored by a local nonprofit group called the Little Italy Restoration Association. The group was known by its acronym, LIRA. Top officials of the organization included Oscar Ianniello, one of the brothers of Genovese family captain Matty the Horse.

The group selected the DeMatteis Development Corporation, one of the city’s largest developers, to build the project. Called to the stand in the Mafia Commission case to talk about his dealing with defendant Vincent DiNapoli and other mobsters, company executive Frederick DeMatteis took the Fifth Amendment rather than discuss the matter.

Tenants were chosen in “consultation with the community,” according to building records. Handling management and tenant selection was a firm headed by a former attorney for Frank Kissel’s butchers union that had pressured meat companies to have their containers printed at Al’s box company. Raffie Cuomo, who was making tens of thousands of dollars each month in drug deals and loan-sharking, was one of several mobbed-up local residents who finagled apartments in the much larger Independence Plaza North, another subsidized project on the far West Side along Greenwich Street. Federal prosecutors probed alleged application fraud there in 1975, but no charges resulted.

To Al, it was much ado about nothing. “We all had a hook. But at least I wasn’t trying to get fancy by moving out of the neighborhood like some guys. I wanted to stay right there.”

He still had to qualify on paper, however. The details were worked out after Al went to prison. In a notarized statement prepared by George Spitz, the attorney who briefly represented Al on his drug arrest, Dolores declared that she and Al were separated. Her income was $185 a week from him in child support. Based on her declaration, she and her children qualified for a two-bedroom, two-bath apartment on the sixth floor at a monthly rent of $195. That was about $750 less than the full cost. The government picked up the rest.

It was partly true. They were separated, since Al was in federal prison. And Dolores’s income was meager. All that was supporting the family was the earnings from the burger stand being run by Pete Del Cioppo and whatever other money Al could direct her way from behind bars.

But after he was released and reunited with his wife and family, Al went right back to making money in the street, as much as he could. He wasn’t about to give up the apartment. The leases were regularly renewed every two years, accompanied by the same declaration that he and Dolores were separated. He was also careful not to give up the old apartment up the street at 32 Spring. “I used it for business when I needed it.”

Both scams barely registered on Al’s crime scales. “I was in that life. It didn’t matter to me if I was cheating the government.”

*   *   *

He used another bit of deception to satisfy parole regulations calling for regular and acceptable employment. He could have listed the burger stand, which he still operated, even though most daily chores were handled by others. But he didn’t want his parole officer, a careful man named Joseph Veltre, dropping by and sniffing around.

Again his friend George Spitz helped out. Spitz agreed to carry Al on his books as a legal assistant and occasional investigator at a weekly salary of $250. Aside from a couple of occasions when Al snapped photographs of a sidewalk for a slip-and-fall case, he did no work. Each time he picked up his check, he would hand the cash back to Spitz.

Meanwhile, he showed the checks to Veltre as proof that he was gainfully employed and staying out of trouble. Every month he stopped by the office to fill out a form listing his earnings and employment and sign on the bottom attesting to the truth of its contents under penalty of law.

He and Veltre got along. They would chat about history and the city. Al encouraged the parole officer to quit smoking. To Al, the bogus work records were just one more petty crime. The important thing was not to get violated and sent back to prison. Having a lawyer as his employer was an added bit of insurance.

“George did it for me as a friend. I helped him out in some other things.”

One of those things was a law client of Spitz’s in need of some extralegal muscle. “George had this guy who was the CEO of a big chemical company. He’d been cheating on his wife, and one of his ex-girlfriends was trying to shake him down for dough. George asked if I could get the girlfriend off his client’s back.”

Al met with the executive, learned the girlfriend’s whereabouts, and went to work. “It was simple. The girlfriend was living in Chelsea, and I had Petey Del call her up and talk real rough, making threats that if she didn’t knock it off he knew where she lived and she would get hurt. She got scared and took off.”

The executive was immensely pleased. “He gives us $12,000 in $100 bills. The money was all paper-clipped together. I don’t think he ever handled cash like that.”

Al’s original arrangement was that he and Spitz would split whatever payment resulted. “But George had been complaining that his two sons, Dan and Dave, were music nuts and they wanted these fancy instruments that he said he couldn’t afford. So instead of splitting it, I gave him $8,000 and told him to go buy his kids their instruments.”

The lawyer’s sons did well with their guitars. Dan Spitz went on to found the heavy-metal band Anthrax. His older brother, Dave, played for Black Sabbath. The music wasn’t Al’s style but he was glad later to attend the wedding of one of the two sons where he heard them perform. “It was a Jewish wedding. We had a good time. I kept the yarmulke.”

*   *   *

He made sure to keep a low profile his first months back. Memories of prison were too fresh to risk an added ten years behind bars. The quickest way to get violated was to be spotted hanging around with other mobsters with records.

He spent a lot of time working the burger stand with Petey Del. “Joseph was working there, trying to get himself straight. And my son John started coming by a lot to help also. John loved to cook.” They decided the place needed a grander name. The Burger Palace, they named it. A new sign was hung over the stand. A TV camera crew pulled up one day. The reporter said she was doing a feature on good, cheap places to eat. “They were from WPIX. She said she heard we had the best 75-cent hamburger around.” They filmed Joseph working the counter. Al was careful to stay out of camera range.

He was at the Burger Palace one evening when a long black Mercedes parked in front of the stand. Vic Amuso stepped out from the passenger side. Anthony Casso got out from behind the wheel. Al was paying off the $80,000 debt that Joseph had racked up with Gaspipe Casso. But he hadn’t forgiven him for doing a drug deal with his son while he was in prison.

Casso had soared in the Luchese ranks. He was made captain of Christy Tick Furnari’s crew when Amuso became boss. When a veteran mobster from the Harlem crew named Aniello “Neil” Migliore went to prison, Casso replaced him as consigliere. A few months later, Amuso named him as underboss.

It was Casso’s first visit to the stand, and Al invited them to have a cup of coffee. “They were both all dressed up, wearing suits. Anthony makes one of his little jokes. He says, ‘Is it safe for me to come in there?’ Like he was going to get dirty or poisoned just by walking inside.”

Cracking wise was one of Gaspipe’s trademarks. Often, he was genuinely funny. Sometimes he was just nasty. It was another thing Al didn’t like. “I said, ‘Cut it out, Anthony. You want a cup of coffee? Have some coffee.’”

As they were having their coffee, Amuso motioned Al outside onto Laight Street. On the sidewalk, Amuso spoke in a low, excited voice. “He says, ‘We’re going to a meeting with ‘the Robe.’” As he said it, Amuso held out a curled index finger and thumb, forming a C with his hand.

Al didn’t ask for details, but he knew what Vic meant. Vincent Gigante sometimes wore a dressing robe, like the ones he’d worn before his prizefights in days past. Amuso’s old captain at the 19th Hole, Christy Tick Furnari, had coined the term. It was derogatory shorthand for Gigante’s ongoing act of seeming mentally unbalanced. The C stood for Commission, a meeting of all the top bosses. It was one of those words never to be said aloud. But it explained their suits and why both men seemed giddy and keyed up.

“Vic keeps talking, telling me it’s at a wholesale candy place up on the West Side. I couldn’t figure out why he was telling me any of this, but I didn’t say a thing. I just nodded.”

Amuso and Casso finished their coffee, got back in the Mercedes, and continued uptown on West Street.

Al was often surprised that Amuso confided in him, telling him things he didn’t need to know. His best guess was that Vic still wasn’t comfortable in his role as boss and needed someone to talk to that he could trust. He’d picked Al. One of the things he eventually told Al was what the Commission meeting that evening had been about. When he heard, Al was impressed.

Together with top members of the Genovese, Colombo, and Gambino families, Amuso told him, he and Casso were part of a multimillion-dollar caper, with the city and federal governments paying the tab. With the help of corrupt contractors and union officials, they had rigged the bids on a massive federal effort to replace all the windows in the city’s public housing projects. The New York City Housing Authority had 180,000 apartments in 334 projects. It was landlord to more residents than lived in the city of Atlanta. New double-glazed windows, officials had decided, would sharply reduce fuel costs, paying back the replacement cost over time.

There were almost 1 million windows to replace, but on paper at least, it made eminent sense. Like the Little Italy restoration project where Al lived, it was another publicly beneficial initiative. And like 21 Spring Street, the mob had seen its opportunity and seized it.

The scam had been going on since 1978 and had reaped millions for leaders of all four crime families. A key player in the scheme was a part-time drug dealer and hit man named Pete Savino, who had had the foresight to buy an ownership position in an aluminum window company when he saw demand rising. A close associate of several Genovese officials, Savino was also well liked by the boss himself. And Vincent Gigante didn’t like many people.

Amuso and Casso, however, were not fans. As a fellow drug dealer, they’d gotten along fine with Savino, selling loads of marijuana and cocaine with him. But they’d had a falling-out over the lucrative windows business. Casso claimed Savino owed him $1 million for having edged him out of one windows company. On Gigante’s orders, Savino had paid Casso the million. It was a good indication of the huge sums flowing from the scheme.

But in 1987, one of Savino’s former drug-dealing partners had been arrested. The ex-partner had pointed the Brooklyn district attorney’s office to a pair of bodies buried beneath a warehouse Savino owned in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. He and Savino had put them there, he admitted. In a joint investigation, the DA and federal prosecutors used the information to pressure Savino, telling him he faced a choice. He could be arrested for at least two murders, or he could cooperate. Savino was soon going to meetings about the windows scam wearing a secret wire for the FBI.

The purpose of meeting with Gigante the night they came by the burger stand, Amuso told Al, was to alert him that Savino had turned. “Vic told me he was trying to tell the Robe that Petey Savino was a rat. That he should kill him. But he said Gigante wouldn’t hear it. He defended the guy to them.”

Amuso and Casso were both frustrated with the obstinate Gigante. Two years later, when Savino’s informant role became public, they were enraged. “Vic said, ‘That asshole should shoot himself now.’”

Amuso didn’t offer any clues about how he and Casso came to know about a top-secret federal informant. But crucial tips from an unknown source soon became a trend with the duo, Al noticed. Casso sometimes had a name for his tipster. “My crystal ball,” he’d say with a laugh. He enjoyed the gag.

*   *   *

Paul Vario died in a Texas prison cell on May 3, 1988. He was seventy-three. The cause was a heart attack, brought on by a chronic lung disorder he owed to the nicotine habit he could never kick. Prison officials found him dead during a routine head count. “A cigarette was still burning in his ashtray,” an assistant to the warden told the Daily News.

By the time he died, Vario was a lot better known than your average mob captain, thanks to the best-selling book about his protégé turned government informant, Henry Hill. Wiseguy, by veteran crime journalist Nicholas Pileggi, depicted Vario as a brilliant crime manager prone to soft-headed decisions when it came to friends, like the drug-addled Hill. A couple of years later, Big Paul became even more famous when actor Paul Sorvino played his character in the movie version, Goodfellas, by Martin Scorsese.

Al mourned the loss of another mentor. They were all gone now. Joe Schiavo, who had retired to Florida just weeks after the party celebrating Al’s getting his button, died in the fall of 1987. He was seventy-six. “Cancer. Fucking cigarettes got him, too.” Amuso had already told Al that he wanted him to take Paul’s place as head of the Canarsie crew when he went. The conversation took place during another walk, this one outside the Walnut Bar, a tavern just a couple of blocks from Geffken’s on Flatlands Avenue that Vic used as a headquarters. The bar was owned by Vic’s brother, Bobby Amuso, a Luchese soldier who impressed Al by ignoring the mob politics always swirling around his brother.

Outside the bar, Vic told Al that he’d heard that Paul was not likely to last much longer. “When he goes, I want you to be the captain,” he said.

Al protested that he was still on special parole. He was also worried that his drug conviction hung over him as a stain against his wiseguy honor. “I want to give you my word of honor,” he told Amuso. “I will never deal in drugs.”

Amuso, still doing his own drug deals, looked at him oddly. “Okay, but that’s not what I’m talking about,” the boss said. “I just want you to be captain.”

A couple of weeks after Vario’s death, Al was summoned to Canarsie to see the boss. The summons was relayed by Jimmy McCann, an Irish construction worker and one of Amuso’s closest associates. Al immediately drove out to the address McCann had given him, a small house on a Canarsie side street.

McCann met him at the door and directed him to the basement stairs. Waiting for him in the small furnished basement were Amuso and Casso. “Vic tells me right away they are making me skipper of Paulie’s crew.” Amuso began laying out his instructions as captain when the basement stairs groaned. “I look up and there’s a guy the size of a whale coming down.”

The human whale wearing glasses under a mop of black hair, was Brooklyn gangster Pete Chiodo, who often tipped the scales at four hundred pounds. Despite his enormous girth, Chiodo had a reputation as a shrewd businessman. From what Al had heard, he had made both himself and his friend Gaspipe Casso wealthy with his construction companies.

Amuso announced that Chiodo was also being bumped up to captain, running the crew once headed by Christy Tick and later by Casso. “Vic tells us both that we should get our crews together, then get them one at a time and ask each one what they’re doing.” The important thing, Amuso stressed, was to make sure that all their activities, both legal and illegal, were “on the record” with the family. It was an important mob distinction. If a dispute arose with another family, they would lose if the person or venture wasn’t already on record.

As they were talking, other Luchese captains and members joined them in the crowded basement. “Sally Avellino, the captain from Long Island who ran all the trash companies out there, came down. Then Petey Beck and Raffie Cuomo came together. Vic’s brother Bobby showed up and Petey Vario, Paulie’s son. Vic tells everybody when they’re all there that me and Fat Pete are both captains.” No formal induction ceremony was required, but everyone present shook Al’s hand and congratulated him.

*   *   *

Al thought he knew all the members of the Vario crew. There were a few old-timers who were semiretired, trying to keep their hand in the game while aging into Mafia senior citizens. One of them was Alfonso Curiale, who was in his late seventies. “Foo,” as he was called, was the son of the crew’s original founding father, Don Turrido, another immigrant from Agrigento, Sicily, who had given Joe Schiavo his button. Foo Curiale had somehow managed to practice his father’s trade as a Mafioso while a full-time employee of the United States Post Office. “He was proud that he got his pension there. He was going back and forth to Florida, but he had a bunch of stores where he ran scams, and a piece of a factory that produced porn tapes.”

Al was already friendly with another veteran, Peter Abinanti, known as “Pete the Killer.” The nickname was for the sharp way he always dressed, not his weaponry. Abinanti had been one of Paul Vario’s closest associates. Now in his seventies and ailing, he still ran a small loan-sharking operation from his home in Howard Beach, Queens.

Pete Abinanti told him there was one veteran member of the crew who was too aged to leave his home. But protocol demanded that he be introduced to his new captain.

“So Pete the Killer drives me out to a little house on East 102nd Street in Canarsie. We go inside and there’s this little old guy. He gets up when we come in and he wasn’t more than four feet ten inches tall standing with a cane. Pete said his name was Paul D’Anna, but everyone called him Zu’Paolo, for Uncle Paul. He was one of the oldest mobsters alive.”

With his cane, Zu’Paolo pointed Al and Vario to the dining room where his wife, Annunziata, served them espresso and strega, the strong Italian liqueur made with herbs.

“I am glad you are my captain,” D’Anna said to Al in a shaky voice. The aged mobster then pointed to an oval framed picture on the wall. It was a portrait of a nineteenth-century figure with a large mustache. “Il Mio capitano in Sicilia,” he said. Al looked at the picture and realized the portrait hanging on the dining room wall was of D’Anna’s first Mafia captain.

“I am at your service,” D’Anna said. “I am a little old, but I still got a good eye, and I can still do this.” He held up his hands as though shooting a rifle.

Al asked him when he was born. “I was born eighteen hundred and eighty-five in ’Grigento, Sicily,” the old man told him. He was 103. His first assignment in America, he said, had been to defend Sicilian sheepherders fighting against the cattle ranchers in Colorado. He had later settled in Brooklyn with Don Turrido.

In Italian, Al told the elderly soldier that he would certainly call on him should he need him.

*   *   *

The new skipper summoned his more active troops to a gathering in another Canarsie home. Some of his crew had excusable absences. Frank Manzo was doing prison time for the same airport racketeering scheme in which Paul Vario had been convicted. Al wasn’t sorry to miss him.

Al repeated Amuso’s warning that they all had to put everything they were doing on record. He also added a warning of his own. He reminded them that they were not to deal narcotics. If they were caught or caused a problem, they would be killed, he said. The crew nodded knowingly, although he suspected they heard his words as just more empty rhetoric. He then met with each member individually to take the measure of his worth and his activity.

After the wealthy Manzo, Bruno Facciola was probably the most successful. He had a large loan shark operation, lending cash to businesses in south Brooklyn and Queens. He also ran gambling and card games where tens of thousands of dollars changed hands at his club on Avenue D, where he’d hosted Al’s induction party. His own businesses included the pizzeria where Al had last seen Tommy DeSimone alive, and partnerships in an auto-wrecking yard and even a Brooklyn horse-riding stable. In addition, Facciola had a jewelry shop where Al suspected heroin was also an item for sale.

Ray Argentina, who had been so thrilled at the sight of the automatic machine gun Al had brought him, wasn’t a businessman. But he was so adept at terror and strong-arming that his services were often in demand from other crews.

Louie Daidone had been one of the men sitting nervously in the small Bronx parlor on Westchester Avenue next to Al just two years earlier as they waited to be called behind the curtain for their inductions. Daidone had a couple of businesses going. There was a bagel shop on Cross Bay Boulevard in Queens called Bagels by the Bay, as well as a nearby car service. He was also active in hijackings, heisting loads of cigarettes and tires with younger hoods he kept gainfully employed.

Peter Vario was the likely heir apparent to his father’s realm. A made member in good standing, he had forged his own mob assets, with interests in gambling and labor rackets. But “Rugsy,” as most called him, expressed no direct interest in the captain’s job. The trickier part was figuring out the son’s inheritance.

Under mob rules, there wasn’t any. The Mafia imposed a 100 percent estate tax on its fallen captains. The operating theory was that everything acquired was due to Cosa Nostra clout, so the spoils went not to the next generation but to the succeeding capo.

Al was instructed by Amuso to collect everything Paul Vario had acquired. “Vic wanted me to take the house in Island Park, Geffken’s, even a condo down in Boca West in Florida. I didn’t take any of it. It’s a creepy thing to do. He has sons, the sons have families. Think I’m going to be a ghoul and take Rugsy’s house away from him? No. Let them keep it.”

He had no problem, however, with taking Vario’s extensive loan shark accounts and the thousands of dollars that rolled in weekly as interest. He also wanted to see whether any of the Lufthansa money was still around. Al’s understanding was that Vario had taken a modest 10 percent of the $5.8 million haul, although most of that money disappeared.

“I went over Paulie’s shylock book with Rugsy and we agreed I would take half.” It came to about $318,000. A few days later, Peter Vario brought Al a large black plastic garbage bag. It held $159,000 in cash.

There was more. Paulie Vario had left additional loan shark accounts with Danny Cutaia, an active crew member and one of Vario’s chauffeurs. In addition to handling Vario’s book, Cutaia ran his own loan shark and gambling operations and held sway over a carpenters union local in Brooklyn.

Al arranged to let Cutaia continue handling the accounts that Paulie had left with him. They agreed that Cutaia would bring Al $4,800 a week from his collections, about half of the interest earned.

For the first time in his gangster life, he was making the kind of money that gangsters go into the business to make. The first thing he did was to take a fistful of the money and bring it to Anthony Casso to repay what remained of the $80,000 debt that Joseph had run up in the drug deal. But there was a lot left over. He was suddenly a wealthy man.

*   *   *

Joseph told his father that he had his drug demons beaten. What he wanted now in life, he told him, was to follow in his footsteps and become a wiseguy.

“I was going to go that way no matter what,” Joseph said. He was thirty-two years old and wanted to get ahead in his chosen career. “I had ambition. My ambition was that I wanted to be the best criminal I could be. I wanted to be in business with my father.”

Al heard his son’s plea with a mix of pride and regret. “I had mixed feelings. I’m his father and I didn’t want anyone else to tell my son what to do. But if I didn’t think he was capable, I would’ve stopped it.”

Al had another little poetic saying he’d picked up along the way that explained the best course of action in these situations. “What I was taught is that if a tree is bent, you try to straighten it up. But if it keeps bending that way, it is going to break if you try to bend it back. So you let it grow the way it wants.”

Amuso and Casso were preparing to add to the ranks of the family’s membership. “Vic proposed that we make Joseph. I said fine.”

His son’s name was added to a list of a half dozen proposed new Luchese family members. The list was circulated and returned with no opposition. An induction ceremony was organized in the basement of another Canarsie home.

Most of the other men being inducted that evening were Joseph’s age. Three of them, George Conte, Anthony Senter, and Joseph Testa, were good friends. Joseph was thrilled to be joining the family with his pals.

The initiates waited upstairs to be called into the basement, where Amuso, Casso, and Al presided at a table.

Bobby Amuso had brought a large safety pin to do the honors. Al looked at it and shuddered. “It was this big, nasty-looking thing. He was using it to prick their fingers, but he was jabbing it in hard. He almost punched it right through. There was blood all over.”

As part of the formal mob liturgy, once Joseph’s induction was complete, Vic Amuso introduced him to his father. “This is your captain, Alfonso D’Arco. You will be with him.”

The father kissed the son on both cheeks. They were now together in two families.

*   *   *

A few days after the induction ceremony, Al had dinner with Amuso and Casso. They dined at Gargiulo’s, the big, rambling seafood restaurant on West Fifteenth Street in Coney Island, a block from the boardwalk and around the corner from where Al and Dolores had held their wedding party.

They were seated in a corner, back by the fish tanks so they could talk. Gaspipe congratulated Al on his son’s induction. Al shrugged his thanks but didn’t say anything.

“Now your son belongs to us,” added Casso with a grin.

Al felt his face flush with anger. He nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “Now he belongs to you.”

*   *   *

Later that fall, Al ran into Hickey DiLorenzo on Prince Street. It was the first time he’d seen his friend since the troubling episodes at Ray Brook prison when he started wondering if the veteran Genovese gangster was coming unhinged. Al was glad to see Hickey. But he could tell right away he wasn’t doing any better.

When he saw him, Hickey was sitting in the club next door to Ray’s Pizza on Prince Street. “Hickey was there with Raffie Cuomo and Big Pete Chiodo. I’d never seen Hickey with those guys before and I suspected he might be doing a drug deal with them.”

His suspicions were confirmed a week later when he ran into DiLorenzo again, this time at a nearby restaurant.

“Hickey says, ‘Hey, I gotta ask you something,’ and he starts to talk to me right there in the restaurant.” Al pulled him outside to the street. DiLorenzo told Al he wanted an introduction to someone connected to the Canarsie crew who had just gone into hiding after being charged in a drug case.

Al asked DiLorenzo what he wanted with him. “Hickey says, ‘We can make money,’ and then he makes like he’s shooting dope in his arm.”

Al shook his head. “Anthony, I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. “But I’m not interested.” Al walked away without saying good night.

After the encounter, Al warned Pete Chiodo and Raffie Cuomo to stay away from Hickey. “The way he was acting, I couldn’t tell if he was nuts or wearing a wire.”

The warning didn’t have much effect. The next time Al saw DiLorenzo he was with the Dean of Dope himself. At the age of eighty-one, Joe Beck DiPalermo was still busily trafficking in narcotics. Al warned DiPalermo as well to stay away from DiLorenzo. The little man insisted he was long finished with the dope trade. “He said he was too old for that stuff anymore.”

A few days later, Al walked into a café on Mulberry Street that doubled as a gambling parlor. Called Tazza di Caffe, it was owned by Jimmy Ida, a captain in the Genovese family. Al and Ida were friendly.

Al was with Dom Truscello, a fellow Luchese soldier. Jimmy Ida was sitting at a table with DiLorenzo. Al and Truscello sat down across from them. DiLorenzo pointed at Al and began shouting. “I know this kid,” he said. “I go back with the kid. I used to hijack trucks with him.”

DiLorenzo kept up the rant for several minutes. Al looked at Ida for his reaction. “Jimmy was sitting there with this tight little smile on his face. You could see he was livid. I was mad myself, this guy shooting his mouth off like that.” DiLorenzo’s speech was interrupted when Joe Beck and Raffie Cuomo walked into the café. They greeted DiLorenzo. It was clear to Al that, despite his warning, they were still hanging around with him. A few minutes later, DiLorenzo walked out with Cuomo and DiPalermo.

After the other men had left, Ida motioned to Al. They stepped outside. “Jimmy starts to talk on the sidewalk, but I stopped him. I thought there might be a bug near that club. It was a pretty busy place.” They walked down the block a few yards and paused in front of a small parking lot behind a chain-link fence.

“Jimmy had a way of talking real low, so he couldn’t be heard. He’d mumble things.” Now, Ida was seething. “He says, ‘Why do these guys stay around him? Why do they give him confidence like that? Don’t they know to stay away from him?’”

Al started to ask Ida why the Genovese crew didn’t just tell Hickey to stop. After all, he was their soldier. But Ida interrupted him. In a low murmur, Ida said, “You know what we’re going to do, right?”

Al didn’t answer. Ida continued. “We’re going to whack him,” he said.

Al was astonished to hear Ida say it aloud. “Jimmy was a very cautious guy. He never blurted things out. But he was steaming.” Al just looked at Ida. Then they said good night and parted on the sidewalk.

A few nights later Al was walking past Ray’s Pizza on Prince Street. The store was closed but the lights in the back were on, the way Raffie often left them after he’d closed up for the night. Al had just returned from Brooklyn. He looked in the window of the pizza parlor and saw Hickey DiLorenzo. “He had his back to the window and Joe DiPalermo was there with Raffie. Dom Truscello was inside as well.”

Al had been looking for Truscello. “I walked in and everyone immediately stopped talking, like they didn’t want me to hear them.” Drugs, he figured. But he didn’t say anything.

Al told Truscello he needed to talk to him. The others made for the door as well. DiLorenzo stepped over to a brand-new red sports car parked at the curb. Al couldn’t tell what make it was, but it was clearly expensive. “Hickey says to me, ‘How do you like it? I just got these wheels.’ I said, ‘That’s a nice car, Hickey.’” The gangster drove away. Al never saw him again.

On November 25, 1988, a few nights after Al saw the sports car disappear down Prince Street, a jogger trotted past DiLorenzo’s home in West New York, New Jersey. The runner glanced at the house and was amazed to see someone shooting into the door. A car with New York plates was double-parked on the street, with someone sitting behind the wheel. The runner raced to call the police. By the time they arrived, the car was gone. Hickey DiLorenzo was lying in his backyard patio, having been shot to death. The gun used to kill him was found on the other side of the fence where the shooter had tossed it.

The FBI ran a check on long-distance calls from local phone booths near DiLorenzo’s house. Someone had made four collect calls from one of the booths, each one for a minute or less, to Jimmy Ida’s home in Staten Island within three hours after the murder. Unfortunately for Ida, they were the only collect calls to his number from West New York that month.

The Genovese family, headed by a mobster who pretended to be mentally ill, had decided to kill one of its own. Hickey DiLorenzo had violated mob rules by actually being crazy.