13

FORT HAMILTON PARKWAY

A few days after the murder, Anthony Casso came to see Al at La Donna Rosa. He had already heard the story of the bullet that bounced off Mike Pappadio’s head and how the old man had stayed standing, despite the vicious beating.

They were outside the restaurant on Cleveland Place. Casso nudged him. “He says, ‘Hey, Al, Mike had a really hard head after all, huh?’ He thought it was funny. That was his kind of humor.”

Al wasn’t laughing, but he wasn’t remorseful either. “Mike killed himself. He wouldn’t do what he was told, and he was a stool pigeon. He was trying to set me up.”

Actually, there was never any evidence that Michael Pappadio had become an informant in the weeks before his murder. None of the agents or prosecutors pursuing the Luchese family in those years ever wired him up. If they had, there would’ve been far greater law enforcement interest in his sudden disappearance.

As it was, the only one who came inquiring was his little brother. “Freddy Pappadio came around the restaurant a couple of times, talking about how his brother was missing and did we know anything about it?” On one of his visits, Amuso and Casso were there. They hustled Fred next door to Shorty DiPalo’s apartment, the same place his brother had received his own warning. “I said, ‘What are you asking me for? What the fuck do I know? Maybe he ran away with a girl?’ That was the old thing you always said when someone was made to disappear. ‘He probably ran away with some girl.’”

*   *   *

He justified the grisly murder that had left him covered in his victim’s blood, the first by his own hands, as simply part of the business he had chosen. “You’re stuck with it like anything else. You’ve got a job to do? You do it. It’s like the Army. You go through basic training, they send you to war, you go out there and shoot who they tell you. You don’t do it, they throw you in Leavenworth. It’s the same thing in the Life. You’re a soldier. You don’t do what you’re told to do, you’re gonna get killed.”

Contrary to popular wisdom, murder wasn’t a required initiation rite for admission to the secret society. But when ordered, a member had to participate. “The press pushes all that stuff. They write how you’ve got to make your bones before you can get made. Nah. It doesn’t hurt to have done it, but guys also get made because they earn, or because they’re smart.”

Wealth also opened Mafia doors. “We had a guy in our neighborhood, his father owned half the parking lots in downtown Brooklyn. They gave him his button. Who’d he ever kill? He was rich, so they wanted him.”

But the order might come at any time. “You could be in the Life for twenty years, and you don’t do anything. But you have to remember that there will come a day, the guy will say, ‘Al, you gotta do this.’ And you can’t say, ‘No, I quit.’ You do or die. It’s blood in, blood out. That’s the way it works.”

He did know one story about a mob recruit who had resigned rather than kill. He didn’t know the name but he’d heard the tale. “It was a guy going back. He wasn’t made, but he was close to being made. They were grooming him. They told him to help kill a guy and he wouldn’t do it. He ran away because he couldn’t take it. He couldn’t take that life, being forced to kill someone you don’t want to kill. He got labeled a rat for running. His family was shamed.”

*   *   *

About his own victim, Al asked no further questions. He never inquired what became of the corpse that he’d last seen wrapped in the white body bag with the torn zipper in the trunk of George Zappola’s Lincoln Town Car. “You don’t need to know. The less, the better.”

Years later, other informants filled in the tale. After Al went to find a bathroom at the Roy Rogers, three men met Zappola in the parking lot. Two of them were brothers, Benedetto and Vincent Aloi. A top official of the Colombo crime family, Benny Aloi had his own holdings in the garment center, where he’d had his own run-ins with Mike Pappadio. He was not unhappy to see him taken out of the picture. Aloi was also close to Casso, thanks to their joint involvement in the profitable replacement-windows scheme.

The third man was a professional undertaker named Jack Leale, a Colombo associate who had provided the body bag. Leale got behind the wheel of the Lincoln and drove it to a nearby crematorium. As he readied the body for cremation, he later told the Aloi brothers, he was surprised to see that it had been stripped of both jewelry and cash. Standard wiseguy practice was not to steal from fellow mobsters you kill.

*   *   *

In Little Italy, the John Gotti parade continued nightly, the peacock mobster strutting the streets, followed by his retinue. The spectacle caused Al and other old-school hard-liners continuing agita. Gotti was out on bail, charged in state court with ordering the wounding of a carpenters union boss who had trashed a Gambino-controlled restaurant. “I’ll lay you three to one I beat it,” the chronic gambler told the arresting detectives when they put the cuffs on him on the corner of Prince Street and Broadway in January that year.

But it was Gotti’s younger brother, Gene, who was in the more serious legal jam. A long-delayed trial from his 1983 arrest on heroin trafficking with two fellow Gambino members had resulted in a fast jury verdict of guilty in May, a few days after the Pappadio execution. Gene Gotti was out on bail, awaiting sentencing. His chances hadn’t been helped by a crack made by his co-defendant, John Carneglia, who told a reporter he’d be back from prison in time to “piss on the grave” of the eighty-nine-year-old judge who would be sentencing them.

Al genuinely liked Gene Gotti. “He was solid as a rock, a real uomo di honore. A man of honor.” When he ran into him in early July in Canarsie, he sympathized with him.

“He was at a barbershop I went to, Pepe and Jerry’s on Avenue L in Brooklyn. A lot of wiseguys went there. Jerry collected shylock payments for Danny Cutaia, and he had a phone extension in the back room he’d let guys use for business.”

Al asked Gotti how he was doing. “Not so good,” answered Gotti. “I got to go in for sentencing tomorrow.”

Al thought he was lucky to be out on bail. Defendants convicted of drug charges are usually taken into custody to await sentencing. But he felt bad for his friend.

“Gene, you don’t have to listen to me,” he said, “but you want some advice? Go on the lam.”

Gotti shook his head. “I can’t. My brother, you know…”

“I knew what he meant. That his brother wouldn’t want him to because of the problems it might cause him. But I said, ‘Don’t worry about your brother. Your brother can take the heat. He makes his own heat.’ I said, ‘Gene, they’re gonna give you fifty years. You hear what I’m saying? Go on the fuckin’ lam, and stay on the lam for four or five years. They’ll be embarrassed. They’ll make a deal. You’ll come in, and maybe you’ll get a few years, but at least you’ll see some daylight. This way, you’re getting fifty.’”

Gotti thanked him but repeated that flight wasn’t an option. Al wished him luck and they parted in front of the barbershop. It was the last Al saw him. The next day the judge smacked Gene Gotti, then forty-two years old, with a fifty-year sentence. Al had hit the number on the head. “The guy was more loyal to his brother than himself. It was a shame.”

*   *   *

For the Luchese bosses, the executions of Red Gilmore and Mike Pappadio were only the start. Murder was becoming the quickest prescription for every ailment they suffered. Hit contracts were the aspirin for the slightest headache.

To some extent, they were following Mafia tradition. As long as proper permissions were secured, and standard precautions taken, murder was considered an acceptable sanction for those who broke the rules, stole from the organization, or otherwise aggravated mob officials.

But the accepted practice was to keep such killings among themselves. The rules of the Commission set out by Lucky Luciano and his partners prohibited targeting those whose deaths were likely to bring more heat than help. The protected list included police officers, religious figures, and newspaper reporters. Men like Tommy Red Gilmore and Michael Pappadio could disappear or be left slaughtered in the street without sparking enormous investigations. Outsiders—civilians, as they were called by the soldiers of organized crime—were a different story. An occasional instructional beating? Yes. Murder? Not usually.

But for months, Luchese capo Sal Avellino had been itching to kill a pair of outsiders who had interfered in one of the mob’s biggest moneymaking schemes. Robert Kubecka and Donald Barstow were brothers-in-law who ran a Long Island waste-hauling firm. They had not only blatantly ignored the rules of the mob’s price-fixing monopoly that carved up the island’s customers among favored firms; they had also talked about it to authorities. They had named Avellino and others as engaging in extortion in the private sanitation industry.

It was Kubecka who had first suggested to investigators from the state’s Organized Crime Task Force that they figure out a way to hide a recording device in the black Jaguar in which Avellino squired former Luchese boss Tony Ducks Corallo around town. The agents had followed up on the suggestion, using Kubecka’s knowledge to help secure a judge’s approval for the bug. The resulting tapes had helped bring down not only Corallo, but the rest of the Luchese leadership including underboss Tom Mix Santoro and consigliere Christy Tick Furnari.

The rebel carters had begun cooperating with investigators in 1982. Kubecka hadn’t hidden his opposition. He testified before both grand juries and state trials, resulting in a coercion conviction for Avellino. When a researcher for the RAND Corporation, a policy think tank, published a lengthy study on the racketeers and their carting monopoly, Kubecka was featured as the essay’s star.

Robert Kubecka wasn’t your average garbage hauler. He was an ardent environmentalist with a master’s degree. He had taken over the carting company from his father, running it with his brother-in-law, Barstow. Kubecka and his wife had a boy and a girl, aged six and eight. Barstow, wed to Kubecka’s sister, had a seven-year-old daughter.

Al first started hearing Avellino’s complaints about the men in late 1988. “He said they shouldn’t be walking around. That an example should be made of them.” Avellino told him that the hit on the two carters had been authorized years ago by Tony Ducks, who shared Avellino’s outrage over their cooperation. The hit had been put on hold in a bid to avoid antagonizing judges ruling on cases involving Luchese members.

What Avellino wanted from Al was permission to use Ray Argentina, the proficient killer who belonged to Al’s Canarsie crew, as the shooter for the hit.

Al balked at the request. Not because he disagreed with the Golfer’s proposed solution, but because he didn’t see why the wealthy Long Island crime captain didn’t use his own gunmen for the mission. “I said, ‘Sal, it’s okay with me. But you’ve got to check it out with Vic and Gas.’”

The Long Island mobster became more determined after federal attorneys in Brooklyn filed a sweeping new civil racketeering lawsuit in June 1989. It named Avellino and his Private Sanitation Industry Association of Nassau and Suffolk. Avellino saw the civil case as leverage for new criminal charges against him. And he viewed the rebels as responsible for that as well. Both Kubecka and Barstow were slated to be witnesses in the civil RICO case.

Avellino eventually confessed to Al another, more complicated motive for wanting the men dead. “Sal told me he felt like a rat. He was worried that people think he was the reason Tony Ducks got nailed in the Commission case, that it was his talk on those tapes that hurt everyone.” Making things worse, Avellino had skated on the charges. He received community service. Corallo took a life sentence.

The go-ahead to have the carters killed was given in early August 1989. It was during a meeting at Sonny Bamboo’s place, Le Parc Night Club, the same spot where Michael Pappadio’s death warrant had been issued. The group was the same as well. Al was at the table with Amuso and Casso. Sal Avellino was there with his brother Carmine. They immediately started laying out everything they knew about the carters’ habits. “They’d done a lot of homework on it. They knew when they arrived each morning in the office. They even had the layout of the place.”

Casso listened to their plans and then waved his hand dismissively. “Do it any way you have to,” he said. Al just listened. He was out of it. Avellino was told to get his own hit men.

The killers struck early on the morning of August 10 when Kubecka and Barstow arrived at their offices in East Northport, on Long Island’s North Shore. Barstow, thirty-five, was shot to death. Kubecka, forty, grappled with one of the gunmen, scratching him badly enough to leave a trail of blood. The mortally wounded carter made it to the phone to dial 911. He tried to give a description of the assailants. He died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital.

Sal Avellino was ecstatic over the successful double hit. “Good, those rat cocksuckers are gone,” he said when Al saw him after the murders. As he spoke, he chopped his hand down as though beheading his now deceased antagonists.

Casso seemed amused by the whole thing. At a dinner with Al and Amuso at Gargiulo’s in Coney Island, he remarked how Avellino had a huge load off his shoulders. “The Golfer can breathe easier now. He can stick his chest out. Thanks to us, he doesn’t have to go around thinking he’s a rat anymore.”

*   *   *

It was to be a summer of murder.

It was one thing to push the mob envelope by killing a pair of civilian businessmen who had stuck their necks out by complaining to law enforcement. It was another to actually kill a member of law enforcement itself.

A few months earlier, a twenty-eight-year-old drug dealer associated with the Bonanno crime family had done just that. Costabile “Gus” Farace shot a veteran Drug Enforcement Administration agent who had been working undercover to bust a cocaine ring. Farace shot the undercover agent four times in the head and chest after luring him to a dead-end street in a remote spot on Staten Island to discuss a drug sale. Everett Hatcher was wearing a radio transmitter, but his backup team from a DEA-FBI task force lost contact with him before he could radio the location of the meeting. They found him an hour later, slumped dead in his car.

The result was the kind of heat that Luciano’s no-kill rules had been designed to avoid. The shooting deaths of Kubecka and Barstow were reported in a handful of news articles after their murders. Hatcher’s killing brought hundreds of bulletins. A smiling photo of him ran in newspapers and magazines and on television around the world.

At age forty-six, Everett Hatcher was a twelve-year veteran agent. An African American, he had served in the Army and as a New York City high school physical education teacher. He was a big man with a warm smile and a wide mustache. He hadn’t even brought a gun with him to the meeting with Farace.

He was the first agent killed since 1972 and the first drug agent ever slain in New York. The death sparked the largest manhunt in years. Five hundred DEA agents were assigned to find the killer. They already had Farace’s name as the prime suspect. Anyone remotely connected with him had agents and cops pounding at the door.

Mobsters were rousted in their clubhouses and at home. Even the president of the United States got into the act. George H. W. Bush invited Hatcher’s widow and two sons to the White House, declaring that “open season” on cops was over. United States attorney general Dick Thornburgh vowed that when caught, Farace would be the first to face the death penalty under a new federal law.

The Mafia had the same idea, under its own long-standing laws.

Al knew the rule without being reminded. “Gus Farace had to go. You kill an agent, or a cop, or a reporter, and you’re dead.” The Luchese leaders felt the pressure as well. Agents came to Amuso’s home asking what he knew about Farace. Nothing, he told them. Detectives pulled him over on the street, asking the same questions all over again. After Amuso was grabbed a third time, the tactic began to have its effect.

Actually, Amuso knew quite a bit. Ralph Cuomo took a break from his own drug dealing at Ray’s Pizza on Prince Street to whisper to his boss that one of Amuso’s own men was hiding Farace. “Raffie was making points, ratting on a guy named Johnny Petrucelli, a member that Vic had made himself. Raffie was telling him that Johnny was hiding Farace.”

Petrucelli was forty-seven years old. He had spent ten years on the run himself in the 1970s, hiding from a manslaughter conviction in which he’d helped kill two men in a Bronx bar. He later became friendly with both Vic Amuso and his brother, Bobby. Vic had given him his button and assigned him to Bobby’s crew.

While doing time in prison, Petrucelli also got to know Gus Farace, a muscular young hood serving a sentence for his own manslaughter rap. In a brutal episode, Farace had beaten a teenage boy to death after the teen tried to pick him up in a Greenwich Village bar. In prison, Farace bulked up in the weight room with the help of smuggled steroids. When another inmate threatened to drop a set of weights on Petrucelli’s head, Farace intervened, saving the older inmate’s life. After he was paroled in 1988, Farace started dealing drugs with a gang in Staten Island. When he desperately needed to hide after shooting the undercover agent, he sought out his old pal from prison for help. Petrucelli dispatched him to an upstate hideaway, a cabin in the woods where he could safely hide.

Al rightly shouldn’t have had any involvement in what came next. Petrucelli was in Bobby Amuso’s crew, so if he was breaking the rules by hiding a cop killer whose execution had been ordered by the mob, it was the Amuso brothers’ problem. But Bobby Amuso was in bad shape, suffering from lung cancer. And in the late summer, after months of law enforcement harassment, Vic Amuso turned to Al when he found out one of his own men was hiding Farace. Al’s pager buzzed while he was at the restaurant. He returned the call from one of the nearby pay phones.

Amuso sounded rattled. The police were all over him, he said. And he was furious about what he’d been told about Petrucelli. “He said I should reach out to Johnny Petrucelli and call him down. He said I should tell him to either kill Farace right away or else shoot himself.”

Al was surprised at the note of panic in the boss’s voice. But he quickly went to work leaving messages for Petrucelli to call him. By the time the call came in he was already out of patience. “You know who this is?” Al demanded. Petrucelli said he did.

“You’ve got to get down here right now,” Al told him. Petrucelli started offering excuses why he couldn’t make it. He didn’t have a choice in the matter, Al said.

Petrucelli showed up a couple of hours later. They spoke briefly on the street; then Al took him down to the basement of La Donna Rosa. He didn’t give Petrucelli a chance to argue. “You’re pinched,” Al told him. “Everybody knows you’re hiding this guy out.” Petrucelli didn’t deny it.

He relayed Amuso’s message. “He said you either shoot Farace right away, or shoot yourself.” The body should be left in a place law enforcement would find it, Al added.

Petrucelli began to protest but Al interrupted him. “Are you listening to what I’m telling you?”

Petrucelli visibly sagged. “All right, all right,” he said.

“If you want me to help you, I will,” Al offered. “But it’s gotta get done.”

“No. I got him upstate in the woods. He sees anyone else he’ll start shooting.”

“Okay,” Al said. “Just go do it.” He watched as Petrucelli bolted up the stairs.

But Petrucelli couldn’t bring himself to kill his friend. A couple of his own crew members were delivering food to the fugitive in his upstate hideaway, and he delegated the task to them. Farace, however, was already on full alert. The crew members reported back that the fugitive was heavily armed and extremely nervous. They couldn’t make a move without a fight, they said.

Petrucelli relayed the situation to D’Arco. “I said, ‘That’s not good enough. This is not me talking, Johnny. This is the boss. You got to shoot Farace.’”

On another run upstate, the crew members couldn’t even find the cop killer. He was hiding out in the woods someplace, they believed. “He’s gone Rambo,” they reported back.

A frustrated Petrucelli called another friend, a Luchese associate named Frank Gioia, to meet him for a drink. They met at a bar in Yonkers. Petrucelli told Gioia about Amuso’s directive.

“Gus is a good guy,” he moaned. “He doesn’t deserve to die for this.” He wondered aloud why the mob would do the government’s work. “We’re our own government,” he said. “We shouldn’t be doing this.” He added that he was ready to kill both Amuso and Casso over the jam they’d put him in. He was the only one who could probably get close enough to kill his friend, he said. But he couldn’t do it. “We were in prison together,” he said. “We’re too close.”

Gioia offered to accompany the crew members upstate on their next groceries delivery and try the hit himself. Petrucelli was grateful. “If you get him,” he told Gioia, “you have to shave him before you ditch the body. He’s got a big beard and they’ve got to be able to recognize him.”

At a supermarket on the way upstate, Gioia and the crew members stopped to buy groceries. As they left, he thought he spotted police surveillance. Spooked, he called off the operation and headed back to the city. By then, Petrucelli had run out of time.

Al got the call from Anthony Casso. “Gas said Vic and him wanted me to go up to the Bronx to see Mike Salerno, the captain up there. He said I should tell Salerno he wanted him to kill Johnny Petrucelli for refusing the order.” Casso had further instructions: he said to be sure and tell Salerno to have a young associate named Joe Cosentino carry out the hit. Known as “Joey Blue Eyes,” Cosentino was related to Tom Mix Santoro, the jailed-for-life former underboss of the family.

Michael Salerno was a veteran captain in the family’s Bronx branch. He had been close to Christy Tick Furnari and had grown wealthy with a hefty portfolio of loans on the street. He lived in an upscale town in Westchester County, wore expensive jewelry, and drove luxury cars, a Jaguar and a Cadillac. His base of operations was a triangular brick building at the corner of Williamsbridge Road and Allerton Avenue in the northeast Bronx, where he ruled from a storefront under a sign reading “Larry’s Tobacco and Candy.”

Shorty DiPalo drove Al up. He met Salerno at the tobacco shop and the two of them took a walk around the corner. Al relayed the orders in the most formal terms he could summon. He lapsed into Italian to avoid naming Amuso and Casso.

“I said, ‘Mike, your rappresentanti have sent me with this message. The rappresentanti want you to kill Johnny Petrucelli and to use Joey Blue Eyes on it.’”

Salerno looked at Al in alarm. Petrucelli’s close ties to the Amuso brothers were well known. “Do you know what you’re talking about, Al?” he said. “That’s Vic’s guy.”

Al held up a hand. “Mike, I’m telling you the way they relayed it to me. This is what they want, and they want it right away.”

Salerno just nodded. He spun around, walking quickly back toward the tobacco shop. Al followed behind, headed to where DiPalo was waiting. He looked up when he heard a car roar past. It was Mike Salerno in his Cadillac racing away.

A few days later, Al heard that Petrucelli had been killed. The hit had been a mess, however. Both shooters, Joey Cosentino and another member of Salerno’s crew, Anthony Magana, had been caught.

On September 13, 1989, the killers had knocked on the door of the apartment of Petrucelli’s girlfriend in White Plains. When the man they were looking for answered, the gunmen fired. Wounded, Petrucelli staggered back to a bedroom where he had a rifle hidden, an M16. The shooters fled. Petrucelli made it out to the street, only to collapse in front of the building.

Out on the street, the gunmen panicked. Cosentino took off in a car, leaving Magana behind. Magana tried to walk away but was grabbed by police responding to the report of shots fired. Cosentino was arrested later.

Al got the details from Mike Salerno, who came down to Cleveland Place to see him. They walked up to the bank building at the corner of Spring Street to talk. There had been at least five witnesses, Salerno told him.

“Mike had the names of the witnesses. He said he’d already laid out $27,000 in expenses for lawyers for Cosentino and Magana. He said the killing had brought real heat. The cops were all over him, agents were on him all the time. He was very worried.”

Al relayed the Bronx captain’s concerns to Casso. The underboss wasn’t sympathetic. “Tell him to lay out the money himself,” said Casso. “Go tell him that for me.”

Al drove back up to the Bronx. He found Salerno at an auto shop on Boston Post Road run by Joey Giampa, a member of Salerno’s crew. “I told Mike what Gas had said about paying the lawyers’ expenses himself. Mike didn’t say a word. He just listened.”

A few weeks after Petrucelli’s execution, Farace was rubbed out as well. It wasn’t the Luchese crews that got him. A trio of would-be mobsters from Farace’s own Bonanno crime family looking to make a name for themselves caught up to him as he cruised through Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, in a van. Police initially had a hard time recognizing the most wanted man in New York behind his thick beard.

Frank Gioia, who knew Petrucelli could have saved his own life by going up to the woods to kill his friend, heard a rumor that bounced around in the days after the murders. It put a different spin on the deadly events. Vic Amuso, the rumor went, was seeing John Petrucelli’s wife, the widow of the man he’d ordered killed.

*   *   *

Just four days after Petrucelli was gunned down, another murder prescription was filled. The Petrucelli killing had been spurred by panic, but it was presented as a bid to uphold Mafia rules and honor. There was no disguising this one. It was sparked by blatant self-interest on the part of the Luchese bosses. It was also premised on another lie.

In late June, the mobsters in the four crime families who had been sharing the glorious profits of replacing windows in low-income apartments got confirmation of what Casso and Amuso had warned them about two years earlier: Pete Savino was indeed a rat. He had been wearing a wire for the FBI for over a year, recording conversations with many of the key players in the scheme.

It was too late to do anything about Savino, already rushed into the witness protection program. But Amuso and Casso decided that as a precaution they should get rid of the next possible weak link.

John Morrissey was a business agent for Local 580 of the ornamental ironworkers union, whose members had installed most of the replacement windows. Morrissey was an old friend of Amuso, who had helped bring his pal into the fold. Known as “Sonny Blue,” the ironworkers’ leader had been an enthusiastic participant. Legitimate outside bidders got his warning that every window they installed would be smashed.

Savino had dealt closely with the union official, passing him regular payoffs. Amuso’s assumption, given Savino’s cooperation, was that some bribes had been monitored by the FBI. He was right about that. Agents had observed more than a dozen hand-to-hand payments from Savino to Sonny Blue. But nothing suggested that Morrissey, a tough Irishman, was cooperating with investigators. Amuso still decided to have his friend taken out.

The contract was passed by Casso to Pete Chiodo, the whale-sized capo, who was active in the construction industry and had worked with Morrissey. “Sonny’s talking,” Casso told him. He was to kill him and bury the body where it wouldn’t be found. Chiodo, aware of the friendship between Amuso and the union man, expressed surprise.

Casso nodded. “Sonny was Vic’s friend,” he said with a sharp look at the captain. “Imagine what he’d do to you.”

Chiodo contacted Morrissey. He told him that Amuso needed to see him to talk about Savino’s cooperation. To put Morrissey at his ease, Chiodo brought along another Luchese associate, Thomas Carew, known as “Tommy Irish.” They picked him up in Chiodo’s wife’s maroon Chrysler convertible. Chiodo drove with Carew seated next to him upfront. Morrissey sat in back. He seemed relaxed and pleased to be going to see his pal Vic.

They chatted on the way out to Morris County, New Jersey, where Chiodo was helping build a new housing development called Hidden Hills in Jefferson Township. It was about a fifty-mile drive. At one point Morrissey asked how long it was going to take. “We’re almost there,” Chiodo told him.

When they got to the development—a series of half-constructed homes around a man-made lake—another Chiodo associate, Richard Pagliarulo, welcomed them at the little model house used as an office by the developers. Chiodo said he would go find Vic and headed out the back door. As Morrissey turned to watch him go, Pagliarulo reached under a folded newspaper and pulled out a pistol with a silencer. The ironworker saw the move and instantly understood what was happening. He whirled around. Just as Pagliarulo fired, Morrissey shouted his innocence. “I’m not a rat!” he yelled.

Pagliarulo fired again but his pistol jammed. Morrissey lay writhing on the floor of the little office. He was trying to prop himself up on one arm. “It hurts,” he said. “Finish me.”

Carew had a backup gun he hadn’t planned to use, since it didn’t have a silencer. It was a five-shot snub-nosed revolver.

Carew fired four times. He stopped when Pagliarulo signaled him he had cleared the jam in his own pistol. Morrissey was flat on his back, making a low, moaning sound. Pagliarulo stepped in close. He fired once into his head at close range. Sonny Blue stopped moving.

Out back, another member of Chiodo’s crew, Michael DeSantis, used a backhoe to dig a hole. He wasn’t very good at it. He slashed a gash in a trailer home with the backhoe’s bucket. The hole he dug was uneven, four feet deep at one end, two feet at the other. They carried Morrissey’s body over anyway and threw it in. They took his wallet first.

In the car on the way back, they tore Morrissey’s license and papers into pieces and let them flutter out the top of the convertible. Chiodo asked Carew if he thought that Morrissey really was a rat. Tommy Irish told him what the union official had shouted just as he was shot. Probably not, they decided. Still, even if he wasn’t cooperating, they consoled themselves, they’d done their jobs.

*   *   *

That same summer the Luchese bosses switched their orders from retail to wholesale murder. The family’s entire New Jersey faction should be wiped out, Amuso and Casso declared. There were at least a dozen members and associates in the group. “Kill them all, they’re outlaws,” Amuso shouted during a meeting with Casso and Al.

The immediate cause of his fury was the refusal of the crew’s wealthy captain, a gangster named Anthony “Tumac” Accetturo, to agree to pass along a larger share of his earnings. Accetturo was “a rat,” the bosses said. Their anger was compounded when the rest of the crew, terrified that they were being set up for their own slaughter, refused to show up at meetings to which they’d been summoned.

Al did his best to mediate, making a late-night visit to the home of a top crew member, Michael Perna, to encourage him to settle the problem. “Mike, nobody’s here to hurt you,” he shouted through the basement window as Perna fearfully peered out at him. Despite his appeals, the faction refused to comply, convinced that the Luchese chieftains would kill them at the first opportunity. Only luck and poor hunting skills on the part of the mobsters assigned to carry out the contracts kept the body count from growing.

*   *   *

That fall, the Luchese family leaders marked their harvest by inducting new members. The ceremony took place in November, just before Thanksgiving.

“We did it in the basement of Petey Vario’s nephew’s house in Canarsie.” Amuso and Casso presided. Most of the family’s captains were present, including Al, Sal Avellino, Pete Chiodo, and Bobby Amuso, despite his ill health. Anthony Baratta, a wealthy capo based in East Harlem, was present as well. Frank Lastorino, who was making his own small fortune handling Gaspipe Casso’s end of a massive scheme orchestrated by Russian mobsters to steal gasoline taxes, also showed up.

Five soldiers were inducted. Included were two of those who had helped carry out the messy execution of Sonny Morrissey a few weeks earlier. Richie Pagliarulo, whose nickname was “the Toupe” pronounced “toop” for the hairpiece he wore to make himself look years younger, got his reward. So did Mike DeSantis, the fumbling backhoe operator.

Another inductee, Al noted with interest, was a sixty-one-year-old heroin dealer from Pleasant Avenue in East Harlem. Frank Federico had been around the Luchese family for years. Al had run into him a few times, including in prison. Thanks to his steady drug dealing, dating back to the 1960s, Federico had never been viewed as soldier material. Everyone called him “Frankie Pearl.” He’d gone gray waiting to be made.

Al had never asked for details, but his understanding from Sal Avellino was that Frankie Pearl had been one of the gunmen who killed the two rebel carters on Long Island that summer. It was Federico who had suffered the deep gashes from Robert Kubecka’s nails as he fought for life. The mob didn’t give Purple Hearts. But it did award buttons.

*   *   *

Amuso, who had seemed so unsure of himself when he first took the reins of the family, was clearly enjoying being the boss. His nickname, when it was used, had always been “Little Vic.” At five foot six, he was about an inch shorter than Al, who had long been stuck with the moniker “Little Al.” That winter, Vic decided he wanted a new name. “He told us all he wants to be known as ‘Jesse’ from now on. Like Jesse James.”

On the street, however, the bosses instructed their troops, names were to be omitted altogether. From now on, the Luchese leaders would be referred to in furtive gestures, the same way that Genovese members pointed to their chins when indicating their own boss, Gigante. Two fingers pointed up, forming a V, meant Vic Amuso. Flipped down, the same two fingers stood for Anthony Casso. Vic and Anthony. Mob sign language.

They altered their costumes as well. Amuso and Casso began dressing like outlaws of old, wearing long black leather coats reaching down to their heels. Amuso added a wide black fedora to his attire. “He looked like Al Pacino in The Godfather. Then I notice he’s walking like him too, long strides, like he’d been practicing.”

Anthony Casso had never lacked for self-assurance. But now he reveled in the riches that flowed his way as the number two leader of the family. He filled his house in Brooklyn’s Bergen Beach with wide-screen televisions. He developed a taste for expensive wine. Visitors to his home were shown the jeroboam of rare champagne he’d purchased. He kept the huge vessel prominently in his living room nestled in a wooden holder, carefully tilted toward the cork.

He delighted in showing how little he cared about the cost. He bragged to Al how how he and his garment center adviser, Sidney Lieberman, had given a sommelier at an expensive restaurant a minor heart attack. “They were at the Forge, a high-class steakhouse in Miami. A lot of wiseguys went there. He calls over the wine steward and asks for the most expensive bottle, it’s like $10,000. The wine guy is thrilled. But he says, ‘You sure you want it? Because once we open it…’ And Gaspipe says, ‘Yeah, bring it up.’ So he goes through the whole thing, and pours a glass. And Gas tells him, ‘Bring me a Coke.’ The wine guy says, ‘You want a Coca-Cola?’ Gas says, ‘Yeah.’ When the soda arrived, he poured it into the wine. The wine steward almost faints. Gas would crack up telling that story.”

He also tolerated no slights, real or imagined. “I’m at his house for dinner one night and we’re in this shed he’s got in his backyard. And he shows me how his neighbor’s yard was elevated above his. It made him nuts. The neighbor is standing right there above him on the other side of the fence. He says, ‘I want to kill the guy. We’ll get him over here and we can kill him right here in the shed.’ Gas’s wife, Lillian, was in the house cooking dinner, and he wants to kill the guy. I said, ‘Let’s think about it, Anthony.’ The nut was ready to do it.”

The underboss voiced even darker fantasies. “He had this plan, we were going to buy a house in Canarsie. He had it picked out, it was going to cost $70,000. He says it’s got a big basement with a dining room table down there. He said, ‘We’re going to invite ten guys I hate for dinner, get them down there and kill them right before they eat.’”

Al listened. He had no idea if he was serious.

*   *   *

Late that year, the crime bosses in their long black coats expanded their reach by ordering a murder on the other side of the country. Anthony DiLapi, a union racketeer who led a small Teamsters local in the Bronx, had long been on their hit list. DiLapi was the fellow wiseguy who had feuded with Al at the Allenwood prison camp when Al had chided him for hanging around with an informant. DiLapi had fired back, threatening to use his connections to his uncle, then underboss Tom Mix Santoro, to have Al reprimanded or worse for his drug-dealing conviction.

Al wasn’t fond of DiLapi, but he’d long ago put the fight at Allenwood in his rearview mirror. “To me it was forgotten about.”

Amuso and Casso were less forgiving. What they wouldn’t forget was that DiLapi was an ally of both Santoro and another member of the Bronx faction named Buddy Luongo, who had briefly been a leading candidate for boss. Santoro had been grooming Luongo for years to take over his rackets. He was a regular at meetings at the Santoro Beverage Company on Morris Park Avenue in the Bronx, where Tom Mix often held court.

The way Amuso and Casso told it, Luongo and DiLapi had been part of a plot by Tom Mix to seize power in the family in 1986. The plot was hatching just as Santoro and Tony Ducks Corallo were being convicted in federal court. But as Vic and Gas repeatedly told the story to Al, only fast footwork on their part had saved the day.

They first took care of Luongo. Claiming they needed to consult with him about an intra-crime-family dispute, Luongo was lured to the 19th Hole, the Bensonhurst bar. From there, he was coaxed to a nearby house owned by one of Amuso’s pals. Amuso sat with him in the kitchen for a few minutes, chatting. Then he excused himself and went into a bedroom, where he retrieved a pistol with a silencer hidden under a pillow. He walked back into the kitchen and killed Luongo, forty-seven, with three shots to the head.

The body was buried someplace in Canarsie. Luongo’s car was driven to Kennedy Airport and abandoned. He was another guy who must have run away with a girl.

But that was only one offender in what Amuso and Casso viewed as foul rebellion in their ranks. Another Bronx veteran, Mariano Macaluso, had been a member of the family for fifty years, growing wealthy from his own garment center holdings and other businesses. Macaluso had briefly served as acting consigliere for the family. But after Amuso took over, Macaluso, at age seventy, was summarily evicted from his post. “They gave him a choice: retire or die. So he went.”

Next up was Anthony DiLapi. The new bosses summoned him to Brooklyn to account for all his holdings and activities. Having witnessed Macaluso’s forced retirement, and how well Buddy Luongo had fared on his own visit to Brooklyn, DiLapi never showed up. Word soon filtered back that he had fled to California, saying he wanted to sever his ties to the crime family. Nothing doing, said Amuso and Casso.

They had been trying to locate him for two years when, in late summer of 1989, Amuso called Al to tell him he had a job and an address for him. The job was to snuff out DiLapi. He didn’t want Al to do it himself. He wanted Joseph and two of the other new recruits to handle it.

The details were provided at a meeting at a popular Chinese restaurant called Joy Tang in a shopping mall off of Rockaway Parkway. “Gaspipe told me he wanted to send ‘the kids’ out to California. That’s what he called Joseph, George Zappola, and George Conte. He had an address for Anthony DiLapi he said he got from his source. I asked him about expenses, and he said to take $10,000 out and give it to the kids. He said Pete the Killer’s son Joey Abinanti was out there and that he’d help them get around.”

Casso gave Al a handwritten piece of paper with a Los Angeles address. He said he’d gotten it from the cops, as he sometimes referred to his tipster. Al assumed anything Casso said about his precious law enforcement source was disinformation. “I figured he said things to throw you off.”

The address was written in code, and Casso had to show Al how to puzzle it out.

If Al had major reservations about sending his son to a state with the death penalty still on the books to commit murder, he didn’t show it. One good reason to get Joseph off the hook would have been to argue that he was on probation for the 1986 gun-possession rap.

For Joseph, that wasn’t an obstacle, though. He was eager. He wanted to finally show what he could do. He and the two Georges boarded a flight to Los Angeles in the late fall of 1989. Airport screening was lax enough that Joseph was able to smuggle aboard a knife in his luggage. He figured that would be all he’d need for the job.

They got to L.A. to find the address was a bust. It led them to a used-car lot where DiLapi had once worked. He was long gone. They had a picture of him, but he was nowhere to be seen. They had a gun, thanks to a delivery from a Luchese member who drove in from Las Vegas. But they had no one to shoot. They were three young men in a city of 3.5 million people. None of them had ever been there before. They had no idea where to even look.

Joey Abinanti helped them out as best he could, giving them a place to stay. Joseph grew his hair long and let his beard grow out. He wrapped a bandanna around his head, affecting a motorcycle gang look as cover. The two Georges seemed more interested in the local bar scene. They went out to the beach and got tattoos at one of the joints on the boardwalk.

With no good leads, and no prospects of getting any, the hit team returned to New York. They ended up making three coast-to-coast trips in the quest to find their target. In January 1990, Casso’s source came up with a new address. This one was for a mob-owned gay club called La Cage Aux Folles where DiLapi was supposed to be working. Joseph, figuring he was now on the right scent, rounded up a Luchese associate who specialized in stealing cars and brought him back with him to L.A. “He needed a couple of work cars, cars you steal for a hit that can’t be traced back to you.”

The second address was on the money. After a couple of nights staking out the club, they spotted DiLapi and followed him to his home in Hollywood. He lived in an apartment house complex with an underground garage where he parked his car. It was the likely spot for the hit.

Shortly after dawn on February 4, 1990, Joseph hitched a ride in the back of Zappola’s car into the garage. He slid out the back door and waited behind DiLapi’s automobile. He sat there in the dark watching the elevator entrance, waiting for his target to arrive. He got anxious as other residents came and went. When DiLapi finally appeared, he was carrying suit bags over his shoulder. Joseph jumped up, pointing his weapon. “Oh my God!” shouted DiLapi. He began to run.

Joseph steadied himself and fired twice. DiLapi fell. He shot him four more times as he lay on the ground. The escape wasn’t perfect. As he was stepping into the getaway car, a man stared at him. Joseph pointed his gun and the witness fled.

Photos of the fifty-three-year-old used-car salesman slain gangland-style in a Hollywood garage showed DiLapi, his shirt riding high over his stomach, spread-eagled on the concrete floor, blood pooled bedside his head. He had several rumpled pieces of clothing next to him. His daughter, Mary Ann, explained that he was on his way to the dry cleaners when he was killed. She had talked to her father the day before on the phone. He was looking forward to seeing his new six-week-old grandson for the first time.

After the shooting, the killers split up. Conte and Zappola traveled back to New York separately. Joey Abinanti drove Joseph to Phoenix, where he caught a flight home.

Al drove out to Paerdegat Basin, a shorefront area of Canarsie where Joseph was living, to see his son and hear the story of his first murder. Now they were both killers.

Al went from there to Howard Beach to report in to Vic Amuso. He stopped a couple of blocks away and walked to the big split-level house. Vic was waiting for him.

“We went upstairs. Vic had this little den in his place and we talked up there. I gave him the report. He was pleased. He said the kids had done a good job but they should just be quiet about it, that they should never talk about it to anyone.”

*   *   *

In the early spring of 1990, the one menacing cloud on the Luchese bosses’ horizon was Pete Savino and the windows scam. By the time the crime families had pulled back, the racket had expanded far beyond the city Housing Authority projects. Every hotel, college, hospital, and high-rise apartment house ordering replacement windows had been a target. The profits had been immense. Now so was the threat.

There was no question in their minds that they would eventually be charged. Months earlier, on October 1, 1989, the Daily News had identified Savino as a cooperating witness in the case. Amuso and Casso were targets. The federal probe was being led by a pair of determined Brooklyn prosecutors named Gregory O’Connell and Charles Rose, along with Mario DiNatale from the federal Organized Crime Strike Force.

The Luchese bosses spent a lot of time trying to figure out who else, aside from the late Sonny Blue Morrissey, might present a problem as a potential witness should the case go to trial. Going down the long list of players, Amuso’s finger stopped at a contractor named Mike Realmuto who had figured in several of the windows deals.

Al was called out to Cross Bay Boulevard to meet Amuso at the office of Richie Oddo, the lawyer. They walked around the corner to Rico Place, the same spot where Vic had given Al his instructions about Red Gilmore. “He told me to get a team to kill this Mike. To get it done right away. That’s all I knew, the name and that he had something to do with the windows business.”

As a favor to Bruno Facciola, who was in bad health, Al assigned one of Bruno’s brothers, Louis, to the hit. “I had promised Bruno when he got sick I would try and help his brother get straightened out. I said I’d do the best I could, so I figured having him on the job would help his chances.” He also ordered Danny Cutaia, the crafty loan shark who handled Paul Vario’s book of debts, to help.

The contractor’s office was in Canarsie, so Al figured Cutaia and Facciola would know the territory. A few days later, Cutaia reported back to Al that they had waited near Realmuto’s business, armed and ready to shoot, but that each time they’d seen the contractor he was with a woman. Al told them to keep at it.

The bosses were impatient, demanding to know what was taking so long. Casso told Al to meet him out on Canarsie Pier, a popular fishing spot that juts into Jamaica Bay at the foot of Rockaway Parkway. It also held a restaurant, Abbracciamento on the Pier, a favored meeting spot for wiseguys. Al had one of his drivers, Frank “Harpo” Trapani, take him there.

When they arrived, Casso was irate. “Gaspipe was yelling that Louie Facciola and Danny Cutaia were dogging it. He wanted to know how long is this going to take.” Al also suspected that his men were less than committed to the assignment. But he defended his crew members to his mob superior. His defense was undermined when Louie Facciola came walking up. “He’s got a fishing rod on his shoulder. I couldn’t believe it. He’s supposed to be out trying to hit a guy and this boob is going fishing.” Casso shook his head in disbelief. Al laughed at himself. “I said, ‘See how hard he’s working?’” He then grabbed Facciola, warning him that he had one more chance.

On the drive back to the city, Al thought about how nervous and agitated the usually well-controlled Casso was behaving. The windows investigation must be pretty hot, he thought.

Two days later, the bosses made a complete reversal. “Vic beeps me and when I call him back he says to forget about that thing. He was telling me that the hit was off.” When he saw Amuso the following day, the boss explained that the four crime families involved in the windows racket had held a council about how to cope with the investigation. “He said they were putting any hits on the side for the time being. They were worried that it would hurt them at bail hearings.”

*   *   *

Except that Amuso and Casso were planning to skip any possible bail hearings. In fact, they had decided to skip town altogether when the windows indictments came down.

On the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend, Casso called Al and told him he needed to see him immediately. He said he’d be waiting for him by “the cannon.” It was their shorthand name for the small park at the foot of Fort Hamilton Parkway in Bay Ridge beneath the soaring Verazzano-Narrows span to Staten Island. It was a convenient and quiet spot for sharing mob secrets.

Trapani drove Al out to Brooklyn. Al had him park a couple of blocks away and wait. He found Casso sitting on a park bench near a large antique cannon, a monument from the War of 1812 aimed at the nearby bay.

They walked through the park. “Gaspipe said the arrests were coming down in a couple of days and he was going on the lam. He said Vic was already gone.”

Al wasn’t surprised the bosses were going underground. The strategy was to stay away for a while and wait to see what the evidence in the case was and let things cool down. It was a tried and true Mafia tactic. But he wondered why Amuso had fled without giving Al a heads-up. “I said, ‘What do you mean he already went? We were just together a few days ago and he didn’t say anything. He didn’t say good-bye.’”

“No, he took off,” said Casso.

“What are you doing still here?” asked Al. “You’d better get out of here too.”

“I’ve got time,” answered Casso. “I’ve got a few things to do at my house tomorrow.”

Al didn’t understand. “How do you know they’re not waiting for you at the house? You’re going to be pinched. What’s the difference you leave today or tomorrow?”

Casso repeated that he knew the timetable. “I’ve got time,” he said again. His information was solid. His law enforcement source, he said, had let him know exactly when the arrests were coming down.

They kept walking, circling through the park back past the cannon. “I’ll contact you through Georgie Neck,” Casso said, using George Zappola’s nickname. He had another instruction as well.

“Me and Vic want you to kill Mike,” he said.

Al wasn’t sure who he was talking about. Mike the contractor? Mike the capo? “Mike?” he asked. “Mike who?”

“Mike Salerno,” said Casso. “He’s a rat. We want you to do it right away.”

Al was still confused. He considered Salerno, the Luchese captain in the Bronx, an old-school gangster, a family veteran and one of the least likely ever to turn. “Mike’s a rat? Are you sure?” he said.

Casso had been talking quietly and calmly up until that point. But the question made him snap. “I said he’s a rat,” he exploded, jabbing his finger at Al. “Me and Vic found out. You’ve got to do it right away,” he repeated.

They walked a few paces in silence. Then Casso asked Al who he would use for the murder. Al’s head was spinning. For a moment he couldn’t remember anyone’s name. Who should kill Mike? There was a right answer he knew, he just had to remember it. “Joey,” he finally said, referring to the Bronx soldier whose auto shop on Boston Post Road had become a part-time headquarters for Salerno. “Joey Giampa knows Mike good. I’ll use him.”

Casso lurched again. “No!” he barked. “Don’t trust that guy.”

Al was now thoroughly baffled. “Don’t trust him?” he said. He looked at Gaspipe, who was glowering, staring at the ground.

Then the underboss visibly relaxed, regaining his composure. “Okay,” Casso said. “Okay. Whoever you trust, use them. Just make sure you do it right away.”

Al promised to take care of it. Casso walked on, mentioning some other items that would need Al’s attention. He stopped back by the cannon. “We’ll be in touch,” he said. “Only do the important things, don’t bother with the small things. We’ll see you.”

Al looked and was surprised to see tears in Casso’s eyes. The underboss was crying. He embraced Al in a hug. Al felt himself tearing up as well.

This is something, he thought, as he hugged him good-bye. Two wiseguys hugging and crying in a park.

Casso turned and walked away toward Fort Hamilton Parkway. Al saw him get into a car. He thought he saw George Conte, one of the kids who had flown out to Los Angeles with Joseph to kill Anthony DiLapi, at the wheel. Al walked in the other direction.

It sounded like he left me in control of things, he thought as he headed toward Harpo Trapani waiting patiently in his car.