14

FOSTER AVENUE

Three days after Anthony Casso’s tearful good-bye at the little park beside the soaring bridge in Brooklyn, the arrests in what came to be known as “the Windows case” came down exactly as he said they would.

On the morning of Wednesday, May 30, 1990, federal agents and New York City police detectives fanned out across the metropolitan area to pick up fifteen defendants named in the indictment. Agents found the boss of the Genovese crime family, Vincent Gigante, in his eighty-eight-year-old mother’s walk-up apartment on Sullivan Street, just down the block from his social club. Gigante was sixty-two years old. It was his first arrest since his 1959 heroin bust with Vito Genovese. The crime boss was wearing a pair of striped pajamas when the FBI arrived. Agents gave him a chance to put on some clothes. He mumbled, then pulled on a tattered, hooded bathrobe. Photos of him in his sleepwear and robe, agents on both sides, ran the next day around the world.

Two of Gigante’s top captains dressed for the occasion. War hero Benny Eggs Mangano was arrested a few blocks away at his apartment on Charlton Street. Also picked up was Dominic “Baldy Dom” Canterino. The pair had handled day-to-day matters of the windows scam for Gigante, meeting frequently with Pete Savino.

Agents also grabbed Benedetto Aloi, the Colombo family consigliere who had helped dispose of Mike Pappadio’s body after last summer’s murder. Peter Gotti, John and Gene’s older brother, who had started out as a city sanitation worker, was the main Gambino family figure on the indictment roster.

But some of the arresting officers returned empty-handed. Prosecutors said ironworkers union official Sonny Morrissey had escaped their dragnet. No one yet knew his body had been lying for months in the uneven hole out in Morris County.

Also missing in action were the men who gave the order to put him there. Vittorio Amuso and Anthony Casso were officially declared fugitives. But prosecutors had no doubts about their role. The absentee defendants were described as the Luchese crime family’s top officials and instrumental in making payoffs to Morrissey and others.

Left holding the bag was Big Pete Chiodo, arrested at his home in Staten Island. Amuso and Casso had slipped out of town without letting their captain know the ax was about to fall.

The case was international news. Dick Thornburgh, the U.S. attorney general who had lost his race with the mob to see who could be the first to execute cop killer Gus Farace, showed up in Brooklyn for the press conference. Thornburgh hailed it as the most significant blow against the mob since the 1986 Commission case.

It was a good catch for the feds. But it had been an audacious crime by the mob. The windows racket was proof that the Mafia still had the reach and the muscle to dig deeply into the public purse. The decade-long scheme had succeeded in rigging $142 million in the Housing Authority’s window-replacement contracts. Greg O’Connell, one of the Brooklyn federal prosecutors handling the case, estimated that the mob had reaped tens of millions of dollars from the caper.

Pete Savino’s name wasn’t mentioned in the indictment, but law enforcement sources told reporters that he was the mob turncoat who had helped make the charges by wearing a wire for eighteen months.

Gigante was held without bail. But it wasn’t much of a punishment. He was allowed to spend the night at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Harrison, New York, where his doctors said he had been receiving psychiatric treatment for the past twenty-four years. A few days later, a judge allowed him to go home to his mother. In court, Gigante’s attorneys began a years-long effort to prove that the oddball godfather was mentally incompetent. His real punishment was having to think about how he had waved off Anthony Casso’s information two years earlier that his friend Savino was cooperating.

*   *   *

The indictments were proof of something else as well: whoever he was, Gaspipe Casso’s source was clearly close to the law enforcement center. As hard as it was for Al to accept that Michael Salerno had “gone bad,” just like Pete Savino, he now set aside his doubts.

He would have arranged the execution regardless. It was one more distasteful chore demanded by the life he had chosen, to follow the orders of his appointed leaders irrespective of his own beliefs or wishes. It was “blood in, blood out,” as he was fond of saying.

Designated hit man Joey Giampa, who had known Salerno most of his life, made the same leap of faith when Al relayed the order.

“I beeped him and had him come downtown. We walked over to the Bowery. I said, ‘Joe, I’m going to tell you a few things you won’t like to hear. I don’t like to hear it myself. You’re going to be shocked. But Mike is no good. He’s a rat.’”

Giampa seemed as stunned as Al had been. But he made no protest. Al went on talking. “They want him killed, and you have to do it. You can use anyone you want to help.”

Unlike Al, Giampa had a quick answer. “I don’t trust anybody,” he said. “Only my own blood. I’ll use my brother, Jay.” Joey and his older brother, Santo, often worked together.

Al nodded. He added an incentive. “They’ll probably make you the captain after this,” he said.

Giampa seemed to brighten. He started thinking aloud. “I’ve got Mike’s car in my garage for repairs right now,” he said.

“Just do it right away,” coaxed Al.

*   *   *

Joey Giampa had been another of those sitting in the crowded parlor in the house in the north Bronx with Al in August 1982 as they waited to have their fingers pricked in the Luchese initiation ceremony. Al hadn’t had a lot to do with him since then. In addition to his auto body shop, Al knew that Giampa and his brother did an active business as loan sharks in the huge Hunts Point Market, the teeming city-owned produce terminal off the Bruckner Expressway in the southeast Bronx. He also knew that, of the two brothers, Joey was considered the tougher and more aggressive.

Al hadn’t had much to do with Mike Salerno, either, aside from the Petrucelli hit and one other notable occasion. That was when Gaspipe Casso, furious that Salerno had sole control of a lucrative construction dump site in Pennsylvania, had used Al as a kind of bad cop to badger the senior Luchese captain.

Even then, Al had watched with admiration as the wealthy mobster tried to talk his way out of trouble. In gangster lingo, Salerno had been “banging down” his earnings from the dump, meaning he was hiding it from the family’s administration, a potentially serious violation of the rules.

“He’s supposed to report everything he’s got going. But he’s got this big dump, out in someplace called Matamoras, where they’ve got trucks dumping construction debris. It was making a lot of money and Gas was saying they didn’t know anything about it.”

Casso had Al drive out and take a look to see what was going on. After Al reported back that the place was humming with activity, Casso instructed him to tell Salerno to join them at a meeting at La Donna Rosa.

“Gas told me he wanted me to lay into Mike, give him a really hard time. I said, ‘Mike’s been around a long time. You really want me to go after him?’ Gas said, ‘Yeah, lay into him.’” At the meeting, Salerno insisted that the dump had always been on the record with the family, and that he’d been sharing its proceeds right along. “Mike kept saying, ‘Trust me, trust me.’”

Al thought he was bluffing, but Casso listened quietly, nodding his head. “So I was the one had to say, ‘Hey, Mike, they never knew. Why should they trust you? What were you thinking?’ Gas just lay back and let me be the tough guy.”

Casso resolved the problem by seizing most of the dump revenue for himself and Amuso. Al was instructed to drive back out to Matamoras and toss the dump supervisor, Salerno’s nephew, off the site. “So I did. I chased Frank Salerno out of there and put Shorty DiPalo and Harpo Trapani on the job.” Salerno’s nephew gave him a hard look when he ordered him off the site.

“Don’t stare so hard,” Al told him. “You’ll be part of the dump. You’ll be staying here.”

When he got a look at the books, Al realized why Casso had been so eager to take over. Some weeks, the dump was taking in more than $100,000 in fees.

Mike Salerno escaped any further punishment. Al thought that might have been because he remained a popular captain. Wise in the ways of mob moneymaking, Salerno, sixty-seven, had largely stayed out of trouble with the law. His rap sheet consisted only of a teenaged robbery conviction in the 1940s, and a weapons charge in 1963. “He was a smart guy, very well respected among all the families. He had a lot of class.”

But Casso and Amuso made clear they had little use for him. “They were always knocking Mike. They said he was disappointed because he thought he should have been made part of the administration after Tony Ducks went to prison, that he was jealous that Vic and guys from Brooklyn were put in charge. They’d say, ‘Keep your eye on him.’”

Al chalked it up to the same Bronx-Brooklyn factional fight that had already resulted in the slayings of two other Bronx veterans, Buddy Luongo and Anthony DiLapi, and the ouster of Mariano Macaluso. Salerno had to know he was on thin ice as well, Al figured. He still wondered if that wasn’t the real reason behind the order to have the capo killed. It certainly made sense. With Gas and Vic on the run, they had to be worried that someone might stage a coup while they were away. A respected leader like Mike Salerno might actually pull it off.

He tried not to think about it too much while he waited to hear back from Joey Giampa.

*   *   *

He didn’t have to wait long.

A few days after receiving his instructions, Giampa and his brother drove to Little Italy to see Al.

“I met him on Broome Street. We took the same walk we had before, over to the Bowery.” Al stepped behind a large van parked along the curb, trying to stay out of sight of passing traffic. “Joe said it was done. He told me he had called Mike to the auto shop to see about his car. When he got there, he shot him through the heart. He said they put him in the trunk of his car. Mike was still making noises, he told me, so they stabbed him in the throat.”

They walked back to where Jay Giampa was parked. Al reached in and patted the brother on the back. “You did good,” Al said.

The news of the murder was relayed to the fugitive bosses via an elaborate communications system. “We had particular pay phones and these set times for calls. And each phone had a number. So the message would be ‘Phone booth two, two o’clock,’ and you’d go to that phone and wait for them to call.”

The designated phone booth that day was out on Long Island, on Glen Cove Road and Northern Boulevard. When the phone rang, it was Casso on the line. Al gave him the report. “He said he was pleased, and so was Vic. But he wanted to know why Joey Giampa had stabbed Mike in the throat. He says, ‘Was there some particular reason why he stabbed him like that? Is it some kind of message?’”

Al didn’t understand the question. He repeated that Giampa had said Salerno had been making noise. Casso said he still wondered about it. “If you want me to check it out, I will,” Al said.

“Yeah, find out, will you?” said Casso.

Al dutifully called Giampa and cryptically asked him about the grisly detail. “Like I said, he was making noise,” Giampa told him. Al reported back to the underboss. “Okay,” said Casso.

It wasn’t the last time the bosses worried over the iconography of their murders. The symbolism of the killings, Al was soon to learn, was almost as important as the killings themselves.

*   *   *

It took police a week to find Mike Salerno’s body. The Giampa brothers had driven his car to a quiet residential block of two-family brick homes in the Wakefield section of the north Bronx, near where Mike Salerno had once ruled supreme at his tobacco shop headquarters.

Al had never asked Joey Giampa which of Mike’s cars they’d used. It was his black Jaguar, a sleek four-door sedan with wire rims and white leather interior. It was registered to his daughter, Julia. No one had reported it stolen. The Jaguar sat abandoned on the street for several days. Everyone left it alone. It clearly belonged to someone important. Then a neighbor washing his own nearby auto noticed the smell. There was also a long dark stain on the street where something had oozed from the back.

When the police popped the trunk they found Salerno’s decomposing body. He was wearing a tan sports coat and had on gold chains, bracelets, and rings. This time, mob protocol had been followed. The Giampa brothers had left him his jewelry.

*   *   *

The same week he was conspiring to kill the respected mob captain in the Bronx, Al had to help cover up someone else’s sloppy killing.

Even by mob standards, this one was brutal and unnecessary. Worse, it was a civilian casualty, someone with no links to the armies of organized crime. He had died only because he’d made the mistake of trying to make peace between a pair of pigheaded young gangsters having an argument. One of them had a gun.

The victim was Ernest Abdul Mateen, a father of nine. An auto mechanic and part-time boxing coach from Bedford-Stuyvesant, Mateen, forty-three, was a black man who belonged to a local Muslim mosque. On a late Friday afternoon after attending prayer services, he had driven his wife to the Brooklyn Terminal Market in Canarsie to buy fruit and vegetables for the weekend. They bought in bulk for their big family, which often brought them to the open-air market that catered to restaurants and hotels around the city.

Mateen paused at stall number 22, Mediterranean Food Distributors, to examine the vegetables. It was a shop that Al had inherited when he took over the Canarsie crew. He was using it as a source of supplies for his restaurant, and as a base for scams at the market, including making sure all the nearby shops had one of the Joker Poker machines that he and Joseph were supplying.

That Friday, Mateen got to the stall in time to encounter an angry argument between two men. One of them was Nicholas Facciolo. Despite the different spelling, he was Bruno Facciola’s younger brother. “Bruno had three brothers and Nicky was the youngest. They called him ‘Nicky No Socks,’ and he often hung around the stall. He wasn’t a kid, he was in his thirties. But he acted like one.”

When Mateen happened upon the argument between Nicky No Socks and Anthony Falsone, a part-time helper at the stand, it was getting physical. Mateen worked with youngsters who often wanted to settle things with their hands. He had trained his son, Ernest Jr., well enough to have won the Daily News’s Golden Gloves light heavyweight boxing championship the past two years in a row.

Mateen stepped between the two men. Facciolo pulled out a .22. He fired at Falsone. The bullet glanced off his elbow. Another shot caught Mateen square in the chest.

The boxing coach staggered to a nearby stall. The owner told him to sit down. “Help me,” the coach said. He died before the ambulance arrived.

When police asked for witnesses, market workers went mum. The listed owner of the stall was a vendor named Anthony Fraggetta. His street name was “Tony Potatoes,” and he owed loan shark debts to both Nicky No Socks and his brother Bruno. Fraggetta drove Falsone to Brookdale Hospital with his wounded wing. Tony Potatoes later claimed he didn’t even know there was another shooting victim. He must have missed it because of his glaucoma and blurred vision, he told a New York Times reporter.

Falsone also initially declined to talk. Detectives eventually coaxed a name from him. Nicky No Socks. Except that Nicky Facciolo was nowhere to be found.

By the time the problem was presented to Al, the shooting had become a citywide incident. There were protest marches outside the market by members of Mateen’s mosque denouncing the refusal of the shopkeepers to talk. Mayor David Dinkins was demanding to know when the DA was going to charge a suspect.

Bruno Facciola and his brother Louie came to see Al at La Donna Rosa. They conferred on the sidewalk in front of the pastry shop next door.

“I told them to hide that asshole brother of theirs, keep him out of sight. The mayor was getting involved. It was getting hot. We didn’t need that nonsense. There was a stool pigeon in the market had given up Nicky’s name. But if they couldn’t find him, there was nothing they could do.”

It was the same tactic the Luchese bosses were using. Stay out of sight until the heat dies down. It worked like a charm for Nicky Facciolo. He stayed on the run for eight years until he was arrested in a Queens pool hall in 1997. Convicted of manslaughter, he won a new trial on appeal. At his retrial, this time just on gun-possession charges, the man he’d been trying to kill in the first place, Anthony Falsone, suddenly had no memory of the incident. As he testified, Louis Facciola sat in court watching. Nicky No Socks won acquittal.

Ernest Mateen Jr. didn’t allow his father’s senseless murder to knock him off the tracks. He went on to win the light heavyweight title of the World Boxing Organization in 1995. “He was a nice, quiet kid,” said Bill Farrell, a veteran reporter who ran the News’s Golden Gloves contests. Nicky No Socks’s niece Carla won her own fame. She starred as one of the miniskirted young women in the VH1 reality show Mob Wives.

*   *   *

The other victim of the Luchese family’s steadily increasing body count that spring was another civilian, but this one was was hardly an innocent.

James Bishop had been the leader of the city’s unionized painters for years. He was a burly ex-Marine from Queens who had won a Bronze Star in Korea. He had come home to get a job painting bridges, dangling dangerously high above the city’s waters. A savvy backslapper, Bishop had risen in his union’s ranks to become secretary-treasurer of District Council 9 of the International Brotherhood of Painters and Allied Trades. With six thousand members it was the city’s third-largest construction union. Bishop’s gift for politics also won him a slot as a local Democratic Party leader.

In his union post, he dangled just as dangerously as he did from the bridges. He was a regular visitor to Luchese consigliere Christy Tick Furnari’s back room at the 19th Hole in Bensonhurst. There, the mobster gamed out bid-rigging schemes on public works projects, pitting Bishop’s union against city painting contractors. It was the model later adopted by the windows racketeers.

In 1978, Bishop put himself even deeper in the mob’s debt. His international union, weary of corrupt hijinks under Bishop’s watch, appointed an outside trustee to step in and run things. Bishop asked Furnari to chase the trustee out of town. Big Pete Chiodo got the assignment. Along with two pals, Chiodo waylaid the trustee when he arrived at the union’s West Fourteenth Street headquarters at six thirty in the morning. Beaten savagely with metal pipes, trustee Frank Wolford was hospitalized for three months. He left town as soon as he could.

But when Vic Amuso and Anthony Casso took over the Luchese family, Jimmy Bishop became one more redundant holdover from the old regime. They were much more taken with other family associates deeply embedded in the painters union. One was a wealthy former union official turned contractor named Frank Arnold. When Furnari was arrested in 1985 in the Commission case, Arnold had put up his $1.75 million mansion in Sands Point on Long Island’s North Shore to get Christy Tick out on bail.

Another Arnold intimate was Leona Helmsley, feisty wife of New York real estate titan Harry Helmsley, whose empire was in need of endless coats of paint. Leona, dubbed the “Queen of Mean” by employees, got along so well with Arnold that she made him executor of her husband’s will. Arnold made money even before the painters went to work. He had a deal with a Brooklyn paint supplier that earned the Luchese family a dollar for each gallon sold. Between his paint rake-offs and contract schemes, Arnold brought in $350,000 a year to the family, Casso told Al.

Bishop was indelicately pushed aside. Via Big Pete Chiodo, a message was passed to him that his grandchildren’s lives would be in danger if he didn’t step down. He quickly resigned his union post.

The ex-Marine’s opportunity for payback came when the Manhattan district attorney’s office and federal labor investigators began probing the union’s mob schemes. Slowly, offering teasing morsels at first, he began to talk. Soon he was a full-fledged cooperator, testifying at a grand jury.

He was compromised almost immediately. Casso’s well-wired law enforcement source soon passed word to the mob bosses that they had their own major leak.

Shortly before Casso and Amuso went into hiding, Al met with Gaspipe, Chiodo, and other Luchese members in a small room above a luncheonette at the corner of Utica and Flatlands Avenues. “Gaspipe had this piece of paper with the names of all the big painting contractors. He said Jimmy Bishop was cooperating. He said he was also worried that Frankie Arnold could go the same way.”

Casso began to rant, like an emperor watching his kingdom spiral out of control. “Fuck Frankie Arnold and fuck James Bishop!” he yelled.

Al thought both men weren’t long for this world. But Arnold’s vast wealth bought him some extra time. Bishop’s had already run out. Casso ordered Chiodo to scout out Bishop’s daily routine. Al was told to retrieve three pistols armed with silencers that he had been given months earlier to hide for safekeeping. Jimmy McCann, Amuso’s faithful assistant who had rescued Al in his daze after the murder of Mike Pappadio, came by to collect the weapons.

On the morning of May 17, 1990, the married Bishop was relaxing at the pool with his girlfriend at her apartment complex in Whitestone, Queens, overlooking the Throgs Neck Bridge. When he came out to get in his gray Lincoln Town Car, a hit team was waiting. Georgie Neck Zappola was the shooter. As Bishop climbed behind the wheel, Zappola stepped up and shot him with a .380 semiautomatic Beretta, one of the guns Al had kept stowed away for just such an occasion.

“I hit him ten times,” Georgie Neck later boasted to his pal Joseph D’Arco. Despite the salvo of bullets, Bishop managed to throw his car into gear. The Lincoln rolled 150 feet before slamming into a fence.

The brazen daytime murder of a cooperating witness shocked even the veteran investigators chasing the painters union racketeers. Several suspects, including Pete Chiodo, were rounded up a day later. Manhattan DA Robert Morgenthau vowed to bring justice to Bishop’s killers. At that point, no one imagined that law enforcement itself was a big part of the problem.

*   *   *

Two months after the bosses fled, Al had his first secret meeting with the men in hiding. The location was Dom Truscello’s suburban home in Wayne, New Jersey. “Dom had a nice big house with a bar downstairs so that’s where we had the first meet.” Truscello was nervous about it, but he instructed his wife and family to be away that evening. “We were all worried. Anything that happened, if we got found out and anyone got pinched, they’re going to say it’s our fault.”

The bosses showed up unshaven, with two months of beard, their faces hidden beneath baseball caps. As a business meeting, it was uneventful. The bosses ran through a checklist of each captain’s responsibilities. Amuso said they were giving Joey Giampa the captain’s post that had been held by Mike Salerno. A $20,000 loan shark debt that Giampa had owed to the veteran mobster was also wiped off the books. Giampa’s murder of his former friend had turned into a beneficial enterprise. Al was told to make sure they stayed on top of the rest of the debtors in Salerno’s sizable book of loans. All of that money belonged to the bosses now, they decreed.

At the close of the meeting, everyone embraced, and then the bosses left together, driving away in a black Jeep registered in Truscello’s name.

Just a couple of weeks after the meeting in New Jersey, Al was told that another message was coming in for him. The designated phone booth was near the New York Post’s offices on South Street, by Knickerbocker Village. The caller again was Casso. “He is telling me he wants me to come out and see them again, this time in Pennsylvania, near Scranton. He wanted me to get an untraceable car and drive out there alone. That I should stay at a motel down there.”

The trip was complicated for Al. He didn’t have a current driver’s license. He had let his license lapse since he was out on parole. Any minor driving infraction, he feared, might result in his being sent back to do the ten years he would owe if he was found to have violated parole rules.

But he didn’t argue. He got a car from another Luchese associate and met George Zappola on Canal Street. Georgie Neck gave him driving directions to where he was supposed to go in Pennsylvania.

“I went up there at night, through the mountains. I’m looking in the rearview mirror the whole way for cops.”

He put up as ordered at a small motel called the Victoria. The next morning he drove to his rendezvous spot, a supermarket parking lot. He sat there for an hour, waiting. “Then I see this Jeep headed my way. It’s Gaspipe. He had a full beard already.”

Casso gestured for him to follow. They drove a couple of miles before the Jeep turned down a tree-lined street. Al saw Vic Amuso standing in front of a small house. His beard had grown in as well. It was the same color as his hair, a dark steel gray.

Al accomplished a big part of his mission right away. He had $50,000 cash with him that he had been told to collect from various Luchese family operations. He handed the envelope to Vic, who accepted it without a word. He also had a message for them from the Genovese captains who had already faced the music in the Windows case. “Benny Eggs Mangano was saying that each of the families involved was going to chip in $50,000 to hire an investigator to come up with evidence they’d need for the defense. He wanted Vic and Gas to join.”

Amuso said they weren’t interested. “He said to tell them they’d hire their own investigator. If their guy came up with anything useful, they’d pass it on.”

During the discussion of the Windows case, Casso turned to Amuso. “We got rid of Sonny. What about Cakes?” he said. Amuso just stared back at his underboss, not saying anything.

Al wasn’t sure who Sonny was, but he recognized the name “Cakes.” It was the nickname for a Luchese associate named Joe Marion, a close pal of Amuso’s who had been arrested in the the windows scam.

Al acted like he hadn’t heard. He broke the silence by asking how long they intended to stay on the run. Vic said the plan was to wait until the other defendants went to trial. “They figured that the evidence against them wasn’t that great and they didn’t want to be painted with the same brush as the others. They wanted to go to trial alone.”

The three men talked for a while about John Gotti. The Gambino boss had been all over TV for months since his acquittal in the state case for attempted murder against the mobbed-up carpenters union official. His lawyer, Bruce Cutler, readily granted interviews lauding his client. Footage of Gotti and his clique sauntering down Mulberry Street was a staple of the nightly news shows.

The Luchese bosses had plenty of time to watch TV from their hideouts, and the sight of Gotti’s victory smile had reminded them of a long-unfulfilled pledge. The murder of Paul Castellano had been carried out without Commission approval. It was supposed to have resulted in a death sentence for Gotti. But aside from a 1986 car bombing that killed Frank DeCicco, Gotti’s number two lieutenant, the other families had failed to make good on their vow.

At one point, Al had been asked to research bomb techniques with his contacts in Pittsburgh, where bombings were a frequent tool. “Vic said the plan was to make it look like the greaseballs from Sicily did it.” An associate of Joe Sica was capable and willing to rig a deadly remote-controlled bomb. Al had reported back what he’d found out, but nothing ever came of it. The plot seemed to fall through the cracks. The mobsters in hiding were left glaring at their rival on television, unable to wipe the smile off his face.

*   *   *

What they could do, however, was eliminate their own internal enemies. And that list was growing.

A few weeks after his solo trip over the mountains to Scranton, Al was again summoned to one of the pay phones to get Casso’s latest instructions. The message, delivered in mid-August, was that the bosses had discovered yet another rat in their ranks who needed to be exterminated. The offender this time was a man who had become one of Al’s closest friends in his Canarsie crew, Bruno Facciola.

Al listened, dumbstruck at the pronouncement. Gaspipe presented it as something that had to be done for Al’s own protection. Casso said that his law enforcement source had found out that California cops looking into Anthony DiLapi’s murder had turned up a nickname of someone involved. The nickname, he said, was “Little Al.”

“Who calls you Little Al?” asked Gaspipe. “Doesn’t Bruno call you that all the time?”

Al had to admit that yes, Bruno called him that. A lot of people did, but Bruno especially. He turned the idea over in his head. Unlike most of his crew, Bruno had never done time. He had prospered almost unmolested in his crime zone outside the Canarsie market. He was one of the the biggest loan sharks in east Brooklyn. He owned a demolition yard, a jewelry store, a riding stable, a restaurant, and who knew what else. Al went through the same dizzying see-saw of pros and cons that he’d wrestled with when Casso had told him about Mike Salerno’s alleged infidelity to Cosa Nostra.

Unlike Salerno, whom he knew and admired mostly from afar, he knew Bruno well. “We treated each other like brothers. Our families got together. We ate together a lot.” Part of the reason for the meals was Facciola’s cooking. “His father was a fisherman, and Bruno knew his fish. I helped him remodel part of the pizza parlor, and afterward, he made this feast for us. He had the whole family, Dolores’s father, the kids, to the restaurant and he cooked this big fish dinner.”

He was also a commanding presence, a good-looking man with a full head of dark brown hair; people were drawn to him. He didn’t have much education. Al suspected he couldn’t really read or write. But he was the center of the action. His club at the industrial junction of Foster Avenue and Avenue D by the produce market was in a plain stucco-covered storefront with blacked-out windows, a few tables, and an espresso machine. But it was more than just a mob hangout. It was the main social center for men in the neighborhood with cash in their pockets. Its marathon card games were legendary, drawing players from around the city, including legitimate businessmen. Games would start on a Friday night and go all weekend. Players would go home, take a shower, and come back. Those who won weren’t allowed to leave until they lost a few hands.

Al wasn’t a card player but he enjoyed sitting around the club. You never knew who was going to turn up there.

In the early 1980s he had been sitting at a table with Bruno’s brothers, Nicky and Louie, when a businessman from the neighborhood joined them.

“The guy’s name was Schultz and he was often in the club playing cards. He was a friend of Bruno’s. His business was selling coffee filters. His biggest customer was Macy’s. He had the downstairs store, where they sold the kitchenware. He said he had just come back from the West Coast, from Seattle, because he said there were these guys out there with two little coffee shops who were buying twenty times the amount of filters that Macy’s was using. So he says, ‘I had to go out there and see what this was all about.’ And he said he went out there and they had these two little stores called ‘Starbucks.’ And he said him and his landsmen were putting up the money to buy the stores and expand.”

The story appealed to Al’s business sense. “I told him ‘Good luck with it.’ I should’ve asked if he wanted a partner.” Starbucks owner Howard Schultz was raised in Canarsie, but a spokeswoman said he didn’t have time to talk about any visits he might have made to social clubs in the old neighborhood.

Al and Bruno had even done a rare good deed together. They had been standing one afternoon outside the pizza parlor on Flatlands Avenue when a crowd of rowdy teenagers rushed into the street to surround a taxicab. “The driver was a black guy and they were shouting about him being in the neighborhood. They yanked him out of the cab and into the street and were beating on him and taking his money.”

Al and Bruno ran over to pull the kids off the driver. “We were kicking at them, telling them to get the hell off the guy. Then Bruno yells, ‘Watch out, Al, he’s got a knife!’ I spin around and there’s this kid about to stab me. I knock the knife out of his hand and he took off.” The rest of the attackers fled as well. The driver was helped back into his cab and drove away. A few minutes later a police squad car arrived. “They all knew Bruno at the precinct. The cop says, ‘What’s going on?’ Bruno just shrugs. ‘Nothing, far as we know.’”

In the past year, Facciola had been struck with cancer. He had lost most of his stomach to an operation. Al had visited his friend at home after the surgery. He often checked in on him to see how he was doing.

Despite his illness, Facciola remained a power to be reckoned with. “He had about twenty stickup guys around him, tough guys who knew how to take care of themselves.” There was Ray Argentina with his fondness for guns and executions. Larry Taylor was a thief rumored to have killed a jewelry salesman whose wares he coveted. Facciola’s brother-in-law, Al Visconti, known to all as “Flounderhead” for his awkward toupee, was another faithful follower.

Al wondered if maybe that was the real reason Bruno was now the next to go. Like Salerno, he was capable of pulling together a cadre of loyal and deadly shooters to challenge the absentee bosses and their own troops.

But his doubts were again trounced by the irrefutable accuracy of Casso’s source. The windows indictments had come down exactly when he’d said. Jimmy Bishop had been a snitch. It was in the papers right after he was killed.

And Al remembered something else that had been nagging at him. A few weeks earlier, he and Bruno had again been on the sidewalk in front of the pizza parlor. Al had gone outside to help chase away a group of junkies who congregated on the corner. As he watched the junkies retreat, Al saw something out of the corner of his eye. It was Bruno making a chopping motion behind Al’s back. “It was like a sign he was going to get me. I just caught it. When I looked at him he looked away. Afterward, I was thinking that Bruno can be devious, that I’d better watch him.”

Now here was Casso confirming that vague suspicion, telling him he had to kill an old friend, a man who had saved him from being stabbed in the back. And the underboss again had specific instructions for the murder.

“Gas said that Vic wanted me to use Louie Daidone and Frank Lastorino, tell them they were supposed to be a team.” And there was something else as well. “He says they should get a canary and put it in his mouth after they kill him. And to make sure he was found that way so everyone knew he was singing.”

Al listened to his instructions. Symbols were important to them, he remembered.

*   *   *

He called Louis Daidone as soon as Casso hung up. He was at his bagel store in Howard Beach. They arranged to meet at the Seaview Diner on Rockaway Parkway, near the Canarsie Pier.

“We went for a walk. I told Louie he should get together with Frank Lastorino and make a plan.” He also told him about the canary. Daidone listened. Louie Bagels went even further back with Facciola than Al. Bruno had been a Luchese soldier for more than twenty years, long before Casso and Amuso had received their buttons.

“I don’t believe it,” said Daidone. “I don’t believe he’s a rat.”

Al didn’t try to convince him. “They want it done,” he said. It was the only argument that mattered. They needed a code word for Facciola. “Call him ‘the Wing,’” Al said.

Daidone called Al later that day to confirm that he’d spoken to Lastorino. They had a plan, he said. There was something odd, Daidone added. Casso had called Lastorino separately, he told Al. “He already knew he was going to do it with me,” he said.

*   *   *

A few days later, Daidone called again. The Wing had been dispatched. Al went out to Cross Bay Boulevard to get the details.

The dodge had been to tell Facciola that Daidone needed him to make a formal introduction to another wiseguy with whom he was dealing. Al was surprised that Bruno would fall for the bait. He had apparently not suspected anything until the last moment.

On the morning of August 24, 1990, Bruno drove to his own funeral. He picked up Daidone in his car and then followed his directions to a garage on McDonald Avenue in Brooklyn where Daidone said the meeting with the wiseguy was to take place. As they walked to the garage, Facciola began to sense something was wrong. “He was hanging back, he let Louie go in front of him.”

When the door opened, Facciola saw Lastorino. Richard “Richie the Toupe” Pagliarulo, who had shot Sonny Morrissey, was standing behind him. Facciola realized what was happening.

Facciola bolted. “He made a run for it. Louie chased him. He used to play college football and he’s pretty athletic. He ran out and tackled Bruno right in the street. He got all banged up doing it.”

Facciola, weakened from his cancer operation, wasn’t much of a match.

Daidone dragged Bruno back into the garage. Two men nearby stopped to gape at the fight. They didn’t interfere. Inside the garage, Bruno cried out. “He was saying, ‘Louie, let me see my daughter again. Let me go home one time.’”

They knocked him to the ground. Daidone held him down. Frank Lastorino had a knife. He stabbed him. The killers said that Facciola cried out in pain, begging to be shot. Pagliarulo stepped forward and obliged him, firing six shots into his head and chest.

Al listened to the cruel tale without flinching. “You’re lucky the shots didn’t bounce back at you,” he said. “If it’s concrete, the ricochet can kill you.”

After Facciola was dead the killers rifled his pockets. Not for cash or jewelry, but for any evidence of his possible cooperation, another Casso order. They found no telltale notes. They took a small red Swiss Army knife that Bruno always carried as evidence that they had carried out their task. His body was dumped in the trunk of his 1985 Mercury sedan. Then they followed Casso’s other command. Daidone had purchased a canary and killed it. He had kept it in his home freezer until he was ready. The little bird was stuffed into Facciola’s mouth. The car was abandoned on a block on East Fifty-Fifth Street in Canarsie.

Like Mike Salerno’s Jaguar, no one bothered the abandoned Mercury for almost a week, until the stench became noticeable.

*   *   *

A couple of days after his brother disappeared, Louie Facciola and a friend showed up at Daidone’s bagel store. Facciola came walking slowly toward Daidone, his hand in his back pocket. Daidone spooked. He thought he was reaching for a gun. He dove to the ground. The men left without incident. Daidone made a panicked call to Al.

“They know, they know,” he told him.

“Okay,” said Al. “We’ll handle it.” He contacted Danny Cutaia and got a pistol. The two of them went to see Louie Facciola. They met at an auto lot on Utica Avenue. Al greeted Facciola. “I said, ‘Louie, let’s take a walk.’”

They walked down an alley alongside the car lot. “Louie, you know, things happen,” Al told him. Both men knew what he was talking about. “I don’t know what you’re doing, but what have you got on your mind?”

Facciola didn’t seem to know what to say. “I know, I know,” he stammered. “It’s nothing, nothing. Forget it.”

“You’re sure, Louie?”

“Yeah, I’m sure,” he said.

*   *   *

But only his brothers cared. To the rest of the world, Bruno Facciola was just another mobster found in a trunk. No one had put together the pieces yet, or noticed that one more victim had run afoul of the new Luchese bosses, the ninth person to have vanished or been killed in the past eighteen months. Michael Pappadio and Sonny Morrissey were still just mysterious disappearances. Only the dramatic assassinations of the rebel carters and Jimmy Bishop had commanded any attention, and even that soon flickered away.

Part of the reason was that law enforcement was busy elsewhere. John Gotti and the nightly conventions at his Ravenite clubhouse on Mulberry Street remained the most intense focus of the media, and the FBI. Watching the comings and goings from the brick tenement, agents had figured out where to place their bugs. They had captured Gotti clearly on tape, conducting what he thought were secret strategy sessions in an upstairs apartment. Gotti had beaten the law three times in court. They now believed they had enough to put him away permanently.

Casso’s crystal ball relayed word in early December 1990 that Gotti’s arrest was imminent. Despite the less than warm relations between the families, the Luchese bosses tried to warn him. It wasn’t completely altruistic. If they were ever going to kill Gotti, it would be easier to do so if he wasn’t in prison.

Al was told to get hold of John Gammarano, the Gambino family veteran he had served time with at Lewisburg federal prison. “Johnny G was dealing with the labor-racketeering and Wall Street scams. He hung out in a bar in downtown Manhattan, Giovanni’s Atrium on Rector Street. I went down there to tell him that Gaspipe had a message for Johnny Gotti, that he got information from the bulls that the pinch was going to come down and that they should take off.”

Al found Gammarano in the restaurant. The two men walked out through the kitchen to West Street. “I told him, ‘Anthony said to go now. Not to wait.’”

Gammarano seemed unconcerned. “He said John already knew, that he had his own thing going.”

A few days later, on the early evening of December 12, agents arrested Gotti and his two top aides, Sammy Bull Gravano and Frank LoCascio, as they sat in the Ravenite. It was Gotti’s last evening as a free man.

*   *   *

That same week, Al was summoned to another meeting with the fugitive Luchese leaders. The message was relayed through Patty Testa, whose brother Joey had been initiated as a soldier the same day as Joe D’Arco. Patty Testa owned a couple of Brooklyn car dealerships and had supplied the Jeeps that Amuso and Casso were using. He’d also taken on the role of messenger for the boss-in-hiding.

They spent a couple of hours driving through Brooklyn in Testa’s Cadillac. “We were dry-cleaning ourselves, making sure no one could tail us.” Testa finally parked on a street in Canarsie near an auto body shop on Farragut Road. The home belonged to Testa’s elderly relatives. They were glad to have him and his friends enjoy their furnished basement. Testa told Al to wait in the car, then walked across the street to a small house. He reemerged about ten minutes later, beckoning Al inside.

“Don’t make any noise,” Testa whispered. He led him down a hallway to an entrance to the basement. Amuso and Casso were waiting downstairs.

The bosses still had their full beards. They did a run-through of family business. Al had another $60,000 for them. The money was still in Christmas wrapping paper, the same way it had been handed over by the construction executive who made regular payoffs to the family.

For a pair of men who had been in hiding for more than six months, the bosses seemed happy and upbeat. “They said they wanted me to throw a big Christmas party for the family. That I should spend what I had to, to make sure everyone knew we were doing good and still holding together.”

The Luchese Christmas party was an annual tradition. They were lavish, spare-no-expense affairs, held at restaurants owned by members or friends. Tables loaded with lobster, shrimp, steak, and pasta were pushed together in the center of the room. It was too crowded for anything but buffet-style dining.

It was made members–only, a kind of meet and greet for the family’s branches and crews. Everyone came, even the far-flung members from Las Vegas and the West Coast. Only the hosts, the two bosses, were expected to miss the party.

Al would have held it at La Donna Rosa. But it wasn’t big enough. “It was also too hot, there were too many agents around.”

But Al had a new restaurant he was helping to launch on Horatio Street on the far West Side in Greenwich Village. It was being run by his son John, along with a Chinese chef he’d met. The idea was Al’s. “Everyone loves Italian and Chinese food, so I said let’s put them together in one place.” It was called Pasquale & Wong’s. A wealthy Greek contractor from Astoria named George Kalaitzis who worked closely with Casso was the up-front owner of the place and was investing most of the money.

“I had one of our guys, Fat Mikey, get these rolls of green sparkling paper and put it over the windows so you couldn’t see who was inside the place. Then we put up a big sign saying, ‘Welcome Mediterranean Fruit Buyers.’ That was our cover in case anyone asked what the party was for.”

On the night of the event, Al had several associates serve as running valets. “Soon as guys would pull up in their cars, we’d drive them a few blocks away so no one could spot all the plate numbers.”

Al cleared a special table for the family’s old-timers. “They said it was the first time they’d been treated like that in years. Everyone was hugging each other. We had champagne all over the place.”

Al interrupted the festivities to make a toast. “We tapped the glasses. Bing, bing, bing. I said, ‘Merry Christmas to everybody, and let’s not forget our friends who couldn’t attend, you know? We wish them and their families a very merry Christmas.’” The room rang with cheers and applause.

The party broke up not long after midnight. “It didn’t go late. It was just holiday spirit, that was the idea.”

Within weeks, the absentee hosts were issuing orders to kill some of their yuletide guests.

*   *   *

A few days after New Year’s, Al was called back to the home of Patty Testa’s elderly relatives. It was snowing when Testa picked him up. Again, they carefully trawled the Brooklyn streets for surveillance before pulling up to the small home in Canarsie.

Downstairs, Casso and Amuso were seated at a table. There was a bottle of wine and several glasses in front of them. Casso spoke first. “Vic wants to tell you something,” he said.

Amuso looked at Al. “You’re now the acting boss of the family,” said Vic. He reached for the wine and filled the glasses.

“Cent’anni,” said Vic.

“Cent’anni,” answered Al. They should live a hundred years. He wasn’t sure what else to say.

“Just take care of the major things,” said Amuso. “Let the little things go, and be careful.” Then the boss added a restriction. “There’ll be none of this,” he said, pinching his finger. “And none of this.” He pointed his index finger at him, thumb raised, like cocking a gun.

Al understood the sign language. No making new members. No killings, without higher approval.

Al was to keep things running, to be their eyes and ears. No one spelled it out, but it was clear they were satisfied with the way he had handled things so far. He had successfully helped dispatch five of their targets. He was already sitting in for them at meetings with other families.

He was also under no illusions. He had been Amuso’s choice for the job, not Casso’s. Vic was still grateful for past favors. His help back at Sing Sing when they were both starting out. His pep talks when Vic first took over the Luchese reins.

But he wasn’t to run things alone. They had designated a full cabinet of acting officers to carry on in their stead. Anthony Baratta, the captain from East Harlem, would be acting underboss. Steve Crea, a soldier based in Yonkers and active in construction rackets, was acting consigliere.

Al was friendly with Crea, a good-looking man with gray hair and a massive chin who managed to make millions with his building firms while keeping a low mob profile. But he wasn’t happy about having Baratta, known as “Bowat,” as his number two. It was an old beef. “Paulie Vario told me Bowat hung with stool pigeons in Lewisburg. He had all these fancy airs about him, but his big thing was pushing babania.” Baratta owned a swank restaurant on the Upper East Side. He also had a regular table at Rao’s, the East Harlem restaurant on Pleasant Avenue that was now a chic dining spot for movie stars and politicians despite its longtime use as a hangout for the heroin dealers who had poisoned the city. Most of Baratta’s crew members were actively dealing drugs. Al knew that Casso had done deals with him in the past as well.

“Nobody likes that fucking guy,” Al told Amuso when Casso briefly left the room.

Amuso shrugged. “That’s Anthony’s guy,” he said.

While they were talking Baratta arrived, escorted by George Zappola. Amuso did the formal introductions, certifying Al’s new rank. Baratta clapped Al on the back, congratulating him.

Al had another thick package of cash for the bosses, some of it Christmas gifts from the crews. Casso had asked for a breakdown. “He wanted to know who was giving what, to make sure he wasn’t being shorted.”

Al kept the itemized list in his own shorthand code, scratched out in tiny script as though it would make it harder for an outsider to decipher. He noted dates and figures. “$6,700 Bronx Lux,” he wrote, signifying cash received from a Bronx home builder under Luchese protection. “John G. 3-way split” was Gambino capo John Gammarano, who worked closely on construction scams with the Luchese clan.

The payments ranged from $3,000 from a lawyer handling a Long Island Teamsters local, to $57,000 from the family’s New Jersey faction, despite the ongoing feud. There were payments from trucking firms, contractors, and garment manufacturers. Altogether, the month’s package came to more than $200,000.

Outside it was still snowing when they left. Baratta said good night and got into his small black Mercedes coupe with Zappola. Al crossed over to Testa’s Cadillac. They chatted on the way back to the city. But Al’s mind was racing. He couldn’t resist the thought: What would Jimmy Alto say if he could see me now?

*   *   *

He wasn’t sure what his own father would have said. It wasn’t something they ever talked about. Even if the tough old bare-knuckle prizefighter had asked, he couldn’t have discussed it, any more than he could with any outsider. “He knew what I was. He knew that life. I didn’t have to spell it out.”

The old man was long retired, living in the cottage in Bayville on Long Island’s North Shore with Al’s mother. But Al had less and less time for family visits.

A few days after he was promoted, he had an urgent call from Joseph. Al’s father had suffered a stroke. He’d been taken to the hospital. Joseph volunteered to go out to see them. Al thanked his son, and said he and Dolores would get there as soon as they could.

He raced out to Long Island, a couple of bodyguards alongside. He sat with his father for as long as he could before he had to go back to the city.

On January 25, 1991, his father suffered a second stroke. This one was fatal. His grandson and namesake was beside his hospital bed, along with Al’s mother, when he went. The former Giuseppe D’Arco was eighty-one years old. He was a few weeks short of celebrating the seventy-seventh anniversary of the day he’d climbed off the SS Verona from Naples at Ellis Island clutching his mother’s hand. He had captured every immigrant’s goal, the American dream. His son was a big success in his chosen field.