15

MATAMORAS

What Al would have told his father, if he could have, was that he was now the acting chief executive of a heavily diversified, multimillion-dollar organization.

The core operations of the Luchese crime family remained gambling, loan-sharking, extortion, and theft. But beyond those mob staples, its business interests were wide and varied. They included air freight firms, bakeries, funeral parlors, roofing companies, car dealerships, building contractors, concrete suppliers, construction unions, produce vendors, and the garment shops that had been the cornerstone of the first semilegitimate fortune of the borgata’s founding fathers.

It was the job of acting boss Al D’Arco to see that all of those interests were protected, and to make sure that all revenues due and owing were collected. The job kept him busy.

He had considerable experience already with one of the family’s top clients. In 1988, Amuso had asked Al to take on the task of stopping by the sprawling yards of the Quadrozzi Concrete Corporation near Jamaica Bay in Far Rockaway, Queens, to see the owner, John Quadrozzi.

The family’s relationship with the firm went back to 1964 when Frank Manzo, the same Frank the Wop who had tried to block Al from becoming a Luchese soldier, had signed up the company. The Luchese family provided ongoing protection from other crime families and agreements with the various construction unions to give the firm operating leeway. It also promoted his product, pressuring other contractors to buy from him.

In exchange, Quadrozzi had agreed to monthly cash payments. By 1991, the tab was running at $20,000 per month, plus two bulk payments of $125,000 per year for extracurricular favors rendered.

Quadrozzi was sixty-two, a big gruff man with a brush mustache who spoke his mind. Al came to like him, often stopping by just to chat. “He was a good guy. I’d go into his office and he had one of those big brown leather doctor’s satchels filled with cash. Always right there with him. When he opened it, you’d see it was filled to the top.”

One reason for having all the cash around, Al learned, was that on Saturdays Quadrozzi offered a special cash-only discount on his concrete. “It was normally about $62 a yard, but on Saturdays he’d let you have it for $54 cash. The trucks would line up to get it.”

The first time Al saw the bulging bag he asked Quadrozzi if he feared being robbed. The businessman grinned and pulled a pistol from the baggy pants he often wore. The two executives enjoyed discussing firearms.

“He was this big collector of rare shotguns. He collected this brand, Purdeys. If he heard about a Purdey shotgun for sale on the other side of the country, he’d fly out there to buy it. And those things went for $50,000.”

The concrete supplier kept careful track of his payoffs. “He had a green ledger book he kept in a desk drawer. He’d pay me and then pull it out and write down the number in pencil in the book right in front of me.”

Quadrozzi had prospered under the arrangement. He was the owner of ten separate companies and was president of a citywide trade group representing fellow suppliers, the Association of New York City Concrete Producers. His concrete was used for the city’s largest projects, including massive sewage-treatment plants and the Cross Bay Bridge that his trucks traveled from the Rockaways to Queens.

His biggest coup was a con he pulled on the federal mob busters themselves. In 1990, Quadrozzi applied to purchase two concrete companies that had been seized by the federal government after they were found in the Commission case to be assets of the Genovese crime family. Potential purchasers had to undergo rigorous screening. After an investigation, then Manhattan U.S. attorney Otto Obermaier vouched to the court overseeing the sale that Quadrozzi was a legitimate businessman with no mob ties. He recommended that his purchase be approved.

But even as the review of Quadrozzi’s records was under way in one room, Al was collecting the family’s tribute next door. “I showed up one day and John tells me to keep quiet because Obermaier’s guys are in the next room. He says, ‘Don’t let them see you.’”

Sometimes, Al served as Quadrozzi’s bill collector. When another concrete firm that purchased its supply from Quadrozzi’s yards fell $40,000 behind in payments, Al ordered the owner to show up in Little Italy with the cash.

Likewise, he went to bat for the company when firms with their own mob backers tried to underbid it. “There was this company Valente Concrete that was undercutting our company with their prices on all the jobs. The owner was with the Gambino family and the family out in Jersey, the DeCavalcante crew.” The complaint was registered with the other families. When the price-cutting continued, the Luchese family threatened to up the ante. “We talked about killing Valente. But we worked it out.”

Other times, he was a labor arbitrator. “I had to straighten out matters with the unions sometimes. The engineers would want three guys on a crane. So I’d have to convince them he was someone who deserved a break.”

Al also assisted Quadrozzi with the union that represented his drivers, Teamsters Local 282. “When John bought the new companies from the government he didn’t want all the workers in the union. So I went to see Johnny Gammarano from the Gambino family, which had the local, to straighten things out.”

Local 282 was a sore subject with the Luchese family. It wielded enormous power over the construction industry, since its members drove the trucks delivering materials to building sites. The slightest slowdown on their part quickly disrupted production. Local 282 president Bobby Sasso was another visitor to Quadrozzi’s office in Far Rockaway, with payments to the Teamsters leader noted in the ledger next to the initials “BS.” The local had been under Luchese family control until Tommy Brown Luchese’s daughter married Carlo Gambino’s son. “Tommy Luchese gave the local to the Gambino family as a wedding present. He shouldn’t have done that.”

*   *   *

But the Luchese family had plenty of labor clout of its own. There were more than twenty union locals the family considered as its own property. They were off-limits to other crime groups, and their officers were subject to Luchese approval or veto.

“We had a lot of Teamster locals because Tony Ducks Corallo and Johnny Dio were close to Jimmy Hoffa. Back in the fifties, Hoffa gave them a bunch of union charters so he could control the votes on the Teamsters Joint Council.”

Some locals were small but useful. Gerald Corallo, Tony Ducks’s son, ran a Teamsters local representing employees at car dealerships. Once much larger, Local 239 had become essentially an insurance scam. Many members were the dealers themselves and their families, receiving Teamster health and pension benefits even though they were employers. It was a blatant violation of federal labor laws, but until a court-appointed union monitor stopped it, the scam ran for years. It was also a useful dodge for mobsters. “Jerry Corallo was the guy to see if you needed to put someone on the books who needed their medical, or who had to show they were working for parole. He’d get them a ghost job, then split the paycheck with them.”

The most powerful Teamster unions in the Luchese portfolio represented workers at Kennedy Airport. Teamsters Local 295 had the truckers and warehouse workers. A separate union, Local 851, had airport clerical employees. Both were run by Luchese soldiers.

The family’s stake in the airports stemmed from Paul Vario’s tenacious claim struck in the 1960s. While members of Vario’s crew like Jimmy Burke were hijacking their trucks, they had also moved in on the association of air freight companies created by the farsighted Hickey DiLorenzo while the Genovese mobster was still in full command of his faculties.

Overseeing the family’s airport interests was Anthony Calagna, a gambler and horse racing enthusiast who had been inducted as a soldier in 1988 at the same ceremony as Joseph D’Arco. Calagna served as the top official of Local 295. Local 851 was run by Patrick Dellorusso, Louis Daidone’s bagel business partner and a member of the hit team that took out Tommy Red Gilmore.

They were running a profitable empire. When Al was told to start collecting the payoffs, the monthly nut from various shakedowns ranged from $12,000 to $60,000, depending on the volume of business.

The Luchese family had been running the airport so long that it had its honored traditions. Negotiations were held at the Sherwood Diner on Rockaway Turnpike just east of the airport where the Canarsie crew had convened for planning meetings since the 1960s.

Some discussions got complicated. A major city freight firm called P. Chimento Trucking had long been under the protection of Pete DeFeo, the veteran Genovese capo from Little Italy. But when Chimento branched out to trucking at the airport, the Luchese family asserted its rights.

“Anthony Calagna and Patty Dellorusso came to me and said Chimento is running fifty trucks out there, doing a lot of airport work they shouldn’t be doing unless they had a contract with our unions.” The trucks were running out of a depot, or “barn” as truckers called it, near the airport. Calagna had offered the company a sweetheart deal covering only some of its employees, but it had refused to pay.

Al discussed the matter with Genovese leader Jimmy Ida, without resolving the problem. After consulting with Amuso and Casso, Al decided negotiations had gone long enough.

“I told Anthony and Patty to put a strike on them. Just go down to their barn and block up all their trucks.” The picket lines went up the same day. The brief show of labor muscle quickly resolved the matter.

“They settled. They agreed to pay $110,000.” The only remaining hitch was that the company president said he needed help hiding the payoff in his books. Again, the Luchese racketeering network obliged. “We had him hire George the Greek’s contracting company to do a little bit of work on the roof of his barn. That way they could pad the bill and draw the cash.” Contractor George Kalaitzis got to keep $10,000 for his trouble. The rest went to the Luchese bosses.

The family also had a firm grip on an international air cargo firm called Amerford International Corporation that made regular payments for labor peace. It also put the mobsters’ children on the payroll. Al’s daughter, Dawn, worked there, as did a daughter of Sal Avellino.

Amerford officials sought an extra favor, asking Calagna to be allowed to replace their unionized clerical workforce with a nonunion subcontractor. Calagna relayed the message and the Luchese bosses said they’d be willing to oblige, for a price. The move saved the firm several hundred thousand dollars a year, and the initial payment Al saw was $100,000. There was more promised down the road. After the deal was cut, the company put thirty union members out on the street. When they complained to their union local, the leaders shrugged. There was nothing they could do, they said.

A few months later, Amerford hired a new director of labor relations. It was Luchese soldier Patrick Dellorusso.

*   *   *

At this point in his career, Al was something of a specialist at labor racketeering. His apprenticeship under Benny Ross and Lou Rich in the 1970s had taught him the art of winning sweetheart contracts, the careful mix of intimidation and financial persuasion required to get employers to sign with outfits that were unions in name only. The employees were usually the easy part. Shops tended to have a high turnover of low-paid workers either unaware of their rights, or fearful of asserting them.

The unions in the Luchese family’s orbit operated on a much more sophisticated scale. Many were construction locals, divisions of the Laborers union whose members poured concrete, handled blasting and excavation, built roads, laid bricks, and hefted supplies around the work site.

These weren’t the craftsmen of the construction trades. The Genovese family held the most sway with those unions, including the carpenters, plumbers, and engineers. But the laborers also enjoyed strong contracts with good wages and benefits, as long as they were enforced. Union officials also did well, commanding six-figure salaries, cars, and usually unlimited expense accounts.

The trick for the mob was to find the maneuvering room to arrange for favored employers to ignore the contract when it suited them. The scam was usually accomplished with newly hired workers paid less than union scale, or forced to work without overtime or paid benefits.

“The contractor wants to beat the workers. So he pays off the family-controlled unions to put nonunion guys on the job, or to skip on some of the benefits he’s supposed to pay. He takes care of us and he’s got no worries. He’s got labor peace.”

The other trick was to make sure schemes didn’t collide with other crime families, each of which had its own satellites of construction unions and companies. Conflicts often arose.

In 1988, Al came up with an innovative management plan. Instead of obligating the bosses to sit down and hash out every jurisdictional dispute, why not designate crime family members with labor expertise to sit on a panel? It would be the Mafia’s version of the National Labor Relations Board.

“There were too many fights, too many guys getting hurt. The idea was to settle things before they got out of control.” The bosses liked it. In addition to himself, Al recommended Dom Truscello, who was well versed in construction, and Steve Crea, who had his own contracting companies, as Luchese representatives.

The panel worked well. But sometimes conflict couldn’t be avoided. In 1989, federal prosecutors in Brooklyn won a racketeering conviction against one of Paul Vario’s nephews who had been serving as business manager of Local 46, a Queens-based Laborers local. The national union responded by placing the local under trusteeship. But the reform simply replaced one crime family with another. The new officers included close allies of the Genovese crime family.

Al registered the complaint. “They were trying to take over our local and we weren’t going to let them.” The matter was discussed at a series of meetings at the Elizabeth Street social club of James Messera, a Genovese captain.

The talks, however, failed. The clash escalated. “These guys were burning out the union. They were calling strikes and shaking guys down. They were out of control.” Things came to a head at a sit-down at Little Charlie’s, a clam bar on Kenmare Street around the corner from La Donna Rosa.

“It was me and Dom Truscello on our side, and Jimmy from Elizabeth Street and Jimmy Ida for the Chin. Later, Petey Vario showed up too.”

The meeting got hot. At one point, Messera claimed that the local official now backed by the Luchese crew couldn’t be trusted. “They wouldn’t back down. They wanted us to pull out, keep their guys in control.”

Al brought the matter to Gaspipe Casso. “He says, ‘Hit them. Give them a good beating.’” The order was handed to Peter Vario for execution.

“Rugsy and one of his pals grabbed this guy Eddie and another guy who was with the Genovese crew from the local at gunpoint. They took them out and gave them a beating with ax handles. They put them in the hospital.”

The would-be reformers limped away, ceding the local back to the Luchese family.

*   *   *

Violence was the core organizing principle for every business move the crime family made. Sometimes the mere threat was enough to accomplish the goal.

In 1989, a top official of a Teamsters local representing produce market workers committed suicide after being summoned to a sit-down with Luchese members. Edward Gallant was secretary-treasurer of Local 202, most of whose members worked for fruit and vegetable vendors at the Hunts Point Market in the Bronx. The union was briefly the focus of a dispute between the Luchese and Bonanno families as to which crime family was going to run it.

Al relayed the message that Local 202 was Luchese family property via Joey Giampa, head of the family’s Bronx crew thanks to his murder of Mike Salerno, and Teamsters official Anthony Calagna, who knew most of those involved. Giampa already had a fearsome reputation in the market as a tough loan shark to cash-needy merchants. He welcomed the opportunity to expand his territory.

But at the time, no one was planning on hurting anyone. Al said his orders were clear: “I said to remind the union guys that they have a nice job with a nice expense account. Just remember the union don’t belong to them.”

Gallant had started out as a produce worker, and he had long bragged about his own mob ties. But after being summoned by the Luchese mobsters, Gallant told fellow local officer Warren Ullrich that he was terrified. “He said it was a fight among crime families and he was afraid he was going to be killed,” Ullrich later told a Daily News reporter. “He shot himself. It was the day before Thanksgiving.”

Ullrich’s father, Charles, had been head of the local for twenty-five years before him. His dad had his own friends in the mob, including Tony Ducks Corallo. In 1955, when the union and vendors were still at the old Washington Market in lower Manhattan, two men entered Charles Ullrich’s office and beat him savagely with pipes. The episode was seared in Warren’s childhood memory, as was his father’s insistence on remaining in his job after the beating. The son convinced himself that he too could ride out the storm. Even after losing an election to a new slate of officers, Ullrich kept visiting the market, hoping for a comeback.

This time, there was sentiment in the Luchese family for more than a beating. “Joey Giampa was telling me this guy Ullrich was going around the market saying he was still in control and he was making his own deals. He wanted to kill him.”

Al decided that with Ullrich out of office there was no point, and not worth the risk. “I told him no. It would create all kinds of heat.”

But Giampa persisted. “Joey comes back with this Ullrich’s home address in New Jersey and says he wants to hit him. I said, ‘No. If you want to give him a good beating you can.’”

Word of the threats reached the FBI. Ullrich got a knock on his door just as he was leaving his home in northern New Jersey to take his son to football practice. “It was the FBI. They said there was a contract to have me killed.” The message was received. He didn’t go back to the market after that.

*   *   *

There was one union that the Luchese family had claimed as its own for more than fifty years, but which was always difficult to tame. The Newspaper and Mail Deliverers Union represented delivery drivers at all of New York’s big daily newspapers, as well as major magazine-distribution firms. But the union was always on the verge of mob-fueled chaos because so many members were themselves associates of organized crime. On every newspaper loading platform, drivers ran scams ranging from stolen bundles of papers to loan-sharking and gun sales.

It was an independent union with three thousand dues-paying members. At one point in the 1980s the Teamsters, its ranks replete with mobsters, contemplated affiliating with it. They decided against it. The NMDU was too mobbed up even for them, officials decided.

The Luchese claim to the union had originally been won through a wily mob associate named Irving Bitz. Known as “Itsy Bitsy,” he had been a gunman for Lucky Luciano in his youth and was a prime suspect in the murder of bootlegger Legs Diamond. He later graduated into high mob finance. In the newspaper-distribution business, he played both sides of the labor and management divide, arranging generous contracts for the union in exchange for bribes and timely loans to newspaper executives facing a cash crunch.

Itsy Bitsy was still going strong at age seventy-eight, the owner of two major news-delivery firms, when he disappeared in 1981. His body washed up on a Long Island beach a few weeks later. He’d been strangled, police said.

One of Bitz’s protégés was the former president of the newspaper deliverers union, a fast-talking charmer named Douglas LaChance. Even after he was convicted in 1980 of selling out his own members by secretly dealing newspapers during a lengthy strike, LaChance remained a popular figure in his union.

When Al took over as acting boss, one of the management decisions he faced was what to do about him. The union leader was considered unruly and prone to cutting his own side deals without letting his mob chaperones know what he was up to.

LaChance had long been close to the DiPalermo brothers, who had multiple relatives on the payrolls at city newspapers. Al viewed him with skepticism. “He was close to Petey Beck. Then when Petey died, he was with Joe Beck. But he was always fooling around. Me and Vic talked about having to kill him one day because he was impossible to control.”

Despite his past racketeering conviction, LaChance ran for reelection as president of his union in 1991. Al was leery of him. “The guy was still on parole but they let him run. What if he was a government agent?” He ordered Luchese members to steer clear of him.

But LaChance’s opponent in the race was a Bonanno crime family associate. And whatever misgivings the Luchese bosses had, keeping the union in the family fold was important. It was a useful place for jobs for members and associates, and for shakedowns of businesses.

LaChance won reelection, celebrating his victory with a party at Forlini’s, a restaurant on the edge of Chinatown and a favorite with both wiseguys and prosecutors from the nearby district attorney’s office. Al dispatched Dom Truscello, whose son was a driver and member, and Anthony Tortorello, an old friend of LaChance’s, to the party.

The Luchese men got there just in time. At the bar when they walked in LaChance was being toasted by a top Genovese family member named Ross Gangi, who had brought along other Genovese associates to add their congratulations. “They were making a play for him to come over with them and leave the Luchese family. Torty and Dom took him on the side and reminded him he was with us and he’d better remember it.”

*   *   *

As tempting as it sometimes was, not killing people, Al understood, was usually the wiser business decision. The best example was a wealthy construction contractor named Joseph Martinelli.

An impressive figure with a shock of white hair and a wide mustache, Martinelli earned his way onto the Luchese hit list in 1989 when he started bucking Vic Amuso’s demands for payoffs. Martinelli headed one of the city’s largest concrete firms, Northberry Concrete. He had poured foundations for the Dag Hammarskjöld Plaza at the United Nations and hospital expansions on the Upper East Side. His firm was even tapped to help build the new federal district courthouse on Pearl Street behind Foley Square.

A major part of Martinelli’s success stemmed from his membership in a mob-orchestrated bid-rigging club that divvied up all city jobs valued over $2 million. The result, lawsuits filed by state and federal prosecutors in the 1980s found, was that the price for each project was hiked up to 15 percent. That cost was then passed along to the public. It was one of the reasons New York City had the highest concrete costs in the nation.

Martinelli had forged his original pact with Christy Tick Furnari, who had helped send work his way in exchange for an annual payment of $100,000. That pledge fell by the wayside, however, when Amuso and Casso took over. The new bosses insisted on the payoffs, but neglected to forward any job referrals. The contractor resented being taken for granted. He stopped paying.

Amuso was furious. He designated both Al and Pete Chiodo to take care of it. “I made a meeting with Martinelli and Pete. I said, ‘Look, you’re getting all the benefits. We’re protecting you.’ I told him he was taking advantage of Vic’s friendship.” Al left the meeting thinking Martinelli had grudgingly agreed to go along. But a few days later, Amuso paged him.

“It was a Sunday and Vic was blowing his fuse. He said some guys in a Jeep had pulled up in front of his house in Howard Beach screaming his name and waving shotguns. They scared his wife and family. Vic said it was Martinelli. He said he was going to have him killed. He said he’d told Chiodo to take care of it.”

The rebellion alone was intolerable to the Luchese leaders. Squashing it quickly became more important than any income they would forfeit from the contractor’s demise.

Amuso and Casso hounded Chiodo to get the job done. But Martinelli proved evasive. At a meeting at a car wash on Flatlands Avenue shortly before Casso went on the lam, Al watched as Casso laced into Chiodo for the delay. “He says, ‘Joe Martinelli is going to die of old age the rate you’re going.’”

Chiodo finally took the direct approach. In the spring of 1990, he called Martinelli and told him that both Casso and Gambino underboss Salvatore “Sammy Bull” Gravano needed to see him over a complaint that had been lodged against Northberry. To his surprise, the contractor agreed to come.

Chiodo arranged to meet him near a video store in Staten Island. He put a gun in his pocket and instructed Richard Pagliarulo to follow behind from a safe distance in his car. Martinelli arrived in a Lincoln Town Car. Chiodo lowered his huge bulk into the passenger seat and directed the contractor to a secluded area in the wetlands of the island’s South Beach section. When Chiodo saw that Pagliarulo was behind them, he told Martinelli to pull over.

They were in the middle of nowhere. Chiodo pulled himself out of the car, telling Martinelli he’d take a look to see if Casso and Gravano were coming. Standing by the car, he reached into his jacket, pulled out a 9 mm pistol, and bent down to the open passenger-door window. Aiming at Martinelli’s head, he squeezed the trigger four or five times. The gun only clicked.

“What are you doing?” yelled Martinelli, his face gone white.

Chiodo tried to laugh. “It’s a toy pistol,” he said. “I took it from my son because it looked too real.”

Martinelli shook his head. “It does look real,” he agreed. They sat in the car for a few more minutes until Chiodo said he’d better see what was keeping Casso and Gravano. They drove to a pay phone, where he pretended to make a call. “They spotted a tail—they’re not coming,” he said. Martinelli seemed relieved the meeting was off.

He dropped Chiodo back at the video store. When Pagliarulo pulled up, they drove back to the wetlands and inspected the gun. It had misfired because Chiodo hadn’t pushed the magazine into place. Chiodo was embarrassed. Pagliarulo, whose own gun had jammed when he had shot ironworkers union leader Sonny Morrissey, reassured him. “Don’t worry,” said the loyal soldier. “I won’t ever tell.”

The contract on Martinelli was still in place when Al was designated acting boss. But Amuso and Casso were no longer asking about him, and Al had no interest in enforcing it. More important, Martinelli, thankfully still breathing, had gone back to making regular payoffs of $50,000 every few months. Handing the money to Amuso and Casso, Al explained where it had come from. “You’d think they would’ve said, ‘Gee, good thing we didn’t kill him.’ But they never said a word about it.”

*   *   *

Cooler heads also prevailed in an angry three-way dispute between crime families over the rights to a developer tapped by the City of New York to build affordable housing. The builder was a Pennsylvania-based firm called DeLuxe Homes, selected because its prefabricated town house–style units were cheaper and quicker to produce.

Designated to build in housing-needy neighborhoods around the city, the company encountered a different crime family at each location.

In the Bronx, Luchese member Steve Crea, a practiced contractor himself, was close to DeLuxe’s superintendent, who agreed to funnel payoffs in exchange for mob favors. In Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where two-family homes were designated for a stretch of Kent Avenue near Al’s old stomping grounds, Gambino underboss Sammy “the Bull” Gravano stepped forward with offers of protection and help. In Coney Island, where acres had been leveled for urban renewal since Al and Dolores had celebrated their wedding at Villa Joe’s, a local associate of the Genovese family named Bartolomeo Nicholo, known on the street as “Barry Nickels,” asserted his own rights to the firm.

Each family offered its own brand of the same package: relaxed union rules in exchange for cash and the use of mob-controlled subcontractors.

In Coney Island, Barry Nickels employed a well-practiced mob tool to get the builder’s attention. He directed a local group of black construction workers demanding jobs to lay siege to the project. The group was one of many rogue offshoots of a civil rights effort to integrate the construction trades. In the name of seeking minority jobs, so-called coalitions used violence and threats to win payoffs and no-show slots. It was a minor-league version of the Mafia’s own hustle. Vincent DiNapoli, the Genovese family’s creative construction expert, had been the first to recognize the coalitions as useful cat’s-paws against developers hesitant to play ball.

Nickels’s agent for harassing DeLuxe was a group called Akbar’s Community Service, considered by police to be one of the most violent of the coalitions. It was headed by a former leader of a Brownsville street gang called the Tomahawks. Since then Derrick Ford, who grew up with boxer Mike Tyson, had morphed into Akbar Allah. He sported a gold front tooth with a large letter A stamped on it. At Nickels’s urging, he sent his troops surging onto DeLuxe’s job sites, doing his best to disrupt the project. “Yeah, we worked with Barry,” Allah later told a reporter. “Sammy Bull too. We helped each other.”

When a truck from the Luchese favorite, Quadrozzi Concrete, showed up to pour a foundation for DeLuxe, Barry Nickels personally showed up waving a pistol to chase away the driver.

After word of the confrontation reached Al, he convened a summit. In his view, Nickels had crossed the line. “You never pull a gun on a driver. He’s got nothing to do with it. You can get killed for that.”

An initial meeting in late 1990 was held at the 19th Hole in Bensonhurst. A tentative settlement called for Crea’s superintendent to remain on the job, with the Gambino and Genovese families calling the shots. The Luchese crew got work for some of its subcontractors, plus a onetime payment of $550,000 to walk away from the company.

But the money wasn’t forthcoming. A second meeting was called by Gravano, this one at Gargiulo’s, the Coney Island restaurant where Amuso and Casso had reminded Al that his newly made son owed them greater allegiance than he owed his own father.

Al was suspicious. Coney Island was Gravano’s home turf. His own construction company was not far away on Stillwell Avenue. “We heard Sammy had some of his shooters on standby in the neighborhood.” As a countermove, Al had Joseph and another half dozen Luchese members and associates arrayed outside, armed with pistols and automatic weapons.

Al’s suspicions increased when Gravano failed to arrive on time. Instead, John Gammarano, the Gambino family’s delegate to the construction panel, showed up alone. “Johnny G showed up and said Sammy had seen heat in the neighborhood and wasn’t coming.” In a back room at the restaurant, Gammarano gave Al a peace offering, an envelope with $30,000.

The rest of the money, Gammarano pledged, would be coming shortly. But a few weeks after the near clash, Gravano and John Gotti Sr. were arrested. Payments slowed to a trickle. “They were paying in dribs and drabs. I was continually in conflict with them.”

*   *   *

The one area of the construction business where the mob’s talents were most in demand, even by otherwise law-abiding builders, was getting rid of the trash. What to do with work site debris was always a major challenge. Builders were knee-deep in it from the moment the job began. First, tons of rubble from the old structure had to be hauled away. That was followed by a steady stream of waste as the new building rose in its place. It was an especially tough problem during New York’s massive building boom in the late 1980s and early 1990s, as new rules about how and where construction and demolition debris—C and D in the trade—could be dumped.

The nearest legitimate dumps were in western Pennsylvania and Ohio, long and expensive hauls. The pressure on contractors to get it done faster and cheaper was intense. No one wanted to know where the debris ended up, just that it was gone from the job site.

Enter the Mafia, which didn’t much worry about rules. Al recognized the natural fit. “There was a lot of money in it. A lot of wiseguys got in the business.”

Illegal dumping of construction debris was John Gotti Jr.’s first entrée into the business side of his father’s empire. In 1988, a company tied to Gotti took over an old railyard site in Mott Haven in the south Bronx and opened the gates to construction companies looking to dump their debris. Investigators tracing illegal landfills said the line of idling trucks waiting to shed their loads backed up to the Triborough Bridge before the site was closed down.

Al got his own close-up look at the immense profits when he was dispatched by Gaspipe Casso to check out the dump in Matamoras, Pennsylvania, to see what Mike Salerno was up to out there.

The dump was located at a bend in the Delaware River, near the borders of New Jersey and New York. It was an otherwise pristine location, just five miles north of the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area. The farmer who owned the land had a canoe and camping area at the other end of his property.

But it was also an easy shot from the city, some eighty miles if you took Interstate 84 from the New York State Thruway. It was a well-worn wiseguy path, about twenty miles southwest of where Chalootz Gagliodotto had done his own dumping of the bodies of Frank Tuminaro and Frank Gangi.

The landfill was essentially just a dip in the land, easily filled in with debris, then covered with a film of fresh dirt. The property owner had been assured that everything was on the up-and-up, with all permits secured and nothing but clean fill deposited on his land.

Actually, the site was in violation of a host of Pennsylvania environmental regulations. And no one was checking to see what exactly was being dumped. All they were doing was counting truckloads and cubic yards of debris to make sure truckers paid the right fees and that the Luchese bosses were getting their fair share.

Even that was tough work. Al’s right-hand man, Shorty DiPalo, came back with a deep sunburn from the two weeks he spent keeping count of the loads. Al looked at him and laughed. “What, were you on vacation?” he wisecracked.

DiPalo, who depended on Al for everything from his rent to the car he drove, risked a rare nasty look at his boss. “You try standing on that platform,” he said.

Even the intrepid Harpo Trapani, who had served Paul Vario as a loyal driver before Al recruited him as his own chauffeur, had a hard time at the landfill. Whatever was coming out of the trucks gave him headaches and nausea. “He said the smell was getting him sick. He asked to be taken out of there.”

But everyone agreed they had seen more cash changing hands at the site than at most banks. Stacks of money paid by the truckers covered the table inside the small trailer that served as an office. Profits were supposed to be a three-way split: one-third for the property owner; one-third for Pasquale Masselli, a Luchese soldier who had come up with the plan, and his partner, a hustler named Donald Herzog; and one-third for the Luchese crime family. Some weeks, the family’s earnings came to $30,000.

The Matamoras landfill was the envy of New York’s mobsters. Gotti Jr., with his own Bronx dump shuttered, tried to elbow his way into the deal. At a meeting at a diner near Eighty-Sixth Street in Brooklyn with Casso and Al, Gotti offered $500,000 for a piece of the action, plus the right for his own trucks to dump at the site. Casso turned him down. He saw no reason to share his golden goose.

He should have taken the money. Neighbors downwind of the landfill had long complained of the same foul odors that sickened Harpo Trapani. They struck out with local officials who had been bribed to look the other way. But state authorities took an interest. When investigators showed up they ordered the site closed. No permits had ever been issued. A quick look determined that garbage and medical waste, in addition to construction debris, had been dumped in huge amounts at the site.

Al tried to fight back. He had John Zagari, an attorney who had done legal work for his cousin Joe Sica, the Genovese powerhouse in Pittsburgh, try to challenge the state’s clampdown. Zagari did his best. He got engineers to file faked reports claiming they were cleaning up any contaminated waste in order to reopen.

The state wasn’t convinced. Governor Robert Casey eventually leveled $933,000 in fines against the owner and operators. The dump had contaminated local groundwater and was likely to pollute the Delaware River, the governor said.

*   *   *

Al saw the shutdown as just a temporary setback. If demand was that strong, he reasoned, there would be other sites. It was a business worth investing in. Even though he couldn’t stomach the smell, Harpo Trapani had the same idea. He suggested to Al that he buy into a carting company that provided debris containers for construction and demolition sites.

The firm Trapani had in mind was called A&M Carting, whose owners included a Luchese associate who was close to Canarsie crew veteran Pete the Killer Abinanti. A&M looked like a winner. The company already had a dozen pickup spots at New York City Housing Authority projects, a customer always good for the bill. Its containers were roll-ons: trucks would back up to the site, drop the container, then roll it back onto the truck when it was full. To handle even bigger loads, Al bought another company called Rhino Trucking. “It was two tremendous tractor-trailer trucks.”

Like the rest of New York’s private carters, the company’s business plan was premised on the notion of “property rights.” Mob trash haulers, like Ralph Masucci’s brother-in-law, Angelo Ponte, who was one of the biggest, divided up the territory according to fiefdoms. Carters weren’t allowed to poach customers by offering lower prices. Routes were the property of individual companies. They could be sold or bartered, but competition wasn’t allowed.

It was the same practice that had helped make Sal Avellino Long Island’s dominant trash hauler and a multimillionaire. The system was so sacrosanct that it had earned the death penalty for the rebel carters, Kubecka and Barstow, when they dared to break the rules.

There was also a rare opening in the business. A government conviction of a major Genovese-controlled firm in Brooklyn called Rosedale Carting had resulted in an auction of its routes. Al went to see his friend Jimmy Ida to see if he could work something out. Ida said he was agreeable, but any deal had to be approved by the Genovese family’s carting broker, a mob elder from Brooklyn named Alphonse Malangone, who headed the Kings County Trade Waste Association. Thanks to eyesight problems, Malangone wore tinted glasses, a fashion statement that earned him the name “Allie Shades” among his wiseguy pals.

“Allie Shades had a book where he kept the records of every carting stop for the past twenty years. He used it to settle any disputes.”

Malangone was also agreeable. “Allie Shades said okay, as long as we cut the Genovese family in for part of our profits.”

The problem of where to dump the debris was solved when Al learned that Mike Salerno had been partners in a second illegal landfill site, this one in the village of Hastings-on-Hudson in Westchester County. Salerno’s partners there had been Vincent DiNapoli’s brothers, Joseph and Louis. “Vinny and Louis were with the Genovese crew. Joe DiNapoli was with us, the Luchese family. They were pretty successful. They had their own carting company and were making a lot of money at it.”

Since Mike Salerno had been a part-owner of the dump site, Al told the DiNapolis, it was only fair that his A&M trucks be allowed to dump there for free as a way of working off what they owed Salerno. It didn’t matter that Al had helped engineer Salerno’s murder. His mob-earned assets remained Luchese family property. “That was how it worked. What he had was ours.”

But the Westchester dump site was also being targeted by angry neighbors. And for good reason. Some of the debris being deposited there was a toxic stew, worse than what had been found at Matamoras. Al heard the reports from carting company employees. “Some of the drivers said the tires on the trucks were melting when they drove into the dump from whatever was on the ground.”

Again, state environmental investigators showed up. “We got a lot of tickets, and then they seized one of our trucks.” For a few months, Al had to pay the insurance premiums on the trucks out of his own pocket. He was also shelling out for Harpo Trapani’s salary when income failed to meet expenses. The plan to take over the Rosedale stops also collapsed after other Genovese-tied carters complained. The splendid business opportunity was becoming a money-losing headache.

Acting boss or not, Al was beginning to wish he’d never gotten involved in any of the landfill scams.

*   *   *

He would have seen his illegal-dumping venture as an even worse disaster if he’d known something else: thanks to his trips up to Matamoras, Al D’Arco was now the subject of intense FBI interest.

Tipped by an informant, agents went to take a look at the sprawling landfill by the Delaware River. The lead agent on the Matamoras expedition was Robert Marston, based out of the bureau’s office in the Westchester suburb of New Rochelle. He was focused on trying to learn as much as he could about those who were allowing medical waste to wash up on beaches, and stuffing toxic-laced debris down abandoned mines in places like West Virginia and Ohio.

His informant told Marston that someone was making a small fortune at an illegal landfill on the New York–Pennsylvania border. Marston and his partner, Jim O’Connor, went up to look.

At first, they thought they might have been given a bum steer. They saw a long plain of rolling hills with a bulldozer pushing loads of dirt around. “It was right out in the open off of I-84, so you assumed they had a permit for it,” Marston said of his first trip.

But a quick check found that wasn’t the case. The agents put the site under surveillance. The intense activity and the long line of trucks enabled them to obtain a wiretap under Title III of the federal law permitting court-authorized snooping on private conversations.

Listening to the phone calls, they started sorting out the players. “There was an accountant, Donny Herzog, who seemed to be a guy in the middle. There was someone named ‘Pat’ who Herzog reports to.”

Pat turned out to be Pasquale Masselli. Then there was someone named Frank Salerno who talked about his “Uncle Mike.”

“We learn that ‘Uncle Mike’ was Mike Salerno. He was a longtime Luchese big shot from the Bronx who lived up in Ardsley. He had a diamond pinkie ring and a high-end Jaguar with his initials on it, a very well-known mob guy.”

The agents had found something much bigger than an illegal landfill. And then things got dramatic.

“In the middle of our Title III, Mike Salerno gets killed.” Listening to the wiretap, the agents heard the landfill operators panicking. “They were saying, ‘Mikey’s missing,’ and ‘Mikey’s dead.’” Fearing he could be next, accountant Donald Herzog fled the state for several days. He didn’t come back until his partners pleaded with him. He had to come back, they said, to meet “Al.”

Herzog, the agents learned, had been told to show up somewhere in Manhattan with his books showing the landfill’s receipts and expenses. Someone named “Al” wanted to go over them. Marston wasn’t sure yet who they were talking about.

“We knew he was a scary guy. We didn’t have a picture of him and we never heard his voice.”

The agents began trying to figure it out. Who was Al?