19

TRUMBULL

He threw his gun behind the house. The agent on the phone, Bob Marston, had told him to be sure not to have any weapons on them when they arrived.

The little house was on a dead-end lane on a neck of land extending into Oyster Bay. Long Island Sound was a couple of blocks away. The house was empty except for Al and Joseph.

Al told the agent they would meet them outside. “It’s a dark street,” Al told him. “We’ll be out by the streetlight so you can see us.”

He made a point of telling Marston that he expected to see him there, not some other agents. “I will come with you,” Al told him. “Don’t be sending no one else.”

Marston promised. He described himself so that Al would know him. “Six foot two, glasses, brown hair, 180 pounds. Medium build.” He would be with his partner, Jim O’Connor, he said. They would also have other agents there as backup, just in case.

Standing on the porch at midnight, Al and Joseph heard nothing but crickets. Then the street erupted.

“All of a sudden, there’s cars shooting up and down the block, racing around.”

A blue Buick sped past the house. Marston was in the passenger seat, his notebook with the directions he’d gotten from Al open on his lap. O’Connor was driving. “I think we just missed the house,” Marston told his partner. O’Connor jammed on the brakes and backed up at full speed.

Another agent following them raced past, stopped at the end of the block, then backed up and blocked the road. A third car pulled up with a squeal of tires, the driver cutting the wheels so that the auto was sideways in the street. Another agent’s car jerked to a halt behind it.

On the porch, Al and Joseph looked at each other. “We couldn’t figure out what they were racing around like that for.”

Marston and O’Connor got out of their car. They stood on the curb. They saw two men come down off the porch and start walking toward them. A shorter, balding older man was wearing a dark blue windbreaker. He had a small gym bag in his hand. The younger man beside him was wearing a Mets baseball cap.

“Mr. D’Arco, I’m Bob,” Marston said, extending a hand. He introduced O’Connor.

“This is my son Joseph,” said Al. Everyone was guardedly polite. Marston asked Al if he was armed.

“No,” said Al. “We got rid of them. I just got some clothes.” He hefted the small gym bag. The agents took his word for it. Thinking back on it later, Marston was surprised that they didn’t pat them down or look in the bag. He realized he had already started to trust Al D’Arco.

“Let’s get going,” the agent said. He opened the back door for them to get in. Al and Joseph hesitated. Neither father nor son had good memories of rides in the backseats of cop cars. They had certainly never done so voluntarily. After a moment, Al clambered inside. Joseph followed.

*   *   *

No one said much in the car. Their first stop, Marston announced, leaning over the front seat, would be his office in New Rochelle. They’d have a chance to use a bathroom and get coffee or a drink of water. They drove in a four-car caravan across the Throgs Neck Bridge into the Bronx, then up Interstate 95 to Westchester County. The trip took about an hour. In the back, Joseph seemed to nod off. Al stared out the window.

The FBI’s offices were located inside a Ramada Hotel right off the highway. Basically a substation of the far larger New York office, the New Rochelle outpost was known as a “resident agency,” where agents covering Westchester and next-door Putnam County were based. When they arrived, several of Marston’s colleagues were there waiting for them, including his supervisor, Craig Dotlo.

While Al and Joseph used the bathroom, the agents consulted with their boss. It was one thirty in the morning, but calls would have to be made, they agreed. There were several people who would want to know right away that the acting boss of the Luchese crime family had voluntarily placed himself in FBI custody, even if they were deep asleep when the call came.

Dotlo called FBI headquarters in Washington. The alert was immediately passed to bureau director William Sessions, a former federal judge named by President Reagan to head the agency in 1987.

Marston knew who his first call should be. He sat down at his desk and dialed the home number of Anthony Siano, the prosecutor handling the Matamoras landfill case. Siano, forty-three, was a veteran of the Brooklyn Organized Crime Strike Force, the federal prosecutors who had made Al’s former captain, Paul Vario, a special target a decade earlier. Siano had often told the story of how they had sent Vario to prison, never to return, with the help of their then star witness, Henry Hill. The case wasn’t much, Siano admitted, a perjury rap for lying about Hill’s no-show job.

Marston smiled to himself as he dialed. Henry Hill had been the mob equivalent of a team batboy. Al D’Arco was like landing Casey Stengel.

Siano was asleep when the call came in. “Tony,” said Marston, “I’m sorry to wake you, but I thought you’d like to know I am here at the New Rochelle office with Al D’Arco. He’s with us now.”

It took Siano a moment to grab ahold of what he was hearing. Al D’Arco, the acting Luchese crime family boss they’d heard about on the landfill wire? Was in custody? Siano was known for his own tart-tongued sense of humor. He immediately had the same suspicion Marston had had several hours earlier. “Is this your idea of a bad practical joke, Bob?” he asked.

Marston laughed. “No, he’s here. He’s come in. We’re going to get to a safe location. I’ll call you first chance I get after that.”

Siano tried to absorb the news. No one this high in the mob had ever defected before. There was no playbook on how to handle it. He put his hand on the phone, debating whether he should wake up his own boss, Howard Heiss, chief of the organized-crime unit in the Southern District of New York. The debate didn’t last long. Siano imagined the questions he’d be likely to face if something went wrong: “Just when exactly were you planning to tell me that you had the acting Luchese boss in a hotel room in Westchester?”

His call woke up Heiss’s wife. Siano introduced himself with apologies. Heiss greeted him with a tone suggesting that if this wasn’t something really important, Siano should forget about going to work on Monday.

“We’ve got Al D’Arco, the acting boss of the Luchese crime family, in custody,” Siano said. “He’s flipped.” He heard only silence on the other end. After a pause, Heiss spoke.

“All right, what are you doing?”

“We’re trying to settle the situation and make sure he’s safe,” said Siano. “But he’s going to need a lawyer.”

“Okay, keep me posted,” Heiss said. Then he hung up.

Siano looked at the phone. As the wiseguys say, he told himself, now I’m on record. They can’t say I didn’t tell them.

*   *   *

In the New Rochelle office, Marston was trying to figure out where to take his new companions. He needed a place that was both safe and convenient. He didn’t have to look far down the road to guess that this was going to take up most of his time for the coming weeks, if not months. If he wanted to be able to see his family, he’d be wise to get a place nearby.

There was a Marriott Hotel off the highway in Trumbull, Connecticut, about fifty miles east of the office and not far from where Marston lived. He woke up a friend who worked in the hotel chain. The friend helped arrange three adjoining rooms on the top floor for them.

He had driven his own car to New Rochelle to hook up with O’Connor, so they decided they would drive separately to Trumbull. That way, they’d have two cars available. Al went with Marston. Joseph got in O’Connor’s car.

Marston chatted with Al beside him in the passenger seat. They talked about Al’s family. The agent told him a little about his own. “I don’t live too far from here,” Marston said as they drove along the Merritt Parkway.

At the hotel, Al and Joseph shared a room. Marston and O’Connor were down the hall in rooms of their own. Neither slept the first night, however. They still didn’t know what they were up against. A couple of other agents arrived to keep a watchful eye on the hallway.

In the morning, the situation got complicated right away. Joseph was sick. Al took Marston aside to explain his son’s ailment. He needed methadone, Al told him. He was hooked. He hadn’t replenished his supply in a few days.

Getting methadone for a potential witness was another new experience for Marston. But he figured that someone in the bureau would have experience with it. He was right. The New York office had a small medical unit attached to it. An agent went to the city to retrieve a prescription.

Once medicated, Joseph felt better. But he was largely silent, often sitting on the bed in the hotel room, saying little.

His father was the opposite. Al was already bouncing off the walls, second-guessing himself and worrying about the next move by his former mob allies. He warned Marston that the Luchese bosses had sources inside law enforcement. “I don’t think they understood how much these guys knew. I was trying to tell them they shouldn’t sell them short.”

Both he and Joseph still had their pagers with them. They buzzed in a continuing chorus, the numbers lighting up on the small screen with the codes showing various mobster pals reaching out for them. The agents wanted to ask about the calls, but Siano gave strict orders. They shouldn’t make any effort to question or debrief the D’Arcos until they had legal representation, he said.

That presented another major problem.

Al insisted that he already had a lawyer, John Zagari, the Pittsburgh-based attorney he had called the night before looking for help in reaching the FBI. “That’s the guy I trust,” he told Siano and the agents. “That’s who I want representing me.”

It fell to Marston to tell Al that Zagari couldn’t be his lawyer. Worse, he couldn’t tell him exactly why not.

What they couldn’t tell Al was that Zagari himself was a target in the illegal-landfill case. He was likely to be indicted. In fact, they had more solid evidence against the lawyer at that point than they had against Al, whose role in the landfill scheme they were still trying to determine. But since it was still possible that Al might decide against cooperating and walk out of the hotel, they couldn’t tell him that, either. To do so would have put Zagari in jeopardy.

Al reacted with suspicion and rage. “You’re telling me I don’t have the right to have my own lawyer represent me?” he thundered.

The decision confirmed all the fears and doubts he had about his new alliance. They were screwing him, he thought, just as he should’ve known they would do. He was in the hands of men who had been his sworn enemies just forty-eight hours before. Someplace out there, his former friends were trying to find him and kill him. He had just moved his family far away. Now he was being told he couldn’t have the backup of the one person he thought he could trust.

Marston asked Al to take a walk with him outside. They couldn’t go far, so they simply walked around the hotel parking lot. The agent tried to cool him down. He could have any other lawyer of his choosing, Marston told him. They would give him a list of court-approved attorneys, eligible to be reimbursed for their work by the government. He just couldn’t have John Zagari. There was a conflict, he told Al as they walked around and around in the lot, one that would hurt both Al and Zagari down the road once the problem surfaced.

Meanwhile, Siano scrambled to come up with a list of attorneys who could represent Al. They needed someone knowledgeable about organized crime who wouldn’t have a conflict of his own, having represented members of the Luchese family in the past. He worked his way through a short list, making calls to find out if the attorneys were interested and available.

He ended up with just three names. One was an Italian American. Siano put that name at the top of the list. He went to the hotel to hand it to Al. The first name was James DeVita. A former prosecutor in the Southern District, DeVita had become a white-collar defense attorney in private practice. DeVita’s specialty wasn’t organized crime, but he had a couple of other attributes Siano thought would help. He was from Brooklyn, and he was Italian.

Al still suspected that he was being conned. But he noticed the ethnic connection. “I’ll try him,” he said, pointing to DeVita’s name.

Nothing was simple, however. They couldn’t just tell DeVita to meet them at the Marriott. Elaborate security precautions were taken for each meeting. Siano reached DeVita at home and told him he had a potential client who would like to interview him as his possible lawyer. He gave DeVita a location. “Meet us there tomorrow afternoon,” he said. “You’ll be picked up.”

Agents drove the lawyer on a circuitous route, looping back on themselves, and pulling over on the side of the highway. They were scrubbing off, the same way Al and the Luchese gang did when they tried to make sure that law enforcement couldn’t tail them.

An hour later, they finally deposited the attorney at a large parking lot. Cars filled with heavily armed agents were posted at the entrance and exit. Siano introduced Al to DeVita and then left them alone. He watched as the two men wandered around the lot. They were feeling each other out.

“Where are you from?” was Al’s first question.

“I grew up in Brooklyn,” said the lawyer.

“Yeah, what part?”

“By the Navy Yard, Fort Greene area,” DeVita said.

Al felt a twinge of hope, his first in weeks. If he couldn’t have the lawyer he knew, then the next best thing, he figured, would be to have a lawyer from his own neighborhood. A paisan, to boot. Al posed a number of other questions and then asked DeVita if he would represent him. He’d be glad to do it, DeVita said. But if he was going to fashion a cooperation agreement for Al, he needed to know everything he’d done, his entire criminal history. They walked and talked for a couple more hours.

Later, speaking to Dolores on the phone in Hawaii, Al told her about the lawyer from his old neighborhood. “His name’s DeVita. He grew up on Clinton Avenue.”

DeVita, Dolores reminded him, was the name of the doctor who delivered John and Tara. The doctor’s office was on Clinton Avenue.

The next time he saw the attorney, Al asked him about it. “That was my father,” DeVita told him. “He was an obstetrician. He had his office right there in our house.”

Al grinned. His lawyer’s father had delivered his kids. Now the son was going to try and deliver him.

*   *   *

Marston and Siano thought they were over the hump. Once Al had an attorney, they could commence working out a plea agreement. As soon as that was reached, they could proceed to the task both men were anxious to get started on, getting Al to tell them the many mob secrets he harbored.

But they had again underestimated Al’s deep suspicions. They assumed that Al understood that he and Joseph would have to have separate attorneys representing them. Both had separate criminal liabilities. A judge might well question the independence of a single attorney claiming to represent the best interests of both father and son.

Al was outraged all over again. It was another trick, he insisted. “You’re trying to pit us against each other. You want to split us apart,” he said.

He announced he was leaving. He packed the few belongings he had in his small gym bag and began heading out the door. Marston rushed to block his way.

“Al, let’s talk about this,” he said. “Let’s take another walk and just talk.”

There was nothing to talk about, Al said. He tried to push past him. Marston planted his hands on Al’s shoulders. He towered over the shorter man, but he wasn’t sure how long he could restrain him, or what he’d do if D’Arco tried to fight him off. “Wait, Al,” he pleaded. “Let’s try and talk this through.”

Al was finally convinced to take another walk through the parking lot. If he didn’t trust anyone, Marston told him, he would be all alone. He had to trust someone, he said.

“I got friends,” Al spat back. “I got people I trust. I can handle it on my own.”

He vented steam as he paced. Marston mostly listened. The more they walked, the calmer Al became. After more than an hour of walking, Al had agreed not to leave.

Back upstairs in the hotel, Marston called Siano to tell him what had happened. “You know if he wants to leave, we can’t stop him,” the prosecutor told him. “He’s not charged with anything. We’ve got nothing to hold him on.”

*   *   *

DeVita recommended a former colleague from the U.S. attorney’s office named Vincent Bricetti to serve as Joseph’s lawyer. Joseph was willing to go along with whatever his father decided. Al relied on DeVita’s judgment. If he liked Bricetti, he figured, his son would be well represented. As it turned out, both lawyers drove hard bargains for their clients.

Al’s agreement was a dense four pages. He agreed to plead guilty to a criminal information charging him with racketeering. His crimes, he acknowledged, included both homicide and mail fraud. He would have to testify truthfully before any grand juries or criminal cases at the government’s request.

For its part, the government agreed that it wouldn’t seek a sentence of more than twenty years against him. He could get less, depending on the level and quality of his cooperation. Or he could get more, up to life imprisonment if the sentencing judge so ordered. The government also agreed to admit him and his immediate family into the witness protection program.

For Joseph, Bricetti demanded complete immunity. He would cooperate, and testify if asked. But there could be no threat of any prison time. The demand put Siano in a tough spot. He knew that Al D’Arco’s crimes had to include murders. As an acting boss, his testimony was potentially invaluable. He knew nothing about Joseph’s activity or his potential value as a witness.

“He wants a total immunity bath for the kid,” Siano complained to Marston. “But we don’t know anything about him.”

Before he agreed, Siano said he wanted to find out what else the FBI knew about Joseph. “I want to make sure I’m not giving away the store.”

He asked the bureau to query all the supervisors following the five crime families to see what they knew about Joseph’s criminal activity. He waited for a response. The answer was blunt and dismissive. “He’s a nobody,” Siano was told. “He’s nothing but a hamburger flipper.”

Fair enough, Siano decided. In that case, we have nothing to lose. He ran the offer up the chain of command to Howard Heiss and Heiss’s boss, U.S. Attorney Otto Obermaier. The decision was to agree to Bricetti’s terms. Joseph D’Arco would have immunity.

At his first debriefing session, Joseph told Siano and the agents about how he had killed Anthony DiLapi in California. He also told them that he had been the one to put most of the bullets into Big Pete Chiodo earlier that year.

Siano was stunned as he listened. “We were each thinking the same thing,” said Siano. “Some hamburger flipper.”

*   *   *

On September 26, five days after he had quit the mob, Al D’Arco began telling the story of his lifetime of crime.

DeVita was in the room for the first session, as was Siano. Marston took the notes. Jim O’Connor and a third agent, William Confrey, were there as well.

The agents and prosecutor were impressed with Al’s intense focus. It was the same industriousness that he’d applied to his criminal activities. He told them he was willing to work just as hard for his new boss as he had for the last one.

The first memo was six pages long. It was recorded on an FBI form used for potential witnesses known as an FD-302, the first of more than seven hundred that Al would generate over the following two years. It contained a shorthand version of Al’s career with the Luchese family, from his 1982 initiation to his promotion as acting boss in January. He made no attempt to glorify his role. Amuso and Casso had designated him as their “prick,” he told them, the one they called upon to do “something unpleasant” when ordered.

He told them about the internal bickering and scheming that had consumed the family after Amuso and Casso had gone into hiding. He described the nighttime meeting in Staten Island in July when he had been demoted, and where his old friend Vic Amuso wouldn’t look him in the eye. It had been followed by a growing realization, he said, that he was being set up for his own assassination.

In a quick count, he cited the murders in which he had played a role, including his personal participation in the slaying of garment center tycoon Michael Pappadio. He told them about the senseless killing of architect Anthony Fava, carried out just two days before he quit the mob.

Who else, Marston and Siano asked, was on the Luchese hit list?

Al named four members of the New Jersey faction who were still targets of active murder plots. He told them that Amuso and Casso had also vowed to kill Neil Migliore, the veteran Long Island mobster who had made a fortune in the construction business. And then there was his own former associate, Pete Del Cioppo. “I think Petey definitely has something to worry about,” Al told them.

The information triggered an automatic FBI response. Any time the bureau learned of a possible murder conspiracy, agents were obligated to warn potential victims, just as word had been passed to Al via his parole officer.

It was always a tough sell. The targets were inevitably more suspicious of the agents giving the warnings than of their fellow mobsters. One way to enhance their credibility was to convince them the tip had started with one of their own, the missing Al D’Arco. No word had leaked yet that the former acting Luchese boss was with the FBI. Presumably, the Luchese mob still wasn’t sure what had become of him.

Marston decided to take a photograph of Al holding his official FBI credentials. It would serve as a “vouch photo”—proving that Al really was cooperating. They posed him in one of the hotel rooms, against floral-patterned curtains kept drawn day and night. In the photo, Al was still wearing the same blue-and-white, collarless short-sleeved shirt he’d had on the night he was picked up in Bayville. He looked directly into the camera, the credentials held chest high by his fingertips so that Marston’s name and official picture were clearly visible. The expression on Al’s face was sober and serious. “This is for real,” he seemed to be saying.

*   *   *

After the initial debriefing session, a new crisis erupted. The agents told Al that Joseph had to go into a drug detox program. The bureau couldn’t continue to feed his methadone habit, they said. In the meantime, Al would be moved to a safe house in upstate New York.

Al erupted in fury. “They were trying to break us up again, split us apart.” He didn’t dispute that his son needed help. He’d never been able to persuade Joseph to kick methadone. Part of the problem, Al knew, was Louise. Joseph’s wife still battled her own addiction. In the days after Al and Joseph had decided to cooperate, she had generated new anxiety by hesitating to join her husband. “I don’t know if I can do this without her,” he told his father.

Al fumed and cursed. He insisted that he needed to be with his son. Marston again performed his role as counselor, gently trying to talk his witness down. They did more tours of the parking lot, Al venting as they walked.

Despite his protests, Al knew there was no way out anymore. He had cast his fate with the government. There was a picture now to prove it. Even as he paced the hotel lot, federal agents were warning Pete Del Cioppo and Neil Migliore about the threats to their lives. As proof, they were showing them the photo of Al D’Arco holding Bob Marston’s FBI credentials.

Before they parted, he sat with Joseph in their hotel room. “We said we would get through this, and be together again, the whole family. That we had to stay strong for everyone else.”

He watched his son walk down the hotel corridor with a team of agents. He was all alone now, he thought.

*   *   *

The safe house was a large, comfortable home on the edge of the woods. There was a swimming pool, a tennis court, and a fireplace. Al didn’t want to walk in the woods. “They got ticks and stuff in there,” the city gangster told Marston. It was chilly the first night. Al watched as one of the agents tried to build a fire. “He didn’t know what he was doing. He kept throwing wood on it, almost burned the place down.” Al, who knew something about setting fires, took charge. “You gotta give it a chance to catch,” he told them.

In the FBI, he was now a star. An almost daily parade of high-ranking agents arrived to interview him, each with his own line of questions to ask. Marston admired Al’s ability to size up the people who sat across from him. “We’d go for a walk out on the tennis court afterward and he’d say, ‘You know that guy really has a big ego,’ or, ‘I’m not sure I’d trust that one.’ And he’d usually be dead-on. He had a great ability to read people very quickly.”

But his suspicions had not disappeared. He tensed up when the room grew crowded and the questions were unrelenting. One day he interrupted an interview with a group of agents and beckoned Marston to follow him into a bedroom next door. Al closed the door behind them.

“Listen, I know about the thing with the finger,” Al whispered.

Marston had no idea what he was talking about. Al pointed to his index finger. “You know,” he continued, “when they take the blood test in prison. I know what they do to guys.”

“I’m not following, Al,” Marston said.

Al looked at him grimly. “The cancer,” Al said. “When they give guys cancer in prison.”

Marston still thought he was missing something. “What do you mean they give them cancer, Al?”

He spelled it out for him. “When we get arrested, and they prick your finger to take your blood and they put the cancer in,” he said. He began listing mobsters he knew who had gone to prison in perfect health, only to contract cancer within months of their incarceration.

“And you think they give them cancer on purpose, Al?”

Al looked at him. “C’mon, Bob,” he said.

Marston didn’t know what to say. Here was a man he’d come to view as intelligent and perceptive telling him that he believed there was a government plot to give cancer to mob convicts. He tried not to insult him. “I don’t think that happens,” he said.

“Okay,” said Al. “Well, anyway, I wanted you to know I know.”

Later that night, the agent thought about the huge chasm that lay between Al D’Arco’s view of the world and his own. In the war against crime, law enforcement could rightly be suspected of sometimes tilting cases, planting evidence, or lying on the witness stand. Those abuses occurred. But plotting to poison inmates? “It was like they saw us as Hitler and themselves as the Jews. They thought we were capable of anything.” What was even more striking, he thought, was the window it opened on Al D’Arco’s desperate state of mind. He had jumped from one group plotting to kill him to another he saw as having equally sinister intentions.

It wasn’t Al’s only fear. In the big house near the woods, surrounded by armed agents, he still felt haunted by the world he’d left behind. Some nights he awoke from nightmares. He was being chased by Gaspipe Casso. Other nights Chin Gigante was after him. He did his best to fight them off, but they kept catching up.

*   *   *

Ten days after he vanished from the Little Italy streets, the news that Al was now a federal informant made the newspapers. D’Arco was “the highest-ranked mobster to violate omerta,” reported the Daily News on October 3. The story, on page 3 of the paper, carried the same grainy photo of him in the dark shirt and light jacket. It also reported that Joseph D’Arco was cooperating. An unnamed underworld source told the paper that the defections had the Luchese hierarchy “going absolutely crazy now.”

High-level FBI officials did their best to spin the story away from his cooperation. New York’s top organized-crime agent was quoted in a New York Times article the same day saying that D’Arco was “on the run,” having fled to avoid execution by fellow mobsters.

The story confirmed one of Al’s many suspicions. The FBI could tell its own lies when it thought it would help.