6
MULBERRY STREET
He arrived back on Mott Street to find only poor crippled Moe at Moe’s café. Columbo Saggese was in prison. Jimmy Alto had died of lung cancer in 1964. Al had known the old man’s prospects weren’t good. Before he went away to Sing Sing, he’d driven Alto up to St. Clare’s Hospital on the West Side several times, walking him right into the examination room. Doctors told him he had a tumor. It was in his chest, shaped like an egg.
“It was a heartbreak when I heard about him dying. I owed him a lot. He was a good man, and he was good to me.”
He paid his respects to Alto’s widow and children. He congratulated Jimmy’s son, Vincent, who had passed the bar to become a lawyer. He had shortened his name to just Alto, the son told him. Al told him his dad would be proud.
He then considered his own circumstances. The newly minted ex-con was on parole for the next nine months until his full sentence expired. To satisfy regulations, he had to show legitimate employment, or at least that he was legitimately looking. Neither of which he was about to do.
“I wasn’t going to get a job driving a truck again. I said, ‘How about if I have my own business?’ The parole officer thought I was nuts, but I was serious.”
He rented a small warehouse just a couple of doors up the block from his home on Kent Avenue and proclaimed himself a furniture dealer. “I got a few sticks of furniture, some couches and chairs, and stuck them out front. I showed the parole officer. I said I was going to run a furniture sales business.”
Al was pleasantly surprised when he sold a few pieces. He ordered more items, and customers started showing up. “I got people asking for mattresses, so I added these Perfect Sleeper mattresses. I joined the Furniture Exchange on Lexington Avenue to get a better price.” His little enterprise pleased Al’s family, especially his father, who figured it would keep him out of trouble.
He enjoyed learning the trade. Setting himself up in a small office in the warehouse, he rose early, working the phones and handling orders. He hired a helper to move the bigger pieces and rented a truck for deliveries. He solicited orders from his underworld pals. It was the same work ethic he’d brought to his criminal endeavors. “I liked making a business. Just like my father, I liked to stay busy. No sitting around.”
At the same time, he had no intention of going straight. He had learned too many angles in prison to waste all his time on a sidewalk furniture outfit. As soon as he could, he headed into Manhattan to see what other business opportunities had opened up while he was away.
* * *
One of his first stops was to see Ralph Masucci, his pal from Sing Sing. Masucci had finished up his sentence in Green Haven and had made it back to the streets a few months ahead of Al. They met at the corner of Desbrosses and West Streets in lower Manhattan across from the North River piers. Masucci introduced Al to his sister’s husband, a successful carting company operator named Angelo Ponte. Along with his brothers, Ponte was preparing the West Street site for a lavish two-story restaurant. Al was impressed.
Masucci had other connections as well. In Green Haven, Ralph explained, he had met another Mafia old-timer looking for younger recruits to help relaunch his own criminal career. “Ralph said, ‘We’re going to be bouncing around, doing a lot of things. He’s got a lot of ideas and connections. You should join up with us.”
The old-timer’s name was David Petillo. He was fifty-eight years old and looking to make up for lost time. He had spent most of the last thirty years behind bars after being convicted in 1936 as Lucky Luciano’s chief accomplice in the business described as “compulsory prostitution” by the state’s ambitious young special rackets prosecutor, Thomas E. Dewey.
It was the gangster trial of the decade. After beer baron Dutch Schultz was shot to death in a New Jersey tavern, Luciano was declared public enemy number one on the East Coast. Dewey vowed to take him down. Instead of narcotics or gambling, both of which fell under Luciano’s domain, Dewey went after what he saw as the gangster’s weak spot: his control of the city’s $12-million-a-year “vice rackets,” including two hundred brothels and two thousand prostitutes.
Indicted under his given name, Salvatore Lucanía, the trial of Charlie Lucky garnered daily headlines. Dewey depicted the crime lord pulling the strings as he strutted around his luxury suite in the Waldorf-Astoria in a silk robe. Luciano’s main instrument of terror and control over the prostitution ring was “Little Davie” Petillo, or Betillo as he often allowed his name to be misspelled.
“You guys are through,” a brothel operator testified he was told by Luciano. “I am giving the business to Little Davie.” Those who resisted suffered beatings, bullets pegged in their direction, and guns and knives in the ribs, Dewey told jurors.
It didn’t hurt Dewey’s theory of the case that Petillo had previously served as a gunslinger for America’s other most notorious gangster, Al Capone in Chicago. Petillo was first arrested at age eleven; his rap sheet included charges of vagrancy, “jostling,” robbery, gambling, grand larceny, and narcotics possession. He was creative with aliases. Over the years, he had given his name to police as Rose, Rosen, Rossa, Farrara, Slade, Quello, Petrilla, and Betillo.
There was no doubt about his real name, however. His father, Anthony Petillo, was a hardworking city sanitation worker who later retired to his homeland in Salerno, Italy, with his wife, Michelina. A brother had returned to Italy, where he went missing fighting with the Italian Army during the war. One sister, Anna, lived out her life in a mental institution. Another lived quietly in Stuyvesant Town with a husband who worked for the Internal Revenue Service, hoping each day not to be asked about his brother-in-law.
Little Davie wasn’t actually that little. He stood five foot seven, with wavy brown hair and a ruddy complexion. Newspaper writers covering the trial often referred to him as “Handsome Davie” and remarked on his deceivingly boyish good looks.
The case was heard over a three-week span by a special blue-ribbon jury panel carefully culled and selected from respectable citizens. Jurors diligently deliberated over a Saturday night, announcing their verdict of guilty on all counts at 5:25 Sunday morning.
At the sentencing, Supreme Court Justice Philip McCook told Luciano he was “responsible, in law and morals, for every foul and cruel deed” committed by his underlings. Then he gave him thirty to fifty years in prison, a vastly longer term than ever ordered for similar crimes.
The judge then turned to Petillo. “As Luciano’s chief and most ruthless aide, you deserve no consideration from this court,” he told him. Little Davie got twenty-five to forty.
Both Luciano and Petillo were dispatched to Clinton prison in Dannemora, dubbed Siberia because of the chill of its winters and its location hard by the Canadian border.
In prison, Luciano chafed at his plight. While his true crimes were many, he insisted that his conviction for this one was purchased largely through perjured testimony. Pimps and prostitutes eager to avoid their own jail time had fed Dewey’s investigators the evidence they sought to tie the king of the underworld to their own squalid business. Private investigators hired by Luciano’s appeals attorneys obtained affidavits from key prosecution witnesses admitting that they had manufactured many of their stories involving Luciano.
Yet his appeals went nowhere. Dewey meanwhile rode into higher office on his rackets-busting reputation. He was elected Manhattan district attorney, and was on his way to becoming state governor and eventual Republican presidential candidate.
No one had to frame Davie Petillo. There was ample evidence of his brutal handling of the brothel operators. But he eventually came to have his own complaint.
That started a few years later, after World War II began, when U.S. naval officers launched a naive mission to try and use mob influence to safeguard New York’s harbors against enemy sabotage. They first approached Joe “Socks” Lanza, a power on the Manhattan waterfront. Lanza told them the person they needed to see was Luciano. Only Charlie Lucky, he told them, had the clout to get them what they wanted. The officers made the long up trip to Dannemora. Luciano told them he was only too glad to help.
To accommodate easier visits from his new military allies, Luciano was moved out of Siberia to Great Meadow prison in Comstock, near Albany. Petillo remained behind. At Comstock, Luciano’s underworld cohorts, including Lanza, Frank Costello, and Meyer Lansky, became regular visitors. They were allowed to meet alone in a private office next to the warden’s. He needed to consult with them for the war effort, Luciano said.
But if any concrete benefit was derived from the charade, the Navy could never cite it. The FBI later stated that the entire operation was a ruse. “A shocking misuse of Navy authority in the interest of a hoodlum,” fumed J. Edgar Hoover in an internal bureau memo.
Yet it paid off well for Luciano. At war’s close, Dewey, now governor and eager to put the episode behind him, pushed the envelope in the other direction. In 1946, he agreed to deport Luciano to freedom in Italy as a reward for his patriotic service. On the morning of February 10, Charlie Lucky, again living up to his name, set sail from a pier in Brooklyn on a freighter for Naples. Newsmen who tried to get aboard were blocked by burly longshoremen.
Left behind bars, Little Davie ranted to anyone who would listen about his old partner’s ingratitude. Al was to hear the story often.
“He would say Lucky Luciano was a rat. He was a rat if he helped the government, and he was a bigger rat for not taking Davie with him when he talked his way out. He could’ve threw Davie in there when he was stringing the government along. Instead, he left him rotting in prison.”
* * *
By the time Ralph Masucci ran into him in Green Haven, Petillo had bounced around the state prison system. He was a surly, often paranoid, inmate. “He didn’t trust anyone when Ralph met him. If you looked at him too long, he thought you were a spy.”
One of the inmates who drew Petillo’s suspicions was a Profaci crime family member named Eddie Fanelli, who was doing time for murder. One day, Fanelli’s glance lingered a moment too long. Petillo began cursing. Then he pulled a shank from his pocket and lunged at him. Fanelli dodged, the blade just grazing his side. He quickly recovered and wrapped the smaller man in a chokehold.
Masucci intervened. “Eddie was choking Davie’s lights out. Ralph punches Eddie in the head and knocks him right out. Davie figured Ralph saved his life, which he probably did.”
The grateful Petillo told Ralph that when the two of them got out of prison, they would do big things together. He was now “with” him, Little Davie told Masucci.
The same way Al had been bound to his cousin Joe Schiavo’s Luchese crime family, Masucci would henceforth have to clear whatever he wanted to do in the world of crime with Petillo. On the other hand, he could now count on the protection and guiding hand of a powerful figure in the most powerful crime family in New York.
Masucci told his new sponsor about his pal from Sing Sing. Petillo said he’d like to meet Al and told Ralph to bring him around when he got out.
* * *
Al duly consulted with Joe Schiavo about working with Petillo. For good measure, he checked in as well with his other connected cousin, Joe Sica, whose Pittsburgh crime group was aligned with the Genovese family. Both gave their approval. “If I had problems, they said I should see Joe Schiavo.”
Al’s employment interview took place in Luciano’s old social club at 121 Mulberry Street. The two-room storefront was the one inheritance that Little Davie was able to claim from his former partner after his own release from prison. It was located on the ground floor of a five-story brick apartment house a few doors down from Hester Street, topped with proud lettering proclaiming the owner’s name and date, Anna Esposito 1926. The club’s exterior had been painted green at one point, but it was chipped and faded by the time Little Davie took over. Inside were a counter, tables, and chairs set on a tile floor. It looked much like Moe’s café and a score of other nearby clubs.
Crime-wise, it was in the center of things. Mulberry Street was the main thoroughfare in the still heavily Italian section stretching from Canal Street to Houston Street. There were more mobsters per acre in the neighborhood than anywhere else in America. And it was still something of a free-fire zone for criminal operations. Detectives assigned to the Elizabeth Street station house were still looking the other way under the same pay-and-let-live approach to law enforcement.
One of Petillo’s main moneymaking businesses was loan-sharking. Al was assigned to service the loans. “Davie had collected a big nut of money owed him when he got out and went straight into big-time shylocking. At one point, I know he had $700,000 pushed out on the street.”
Al had done some loan-sharking of his own before going to prison. But this was a different league, where thousands of dollars had to be collected from businessmen, restaurant owners, and even other wiseguys.
There was an art to the task, his new boss explained. “He’d say, ‘I want you to go see this guy over here and don’t let him give you any stories. Get the money.’” The threat of violence underscored every exchange, but it was to be avoided whenever possible. “It made sense. If you gotta hit a guy, you might as well kill him, because you’re putting yourself in a jam if he goes to the cops.”
The best method, Petillo instructed, was to have a set day for collections so that both customer and lender understood the payment schedule. The etiquette of a mob loan officer was also important. “For starters, you didn’t loan to guys you didn’t trust. You look them right in the face and say, real quiet, ‘You know what you’re doing here, right? I don’t want to have to chase you. No excuses. Otherwise, don’t take the money. Do us both a favor and just walk away now. No hard feelings.’ But the guy never walks away. They always want the money and they always say they understand.”
* * *
Al found the loan shark’s customers easier to handle than the loan shark himself. Petillo was a man of ferocious temper, constant suspicions, and strange habits.
“Davie smoked like a chimney. He’d light one cigarette off of another. But he was also a health nut. He’d take us up to some vitamin wholesale place and buy a shopping bag full of vitamins. He’d be popping the vitamin pills all day long, in between his cigarettes.” The health fiend also delighted in showing off muscles shaped by decades in prison. “He’d drop to the floor and do sixty push-ups right in front of everyone. Me and Ralph were in pretty good shape ourselves, but we’d watch this old guy and be amazed.”
Petillo brought the same manic approach to his driving, piloting a car as though he were trying to catch up with his lost years. “He’d always be borrowing your car, and he’d bomb along at top speed wherever he went. Meanwhile, he’s slouching so far down on the seat that it looks like there’s no one behind the wheel.”
* * *
Petillo kept the two recruits busy. “He had us make the rounds with him every day. You’d take care of some loans, see someone else about a heist and any other crimes he could come up with. He’d say, ‘We’re going out to shake the trees.’”
One of the crimes that fell from the branches was arson for hire.
Their first target was a trucking firm on Washington Street around the corner from where Masucci’s brother-in-law, Angelo Ponte, was opening his new restaurant. Their instructions were to torch the place, but to make sure no one got hurt. “They asked us to burn this company, Essenfeld Brothers, a big trucking outfit. They had some kind of dispute going on with Ralph’s brother-in-law. But they just wanted to send the message, not get anyone killed.”
Equipped with several gallon jugs of gasoline, Al and Ralph waited until late at night after the business had closed. “We jimmied our way in and looked around to make sure no one was there. We even banged on the door and no one answered.” The crime was a first for the men, but they figured it couldn’t be that complicated. They started by pouring a wide trail of gas across the second floor, then down the stairs. Inside the door, they connected a long gauze rag to a pair of open bottles. They lit the fuse and walked quickly away.
A block from the warehouse, they stopped to look back. “We weren’t sure if the fuse had gone out. We were wondering should we go back when we hear this ka-boom and the windows on the second floor explode.” An object came hurtling out to the street. “There was a guy there rolling around. We took off, but we read about him in the newspaper the next day. He was a security guard who was asleep upstairs. He blew right out the window. He only broke his shoulder, but that was close.”
Other arsons followed. “There was a wastepaper company out in Jersey that was competing with Ponte for business. It was owned by a politician and he wanted it wiped out. We drove out there and did the job. The place was filled with paper so it lit up like a bonfire. We could still see the smoke halfway back to the city.”
* * *
Mornings on Kent Avenue, Al was host to regular visits from his skeptical parole officer. “He’d come by to see was I really working, and since I did the furniture business early in the day, I’d be there. I’d say, ‘C’mon in, have a cup of coffee.’ He’d leave, and then I’d be gone, out doing crimes.”
Despite Al’s part-time management, the business continued to prosper, fueled by orders from his gangland contacts. After his parole ended, he merged with another nearby company.
“There was another guy I knew had a business a couple of blocks away on Hall Street and Myrtle that sold appliances, refrigerators, and stuff. I moved in with him.”
His need for income similarly expanded. In March of 1967, Dolores gave birth to a second son, John. A year later, the couple had a fourth child, another daughter, Tara. One more daughter, Dawn, arrived in 1970.
Joseph, increasingly attuned now to the nature of his father’s business, would sometimes accompany his dad to work. He rode with Al in the truck as he delivered furniture. On occasion he’d go to the other job on Mulberry Street. “They’d put me up on the counter, give me a soda,” recalled Joseph.
There weren’t many of the father-son get-togethers, on the job, or off. Mostly on his own, Joseph came to love baseball. He was a die-hard Mets fan, attending games with his mother’s father. He played ball in a Little League sponsored by local shop owners in Fort Greene. The games were played in the park by Navy Street, beside the elevated Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. His dad didn’t make it to the games. But there was a day Joseph remembered when he looked up from the field to see his father sitting in the cab of his furniture delivery truck under the highway watching his son play. “He didn’t call out or anything, he was just sitting there, watching me. But I was happy he was there, watching me play.”
As far as Al was concerned, his was just an ordinary working-class family, with many mouths to feed and bills to pay. If he didn’t make it to the Little League games, he still made it home most nights for dinner with the family, even if he often went out again immediately afterward. He accompanied Dolores and the kids to church on Sundays. They enjoyed big meals on Sunday afternoons with the families. The only difference was the way he made his living.
* * *
The daily scheming began at the Mulberry Street club, which had become a gathering spot for many of Petillo’s old partners in crime. Over cups of coffee and card games, Al listened to their stories.
Many, he learned, had started out under the wing of an old mob boss from the Fourth Ward on the Lower East Side named Giosue Aiello whose crew included Al’s old tormentor at the ziginette game, Don ZaZá. Like Jimmy Alto, Aiello was another powerful mobster who slipped unnoticed past law enforcement and newspapers. After his death, his crew merged into the Genovese crime family, or borgata. But the group still maintained a feisty independence.
Among those clustering around the tables at the club was a big, broad-shouldered man named George Filippone, known on the streets as “Georgie Argento.” Filippone’s sidekick, Philip “Phil Katz” Albanese, controlled a lucrative truck-loading concession on the West Side docks and had served prison time for dope sales.
Another regular was Ottilio Frank Caruso, whose short, barrel-shaped build lent him the nickname “Frankie the Bug.” In early 1962, the Bug had jumped bail on a narcotics charge and fled to Madrid, where he tried to hook up with Luciano. The two never got together, however. On January 26, 1962, a few days after Caruso and a cohort contacted the exiled gangster, Luciano suffered a fatal heart attack. The former underworld boss died complaining that Genovese’s men were trying to set him up for arrest on drug charges.
There was a lot of it going around. Another veteran who had started out with Aiello was Angelo Tuminaro, a Genovese soldier who had been arrested a few years earlier in a million-dollar narcotics-importing ring. The bust was the first stage in an episode that later became mob history as the French Connection, with its huge cache of seized heroin famously vanishing from police custody.
But the mobster to keep the closest eye on, Al was told, was the smallest man in the group. Charles Gagliodotto was the size of a jockey, barely five feet tall. He had hooded eyes, hair gone gray, and an often ghostly pale pallor. He looked something like a pint-sized Boris Karloff. But no one dared kid him. “They called him ‘Chalootz,’ and he was a mad hatter. A stone killer. People were deathly scared of him.”
For good reason. His killings had begun in 1925 when Gagliodotto, at age eighteen, was charged with shooting a rookie cop who had interrupted the robbery of a Jewish sacramental wine shop on Rivington Street on the Lower East Side. The teenaged Gagliodotto hid behind the cellar stairs, then shot the patrolman in the back of the head as he climbed down to investigate. A few years later, he was back on the street, serving as a proficient hit man for Luciano and others.
Many of Gagliodotto’s missions were cross-country jaunts to rub out those who had balked at going along with Luciano’s new world order in the Mafia. On those trips, the old-timers told Al, Petillo often accompanied him.
The two slightly built men had a special technique to help them get the drop on their victims. “They’d dress up like women. They’d wear hats and veils and dresses and stick the guns in their purses. That way they could sneak up on people, do the hit, and get away. One time, Davie and Chalootz go to a funeral. They wore black veils. They get in the funeral limousine with the guy they’re after, and pop him right there in the car. They did at least a couple dozen hits made up like women.”
That estimate meshes with one offered by an FBI informant who told the same strange tale to a bureau agent back in 1960. Referring to Little Davie as “Betillo,” the unnamed snitch described him and Gagliodotto as “two of the most feared members of the Italian syndicate.” The informant added that “it was common knowledge among the hoodlum element” that the pair had “killed between 20 and 30 persons in Detroit, Cleveland, Chicago and New York.” The memo of the interview offered a slightly different wrinkle on the duo’s deadly mode of operation: “Betillo often dressed as a woman and Gagliodotto accompanied him as an escort. In this manner, they aroused no suspicion in contacting the victim, and identification was almost impossible once they succeeded in fleeing the scene of the murder.”
* * *
As far as Al could tell, the two aging gangsters had abandoned their cross-dressing tactic. But neither one was out of the murder business.
Al found that out when a young Jewish hoodlum from the Bronx named Frank Salzberg who had been hanging around the club suddenly disappeared. Salzberg had done time with Petillo in prison, and had been another willing recruit to the mobster’s team. All anyone knew when he went missing was that he had somehow rubbed Little Davie the wrong way.
“Frankie was a pretty decent kid. He would hang around with us on Mulberry Street. Davie got mad at him and claimed he owed him money. Next thing I know, the kid is gone.”
The story soon emerged that Petillo had borrowed a car and barreled up to the north Bronx where Salzberg lived, and taken him for a walk in Van Cortlandt Park. The details were whispered around the club. “Davie stabbed him in the head. Killed him.”
The body was found by someone out for a Friday afternoon stroll in the park on August 9, 1968. Salzberg was lying face up in the bushes, just east of West 253rd Street, where he had been living. The medical examiner’s office determined that he’d been stabbed seven times, including in the neck, face, lung, jaw, and head. An aunt identified him but didn’t claim the body. The Hebrew Free Burial Association took care of it, burying Salzberg in Mount Richmond Cemetery on Staten Island.
Soon, another detail of the story tumbled out. Salzberg had been distributing heroin for Petillo. At that point, neither Al nor Ralph had been assigned that task, but it hadn’t taken them long to notice that it was all around them. The crew at 121 Mulberry Street was drenched in the narcotics business.
Gagliodotto had been among nineteen gangsters arrested in a 1965 roundup by the Brooklyn district attorney, charged with helping to run a $90-million-a-year narcotics ring. “These are the big boys,” said Brooklyn DA Aaron Koota announcing the arrests. Named as leader of the ring was Frank Tuminaro, who was following in his big brother Angelo’s footsteps in the dope trade. A host of other Genovese associates were also snared, including Frank Gangi and his nephew, Rosario “Ross” Gangi. The case was made by many of the same investigators still chasing the French Connection, including NYPD detective Eddie Egan, the model for Popeye Doyle in the movie.
Thanks to multiple motions filed by defense attorneys, the case had still not gone to trial three years after the arrests. Defendants were still walking the streets, free on bail. But they were worrying as much about each other as they were about prosecutors. Al noticed Gagliodotto was particularly edgy. Part of the problem was that Chalootz had become addicted to his own product. “He was doing heroin and smoking opium. Some of the old-timers were users. They called it ‘kicking the gong.’” Together with Chalootz’s suspicious nature, it made for a lethal combination. The same summer of 1968 when Frankie Salzberg disappeared, Charles Gagliodotto went on his own final killing spree.
“Chalootz thought Frankie Tuminaro and Frank Gangi were stealing from him. Considering how crazy Chalootz was, I don’t think they would have done that. But he didn’t give them any time to explain.”
The way Al heard it, Galgiodotto invited the two men to a social club on Elizabeth Street around the corner from where he lived in an apartment on East Houston Street above Bentivegna’s Restaurant. “He gives them a drink and then shoots them both. He had body bags ready and he puts them in his car trunk. He dumped them upstate in Monticello in the Catskills where he used to go in the summers.”
Actually, Chalootz never made it up to Monticello. He pulled off Route 17 about twenty miles south of his vacation home, and dumped the bodies in the woods outside the village of Bloomingburg in Sullivan County. A few days later, a pair of boys from a nearby American Legion camp spotted the body bags just off a dirt road. The men had been shot once in the head, their bodies trussed in rope and wrapped in heavy plastic. They’d been dead about a week. All identification had been stripped, but it took state troopers and the FBI only a day to figure out who they were.
On Mulberry Street, the reaction to the murders was that crazy Chalootz had finally gone too far. “When people are deathly scared of you all the time, you’re gone. Because you’re too crazy. No one’s safe.”
The motion for termination was made by Frankie Tuminaro’s outraged big brother, Angelo. “Little Ange got the okay to whack him.” Even Chalootz’s old killing partner, Davie Petillo, was on board with the decision. The assassination team stealthily tracked Gagliodotto, waiting for an opportunity to take him.
On the evening of August 22, Petillo met his old pal in Astoria, Queens, on Twenty-First Avenue. Chalootz, suspicious of everyone else, figured he had nothing to worry about from Little Davie. Petillo had brought along a younger cousin, Eddie Vassallo, nicknamed “Bullshit Eddie” for his mangling approach to the truth. Petillo managed to slip behind Chalootz and strangle him while Bullshit Eddie held him down. “I heard he used a plastic bag over his head.”
Whatever the tool set employed, no discernible marks were left on Gagliodotto’s body. After passersby spotted it on the sidewalk where Petillo and Vassallo deposited it, the assumption by police and the responding ambulance crew was that a neatly dressed old man had simply collapsed and died on the street of natural causes. He was still wearing his diamond ring and wristwatch, so he clearly wasn’t a robbery victim. At the morgue, doctors concurred. “Arteriosclerotic heart disease,” they wrote on the death certificate. Even as he’d been wrestling bodies of full-grown men in and out of his car trunk, the sixty-two-year-old Gagliodotto had apparently been in pretty tough shape.
A day after the murder, a pair of informants whispered in the ears of FBI agents in New York that there was nothing natural about Chalootz’s death. Police and the bureau should already have been suspicious. A reputed mob assassin and drug dealer drops dead on a Queens street two weeks after the murders of two members of the same gang, all of whom were indicted in the same massive narcotics case? It was a bit odd.
Chalootz was already being waked by family members at La Vecchia Funeral Home on Mott Street next to St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral when the FBI told police what they’d learned. Armed with a search warrant, police went into the parlor and removed the body. The Gagliodotto clan was irate, but there wasn’t much they could do. The remains were brought back to the morgue, where a second autopsy produced a new finding: death by strangulation.
FBI memos noted that city police detectives mounted a “major investigation” to find Gagliodotto’s killer. No one was ever charged. A month after he’d throttled his former friend to death, Petillo was spotted attending a wake for another old pal, Joe “Socks” Lanza, the waterfront boss who had helped Luciano con the Navy. Unlike Chalootz, Lanza really had died of a natural cause, cancer. Petillo, the FBI’s informant noted, attended together with “Angie Tuminaro.”
* * *
Absent Chalootz’s spooky presence, most of the crew at 121 Mulberry Street relaxed somewhat, Al noticed. Little Davie, however, seemed more keyed up than ever. His core industry remained loaning cash. He pushed Al and Ralph to get more money on the street, and collect from those who owed. But every now and again, despite the consequences, a customer would fail to make his payments. “You got a choice then. You kill him or you take his property.”
When a loan shark customer who owned a small diner at the corner of Seventh Avenue and Perry Street near St. Vincent’s Hospital in Greenwich Village defaulted on a loan, Al and Ralph decided to take over the diner. “The guy who had it went bust. He was a gambler and when he couldn’t make the vig, he just handed us the keys.”
The little diner had been called the Greenhouse. Al renamed it At Joey’s. “You know, ‘Where are you?’ “I’m at Joey’s.’” He enjoyed operating a restaurant. “I liked to cook, so that was part of the reason we took it.”
To handle chores at the diner, Al brought in a pal he had met in Sing Sing who was helping him with his furniture business. “His name was Gene Agress. I called him ‘Big Gene.’ He was half Irish, half Greek. He’d done time for supermarket stickups. He’d stick a big wad of bread in each cheek to disguise himself, but he got picked up for it a few times.”
Big Gene was working in the kitchen of the diner one afternoon while Al was behind the counter when a heavyset man in a suit came in the door. “He introduces himself as Abe something or other, saying he represents the landlord of the building and the old owner owes rent. Right away he’s talking tough. I said, ‘So what? He’s gone and now we’re here.’ We’re arguing, it gets loud, and then he pulls a gun.” Al grabbed for the weapon. He was fighting with the collection agent when Big Gene burst out of the kitchen, grabbed the man by the shoulders, and punched him. Together, they wrestled him out a back door.
“We were getting ready to stomp him out back when a cop comes in the front to buy cigarettes from the machine. The guy in the suit takes off. The cop must’ve heard us because he comes in the back and sees the gun lying in the street where it fell. He says, ‘What’s this?’ Gene and me look at each other. I said, ‘I dunno. I think maybe that guy was looking to rob us till he saw you.’ The cop couldn’t figure out what to do, so he picks up the gun, gets his cigarettes, and that’s it. It was close. We almost got pinched.”
A few days later, the landlord himself came by to meet his new and uncooperative tenants. “That’s how I met Frank Moten. He was a black guy who was big in the numbers, not just New York, but in a bunch of states. He also had a couple of nightclubs uptown.”
Moten, it turned out, held the mortgage on the building where the diner was located. He had other properties nearby as well as in Harlem and the Bronx. The two men found they had a lot in common. “We started talking about guys we both knew. We hit it off.” Moten, Al learned, was allied with the East Harlem Genovese family faction, which was running a booming narcotics trade out of storefronts along Pleasant Avenue near the East River. Moten was one of their major heroin distributors. But unlike most of the gangsters Al knew, Moten was wisely investing his profits from the numbers business and his dope trade in real estate. Handling the transactions for Moten was a savvy Bronx real estate operative named Morris Skidelsky. “Frank was a lot smarter than most guys. He was figuring out how to save money.”
* * *
The diner drew a cross section of customers: workers from St. Vincent’s up the avenue, jazz musicians playing at the famed Village Vanguard across the street, the occasional cop, as well as more than a few gangsters. The most illustrious of these was Thomas Eboli, known as “Tommy Ryan,” a high-ranking leader of the Genovese crime family. Eboli’s official title at the time was acting underboss for the still imprisoned Don Vito. But Eboli was widely perceived as caretaking for most of the family’s operations in the city. For Al and Ralph, having Eboli stop in for a regular cup of coffee at the counter of At Joey’s was better than a four-star restaurant review.
“Tommy Ryan would come by every day. He had a little private café he ran nearby, Napoli di Notte, and he’d stop in on his way there, hang around and chat.” Eboli did not adhere to the Jimmy Alto school of keeping a low profile. There was nothing low-key about him. “He rode around in this Cadillac Eldorado with a purple roof and a cream-colored body. He dressed like a million bucks. Everything about him said, ‘Gangster.’”
Eboli told Al and Ralph he liked the job they were doing with the diner and for Davie Petillo. And he suggested they might want to branch out. “He had an offer for us. He wanted us to take over this hotel in Texas that he got the same way we got the diner, from someone who couldn’t pay a debt. He was telling us it was a nice place and we could make a lot of money.”
Al and Ralph told Tommy Ryan they’d think about it. But after Eboli made his pitch and left, they started to laugh. “We couldn’t go to fucking Texas. Me? With my Brooklyn accent? Down there? We didn’t want to offend Tommy Ryan, but there was no way we were doing that.”
The acting underboss wasn’t bothered. The next time he took a stool at the counter the subject never came up. “I liked Tommy Ryan. For a boss, he was an easy guy to talk to.”
* * *
Far harder to communicate with was the other Genovese power in Greenwich Village. Vincent Gigante, the ex-prizefighter with the bad aim, got out of prison in 1964. He’d served almost five years in Lewisburg federal penitentiary after being convicted alongside Genovese in a major narcotics conspiracy case. Ralph Masucci occasionally saw his old high school acquaintance around the neighborhood, but they didn’t spend time together. Gigante was just starting to perform the role he would eventually make famous as the mentally unhinged gangster. He spent much of his time closeted inside his Sullivan Street clubhouse, brooding and saying little.
But when a promising business opportunity developed involving one of Gigante’s associates, Al and Masucci went over to Sullivan Street to discuss it.
Masucci had met the captain of a Greek ocean liner docked at a pier on the lower West Side. The captain explained he was unable to depart because of a million-dollar lien that had been placed against the vessel by a downtown travel agency. The lien had been placed by an ambitious travel agent named William Fugazy who had grown up in the Village and who kept an office above O. Henry’s steakhouse at Sixth Avenue and West Third Street.
Fugazy was a tireless self-promoter. His name constantly appeared in the press. He could honestly boast of friendships with Bob Hope, Lee Iacocca, and Cardinal Terence Cooke. Along with former federal prosecutor Roy Cohn, he had promoted the second and third Ingmar Johansson–Floyd Patterson heavyweight title matches in 1960 and 1961. Another of Fugazy’s influential friends was the local Greenwich Village Genovese capo, Vincent Gigante.
Together with the captain, Ralph and Al hatched a plan for the lien to be lifted and the ship to sail in exchange for letting the gangsters have the vessel’s gambling concession.
“We knew a casino on the ship would be a big moneymaker. Ralph knew Fugazy from the neighborhood, and we went to see him and his partner, who ran O. Henry’s steakhouse.” The deal they pitched was that the travel agents would recruit customers for the gambling junkets and get a percentage of the take. Their next stop was to see Gigante to get his approval.
At the Sullivan Street clubhouse, Gigante looked perfectly normal. He was wearing a gray suit and an open-necked white shirt. He nodded at Al and said hello. Although their trails continued to cross over the years, it was the only word he and Al ever exchanged. Gigante and Masucci then went off to the side to have a whispered conversation.
Outside the club, Ralph relayed the verdict. “Chin was good with it. He gave the okay to do the deal.” But the scheme soon fell apart. The ship’s captain, possibly thanks to second thoughts about his prospective new partners, found another way to raise the cash for the lien and paid it off. A few days later, the ship sailed without them.
* * *
Davie Petillo made his own trips abroad, but in keeping with his restlessly suspicious nature, he said little about them. Al never asked. In fact, he and Ralph knew little about Petillo’s life away from Mulberry Street. What they did know was that he was single. His wife had died while he was in Dannemora. For a time after he got out of prison, Petillo lived at the Holland Hotel in Times Square. He also remained deeply embedded in the local narcotics trade, despite the arrests of many around him. It was the one crime in which he hadn’t enlisted Al or Ralph, but that day soon arrived as well.
Petillo showed up at the diner one day and announced that he had a large load of heroin he needed to move. They should take as much as they wanted to sell, he told them. They asked him how much he had. “One hundred kilos,” he told them.
The partners were amazed. They’d had no idea he was that big in the business. Gangsters all around them were getting nailed as big narcotics traffickers, and here was Little Davie moving mountains of junk and yet no one had laid a glove on him.
They debated what to do. On the one hand, they were deeply envious of the enormous profits they’d seen others make in the dope trade. On the other, they had no idea how to spot a quality product, or how to distribute it.
“We ended up telling Davie we’d take one kilo. We figured that was a good starting point, and if it worked out we’d be back for more.”
Petillo was pleased. After he delivered the package he began to talk openly about his heroin importing. “One of the places he got junk from was Afghanistan, he tells us. And he smuggled it into the country by hiding it in these big sheepskin coats.” In proof of his claim, Petillo showed up the next day with one of the garments. “He spreads the coat out right there on the counter in the diner, and he starts cutting it open. There’s the package of heroin inside, just like he said.”
Enthused about their new business, Al and Ralph lined up customers who said they’d be happy to sell some of the heroin. “We didn’t know what we were doing. We just gave it to them. We didn’t cut it down to make more like you’re supposed to.” But even at full strength, the product was rejected.
“Everyone we sold to came back and said the junk was no good. So we took what we had left and brought it back to Davie. He asked what was wrong. We said it just didn’t work out. He was much too crazy to try and take a chance of telling him his stuff wasn’t any good. You never knew what he would do.”
* * *
Petillo’s volatile nature became even clearer a few months later when, in the spring of 1970, the gangster world went almost completely off its axis.
The turmoil began when a gung ho Mafioso from south Brooklyn named Joe Colombo decided to adopt civil rights tactics used by black leaders in defense of Italian Americans being pursued by the FBI. It was an audacious gambit, especially for a second-generation gangster like Colombo. He had ascended to the leadership of the Profaci crime family in 1964 thanks to his skills as a hit man and his cunning as a mob strategist. But when his son Joe Jr. was indicted in April 1970 on federal charges of conspiring to melt coins into silver—charges he later beat—the father decided to shift gears. He organized picket lines outside FBI headquarters in New York at Third Avenue and East Sixty-Ninth Street. The picketers grew to more than five thousand people, led by cheering members of Colombo’s crime family. He took things up several notches more by calling for a “Unity Day” mass rally for June 29 in Columbus Circle.
The antics struck most top mobsters as a clownish embarrassment, and a potential threat to organized crime’s well-being. But the take-it-to-the-streets approach struck a chord with many younger mobsters. Al and Ralph went up to the rallies to check things out. So did Al’s son, Joseph, then fifteen years old and eager to get his licks in against the hated FBI. “Joseph went up there and got into a fight with some guy who tried to pull him out of the crowd.”
After Genovese family leaders passed the word to steer clear of Colombo’s activities, Petillo told them to stay away. Al didn’t disagree. “It was just drawing attention. What are you trying to do? Prove you’re a gangster?”
But few mobsters were more on board for fighting the FBI than Little Davie. For him, the bureau was the ultimate symbol for the cops and prosecutors who, by his lights, had kept him unfairly locked in prison for decades and had hounded him ever since.
The bureau got a taste of that hate when it tried to interview him in his room at the Holland Hotel in 1967. “Petillo began shouting and using obscene language,” reported the luckless agents who tried to talk to him. He’d been “framed by Tom Dewey,” he said. If the FBI didn’t stop “buggin’” him, he’d “yell harassment to the highest court in the land.”
Colombo’s civil rights protests a few years later were fuel for Petillo’s fire. “Davie comes to see me and Ralphie. He says, ‘There’s this thing they’re gonna have called Unity Day and we’re gonna do our own protest.’ We’re listening, since he told us not to go up there no more.”
Petillo then laid out his plan. “I’m getting you a garbage truck from the company that picks up trash at the FBI building,” he told them. “I got a load of dynamite we’re gonna put in it, and you’re gonna drive up there on Unity Day, get right close to it, and blow the whole place up.”
Al and Ralph listened in wonder. “We’re looking at this crazy bastard trying to figure out if he’s serious or having us on. We realize he means it. He did thirty years and it did something to his brain. And it’s not like he’s asking, ‘Whaddya think?’ He’s telling us. He wants us to do it. He was out of his mind.”
Petillo may have come to his senses later. More likely, someone else in the Genovese clan spelled out for him why his plan was a dangerous and foolhardy notion. The idea vanished as quickly as it arrived. Al breathed a sigh of relief. He didn’t want to have to say no to the lethal Petillo.
* * *
But there was more to come. A few weeks later, Petillo announced that he had another important assignment for them: a murder.
The proposed victim was Petillo’s own cousin, Edward “Bullshit Eddie” Vassallo, who had helped Little Davie throttle Charlie Gagliodotto to death. Petillo didn’t give a reason for wanting his cousin dead. But Al had a general idea. Vassallo was a heavy drug user, a habit that had helped make him notoriously sloppy. The story was widely told on Mulberry Street how Bullshit Eddie, assigned to get rid of a body wrapped in a carpet, had left the back door of his station wagon open, allowing both body and carpet to roll out onto a busy Lower East Side avenue. Not that any of those issues really counted in the end. “Davie was always ready to kill anyone who got in his way.”
Vassallo, Al knew, was deeply involved in the pornography business, with Little Davie as his chief backer. Porn was another part of the mob repertoire that Al had so far avoided. “That was something Jimmy Alto taught us to stay away from. He said it was a bad way to make a living.”
But it was clearly lucrative. There was a studio in the office building at 75 Spring Street at the corner of Crosby Street where Vassallo and another partner, a hairdresser from First Avenue named Charlie Pomaro, had workers making and copying 8 mm sex movies. The films were supplied to Times Square peep shows and marketed to customers at adult bookstores throughout the metropolitan area. Vassallo and Pomaro owned a few of the stores themselves.
Al learned something of the problems between the cousins one night when Davie took him and Ralph out to dinner at Paolucci’s restaurant on Mulberry Street. “Davie was feeling good because he had this young girl visiting him, and he took us all out to celebrate.” At the restaurant, Petillo began complaining about a string of new porn shops that Vassallo and Pomaro had opened uptown. “I couldn’t tell exactly what his beef was, but he was pissed off about it.”
Whatever the motive, murder had not been among the crimes that Al signed up for when he agreed to work with Petillo. Before things went any further, Al told him, he would have to talk to his own cousin, Joe Schiavo, to make sure the killing was approved by his Luchese family superiors.
“Davie wasn’t happy when I told him. He must’ve thought that all this time we’d been scheming together that I would just do a piece of work for him, no questions asked.”
Al contacted Schiavo, who immediately told him not to do anything more involving the plot. “Joe said we would have to have a sit-down to work out this thing and to get Davie to stop trying to order me around.”
Sit-downs were the mob equivalent of arbitration sessions, except that the highest-ranking mobster in the room usually got to decide. The one about whether Davie Petillo could have Al D’Arco kill for him was decided at a coffee shop at the corner of Clinton and Grand Streets on the Lower East Side.
Representing the Luchese family’s interest in Al were Schiavo and Babe Vario, the gangster from Canarsie in south Brooklyn who had been friendly with Al in Sing Sing. Babe’s older brother, Paul, was now the captain of the family’s Canarsie crew. But Joe Schiavo was still its senior member. It was understood that the captain’s job had been Joe Schiavo’s for the asking, but that he had opted to continue handling the garment shops and business interests he ran with boss Thomas Luchese and other elder statesmen of the family.
Petillo came alone to the meeting. But lingering on a corner nearby, and making no effort to hide his presence, was an old friend of Davie’s who made an excellent bodyguard. Red Levine lived in the neighborhood, so he had a good excuse to be there. But more significantly, Levine was a veteran and well-known Jewish gangster who had led the hit team that assassinated the most powerful mobster in New York, Salvatore Maranzano, back in 1931. The murder, on an upper floor of a Park Avenue office building, established Lucky Luciano as the unchallenged leader of New York’s mobs. Levine and Petillo had been close ever since.
From the coffee shop, Schiavo and Vario watched Levine, who was being greeted on the corner like a celebrity. “Look at all the Jews kissing Red Levine’s ring,” said Vario. “He’s like the pope down here.”
Petillo began the discussion. “Right away in the sit-down, Davie tried to get an advantage, throwing some crap out there claiming I had been doing cocaine. At that time, if you were using drugs, you automatically lose the argument, whatever it is.”
Al suppressed his anger and simply shook his head. “I didn’t want to call him a liar right to his face. I just said that’s not true.” The discussion moved on, going back and forth until Schiavo announced his findings. “Joe put it on record that I was allowed to keep operating with Little Davie. But I couldn’t commit any murders without the approval of the Luchese family, including Joe Schiavo and the captain, Paul Vario.”
Schiavo closed the meeting with an instruction for Davie. “When you talk to Al, you are talking to me.”
Petillo left the coffee shop fuming. Al felt like a giant burden had been lifted. “I knew Davie wasn’t going to want me back to work under him again. Not after he’d been told he couldn’t make me do whatever he wanted.”
“How’s Paulie?” was Petillo’s taunt to Al when he next saw him on Mulberry Street. “You still with Paulie?”
Al ignored him. “I didn’t care. I didn’t have to deal with that loony bastard. That was the important thing.”
As for Bullshit Eddie Vassallo, he went on making porn movies, having been granted a stay of execution. But it was only temporary. In February 1980, someone shot him to death as he sat in his New Jersey living room.
The prime suspect in the shooting was the same man who had wanted him dead ten years earlier. David Petillo quickly fled the country. The FBI and Interpol tracked him for the next three years as he moved between luxury hotels in Germany, Greece, Singapore, Bali, Hong Kong, and Hawaii. They never caught up. The trail ended three days after Christmas in 1983 when Petillo collapsed and died while staying in the resort town of Málaga, Spain, on the Mediterranean coast. Little Davie had added one more alias to his roster. The dead guest was registered as James J. Pilone.