7

32 SPRING STREET

On October 6, 1970, the body of a gangster named Salvatore Granello was found in an abandoned car on the Lower East Side. He had been laid to rest in a mob casket: a heavy canvas wrap, a plastic bag over his face. He had four .22-caliber bullets in the back of his head. By the time a passerby finally worked up the nerve to take a good look inside the car sitting at the curb along the Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive at Gouverneur Slip, Granello had been dead at least a week, by police estimate.

The murder generated a day or two of newspaper stories, but the killing was never solved, so that was about it for public notoriety in the case. In terms of mob slayings in New York in the early seventies, it didn’t make much of a ripple. The big headlines and permanent historical mob markers went to the sensational cases that came soon after: Joe Colombo, shot in broad daylight in Columbus Circle at the start of his second annual Italian-American Civil Rights League rally in June 1971; the even more cinematic rubout of the man most people blamed for having Colombo hit, Joe Gallo, gunned down while dining with friends in Umberto’s Clam House on Hester Street in April 1972.

But for those trying to carve out criminal livelihoods on the streets of Little Italy in those days, it was the execution of Salvatore Granello—known as Sally Burns—that raised eyebrows the highest. Granello’s mob bloodlines went deeper and wider than either Colombo’s or Gallo’s, both of whom, by the time of their demise, were generally dismissed as equally ubazz—crazy.

On Al’s turf, the hit on Granello was the talk of the town. “Sally Burns was one of the biggest guys around. He was into everything. He had a racetrack and a casino in Cuba. He had nightclubs all over. He was big in the unions, had a big shylock book. He lived in this beautiful duplex apartment at 215 Mott Street. The building was just another tenement, but he spent a lot of money on it, made it into a fancy place.”

A frequent visitor to the swank apartment was Granello’s boss, Vito Genovese, who strolled over from his office at the Erb Strapping Company at 180 Thompson Street. After Genovese’s top lieutenant, Anthony Strollo, vanished in 1962, Granello took over many of Tony Bender’s old chores, including handling bars and nightclubs in the Village and Times Square. His criminal career began in 1940 at seventeen when he and a pal, Carmen Di Biase, pistol-whipped a tailor on Hudson Street in an attempted robbery. He spent two years in the reformatory at Coxsackie for that. He was charged with evading the draft in 1946, but it was later cleared up when he proved he was 4-F and just not up to the task.

He was five foot seven, a stocky 225 pounds. He liked to dress with flash and flare, drove a light blue Cadillac convertible, and sported a ten-carat diamond ring on his right hand. There was a vacation home on upstate Greenwood Lake where he kept a twenty-one-foot Chris Craft speedboat and ran a club called the Little Copa. He was a mob trend setter. A leader in the electricians union local representing TV repairmen, he was suspected of having orchestrated the 1953 hijacking of a $500,000 cargo of Sylvania televisions.

Once the FBI started taking the Mafia seriously in the late 1950s, Granello quickly made the agency’s “top hoodlum” list. Agents spent hours surveilling his Mott Street tenement, quizzing neighbors, and checking out the numbers dialed from his phone. The checks confirmed a lengthy and varied list of business interests. Along with another crooked union official, George Levine, Granello had been part owner of the Oriente Park Race Track outside Havana. The duo also ran the next-door casino as well as the restaurant and bar in Havana’s Hotel Sevilla Biltmore. After Castro took over, Granello opened a gambling and after-hours club on Collins Avenue in Miami Beach. There, he fleeced exiled supporters of dictator Fulgencio Batista, turning their millions in pesos into dollars at a rate to his considerable advantage.

In New York, his clubs included the El Borracho on East Fifty-Fifth Street, and the Headline Bar and Joey Dee’s nightclub in Times Square. At the Café de Paris at Fifty-Third and Broadway, his front man was nightclub impresario Lou Walters, whose daughter Barbara was then writing copy for CBS News. Another illustrious pal was former middleweight world champ Rocky Graziano, who stood as godfather to Granello’s youngest daughter.

He ranked high enough on Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy’s target list that in 1963 he was hit with tax-evasion charges for failing to disclose $425,000 earned from the sale of Cuban oil shares. That was followed by a state extortion rap for shaking down a Nassau County jukebox distributor. Granello, testimony alleged, threatened to kick the distributor’s pregnant daughter in the stomach.

But his most serious difficulties stemmed from his dealings with a fast-talking lawyer named Herbert Itkin, whose past clients included Teamsters union chief Jimmy Hoffa. Itkin told Sally Burns he could help the Genovese organization tap into the vast millions of the Teamsters union’s pension funds.

Granello was charmed by the tall, glib attorney and his easy access to decision makers. He brought him to meetings of fellow mob dignitaries, including James “Jimmy Doyle” Plumeri, a Luchese family captain who had graduated from Luciano gunman to major power in the city’s garment industry.

Granello also drove Itkin out to western Pennsylvania to meet a pair of friends from his salad days in Cuba. Until their own Castro eviction papers were served, Pittsburgh crime boss Sebastian John La Rocca and a top lieutenant, Gabriel “Kelly” Mannarino, had held a large share in the casino at the Sans Souci Hotel. Both men were also eager to obtain the favorable financing Itkin offered.

Al knew about these meetings because they took place at the Monroeville, Pennsylvania, home of his cousin Joe Sica, the man whose gleaming Cadillac and shiny jacket buttons had dazzled Al as a boy on Kent Avenue.

“Sally Burns brought Herbert Itkin into Joe Sica’s house and they scoped out all these deals he was going to do for them. They thought they were all going to make millions with this guy.”

Instead, the meetings and ensuing deals became a Mafia disaster. Itkin was a true double agent. He had been a part-time informer for the Central Intelligence Agency before taking his talents to the FBI. Along the way, he was careful enough to win immunity for his own many financial scams while building cases against those he hooked.

More than two dozen mobsters, mob associates, and politicians were indicted for fraud. Among them were Granello, Plumeri, and the entire top shelf of Pittsburgh’s mob, La Rocca, Mannarino, and Sica. In a separate case involving kickbacks on a city water contract, Itkin snared a New York trifecta: a top aide to Mayor John Lindsay named James Marcus, Tammany Hall boss Carmine DeSapio, and the heir apparent to Thomas Luchese’s crime family, Anthony “Tony Ducks” Corallo.

The Itkin cases caused a mob furor. When the charges came down, Al was asked to hide Joe Sica and a son-in-law, Frank Rosa, who was also indicted. “I picked them up right in front of Macy’s on Thirty-Fourth Street. They dove right in the car. We hid them out at my aunt’s house and our place for a few weeks till they were ready to surrender.”

Granello also went into hiding when his first indictment came down. Law enforcement thought he was only ducking the fraud charges. But given the way Joe Sica talked about him while he was on the lam, he had more to fear from his friends in the mob than the law.

“Sally Burns was the guy who caused the pinch. He was responsible for bringing Herbert Itkin around. Everyone was looking for him.”

While Granello was serving his time in Danbury prison, someone killed his nineteen-year-old son Michael with a shotgun. Granello got a one-day furlough to attend the services at Most Precious Blood Church on Canal Street and the burial at St. John’s Cemetery in Queens.

After he was released from prison in the fall of 1970, FBI agents warned the mobster that they’d picked up word he was marked for death. Other gangsters, they’d heard, were worried he would seek revenge for his son’s killing. They had the right information, but only a partial motive. Granello brushed them off anyway, telling them to talk to his lawyer, Roy Cohn, who was representing him on the fraud charges.

On the evening of September 24, 1970, Sally Burns was spotted at Vincent’s Clam Bar at the corner of Hester and Mott Streets. He was seated with his old partner, George Levine, and a couple of other associates. He told them he had an appointment and he’d catch up with them later.

Granello went around the corner, where he ducked into a Genovese clubhouse on Mott Street called the Eighth Ward Pleasure Lounge. Al was later told what happened next.

“The guy that got him was his own goombata, Charlie Brody, one of the DiPalermo boys.” The DiPalermo brothers were a notorious band of Little Italy drug dealers. “He was the only one could get that close to him without him worrying. They clipped him right there on Mott Street.”

After Granello turned up dead, police and the reporters who quoted them anonymously offered two theories for the hit. One was the concern over vengeance he might seek for his son. The other was that it was part of the fallout from the scramble to succeed Vito Genovese, who had died in prison in February 1969. Granello’s death meant one less applicant for the job.

Years later, another theory surfaced after a congressional investigation found evidence that Granello had been one of the mobsters approached by the CIA in 1961 for help with his Cuban contacts in figuring out how to kill Castro. Conspiracy theorists soon added his name to the list of those who died untimely but convenient deaths after the assassination of President Kennedy. Al wasn’t impressed. “I know why Sally Burns went, and I know who did it. After he brought that rat around who caused so much trouble, he was not going to last too long.”

*   *   *

No matter how steeped in the ways of the mob he was becoming, and for all of his hard work in the crime business, Al still wasn’t making much of a living. There was even less money coming in after his split with Little Davie Petillo. He kept up the furniture business, at one point landing a contract to distribute and deliver sofas for Macy’s. “Me and Big Gene Agress were humping these big couches up and down flights of stairs. Some of those downtown buildings were six stories, no elevator. It was tough work.”

He gave up the company only when police came around pestering him with more questions than he wanted to answer. A rolled-up rug he had sold to one of his wiseguy pals had been found a couple of blocks from his Brooklyn warehouse under the viaduct on Park Avenue. Inside was a body belonging to a local gangster. “The cops came looking for me, breaking my chops. So I gave it up.”

At Joey’s diner suffered a similar fate. Al met an out-of-work chef who had worked at Rumpelmayer’s, the upscale ice-cream parlor at the St. Moritz Hotel on Central Park South. “I said, ‘Why don’t you come down and make sodas for us? But sodas with a little pop in them.’ We called it the ‘Drinking Man’s Ice-Cream Soda.’ He’d put in crème de menthe, or a shot of schnapps, maybe a pineapple liqueur. We put some chairs out on the sidewalk, we were serving those sodas all night.”

No one bothered trying to get a liquor license, however, and when spoilsport neighbors complained, a police raid was staged. “There must have been fifty cops come down on us.” No arrests were made, but At Joey’s was shuttered. “I just walked away.”

*   *   *

In 1971, he walked away from the old neighborhood as well. Looking to save both time and money, Al moved his family out of the apartment in Rosa Lisena’s building on Kent Avenue and into the city. “I was spending most of my day in the city anyway, and Dolores’s family was still there, so we figured, why not?”

Al’s own parents were already gone. In 1965, they had bought a small cottage on Long Island’s North Shore in the town of Bayville. Al tried to visit every weekend with Dolores and the kids.

The new home of the Al D’Arco family wasn’t much to look at. It was four rooms in a row, a railroad flat, one flight up in a hulking old-law tenement at 32 Spring Street between Mott and Elizabeth. Across the street was Guidetti’s funeral parlor. “I got a good deal on it. The guy who had it before me was a hijacker named Sonny and he had spent a few thousand making it tough for the cops to break in. He put in reinforced steel doors, and a special rear exit.” The hijacker threw in a new washing machine, and Al covered the bedrooms with flocked wallpaper with roses. For a seven-member family, the apartment was a tight fit, but Dolores said it was fine.

The landlord was an electrical contractor named Arnold Migliaccio who handled all the streetlights for the annual feast on Mulberry Street. “He didn’t do nothing for the place. Left it filthy. We had to keep it clean.” The other downside was their upstairs neighbor. “This lady lived up there was nuts. She would forget, leave the water running, we’d get these big leaks.” Solving the problem was complicated, though. The bothersome tenant was the niece of Pete DeFeo, one of the grand old men of the Genovese crime family. “I could complain, but it wasn’t like we could get her thrown out of the place. I mean, she was Pete DeFeo’s niece.”

But the apartment came with a lot of history. “After we get there, Dolores’s father comes by to visit. And he says, ‘I was born in this apartment.’ It was unbelievable. Then, I find out that Paulie Vario, the guy who was my captain out in Canarsie, lived there too when he was a kid, because his aunt and uncle had the place. They had the lemon concession for the feast and he would stay with them, make some extra dough when he was just a kid.” Then there was a darker side. One night, Dolores dreamed that a woman in a long black dress came running at her in the bedroom, then flew right out the window. “Later we find out, that really happened. There was a woman went out the window there many years ago.” He was to tell the story of the apartment and its many coincidences over and over, shaking his head. “These are things you cannot fathom.”

*   *   *

Joseph wasn’t thrilled with the move. He’d already spent some time in the new neighborhood, after being forced to hide out in the Mulberry Street apartment of his father’s friend from Sing Sing, Jimmy Red Caserta, after a gang fight in Brooklyn in which one teenager had died.

“These homicide detectives were looking for me, so they sent me to stay with Jimmy Red in the city. I wasn’t supposed to leave the apartment for anything, so of course the first thing I do is go out. I was walking around, it was mostly a new neighborhood to me, and I see this ten-speed bike and I jumped on it and took off. I peddled it back by Jimmy Red’s house and a bunch of kids are hanging out the window. They were calling me out, like ‘Where’d you get that bike?’ and ‘Who the fuck are you?’ and ‘Why are you in our neighborhood?’ So I go, ‘You want to fight? Or fuck you.’ But I didn’t get any takers. Nobody came downstairs. It was like a bullshit thing. That wouldn’t have happened in my neighborhood. They would’ve come down.”

By the time he got to Spring Street, Joseph was fifteen years old and had a pretty good grip on what his father’s life was all about. The light had gone on as he was sitting in his uncle Gino’s apartment at 961 Kent Avenue reading the newspapers about Vito Genovese’s death in 1969. “I’m looking at the papers to see ‘Who is this guy?’ Then I start thinking to myself, these are not just a bunch of guys. There is this thing that exists, there actually is a Mafia. I’m thinking about my father and the things I’d done at that point. I used to steal things and I’d take them down to Myrtle Avenue and sell them to the guys who hung out in the Sons of Italy club. I never thought of them as a mob or the Mafia, but right then I started to understand what was going on.”

*   *   *

For Al, getting straightened out as a full-fledged member of that secret society was the surest ticket to making the big money. The status would make him an automatic earner, with the clout to lend protection to favored businesses, both legitimate and illegitimate, and the power to insert himself into their profits.

But there were steep obstacles to getting his button, as mobsters called it. Al understood the term. “It means you’re told to do something and you do it. Whack someone, whatever it is. You press the button, and you go.”

One reason was that the leadership of New York’s five families had kept their enrollment books closed for new members for the past twenty years. Lucky Luciano’s original Commission had capped the number of members of each family as a means of keeping everyone in line. The Genovese and Gambino crews were the largest with some 300 soldiers each. The Colombo gang had about 150. The Luchese and Bonanno families were the smallest with 125 to 140 members.

There were plenty of vacancies due to deaths, natural and otherwise. But the bosses couldn’t agree on when to fill them. Jealousy and greed were part of the reason. Why split the take with new partners when things were going so well? Pride of position was another. Any expansion of the franchise only diluted the product, the thinking went.

The exclusive attitude about the franchise had sparked deep resentment and rebellion among some younger hoods. “There were guys got fed up. What was the point in hanging around and waiting to get made when it wasn’t going to happen? They still had to split part of their scores with the good fellows in their territory anyway for the right to operate. They were going around saying, ‘Let these guys stick their button up their ass.’”

Some of these rebels had banded together in an effort to resist the shakedowns from the wiseguys in control. “One of them was Tommy Langone from downtown in the Fourth Ward, a very tough, streetwise kid into heists and hijackings. He got together his own crew and stopped sending a piece of his earnings up to the families. He openly told some wiseguys to go and fuck themselves. Next thing we know, Tommy is at the bottom of Canal Street near the bridge, inside a roll of linoleum, cut up in pieces. Like Jimmy Alto said, ‘All the tough guys are in the cemetery.’”

Al marked it down as another lesson learned. He figured in three years or so, by 1974 or 1975, the books would open up again. By that time he’d be well positioned, after his years on various farm teams, to join the Luchese family, probably in Paul Vario’s Brooklyn crew, courtesy of his influential cousin Joe Schiavo.

That was his game plan, at least until he got an offer to skip the wait and go to the head of the line. The offer came from his other well-connected cousin Joe, the one in Pennsylvania. “Joe Sica tells me he’d like me to come down and join up. He even had a beautiful house picked out for us to live in near him in Monroeville.” It was a multigenerational offer. “He says, ‘I can straighten you out now, and when your sons are ready, I can straighten them out too.’”

Sica was riding high at the time. He and the other Pittsburgh mob leaders had been acquitted of the charges in the Itkin case. He had a lot to offer. The Pittsburgh crew’s area of influence extended over a wide western arc, including Wheeling, West Virginia; Youngstown, Ohio; and Erie, Pennsylvania. The family itself was small, with no more than three dozen members. One of the reasons for its size was that its founding fathers had ruled that only blood members of the same family could be made there. “They had the old rule, ‘Sangue del mio sangue,’ ‘Blood of my blood.’ It was sort of like a village in Sicily, or Calabria. The idea was to trust only your own, to keep it all in the family.”

Unlike New York, where Luciano’s rules held that names of new members had to be circulated to the other families for possible objections, no one else had veto power over the Pittsburgh family’s recruits. “They took care of their own problems. If they made a mistake, they corrected it by just taking the guy out to the Monongahela River, and that was the end of it.”

As inviting as his cousin’s offer was to become a big fish in Pittsburgh’s smaller pond, Al decided against it. “It was tempting, with the house and all. But my cousin Joe Sica was a demanding kind of guy. I would have been under him and I don’t know if that would have worked out.” Besides, he also just didn’t want to leave home. “I felt like New York was part of who I was, and what my family knew. I didn’t think I’d fit in anywhere else.”

With deep thanks, Al told Sica his decision. “He was good with it. He said if I changed my mind, the offer stood.”

*   *   *

Al spent his days scrambling for opportunities, with Ralph Masucci still his chief partner in crime. After Al moved to the city he spent more time in Ralph’s hangouts. One of them was the saloon downstairs at Ponte’s, the restaurant co-owned by Ralph’s brother in law, Angelo Ponte, along with his brothers on Desbrosses Street near the river. “They called the bar the Faja Lounge after all the Ponte brothers, Frank, Angelo, Joey, and Anthony.”

Al was in the Faja Lounge one evening with Ralph and two of the Gallo brothers, his friend Albert the Blast, and Albert’s brother Joe, who was already living on borrowed time after Joe Colombo’s shooting. The scene made Al nervous. “His bodyguard, Pete the Greek, is sitting at the bar watching everything, so no one’s going to pull anything right there. But Joe is talking about how he wants Ralph to help get him a machine gun. And stupid Ralph is going along with him, saying he knows where to get one.”

Upping Al’s anxiety level was the presence of two senior powers in the Genovese family, Mike Genovese, Vito’s brother, and a powerful capo, Saro Mugavero, who were dining upstairs in the main restaurant. “That was Ralph’s family and he wasn’t supposed to be taking sides in this war going on with the Colombo family, and here’s Joe Gallo talking about getting machine guns. I am trying to tell Ralph, ‘What are you crazy? We have nothing to do with this.’”

Al was trying to coax Masucci away when Joe Gallo shifted the topic. “All of a sudden, he starts raging about fat Jimmy Breslin, the newspaper reporter. He is calling him a drunken Irish bum, and saying he is going to get even with him for writing a book making fun of his crew.”

Breslin’s novel The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight came out in late 1969. The tale of bumbling gangsters quickly became a bestseller. The movie version, starring Jerry Orbach, was due out in December 1971. Gallo later became friends with Orbach, who played the Gallo character, Kid Sally Palumbo. But Gallo, whose temperature rarely dropped below a boil, was furious, saying that Breslin had demeaned him, portraying him and his crew as vicious lowbrows.

“Joe Gallo is telling us he has a plan. He says he knows where Breslin’s kids go to school, because it is the same school as where Angelo Ponte’s sons go. He says, ‘We’re gonna grab his kids. I know just where they are.’”

“What do you mean ‘grab them’?” asked Ralph.

“I mean we’re gonna snatch them,” said Gallo, grinning.

Al didn’t say anything for a moment. “I am thinking, This is nuts. This guy might actually kill this guy’s kids. So I wait awhile, listening to him go on. Then I tell him, real quiet and serious, ‘What are we talking about here? Kidnapping kids? We don’t do that stuff.’ I look at the Blast after I say it, because he’s a good friend and knows how to handle his brother. I go on about how this will just make big trouble for everyone. I tell him, ‘That’s why we don’t hurt newspaper guys, Joe, because it creates bigger headaches than they’re worth.’”

After a while, Gallo calmed down and seemed to agree, or at least he dropped the subject. Al finished his drink and said his good nights, pushing Ralph along in front of him. Outside, Al asked Ralph if he thought Gallo was serious or just blowing smoke. Masucci shrugged. “With him, who knows? That’s why they call him Crazy Joe.”

Years later, Gallo’s bodyguard, Pete the Greek Diapoulas, wrote a book. “The writer our crew would have loved giving a beating to was Jimmy Breslin,” he wrote.

Breslin himself never heard a word about it. The writer reacted with typical bravado when told of the scheme. “He’d have been dead if he tried it, oh yes,” insisted Breslin. His own gangland pals in his home borough of Queens would have taken care of Gallo, he said. But he also acknowledged that Gallo was capable of the escapade. “If he ever meant it, it’s dangerous,” he said.

*   *   *

Al was just down the block the night Gallo was shot on Hester Street. His chief surprise when he heard that Joe Gallo had been hit in Umberto’s was that the forty-three-year-old gangster had been foolish enough to wander into Little Italy in the wee hours of the morning.

The other was that the shooting had taken place right in front of Matthew Ianniello, a wealthy Genovese member built like a tree trunk, who owned a string of bars and restaurants, including Umberto’s. “Matty the Horse was right there in the kitchen. They could have shot him too. Now that would have made trouble.”

Al steered clear of the shooting scene itself. “It was none of my business so I stayed away. But the place was crawling with police. They start raiding all the clubs and cafés. The next day in the paper, there’s a sketch of the shooters. Somebody says, ‘Hey, Al, that looks like you.’ So I got scarce.”

Later, Al learned that he knew two of the men dispatched to take care of Gallo once word circulated that he was in the neighborhood that night. One of them was Filippo “Fungi” Gambino, who had been at Al’s side the chaotic night in Sing Sing when he tried to kill the jailhouse snitch in the movie hall.

“Fungi was one of the two guys that went in the side door to Umberto’s. The other was Sonny Pinto.”

Sonny Pinto was the street name for Carmen Di Biase, who had been Sally Burns Granello’s teenaged robbery accomplice. Di Biase had been a fugitive for seven years after shooting a friend of his in an argument over a card game in a Mulberry Street social club. Di Biase eventually turned himself in. He was tried and sentenced to die in the electric chair in 1959. But his sentence was later overturned, and he got even luckier when he was acquitted at retrial. Long associated with Granello’s Genovese family, Di Biase had shifted to the Colombo gang after his friend’s death.

“Sonny Pinto never got made, but I know he was very close to Matty the Horse, which was another surprising thing about it, since Matty is right there when it happened.”

Di Biase and Gambino were named as part of the hit team by one of the getaway drivers, Joe Luparelli, who turned state’s evidence days after the Gallo execution out of fear that his partners were about to kill him.

But all that the district attorney had was a single, uncorroborated witness, not enough for an indictment. Gambino was convicted only of a parole violation for consorting with known felons. Di Biase disappeared again, this time never to resurface. Al eventually heard the last chapter. “Years later, my bosses in the Luchese family told me Sonny Pinto got killed while he was on the lam. So that was it.”

*   *   *

Matty the Horse Ianniello told cops he saw nothing that night in his restaurant. The gunfire would hardly have rattled him. Ianniello fought in the Pacific in the war, where he won a Bronze Star. When Al was asked in the summer of 1973 to do a favor to help out the war hero turned mobster, he was glad to help. The favor was to torch Times Square’s most prominent topless dancing spot.

“The guy who asked me to do it was a friend of mine from Brooklyn named Frankie Mengrone who was associated with the Genovese crew. Frankie said that Matty the Horse wants this place put out of business. He told me the request for the favor was coming from Chin Gigante. Matty didn’t say nothing to me about it, but I figured what he wanted was to close it down, so he could take the place over.”

Al wasn’t sure why they needed him for the job, but he guessed that word of his earlier arson accomplishments for restaurant owner and waste-carting magnate Angelo Ponte had filtered up the ranks. “I wasn’t going to say no. It was coming from the top of the family.”

The target was the Metropole Café, the biggest and brassiest of the many Times Square topless joints of the era. Located at the corner of Seventh Avenue and West Forty-Eighth Street, it had a looming marquee of blinking lights and picture glass windows that beckoned passersby to check out the action inside. There was usually a crowd on the sidewalk.

The club had long been a jazz mecca, where performers like Gene Krupa, Dizzy Gillespie, and Roy Eldridge held forth. But in 1970, a new owner kicked the less profitable musicians upstairs to the club’s smaller second floor, and installed a large mirror-backed platform for strippers and topless dancers surrounded by plush red sofas and chairs in the main room downstairs. It was a hit with tourists and visiting businessmen.

Al went by to check the place out. “It didn’t close until four in the morning, that was one problem. And you couldn’t pull it off after people started going to work outside.” He figured he needed a timer, a task well beyond the limited scope of his arson know-how. “I asked around for someone knows how to do it, and I am told about an Irish guy in the Bronx who was in the Army and is an expert with bombs and timers. His name was Dailey and I went up to see if he was interested. He said he was.”

Al took Dailey on another reconnaissance mission while the club was filled with patrons. “The place was jam-packed. We went up the stairs and there is a cigarette machine on the landing, halfway up to the second floor. Dailey says this is the spot.”

They returned the following night, this time posing as repairmen for the cigarette machine. Dailey had obtained a key that opened the rear of the machine. “I stood in front, watching his back while he stuck the bomb in there.”

They set the timer for five in the morning. Reports in the next day’s newspapers described how a bomb had shattered walls and furniture, leaving a clutter of debris. Employees were nailing up temporary plywood coverings. “We drove by to see what had happened. We’d blown the front of the place right into the street.” Club owners glumly refused to discuss it. Police had no suspects, but described it as the latest in a series of “suspicious mishaps” plaguing Times Square strip clubs. “That was Matty the Horse. He was taking over, and he was letting everyone know it.”

*   *   *

The occasional favor for a mob boss came with the territory, Al figured, and would stand him well down the road. But while he waited for the Mafia to open its books to new members, he still hustled for scores.

Al and Ralph made some money helping Venero Mangano, another Genovese captain. Known as “Benny Eggs,” Mangano was also a war hero, having won the Distinguished Flying Cross as a tail gunner on B-29 bombers over Europe. He was a member of what was known as the Mozzarella mob, a wing of the Genovese family headed by Vincent Gigante. “Benny Eggs had this big clothing-sales business, and Ralphie and me hooked him up with a lot of customers dealing stolen leather coats, including my relatives in Pittsburgh.”

Masucci considered Mangano a loudmouth, however. “One time they got in a fight and Ralph grabbed Benny by the neck. He was choking him.” Al pulled his friend off. It was a capital offense to attack a made member. Masucci shrugged. “Ralph never worried about that stuff.”

Another friend steered them to the operator of a large Bronx discount store who was in the market for stolen merchandise. “They called him Louie Corners and he had this big place under the elevated train line up on Allerton Avenue. It was giant, with furniture, kitchenware, clothes, electronics, anything he could get. Guys were bringing him swag, doing bust-outs, letting places go bankrupt, and selling all the property to him.”

Together with Frankie Mengrone, Al hijacked a truckload of new cameras. It was a good example of the grunt work crime often demanded. “Nice Japanese cameras still in their boxes. But Louie Corners wanted just the cameras, so he could make them look like he got them used. So me and Frankie have to pull every camera out of its box.”

Between finding the load, stealing it, and pulling the merchandise out of the containers, Al figured his wages were not a lot better than if he were still driving a truck. And while that might be a decent living, it wasn’t his idea of being a gangster. Plus, he had no idea where the next haul was going to be found.

Part of the solution to his problems came when he and Ralph Masucci heard that a small hamburger stand a block away from Ponte’s was going out of business. The owner was trying to find a tenant to finish out the lease. “I did pretty good with the diner, so I figured a coffee and burger stand would work out too.”

The stand was located at the corner of Laight and West Streets. It was more of a shack than a stand. It was a one-story structure attached to the side of a nineteenth-century brick storehouse, an after-thought constructed to serve fast meals to the factory and dock workers who had once filled those streets. Above it roared traffic on the elevated West Side Highway. Across the street sat the Market Diner, an all-night eatery with a small parking lot.

Al borrowed some cash to fix it up. He named it the Late Laight Stand after the street corner where it stood. He priced his hamburgers at the affordable price of 75 cents apiece. Al often opened the stand himself in the mornings, serving coffee and rolls to people on their way to work. Joseph, ever eager to be beside his dad, came down after school to help.

“West Street had a lot of traffic, and cars and truck drivers would pull over to grab a bite. Our biggest seller was the coffee. We made it fresh every hour. We were doing pretty good. I’m thinking, Here I am trying to be a gangster and I’m making my best money selling java.”

*   *   *

The other solution to Al’s money problems came from Angelo Tuminaro, one of the powerful men he had gotten to know while hanging out at 121 Mulberry Street. In addition to his extensive dealing in narcotics, Little Ange was deeply involved in the union business. He told Al and Ralph he was looking for organizers.

Al understood the pitch. “I knew what it was. It was shakedowns, it wasn’t organizing. It was like what Sammy Chillemi had going with the toy workers union when I used to help him make his collections.”

The difference in Tuminaro’s case was that he had assembled a team well versed in the law and the labor rackets, men who were aggressively marketing their contracts to companies, willingly or otherwise.

Tuminaro’s partner in the union scams was John Dioguardi, a fellow member of the Luchese crime family who managed to be both a major owner of garment sweatshops and a top city union official at the same time. Known as Johnny Dio, he hailed from mob royalty. His uncle was Jimmy Doyle Plumeri, the Luchese captain who had been snookered by Herbert Itkin with Sally Burns’s help. Dio had created his own legends. In a deal with Jimmy Hoffa, he had carved up the city’s Teamsters locals among different mob factions. He was also alleged to have ordered the acid blinding of newspaper columnist Victor Riesel for writing stories that angered him.

But Tuminaro’s senior, day-to-day labor expert was a man named Ben Ross, a New York City racketeer whose antics had plagued businesses and legitimate unions for more than twenty years. Born Benjamin Krakofsky on the Lower East Side in 1916, he received fifteen years for attempted robbery as a teenager. He served most of his sentence in Clinton prison in Dannemora, where his fellow inmates included Charlie Luciano and Davie Petillo. He later changed his name, but his nickname stayed the same. He was known as “Benny the Bug.”

“Benny was a stickup guy. He’d done time with Little Ange in prison when he was young. Then he went into unions, with Ange backing him up.”

Ross only finished eighth grade, but he was considered a formidable opponent by law enforcement. In 1959, Johnny Dio and Ben Ross were top targets of Robert Kennedy when he served as chief counsel to the U.S. Senate committee investigating labor racketeering.

One of Ross’s associates testified about his organizing tactics to the committee. “He would just walk into the shop and pull the switch, and say, ‘Everybody out on strike.’ That is all there was to it. Everybody thought he was crazy, and they would walk out, and the boss would sign a contract.”

By the time Al met him, Ross had racked up additional convictions for loan-sharking, embezzlement, drug possession, and assault.

Assisting Ross in his schemes were two other veteran union racketeers, a bookmaker named Louis Richko, who had shortened his name to Rich, and Richko’s brother-in-law, Nathan Nass. “Their side business was shylocking to all the downtown stores. I helped them out with that too.”

Al’s first stop was the headquarters of the many catch-all unions that Ross and his crew ran. The largest was Ross’s District 5 and Affiliated Unions, which was then battling to get control of maintenance workers at Shea Stadium, even though the three hundred workers there had opposed them in a vote by a margin of six to one. Behind the same doors at 11 East Seventeenth Street were Local 348, International Brotherhood of Trade Unions, the International Jewelers Union, the Allied Crafts Union, and the Allied Guards Union.

Al and Ralph were given business cards declaring them organizers. Al was clear what his job was. “My end was to scare guys.”

He was a quick learner. His instructions were to visit hesitant employers and show them a stack of cards that had allegedly been signed by their employees asking to be represented by one of Ross’s unions.

“I would go up to the shop and show the guy my business card. Then tell him, ‘You know, I represent the union and we got all your workers signed up right here.’ But you hold the cards in your hand so he can’t see them. And there’s not one signed card in the whole stack. You say, ‘See, we got them all signed up, and you know it is against federal law for you to break the union.’”

Step two was to let the employer know you weren’t to be fooled with. “You get that rough tone in your voice and tell them to back off. ‘Your workers are all signed up, so don’t threaten them, don’t talk to them.’”

The third step was to reassure the employer that he was really getting a gift, a union that was an ally, not a threat.

“I’d say, ‘How are you doing with the business? You got a hundred guys working here? And you’re worried about the union? Listen, you ain’t got a union. You know why? Because I give you a contract and you stick it in your drawer, and you pay me $100 a year for each worker. And for each worker you don’t want to pay any pension or welfare on, you pay me $100 a month so they never get listed. They don’t get this, and they don’t get that.’ Then you put your business card right in his pocket and say, ‘Keep this, and if anybody bothers you with a real union, show it to ’em and call us. We’ll come around.’”

Another tactic was to pull a kind of labor razzle-dazzle on employers. “Nat Nass or Lou Rich would reach out to anyone they had a contact with at a big company, telling them, in strict confidence, that if they ever had a labor problem, that they’d be there to help them. Bingo, a month or so later, Benny would tell me and Ralph to go and give that company a big headache.”

They’d start by setting up an “informational” picket line, claiming the company was unfair. “A lot of truckers would see that and not cross, even if they had no idea what was going on. The guy can’t get his deliveries, and pretty soon, Nat is getting an SOS from the guy, saying he’s ready for that favor Nat promised.”

Ross’s team broke Al and Ralph in on a push to sign up Cumberland Packing, the company that made Sweet’n Low and which was located in Al’s old neighborhood next door to the Brooklyn Navy Yard. “They weren’t interested until after we released the brakes on a couple of their trucks that were parked on an incline. The trucks rolled down the hill and crashed. They got the idea.”

Other successful targets included a caviar-importing company, a jewelry chain, and a sporting-goods shop. The shakedown artists’ job was made far easier by the fact that there were plenty of legitimate unions around signing up workers and demanding real wages and benefits. One out of three workers in the city belonged to a union in the 1970s, most of them providing real benefits. In comparison, Benny the Bug’s crew and their sweetheart contracts didn’t look like such a bad deal.

Al felt like a salesman with a good product, even if the customer sometimes needed some tough persuasion. As for the workers trapped by subpar contracts and wages, they weren’t his problem.

Sometimes, they found themselves up against legitimate labor organizations. Those fights occasionally got rough. In one contest, Al represented a corrupt electrical workers union in a face-off against Local 3 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, one of the city’s most powerful unions. “Our union, Local 363, was getting the contracts to install incinerators in the big apartment buildings. Our wages were a lot less than what Local 3 was getting, so the buildings that dared to, used our contractors.”

The mob was making money on both ends of the deal. Many of the contractors were mob controlled. The lawyer for the union was Richard Oddo, brother-in-law of Luchese captain Paul Vario. The showdown came at a site in Queens where incinerators were being installed.

“Local 3 was run by Harry Van Arsdale and he had members who were cops and firemen, moonlighting as electricians. And he’d turn them out for his picket lines. Big guys. We’ve got our guys out there too, and we’re getting ready to go at it. Their leader is this very big Spanish guy with a fedora. He’s got a bullhorn and making a lot of noise. Me and Nat Nass stepped out, and I go over to the guy and say, real quiet, ‘I don’t care about all these other guys, you’re the one that’s gonna go.’ And I put my hand in my pocket to let him know I had a gun. And I did, too. He waited awhile and he’s looking at me, and then he says to his crew, ‘Let’s go.’”

But there were also times when the racketeers were the ones who had to walk away. One of them was when Al and Ralph went after their biggest shakedown target, the big cosmetics firm Estée Lauder. “We were getting a little greedy. They had their plants out on Long Island and we were way out there trying the informational-picketing scam. We had sandwich boards with different signs on each side. One said just ‘Unfair’ and the other said ‘On Strike,’ which was bullshit, since we didn’t have any members there to strike. We’d wear the strike signs, then flip them over when the cops came around so we were within the law. As long as you kept walking, you were okay.”

Several delivery drivers balked at making deliveries. A representative of the company came out to see the picketers. “We were sure he was going to ask us who to see to make a deal. We’d seen it happen before.” Instead, the company official handed them a business card.

“He says, ‘This is my lawyer. He’d like to speak to you.’ We look at it, and it’s the United States Justice Department, attorney general. We scrammed out of there.”

They also backed down when faced with an employer who simply challenged them to take their best shot. The company was a food outfit called Meal Mart located on Taaffe Place in Brooklyn, a couple of blocks from where Al was raised. The company’s owner was an Orthodox Jewish rabbi. Most of the employees were Orthodox as well, many of them women in traditional long skirts and wearing wigs. “We were picketing and Nat Nass came out. Since he was Jewish, we figured he could reason with the guy. Nat is giving the guy our spiel, how we won’t go away, that we’re within our rights.”

The owner was wearing a long-sleeved white shirt. He rolled up one sleeve to show the tattooed number of a concentration camp survivor. “He looks at Nat and says, ‘I lived through Hitler, I’ll live through you.’ Nat looked like he’d been hit with a rock. He shrugs and says, ‘Okay, I guess that’s enough for today.’ We didn’t go back.”

*   *   *

Between his union scheming and the burger stand, he still made time to get out to Long Island to see his cousin Joe Schiavo. “Joe never wanted to say a thing on the phones. But he would call me up, say, ‘Hey, you got any olive oil over there?’ And that was the code. I’d bring him a bottle of oil from one of the salumerias, the Italian delis, on Grand Street.”

Sometimes he’d head out to his parents’ place in Bayville on a Sunday afternoon, drop off Dolores and the kids, then double back to Valley Stream, where Schiavo lived in a large Tudor home on North Corona Avenue. “He bought it from the guy built all the sewers in Nassau County. He bragged that the walls were so thick a bomb can’t blow them down.”

Schiavo had a porch in back where the two men sat and talked. Conversations ranged from the long-ago past to the present. Still an eager student of mob history, Al pressed Schiavo for details about the old days, who got made by whom.

“Joe could have been the captain of the Brooklyn crew. He was made by Don Turrido Curiale. Don Turrido was still alive then, even though he was almost a hundred years old. He was from Agrigento in Sicily, ‘Grigento’ they said it in Sicilian. He was one of the originals from before they made the Commission, when there was just one mob in Brooklyn.”

Schiavo’s own induction was a small piece of mob history. He was the first American-born member of the Brooklyn crew, he told Al. When Curiale decided to step down, he offered his post as captain of what had become the Luchese family’s Brooklyn crew to Schiavo. “Joe didn’t ever want to be a captain. He was more like an elder. He had his garment businesses with Don Turrido and Tommy Luchese, and he was more interested in staying out of the limelight.”

Schiavo demurred, telling Curiale he should give the job to Paul Vario, an ambitious young mobster that Schiavo had recruited and sponsored into the family, along with Vario’s brother Babe, Al’s friend from Sing Sing.

Schiavo did a good job of staying out of the limelight. No one kept closer track of New York’s mobsters than an investigator named Kenneth McCabe, who spent thirty-five years as a New York Police Department detective and later as a federal investigator prowling outside of social clubs and mob meetings. At six foot four, McCabe was a familiar sight to mobsters, Al included. “Everyone knew Kenny. He was like a friendly enemy, always out there in his white Dodge taking notes on us. Guys would wave hello. One wedding they brought a piece of cake out to him.”

But Schiavo slid even below McCabe’s keen radar. By the time McCabe started clocking wiseguys in 1969, Schiavo had already moved Vario into his slot. McCabe had Schiavo’s name, birth date in 1910, and some hints about a few of his garment shops in Brooklyn and on Long Island. That was it. Like Al’s other mob mentor, Jimmy Alto, the mob watchers had barely a clue.

Schiavo’s criminal record included a bust for his own bogus-union scams back in 1943, when he was arrested for trying to help shake down a Seventh Avenue photo studio.

Five years later, Schiavo successfully played the victim, claiming he’d been robbed of $5,500 in payroll cash outside his Hendrix Coat Company in Brooklyn’s Brownsville. Schiavo was quoted in the newspapers as having told police that a pair of young men had jumped out of a car, brandishing a pistol and shouting, “Hand over the coconuts!”

Al laughed at the story. “If he got robbed, he’d never tell the cops anything. And ‘coconuts’? That was his word for dough. It was a scam.”

The other topic of discussion on the back porch was when and how Al was going to get his own button.

“I never paid attention to it that much. I was content to wait things out because I knew my day was going to come.”

He admitted, though, that he didn’t much care for being on the outside looking in with his made-member pals. “Two guys you know would be talking, and then they say, ‘Excuse us,’ and step away so you can’t hear their wiseguy discussion. ‘Excuse us’? Who the fuck are you? I didn’t like that stuff.”

Schiavo tried to convince Al that, in some ways, he was better off not getting made. “He’d say, ‘What do you want that for? This way, you’re not responsible. You can always say you don’t know. Say you punch a guy in the mouth, and he’s a made guy? When you’re made, you’re responsible, whether you know it or not. If you’re not in the mob, you can just say you didn’t know.’”

Al wasn’t convinced. In early 1974, Schiavo put forward Al’s name to be included when the books opened up. The Luchese family added twenty members to its membership rolls that year. But when the approved list came back, Al’s name wasn’t on it. “Politics,” Schiavo told him. Al was badly disappointed, but didn’t push for more details. He knew his cousin would handle it eventually.

Later, he found out that men he considered less worthy than himself, crime-wise at least, were getting straightened out as made members ahead of him. One of them was a friend of his named Anthony Tortorello who lived on Madison Street on the Lower East Side in Knickerbocker Village, the government-subsidized development complex that was home to Don ZaZá and a score of other mobsters.

“I knew Torty a long time. His brother Richie worked in the fish market with me. Torty hung out at the K & K Luncheonette on Market Street and Monroe, and I’d go by there sometimes, see what was going on.”

Tortorello’s specialty was shylocking, but he was also adept at handling stolen cars, and had dealt narcotics with the DiPalermo brothers on Mott Street.

“I said, ‘Hey, they straightened out Torty. What’s the matter with me?’”

Schiavo eventually explained to Al that the “politics” he’d mentioned earlier was the objection of a single member, a Luchese soldier named Frank Manzo. “Joe didn’t want to tell me what Manzo said about me, but I found out. He said something like, ‘Why are we making him? He’s nothing but an ice-cream vendor.’”

Al’s nomination had passed muster with all the other families. But the mob demanded consensus. One man’s thumbs-down was enough to block a candidate from getting his button.

Frank Manzo was a late import to the American Mafia. Born in Naples, he came to the U.S. at the age of twenty-one after spending two years in the Italian Navy during the war. His accent was so thick that his nickname was “Frank the Wop.” But he’d done well in the U.S. He owned a couple of restaurants on Long Island and was a successful contractor.

The real reason for Manzo’s veto, Schiavo reassured him, had nothing to do with Al. “Joe told me it was some old paisan stuff. Manzo was mad at Joe for something he did years ago.”

Schiavo told Al he’d spoken to the captain of their crew, Paul Vario, about the matter, and that Paul was also annoyed. “Joe said there was nothing they could do for the time being.”

*   *   *

If he couldn’t give Al D’Arco his button, Paul Vario did the next best thing. On a snowy Sunday in late 1974, the captain told Al to come out to Canarsie to meet him at his headquarters, a bar called Geffken’s on Flatlands Avenue.

Vario was fifty-nine years old and feeling all of his years. A bear-sized man with glasses and multiple chins, he was living in an apartment above the tavern because his wife had kicked him out of his home in Island Park in Nassau County after discovering his dalliance with a mistress.

In the past few months, he’d been hit with a torrent of criminal charges. He was looking at six years in prison, having been convicted on federal tax evasion. In state court, he was facing six separate indictments, all stemming from a bug placed by police detectives in a junkyard trailer on Avenue D where he occasionally did business. Dubbed the “Gold Bug” after Brooklyn district attorney Eugene Gold, whose office made the case, Vario had been caught trying to buy a list of informants from a detective posing as a corrupt cop. More embarrassing, he’d been recorded telling the detective, Douglas Le Vien, how he rigorously avoided wiretaps by refusing to have a telephone in his house.

The hardest blow, however, was the death of his youngest son, Lenny, in the summer of 1973. Moments after an arson explosion at a nearby construction company involved in a labor dispute, Lenny, twenty-three, was deposited at the emergency-room entrance of Wyckoff Heights Hospital. He had burns over 90 percent of his body. He lingered for weeks, but true to his dad’s ethic, he refused to say anything before he died. The tragedy was compounded by what the son didn’t say: that he had been dispatched on the arson mission by his father. “Yeah, Paulie sent him there. But the kid didn’t know what he was doing. He went to torch the place and the fumes from the gas ignited on him and he caught fire himself. They had to have a closed casket.”

The funeral was held at St. Fortunata’s Church on Linden Boulevard in East New York. “There had to be a thousand people there, half of them wiseguys. Some real old-timers went, out of respect for Paulie. We had to park five blocks away, it was so jammed. I went with Joe Schiavo, and he never liked to go to those things because he knew there’d always be cameras and agents.”

Cameras and law enforcement agents were on hand for this one as well. But when the crowd spotted cameramen for two local TV stations, they set upon them, beating them furiously. Detective Kenny McCabe was across the street conducting surveillance for the DA’s office. He waded into the crowd toward the besieged cameramen. But that afternoon, the rage was so strong on the sidewalk outside the church that even the bear-sized McCabe took a pummeling. “He saved those news guys’ lives, but he took some shots, I saw that.”

When Al got the summons to Geffken’s Bar, Paul Vario was waiting to surrender on a combined sentence of three years. “Paulie had all these things going on with him, but he called me out to Geffken’s to tell me that, even without the button, he was going to treat me just as if I’d been made. Then he took me around to the members of his crew and told them the same thing.” Leaving the bar, Al told himself he was at least halfway to his goal.