8

FLATLANDS AVENUE

Despite Paul Vario’s generous gesture, it was hard to put a label on Al’s gangster status. He remained an associate, one of the large crowd hanging around Geffken’s, ready and eager to assist the Luchese captain with any chores. But he was also a wiseguy in his own right, with his own underworld connections, running his own legitimate moneymaking business.

The burger stand generated a small but steady stream of revenue. Al added a sideline of taking numbers. Georgie Argento, one of the old-timers from the Mulberry Street club, had control of the numbers action in the territory and suggested to Al that they see how it worked out.

But it was hard to make customers feel safe. “Part of the problem was the cops took a liking to the place. They’d be pulling up, order a cup of coffee, a burger. Then they’d hang out and bullshit with each other. Nobody’s gonna come bet a number when you’ve got a line of cop cars parked out front.”

Even the governor liked the coffee at the Late Laight Stand. Al had noticed the dark sedan with official State of New York license plates pulling up almost daily. He had nailed the driver right away as some kind of cop. The officer always ordered two coffees to go. Al stepped outside to see who was getting the second cup. He did a double take. “It’s the new governor, Hugh Carey. He’s sipping on my coffee. He looks up and gives me a wave.”

Al’s regular assistant at the stand was a hard-luck gambler named Pete Del Cioppo. When Al met him, Del Cioppo was badly behind in paying off gambling debts to one of Paul Vario’s loan sharks. A big plodding man with a comb-over haircut, Del Cioppo was a sheet metal worker who regularly gambled away his earnings. “Petey Del came from Broome Street. He was a tin knocker working on the World Trade Center when I met him. He’d borrowed a lot of money, but he was broke and ducking payments. Paulie was furious. I heard they had it set up, they were going to toss him off the Trade Center. Make it look like he tripped. That happened more than once on that job.”

Al took a liking to Del Cioppo. He persuaded Vario to give him another chance. “I paid the money he owed, then I grabbed hold of Petey and read him the riot act. He must have been grateful because he stood around me after that.”

*   *   *

A lot of his gangland pals suddenly became jet-setters in those years, thanks to the big mob fad of the era, counterfeit and stolen airline tickets. Al and Ralph Masucci first learned about the scheme from Anthony Tortorello, the gangster from Knickerbocker Village who had reached his Mafia milestone ahead of Al. Tortorello was selling tickets by the hundreds out of the K & K Luncheonette on Monroe Street.

“It was the hottest thing going for a while. Everybody had a different angle. Some guys were stealing them, other guys figured out how to copy them. And everyone was taking off for wherever they wanted to go.”

Airlines and travel agencies were at the mobsters’ mercy. Prosecutors brought several indictments of multimillion-dollar air ticket fraud rings. But the tickets were everywhere and the fraud was rampant.

Al scored a few tickets from Tortorello and passed them on to others at a modest profit. But his biggest source was one of his associates from the labor rackets. Julius Angstreich was a gambler with a taste for the good life who had done prison time in the early 1950s. He had gone from counterfeit unions to counterfeit tickets.

“Juicy Angstreich had a connection with a printer who had figured how to knock off thousands of phony tickets. They had the wax backing and everything. Once they were printed up, you couldn’t tell them from the real thing.”

The bootleg tickets went for 25 percent of the cover price. Angstreich and his confederates peddled them to travel agencies glad to get them at a heavy discount, and shop owners who dealt them to customers under the table. Angstreich cut Al in as a fellow middleman, giving him a commission on whatever he could sell.

Al and Ralph decided to take advantage of the discount airfare and see the sights themselves. “We went and got passports. I was surprised, since we both had records, that we could get them, but it was no sweat.” For spending cash on their junkets, Angstreich had access to fake American Express checks as well. “So not only were the tickets free, so was everything else as long as the hotels and stores didn’t catch on.”

Their first outing was a modest hop down to Mexico City. “That was mainly to score some money. We went to a bank and cashed a stack of the phony American Express checks. Ralph goes up to the counter and I’m standing back watching. There is a Mexican soldier in a federale uniform right there, and he’s got a gun almost as big as him on his hip giving us the eyeball. I’m trying to look like this is no big deal, smiling at the guy.”

From the bank they went to the money exchange and converted their pesos to dollars. They spent a day sightseeing. Al dropped a postcard in the mail to the kids and Dolores. Then they got back on a plane to New York.

*   *   *

Back on Spring Street, Al told his family about the trip, minus the details about the fraudulent tickets and fake money orders. Joseph excitedly asked if he could go with him next time.

“I had to say no, that this was business. Dolores knew what was going on but she never asked and never said anything.”

His kids felt left out, but Al wasn’t taking chances. “I knew we could get caught and I wasn’t going to have my family picked up for some scam I’m running. I said I’d bring them presents and send more postcards next time I went someplace.”

*   *   *

The next overseas postcard to arrive at apartment 2B at 32 Spring Street came from Hong Kong. “We heard about these places you could buy gold on the cheap, and we had this idea we could make a big score, bringing jewelry back into the country and flipping it.”

But the Chinese dealers they were directed to were slicker than the gangster tourists. “We bought these medallions and half of them turned black. They had just enough gold in there to pass a test we gave, but the rest of it was junk.”

To console themselves, they went over to check out Macao, the nearby gambling mecca. While Ralph gambled in a casino, Al took a walk. He asked someone where the border was with mainland China.

“I walked over and there were these soldiers standing on the other side of a swampy area.” The ex-GI reflected on his long-missed opportunity to lead an Army charge against Red Chinese troops in Korea. “So I took an American quarter and threw it across and said, ‘America has landed!’”

*   *   *

It must have brought them luck. “Back in Hong Kong, we found a place had real gold that we could buy from and got it back into the country. Between the sale of the phony tickets and the gold, we were doing pretty good.”

They rested up from their travels for a few weeks, then made plans for one more excursion, this time to Japan. The idea was to scout out more opportunities for buying precious metals and jewelry on the cheap, then smuggling them back into the country. But once they reached Tokyo they found out that the big demand in Japan was for diamonds, not to sell, but to buy.

“The Japanese were desperate to get their hands on them. They wanted big stones, over three carats each.” They got the lay of the land from an American contractor named Pepe they met in their Tokyo hotel. Pepe was from California, but he had been living in the Far East for several years. He was a jack-of-all-trades for a large construction company that did work for the American military. Part of his job was entertaining local officials, which was how he’d learned of their craving for big diamonds.

“Pepe told us that if we could get our hands on large stones, he had buyers who would take them for a big profit.”

As it happened, Al and Ralph had recently met a dealer in the West Forty-Seventh Street diamond district in Manhattan who handled large pieces. George Solow was a second-generation diamond cutter whose skill was such that he was a sightholder for the De Beers Family, the dominant trader in international diamonds. As a sightholder, he was regularly apportioned a set number of rough, uncut stones, which he would then cut and refine.

The introduction to Solow had come after the cutter went looking for protection from armed, mob-linked thieves preying on small diamond cutters in the district. In 1970, Solow and his father had been pistol-whipped by a pair of men posing as telephone repairmen. The jewelers had managed to activate a silent alarm, and the patrolman who responded had shot one of the holdup men six times, firing directly over the diamond cutters as they lay on the floor.

Al had forged a bond with the dealer by promising he would do his best to make sure he was off the list for future targets.

Returning to New York, Al went to see Solow to ask if he’d let him take a package of stones to Japan on consignment to try and sell them. “We were talking about $150,000 worth of diamonds. It was no small thing we were asking.” After hearing about the possible profits, Solow agreed.

“So Ralph and me sew these diamonds into our clothes and go right back to Japan to catch up with Pepe. It was just a little package, so it was easy to make it in and out of customs.”

Pepe the hustler was good to his word, and quickly sold the diamonds for more than twice what Solow had paid for them.

“We did it one more time, in and out, without getting caught. We thought, This is beautiful. Then the whole airline-ticket scam started falling apart and it got dangerous to fly. The airlines had hired these Pinkerton agents and they were snatching people right off the planes. People got arrested right in their seats. The private eyes were watching the passenger lists for guys like us. That pretty much ended a nice thing for a lot of people.”

*   *   *

The sudden halt to the bogus-airline-ticket splurge left some promoters high and dry. One of them was Morris Campanella, the printer who was Juicy Angstreich’s source for counterfeit tickets. Campanella was a master printer but a failure at business. “Everybody called him ‘Moishe,’ but he was an Italian. When the tickets scam ended, he was starving to death.”

Campanella’s printing company was located in an old barn of a building on Imlay Street in Red Hook, a neighborhood of factories, warehouses, and longshoremen’s bars strung along an elbow of the south Brooklyn waterfront. Al went down to Red Hook to look at Campanella’s operation. “It was a rainy day, and when I got there, Moishe was trying to move his machines by himself to take them out of the place. All he had was a crowbar. He said he hadn’t paid rent in a while and the landlord was cracking down. If he didn’t get the machines out of the building, the owner was going to seize everything in the place.”

The landlord owned a book-distribution business located down the street. Al had a few hundred dollars with him. He told Campanella to call the owner and tell him to come down to get his rent. “Moishe didn’t want to do it, but I told him go ahead. He gets off the phone and says, ‘He’s coming over.’ So I go downstairs and wait in the doorway. I get a paper bag and put the money in it and keep one hand inside. The owner, a guy named Goldstein, comes up. I say, ‘You’re the landlord? How come you’re pressuring Morris?’ I point the bag at him like I got a gun hidden there. He freezes and starts to put his hands up. I said, ‘Relax, I’m Moishe’s new partner.’ I hand him the bag and the money. I told him I was sure we could work out the rest of it.’ He was glad to get out of there alive I think.”

Campanella had printing and stamping machines for making cardboard boxes, but no customers. “Moishe was a screwup. He didn’t have any credit. I knew from my father’s dye business that no one used cash to order supplies. You got a line of credit at a bank and then paid it back when you made and sold your order. You want to order $50,000 worth of cardboard from the mill? You got to have credit to get the loan.”

Al’s own background was an automatic out at any lender. Only a wiseguy shylock was going to give an ex-con who had done time for stock theft a major loan, and the points charged would make it too expensive. On the other hand, Petey Del Cioppo didn’t have a big criminal record. He might get a loan. “I made Petey the president of the Cherokee Box Company. He didn’t have a clue but all that mattered was his signature.”

Campanella’s machines could cut and print small packing boxes for food or other items. The trick was to come up with customers. “I’m thinking about it, and then it hit me that I knew somebody had a company made sausages.” The somebody was Anthony “Hickey” DiLorenzo, a freewheeling mobster originally from Avenue A on the Lower East Side who was a high-earning member of the Genovese family.

“Hickey had a company that made Italian sausage. He had the hot sausages in boxes with a red stripe, and the sweet sausages in blue-striped packages.” Al went to see him. DiLorenzo said he’d be glad to start buying boxes from Al’s company, as long as he could supply them in bulk. He needed no fewer than a half million, he said.

Al the businessman now went into high gear. “This was a big order, but it was all legit. We could take the order to the bank, get the credit, and get the materials.” They discovered they also needed a four-color press. “We went out to Edison, New Jersey, and bought one off a company going out of business. We had to get riggers to get it set up in the plant on Imlay Street. Then we needed a die-cutting machine to cut the boxes. We got one of those, too.”

For a gangster-run enterprise, the entire operation so far was remarkably legal. But to keep the machines going, they needed more customers. And here, Al decided, he needed to put his thumb on the scales. “The guy who had control of the big meat suppliers, the bacon and sausage makers, was the head of the butchers union, Frankie Kissel. I went to ask him if he could help.”

Frank Kissel Sr. was part of the network of labor racketeers loosely associated with Ben Ross, which was how Al had met him. Unlike Ross’s mostly rogue outfits, however, Kissel had a tight grip on a union that was a major member of the dominant AFL-CIO. Despite that official recognition, Local 174 of the Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen of North America had been under mob control since its inception. Its officers had long used their clout to push meat suppliers and supermarkets to accommodate gangland entrepreneurs. The mob was so closely tied into Kissel’s union that one of his top officers was an aging former enforcer for Lucky Luciano named Lorenzo “Chappie” Brescia. Even at seventy years old, the solidly built Brescia cut an intimidating presence, and he often accompanied Kissel to meetings and negotiations as a reminder of the union’s backers.

The local had been at the center of a series of corruption scandals for the past decade, including scams that allowed adulterated meat to be sold in major New York supermarkets. Kissel had just finished up a seven-year sentence for extortion. But he’d lost none of his zest for crime or profit. After hearing Al’s pitch, Kissel said he’d be glad to help. All he’d charge was $5,000 to start, with a percentage of the profits down the road.

Figuring it would be money well spent, Al scratched around and came up with the cash. He had several meetings with Kissel and his son, Billy, at Pete’s Tavern, the saloon on Irving Place near Gramercy Square and around the corner from Local 174’s offices. “We talked about what companies they could get for us. It took a while to line things up, but Frankie came through.” Orders eventually came in from a half dozen manufacturers, including a firm called Chef Romeo in the Bronx and a large supplier called White Packaging in New Jersey.

“We were rolling. We had some trouble collecting payment from one of the companies, but I sent Petey Del around to give a pep talk to the bookkeeper and that did the trick.”

*   *   *

There was enough money coming in now for some modest luxuries. Dolores’s parents had retired to Miami, where they owned a condominium. Al and Dolores brought the family down to Florida for visits. Al still admired his father-in-law. Joe Lefty Pellegrino still projected a fiercely tough image, even in old age. Surrounded by retirees in pastels, he looked out of place in his formal white shirt. The old man was eager for news of New York. “We’d sit by the pool or the beach talking while the kids swam and played around.”

Ever cautious, Al left as light a footprint as he could as he moved through the mob world. On a visit to the in-laws, he decided to switch his driver’s license to their Florida home. “I just used their address. The less they had on paper about me in New York, I figured, the better.”

*   *   *

He was now basically working three jobs. He had the burger and coffee stand on Laight Street, the occasional labor assignment from Ben Ross and his crew, and the box company, which was taking up more and more of his time.

His gangster pals wondered why Al worked so hard. One day in the K & K Luncheonette on Monroe Street, Anthony Tortorello started in. “Al, how come you make money in the street,” he asked, “then go and spend it in a straight business you got to work at around the clock?”

Al answered with his father’s inflections of the word. “I go into the bizaness because I like bizaness,” he said. Then he added, “Second of all, when you buy something, at least you can show where you got the money, unlike a lot of guys.”

Not that his gangster world and the printing operation didn’t heavily overlap. In addition to the orders that resulted from strong-arming by Frank Kissel and his crew at the butcher’s union, Al was approached by local Brooklyn pizza shop owners, most of them mob-connected, to make boxes for their pies.

“I said we’d make all they needed, but if they wanted their names on the boxes, they had to pay up front. That worked out, except for this one store that made a big order and refused to pay.”

Al first sent Petey Del around to collect. Del Cioppo returned empty-handed, sheepishly admitting that the Sicilians who owned the place had tossed him out of the shop. When he’d demanded the money, he said, they told him they were real Mafiosi, unlike him, and to get lost.

“So I go over there myself with Petey to show him how it’s done. It’s a place in Bay Ridge. They owed us for twenty thousand boxes, a lot of money. I go in there and I’m speaking Italian to them, basically asking who the fuck do they think they are?”

The pizza shop owner tried to pull rank, invoking his own affiliation with the Sicilian Mafia and citing the name of a powerful island chieftain. “This one guy says to me, ‘Show me your moosa.’ It means ‘Show me your lip.’ It’s basically a way of saying, ‘Screw you, do something about it.’ So I did.”

Al smacked the pizza maker, knocking him down. “I hit him hard as I could. When he hit the floor, me and Petey Del gave him a stomping.” When they were done, they went in the back and got the unused boxes and carried them out of the shop.

Under normal mob protocol, raising your fist to a made member of the Mafia was a felonious offense, punishable even by death. After they left the shop, Petey Del asked Al if he was worried about that. “Nah,” he responded. “They’re Italian Mafia. They don’t count.”

The printing business was proving a growth industry for the hardworking mobster. Looking to expand further, Al started trying to land contracts with fast-food outlets. McDonald’s wasn’t yet much of a local presence, but White Castle had several popular hamburger outlets in Brooklyn, and he went around trying to line up the business. But obtaining the proper thickness of cardboard demanded by the burger company was difficult. “First thing I find out is they use only ten-point board for their paper burger sleeves. And you can’t buy ten-point board. The mills won’t sell it to you because the big box companies have a lock on it, and they don’t want anyone else getting a piece. I’m thinking, These guys are gangsters too. How you gonna print the boxes? You can’t.”

There was a gangland solution to everything, however. “I heard about a load of ten-point board coming into the printing company that’s got the contract. The shipment is in Connecticut, so I get Petey Del and Ralph and we went out there and hijacked the truck.”

They delivered the load to the plant at Imlay Street. “Now we’re all set—we got the board, and I can tell the burger joints we’re ready to supply them.” There was so much business coming in, however, that Campanella’s printers were backed up on production.

“Fucking Moishe, he procrastinates. He leaves the board near the heaters, and since it’s wintertime they’re going full blast to heat the place. And of course they warp the board so now it’s useless. It’s curved and won’t print right.”

Such was the life of a small businessman. Frustrated, Al was casting around for a new cardboard source when a different way to make money with Moishe’s printing machines was broached by Anthony Tortorello and some of his friends. Their idea was literally to make money. Counterfeit cash.

The plan had started with a Genovese member named Salvatore Aparo who had gotten hold of some samples of bleached dollar bills that, if carefully handled, might be reprinted as larger denominations. Aparo was from the family’s East Harlem faction. Known on the street as “Sammy Meatballs,” he had been arrested in the same big 1965 narcotics sweep that netted Chalootz Gagliodotto and his victims, Frank Tuminaro and Frank Gangi. Aparo had made it through unscathed, however. A couple of years younger than Al, he was an active hustler and another regular visitor to the K & K Luncheonette.

Aparo was thinking big. “The numbers Sammy threw out were huge. He was saying we could make $20 million if the job was done good enough.” Campanella took a look. He said he could do it, but it would take time and investment. He’d need a new printer, a special camera to shoot photos of real $100 bills, plus ink, oil, and chemicals. The tab for the added equipment, he estimated, would come to about $50,000.

Aparo and Tortorello kicked in $13,000 to get things going. As Al was scrounging around for more, Moishe got to work fashioning the plates he would use to make the bogus bills. “I’ll say this, the guy was some printer. When we couldn’t find the press he said he needed, he just started building his own. Moishe was amazing that way.”

But it was a time-consuming process. While Campanella was trying to perfect the machine and the plates, Al got a different pitch involving faked money from another friend in the Genovese family. Ever the nimble businessman, he was all ears.

The pitch came from Frank Caggiano, a close associate of Vincent Gigante and a member of the Mozzarella mob. Known as “Frankie Heart,” Caggiano ran a jewelry stand in the Canal Street diamond exchange and had a members-only social club on Prince Street near Thompson, across from M’Lady’s bar. At the box company, he explained his needs to Al. “What he wanted to know was if we could get bundles of paper that would match the exact weight and look of a $10,000 stack of $100 bills. It had to have bank wrappers on them with real bills on top and bottom. He said he needed four hundred stacks’ worth.”

Al did the math. “I thought, Wow, $4 million.” He told Caggiano he would see, but he thought it was possible. “I wanted to help him out. I really liked Frankie. Everybody did.” Al checked with Moishe and an agreeable paper supplier. “What you needed was 100 percent rag paper, and this guy said he could get it.” Al sent Caggiano word that it would take a couple weeks but they could handle it.

A few days later, Frankie Heart returned, this time with a large blue bag made of heavy canvas cloth. “He says that when the paper is ready, we should see if four hundred packets of the bills fit into this sack.” Caggiano warned Al that everyone handling the paper and the sack should wear double sets of latex gloves to avoid leaving any fingerprints.

“I don’t ask him what he wants with this, but now it’s pretty clear. The bag was like the ones that armored-car drivers use to deliver money to the banks.” When the paper had been cut, wrapped, and placed in the bag, Caggiano sent an emissary to collect it. Al received a hefty payment for the work.

“I never asked Frankie about it, but I heard later that a couple of guys who worked for an armored-car outfit had been busted after switching a bag of cash that was headed for a bank in Germany. I heard they almost made it.”

*   *   *

It took Moishe Campanella almost a year to get the plates perfected to make the counterfeit $100 bills. On the day he started running them off his homemade press, Sammy Aparo and Anthony Tortorello came out to watch. “It was like we’d just hit the lottery. We’re looking at the bills and they look real to us.” Moishe printed a quarter million dollars’ worth. The stacks of bills filled an entire pallet.

There hadn’t been much talk about how the money would be passed off. But Al now learned that Aparo and Tortorello had been planning all along to buy heroin with it. The thinking was that the bills might not fool a bank, but that an eager narcotics dealer wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.

Al begged off that plan. Not because he was against selling junk, but because he suspected that Tortorello, who tended to flaunt his crimes, might already be a police target. It turned out he was right to hesitate. Shortly after the phony money was produced, Tortorello was arrested, charged with narcotics trafficking.

“After Torty got picked up we brought the counterfeit cash over to his kid, Joey. We told him not to do anything with it, but keep it in a safe that his family had. Of course, him and his friends immediately go out on a buying binge.” Even a friend of the Tortorello family got into the act when she came across the stash, buying herself a new car with a wad of bills she lifted.

The counterfeit money was spotted, and the rest of it became too hot to touch. “Sammy Aparo started complaining that he was out $30,000 between what he laid out for the bleached bills and his investment in the press. I couldn’t say he was wrong, but we were all out a lot of dough on this thing.”

Moishe’s intensive labor on the counterfeit cash had also taken him away from their regular box-printing business. “Suddenly I look around and we owe about $100,000 in bills, with almost nothing coming in.”

The yawning financial hole made Al receptive when someone told him about a supply of stolen drums of quinine, used for cutting heroin. “There were ten drums from a shipment from West Germany that had been heisted off a pier in New York. You could gross $22,000 a drum if you had a steady buyer.” Despite Tortorello’s recent arrest, Al reached out through Torty’s network of dope dealers to test the market. He found immediate interest. He sold the first two drums, then two more.

The drug money kept the wolf from the printing company door for a while, but he eventually ran out of options. He looked around and realized he still had one asset: the insurance policy he’d had Del Cioppo take out on the business. Collecting on it was the only possible payday he saw ahead of him.

“It was pretty simple. Petey and me went to Imlay Street one night and went to work. We had these propane tanks to run the fork lifts that we used to move the cardboard pallets around. We also had gasoline in this separate room we used to wash down the printing plates. The gas was permitted as long as we kept it away from everything else. Which we did.”

The place was also filled with tinder-dry combustibles. Paper and cardboard were strewn throughout the floor. Al propped up a propane tank and stuck a long, gas-soaked length of gauze tissue in the top of a jug of gas as a wick. “Then I took a lit cigarette and a book of matches, laid them at the end of the gauze, and took off.”

He and Petey Del drove away, then looped back on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway to see what had happened. “The place was roaring.”

The arson was successful. The insurance scam, less so. “Petey was the president of the company so he was the one the insurance investigator came to talk to. I told him what to say, but when they asked him if he had gas there, he just said yes. The big dope didn’t explain that it was allowed to be there.”

The claim was denied. “I think we were out $300,000 on that score.”

*   *   *

The setbacks might have gotten him down, if not for his frequent visits out to Geffken’s Bar on Flatlands Avenue, where he had become an increasingly popular figure. Even without his button, Al was treated as an accepted member of Paul Vario’s crew.

Among the tavern regulars was Jimmy Burke, a wild Irish gangster who was feasting on the freight going to and from nearby John F. Kennedy Airport. “Jimmy Burke and his crew were hijacking everything they could. I couldn’t tell how much he was passing up to Paulie, but I know he was getting a share.” One day, Vario turned to Al and asked if he could handle a dispute between Burke and two other men over a hijacking that was threatening to get out of control. “I said, ‘Sure, I’ll listen to it,’ but what I was thinking was, Why does Paulie want me to handle a sit-down with Jimmy Burke?”

At a nearby coffee shop, Al heard them out. The dispute centered on a $300,000 tractor-trailer load of Bic lighters that Burke had snatched. The other two men claimed that they were owed half the earnings because they had told Burke about the load. Burke said he was willing to give them a third, but no more. “I asked the two guys claiming a bigger share if they’d shopped the deal around to others before bringing it to Jimmy. They said yes. So I said, ‘That’s it. You get the third. He helped you out here.’”

Burke apparently thought even a third of the profits was unreasonable. “Both those guys turned up dead a few nights later. He shot them right in their own car. Jimmy’d kill you in a minute for nothing. He didn’t give a fuck.”

Al was around to notice all the furtive whisperings after Burke’s biggest and most famous score, the $6 million Lufthansa heist from a Kennedy Airport terminal a couple of weeks before Christmas in December 1978. “It was none of my business so I never asked a thing, but it was hard to miss.”

A few days after the robbery, he accompanied Paulie to Vario’s mother’s house for a small Christmas celebration. Burke was there, as were Frank Manzo and Peter “Rugsy” Vario, one of Paulie’s two surviving sons. The group talked about the robbery with Al in the room. “I’m trying not to listen. It’s something I don’t need to know about.”

As members of Burke’s crew who had participated in the heist started turning up dead over the following months, Al had good reason to be glad he’d steered clear of it.

The closest he came to being pulled into Burke’s robberies was when Paul Vario asked him if he could have a diamond ring he’d received from Burke reset. “I had told Paulie about my friend George Solow in the diamond district, so he knew I had a connection who could handle it.” The ring was an expensive trophy, possibly a championship ring. It was clear from the engraving that it had once belonged to New York Jets football star Joe Namath. There were several large diamonds on it arranged in the shape of a football. Vario wanted it redone so he could wear it.

“I took it to George and he did a beautiful job. Paulie was very pleased. I don’t know how he got it to begin with, but I heard that Joe Namath was a gambler, so maybe it had something to do with that.”

The other big diamonds he saw out at Geffken’s were on the cuff links of Jimmy Burke’s friend and hijacking partner, Tommy DeSimone, the model for Joe Pesci’s character in the movie Goodfellas. “Tommy was just as wild as Jimmy. The mob had a strict rule that you never carried a gun unless you were going to use it. But Tommy always had two guns on him and he wasn’t afraid to flash them.”

The night DeSimone was killed, Al saw him come into Geffken’s. “He was all dressed up. He had on this nice suit and diamond cuff links and everything. The word was around he was going to get made.” Everyone in the bar seemed to know about it. In addition to Paul Vario, there were his sons, Peter and Paul Jr.; Pete “the Killer” Abinanti, who was another of Joe Schiavo’s protégés; and Angelo Sepe, part of Burke’s hijacking crew. “Even the barmaid, this Sicilian girl, was congratulating him.”

Al saw DeSimone leave the bar with Peter Vario and a member of the crew named Bruno Facciola. About an hour later, Al went to a pizza parlor that Facciola owned. DeSimone was seated at a table inside, with Facciola and Peter Vario. They seemed to be waiting for someone. “I remember Bruno was standing up and both him and Petey were wearing nice sports coats like they were going out somewhere.”

It was DeSimone’s last dinner. “They brought him to the place he was supposed to get made, then pushed him in and whacked him.” The reason for the murder was that DeSimone had killed a Mafia member without permission. Al understood the rule, but was disturbed by the ruse. “I didn’t like the way they did it. It was dishonorable. They told him they were going to make him. Then they kill him.”

*   *   *

He got his own invitation to murder one day while sitting at Geffken’s. The bar was almost empty and Al was seated next to Paul Vario when the crime chief leaned over the counter, picked up a kitchen knife, and handed it to Al. “He says he wants me to go out and kill Red Gilmore.”

Al barely knew Tommy Gilmore. He knew he made his living as a burglar and that a lot of people in the Vario crew didn’t like or trust him. But Al neither liked him nor disliked him. He didn’t care one way or the other. “I took the knife from Paulie and it was almost automatic. Red had been in the bar just a few minutes before, having a beer. He’d said he was going out to work on his car. He had an antique Chevy he liked to tinker with. I figured he was in the alley out back.”

Al stood up, slipped the knife down along his pants leg, and headed out the side door. He was going to do what Paul Vario had told him to do. Kill Red Gilmore.

Just as Al got to the door, Vario called him.

“Okay,” he said. “That’s enough. C’mon back.”

Al went over to Vario, who took the knife and patted his shoulder. “Good,” he said.

“That’s all he said. It was some kind of test, I guess. But if he hadn’t called me back, I know I would have done what he asked.”

*   *   *

In March 1979, Al’s best friend, Ralph Masucci, died. He was just fifty-three years old, but it was natural causes, not the gangster virus going around. “He died of cancer, Hodgkin’s. It came on real quick. The doctors told him, ‘Don’t go in the sun no more, and stop smoking the cigars.’ So that meant go to Florida and keep smoking the fucking cigars. He wouldn’t quit. I took him up to Sloan-Kettering and they cut him up to try and get it, but it was too late. Half his neck was gone from operations by the time he went.”

The whole family grieved. Ralph was godfather to Tara at her baptism. He was Joseph’s godfather too for his confirmation in 1966. Alone of Al’s many gangland pals, Ralph had been a regular visitor to the D’Arco home and dinner table. Al’s daughters doted on him, as did his younger son, John. Al tried not to show a lot of emotion. But he was quietly devastated. “Me and him did a lot of things together, traveled the whole world. We got along good.”

*   *   *

He still had the burger stand going, but without the printing company he was now back to hustling, ever in search of daily scores to pay the rent.

He became friendly with an old-timer off the Brooklyn waterfront named Frank Gagliardi who had been part of Anastasia’s mob. Gagliardi had been a major hijacker in his day. In 1947, he’d been nabbed by the FBI as the ringleader in $500,000 worth of heists that had plagued truck freight operators. “Frank had a nephew who was pulling jobs and he asked me to help him out. I didn’t much care for the kid, but I liked Frank so I went along.”

The hijacking jobs with Gagliardi’s nephew made money, but each was a headache in its own way. “We had a load of dresses we’d snatched and were taking them out to Hackensack, New Jersey, to someone who had a dress plant and was going to take them off us. I’m in a Cadillac with Frank following the truck. The truck was this old Bulldog Mack and I could tell it was on its last legs. I can hear the engine whining from back where we are. The driver is wobbling all over the road. We get over by the World Trade Center and he pulls over and says he can’t drive the thing.”

Al volunteered to take over. “I get behind the wheel and I see why the other guy quit. It will barely turn. I’m swinging the wheel twice around just to take a corner. We had to go through the Holland Tunnel and I’m hitting the sides of the tunnel as we’re going through. It was a miracle I didn’t get pulled over, but we made it.”

Another hijacking job involved dropping through the skylight of a Brooklyn garage guarded by a large watchdog, a German shepherd. “Frank’s nephew said he had a plan to take the dog out without making any noise. He was going to use a crossbow once we opened the skylight. I figured he knew how to use it, but we get up on the roof and he can’t even crank it back. So I took it, aimed, and hit the dog. One shot.”

Al felt bad about killing the shepherd. “I thought about that for years. I was sorry about that dog.”

*   *   *

Out on Flatlands Avenue, another mob associate with a penchant for fouling things up was wreaking havoc on Paul Vario and his crew. Henry Hill, a member of Jimmy Burke’s hijacking team, had been busted on federal drug charges. Facing serious prison time and his own drug-addiction-fueled suspicions, Hill decided to cooperate. Al never had anything to do with Hill but he knew that Vario was fond of him, despite his many problems. “I remember one time he got in trouble on something out on Rockaway Parkway on some heist gone bad. Paulie had to send a rescue crew out to help him.”

Hill wasn’t a made member of the mob, but his decision to flip was a considerable coup for law enforcement. Before the half-Irish, half-Italian Hill started talking, the only significant mobsters to cooperate were Joe Valachi in 1963, followed by a West Coast–based Mafioso named Jimmy Fratianno in 1977.

Hill told the feds about the Lufthansa job, and how Paul Vario, who had taken Hill under his wing as a boy in Brownsville, had gotten a huge share of the loot. But his knowledge was mostly secondhand, and he had no solid evidence to offer. He did help prosecutors nail Burke on a point-shaving scandal involving players for the Boston College basketball team. They also got Vario on a separate charge for lying to federal parole officers to get Hill a job with a mob-tied nightclub operator.

The perjury rap wasn’t much of a case to bring down a man dubbed as the criminal mastermind of south Brooklyn. But prosecutors made good use of what they had. And Henry Hill proved an effective witness on the limited scams he knew about.

The parole-scam trial also raised a curtain on a previously hidden part of Long Island politics. During the trial, U.S. senator Alfonse D’Amato appeared as a character witness for Phil Basile, the mobbed-up nightclub owner who gave Hill the job as a favor to his close friend Paul Vario. D’Amato was from Island Park, the Long Island South Shore town where Vario had lived and where Basile ran big, brassy nightclubs including one that hosted a D’Amato victory party. In the courtroom, the senator gave Basile a peck on the cheek, then took the stand to call him “honest, truthful, hardworking. A man of integrity.” The jury didn’t agree, convicting Basile of perjury.

Al heard D’Amato’s name mentioned occasionally by Vario and his son Peter. “They called him ‘Cappy.’ Paulie knew him for a long time and D’Amato and Philly Basile were very tight.”

As for Henry Hill’s treachery, there was little energy for doing anything about it. “There was talk about trying to find him and hurt him. But no one pursued it. They had him too well protected. Only way Henry Hill had something to worry about was if he ended up driving a cab and Petey Vario got in the back. Then he’d have something to worry about.”

*   *   *

Part of what drove Henry Hill to change sides, as he often admitted later, was his fear that Vario might kill him for having steadily ignored his orders not to deal narcotics. Vario may well have run out of patience with the incorrigible Hill. But Al had seen the mob’s alleged sanction against drug dealing steadily ignored. “Half the crews were dealing. You didn’t talk about it, but the bosses were happy to take their cut of the money.” He’d watched as top figures in the Genovese crime family, including Vincent Gigante, were convicted in major narcotics cases with no penalty exacted. Vario’s own Luchese family boasted many of the city’s leading narcotics dealers.

Al had reached his own conclusions. “The rules were made for the peons. The guys making the big bucks? The rules weren’t made for them.”

Which didn’t mean that he might not face difficulties if he dealt narcotics as a made member. But until he got his button he was still a free agent. He had long nibbled around the edges of the drug trade. There had been his failed effort with Ralph Masucci to sell Davie Petillo’s Afghani heroin. Then, more successfully, the sale of the cutting agent, quinine, out of the stolen drums from the box company in Red Hook.

Not long after that, he also took a kilo of heroin “on consignment” from a crew of Luchese family members who operated out of a social club on Prince Street and who were actively dealing drugs. He took the kilo to a friend of his named Jakie Bove, a mob-tied drug dealer based in East Harlem. He did well at first, earning $70,000 on the sale. Then the deal quickly went sour. It turned out the heroin was laced with caffeine, a trick to make the drug give a false reading of purity when tested. He was forced to return both the cash and the drugs.

Equally frustrating were two failed efforts to do drug deals with Vic Amuso, the young gangster Al had first met at the bust-out on Washington Avenue and had later helped out at Sing Sing. Amuso was teamed up with a partner named Anthony Casso, a wisecracking mobster from the Gowanus neighborhood of Brooklyn. Casso’s nickname was “Gaspipe.” When asked about it, he would laugh and say friends called him that because of his proficiency with a heavy length of metal pipe as a weapon. Al had a different theory. “I remember Anthony’s father on Kent Avenue coming around to check the gas because he worked for the gas company. I figured that’s where the name came from.”

Amuso and Casso told Al that they had a kilo of heroin they would sell him for $150,000. Al didn’t have the money, but he was sure Jakie Bove would be eager to advance the cash if the heroin proved potent. Bove agreed to back the deal. Retrieving the drugs from Amuso and Casso, he eagerly waited to see the results of the tests. “Jakie comes back to me and said the same thing. The heroin didn’t stand up. It was no good.”

Al went to see Amuso to return the drugs and get Bove’s money back. “Vic told me there was a delay, and I’d get it, but it would take a little while.” Al was annoyed but didn’t complain. Amuso and Casso were both made members of the Luchese family, and unless he wanted to lodge a complaint against them, there wasn’t much he could do but wait.

“A few days later I get a call to come out to Brooklyn and get the money from Anthony.” Casso told Al to meet him at the parking lot of a Chinese restaurant called the Golden Ox, on Avenue N in south Brooklyn. “He had the money but it was all in fives, tens, and twenties. It was $150,000 in small bills.”

Despite those experiences, he was still eager to make the huge profits he saw others hauling in from drug deals. So when a hustler he knew named Francisco Solimene approached him in the spring of 1982 about participating in a heroin deal, Al, ever eager for a score, listened.

“I met Solimene around the neighborhood. His name was Frank, so of course everyone called him Cheech. I knew he was a big gambler, but so were a lot of guys, so that didn’t seem a problem.”

Cheech Solimene had a straightforward pitch: He had a willing buyer with deep pockets for high-grade heroin. What he needed was a supplier. “I figured he knew people I knew, and as long as the quality was acceptable, we could make some money. I said I was in.”

Solimene’s own luck in the drug business hadn’t been great. He was just getting back on the streets after serving seven years for his last heroin deal. That conviction followed the discovery in 1971 by airport customs agents of 155 pounds of the narcotic in four suitcases. The trail led them to Cheech’s Queens apartment, where agents found a key to a safety-deposit box in his wife’s name containing $87,000, and the number of a Swiss bank account that held $105,000. Solimene didn’t have a job at the time, so he had a hard time explaining the money. He was convicted of conspiracy to import heroin.

Al didn’t press Solimene for details about his buyer. But after obtaining heroin for the deal from the same group of Luchese-tied operators on Prince Street, he began to wonder.

Late on the night of July 7, 1982, Solimene met Al outside his apartment at 32 Spring Street after making his sale to his buyer uptown. Al and Solimene climbed into a tan 1978 Lincoln Continental for a drive to meet another dealer. The car was Al’s, but he kept it registered in Pete Del Cioppo’s name, as one more way to keep a low profile.

The meeting was at Sarge’s Delicatessen, a late-night restaurant on Third Avenue and Thirty-Seventh Street. Al and Solimene stayed only a few minutes and then headed back downtown. On the way, Al got suspicious of a car behind them.

“I thought this guy was following us, but I couldn’t be sure, so I started driving around, squaring the blocks.” He turned right, right, and right again in an effort to spot any surveillance. He headed down Second Avenue, then suddenly lurched across several lanes of traffic and made a fast left turn toward the FDR Drive. He sped down the highway, exiting at Houston Street.

On the service road paralleling the drive, he pulled over. The car that he thought was following him cruised past. Al followed behind. At a stop light on Grand Street Al pulled abreast of the suspicious car. He gave a long hard look at the driver. Then he made a U-turn, heading back in the direction they had come. The car stopped following.

Solimene wanted to make another deal. Al was hesitant. He said he wanted to get a look at this deep-pocketed buyer. “I told him to bring him down to our territory so I could see him.” Solimene told his buyer to meet him at Caffe Roma, the pastry and espresso place on the corner of Mulberry Street, at 9 p.m. on July 15. Shortly after Solimene and his buyer sat down at a table, Al came up the block. He peered in the window, trying to see if he recognized the man talking to Solimene. He didn’t know him.

*   *   *

As a business deal, the heroin sale was a modest success. Solimene’s buyer paid $31,000. Al made a decent profit after paying off his Prince Street connection. Solimene pushed Al to keep going. His buyer was hungry for more, he said. But Al had had enough. “I didn’t get a good feeling. I made out okay. Nothing went wrong. But it wasn’t worth a pinch. I told him no thanks.”

In the ensuing weeks, Al noticed Solimene often on the streets of Little Italy, hanging out around a Genovese family club at the corner of Broome and Mott Streets, the Latineers Social Club.

Al didn’t pay him much attention. Part of his distraction was that Joe Schiavo had revived the push to finally get Al his button. “Joe said he was fed up with Paulie’s delaying.”

The elder Luchese family statesman went on a lobbying campaign. First he took Al to a bar in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, that was the headquarters for the family’s consigliere, Christopher “Christy Tick” Furnari. The 19th Hole was a one-story tavern at the corner of Eighty-Sixth Street and Fourteenth Avenue, across from the Dyker Beach Golf Course. Furnari did much of his business in a back room there. One of those listening to Schiavo make Al’s case was Vic Amuso. Amuso greeted Al warmly and promised to do what he could.

Another campaign stop was northern New Jersey, where Schiavo brought Al to meet an old-time power in the family. Joe Rosato was Tommy Luchese’s brother-in-law. Known as “Joe Palisades,” he had become a wealthy man helping to run the family’s lucrative racket in garment trucking operations. Aside from a homicide arrest that didn’t result in a conviction, Rosato kept a low profile. His chief brush with notoriety came when he was one of those arrested at the 1957 Apalachin conclave. Rosato was briefly jailed on contempt charges after he refused to tell the New York State Commission of Investigation why he was present at the underworld gathering.

Al was introduced, and then the two older men stepped aside to talk. Whatever Schiavo said, it apparently did the trick.

“Joe Palisades reached out to Tony Ducks Corallo, who was running the family then, and asked why they were keeping me out.” There was no good answer, except for Frank Manzo’s unspecified objections. And if it was possible to have dismissed Al as an “ice-cream vendor” back in 1974 when he was first proposed for membership, the description no longer held.

On August 23, 1982, Vario contacted Al. “Get dressed,” he told him. “I knew what he meant.”

Al put on a gray suit that Dolores had bought him, a white shirt, and a tie, and went to the Prince Street clubhouse that was headquarters for the DiPalermo brothers and their friends, the same place where he’d scored a kilo of heroin a few months earlier. Two of the brothers, Charles and Peter, were waiting for him there. “We got in Petey Beck DiPalermo’s Cadillac, and drove up to the Bronx. I didn’t know where we were, but we parked beside a brick wall and sat awhile.” After a few minutes, a four-door Fleetwood Cadillac pulled up. In it was another Luchese member, Salvatore “Sally Bo” DeSimone. Beside him was an associate from the Canarsie crew Al had met, Louie Daidone. Also in the car was Frank Manzo. Al acted like nothing had happened between them. “I just said ‘How ya doin’, Frank? Good to see you.’”

The entire group piled into the Fleetwood and drove around. “They were looking for any kind of surveillance. It was the worst thing that could happen, if the cops spotted an induction ceremony. So we squared the blocks for a while.” On Westchester Avenue, in the northwest Bronx, the car stopped in front of a row of small houses. “They said we should make straight for the door. We ran inside.”

Al was just one of the inductees. Daidone was another. There were four other men, most of whom he didn’t know. The recruits sat quietly in a small parlor. The room was made smaller by a sheet that was hanging over an entrance to a kitchen. Al couldn’t see who was back there but he heard men talking and moving around.

“We got told to just wait there. We all knew what was going on, but no one said anything. We just sat.”

Al’s was the first name called. He was beckoned past the sheet into the kitchen area. A dozen men were crowded around a table. Al spotted Paul Vario, Corallo, Vic Amuso, the DiPalermo brothers, and Frank Manzo. He also recognized Salvatore Santoro, the family’s underboss from the Bronx, known on the street as “Tom Mix.” On the table a towel was covering a lumpy object.

Corallo spoke first. “Do you know why you are here?” he asked.

Al knew the correct answer. “No,” he said.

“Well, you’re here to be one of us,” Corallo told him. “Do you have any objections to that?”

“No, I got no objections,” Al answered.

Santoro spoke next. He lifted the towel. A gun and a knife were underneath. “If you were asked to kill somebody, would you do it?”

Al shrugged his shoulders. It was a gangster gesture that signaled he would do what he had to do.

Santoro asked Vario if he had a pin. Vario pulled out a safety pin and reached out for Al’s right hand. He held his index finger, the one that Al would use to pull a trigger, something he hadn’t had to do so far. “Paulie gives me a sharp jab. Then he lets the blood drip onto a tissue of paper he’s got.”

Vario told Al to cup his hands and dropped the bloody tissue onto them. Then he took a match and lit it. “I shuffled this burning paper back and forth between my hands.”

As the tissue burned, Santoro gave the incantation of the Cosa Nostra and told Al to repeat it after him. “You live by the gun and the knife, and you die by the gun and the knife. And if I betray anyone in this room, or any friends of ours, may my soul burn in hell like this paper.”

He dropped the paper into an ashtray. Santoro leaned forward and gave Al a kiss on both cheeks. “He says, ‘This is your boss, Antonio Corallo. And I am your underboss, Salvatore Santoro, and this is your caporegime, Paul Vario.” He then filled Al in on the names of the heads of New York’s other crime families. “At the time, it was Rusty Rastelli for the Bonannos, Junior Persico for the Colombo family, Chin Gigante for the Genovese, and Paul Castellano for the Gambinos.”

The induction ended with Al’s own formal introduction as a member of the crime family to everyone in the room. “Then they told me to take a seat and went through it with the rest of the guys who’d been waiting outside in the living room with me.”

After all the inductions and speeches were over, the men in the room stood and held hands. “It’s an old-world thing. It means to ‘tack up.’ The Italian for it is attacatta. It basically means we’re all in this together.”

Tony Corallo then spoke in Italian. “He said, ‘La fata di questa famiglia sono aperti.’ It meant ‘The affairs of the family are now open.’ And then he starts to lay down the rules.”

The boss went over a list of prohibitions. “He said no narcotics, no counterfeit money, no stolen bonds and stocks. No fooling around with other members’ wives and daughters. Then he tells us that when your captain calls you, no matter what time of day or night, you must respond. He says, ‘This family comes before your family.’”

When he was done, Corallo instructed the men in the room that they were never to speak of what they’d seen and heard. Speaking again in Italian, he told them that the family’s affairs were now closed. “Then we tacked up again, and that was it.”

The men went back into the living room, where there was a snack of pastries and coffee. They had just pledged to kill on demand in a secret society but they stood around chatting like a church social. It didn’t last long. “Everybody was anxious to get out of there. It was crowded and the bosses were worried about law enforcement. We went out a few at a time.”

*   *   *

The next day, Al went out to Geffken’s to see Paul Vario and the crew. Vario reintroduced him to men he’d known for years, this time as a member of the family. Among them was Bruno Facciola, the owner of the pizza parlor where Al had last seen Tommy DeSimone alive on the eve of what was supposed to be his own induction into Vario’s crew. Facciola told Al he was going to have a big party in his honor at his club on Avenue D.

“The party was a few days later. It was made guys only, but there were more than fifteen guys there. Paulie opened it like a formal meeting. He says, ‘I want to introduce you to our friend, Al D’Arco.’ Then he goes over some of the rules that didn’t get mentioned the first time. He says to make sure no business is discussed with wives in the room. And for everyone to concern themselves with the families of other members when they’re in need. Then we had a feast. Bruno had a real spread for us, lobster, pasta. Everyone was congratulating me and making toasts.”

After the dinner was over, Vario had the men ceremonially join hands again. Then he announced the meeting closed.

Al enjoyed the attention. But he was fairly clear about the bottom-line benefits of the club he had just joined. “What it meant, most of all, was that this thing is mine. Once you’re straightened out, no one can take it off you. Not my boss, not anyone. No one can tell you what to do. You got all the privileges, and you can’t get abused. You’re not a second-class citizen anymore.”