9

RAY BROOK

After all the speeches about steering clear of drugs, Al was a little thrown off guard when Paul Vario asked him a few months after his induction to help out on a cocaine deal.

The request came in November 1982, while Al was in Florida with his family at Dolores’s parents’ condo. Vario was in Miami as well and the two of them got together. “Paulie said that a couple of his guys were going to move a large quantity of coke and he wanted to know if I could help out.”

Al thought at first that this was another test, like the time Paulie had handed him the knife in Geffken’s to kill Red Gilmore. But it wasn’t. “He wanted me to do it.”

Al didn’t want anything to do with it. He had several reasons, starting with his mob vows. “I swore I wasn’t going to sell drugs when I got made. So I wasn’t going to do it.” Even if he wanted to, he didn’t want to risk another close call like he’d had with Frank Solimene and his heroin buyer. There was one more good reason: the gangster handling the coke deal was one of the most ruthless members of the Canarsie crew, a twenty-seven-year-old armored-car hijacker named Ray Argentina.

He first met Argentina at Geffken’s Bar. After the introduction, Paulie nudged Al. “He did three for me,” whispered Vario. Al knew what he meant. Three murders.

Argentina was one of nine brothers. He and a younger brother, Peter, worked as strong-arm enforcers for Frank Manzo, helping to shake down businesses at the airport.

Even in a mob that valued brazen musclemen, Ray Argentina was considered dangerously impulsive. “He was a mad kid. He did everything hyper. He drove really fast, moved really fast. And killed a lot of people.”

A few months before he was made, Al got a taste of Argentina’s frenzied style. The opportunity came when he was asked to pick up an Ingram machine gun equipped with a silencer at a Luchese family social club in Little Italy and deliver it to Argentina in Canarsie. The weapon was a large, military-style machine pistol, the kind favored by drug dealers for impact, not accuracy. After he handed over the gun, Argentina thanked Al profusely. “Then he tells me this story how he once walked up behind someone on the street in the middle of the day and shot him. He said he used a 9 mm pistol in that one. I’m thinking, The guy hardly knows me and he’s telling me this?”

Al didn’t say no to Vario, but he didn’t pursue it either. His new caporegime let it drop. He didn’t hear any more about it.

*   *   *

The episode was one more reminder of the mob’s empty rhetoric about drugs, at least when it came to established Mafia members doing the dealing.

The Luchese family’s lead exhibit for that double standard was just a couple of blocks from Al’s Spring Street home. At their headquarters on Prince Street around the corner from Old St. Patrick’s Church, the fabled DiPalermo brothers had been running narcotics for decades without suffering any noticeable mob consequences.

The family had five brothers, each one with a long criminal résumé, with a major in drugs. The oldest of the brood was Joseph DiPalermo. Known on the street as Joe Beck, he was born in 1907 at 246 Elizabeth Street between Prince and Houston. He was still going strong in his seventies, working the same block, when Al knew him.

In the tabloids, Joe Beck was dubbed “the dean of dope dealers,” though you wouldn’t know it to look at him. He was reed-thin, balding, stood five foot six, and wore thick glasses. At one of his arraignments, the Daily News described him as “a wispy gnome-like creature with outsized horn rims.” At another, he was a “skinny, tubercular little crook.” The tuberculosis was the one thing you couldn’t blame on him. He had picked it up sleeping in damp prison cells after being convicted of bootlegging in the 1930s.

DiPalermo’s greatest claim to mob fame was for a murder he didn’t carry out. His mission from Vito Genovese was to kill Joe Valachi in the yard at the Atlanta federal prison. Or at least Valachi believed it. He crushed the skull of a prisoner who looked just like Joe Beck from the back, the crime that caused him to seek refuge with the FBI.

DiPalermo’s other brush with notoriety was a murder for which he was never charged. He was a prime suspect, along with his partner, Carmine Galante, in the slaying of Italian anarchist and Mussolini foe Carlo Tresca, gunned down on lower Fifth Avenue in 1943. It was a rare mob murder of a victim who was not one of their own. Tresca had offended pro-Fascist sympathizers, who licensed his assassination to the Mafia. A halfhearted investigation by the Manhattan DA never produced indictments.

Joe Beck and one of his younger brothers, Charles, dodged charges on another infamous murder, Al learned. That was the elimination of the young Jewish hoodlum who blinded Daily Mirror labor columnist Victor Riesel.

At 2:40 a.m. on April 5, 1956, Abe Telvi, twenty-two, tossed a vial of acid in Riesel’s face as the writer was leaving Lindy’s Restaurant at Broadway and West Fifty-First Street. Telvi was paid $1,000 for the attack, allegedly commissioned by labor racketeer Johnny Dio, who wanted to teach Riesel a lesson for his tough columns about Dio’s corrupt union tactics. After learning that his target was a big-shot journalist, Telvi naively demanded more money. The DiPalermo brothers took on the task of giving Telvi his own lesson. “They shot him in the head and dumped his body in Jersey Street, the little alley off Mulberry Street.”

That killing was also never solved. Meanwhile, the DiPalermo boys went on to notch repeated drug convictions: Joe Beck got fifteen years in the same 1959 narcotics case in which Genovese and Vincent Gigante were convicted. Charlie Brody, as the little brother was called, was nailed in the same case and sentenced to twelve years.

Decades later, they were still at it. In 1975, the feds picked up Charlie Brody with twenty-five pounds of heroin as he stood on the beach in Point Lookout, Long Island, waiting for his connection to show up with the buy money. Big brother Joe went him one better. He was convicted in 1978 of heading a ring that peddled the new drug of choice in those years, quaaludes, or methaqualone.

Then there was Peter DiPalermo, or Petey Beck, a paunchier but even shorter version of his older brothers. “Pete was the captain of the Prince Street crew. He was directing the traffic.”

The crew’s headquarters was a social club at 27 Prince Street, spread across a pair of storefronts. Charlie Brody fell in love with and married a girl named Marion Cuomo, whose family lived in an apartment above the club. The Cuomos and DiPalermos were close. Marion’s teenaged brother, Ralph, began running around with Joe Beck’s son, John Joseph. The two formed a gang that robbed restaurants in midtown, late-night jobs aimed at getting the night’s receipts. Al steered clear of both. “Raffie was a stick up artist back then. Him and Joe Becky’s kid were taking chances, armed robberies.”

On August 19, 1956, the gang tried to rob a posh restaurant on Park Avenue and East Forty-Ninth Street. A gunfight broke out after a patrolman spotted them. The cop was wounded. John Joseph was shot dead.

Ralph Cuomo was captured at the scene. Back at the station house, police posed him for the cameras, mockingly pointing his own gun in his bleeding face. But he didn’t do much time. He was out of prison by 1959, just as his brother-in-law, Charlie, and John Joseph’s father, Joe Beck, were beginning their own sentences for their narcotics bust with Vito Genovese.

That year, Cuomo opened the pizza parlor in one of the Prince Street club’s storefronts. He called it Ray’s Pizza. The pies became popular, and the name famous. But the shop’s real trade was always drugs. “Raffie went into business with Charlie and the rest of the Becks moving heroin. He became a big narcotics guy.”

In 1969, Cuomo earned his own heroin arrest when Bureau of Narcotics agents caught him with two kilograms of heroin in his car trunk. He served a few years, then went back to the pizzeria and started dealing all over again.

None of the members of the Prince Street crew were users of drugs. But they had another addiction that drove them to ever-larger heroin deals. “They were all degenerate gamblers. Each one of them. They would gamble a hundred thousand dollars, lose it, and then have to do another dope deal.”

Their heroin business generated huge quantities of cash. “They had one of the Becky’s kids, Anthony, going over to the East River Savings Bank at Lafayette and Spring Street with bags of bills. They had a guy in the bank on their payroll who handled the money for them. They made millions in babania, heroin. All the brothers and Raffie did. That’s what they were all about. They never stopped dealing. They were at it night and day.”

*   *   *

They also tutored Al in the trade. The kilo of poor-quality heroin he took on consignment and tried to sell to his friend Jakie Bove, came from Cuomo and the Becky boys. And when he’d gone looking for heroin to sell to Frank Solimene’s mysterious but deep-pocketed connection, he’d headed straight to Prince Street to score.

Al’s involvement with Solimene was increasingly looking like a devastating mistake. In the fall of 1982, the FBI rounded up thirteen men, several of them Luchese family mobsters, on charges of dealing $25 million in narcotics. FBI director William Webster announced the case. An undercover agent of the Drug Enforcement Administration named Gerald Franciosa, he said, had successfully manipulated a chronically addicted gambler with mob ties. The gambler’s name was Francisco Solimene.

Al didn’t know most of those arrested, but the neighborhood buzzed with the news. He didn’t tell anyone, but he was pretty certain that Franciosa was the buyer he’d seen with Solimene at Caffe Roma. Solimene’s name was also listed on the indictment. But he was nowhere to be found. Investigators told the press they believed he was dead.

He probably would have been if anyone had been able to find him. But the gambler had vanished. Al was beginning to think he’d been set up. If so, there wasn’t much he could do about it at this point. He warily went about his mob business, looking over his shoulder for the arrest he knew might happen any time.

*   *   *

The drug enforcement agents waited until St. Patrick’s Day, March 17, 1983. Al was driving uptown to a wake in the Bronx when he noticed a car on his tail. He pulled over on Prince Street. “They pinched me right there. I was standing on the sidewalk and a squad car jumps the curb next to me. This agent in a leather jacket jumps out, runs up, and puts a gun right next to my head.” Al grabbed the agent’s arm. “You don’t need that,” he said. “Put the fucking thing away.” The agent cuffed him.

“There’s a crowd on the street watching. I saw Raffie come out of the restaurant. Then he sees me and turns around, goes back inside.”

He was arraigned in federal court in Foley Square the next morning. Representing him was George Spitz, an attorney Al had come to know. Spitz had a reputation as a courtroom battler who had represented both mobsters and black militants. The lawyer won Al’s release on a $1,000 cash bond, plus a pledge of $9,000.

In the days after the arrest, he decided he would fight the indictment. “I wouldn’t cop to it. I couldn’t really.” Maybe, he hoped, a jury could be persuaded not to buy the prosecution’s claims.

One thing in his favor was that there was no evidence of cash or drugs actually changing hands between him and Solimene. For another, Solimene wasn’t around. He was listed as a co-defendant, not a witness.

He drew more hope when prosecutors released the original arrest complaint. It had been issued in November, at the same time the thirteen other mobsters who had dealt with Solimene were arrested. It hadn’t been executed because the agents didn’t even know who Al was. The original names on the warrant were Solimene and Peter Del Cioppo. To cover their legal bases, prosecutors had added a John Doe. Al understood immediately what had happened. The car he and Solimene had been driving the night they’d been tailed after making the drug sale was the tan Lincoln registered in Petey Del’s name. It had taken them months to realize Solimene’s partner in the deal was Al D’Arco.

The more Al thought it over, the more it sounded like reasonable doubt to him. A jury might well decide there wasn’t enough evidence to convict a hardworking family man and ex-GI trying to scrape a living out of a tiny hamburger stand.

Paul Vario recommended his own lawyer, a savvy criminal defense attorney from Long Island named Joel Winograd. In 1974, Winograd had won a big acquittal for the mob captain’s son Peter and crew member Bruno Facciola after they were charged with helping to fix harness races at Yonkers Raceway. Spitz, with whom Al remained friendly, stepped aside.

As far as the mob’s rule against drug dealing went, Paul Vario didn’t make a fuss. Whatever he’d done, Vario told Al, it was before he was made. So it didn’t count. Others weren’t so understanding.

His old antagonist, Frank Manzo, sought out the family’s underboss, Salvatore Santoro, to once more make his case against Al’s mob bona fides. “Frank the Wop goes to Tom Mix with my indictment papers. He tells him, ‘Look at this, Al D’Arco got busted for drugs.’ You know what Tom Mix did? He got up and threw the papers in his face. He said, ‘Get the fuck outta here, you stool pigeon.’”

Or at least that’s how the story came back to Al. Whatever the reaction of top Luchese family leaders to his legal problems, he never heard a direct criticism. It would’ve been a tough violation for the bosses to make stick. Several other Luchese members had already been convicted from the earlier indictments in the drug case.

*   *   *

His case went to trial on June 20, 1983. It was a Monday, and over the next three days, assistant U.S. attorney James B. Rather III called to the stand a string of drug enforcement agents who had taken part in the sting operation. Their testimony about Solimene was ironclad. The drug dealer had virtually lived with the undercover agent, Franciosa, for months while using tens of thousands of dollars of the agent’s money to buy heroin from various mobsters. He’d even taken Franciosa with him to Atlantic City, where he’d gambled away $350,000 in a three-day binge. All told, Solimene told the agent, he’d lost more than $1.5 million that year in casinos. “When this is gone,” Solimene said of his last $11,000, “I’ll kill myself.” He was a man on the edge, a condition that played to the agents’ advantage.

The agents had also duly recorded the serial numbers on the $31,000 paid for the heroin purchased from Al. But that money was handed to Frank Solimene. And Solimene wasn’t on trial.

The testimony putting Al D’Arco in the conspiracy was considerably less certain. The undercover agent testified that after paying the cash, Solimene had told him that he was “going to go and see the guy and give him the good news.” Agents had then tailed him downtown to Al’s building on Spring Street. From there they’d followed the pair to Sarge’s Delicatessen on Third Avenue, then on their circuitous route to the Lower East Side as the driver of the Lincoln tried to shake them.

But Winograd pointed out to the jury that the bag containing the heroin had never been submitted for analysis to see if Al’s fingerprints were present. There were also major discrepancies. The agent who had tailed Al that night described the Lincoln’s driver as being six foot two and weighing 210 pounds. Winograd had Al, all five feet seven inches and 175 pounds of him, stand up for the jury.

The same agent had snapped photos of Al the night he went to check out Solimene’s buyer at the Caffe Roma. But the photos never came out, the agent testified. It was too dark.

What became of the negatives? Destroyed, the agent stated.

“What is this? A game?” asked Winograd in his summation.

The defense didn’t get much help from federal district judge Richard Owen, who was hearing the case. An appointee of President Richard Nixon, Owen had been on the federal bench for ten years by the time of the trial. An amateur musician, Owen once wrote an opera about Abigail Adams, wife of the second president.

After Winograd got the surveillance agent to admit his gaffe about misjudging Al’s height by seven inches, the judge put his own question to the witness. “When you saw the defendant, he was riding in a car, right?” asked the judge. “He was sitting down?”

The agent quickly agreed that, yes, the driver of the auto had been seated while driving.

The jury began deliberations on Thursday morning. They kicked the evidence around for a day and a half, waiting until Friday afternoon to announce a verdict of guilty on both counts.

Al was stunned. “I thought we won the case. Then the sons of bitches came back and found me guilty.”

*   *   *

After the verdict, Al was immediately remanded to prison to await sentencing. He spent a month in the redbrick Metropolitan Correctional Center on Pearl Street, the main detention site for federal prisoners behind the federal courthouse.

He went before Judge Owen for sentencing on July 29. After a reminder that this was his second conviction, the judge gave Al six years. The sentence was to run concurrently on the two counts of possession of heroin with intent to distribute, and conspiracy to distribute the drug. Under a 1977 law, the federal Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act, a mandatory special parole period was tacked onto the end of his sentence. It meant that any violations committed by Al during that period, such as associating with other felons, would put him back in prison. And he would have to serve an additional sentence of the entire term of his special parole. The law required a minimum parole period of three years. Judge Owen gave Al ten.

“That judge, Owen, was a vampire. He enjoyed putting people away as long as he could.”

Cursing the judge didn’t help Al’s family much, though. He had told them he was going to beat the case. “They took it hard. Of course they did. Joseph had been through it once, but for John and the girls, it was tough.”

This time there was no pretending that daddy had to go to work. The youngest, Dawn, was thirteen years old and already wise to the ways of her father’s world. The rest of the children were already adults, or close to it. Tara was eighteen; John, nineteen. Ava, twenty-five, was already out of the house, as was Joseph, who was twenty-seven and living in Knickerbocker Village. Dolores was as stoic as ever. “My mother would follow my father into the gates of hell,” said Joseph.

*   *   *

His first stop was a plum location, at least for those who had to be incarcerated. Allenwood Federal Prison Camp was in the Allegheny Mountains of central Pennsylvania. It was roughly a four-and-a-half-hour drive from New York City, farther than some facilities, but closer than most. Its relative proximity to the city made it a sought-after placement for convicted offenders from the metropolitan area.

Its other advantage was that it was an “honor camp,” reserved for those convicted of nonviolent crimes. There were no walls or barbed wire to keep inmates from simply wandering off. Prisoners slept in camp-style dorms, not individual cells. Al’s drug conviction made him eligible for the facility in the eyes of the federal Bureau of Prisons, which didn’t view him as an escape hazard despite his criminal past. But Al wasn’t going anywhere.

“Where the fuck are you going to go? They got a state police barracks right in back. You going to walk through the woods?”

Most Allenwood inmates were white-collar felons. A handful were politicians, nabbed at various schemes. Former New Jersey senator Harrison Williams, convicted for taking bribes in the Abscam sting operation mounted by prosecutors in Brooklyn’s Organized Crime Strike Force, was already there when Al got to Allenwood.

“He gets next to me and gives me a wink and a thumbs-up. I guess he wanted to fit in. ‘How ya doin’, kid,’ he says to me. I said, ‘Who the fuck are you? I’ll knock your ass off.’”

Another bunkmate in the dormitory was Joseph Margiotta, the former Republican boss of Nassau County convicted of taking kickbacks on insurance contracts. Margiotta also tried to make friends. “I told him, ‘Get the fuck outta here.’”

The snarl was Al’s basic approach to the world as he began his second sentence behind bars. He deeply believed he’d been wrongly convicted. Not that he hadn’t done the crime. But that the evidence presented against him at trial shouldn’t have been enough to find him guilty.

Part of it was his lawyer’s fault, he decided. Winograd hadn’t fought hard enough to keep the government from using what the agents claimed Solimene had said about him. “Don’t I get to confront my accuser?” he asked over and over.

This time around, he wasn’t a young rookie prisoner soaking up the stories and gangland wisdom of veteran convicts. He was an often hostile, two-fisted enforcer of the basic criminal code.

One of the first to offend that code was a fellow wiseguy named Sal Miciotta. A member of the Colombo crime family, Big Sal Miciotta was at Allenwood for his own nonviolent offense, dealing in untaxed cigarettes.

It was the least of his sins. A burly man of six feet plus weighing over three hundred pounds, Miciotta had taken part in a gangland murder just eighteen months earlier. The targets were a father-and-son duo who had failed to share their immense earnings from having produced Deep Throat, the most profitable pornographic movie ever made at the time. The hit took place on a street in the south Brooklyn neighborhood of Gravesend. As the victims tried to flee, an errant shotgun blast killed a former nun as she stood in a hallway inside her home. By comparison, the cigarettes rap was a trifle. Miciotta was doing a relaxed stretch at the prison camp when Al arrived.

“Big Sal was like a rhino. We played racquetball together inside. When he hit it, he’d bust the ball. He was 350 pounds of muscle.”

At Allenwood, Miciotta was using his jumbo size and street savvy to serve as protector for a wealthy financial consultant from Morristown, New Jersey. Alex Feinman had been convicted of issuing millions of dollars in bogus bonds for construction projects. A millionaire himself, Feinman flaunted his wealth. When his wife came to see him, she arrived by limousine, loaded with expensive food. Dolores had taken the bus already once to see Al. The trip took her six hours.

Feinman’s more grievous conduct, however, was that he was a spy. After his conviction, the financier had sought to reduce his sentence by helping prosecutors make other financial cases, serving as both adviser and informant. His cooperation was no secret inside the camp, and Al scolded Miciotta for protecting him.

“I said, ‘Sally, you’re hanging out with a stool pigeon. That gets out on the street, you’re going to be embarrassed.’”

Miciotta tried to allay Al’s concerns. “Of course he’s a rat,” he told Al. “These guys are all rats in here. What do you want to do? Go to the penitentiary and do real time?”

The way Miciotta saw it, mobsters like him and Al were sharks, swimming in a sea of guppies at Allenwood. A wiseguy could gobble them up, or see about getting a chunk of their money for themselves. Feinman was paying handsomely for protection that he didn’t really need. In Miciotta’s view, that con job canceled out any possible taint from associating with an informant.

“I told Al he should be more forgiving,” Miciotta recalled.

Al’s gangster standards didn’t permit the compromise. And he didn’t hesitate to use his hands to make his point with inmates he didn’t like.

“Al was being a bully, smacking all these guys around. He fancied himself a tough guy,” said Miciotta.

There was no question Al knew how to use his hands. Miciotta heard the thuds echoing down the gym hall at night after they’d played racquetball. “You could hear him with the gloves hitting that heavy bag every night. He would get some workout.”

Miciotta did his best to placate him. “I know you’re a tough guy, Al,” Sal told him.

“You’re wrong,” Al responded. “I’m not a tough guy. I do what I have to do.”

Miciotta wasn’t the only wiseguy inmate at Allenwood who resented Al’s lectures about what they should or shouldn’t do. Also in the camp was Anthony DiLapi, a member of the Bronx branch of Al’s own Luchese crime family. The Bronx crew was headed by Salvatore Santoro, the Luchese underboss known as Tom Mix who had performed the induction rites at Al’s initiation into the family. Santoro was also DiLapi’s cousin, a relationship he steadily reminded Al about.

“DiLapi was doing the same thing as Big Sal, feeding off this stool pigeon. They were getting money and food his wife’s bringing in.”

Unlike Miciotta, who tried to calm Al down, the dispute with DiLapi quickly escalated. “He started threatening me, saying he was going to tell his cousin Tom Mix about my getting arrested for drugs. That he was going to have me killed.”

The argument got heated. Wisely, no one threw a punch.

Feinman wasn’t as sensible. The financial crook was thirty-four years old and several inches taller than Al, who was fifty-one at the time. But Miciotta, who dwarfed both men, said the Jewish inmate was still no match for the Italian gangster from Spring Street. “He couldn’t fight his way out of a paper bag,” said Miciotta.

Feinman apparently didn’t know that. One morning while Al and Feinman were both working in the mess hall cleaning up after breakfast, a loud argument erupted between the two. According to an incident report compiled by correction officers, Feinman got physical, giving Al a shove. What happened next was predictable: “At this time, D’Arco came at Feinman, swinging his fists and kicking.” The battle took place in front of several other inmates, but guards quickly broke it up.

A few days later, Al was shipped twenty miles down the road to the federal penitentiary at Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, a high-security facility. In prison parlance, it was a “disciplinary transfer.” Al saw himself as the victim. Describing the incident in a letter he sent to authorities, he said he had merely defended himself after being attacked. “I did not know or intend to find out if the other inmate, who was much larger and much younger and stronger than I, had a weapon (knife, spoon, or fork) that was readily available in the dining area.”

To others, he gave a more compact version of the encounter. “I knocked a guy in the head in the mess hall. It was the worst thing you could do in there. You start a riot.”

*   *   *

Lewisburg was a far tougher place to do time. But in many ways, it was a more comfortable fit for Al. There were still plenty of gangsters like himself, and no rich convicts to turn their heads from the proper path of Cosa Nostra. “They put me in the hole when I got there, and when I came out, right next to me is Johnny Gammarano, a Gambino gangster I know.”

Gammarano was actively involved in his family’s rackets in the construction industry. He was in Lewisburg for a tax-evasion charge, compounded by a conviction for extortion while he was on probation.

There were other familiar faces. Jimmy Burke had beaten the Lufthansa case, but he was doing twelve years for the basketball point-shaving scheme. The two convicts exchanged news about the Vario crew. Shortly after Al arrived at the prison, Sal Miciotta was sent there as well after his own fight with another inmate.

Miciotta wasn’t happy to be back with Al. “I said, ‘God is punishing me again.’ This is the guy I wanted most to get away from.” But Gammarano and Miciotta also didn’t get along. This time, Gammarano brought his gripes to Al.

“He used to come to me every day, saying, ‘Al, Big Sal is bothering me.’ I said, ‘Why are you coming to me? You’re a wiseguy. You’re a made guy in the Gambino family. Go make a complaint, or tell him yourself.’ We were friends, but every day he’s complaining to me.”

The wiseguy bickering didn’t last long. Miciotta was shipped off to Danbury prison in Connecticut after a month. Al was sent to the far reaches of northern New York.

*   *   *

Al’s new home was the federal correctional institution at Ray Brook, located in the Adirondack Mountains near Lake Placid. It was just forty miles south of Dannemora, the Siberia of state prisons, where Charlie Luciano and Davie Petillo had suffered through the winters almost fifty years earlier.

Unlike Lewisburg, Ray Brook at least was a medium-security prison. Inmates often worked outside the gates on public roads. But it was a solid six-hour drive from the city, making visits tough on families. It was also bitterly cold much of the time.

“It was a freezing-ass place. Inside or outside. They said you had two seasons up there. Winter and August. Most of the time you froze in those cells.”

The trip north had one beneficial effect. On the bus there he decided to quit smoking. “I’d never smoked that heavy. Only at nighttime. But all you could get in prison was that Bull Durham roll-your-own stuff. And I’m on the bus on the way from Lewisburg to Ray Brook and I am wrapping the papers and I look at my hands and they’re orange from the cigarettes. I said, ‘I’m gonna quit smoking.’ After I quit, my face broke out in blisters. Shows what those cigarettes do to you.”

Ray Brook was also old-home week. Paul Vario had been free on appeal from his perjury conviction concerning the no-show job he’d arranged for Henry Hill. In 1984, at age seventy, he was sent to prison for the last time. “Paulie was at Ray Brook for a while. We got a chance to talk. It was good to see him.”

He was less sure how good it was to see another old pal who was also at Ray Brook. Anthony DiLorenzo was the veteran Genovese family captain who had given Al’s box company a nice boost with his order to make blue and red containers for his sausage firm.

“Hickey DiLorenzo and me were good friends. I first met him through Ralphie hanging out at Angelo Ponte’s place.” DiLorenzo had his own storied mob career. At one point, law enforcers had viewed him as Vito Genovese’s likely heir apparent. He was well-spoken, well-read, and adept at business. Through the creative application of threats and sabotage, he and Johnny Dio had created an association of air-freight trucking firms that allowed them to dominate the airport’s trade. Self-taught, he’d become a proficient jailhouse lawyer during an earlier prison term for assault.

Part of Hickey’s legend was the story of how, while serving another sentence for transporting stolen stocks in 1972, he’d escaped from custody while visiting the dentist. The escape itself wasn’t hard to pull off. A model prisoner at the Allenwood camp, DiLorenzo had been shifted to the old Federal House of Detention on West Street, where he was given permission to make an unescorted trip to see his own dentist on Long Island. DiLorenzo knew he was facing new charges stemming from the airport scams. So he just didn’t return.

What was impressive was that Hickey stayed on the lam for five years until federal Drug Enforcement Administration agents located him in Venezuela in 1977. With no legal ability to arrest him there, agents tricked him into boarding a plane to Panama. There, he was snatched up at the airport by local police and taken to a Panamanian jail, where he was beaten and tortured. It was an early version of rendition by American officials, using a foreign country to do otherwise-prohibited dirty work.

Whatever the thugs in Panama did to him, DiLorenzo was not the same person by the time he left. The Panamanians put him on a Braniff airliner bound for Miami in DEA custody. Aboard the plane, he went berserk and had to be subdued. Back at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan, he required repeated medical treatment.

He wasn’t so far gone, however, that he couldn’t put his jailhouse lawyer skills to work. He sued the Justice Department in 1979 for damages and violating his civil rights. A federal judge scolded the DEA for abducting him and allowing their Panamanian surrogates to abuse him. But the judge ruled that Hickey’s constitutional rights had not been violated, since there was no indication that the feds took part in the torture. Even his forcible abduction from Panama by the agents fell short of a civil rights violation. As for a lack of medical treatment, Hickey had failed to prove “callous indifference” to his well-being, the judge held.

The experience was enough to damage anyone’s mental health, and by the time Al ran into DiLorenzo at Ray Brook, he was showing signs of being seriously troubled.

Al was proud to be reintroduced to his old friend, this time as amico nostra, friend of ours, the mob terminology for a fellow member. But DiLorenzo’s behavior was otherwise odd.

“Hickey was always so sharp. He noticed everything. But now he was acting strange. He starts talking about drugs, about liquid cocaine, stuff he never talked about. He said he would go back on the lam to South America. He was talking wild.”

DiLorenzo’s other disturbing activity was an echo of what Al had objected to in Allenwood. “He was playing cards with this guy who was known to be a stoolie.” Al talked to Hickey about it. “I said, ‘You may not know it, but that guy you’re playing cards with is a federal informant.’ He said, ‘You’re right. I better not.’”

The following day, DiLorenzo was back playing cards with the same inmate. “So I pulled him up again. He said, ‘Al, I am just playing cards with him.’”

Al raised DiLorenzo’s behavior with two other Genovese crime family stalwarts who were also residents of Ray Brook. One of them was James Napoli, a dapper capo in the family serving a sentence for running a $35 million betting ring. Jimmy Nap, as everyone called him, had briefly run the Genovese family after Al’s old admirer, Tommy Ryan Eboli, was killed. Napoli was cut from somewhat different Mafia cloth. He had lived in an East Side town house with his wife, Jeanne, a songwriter and theatrical producer. While he was in prison, a musical about Marilyn Monroe, written by Jeanne Napoli and financed by her husband, was playing Broadway.

The other opinion Al solicited was that of Carlo Mastrototaro, who ran the Genovese family’s satellite operation in Worcester, Massachusetts. Mastrototaro was yet another genuine war hero in the Genovese ranks. He won the Silver Star and a Purple Heart for having saved his platoon from a Japanese attack during the Battle of Saipan. Mastrototaro was doing a nine-year term for stolen bonds.

“I told Jimmy Nap and Carlo Mastrototaro about being worried about Hickey and the way he was talking and acting. They went and checked it out and agreed with me. They told Hickey the same thing. He ignored them, too.”

After rejecting their advice, Hickey suddenly lurched back into the role of senior mobster, demanding to handle a sit-down to settle a dispute between Mastrototaro and a Philadelphia Mafioso also at Ray Brook. “You’re not my captain,” Mastrototaro told him, walking away.

Al cringed for his friend. “Hickey was way out of line. He didn’t know what he was doing.”

Napoli and others now confided stories they’d heard. How Hickey had run naked on a balcony in New Jersey while firing a pistol at police. Mastrototaro offered an ominous solution to the situation. “We will straighten it out in the street,” he said.

*   *   *

Al’s own conviction still gnawed at him. At each prison, he made his way to the library, thumbing through law books. His initial appeal denied, he wrote his own writ of certiorari to the U.S. Supreme Court asking for permission to appeal again. Rejected twice, he sent a third plea.

He composed his briefs on lined paper in the formal, slanting script he’d been taught by the Christian Brothers at St. Patrick’s. He lifted phrases that impressed him from cases he read. “I hope I have not burdened your Honor with lurid characterizations or detail,” he wrote to Judge Owen in a petition for bail pending appeal.

At the same time, he invoked his limited learning as cause for any shortcomings in his filings, misspellings and all. “The Honorable Court should be aware that the Petitioner/Appelant has only a ninth grade formal education,” he wrote in each appeal.

He even tried sweet talk to the vampire judge. “Thank you for any consideration shown for this petition,” he wrote on Christmas Eve 1984. “I extend a Happy Holiday to Your Honor and his loved one’s.”

The appeals went nowhere.

*   *   *

That fall of 1984 while at Ray Brook, Al began to feel seriously ill for the first time in his life. He’d always been in good health. He still prided himself on his workouts on the heavy bag and his prison calisthenics. But his blood pressure now soared, his legs ached, and he had trouble standing. The doctors who visited Ray Brook recommended he be sent to the Bureau of Prisons hospital in Springfield, Missouri.

In Springfield he was put through a battery of tests that reminded him of his Army physicals. “It’s like a military examination. They say, ‘Put your leg up.’ ‘Put your arm up.’ Then they take your blood about twenty times.” The tests yielded an explanation: thrombophlebitis of the left leg. Blood clots in the veins complicated by elevated sugar in the blood. They were less clear about the cure. Al noticed that few of the other patients around him seemed to be faring too well. “I started thinking it might be healthier if I could get out of there.”

He was scheming about how to do that when a visiting doctor came through the ward. “He looked at my charts and checked my blood pressure one more time. Then he said, ‘If I were you, son, I’d become a vegetarian.’ I’m thinking, How do you become a vegetarian in prison? You’d have nothing to eat.”

But he took the advice to heart. Shipped back up to Ray Brook a few days before Christmas, he swore off meat and heavy foods. He did have less to eat. He stuck to the prison’s watery vegetables. But he felt better.

“I figured I would just as soon as have fish, pasta, and salads as anything else. So that’s what I decided I’d have. If I could ever get it again.”

*   *   *

The Bureau of Prisons moved him once more, this time down to the city, to the Metropolitan Correctional Center in the late summer of 1985. Usually that was a last stop, shortly before a prisoner’s release. Al still had a year to go on his minimum sentence, which was two-thirds of the original six years he’d been given, assuming he didn’t get into any more trouble behind bars.

But he didn’t argue. It was good to be back in the city. His Spring Street apartment building was less than a mile from the prison, almost visible from the roof where he played ball under the high metal grille.

Best of all, it was easy on Dolores, who didn’t have to make the long trips to visit.

It was also a remarkable time to be at the Manhattan federal lockup. In February of that year, Rudolph Giuliani, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, obtained a racketeering indictment of the men he believed led New York’s crime families in what he dubbed “the Commission case.” They were charged with running a conspiracy enterprise, the Mafia.

Among those facing lifetimes in prison were Al’s boss “Tony Ducks” Corallo, and his two top lieutenants, “Christy Tick” Furnari and “Tom Mix” Santoro. The evidence included Corallo’s own words, captured by a secret bug planted in a Jaguar he rode in.

It was one of a series of major mob cases filed by the prosecutor’s office. The press declared Giuliani the biggest gangbuster since Thomas E. Dewey, who had used perjured testimony to convict Lucky Luciano of running the city’s prostitution business. Actually, Giuliani’s cases were built on the work of a half dozen different law enforcement agencies and prosecutors before him who had been plugging away at the Mafia for years. Regardless, it was still a disaster for the mob.

It also gave Al a lot of wiseguys to talk to. Charlie Brody DiPalermo showed up after his latest narcotics arrest. He and his big brother Joe Beck were still at it, charged with running a $2 billion drug operation. The brothers were responsible for “a majority of the heroin sold on the Lower East Side,” claimed prosecutors.

Charlie Brody introduced Al to Vincent DiNapoli, a jowly captain in the Genovese family from the Bronx. DiNapoli was part of another clutch of mobbed-up brothers, but unlike the DiPalermo boys, they were bipartisan in their affiliation. Louis and Vincent DiNapoli were with the Genovese crew, while Joseph was in Al’s Luchese clan.

Vinny DiNapoli had a reputation for business brilliance. He ran several construction firms and had managed to control a large swath of the city’s affordable-housing development activity. He was charged in another sweeping Giuliani indictment. Dubbed “the Concrete case,” it claimed the mob controlled most of the city’s concrete suppliers, making New York construction projects more expensive than anywhere else in the country.

The leaders of the the Colombo crew also passed through the MCC. Boss Carmine “Junior” Persico and underboss Gennaro Langella, known as Jerry Lang, had been the target of the first big mob racketeering case by the ambitious Manhattan prosecutor. They were defendants in the big Commission case as well.

Al was chatting with Jerry Lang in the recreation room one day when a Genovese member named Vincent Cafaro, a slim balding man from East Harlem, came up to join the conversation. Al had met “Fish” Cafaro before, but they hadn’t had their amico nostra introduction as fellow made men. It didn’t matter. Lang ignored him. “It was funny. He just butted right into our conversation, started asking questions. I said, ‘What, are you writing a book?’”

Cafaro walked away. “We don’t like him,” Lang said.

“I don’t like him either,” said Al.

A few months later, Cafaro became a government informant. He was a close associate of Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno, the cigar-chomping mobster who presented himself to the mob world as boss of the Genovese family while crafty Vincent Gigante held the true reins in his Sullivan Street clubhouse. Cafaro had been at Fat Tony’s elbow for years, witnessing the comings and goings of mobsters, businessmen, and union chieftains at Salerno’s Palma Boys Social Club on East 115th Street between First and Pleasant Avenues. The Fish was the biggest catch for law enforcement in a long time.

*   *   *

Al was present in the MCC for another Mafia upheaval, this one of the mob’s own making, with no help from the government. On the evening of December 16, 1985, the boss of the Gambino family, Paul Castellano, was gunned down outside Sparks Steak House on East Forty-Sixth Street. Castellano’s right-hand man and newly named underboss, Thomas Bilotti, was killed alongside him. The hit took place on a midtown street as pre-Christmas shoppers rushed past. Witnesses saw at least four gunmen. All got away.

The quick consensus among the MCC’s residents was that John Gotti, a headstrong Gambino captain from Queens, was behind the hit. Among those agreeing to the thesis was Virgil Alessi, a drug dealer from New Jersey, whose DeCavalcante crime faction was allied with the Gambino family. Even Leonard DiMaria, a Gambino mobster from Brooklyn, said the same thing.

“The thing they were all saying was that you weren’t allowed to kill a boss without the okay from the Commission. Nobody thought this had been approved.”

DiMaria knew something about such matters. He had been hauled before a grand jury probing the last assassination of a mob boss, the shotgun killing of Joe Beck’s old partner, Bonanno chieftain Carmine Galante, on a restaurant patio in Bushwick, Brooklyn. In that case, it was widely accepted in gangland, the murder had been fully sanctioned by the proper authorities.

*   *   *

Another veteran gangster shaking his head in astonishment at Castellano’s assassination was Paul Vario, who was also shipped down to the MCC for a brief stay. It was his last hurrah in New York, before being shipped off to a federal prison in Texas. Al did his best to make his aging captain’s stay pleasant.

“Paulie talked about wanting two things: cigarettes and soppressata sausage. He’d say, ‘We gotta get some cigarettes.’ The fucking things were killing him but he couldn’t stop.”

Al got help from a clever fellow inmate named Nicky Lanzieri who was assigned as a porter at the prison and had relative freedom to roam within the correctional center. Lanzieri was doing time for an innovative theft. An executive of an air freight company, he’d stolen almost $700,000 worth of silver sludge, the material used to process photographs. The silver was being shipped in three dozen barrels from London to Eastman Kodak headquarters in Rochester when it disappeared. Lanzieri got away with the silver, but customs agents later came knocking and arrested him.

“Nicky could move around in there—they even let him clean the warden’s office. One time he snatched a whole list of visitors to the place, though we didn’t do anything with it.”

The more important goal was to get the thick Italian sausage and smokes for Vario. Al’s own work assignment had him helping to haul the MCC’s garbage outside for pickup. “Nicky knew guys who had the trash-collection contract, and he had them wrap up packages of cigarettes and soppressata, provolone, whatever we could get, in plastic wrap and dump them in the containers after they were empty.”

One of Al’s tasks was to wash down the trash site with bleach. “I’d pour it all over, then take a broom and scrub it. I was in the alleyway there at St. Andrew’s Plaza. I’d see Giuliani come walking through all the time.”

After the garbage truck pulled away, Al retrieved the packages from the trash containers and stuck them under his shirt. He had no way of hiding them, however, if he was searched, which he often was on his way back into the prison.

“But we had this one old hack, a black guy had been on the job for years. He knew every wiseguy who had come through the joint. He’d search me, feel the sausage and cigarette cartons, but he still let me take them in. I couldn’t figure it out. Then Paulie tells me the guard used to be on West Street at the old detention center. He helped them out there, too.”

One day while cleaning up in the alley, Al spotted a small doll. It was a Madonna figure, with a black face. “Somebody threw it away and I picked it up. I showed it to a Spanish guy inside and he says, ‘That’s a Shango, the god of fire. It’s for black magic.’ I said, ‘Oh, I’m keeping this. I can use it.’ I still got it.”

*   *   *

Al was released to a halfway house on October 22, 1986. The facility was run by the Salvation Army and located on the Bowery at East Third Street. “They let you out early, six in the morning. They dropped me off at the Bowery. It was raining but I walked straight downtown to the burger stand on Laight Street.”

It was about a two-mile hike in the rain. He was looking for Petey Del Cioppo and another helper, Joe Fiore, known as “Joe Cuz,” whom he had told to run the stand while he was away. They were supposed to bring Dolores at least $150 every week from the receipts. They had missed a few weeks.

Before he was released from the MCC, he’d been reminded of all the special parole requirements that would govern his activities for the next decade. One of the trickiest was that he was not allowed to associate with known felons. He violated parole his first morning.

“I got to the stand and Vic Amuso is there waiting for me.”

Al was surprised to see Amuso. But he was also glad. “It was good to see him. I liked Vic.”

Amuso had prospered since Al had last seen him. The kid he’d met pushing a hand truck on Flushing Avenue was now a leader of the Luchese family. In fact, he was the leader.

“We had a cup of coffee, and then Vic says, ‘Let’s take a walk.’ And we start walking. First thing he tells me is that he’s the new boss.”

Al noted that Amuso was violating a rule by sharing the news. Mob protocol held that promotions were to be revealed only by way of formal introduction by another member in the know.

“But we go back a ways, so he was telling me like as a friend.” Al was less surprised by the news than by Amuso’s demeanor. “He seemed timid about it. Like he wasn’t sure he could do it.”

Al congratulated him. And then offered a small pep talk.

“I said, ‘Let me tell you something, Vic. Tony Ducks was the boss and now he’s looking at one hundred years. But he was the boss. Now you’re the boss. They nail you and you’re gonna get a hundred years too. So be the boss.”

Amuso seemed grateful. “He says, ‘You’re like my brother, you know.’” The new boss told Al that he had promoted his close friend, Anthony “Gaspipe” Casso, to run Christy Tick’s old crew at the 19th Hole.

The two men kept walking through the lower Manhattan streets in the rain. Al had the feeling there was something else Amuso wanted to tell him. He offered more encouragement. “I said, ‘Vic, if I can help you with anything, just let me know.’”

Amuso sighed. “I don’t like to bring this up,” he began, “but Anthony—Gaspipe—he’s involved in a deal with Joseph and he owes Anthony $80,000. And Anthony wants to get paid soon.” Amuso stumbled about a bit, then added that the deal was for heroin. The reason Anthony was concerned, he said, was because Joseph seemed to be using drugs quite a bit himself these days.

Al didn’t say anything for a moment. He didn’t know about his son dealing drugs. He didn’t know about him using drugs. What took his breath away was that the new leaders of the Luchese family were doing the drug deals with him, without apology or explanation.

“I was hot as a pistol. I tried not to show it. I said, ‘He owes Anthony $80,000? Anthony will get his money.’ Vic says, ‘Okay, good. I’ll tell him.’”

They walked back to the burger stand and said good-bye. Al watched his new boss drive away.

He tried to make sense of what he’d learned. “I’m in the can for drugs? And they get my own son involved? While he’s using dope?” He started heading back to the halfway house. He had no idea where he was going to get $80,000. Welcome home, he told himself.