Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America's Most Powerful Mafia Empires (100 page)

Levy’s disreputable background was publicly exposed in 1988, when he was convicted on federal charges of extortion, spinning out of an attempt with mobsters to recoup $1.2 million from a record distributor. He died of liver cancer in 1990, at age sixty-two, before he could begin a ten-year prison sentence.

Convinced that Chin was using the town house as a retreat for Mob business meetings, Pritchard made it a priority objective for surveillance and bugging. A court-authorized Title III tap on the house’s telephone lines ran sixty days in the autumn of 1985. Gigante’s conversations produced no evidence or clues of crimes, but the tap provided substantial documentation that his deranged behavior was an act. On the telephone, Gigante chatted mainly with his children and Olympia Mitzi Esposito about mundane household matters—bringing home groceries, medical appointments, the weather—and his comments were invariably intelligent.

Calling Mitzi on October 17, 1985, Gigante inquired about her examination by a doctor for a severe cough. “Stop smoking,” he scolded her. Before he rang off, there was a loud kissing sound, and he added, “I love you.” On November 8, 1985, in one of the last recorded calls, he told Mitzi he was at “the barber’s” and asked what items she wanted him to bring to the town house.

FBI teams tailing Gigante in his trips uptown saw him jump out of the car to randomly use telephone booths. There was no way to trace or monitor these sporadic calls. When the telephone tap at the town house failed to unearth clues to past or ongoing crimes, Pritchard tried other ploys. The bureau set up an observation post at night in the Ramaz Yeshiva, a Jewish parochial school on East 78th Street, whose rear windows and terrace overlooked the back windows of the East 77th Street town house. School officials gave the bureau a key to the front door and asked that they be notified whenever agents intended using the building for surveillance. Agents were told how to disengage a series of electronic burglar sensors upon entering the building.

Dr. Noam Shudolsky, the school administrator, was summoned to the building one midnight by a security service that reported a sensor had been tripped on the third-floor terrace. The FBI had not informed the school that agents would be there that night, and when Shudolsky—armed with a flashlight—
confronted a figure in the darkness on the terrace, he shouted: “Stand where you are. You’re under arrest.”

“Don’t shoot, I’m with the FBI,” was the instant reply.

Disturbed that agents felt “they could come and go” without alerting him, Dr. Shudolsky reclaimed the front-entrance key and barred the FBI from using the building. Pritchard blamed an overzealous agent for violating the agreement with the school.

Determined to spy on Chin while he was off-guard inside the town house, Pritchard tried another approach. An agent rented an apartment in a luxury building at 61 East 77th Street, next to the town house at number 67. Pritchard wanted the apartment because it directly abutted the third floor of Chin’s uptown refuge.

The two-bedroom flat was leased for $4,500 a month in late 1985, and agent Charles Beaudoin drew the main observation assignment. Nightly, Beaudoin outfitted himself with green camouflage clothes, a small flashlight, a walkie-talkie, a notebook in a vinyl bag, and a lightweight waterproof canopy or tiny tent built by the FBI. From the apartment’s rear terrace, the athletic, six-foot-tall Beaudoin scrambled across a distance of about eighteen inches onto the Ramaz terrace without triggering a sensor. The agent said he might have used the Ramaz terrace “unofficially” under the assumption that “we still had permission” from the school.

Prone, concealed, and sheltered from snow and rain by the canopy, Beaudoin was about fifty feet from the town house. He had an unobstructed view of the interior of the three-story building through its large rear windows. Agents on the street alerted Beaudoin on his walkie-talkie when Gigante arrived. Sprawled on concrete, and surrounded by planters, Beaudoin relied on his eyesight to record his observations without the help of binoculars or a camera. (At the time, a court ruling, which was later reversed, prohibited the introduction of evidence obtained with the aid of binoculars or a camera unless agents had obtained a search warrant for viewing the interior of a building.)

Beaudoin noted in his official 302 reports that Gigante’s nocturnal visits fell into a pattern. Generally, he arrived before midnight, showered on the top floor where the bedrooms and a living room were located. Chin sometimes donned a bathrobe after showering, but wore it only briefly. Usually, he changed into a blazer, a sport jacket, or a sweater for a meal in the dining room with relatives and friends or for meetings with Genovese underlings. Chin always sat at the head of the table for conferences with other mobsters, and personally served
drinks to his guests, Beaudoin wrote. He saw Gigante occasionally pull aside a visitor and whisper into his ear. At all times, in Beaudoin’s view, he showed no sign of physical distress, moving easily around the three floors and using the elevator without assistance.

The agent often observed Chin on the third floor, wearing eyeglasses, reading a newspaper or perusing documents and ledgers that he removed from a bookcase and a file cabinet. In a 302 report, Beaudoin recorded that one night Angelo D’Acunto, a Genovese soldier, walked with Gigante out of the agent’s sight into the kitchen. Returning alone from the kitchen, Gigante began counting “a large stack of American currency” on a table. To Beaudoin, whose medical records showed he had extraordinarily acute vision, “The amount appeared to be substantial.”

Gigante normally left the town house between 9:00 A.M. and 10:00 A.M., in the same shabby clothes or bathrobe he had worn when he arrived, and was driven back to his mother’s apartment on Sullivan Street. Later in the afternoon, he emerged, with bodyguards at his elbow, for the short stroll past the Children’s Aid Society headquarters, a few doors away, and into the Triangle Club. His schedule was as predictable as the tides.

Almost every night for four months in the winter and early spring of 1986, Beaudoin lay on the Ramaz School terrace, peering into the town house. His observations and those of other agents and a police department detective who spelled him, gave Pritchard, and the FBI, the “probable cause” needed for the next attack on Chin Gigante—a bug in the town house.

A court order for hidden microphones was obtained in the spring. Rather than trying to break surreptitiously into the house, which was usually occupied and was guarded by a state-of-the-art burglar-alarm system, technicians decided to use the FBI apartment in the adjacent building as a means of entry. Relying on a makeshift blueprint prepared by Beaudoin of the layout of the town house, Jim Kallstrom’s special-operations unit drilled through a common wall separating the buildings. They used a noiseless drill that sucked out debris and did not leave a telltale trail of plaster and wood dust on the town house floor. The eavesdroppers intended to install a bug in the wall behind a kitchen cabinet. Technicians were certain the powerful miniature microphone would be concealed and there would be an “air path” allowing voices to be recorded from the kitchen and the adjacent dining room, the two areas where Gigante often conferred with aides. But Kallstrom’s eavesdroppers miscalculated. Their first try placed a microphone behind a refrigerator, instead of a cabinet, and the motor
drone overwhelmed all other sounds. Next, they drilled through a wrong section of a wall, into a bathroom, penetrating too deeply. The hole burrowed through, knocked off a wall tile, and was clearly visible inside the town house before the frantic agents could patch it up.

“The floor plan we had was inaccurate, off by a few feet,” Kallstrom sighed.

Unintentionally notified that the bureau was trying to penetrate the town house and that he was under watch there, Gigante stopped holding meetings in the dining room. Curtains were drawn at all times, covering the rear windows, preventing observations from the terrace.

There was one more huge disappointment for the Genovese Squad. One night, when Baldy Dom Canterino left his Cadillac for several hours in a parking lot, Kallstrom’s break-in artists entered the car, removed a rear panel and replaced it with an identical one that contained a listening device. The objective was to duplicate the state task force’s earlier success with the Jaguar bug on the Lucchese boss, Ducks Corallo. “We had seen Chin and Baldy Dom in conversations in the Caddy and we were sure we’d pick up important evidence or intelligence,” Pritchard said. “But we had unbelievably bad luck. Almost on the very day the Caddy bug began operating, the news came out that Goldstock’s office [the state task force] had bugged the Jaguar, and Chin stopped talking in the car.”

Its campaign against Gigante was stalled, but the FBI was having much more success against two other Genovese garrisons. Mainly through electronic spying at the Palma Boys Social Club, Fat Tony Salerno was bagged in the Commission case investigation and in two separate labor-racketeering indictments. Salerno’s career as a Mob leader ended with a life sentence.

Donald Richards’s plan to drive Matty the Horse Ianniello out of the Triangle eventually paid dividends. Ianniello began relying on a Midtown office, where FBI bugs and concealed video cameras produced evidence for a series of indictments. Matty was found guilty in 1986 of skimming millions of dollars from topless bars and restaurants, shaking down construction companies, and extorting protection payoffs from food suppliers, including a company that provided hot dogs at Yankee Stadium.

When the trials were over, Ianniello was hit with more than twenty years in prison time. The government even moved in on his favorite restaurant, Umberto’s Clam House in Little Italy. The popular trattoria’s listed principal owner
was Ianniello’s brother Robert, but the Justice Department found that profits from the restaurant’s zesty dishes of calamari, scungilli, and pasta were being fed to the Genovese family. For seven years, a federal manager was stationed at the restaurant to watch the books and the cash register. The monitor left in 1994 after a court suit by Robert Ianniello accused the government of bankrupting Umberto’s through mismanagement.

With court triumphs over Fat Tony and Matty the Horse, only Chin Gigante remained from the FBI’s designated Big-Three Genovese targets. Yet all gambits against him had failed. “We burnt a lot of manpower following Chin without getting a bang for our buck,” the FBI’s Don Richards conceded. “He was a real challenge, a mystery.”

The Real Boss

“… I’ll leave this up to the boss.”

S
omehow the immense significance of those words casually spoken by Fat Tony Salerno was overlooked by FBI agents and prosecutors.

For more than five years, U.S. Attorney Rudolph Giuliani and FBI officials remained steadfast about one fundamental aspect of the Genovese crime family: until the Commission trial in 1986, Tony Salerno was the Genovese godfather. They were uncertain about Chin Gigante’s sanity, but in court documents and news pronouncements, they never wavered from this certainty about Salerno’s status.

Nevertheless, long before the 1986 Commission trial, investigators were missing clues that came directly from the mouths of wiseguys, speaking freely, unaware that they were being overheard on bugs and telephone taps.

As early as April 4, 1982, Bruce Mouw’s Gambino squad intercepted a telephone conversation between Angelo Fat Ange Ruggiero and John Gotti that strongly suggested Gigante was then equal in rank to Paul Castellano. In his Long Island home, Ruggiero explained to Gotti, then his capo, that “Paul and Chin made a pact.” He continued, “Any friend of ours that gets pinched for junk, they kill ‘em. No administration meetings, no nothing, just go kill him. They’re not warning nobody; not telling nobody because they feel the guy’s going to rat.” It was an obvious reference to Castellano and Gigante’s imposing
the death penalty on any mobster caught in narcotics trafficking. Only a godfather could unilaterally exercise that ultimate penalty, and it was proof that Chin Gigante was in command of the Genovese family.

From the Jaguar bug, State Organized Crime Task Force personnel heard Tony Ducks Corallo, the Lucchese boss, complaining on June 23, 1983, that “Chin” and “Paul” had made a Commission decision without consulting him. “What Commission?” Corallo griped. “The Commission was him [Gigante] when they okayed a guy to be killed and nobody come [sic] and told Tom [Santoro, the Lucchese underboss] and me a thing about it.”

A brief segment of a bugged conversation at the Palma Boys Social Club between Tony Salerno and Matty the Horse Ianniello, on May 22, 1984, also failed to register properly with agents and prosecutors. Salerno and Ianniello were reviewing a list of candidates to be inducted as made men in another family. Upset that the nicknames of the proposed soldiers had not been included, which would have made it easier to identify them, Salerno said, “I don’t know none of them. They don’t put the nicknames down there… . But anyway, I’ll leave this up to the boss.” Salerno’s remark was a blunt admission that he was not the final arbiter of decisions in the family.