Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America's Most Powerful Mafia Empires (101 page)

On February 6, 1985, only days before the Commission indictments were unsealed, Fat Tony was dejectedly discussing with a soldier, Giuseppe Sabato, newspaper stories that arrests of Mafia godfathers were imminent. They wondered if Chin would be among the chieftains indicted. “Forget about the papers,” Sabato said. “There’s arrests next week. I’m pretty sure Paul and the other guy and Tony Ducks. I’m pretty sure I’ll find out tonight. If they get Chin they’re wrapped up.”

Referring to Gigante’s feigned mental illness, Sabato continued, “All, all the finagling, manipulating, manipulating and manipulating to fool the government, fuck it, it won’t stick.” Salerno responded, “He’s got to worry if he gets pinched, all them years he spent in that fuckin’ asylum. For nothing.”

The FBI might have erred connecting the dots to compose an accurate picture of the Genovese chain of command, and agents were unsure for years of Gigante’s true mental state and his role in the family. But mafiosi of all ranks in the New York families understood that the government had for years identified the wrong man, Tony Salerno, as the Genovese supreme leader. They knew that Chin Gigante was the godfather of a mighty Mafia family, his erratic behavior was a stunt to avoid prosecution, and Fat Tony Salerno just a straw man used by Gigante to deceive investigators.

Clearly, Angelo Ruggiero and John Gotti, two veteran wiseguys, were positive that Chin was the paramount leader of the Genoveses. In 1982 the FBI overheard them discussing the punishment for getting caught in drug deals, and that year even a neophyte like Alphonse D’Arco was clued in. At Little Al’s induction into the Lucchese family as a made man, Ducks Corallo informed him that, among the bosses, Vincent Gigante led the Genovese family.

In the early 1980s, Sammy the Bull Gravano, then only a middle-ranking mobster, learned from Gambino higher-ups that Chin was a major Cosa Nostra force with lethal influence outside New York. Gravano was told that Gigante, in a power play to gain a larger portion of gambling and union rackets in Atlantic City, had authorized the murder of Angelo Bruno, the boss of the Philadelphia Cosa Nostra, which had territorial interests in Atlantic City. About that same time, Philip Leonetti, who became the underboss of the Philadelphia family, discovered that Gigante had approved six additional Philadelphia Mob slayings in the 1980s to resolve an internal feud.

The New England crime family, the Patriarca gang, active in Boston and Providence, was another borgata that deferred to Gigante. When Al D’Arco was the acting boss of the Lucchese family, Gigante’s emissaries invited him to attend the installation of a new Mob hierarchy in Boston. “We picked the administration,” Genovese soldier Jimmy Ida boasted at a sit-down in an Elizabeth Street bakery. “Vincent has selected the names.”

Gigante’s awesome reach and position was also evident to Anthony Gaspipe Casso before he moved up to a leadership spot. In the autumn of 1986, during the Commission trial, his Lucchese superiors informed him that Chin had issued a contract on John Gotti to avenge Paul Castellano’s murder.

That Gigante had been the unchallenged Genovese boss for years was revealed conclusively to government investigators in the autumn of 1986, almost two years after the Commission indictments. The information came from a defector. Facing conviction and a long sentence on labor-racketeering and extortion charges, Vincent Fish Cafaro, began cooperating with the government. Agents said he flipped partly to save his son Thomas and a girlfriend from prosecution. (Tom Cafaro disowned his father, refused a plea-bargain, and remained an associate in the family.)

Fat Tony Salerno’s closest confidant for decades, Cafaro dissolved the mists shrouding the family’s hierarchy for almost ten years. He provided convincing first-hand evidence that Chin Gigante had orchestrated a double deception for
years. Chin had playacted his madness and had set up Salerno to conceal his own omnipotence in the borgata.

“Straightened out,” made in 1974, Cafaro was working under Salerno in 1981 when Philip Benny Squint Lombardo retired as boss, apparently because of failing health. Salerno, who had been consigliere and underboss—never the boss—suffered a stroke about the same time Lombardo left the scene. At that point, Cafaro said in FBI debriefings, Chin Gigante took over as godfather. There was no internal strife. One of Gigante’s first moves was to “pull down,” demote, Salerno to the lowest rank, soldier, and to leave him virtually powerless.

Recuperating from his stroke at his country home in upstate New York, Salerno became bored and wanted to resume his racketeering activities in the city. Gigante, adopting some of Lombardo’s protective tactics, gave Cafaro these instructions: “Let Tony come down and you stay with him, watch him and see that he’s all right.” Salerno was ordered to resume attending Commission meetings as he had for Lombardo, but to withhold from other families as long as possible the identity of the real Genovese boss. “Chin wished the heat to remain uptown rather than on his downtown base of operation,” Cafaro said, and he used Salerno as a decoy. Cafaro recalled Gigante attending only one Commission meeting. But before sit-downs with other borgatas, “Fat Tony conferred with Chin on any major matters affecting the family.” All Fat Tony’s decisions were first “put on the record with Chin,” Cafaro added.

During the period when the FBI believed that Salerno was running the Genovese clan, according to Cafaro, two murders affecting important federal investigations were sanctioned by Gigante in 1982. In March, shortly before he was to go on trial with Genovese mobsters on bid-rigging and extortion charges, Theodore Maritas, president of the 25,000-member carpenters’ union, “disappeared.” Prosecutors believe he was killed because of Mob fears that he might become a government witness against the lead defendant, Vincent DiNapoli, a Genovese controller in the construction industry. After Maritas vanished, DiNapoli negotiated a plea deal for a lighter sentence.

Cafaro disclosed that a second highly publicized slaying ordered by Gigante was wrongly linked by law-enforcement agencies to an inquiry involving Raymond Donovan, first Secretary of Labor in President Ronald Reagan’s cabinet. In 1982, a special federal prosecutor was looking into allegations that Donovan, while a construction-company executive, had met with organized-crime figures and knew about payoffs to mobsters. A prime suspect in the federal investigation
was Pellegrino Butcher Boy Masselli, the Bronx-based Genovese gangster, who had a multimillion-dollar trucking contract with Donovan’s former construction firm. In August 1982, Butcher Boy’s son, Nat Masselli, was shot to death by Genovese mobsters. The younger Masselli was secretly assisting the special prosecutor, Leon Silverman, and the slaying touched off speculation that the Mafia was impeding the Donovan-Masselli investigation. Silverman later determined that there was “insufficient credible evidence” for a federal indictment of Donovan for associating with mobsters or knowing of illegal payoffs.

But the whacking of Nat Masselli and the uproar over his undercover work in the federal investigation triggered a probe by the Bronx DA’s office that charged Donovan, Butcher Boy Masselli, and six others with defrauding $7.4 million from a subway-construction contract. After a nine-month trial, all eight defendants were acquitted on the state indictment.

The Bronx investigations ended with the conviction of two Genovese soldiers for Nat Masselli’s murder. Cafaro said Gigante approved the hit because the younger Masselli knew about Genovese rackets and had become an informer. Although the Bronx DA’s office alleged that the federal government covered up contacts between Donovan and organized crime, Cafaro insisted that Nat Masselli’s murder was unrelated to Donovan and Special Prosecutor Silverman’s inquiry. Contradicting the DA, Cafaro said the Genoveses were unaware of the young man’s involvement with the special prosecutor and Chin wanted him killed simply because he was believed to be a rat.

Cafaro also tipped the FBI on how Chin had paid $175,000 to trim two years from the eight-year federal sentence of his brother Mario for loan-sharking and extortion. According to Cafaro, in 1984, Roy Cohn, the slick lawyer who represented numerous mobsters, told him that a three-year sentence reduction would cost $250,000, and two years, $175,000. Chin opted for two years, and Cafaro said he delivered the prescribed amount in cash to Cohn after the lawyer obtained the shorter term. How did Cohn manipulate the reduction? Fish assumed the money was “used for a ‘reach’ or a ‘payoff,’” but he did not know to whom. On another occasion, Cafaro claimed that he “laundered” a $200,000 illegal bookmaking debt through Cohn’s office. The debtor, a businessman, wrote a $200,000 check to Cohn’s firm as a supposed legal fee, and Cohn passed along most of the money in cash to Cafaro and to Tony Salerno, after deducting a service fee. None of Cafaro’s allegations against Cohn resulted in a criminal complaint against the attorney, who died in 1986, soon after Cafaro switched sides.

From the start of his regime, Gigante worried that his underlings’ loose talk could be perilous and used against him. No bug, no telephone tap, and no wired informer would ever ensnare Chin by obtaining an incriminating remark from his own lips. To protect himself from being implicated through circumstantial evidence in a RICO or other criminal indictment, Gigante circulated a warning to the Genovese and the other borgatas that he would severely punish anyone who spoke his family name or his nickname in a direct or a telephone conversation. Top lieutenants Benny Eggs Mangano, Baldy Dom Canterino, and Quiet Dom Cirillo relayed the decree to all families: never mention Gigante’s name in a conversation. Genovese soldiers could refer to him by pointing to or touching their chins, or by shaping a C with thumb and forefinger and saying, “That guy,” “My aunt,” or “Aunt Julia.”

During a meeting over joint construction rackets, the Gambino’s Sammy the Bull Gravano was admonished by his Genovese counterpart, Vincent DiNapoli, for using Gigante’s name. Teasing DiNapoli, Gravano deliberately asked about Chin’s views on an interfamily issue. “Sammy,” DiNapoli said gravely, “you get caught on tape, or you get this guy in trouble, you’re going to get hurt.”

Anthony Tortorello, a Lucchese soldier, was overheard by a Genovese gangster in 1986, asking why Chin was upset by drug deals when he himself was profiting from trafficking by his men. A furious Gigante sent consigliere Louis Bobby Manna to the Lucchese hierarchs, demanding that Tortorello be killed. Gaspipe Casso, then the Lucchese underboss, agreed that Tortorello had sinned but considered him too valuable to be whacked. Appeasing Gigante, the Lucchese leaders pledged that Tortorello would be severely beaten for insulting Chin. A phony mauling was staged to satisfy Gigante that the violator of his edict had been punished.

A Colombo mobster, Joseph “Joe Black” Gorgone, was picked up on an FBI bug saying that Gigante was merely acting and was not crazy. A report reached Gigante that the bureau had taped Gorgone’s remark. “I’ll kill him if that statement ever makes it into a courtroom,” Gigante threatened in a message to the Colombo consigliere, Carmine Sessa.

One medical condition Gigante was not faking was his coronary ailment. In 1988, he underwent an aortic valve replacement, and a pacemaker was inserted
to regulate his heartbeat. Convalescing that autumn, he agreed to John Gotti’s bid for a truncated Commission meeting. Gotti’s people arranged the first face-to-face conclave between the two bosses in the apartment of Gambino capo Frankie D’Apolito’s brother. The Gambinos figured that it would be a safe site for Gotti, in case the meeting was a setup by Gigante to ambush him. They were unaware that it was even safer for Chin; his relatives had an apartment in the Greenwich Village complex.

After Gotti arrived with the Lucchese representatives Vic Amuso and Gaspipe Casso, Gigante showed up, accompanied by his underboss, Benny Eggs Mangano. Wearing pajamas and a robe, he explained that he was recovering from his recent surgery in an apartment used by his mother and other relatives. To attend the meeting, all he had to do was step into the elevator.

The main topic was approval of seats on the Commission for the Colombo and Bonanno borgatas. Gigante had no objection to the reappearance of the strife-torn Colombos, but he rejected Gotti’s proposal to allow the Bonannos to return from exile. Recognizing the Bonannos’ Joe Massino as acting boss with full voting rights would allow Gotti to dominate the Mob’s supreme council, with a sure three votes out of five; Massino was Gotti’s ally and would be beholden to him in the event of any disagreements between the Genovese and Gambino families. More than likely, the Colombo delegate, Vic Orena, would also line up with the Gambinos. Chin could count on support from the Lucchese combination of boss Vic Amuso and underboss Gaspipe Casso, who disliked Gotti and had joined in Gigante’s plot to kill him. Chin was taking no chances on relinquishing control of the Commission by giving Gotti two satellite votes.

Another item was replenishing the families’ ranks. Chin complained that the Luccheses had recently made eleven men without vetting them with him. Moreover, he objected to one of the candidates, mocking him as “a good Samaritan” because he had helped the police arrest a mugger. “He’s no longer a problem,” Gaspipe chimed in. “We killed him.”