Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America's Most Powerful Mafia Empires (102 page)

Both the Gambino and Genovese families, the nation’s two largest Mafia borgatas, were down from their maximum strength of roughly four hundred soldiers each. Seizing on the reduced-ranks situation, Gotti urged Gigante to reinforce his family with forty additional men. Sammy the Bull Gravano knew that Gotti was scheming to undercut Gigante and to court loyalty from the new Genovese cadre by informing them that he was responsible for their admission into Cosa Nostra.

Chin saw through Gotti’s machinations and, according to Sammy, curtly rejected the idea. “Why would I have to make men for you to respect them? If they were with me, you would respect them, no? I appreciate your concern but I’ll make those moves when I’m ready.”

Gravano was impressed by a remark Chin made about surviving as a Cosa Nostra don. Mentioning that he had enough wealth from his own schemes, Gigante said he was not pressing his crews for huge cuts from their rackets. Sammy the Bull thought that was a smart strategy for insuring loyalty in a family that had plenty to go around—more than $100 million a year.

Before the meeting broke up, Gigante discussed his heart surgery and opened his pajama top to show a huge scar on his chest. As they left the apartment, Gotti remarked to Gravano how “clever” and security-conscious Gigante had been to arrange their first meeting in a building in which he was living. “He’s smart as a fox, this guy,” Gotti said grudgingly.

It was the only sit-down ever held between Gigante and Gotti. One thorny topic left off the agenda was the conviction of several New Jersey Genovese members, accused in a federal indictment of conspiring to kill Gotti and his brother Gene.

Although no criminal accusations were lodged against Gigante, the New Jersey charges generated a buzz inside the Mob that Chin had issued a contract on Gotti. Before their Commission session, Gigante had tried to smooth over the issue. Through a conciliatory message to Gotti, Chin assured him that the New Jersey gangsters, including his consigliere Bobby Manna, were “renegades” who had conspired without his knowledge.

Gigante’s explanation was a patent lie and Gotti was not deceived. But Gotti was wary about taking on Gigante and his army. Listening to Gotti’s bugged conversations, Bruce Mouw, the head of the Gambino Squad, sensed Gotti’s concern about crossing swords with Chin. “We heard John trash everybody. He called the Colombos ‘Cambodians.’ Vic Amuso and Gaspipe were ridiculed as ‘the Circus.’ He even mocked his good friend Massino. But he never trashed Chin, never once. He always spoke of him with deep respect.”

Gotti failed to grasp the extent of Gigante’s hatred. He never realized that Chin schemed with two disloyal Gambino capos, Jimmy Brown Failla and Danny Marino, to whack him and thereby himself become the kingmaker in the Gambino family. To avenge the assassination of his ally Paul Castellano, Gigante told confidants, “somebody has to pay.” Although he failed to eliminate Gotti, Chin exacted a heavy toll from his devoted entourage, killing three
of them. He authorized contracts on Frank DeCicco, Gotti’s first underboss; Eddie Lino, a Gambino capo, who was on the hit team that clipped Castellano outside Sparks Steak House; and Bartolomeo “Bobby” Borrelli, a Gotti chauffeur and bodyguard. The Lucchese’s Gaspipe Casso, in an interview, claimed that he helped arrange the three “hits”.

When Chin learned that the FBI had his town house under surveillance, and the Commission case revealed the effectiveness of the government’s electronic eavesdropping, his obsession with insulating himself was further heightened. Simultaneously, he tried to beef up his medical record of incompetency. Under the care of his personal psychiatrist for treatment of “dementia rooted in organic brain damage,” Gigante’s stays in a mental health clinic at a Westchester County hospital became more frequent. Over two decades he checked into his favorite clinic twenty-eight times, for “tune-ups.” Of course, he knew it would embarrass the FBI to drag him inhumanely out of a psychiatric ward to stand trial.

Within the Genovese family Gigante cultivated his penchant for constant vigilance and covertness. He instituted longer testing periods or apprenticeships before inducting members, and he instructed capos and soldiers to conceal as long as possible the identities of prospective soldiers from other families. The secrecy, he thought, would prevent investigators learning from informers about new and possibly vulnerable Genovese inductees. Concealing rookie soldiers from the other borgatas would also camouflage the actual Genovese strength in the event of a violent showdown. In another directive, capos were urged to keep a low profile, to avoid being seen in public with him, and to forward all messages through two trusted lieutenants, Quiet Dom Cirillo and Benny Eggs Mangano.

The main communications link to and from capos and soldiers in the field to the Genovese godfather was Quiet Dom, dubbed in the family
“il Messaggero”
the messenger. Cirillo was a big moneymaker for Gigante, handling Chin’s loan-sharking bank. Quiet Dom went back a long way with Gigante, to a time when they both had been club boxers in the late 1940s. Cirillo’s prizefighting career ended in quick failure. A welterweight, he lost three bouts by knockouts and managed one draw before retiring ingloriously at age twenty from the ring. Investigators looking to connect Cirillo to Gigante found him to be a skilled dodger. Leaving his home in the Bronx, he drove onto a highway and at high
speed abruptly pulled over to the side of the road while his tails zoomed past his car. In Manhattan Quiet Dom had innumerable escape routes. “He would go into an office building or a restaurant that had more than one exit and often lose us by darting out of one of them,” John Pritchard, the FBI supervisor, said.

Before Chin’s ascension, the New Jersey crews strutted around almost brazenly, greeting each other outside hangouts with traditional Mafia embraces and kisses. Robert Buccino, the New Jersey’s Organized Crime Division official, soon noticed the mounting caution of the Genoveses under Chin’s rigid command. Soldiers stopped greeting each other effusively in public, became more watchful, and took exceptional measures to deter surveillance. Sometimes, the gang’s best efforts failed, as when the FBI uncovered meetings of a New Jersey crew in a Hoboken restaurant’s toilet and bugged it. One soldier, Tino “the Blade” Fiumara, an important Genovese racketeer on the New Jersey waterfront, conceived a disappearing act that worked for a while. Buccino’s investigators eventually deduced Fiumara’s trick: he was traveling to meetings curled up on a car floor or in the trunk to avoid being tracked.

A recognized connoisseur of Mafia talent, Philadelphia underboss Phil Leonetti gave Gigante’s administration the highest compliment. Known as “Crazy Phil,” for his murderous rampages, Leonetti, the nephew and protégé of the imprisoned Philadelphia boss Nicodemo Scarfo, defected and became a government witness in 1989, after indictments for racketeering and murder. Debriefed by agents, he described Chin Gigante’s administration “as the most sophisticated, cautious, secretive, and powerful Cosa Nostra family in the United States.”

Chin’s Millions

P
roviding a crash course in Mafia Economics 101, Fish Cafaro explained how the Genoveses prospered to a Senate committee in 1988. “My family made a lot of money from gambling and the numbers rackets. We got our money from gambling, but our real power, our real strength, came from the unions. With the unions behind us, we could shut down the city, or the country for that matter, if we needed to, to get our way.”

Cafaro was right on the mark. The government’s anti-Mafia crackdown in the mid-1980s had crushed Fat Tony Salerno and Matty the Horse Ianniello, and dismantled several of their construction and extortion rackets. Nevertheless, the Genovese family’s Mob industries were practically unimpeded. Rivers of cash still cascaded from gambling and loan-sharking, and the family’s most prized gold mine—labor rackets—flourished.

Chin Gigante’s brigades counted on unending payoffs and well-paid “no-show” jobs from their under-the-table arrangements with corrupt union mandarins. The borgata also got willing assistance from unscrupulous management associations in four sizable industries: the Fulton Fish Market, conventions and trade shows, garbage collection, and waterfront services.

In the darkness before dawn, tractor trailers rumbled over the cobblestones of Lower Manhattan, and workers grappled with ice-coated crates to keep fresh fish moving through the nation’s largest wholesale seafood-distribution center, the Fulton Fish Market. Operating since 1833, the market inspired colorful tales of gritty merchants and laborers toiling from midnight to dawn on the banks of the East River to supply the New York area with every species of salt-and fresh-water produce.

By the 1930s, the Mafia was entrenched in the market, largely due to the ruthlessness of Joseph “Socks” Lanza, a hands-on capo. Lanza organized a seafood workers’ local and acquired his nickname for punching out merchants and suppliers who refused to pay him for permission to do business in the market. Largely through control of the union that Lanza had formed, fifty years later the Genovese family was still the dominant, invisible force in a $1 billion-a-year enterprise.

To survive, more than one hundred trucking companies and fifty wholesalers depended on the rapid unloading of quickly perishable seafood brought into New York five days a week. The Mob’s iron grip derived from this movement of food in and out of the market. Six companies, called “unloaders,” were the only ones authorized by the Genovese family to unpack refrigerated trucks arriving with their valuable catches from East Coast ports and fish hatcheries. The self-appointed, Mob-approved unloading companies operated without required municipal licenses in the market, on city-owned land. They granted themselves exclusive territorial rights to unload trucks, to set the order in which the vehicles were handled, and to dictate the prices for their services; supplies were not unloaded on a first-come, first-served basis. For prompt delivery to a wholesaler’s stall, only a few feet away, the merchant or the trucking company had to bribe the unloaders; otherwise, the seafood was left to spoil on the pavement and become worthless.

A similar setup of unlicensed companies, known as “loaders” and endorsed by the Genovese borgata, handled all after-sale transfers by wholesalers to their customers. Only a handful of Mob-favored loading companies was allowed to transport the food on handcarts from wholesalers to the parked vans or trucks of customers, essentially hundreds of restaurateurs and suppliers to retail stores. No one who sold or bought fish or seafood had a choice in selecting an unloader or loader, dickering over the prices charged, or even choosing a parking space.

An intimidating frontier-style justice prevailed where the laws of the state
could not reach. The Mafia’s presence and its culture of suspicion intimidated honest merchants and workers, preventing them from cooperating with investigators or testifying. The rare rebel who objected to the established order would find his vehicle vandalized, his tires slashed, and himself threatened with being manhandled or worse. Since all vendors and customers were subject to the same conditions, the market functioned on the principle that the jacked-up costs were simply passed along to the consumers.

Over half a century, sporadic investigations would temporarily remove mafiosi, such as Socks Lanza and several of his successors, from the scene. The Genovese family simply brought in a replacement enforcer to continue its exploitation. City officials responsible for licensing merchants and monitoring business practices at the market privately admitted that the atmosphere was too dangerous and volatile for civil servants to supervise. Since few wholesale vendors and suppliers had the guts to complain publicly, the city government, in effect, decided to allow the Mafia to profit so long as a plentiful amount of seafood was available in restaurants and stores.

Chin Gigante appointed two capos, Rosario “Ross” Gangi Sr. and Alphonse Malangone, to control the market and funnel profits to the regime. Both captains, along with Carmine Romano, a former Genovese controller, had sons who owned wholesale seafood companies in the market. Gangi was listed as an employee of a fish company, and Malangone was often seen in the area, allowing his ominous countenance to be known. His nickname, “Allie Shades,” came from dark lenses he wore because of an eye ailment.

The unloading and loading system alone netted $2 million to $3 million a year in “fees,” more properly called shake-downs, for the Genovese. Each year about 150 million pounds offish and seafood were sold, totaling $800 million to $1 billion in sales, salaries, and ancillary services, with a goodly portion siphoned off by mobsters as phantom partners in companies doing business there, or for “protection” from union problems. The market was a prime setting for other fundamental Cosa Nostra crimes: thefts of seafood from the arriving trucks, and fleecing the one thousand market employees through gambling and loan-sharking.

“The market is the most intractable organized-crime problem in the Northeast,” Michael Cherkasky, a prosecutor and official in the Manhattan DA’s office, observed in the early 1990s. “You remove one guy and a whole set of two-bit hoods are lined up to replace him.”