Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America's Most Powerful Mafia Empires (105 page)

The background of the two murders was easy to assemble. Starting in the mid-1970’s, Farenga had teamed up on drug deals with Gerard “Gerry” Pappa, a soldier in the Genovese family, and Peter Savino, like him a Genovese associate. Over the years, he had helped Pappa whack five victims. Pappa did the dirty work, and Farenga and Savino went along as accomplices or to help dispose of the corpses. The two stiffs in the Williamsburg warehouse had been hidden there when Savino owned the building.

Richard Scarcella was slain in 1978. A masonry contractor and an associate in the Genovese family, Scarcella made a fatal error on a renovation job at the home of Frank “Funzi” Tieri, a family hierarch: he asked Tieri to pay for the construction materials. Tieri assigned Pappa to “work over” Scarcella for his disrespect in seeking money from a Mob aristocrat. It was not a hit contract. But Scarcella was a tough egg, and fearing that he might seek revenge for a rough beating, Pappa decided it would be expedient to shoot him.

The second body in the warehouse was Shorty Spero, a Colombo capo missing for seven years. Spero was shaking down and robbing drug dealers in Brooklyn, and Pappa, Farenga, and Savino divvied up a $500,000 fee from narcotics merchants for disposing of Spero and his brother. It was Savino’s idea to deposit the bodies at the warehouse while construction work was going on; the newly poured concrete would create ideal concealed tombs.

Bobby Farenga’s information was solid and the slayings could be wrapped up as “solved.” But Gerry Pappa, the shooter and arch villain was dead, blown apart seven years earlier by shotgun blasts. More compelling for Richard Rudolph and prosecutors was the Mafia interfamily bid-rigging plot that Farenga had described. His statement added substance to rumors heard by agents that the Mob was milking millions of dollars from contracts with the NYC Housing Authority, the agency that built and maintained vast public-housing projects. Farenga knew the outline of the scheme but lacked specifics. He had invested in a window-manufacturing company organized by Pete Savino that was an essential part of the scam, but had always been on the fringe of the conspiracy, his knowledge derived mainly from what Savino told him. Several years earlier, Savino had dumped him as a crime and business partner. Bobby’s expertise was drug trafficking, not windows,
and his information about the Housing Authority swindle was imprecise and dated. But he knew that Savino, with the muscle of the four families behind him, had dreamed up a surefire plan to rig bids for the installation of windows in Housing Authority projects. The key to unlocking what the prosecutors instantly code-named “the Windows case” was Pete Savino, an unknown Mob prodigy.

An untypical wannable without traces of wise-guy associations in his early history, Savino had conventional, prosperous, rock-solid middle-class parents. No Mafia relative influenced him with tales of the virtues of the Honorable Society. Growing up in Brooklyn’s Bensonhurst section, he had been a good student, graduated from Catholic schools, and after a year of college went into the family business, working for his father’s metal works factory. It was the mid-1960s, the Golden Age for the New York Mafia, and the bright twenty-year-old Savino saw that mobsters, through the takeover of one union, had their claws in several construction businesses. The union, Local 580 of the Architectural and Ornamental Iron Workers, which represented window installers for jobs at major residential and commercial buildings, was mobbed up, and its officials got systemic kickbacks for sweetheart contracts.

Over six-feet tall, with jet black hair, dark, handsome features, and an innate gift of charming everyone he met, Savino decided that the quickest route to big money was through corrupt Local 580 shop stewards and their Mob cronies.

After working for the union, Savino allied himself with neighborhood buddies from his teenage days, Bobby Farenga and Gerry Pappa, who had matured into eager borgata recruits. Pappa was in a Genovese crew run by Anthony “Dutchie” Tuzzo, and was clued in on hoodlum angles for making quick bucks. Pappa welcomed Savino as an underworld accomplice and taught him the basics of drug trafficking. They also devised a system of smuggling thousands of cases of cigarettes from southern states into the high-tax New York area. It brought them a profit of fifty cents for each carton. One transaction in New Jersey, however, flopped, and Savino was arrested in 1973 by the FBI on interstate smuggling and federal tax-evasion charges. An agent in the Newark office offered to spike the most serious accusations and get Savino a suspended sentence for a reduced charge—if he become an informer. It was a comfortable compromise for Savino. He avoided a conviction and for fourteen years was listed by the Newark FBI office as a “C.I.,” confidential informant. However, he provided little information to the bureau about his pals or what he was really up to. “I never volunteered information,” he later testified about that period. “I answered questions when they called but withheld important information.”

There was plenty Savino could have told the FBI, had he wanted to. His Mafia business partnerships were making him rich. Then, too, there was the occasional murder. In addition to the two men interred in his Williamsburg factory and warehouse, he was an accomplice on four other hits with Gerry Pappa; a total of six, one more than Bobby Farenga had participated in. Through Pappa he met Gaspipe Casso and Vic Amuso of Lucchese family fame, and made hundreds of thousands of dollars by investing in their marijuana and Quaalude imports from Latin America.

Savino was also flush with money from his corrupt Local 580 contacts, which allowed him to operate window-manufacturing and installation companies under extremely favorable union terms. For selected bribes, the local gave him a competitive edge by allowing him to underpay and cheat his employees on welfare and medical benefits. Searching for larger and still easier payoffs, Savino spotted a windfall opportunity in the late 1970s from a new federally financed program. To conserve heating oil, the government’s Department of Housing and Urban Development, HUD, began subsidizing the installation of double-glazed thermal windowpanes in public-housing units. New York’s Housing Authority was in line to have 900,000 windows replaced, with the goal of saving $5 million a year in heating bills. It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to steal a fortune, and Savino, with Pappa’s assistance, convinced the Genovese regime that a cartel could reap enormous profits though rigged bids. It was almost a carbon copy of the Concrete Club, which the old Mafia Commission had successfully run for decades.

The window-installation program began in 1978. Savino organized two companies, Arista Windows and American Aluminum, to get his thick slice of the profits. Because the Luccheses controlled Local 580, the window workers’ union, the family naturally had to be brought in. Since the Colombo and Gambino families had hidden ownership in several window manufacturers, they also were added. Thirteen Mob-connected companies, including Savino’s, divided the work by determining among themselves who would submit the phony lowest “competitive” bid, and substantially inflate all contract prices. The mobsters doubled and tripled what should have been reasonable profits on honestly competitive work. Besides the money that rolled in to Mob-dominated companies through the exaggerated prices, non-Mafia firms were permitted to join the cartel and paid a tax of $2 for each window they installed, with the kickbacks parceled out to the four families. With the Housing Authority planning to replace nearly a million windows, the families could be assured of more than $1 million in payoffs from non-Mafia companies alone.

Contractors excluded from the cartel were prevented from competing through intimidation. Sonny Morrissey, the Local 580 steward and the Luccheses’ strong-arm pawn, warned outside firms what to expect if they honestly obtained a Housing Authority job. Morrissey threatened them with work stoppages; every window they installed would be smashed; and their factories would be vandalized. His warnings and the power of his union were heeded throughout the industry.

Pete Savino was not made, but his relationship with the Genovese family seemed solid, especially after Gerry Pappa was inducted as a soldier in 1978, the year the cartel was created. Pappa, who had branched into loan-sharking, was a partner in Savino’s two window companies and, more important, was his liaison with the Genovese administration. There was no hint of danger until July 1980, when Pappa was killed by a shotgun blast, an obvious Mob retaliatory hit for the slaying of the Colombo’s Shorty Spero. After Spero disappeared and long before his body was found in the warehouse, the Colombos suspected Pappa had killed him because of disputes over money. Savino sweated out two months, worrying if, as Pappa’s partner, he was next on a contract list. In September he got a call one afternoon to drop everything and report immediately to Ruggiero’s Restaurant on Grand Street in Little Italy; someone in the Genovese family wanted to see him. It was the first time he had been summoned to a sit-down with unknown mobsters. One thought consumed him: he was being set up for a kill and it was futile to attempt to escape.

Ruggiero’s was owned by a Genovese soldier, Joe Zito, who escorted Savino to a private room on the second floor. Seated around a table, with bodyguards nearby, were the Mafia moguls Fat Tony Salerno, Funzi Tieri, and Chin Gigante. Savino was unable to camouflage his fear; his nerves were on fire and he dabbed at slivers of perspiration creasing his face. This was it! He was sure the Genovese leaders were about to sentence him to an unpleasant death because he had dealt in drugs and had helped Gerry Pappa kill Shorty Spero.

“Calm down,” Gigante spoke up. “You’re not in any trouble. Just tell us the truth.”

Gigante did most of the questioning. First off, he wanted to know if the acting capo of Pappa’s crew had taken all of the dead man’s assets, mainly his loan-sharking money. When Savino confirmed this, he was surprised by Chin’s reaction. Spitting on the floor in disgust, Gigante asked rhetorically, “Are these the new rules? We take money from widows and orphans?”

Chin proceeded to tell him that Pappa, as he suspected, had been executed
in retaliation for murdering Shorty Spero. Not only had he lacked permission for the hit, but he had whacked a capo—a protected mafioso—from another family. Savino did not volunteer that he had helped conceal Spero’s body under a canopy of concrete and had profited from the drug dealers’ reward for Shorty’s murder.

In Savino’s presence, the three leaders—he was unsure of their rankings—talked openly among themselves as to who would control him, now that Pappa was gone. “I’ll take him,” Gigante decided. Chin’s first order to Savino was expensive: he had to shell out $1 million to the Lucchese family’s Gaspipe Casso and Vic Amuso. At that time, the two future Lucchese despots were only soldiers and had given Pappa $500,000 as an “investment” to expand Savino’s window companies. They intended to cash in on the Housing Authority racket and Savino’s other quasi-legitimate window enterprises. But Savino felt Gaspipe and Vic lacked business sense and were too meddlesome as partners, and he and Pappa had dissolved the arrangement. Gaspipe had complained to Chin and was demanding $1 million, a $500,000 profit, from the Genovese clan because the up-front money had been given to Pappa, a soldier in that borgata. Under the Mafia code of honor, the Genoveses were responsible for Pappa’s compact, even after his death. Chin told Savino to pay the $1 million on behalf of the family, and he pledged to cough up the money, even though Pappa had kept the $500,000 for himself. A lowly associate in the family, a slave to the hierarchy, Savino had no right to complain or protest its decisions.

Before dismissing Savino, Gigante instructed him to keep Benny Eggs Mangano apprised on all his window-contract arrangements and decisions with other families; Mangano would be Pete’s main conduit to Chin on all Mob undertakings. Pete was obligated to report to Mangano three or four times a week at his club on Thompson Street in Greenwich Village. Chin also gave him permission to visit the Holy of Holies, his own hangout at the Triangle Civic Improvement Association.

The meeting at the restaurant had cost Savino $1 million, but he was relieved to walk out alive.

Chin and Mangano’s clubs were opened to Savino for practical reasons. He was a big earner and, with Pappa gone, the Genoveses needed his expertise to continue the windows profiteering. At the outset, Benny Eggs gave Savino lessons in Genovese protocol. He was never to mention any of Gigante’s names in conversations, and if he had to refer to him, Mangano cautioned Savino, “Point to your chin and say ‘this guy.’” Another expression that could be used was “my
aunt.” Mangano and Baldy Dom Canterino stressed that whenever he was asked by curious outsiders about Gigante’s mental condition, he should reply, “Vincent’s crazy.”

At the Triangle Club, Savino saw Gigante, sometimes dressed in pajamas and a robe, playing cards, and holding private, whispered conversations, often with Benny Eggs and Baldy Dom. He watched Gigante plod slowly along the streets, mumbling to himself, and once saw him pause on Sullivan Street to urinate on the sidewalk. But Savino understood that Gigante’s behavior was “fake, a standing joke.”

Gradually, Chin warmed up to Savino, but with his usual caution never talked about exact details of the Housing Authority windows racket. Savino found him to be coherent, even when he was wearing pajamas. One afternoon at the Triangle, Gigante took him into the toilet, turned on the water tap, and in a whisper asked if anyone in the family or union bosses was squeezing him for additional payoffs or badgering him for free window installations in their homes. When Savino assured him that no one was pressuring him, Gigante replied, “Okay, I just wanted to know if anybody was taking advantage of you.” Motioning Savino to follow him outside the club, Gigante, with a wink, said, “You know you can tell your friends that I’m not right. I’m not okay.” Savino nodded, trying not to laugh or appear embarrassed, realizing that Gigante was honoring him by taking him into his confidence about his erratic stunts.

Gigante showed his increasing regard for Savino by inviting him to meals in a private room at Ruggiero’s Restaurant. On one occasion, Joe Zito, the restaurant proprietor, began disparaging Savino’s appearance. “You dress too casually,” Zito said. “I’m going to change the way you dress and make a real man out of you.” Picking up an umbrella with a distinctive duck’s head carved on the handle, Gigante hit Zito on the forehead, adding sternly, “He dresses okay for me.”