Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America's Most Powerful Mafia Empires (125 page)

Prospective jurors in organized-crime trials are frequently asked if their judgments might be influenced by movies or television programs dealing with the Mafia. Many fictional scenarios view the Cosa Nostra as comprised of both honorable and evil participants, in a profession that oddly parallels large, legitimate corporations, with a subtext that mobsters lead nonconformist, adventurous lives. In real life, no mafiosi are “good guys.”

A prototype of show business’s vicarious flirtation with the Mafia is
The Sopranos
, HBO’s prize-winning television series, which is to television what
The Godfather
was to films—a super hit. The underlying humanizing theme of the series is that, except for his occupation as the boss of a New Jersey crew, Tony Soprano is a quintessential suburbanite, searching for the meaning of life, happiness, and security. He lives in a small mansion and is rolling in dough; yet he is afflicted by the common turmoil of middle-aged bourgeois fathers. His
marriage to Carmela is on the rocks; she, tuned-in to womens rights, is seeking to liberate herself from a humdrum existence; his spoiled teenaged children are rebellious; and despite a harem of girlfriends, he agonizes over being unloved and unappreciated. The ambitious gangster-executive is constantly confronted by nuisances at his “office”—a workplace peopled by menacing types, where minor errors result in death or imprisonment.

Genuine capos and wiseguys would never emulate Tony’s behavior. He stalks and kills victims, chores normally shunned by a capo or boss; murder is the task of soldiers and wannabes. No top-tier mobster would last long if he behaved like Tony Soprano, who defies basic mafioso caution by exposing himself as a ripe target, to be easily mowed down by rivals. He drives without a bodyguard; sips espresso in daylight at a sidewalk café; and begins his days in a bathrobe, sluggishly strolling down his driveway to pick up his newspaper near an open road.

Sex and psychiatry are prominent in
The Sopranos’
story line. Confiding in a psychiatrist, however, would be a radioactive mistake for a boss or capo, who can never display symptoms of weakness or mental instability. Seeing a shrink is guaranteed to incite dissension and doubts about a hierarchy reliability to head a borgata. Tony Soprano ignores the caveat by consulting a woman psychiatrist who, naturally, is fetchingly attractive as she counsels him on his nagging insecurities and interprets the Freudian symbols, fears, and sexual frustrations revealed in his dreams. No self-respecting mobster would confide intimate secrets to a stranger, let alone a female psychiatrist. An increased business-world role for women might be politically correct, but the Mob has resisted that trend.

There are aspects of
The Sopranos
that do accurately capture the Mob’s crude lifestyle. The profanity-laced dialogue is much like bugged vitriolic conversations that have been featured at actual trials. Tony and his cronies vividly display the casual savagery that is trademark Mafia behavior. And Tony’s compulsive whoring could have been modeled on the escapades of countless wiseguys.

Despite the cruelty, depravity, and sex, the presentation creates an undercurrent of sympathy for Tony, a mobster who yearns nostalgically for an earlier era when Men of Honor were Spartan and trustworthy. As the series antihero, he suffers the same angst as any law-abiding, average American striving to enjoy material success. He is generous, worries about his children, grieves over the death of a discarded lover, has compassion for a cancer-stricken friend and for a
boyhood buddy who attempts suicide. Essentially a beguiling soap opera about a dysfunctional suburban household,
The Sopranos
contributes yet another deceptive image of a genuine Mafia family.

“They are displayed having a twisted sense of honor, ‘taking no crap’ from anyone, with easy access to women and money,” Howard Abadinsky, an organized-crime historian, says of
The Sopranos’
cast of thugs. “Such displays romanticize organized crime and, as an unintended consequence, serve to perpetuate the phenomenon and create alluring myths about the Mafia.”

For more meaningful pointers on the resurgent powers of authentic borgatas, America’s law-enforcement planners might well look to the Mafia’s birthplace—Sicily. After World War II, Italy’s weak central governments tolerated a Mafia renaissance, allowing the clans to coerce legitimate businesses and to pollute the political system, principally through alliances with leaders in the since-discredited Christian Democratic Party.

A courageous prosecutor, Giovanni Falcone, launched the first sustained postwar assault against the island’s Cosa Nostra in the 1980s, imprisoning bosses and some three hundred soldiers. Falcone and another prosecutor, Paolo Borsellino, won mass convictions partly by employing American tactics—fracturing
omertà
through plea bargaining with
pentiti
, penitents or turncoats, and following incriminating paper trails linking gangsters to extortion payoffs. Although heavily guarded and working in bunkerlike quarters, both prosecutors were killed by bombs in 1992, in a spectacular Mafia message of uncompromising defiance. Their murders galvanized Italy for several years into breakthroughs against the Sicilian chieftains by increasing the powers of prosecutors and by safeguarding pentiti and their relatives in the first effective Italian witness-protection program.

After a decade of stringent enforcement, the drive was hobbled when the government of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi promoted legislation in 2002 and 2004 that makes the climate less favorable for Mafia convictions. New laws limit the use of testimony from defectors, restrict the use of bookkeeping evidence to implicate mobsters in frauds and shake-downs, and hamper recruitment of
pentiti
.

Using public-relations finesse, Sicily’s modern godfathers adopted low-profile policies known as
Pax Mafiosi
, Mafia Peace. Fearful of rekindling public outrage against their organizations, the new bosses avoid violent confrontations
with law enforcement and prefer invisibility. They have imposed stricter discipline on soldiers, tamped down internecine feuds, and ceased murdering so-called “excellent cadavers,” prosecutors, judges, police, and outspoken opponents. “Nowadays, the Mafia is stronger than before because its leaders have changed their strategy,” Sergio Barbiera, the deputy director of the Anti-Mafia Public Attorney’s office in Palermo, acknowledges. “No one can commit a serious crime which can attract the attention of the mass media.”

Palermo’s chief prosecutor, Pietro Grasso, adds, “The silence of the Mafia is a strategy, not an absence.”

Law-enforcement authorities concede that the reconstituted Sicilian gangs have resumed their classical “protection” schemes in all types of businesses and public projects. The redesigned clans jolted prosecutors in 2003 by planting moles in their office in Palermo, the center of anti-Mafia activities. Two officials, working on cases involving Cosa Nostra’s linkage to corrupt politicians, were arrested on charges of being double-agents and sabotaging the inquiries.

Alexander Stille, an American journalist who has written extensively about the Sicilian Mafia, says it has regained ominous political vitality, seeking the kind of supremacy that it enjoyed in the past. “Even if Cosa Nostra can deliver only five percent of the vote—the low end of most estimates—that can make the difference in many elections.”

And, as so often was true in the past, eruptions in the Sicilian Mafia reverberate in America. Astute Mafia-watchers are aware that the Sicilians have the means to fortify the U.S. families through an infusion of new Zips. A defector from the DeCavalcante family in New Jersey, Frank “Frankie the Beast” Scarabino, disclosed that his leaders planned to hire “ghost soldiers” to rub out informers and to assassinate judges and FBI agents. “They were going to start importing Sicilian shooters,” he testified at a Mob trial. DeCavalcante leaders referred to the Sicilians as ghost soldiers because they would be unknown to American police and could “do a piece of work [murder] and get out of the country with no problem,” Scarabino said. A federal prosecutor in Manhattan, Miriam Rocah, described the plan as “no idle chitchat.” Because the tiny DeCavalcante crew has often functioned as an auxiliary of the Gambino family and was close to Joe Massino, Scarabino’s talk of ghost solders indicates that it might be an idea under consideration by the larger New York borgatas.

Sicily also beckons as a conscription area for the American Mafia’s depleted battalions. The Bonannos and Gambinos have a history of sponsoring Sicilian branches in New York; and talk by the DeCavalcantes suggests more budding
alliances with Sicilian mafiosi. In the aftermath of the rash of defections that roiled the American Mafia, Sicilians not formally inducted into an Italian gang could be made and welcomed as reinforcements by the U.S. borgatas. Zips are respected by the Americans for their steely discipline, and more vitally, their allegiance to the code of
omertà
.

A decade of defeats might embolden the next wave of American dons to apply a survival tactic long practiced by the Sicilian Mafia—slaughtering relatives of informers to stiffen the code of
omertà
. One rarely violated Commission rule is a ban on injuring “civilians,” innocent relatives. In September 2003, however, the FBI secretly recorded Anthony Tony Green Urso, then the Bonanno acting boss and consigliere, talking about murdering children and relatives of cooperative witnesses. He proposed it as the surest way of stemming the tide of traitors. “… You gotta throw somebody in the streets—this has got to stop,” Urso urged other Bonanno honchos in a discussion about muzzling informers following the arrest of Joe Massino. “You turned, we wipe your family out. … Why should the rats’ kids be happy, where my kids or your kids should suffer because I’m away for life.… See, Louie, Louie, if you take one kid, I hate to say it, but you do what you gotta do, they’re going to fucking think twice.” (Unbeknownst to Urso, his words were captured on tape by Big Louie Tartaglione, a wired turncoat.)

Borrowing a page from the past, the five families now view proper blood lines as indispensable character references. Fixated on insuring loyalty and greater security, hierarchs restored a binding requirement that both parents, not just the father, must be of Italian lineage as a fundamental requirement to become a made man. At Joe Massino’s trial in 2004, Sal Vitale disclosed that Massino and other leaders reimposed the rigid rule at a Commission meeting. Vitale also reported another step to weed out weaklings. In 2000 the godfathers decreed that any wannabe arrested on drug charges would have to wait at least five years after release from prison before being straightened out. The rule was intended to finally eliminate from membership vulnerable drug dealers, who often become informers to escape harsh prison sentences.

The extreme steps advocated by Mafia insiders should be a beacon warning against an easy surrender. “Backed into a corner, they might become desperate and lash out in ways they haven’t before,” Matthew Heron, a former supervisor of the FBI’s Organized Crime Branch in New York, believes. Pointing to the Mafia’s penchant for violence. Heren says that an FBI analysis attributed at least 912 murders in the New York area to the Mob from 1970 through 2003, an average of almost thirty a year.

Heren and two agents in front-line trenches—Philip Scala of the Gambino Squad and Michele Campanella, the chief of the Genovese Squad—confirm that additional agents are needed. “Despite the tremendous successes we have had, we need more resources and funding to get a real shot at wiping them out in three to five years,” says Scala.

After the misfortunes of Joe Massino and his Bonanno compatriots, FBI officials believe the Gambino and Genovese gangs returned to the peak of the five families’ pyramid. Scala and Campanella estimated in 2004 that they each had managed to raise their ranks to at least two hundred active soldiers and several thousand compliant associates. The Gambinos, under the direction of street bosses and capos, have become much more secretive in the wake of John Gotti’s flashy reign. “They are trying to keep their big earners off our radar screens,” Scala says. To shield the identities of money men and insulate them from investigations, the street bosses have instructed them to stay away from hangouts and from Mob social events where they could be spotted by agents.

Campanella credits the Genoveses, the other large borgata, with trying to reconstruct the widespread business structure it developed under Vincent Chin Gigante’s direction. In prison, the aging Gigante retained his godfather title while senior capos ran the family in his absence. “The boss is incarcerated but there is somebody ready to step up to the plate for him and take care of the money-making possibilities,” Campanella explains.

A thorny question is whether eased law-enforcement pressure can whittle away the Cosa Nostra’s remaining strength. Institutional memories about the Mafia’s potency might fade; investigative fervor and proactive policies might further lessen as fewer battle-hardened agents and prosecutors are assigned to combat the Mob. Most federal attorneys arrive as fledglings directly from law school, untrained in prosecuting mafiosi and unaware of Mob stratagems. Many leave within ten years for lucrative private practices, just as they have honed the skills to master complex RICO cases. For two decades, the Justice Department’s fourteen Organized Crime Strike Forces relied on a corps of prosecutors who stayed longer and concentrated exclusively on the Mafia. Although many law-enforcement researchers believe the independent strike forces proved their effectiveness, they were eliminated in a 1989 political decision to mollify the regional U.S. Attorneys who viewed them more as rivals than as colleagues.

If the federal government continues its cutbacks, local officials wonder if the
FBI will pass along the intelligence it obtains from informers, particularly those relating to gambling and loan-sharking operations. The bureau reputedly still shares evidence and intelligence leads grudgingly with state prosecutors and police departments, which often breeds resentment and confusion within other agencies.