Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America's Most Powerful Mafia Empires (38 page)

Two other deaths in the 1970s significantly altered Mafia history: Carlo Gambino and Carmine Galante.

The first to go was the venerated Don Carlo Gambino, who came closer than any other member of the Commission to being recognized as Boss of Bosses. Although the title of
capo di tutti capí
was a media invention, Gambino was the Mob’s most potent and revered godfather in the decade stretching from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s. He was unquestionably first among equals. In 1957, he seized control of the borgata that would bear his name by arranging the treacherous murder of the erratic Albert Anastasia, and then proceeded to unify and enlarge the racketeering scope of the family. Under Gambino’s firm command, the borgata became the nation’s largest with about five hundred made men and more than two thousand associates. The family’s size and its wealth alone would have put him on the highest rungs of the Mafia. In addition, Don Carlo was an innovator, encouraging his capos and soldiers to expand the family’s fortunes by infiltrating unions and legitimate business where the booty was larger and the risks fewer than in violent crimes. Control of teamster, construction industry, waterfront, and garbage-carting union locals created a steady cash flow from union welfare fund frauds. Their power in the unions gave the mobsters the clout to demand kickbacks from companies in exchange for labor peace and sweetheart collective-bargaining contracts. The under-the-table union deals allowed Gambino and his capos to become partners in semi-legitimate companies and to benefit extensively from inflated rigged bidding on public and private contracts.

By outwitting his main rival, Joe Bonanno, who was forced into retirement in the mid-1960’s, Gambino became the senior don on the Commission. His word became dogma for the national Commission and the policies it set for the country’s other crime families.

Life in the Mafia had been bountiful for Gambino. For half a century, from soldier to godfather, he was seemingly immune from law-enforcement pressure, avoiding prison terms as charges against him were dismissed or overturned on appeal. On the surface, he lived unpretentiously, renting an ordinary apartment in a middle-class section of Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn and owning a more posh home in Massapequa on Long Island’s North Shore. To tax collectors, he pretended that his income was derived from partnerships in a labor consulting firm and in trucking companies. Experience taught him to rely on caution, and he moved around in the company of select bruisers. A slightly built man, with a beaklike nose and an elfish smile, his appearance belied the deadly power he
exerted on his own and other Mafia families. Once Carlo Gambino assumed the mantle of boss, except for Joe Bonanno’s misconceived plot there was never an attempt on his life or a conspiracy to damage him.

Gambino adapted easily to the role of patriarch. To young mafiosi to whom he took a liking he volunteered the philosophy that inspired his success. “You have to be like a lion and a fox,” he lectured attentive recruits. “The lion frightens away the wolves. The fox recognizes traps. If you are like a lion and a fox, nothing will defeat you.” It is doubtful that any of the boss’s untutored disciples realized that Gambino’s parable was plagiarized from Niccoló Machiavelli, the sixteenth-century Italian political realist and cynic, who advocated that princes should rely on deception to seize and retain power.

Time ran out for the lion-fox on May 15, 1976. Don Carlo died at age seventy-four in his bed in Massapequa, after suffering from a heart ailment for several years. A consensus builder, always thinking about his borgata’s future, Gambino selected an heir before his death. His choice was his brother-in-law and second cousin, Paul “Big Paul” Castellano. Traditionally, in the Gambino family, as in most American borgatas, a new boss must be ratified by a majority of the capos. This odd parallel to a democratic selection is usually honored in the breach, since the formal vote is predetermined in each family by the faction that has seized control.

During the last months of Don Carlo’s failing health, Paul Castellano had been in training as acting boss of the family. He became Gambino’s dependable right hand, channeling the family’s activities into the white-collar areas of union and industrial corruption. At the time of Gambino’s death, the longtime underboss, Aniello Dellacroce, was serving the final months of a prison sentence, convicted by that old Mafia bugaboo the 1RS for evading $123,000 in income taxes from stock he obtained in an extortion plot. Dellacroce’s ideas about the family’s operations were in sharp contrast with Castellano’s. A ruggedly built, cigar-chomping mobster from the tenements of Little Italy, Dellacroce relied for revenue on old-fashioned practices: loan-sharking, truck hijackings, robberies, numbers, and gambling. He had a rich assortment of Mob nicknames, “Neil,” “Mr. Neil,” “Tall Guy,” and “Polack.” His adherents in the family were chiefly recognized for their abilities as hit men and bone-breakers. Released from prison shortly after Carlo Gambino’s death, Dellacroce had the heavy-duty fire power to challenge Castellano for the top spot. But, ever the good soldier, he respected Gambino’s deathbed wish. Rather than unleashing an internal war, he accepted Castellano’s coronation in late 1976 and agreed to
continue as underboss. According to Mob folklore, “Big Paul” won over “Mr. Neil,” with a practical proposal: “Anything you had with Carlo, you keep. Anything more you want, we talk.” By compromising instead of selecting a new underboss committed to him, Castellano had divided Gambino’s unified kingdom into two domains. But through appeasement he had avoided internecine combat, and with plenty of spoils for himself and for Dellacroce, there was little to worry about. Moreover, Big Paul was now the family’s acknowledged head and his triumph made him the first American-born boss of the Gambinos, the nation’s most important borgata.

A year earlier, in 1975, another native-born American, Carmine Galante, tried to assume control of New York’s strife-torn Bonanno gang. Balding, bespectacled, and with a bent walk, Galante was another don whose demeanor contradicted the popular image of a Mob narcotics predator and assassin. To passersby, the chunky, five-feet four-inch tall Galante looked like a relaxed, retired grandfather as he selected fruit and vegetables at Balducci’s market in Greenwich Village, or stopped for espresso and cannoli at the De Robertis Pasticceria on the Lower East Side. Yet he was a man who had been in serious trouble with the law since childhood, a man with an unsurpassed underworld resume of viciousness. Suspected by New York police of being a participant or a conspirator in more than eighty murders, Galante had deftly eluded indictment for all of them. Mafia associates said he was the actual gunman in the shocking and politically motivated 1943 murder in New York of Carlo Tresca, the exiled Italian anarchist editor and opponent of Benito Mussolini. It was a homicide to benefit Vito Genovese, who was in Italy during World War II; in courting favors from Mussolini, Don Vito wanted Tresca’s pen and voice silenced.

Galante was born in 1910, and reared in the mafiosi enclave of East Harlem. His parents had emigrated from Castellammare del Golfo, the fishing village and ancient breeding-ground for the Sicilian Mafia, the incubator for Joe Bonanno and numerous Bonanno family members in America. At age ten, Galante was sent briefly to reform school as an “incorrigible juvenile defendant” for truancy and a string of street robberies. Seven years later, he was convicted of assault and sentenced to Sing Sing prison. Back on the streets, with the aid of well-connected Castellammarese relatives, Galante was an apt recruit for the Bonanno gang. By the time Galante was in his forties, Joe Bonanno promoted him to consigliere and put him in charge of the family’s
narcotics network. Nicknamed “Lilo” by his mobster companions, after the Italian slang word for a stubby little cigar, Galante was at Bonanno’s side and his main adviser when the 1957 compact was made in Palermo with the Sicilian clans to plague America with heroin. Fluent in Italian, French, and Spanish, Galante was the Mafia’s principal emissary in Europe for their multimillion-dollar drug deals. Harry Anslinger’s narcotics agents caught up with him in 1960, and he was indicted on federal charges of being the “chief executive” of a gang that imported vast amounts of drugs into the country from Canada. On the eve of summations, the first trial ended when the jury foreman broke his back in a mysterious fall down a flight of stairs in an abandoned building in the middle of the night, and a mistrial was declared. Federal prosecutors believed the foreman had been assaulted to halt the trial and to terrorize and intimidate jurors, but lacked proof.

At Galante’s second trial two years later, with thirteen codefendants, there were calculated attempts to bedevil the judge and jury and cause another mistrial. One of Galante’s soldiers, Salvatore Panico, climbed into the jurors’ section, pushing them aside and screaming vilifications. Another codefendant pitched a chair at a prosecutor that shattered against the railing of the jury box. Presiding judge Lloyd F. MacMahon awoke one morning at his suburban home to find a severed dog’s head on his porch, an ancient and crude Mafia intimidation tactic. For months afterward, the judge had round-the-clock protection. MacMahon ordered several defendants gagged and shackled after frequent profane and vile outbursts directed at the jurors and prosecutors. Despite the outrageous attempts to disrupt the trial, Galante was found guilty on multiple narcotics charges. Prison psychiatrists diagnosed him as having a psychopathic personality, unable to tolerate losing arguments or being contradicted or humiliated. His piercing eyes made prison guards quiver. “Galante’s stare was so dreadful that people would shrivel in their chairs,” according to Detective Ralph Salerno. In his many encounters with icy Mafia killers, Salerno admitted that only two of them rattled him with their terrifying eyes: Neil Dellacroce and Carmine Galante.

Inside prison, Galante maintained his status; a small stable of other Bonanno inmates attended to his mundane needs. Disdainful of penitentiary grub, Galante shelled out $250 a month in bribes for choice cuts of meat to be served to himself and his flunkies. At the time, prison authorities gave Mafia inmates virtually a free hand to run their own sections of cell blocks. The mobsters were tolerated because they created no disciplinary or violence problems. Snitches
later told investigators that the arrogant Galante vowed to prison buddies that he would restore the former glory of the splintered family, which had been in flux and without a Commission-approved boss since Joe Bonanno’s forced retirement in the mid-1960s. Paroled in 1974 after serving twelve years, Galante’s lust for power and his murderous instincts soon prevailed. Philip “Rusty” Rastelli, a rival for the top post and interim boss, balked at stepping aside in Galante’s favor. But convicted of extortion, Rastelli began serving a six-year sentence that left the road open for Galante to become the most decisive and potent capo in the faction-riven borgata. As the former consigliere and virtual underboss to Joe Bonanno, Lilo considered himself the rightful heir to the throne, even officiating at inductions of wiseguys, a power normally reserved for the boss.

On parole, Galante masqueraded as a legitimate businessman, opening a dry-cleaning store on Elizabeth Street in Little Italy. His personal life was equally duplicitous. He had three children with his wife, but after his narcotics prison stretch he lived with another woman who had borne him two children. Galante confided in friends that as a “good Catholic” he would never seek a divorce.

Refusing to recognize Rastelli as boss, Galante made two bold moves to raise money and to reinforce his contingent. Increasing his cash flow, he stepped up narcotics deals with Sicilian exporters, designating himself “rent collector,” the sole Mob magnate entitled to franchise fees from Sicilians operating in the United States. The loot would not be shared with other borgatas. And, adding muscle to his ranks, Galante imported from Sicily additional manpower known as Zips. The origin of the term “Zips” is fuzzy. Remo Franceschini, the New York detective and Mafia expert, attributes the expression to a contraction of a Sicilian slang word for “hicks” or “primitives.”

Galante’s undisguised attempt to dominate the Mob’s narcotics market alarmed New York’s reigning godfathers, who declared him persona non grata. Unconcerned by the animosity he was engendering, Galante was confident that his Zips retained the traditional Mafia virtues of loyalty and ferocity that would reinvigorate the Bonanno gang. He began using Sicilians for the toughest jobs, often relying on them as his personal guards. Two of his favorites were Baldassare Amato and Cesare Bonventre, rugged twenty-seven-year-olds and close friends from Castellammare del Golfo, whom Galante had personally inducted as made men. He had total confidence in their fealty.

On the steamy Thursday afternoon of July 12, 1979, Galante was dropped off for a luncheon date in the fading Bushwick section of Brooklyn by his
nephew James Galante, a soldier and his chauffeur for that day. In earlier times when Bushwick was more prosperous, it had been a Bonanno family stronghold. Zips still liked the area for its remaining Mob storefront clubs and pizzeria hangouts where the Sicilian dialect dominated and undercover agents and nares were as easily spotted as a herd of pink elephants. Galante’s distant cousin Giuseppe Turano and his wife owned Joe and Mary Italian-American Restaurant, where Galante often dropped in for home-style Sicilian dishes and a chat with Giuseppe. The Knickerbocker Avenue restaurant retained a nostalgic image of an old-fashioned, unpretentious gathering place, with lemon-colored, floral-patterned oilcloths on the tables, and photographs of Frank Sinatra and other Italian-American celebrities bedecking the walls. Above the entrance was a large painting of the Last Supper.

The reason for Galante’s visit was a bon voyage luncheon for Turano, who was leaving the next day for a vacation in Sicily. A rectangular table in a private patio was prepared for the honored guest, Lilo Galante, his cousin, and Angelo Presanzano, an elderly soldier and devoted adjutant of Lilo. Before the first course was served, Presanzano excused himself, saying he had pressing business to attend to, and left.