Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America's Most Powerful Mafia Empires (39 page)

But soon there were unexpected Bonanno mobsters at the restaurant. The Zips, Baldo Amato and Cesare Bonventre, accompanied by Leonardo Coppola, a drug dealer in Lilo’s faction, showed up and Galante invited them to his table. Giuseppe Turano was surprised that Coppola would patronize his place because the two men disliked each other. Acting as peacemaker, Galante told them he hoped a convivial luncheon would end their feuding.

The five men at the outdoor table finished their meal of salad, fish, and wine, and Galante lit up a cigar while waiting for dessert and coffee. Just then, at 2:45 in the afternoon, three ski-masked men strode into the restaurant. John Turano, the seventeen-year-old son of the owners, shouted a warning toward the open courtyard as he scrambled away. One of the trio pegged a shot at the teenager, wounding him in the buttocks. His sister, Constanza, heard her father cry out, “What are you doing?” before gunfire rang out. In the patio, the intruders—apparently joined by the Zips Amato and Bonventre—opened up with a shotgun and automatic handguns. Galante, Coppola, and Turano died instantly. Hit at close range, Galante was hurled backward, a shotgun hole in his left eye and his cigar clenched between his teeth in a death grip.

Witnesses on the street saw the masked shooters leave Joe and Mary’s with Amato and Bonventre on their heels. There was no attempt by the Zip “bodyguards”
for Galante to retaliate against the killers, easy targets whose backs were turned as they entered a getaway car in front of the restaurant; nor did the gunmen demonstrate any apprehension of the Zips walking calmly in another direction. It was clear that Amato and Bonventre conspired in the assassination, but there was no immediate evidence or witness’s testimony to arrest or indict them.

Motives for Galante’s execution buzzed through the Mafia rumor mill and were relayed by informers to detectives and FBI agents. From prison, Rastelli had dispatched a supporter to petition the Commission for approval to kill Galante as an illegitimate usurper. The Mafia’s board of directors was receptive. The putative Bonanno boss had committed two unforgivable offenses that threatened the leaders of New York’s four other borgatas. He had attempted to injure their interests, especially the Gambinos’, by cornering the American end of the Sicilian heroin market. Possibly even more grievous, after Carlo Gambino’s death he had openly predicted that he would be crowned boss of bosses. With the Gambino’s Paul Castellano in the lead, the Commission sentenced Lilo Galante to death. Amato and Bonventre, two of the stalwart Sicilians he had brought over from the mother country as his praetorian guard, were reached and persuaded to betray him. Investigators concluded that they had deliberately steered Coppola to Joe and Mary’s because the plotters wanted him—a fervent Galante supporter—out of the way to prevent retaliatory raids to avenge his “boss’s” slaying.

Another intended victim, Angelo Presanzano, narrowly avoided a gory execution by leaving the luncheon table early. The seventy-year-old Mafia veteran, however, survived only a few more days. Hiding out in the Catskills and terrified that he was a marked man, Presanzano suffered a fatal heart attack before any gunman could track him down.

“He must have stepped on someone’s toes,” James T. Sullivan, New York’s chief of detectives, commented after reviewing the intelligence findings about Galante. In fact, the brutal sixty-nine-year-old gangster had trampled on many.

Galante’s murder once again plunged the fractious Bonannos into disarray, without a strong hierarchy to negotiate disputes or agreements with their Mob counterparts. The basic structure of the other four New York Mafia borgatas remained in solid shape, with their bosses all too eager to take advantage of the Bonanno decline.

The natural death of Carlo Gambino and the gangland shootings of Joe Colombo, Joey Gallo, and Carmine Galante had resulted in a changing of the
guard in the Gambino, Colombo, and Bonanno borgatas in the 1970s. These developments in three major families were the result of internal rivalries and gangster power plays; none had been caused by pressure from law-enforcement agencies, the Title III electronic surveillance act, or the RICO law. J. Edgar Hoover died in 1972, and his three immediate successors as FBI director, L. Patrick Gray, William D. Ruckelshaus, and Clarence M. Kelley, continued the same ineffectual and indifferent policies Hoover had instituted for pursuing mafiosi.

On assignment in America in the 1970s, Frank Pulley, an organized-crime detective from Britain’s Scotland Yard, was appalled by the widespread indifference in the higher ranks of most American police agencies to the Mafia’s awesome threat. An intelligence specialist, Pulley was gathering evidence about attempts by American mobsters to take over London’s posh legal casinos. He singled out the New Jersey State Police for its anti-Mafia efforts but thought the New York Police Department and many federal and other local units were asleep at the wheel. “Many good cops who knew what was going on were kicking against the bricks and getting no support from their superiors,” Pulley recalled.

Their comfort zones seemingly secure from outside pressure, the leaders of the Commission in the mid-1970s reopened the books, permitting all of the nation’s Mafia families to induct qualified members to replace mobsters who had died. New blood was needed, and there appeared to be no danger that the next generation of mafiosi would be compromised or infiltrated by the lackadaisical federal and local law-enforcement agencies.

The Mob bosses’ unconcern about law-enforcement efforts and zeal was well founded. Struggling alone, Bob Blakey pleaded with prosecutors and investigators to use RICO to attack the nerve centers—Cosa Nostra hierarchies. Almost a decade had gone by since the passage of the law and the analytically minded law professor was still searching fruitlessly for allies in his combat with the Mob.

The FBI Wises Up

F
or two hardened FBI agents it was a novel assignment in unorthodox surroundings: a pastoral college town some two hundred miles from the clamor surrounding their offices overlooking the courthouses lining Foley Square, in downtown Manhattan. Driving along the campus heights at Cornell University, agents James Kossler and Jules Bonavolonta were engulfed in a picturesque landscape. On that placid Saturday afternoon in August 1979, sails fluttered from drifting boats on Cayuga Lake, the Cascadilla Gorge and waterfall were framed by velvety green hills, carefree students tossed Frisbees, and melodic chimes echoed from the clock tower. It was an idyllic picture-postcard scene. Nevertheless, Kossler and Bonavolonta groused to each other, uncertain why they had been ordered to spend a week on a remote campus in Ithaca, New York, far removed from their life’s work of hunting criminals and racketeers.

Both men were new mid-level supervisors in New York, having been recently appointed by the district’s highest official, Neil Welch. While welcoming the promotions, Kossler and Bonavolonta understood they were working for an iconoclastic reformer. Welch had abruptly ordered them to spend a week at Cornell. His instructions were crisp: attend a seminar and listen to certain lectures. Laconic directives were the hallmark of Welch’s maverick style; the FBI official abhorred long memos and time-consuming staff meetings.

With a complement of one thousand agents—about 10 percent of the FBIs entire strength—New York was the bureau’s flagship station, and overseeing it was the most coveted field assignment in the agency. In other cities, the head of an FBI office was designated Special Agent in Charge, “SAC” in bureau talk. Signifying New York’s prominence, the head job there carried the prestigious title of assistant director of the FBI.

Under Hoover’s autocratic reign, Neil Welch would never have advanced to New York. But after Hoover’s death in 1972 and the appointment in 1978 of William Webster, a former federal judge, as FBI director, the bureaucratic reins at headquarters in Washington gradually loosened. Dedicated to changing the organization’s archaic policies and to ending the Constitutional abuses winked at by Hoover, Webster gave Welch a free hand in shaking up the New York staff. Welch had chafed at Hoover’s downgrading of the Mafia’s importance, and he was determined to overhaul the organized-crime units under his control. The Mob, he told everyone who would listen, was an everyday reality to field agents, but a forgotten factor at FBI headquarters. “We were not trained about the Mafia or how it operated,” Welch later admitted. As a tyro agent in New York, during one of Hoover’s on-again, off-again forays against the Cosa Nostra, he learned that the best method for obtaining accurate leads on mobsters was to get his hands surreptitiously on the Narcotics Bureau’s Black Book, the intelligence files compiled by Hoover’s rival, Harry Anslinger. Hoover had banned distribution of the dossiers to his agents, an absurd consequence of his animosity toward Anslinger.

A lawyer and talented administrator, Welch in the 1960s had succeeded in landing SAC appointments in Buffalo and in Detroit, despite Hoover’s coolness toward him. Both assignments were in Mafia territories, and Welch, disregarding Hoover’s admonitions, launched investigations into Mob operations. His efforts generated stinging rebukes from Hoover. “He accused me of running lopsided offices, and I was in serious political trouble for years,” Welch said, chuckling. “He complained that I wasn’t doing anything about Communist cases and his worn-out priorities.”

The post-Hoover era saw Welch move up to SAC in Philadelphia, where his disdain for red tape and headquarters’ interference became the stuff of FBI legend. Outraged that a holdover supervisor called Washington for clearance on a directive that he had issued, Welch stomped into the milquetoast supervisor’s office and with a pair of scissors snipped all of his telephone lines.

“It was an excellent lesson that no one was going to question my orders and
call headquarters for permission on any damn thing,” Welch said of the incident. “I wanted to teach everyone that we have to depend upon ourselves and we don’t need anything from headquarters.”

Welch viewed the New York area as the Mafia’s “world headquarters” and his appointment there as his most daunting challenge. “I was pretty well advanced in my career, and I didn’t want to go out with a record of meaningless statistics. I wanted to achieve something important by knocking off the country’s biggest crooks.”

An appraisal after settling into the new job convinced him that New York’s agents were floundering in quixotic efforts against the area’s five sizable borgatas. His first policy decision was to “turn the office over on its head” by raising the Cosa Nostra to the highest priority level. Previously, agents working Mob cases did a decent job in developing informers, but these liaisons produced few arrests. Welch was dismayed at the methods used by some agents to handle snitches. Informers usually became turncoats for money or as an insurance policy for leniency if they got jammed up in criminal cases. Under tacit agreements with New York agents, the informers were providing the bureau with seemingly inside information about the crime families. Welch, however, evaluated most of these tips as trivial gossip. It was a lamentable strategy that generated few concrete facts or evidence about important crimes and internal Mob developments. “We were getting general information, sort of a Who’s Who’ on relations in the families,” Welch fumed. “And if something happened, we’d get a version of the event. It was the Mob’s version of what they wanted us to know and we weren’t going out there, investigating, doing any real work to find out if it was fact or fiction.”

Welch gradually brought in a new cadre of assistants to devise strategies for a fresh campaign against the Mob. “I want you to play two ball games at the same time,” he instructed the newcomers. “Continue the intelligence gathering but go after the top people. Lock somebody up!”

Many agents considered New York City a hardship post, mainly because of its expensive real estate. Almost all agents lived in the more affordable distant suburbs, but that entailed long commutes of up to three hours each way on clogged highways. Greater effort, longer hours, and tighter surveillance of mobsters were demanded by Welch. The fatiguing drives and home-life stress were disincentives for agents to put in extra hours trailing mobsters or ferreting out reluctant witnesses.

“The best thing to do for these agents is work them until their tongues hang
Out,” Welch advised. “Make them forget they’re in New York. Keep telling them they’re doing significant work, that they are going to bring about important changes, and have a real effect on organized crime.”

Kossler and Bonavolonta were two of Welch’s first replacements. Both were in their thirties with records of adopting unusual tactics and the nerve to cast aside the bureau’s petrified operational rules. With smoke plumes constantly lofting from his pipe and a contemplative mien, the red-haired Kossler could pass for a tweedy college professor rather than the rugged investigator that he had proved to be for over a decade. Unlike most agents, who had military or legal training, he had entered the bureau with a pedagogical background. A Pittsburgh native with a degree in education, Kossler specialized in teaching mentally retarded children before signing on with the bureau. A casual conversation with an FBI agent at a party whetted Kossler’s interest in a career change that offered more thrills, more money, and more travel in a year than he would experience in a lifetime in a classroom.