Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America's Most Powerful Mafia Empires (40 page)

Joining the FBI in 1970 at the tail end of Hoover’s administration, Kossler was taught by sophisticated agents that the quickest escalator to success was churning out arrests of small-time criminals and hoodlums. The prevailing bureau success style was: compile a fat statistical portfolio of stolen cars, gambling, and other easily solved cases. “Your job performance was rated strictly on statistics, not the quality of arrests,” Kossler said. “The word from older agents was to think about our work as being like a fireman’s. We put out routine blazes every day, chalking up numbers until something big happens, like a kidnapping or a major bank robbery. Then we stop what we’re doing and jump into the one big, high-profile case.”

When Jimmy Hoffa vanished in 1975, Kossler was assigned to the New Jersey aspect of the investigation. He was on a squad dogging Anthony Tony Pro Provenzano, a northern-New Jersey teamster union official and Genovese family capo, suspected of a central role in arranging the abduction and presumed murder of Hoffa. The Hoffa mystery was a decisive juncture for Kossler, illustrating to him the Mafia’s defiant contempt of law enforcement. By slaying a prominent labor leader and disposing of his body, the Mob blatantly demonstrated its power to maintain control of a union vital to its interests without fear of reprisal or government intervention. Kossler’s probing into Tony Pro’s bailiwick sharpened his understanding of the Mafia’s covert and menacing ties to teamster locals. His prowess in digging up evidence for a New Jersey labor-racketeering
squad brought Kossler to Welch’s attention and earned him the job of organizing a similar unit in New York.

Welch understood that much of the Mafia’s strength and wealth in New York was linked to the control of unions. As a partner for Kossler, Welch nominated an agent who thought along those same lines. He was Jules Bonavolonta. Lithe, a karate enthusiast, with boundless energy and a tart-tongued wit, Bonavolonta’s inexorable hatred of mobsters stemmed from his childhood. Raised in Mafia-tainted Newark, New Jersey, he heard his father, an immigrant tailor from southern Italy, recount how hardworking Italian-Americans were harassed and threatened by neighborhood wiseguys. A boy in the 1950s, he witnessed crude shakedown attempts in his father’s modest tailor shop. Years later, he proudly reflected on the courage his hard-pressed father had exhibited by never yielding a dime to mobsters.

Graduating from Seton Hall University, Bonavolonta was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the army and fought in Vietnam with the Special Forces, the Green Berets. The prospect of new adventures and meaningful accomplishments against mafiosi and other criminals brought him into the FBI in 1968. From the start he rebelled against the fossilized investigative system. With his street-smart Newark background, he sought undercover roles, believing them to be the most effective tool for gathering incriminating evidence against mobsters. In Bonavolonta’s early years as an agent, the bureau frowned on such exploits. Even after his death and into the mid-1970s, Hoover’s entrenched disciples in Washington opposed long-term undercover assignments as unproductive, costly ploys.

When organized-crime investigations did come his way, Bonavolonta usually disregarded official policy. He scraped up leads and evidence by hanging around Mafia bars, posing as a made guy and wiseguy. His main armament was the ability to imitate a swaggering mafioso style and an unflinching gaze through jet black eyes. His barroom bravado act in Brooklyn once almost erupted into a brawl and potential shoot-out with real wannabes. To Bonavolonta’s dismay, he often was pulled off the streets for undesired duties. Before Welch rescued him, Bonavolonta’s dreariest period was a desk job at headquarters in the J. Edgar Hoover building on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington. Writing about his FBI days, he described that two-year stint as being trapped with “timeservers, ticket-punchers, and fat-assed desk jockeys sitting around doing not a hell of a lot of anything useful.”

Neil Welch had a valid reason for dispatching Kossler, his labor-rackets specialist, and Bonavolonta, his organized-crime expert, upstate to Cornell. A lawyer as well as a masterful investigator, Welch kept abreast of criminal-law developments. He read law school reviews, sought out prosecutors and trial lawyers, and discussed legal conundrums with law professors. One professor who intrigued him was Bob Blakey, and he knew of Blakey’s lament that for a decade the FBI had failed to grasp the significance of his pet project, RICO, the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act.

Blakey had left Senator McClellan’s committee in 1973 and moved to Cornell as a professor of criminal law and procedures. At the university, still searching for methods to counterattack the Mafia, he established a unique think tank, the Cornell Institute on Organized Crime. Starting in 1977, for two and a half years, Blakey took a break from teaching for an investigative job. He became chief counsel for the House of Representatives’ thorny reinvestigation of President Kennedy’s assassination, the inquiry that revealed how the Mafia profited from Kennedy’s elimination, and that suggested that mobsters might have had a role in the murder.

Returning full-time to Cornell’s law school afterward, Blakey cut back on cross-country stump speeches. His new approach was to sell RICO at summer seminars at Cornell. Through the prestige of the university’s law school and the Institute on Organized Crime, he enticed state prosecutors into concentrating on his message in a relaxed, distraction-free campus setting. Another goal was to bypass the indifferent federal law-enforcement system by urging state officials to create “little RICO laws” modeled on the Congressional statute. This maneuver, he believed, could unleash a second legal front against the Mob.

Before Welch’s arrival in New York, FBI officials there and in the rest of the country spurned Blakey’s invitations for agents to attend the seminars. Typically going his own way, Welch ignored a mandate from headquarters that agents could attend training sessions only under official auspices at the FBI academy in Quantico, Virginia. He eagerly accepted Blakey’s offer, and in the summer of 1979 sent the first FBI agents to participate in the RICO educational program.

In selecting Kossler and Bonavolonta, Welch knew he had two investigators with mind-sets similar to his own, committed to developing new strategies and tactics for grappling with New York’s Mafia. Blakey’s opening sessions on the RICO law, however, disappointed both agents. Before the trip, Bonavolonta was
dimly aware of the statute; and while Kossler knew about its broad outlines, he was uncertain of its possible value to FBI investigators. Most of the hundred people at Cornell were state prosecutors, leading both agents to feel as if they were fish out of water, oddities to the other participants, who apparently understood the thrust of Blakey’s lectures and his hypothetical case discussions. “It was mainly theoretical and the local prosecutors were interested in state systems that were not applicable to us,” Kossler complained. “Jules and I kept asking, What are we doing here? We’re not part of this fraternity.’” “The seminar was a blend of college tutorials and an evangelical revival meeting. Articulate, with sparse graying hair, Blakey fulfilled the role of the prototypical professor clarifying the nuances of a groundbreaking law. But when drama was needed, Blakey would transform himself into a rousing circuit preacher. Reviewing a sixty-one-page history of labor racketeering in America that he had written for the program, Blakey railed, “The Mafia is a dread disease that is threatening to destroy the American labor movement. We need a comprehensive preemptive strike aimed directly at the heart of the Mafia. That is the only strategy for dealing with this cancer that has existed in America for more than half a century.”

Suddenly, Kossler felt that the sermon’s main message was aimed directly at him. He listened attentively as Blakey hammered away on two points. First: RICO must be twinned with Title III bugs and wiretaps as the only effective tactic for gleaning evidence. Second: investigators and prosecutors must stop wasting time on two-bit gangsters and focus entirely on royalty, the Mob bosses and their skilled ministers. “Work on the families, the enterprises, not low-level individuals,” Blakey implored.

One of Blakey’s favorite old movies,
Little Caesar
, which may have influenced the choice of a name that yielded the acronym RICO, was another device that the law professor used at the seminar. The movie was entertaining but he selected it to reinforce his notion that the dons should be the prime objective of investigators and prosecutors. In the film, Edward G. Robinson is cast as a ferocious thug named Caesar Enrico “Rico” Bandello, a killer clawing his way to the top of a big-city gang. Rico, however, is subservient to the city’s real gangland colossus, a polished, tuxedo-wearing upper-class figure dubbed “Big Boy.” A 1930s Hollywood stereotype of the crude, Italian immigrant gangster, Rico is ultimately gunned down by the police after murdering a prosecutor.

“Yes, Rico gets shot and killed in an alley,” Blakey intoned to his audience of prosecutors and two FBI agents when the lights came on. “But what about Big Boy? He escapes punishment because he wasn’t investigated.” With elongated,
dramatic pauses, Blakey then delivered the underlying motif of the weeklong seminar. “Nothing happens to Big Boy. He’s still in charge. Nothing has really changed. That’s the overwhelming value of RICO. It is designed to change the end of that movie.”

Back in New York, Kossler and Bonavolonta were fervid converts to RICO. Their enthusiasm was endorsed by Welch but they needed more intricate explanations from Blakey on employing the law against the Mafia. Four months later, shortly before Christmas 1979, Welch authorized Kossler, Bonavolonta, and three other supervisors to meet with Blakey for a private tête-à-tête in Ithaca. At marathon sessions over two days, with meals sent into their small conference room at a Holiday Inn, Blakey amplified RICO’s potential applications.

The professor outlined on a blackboard how RICO should be used to combat the Mafia. He told them that the statute included provisions on investigating, prosecuting, and obtaining long prison sentences. “You have to use all three theories, not just one,” he said, pacing before the blackboard. “And you’ve got to attack their economic foundations through asset seizures and by bringing civil RICO cases.”

Embalmed methods by federal prosecutors was another barrier the agents would have to surmount. “They want to make it simple and easy for themselves,” Blakey said, critiquing federal attorneys. “They become scalp collectors, making a case against an individual and putting him in prison. That’s nothing more than a merry-go-round and you’ve got to get off that ride. Force the prosecutors to do more. Show them that while individuals commit organized crimes, it’s the organizations that make organized crime possible.”

Another vital strategy was Blakey’s “tip of the iceberg and dynamic probable cause theory” for installing bugs and wiretaps. Prosecutors, he cautioned, misunderstood the amount of evidence required to establish “probable cause” for obtaining court authorization for Title III electronic surveillance in RICO cases. The main thrust was to focus the investigation on an “enterprise” as outlined in the law, not a specific individual or crime like loan-sharking, extortion or gambling. The essential factor was “enterprise.” Agents, he pointed out, could use informers, their own observations of mobsters gathering for obvious meetings, and records of a Mafia family’s criminal history as evidence of an ongoing enterprise. Those facts would be sufficient to obtain authorization from a judge for an initial bug or wiretap applicable to RICO.

“Use what you get on the first wiretap or bug to get another,” Blakey continued.
“Then use the evidence from the first two bugs and taps to bug another meeting place or mobster’s home.”

Omertà—
the Mafia code of silence and secrecy—could be outflanked by persistent electronic eavesdropping. “Don’t pull a bug after you get confirmation and evidence for one easy conviction,” Blakey added. “Climb the ladder until you get to the top of the organization. There’s no defense against wiretaps and bugs.”

Finally, he urged the agents always to think systemically and not about prosecuting specific crimes. “If you uncover evidence of a homicide, make the fact of the murder an item of evidence. Show a series of homicides and other crimes and you’ve proven the acts of racketeering. Demonstrate the existence and pattern of an enterprise and connect the murders and other crimes, and you’ve got a RICO indictment and almost certain conviction.”

Because New York was the Mafia’s largest regional fortress, Blakey stressed the implications of their war against the five families to his new acolytes. He envisioned that RICO victories in New York—with its media prominence and guaranteed nationwide publicity—would encourage FBI agents and U.S. Attorneys in the rest of the country to undertake similar campaigns.

As the agents settled into their car for the trip back to the city, Blakey stuck his head in the window and gave them his parting shot. “Right now, law enforcement is like a wolf to a herd of deer. You and prosecutors look for single cases, you pick off the sick and wounded, and only make the herd—organized crime—stronger.”

Blakey’s explanations at the private eight-hour meetings were an “epiphany” and an “adrenaline rush” for Kossler. “He unlocked my mind. He gave us a clear road map for investigating and making RICO cases. Before leaving Ithaca, I told him that the next time he writes a law he has to include a handbook so we’ll know how to use it.”

In New York, Kossler and Bonavolonta extolled Blakey’s concepts, bending the ears of fellow agents and receptive higher-ranking personnel. Despite their zeal, the two agents were low on the FBI’s bureaucratic totem pole, and they lacked the influential connections in Washington that would authorize a radical and expensive plan for challenging the Mafia.

Their first order of business in 1980 was to help Welch rectify the organizational mess that plagued New York’s Mob investigations. Kossler pinpointed the worst problems as the secrecy, infighting, and internal rivalries for resources
that afflicted the office’s competing wings. Unlike other cities that had a single, unified FBI command, New York’s immense size had spawned three jurisdictional divisions. The Manhattan office was the de facto headquarters for the entire metropolitan area, but there was a branch covering Brooklyn, Queens, and Long Island, and another in New Rochelle that was responsible for the vast northern suburbs and for the Bronx. Each of the three offices had a SAC, a Special Agent in Charge, who supervised all investigations and other criminal matters they felt to be in their province. Over time, the two outlying districts had evolved into semi-independent branches, often undertaking investigations without notifying anyone at headquarters in Manhattan.