Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America's Most Powerful Mafia Empires (42 page)

Luciano’s gang eventually became known as the Genovese borgata, and Salerno was a lieutenant to Michael “Trigger Mike” Coppola, the top capo in East Harlem, who got into serious trouble in 1946. According to detectives, Coppola performed a favor for Vito Marcantonio, the neighborhood congressman. Trigger Mike assigned three of his boys to rough up a political ally who, Marcantonio suspected, had betrayed him in an election campaign. Coppola’s sluggers went too far, killing the man by cracking his skull. The outrageous murder created headlines suggesting Mob involvement and a political motive for the homicide, factors compelling the normally obliging police to pressure Coppola. To escape the heat, Coppola fled to Florida. It was Tony Salerno’s big
break. Only in his mid-thirties, he assumed the reins of the Genovese capo in East Harlem and his fortune was assured.

As a soldier or button man, and later as a capo, Salerno endured several arrests on minor gambling charges that culminated in petty fines or quick dismissals. These brief interruptions of business were little more than expected, routine harassment in the charade performed by the police to meet arrest quotas and to demonstrate to the public that they were incorruptible. Salerno used an assortment of fictitious names, usually “Tony Palermo” or ‘Tony Russo” for these nuisance pinches in his younger years.

By middle age, Salerno’s expanding girth of 230 pounds on his stocky five-feet seven-inch body earned him the underworld nickname Fat Tony. But once he established himself as a powerful figure in the Genovese family, no one dared utter that name in his presence. The Manhattan DA’s office became acutely aware of his nickname and his importance in 1959, while investigating charges that he and other mobsters had a piece of a heavyweight title fight between Floyd Patterson and Ingemar Johansson at Yankee Stadium. Suspicions that Salerno and the Genovese family secretly financed the bout for a cut of the profits failed to pan out for the DA. No charges were filed, chalking up another legal victory for Fat Tony.

Preferring a low-key existence in East Harlem, Salerno was never spotted by investigators at gaudy Mob parties or nightclubbing at the Copacabana and other favorite Mafia bistros. His unpretentious, grubby lifestyle was accurately reflected in the Christmas card that he sent to cronies. Standing alone before a tree, the plump Mafia leader gazed dourly into the camera lens, attired in pajamas, a bathrobe, a cigar in his mouth, and sporting a baseball cap worn backwards.

Salerno’s only major arrest came in 1977, at the age of sixty-six. The FBI roped him in on accusations that he was one of the city’s biggest bookies and loan sharks, the head of a network with more than two hundred underground employees that grossed $10 million annually. At that time, gambling and loan-sharking arrests were FBI priorities and the bureau’s main targets in its limited Mob investigations. Another favorite weapon against the Mafia was aimed at him, an income-tax evasion complaint. The indictment asserted that he reported an annual income of about $40,000 when he was actually pocketing more than $1 million a year from his rackets.

For his defense, Salerno hired Roy Cohn, an attorney known for his right-wing politics and power-broker connections, who could conjure up soft plea
bargains for criminal clients. Cohn’s high-profile status stemmed from his 1950s roles as an intemperate federal prosecutor in the controversial espionage convictions and executions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, charged with stealing atom bomb secrets for the Soviet Union. Later, he was Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy’s main counsel during his erratic hunt for Communist subversives in the government and in the army. In private practice, Cohn became a favorite of indicted mobsters and was whispered to have influence as a deal maker with judges and prosecutors, thanks to his political liaisons.

Two trials on the income-tax accusations ended indecisively, with deadlocked juries. Cohn then worked out a bargain with federal prosecutors. Salerno pled guilty to reduced charges on one felony count of illegal gambling and two tax misdemeanors in exchange for a promise of leniency. Before sentencing, Fat Tony appeared in federal court in a wheelchair, claiming he was beset by life-threatening illnesses. Denying that his client was a gangster, Cohn characterized him merely as an avid “sports gambler,” imploring the judge to consider Salerno’s advanced age, frail health, and his unblemished record.

The tactic worked. Instead of a minimum sentence of two years, Salerno received a light term of six months and was fined $25,000. As part of the deal, Cohn got gambling charges dropped against six codefendants, including Salerno’s brother Cirino. Upon hearing the judge’s decision, Fat Tony said softly, “Thank you.” He had good reasons to be grateful. The abbreviated sentence allowed him to be jailed in a minimal-security lockup in downtown Manhattan from which he could easily communicate with his underlings, instead of serving time in a harsher, distant penitentiary.

His legal difficulties resolved, Salerno was back on the streets in late 1978, following a predictable schedule. Mondays through Thursdays he spent most mornings and afternoons at the Palma Boys Social Club, his headquarters on East 115th Street between Pleasant and First Avenues. The club—a largely bare, single room—was decorated in standard mid-twentieth-century mafiosi fashion: there was a bar with an espresso machine, and a sprinkling of card tables and hard-backed wooden chairs. The rear section, about a third of the entire space, was reserved as Salerno’s makeshift private office, where his most trusted courtiers and invited guests were allowed to confer with him around a worn table. A few steps from his club, above a fruit and vegetable store, Salerno maintained a first-floor railroad flat in a tenement building. A private street entrance leading only to his apartment door guaranteed privacy and enhanced security.

Every Thursday or Friday, Salerno changed his environment. From the ghetto tenement, he was driven two hours to rural Rhinebeck in the Hudson River Valley, site of his one-hundred-acre estate, the Spruce Bar Ranch, its entrance flanked by two massive white stone stallions. Here he raised thoroughbred horses. His lackeys were under instructions never to trouble him with Mob business on the long weekends spent with his wife and son in the unspoiled countryside. Whatever problems that arose in his enterprises waited until the carefree weekend was over, and no business meetings were held at the ranch.

Like clockwork, by 10:00 A.M. every Monday, Salerno was ensconced at the Palma Boys. When the skies brightened, Salerno, using a cane after a slight stroke in 1981, ventured outside to sun himself on a sidewalk chair in front of the club, surrounded by his faithful coterie. Puffing on a cigar, dressed in a fedora and crumpled clothes, Salerno appeared to passersby as a nondescript, aged pensioner, whiling away serene days, laughing at innocent small talk.

In the early 1980s there seemed to be no end to the pleasant times for Salerno and most Mafia leaders in New York. Fat Tony and his Cosa Nostra colleagues blithely conducted their businesses as they and their predecessors had for decades. They envisioned no reason to alter their lifestyles or customs. Secure in their privileged castles—their social clubs, homes, restaurants, cars—they talked freely about Mafia affairs. In these sanctuaries, they felt invulnerable and immune from electronic spying by lawmen. If serious external danger loomed, they apparently took no notice—even though there were abundant warning signs.

None of the bosses paid much heed to internal events within law enforcement in 1981. Eleven years earlier, in 1970, with much fanfare, New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller and the state legislature had created the state’s Organized Crime Task Force. State politicians were belatedly responding to the embarrassing series of U.S. Senate hearings in the 1950s and 1960s that focused on the Mob’s operations and its union rackets in the New York City metropolitan region. The task force’s assignment was to investigate and coordinate cases that overlapped different counties and district attorney jurisdictions. Once established, however, it became a political boondoggle, achieving little more than providing patronage employment for lawyers pretending to be prosecutors and for former police officers looking for unchallenging retirement jobs as investigators. During its first eleven years, the unit was a monumental flop, failing to produce one significant investigation, indictment, or conviction under Republican administrations.

Deciding to breathe life into the moribund task force, in 1981 two Democratic officials, New York Governor Hugh Carey and Attorney General Robert Abrams, jointly appointed a new director to lead the agency. He was Ronald Goldstock, a lanky, six-foot-tall lawyer with a lengthy résumé of prosecuting rackets cases in the Manhattan DA’s office and uncovering corruption as the acting inspector general for the U.S. Labor Department. A native New Yorker, a Harvard Law School graduate, Goldstock was well versed in the history of the New York Mafia. More significantly, he had helped run Bob Blakey’s Institute on Organized Crime at Cornell and was impatient to apply Blakey’s untested prosecutorial theories: attack the Mob’s hold on legitimate industries and labor unions, and rely on Title III wiretaps and bugs to dig up vital evidence and intelligence.

When Goldstock explained his operational plans, Governor Carey replied, “Go do it. You have a free hand.” On his first day at the task force’s main office north of the city in suburban White Plains, Goldstock walked into a stagnant scene. Lawyer-prosecutors were reading newspapers and concentrating on crossword puzzles, many with their feet on their desks, oblivious to the presence of their new leader. “Not only do they have nothing to do but they don’t care,” a stunned Goldstock thought to himself. Even more shocking, he discovered that the agency’s intelligence files were virtually worthless and that its records revealed no previous interest in going after the Mob in New York City and in Long Island, its two largest bastions in the state.

In short order, Goldstock chopped off the office’s dead-wood do-nothing personnel. With a beefed-up annual budget of almost $3 million, he tripled his staff to 140, bringing in prosecutors and investigators, most with experience in handling complex criminal cases. Leaving no doubt about his intentions, Goldstock announced in July 1981 that he was targeting the Mafia’s domination of key industries and unions, and its narcotics trafficking. “This is a critical time,” the enthusiastic gangbuster warned in press interviews, specifying that his sights were on high-echelon mobsters—the bosses.

As the state was revving up its drive, there was more grievous news for the Bonanno family and the Commission. The FBI jubilantly disclosed—also in 1981—that an agent for the first time had infiltrated a Mafia family—a Bonanno crew—and that indictments of Bonanno members were imminent. Agent Joseph Pistone, under the name “Donnie Brasco,” had successfully posed as a wannabe for almost six years. Assigned to a hijacking squad, Pistone’s original objective was to identify and destroy big-time fences. But he wormed
his way into a Mob crew in New York, as an earner and associate, and his mission expanded to an unimaginable extent: a Bonanno capo was ready to sponsor him for induction into the borgata. Besides the wealth of solid criminal evidence Pistone had unearthed, his exploit provided a rare peek into the mind-set of New York’s rank and file mafiosi. During idle banter, Benjamin “Lefty Guns” Ruggiero, an undistinguished Bonanno soldier, gave “Donnie Brasco” and another undercover agent named “Tony,” a crash course on the advantages of enlisting in the Mob. “What the fuck, Donnie, don’t you tell this guy nothing?” Lefty Guns said. “Tony, as a wiseguy you can lie, you can cheat, you can steal, you can kill people—legitimately. You can do any goddamn thing you want, and nobody can say anything about it. Who wouldn’t want to be a wiseguy?”

Beyond the possible damage inflicted by Pistone’s embarrassing penetration of the Bonanno family, Commission members had cause for even greater alarm. Lefty Guns had used Pistone on cooperative ventures with other families in New York, Florida, and Milwaukee, thereby implicating members of several borgatas and possibly compromising the Commission itself.

Mafia reaction to Pistone’s emergence as an FBI spy came quickly. Tipsters informed agents that Mob big shots were offering a $500,000 reward to the hit men who got Pistone or his wife and children before he could testify. The agent and his relatives were relocated with twenty-four-hour protection. Assuming that the murder contract had been authorized by the Mafia’s highest authorities, agents Brian Taylor and Pat Marshall paid a nighttime call on Fat Tony Salerno, one of the suspected members of the Commission. They found him in his East Harlem apartment retreat with his most trusted lieutenant, Vincent “Fish” Cafaro. The agents made their point sharply: massive retaliation would befall the Mafia if Pistone and his relatives were harmed or threatened. “Get the word out, Tony; leave Pistone alone,” Taylor said. “We don’t hurt cops, we don’t hurt agents,” an unruffled Salerno replied. “Hey, you boys have a job to do, you got my guarantee.” Walking out of the apartment, Marshall who had often encountered arrogant, foul-mouthed mafiosi, made a mental note to himself about Salerno’s behavior. “Whatever else he was, to us he acted like a gentleman.”

No harm came to Pistone and his family.

There were immediate consequences inside the Bonanno family from Pistone’s masquerade and infiltration. Soldiers held responsible for Pistone’s triumph were killed or ousted. Other families and the Commission shunned the already distrusted Bonannos as unreliable pariahs, cutting them out of any joint
rackets. Pistone’s evidence convicted Lefty Guns Ruggiero and several other minor Bonanno soldiers and associates on racketeering charges, but the other New York families and their bosses for the moment appeared to have escaped unscathed.

Yet throughout 1982 and 1983, there were clear signs that the Mafia and its widespread illicit businesses were under intensive scrutiny. The
New York Times
in April 1982 detailed the Mob’s incredible hammerlock on the city’s billion-dollar construction industry. A series of articles, headlined “Tainted Industry,” described how rigged bids and combined union-mobster corruption were siphoning millions of dollars and inflating building costs on major public and private projects. The centerpiece story revealed that a cartel of suppliers and contractors with links to the Mafia had saddled the city with the highest concrete costs in the country—70 percent greater than in comparable parts of the Northeast. High-ranking mobsters who split kickbacks from the arranged deals called the select contractors “the club.” And the group was concerned mainly with the city’s most expensive undertakings, resulting in owners raising commercial and residential rents to make up for the excessive construction bills.