Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America's Most Powerful Mafia Empires (43 page)

Every Manhattan multimillion-dollar project in the late 1970s and early 1980s was victimized by “the club,” the
Times
reported. Among the well-known places hit with invisible Mob taxes were the huge Battery Park City development, the Helmsley Palace Hotel, the IBM Building, and Trump Tower. Also affected was a public showplace, the state’s Jacob Javits Convention Center, where state auditors had estimated that the concrete work should cost no more than $18 million, including a healthy profit for the contractors. The Mob game plan, however, permitted only two controlled contractors to bid and their prices were $30 million and $40 million. Shocked officials negotiated the low bidder down to $26.5 million, still $8 million above their own evaluation. Several years later these concrete companies—an entity known as Nasso-S&A—that were awarded the excessive contract dissolved after disclosures that they had a secret partner—Fat Tony Salerno.

Even President Ronald Reagan sounded alarm bells about the Mafia’s growth. “Today, the power of organized crime reaches into every segment of our society,” Reagan dramatically announced in a televised speech on October 14, 1982, from the Great Hall of the Justice Department. Citing information that Attorney General William French Smith had presented at a special cabinet meeting, Reagan said that the Justice Department was taking a new tack. Henceforth it would “more vigorously prosecute the Mob, including use of the
RICO statute to confiscate more of its financial assets.” He ordered federal agencies, essentially the FBI, to forge closer ties with state and local law-enforcement units in a combined campaign against the Mafia. Reagan was in effect officially abolishing J. Edgar Hoover’s decades-old noncooperation policy of refusing to share information. Indicating that his administration would be far more aggressive than previous ones in confronting the Cosa Nostra, Reagan added that he was appointing a special presidential commission to recommend further steps against organized crime.

Gratified by the encouragement from Washington, FBI officials in New York began proclaiming that serious blows would soon befall the chieftains of the five families. They spoke publicly and confidentially about their work against the Mob as no other lawmen had in the past. Scores of indictments were in the offing, Thomas L. Sheer, the head of the bureau’s criminal division in New York, boldly forecast in August 1983. “Our main focus is the hierarchy of the five families and these indictments will be significant and in large numbers,” Sheer was quoted in news stories. “We are not going after fringe players.” Sheer revealed that the New York office had adopted Jim Kossler’s plan for tackling the Mob: almost two hundred agents were deployed on investigations, and five FBI squads had been formed to concentrate on each of the crime families.

Another self-proclaimed Mafia opponent arrived in July 1983. It was the new U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, the jurisdiction that covered Manhattan, the region’s hub for developing major criminal and civil cases. The appointee to the prestigious office was thirty-nine years old and his name was Rudolph William Giuliani.

After graduating from New York University Law School, Giuliani proved himself a fierce prosecutor and masterful cross-examiner as an assistant U.S. Attorney in Manhattan from 1970 to 1975. A Democrat in his earlier years who had voted for the party’s liberal presidential candidate George McGovern in 1972, Giuliani by the 1980s had become a devoted Republican. Reagan’s Republican administration chose him for the number-three post in the Justice Department as the associate attorney general in charge of the criminal section. When the U.S. Attorney’s post in Manhattan became vacant, Giuliani opted for it, even though it was technically a lower rank than the Justice Department job he held in Washington. Explaining his decision, Giuliani said that heading the Southern District was the most challenging law-enforcement position in the country, and he had coveted the job since his apprentice days as a prosecutor. What Giuliani kept to himself was precious inside knowledge known only to a
select handfull of FBI and Justice Department officials. He had been briefed about the full extent of the investigative nets being spun to ensnare New York’s Mafia bosses.

A self-confessed workaholic, bordering on the chubby side, Giuliani’s behavior ranged from unrelenting, steely-eyed litigator in the courtroom to convivial companion when discussing his favorite pastimes, attending the opera and rooting for the New York Yankees. The new U.S. Attorney knew how to turn a phrase, and newspaper and television reporters found him highly quotable. On taking over the Southern District, he was asked how he would use his 130 prosecutors. His ready reply: undermining the Mafia and narcotics trafficking were the highest priorities on his agenda. “The attack on the families is an excellent approach,” he told interviewers, endorsing the FBI’s new strategy and tactics while simultaneously warning that missiles were being prepared for the godfathers.

Citing his personal history, Giuliani emphasized to reporters the shame that the vast majority of Italian-Americans felt because of the depravities of the American Mafia. A native New Yorker and fourth-generation Italian-American, he said that his hatred of mobsters arose at a young age from listening to relatives relate the injuries inflicted on his own family. At the turn of the century, Black Hand extortionists demanded payoffs from one of his immigrant greatgrandfathers, who had opened a cigar store. Another relative, a baker, committed suicide because he had been unable to meet the tribute demands of the Mafia. Frequently, Giuliani mentioned in interviews and speeches his pride in the law-enforcement achievements of his immediate family. Five uncles had been on the New York police force and a policeman cousin had been killed interrupting a holdup.

Giuliani’s incentive against the Mafia might also have been motivated by a need to erase shadows that clouded his family’s past and of which he never spoke publicly. Long after Giuliani’s prosecutorial days were over, after his second election as mayor of New York, the criminal records of his father, an uncle, and a cousin were exposed. In a biography published in 2000,
Rudy
, investigative journalist Wayne Barrett wrote that in 1934 Giuliani’s father, Harold, at age twenty-six, jobless in the Depression, had been arrested for holding up a milkman making his collection rounds in a Manhattan apartment building. Harold pleaded guilty to robbery in the third degree and served a prison sentence of sixteen months. Barrett also asserted, without providing court documentation, that Harold Giuliani collected payments in the 1950s and 1960s for his brother-in-law,
Rudy’s uncle, who was a reputed Brooklyn loan shark and a business partner of a made man. Barrett alleged that the uncle’s son, Lewis D’Avanzo, a cousin and schoolmate of Rudy’s, had worked with the Colombo and Gambino families in the 1960s and 1970s. Court records show that D’Avanzo served a prison sentence in 1969 for truck hijacking. Out on parole, he was shot and killed in 1977 by FBI agents investigating a stolen-car ring.

Whatever factors motivated Giuliani, there was no question within law-enforcement circles about his fervor to demolish the Mafia. Six months into the job as U.S. Attorney, in January 1984, his dark eyes turned grave when he related the victimization of his great-grandfather in an interview. He underlined what a great joy it would be to personally conduct a courtroom prosecution of Cosa Nostra bosses. “There are a couple of cases that I’m thinking about,” he said, an obvious indication that indictments were imminent.

Regardless of the headlines about the government’s determination to get tough with New York’s Mafia legions, some politicians apparently were willing to lobby on behalf of convicted mafiosi. Early in Giuliani’s tenure, New York Senator Alfonse D’Amato, a Republican, telephoned him about the imposition of a prison sentence on Mario Gigante, whom the government had identified as a Genovese capo. Found guilty of loan-sharking and extortion, Gigante was seeking a reduction of an eight-year term. D’Amato, the sponsor of Giuliani’s appointment as a U.S. Attorney, apparently indicated that the sentence appeared severe.

Giuliani said that he had rebuked D’Amato for making the suggestion and opposed reducing Gigante’s imprisonment. Two years, however, were cut from Gigante’s original term after a motion was filed by Roy Cohn. Fish Cafaro, a Genovese soldier, later claimed that he had delivered $175,000 in cash to Cohn for securing the shortened term and he assumed the money was used for a “reach” or payoff.

About that same time in the early 1980s, a similar intervention was initiated by a group of New York politicians for another Genovese mobster and big earner, Vincent DiNapoli, who had pleaded guilty to labor-racketeering charges. His codefendant, Theodore Maritas, the head of the city’s carpenters’ union, had disappeared after his indictment, and prosecutors believed that the Mob killed him because it feared he might become a rat. Coming to DiNapoli’s aid were Congressman Mario Biaggi, a Bronx Democrat, and a bipartisan group of four state legislators. They urged a federal judge to suspend DiNapoli’s five-year sentence. Three of the five elected officials said they knew DiNapoli
personally and recommended that he be freed to help underprivileged youths find work in the construction industry, the same industry that he had been convicted of corrupting. After a strong protest from federal prosecutors in Brooklyn, the judge refused to modify the sentence. (Congressman Biaggi was convicted by Giuliani’s office in 1988 of accepting bribes to steer government defense contracts to a Bronx manufacturer, the Wedtech Corporation.)

Well-placed New York politicians might appear to be oblivious to the Cosa Nostra’s activities, but suddenly there was a hardening of attitudes in high law-enforcement ranks. And, if New York’s dons needed more ominous clues in 1984 that dangerous times were ahead, they simply had to ponder the words of the FBI. “We are going to make a hell of a dent in the five families,” Sheer, the FBI official, pledged. In a page-one
New York Times
interview, he dropped a strong hint of why the bureau was so confident that the bosses were dead-center in its crosshairs. A large part of the evidence was flowing freely from “electronic eavesdropping and telephone taps.” Sheer was telling the truth.

Operation Jaguar

P
elting rain shrouded Jack Breheny and two partners as they scrambled over the rattling chain-link fence. It was ideal weather for the trio’s commando-style operation: breaking into a new XJ-6 Jaguar and planting a bug in the stylish sports car of a prime Mafia capo.

An electronics crackerjack for New York’s Organized Crime Task Force, Breheny dropped to the ground from the five-feet-high barrier. Now he was safely inside the huge parking lot of the catering hall. Seconds later, technician Jim Stroh and investigator Richard Tennien pitched themselves over the fence. Not a person was in sight as they moved silently, crouching, some one hundred feet to the black Jaguar. “Thank God for the storm,” Breheny thought. “Perfect cover. Who would wander around in a parking lot or keep a head up in this monsoon?” Breheny had a key ready for the Jag’s door but, in another piece of good luck, it had been left unlocked. Tennien was the first inside the car, squatting in the rear, aiming his searchlight at the dashboard. Using ordinary screwdrivers, Breheny and Stroh dismantled the front instrument panels. The brawny six-feet-three-inch-tall Breheny left the delicate work of wriggling under the open compartment of the dashboard to the smaller, wirier Stroh. Without exchanging a word with his companions, Stroh used strips of electrical tape to attach a half-inch microphone and a three-inch transmitter to the inside of the
dashboard’s instrument panel cover. When the miniature devices were in place, he connected them with a spidery-thin cable to the car’s fuse panel, which was already wired to the battery. The battery would provide “the juice,” the power for operating the bug and the transmitter.

Together, as they had rehearsed in practice sessions, Breheny and Stroh replaced the front section of the dashboard cover. Their job done, both men trotted to the fence and scaled it. Tennien remained behind another minute or two. Removing the plastic covers that he had tossed over the front and rear seats and floors, Tennien mopped up several damp spots with a towel. This was insurance against leaving incriminating puddles, watery traces that the car had been secretly entered. His cleanup completed, Dick Tennien climbed over the fence, rejoining his teammates. Their astonishing exploit of bugging the mobile headquarters of the head of the Lucchese crime family had taken less than ten minutes. But more than a year of exhaustive surveillance and patient analytical groundwork had prepared the way for their smooth success in 1983.

The Jaguar project stemmed from the reorganization of the state’s anti-Mafia task force begun in 1981 by its director, Ronald Goldstock. His objective was to cast aside reactive, catch-as-catch-can techniques of investigating Mob-related crimes after they had been committed. Goldstock divided his newly recruited staff into teams, directing them to find “nontraditional” solutions for cleansing industries known to be under Cosa Nostra control or influence. Each team had a complement of investigators and prosecutors to dig up the necessary criminal evidence for potential indictments and civil proceedings. And Gold-stock added another element to the mixture. He brought in sociologists, economists, union reformers, and historians as consultants. Their role as analysts was to propose oversight legislation, regulations, and other solutions that would permanently reform Mob-contaminated industries. Goldstock wanted to end the frustrating cycle of criminal trials that sometimes removed one stratum of mobsters only to see them replaced by a new tier of predators.