Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America's Most Powerful Mafia Empires (44 page)

In the early 1980s, every law-enforcement agency knew that garbage pickups, carting, and dumping in the New York metropolitan area were manipulated to a large degree by the Mob. Federal and local intelligence files were replete with informers’ tips and confidential complaints from intimidated refuse carters about gangsters skimming money from their businesses. Yet the illicit practices flourished without meaningful intervention by the government. The convenient excuse for inaction was that honest carters were too frightened of retaliation to cooperate with the authorities, let alone dare to testify openly
in court. Despite the known obstacles, Goldstock decided that the waste-disposal industry was one area to set his sights on. Early in 1982, six months after he assumed command of the task force, a team began to explore the Mafia’s hold over carting companies in Long Island’s two heavily populated counties, Nassau and Suffolk.

Almost every carter and detective on the island knew which Cosa Nostra group had turned Long Island’s tons of trash into gold. The Lucchese family was the culprit. Years earlier, Mob informers had pinpointed for the FBI and local detectives the identity of the Lucchese leader who had concocted the basic scheme of monopolizing refuse removal on Long Island. His name was Antonio “Tony Ducks” Corallo.

Another Mafia success story from East Harlem, Corallo in his teens worked briefly as a tile setter before discovering his true calling. In the 1930s, he came under the tutelage of a future godfather, Tommy Three-finger Brown Lucchese. A dedicated Lucchese student, Corallo learned from his master the basic urban Mafia arts. The curriculum included loan-sharking, hijackings, and the more refined practices of teaming up with corrupt union stooges to shake down Garment Center companies by threatening unionization drives and work stoppages. Narcotics trafficking was another advanced course in Corallo’s studies, but Harry Anslinger’s indomitable drug agents captured him in 1941 with a cache of heroin worth about $150,000 wholesale, and hundreds of thousands of dollars after being “cut” for retail street sales. Corallo got a light term of six months, leading mafiosi to speculate that Lucchese thought so highly of Corallo as his main liege man in the Garment Center that he used his Democratic political pull and a payoff to sway the sentence.

From 1941 to 1960, Corallo was picked up a dozen times as a suspect in murder, robbery, hijacking, and extortion cases. All of the charges were dismissed before trial. Lucchese found Corallo’s finesse with the law and ability to dissuade prosecution witnesses so amusing that he manufactured the enduring nickname for his assistant by remarking, ‘Tony ducks again.” Corallo’s elusive-ness also earned a backhanded compliment from Senator John McClellan at one of his labor-racket hearings. “He is one of the scariest and worst gangsters we ever dealt with.”

His luck with the law dimmed slightly in the 1960s. In 1962 he was convicted together with a federal judge, and a former U.S. Attorney, of attempting to fix a bankruptcy case. Ducks got a two-year sentence, but the charges demonstrated his and the Mafia’s inordinate ability to reach important figures
in the criminal justice system. Another example of Corallo’s political agility surfaced in 1968 when he was enmeshed in a bribery scheme involving a close aide to New York Mayor John Lindsay. Along with former Tammany Hall leader Carmine DeSapio, Corallo was convicted of bribing a Lindsay administration commissioner, James L. Marcus, to rig a multimillion-dollar maintenance contract for a Mob company to clean city reservoirs. The conviction resulted in another stretch of two years for Corallo in a federal prison.

Before the two prison interludes, Tony Ducks’s attention in the 1960s had turned to trash. Shortly after World War II, the prescient Corallo observed the population boom in the suburbs and planted the Lucchese family flag on Long Island. He moved there as the Lucchese’s reigning capo, to exploit postwar suburban expansion. Long Island, a semirural suburb before the war, experienced a population boom that soared to two million by the 1960s. Corallo’s initial rackets there in the 1950s were gambling, loan-sharking, and, through Jimmy Hoffa and other corrupt officials in the teamsters’ union, extorting the army of developers and contractors building homes and businesses in vast tracts on the island. By the mid-1960s the construction industry had waned, but Long Island’s rapid growth had transformed garbage-carting from a minor legal moneymaker into a perennial multimillion-dollar conglomerate. Corallo recognized its potential.

Tommy Lucchese died in 1967. Tony Ducks was his natural heir, and even though he was in prison on the reservoir-contract graft rap, the leadership was reserved for him. A capo specializing in narcotics, Carmine “Gribbs” Tramunti, held the fort temporarily as interim boss until he was indicted on narcotics charges. Released in 1970, Tony Ducks, at age fifty-seven, was installed as the Lucchese borgata’s undisputed godfather, with a seat on the Commission. Bribes and Mob influence with guards for gourmet food and soft prison work details had allowed Corallo to lead a relatively comfortable penitentiary life. He emerged in good health with a potbelly. Befitting his elevated rank and prominence, Corallo built a $900,000 house in a posh section of Oyster Bay Cove on Long Island’s affluent North Shore. Looking respectable and owlish behind horn-rimmed glasses, the graying Mob mandarin maintained to the 1RS that his wealth came from the dress factories he owned. His coffers were actually overflowing from his entitlements to a percentage of all of the family’s plunder and the new cash cow—Long Island’s garbage.

The linchpin to controlling the industry was a so-called trade association, Private Sanitation Industry, Inc., formed by Corallo and his brethren. Ostensibly, the group’s purpose was to handle collective-bargaining negotiations and to
promote the growth of the carting business in Suffolk and Nassau Counties. In fact, the association was run by Corallo’s vassals as a cartel to carve up collection routes, rig bids on public trash-removal contracts, suppress competition, and punish and rough up dissenters. Each carter paid $5,000 a year for the privilege of membership in the association, plus whatever secret shake-downs Corallo’s minions imposed. The benefits for compliant association members were plentiful. They were guaranteed business at rates that ensured sizable profits since all extra costs or kickbacks to the Mob were passed along through higher prices to their helpless customers. Another blessing was labor peace through Corallo’s alliance with the Gambino-run Teamsters’ Local 813, which represented most of the carters’ employees. Without Tony Ducks lifting a finger, the trade association deals lined his pockets every year with $200,000 to $400,000, and a similar payoff went to Gambino big shots for their help in controlling the teamsters.

The Organized Crime Task Force’s quest was to find a gap in Corallo’s armor, pry open a case on him and prove his criminality in the carting industry. The unit had no informers within the Lucchese family or in the carters’ association who could substantiate probable cause for a court-authorized wiretap on Corallo’s home phone. Two prison terms had increased Tony Ducks bent for secrecy and insulation. He never visited any of his family’s neighborhood social clubs, although he made rare nostalgic trips to his boyhood haunts in East Harlem for a restaurant meal and a conversation with Fat Tony Salerno. Surveillance squads reported that Corallo met regularly only with a tiny corps of lieutenants. Those sessions were often conducted in parking lot “walk-talks,” in which the boss strolled, spoke, and listened out of earshot of any investigators. When he dined with aides, Corallo used a wide variety of restaurants and diners, randomly chosen by him at the last moment or at a whim. Lacking advance notice where he might talk and compromise himself on a bug, the task force’s investigation of Corallo seemed stymied until the appearance of an independent rebel carter. He was Robert Kubecka, a feisty volunteer willing to work under cover against a dangerous crime family.

Kubecka’s father, Jerry, had started a small garbage-hauling business in Suffolk County in the 1950s before Corallo developed an acute interest in sanitation. The arrival of Lucchese wiseguys inaugurated chronic threats and vandalism that plagued the elder Kubecka. Nevertheless he kept his company going and refused to join the phony carters’ trade association. In 1977, a weary Kubecka turned over daily supervision of the company to his son, Robert, and a
son-in-law, Donald Barstow. Robert Kubecka, who had a degree in business management and a master’s in environmental engineering, was immediately greeted with undisguised warnings. Like his father before him, he was cautioned by other carters and Lucchese leg breakers of the perils of being a maverick. But he resisted cooperating with gangsters and the carters’ group. The Kubeckas provided an efficient, less costly service than the association’s members offered, and a loyal clientele enabled their family business to survive. Equipped with only eight trucks, the Kubeckas were unable to compete with the association for large contracts. The smallness of the company was its salvation. The Lucchese hoodlums viewed the Kubeckas company as a minor nuisance that could be crushed if it ever challenged the cartel for highly profitable work.

Long before the state Organized Crime Task Force came on the scene, Jerry and Robert Kubecka had complained to the Suffolk County police authorities about the harassment and abuses they endured. Their reports were filed away without substantive results or redress for the embattled Kubeckas. Finally, in late 1981, Robert Kubecka found a receptive ear at the reinvigorated task force. One of the unit’s new investigators, Dick Tennien, a former Suffolk County police detective, was aware of the Kubeckas’ plight and their resistance to the rigged-bidding setup. Once a carter in the association signed a customer, called “a stop,” no other company could compete for it, even if a new commercial or residential client took over the site. Kubecka’s information about the system, known as perpetual “property rights,” was added to the task force’s intelligence dossiers. But it was “hearsay,” supposition, inadmissible evidence in a criminal trial.

Mulling over a request from Tennien, Kubecka agreed in 1982 to participate actively in the investigation. He would wear a wire—a hidden mike. Although he was a thirty-two-year-old married man, the father of two young children, Kubecka willingly undertook the perilous, unsalaried undercover role. Investigators wanted him to seek out evidence and clues by chatting up carters in the association believed to be close to a central Lucchese player, Salvatore Avellino. Avellino, the owner of the Salem Carting Company, was more than an ordinary garbage hauler. Investigators were certain that he was the Lucchese capo who supervised Long Island’s garbage money-making machine for Ducks Corallo. Kubecka wore a recording instrument strapped to his body underneath his shirt and was urged to turn it on when talking with carters trying to entice him into joining the corrupt group.

Kubecka never got close to the wary Avellino, but his efforts helped jump-start the case. Incriminating remarks and implied threats by association carters in the secretly transcribed conversations provided the task force with justification for a court-authorized wiretap on Avellino’s home telephone. Avellino’s telephone talks with Corallo advanced the investigation by allowing the task force to tap Tony Ducks’ home phone—the cumulative tactic advocated by G. Robert Blakey. But the results were disappointing. Both mafiosi, cognizant of law-enforcement’s ability to eavesdrop on telephone lines, used their home phones only for routine domestic matters. Not the slightest glimmer of Mob or garbage-industry corruption emanated from their conversations.

The telephone taps, however, did reveal a seemingly innocent routine. Most mornings, Avellino left his upscale suburban home in Nissequogue, slid behind the wheel of his glistening $100,000, 1982 Jaguar, and drove 25 miles to Oyster Bay to pick up Corallo. For much of the day the capo was Tony Ducks’s chauffeur as the boss attended to business and personal chores on Long Island and in the city.

With the wiretaps proving to be barren, Goldstock, Tennien, and other task force investigators focused on the Jaguar as an alternative hot prospect. Because Corallo spent hours being driven around—often with members of his Mob cabinet—the car had to be his nerve center for discussing vital family issues. But getting a court order to bug the car was tricky. The legal foundation—or probable cause—for electronic eavesdropping normally rests on information from an informer, an agent, or from another bug, indicating that criminal activities were being planned in a specific site. While task force prosecutors could identify the Jaguar as the location used by two worthy suspects—Corallo and Avellino—they lacked proof that carting scams or other crimes were blocked out in the car.

For weeks Goldstock searched for a legal strategy that would justify a court order. One morning in March 1983, he awoke with an inspiration—“a message from God” is how he described it to his staff. The basis for the bug, he reasoned, could be built on a novel “probable cause” concept: “the relationship of parties.” His eavesdropping application would contend that sufficient evidence indicated that Avellino was more important than a mere chauffeur. The task force could demonstrate that Avellino was presumed to be the Lucchese family’s carting specialist, a “sounding board” and “liaison” for passing on orders issued by Corallo, the Mob family’s boss.

Relying on affidavits from his state investigators and from FBI agents attesting to Corallo’s lofty status and Avellino’s reputed role in controlling Long
Island’s carting industry, Goldstock’s plan worked. But he got court permission to bug the Jaguar only after surmounting another quirky legal barrier. Avellino’s Jaguar roamed through two counties on Long Island and five in New York City. A federal court order would cover a wide jurisdictional area, but Goldstock needed state court authorization to record conversations in seven different jurisdictions or counties. Rather than petioning a bevy of judges in a time-consuming process for identical orders, Goldstock devised a simpler approach. He found an appeals court judge whose jurisdiction included all of Long Island and the city boroughs of Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island. Another judge with authority to grant jurisdiction in the city’s two remaining counties, Manhattan and the Bronx, completed the complicated process.