Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America's Most Powerful Mafia Empires (45 page)

The legal underbrush cleared away, Goldstock’s investigators and technicians still needed a plan to outwit Avellino and surreptitiously invade his Jaguar. Jack Breheny, the head of the task force’s break-in and technical artists, knew from bitter experience as a New York City detective the abysmal record of car bugs. He had hidden several electronic devices in the interiors of auto seats used by mobsters, and the results had been miserable. Noise from car radios overwhelmed the conversations and the bugs’ transmission ranges had been too limited to be picked up clearly in trailing vehicles. This time, however, the task force had new, state-of-the-art equipment that might succeed. In a fortuitous break, a state trooper who worked with the task force had a friend who owned an XJ-6 Jaguar model identical to Avellino’s. Examining the car at a state police barracks, Breheny and his fellow technician, Jim Stroh, determined that there was only one place to secrete a bug that could be hooked easily to a power supply: a vacant space in the middle of the interior of the Jaguar’s dashboard.

For three days, the two technicians and Dick Tennien, the lead investigator, experimented and rehearsed techniques for installing the bug. Finally they had it down pat. Once inside the vehicle, all they needed was four or five uninterrupted minutes. To save precious seconds, the task force obtained from the Jaguar company a key that would unlock Avellino’s car door. The remaining obstacle was finding the right place and time to get at the Jaguar. Breaking in overnight while Avellino was asleep was ruled out. He parked the car in his own garage, and the interior of the garage, the house, and the approaches to the buildings were ringed with elaborate alarms.

Tennien came up with a long-shot possibility. From telephone taps, he learned that Avellino would attend the annual dinner-dance on March 23,
1983, of the Private Sanitation Industry, the carters’ association dominated by the Lucchese family. Because no important mobster’s car had ever been successfully bugged, Avellino might drop his guard at the dinner-dance and be temporarily careless about the Jaguar’s security.

Accompanied by his wife, Avellino arrived at the dinner-dance in the Huntington Town House during a rain squall. Besides Breheny, Stroh, and Tennien in one car, nine other task-force investigators were trailing Avellino in unmarked cars as backup support for the commando unit. Handing his keys to a parking valet, Avellino was overheard saying he wanted the Jaguar parked far from the front entrance and away from other cars to avoid anyone accidentally scratching or damaging his precious vehicle. The Lucchese capo spent the rest of the evening dining and talking with other tuxedo-clad carters and politicians, while the rain-soaked investigators fulfilled their mission.

“We planned for everything to go wrong and instead everything went in our favor,” Breheny said, rejoicing with his teammates that night after the bug had been installed. “It was amazing; it was meant to happen.”

The next morning, in his customary manner Avellino eased the Jaguar out of the driveway of his home on Frog Hollow Road, ready for another day with Tony Ducks. An intricate surveillance system was in place to shadow the car and its occupants. The task force knew how vigilant Avellino and Corallo were on their trips together, counting on complex “dry cleaning” tricks to evade tails. Riding in the front passenger seat, Corallo always slanted the rearview mirror to keep his eyes on vehicles behind the Jaguar. Frequently, Corallo instructed Avellino to exit a highway precipitously and cut through back roads before reentering it. At other times, Avellino would pull onto the shoulder of an expressway for three or four minutes to lose any following vehicle. On city and suburban streets, Avellino would abruptly spin into a swift U-turn, to shake anyone who might be tracking him.

To outflank Corallo’s defenses, the task force assigned five or six unmarked cars each day to alternate as the lead auto following the Jaguar. The drivers were positioned by a supervisor who told them on a radio hookup when to drop in and out of the pack pursuing Avellino. Each car, equipped with a transmission receiver, had to be directly behind and in sight of the Jaguar to pick up the signal from the bug. The task-force drivers could not hear the conversations in the Jaguar. Their cars were equipped with a high-tech “repeater system” that amplified and boosted the volume and the range of the transmission from the Jaguar, and relayed it to a van a mile or more behind. The van’s huge antenna
could not be spotted from the Jaguar, and the vehicle contained recording equipment that preserved every word uttered in Avellino’s auto.

Delighted by their Jaguar success, Goldstock’s investigators and prosecutors tuned in expectantly to Tony Ducks’s conversations. Unfortunately, several weeks after the bugging began, Avellino and his wife left for a week’s vacation in Florida. In their absence, the Jaguar stood idle in the garage and its battery was drained by the bug which continuously extracted power from it. Returning home, a chagrined Avellino could not start the car. Listening in on the telephone tap at the Avellino home, task force members heard his incensed wife call the dealer, demanding that he immediately repair the recently bought auto. Hearing that a tow truck was on the way to transport the Jaguar to the dealer’s repair shop, investigators had to act quickly. Any half-bright mechanic would find the “hot wire” in the fuse box, sabotaging the eavesdropping project.

A hasty plan was whipped up by Fred Rayano, the task force’s chief of investigators. He enlisted the aid of the local Suffolk County police who stopped the truck driver before he reached the garage with the Jaguar in tow. Police officers escorted the driver on foot to one of their vehicles, parked out of sight of the Jaguar. Making sure the driver’s back was turned away from the Jaguar, the officers questioned him minutely about his towing permit and his special-driver’s license. Confident the besieged driver was sufficiently distracted, a task force technician slipped into the Jaguar and pulled out the hot wire from the fuse panel that was connected to the bug. If the wire had been left inside, the dealers’ mechanics would have traced the battery failure to the concealed microphone and transmitter. As the task force technicians hoped, the dealer was unable to explain the battery failure and simply installed a new one.

Two days later, his car running smoothly, Avellino stopped for a snack at a diner in Queens, parking in a crowded lot. It was the opportunity the task force needed. Using the skeleton key obtained by Jack Breheny, a technician entered the car, opened the fuse panel underneath the dashboard, and reconnected the “hot wire.” In a few seconds, the Jaguar bug was again alive.

That spring and summer of 1983, Goldstock and other prosecutors in his office listened in wonderment to the unfettered conversations in Avellino’s car. From their own mouths Tony Corallo and Sal Avellino implicated themselves and their cohorts in the garbage cartel and other Lucchese-borgata crimes. The tapes were also unearthing evidence more startling and important than the Mob rackets on Long Island. Decades before the Apalachin conclave in 1957 and Joe Valachi’s defection in 1963, law-enforcement officials had heard
rumors from informers about the Commission. Yet not a single tangible piece of evidence had ever been produced to convince a jury that the mysterious Cosa Nostra board of directors was a reality. As Goldstock studied the transcripts of the Jaguar conversations, he realized that the long-sought proof might be at hand. On the tapes, Corallo, Avellino, and other mafiosi were talking about an electrifying subject and discussing at length how it functioned. They were referring to it by a name—the Commission. It was an unimaginable windfall. The repercussions were beyond the most optimistic expectations of Goldstock and his staff.

Planting Season

W
hile the state task force’s electronic ears kept tabs on Salvatore Avellino’s Jaguar, FBI equipment was similarly utilized in New York. With the zeal of Iowa farmers sowing fields in springtime, the bureau’s eavesdropping virtuosos were planting a crop of bugging devices in the homes and hangouts of New York’s highest-ranking Mafia potentates. From late 1982 into 1983, the intimate sanctuaries of leaders in the Colombo, Gambino, and Genovese families were penetrated by agent James Kallstrom’s Special Operations division.

During the autumn of 1982, the FBI’s Colombo Squad maintained a constant vigil on Gennaro Langella, better known by his street name, “Gerry Lang.” The Colombo boss, Carmine the Snake Persico was in prison for violating parole on a hijacking conviction, and Langella, his underboss, was running the borgata as street boss. Known and feared for his ruthless arrogance as a loan shark and drug trafficker, Langella rarely made a statement that did not include a cascade of invectives. If he had a weakness, it was playing the gangster dandy among his roughly dressed associates. He was a vain clotheshorse. Unlike conservatively dressed Mafia royalty, Gerry Lang, favored the more contemporary Hollywood Gangster look: double-breasted blazers, sporty open-collar shirts, topped off with wraparound sunglasses.

Agents noticed that on most evenings Langella showed up at the Casa
Storta, a simple restaurant in Brooklyn’s Bensonhurst section. Pretending to be couples on dates, female and male agents began dining at the Casa Storta. Langella always sat at a reserved table at the far end of the dining room, distant from other customers. At 9:00 P.M., the owner began closing up, imperiously shooing out patrons, refusing to serve them even a first cup of coffee. Gerry Lang and the wiseguys with him remained, and heaping plates of pasta, seafood, and veal were brought to their table. It was easy to see that the Colombo mafiosi considered the restaurant a snug, safe harbor to conduct their business, regardless of the chefs cuisine. Further confirmation of the place’s importance came through an analysis of Persico’s telephone calls from the federal prison in Dan-bury, Connecticut. Most of the Colombo boss’s calls were to the Casa Storta.

The week before Christmas 1982, Kallstrom’s tech specialists struck at 3:00 A.M. The tactics used to enter and bug the restaurant were similar to most “black bag” raids under Kallstrom’s tight management. Lock men—deft-fingered artisans—led the assault. They neutralized alarm systems and entered buildings by swiftly manipulating with tiny metal instruments the most intricate burglar-resistant tumblers. Extreme care had to be exercised in picking a lock to avoid damaging or clogging it, thereby leaving evidence of a covert entry. At the Casa Storta, the lock men easily opened the padlocks on a sidewalk metal gate and on the restaurant’s plate-glass front door. Inside, a second group of technicians moved in, installing mikes and transmission cables in the ceiling panels above Langella’s favorite table. While the legal break-in was underway, case agents from the Colombo Squad ringed the area to alert the lock men and the technicians by radio if an intruder was in sight. The case agents were responsible for heading off anyone who might endanger or expose the technicians.

On the Casa Storta job, the tech men encountered one adversary—a watch dog inside the front door. Snarling Rottweilers and Dobermans were the favorite breeds used by New York mobsters to deter lawmen and other snoops. Black-bag agents were prepared to humanely subdue mean-tempered canines, and a resourceful agent quieted the Casa Storta’s barking dog with several blasts of foam from a fire extinguisher he had brought along for just that purpose. When the hidden microphones and transmitters were in place at the Casa Storta, the agents stationed in a listening post in a nearby apartment were ready to tune in and record Gerry Lang and his soldiers while they gorged themselves and talked freely.

An extra dividend from the Casa Storta expedition was the frequent appearance
at Langella’s table of a short, stout, fast-talking individual. He was identified as a made man named Ralph Scopo. Agents wondered why the acting boss hobnobbed almost every night with a lowly soldier. A check on Scopo’s occupation provided the answer: he was president of the New York Concrete District Workers Council, the union whose members were a vital cog in every significant construction development in the city. To their surprise, the FBI agents had uncovered a tantalizing lead. The union leader representing thousands of laborers needed for constructing foundations, walls, and floors—the sinews of every high-rise commercial and residential building in Manhattan—was a Colombo mafioso. The dinnertime chats between Langella and Scopo piqued the FBI’s interest in a new investigative avenue: the fixing of multimillion-dollar concrete jobs by the Colombos in concert with other Mafia families.

Based on the Casa Storta evidence, more Title III wiretaps and bugs were authorized by judges and were concealed in Scopo’s union office and in his car, and his conversations with contractors unveiled his main value to Mafia bosses. Scopo was their “bagman,” the collector of payoffs from concrete companies in a Mob-controlled and Mob-named “Concrete Club” that allocated contracts and fixed prices on all large-scale construction work in New York.

Next on the FBI’s eavesdropping list was Paul Castellano, the boss of the Gambino family. He was number one on the FBI’s private roster of most-wanted Mafia godfathers. Big Paul had inherited the leadership of the nation’s largest Mafia family upon the natural death of his blood relative Don Carlo Gambino in 1976. The succession was in keeping with Castellano’s charmed gangster-racketeer odyssey.