Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America's Most Powerful Mafia Empires (47 page)

Nearby, in a rented apartment in a Staten Island two-family house, Gambino Squad agents instantly began recording-Don Paul’s chats with his mafiosi subordinates. Castellano’s lifestyle at first created havoc with the new bug. He constantly played the television set or a radio, and the broadcast audio drowned out clear transmission of voices; it was impossible to understand what was being said by Castellano and his guests. The frustrated head of Special Operations, James Kallstrom, sent a distress signal to the bureau’s Merlins who solve electronic eavesdropping headaches for foreign counterintelligence units. At the Staten Island listening post, the technical shamans, using exotic gear and antennas, exorcised the TV and radio interference. The bug now transmitted the voices agents were eager to hear: Big Paul’s intimate conversations with his confidants.

At the end of 1983, one mandatory black-bag job remained: Fat Tony Salerno’s Palma Boys Club in East Harlem. Employing their customary tactics, the Special Operations magicians struck on an icy December night at 2:00 A.M. The toughest challenge was suppressing noise while they worked on an exterior brick wall to temporarily disable the club’s burglar alarms. Kallstrom’s sound-suppression solution was to imitate a familiar nuisance tolerated by the city’s hardened citizens. He borrowed two garbage-removal trucks from a private company, dressed agents in uniforms, and instructed them to freely toss trash cans onto the pavements and to operate the truck’s garbage grinders at maximum
power. The sidewalk clatter at the Palma Boys nevertheless attracted someone’s attention, and a fleet of police patrol cars screeched into the street in front of the club.

“We’re on the job,” Kallstrom imperiously announced to a sergeant, flashing his FBI credentials. “Get the fuck out of here.” And the police did.

Before dawn, agents entered Salerno’s headquarters and hid several mini-mikes near Fat Tony’s conference table. In the cellar, the technicians drilled into the floorboards below Salerno’s favorite table to hook up a transmission line for the microphones. In the dank basement, instead of threatening dogs, agents were confronted by foot-long feral rats. One of them bit John Kravec on the ankle before the wiring job was completed.

A few hours later, from underneath Salerno’s feet, his throaty comments were relayed crystal-clear to an FBI listening post five blocks away. The last targeted Mafia boss had been bugged.

“This Is It!”

I
t was a dynamite concept. That’s what Ronald Goldstock, a Mafia authority and scholar, knew when he came calling on Rudolph Giuliani, the new U.S. Attorney for the Southern District.

Goldstock’s proposal was unprecedented: a full frontal attack on the Cosa Nostra’s governing body, the Commission. And the weapon for destroying it would be the RICO law.

In August 1983, two months after Giuliani moved into his office in St. Andrew’s Plaza in downtown Manhattan, Goldstock, the director of the state’s Organized Crime Task Force, appeared for an exchange of ideas between prosecutors. Accompanied by his chief of investigators, Fred Rayano, Gold-stock proudly summarized the successes achieved through his agency’s Jaguar bug before offering his grandiose proposal. “You came in just at the right time. We have the Corallo tapes and the FBI has tapes on the Colombos, Gambinos, and Genovese. You can bring a RICO case against the entire Commission—the Commission is the enterprise.”

Rayano had no idea what his boss was going to spring and he sat in suspense as Giuliani summoned several aides to listen to Goldstock’s spiel. Doffing his suit jacket and rolling up his shirt sleeves, Goldstock began sketching excitedly on a flip chart the main elements and evidence gathered by his staff and the
FBI, implicating four bosses and their mainstay aides in the Lucchese, Gambino, Colombo, and Genovese families. He mapped out the felonies—predicate offenses—the specific criminal acts that he was certain showed a pattern of collective crimes that could be blended into a massive RICO indictment of all Commission members as participants in an illegal enterprise.

That same day, in a private one-on-one conversation with Goldstock, Giuliani wondered about jurisdictional conflicts with another U.S. Attorney. He was in charge of the government’s Southern District in New York State, commonly shortened to SDNY, which included Manhattan, the Bronx, and the city’s northern suburbs. Many aspects of the Lucchese, Colombo, and Gambino family investigations, however, centered on Long Island, Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island, the jurisdiction of the U.S. Attorney in the state’s Eastern District. In fact, the adjoining territories were so close that Giuliani could gaze out his office window and see the Eastern District’s main office building across the East River in downtown Brooklyn. Feuds over high-voltage cases flared frequently between the prosecutorial neighbors. FBI officials could settle these jurisdictional rivalries unilaterally by picking the office they wanted to handle a prosecution and submitting their evidence to it. A jurisdictional decision over a colossal Mafia case—and the prosecution of the Commission promised to be one—was out of the bureau’s hands. Giuliani and Goldstock, two politically attuned prosecutors, knew the verdict could only be handed down in Washington by the attorney general and his advisers.

Before ending their meeting, Goldstock promised to support Giuliani in a showdown battle with the Eastern District. As an assistant district attorney in Manhattan, Goldstock had worked on cases with Giuliani when he was a young federal prosecutor in Manhattan. He admired Giuliani’s fervid style and the loyalty that he engendered from his staff; and he believed Giuliani would be more cooperative and generous in sharing evidence and plaudits with the state task force than Eastern District prosecutors.

Giuliani moved swiftly to get a jurisdictional lock on the case. “If Bonanno can write about a Commission, I can indict it,” the prosecutor confided to assistants, referring to Joe Bonnano’s, A
Man of Honor
, published earlier that year. His staff sifted through hundreds of tapes and investigative reports, hunting for the essential components of an indictment, and prepared charts delineating RICO accusations that could be brought against the bosses and their lieutenants. A month after meeting with Goldstock, Giuliani sat down in Washington with Attorney General William French Smith and FBI Director
William Webster. He displayed the informational charts, outlined his prosecution plan, and asked both officials to support him even if it meant intruding on the Eastern District’s territory. A jubilant Giuliani returned to New York in September 1983 with a green light to proceed with a “Commission case.” For added incentive, he had guarantees that the attorney general and the FBI director would supply him with all the attorneys and agents he needed to expedite the investigations.

“Rudy is the 800-pound gorilla in this case,” Goldstock observed upon learning of the jurisdictional victory. Political muscle in Washington and gargantuan ambition, Goldstock realized, had easily won the day for Giuliani.

Giuliani’s zeal for Commission indictments ignited a debate in his own office. Walter Mack, the assistant in charge of organized-crime prosecutions when Giuliani arrived, argued that a Commission trial would “eviscerate” and skim off the best evidence from substantial work under way in the Southern and Eastern Districts to indict higher-ups in all five families. He warned that the borrowed materials for Commission indictments would hobble, if not jeopardize, important cases aimed at individual Mob hierarchies. And, suddenly shifting priorities, Mack believed, would dishearten prosecutors and agents who had labored for months on those tough investigations. “The Commission case seemed intended more for publicity than for impact on the Mafia,” Mack asserted. “I thought the more effective strategy was taking out the families as quickly as possible, not the Commission: Rudy was much more bullish on the Commission as a priority and he was the boss who made the decision.”

A much-praised prosecutor, Mack, in March 1984, with Giuliani’s approval, did obtain an indictment in a non-Commission case against twenty-four Gambino members and associates on homicide and racketeering charges. The investigation by several law-enforcement agencies had been in progress long before Giuliani became U.S. Attorney. Soon afterward, Giuliani demoted Mack, bringing in his own appointee to oversee the organized-crime unit. “Rudy at times had problems with me,” Mack conceded. “I’m strong-willed and outspoken and Rudy’s management style was, ‘Do things my way.’”

Once shunned at the SDNY, Bob Blakey, RICO’s principal author, was welcomed back as an honored prophet by Giuliani. Since the acceptance of his theories two years earlier by the FBI brass in New York, he had been a kitchen-cabinet adviser to them. Agents jokingly dubbed him “the consigliere,” and he encouraged them to seek a mammoth indictment of the entire Commission, sweeping up all of the area’s bosses in a combined trial. Meeting with Giuliani,
Blakey urged him to launch that plan. “Giuliani’s mind was running full speed,” Blakey said. “He had the moxie to know how to use RICO; he ate it up.”

The idea of undermining the bosses in a single indictment, Giuliani later insisted, had come to him alone, months before he moved to New York as a U.S. Attorney, and had been inspired by one of the Cosa Nostra’s original caesars, Joe Bonanno. In early 1983, while still the number-three official at the Justice Department, Giuliani avidly watched Bonanno promote his self-glorifying memoirs on the television program
60 Minutes.
Reading A
Man of Honor
, Giuliani concluded that Bonanno had catalogued the entire structure of the Commission. In
Leadership
, a book published by Giuliani in 2002, he said that he “dreamed up the tactic” of using RICO “to prosecute the Mafia leadership for being itself a ‘corrupt enterprise.’”

“I realized that Bonanno’s description of how the families were organized provided a road map of precisely what the RICO statute was designed to combat. As soon as I became the U.S. Attorney I was able to hoist Bonanno by his literary petard,” Giuliani wrote. He pointed out that most criminal cases were initiated by federal agents or the police. The Commission investigation was different because of his personal involvement, he claimed. Emphasizing that prosecuting borgata bosses was exceptionally meaningful to him because of his “animus” to Italian-American gangsters, he added, “I was part of the team that had developed the case from the start.”

The genesis of the Commission investigation, however, remains hazy.

“I can’t tell you what was in Rudy’s mind the first time I spoke to him about a Commission enterprise indictment,” Goldstock recalls about his meeting with Giuliani in 1983. “But he gave no indication that he was thinking about it. He said, ‘It sounds very interesting and how would you put it together?’”

More than a year before Giuliani’s arrival, industrious FBI officials had already recognized the possibility of a breakthrough case against the Commission. Starting in December 1982 with the bugging of the Colombo gang at the Casa Storta Restaurant, federal and state lawmen for the first time were recording frank, uninhibited conversations of several mafia hierarchs: Paul Castellano, Tony Salerno, and Tony Corallo; an acting boss, Gerry Langella; and their assorted Cosa Nostra comrades. Agents and investigators pored over compelling evidence, usable intelligence, and rewarding gossip. The bugs clarified nitty-gritty details of the confidential practices of
Mafia
leaders never before understood by law enforcement. Salvatore Avellino’s curiosity was especially helpful. He had attended college for several years, and on the Jaguar drives he behaved
like an inquisitive freshman, peppering Tony Ducks Corallo and other Lucchese old pros with incisive questions. Avellino delved into the family’s history, its internal operations, and its relationships with other families.

Revelations streamed from the Jaguar about extortions and loan-sharking crimes, about the Concrete Club run in partnership with other borgatas, about compliant union leaders, and about the bosses’ conflicting views on narcotics trafficking. There were personal issues, soul-searching dialogues about the wisdom of encouraging sons to follow their fathers’ career paths into the Cosa Nostra, and backbiting blasts over Paul Castellano’s insatiable thirst for larger shares of plunder.

At the start of the Mafia investigations, FBI officials had wide latitude on shaping the objectives of the family cases. Their original game plan was to prosecute the hierarchies of each of the five New York families separately and to destroy their spheres of influence. As the individual investigations progressed, Jim Kossler, the bureau’s organized crime supervisor in New York, grew increasingly absorbed in the interlocking interests of the five families and the Commission. Every Thursday morning, Kossler met in a windowless conference room at the bureau’s downtown headquarters with members of the anti-Mafia squads and city police detectives working with them in a joint task force. The purpose was to exchange information, compare notes, and try to clear up cryptic clues. “It’s becoming clearer and clearer as we expand the attacks on the various families that there is a commonality about much of what they’re up to,” Kossler told agents. “Different squads have different pieces of the jigsaw puzzles.”