Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America's Most Powerful Mafia Empires (48 page)

A striking commonality from the FBI and the state’s bugs were numerous references to the mysterious Commission. The tapes from the Palma Boys Club, the Jaguar, and other intercepted conversations were replete with references to the ruling body. Different bosses were talking about the same high-level meetings, payoff splits, and the unions and construction companies that were in their grip. Piecing together segments from hundreds of hours of electronic eavesdropping, the FBI began to comprehend the magnitude of the power of Commission members: they authorized murder contracts, carried out joint ventures, regulated relationships between the families, and blackballed the induction of soldiers in other borgatas.

Electronic eavesdropping further clarified the Mafia’s impact on one of the nation’s largest and most powerful unions. Kossler, a labor-racketeering expert, deciphered the importance of Tony Salerno’s discussion one afternoon with
representatives of the Cleveland Mob. The men were casually dropping names while selecting new leaders of a union unidentified in their discussion. Kossler was familiar with the names they mentioned. “Do you realize what these bastards up there on 115th Street are talking about?” he asked fellow agents. “They’re picking the next president of the teamsters’ union.”

The tapes fleshed out rumors that the strife-ridden Bonanno family had been ousted at least temporarily from the Commission, and that the board of directors now consisted essentially of the four remaining big-time New York gangs. Families from Chicago and other cities no longer had automatic Commission seats. The bugs also revealed that Mafia families is Cleveland, Philadelphia, New England, Milwaukee, Buffalo, and New Jersey often acted like satellites, seeking advice or permission from New York on leadership and other grave internal decisions.

As far back as 1981, state and federal officials and prosecutors at different stages in various investigations had recognized the framework of the Commission as a viable RICO target. “We had been looking at developing a case against the Commission as early as 1981,” said Thomas Sheer, the head of the FBI’s New York office in 1986 and 1987. “That was one of our original and ultimate goals.”

While Giuliani may not have been the first law-enforcement official to envision a Commission indictment, he assembled the disparate parts of several independent investigations into a single cohesive case. He was the undeniable catalyst. Almost from the day he took over New York’s Southern District, he talked about zeroing in on the Commission. “Rudy read excerpts of Bonanno’s book to us and said, Wouldn’t that be a wonderful case?’ “Walter Mack noted.

Backed by the attorney general and the FBI director, Giuliani had the authority to access all of the bureau’s resources on his pet priority. In the late summer of 1983, the FBI’s New York office came on board. Responding to directives from Giuliani and the Justice Department, the bureau officially opened a Commission file by assigning a case agent for the investigation—one of its brightest and most energetic investigators, Pat Marshall.

As lead agent, Marshall was the FBI liaison to Giuliani and his team of prosecutors exclusively assigned to a Commission indictment. He was responsible for reviewing and culling the many tapes to piece together incriminating segments from bugged conversations, examining thousands of old and current reports on the principal suspects, and plugging gaps in evidence required by prosecutors. The bureau’s coordinating supervisor, Jim Kossler, chose Marshall
for his extensive background in Mafia investigations and also for his diplomatic prowess. Acrimony, resentment, and internal jealousies were certain to erupt when agents would be asked to abruptly subordinate and perhaps abort their cases by transferring hard-earned evidence to help out another agent—in this case, Marshall. “We need someone well respected who can deal smoothly with everyone,” Kossler told other supervisors. “Pat doesn’t have an enemy in the world. Everyone knows he’s not a poacher only out for glory for himself.”

The lean, sandy-haired thirty-three-year-old Marshall had dreamed of joining the FBI while a teenager. His first job out of high school was as a clerk in the bureau’s office in Baltimore, his hometown. After college he qualified for admission to the bureau, and in the early 1980s was working exclusively on organized-crime matters in New York.

The Commission assignment was the most complex and sensitive of Marshall’s career. An unwritten code of conduct prohibited an agent from balking at an order. Nevertheless, the scope of the project and having to coax fellow agents to cooperate, preyed on him. Soon enough, he encountered numerous naysayers. The common refrain he heard was: “Sure, we all know the Commission exists but you’re never going to prove it.” Marshall soothed those objecting to the expropriation of their tapes and their witnesses with reassuring words: “I know you’re pissed off. But you can still have your case and the tapes can be used again in other indictments and trials.”

Besides the internal FBI rivalries, the complicated Commission case sometimes whipped up storms with the state’s Organized Crime Task Force. Separate and uncoordinated investigations of the same suspects by two units thwarted at least one golden opportunity to turn up valuable evidence. In June 1983 state investigators obtained the rarest of intelligence breaks from the Jaguar bug: advance news of a scheduled Commission meeting. The task force learned that Sal Avellino would drive Ducks Corallo and other Lucchese leaders to a Commission sit-down with other bosses and Mob leaders on June 14.

It loomed as an important assembly where the bosses would review the qualifications of proposed new members into the five Mafia clans, among other items. Investigators heard Corallo proclaim to Avellino that he planned to veto the induction of a Gambino candidate because the wannabe had once testified in a civil suit. The Lucchese boss viewed taking the witness stand—even in a noncriminal matter—as cooperation with law enforcement and a disqualifying character blemish for Mafia membership.

There was no advance hint, however, of where or at what time the meeting would take place. Law-enforcement agents had never before gotten advance word on a sacrosanct Commission gathering. The task force had been handed the unique opportunity of capturing on videotape the Mafia’s upper crust departing the premises and identifying a specific meeting place. Pictures of them leaving could be used as corroborative courtroom exhibits to bolster the theory that the Commission existed and to implicate its members. Aware that FBI agents often shadowed major Mob targets, Fred Rayano, the state task force investigator, notified bureau officials that on the day of the Commission gathering his men would track Ducks Corallo to the hush-hush session and attempt to photograph the participants entering and leaving. “If you are going to cover Castellano or anyone else, let’s make sure we don’t fall all over each other and mess it
up
,”
Rayano
told his FBI counterparts.

On the afternoon of June 14, the task force relied on a helicopter and a huge posse of state investigators to pursue Avellino’s Jaguar. Locating the Jaguar in Long Island was easy and, despite Avellino’s normal dry-cleaning tactics to shake tails, the task force never lost sight of the car cruising on highways and wending through dense city traffic. The trail ended in a dingy section of the Bowery in Lower Manhattan. Corallo and his lieutenants were spotted entering the Bari Restaurant and Pizzeria Equipment Company near Prince Street, obviously the site of the meeting. Rayano expected the bosses to confer for several hours and he began getting his units in place to photograph and document the Mafia big shots when they exited. But only minutes after Corallo’s arrival, and before the cameras were ready, Corallo, Paul Castellano, Fat Tony Salerno, and other exasperated-looking mafiosi bolted from the building, scattering in different directions, searching for their cars and hailing taxis to get out of the neighborhood. A hard-breathing Salerno escaped by squeezing through a rear window, pushed by younger mobsters.

A disappointed Rayano found out later that day from the Jaguar bug the cause of the pandemonium. Corallo explained to Avellino that the meeting was aborted by Paul Castellano’s sounding an alarm that the godfathers were under the watchdog eyes of the FBI. The Gambino boss was certain he had seen agent Joseph O’Brien on the street, peering through the plate-glass front window of the Bari Pizzeria Equipment building. The Mob boss recognized O’Brien, who had been bird-dogging and trying to pry information from him for more than a year.

O’Brien denied having been near the meeting place or even tailing Castellano that afternoon. “It wasn’t me. It might have been some other big guy that
Castellano saw,” the six-foot-five O’Brien protested. “If I had been there, I would have admitted it.” FBI supervisors backed him up, insisting that none of their agents had interfered with the state’s surveillance. Nevertheless, the incident created ill feeling between the state and federal agencies. Rayano conjectured that O’Brien “out of curiosity went down on his own to get a look at what was going on.” FBI meddling, he griped, spoiled a well-planned operation. Other task force investigators were convinced that deliberate snooping by O’Brien or another agent had occurred. They assumed that elitist bureau agents had tried to demonstrate their investigative superiority in unearthing the meeting, rather than allowing state investigators to claim full credit for an exceptional accomplishment.

By late 1984, an unprecedented number of FBI agents, 350, were working full-or part-time on Mob cases in the New York region. Reinforcing them were about one hundred city detectives and investigators assigned to the FBI’s joint task force. It was a large complement of anti-Mafia lawmen for an enormous job. They had to maintain a watch on over more than one thousand made men and at least five thousand associates in a region stretching over New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut, and into other states. (Mafia investigators estimate that the families can count on between five to ten associates and wannabes for each inducted soldier.) Besides the continuous investigation of the five families, agents and investigators were pulled off their regular schedules for essential duty on the super-priority Commission probe. To help Pat Marshall with his mounting burdens, a second agent, Charlotte Lang, was assigned full-time as a case agent for prosecutors.

A baffling part of the pending Commission indictment centered on the 1979 luncheon murder of Carmine Lilo Galante and his two dining companions. Giuliani and his prosecutors were confident there was sufficient evidence to prove the Commission had ordered the execution of Galante, who at the time of his assassination had been identified as the Bonanno boss by most FBI and local Mafia investigators. (It turned out that the authorities were mistaken about Galante’s actual rank. Twenty-five years later, the FBI would conclusively determine that he had never been the “official” head of the Bonanno family but, rather, a haughty capo intent on seizing control of the splintered borgata and being recognized as its supreme dictator.) For a motive, the prosecution counted on the theory that Galante’s rival godfathers had wanted him
dead, fearing that he was attempting a power move to become the boss of bosses. The big hole in the Commission case was finding enough evidence to bring a murder charge against an actual assassin with a direct relationship to the Commission. Agents had a strong suspicion that one of the three gunmen was Anthony Bruno Indelicato, a cocaine-snorting Bonanno button man. About forty-five minutes after the Galante contract had been fulfilled in a Brooklyn restaurant, a surveillance team from the Manhattan DA’s squad videotaped Indelicato being hugged, kissed, and congratulated by high-ranking Bonanno and Gambino mobsters on the sidewalk outside a Gambino club in Little Italy known as the Ravenite. The DA’s men were concentrating on Neil Dellacroce, the Gambino underboss, in an unrelated Mob matter, when Indelicato arrived, apparently to report the successful result of the hit on Galante. It was a warm summer day and the videotape showed the outline of the butt of a handgun, covered by a loose-fitting white T-shirt, in Indelicato’s waistband. At best, the videotape could be used as circumstantial evidence, but prosecutors lacked direct proof that Indelicato was one of Galante’s executioners.

The getaway car in Galanteas murder, a Mercury Montego, had been found by the police shortly after the slayings, but their forensic tests had been unable to match partial palm prints—the only evidence lifted from the car—to any suspect. In the intervening years, the FBI had developed a system for identifying segments of handprints, and Pat Marshall, playing a long shot five years after the assassination, got Indelicato’s complete hand prints and ran them through the bureau’s forensic system. “Bingo, we have him,” Marshall proudly reported to Jim Kossler and the prosecutors. “We nailed him from a left palm print on the inside of one of the doors.” They had a shooter, Bruno Indelicato, and on the day of the assassination, they could link him to Dellacroce, the Gambino underboss, who often sat in on Commission meetings. The FBI and prosecutors could now pin the murder on Commission members, accusing them of having issued Galanteas death warrant.

If Giuliani’s interest in the Commission was sparked by Joe Bonanno’s revelations, the Jaguar tapes doubled his enthusiasm about the exiled boss’s literary confessions. On two tapes, Ducks Corallo and his underboss, Salvatore “Tom Mix” Santoro, derisively reviewed with Sal Avellino Bonanno’s appearance on
60 Minutes
to promote his book. The Lucchese mobsters reviled him as an apostate for violating the code of omertà, specifically for confirming details of the American Cosa Nostra’s birth in exchange for a big-bucks book contract and a movie deal.
By bashing Bonanno, the mobsters unwittingly contributed to the accumulating evidence proving the existence of the Commission and its historical record.

Chauffeuring Santoro, Avellino several times brought up the subject of Bonanno’s reminiscences and his relations with earlier godfathers Tommy Lucchese, Carlo Gambino, and Joe Profaci. On March 28, 1983, Bonnano’s public disclosures dominated the thoughts of Santoro and Avellino as they talked in the Jaguar.