Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America's Most Powerful Mafia Empires (49 page)

A
VELLINO
: “I was shocked. What is he tryin’ to prove, that he’s a Man of Honor? But he’s admitting—he, he actually admitted that he has a fam, that he was the boss of a family.”

S
ANTORO
: “Right. Right. Right. Right.”

A
VELLINO
: “Even though he says, ‘This was my family. I was like the father.’”

S
ANTORO
: “He’s trying to get away from the image of a gangster. He’s trying to go back to, ahh, like in Italy. See, when he says, ‘My father taught me.’”

In A
Man of Honor
, Bonanno denied involvement in narcotics, a contention mocked by Santoro in these choice words: “He’s full of shit, ‘cause I knew he was a phony… . You know like he says he ain’t never been in narcotics, he’s full of shit. His own fucking rule, he was makin’ piles of money… .”

The two mafiosi railed at Bonnano’s apparent intent to capitalize on his former life as a Mafia don.

S
ANTORO
: “This cocksucker, you know what he’s gonna make, this cock-sucker? You know much money he’s gonna make now, his book… . Make a movie and this guy’s gonna be like the technical director, forget about it, this cocksucker will make a fortune.”

A
VELLINO
: “This will be like, the ahh, now they’ll say we have the original godfather.”

Two weeks later on April 6, Bonanno was the popular topic again as Avellino talked in the Jaguar with his boss, Tony Ducks. Avellino was particularly interested in Bonanno’s insistence that he had been kidnapped by other mobsters in 1964. A snickering Corallo ridiculed the claim, saying that Bonanno had disappeared in fear of Mob retaliation for his unsuccessful plot to kill rival bosses Tommy Lucchese and Carlo Gambino.

C
ORALLO
: “Bonanno. He’s been squawking for years, the cocksucker. What are you, kidding?”

A
VELLINO
: “So what is he going to tell them about this kidnapping when he disappeared now? He’s going to tell them the story that… .”

C
ORALLO
: “What kidnapping?”

A
VELLINO
: “When he ran away.”

C
ORALLO
: “He ran away that phony cocksucker, what kidnapping? … He’s got to make that legitimate. He’s got to make it a kidnapping. I wonder if he’s going to say on the windup that when they got together they wanted to kill Gambino, Tommy Brown [Lucchese].”

Avellino informed Corallo that in an interview Bonanno had maintained that a “father,” or “boss,” “operates a family however he wants.”

C
ORALLO
: “He said that? … They could call him in and lock you up and under this act over here.”

A
VELLINO
: “This R
ICO
Act. He admitted that he was in charge of a family… .”

C
ORALLO
: “Now they could call him in… . They call him as a witness… . What are you going to do then?”

Corallo might have been reading Rudolph Giuliani’s mind. The prosecutor and his staff had been working fifteen-hour days to produce the counts for the Commission indictment, and one of the final witnesses to be questioned for firsthand knowledge of the Commission’s history and powers was Joe Bonanno. In November 1984, Bonanno was served with a subpoena to testify before a grand jury in New York. The seventy-nine-year-old Bonanno responded by checking into St. Mary’s Hospital in his hometown of Tucson. He claimed that a weak heart and other debilitating ailments prevented him from traveling, and that the stress of testifying could be fatal. His personal physicians attested that he was suffering from a severe cardiac ailment. When government doctors diagnosed Bonanno as being in good health and fit to answer questions, Giuliani flew to Arizona in an attempt to persuade him to testify at the coming trial with an offer of immunity from prosecution.

Lying in a hospital bed with his lawyers standing by, Bonanno was cordial to Giuliani. “You’re doing a good job,” he congratulated the prosecutor. But he declined to cooperate, dodging questions regarding his published and television statements about the origins of the Commission and his life in the Mafia. Each question for the deposition was met with an evasive reply or an invocation of his Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination.

Bonanno’s recalcitrance cost him fourteen months in prison for obstruction of justice. Appealing his sentence, Bonanno admitted he had been “mistaken” in writing his biography. Testifying for the government, he insisted, would “compound the problems” and violate his “principles.” (After Bonnano’s release
from jail, he spent most of the remainder of his retirement years in Arizona, where he died in 2002 at the age of ninety-seven. Clearly, his heart had been healthier than he and his doctors contended sixteen years earlier.)

Bonnano’s deposition was one of the last stages in Giuliani’s preparations. He, his staff of prosecutors, Pat Marshall and Charlotte Lang, and dozens of conscripted agents spent eighteen months trying to construct an error-proof RICO “enterprise” indictment. The final product was reviewed by Giuliani, his closest aides, and Justice Department executives. It was a blockbuster assault against the reputed sovereigns of four of New York’s five families, asserting that they constituted the supreme council that ruled America’s Mafia. For good measure, several henchmen of the presumed bosses were named as accomplices, creating a total of nine defendants. The Mob’s entire ruling class would be put in the dock.

A fifteen-count indictment specifying the accusations was approved, or handed up, in a formal vote by a grand jury in February 1985 at the Federal District Court in Manhattan. The FBI planned to arrest the mobsters early in the morning of Tuesday, February 26, the day the indictment would be unsealed and made public. But a week before the scheduled arrests, news of the gigantic case leaked to the press. “Indictments Taking Aim At Crime Family Big Shots,” blazed a headline in New York’s
Daily News
on Sunday, February 24. The next day, taking no chances that any of their quarry would go on the lam, agents rounded up the major targets, Paul Castellano, Antonio Corallo, Anthony Salerno, and their codefendants, at their homes. Fat Tony Salerno was the most chagrined at the timing. He was
nabbed
in his East Harlem apartment when FBI agents arrived simultaneously with the delivery of a huge takeout order from the neighborhood’s Andy’s Colonial Tavern. The agents refused Salerno’s request to allow him to partake of the meal he was sitting down to enjoy with his personal physician, Bernard Wechsler, and four Genovese underlings.

The next morning in a federal courtroom, the FBI supervisor Jim Kossler sat alongside Pat Marshall, watching the spectacle of Mafia dignitaries being escorted en masse for arraignment on RICO charges. “This is it,” Kossler thought to himself. “This is great. We finally did what Blakey always told us to do.” Afterward, Kossler telephoned Bob Blakey at his office at Notre Dame with news of the indictment. “It’s the most exciting moment of my life in the Bureau,” he told the law professor.

That same day, at a packed news conference, an ebullient Rudolph Giuliani, flanked by Justice Department and FBI officials, complimented a long list of federal and state law-enforcement officials. Every investigator and prosecutor remotely involved in the preliminaries to the indictment was praised for a contribution. Talking to reporters, FBI Director William Webster briefly mentioned the anti-Mafia statute used to prosecute the bosses. “We had RICO for almost ten years before we knew what to do with it,” Webster remarked. In the give-and-take of a noisy, hectic news conference, his tribute to RICO’s anonymous creators passed largely unnoticed and unreported.

The Curtain Rises

P
aul Castellano, the Gambino boss, looked buoyant. It was the week before Christmas 1985, and seemingly without a care he was handing out gifts to clerical staff at the office of his lawyer, James LaRossa. Big Paul was in the midst of one federal racketeering trial and facing another, but to LaRossa he appeared unconcerned and relaxed that late Monday afternoon. After distributing his presents, Castellano sat down for small talk with his lawyer.

Free on a $2 million bond, Castellano did not raise questions about his pressing legal headaches. He spoke only of his taking advantage of the Christmas-New Year’s adjournment in the trial for a Florida vacation in Pompano Beach. Before the Commission indictment, the government had accused him of other crimes: conspiracy and profiting from a murderous car-theft crew led by one of the Gambino family’s most savage hit men, Roy DeMeo. The indictment in Manhattan charged that the ring stole and shipped hundreds of luxury model cars to Kuwait, clearing $5,000 on every sedan. Castellano was said to have received $20,000 in a wad of one-hundred-dollar bills every week as his share of the profits, though it was unlikely that he had a direct hand in the crew’s operation and the twenty-five murders linked to it.

DeMeo, a leading player in the international car-theft scheme, who reveled in chopping up the corpses of murder victims, had met a contract killer’s ironic
fate. In 1983, he was found shot to death in the trunk of his Cadillac. On the street, the word passed along was that he had become a heavy cocaine user and was considered unstable and unreliable as a codefendant of Big Paul.

A former federal prosecutor and stellar trial lawyer, LaRossa was confident the prosecution’s case against Castellano in the stolen-car trial was collapsing, and cheered him by saying that the outlook was good. There were no witnesses to directly tie Castellano to the auto ring and no tape recordings implicating him. Agents in the FBI’s Gambino squad, many of whom had opposed citing Castellano in the indictment, privately agreed among themselves that the evidence against him—consisting mainly of testimony from low-level turncoats—was flimsy. They believed Castellano was headed for an acquittal or at most a hung jury in this round with the government.

(Giuliani later told aides that before the trial began he received a second intervention call about a Mob investigation from Senator Alfonse D’Amato, this time concerning Castellano’s case. According to published reports, Giuliani believed the senator “seemed naive,” and he cautioned him never to broach such matters with him again.)

Once the stolen-cars case was completed, LaRossa planned to plunge into the broader Commission case accusations and prepare for that separate trial. The government had not as yet turned over its incriminating evidence, in legal parlance “discovery materials,” to defense lawyers, so LaRossa was unaware of the contents of the tapes that the FBI had obtained from bugs planted in Castellano’s house and in the sanctuaries of the other Commission defendants.

At LaRossa’s office, Castellano was accompanied by his prime bodyguard and protégé, Thomas Bilotti. The two men presented contrasting versions of contemporary mafiosi. The tall seventy-year-old Castellano cultivated the image of a soft-spoken efficient executive who would be welcomed at the toniest clubs, restaurants, and homes. A man of studied dignity, bedecked in richly tailored suits on his business rounds, and at home in satin and silk dressing gowns and velvet slippers, Castellano’s manners and style apparently had failed to influence Bilotti’s persona. Short, stubby—built like a fireplug—Bilotti at age forty-five made no outward attempt to imitate his overlord. He wore wrinkled suits and the colors of his jackets and trousers usually clashed. His appearance was further marred by a toupee that always seemed to be on the brink of sliding over his eyes; his detractors used the ill-fitting hairpiece to deride him behind his back as “the Rug.” Bilotti’s reputation in the Gambino family rested on his rock-solid loyalty to Castellano and a penchant for violence rather than the
sophisticated white-collar crimes that Big Paul advocated. There was little subterfuge in Bilotti’s style: he looked like a goon and he was a goon. A major loan shark in Staten Island, his favorite means of disciplining late-paying customers was slamming them with a baseball bat.

Bilotti’s legitimate-occupation cover was a partnership in a Staten Island concrete supplier, Scara-Mix Inc. He was listed as vice president; Castellano’s son, Philip, was the president. Much of Scara-Mix’s income, at that time in excess of $1 million a year, came from subcontracts on city and state
projects
.

Before leaving LaRossa’s office on Madison Avenue in the late afternoon, Castellano asked the lawyer for the address of a perfume shop on Fifth Avenue, where he wanted to pick up more Christmas gifts. As they walked to the office exit, Castellano whispered to LaRossa that he was pleased with his work in the auto-theft trial. “I’m very happy, Jimmy.”

That evening, December 18, 1985, Castellano had a dinner date on Manhattan’s East Side with three capos, Frank DeCicco, James Failla, and Thomas Gambino (Carlo’s son). At about 5:45 P.M., with Bilotti at the wheel and Castellano sitting alongside him, the Lincoln sedan pulled up in front of Sparks Steak House, an expensive restaurant on East 46th Street where he often dined with his lieutenants. A former butcher and meat purveyor, Castellano fancied himself a steak connoisseur, and he particularly enjoyed the sirloin cuts at Sparks. Although stopping in an illegal parking zone, Bilotti ignored the prohibition, placing a Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association placard inside the windshield.