Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America's Most Powerful Mafia Empires (50 page)

A fusillade of fatal gunfire engulfed the two men alighting from the car. Three assassins, dressed similarly in conspicuous long, off-white trench coats and Russian-style fur hats, opened fire at close range with pistols. Castellano was hit six times in the head and torso, and Bilotti was struck four times. The triggermen escaped on foot, walking calmly past pedestrians eastward toward Second Avenue. Having reigned unchallenged as the Gambino boss for nine years, and despite the heavy security precautions taken at his home, Castellano had felt safe enough to travel around the city without a screen of guards. Tom Bilotti, his lone protector, was unarmed that evening, another indication of Castellano’s confidence.

Even before the autopsy on Castellano was completed the next morning, agents and police investigators on the FBI’s Gambino Squad were reasonably certain they knew who had engineered the double murder. All outward signs pointed to John Gotti, the capo of one of the most violent Gambino crews and the family’s most devoted adherent of Aniello Dellacroce, Castellano’s underboss.
Secret FBI bugs had picked up conversations among Gambino members about chronic discord between Gotti’s crew and Castellano, especially the latter’s demands for information about a botched narcotics deal involving Gotti’s brother Gene. Two weeks before Castellano’s assassination, Dellacroce had died of cancer, and FBI agents knew that for some time he had been a buffer shielding John Gotti and his crew from Castellano’s wrath.

FBI mafiologists theorized that Dellacroce’s death also removed the final restraints that prevented Gotti from launching a preemptory strike, before Castellano could move against him. The speculation sounded even more credible when informers reported that soon after the double murder, Gotti had usurped Castellano’s crown. John Gotti was the new boss of the Gambino borgata. But investigators were unable to find an atom of evidence attaching Gotti to the Sparks Steak House ambush.

A final indignity for Paul Castellano came when the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York announced that after “prayer and consultation,” it had banned a public mass for Castellano because of the “notoriety” of his background. Even in death Big Paul appeared inferior to his idol and instructor, Carlo Gambino. Don Carlo had indisputably been the paradigm of a Cosa Nostra titan of his generation, but he died of natural causes, and the church, apparently oblivious to press reports about his disreputable past, accorded him the full rites of a requiem mass.

Paul Castellano and Neil Dellacroce’s deaths substantially reshaped the prosecution strategy and the topography of the Commission trial. At the time of the indictments, Giuliani and the FBI had branded Big Paul as the nation’s most powerful and important Cosa Nostra figure and had cast him as the star defendant. With Castellano gone, several of the bugged conversations in his Staten Island home had to be excluded as evidence because they were relevant only to him. Although the Castellano tapes would have lent support to the overall charges, the prosecution team doubted that the lost evidence endangered the substance of their case against the remaining bosses. Therefore, the trial would proceed without any direct Gambino family involvement in the case.

For tactical reasons, the prosecution eliminated another original defendant, Philip “Rusty” Rastelli, who had been installed as the Bonanno boss after Carmine Galante’s murder. The evidence against him was skimpy. His voice had not been recorded on any of the bugs, although other accused Commission members and mobsters referred to him by name. Rastelli was instead indicted and convicted in the Eastern District jurisdiction on different RICO
charges—that he led a Bonanno conspiracy to extort millions of dollars from New York’s moving-and-storage industry.

While the Gambino and Bonanno godfathers were removed from the trial, Giuliani’s prosecutors brought another boss into the Commission lineup: Carmine the Snake Persico, the alleged head of the Colombo family, was added as a defendant in a superseding set of charges. The nine mafiosi in the first indictment were reduced to eight, and Fat Tony Salerno became the lead defendant in a trial docket titled,
United States
v.
Anthony Salerno, et al

The revised indictment covered Commission representatives of only three of the five dominant Mob families. Anthony Salerno, identified as a boss, was the lone Genovese leader on trial. Carmine Persico and his underboss, Gennaro Gerry Lang Langella, were the reputed Colombo big shots. The largest contingent were the Luccheses: Antonio Ducks Corrallo as boss; Salvatore Tom Mix Santoro, the purported underboss; and Christopher “Christie Tick” Furnari, the suspected consigliere.

Ralph Scopo, the concrete-workers’ union leader, who dined frequently at the Casa Storta with Gerry Lang, was indicted as the alleged collector of payoffs for the bosses in the Concrete Club. Identified as a Colombo soldier, he was too low-level to participate in Commission deliberations. Scopo was accused of being a Commission gofer, arranging and implementing schemes for the Mob leviathans.

The final defendant, Anthony Bruno Indelicato, a Bonanno hit man, also was not charged with being a Commission member. He was on trial for carrying out a Commission order in 1979 to assassinate Carmine Galante, who prosecutors and the FBI believed at that time was the Bonanno godfather. Indelicato’s role in the murder had boosted his underworld career, leading to his promotion to capo in the Bonanno family.

U.S. Attorneys rarely serve as front-line, courtroom prosecutors, leaving those tasks to their corps of assistants. A U.S. Attorney’s primary role in a major post like New York is administrative, overseeing scores of cases streaming through his office. He is not expected to spend months in a grinding courtroom battle and simultaneously fulfill—or neglect—supervisory duties. Rudolph Giuliani, however, was confident that he could handle his administrative responsibilities
and
conduct the prosecution in the most important organized-crime trial of the century, the Commission case. But events in 1986 altered his plan. A political corruption scandal erupted over the awarding of more than $20 million in equipment and maintenance contracts
by New York City’s parking-meters agency, the Parking Violations Bureau. The investigation culminated in an indictment against one of the city’s most influential political figures, Stanley J. Friedman, the head of the Bronx Democratic Party organization, a leading lobbyist at City Hall. Here, too, Giuliani resorted to an innovative use of RICO, expanding its scope by employing it against public corruption as well as the Mafia. He charged Friedman and three city officials with fixing contracts and converting the Parking Violations Bureau into a racketeering “enterprise” covered by the RICO statute.

Torn between leading the prosecution at the Commission trial or at the equally high-profile case against Friedman, Giuliani chose the politically sensitive one. He told aides that the evidence appeared overwhelming against the Mafia bosses, and that other bright prosecutors could convict the lot. The parking bureau trial would be a closer call, he reasoned, and an acquittal would diminish his and the office’s reputation. Perhaps an added ego incentive for Giuliani was the prospect of squaring off against a renowned rival and former federal prosecutor in Brooklyn, Thomas Puccio. Before becoming a defense lawyer for Stanley Friedman, Puccio had been acclaimed as one of the nation’s most tenacious prosecutors against corrupt politicians and the mob—the image of invincibility that Giuliani had coveted for himself.

As his substitute for lead prosecutor in the Commission case, Giuliani tapped a relatively inexperienced assistant, Michael Chertoff. Tall, balding with a bushy black mustache, the thirty-two-year-old Chertoff had worked with Giuliani from the start of the investigation two and half years earlier, in 1983, and was immersed in every detail of the case. The son of a rabbi of the Conservative branch of Judaism, he came from the blue-collar town of Elizabeth, New Jersey. He was a graduate of Harvard Law School and had obtained a prestigious clerkship with Supreme Court Justice William Brennan before joining Giuliani’s staff as an assistant U.S. Attorney. Although Chertoff had been a prosecutor only three years and had never before conducted a Mafia trial or a knotty one that hinged on electronic surveillance, Giuliani considered him a brilliant, lightening-quick litigator, who would not be fazed by the legal howitzers that would be lined up on behalf of the bosses. Hearing the news and realizing that he had been given a golden opportunity to direct a heavyweight case, Chertoff had only one thought: “I’d better win or it will be very, very embarrassing.” He began putting in eighteen-hour sessions, seven days a week, preparing for the expected courtroom hostilities.

A chief judge of New York State’s courts once said that a resourceful prosecutor, if it struck his fancy, could indict “a ham sandwich.” An indictment might appear overwhelming on paper, but trial lawyers know how easy it is for prosecutors to persuade a grand jury composed of ordinary citizens to generate criminal accusations. Normally, a grand jury is presented with only one version of evidence—the prosecution’s. The real battles are in the courtrooms and the appeals courts. Chertoff and two other young prosecutors, John F. Savarese and J. Gilmore Childres, would be confronting a battery of artful lawyers skilled in organized-crime defense maneuvers. And with deep pockets, the bosses had the money to call on expert witnesses and other resources to contest the prosecution’s evidence and testimony.

There was one immediate surprise for the defense side. In an extraordinary move, claiming he had more actual courtroom experience than most lawyers, the quixotic Carmine the Snake Persico had elected to represent himself.

Hovering over both sides, even before the trial began, were the unresolved questions of the effectiveness and legality of the RICO statute. The Commission case loomed as a landmark event in the history of the American Mafia. It was the first significant courtroom test of RICO. Even if guilty verdicts against the nation’s highest-ranking mafiosi were obtained, the conflict would continue. There would be hard-fought appeals to determine if convictions under the newly applied law were constitutional and sustained by the higher courts, ultimately the U.S. Supreme Court.

The three federal attorneys trying the Commission case faced another subtle handicap. The jury’s decision might be affected by widespread doubts in the country that the Mafia or Cosa Nostra actually existed. Important officials were continuing to question whether the Mob was a myth invented and exaggerated by arrogant, publicity-thirty law-enforcement officials. After Castellano’s slaying, New York Governor Mario Cuomo brought this issue to the forefront. He spoke out at a news conference against ethnic stereotypes and slurs that he said had been inflicted on himself and other Italian-Americans by frequent law-enforcement and press references to the Mafia. In part it somewhat echoed Joe Colombo’s screed against the FBI fifteen years earlier. Cuomo lamented the frequent use of “Mafia” to describe organized crime. Since Mafia is an Italian word, Cuomo told reporters, “every time you say it, you suggest to people that organized crime is Italian—it’s an ugly stereotype.” Asked if the Mafia existed, the governor replied, “You’re telling me that Mafia is an organization, and I’m telling you that’s a lot of baloney.”

To succeed at trial, the prosecution would have to convince all twelve jurors of four basic facts: the Mafia and its presumably all-powerful ruling body, the Commission, existed; the defendants were Commission members or carried out its orders; through the so-called Concrete Club, the Commission controlled a major building-trades industry; and the Commission was responsible for Carmine Galanteas execution.

In September 1986, in the austere Federal District Courthouse in Foley Square, the trial began. The dramatic tone was set on the first day when presiding Judge Richard Owen agreed to a prosecution motion for an anonymous jury. Withholding the juror’s identities and addresses to protect them from possible intimidation and tampering was a blow to the defense; in 1986 juror anonymity was rarely imposed. The ruling suggested to the jurors that they had to be protected from these defendants.

As its vital witness to lay out the origins and customs of the American Mafia and the Commission, the prosecution presented Angelo Lonardo, the self-described former acting boss and underboss of Cleveland’s mobster family. Serving as an on-the-scene historian, Lonardo, seventy-five-years old, recalled ancient Mafia events, the formation of the Commission, and gangland killings dating back to the 1920s. He had “flipped,” turned government witness, in the hope of having a life sentence reduced for a racketeering and narcotics-trafficking conviction. Besides his vivid testimony about the Mob’s organizational structure, traditions, and codes of conduct, Lonardo described the rank and status of each of the defendants. He singled out “Fat Tony” Salerno as the Cleveland Mob’s contact for dealing with the Commission.

On the witness stand, Lonardo was asked by prosecutor Michael Chertoff, “What are the Commission’s functions within La Cosa Nostra?”

L
ONARDO
: “Well, if there is a dispute about anything they get together and iron it out.”

C
HERTOFF
: “Are there any other functions the Commission performs?”

L
ONARDO
: “They make all the rules and regulations, what you can do, what you can’t do.”

Outlining the Commission’s authority over all borgatas, Lonardo said, “Well, the rules are that they can’t kill a boss in other cities or in New York City without them knowing anything about it.”

Joe Bonanno’s self-aggrandizement and published tales of his past glories were turned into Mafia gospel and evidence harmful to the defense. The former Bonanno boss refused to testify, but the prosecution played his TV interview
on
60 Minutes
in which he boasted about his role in the birth of the Cosa Nostra and the origin and evolution of the Commission.

Colorful and more recent insight came from a former Colombo family associate, Joseph Cantalupo. An FBI informer, he said that like all members of the gang, he was apprised that Persico was anointed the borgata’s boss after Joe Colombo was shot and paralyzed in 1972. Cantalupo even provided coffee-klatch details of a Commission gathering in the late 1960s, the height of Colombo’s power. Claiming a cordial relationship with Colombo, Cantalupo said he gave the Mob boss a phantom job in his Brooklyn real estate firm, which Colombo used as a front for his illegal activities.