Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America's Most Powerful Mafia Empires (51 page)

“One day, Mr. Colombo asked me if he can use my apartment for a meeting,” Cantalupo recalled. “I said, ‘Of course,’” “Colombo then gave him culinary instructions: “Tomorrow night have your wife make a large pot of black coffee, go out and buy a couple of pounds of Italian cookies, and set the table for five. We’ll be over as soon as it gets dark.”

The next day, Cantalupo sat on the stoop of his building and observed Colombo, Carlo Gambino, other bosses, and their bodyguards arrive in their cars and climb the stairs to his apartment. None of them acted furtively or attempted to disguise himself. Several hours later, they came down one at a time and drove off.

Lonardo and Cantalupo’s testimony about life among gangsters was garishly interesting, but both had made deals for softer sentences, and their accounts were therefore suspect—and insufficient to confirm the existence and potency of the Commission. Their tales became important only because they added flesh and meaningfulness to the prosecution’s essential body of evidence: the tapes from the secret bugs.

Lonardo’s version of the Commission’s supremacy within the Mafia was buttressed by a recording of a meeting in the Palma Boys Social Club on the morning of October 8, 1984. Two men identified as members of the Cleveland family, John Tronolone and Joe Pieri, were heard requesting help from the Genovese’s “Fat Tony” Salerno to resolve a leadership dispute in their borgata. It was at that session that Salerno told the two Cleveland emissaries that he would pass along their reports to other Commission members. His tone became more lordly when he warned them to instruct a maverick mafioso to end a feud on installing a new Cleveland boss. “Let the Commission decide,” Salerno was heard saying, adding, “Tell him it’s the Commission from New York. Tell him he’s dealing with the big boys now.”

Salerno’s recorded conversations about denying Rusty Rastelli, the New Bonanno boss, a seat on the Commission, reinforced prosecution charges of how the Mafia operated. On February 29, 1984, Fat Tony explained to Mickey Generoso, a Genovese capo, his views on Rastelli. “I told the Commission,” Salerno confided, “‘Ah, ah, hey, listen, this guy wants to be the boss. He can be the boss as far as I’m concerned.’ I said, ‘but he cannot be on the Commission. One vote is enough to throw it out. Cause, the Commission thing, it’s supposed to be such a sacred thing.’”

Rastelli’s efforts to gain admission to the Commission came up again at the Palma Boys Social Club on May 22, 1984, when Salerno met with James Ida, a Genovese soldier, and Matty the Horse Ianniello, the Genovese capo of Umberto’s Clam House fame. Ianniello told Salerno that Rastelli had given him the names of men he wanted to induct into his family, which would have to be vetted by Genovese family higher-ups.

The report provoked a tirade from Salerno about Rastelli’s reliance on “junk guys,” narcotics traffickers, in the Bonanno family. “Listen,” he railed, “we don’t recognize him down there.…I didn’t want to meet [with Rastelli], Paul [Castellano] didn’t want to meet. Tony Ducks told Rusty, he said, ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘take care of your family first. Straighten out your family and when you straighten them out, then we talk about the Commission.’”

Concealed microphones at the Palma Boys also picked up incriminating remarks from Ducks Corallo’s two closest subordinates in the Lucchese family, Salvatore Tom Mix Santoro, the underboss, and Christopher Christie Tick Furnari, the consigliere. They met with Salerno to review the question of barring Rusty Rastelli from the Commission. Fat Tony further worried that Rastelli’s excessive drug deals could endanger other New York families.

The conversation about the Bonanno family’s exclusion from the Commission and narcotics politics was a major piece of prosecution evidence compromising Santoro and Furnari in the RICO “enterprise.” Santoro, in his seventies, was no stranger to drug deals. Like Corallo he was an alumnus of an East Harlem gang that was mixed up in drug sales before and after World War II. The biggest blot on his record was a four-year prison sentence in the 1950s for narcotics sales. Furnari had an arrest record for assault and loan-sharking, and like most mafiosi of his generation had evaded felony convictions and long prison interludes.

The Jaguar bug was indispensable for the prosecution, contributing numerous insights about the powers of a boss, including the death sentence for those
ignoring a godfather’s edict, the scheduling of Commission meetings, and the induction of members into families. It even revealed the contempt mobsters had for law-enforcement campaigns against them.

Two weeks after Giuliani was sworn in as U.S. Attorney in July 1983, Sal Avellino, the Lucchese capo, was filling in his boss, Ducks Corallo, on Giuliani’s pronouncements that he was dedicated to uprooting the Mafia. While driving, Avellino mentioned that Giuliani and other officials believed that stepped-up government repression would rout the Mob. Mocking Giuliani, Avellino paraphrased the prosecutor’s objectives.

A
VELLINO
: “The Italians are traditional gangsters and they [the officials] feel that within the next ten to twenty years they can completely eliminate it [the Mafia] because they’ve been getting more and more information on them.”

C
ORALLO
: “Yeah, they’ll eliminate themselves.”

A
VELLINO
: “Well and that was the day he [Giuliani] says, We have to hire more prosecutors because if we hire more we can eliminate it [the Mafia]. ‘So I says to myself, Well you better go and hire six right away because we just added six last night.’”

Later in July, riding in the Jaguar, Ducks Corallo became disturbed when Avellino told him that an article in
The New York Times
had identified him, Santoro, and Furnari as the hierarchy of the Lucchese family. Both men were upset that the story reported that the gang dealt in narcotics, and it triggered a discussion about the Mafia’s fluctuating attitude about drugs. Narcotics deals were profitable but attracted more police attention than their other illicit activities. Tony Ducks said he wanted his soldiers cautioned that he would order them slain if they engaged in extensive trafficking. In his Mafia code, he was imparting to Avellino the Mafia’s basic theme that it was permissible to furtively peddle drugs but not to get caught.

C
ORALLO
: “Now I couldn’t be any fucking plainer than I was with some of these guys ‘cause I don’t want anybody fucking with junk, they gotta be killed. That’s all. Fuck this shit.”

A
VELLINO
: “Sure, this is the whole fuckin’ problem. Is the junk. They [law enforcement] don’t care about the gambling and all that other bullshit. They never did …”

A few minutes later, Corallo returned to his concern over narcotics trafficking by his troops. “… You can’t be in the junk business without goin’ in the fuckin’
streets and selling this cocksucking shit. We should kill them. We should have some examples. See, other people [Mob families] ain’t like us… . Well, anybody with us, anybody comes near us, you know, we’ll kill ‘em. Don’t worry, that gets to their fucking ears. See?”

Several days later, Avellino and Corallo again talked in the Jaguar about the news reports identifying the family’s leaders and the gang’s illegal pursuits. Tony Ducks reiterated how he tried to stay out of the spotlight to evade attention from law-enforcement agencies and reporters.

At one point, Corallo and Avellino proudly confirmed Tony Ducks’s underworld position.

A
VELLINO
: “It said in that, in that article, it says about Tony, Tony Ducks, about he controls the Garment Center, he controls waste foliage [sic] disposal business. And the construction.”

C
ORALLO
: “Yeah sure, didn’t you know that?”

A
VELLINO
: “’Course I know that. I know it because I’m with you, but not everybody else knows.”

C
ORALLO
: “Yeah, well, they ain’t supposed to know.”

Both men broke into gales of laughter.

On another Jaguar excursion, Avellino and Richard DeLuca, a Lucchese soldier involved in Garment Center rackets, were surprised at the ignorance of a new “straightened out,” inducted, Lucchese member concerning payoffs to the boss.

A
VELLINO
: “Before he was straightened out, he’s telling me that the union is his, you know? So, I’m saying, ‘What, what do you mean the union is yours?’ He believes the fuckin’ union is his. And what am I gonna say, union? Nothing is yours. Everything is the boss.”

D
ELUCA
: “Yeah.”

A
VELLINO
: “Wait, and we, we only got the privilege of working it, or running it. Unless you got a something that is a legitimate thing, that you know, that it’s yours, then they say, ‘Well, that’s yours.’ But anything that’s got to do …”

D
ELUCA
: “YOU operate at his pleasure.”

A
VELLINO
: “You do what he wants. I mean, and even, even if, with a legitimate thing, you operate at his pleasure ninety percent of the time.”

More indirect proof that the Mafia was a secret society and that membership was a preoccupying concern came from the Jaguar tapes. A decision on
whether to groom his own son for induction occupied Avellino’s thoughts in the spring of 1983, and he sought advice from Corallo and Santoro in separate conversations. He raised the subject with Corallo, referring to a Colombo capo, Andrew “the Fat Man” Russo.

A
VELLINO
: “Andy Russo just made his other son, the youngest one.”

C
ORALLO
: “They [the Colombos] make all their kids, huh.”

A
VELLINO
: “Yeah, he made his two sons.”

C
ORALLO
: “Would you make your kids?”

A
VELLINO
: “No, not now. I mean my thinking right now is no. It might change five years from now, ten years from now, but right now my thinking is no.”

On another drive alone with Avellino, Santoro, the underboss, without offering reasons, said he and Corallo had never encouraged their sons to become mafiosi. Noting that other Lucchese members “feel we have to think about it,” a conflicted Avellino expressed his thoughts.

“If this life was good enough for you and the life was good enough for me. If we really believe in it, why wouldn’t we want our sons [to join]. If I were a doctor, I would be saying to my son, since he was a little kid, you’re going to be a doctor or if I was a lawyer I would be looking for my son to be a lawyer, so they must feel that if this life was good enough for me, I want it for my son also. Otherwise we’re really saying that this fucking life is no fucking good. It’s for the birds. Right? Because we always want for our kids what’s good for them. Right?”

Testimony about the Commission’s tight supervision of the fractious Bonanno borgata came from Joseph Pistone, the FBI agent who had been a mole in the Bonanno family. Posing as a mobster named Donnie Brasco, Pistone secretly recorded conversations supporting the prosecution’s contentions that the Commission possessed unquestioned authority within the Mafia.

On April 2, 1981, Benjamin “Lefty Guns” Ruggiero, a Bonanno soldier, notified Brasco that the Commission had decreed a truce among warring groups in the borgata following the murder of Carmine Galante. Ruggiero said he expected that Rusty Rastelli, the leader of his faction, would be ratified by the Commission as a boss when he was released from prison and the family became autonomous again. “So,” the jury heard Ruggiero’s recorded voice say, “we’ll just see ‘til Rusty comes home, but whether we can survive these fucking sixteen fucking months, which them bosses says no war. First guy fucks with a pistol they’ll break up the whole crew.”

Pistone-Brasco accompanied Ruggiero to a June 1981 meeting with Dominick “Sonny Black” Napolitano, a Bonanno capo, the head of Ruggiero’s
crew. The jury listened as Ruggiero promised that Brasco, the undercover agent, would be inducted into the Mafia as soon as possible. “Now you’re going to get straightened out, Donnie,” Lefty Guns vowed. A few seconds later, the volatile Ruggiero urged Napolitano to break the truce and wipe out the main opposition to their control of the Bonanno family, the Zips, the Sicilian-immigrant crew.

Napolitano
cut him short. “I can’t do that. It’s Commission rules,” the capo declared.

There was no shortage of tapes disclosing various views of Commission decrees. The secret microphones above table one at the Casa Storta Restaurant in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, exposed another chapter on the Commission’s authority over financial disputes between Mob families. On January 26, 1983, the acting Colombo boss, Gerry Lang Langella, dined with Dominic “Donnie Shacks” Montemarano, a Colombo capo, and Angelo “Fat Angie” Ruggiero, a friend and Gambino soldier. (Fat Angie was not related to the Bonanno’s Lefty Guns Ruggiero.) Langella and Montemarano summarized for Ruggiero their displeasure at a Commission ruling that cost the Colombo family $25,000.

The clatter of dishes and silverware could not mask the anger in their voices over a failed shake-down. They told Ruggiero how one of their soldiers had squeezed $50,000 from a construction company for labor peace. The owner of the company solicited a relative, a Lucchese soldier, to intervene in the shakedown. Because of the contractor’s blood ties to a Lucchese member, Ducks Corallo persuaded the Commission to reduce the Colombo’s extortion fee to $25,000. At a sit-down, Langella, a mere acting boss, was outvoted and outranked three to one by Corallo, Castellano, and Salerno.

A chagrined Langella indicated to Ruggiero that a $25,000 loss was relatively small change for him, but he was incensed by the other families meddling in a Colombo scheme, a sign of disrespect. He had held his tongue at the sit-down with the bosses. Now he spoke more candidly in his typical obscene style. “’Cause I asked three guys [the bosses] if I was entitled to it [the $50,000]. ‘Maybe I’m wrong,’ I said. ‘Maybe I’m not entitled to it.’ When three people tell me I’m not entitled to it, I waive. What’s the big deal? I’ll make these fuckin’ bosses eat shit. I’ll blow their ass off.”