Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America's Most Powerful Mafia Empires (53 page)

“They used to send me a bone every year, about 200,000 a year,” Avellino quoted Castellano, astonished at his minimizing the payoff. “That’s ‘a bone,’ he says.”

Indicating that the incident was typical of Castellano’s grasping for the largest portions of Mafia loot, Corallo said, “I got to listen to him bullshit. A bone, two hundred thousand dollars? … Imagine that, he didn’t get enough. I don’t understand this for the fucking hell of me, he didn’t get enough. Imagine that, he didn’t get enough money?”

The only defendants’ voices missing from the electronic surveillance were those of Carmine Persico, the accused Colombo boss, and Anthony Bruno Indelicate, the Bonanno soldier on trial for Carmine Galante’s murder.

During much of the time in the early 1980s when the secret tapes were producing evidence, Persico was tucked away in prison, completing a hijacking sentence. The prosecution attempted to tie him to the Commission and the Concrete Club through recorded comments about him by Gerry Langella, the family’s acting boss, and the other defendants. But the most devastating evidence against Persico came from a witness, a cousin by marriage, Fred DeChristopher, an insurance salesman.

Before his arrest on the Commission indictment, Persico was on the run, and had used DeChristopher’s home in Wantagh, Long Island, as a safe house for three months. DeChristopher tipped the FBI to Persico’s hideout and received a $50,000 reward for turning in the gangster.

Questioned by Michael Chertoff, the lead prosecutor, DeChristopher told how through marriage he had become an unwitting aide to Colombo leaders and a recipient of the crime family’s secrets. While Persico was hiding out in his home, DeChristopher said, he talked freely about his illegal activities, boasting that from prison he had used visitors and telephone calls to Langella and other
loyalists to relay orders about criminal operations. “His business was running a crime family,” DeChristopher said matter-of-factly.

DeChristopher looped two other defendants, Gerry Langella and Ralph Scopo, into Persico’s crime regime. Persico frequently referred to Langella as trustworthy and characterized him as one of his key men. DeChristopher testified, “He said Ralph Scopo was his front man in the cement and concrete workers’ union and that not a yard of concrete was poured in the city of New York where he and his friends didn’t get a piece of it.”

Through DeChristopher, Chertoff elicited evidence not only against Persico but indirectly against the entire Commission. According to DeChristopher, Persico reminisced about sharing a federal prison cell with Carmine Galante in the 1970s. Galante was serving time for narcotics trafficking and Persico, a comparatively young boss, was beginning his hijacking sentence. The two mafiosi had a good relationship, DeChristopher testified, and Persico said Galante “was a friend and the top man in the Bonanno family.”

DeChristopher remembered Persico saying, “And quite frankly, I voted against him getting hurt.” The quote was used by the prosecution to strengthen the charge that although Persico opposed it, the Commission took a poll and a majority sanctioned the killing of Galante.

The most substantial evidence against Bruno Indelicato in the 1979 Galante murder was the palm print lifted from the gunmen’s getaway car in Brooklyn. His appearance at Neil Dellacroce’s Ravenite Club in Little Italy shortly after the murder was, at best, circumstantial. But the prosecution played the surveillance videotape to the jury, showing a perspiring Indelicato being hugged and kissed on the cheeks by Dellacroce, then the Gambino underboss, and Stefano Cannone, the Bonanno consigliere. Chertoff strung together the palm print, the welcome that Indelicato got from two Mob leaders, and Persico’s telling DeChristopher about voting against Galante’s execution. He argued that the three elements, plus historical testimony that only the Commission could authorize the murder of high-ranking mafiosi, was sufficient proof of a conspiracy. In the prosecution’s scenario, the Commission bosses ordered Galante’s murder. Dellacroce was assigned to supervise the hit; Indelicato helped commit it, and then rushed to Little Italy to report his successful accomplishment to Gambino and Bonanno big shots. Chertoff also pointed out that Indelicato, previously an insignificant foot soldier in the Bonanno family, was promoted to capo after the Galante hit—a sure sign that he had been rewarded for meritorious service.

Before the trial, the battery of seven defense lawyers and an attorney serving as a legal adviser to Persico searched for a unified strategy. Five of them were former federal or state prosecutors; all were battle-tested trial attorneys. From pretrial examination of discovery materials, they could plumb the soundness of the prosecution’s evidence and the prospect of acquitals.

A central point was clear: their clients’ hopes were dismal. There was no possibility that these Mob kings and their steadfast subordinates could wangle plea bargains and soft sentences. Giuliani would give no quarter except for guilty pleas to the highest counts, which for most of the defendants meant life sentences without the possibility of parole, and dying in prison of old age.

The lawyers agreed that their one faint hope was an unorthodox ploy: they would tacitly acknowledge that the Commission and the Mafia existed. Their counterpoint was to convince the jury that involvement and association with these specific groups was not proof of a crime. But this strategy contravened the sacred principles of committed and tradition-minded mafiosi. By accepting their lawyers’ advice, the mobsters would forsake their most cherished commandment and admit the existence of their secret organization. Fat Tony Salerno, Ducks Corallo, and their codefendants recoiled at the thought of breaking the oath of
omertà
, even if was done circuitously for them by their lawyers.

At pretrial meetings, the defense attorneys stated bluntly that they had run out of options. If they tried to contradict and deny their clients’ numerous taped references to Cosa Nostra and the Commission, the lawyers would surrender all trace of credibility and logic.

“We are not going to say directly to the jury that there is a Mafia and our clients belong to it,” Jim LaRossa, one of the lawyers, preached to the chagrined bosses and lieutenants. “What we will say to the jury is, ‘Let me make this case easy for you. Part of the indictment charges that there was such an organization and our clients were members of that organization. Let’s assume it’s true for the sake of your determinations. But we contend that our clients did not commit any of the criminal acts that they are being charged with in this indictment.’ “LaRossa, Castellano’s lawyer, had remained on the defense team as Christie Furnari’s counsel after the gangland hit on Big Paul.

Initially hesitant, the defendants grudgingly accepted the tactic so long as they were not required to admit personally the essential truth about the Mafia.
This way their consciences were clear because they had maintained
omertà.
The unenviable task of minimizing the issue fell on an articulate defense lawyer, Samuel Dawson. Through his opening speech to the jury, he tried to bury the problem by casually referring to the Cosa Nostra as an insignificant footnote in the trial. “The Mafia exists and has members,” Dawson conceded, adding: “Just because someone is a Mafia member, it doesn’t mean that he committed the crimes in this case.”

Nevertheless, the cat was out of the bag. After a half century of denials, for the first time in an American court, accused mafiosi admitted that the Mafia was a reality by allowing their lawyers to state it as a fact.

Another dilemma was created by Carmine Persico. His decision to represent himself troubled several of his codefendants and their attorneys, who feared that his courtroom mistakes could damage the overall defense posture. But Persico was a boss, and there was no power that could override his obstinacy. In fact, some lawyers harbored the frail hope that his courtroom blunders could create a mistrial or technical grounds for a successful appeal. Unfortunately for the defense, Judge Richard Owen had scrupulously warned Persico that if he insisted on being his own lawyer, he and the other defendants would be unable to appeal a guilty verdict on grounds of “incompetent counsel.”

The prosecution put on eighty-five witnesses and played more than one hundred audio- and videotapes. There was additional photographic evidence. Although the attempt by state investigators to photograph the Commission meeting in the Bowery in 1983 had gone awry, FBI agents later succeeded. Acting on a tip from an informer, on May 15, 1984, agents used a camouflaged van to snap still pictures of the bosses departing from a session in Staten Island. The meeting was in a house in the middle-class neighborhood known as South Beach, the home of a longshoreman cousin of Tom Bilotti. Except for the pariah Bonannos, all Mafia families sent representatives. Photographed leaving were Castellano, Bilotti, Salerno, Santoro, Furnari, Langella, and Scopo. The reason for the gathering was unknown, but the photographic display was a valid, persuasive suggestion that this was a full-blown Commission conference, attended by five of the men on trial.

Prosecution witnesses like Angelo Lonardo, the aged Cleveland mobster, and Joe Cantalupo, the small-time Colombo wannabe, might be discredited through cross-examination. They were men with checkered criminal pasts. On the witness stand they conceded having lied in previous trials, agreeing to testify in this one only after making deals with the government to get lighter sentences
for their own crimes. The defense lawyers’ nimble questions suggested that they were untrustworthy witnesses with incentives to perjure and to tailor their accounts. But there was no rebuttal to the tapes, which comprised 95 percent of the prosecution’s salient evidence. They were the government’s flies on the wall, providing indisputable evidence of the Mafia at work.

During nine weeks of listening to the demoralizing tapes, the defense lawyers sensed the increasing defeatism of their clients. Fat Tony Salerno became the most stoical, seemingly closing his mind to the impending doom. Held without bail as a potential danger to the community, Salerno seemed more concerned with his stomach than the outcome of the trial. He munched constantly on an inexhaustible supply of cookies and candy. At the conclusion of one session, he rose from the crowded defense table to ask Judge Owen for a favor. Displeased with the cold sandwiches provided prisoners at the midday break, he inquired plaintively of the judge, “What about a hot lunch, judge? Can’t we have a hot lunch?”

Taking pity on him, codefendant Anthony Indelicate tried one day to smuggle a veal sandwich into the courtroom and pass it furtively to the ravenous Fat Tony. Unfortunately, a guard spotted the transfer and seized the sandwich as contraband.

Carmine Persico’s debut as mouthpiece for himself provided the somber trial’s one whiff of comedy. A stranger at first glance might have mistaken him for a respectable lawyer when he rose to cross-examine a witness or to address the jury. He dressed like many courtroom attorneys, in dark and gray suits, solid-colored shirts, and conservative striped ties. His gold-rimmed glasses and lugubrious bloodhound’s eyes added to the illusion. But the facade shattered when he tried to score legal points in a folksy Brooklyn accent with phrases such as, “I sez,” “you seen,” and “dem kids.” At times, he fumbled with his notes, asking the judge and jury, “Bear with me, please. I’m a little nervous.” As a combination lawyer and defendant, he referred to himself in cross-examinations and motions as “me” and “Mr. Persico.”

The brassy don, in his opening remarks, tried to garner sympathy as an oppressed underdog. “Don’t be blinded by labels,” he implored the jury. Pointing to the prosecutors, he said, “They are powerful, not me.” From his questions to hostile prosecution witnesses, it was clear that Persico was trying to score points without endangering himself by testifying. His courtroom mannerisms and reputation attracted the attention of professional actors James Caan and Robert Duvall, who showed up in the public gallery to observe a real mafioso play a
lawyer. Caan had met Persico before the filming of the original
Godfather
movie, and Duvall had played the consigliere in the same production and its sequel.

As his codefendants feared, Persico’s performance weakened the defense’s overall strategy. Cross-examining Joe Cantalupo, who had identified him as the Colombo boss, Persico brought out that Cantalupo had been beaten up by Persico’s brother. His intent may have been to show that Cantalupo despised him and was testifying to obtain revenge. “You was angry because you was beat up, and you was beat up because you didn’t pay back the money,” Persico lashed out at Cantalupo. His argumentative question was a costly gaffe. The beating was over a loan-sharking debt, further illuminating Persico and his underlings as ruthless gangsters.

A similar Persico mistake occurred in his cross-examination of a Concrete Club contractor, Stanley Sternchos. Trying to illustrate the witness’s unreliability, Persico got an admission from Sternchos that he had missed making required payments to Ralph Scopo, the Mob’s bagman. Persico’s line of questioning solidified the evidence of extortion against all of the defendants by confirming the routine system of kickbacks. Only an amateur lawyer would have made such a slip-up.