Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America's Most Powerful Mafia Empires (54 page)

Persico might have thought he was charming the jury and getting his points across without subjecting himself to fierce cross-examination. Watching Persico, Michael Chertoff was convinced his antics had unintentionally aided the prosecution. The prosecutor was certain from reading the juror’s facial reactions that Persico’s testy duels with witnesses only further exposed his personality as a vindictive hoodlum.

Only one witness appeared for the defense: Fred DeChristopher’s estranged wife, Catherine, Persico’s cousin. She tried to refute her husband’s testimony that Carmine made incriminating remarks to them about his Mafia position, but she was a marginal witness of little impact. All the defense lawyers could count on was their combined summations as the best hope of picking apart the testimony and discrediting the tapes. Persico’s address to the jury, however, proved to be more riveting than any of the professional attorney’s speeches. Speaking for ninety minutes, he hammered away at the point that the prosecution lacked a sliver of direct evidence connecting him to a crime. His voice was not on any of the tapes, and he was in prison during most of the time the Concrete Club felonies were committed.

Nearing the end of his speech, he pushed aside his notes, leaned over the rail of the jury box, and acknowledged that he had fled to evade arrest after the indictment. “Maybe I was afraid,” he declared. “Maybe I was a little frightened. Not again. For what? What this time? What could I have done, being in jail so long? So many years? Maybe I was tired of going back and forth to jail, tired of being pulled into courtrooms and being tried on my name and reputation. When does it end? When does it stop? When do they leave you alone?” he asked the jury.

Disparaging the two principal witnesses against him—his cousin Fred DeChristopher and wannabe Joe Cantalupo—as untrustworthy and deceitful, he stressed that their testimony was insufficient to convict him. Following the defense’s fundamental line, Persico blasted the prosecution for prejudicially smearing all of the defendants with the vile name of Mafia. Saying he had been punished sufficiently for his past crimes, he concluded with a plea for justice.

“How long do they want me to keep paying for that mistake I made years ago? They didn’t come to try a case, they came to persecute people with the word Mafia. I can’t say I never did anything wrong; you know I’ve been in jail. You can’t send me back to jail ‘cause I’ve been in jail; they have to prove I did something wrong, I did something else.”

Lawyers for the remaining defendants were compelled in their summations to surmount three principal charges. They asked the jury to ignore the issue of the existence of the Commission, portraying it as no more dangerous to society than a Rotary Club. The government, they warned, was relying on anti-Italian bias to gain convictions. Calling the testimony about the history of the Mafia in Sicily and America outrageously prejudicial, they urged jurors to dismiss it as meaningless and irrelevant. Jim LaRossa noted sardonically that many of the historical events brought up by the prosecution occurred before most of the defendants were born.

The law team collectively challenged the validity of a second major charge—the formation and operations of the Concrete Club—by attacking the contractors. Again, they had to make a concession. Yes, the club existed and Scopo accepted payments. But the extortion charges were false. The rigged-bid scheme, in the defense’s version, was conceived by avaricious businessmen, willing partners for their own primary benefit in order to make millions of dollars. The lawyers argued that the accused mobsters were simply mediators who were brought in to resolve competitive disputes among the contractors; the defendants were blameless referees, not extortionists.

Summing up, Anthony Cardinale, who took over as Salerno’s lawyer after his first choice, Roy Cohn, died, scorched the contractors as the real criminals who should have been indicted. “It is a club of contractors, not of Commission members,” Cardinale said. “The Commission had nothing to do with the concrete payments. Listen to the words that are actually being spoken, they do not contain any threats or pressure. The concrete companies gladly paid to gain an advantage in the industry.”

Finally, on the Galante assassination charge, the lawyers demanded to know the prosecution’s proof that Commission members were implicated in the killing. Bruno Indelicato’s palm print in the getaway car, they said, had no bearing on the remaining defendants. Prosecutors had failed to show a fragment of evidence that any of the defendants knew Indelicate, associated with him, or ordered him to whack Galante.

In his summation, Michael Chertoff sought to demolish the defense’s strategic theme that the crimes cited in the indictment were isolated, unproven accusations, lacking evidence of a coordinated conspiracy by the Mafia or any other group.

“Merely the fact that a person is a member of the Mafia does not make him guilty of the crimes,” he told the jury, agreeing obliquely with the defense lawyers. “But, part of the crime charged here is being part of the Mafia and part of the Commission of La Cosa Nostra. That is one of the elements, that is one half of the crime, because the crime that is charged here is racketeering and what racketeering is about is setting up, joining, and associating with a criminal enterprise, organized crime activity, and using that organization to commit crimes like extortion and murder and loansharking.”

The insulation that had served so effectively in the past to protect the Commission bosses from prosecution now was turned against them, as Chertoff cited the testimony of high-ranking Cleveland defector Angelo Lonardo and other Cosa Nostra turncoats, to underscore the Commission’s supreme position in issuing commands to the Mafia’s legions.

Chertoff’s closing remarks were a barrage aimed at the defense’s collective position. “So it is not true to say that this case has nothing to do with the Mafia or the Mafia is irrelevant. The Mafia is very relevant in this case. The Mafia is relevant because it is the Mafia that makes possible this kind of concerted criminal activity. The Mafia is relevant because what racketeering is, the evil that
racketeering laws are designed to prevent, is people banding together in an organized and disciplined fashion for one purpose: to commit crimes.”

The jury deliberated five full days, and the last exhibit it called for was a tape made at the Palma Boys Social Club in which Salerno and Corallo reviewed problems about recruiting talented soldiers. “If it wasn’t for me,” Salerno said, “there wouldn’t be no Mob left. I made all the guys.” Discussing the necessity for a contract hit on a disabled but traitorous soldier, Corallo philosophized to Salerno, “You pick ‘em and ya kill ‘em. He’s in fucking bad shape. He’s crippled. But we do it.”

Jim LaRossa, the defense lawyer, realized that the jury’s rehearing a tape relating to justifications for murder was an ominous sign. The outlook for guilty verdicts was so strong that he was surprised that Corallo, Santoro, Furnari, and Scopo, the only defendants free on bail, showed up every day and had not gone on the lam after the closing arguments. Privately, he concluded that the trial had been an “inquest” rather than a close adversarial contest.

On November 19, 1986, the sixth day of deliberations, the jury filed into the courtroom. The forewoman grew hoarse as she recited the verdicts for twenty-eight minutes. Sipping water from a blue plastic cup, she announced “guilty” on a total of 151 counts against the eight defendants. They were convicted of every charge. As the litany of guilty verdicts was read out in the hushed courtroom, only Indelicate showed any animation. He giggled and fidgeted at the defense table. The other newly coined convicts were stone-faced.

Two months later, the three accused bosses, Tony Salerno, Ducks Corallo, and Carmine Persico, and the other convicted leaders, Salvatore “Tom Mix” Santoro, Christie “Tick” Furnari, and Gerry Langella, returned to court for sentencing. The sentence was identical for each of them: the maximum for a RICO conviction, one hundred years without the possibility of parole. Scopo, the diligent Mob soldier and corrupt union leader, was hit with the same one-hundred-year penalty. Bruno Indelicate got a lighter term: forty years for carrying out the hits on Galante and the two men who were lunching with him.

Singling out Salerno for his harshest rebuke, Judge Owen said, “You have essentially spent a lifetime terrorizing this community to your financial advantage.”

True to form, Persico, still representing himself, was the only defendant to rise and denounce the prosecution and the judge. “This case and the attitude of the prosecution and the court itself is in conformance with this mass hysteria, this Mafia mania, that was flying around and deprived every one of us in this courtroom of our rights to a fair trial and impartial trial.”

The remaining mafiosi were impassive as they heard the sentences meted out to them. Appearing bored, Lucchese underboss Tom Mix Santoro sarcastically asked Judge Owen to hurry along. “Ah, give me the hundred years,” he spoke up. “I’ll go inside now.” When the judge said he had pro forma requirements before imposing sentences, Santoro added bitterly, “You’re in the driver’s seat, Your Honor. And, you’re doing a good job.” (The mobster’s flippancy was ignored by Owen, a federal judge for thirteen years, with extensive courtroom experience as a former prosecutor and trial lawyer. Owen sometimes referred to himself as “a musical judge” because he composed operas in his spare time.)

For Rudolph Giuliani, who spearheaded the Commission prosecution, the verdicts were a total vindication of his strategy and the extensive commitment of government resources. (Giuliani simultaneously triumphed in another significant trial that enhanced his national reputation: the conviction in November 1986 of Stanley Friedman, the Bronx Democratic party leader, for participating in a RICO enterprise to fix contracts in New York’s Parking Violations Bureau.)

Michael Chertoff’s flawless presentation in securing the multiple convictions was his springboard for advancement. He went on to become the U.S. Attorney for New Jersey, and in the administration of President George W. Bush obtained the same post that Giuliani once held—assistant attorney general overseeing the Justice Department’s Criminal Division. In 2003, he was appointed a federal appeals court judge, one of the highest honors in the legal profession. Chertoff attained cabinet status in 2005 when Bush named him Homeland Security Secretary.

Several years after the Commission case ended, Tony Salerno was tried in a separate indictment involving another aspect of Mafia corruption in the concrete industry. A police sergeant at the trial mentioned to Salerno that Chertoff’s career was flourishing. “Well, you give him a little message from Fat Tony,” a smiling Salerno responded. “You tell that son-of-a-bitch he owes me a thank-you note.”

“Far from Finished”

A
t first, the sweeping Commission verdicts seemingly resonated like a death knell for the Mob’s most prominent families. A single trial had destroyed the Concrete Club. Embedded hierarchies were uprooted. And the Commission—organized crime’s version of the United Nations Security Council—was apparently dissolved.

But as law-enforcement officials celebrated and assessed the unprecedented dethronement of Cosa Nostra giants Anthony Salerno, Antonio Corallo, and Carmine Persico, the infrastructures of New York’s mafiosi brigades remained fundamentally sound and effective. The elimination of the $1.2 million shakedowns from the concrete industry was minuscule compared to the loot still collected daily from the Mob’s traditional sources. Moreover, during the course of the trial and afterward, a new breed of mobsters—largely unknown to Mafia investigators—were enriching their families through novel schemes. Two of the freshest ideas were the theft of $100 million a year from gasoline excise taxes and stealing the remains of the dilapidated West Side Highway in Manhattan.

A typical player in the gasoline game was Mieczyslaw “Misha” Szczep-kowski, a Polish immigrant who was barely literate in English. After scratching out a living for two years as a house painter and handyman, Misha got an irresistible job offer. A group of Russian-Jewish immigrants in Brooklyn made him
the salaried president of a new gasoline company that supplied millions of gallons of fuel to service stations. The Russians were not rewarding Misha for his executive talents. They were using him in a flimflam devised in the early 1980s to take advantage of a New York State law, which was intended to simplify the payment of gasoline taxes.

The new law shifted the responsibility for collecting and forwarding taxes to the government from the gas station proprietor to the wholesaler who delivered the fuel. Bureaucrats thought it would be easier and faster to gather taxes from a clutch of wholesalers rather than from thousands of gas stations. The catch in the law, however, was a provision that allowed wholesale distribution companies to trade or resell gasoline among themselves. Through that loophole, the Russians spotted a flaw in the tax process: only the last company that sold the gasoline to a retailer collected the taxes that were included in the total cost paid by the individual gasoline stations. The wholesaler was then required to pass along the revenue to the government.