Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America's Most Powerful Mafia Empires (57 page)

The next generation of Lucchese soldiers could be led by Steven “Wonder Boy” Crea, the family’s underboss. A major Mafia overseer in the construction industry, Crea is completing a prison sentence for extorting companies that removed debris from the World Trade Center ruins.
(FBI Photos)

In 1975 the disintegrating four-mile elevated section of Manhattan’s West Side Highway, which paralleled the Hudson River from the Battery to 59th Street, was closed for safety reasons. A decade later, fearing the roadway would collapse, the state began dismantling the crumbling hulk in stages, awarding one demolition contract to the John P. Picone Company. Picone was paid $12 million to remove a one-mile section and was given the right to sell salvageable materials.

Another company, A. J. Ross Logistics, Inc., which was not involved in the razing, wanted to acquire the girders and other steel slabs before they could be dumped and discarded. At that time, Ross Logistics was a specialty company that reshaped and designed steel for multimillion-dollar construction projects, and was a major subcontractor in the New York construction field. In the mid-and late 1980s, the company was a significant player, keeping more than three hundred employees on its payroll and grossing about $50 million a year.

The head of the company, who had his eye on the highway’s valuable 11,000 tons of steel, was Thomas J. Petrizzo, an executive well known in the construction business and without a hint of a criminal background. Years later, however, prosecutors would identify him as a capo in the Colombo family. Petrizzo had the important distinction of being his borgata’s main representative on a Mafia-type commission that coordinated construction rackets for all New York families. He also had a direct social and family link to Carmine Persico, the Colombo boss, through the marriage of his daughter, Joanne, to Persico’s younger son, Michael. For almost two decades, Petrizzo dealt with the city’s leading contractors, developers, and architects, helping to shape New York’s skyline. None of them seemingly suspected that he was a mafioso “sleeper,” scheming to enrich crime families.

To get his hands on the West Side Highway’s steel without paying for it, Petrizzo brewed a scheme that would benefit the Colombos and the Gambino and Lucchese families as well. Under existing union jurisdictional rules, the destruction of the highway was a job restricted to an ironworkers’ local. Petrizzo lacked a connection to that union, but as part of his Mafia duties, he controlled a carpenters’ local that normally worked only on dock construction and repairs. Through underworld alliances, Petrizzo knew that the Lucchese family was extorting
the contractor dismantling the highway, the Picone Company, for labor peace. The Luccheses knew that the Picone Company was a powerhouse road-and-infrastructure builder with almost $600 million in state and city contracts in the 1980s.

Aware of the Lucchese influence at Picone, Petrizzo offered that family’s construction coordinator, Anthony “Gaspipe” Casso, a nifty proposal. If the Lucchese leaders gave him the steel remnants, he would exert his power to get carpenters to work on the highway for Picone at much lower wages than ironworkers. The arrangement would increase Picone’s profit and therefore guarantee a larger kickback share for Casso and the Lucchese family. In addition, Petrizzo was so confident of the profit he could extract from the steel that he gave Casso $800,000 for bringing the Picone company on board.

As a final segment of the Mob triangle, Petrizzo got Salvatore “Sammy the Bull” Gravano, then the Gambino underboss, to intervene with the ironworkers to prevent them from using their jurisdictional rights to disrupt the carpenter demolition crews hired by the Picone company. Gravano could head off labor problems since the Gambinos exercised control over the ironworkers’ local. The payoff to the Gambinos was never disclosed, but Petrizzo’s gift of $800,000 to Casso clearly indicated that big bucks were made by each crime family.

“It was a sweetheart deal,” Alphonse D’Arco, the Lucchese’s acting boss in the late 1980s, later confided. “The labor peace which ensued helped Picone and Petrizzo make a large sum of money from the scrap steel alone.”

While their families continued to prosper from old and new enterprises, the three bosses convicted at the Commission trial awaited the outcome of their appeals. Traditional Mafia protocol enables a boss to retain his rank even while in prison, if he desires. As long as the appeals were pending, Salerno, Corallo, and Persico could cling to the faint hope that the convictions would be reversed, their life sentences voided, and that they might have the option of either returning to their previous posts or retiring tranquilly.

A blizzard of legal points was raised in appeals for the three identified bosses and their five lower-ranking codefendants. Challenging the constitutionality of the RICO law, the defense argued primarily that the statute unjustifiably allowed the prosecution to use irrelevant evidence and improper tactics, violating the defendants’ basic rights to a fair trial.

None of the convictions was overturned by the United States Court of Appeals
for the Second Circuit. The only count that created a troubling dissent was whether there had been sufficient evidence to convict the Commission members of conspiracy in the gangland rubout of Carmine Galante. All of the linkage to the slayings was circumstantial and the accusation was the weakest charge against Salerno, Corallo, and Persico. One judge, in a partial dissent, discounted the prosecution’s theory that Bruno Indelicato’s visit to the Ravenite Club shortly after Galanteas murder implicated Commission members. The judge found the evidence insufficient, resting entirely on “speculation and inference.”

But the overall thrust of the unanimous rulings verified the effectiveness of RICO. The judges declared that the prosecutors could introduce evidence of the history and customs of the Cosa Nostra and that these areas were neither prejudicial nor irrelevant. By allowing such testimony, the thick layers of insulation that had protected the bosses for half a century were stripped from them. Even if members of a Mafia hierarchy did not commit the actual crime, they could still be judged guilty as leaders of a racketeering “enterprise.” Thus, in the Commission case, members of the Mafia’s board of directors were guilty of extortion via the Concrete Club, even if they did not personally coerce any contractor. They were also guilty of Galante’s murder, even if they did not pull the trigger. Upholding the convictions, the appeals court sustained the essential theory of RICO—that mobsters could be prosecuted at one trial for a diverse “pattern” of crimes.

Additionally, the judges found that one-hundred-year sentences for Mob leaders were not cruel and excessive. The Supreme Court then delivered the legal haymaker, declining to even review the appeals of the imprisoned dons and the lower-court decisions. The crux of the rulings established that the entire RICO statute was constitutional and enforceable. In short, the Commission case was enshrined as a legal milestone and breakthrough against the Mafia.

Ramifications were felt far beyond New York. With a clear signal from the courts, anti-Mafia prosecutors throughout the country could adopt the tactics used by Rudolph Giuliani’s prosecutors to dismember Mob families in their jurisdictions. G. Robert Blakey hailed the courtroom victory against the Commission as a model and an incentive for attacking other Cosa Nostra strongholds. “It was a big win legally and psychologically,” Blakey declared. He compared the seismic legal consequences of the Commission convictions and appeals decisions to the antimonopoly ruling by the Supreme Court in 1911, upholding the Sherman Antitrust Act. The 1911 case broke up the mammoth Standard Oil Company of New Jersey into a group of independent competitors.
Blakey and other legal scholars saw the Commission case as a model for ending Cosa Nostra’s infiltration of legitimate businesses and unions.

Agreeing with Blakey that the Commission case was without precedent, top Justice Department officials encouraged prosecutors to launch similar offensives. In November 1987, exactly one year after the New York convictions, William F. Weld, the assistant attorney general in charge of the department’s criminal division, characterized RICO “as the backbone of our organized crime effort.” Weld later governor of Massachusetts, observed in a progress report that the FBI and federal prosecutors no longer reacted only after crimes were committed by mafiosi. The new policy, he stated, “was the proactive targeting of specific OC [organized crime] figures who were responsible for large numbers of crimes.”

In essence, the Justice Department had belatedly signed on in the late 1980s to an investigative and prosecutorial strategy that had been advanced almost a decade earlier by Blakey; one of his early supporters, Ronald Goldstock; and a handful of F.B.I agents, notably Jim Kossler, Jules Bonavolenta, Jim Kallstrom, and Neil Welch. “This concept of targeting entire criminal enterprises remains the current state-of-the-art method of attack in the evolution of the war on organized crime,” Weld wrote, endorsing RICO as the government’s most powerful weapon against Cosa Nostra fiefs.

RICO campaigns soon succeeded against top-echelon mobsters outside New York. Long-established Mob families were vanquished or severely undermined in Kansas City, St. Louis, Milwaukee, Detroit, St. Louis, New Orleans, Boston, Providence, Los Angles, Denver, and Buffalo. By 1990, more than two hundred high- and middle-ranking mafiosi were imprisoned for long stretches or were facing racketeering trials. All of these regions had been victimized for half a century, each by a single borgata. In most of the country, no understudies or substitute families waited in the wings to quickly fill the power gaps created by the imprisonment of top-dog mobsters.

New York was a different story. Investigators faced more complex obstacles in destroying the Mob’s infrastructure than in any other part of the country. Metropolitan New York’s vast size and the Mob’s diversity of legal and illicit economic interests created extraordinary problems for law enforcement. The local Mafia was unique and more varied than its counterparts in other Mob realms. The existence of five clanlike families with a combined total of more than one thousand soldiers and at least five thousand associates meant that power vacuums brought about by RICO convictions were more easily filled
than elsewhere. The large New York gangs had the in-house manpower reserves to take over rackets from fallen colleagues. And if one family relinquished an asset, a rival group always was available to grab the prize.

After the early euphoria of the Commission verdicts and the appeals court decisions, some investigators recognized that the Mob’s recuperative powers were stronger than anticipated. Despite a spurt of convictions mainly involving the middle echelons of the Bonanno and Colombo families, New York’s Mafia might not, after all, be living on borrowed time. By 1988, two years after the Commission case, federal and state officials conceded that one of the Mob’s bottomless troughs—the construction industry—remained rampant with payoffs and rigged bids.

Before the Commission trial, Governor Mario Cuomo had disputed the notion that the Mafia even existed. Afterward, he agreed that the multibillion-dollar construction industry was “infested” by racketeers. He called on business executives to find the courage to drive out the Mob by cooperating with a reform campaign. Cuomo’s blast came after a study by the state’s Organized Crime Task Force found that high-level management and union groups had willingly accommodated themselves to the Mafia as a “necessary evil” that promoted stability, labor peace, and profits for everyone.

“By controlling the activities of disparate groups of racketeers preying on the industry,” the report said, “syndicates can assure contractors that they will only have to pay off once for a specified result, that the amount to be paid will be ‘reasonable,’ and the ‘services’ paid for will be delivered.” The report implied that as long as companies could pass along the price of kickbacks to their customers, they preferred living with a measure of Mob and union corruption rather than wrestling with honest, tenacious union leaders who could lawfully disrupt their completion schedules by exercising their collective-bargaining rights.

Construction delays are the bane of contractors and developers, and calculating mobsters counted on the threat of possible work stoppages to induce payoffs. On a $100 million project, the report estimated, each day of delay added $75,000 in interest costs alone.

“Nothing has changed, except that it’s gotten worse,” Governor Cuomo said glumly, discussing the Cosa Nostra’s insidious presence. “After a while it becomes habitual. After a while if you don’t cure it, the society takes it for granted—it is there and it grows.”

Even before the report, the agent now leading the FBI’s New York bureau,
Thomas Sheer, knew the war on many fronts was unending, and that greater efforts were needed to crack the Mafia’s bear hug on unions and contractors. He highlighted greater use of RICO’s civil provisions as a means of removing dishonest union administrations. “The next stage is an assault on the Cosa Nostra’s main economic base of power, the money they make from corruption by taking over unions and legitimate businesses,” Sheer told his agents in 1987.

One union immediately targeted for a purge was the District Council of Cement and Concrete Workers, a regional administrative body that had been headed by the convicted Ralph Scopo of Concrete Club infamy. Federal judges authorized the ouster of Scopo’s deputies and appointed a monitor to supervise the union for four years, until honest elections could be held. Officials on the council and its main Mob-controlled subsidiary, Local 6A, resigned their well-paid posts rather than answer prosecutors’ questions and risk perjuring themselves in sworn pretrial depositions. The interrogatory they apparently most dreaded was: Did they know anyone who was a member of the “Colombo Crime Family of La Cosa Nostra and who in any way participated in or profited from the cement construction industry in the Metropolitan New York area?” Obviously, silence was the safest course.