Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America's Most Powerful Mafia Empires (58 page)

Lieutenant Remo Franceschini, the New York detective toughened by twenty-five years of showdowns with mobsters, was certain the New York families had no intention of capitulating because of the Commission verdicts. He pointed out that historically the five borgatas were adept at adjusting to changing conditions. “All the recent cases showed that law enforcement could infiltrate the top leadership with informers and bugs. The new bosses probably will try to insulate themselves even more from us by having less contact with underlings, including capos. Despite what’s happened, they’re far from finished.”

Turning Point

T
here was widespread agreement among Mafia prosecutors in the late 1980s that the permanent imprisonment of Fat Tony Salerno, Ducks Corallo, and Carmine the Snake Persico eliminated a vast reservoir of irreplaceable experience,
contacts
, and knowledge from the Mob’s brain trust. Salerno’s and Corallo’s long-term relationships and corrupt manipulations of
businessmen
, politicians, and local police could not be swiftly duplicated by their successors. But they were in their seventies and probably close to stepping aside and relinquishing power, even if they hadn’t been trapped in the Commission investigation. Both would die in prison, Salerno at age eighty in 1992, and Corallo at eighty-seven in 2000. Corallo’s underboss, Salvatore “Tom Mix” Santoro, was also a ripe seventy-two when he went to prison for the rest of his life. The only relatively young boss receiving a life sentence, fifty-three-year-old Carmine Persico, was a more grievous casualty for the
Colombo family
. His conviction removed from the streets and from the Mafia’s highest councils a promising Mob leader at the peak of his abilities.

As a sequel to the trial, and following more exacting interpretations of the one thousand hours of tapes obtained in the investigation, questions were raised by lawyers and scholars about the true dimensions of the Commission’s authority and its genuine powers. James B. Jacobs, a professor at New York
University’s Law School, and an authoritative Mafia researcher, said the extent of the Commission’s national reach and its decision-making methods remained unclear from the evidence at the trial. Among the unresolved mysteries, Jacobs wrote, was how the Commission enforced its judgments, and on what basis it could intervene in internal family disputes.

Skeptical defense lawyers like Richard A. Rehbock, who represented members of the Gambino crime family, lambasted the prosecution for allegedly exaggerating the Commission’s importance as the Mafia’s controlling clique in the 1980s. “The government’s theory that the Commission could dictate to families what could and could not be done was factually incorrect. It was a loose confederation, a meeting place to settle disputes and not a ruling body.”

Compounding the frustrations of unraveling Mafia secrets was evidence that arose after the trial that contradicted the prosecution’s labeling Fat Tony Salerno the head of the Genovese family, when he was arrested in 1985. Shortly after the Commission trial, Salerno’s closest confidant, Vincent “Fish” Cafaro, “flipped”—became a prosecution witness after being indicted on racketeering charges. Although Salerno had represented the Genovese gang at Commission meetings, Cafaro revealed that Fat Tony had never been the family’s godfather, and that he had been used as a figurehead by the real bosses to deflect law-enforcement attention from themselves. (Even if the prosecution’s ranking of Salerno was wrong, it was still insufficient grounds to overturn his conviction. He had been found guilty of specific criminal acts and had not been tried on the accusation of being the Genovese godfather.)

Cafaro’s disquieting revelation reflected the persistent fog that clouded much of the Mob’s activities. Secrets remained that were difficult for FBI and other investigators to decipher from the veiled conversations overheard through electronic surveillance and from morsels provided by low-ranking informers. Mob soldiers and associates were often in the dark themselves about fundamental facts concerning their own families. Although mixed up with racketeers in the Bronx for decades, William Pellegrino Masselli, better known as “Butcher Boy”, remained muddled into his mid-fifties about the accepted name of his borgata. An FBI bug had been placed in Masselli’s office in an investigation of his links to hijacking, narcotics deals, and a possible rigged bid on a subway construction project. Listening in, agents heard Masselli, the reasonably intelligent owner of a trucking company, tell a Mob pal that he had read a newspaper story identifying a wiseguy who was his Mafia supervisor. “Geez, I didn’t know we belong to the Genovese family,” a surprised Masselli said. Another example
of how little the street earners might know about their own organizations came from the lips of Vinnie DePenta, a small-time gambler and former Bonanno wannabe. In the early 1980s, the FBI set up a sting operation in Little Italy, opening a pasta-importing company. The spurious company was run by DePenta, who had switched sides to become a paid government informer after getting into life-threatening trouble with Bonanno loan sharks. Counting on DePenta’s predatory Mob contacts to visit him in his D&M Pasta Company, the FBI concealed video cameras and bugs to record incriminating conversations. The sting failed to lure any big-time mafiosi but it entrapped a Colombo enforcer
named
Frankie “the Beast” Falanga, who informed DePenta that he would be “owned,” protected by the Colombos
from
Bonanno barbarians in return for payoffs and the prospect of exploiting his pasta business.

Taking DePenta under his wing, Falanga felt dutybound to instruct him in the importance of Mafia history. Despite a misspent life mingling with made guys, DePenta was totally ignorant of Mafia genealogy. Frankie the Beast traced the roots of his crime family, which now controlled DePenta, to the renowned Joe Profaci, one of the five founding godfathers in 1931. Furthermore, Falanga boasted that he had been a driver and bodyguard for Joe Colombo. As part of the orientation, Falanga pointed out that the current acting boss of the Colombos was the aged capo Tommy DiBella, who was filling in for Carmine Persico. Professor Falanga’s recital of borgata names and leaders left the student DePenta bewildered. The FBI recorded this Abbot-and-Costello “Who’s on firsts-type exchange.

F
ALANGA
: “NOW, everybody’s got a family, right? DiBella’s got a family, right?”

D
EPENTA
: “Right.”

F
ALANGA
: “He’s got the Profaci family. And the Bonannos have got this guy. And the other guy has got that guy. Then there’s another crew. You get it?”

D
EPENTA
: “I thought DiBella was Colombo.”

F
ALANGA
: “That’s Colombo.”

D
EPENTA
: “Profaci?”

F
ALANGA
: “Right.”

D
EPENTA
: “Profaci-Colombo are one and the same?”

F
ALANGA
: “Profaci’s all one, that’s all one. It’s all one.”

Frankie the Beast, exasperated by the job of clarifying the borgata’s background to his confused new associate, got to the heart of his plan to use the pasta company as a front for Mob activities.

F
ALANGA
: “You know what the name of the game is here, right Vinnie?”

D
EPENTA
: “Yeah, what?”

F
ALANGA
: “Make fucking money, that’s what.”

Comic moments were provided by Butcher Boy Masselli, the brutal enforcer Frankie falanga, and FBI spy Vinnie DePenta, but the trio’s activities showed that veils of secrecy and ignorance within the Mob’s lower ranks were still in place to shield capos and leaders. Masselli and falanga were far removed from Mafia power centers, and the information gained from investigating them did not enable the FBI to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of their families.

Later information obtained by the bureau demonstrated that the Commission case had barely affected the diversified illicit operations of most New York mafiosi. Despite the murder of Paul Castellano and the convictions of Tony Salerno, Ducks Corallo, and Carmine Persico, business continued to hum in every gang, and replacements filled the gaps left by the stricken leaders and their cohorts. This continued prosperity could be credited to Lucky Luciano’s ingenious organizational plan for the Cosa Nostra, devised in 1931. Fifty-five years later, Luciano’s legacy kept each family’s table of organization intact and functioning. As the 1980s ended, there seemed no end to the plundering by the five families.

The perennial cash cows for each borgata were gambling and loan-sharking. Bookmaking rings for sports betting and the numbers games also guaranteed huge profits. The exact “take” will never be accurately added up, but gambling researchers believe Mafia bookies netted a minimum of 15 percent of the gross wagered by bettors. Of course, there were overhead costs for employees and rental of places to handle telephone bets, but the profits—like all Mafia spoils—were tax free. The National Football League’s Super Bowl game provides the clearest indication of the riches gambling can generate for the Mob. A study by the New York Police Department’s Organized Crime Control Bureau in the early 1990’s estimated that more than $1 billion was wagered on the Super Bowl every year with Mafia-controlled bookies in the city and suburbs, including New Jersey, Long Island, and Connecticut. On one game and in one day, the five families cleaned up with a profit of 15 percent—a “take” of $150 million. One of the most enterprising Gambino capos and bookies, John “Handsome
Jack” Giordano, developed a network of forty sports-betting locations that alone grossed over $300
million
a year, court records disclosed.

Loan-sharking is the symbiotic partner of gambling operations. Nobody with any sense welshes on a Mob bookie. Compulsive bettors in debt to a bookie frequently have recourse only to a loan shark for quick money. Most loan sharks offer two types of usurious loans: the “knockdown” and the “vigorish,” “vig” or “juice.” Howard M. Abadinsky, a professor of criminal justice and legal
studies at St. John’s
University in New York, an expert on Mafia financial tactics, says that the knockdown, a variation of a type invented in the 1930s by Tommy “Three-Finger Brown” Lucchese, requires a specified schedule of repayment of the principal and interest—similar to a legitimate loan but at an astronomical cost. Every week the debtor must hand over six dollars for every five dollars borrowed; the one dollar interest is the vig or juice until the full principle is repaid. Abadinsky found that a $1,000 loan might be repaid in fourteen weekly installments of $100 for a total of $1,400.

There is no time limitation on a “straight vigorish” loan. Trouble mounts speedily if a debtor misses a weekly installment. For a late payment, the vig is compounded, and the weekly interest payments are increased without a reduction in the principal. The interest on an original loan of $100 is $20 for the first week. If vigorish payments are missed, the interest zooms sharply from $20 for the first week to $107 after four weeks—more in just one weekly interest payment than the value of the original loan.

Loan-shark interest rates in New York normally varied from a low of 2 to 5 percent a week to above 100 percent a year when late payments were factored in. The huge profits were illustrated by a Colombo crime family ring in the mid-1980s, which expanded its clientele from addicted gamblers and blue-collar workers to businessmen suddenly pressed for cash and unable to get legitimate loans. The Colombos employed the usual vig methods but on a loftier scale. The mobsters established a phony loan company with an impressive sounding name, the Resource Capital Group, and used their muscle and contacts to tap two teamster union locals to subsidize the company with $1.2 million as capital for the usurious loans. One borrower was forced to pay $14,000 a week in vigorish on a loan of $685,000. Another paid $50,000 in a three-month period on a $400,000 loan.

At the racket’s peak, the Colombos were extorting about $40,000 a week from some fifteen businessmen who had fallen into their clutches. When the
FBI smashed the ring, agents termed it “a super Shylock operation.” The borrowers said they were intimidated into making the excessive payments after learning the loan company was a Mafia front and after being apprised of the Mob’s loan-sharking motto: “Your body is the collateral.”

Family bosses, other hierarchy members, and capos traditionally profited from loan-sharking without the bother of doing any grunt work. They distributed $100,000 or more to soldiers and charged them one point—one percent—for an assured income of at least $1,000 a week. Any amount the soldiers imposed over the one percent lined their own pockets.

“The boss doesn’t do anything,” Police Detective Lieutenant Remo Franceschini, points out. “He puts $1 million in the street and gets half a million in interest every year, the money coming into him each week. If for some reason it doesn’t come in, the soldier has a problem and he is going to get that money whatever way he has to. That’s what makes the Mob rich. It’s the ultimate pyramid scheme.”