Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America's Most Powerful Mafia Empires (59 page)

Heading into the 1990s, the FBI and state investigators had dossiers on about 1,200 made soldiers active in the New York area. Nearing the end of the century, the Mafia could field a combined army in New York totaling almost eight thousand made men and associates engaged in a melange of illegal adventures. Compared to some new sophisticated schemes, the old standbys, bookmaking and loan-sharking, were loose change for the bosses.

In 1990, each of the five families had its own characteristics and growth potential. Some of their activities were joint ventures.

The Gambinos, the nation’s largest Mob family, with more than four hundred soldiers, were important players in crimes involving:

Corruption on the Brooklyn and Staten Island waterfronts with the aid of officials from the longshoremen’s union; payoffs in the construction industry through direct ties to the teamsters’ union; kickbacks from Key Foods and Waldbaum supermarket chains for soft union settlements; gasoline-tax rip-offs; and payments from companies in the Garment Center for labor peace and rapid trucking services.

Thomas Gambino, the son of the late Don Carlo and himself a Gambino capo, controlled much of the Garment Center’s vital trucking network, and had accumulated a personal fortune of $75 million in bank accounts, stocks, and bonds. By inflating transportation and manufacturing costs, the Gambino
family added $3.50 to consumers for every $100 purchase of clothing, according to an analysis by the Manhattan district attorney’s office. One of the family’s most productive operations, in conjunction with the Genovese borgata, was rigging prices for collecting nonresidential trash from office buildings, factories, and stores. The Mob-run private garbage-hauler associations were cartels with fixed prices, and customers were denied a choice in selecting a carter. The system inflated costs by $400 million a year, with a large part of the overcharges kept by Gambino and Genovese members and their associates.

In another construction sideline—also practiced by the Genoveses—Gambino soldiers gouged companies for protection from demonstrations and work stoppages by bogus civil-rights activist groups. The synthetic “community coalitions” collaborated with the Mafia by picketing and harassing contractors, demanding greater employment of blacks and Hispanics. Mobsters would then step in, promising the contractors that they had the muscle to end the protests, and thousands of dollars were paid them to head-off or end the demonstrations. For their services, coalition organizers were usually bribed by the contractors with no-show jobs for as much as $1,000 a week; the Gambinos’ profit was much larger, up to $100,000 for a single project.

Organized prostitution was no longer a respectable trade for Mafia entrepreneurs, but the sex industry churned out profits for the Gambinos. A suave, impeccably dressed capo, Robert DiBernardo, owned Star Distributors, the largest pornography wholesaler in the New York area. In the 1980s, anti-smut laws—no longer on the books—made the illegal sales of porno magazines and photos a big underground business. DiBernardo was also a partner of Show World Center in Times Square, one of the city’s most profitable video porn and striptease emporiums.

The Genoveses, with at least three hundred identified soldiers, were believed to be more affluent than the Gambinos. In addition to carving up the city’s private waste-hauling racket with the Gambinos, the Genoveses’ main interests focused on labor and industrial profiteering. Helped by officials in teamster and longshoremen’s locals, the family extorted payoffs from shipping and stevedoring companies in New Jersey and Manhattan. Paying blackmail was the only way the companies could avoid costly work stoppages. The family’s ties to the carpenters’ union placed it in a linchpin position to extract payoffs from major dry-wall and construction contractors. In another ploy, connivance with the
carpenters’ union allowed the Genoveses to extract bribes from trade-show organizers, contractors, and exhibitors at the Javits Convention Center, in return for labor peace. The family also placed dozens of mobsters on payrolls at the center for no-show jobs. (The Gambinos had a smaller extortion racket, based on its control of a teamsters’ local that worked there.)

Indicative of the Genovese borgata’s range of influence in the construction industry was the hiring of a family associate, Michael J. Crimi, as primary labor consultant by the state’s Battery Park City Authority when it was in the midst of a billion-dollar development program in the 1980s. Crimi was appointed in disregard of warnings from Mafia investigators that he was linked to Genovese soldiers and to the roofers’ union, which had been cited by federal authorities as mobbed up. Crimi had a loan-sharking conviction, which was reversed on appeal, and he had been acquitted in an indictment for participating in the slaying of a loan shark.

At the city’s bustling Fulton Fish Market, the Genovese gang had been the dominant force since the 1930s. Through strong-arm bullying and threats, the family enriched itself at the nation’s largest wholesale fish market, which every year had gross sales of nearly $1 billion. Genovese thugs thrived by controlling the unloading and loading offish and sea food, and granting parking privileges. Payoffs came from fishmongers, suppliers, and customers whose livelihoods depended on the prompt handling of food that was perishable and worthless unless sold quickly.

Although Fat Tony Salerno was confined to a prison cell, his brother Charles “Speed” Salerno was raking in illicit profits for the family from the city’s 1,200 private parking lots and garages. As head of teamsters’ Local 272, which represented garage employees, Speed Salerno was the bagman for payoffs from employers. (He was later charged with accepting about $300,000 in bribes for contracts that allowed lower wage scales.)

Without the necessity of risking a single bet at the Atlantic City, New Jersey, casinos, the Genovese family was a big winner. Allied with Philadelphia’s Mafia family, New York’s Genovese leaders dipped into the treasury of the union representing casino employees, Local 54 of the Hotel and Restaurant Employees and Bartenders Union. Strategically placed officials of the local were Mob associates, who conspired with the Philadelphia and Genovese groups in frauds that milked the local’s dues and its pension and medical welfare plans.

Religion was another profitable area for the Genoveses. At a celebrated
tourist attraction, the annual San Gennaro Feast in Little Italy, a Genovese crew was around to shake down vendors for the right to set up food and souvenir stands. The mobsters also operated illegal gambling games and unashamedly stole thousands of dollars in donations to a local church from festival visitors who pinned bills to a statue of Saint Gennaro.

The Luccheses, with close to two hundred wiseguys, excelled at labor racketeering. Manipulating teamsters’ locals at the John F. Kennedy and Newark Airports, they got systemic payoffs from air freight companies for the right to employ cheaper nonunion labor, and delivered sweetheart collective-bargaining contracts at the expense of union employees. Similarly, the family’s grip on several painters’, plumbers’, and carpenters’ locals allowed it to collect under-the-table payments from construction companies. The usual payment was $100 for each nonunion employee allowed to be hired “off the books,” which sharply lowered hourly wage scales and exempted contractors from required fringe-benefit contributions to union pension and medical funds.

Strategic jobs at the air-freight companies provided golden information for conventional crimes—cargo hijackings outside the airports and inside thefts in storage areas. More than $350 million worth of cargo moved in and out of the airports every year, tempting targets for Lucchese wiseguys. Supplied with inside information from a tipster employee at JFK Airport, a Lucchese crew in December 1978 pulled off one of the nation’s largest cash heists. The gangsters overpowered guards and stole about $5 million in cash and $875,000 in jewels from an easily cracked vault in the Lufthansa Airline storage terminal.

A building-trades bonanza in the 1980s, which the Luccheses shared mainly with their Genovese partners, was rigging bids totaling almost $150 million for window replacements at the city’s public housing projects. Prosecutors later said those deals significantly inflated costs and netted Mafia families “tens of millions of dollars” in kickbacks from companies that got the contracts. And in a mutual pact with the Gambinos, top Lucchese leaders created and operated the Garment Center’s only trucking companies. The monopoly allowed the two families to control freight shipping costs and indirectly added to overhead and consumer prices for dresses, suits, and other apparel throughout the country.

An important racketeering sideline existed at two of the city’s major newspapers,
The New York Times
and the
New York Daily News—
both of which prided themselves on their reporting of Mafia inroads elsewhere. Through influence in the Newspaper and Mail Deliverers Union, the family got no-show jobs, ran bookmaking and loan-sharking activities inside the newspaper plants, and stole and resold copies of the newspapers.

The Colombos, with 100 to 125 soldiers, relied mainly on gasoline-tax thefts and the traditional bookmaking and loan-sharking techniques for the bulk of their illicit income. They had a smaller stake than the Gambinos and Luccheses in protection payoffs from Garment Center companies resisting unionization attempts. The family, however, rivaled the Gambinos in getting a slice of easy money from transporting city schoolchildren. Both families were secret partners in ten Brooklyn school bus companies that mysteriously managed to obtain about $40 million in annual contracts without the nuisance of bidding competitively against other companies. One Mob outfit responsible for transporting children was run by a professional hit man, Robert Bering, who years later revealed that wiseguys and associates headed the two unions that represented drivers for all of the city’s school buses.

The innovative capo Michael Franzese moved the family into another new arena, capitalizing on sports and entertainment activities. He became a secret partner in an agency that represented athletes and showbusiness personalities. Banking on the clients’ inherent fear of resisting the Mafia, the agency used its Colombo connection to pressure them to sign up.

Narcotics trafficking—always a Colombo franchise—became an increasingly important resource for the family’s leaders after the river of money from the Concrete Club dried up. Another innovation was the creation of a financial pipeline to Las Vegas. Through a crew led by a feared capo, Charles “Charlie Moose” Panarella, the regime profited from loan-sharking in Las Vegas, and ran brothels, a practice shunned by the other New York families.

The Bonannos, battered by decades of internal turmoil and its disastrous infiltration by FBI agent Joseph Pistone, were the smallest and weakest of the five families, mustering about 100 soldiers. Narcotics deals, run mainly by Zips, the family’s Sicilian wing, along with bookmaking and loan-sharking, were the family’s mainstays. Its labor-racketeering exploits had been reduced mainly to payoffs
and no-show jobs derived from influence in the Newspaper Deliverers Union at the smallest of the city’s three daily newspapers, the
New York Post.
A veteran Bonanno soldier and
Post
employee, Alfred “Al Walker” Embarrate, doled out phantom jobs to mafiosi and controlled loan-sharking and bookmaking in the composing room and on the loading bays. Embaratto also supervised the daily theft of ten thousand copies of the
Post
, priced at 50 cents, and sold them for 20 or 30 cents each to news dealers. (Overall, the Bonanno and Luchesse thefts and other operations at the city’s three major newspapers, mainly from the
Post
, netted the Mob about $5 million a year.)

Another Bonanno innovation was installing illegal video poker machines in
neighborhood
stores in Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island. The enterprise was inspired by the family’s imaginative consigliere, Anthony Spero, whose gorillas placed the gambling games in groceries, restaurants, and candy and bagel shops, and shared the proceeds fifty-fifty with the proprietors. Nevertheless, by 1990, the Bonanno borgata appeared to be a fading shadow of the expansive empire that Joe Bonanno, its first godfather, had created.

New York’s most prominent district attorney, Manhattan’s Robert Morgenthau, was frank in assessing the robust health of the combined Cosa Nostra families. Mobsters were skimming “multimillions” annually from the construction and garment industries alone, Morgenthau said in an informal “State of the Mob”-type review in 1990. “They have imposed an invisible tax on the region,” he asserted. “What they do translates directly into high costs for such basic things as clothes, the cost of an apartment and an office, and discourages legitimate businesses from coming here or staying here.”

As the last decade of the twentieth century began, new faces and a third generation of American mafiosi were in control or seeking to govern each of the five families. This latest batch of mobsters was acquainted with the pitfalls that had destroyed the previous generation of dons: Paul Castellano, Antonio Corallo, Anthony Salerno, Philip Rastelli, and Carmine Persico. The RICO arrests and trials of the old godfathers was a transitional round for the Cosa Nostra. Although that struggle ended with a jolting defeat for the Mob, the Commission trial had previewed for the new ruling generation the main law-enforcement tactics that would be employed against them.

FBI agents and prosecutors openly advertised that their blitz did not end with the Commission verdicts. They were committed to destroying the Mob’s
remaining power centers with the same weapons used against the previous generation. RICO would be the government’s prime instrument to remove the latest coalition of bosses and their closest henchmen. Agents would count on tested methods—a rash of informers violating the
omertà
oath and electronic bugs and wire taps—to demolish the new regimes. “Our mission is to reduce the families to the level of street gangs that they were sixty or seventy years ago,” William Y. Doran, supervisor of the FBI’s New York Criminal Division, proclaimed confidently. “We have no intention of pulling out now and giving them a chance to revive.”