Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America's Most Powerful Mafia Empires (60 page)

In handing out life sentences at the Commission trial, Judge Richard Owen emphasized that the harsh terms were meant as a strong deterrent message to mobsters hoping to succeed the imprisoned leaders. If caught and convicted, the new dons surely knew the draconian consequences awaiting them. The future of the New York families and, in effect, the American Mafia, rested squarely in the hands of four ambitious mobsters heading their revamped gangs: John Gotti (Gambino); Vincent Gigante (Genovese); Anthony Casso (Lucchese); Joseph Massino (Bonanno); and oddly enough, one of the convicted Commission godfathers, Carmine Persico. Although imprisoned, Persico refused to relinquish power in the Colombo family. The modern-era Mafia was at a turning point and these five men would be its saviors or its ruination.

Snake Charmer

I
n the clandestine fraternity of La Cosa Nostra, Carmine Joseph Persico evoked either unqualified loyalty or enmity. His moody personality elicited contradictory nicknames: the affectionate “Junior” from his charmed supporters, and the derogatory “the Snake” from his detractors. Born on August 8, 1933, he grew up in
Carroll Gardens and
Red Hook, Brooklyn sections then populated mainly by working-class Italian and Irish families. Unlike most blossoming hoodlums of his generation, Persico was raised in comfortable circumstances. During the Depression years, almost every family in Persico’s neighborhood barely scraped by as breadwinners desperately scrambled for backbreaking jobs on the nearby
docks or in factories
. Better educated than most of his neighbors, Persico’s father, Carmine senior, was a legal stenographer for prestigious Manhattan law firms and brought home a weekly pay packet even in hard times. The boy’s mother, the former Susan Plantamura, was a strong-willed woman who tried to keep a tight rein on Carmine and his siblings, the elder Alphonse, the younger Theodore,
and a sister, Dolores
.

The neighborhood was ideal territory for Mafia crews, notably Joe Profaci’s organization. Youngsters were attracted to the wiseguys flashing big bankrolls, who idled away afternoons drinking coffee and playing cards at storefront Mob hangouts, misleadingly called “social” or “athletic” clubs. The Persico brothers,
starting with Alphonse, followed by Carmine and Theodore, joined in the adulation of the neighborhood mafiosi.

At sixteen, over the objections of his parents, Carmine dropped out of high school. He was already known to the police as one of the leaders of the Garfield Boys, a street gang armed with knives, clubs, and zip guns—primitive single-round weapons often secretly constructed in high-school machine shops—for wild battles with rival gangs and for extorting money from defenseless classmates. In March 1951, at age seventeen, Carmine was arrested for the fatal beating of another youth during a brawl in Prospect Park. It was his first felony, and when the charges against him were dropped, his street reputation for boldness was enhanced. A Profaci capo, Frank “Frankie Shots” Abbatemarco, recognized Persico’s underworld potential even though the skinny, five-feet six-inch tall teenager hardly resembled a tough enforcer. Abbatemarco put Persico to work in his bookmaking and loan-sharking rings, and later upgraded him to burglaries and truck hijackings. Persico advanced swiftly, and at an unusually early age, in his mid-twenties, got his “button” as a made man in the Profaci family.

In the 1950s Persico piled up more than a dozen arrests. His rap sheet encompassed almost every Mafia activity: numbers betting, running dice games, loan-sharking, burglary, assaults, hijackings, possession of an unregistered gun, and harassing a police officer. Through the assistance of the Profaci family’s stable of politically connected lawyers, who knew how to manipulate Brooklyn’s criminal court proceedings, the felony charges were dropped or reduced to misdemeanors. When Persico’s cases came to trial, the complainants and witnesses often refused to testify or were out of town, a frequent occurrence in mobster trials. As a result, Persico never spent more than two weeks at a time in jail; most of his arrests ending with insignificant fines, the Mob’s equivalent of routine business overhead costs.

Early on, Persico hooked up with three other young Brooklyn soldiers in the Profaci gang, the Gallo boys, Crazy Joey, Larry, and Albert. Persico’s reputation for violent audacity rose sharply after the shocking 1957 murder of Mob boss Albert Anastasia in a Manhattan hotel barbershop. Together with the Gallo brothers, Persico was credited in the underworld with carrying out the big-time hit at the request of their boss, Joe Profaci, and other Mafia leaders who resented Anastasia’s lust for power.

A conflict enveloped the Profaci family in 1959 after Frank Abbatemarco, Persico’s crew leader, was murdered. The ambitious Persico and the Gallos expected Profaci to reward them for the Anastasia contract and other services by
handing them a huge hunk of Frankie Shots’ Brooklyn rackets. Instead, Profaci dispensed all of Abbatemarco’s loan-sharking and numbers spoils to his older cronies. Infuriated, the Gallo brothers and Persico retaliated in commando-style lightning kidnappings of Profaci’s brother-in-law and underboss, Joe Magliocco, plus four of his capos. Joe Valachi, the first Mafia soldier to publicly renounce
omertà
, said that at the time of the revolt Persico explained to him that he and other Young Turks believed that Profaci was taxing them more heavily on their illicit profits than the older wiseguys were levied. As an example of Profaci’s greed, Persico griped to Valachi that the boss once forced him to turn over $1,800 from a $2,000 robbery.

To gain the release of his five lieutenants, Profaci quickly agreed to the insurgents’ financial demands. Once the men were freed, Profaci reneged on his deal with the rebels and an internal battle erupted, the first time New York mafiosi had “gone to the mattresses” since the Castellammarese War of the 1930’s. Between 1961 and 1963, at least nine combatants were killed, three others disappeared and were presumed murdered, and fifteen were wounded in the combat known as the “Gallo Wars.”

The major defector and double-crosser in the Gallos’ trenches was Carmine Persico. He returned to the Profaci fold soon after the fighting began. According to Valachi, Persico’s decision was influenced by a heart-to-heart talk with the recently retired Mafia sage Frank Costello, who convinced the younger mobster that his Cosa Nostra loyalties should lie with his boss, Profaci.

Persico’s importance in the war became evident on the morning of August 20, 1961. A police sergeant on a routine inspection walked into the darkened Sahara Club, a South Brooklyn bar, and came across two men strangling a third man with a rope. Bolting from the club, the two assailants ran past the sergeant and another cop. The intended victim, barely breathing, was Larry Gallo. Persico was identified by the police as one of the assailants. But true to the code
of omertà
, Gallo refused to utter a word against Persico, and the assault charges against him and the second hit man were dropped.

The attempted garroting of Larry Gallo solidified Persico’s Mob reputation for duplicity and earned him the crude sobriquet “the Snake.” He first double-crossed the Gallos by rejoining the Profaci forces, and then lured Larry Gallo to the bar on the pretext that he was switching sides again and reenlisting with the Gallos. Moreover, it was clear that Profaci had given Persico and his pals a contract to kill the brothers. The Gallos knew how to exact revenge, and on the morning of May 19, 1963, they struck back. Persico, a passenger in a car, was
peppered by a burst of gunfire from a passing pickup truck. Bullets grazed his head and several slugs ripped into his left hand and arm. Wheeled into a hospital emergency room, his eyes were swollen, his face caked with blood. Asked by a detective to identify who shot him, Persico stared at the ceiling and shook his head negatively. He would never violate
omertà
and cooperate with the police, even if his own life was in danger.

Persico’s troops were certain that the drive-by shooter was Larry Gallo, who had narrowly escaped being strangled by Carmine. The episode was magnified by Persico’s supporters to bolster his reputation for toughness, claiming that a slug had punctured his jaw and that he had spat out the bullet. Although Persico minimized his wounds as mere paper cuts, he was an authentic casualty, never regaining the full use of his left hand.

Joe Profaci’s death from cancer in 1962 gave Carlo Gambino and other dons the opportunity to intervene in the Gallo Wars. They imposed an armistice and ended the violence in 1963 by installing Joe Colombo as boss of the old Profaci gang. Persico’s services in behalf of the Profaci-Colombo faction were rewarded with promotion to capo. The fighting over, good times and more loot beckoned. Persico was a rising star, heading a Colombo crew that included his two brothers. Detectives began hearing from informers that Carmine, who a few years earlier had been regarded as a thuggish hired gun, was now well-tailored, and hiring other gunmen to do his dirty work.

Only one unresolved matter from leaner times hung over Persico’s head: a federal indictment that he participated in a 1959 truck-hijacking in Brooklyn of a $50,000 cargo of linen. Carmine’s main codefendant was Hugh “Apples” McIntosh, his bodyguard and ace partner in crime. The physical contrast between the two gangsters was striking. Built like a tree trunk, McIntosh at 250 pounds and six-feet five-inches tall towered over the wiry, 150-pound Persico. Although McIntosh was Persico’s loyal henchman, his Irish heritage precluded induction as a full-fledged made man.

The hijacking charge entangled Persico in courtrooms for a decade and became one of the longest federal cases recorded in New York’s Eastern District jurisdiction. At the onset, prosecutors offered Persico a deal. A guilty plea would have been his first felony conviction, resulting in a light sentence of about three years, and probably parole in a year. Arrogantly confident, Persico rejected the offer, sure that with his Mob know-how and battery of expensive
lawyers, he could again escape legal punishment. The first trial in 1961 ended in a hung jury. A year later, he and McIntosh were convicted, but the verdict was overturned on appeal. A third trial was halted when Persico was shot and wounded. In 1964 he was convicted for a second time, but that decision also was reversed on appeal. A jury at a fifth trial in 1968 found him and McIntosh guilty, and this conviction stuck. After three years of recondite arguments, the verdicts were finally sustained in 1971 by an appeals court. Instead of the one-year plea bargain Persico had spurned in 1960, he was hit with a maximum prison term of fourteen years; McIntosh got six years.

Before the federal appeals process was completed, Persico, free on bail, was back in court on another charge in 1971. The Manhattan district attorney’s office brought state accusations that he had created a multimillion-dollar loan-
sharking
enterprise. Meanwhile, Persico’s well-documented seamy past created a legal contretemps. In an extraordinary move that caused an uproar, a state judge closed the trial to the public and the press. Judge George Postel ruled that newspaper articles about Persico’s Mafia background could unfairly influence the jury and jeopardize his right to a fair trial. Postel was later severely admonished by a higher court for violating the constitutional rights of the public and news organizations to view and report on the trial.

At the closed trial in December 1971, Persico’s attorneys obtained his acquittal on all charges, ten counts of loan-sharking conspiracy. As in most of his arrests, an essential witness, whom the prosecution was relying on to implicate him in the loan-sharking business, vanished just as the trial started.

Six months before the loan-sharking trial, the Colombo family’s overall tranquility was shattered when Joe Colombo was shot at his Italian-American civil-rights rally. Persico had
already
begun serving his hijacking conviction in January 1972, and with the paralyzed Joe Colombo incapacitated, the
family’s
elders chose Tommy DiBella, a proficient capo, as interim boss. Prison did not hamper Persico’s resolve to maintain influence in his crime family. Relaying instructions through his two brothers and the paroled Hugh McIntosh, he organized a powerful bloc in the borgata. By the late 1970s, although still behind bars, he was recognized as the family’s leader, his formal anointing only awaiting his parole.

Joe Cantalupo, an admitted loan shark and Colombo family associate, who became an FBI informant in the mid-1970s, reported that Carmine and his brothers wrested control from Joe Colombo’s sons and partisans in the confusion following the assassination attempt in Columbus Circle. “The wheel has
turned,” Cantalupo informed his FBI handlers. “The Colombo boys are on the bottom now and the Persicos are on the top.”

Cantalupo specified that in Bensonhurst and other Brooklyn neighborhoods with heavy Italian-American populations, the Persico branch of the family was extorting protection money from almost every legitimate business—funeral parlors, restaurants, catering halls, garment manufacturers. “They shake people down, put fear in them,” Cantalupo told the FBI.