Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America's Most Powerful Mafia Empires (62 page)

D
riving alone in the mellowing light of a summery evening, Victor Orena was nearing the driveway of his home when his instincts sounded an alarm. Four men were seated in a parked car directly across the road from his elegant two-story home on Buckingham Road in Cedarhurst, Long Island. Slamming on the brakes, Orena spun into a quick U-turn and roared away from his placid suburban street. He had recognized the men in the parked car and instantly realized why they were staked out at his house. There was a contract on his life and the four men were a hit squad, with him in their crosshairs.

Victor John Orena was no ordinary businessman returning from a day at the office. He was an accomplished, wealthy mafioso eager to ascend to the rank of a mighty godfather. As Orena sped away from Cedarhurst in the twilight of June 20, 1991, he knew who was behind the ambush attempt. The orders must have originated 3,000 miles away, and could only have been issued by the perfidious Carmine the Snake Persico.

Known as “Little Vic,” Orena had been abruptly thrust into a powerful position in the Colombo family in the wake of the racketeering convictions of Carmine Persico and Little Allie Boy. At the time of the guilty verdicts, Orena was merely a striving soldier in the younger Persico’s crew. But when Little Allie
Boy went off to prison for racketeering in 1987, he picked Orena as his crew’s replacement capo.

Sentenced to life imprisonment, Carmine’s first choice as acting boss to supervise the family for him was his older brother, Alphonse, the original Allie Boy. But after a brief reign, Allie Boy became a fugitive, skipping out on a $250,000 bail bond to avoid a long sentence for a loan-sharking conviction. So, in 1988, with his brother and his son out of circulation, Persico by a method of elimination settled on Little Vic Orena as acting boss.

Viewing Orena as a trusted ally but at most a temporary second fiddle, the Snake delivered one primary directive to him: keep the throne secure for Little Allie Boy until he comes out of prison to take over as the family’s godfather. Orena’s other big task was to ensure that the imprisoned Persicos and their relatives on the outside continued receiving their share of the family’s take. Kenneth McCabe, a federal Mafia investigator, later learned that Carmine displayed his exceptional faith in Orena’s loyalty by extending to him two powers rarely given to temporary bosses: Little Vic could unilaterally order hits and induct soldiers.

Carmine and his son’s confidence in the fifty-four-year-old Orena arose from his record as an exceptional earner and an obedient soldier. Short and chubby, with penetrating green eyes and gray-flecked hair, Orena was well regarded among the Colombo cognoscenti for his business acumen. A mobster with decades of unfailing service to the Persico wing of the family, Orena skillfully handled major loan-sharking and labor rackets, principally on Long Island. His “yellow sheet,” his arrest record, was skimpy: minor busts for gambling and one for perjury, without any prison time. The most serious entry against him was a loan-sharking conviction, which cost him four months in a Long Island county jail.

As a soldier, the levelheaded Little Vic had ducked out of violent tasks, but he knew which “cowboys” to choose for dangerous work. In fact, after taking charge of Little Allie Boy’s crew as a capo, he often instructed soldiers and wannabes assigned to murders that he preferred a traditional Sicilian method known as
lupara bianca
(literally, “white shotgun” but meaning “white death”), the euphemism for making certain the corpse is not found.

Orena had developed an invaluable asset for himself through a relationship with Dennis J. Pappas, a lawyer and fiscal consultant. Federal investigators eventually untangled a dizzying array of eleven companies and 165 bank
accounts created by Pappas in the 1980s to launder at least $5 million dollars for Orena and his confederates. Untold millions more, prosecutors and FBI agents conceded, were untraceable. As Orena’s banker and money man, Pappas, then in his late thirties, was known in the borgata as the “finance consigliere.” In return for huge payoffs to himself, Pappas’s primary function was moving the family’s cash from loan-sharking, gambling and gasoline bootlegging into dummy corporations and bank accounts. The money was then cleansed by being paid out to relatives of the mobsters, who were given fake jobs at the sham companies.

Pappas further assisted Orena and his partners by siphoning about $1 million from pension funds in unions the Colombos controlled. The money was used for loan-sharking capital. An accountant working for Pappas got an alarming gift after he raised questions about some of the lawyer’s bookkeeping legerdemain. He received a package containing a dead fish wrapped in newspaper—the customary Mafia warning that he would be murdered if he opened his mouth to law enforcement.

For two years Victor Orena served as a reliable caretaker, heeding Carmine Persico’s decisions from prison regarding the family’s most important policies, murders, inductions of new members, hierarchy appointments, and demotions. By the spring of 1991, Orena was tired of Persico’s intrusions and told his hatchet men that Carmine was out of touch, obstructing the family’s profits, and that he, rather than Little Allie Boy, deserved the title and recognition as boss. Orena was especially rankled by Persico’s negotiations to have a version of his life broadcast on television shows. The acting boss feared that Persico’s grandstanding would increase law-enforcement pressure on the family, just as Joe Bonanno’s biography and television appearances had helped spark the disastrous Commission case.

Complying with Mafia custom, Orena decided to take absolute control by winning support from a majority of the family’s dozen capos. He instructed Carmine Sessa, the family consigliere, to poll the captains to determine if they favored installing him as boss. Their firm endorsement would smooth Orena’s path to acceptance as a godfather by the other New York families and end Carmine Persico’s claim. Sessa, who had been elevated to consigliere, the family’s third highest position, by Carmine Persico, never carried out Orena’s request. He informed Persico of Orena’s treachery, most likely through Carmine’s
brother Ted, a capo who had permission to visit Carmine in Lompoc. Persico’s loyal troops had their own complaints about Orena to forward to the imprisoned boss. They were incensed that Little Vic was cutting them off from the family’s most rewarding rackets and building an empire by favoring other crews.

The news about Orena’s proposed referendum poll was conclusive for Carmine. His message to his soldiers was direct: whack Orena. And on the evening of June 20, 1991, they amateurishly attempted to carry out the boss’s command. Four of the Snake’s gunmen, led by consigliere Sessa, failed to eliminate Little Vic when he spotted them parked near his home.

Over the next three months, Orena and Persico representatives met for sit-downs to work out a peaceful compromise. The Orena forces numbered close to 100 and the Persico combatants 25 or 30. Neither side budged on the question of leadership, and in November 1991, bullets began flying. The war was on.

A bug in Camden, New Jersey, across the river from Philadelphia, provided the FBI in New York with the Orena battalion’s casus belli. The bureau’s Philadelphia office had concealed microphones in the office of a lawyer who allowed high-ranking Philadelphia mobster clients to meet there secretly. At noon on December 5, 1991, John Stanfa, the Philadelphia boss, and his underboss, Anthony Piccolo, were solicited in the lawyer’s office for support in the newly started war by Salvatore Profaci, a pro-Orena capo. Salvatore was the son of Joe Profaci, the founder and first godfather of the family that eventually assumed the Colombo name. He was in charge of the family’s activities in parts of New Jersey. Nicknamed “Sally Pro” and “Jersey Sal,” Profaci had mutual deals with the Philadelphia Mob in Atlantic City and southern New Jersey.

“You know, to me La Cosa Nostra’s very sacred,” Sal Profaci said. “Okay, and my word is better than anything else that I got to offer.” Explaining his reasons for siding with Orena as his choice for
representante
, Profaci pictured him as “a gentleman, beautiful person, very very capable, very very qualified, levelheaded.” The Snake was “crazy,” igniting the war by trying to kill Orena. “Carmine Persico is losing his mind. Carmine Persico is calling press conferences … He wants to go on
60 Minutes
, Barbara Walters interview …”

Profaci claimed that a large majority of the family’s 125 soldiers favored dethroning Persico because his long-distance rule and frequent hierarchy changes were creating chaos. “A hundred people say no we don’t agree with what he’s doing, and it’s not right what he’s doing, and he’s got a hundred-year sentence, therefore we can’t stay without a family,” he intoned, his voice rising. “I mean,
that’s no way to live, you gotta have a family, you gotta have a share.” Blaming Persico’s relatives, his brothers, cousins, and nephews, for inciting the mayhem, Profaci lamented, “Now we started shooting and where’s it gonna end? Where’s it gonna end?”

That December, five Colombo mobsters were slain in Brooklyn, one of them while hanging a Christmas wreath on his front door. Innocent civilians were shot in the volleys of gunfire. One victim, eighteen-year-old Matteo Speranza, was brutally murdered in the bagel shop where he worked, mistaken by Orena gunmen for a Persico supporter.

Trying to prevent the Colombos from turning the city into a killing field, Brooklyn District Attorney Charles J. Hynes in late December subpoenaed forty-one suspected members and associates before a grand jury. Only twenty-eight showed up, their faces concealed in the collars of lumberjack shirts or leather jackets. None of them was a canary, and none would offer any information about the slayings. “They’ve turned this into a class-B movie,” Hynes fumed. “We’re not going to allow this county to become a shooting gallery where innocent people are being gunned down.”

The ambushes and drive-by fusillades, however, continued.

Oddly, the FBI was getting blow-by-blow reports on the carnage and internal Colombo politics from a bizarre source—Gregory Scarpa Sr., a warhorse Persico capo, sociopathic killer, and longtime undercover government informer. A stylish dresser, Scarpa routinely carried $5,000 in cash as pocket money and for bribes if he were arrested. Starting in the 1960s, he ran auto theft, loan-sharking, narcotics, and extortion rackets for Joe Colombo and Carmine Persico. A classic underworld success story, Scarpa, at his prime in the late 1970s and early ‘80s, had homes in Manhattan’s exclusive Sutton Place, Las Vegas, Staten Island, and Brooklyn. Compactly built at 200 pounds, he radiated power, and his guile and penchant for brutality earned him the nickname “the Grim Reaper.” His confidants gleefully related that he so enjoyed whacking a hated rival that he told them he wanted to dig up the corpse and kill the victim again.

Scarpa’s headquarters for thirty years was the storefront Wimpy Boys Social Club, in his home neighborhood of Bensonhurst in Brooklyn. Despite numerous arrests for loan-sharking, fencing hijacked goods, assault, carrying unlicensed guns, stock and bond thefts, distributing counterfeit credit cards, and attempting to bribe police officers, Scarpa somehow emerged from these scrapes with the charges dismissed or was freed on probation.

An explanation for Scarpa’s good fortune finally surfaced in the mid-1990’s. As a young soldier in the Colombo family, he had taken out an insurance policy in the 1960s by secretly working for the FBI. His most astonishing exploit was helping agents after the 1964 slaying of three civil rights workers, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, in Philadelphia, Mississippi. The bureau, uncomfortable that it had employed a mobster for aid in a high-profile investigation that attracted international attention, has never officially credited Scarpa. But former law-enforcement officials, who asked for anonymity, and lawyers who are aware of the circumstances, verified that the Brooklyn mobster compelled a Ku Klux Klan member to disclose that the three missing bodies had been buried in an earthen dam.

“He went down to Mississippi for the FBI and kidnapped a KKK guy agents were sure was involved in disposing of the bodies,” said a New York lawyer who has represented many mafiosi and who knew Scarpa. “The guy had an appliance store. Scarpa bought a TV and came back to the store to pick it up just as he was closing. The guy helps him carry the TV to his car parked in the back of the store. Scarpa knocks him out with a bop to the head, takes him off to the woods, beats him up, sticks a gun down his throat and says, ‘I’m going to blow your head off.’ The KKK guy realized he was Mafia and wasn’t kidding and told him where to look for the bodies.”

After the Mississippi mission, Scarpa continued his affiliation with the bureau, supplying information about the Colombo borgata for three decades. Like numerous criminals, his motive for ratting was to obtain behind-the-scenes intervention from the bureau, and leniency if he were confronted with arrest or conviction. Although spying for the FBI and violating
omertà
, he had no intention of abandoning his gangster spoils. Before and during the Orena-Persico conflict, FBI agent R. Lindley “Lynn” DeVecchio was Scarpa’s contact and handler. DeVecchio filed dozens of “confidential informant” reports—called 209s by the bureau—describing events in the war based on information supplied by Scarpa. The agent met clandestinely with Scarpa and received telephone calls from the mobster on a supersecret telephone that no agent but DeVecchio could answer. Agents called it a “Hello phone.”

During the war, while seemingly cooperating with the FBI, Scarpa was Persico’s generalissimo, doing his utmost to wipe out Orena’s shock troops. Scarpa’s reports to DeVecchio were filled with incriminating leads about illegal operations run by the Orenas. He also betrayed his own gunmen by identifying them as participating in conspiracies to whack Orena’s men. Although he
killed at least three Orena soldiers and tried to murder others, Scarpa omitted those details in his tips to DeVecchio. He never reported that he was a willing participant in the deadly clashes. He did inform DeVecchio of attempts on his own life and that Orena gunman had sprayed his car with bullets while his daughter-in-law was behind the wheel.