Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America's Most Powerful Mafia Empires (64 page)

T
he fierce Colombo dynastic struggle was the last New York Mob war of the twentieth century. It had been a costly bloodbath for both sides, in casualties and convictions. Ultimately, forty-two Persico soldiers and associates, and sixteen from the Orena faction were convicted on an assortment of charges and packed off to prison. Ten turncoats undermined the family by defecting into the Witness Protection Program. Carmine Persico emerged as the seeming victor of the war of succession. The government indirectly decided the outcome in his favor by obtaining a life sentence for Victor Orena. With their leader gone, the Orena gunmen ended the revolt, and cleared the way for Carmine’s son Alphonse to become boss when he was paroled after serving eight years for racketeering.

From an early age, Little Allie Boy, the eldest of Carmine’s sons, was destined to follow in his father’s footsteps. He was raised in South Brooklyn and Bensonhurst, the heartland of the Colombo family, where his father, in and out of prison, was looked upon by relatives and neighbors as a folk hero. Taller and more muscular than Carmine, the bespectacled son was a bright student. Favoring the Ivy League-look in tweed jackets, he toyed with the idea of becoming a lawyer, but dropped out of St. John’s University after his sophomore year. By his mid-twenties, according to police intelligence files, he was a capo in his
father’s borgata. His first arrest in 1983 at age twenty-nine, on heroin trafficking charges, ended in a dismissal. Three years later, he was labeled a capo by prosecutors, convicted along with his father in the Colombo family RICO trial, and sentenced to twelve years.

“The kid wanted badly to get the same respect as his father,” Aaron Marcu, a federal prosecutor at the trial, said afterward. “He had more education, style, and looks than the average mobster, but from tapes we got an image of him as the classic wannabe. He was taken by the life, bossing around people, barking orders.” Scheduled for parole in 1993, Little Allie Boy’s release was blocked by George Stamboulidis, the assistant U.S. Attorney and lead prosecutor in many of the Colombo family trials. Stamboulidis informed the parole board that Little Allie Boy was suspected of arranging from prison the murder of a man who had been dating his wife, Tori, mother of his three daughters. The victim, Michael Devine, a Staten Island bartender, was shot to death in 1992. Several of the slugs tore into Devine’s genitals. Citing cooperating witnesses and Mob turncoats, Stamboulidis’s letter to prison officials said, “When a murder victim’s genitalia are mutilated, it is a sign to those who learn of his murder that he was imprudently intimate with the spouse of a member of La Cosa Nostra.”

Although never formally charged with Devine’s slaying, Little Allie Boy was tried in the summer of 1994 on federal accusations that he helped direct the Colombo family war from prison and had authorized plans to kill seven Orena partisans. Another homicide charge tagged on was the prewar murder of his brother-in-law, Steven Piazza. Prosecutors claimed that Carmine Persico wanted Piazza killed in 1985 because he was physically abusing Carmine’s daughter, Barbara. Additionally, the Persicos believed Piazza was either using or selling drugs and might become dangerously talkative if picked up by the police. The murder was carried out by Little Allie Boy’s crew with his specific blessings, according to an indictment.

In a legal twist at the 1994 trial, Little Allie Boy was found guilty of conspiring to kill Piazza; yet he was completely acquitted of racketeering charges because of a complex glitch in the RICO law. A jury found that yes, he had participated in Piazza’s murder, but the slaying was not a count in the indictment; it was an underlying act or felony. A RICO conviction requires the commission of at least two underlying acts, and the jury failed to link him to any other underlying act. Observers felt that the prosecution was hoodwinked by a defector and former capo, John Pate, whom they expected to be the best witness
against Persico. Instead, Pate, who had been a boon companion of Little Allie Boy, seemed to tailor his testimony to help rather than hurt him.

Nine other defendants in the RICO case were found guilty or plea bargained for reduced sentences. Little Allie Boy was the only one to walk out of the courtroom in 1995 a free man, his parole no longer thwarted.

The forty-year-old Alphonse Persico, crowned with the title of either boss or acting boss, was now in charge of rebuilding the divided crime family. On the other side of the continent, his father, Carmine, still the titular don, could look upon the war as an unqualified success. While the rival Colombo soldiers were killing each other in New York, Carmine had molded a comfortable niche for himself in the Lompoc penitentiary. Always a leader, the Snake founded an Italian cultural club in the prison where he and other Mob inmates, mainly killers, drug dealers, and extortionists, could meet to talk over old times. Prison authorities allowed the club members to prepare special banquets, birthday feasts, and entertain themselves as if they were in one of their storefront hangouts in South Brooklyn. Feared in the outside world for his cruelty, inside the sunny prison in central California, several miles from the Pacific Ocean, Carmine Persico whiled away his days cultivating a rose garden. Imprisoned for life, by the late 1990s the Snake could at last see his aspirations for a Mafia dynasty fulfilled through his son.

Following his narrow escape on RICO technicalities, Little Allie Boy tried to conceal his Mafia command position by posing as a businessman with investments in a Brooklyn limousine service, a restaurant, a wholesale coffee company, and two bagel shops. Evading investigators in New York, he spent much of his time over the next four years in Florida. It was there that his luck ran out. In February 1999, he was relaxing on a friend’s yacht near Fort Lauderdale when the Coast Guard, acting on a tip from an informer, found him in possession of a 9-millimeter pistol and a shotgun. Because of his 1986 RICO conviction he was prohibited from carrying weapons.

Out on bail on the gun charges, Persico returned to New York, where bitter paybacks were still being exacted within the Colombo family for the 1991-1993 fighting. In an apparent compromise gesture to the old Orena faction, Little Allie Boy had allowed William “Wild Bill” Cutolo to be underboss. A huge loan-shark earner and labor-rackets extortionist, Cutolo had been booted out of an officer’s position in the teamsters’ union, only to take over an obscure “production workers” local representing city employees. The union
post put him in a convenient spot to hand out no-show jobs to wiseguys and to steer contracts to mobbed-up vendors.

Cutolo, sporting a large cowboy hat as part of his Wild Bill character, had in the recent war survived numerous hit attempts, and had captained a crew in the Orena ranks that whacked several Persico soldiers. Little Allie Boy and his entourage obviously remembered Cutolo’s disloyalty and bided their time. On May 26, 1999, eleven days short of his fiftieth birthday, Wild Bill vanished. His relatives knew the significance of a mafioso’s abrupt disappearance. They were certain that Persico’s men murdered him in revenge for his wartime activities. To inflict additional punishment on his kin, the Persicos arranged that Cutolo’s body would never be found.

Whether or not the younger Persico had a hand in Wild Bill’s removal, it would rebound against him. Cutolo’s thirty-year-old son, William Junior, silently vowed to wreak havoc on the Persicos to avenge his father. Several weeks after his father’s disappearance, the son contacted the FBI, volunteering to go undercover. A mini-voice recorder was taped to his chest and he mingled easily with Colombo soldiers who never suspected he was anything more than a compliant wannabe.

Dubbing his infiltration “Operation Payback,” and using information supplied by young Cutolo, agents obtained a search warrant for the Brooklyn apartment of Little Allie Boy’s daughter, where he often stayed. The warrant stated that agents were looking for a cellular phone that might contain evidence of calls linking Alphonse Persico to Wild Bill’s slaying. The phone was found along with $25,000 in cash hidden in a shoebox and in a mattress. More damaging discoveries were computer disks and loan-sharking records stashed in a kitchen stove hood; they indicated that Little Allie Boy was collecting vigorish on $1 million in loan-shark business that Cutolo had been running before he vanished.

The evidence in the Florida gun arrest and Operation Payback was overwhelming. In February 2000, Little Allie Boy pleaded guilty in Florida; and in December 2001 he threw in the towel in New York, pleading guilty to RICO counts of racketeering, loan-sharking, and money-laundering. The undercover work of Cutolo’s son—an epilogue to the Colombo war—helped convict young Persico and fifteen additional Colombo soldiers and associates.

The RICO sentence for young Persico was thirteen years and a forfeit of $1 million in cash or assets. If he had risked a trial and the thicket of evidence and defectors testifying against him, at age forty-seven he would have faced a possible
term of seventy years. He cut a deal, but in doing so he violated
omertà
, dishonoring his father and uncles’ code of honor by in effect admitting that the Mafia existed and that he was one of its leaders.

“You were not some errand boy,” the sentencing federal judge Reena Raggi stated, asking him to acknowledge his status in the Colombo family. “You had a high-ranking role in the enterprise, you had the discretion of your actions?”

“Yes, I had,” an abject Persico replied.

Calling Persico “a very dangerous man,” Judge Raggi said she wished she had the authority to imprison him for life. Noting that through a technicality in the RICO law he had escaped punishment in 1994, even though a jury found that he had ordered his brother-in-law’s murder, she added, “I think there’s no crime he wouldn’t commit.”

Seventeen years earlier at Little Allie Boy’s sentencing along with his father for his first racketeering conviction in the Colombo family trial, Judge John Keenan had urged him to change direction, emphasizing that he would be young enough to start a new life when he left prison. “You are a chump if you stay in the Colombo family,” the judge warned. At the joint sentencing hearing, Judge Keenan also expressed admiration for Carmine Persico’s able performance as his own lawyer in the Commission case. Sentencing the father to prison for life without the possibility of parole, the judge lectured him: “Mr. Persico, you’re a tragedy. You are one of the most intelligent people I have ever seen in my life.”

Keenan’s analysis of father and son was cogent. Impelled by an oversized ego, Carmine the Snake fomented an internecine Mob war to retain control of a Mafia empire. He wanted a dynasty. His deceitful schemes culminated in a debacle. Besides a dozen known slayings, the final tally from the Colombo war included his son, and more than seventy hierarchy members, soldiers, and associates from both sides convicted and jailed. At the start of a new century, the Colombo borgata was reduced to roughly seventy-five experienced and unimprisoned surviving made members, much of their plunder gone, the family structure in shambles, its would-be leaders in prison, awaiting trial, or fugitives on the lam.

Wild Bill Cutolo’s murder caught up with Little Allie Boy in late 2004 while he was behind bars. Describing him as still the acting boss, prosecutors indicted the younger Persico on charges of ordering Cutolo’s execution. Once more, the evidence was based largely on the word of defectors, and this time a conviction would mean life imprisonment or the death penalty.

“The war helped us destroy the family from within,” observed George Stamboulidis, the prosecutor in the most significant trials stemming from the family’s endless vendettas. “Instead of pulling together in the face of government investigations, they were worrying about saving their lives, and that gave them incentives to become cooperating witnesses. The war had a snowball effect; it allowed us to pull the trigger faster than normal to develop big cases.”

A Hell of a Legacy

J
ohn Gotti was in his private office, pondering his future. It was mid-January 1986, barely a month after he had seized control of the Gambino family in a murderous rebellion and crowned himself boss of the nation’s largest Mafia borgata. Unbeknownst to Gotti and his unidentified companion, his ramblings were being recorded secretly by New York State investigators.

“The law’s gonna be tough with us, okay,” Gotti’s rumbling voice was picked up by a concealed microphone. “But if I can get a year [sic] run without being interrupted. Get a year gonna put this thing together where they could never break it, never destroy it. Even if we die, be a good thing.”

“It’s a hell of a legacy to leave,” the companion briefly interjected before Gotti continued his musings.

“Well you know why it would be, ah, because it would be right. Maybe after thirty years it would deteriorate but it would take that long to fuckin’ succumb.”

In the inner sanctum of his headquarters, the Bergin Hunt and Fish Club, the newly enthroned Gambino godfather had no compunction about expressing his ambitious plans to forge an even mightier Mafia empire from the already powerful Gambino family. For a decade, the storefront Bergin club in South Ozone Park, a blue-collar section of Queens, had served as Gotti’s central
command post. In his guarded sanctuary, a confident Gotti felt secure enough to express his innermost thoughts.