Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America's Most Powerful Mafia Empires (87 page)

“Soon after
this killing took place
,” Casso wrote decades later in a letter to a judge, “Christie had then sponsored me to become a member in the Lucchese crime family, which was at that time one of the highest honors known among our own society.”

Even before his induction into the Honorable Society, Casso was bonding with another wannabe in Furnari’s crew, Vittorio Amuso, known (like the Colombo family’s Victor Orena) by the familiar nicknames “Vic” and “Little Vic.” Amuso was eleven years older than Casso, but their similar bully-boy mannerisms, stocky physical builds, oval faces, and pomaded black brush-cut hairstyles could allow them to pass as brothers or cousins.

Gaspipe and Vic paired off as an effective team and, despite the hypocritical Mafia ban on narcotics imposed by their Lucchese boss, Ducks Corallo, they plunged into drugs and marijuana trafficking. Arrested in one major transaction involving the Sicilian Mafia and heroin smuggled from Thailand, Casso and Amuso managed to get the charges against them dismissed for lack of evidence. Disregarding the hypocritical Mafia prohibition on peddling narcotics,
the Lucchese regime gave Amuso his button as a made man, and he and Casso joined a select and sophisticated burglary ring. Dubbed by the police as “the Bypass Gang,” a coalition of about fifteen skilled criminals—electronic experts, locksmiths, and safe crackers—disabled burglar alarm security systems, and over a decade in the 1970s and ‘80s broke into banks and jewelry stores in New York and Long Island. The loot from safe-deposit boxes and vaults was estimated at more than $100 million. Gaspipe and Vic were present at most of the larger heists as watchdogs, to ensure that the Lucchese leaders and other family bosses got their slices of the booty.

As teammates Gaspipe and Vic eagerly volunteered to carry out hit contracts in the 1970s for Furnari, then the capo of a Lucchese group known as “the 19th Hole Crew,” named for a Brooklyn bar that was Furnari’s headquarters. In addition to his solo debut murder of the narcotics dealer Lee Schleifer, Casso, accompanied by Amuso, carried out four other assignments. Wielding pistols, shotguns, and once a machine gun equipped with a silencer, they killed two victims, while two others miraculously escaped despite serious wounds.

Casso was so devoted to Furnari that he turned down an offer from him in 1980 to take over his old crew as capo, when Christie Tick became the Lucchese consigliere. Rather than a promotion for himself, Gaspipe successfully urged Furnari to reward his partner, Vic Amuso, with the capo’s job—and the certain profits that would ensue. Portraying himself as a modest, loyal disciple of Furnari’s, Casso preferred working directly for the new consigliere. The borgata’s protocol allowed the counselor to retain one soldier by his side as an aide de camp; Furnari chose Casso.

Married to his childhood sweetheart, Lillian Delduca, and living in Brooklyn with her and their young daughter and son, Casso passed himself off as a trucker and as a sales representative for a construction company, while Lillian opened a lingerie boutique in their unpretentious Flatlands neighborhood. On the surface, they resembled many other hardworking, blue-collar families striving to move up in society.

After nearly getting arrested in a 1977 narcotics sting, Gaspipe disappeared from law-enforcement radar screens. As the FBI and New York’s Organized Crime Task Force began besieging the five Mob families in the early 1980s, Anthony Salvatore Casso was relegated to the status of a Lucchese spear-carrier. The government’s opening thrusts against the Mob were aimed at Mafia kings and barons. On the federal and state investigators’ priority charts, Casso was a bottom-rung serf.

Gaspipe’s hard-edged reputation, however, was recognized by the rebels in the Gambino family, John Gotti, Frankie DeCicco, and Sammy the Bull Gravano. Rating Casso a potential force to be reckoned with in the Lucchese borgota, DeCicco went so far as to sound him out for his views on their planned murder of Castellano. “Frankie said that Gaspipe told him he didn’t give a fuck about Paul,” Gravano reported.

Casso never told his immediate supervisor, Furnari, about this conversation. Keeping his mouth shut proved to be a wise decision.

One month after the December 1985 slaying of Castellano, Vincent Gigante, then the boss of the Genovese family, conferred with his Lucchese counterpart, Tony Ducks Corallo, in Furnari’s Staten Island home. Although present in the house, Casso did not participate in the high-level meeting. The next night, Furnari filled in Casso and Amuso on the purpose of the huddle: a decision had been reached to avenge the slaying of fellow boss Big Paul Castellano.

The vindictive godfathers, Corallo and Gigante, dismissed as insulting the line put out by Gotti that the Gambinos were mystified by
Castellano’s murder
and were themselves searching for his killers. They concurred that Gotti had violated a holy Mafia canon by assassinating a boss without the tacit authorization of a majority of the Commission. After putting their heads together, the two bosses agreed that
Gotti and his second-in-command
, Frank DeCicco, had to pay the supreme penalty. Chosen to handle the dangerous double-murder assignment were Casso and Amuso.

Several months earlier, Casso had expressed indifference about the plot to kill Castellano when
he was approached by
DeCicco. Now his most urgent chore was scheming with Amuso to retaliate for Big Paul’s assassination by executing his successor, John Gotti, and Frankie DeCicco. The vendetta against Gotti would lead to DeCicco’s brutal execution by a remote-controlled bomb, a crime that
confounded
Gotti and law-enforcement experts for seven years, until Gaspipe divulged the weird details.

Accompanying the operational orders to murder Gotti and DeCicco was an unorthodox tactical directive. The Genovese and Lucchese leaders wanted Casso and Amuso to wipe out both targets with a weapon traditionally outlawed by the American Mafia—a bomb. Previously, bombs had been banned by the Commission because innocent people might be killed, drawing too much attention to the Mob’s internal bloodbaths. Using explosives in this instance, it was thought, would camouflage the Mafia involvement and deter Gotti’s
revenge seekers from fingering the Genovese and Lucchese families as being behind the murders. A big bang also would distract law-enforcement agents from zeroing in on American mobsters as suspects. Explosives would confuse everyone and, most likely, focus blame on Sicilian mafiosi Zips, who had a record in Italy for blowing up opponents.

A key participant lent to Casso by the Genovese family for the “Get Gotti” job was Herbie “Blue Eyes” Pate. An experienced hit man in the Genovese family, Pate had a rare Mafia talent: he was an ammunitions craftsman, trained while in the U.S. army. The resourceful Casso obtained a plastic explosive called C-4, resembling a long bar of soft clay, and Pate figured out how to detonate it by tinkering with the remote control of a toy car. At his upstate rural home, Pate demonstrated in a trial run for Casso and Amuso the effectiveness of the weapon and his remote-control zapper. All that was left for the conspirators to do was to find the right place to ambush Gotti and DeCicco.

As Gotti in the spring of 1986 tried to solidify his dominance within his own family, he had no inkling of the Genovese-Lucchese intrigue to avenge Castellano’s death. Nor did he suspect that the Genovese hierarchs had cemented a pact with two of his own capos, Jimmy Brown Failla and Danny Marino, for help in assassinating him. A confidant and longtime friend of Castellano’s, Failla resented Gotti’s lightning coup. He also may have harbored the hope that the Genovese regime would help install him as the Gambino boss once Gotti was eliminated.

Gaspipe, responsible for drawing up a plan, found that Gotti was a hard quarry to isolate in a location that would be practical for the hit and would also allow the assassins a fair chance of escaping. Gotti, he complained, “bounced from one area to another,” usually in congested spots, surrounded by a thick cordon of bodyguards. Through Failla, however, the C-4 bombers learned of a rare opportunity to knock off Gotti and DeCicco with one blow.

Trying to pacify crews that had been in the Castellano faction, Gotti was visiting their hangouts to rally their support. As one of these goodwill gestures, Gotti and DeCicco scheduled a joint visit to Failla’s Veterans and Friends Club in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. Tipped off by Failla, Casso and his conspirators went into action. Failla told them Gotti and DeCicco would be departing the storefront club together in DeCicco’s car. It was a perfect setup for a double wipeout.

Early on Sunday afternoon, April 13, 1986, Casso, together with Amuso and Amuso’s brother, Bobby, were staked out in a sedan about a block from Failla’s club. The car’s tinted windows prevented them from being observed. Herbie
Pate was nearby in his car. All of them saw DeCicco arrive and park his Buick Electra across the street from the club before entering. Pate had concealed the C-4 explosive in a brown paper bag and, carrying that bag and another bag filled with groceries and bread, he strolled toward DeCicco’s car. Pretending he had dropped something, Pate bent down, placing the bag with the C-4 explosive under the Buick. He then sauntered back to his own auto.

Gotti probably saved his life that day by canceling his trip to Failla’s headquarters at the last minute. Stationed in his car, Pate saw DeCicco walk from Failla’s club to his Buick, accompanied by another man. Assuming the second man was Gotti, Herbie Blue Eyes turned on his ignition. With the passenger’s side window rolled down, Pate drove slowly toward DeCicco’s car, and when he was alongside pressed his remote-control switch. The detonation almost instantly killed DeCicco, who was inside his car, rummaging in the glove compartment for a lawyer’s card and telephone number for the man who had accompanied him from the club. That second man, Frank “Frankie Heart” Bellino, slightly resembled Gotti. An undistinguished Lucchese soldier and friend of DeCicco’s, Bellino survived, though suffering serious leg and feet wounds.

Metal and glass fragments from the explosion showered Pate’s car, and his right ear and face were nicked with minor cuts. Casso and the Amuso brothers
drove off
unharmed. Christie Tick afterward instructed Casso, “Tell everyone to be on their toes and lay low for a while, but keep looking for an opportunity to get Gotti.” The bomb plot, however, was the Lucchese family’s only attempt to eradicate Gotti, who remained on good terms with Casso and Amuso, never suspecting that they had tried to blow him to bits.

Accustomed to killing, and never considering himself a target, Casso often traveled alone. Occasionally, the police shadowed him but, alert to surveillance, he was difficult to trail, zooming across lanes and flashing through red lights. On a bright September afternoon in 1986, alone in his car, Gaspipe headed for a restaurant near his home in Brooklyn. Stolen bonds were on his
mind, according
to an informer’s report to federal prosecutors. A Gambino family associate had arranged to meet Casso, presumably to discuss fencing a sizable collection of stolen bearer bonds. The meeting was a ruse. As Casso parked his Cadillac on the street in front of a Carvel’s ice cream store, another auto with at least three gunmen pulled alongside and he was raked with gunfire and a
shotgun blast
through the driver’s window. Unarmed and hit in the back and left arm, he staggered across the street to a restaurant, grabbing a table
cloth to staunch his bleeding. None of the startled employees or diners told the police who descended on the area that Casso was hiding in a basement freezer. He emerged shivering from the freezer to telephone Vic Amuso, who picked him up and drove him to a hospital.

Detectives traced Casso to the hospital, where he brushed aside questions about the murder attempt and possible links to the Mafia. “There’s nobody who doesn’t like me. I don’t know nothing about organized crime.” Casso could offer no explanation for a curious discovery in his car: a confidential Police Department list of the license-plate numbers of unmarked cars used by investigators for surveillance purposes. Except for loss of blood, he was in fairly good condition when he was discharged from the hospital.

Gaspipe quickly surmised who had set him up. He was feuding over the division of spoils from a heroin sale that he had cosponsored with a Gambino capo, Michael “Mickey Boy” Paradiso. The argument between members of two families had festered because the Commission case trial was under way, and the customary sit-down formula for resolving Mob disputes was suspended.

Even before his wounds had healed, Casso’s intelligence operatives identified the leader of the hit team that tried to assassinate him. He obtained the gunman’s name and police surveillance photos of him from two “dirty” NYPD detectives who were on his payroll for several thousand dollars a month. Both were in units investigating organized-crime cases and had access to sensitive information, including the identities of informants, evidence obtained by the authorities, and pending arrests. Through an associate in the Lucchese family, who was the intermediary in contacting the detectives, Casso earlier worked out a deal with them to inform him of police and FBI investigations of the Mob.

Casso was prepared to kill everyone on the hit team that had failed to get him, but his revenge had to take a back seat for more important consequences arising from the Commission case.

Since the creation of the five families in 1931, the Lucchese borgata had proved to be the most stable and least divisive of the New York families. For more than fifty years, power had been peacefully transferred from Gaetano Gagliano to Tommy Three-Finger Brown Lucchese, and then to Antonio Tony Ducks Corallo. Unlike the other four major families, there had never been an attempt on the life of a Lucchese godfather, and the family had never been riven by an internal war.

Tony Ducks wanted to continue that harmonious tradition. With the Commission trial winding down in the autumn of 1986, Corallo saw the grim writing on the wall. The Lucchese family leadership was about to be decimated, more seriously affected than any other borgata by the Commission case. Realizing that he was finished along with underboss Tom Mix Santoro and consigliere Christie Tick Furnari, Ducks prepared for an orderly transition of authority. Shortly before the guilty verdicts were handed down in November, he summoned Gaspipe Casso and Vic Amuso to Furnari’s home in Staten Island. Swayed by Furnari’s lobbying, Corallo chose Amuso or Casso as the best candidates to take over the helm of the family. Although neither mobster had lengthy Mob managerial experience, they had proven their loyalty to Corallo’s organization and to Furnari. Both were exceptional earners, an optimistic sign that they would keep the family prosperous and competitive with rival Mafia outfits.