Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America's Most Powerful Mafia Empires (89 page)

“The kid knew he was in trouble,” Casso related years later. “I didn’t die and he became leery of everybody. Nobody could get near the kid.”

Casso asserted in interviews in 2003 that he employed an FBI agent and two New York City detectives to find Hydell. The corrupt trio, he said, were contacted and paid off by Burton Kaplan, a Lucchese associate and his liaison with the lawmen. According to Casso, the FBI man located Hydell and notified the detectives, who picked him up when he ventured out to visit a Mob club in Brooklyn. Pretending they had a warrant for his arrest, the detectives handcuffed Hydell and drove him in a car given to them by Casso to a closed garage. (The green auto was an unmarked police car that Gaspipe had bought at an auction.) Removing their captive from the rear seat, they bound and jammed him into the car’s trunk, and then met Casso at a prearranged spot in a Toys “
” Us parking lot. It was the only time that Casso had personal contact with the detectives and he shook their hands for a job well done. He claimed that although he knew the identity of the FBI agent, he never met him, communicating only through Kaplan. Taking the wheel of the green car, Casso drove off with Hydell still in the trunk, and the detectives followed in Kaplan’s car.

“The kid, a big guy, about six-two or three, was kicking the lid in the car and there were a lot of people around in the parking lot,” Casso sneered. “But I was not concerned, I had the law on my side, two fucking detectives with me if there was any trouble.”

For several hours in the basement of a house in Bergen Beach, a residential section of Brooklyn, the sharpshooter Casso used Hydell for target practice, firing bullets into his legs, arms, and body without delivering a mortal wound. Finally, after Hydell identified the rest of the hit squad that tried to kill him,
Casso ended the torture with a coup de grace slug in his brain. Like many of Casso’s victims, Hydell’s body was never found.

To locate and abduct Hydell, Casso said he paid a total of $75,000; $25,000 to each of the New York detectives and the FBI agent who assisted him. He claimed he routinely sent each venal lawman $1,000 to $1,500 a month to provide him with confidential information about Mob investigations, and they always got bonuses for special assignments like Hydell’s abduction.

Hydell’s wretched death did not satisfy Casso’s mania for revenge or end the search for the other men who had ambushed him. His private execution squad thought they had bumped off one of Hydell’s accomplices, a hood named Nicholas Guido. Tragically, they gunned down the wrong Nicholas Guido, killing a 26-year-old telephone installer outside his home on Christmas Day 1986. The innocent man died because of a slipup by the detective spies who were moonlighting for Casso. Asked to find the would-be assassin Nicholas Guido, they produced the address of a man with the identical name, who lived in Park Slope, Brooklyn. The victim was three years younger than the wannabe mobster Casso was determined to kill.

Casso shrugged off this murder.

“Hey, it’s a mistake,” he said in an interview. “No big deal.” The real Nicholas Guido fled to Florida and surrendered to police on an assault charge; he knew that life in prison would be safer than being on the streets with Gaspipe Casso gunning for him.

The third member of the failed murder team, Robert Bering, escaped Casso’s clutches by seeking safety in the Witness Protection Program. A former Transit Authority police officer, he turned himself in to the FBI, admitted that he had been a hired killer for the Mob, and testified about crimes unrelated to Casso, including covert Mafia ownership of city school-bus companies. Bering died in jail of a heart attack at the age of forty, perhaps from anxiety that Gaspipe’s vengeance could penetrate prison walls.

Moving up in the underworld as an underboss, Casso decided to live well in the real world. He lavished $1.2 million on constructing and furnishing a new home in Mill Basin, an upscale waterfront enclave in Brooklyn. The architect overseeing the construction was Anthony Fava, a Lucchese associate who had designed and supervised the construction of expensive homes for other family members. Soon after the house was completed in 1991, Fava turned up dead in
Brooklyn. His mutilated, nude body, feet and hands trussed, was left inside a stolen auto. He had been sadistically slain, his body punctured by scores of bullet and knife wounds. While still alive, his face, chest, and arms had been scorched, probably with cigarette burns. The murder was committed on Casso’s and Amuso’s orders, ostensibly because Fava was suspected of being or becoming a stool pigeon.

From informers’ reports, investigators theorized a second factor may have influenced Fava’s fate. Casso was worried that, from paper work and records for the new home, the architect had picked up too much information about his financial affairs and money spent on the sumptuous house. Casso’s retainers passed along the word that Fava deserved to die because he had overcharged Casso and was a government snitch. Fava had been stripped to his shorts before being killed, indicating that he had been searched for a hidden recording device. He was one more victim falsely smeared as a rat. Afterward, Gaspipe, in a rare suggestion of compassion, chastised the killers for torturing the architect without specific orders from him. The “piece of work,” he believed, had warranted a routine murder without prolonged flourishes.

Simply as a friendly gesture for a Brooklyn neighbor whom he liked, Casso could decree
death
. The neighbor had complained that an overly romantic young man named Angelo Sigona refused to stop pestering his daughter for dates and might endanger her engagement to another suitor. A hit man shot and killed the lovelorn Sigona as he sat in his car. It is unclear if the neighbor only wanted Sigona slapped around, intimidated, not permanently removed. But Casso apparently liked posturing as an omniscient, old-country Mafia godfather who had a solution for every problem.

A more straightforward request came from capo Sal Avellino, the Lucchese family’s controller of the garbage-carting industry on Long Island. In the backlash of the Commission case, several old scores needed settling. Avellino wanted to whack Robert Kubecka, the gutsy carter whose undercover work for the state Organized Crime Task Force had led to the bugging of Avellino’s car. The Jaguar tapes were devastating evidence against Ducks Corrallo and other Mob aristocrats in the Commission trial. Avellino had escaped indictment in the Commission investigation, but feared that Kubecka might be initiating new criminal and civil cases that would
endanger him
and the Mafia’s $400,000 a year profits from Long Island’s carting business.

The Jaguar bug had undercut Avellino’s Mob status and reputation for competence. He worried that his words on the tapes might be construed as evidence that he had extorted payoffs from contractors through influence in a teamsters’ union and in the association representing garbage haulers. “Whoever controls the employees controls the bosses,” Avellino was heard saying on the taped 1983 car conversations, outlining his tactics to two of his soldiers. “Because … if you got twenty people and they’re not gonna come to work tomorrow [to] pick up that fuckin’ garbage, who are you going to listen to?”

Avellino chortled over the Mafia’s domination of the teamsters’ and the carters’ association. “Now when you got a guy that steps out of line and this and that, now you got the whip. A strong union makes money for everybody, including the wiseguys. The wiseguys make even more money with a strong union.”

Still free and still running the Long Island rackets in 1989, Avellino feared that Kubecka and his relatives would be vital witnesses in a federal investigation. He wanted Kubecka killed immediately. Authorizing the hit, Gaspipe confirmed that the Long Island carter was indeed talking to the FBI and prosecutors, and therefore was a threat not only to Avellino but to his and Amuso’s huge profits from garbage carting. “I have a hook into getting classified information from inside the FBI office,” Casso assured underlings.

Casso okayed the murders of Robert Kubecka and his father, Jerry, who had founded their small independent waste-removal company. The Gambino family, which was sharing in the profits from the Long Island garbage rackets, agreed that the hit should be carried out by the Luccheses. At dawn on August 10, 1989, Robert Kubecka and his brother-in-law, Donald Barstow, who also was cooperating with the FBI, were alone in their tiny Long Island office, preparing the day’s work schedules. Two Lucchese gunmen burst in and killed them. Jerry Kubecka was spared because he had stayed home that morning.

Although the two witnesses were eliminated, Casso and Amuso faulted the killers, Rocco Vitulli and Frank Frederico, for messing up the job, leaving behind a gym bag containing a gun, and leaving bloodstains from one of the gunmen who had grappled with Kubecka. Still, Gaspipe did not regret the executions. “The guy was an informer. In this life, there’s only one way you deal with informers, you kill ‘em. He was going from the state to the FBI, he was really pushing the envelope. There was no other option.”

For fulfilling the assignment, Frederico got his button from Casso and Amuso and was inducted as a made man. (Indicted for the slayings, Vitulli in 1995 plea-bargained to lesser federal charges for a soft prison term of four years.
Tracked down after fourteen years in hiding, Frederico admitted his role in 2004 and at age seventy-six was sentenced to fifteen years.)

The murder of the two courageous businessmen attracted widespread news coverage. The stories displayed both the Mob’s audacity and law-enforcement’s weak spots, potentially discouraging other witnesses from whistle-blowing on the Cosa Nostra. The tragedy also embroiled law-enforcement agencies in a dispute over their obvious laxity in safeguarding Kubecka and Barstow. FBI agents and federal prosecutors blamed the state’s Organized Crime Task Force for misleading the Kubeckas about the perils of working undercover, and for failing to respond to numerous protection requests by the victims—including Robert Kubecka’s plea for assistance the night before the killings. Ronald Goldstock, then the task force’s director, maintained that Kubecka had rejected offers to relocate or to enter the Witness Protection Program, saying he wanted to retain his business interests and remain in Long Island. Holding the FBI and federal prosecutors at fault, state investigators argued that Kubecka and Barstow had been working solely with the federal government in the period immediately before the murders, and that this was the Mob’s primary motive for the slayings. Kubecka, forty, and Barstow, thirty-five, left behind their wives and five children.

A lawsuit by the widows laid the blame for the murders squarely on the state task force. In 1996, a judge found the unit had failed to alert Kubecka and Barstow that their lives were in danger and had been negligent in protecting them. Their families were awarded a settlement of $9.6 million.

“The state task force took no steps at all for the security of these two men,” Robert Folks, the widows’ lawyer, said angrily. “They didn’t want much, security cameras outside their office and occasional posting of police cars as a warning to the bad guys.” A former federal prosecutor in Manhattan, Folks said that state investigators and prosecutors neglected to employ a routine step taken by agencies to protect witnesses: “They should have contacted the Lucchese top guys and warned them about harming ‘our witnesses.’ That’s what is usually done and it puts the heat on them to behave.”

Casso’s internal purge and the assassinations of dangerous outsiders like Kubecka appeared to be a tactical triumph for the Lucchese bosses. Early in their reign, Vic Amuso and Anthony Casso designated a new capo, Alphonse D’Arco, as the main bagman to collect and deliver payoffs due them from the family’s various enterprises. D’Arco got clear instructions on the distribution of loot. “Vic told me, ‘Al, we’ll let Anthony take care of the cash. I’m more interested in Cosa Nostra things, you know, important things.’ “Amuso relied on
Casso’s business sense and his fearsome image to ensure that they would get the lion’s share of payoffs. As boss, Amuso preferred attending to policy issues, hobnobbing with other dons, appointing capos, and selecting new button men.

Casso had a mania for details. He meticulously kept ledgers recording payments channeled to him from capos and soldiers, and their overhead expenses, including bribes to corrupt lawmen. Another quirk was keeping card files listing the criminal abilities of soldiers and associates. Explaining his filing system to capo George Zappola, Casso noted that he catalogued top-notch car thieves under the letter C. Gaspipe’s sharp wit deflated Zappola when he asked for his classification. “Under U for useless.”

Before taking charge of the family, Casso and Amuso’s main source of income had been derived from narcotics deals. As hierarchs, their drug money was dwarfed by the leadership entitlements they suddenly shared: $15,000 to $20,000 a month from Long Island carting shake-downs; $75,000 a month in kickbacks for guaranteeing eight air-freight companies labor peace and allowing them to cheat employees out of union benefits; $20,000 a week in profits from illegal video gambling machines; and $245,000 annually from a major concrete supplier, the Quadrozzi Concrete Company, to shield it from tough union contracts. (Construction contractors were cautioned by Lucchese strong-arm thugs to use Quadrozzi’s ready-mix concrete if they wanted to avoid “serious problems.”)