Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America's Most Powerful Mafia Empires (90 page)

Sidney Lieberman, their special envoy in the Garment Center, was extremely useful. He reportedly enriched them by some $200,000 a year through a subtle shake-down system. According to Department of Labor investigators, Lieberman would get a corrupt official from the International Ladies Garment Workers Union—the industry’s largest union—to threaten unionization drives at targeted firms. After an ILGWU organizer showed up at the companies, Lieberman or a lawyer who assisted him would work out under-the-table cash deals to keep the union out of the shops, with more than half of the systemic payoffs destined for the two Lucchese hierarchs. (Years later, Lieberman pled guilty to a RICO labor-racketeering conspiracy and was sentenced to four years in prison.)

As family leaders, Casso and Amuso also got portions of all gambling and loan-sharking profits picked up by the lower ranks. There were also lush, single-shot payoffs. The Colombo family anted up $800,000 for Casso’s aid in helping
them pilfer steel from the demolished West Side Highway. For allowing the Gambino family to take over a Lucchese-protected general contractor for one project—a huge Coney Island housing complex—they were rewarded with $600,000.

Following the lead of the Colombo family, the Lucchese borgata branched into gasoline-tax thefts, forming a partnership with a Russian gangster, Marat Balagula. “He made millions off the gas-tax business and our family made a lot of money with him,” Gaspipe disclosed years later. When another Russian tough guy demanded a $600,000 protection payment from Balagula, the Luccheses killed him. Casso could only recall the rival Russian’s first name, “Vladimir.” His full name was Vladimir Reznikov.

For himself, Casso was drawing more than $100,000 a year from his personal loan-sharking business. He also maintained an exclusive sinecure: control over George Kalikatas, a Greek-American gangster who in 1990 alone passed along $683,000 to him for permission to operate loan-sharking, book-making, and extortion rings in Queens. And every Christmas, there was a customary combined gift of more than $100,000 to the boss and underboss from the crews, a token of respect.

The onrush of wealth substantially altered Gaspipe Casso’s lifestyle. In addition to his costly new house, he went on regal buying sprees, spending in one day $30,000 for clothes and more than $100,000 for a 10.5-carat diamond ring. His arrogant, roughneck character, however, never deserted him. Dining in a French restaurant in Miami, he ordered the most expensive wine available, a magnum costing $3,000. The sommelier performed an elaborate decanting ritual with a candle flame to remove sediment and to ensure the delicate bouquet of the grapes. Gaspipe tasted the wine, nodding approvingly to the hovering sommelier. Then as his companions roared, Casso poured a bottle of Seven-Up into the decanter. One Christmas season, Casso showed up with a large group of gangsters and their girlfriends at Rockefeller Center’s Sea Grill Restaurant, popular for its picture windows facing the ice skating rink. Lacking a reservation, Casso was told by the maître d’ that there was no hope of getting a table. Counting and placing $100 bills in the man’s hands, Casso got a ringside table. The tip cost him $1,400.

In 1990, after almost four years at the pinnacle of the Lucchese family, Casso and Amuso felt secure. By inducting seventeen young members, they had fattened the ranks of loyal soldiers who could be relied upon to report any murmur of dissent. Their real or imagined internal borgata enemies were in
their graves. Another asset was their obscure profiles. There were no media or government spotlights illuminating them as important mafiosi and Cosa Nostra monarchs. All signs were favorable for a long and successful run of their administration. Life was so comfortable and they were so close that Gas and Vic and their wives vacationed together without bodyguards in Disney World.

Best of all, millions of dollars were pouring into their coffers.

The Professor and Fat Pete

E
ven in the fading light, Al D’Arco could see the agitation roiling Anthony Gaspipe Casso. As they walked along the embankment in Brooklyn’s Fort Hamilton Park, watching the sun sink over New York harbor, Casso delivered the unsettling news: he and Vic Amuso were going on the lam to escape imminent arrest on racketeering charges. Late that Saturday afternoon in May 1990, D’Arco had been summoned to an emergency meeting at “the Cannon,” a spot in the park near an old artillery piece.

Casso had in the past dropped more than one hint that bribed federal and local law-enforcement agents were surreptitiously giving him valuable confidential information. He had coined the nickname “Crystal Ball” for the corrupt mole who had reported his own pending arrest.

Now, Casso hurriedly filled in D’Arco on the details. In two days, federal indictments would be unsealed against him, Vic Amuso, and high-ranking members of the Genovese, Gambino, and Colombo families. They had been reeled in on RICO enterprise charges stemming from the Mob’s control of contracts to install windows in the city’s housing projects through extortions and rigged bids; the investigation would be dubbed “the Windows case.”

The Lucchese boss Vic Amuso was already holed up in a hideout. “What are you doing?” D’Arco asked. “You’d better get out of here too. How do you
know you ain’t going to go to your house and they’re going to be laying there for you? You’re going to be pinched.”

Confident that his information—presumably from a dishonest FBI employee—was accurate, and that the arrests were set for the following Monday, Casso explained his reasons for becoming a fugitive. He and Amuso believed they would stand a better chance of beating the charges after the other defendants were tried. The first trials would be a preview of the prosecution’s evidence and its strength. Tried at a later date, Amuso and Casso would come into court with lawyers better-armed for legal combat.

Casso delivered other important news. While Amuso and Casso were away, D’Arco would be acting boss, although not with the official title. Major policy decisions would still be in the hands of Amuso and Casso, and they had devised a circuitous system for contacting D’Arco from their hideouts. Handing D’Arco a list of public pay phones and their locations in New York City and in Long Island, Casso said he would call him at these numbers. A courier would tell him when and where he should take the calls It was a system intended to frustrate law-enforcement efforts to tap the mobsters’ conversations and trace their calls.

“I’ll see you,” Casso said, winding up the rendezvous. “I’ll be in touch. You’re the boss. Don’t worry. Do only the big things, don’t bother with small things.” Before parting, Casso locked D’Arco in a tight embrace and tears soaked the eyes of the callous killer.

Alphonse D’Arco was a relative newcomer to command. His career in the Lucchese family had been tedious and unpromising. Slightly built, balding, and generally soft-spoken, he was one of those mafiosi who passed more easily for an obsequious clerk than a strong-armed gangster. Most of his Mafia life had been spent as a scrambler, a low earner, a wannabe mixed up in crimes where a made man or a capo thought he might be useful as an accessory. A Brooklyn boy, with several Mob-connected relatives, he grew up in neighborhoods where the Cosa Nostra was looked upon as a natural part of the landscape. In D’Arco’s words, “It was like a forest and all the trees around it were organized-crime guys.”

Formal education was of secondary importance to D’Arco, and at fifteen he was working full-time at legitimate menial jobs while trying to ingratiate himself with a Lucchese crew in Canarsie, a middle-class section in Brooklyn. Never pulling off a big score, he made a hardscrabble living participating in a variety of crimes: robberies, burglaries, arsons, hijackings, bookmaking, running dice games, counterfeiting, and one armored-car robbery—any illegality
where he could fit in as an accomplice. His one attempt to pull off a big solo
stunt
was a disaster. He was nabbed trying to fence $500,000 in stolen stock certificates, and at twenty-nine, was sentenced to five years in Sing-Sing (Ossining) Prison.

Returning to the streets in 1966 as an associate with the Canarsie crew, D’Arco resumed scratching out an illegal income from his old trades, primarily illegal gambling and loan-sharking. He also tried his hand at narcotics trafficking, the surest way of making big bucks quickly. Never eminently successful himself as a heroin and cocaine wholesaler, D’Arco made some important connections in the Lucchese family through attempted drug deals, and connected with a pair of comers, Vic Amuso and Anthony Casso.

D’Arco’s long service to the Canarsie crew finally was rewarded when, in 1982, at the overly ripe age of fifty, he was inducted as a made man, with Ducks Corallo himself officiating. Plagued by hard luck, D’Arco barely had time to enjoy or cash in on his promotion to the rank of soldier. Several months after becoming an official wiseguy, he was sentenced to a prison term of almost four years. After an arrest on heroin trafficking, he plea-bargained for a reduced sentence. Paroled in late 1986, D’Arco returned amid tectonic changes in the Lucchese clan. Amuso and Casso had taken over the borgata.

The capo of D’Arco’s Canarsie crew, Paul Vario, died of natural causes in 1988, providing Amuso and Casso an ideal opening to install their own man as captain of one of the family’s wealthiest outfits. Despite his undistinguished Mafia resume, paltry earnings, and limited time as a soldier (more than half of which had been spent in prison) Al D’Arco was chosen. He had the prime qualifications the bosses desired: gratitude, loyalty to them for his rapid promotion, a record of obediently following orders, and an unassertive background that virtually guaranteed he would never pose a threat to the bosses. Almost from the start of his association with the Lucchese family, D’Arco had been called “Little Al.” Amuso and Casso thought he deserved a snappier nickname. His un-threatening persona and his bespectacled appearance—he favored tweed jackets, white shirts, and bland ties—prompted them to sarcastically tag him “the Professor.”

Along with his promotion came an immense boost in D’Arco’s finances. Previously, he operated a combined bookmaking and snack stand, the Hamburger Palace, near Manhattan’s West Side docks, to supplement his meager Mob earnings from numbers and loan-sharking. Suddenly, thanks to Amuso and Casso, his pockets were bulging. One of his entitlements as capo was
acquiring his predecessor’s shylock book, which included an initial payment to him of $160,000, and a weekly income of about $10,000: Additionally, his share of the earnings of his crew—fourteen soldiers and some one hundred associates—netted him several thousand dollars a week. A good part of this treasure came from shake-downs of air-freight companies, bakeries, and funeral parlors.

Earlier, D’Arco had moved to Manhattan from Brooklyn, and his soaring wealth enabled him to open La Donna Rosa restaurant in Little Italy. The restaurant, which became the Luccheses’ new meeting hall, was on the square named in memory of Lieutenant Joseph Petrosino, the New York detective killed by the Sicilian Mafia at the turn of the twentieth century. Through Mob and political influence, D’Arco wangled a prize sought by millions of New Yorkers from the state: an inexpensive rent-subsidized apartment. Ideal for D’Arco, the apartment was located in a desirable section of Little Italy and near La Donna Rosa. Staying clear of storefront Mafia clubs to avoid law-enforcement surveillance, D’Arco used the restaurant as a convenient and safe site for conferences with Casso and other Lucchese mobsters. Aware of the woes caused by Title III wiretaps and bugs, the Professor had his apartment and restaurant swept periodically for listening devices. As a sign of gratitude to his bosses, D’Arco sent his technicians to certify that Casso’s home and the Walnut Bar, a Brooklyn hangout frequented by Amuso and Gaspipe, were free of secret mikes.

The new Lucchese bosses, Vic Amuso and Gaspipe Casso, had other uses for D’Arco. They appointed him their personal bagman, responsible for picking up systematic payoffs from various rackets, and at Christmas, it was D’Arco who gathered about $100,000 from crew captains as a holiday gift to Amuso and Casso.

D’Arco handed all the plunder, more than $1 million a year, to Casso, the hierarchy’s treasurer. Aware of Casso’s paranoia about being shortchanged and of his zeal for exactitude, D’Arco gave him a written record of every penny he received for the bosses and its source. For added insurance, D’Arco kept his own ledger of the payments.

Partly as a reward for D’Arco’s services, the two bosses honored him by presiding at the induction of his son Joseph into the borgata and placed him in his father’s crew. Following the ceremony in the basement of a Canarsie home, Casso nudged Amuso and announced gravely to D’Arco, “Your son belongs to us now, he doesn’t belong to you anymore.” Following his father’s path, Joe
D’Arco became a drug dealer. He also began sampling his own wares, descending into heroin addiction.

Before D’Arco came under Casso’s tutelage, there was no firm evidence of his involvement in any murders. But as Amuso and Casso’s most dependable capo, he served as a conspirator in many of their reign-of-terror killings. The Lucchese family’s Professor helped lure Mike Pappadio, the ousted Garment Center rackets supervisor, to his death in a bagel factory, where D’Arco bludgeoned him before he was fatally shot by another mobster. He participated in or knew the details of at least eleven executions. For the murder of Anthony DiLapi, he assigned his son to the team that hunted him down in California. The killers of a fellow capo from the Bronx, Mike Salerno, were personally selected by D’Arco. To facilitate one murder for Casso, D’Arco obtained a submachine gun with a silencer, test-firing it from a window in his apartment before transferring it to the designated hit man.