Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America's Most Powerful Mafia Empires (91 page)

Amuso and Casso’s flight in May 1990 failed to halt the internal purges. Many of the hits were arranged by D’Arco at Casso’s orders. Murder instructions came from Casso, rarely from Amuso, via the prearranged calls to the public phones. Even as a fugitive, Casso managed to obtain confidential information from his law-enforcement spies, relaying the secrets to D’Arco. In the fall of 1990, he told D’Arco to warn John Gotti and Sammy Gravano that they would be arrested on federal indictments around Christmas. The information was accurate.

The fugitive Lucchese leaders were sufficiently confident to surface for occasional conferences with the Professor. He met them twice in the Scranton, Pennsylvania, area, once in a tavern and once in a supermarket parking lot. Affecting disguises, both men had grown beards and wore sunglasses and baseball caps. Apparently confident that they would not be recognized, or that D’Arco might have been tailed by agents, Amuso and Casso drove off together in a black Jeep at the end of the sessions. Taking even a greater risk, they slipped several times into New York for talks with D’Arco, usually in safe houses in Brooklyn. D’Arco found Casso undaunted by the problems of being a hunted fugitive, continually tossing him ideas for expanding the family’s activities. Seizing upon the divisions in the Colombo family between the Carmine Persico and Vic Orena factions, Casso proposed a peace plan in a private conversation with D’Arco. The Luccheses, Casso said, could end the Colombos’
incessant wars by absorbing them into their own gang. The judicious D’Arco had agreed to all of Casso’s previous proposals, regardless of their danger, but now he ratcheted up his courage and objected to the merger idea. The Colombos, he argued, could not be trusted as partners, and the Gambino and Genovese families would be incensed if the Luccheses created a borgata larger and stronger than either of theirs. In his own mind, he reckoned that Casso’s ulterior motive for uniting the two gangs was to establish himself as boss of the combined family and thereby become the country’s most important Mafia don.

It was a rare display of candor by D’Arco. A moment later, he reverted to his usual submissiveness. An outburst by Casso about Lucchese wiseguys gave him a renewed warning of what happened to Mob members Casso distrusted. Ticking off the names often soldiers, Casso vowed that he would invite all of them to a victory party as soon as his legal problems were over. Before they ate, he continued, “I’m going to kill them all because they took advantage of me while I was on the lam.”

Seven months after the bosses went into hiding, D’Arco was given the title of acting boss. On January 9, 1991, the family leadership met at the Canarsie home of a Lucchese soldier. “Al, you’re the boss now,” Amuso said, opening a bottle of wine to celebrate. “You’re running the family.” Though he had the title, D’Arco’s actual authority remained severely limited. Amuso and Casso informed him that they would continue calling the shots, making all major policy decisions, and receiving the bulk of the regime’s income. Moreover, Amuso forbade D’Arco to authorize murders or induct soldiers, a boss’s unquestioned prerogatives. Indicative of D’Arco’s subservient role, before the meeting broke up the new acting boss turned over to Casso $75,000, the latest cash pickup he had made for him.

Amuso and Casso’s absence created bickering within the ranks over who actually had the authority to make snap decisions and resolve disagreements with other families. D’Arco increasingly perceived that Gaspipe, who talked with him frequently through the prearranged telephone system, distrusted him. Although designated as acting boss, D’Arco sensed he was getting “curved instructions” from Casso, who was transmitting the same information and directions he received to other Lucchese members. The curved instructions were designed to determine if D’Arco was faithfully carrying out his bosses’ commands. It was evident they were questioning either his loyalty or his ability.

That spring of 1991, Casso ordered a hit that astonished D’Arco. The contract was for a capo who, D’Arco knew, had been Casso’s right hand for years:
Peter “Fat Pete” Chiodo, a four-hundred-pound intimidator of balky contractors and tardy loan-shark clients. Together with Amuso and Casso, Chiodo had been indicted the year before on RICO charges linked to the Windows case. Compounding Chiodo’s legal problems was a second indictment for corruption involving the Lucchese family’s control of a New York painters’ union. One of Casso’s “Angels of Death,” Fat Pete had led the team that whacked Sonny Morrissey, the ironworkers’ union leader.

Fat Pete had not become a fugitive. Facing two trials, the forty-year-old mafioso decided to plead guilty to both indictments, hopeful that a reduced sentence might allow him to be paroled in ten years. Otherwise, the double-barreled racketeering convictions could mean his spending the rest of his life in prison. Before copping pleas, Chiodo committed an unpardonable sin by failing to ask permission from Amuso and Casso. His bosses both had vital stakes in his decision since they were also defendants in the two cases. Infuriated at not being consulted, and suspecting that Chiodo was cooperating with the prosecution for leniency, Casso telephoned D’Arco. “Kill Fat Pete” was his brisk order.

Having worked for and murdered for Casso, Chiodo realized that his guilty pleas might enrage Gaspipe. Protecting himself before his sentencing date, he kept close to his home in Staten Island, venturing out only when encircled by a swarm of relatives. To smoke out Chiodo, D’Arco recruited a member of his crew who knew his habits and the places he frequented, and used Mob technicians to tap Fat Pete’s home phone for leads on where hitters could jump him. The mobsters learned from the taps that Chiodo was leaving the area for an undisclosed hideout until his sentencing date; before departing on the morning of May 8, 1991, he planned to drive his Cadillac to a Staten Island service station for an engine checkup. Three shooters, including Al D’Arco’s son Joe, were waiting in two cars to waylay him. Opening the hood of his car, Chiodo spotted the assassins approaching. Drawing his gun, he fired first, retreating as bullets whistled around him. None of the shooters was nicked, but Chiodo collapsed in a heap, struck twelve times all over his body. Believing him dead, the gunmen and their wheel men sped away.

The shooters were wrong. Although he suffered grievous abdominal wounds and a disabled right arm, emergency surgery lasting eight hours saved Chiodo’s life. Surgeons credited his enormous obesity for saving his life; his fat prevented the slugs from fatally penetrating a vital organ or artery.

Still trying to fulfill Casso’s orders, D’Arco’s hit squad looked for a second
chance to finish him off in the hospital. A Lucchese gangster masquerading as a doctor, accompanied by a nurse who was friendly with one of the family’s soldiers, tried to sneak into Chiodo’s hospital room. But a screen of FBI agents and police officers guarding the wounded mobster prevented unauthorized persons from getting close to him.

Before the attempt on his life, Fat Pete Chiodo had spurned an offer from prosecutors for greater leniency if he testified against higher-ups and other mobsters. “I appreciate what you guys are trying to do but no thanks—goodbye and good luck,” Chiodo told Charles Rose and Gregory O’Connell, the federal prosecutors handling the Windows case. Twelve bullet wounds finally convinced him that survival depended on his breaking his
omertà
vow and converted him into an informer. At bedside interrogations, he fleshed out for the two prosecutors details of numerous murders and other crimes committed by his former bosses, Amuso and Casso, and other Lucchese members.

Realizing the damage that Chiodo could inflict upon them, Amuso and Casso tried another tactic to dissuade him from ratting. Casso instructed D’Arco to get word to Chiodo’s parents that they would be killed if their son testified or cooperated with the prosecution. The threat violated the Mafia’s presumed code of honor that exempts innocent relatives from retaliation for a mobster’s transgressions, but, once again, following orders, D’Arco’s soldiers made sure the message was delivered. Chiodo took the threat seriously and his wife and children and other close relatives were whisked into the Witness Protection Program. The two Lucchese bosses did strike back at Fat Pete’s family members who declined joining the parade into the protection program. The body of his uncle, Frank Signorino, was found stuffed into a car trunk, and his sister, Patricia Capozzalo, was seriously wounded when a masked gunman shot her in the back and neck with a silencer-equipped pistol.

The bungled hit on Chiodo further weakened D’Arco’s reputation as an effective acting boss. In July 1991, he attended a priority meeting with the bosses in the Staten Island home of a girlfriend of Richard Pagliarulo, a Lucchese soldier. Amuso and Casso showed up clean-shaven, their beards gone, making no attempt to disguise themselves. They announced D’Arco’s removal as acting boss and the establishment of a panel of four capos as a temporary hierarchy to conduct the family’s business in their absence. Although D’Arco was one of the four, it was a humiliating demotion, indicating the leadership’s displeasure with his handling of crucial assignments. He was
particularly disturbed by Amuso’s refusal to speak directly to him or look him in the eye.

Several days after the administrative shakeup, the borgata was rattled by the arrest of their titular boss, Vic Amuso. Alone at a shopping mall near Scranton, Amuso was pounced upon by FBI agents as he made a call from a public phone. His last hideout was never located. The FBI did learn that, registered under the surname “Ricci,” Amuso had spent two of his fourteen months as a fugitive in The Inn at Nichols Village, a resort hotel in Clarks Summit, a town north of Scranton, where he had friends. The circumstances of his capture indicated that help from an informer, not investigative skills, had tipped off the feds. An anonymous telephone caller had “dropped a dime” on Amuso, informing the bureau of the approximate time he would appear at the mall. Someone close to Amuso in the Lucchese family knew about the prearranged telephone system and had betrayed him.

With Amuso in custody and facing a RICO trial, Casso’s shadow over the family loomed larger. Totally in control of the borgata, he continued to communicate with D’Arco, getting updates from him about the family’s business affairs and transmitting orders. But D’Arco sensed a growing frost, an estrangement, in the clandestine telephone conversations. Preying on the Professor’s mind was Casso’s attempt to terrorize Chiodo’s relatives and a haunting conversation he had had with Fat Pete shortly before the contract was issued on his life. “These guys [Amuso and Casso] have a pattern of calling people rats and they are marking guys rats and killing them,” Chiodo cautioned. “I got information that you and I are going to be killed and hurt.”

Having assisted in the murders and attempted homicides of more than a dozen victims Casso had classified as stool pigeons, D’Arco fretted about his own fate. He knew that the mere whisper of disloyalty, without substantiation, would provoke Casso into whacking even the most faithful servant.

The four-man panel set up by Amuso and Casso to oversee routine matters gathered once a week, and on Thursday, September 19, 1991, D’Arco dutifully attended a meeting in the Kimberly, a Midtown Manhattan hotel. During the afternoon session, Mike DeSantis, a soldier, showed up although he was not part of the group. DeSantis worked for another panel member, capo Frank Lastorino, and was an efficient gunman frequently used by Casso. D’Arco spotted a pistol stuck in the small of DeSantis’s back, under his shirt, and noticed that
he was wearing a bullet-proof vest; the gunman looked as if he were preparing for a shoot-out.

“This is it. I’m going to be hit,” D’Arco thought. Jumping to his feet, over the protests of Lastorino and the other panel gangsters, he scurried out the door.

Friday, the next morning, D’Arco’s parole officer from his narcotics sentence telephoned him at home and told him that the FBI had learned there was a contract on his life. Now certain that Casso was out for his hide, D’Arco crossed his own Rubicon. Together with his wife, Dolores, his mobster son Joe, and other close relatives, he fled from the city. He had decided to defect but was too frightened to surrender at FBI headquarters in downtown Manhattan, fearing that Casso might reach “Crystal Ball” or another of his moles, and order his death. On Saturday night, the cautious Professor showed up unannounced at the FBI office in suburban New Rochelle, ready to confess to his own serious offenses and tell all he knew about the hideous crimes he had committed on behalf of Gaspipe Casso and Vic Amuso.

Called in for his questioning, federal prosecutors Rose and O’Connell met the jittery turncoat in an upstate hotel; an FBI cordon had been assigned to protect him. “Even though he was in a room with agents, he was so paranoid of Gaspipe that he was hiding in the bathroom when we came in,” O’Connell recalled. “He told us, ‘You have to understand how dangerous this guy is. He has sources, agents, he knows what’s going on.’”

Looking back, trying to explain his reasons for deserting the Mafia, D’Arco was bitter about the way Amuso and Casso exploited him. “When a job needed to be done, whenever they needed to do something unpleasant to someone, I was the prick chosen by them,” he told the prosecutors and agents. His sudden bolt, he acknowledged, had been costly, forcing him to abandon his Mob wealth, including $1.5 million in loan-sharking money circulating on the street. All of his illicit assets, he knew, would be confiscated by Casso and other capos, but he did hang on to $55,000 that he had kept as an emergency cache.

Before Fat Pete Chiodo was shot and Al D’Arco surrendered voluntarily, federal and state law-enforcement agencies were essentially ignorant of Amuso’s and Casso’s killing spree and the revamped Lucchese regime. Unexpectedly, two high-ranking capos were now providing them with chapter and verse on the family’s most violent crimes and best-kept secrets. Hundreds of pages of debriefing reports by FBI agents, titled 302s, documented D’Arco’s and Chiodo’s firsthand accounts of murders and rackets, many previously unknown to the authorities. The defectors, reconstructing conversations and meetings with
Amuso, Casso, and other mobsters, gave the government a graphic inventory of slayings, attempted hits commissioned by Amuso and Casso, the killers’ names, and the disposition of the victims’ corpses. Amuso and Casso’s operational methods, the Lucchese family’s revised table of command, the telephone system used to communicate with the fugitive bosses, and the identities of new capos and soldiers were disclosed and gift-wrapped for the government. Professor D’Arco also produced the financial records he had squirreled away in his apartment, providing the agents with the full dimensions of the family’s wealth. D’Arco and Chiodo unveiled the Lucchese mosaic of rackets; how through control of some twenty union locals, the family exacted millions of dollars in payoffs for protection and for rigged bids from dozens of construction, airfreight, and garbage-carting companies.