Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America's Most Powerful Mafia Empires (92 page)

For added insight, the two turncoat capos explained how the borgata inflated the cost of buying a bunch of bananas or a head of lettuce in the city, by intimidating and shaking-down major wholesalers in the vast fruit and vegetable market in Hunts Point in the Bronx and in a smaller one in Brooklyn. It was common knowledge that the Luccheses had embedded interests in both produce markets, but the FBI had made little headway in cracking the Mob’s control. D’Arco changed the bureau’s prospects by identifying both the Bronx crew members and the union collaborators used to extract payoffs from merchants in the markets by threatening work stoppages and disruptions. The extortion costs, naturally, had been passed along to the public for decades in the form of higher consumer prices for fresh fruit and vegetables.

The detailed information about the Luccheses’ violent and white-collar crimes was an evidentiary gold mine. Together, the Professor and Fat Pete sprung open the door to potential indictments of more than fifty Lucchese mafiosi and associates.

Tumac’s Turn

A
s agents and prosecutors sifted through Al DAJCO and Pete Chiodo’s evidence, a third and more important Lucchese capo was trying to extricate himself from the minefield laid by Gaspipe Casso.

He was Anthony Accetturo, the boy from Newark who obtained the nickname “Tumac,” for his caveman ferocity, and who described his admission into Cosa Nostra by Ducks Corallo as “the greatest honor of my life.”

A consummate mafioso and a fervent believer in the sanctity of the Mafia’s code of honor, Accetturo represented the Mafia ideal. Loyal, absolutely trustworthy, he had profited beyond his wildest dreams from three decades of dedication to the Honorable Society. Tumac had risen from a lowly loan-shark muscleman and numbers runner in Newark to become a sophisticated capo, and eventually commander of the entire New Jersey branch of the Lucchese family. Corallo had been an indulgent godfather, allowing him wide latitude for more than twenty years as the Lucchese’s most successful member in the Garden State and in Florida. “Unbelievably great,” Accetturo replied to his soldiers when asked about his relationship with Ducks. Under Corallo’s long tenure, Accetturo had grown enormously rich, netting about $500,000 yearly from his crew’s traditional rackets—gambling, loan-sharking, narcotics, and protection extortions—and from its takeover of legitimate businesses.

Part of Accetturo’s plunder was laundered through investments in real estate, insurance, asphalt, equipment-leasing, and garbage-carting companies. In the 1980s, Accetturo reported to the 1RS average annual earnings of approximately $100,000. His criminal income was actually five times larger, but the investments provided reasonable cover for his affluent lifestyle in New Jersey and Florida.

Seeking criminal ventures beyond New Jersey, Accetturo in the 1970s established an outpost in South Florida, and bought a home in Hollywood, a resort town north of Miami. No single family exercised exclusive territorial rights in Florida, and the Miami area has always been wide open to Mafia entrepreneurs. When Accetturo set up shop in Florida, the state was experiencing an economic and population boom, and he took advantage of the opportunity to initiate drug deals, illicit gambling, and extortion shake-downs of various companies. Deputies safeguarded his New Jersey interests, and the Florida sojourns helped Accetturo avoid subpoenas from investigation committees in his native state. Tumac’s New Jersey State Police intelligence file cited his frequent flights to and from Florida, under the alias “Anthony Anderson.”

A file entry on April 10, 1975, wrongly characterized him as more powerful than any other organized-crime figure in South Florida. Although Accetturo’s Mob status was then soaring, in retrospect he was never the most significant Mob manager in the Miami area. The only Cosa Nostra godfather in Florida from the 1950s through the ‘80s was Santo Trafficante, the uncontested boss in Tampa on the Gulf Coast, and a force to be reckoned with throughout the state. Accetturo never poached on Trafficante’s territory or challenged him. He diplomatically exhibited the utmost deference to the Florida don, seeking his advise about racket innovations in the state, and personally chauffeuring Trafficante when he was conducting business from his second home in the Miami area.

One of the reasons why Accetturo admired Ducks Corallo was because the New York boss was undemanding when it came to money. When Ducks first took over in 1970, the New Jersey wing every year contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to the New York hierarchy. By the 1980s, the annual payments had been substantially trimmed; Accetturo was transferring a paltry $10,000 to $50,000 without drawing flak from New York. Wealthy as Croesus and getting on in years, Corallo became less gluttonous and lowered his demands from the New Jersey crew. Duck’s conviction in the Commission case and the ascension of Vic Amuso and Anthony Casso in the late 1980s ended Accetturo’s idyllic era.

Now, for the first time, he was locked in a struggle with anointed Mob leaders. The new hierarchs considered a $50,000-a-year cut from New Jersey a base insult, and demanded that Accetturo fork over up to 50 percent of his crew’s take. Simultaneously, the government’s widening scrutiny added to Tumac’s troubles. In early 1987, like his former boss, Corallo, Accetturo was indicted on RICO charges, with a life sentence looming if convicted. After thirty years of evading felony trials, he had been cited as the head of the Lucchese borgata’s New Jersey crew, a criminal enterprise. The trial in Newark, New Jersey, delved into the gang’s operations in that state and in Florida, including cocaine trafficking, credit-card frauds, gambling and loan-sharking. Federal prosecutors focused their case on evidence from low-level informers and bugged conversations, but the cautious Accetturo had never been caught on the tapes. He and nineteen soldiers and associates were defendants in a trial that lasted twenty-one months, the longest Mafia RICO trial ever held. Despite the length of the proceedings, the jury needed only fourteen hours to reach a decision in August 1988: all twenty defendants were found not guilty.

This was the first major RICO case to end in mass acquittals and a Mafia clean sweep. The bitter failure was a stinging rebuke to the Justice Department, and prompted it to avoid future “megatrials,” involving a dozen or more Mafia defendants in complex, marathon proceedings. Federal prosecutors in the Accetturo trial, however, had been trumped by a tactic used frequently by the Mob: fixing the jury. In an extraordinarily lucky break, one juror turned out to be a nephew of an Accetturo crew member who had not been indicted. For a $100,000 bribe the nephew guaranteed at least a hung jury. As it turned out, his persuasiveness in the jury room was effective in obtaining blanket acquittals for Accetturo and his entire criminal entourage.

Having dodged a RICO bullet, Tumac Accetturo now faced Mafia justice as dispensed by Little Vic Amuso and Gaspipe Casso. Accetturo refused to turn over half of the crew’s future earnings; nor would he come to New York to meet with the new leaders. By defying the regime, he knew he was violating a fundamental Mafia rule, but he was adamant, telling his lieutenants, “I won’t kowtow or buckle under.” His mafioso rationale was that Casso and Amuso’s demands were insatiable, and they were breaking a financial tradition and pact established with him by their predecessor, Ducks Corallo.

Little Vic and Gaspipe had a ready solution for Tumac’s recalcitrance. Stigmatizing him as a rat, they stripped him of his rank of capo and issued murder contracts on him and his son Anthony junior, a member of his New Jersey crew.
Casso also justified whacking Accetturo because he supposedly had violated a Cosa Nostra rule by using his wife, Geraldine, to transmit instructions to members of his crew. Casso claimed there was an inviolable prohibition against using women in Mafia activities.

In the fall of 1988, shortly after the acquittals in Newark, the entire New Jersey crew was summoned by Amuso and Casso to get the official word on restructuring their outfit. About ten members, half the crew’s made wiseguys, showed up outside a home in Canarsie where the meeting was to be held in a basement. But in a comic-opera scenario, admitting to each other their fear of being set up for a mass execution inside the house, the New Jersey mobsters scattered to their cars and drove off. Later, the entire New Jersey faction boycotted a 1988 Brooklyn Christmas party thrown by Amuso and Casso, and refused in early 1989 to venture into Manhattan for another mandatory session. Casso exploded. “That’s it! Kill them all,” he commanded Al D’Arco.

Over the next year or so, most of Accetturo’s band, were driven back to the fold by terror. They
deserted him, aligning
themselves with Amuso and Casso. Al D’Arco and Fat Pete Chiodo were delegated by Casso to arrange the executions of the disloyal remnants of the New Jersey crew: Accetturo, his son, and seven loyalists who stuck with their old skipper. Lecturing members of the New Jersey unit at a strategy sit-down in his La Donna Rosa restaurant, D’Arco read them the riot act. “Accetturo is an outlaw and you have to make all efforts to kill him and his son and whoever sticks by him.” To home in on “the outlaws,” two of Accetturo’s former soldiers handed D’Arco photographs of Accetturo, his wife, their son Anthony junior, and several other soldiers and associates in his rebellious circle. Most of the photos had been taken at dinner parties in Accetturo’s New Jersey home. Labeling Accetturo’s photo as “Tu” for Tumac, and his son’s as “Little Tu,” D’Arco circulated the pictures to fourteen soldiers and wannabes on the lookout for the father and son in New Jersey and in Florida from late 1988 into 1990.

Emphasizing
the urgency of the hits, Casso opened the administration’s vault, doling out large sums for bumping off the Accetturos and their dwindling forces. Tommy Ricciardi, who stuck with Tumac, was located hunkering down in a rural home near Toms River, in southern New Jersey. Through a quirky coincidence, Ricciardi’s hideout was adjacent to a farm owned by a friend of a Lucchese soldier from Brooklyn. Killers were sent to the farm to stalk Ricciardi, but he rarely left his hideout. One gunman proposed stocking the farm where they were encamped with horses, in the hope Ricciardi would be lured outside
to get a close look at the animals. About $70,000 was spent bringing in horses, but the animals failed to entice the suspicious Ricciardi from his guarded niche. No one could get a clear shot at him.

Fat Pete Chiodo took a squad to Florida to hunt for Accetturo and his son, but Tony Accetturo Jr. turned the tables on his pursuers. The younger Accetturo became the hunter, tracked Chiodo’s car, and called the police to alert them that a New York mobster was in the area. When the cops showed up and stopped Chiodo for questioning about his activities in Florida, “Casso blew his top” in D’Arco’s presence.

Chiodo attempted to redeem himself by abducting Joseph LaMorte, an Accetturo soldier, and torturing him into disclosing Tumac’s whereabouts. When LaMorte proved too evasive to pluck off the streets, Chiodo and his team tried to kill him, shooting him in the neck and shoulder as he sat in his car outside his Florida home. Fat Pete confidently reported to Casso that they had finished off LaMorte, but despite serious wounds, he survived. “Petey cost me twenty thousand dollars a bullet,” Casso groused to D’Arco, saying he had laid out $40,000 for Chiodo’s hit team’s expenses in Florida.

The Florida trip was a misdirected expedition from the start. While Chiodo was scouring South Florida in 1988 and 1989, Accetturo was in a New Jersey jail. Following his acquittal on RICO racketeering charges, Tumac was held almost a year on a contempt order for refusing to testify before a state panel investigating organized crime. This fact inexplicably escaped the attention of the Lucchese hit team before they left for Florida.

Except for LaMorte, the other New Jersey dissidents evaded Casso’s death squads. Tumac’s long experience in the Mob had taught him how to spot assassins, but he no longer could escape the mounting law-enforcement pressure. Following the 1988 RICO acquittals, New Jersey state investigators began concentrating on Accetturo’s past, and four years of dogged work got results. Aided by the dissension and disarray in the Luccheses’ New Jersey operations, the state’s attorney general’s office unearthed evidence that the crew extorted a video-poker gambling-machine manufacturer in New Jersey, and boardwalk amusement arcades at New Jersey’s beach towns. At a trial in 1993, Accetturo beat a murder-conspiracy count, but was convicted on racketeering charges that he was the leader of an organized-crime gang, and had shared the extortion payoffs. His longtime follower, Tommy Ricciardi, was found guilty of murdering a family associate who had refused to pay sufficient tribute to the Luccheses. Ricciardi beat him to death with a golf club. Most of the crimes had
occurred in Accetturo’s heyday, before Amuso and Casso took over his crew. Ironically, two of Tumac’s ex-soldiers, who had aided the new regime’s efforts to kill him, were found guilty as codefendants on the same racketeering and extortion accusations that tripped him up.

Overweight at 250 pounds, moonfaced, suffering from high blood pressure, the once robust Tumac Accetturo was in bad shape. At age fifty-three, he anticipated a sentence of thirty years without parole; the only way he would leave prison would be in a coffin. Searching for the roots of his downfall, he blamed the internal turmoil uncorked by Amuso and Casso for providing investigators with valuable leads and with testimony from turncoats. Al D’Arco, who defected to the government’s side for fear of Gaspipe, had been turned into a vital witness against Accetturo. Brooding in his jail cell, Accetturo saw only one escape route. Painful as it would be, he was ready to renounce his lifelong devotion to the Mafia, the organization that had sheltered him for thirty-five years. He was now willing to testify against Men of Honor and to reveal Cosa Nostra secrets he had sworn to conceal.