Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America's Most Powerful Mafia Empires (93 page)

The turning point for him was the revelation that his former lieutenants, on Casso’s orders, had provided photographs of himself and his wife to the hit teams. “Me and my son accepted the life and what might happen to us,” he emphasized angrily in an interview. “I can accept they were gonna kill me. But my wife? She used to treat them like her own and make dinner for them at our house. For me, that was the end.”

Before converting, Accetturo reached out to the nemesis who had spearheaded the state’s pursuit and conviction of him, an official named Robert Buccino. He and Buccino had been boyhood friends in their native city, Orange, and Buccino considered himself a wilder teenager than Tumac had been. While Accetturo nestled into the bosom of the Mafia, Buccino took the opposite road. A strapping six-footer with a steady smile, Bobby Buccino joined the New Jersey State Police. After seven years as a trooper, he was attached to the organized-crime division and began a watch on someone he knew well, Anthony Tumac Accetturo. They had a face-to-face collision in the early 1970s when Accetturo stormed out of his home in Livingston, New Jersey, demanding to know why Buccino was shadowing and hounding him. Trying to rattle the mobster, Buccino said the surveillance was a forerunner to subpoenaing him to testify before a state investigation committee. “It was a tactical lie,” Buccino acknowledged, “but he believed me because other hoods were getting subpoenaed around that time, and that might have been the reason he hightailed it to Florida.”

Decades later, as a high official and Mafia expert on the New Jersey attorney general’s staff, Buccino supervised the investigation that brought about Accetturo’s racketeering conviction. Desperate for a light sentence, Accetturo sat down with his boyhood chum and chronicled a multitude of Mafia crimes. For state, federal, and even Italian organized-crime authorities, Accetturo yielded a lode of untapped evidence and historical intelligence about the Lucchese family and other borgatas. Accetturo’s narration of his life as a Mafia executive was the clearest picture investigators had ever obtained of the Luccheses’ penetration and exploitation of legitimate businesses in New Jersey, and the borgata’s corrupt compacts with municipal officials.

Among Accetturo’s offerings was an explanation of the primary reason for a huge government setback. He revealed the jury-rigging that produced acquittals for himself and his crew at the federal racketeering trial in 1988. He provided a cornucopia of evidence about violent crimes during his nearly four decades as a mobster. His tips led to the seizure of forty weapons, including a machine gun, and the breakup of a Mob gambling ring that was grossing $40 million annually. Clearing up thirteen murders, Accetturo admitted knowledge of the conspiracies that led to them, although he insisted that he had never personally participated in a slaying. Always rationalizing his behavior, Accetturo compared his role in the borgata to that of any businessman. His objective, he claimed, was a fundamental American goal: to enrich himself and his pals, while keeping violence to a minimum.

Robert Buccino and the other interrogators were skeptical of Tumac’s self-serving justifications. Nevertheless, Buccino allowed him to vent his frustrations without debate. Informers are an indispensable element in police work, and Accetturo was producing arrests and prosecutions. By renouncing the Mafia, he influenced his crony Tommy Ricciardi and two other Lucchese soldiers to follow him into the ranks of cooperating witnesses.

The detailed information coming from Accetturo and his band of turncoats persuaded twelve other Lucchese mobsters to plead guilty to an assortment of federal and state charges, including nine homicides. By the time Accetturo finished talking to the authorities, the state attorney general’s office declared that the New Jersey affiliate of the Lucchese family was severely crippled.

Accetturo’s unexpected contribution was historical data about the Mafia’s origins in New Jersey that he had absorbed from conversations with mafiosi old-timers, information previously unknown to students of the Mob. At the creation of the American Mafia organization in 1931, Lucky Luciano had permitted the
formation of only one independent New Jersey borgata, a small clan in Elizabeth that became known as the De Cavalcante family. Leaders of more powerful crews in the Newark area were offered a one-time opportunity to join one of the five newly defined New York families. Believing they would have little chance of upward mobility in the largest New York family, which Luciano controlled (later known as the Genovese), most Newark capos aligned themselves with the four other borgatas. Their decisions in 1931 established the strong and lasting presence of all the five major families in New Jersey.

Mysteries about the exact relationship between the American and Sicilian Mafias were clarified when Accetturo was debriefed by Italian organized-crime agents brought in to question him. He explained that dual membership in an American and a Sicilian family was prohibited; mafiosi could have allegiance to only one national group. Each New York family had links to the Sicilian Mafia, primarily to facilitate narcotics transactions. And, although most American mobsters resented the Zips, the Sicilian made men, because of their patronizing attitude, the Americans felt they were more dedicated and ruthless than their Yankee counterparts. Accetturo acknowledged that the Sicilians had the right to feel superior. Under strict control of their bosses in Sicily, they were better disciplined, more tightly knit, and more secretive than American gangsters, he thought. Younger American mobsters tended to disparage the Sicilians with uncomplimentary names like “greasers,” and “grease balls,” and with an expression once reserved for old-fashioned American mafiosi who spoke heavily accented English—“Mustache Petes.”

Ducks Corallo had maintained a close relationship with the Sicilians, and Accetturo had often cooperated with Italian mafiosi sent on missions to the United States. Tumac found suitable lodging for them, and helped track down people they were looking for. To illustrate the Sicilians’ merciless protocol, he spoke of two Zips who came to New Jersey “to do some work.” Learning that their intended victim was dying of cancer, the Zips were undeterred. Under the Sicilian Mafia’s system of justice, their target could not be allowed to perish of natural causes without being punished for his misdeed. Even on his death bed, the intended victim had to be murdered as an example to other violators, Accetturo related. And he was.

455 Years in Prison

I
n January 1993, Vic Amuso, the titular boss of the Luccheses, was in prison for life after being convicted at a RICO trial; and three important capos—Al D’Arco, Pete Chiodo, and Tumac Accetturo—were exposing all they knew about the family’s operations. The defectors had opened the eyes of FBI agents and prosecutors to Anthony Gaspipe Casso’s awesome power and to the violence that he had provoked inside and outside the family. Information from the former capos lifted Casso’s capture to the highest priority status for the Lucchese Squad’s prosecutors. “He is the most dangerous, cunning and ruthless Mafia leader left on the streets,” Andrew Maloney, the U.S. Attorney in Brooklyn, declared. “He is number one on our hit parade of wanted criminals.”

Two federal prosecutors in charge of Lucchese cases were so resolved to capture Casso that they postponed their plans to resign and set up a private law partnership. Assistant U.S. Attorneys Charles Rose and Gregory O’Connell were determined they would bring him to trial. “We consider him the most dangerous organized-crime figure in our scope,” O’Connell told a reporter, “the one who is responsible for countless murders and could do the most damage to the public.”

The prosecutors found that Gaspipe’s reputation had even scared Sammy the Bull Gravano, who had defied the fearsome John Gotti. Gravano knew
Casso from interfamily construction rackets, and he begged off testifying against him should he be brought to court. Sammy feared that Casso would retaliate against his relatives, as he had against Pete Chiodo’s.

Searching for Casso’s secreted wealth, which might help him while he was on the run, the FBI and prosecutors located $684,458 in six bank accounts under various names. A safe deposit box in a Brooklyn bank, rented in Casso’s wife’s maiden name, Lillian Delduca, turned up an additional $200,000 hidden in a dog-food container.

Casso had eluded the FBI for twenty-two months. Disgusted, Jim Fox, the head of the bureau’s New York office, stepped up efforts to smoke him out, warning, “He’s a psychopath whose name should be ‘Mad Dog.’” FBI agents and city detectives followed Casso’s known henchmen and tapped their phones for leads. Clued in by Al D’Arco, the FBI tried to locate Casso’s hideout by unraveling the intricate telephone-booth message system he used to contact his loyal coterie. On the lookout in Casso’s home turf, investigators in the Brooklyn district attorney’s office intercepted suspicious calls to the cellphone of Frank Lastorino, the new Lucchese consigliere. The calls were traced to a split-level home in the placid township of Mount Olive, New Jersey, fifty-five miles from Casso’s turbulent haunts in Brooklyn. Real estate records were checked and the house was put under subtle surveillance. Located in a woodsy, sparsely populated section, the property was owned by one of Casso’s girlfriends. On the morning of January 19, 1993, after the woman left, an FBI SWAT team used a battering ram to crash through the front door. Gaspipe emerged dripping wet from a shower, modestly draping a towel around himself. To alter his appearance he had sprouted a mustache, let his cropped hair grow long, and wore eye
glasses
. The disguise was no longer of any value; the chase was over.

Casso was alone in the expensively furnished house. A search turned up a rifle, $340,000 in cash stuffed in briefcases, and photocopies of a large number of FBI agents’ confidential 302 reports concerning Casso and other Lucchese members. More than likely, the documents had been furtively given to Casso’s soldiers by defense lawyers, who had received them as discovery material for hearings and trials involving Lucchese mobsters.

While Casso was still underground, a more extensive, superseding RICO indictment had been handed up against him, derived largely from evidence supplied by defector capos Chiodo, D’Arco, and Accetturo. In addition to the original racketeering charges stemming from rigged bids for contracts in city housing projects, the Windows case, he now faced charges on a raft of felonies:
at least twenty-five murder and attempted murder accusations, plus numerous extortion and labor-racketeering counts.

After a judge pronounced him a danger to the community and ordered him jailed without bail, Casso’s imaginative mind swirled with ideas to delay or prevent a trial. He manufactured two plans to escape from the high-security prison where he was held, the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Lower Manhattan, a short stroll from City Hall and FBI headquarters. Assisted from the outside by Lucchese members, Casso bribed a guard to help him escape. (Differing accounts estimate the bribe as either $80,000 or $200,000. Regardless of the exact amount, it was tempting to vulnerable guards whose annual salaries at the time were as low as $30,000.) The first plan called for Casso to walk boldly out of the MCC instead of attempting a more violent and dangerous breakout. Promised another $400,000 if the plan succeeded, the guard provided Casso with clothes to replace his prison uniform and helped him obtain duplicate keys to his cell and the cell block.

The escape was planned for 6:30
A.M
., and Casso donned civilian clothes under his prisoner’s jumpsuit. The corrupt guard, who was alone in the cell block, opened the electric-controlled doors that allowed Casso to enter an unguarded elevator that took him to the street level. Walking as calmly as he could, Casso headed toward an exit leading to a side street. He was a few feet from freedom when a guard stopped him. His cover story was that he had been summoned to the main floor for consultation with his lawyer. The suspicious guard found it hard to swallow that a lawyer’s conference would be scheduled at daybreak. Escorting Casso back to his cell block, the vigilant guard apparently accepted the bribed guard’s fishy tale that he had received a telephone call from the administrative office permitting Casso to go unattended to the ground-floor session with his lawyer.

Thwarted once, Casso worked out a more reckless escape scheme. For pre-trial hearings in a downtown Brooklyn courthouse, he was normally transported in a van guarded by two U.S. marshals. He contrived a wild plan for his soldiers to bushwhack the marshals as they were returning him to Manhattan from court. Lucchese gunmen would use a crash car to block the van on a narrow Brooklyn street, and open fire on the marshals, compelling them to come out with their hands up.

Simultaneously, an alternative plan was conceived in a conspiracy with inmates from the Colombo crime family to kill Federal District Court Judge Eugene Nickerson, who had been assigned to preside at the separate trials of Casso
and his Colombo jailmates. The judge’s murder, Gaspipe hoped, would provoke a mistrial or at least delay the proceedings, giving him more a time to pull off an escape. His outside allies were instructed to follow the judge on his train ride home to Long Island, and to scout out a prime spot to shoot him, either on the train or after he reached his station.