Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America's Most Powerful Mafia Empires (94 page)

All of Casso’s schemes were abruptly canceled in late 1993 on an edict from his erstwhile boon companion, Vittorio Vic Amuso, still the titular Lucchese boss. Captured in 1991, Amuso was found guilty on fifty-four RICO and murder counts, and sentenced to life without parole. According to investigators and prosecutors, Amuso eventually concluded that Casso had double-crossed him, and that Gaspipe had been the anonymous tipster who steered the FBI to the Scranton mall where he was arrested. The reason for the betrayal? Amuso believed Casso wanted to seize the title of boss and gain absolute control of the family. From his prison cell, the avenging Amuso spread the news: Gaspipe was denounced, stripped of his rank and authority as underboss, and declared a pariah to be despised by all Lucchese mafiosi.

Bereft of escape help from the borgata, with devastating testimony from Al D’Arco and Pete Chiodo and a mountain of evidence looming against him, Casso played his last card. In February 1994, two weeks before the start of his RICO trial, a relative relayed important news to Richard Rudolph, the lead FBI agent in Casso’s case. Anthony Gaspipe Casso wanted to cross over, to testify as a government witness against the Mafia. If the government granted him a lenient sentence, he promised he could match Sammy the Bull Gravano in revealing priceless information that would undermine the Luccheses and other families.

Before a
cooperation
agreement could be fashioned, prosecutors had to evaluate Casso’s worth without alerting his prison mates to his deception. His cell block contained other Mafia defendants who watched every movement of fellow inmates in and out of the MCC, on the lookout for possible traitors. To protect him, a ruse was devised to get him to the courthouse in Brooklyn and into a secluded basement nook for a talk with prosecutors. On the pretext that he had to provide handwriting samples for possible evidence at his trial, he was summoned to appear at the courthouse alone, without the Lucchese codefendants who normally accompanied him to pretrial hearings.

Two weeks after Casso’s secret courthouse meeting with prosecutors Rose and O’Connell, a deal materialized. On March 1, 1994, at a closed hearing before Judge Eugene Nickerson, whom he had conspired to kill, Casso pleaded
guilty to fourteen murders and a medley of RICO racketeering and extortion charges. For the plea, Matthew Brief, a former federal organized-crime prosecutor, was brought in at the suggestion of Rose and O’Connell to represent Casso. (Prosecutors universally demand that defectors ditch their previous attorneys, many of whom have other Mafia-connected clients; they are distrusted by prosecutors as “Mob lawyers.” In any event, most attorneys who defend Mafia clients refuse to represent defectors, believing it would compromise them with their clientele.)

There had always been the slim possibility, Rose and O’Connell worried, that without a single incriminating taped conversation as trial evidence, Casso might slip through their fingers. Now, without the necessity of a lengthy trial, and the possibility of an acquittal or a hung, jury, Casso was boxed in, with a guilty plea exposing him to fourteen life sentences.

“We now have him tied up six ways to Sunday,” O’Connell told Rose after Casso signed a cooperation agreement pledging to disclose all the crimes and background intelligence information he possessed about organized crime. It was a nonnegotiable plea, with the provision that the prosecutors would advise a judge of the extent and depth of Casso’s cooperation, thereby virtually insuring him a reduced sentence. Although repelled by Casso’s record, Rose and O’Connell knew that a compromise with an infamous mafioso was always a balancing act. They would give him a break—but only if he measurably aided the government in dismantling the Mob. Any reduction from a life sentence depended entirely on the value of Casso’s information. The prosecutors were confident that he could divulge a treasure house of evidence against other mobsters, corrupt unions, business executives, and possibly his law-enforcement moles, dishonest police and federal agents—if he were truthful with them.

Casso appeared content, believing that he had negotiated an eleventh-hour chance to begin a new life. In his mind, the prosecutors and FBI agents had strongly suggested to him, in an off-the-record unwritten accord, that they would seek a huge reduction in his sentence in exchange for testimony. He visualized himself being coddled in a “country club” prison environment for no more than five or six years, and then sheltered in the Witness Protection Program.

A highly valued defector, Casso was flown under heavy protection from the austere jail in Manhattan to the remote La Tuna federal prison, two thousand miles away in Texas, near El Paso and the Mexican border. There, he was installed in what passes for luxury prison accommodations reserved for conspicuous and endangered informers who needed a safe setting. Casso’s cozy quarters,
in a section of the prison isolated from other inmates, was called “the Valachi Suite.” It had been constructed thirty years earlier for Joe Valachi, the Genovese soldier and the first made man to publicly violate omertà. Although locked in at night in a cell six feet long and nine feet wide, during the day Casso had access to an adjoining room, containing a sofa, a stereo, a television, a refrigerator, a microwave, and a hot plate for making coffee and tea. His rooms in the hot desert climate were made comfortable by a “swamp cooler,” a local version of air conditioning through circulating water pipes.

At La Tuna, Rose, and O’Connell and FBI agents began prying out Casso’s reservoir of Mafia confidences. Accustomed to the eccentricities of murderous mobsters, the prosecutors nevertheless were amused by Casso’s housekeeping ardor and compulsive neatness. He was distressed at the lack of a shaving mirror. And at their long sessions, he served cakes and tea boiled on his single-burner hot plate, frequently wiping the table to remove stains and crumbs. His reading tastes also confounded them. He requested a subscription to the Robb Report, an expensive magazine catering to an audience “seeking the Luxury Lifestyle,” a publication unknown to the prosecutors and agents.

Before Casso’s capture, FBI investigations and informers had implicated
him
in fourteen murders that were listed in his guilty plea. At the debriefings he startled his interrogators with a catalogue of numerous whackings never linked to him. Overall, he confessed to ordering or having a hand in at least twenty-three other slayings—a grand total of thirty-seven victims—during thirty years as a Lucchese apprentice, made man, and underboss. There were an additional twenty-five victims he had marked for death, most during the recent reign of terror, who had escaped with wounds or were uninjured when the attempted murders went awry or were aborted. High on the list of Mafia mysteries that Casso resolved for the authorities was the car explosion that seven years earlier had killed Frank DeCicco, John Gotti’s first underboss. From Casso they learned the astonishing fact that it was Gotti that the Genovese and Lucchese leaders were really out to get, but they had to be content with DeCicco’s death as revenge for Paul Castellano’s assassination.

Another murder target, Gaspipe admitted, had been one of his questioners—Charles Rose. While in hiding, Casso had put out a contract on him, directing his troops and two rogue New York detectives on his payroll to locate the prosecutor’s Manhattan apartment, tap his phone to learn his movements, and kill him. Matter-of-factly, Casso explained that he had wanted Rose exterminated because he believed the prosecutor had leaked a false story to the
New York
Post that the architect Anthony Favo had been tortured and murdered for having had an affair with Casso’s wife.

Rose wryly replied to his would-be assassin, “I forgive you, Anthony. Let’s continue.”

It was at La Tuna that the agents and prosecutors learned about Casso’s recent conspiracies and crimes while awaiting trial. They were riveted by his tales of his machinations to kill Judge Nickerson, his bold bribery of a guard, and his daredevil escape schemes.

Listening and recording Casso’s gruesome accounts of gangland slaughters and the senseless murders of innocent victims, O’Connell tried to remain professionally cool. But one description unnerved him. In the late 1970s, Casso had profited along with other mobsters from smuggling drugs from South America to New York on Terry’s Dream, a seventy-five-foot-long converted trawler. The vessel and its cargo of twenty-three tons of marijuana and a half million tablets of methaqualone or Quaaludes—a prescription depressant popular at the time—was seized by the Coast Guard in November 1978. Casso was not immediately implicated, but he decided to kill the boat captain’s son to prevent him from caving in and informing.

The unsuspecting young man was invited on a fishing trip in the Florida Everglades with Casso and a confederate. Before the victim arrived at the meeting spot, Casso and his accomplice dug a grave. “When the kid showed up, I took my gun out and shot him,” O’Connell recalled Casso saying. Casso became disturbed because the young man bled over the hood of his car. “Casso was laughing and his face was filled with mirth and merriment as he talked about the difficulties he had washing the blood from the car,” O’Connell said. “As he was shoveling dirt into the grave, the kid, still alive, jumped up, and he struck him in the mouth with the shovel and continued to bury him alive.”

Appalled, the prosecutor asked Casso if burying a man alive had distressed him. “‘No,’ he told us, ‘it had to be done.’”

Over the next three and a half years, still awaiting sentencing, Casso was transferred to several prisons in New York and the Northeast. He was always housed in a protective-custody unit, reserved for cooperating Mafia defectors, segregated from the general prison population. Essentially, he was in a witness-protection program while imprisoned. Agents and prosecutors continued their debriefings, particularly interested in confirming his accounts of bribing two detectives to feed him confidential reports and to commit crimes on his behalf. One of his most shocking claims was his assigning the detectives as hit men for
a Mob murder. As a favor to Vincent Gigante, the boss of the Genovese family, Casso said he gave the detectives the contract in 1990 to execute Eddie Lino, a Gambino capo.

Before they were fingered by Casso, the two detectives retired under a cloud, without murder or corruption charges lodged against them at that juncture. Casso had informed federal and police department investigators that he regularly communicated with the detectives through his go-between Burton Kaplan, a Lucchese associate who worked almost exclusively for him. Kaplan was instrumental in arranging the kidnaping and torture-murder of Jimmy Hydell, the gunman who tried to bump off Gaspipe. According to Casso, Kaplan also relayed the warning in 1990 that he and Vic Amuso were about to be indicted on RICO charges in the Widows case. Convicted for narcotics trafficking and tax evasion, Kaplan was hit with a twenty-seven-year prison sentence. At that time, in 1997, he refused a deal for a lighter term in return for corroborating Casso’s story that investigators were selling secrets and committing crimes for the Mob. No other evidence was then available, and prosecutors felt it was impossible to build a case against the detectives on Casso’s word alone.

In an interview in 2003, Casso said Lino’s murder was committed because the Genovese family boss, Chin Gigante, wanted to weaken his hated Gambino rival John Gotti. Lino, a feared killer, was one of the triggermen who assassinated Paul Castellano and Tommy Bilotti outside Sparks Steak House. “He was one of John’s strengths, a stronghold that we wanted to take down,” Casso continued. “We were not that worried about Sammy [Gravano].”

Lino was found shot to death on November 6, 1990, in his black Mercedes-Benz, on the service road of the Belt Parkway, the main highway in Brooklyn. To trap the cautious forty-eight-year-old gangster, Casso believes the detectives activated a flashing dome-light on their car to pull him off the highway for a presumed traffic violation, then killed him. He remembered paying either $45,000 or $75,000 to the detectives for the slaying.

Corrupt cops have been a chronic sore point for police forces in the New York region since the birth of the modern Mafia. Errant officers and investigators are simply bought off or, as relatives or longtime neighborhood friends of mobsters, are susceptible to being corrupted. The Mob also hired former detectives and officers as private eyes who can easily obtain confidential information from their contacts in law-enforcement agencies. Rose and O’Connor
knew about the Mob’s ability to “reach” cops, and readily accepted Casso’s version of purchasing information and deadly help from dishonest detectives.

An even more explosive corruption issue developed over Casso’s account of an FBI mole on his payroll. FBI 302 reports reveal that after Al D’Arco defected in 1991, he informed his interrogators that Casso had spoken of getting leaks from the agent nicknamed “Crystal Ball”. Years later, Casso’s defense lawyers said that he had given them a similar version of a corrupt bureau agent in New York. As late as 2003, Casso said in an interview with the author that he had identified the FBI traitor to bureau agents who debriefed him. He asserted that the FBI was intent on covering up the tainted agent’s involvement with a mobster, and his interrogators warned him that his leniency deal would be endangered if he stuck to his story and thereby tarnished the bureau’s reputation. Casso insists that agents instructed him not to reveal the reputed agent’s identity or existence when he was questioned by prosecutors. Rather than risk a sentencing problem, Casso claims, he kept quiet for years.

But the Justice Department, branding Casso an untrustworthy liar, repudiates his allegation. And Gregory O’Connell said that when he intensively questioned Casso shortly after the cooperation agreement in 1994, Gaspipe denied having an FBI agent on his payroll. “He called the mole story bullshit,” O’Connell added. In defense of Casso, his lawyers stressed that he had been prevented from leveling with the prosecutors because of warnings from FBI agents that they would retaliate against him.

The end result was murky. Federal investigators accepted the tale of corrupt New York City detectives, and discounted the possibility that the Mafia had corrupted one of their own agents.