Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America's Most Powerful Mafia Empires (96 page)

Much-decorated detectives, Caracappa and Eppolito had each been on the police force for more than twenty years. Both were assigned to elite units investigating Mafia-related crimes, and Caracappa had access to the identities of undercover informants and sensitive FBI materials. Retiring from the NYPD in the 1990s on tax-free disability pensions of about $70,000 each, they were neighbors in Las Vegas at the time of their arrest. Prosecutors, in court documents, asserted that Eppolito lied when he applied for the police force in 1969. On his application, he swore that he was unrelated to organized-crime figures when, in fact, his father and uncle were both Gambino soldiers and he was acquainted with other mobsters.

In retirement, Eppolito co-authored Mafia Cop: The Story of an Honest
Cop Whose Family was the Mob
, and appeared in bit film roles, sometimes as a gangster, in eleven crime dramas.

Sammy the Bull Gravano’s downfall and the break in the detectives’ case apparently failed to aid Gaspipe’s campaign for leniency. Evidence that Gravano was a drug trafficker did not erase complaints against Casso—lying, bribing guards for prison contraband, and assaulting an inmate—which were used to eject him from the witness-protection unit and to justify a life sentence. The charges against the ex-detectives were one of the sharpest scandals in the NYPD’s history and on the surface fortified Casso’s credibility in his dealings with the Justice Department. Investigators, however, declined to interview him after reopening their inquiries into the activities of Caracappa and Eppolito. As far as federal authorities were concerned, Gaspipe remained discredited. Prosecutors in 2005 said they had no intention of relying on his testimony or seeking a reduction in his harsh sentence.

Still protesting his unfair treatment as a turncoat witness, Casso was confined in the government’s most oppressive prison, the “Alcatraz of the Rockies” in Florence, Colorado. Also dubbed “Super Max,” the penitentiary is restricted to 575 inmates classified by the Bureau of Prisons as the nation’s most dangerous federal convicts, including Islamic terrorists. Officially known as ADX-Florence, it opened in 1994 as a high-tech, escape-proof prison to replace the maximum-security institution in Marion, Illinois (where John Gotti was held), for inmates
considered incorrigible. Like most prisoners in Florence, Casso is caged in an isolation cell up to twenty-three hours a day, with only a sliver of natural light filtering in through a tiny, meshed windowpane that allows no view of the sky or the nearby Rocky Mountains. Meals are delivered into his cell through double-entry doors, and he passes most of the time reading or watching television on a thirteen-inch black-and-white set. His hermetic cell contains a concrete slab bed with a three-inch-thick mattress, a concrete toilet stool, and a desk and bookcase anchored in place. Five days a week he is allowed out for one hour to walk in a small enclosed courtyard with several other prisoners, usually his only contact with other inmates.

Lamenting his decision to sign a cooperation agreement, Casso says that before his defection the prosecution offered him a deal that would have turned out infinitely better for him. He had been on the verge of accepting a plea bargain that would have made him eligible for parole after twenty-two years. “I help them and I get life without parole,” he summed up in an interview. “This is really a fuckin’ joke.”

“Team America”

T
he Lucchese capos who switched sides, and in the words of prosecutor Gregory O’Connell, joined “Team America” were well rewarded. Unlike Gaspipe Casso, they got lenient sentences or none at all.

Fearing that he was on Casso’s hit list, Alphonse the Professor D’Arco surrendered, pleaded guilty, and sought the government’s protection for himself and Joe, his made-member son. (As part of the deal, the government granted Joe immunity from prosecution for his role in one killing and an attempted murder during the blood purge.) A cogent witness, D’Arco helped convict Lucchese boss Vic Amuso and more than fifty other hoods. On the witness stand, D’Arco admitted his complicity in ten murders and, in his words, “a bevy of crimes”: shylocking, gambling, extortion, labor rackets, counterfeiting, arson, hijackings, and firebombing companies that resisted paying for protection. At one of his last court appearances, summarizing his metamorphosis, D’Arco told a judge, “I’m the same physical human being, but Pm not the same man.” Prosecutors heaped praise on him for his cooperation, emphasizing that he broke away from the Cosa Nostra though no charges were pending against him. A federal judge accepted the government’s 5K1.1 appraisal, and D’Arco disappeared with his nearest relatives into the Witness Protection Program. He did not serve a single day in prison.

Shot twelve times, partially paralyzed and confined to a wheelchair, Peter Fat Pete Chiodo survived to testify and help convict Vic Amuso, his former boss, and several other Lucchese mobsters. If Casso had gone to trial, Chiodo would have appeared as a principal prosecution witness. In his guilty plea, Fat Pete admitted to participating in five murders and numerous extortions. He was also embraced by the Witness Protection Program, given a new identity, and avoided prison time.

Tumac Accetturo emerged as the prosecution’s most effective weapon in fracturing the New Jersey branch of the Lucchese family, which he had nurtured and led for more than two decades. His importance was magnified by his being the first Mafia leader in the state to defect, bringing with him a trove of high-level Cosa Nostra knowledge. He disclosed the New Jersey borgata’s murders, infiltration of unions and businesses, loan-sharking, and jury tampering, providing state and federal prosecutors with a chart for wholesale indictments. Unbeknownst to mobsters implicated by Accetturo, it was unlikely that he would have appeared in court against them. Prosecutors were reluctant to use him as a witness because of his phony claim of “presenile dementia” in the 1980s to wriggle out of a racketeering conspiracy accusation in Florida. No jury in a Mafia case would bring in a guilty verdict if the prosecution’s main witness had a record of mental instability. But the mere threat that he might testify worked for the government. A dozen of his former soldiers, faced with overwhelming documented evidence that Accetturo helped compile, capitulated and opted for plea-bargains rather than risk trials and life sentences.

Like all defectors, Accetturo felt entitled to a “pass,” freedom from a prison term via a suspended sentence or probation on his state racketeering conviction. Investigators in the New Jersey attorney general’s office, acknowledging that Tumac’s help had paralyzed the Lucchese family’s operations in the state, recommended a substantial reduction in the maximum sixty-year sentence he faced. At his sentencing in December 1994, Accetturo’s lawyer, Robert G. Stevens, emphasized that Accetturo had a “uniquely nonviolent past” for a Mafia leader, and that as a prominent defector, his life would be endangered if he were imprisoned.

State Judge Manuel H. Greenberg saw Accetturo in a less sanguine light. Imposing a maximum term of twenty years and a $400,000 fine, Greenberg cited his extensive criminal record and found him to be “more than a spectator in the operations of a ruthless, violent organization.” To protect Accetturo from Mob retaliation in a New Jersey prison where he would be easily recognized,
the state arranged for him to serve his time in a North Carolina state penitentiary.

The New Jersey attorney general’s office eventually helped rescue Accetturo. An internal report in July 1997 by the office’s organized-crime investigators praised him for unveiling an enormous amount of intelligence information concerning the Mob in New Jersey, New York, and Florida that would not have been obtainable through other means. In December 2002, his sentence was reduced to time served, and he was released unconditionally after nine years and two months in prison, less than half his maximum term. The sixty-three-year-old Accetturo remained in the South, far from his past gangster habitat in New Jersey. After his admitted lifetime in big-time organized-crime, nine years was moderate punishment.

At the start of 1987, Vittorio Vic Amuso and Anthony Gaspipe Casso had inherited and commanded a tightly disciplined Mafia borgata—one of the nation’s most affluent crime families. Although Ducks Corallo’s old Lucchese hierarchy had been eliminated, the FBI and state agencies were rummaging for leads and scraps of evidence to close in on the masters of the new regime. Law-enforcement officials knew that Amuso and Casso were in control, but the two leaders and the family’s fundamental structure were not in imminent danger from legal assault. Five years later, the Lucchese gang was in tatters, with more than sixty made men—about half of its membership—imprisoned, slain, or “turned.”

Mafia investigators attribute the Lucchese shipwreck largely to the incessant intrigues Casso contrived to gain supreme power and riches for himself. Amuso wore the boss’s crown, but Casso was the strategist behind the chaos that divided the borgata. Trial testimony, FBI interrogations, and acute observations by Lucchese apostates cast Casso in the role of arch manipulator, an lago, steering a malleable Amuso. “Gaspipe was more dangerous than Amuso and more responsible for the mayhem that fortunately for us ruined the family,” concluded Gregory O’Connell, who with Charles Rose, prosecuted Casso, Amuso, and other major Lucchese gangsters. The two prosecutors’ knowledge of Casso’s diabolical record—much of it gained listening to his admissions—spurred them to originate a private code name for him: “Lucifer.” “He had boundless enthusiasm for conspiracies and for murder,” O’Connell remarked. “I prosecuted drug dealers, organized-crime bosses, and terrorists, and the only one I feared who was clever and vindictive enough to reach out from prison and come after me was Gaspipe.” (After Casso’s capture and agreement to
plead guilty and cooperate, Rose and O’Connell left the U.S. Attorney’s Office to set up their postponed private practice. Rose died of a brain tumor in 1998 at age fifty-one.)

Of all the Lucchese veterans whom Casso drove into the government’s arms, Tumac Accetturo probably was the most anguished. His thirty-five-year climb from being a $75-a-week apprentice to the highest rungs of the crime family and his ultimate desertion encapsulates the modern history of the American Mafia. Interviewed in a prison in Newton, New Jersey, shortly after his conversion, Accetturo sounded rhapsodic, reminiscing nostalgically about his glory years under Ducks Corallo’s benevolent administration. He mythologized the Cosa Nostra as it functioned from the 1960s to the late 1980s as an authentic Honorable Society, populated by deserving men who otherwise would have been denied advancement and wealth because of their ethnicity and humble backgrounds. In Accetturo’s romanticized flashbacks, his generation of mafiosi had resorted to murder and force as a last resort, and only for serious violations of Cosa Nostra rules. He refused to discuss reports from investigators that he had knowledge of at least thirteen gangland hits. He preferred to portray himself as a nonviolent capo dedicated to protecting a misunderstood but venerable organization. ‘There was no greater life,” he said ruefully. “We were interested in money, but we didn’t put money before honor. The old-time guys who taught me would never think of cheating somebody in a deal or in a dice or card game. They played by the old rules because they wanted the games and deals to go on forever.”

Law-enforcement pressure finally confronted Accetturo with a tormenting dilemma: perish in prison or forsake his vows by becoming a rat. There was no question in his mind that under his previously esteemed bosses he would have borne a prison sentence and upheld until death the code of omertà. “It wasn’t the all-American way. It was the life I chose and I considered myself a Man of Honor and would have stuck to it forever.”

But by concocting fictitious reasons to murder him, Gaspipe Casso and Vic Amuso had destroyed Accetturo’s faith in Cosa Nostra’s sacred principles. He rationalized that they, not he, were the betrayers and defectors, and therefore his renunciation was justified.

Accetturo’s Mafia
life
had been comfortable before federal and state agencies went on the offensive against the Mob. “Back then, we were disciplined, coordinated, and better-organized than they were and we took advantage of
that.” He smiled as he alluded to the halcyon years of feeble law enforcement. “Now, it’s just the reverse. These guys are coordinated together and we’re trying to kill one another.”

With better leadership, he felt, the Lucchese family might have resisted and overcome the government’s campaign. An intimate witness to the abrupt decay and decline of the borgata, Accetturo critiqued a cadre of made men inducted in the 1980s and 1990s as more devoted to greed and narcotics trafficking than to the Mafia’s revered rules of conduct. He singled out Gaspipe Casso as the single major figure behind the internal anomie that generated the Luccheses’ disintegration. “Casso and his people had no training, no honor,” Tumac reflected mournfully. “Look at the trail he left behind. He’d sell his soul for money. He threw the old rules out the window. All he wanted to do is kill, kill, get what you can, even if you didn’t earn it. That’s the main reason why we fell apart.”