Made Men (12 page)

pulled the trigger, but he did say that after the deed was done, the assassins had difficulty disposing of Big Trin’s body because it was so, well, big. Boobie, Ruggiero claimed, somehow managed to pick the guy up.

“I was amazed,” Donnie quotes Ruggiero as saying, “Boobie could move him. They cut him up and put him in green plastic garbage bags.”

In 1982, Donnie the FBI agent left his life as an undercover associate of the Bonanno crime family and began testifying in court. Boobie and numerous others with whom Donnie had spent many loquacious hours were indicted, but Boobie was acquitted of all charges. He was never charged with murdering Big Trin, never mind moving him or cutting him up and placing him in green plastic garbage bags.

In 1987, Donnie the FBI agent wrote a book about his experiences. Presumably Boobie read it, being that he was mentioned in it fifty-five times, including the description of Big Trin’s demise. The book,
Donnie Brasco: My Undercover Life in the Mafia,
made the
New York Times
bestseller list, and Boobie made not a peep.

Ten years later times had changed in La Cosa Nostra. Gone were the days when a wiseguy said with a straight face that the Mafia did not even exist. No longer did a goodfella describe any allegation against him as mere fabrication. Gone were the days when silence was the universal response to newspaper stories, TV exposés, and even movie spectaculars portraying life in the mob. By 1997, if you were a gangster and you didn’t like what people were saying about you in a book, you didn’t whack the author. You sued.

Sometime in 1996, years after the book debuted, somebody managed to sneak a video camera into a prerelease screening of
Donnie Brasco,
starring Johnny Depp and Al Pacino. The unnamed somebody managed to get a pirated copy of this soon-to-be-released movie to Boobie Cerasani. This time he was not amused.

In the movie, the actor who portrays Boobie and several other gangsters portrayed by actors are seen kicking the owner of a Japanese restaurant in the face and smashing him in the head with a garbage can. Worse, the actor playing Boobie is seen blasting three gangsters with a shotgun, blowing off pieces of one head and a chunk out of the leg of another. The Boobie character is then seen helping other gangsters saw the bodies into pieces for disposal in garbage bags, which, unlike the description in the book, are black, not green. When Boobie saw this, he reached for the phone.

A series of letters ensued.
Boobie’s lawyer, Barry Slotnick, threatened to sue for libel and defamation of character, even though the picture had not yet been released. He argued that because enough people had seen the pirated version, the damage was already done to Boobie’s reputation. This worked, somewhat. Sony Pictures Entertainment shortened the murder scene and deep-sixed a scene in which the Boobie character reloads during the shotgun murder. They also changed the Boobie character’s name to Paulie. They did this by having actors dub the name Paulie every time they had previously said Boobie. They missed one reference, so when the picture was released in early 1997, there was still one Boobie involved. In addition, the Boobie character, now named Paulie, still helps dismember a victim with what is described by all involved as a “sawlike knife.”
On April 3, 1997, Boobie Cerasani—who was not satisfied with the Paulie version of the film—took the position of the new gangster and filed suit in Manhattan Federal Court. He sued Sony, he sued the distributor, the executive producers, the producers, the director, even the screenwriter. He alleged many things. There was “damage to his reputation in an amount exceeding $50,000.” He alleged that the film had caused him “extreme emotional distress, including fear of retaliation by organized crime seeking revenge.” This onetime “mean fucker” was now asking a federal judge to protect him from the Mafia. He did not even bother to deny the existence of the Mafia. In fact, he acknowledged its existence to collect damages. He demanded compensatory damages, punitive damages, and, of course, financial reimbursement for the cost of bringing suit.
United States District Court Judge Denny Chin got Boobie’s case. A few months later he got another case involving Boobie. This time it was a new criminal indictment that came out of the stock-fraud investigation. Boobie was charged with being an enforcer and threatening stockbrokers and promoters to do what they were told so the mob could capitalize on the booming stock market through illegal “pump and dump” schemes. These were, of course, mere allegations. Judge Chin allowed Sony Pictures to file a motion demanding that Boobie’s suit over
Donnie
be tossed out. He then took a full six months to make up his mind.
On January 15, 1998, Judge Chin issued his opinion. In thirty-four typewritten pages, double-spaced, the judge did the only responsible thing a distinguished member of the court could do. He laughed Boobie out of court.
First, Judge Chin wondered why Boobie hadn’t sued when the Donnie Brasco book came out eleven years earlier. Then Judge Chin declared that Boobie was “generally reputed to be an associate of organized crime,” and, even worse, “not a model citizen.” Finally Judge Chin declared Boobie “libel proof.” This is an extremely rare declaration that essentially says you are such a bad person no one can possibly defame you. “I hold that Cerasani’s reputation is so ‘badly tarnished,’ that, even assuming the pre-release version of the film is defamatory, he can suffer no further harm and hence no reasonable jury could award him anything more than nominal damages,” Chin wrote.
Boobie declined to appeal, and a few months later pleaded guilty before Judge Chin in the stock-fraud case. One defense lawyer pointed out privately that Judge Chin was relatively new to the bench and probably had little grounding in the history of “traditional” organized crime. This defense lawyer wondered if Judge Chin would have even been aware of Boobie’s involvement in the Donnie Brasco case if Boobie hadn’t told him.

ing more slumped over than usual. Joey had once been a strong, wiry guy, deeply tanned, with a certain kind of rough charm. Now his belly protruded under his black silk shirt and he had to make do with a cheesy comb-over to hide his thinning hair. He smoked too much, his diabetes was killing him. Driving down Flatbush, he had trouble managing Ralph’s cell phone. “How do you use this fucking thing?” He called his doctor about something called Protac that Ralphie thought was Prozac.

“Let me ask you a question,” Ralphie said. “What’s the matter with you?”
“What do you mean?”
“What you got to do with this fucking Pro—”
“Diabetic.”
“Oh,” Ralphie said. “I thought...”
Joey O was forty-nine, headed rapidly toward fifty. “I’m driving a car with no muffler,” Joey O said. “The fucking thing is shimmying.”
Ralphie knew Joey O’s problems by heart. He also knew they were becoming legendary among the nylonjogging-suit set. He’d been talking with Joey Cars, another DeCavalcante associate, who let him know that Joey O was now stealing from his own friend and boss, Vinny Ocean. Joey O was going around telling people that Vinny Ocean was putting money out on the street at two points per week interest, which was not true. Vinny was actually putting the money out at a point and a half, and Joey O was pocketing the difference. This he was doing in violation of just about every rule of La Cosa Nostra. Joey Cars said he borrowed $4,000 from Vinny and paid back the money to Joey O. Joey O, however, neglected to give the money to Vinny, which put Joey Cars in a bad spot.
“He’s a friend of mine,” Joey Cars said, “I don’t wanna embarrass him.”
“Like my father used to say,” Ralphie offered. “When you feel sorry for sorry people, they make you sorry. And guess what? He is making everybody sorry.”
Ralphie was now in the middle. If Vinny Ocean found out that Joey O was stealing from him, that could be the end of Joey O, and Ralphie needed Joey O to get close to Vinny. The FBI was clearly interested in Vinny Ocean quite a bit and interested in Joey O Masella not at all. Therefore, it was important that Ralphie get more information on Vinny. The problem was that six months into his role as a secret informant for the FBI, Ralphie had not done so well getting Vinny Palermo to say things that could get him in trouble. He’d given him free cell phones and the FBI had plenty of hours of Vinny Palermo on tape, but Vinny was smart. He rarely talked about illegal business on the phone, and when he did, the conversation was usually too cryptic to understand.
Ralphie took another approach. He had noticed that when Vinny discussed Joey O, he had a tendency to fly into a rage. Rage implied lack of self-control. The FBI figured that during one of his tirades about Joey O, Vinny Ocean might slip up. Ralphie was instructed to take advantage of this weakness by keeping the two men in constant contact.
The two men found the Wiz, did their business, then got back in Ralphie’s FBI-wired car and cruised into Manhattan toward Canal Street and Chinatown. They needed to fence some stolen watches.
Canal Street used to mark the northern border between Chinatown and the old Mafia neighborhood of Little Italy. This was the Little Italy where John Gotti strutted down Mulberry Street, where Crazy Joey Gallo was shot inside Umberto’s Clam House, and where the Genovese crime family controlled the Feast of San Gennaro every September by charging mob tax on everything from the scungilli stands to the water guns. Now Canal Street marked the center of Chinatown, and Little Italy was a shadow of its former self. Chinese immigrants had continued pouring into this country. Italians did not. The Chinese drifted north into Little Italy. The Chinese who flooded the city year after year took over the Italian neighborhood, and most of the Italians fled to Staten Island and New Jersey. Gotti’s social club, the Ravenite, had been sold off to somebody who was planning on putting in a trendy shoe store. The old Umberto’s Clam House where Joey Gallo got shot in the head over his scungilli had shut down and moved. Most of the Italian restaurants that were left had become tourist traps. Most of Little Italy was now owned by the Chinese. Only one fact remained constant over all the years—Canal Street was still the best place in New York to buy and sell stolen goods.
As Ralphie and Joey O drove over the Manhattan Bridge and into the mess of traffic that was Chinatown, Ralphie (and the FBI) began to get a clearer picture of Vinny Ocean’s illegal behavior.
Joey was happy that Vinny picked him to shake down the owner of a Long Island bus company called Manti Transportation. The setup was good. The capo put in charge of collecting, Joe Pitts, was gone. Vinny Ocean took over and put Joey O into the company in a no-show job. This was not a legal thing to do. This was more “probable cause.” Joey O put the company in the name of Joey’s daughter. He talked like a big businessman about borrowing money from his wife so he could get a $3 million line of credit from a bank to buy more buses to drive customers to Great Adventure theme park in New Jersey. He told Ralphie that every Wednesday Joey would show up at Manti Transportation and pick up a paycheck. He would cash it and kick a percentage up to Vinny as tribute. He needed the money desperately.
“The more you want, the more you need,” Joey O said.
“The more you got, the more you want,” Ralphie said.
But Ralphie could see that the more Joey talked, the more Joey wanted to talk about himself. All of a sudden, with Joey trying to keep himself upbeat about making money scheming, he dropped the F-word into the conversation.
“The FBI,” Joey said.
This could have given Ralphie a heart attack. He could have suddenly felt extremely self-conscious about the casual mention of the people he was really working for who had planted a bug in his car. Then again Ralphie could have felt Joey O would never have mentioned the FBI so casually if he ever suspected Ralphie. And it would seem that the latter was true, because Joey just prattled on and on about some agents in a boat taking photographs of him hanging out at Vinny Ocean’s hundred-foot dock on Long Island Sound.
“There was a degenerate taking pictures of us while I had my bathing suit on,” Joey O said. “They were agents. The guy on the left would make a call, the guy on the right would pick it up. They were talking to each other, these fucking agents. Taking pictures of me while I’m taking my clothes off. Cocksuckers.”
Ralphie said nothing, and Joey went on. Other FBI agents had come to Joey’s home in Staten Island, where he lived with his ancient grandmother. “My grandmother answers. She says in Italian, ‘Who’s this?’ I say, ‘The cops.’ She says in English, ‘Get the hell outta here!’ So the cop is saying, ‘I have a subpoena for you.’ He says, ‘Here,’ and he gives me a subpoena.”
Ralphie cautiously ventured back in: “For the grand jury.”
“My lawyer told us just give your address and phone number. They ask, ‘Do you know a Vincent Palermo? How long do you associate with Vincent Palermo?’ They ask you four or five questions.”
“Then they let you go?” Ralphie asked, but Joey ignored him.
“So the Justice Department came down and they put on about seventy-eight people. They got neighbors.”
“Neighbors?”
“Everybody,” Joey O said. “You want to write a book? I can write a book.”