Made Men (20 page)
Authors: Greg B. Smith
Michael asked if they found the shooter. Vinny made it clear he knew a lot about the investigation. He knew, for example, that before he died, Joey told the police who did it. Vinny said, “And I mean I don’t know the freakin’ guy. I don’t know what Joey was doing, you know what I’m saying?” He even suggested putting together a fund-raising dinner for Joey’s family and a $25,000 reward for the capture of the shooter.
During a call to his sister, Millie, he sounded positively weepy. “I’m thinking about Joey. I miss him. All for nothing, all for nothing.”
His sister had heard some things. “It must have been more serious than money, is what I’m saying. Money is nothing.”
“Who knows? I have no idea. They mention a name. I have no idea.”
“If he had confided in you it wouldn’t have happened.”
“I know.”
“Wouldn’t have happened,” she repeated.
“I need blood pressure pills, or, you know we’re going to Florida, get the ticket.”
“You take blood pressure pills?” his sister asked.
“Yeah.”
“I didn’t know.”
“Yeah, not strong, but—”
“Yeah but you need something.”
“I went for a complete checkup and the only problem I have so far is the blood pressure.”
“Well, that’s okay,” she said, “if you know.”
“It’s the stress,” he said. “You know?”
Over two days, the DeCavalcante crime family paid its respects to wannabe gangster Joseph Masella, who had said “the life” was not for him but could never quite walk away from it. During the wake, Vinny Ocean was balancing his feelings of guilt while working his business deals over the cell phone. Vinny was to set up a corporation called World to World Clothing to distribute women’s underwear to the Asians. They even drafted paper, with Guccione’s General Media International Incorporated granting World to World Clothing International “exclusive license for the manufacturing, sales and distribution of Penthouse undergarments, lingerie, sweatshirts, t-shirts, blue jeans, sneakers and other apparel in Japan, Hong Kong, Korea, Taiwan, China.” They were talking about opening up Penthouse strip clubs and maybe casinos in Russia and New Jersey. They were talking grand scale. Vinny’s attorney, John Daniels, communicated that “Bob”—whom he called “the chairman”—was very pleased with Vinny.
“He said, ‘In my opinion, Vincent is the perfect man. I trust him and I like what he has to say and I really have confidence that he can pull it off.’ ”
Vinny was ready for the sweet life. On the cell phone with his son Michael, he said, “I mean, if this clicks, Mike, you’re quitting that job. I don’t give a shit. I’m making you a partner, I don’t care.”
But he stopped midsentence and said, “I tell ya, I really miss Joey.” It’s was if Joey was Vinny’s Jacob Marley—he kept coming back. And the phone calls kept coming. Rosemary Masella called at 1:35 in the morning to say she’d been scrounging through Joey O’s sock drawers looking for $40,000 she was told Joey O had picked up the day before he died. She would call to say she went to the hospital to pick up Joey’s things but she couldn’t find his sports beeper. She was sure the police had it, which meant that the police had every number Joey ever stored in its memory.
Paranoia set in. Everyone knew that when one wiseguy gets executed, all wiseguys have to watch what they say. The police and the FBI start asking questions and listening closer. In a talk with one of his soldiers, a guy from Florida everybody called Marshmallow but whose real name was Anthony Mannarino, Vinny danced around saying what he wanted to say. Marshmallow—who apparently hadn’t watched enough Mafia movies to know that you don’t say anything of substance on the telephone—tried to discuss the fact that people were talking about him being an informant.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Vinny said. “I swear on my kids.”
When Marshmallow didn’t get the message and kept trying to talk about this subject, Vinny beeped him with another number to call. The only problem was the number wasn’t registering and Marshmallow had run out of quarters for the pay phone.
“I’m fucking anxious to hear what you got to say because I have no fuckin’ idea what you’re talking about, I swear on my kids’ life,” Vinny yelled. “You’re a fucking— out of your fucking mind. Did it come in?”
“No,” Marshmallow said. “Yeah.”
“Okay, call me on that number.”
This was how Vinny had to behave. He had known for months, ever since he saw the FBI agents watching his house from a boat on Long Island Sound, that he was under surveillance. And he knew that the people whose job it was to follow him around every day were likely pretty ticked off that his driver had been terminated right under their noses. He had now entered a new world, where the wrong word uttered in the right context could lead to a dance with RICO. Vinny Ocean now lived his life under the spotlight of the Racketeering Influence and Corruption Order Act.
Joey O was gone, but his ghost remained.
The FBI was going crazy. They now had Vinny Ocean—who for months said nothing incriminating on the telephone and was the sworn enemy of probable cause— twitching like a squirrel. He was speaking in obvious code. The cool and collected Vinny Ocean they had come to know was now a paranoid, amateur prevaricator. Although they were unhappy that Joey O, a living, breathing human being, had been executed on their watch, they knew that the target of their investigation was obviously rattled. And that meant opportunity for the bureau.
They had, by the date Joey O was killed, nearly ten months of taped recordings in hand. Ralphie Guarino had worked his way up the ladder at least far enough to implicate Vinny Ocean in a number of crimes, including a conspiracy to murder Charlie Majuri. He had managed to convince Joey O that he was his friend, and as a result, Joey O had grown comfortable telling Ralphie just about everything he knew or had heard. Ralphie had captured hours of candid talks with Joey about loan sharking, extortion, stealing anything that wasn’t nailed down, and murder. Lots of probable cause. And Ralphie’s number-one contact with Vinny had consistently been Joey O, who had managed to offer up more incriminating statements about his boss than about anyone else in the entire DeCavalcante crime family. Joey O was practically a repository of damaging information about Vinny Ocean and everyone else in the underworld with whom he had had even a passing acquaintance. And he was history. There would be no more Joey O explaining who was in charge, who was on the ins, who was on the outs. Ralphie was still out there wearing a wire, but his Virgil was dead.
The FBI now sat back and waited. When a member or associate of organized crime dies, the hierarchy has to deal with both his assets and his debts. And if the deceased had been supervising anybody, the supervisee had to be reassigned to a new supervisor. It was all very civil service. Ralphie was now in a position to be reassigned. The options were limited. He was from Brooklyn, and so were most of his loan-shark customers and sports book clients. So it made sense to put him with a soldier in the New York wing of the family. The only question was, who?
neral, the family put Ralphie with a fifty-four-year-old oldschool gangster from Staten Island who was proud to report to anyone who would listen that once, a long time ago, he had actually known Joe Valachi. His name was Joseph Sclafani, but everyone called him Tin Ear because he was deaf in his right ear. The FBI had a light file on him, listing him as a soldier with a handful of arrests for minor gambling charges and one weapons count. He was not a well-known gangster, but he was Ralphie’s.
The fact that Ralphie had been put with a made member of the family was a sign that they trusted him, and that was good news for both the FBI and Ralphie. They now had long talks about where the investigation was going and how to keep Ralphie on the street with his little wire device. They decided to cook up a new “robbery” that Ralphie could take to Sclafani to impress him and gain his confidence. They had no idea how easy it was going to be to do just that.
It is a well-known fact that many of the actors who make a living pretending to be gangsters either grew up with or know real gangsters. James Caan, who played Sonny in
The Godfather,
was good friends with a Colombo captain named Jo Jo Russo. Joe Pesci modeled his psychotic Tommy character in
Goodfellas
on a Gambino gangster named Bobby Basciano. And Jerry Orbach spent hours hanging around with Crazy Joey Gallo, right up until the last hours of Joey. Sometimes the relationship between pretend wiseguys and the real thing gets even cozier.
When
The Sopranos
began filming, it would hold daylong casting calls for extras. Hundreds, even thousands of people from New York and New Jersey who saw themselves as looking like members of the Mafia would stand in line for hours, résumés in hand. One such aspiring goomba was a twenty-five-year-old actor from Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, named Thomas Bifalco.
walk-on appearances on TV shows. He’d snagged a walkon on the show
Spin City
and landed a role in a small production on Long Island with the mysteriously multiethnic title,
Meshuggener Godfather.
He decided to put up with the long line at the
Sopranos
show-up. He endured and landed a walk-on.
But this would not pay the bills. Bifalco had a sideline. He had opened up a boiler room down on Wall Street. This type of operation had become a big moneymaker for the mob in the late 1990s, operating on the principle that where there’s money, there’s opportunity for larceny. Bifalco’s boiler room was the usual setup. A group of young hustlers sat in an anonymous office down in the winding streets near Wall Street, working the phones. In Bifalco’s case, there were eight phones. The “brokers” would coldcall unsuspecting victims, usually senior citizens, and try to berate them into buying stock in a worthless company. They would make the worthless company—in Bifalco’s case, something called Falcon Marine—seem like the deal of a lifetime. They would then con the elderly persons to invest everything they had saved all their lives. And they had to act quickly because the deal was going to disappear.
In this manner, Bifalco and his colleagues managed to steal $300,000 from thirty elderly victims.
During Bifalco’s sentencing on securities-fraud charges, John Panagopoulos, the New York assistant attorney general who prosecuted
The Sopranos
walk-on, tried to make a distinction between the real world and the TV world, but it wasn’t easy. “He did not realize this is not
The Sopranos.
This is not television. He cannot shake down real victims and walk away unpunished.”
Bifalco got two years in state prison. He will most likely not be making any more appearances on
The Sopranos.
The courtroom of Administrative Judge Steven Fisher sits far out in Jamaica, Queens, in an aging Tammany Hall–built monstrosity that refuses to enter the late twentieth century. It is one of those ancient structures of New York’s outer boroughs that are frozen forever in the past, stuck in a time when political machines rewarded the loyal with jobs for life in obscure municipal backwaters. Here the underachievers of the Democratic Party could file and refile overstuffed boxes of dry, yellowing documents of consequence to few. The whole place was run by dozens of civil servants who could have been characters in
Bleak House
—powerless bureaucrats who knew all the right ways to torture the unsuspecting citizens who ventured into their musty, dusty realm. On this miserable frigid day in November, Vincent Palermo was one of those unsuspecting citizens.
The hearing in question was listed in the civil docket as 16705/98:
City of New York
v.
Din Din Seafood, DBA Wiggles.
The file was impressive. The case had amassed enough motions and replies and memoranda of law that it took up four binders that stacked a good three feet high. Lawyers on both sides had generated millions of words and hundreds of billable hours. The city lawyers said New York Police Department vice-squad detectives had paid the twenty-dollar cover to get into Wiggles, where they discovered adult activity taking place in far more than 40 percent of the club. Lawyers for the club denied it, but the city shut down Wiggles anyway and took its case to Judge Fisher. One by one the city’s witnesses took the stand, re
creating for Judge Fisher just exactly what was going on inside the pink walls of Wiggles. As the hearing droned on, Vinny Ocean sat in the back of the room, wondering how it had all come down to this: Was or was not booby pool a violation of New York State law?
Detective Eugene Jung of the Queens vice squad was sitting in the witness chair. Detective Jung was describing a night in October when he was having a little chat with a dancer named Camille. His problem was that he had just had a lap dance in the cigar room, and now he was running out of the money the city allowed him to spend to prove that there was vice in the night. He came out of the cigar room and sat down at the bar, and another dancer named Lena walked over.
This was, for Detective Jung, a new one. He was intrigued. He asked, “What’s that?”
“It’s a game of pool and the main thing is that when you take a shot, I will try to block your shot with my boobs.”
“And did you play booby pool with her?” asked the city attorney with a straight face.
“Yes.”
Unfortunately for Detective Jung, in the middle of the booby-pool game a fight broke out in the room outside and Lena the dancer went running out to see what was what. The fight ended and Lena returned to finish the boobypool game. When Detective Jung would lean down to take a shot, Lena would lean down, too. In the middle of this she asked him if he wanted another lap dance. She said she’d seen the one Camille had provided and was not impressed.
“She was lazy,” Lena contended. “She was just lying on you. I can do better.”
Detective Jung, however, had run out of municipal funding. He gave her his last five dollars and left.
Next on the witness stand was Lena herself, whose real name was Myan Leroi Masterantonio of Oyster Bay, Long Island. For eighteen months before Detective Jung had showed up, Myan had worked at Wiggles from six o’clock at night to two the next morning, three to five nights a week. She acknowledged playing booby pool but denied touching Detective Jung in any manner. In the cigar room, she insisted that she always wore what she called a “European bottom, which means it has to be basically mainly covered, with a little bit hanging.”
All of this amounted to a pretty tough case to make against Wiggles and Vinny Ocean. Lena had denied lap dancing but freely admitted to leaning suggestively over a pool table, and the city had only Detective Jung talking about a single lap dance. There was no pattern to show that the 40 percent rule had been broken repeatedly inside Wiggles, which was the heart and soul of the city’s allegation. It was Vinny Ocean’s forty-fifth birthday coming up on Saturday, and as the hearing was winding down, he had reason to believe he might get to reopen Wiggles after all. Things were looking up. Then came Frank Stellini, otherwise known as Frankie Pina.
Frankie was being called by Weinstein, the lawyer for Wiggles. The idea was that Frankie would rebut the city’s claims that sex was running out of control throughout the entire strip club, instead of being relegated to 40 percent. At Wiggles, Frankie Pina was just another mortadella who got a job because he knew somebody. He called himself the assistant general manager, but two days after the city came in and shut the place down, Frankie became the general manager. This happened because the real general manager, a guy named Tommy, had a heart attack. The first thing Frankie did after taking the witness stand was tell a little joke when they asked him to identify himself.
“They nicknamed me Mussolini because I did not tolerate nothing,” he confided to the judge.
He was asked to explain where the rules were posted. He said they posted the rules for all the dancers to see “very inconspicuously—they were right in the middle of the mirrors where they put on the makeup.”
Frankie Pina then explained the rules according to Frankie Pina. “Any such activity that does not inquire with the rules is supposed to be reported to the manager.”
The lawyer Weinstein did his best to keep Frankie on track. He asked what steps the club took to ensure that the 40 percent rule was adhered to. Frankie replied as best he could.
“We took every step we could possibly take. Sometimes it might look like what you are doing, but they are not doing exactly what they think they are doing. Because in this business, it is imagination more than anything else.”
Presumably the judge knew what Frankie was talking about. Frankie allowed that sometimes accidents did happen. “Another dancer by accident... maybe a top might come off. One of the girls solicited for the so-called unquote blow job. The girl told me.”
But Frankie insisted that these incidents were unusual. He explained that the “industry” was “under attack” and that Wiggles had been forced to do a “configuration of the situation.” This meant they started making the dancers sign a set of rules that prohibited prostitution in the club. “So I kill two birds with one stone, as they say.”
Then it was the city lawyer’s turn. The city lawyer began asking Frankie just exactly what went on inside the cigar room. Frankie was ready with an answer.
“I tell the customer if you want to spend private time with a girl, enjoy nice cheap cigars, it costs this much.”
The city lawyer wanted to know how it was that he was selling cigars when he did not have a license to sell tobacco. Again Frankie was ready for him.
“We give them away. That’s why they are cheap.”
He explained why customers need to spend “private time” with a dancer by contending, “Sometimes they will do anything to hear something nice from a girl which they don’t hear from their wives.”
The trouble was, the more questions the city lawyer asked, the more times Frankie was forced to confess to another “accident” during this “private time” with the dancers. The city lawyer pressed further, demanding to know how often a breast might “fall out” of a halter top, as Frankie had put it. Frankie explained that he had lived with three girls his whole life and “sometimes it happens.”
“So,” the city lawyer demanded, “there are times that a breast may be exposed?”
“Sometimes,” Frankie admitted. “A big breast, a small bra. It might fall off. It’s uncontrollable.”
“No further questions,” said the city lawyer.
The judge reserved decision and all Vinny Ocean could do was wait. He couldn’t be sure if Frankie Pina had simply hurt the case or if he had completely blown it to pieces. He had a lot of deals going and would survive no matter what the judge decided, but Wiggles was a major element of the Vinny Ocean empire. In a way, Vinny benefited from Wiggles’s notoriety as much as from its steady stream of crumpled-up five- and ten-dollar bills. He controlled another strip club called Gentlemen’s Quarters on Long Island, but who had ever heard of that? Wiggles was in the news. When he was dealing with Bob Guccione, he was able to brag about a known commodity to show the clout he had in “the industry.” The closing of Wiggles wouldn’t kill Vinny Ocean, but it sure would hurt.