The Strength of the Wolf (44 page)

Like every made man, Joe Valachi paid a percentage of his business profits to his bosses, and they in return were obligated to support his family if he was imprisoned. But Tom Eboli had no prior relationship with or commitment to Valachi, and when the aging hood surrendered and was no longer productive, Eboli gave his jukebox concession to someone else, leaving Valachi without any means of supporting his family. When Selvaggi heard about this development from Ralph Wagner, he started visiting the vengeful hood at the Federal House of Detention – what FBN agents called West Street – with the intention of exploiting him.

“He told me he'd run out of time before,” Selvaggi explains, “but he still wanted to make a deal. But he's nervous. The meetings we're having at West Street don't look good. A young hood from the Bronx made a remark: ‘Why you talk to Selvaggi?' So he calls me up during the Army-Navy [college football] game. The guards bring him down, and he puts on the act: he storms out of the holding cell yelling how I'd set him up. But just before he does that, he whispers a telephone number to me. ‘It's the biggest operation in the city,' he says. It's Sal Rinaldo's number, and he thinks it'll help reduce his time. But I already had Rinaldo from another source.” Selvaggi shrugs indifferently. “What he gave was confirmation, that's all. So in June 1960, Valachi got fifteen years in the Freeman case. He was fifty-seven, and there was no consideration.”

Valachi's confirmation, however, was one of the factors that allowed the deputy sheriff in Westchester to put a wiretap on Rinaldo's home phone in New Rochelle. Detectives and FBN agents listened in constantly for the next few months, until they overheard Matteo Palmieri telling Rinaldo that something “big” was coming in on a particular ship. “He gave the date and location,” Selvaggi says, “so Charlie Mac and I followed Rinaldo up to Pier 84, and that's when Customs Agent Mario Couzzi sees us. He asks me what we're doing there.” Selvaggi smiles. “There's a war going on with Customs, so I tell him, ‘I'm waiting for my aunt.' Then Palmieri shows up and pays off the Customs inspector. We watched Palmieri meet Rinaldo, and we saw them load the trunk with the heroin in the back of a bakery van. Gaffney and Ward were with us, and they let Sheriff Hoy and his people bust them up in Yonkers with ten kilograms of pure heroin that had been transported from Italy aboard the Saturnia.

“Right after the bust we went back to the machine in New Rochelle,” Selvaggi continues. “Frank Caruso's calling. He's asking, ‘Where's Rinaldo?' He's calling Mrs. Rinaldo so she can warn Sal. He was calling to tip him off, but it was too late.

“Next we searched Rinaldo's house, and Agent Dave Costa found a trap. Inside it was twenty grand and two half-kilogram packages of heroin, which meant that Rinaldo had been stealing from his bosses. And once we announced to the press that we'd found the junk at his house, Rinaldo knew he was dead, so he flipped and told us how tons of dope from Turkey passed through labs in France to Sicily, where Mafia travel agents got unwitting immigrants to agree to bring along a trunk. The immigrants were on a waiting list, and they would agree to carry the trunk to speed up their paperwork. The trunks had false bottoms and each one was packed
with ten kilograms of heroin in long thin packages. They moved over $150 million over ten years that way.”

Thanks to Frank Selvaggi, the Rinaldo–Palmieri case exposed the Mafia's biggest drug smuggling operation in Italy and America. His main informant, Sal Rinaldo, was the plant-man, and through Rinaldo the case led to many of New York's major drug dealers, including Saro Mogavero. As recounted in
chapter 9
, Mogavero was a former vice president of ILA Local 856, and the protégé of Rocco Pellegrino, the Mafia boss in Westchester. Pellegrino supplied heroin to Joe Civello in Dallas through Mogavero, his contact-man to John Ormento. Mogavero, in 1954, had taken a small fall for Ormento, which allowed the latter to initiate the drug smuggling operation through Cuba that led to Vito Genovese's downfall.

A hit man at the age of fifteen, Saro Mogavero was such a ruthless predator that he forced his childhood friend, Salvatore “Billy Boy” Rinaldo, to become his plant-man. How he did this is worth recounting, for it's a perfect, graphic example of the cruel methods gangsters used to build their drug trafficking empires. Mogavero knew that Rinaldo loved to gamble, so he persuaded him to borrow money from loan shark Frank Caruso. Mogavero and Caruso knew that Rinaldo would lose the dough, which he did, at which point they made him borrow even more money and then use it to invest in drug shipments with Willie Locascio and Sam Accardi. In order to protect his investment, Rinaldo had no choice but to take the job as plant-man.
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Selvaggi's other major informant, Matteo Palmieri, was a baker by trade, and the contact man with the Italians. Whenever a shipment arrived, Palmieri would notify Albert Agueci in Buffalo, and Vinnie Mauro and Frank Caruso in New York. Palmieri was also responsible for making sure the shipments were safely delivered to Rinaldo. These were things he had done correctly many times before, but it was the smallest mistake on 21 October 1960 that led to his becoming Selvaggi's reluctant informant.

As Selvaggi explains, “On the day we arrested them, Palmieri showed up late at the pier. Palmieri spoke broken English, and because the Customs guy couldn't understand him, he wouldn't release the trunk at first. So Palmieri panicked and called Vinnie Mauro, which was something he shouldn't have done. That put Mauro in the case, and Mauro, who was the most vicious of them all, swore he was going to kill Palmieri; and that's why Palmieri flipped and started talking about forty-three Italians. Together, he and Rinaldo testified against dozens of people in the US and Italy. They named Mauro, Caruso, and Sal Maneri – a big money-man who ran a crap game and had his own sources in Italy; Albert and Vito Agueci;
Sam Accardi; the Caneba brothers in Sicily; and,” Selvaggi shrugs, “Valachi. From their testimony we developed one conspiracy in Italy, and two [including the Frank Borelli case] in New York.

“Rinaldo,” Selvaggi stresses, “was a death sentence for everyone. Right away, Eboli puts out a contract on all of these guys. Each one's got a price on his head, but $1 million dollars for anyone who kills Rinaldo. That's when things get rough. A witness in the case, Shorty Holmes, is found stuffed in a garbage can in August. Then in September, Judge Dimmock reduces bond on Mauro, Caruso, and Maneri, and they flee; which means that Valachi, who's in jail and can't go anywhere, becomes the main target of the State prosecutor. So now, more than ever, he wants assistance. He's hoping to do the Rinaldo time on top of the Freeman time, but I told him that I already had Rinaldo's number. ‘Cop a plea,' I said, ‘or come up with something new.'

“Valachi became incensed,” Selvaggi says. “ ‘You double-banged me!' he yelled. Then he tells me that Mauro, Caruso, and Maneri fled to South America, thinking that might help. But we knew that too. So tough. Then Albert Agueci gets pissed off at Magaddino. Magaddino got two grand for every kilogram Albert brought in, but he wouldn't bail him out of jail. Albert had to mortgage his house. Well, Albert's a badass, so he goes to Magaddino and confronts him. A few days later [23 November 1961], they find Albert's body near the Canadian border. He'd been burned with a blowtorch and chunks of flesh had been carved out of legs. It was gruesome. At which point his brother Vito wants revenge and starts cooperating. So now we have Rinaldo, Palmieri, and Vito Agueci. And that's when Matteo Palmieri and I go up to Buffalo to make a case on Magaddino.”
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As mentioned earlier, Charlie Siragusa had chewed out John Dolce for sending Frank Selvaggi alone into Harlem. For that reason, and because he was Siragusa's in-law, one of the Group Three agents christened Frank with the nickname, “Selagusa.” That didn't bother him, as it was part of the ribbing that went back and forth in the New York office. What troubled him was that the Group Three clique was starting to interfere in his cases.

“Sal Rinaldo had two other connections,” Selvaggi explains, “a guy named Shears, whom we hadn't heard about before, and a super-connection named Mickey Blair. You couldn't go to Blair [real name Dominick Castiglia] for less than five kilos. He'd been in the Army during the war,
and when he was arrested in the Borelli case, he said that General Mark Clark would vouch for him.” Selvaggi arches his eyebrows.

“Anyway, Brady found out that Shears was Sal Maneri, the contact-man between the Italians and the French. So we arrested Maneri one night on the street, and during the arrest I treated his wife with respect – which is why Maneri called me when he got out on bail. Like everyone else in the Rinaldo case, he was on Eboli's hit list and wanted help. So we started meeting in Times Square on Sunday afternoons. Maneri tells me things. He says he'll give me ‘a house,' meaning a plant, if I can help him. ‘They'll make you a general,' he says.

“Well, Dolce is my group leader, and he knew I was meeting with Maneri. He also knew that Maneri was running a crap game down on the Lower East Side with a Czechoslovakian guy, Jan Simack. The next thing I know, Dolce decides he's going to hit Maneri's crap game. Everyone in the group gets an envelope. The way it works, you open the envelope at a prearranged time, and inside is a piece of paper telling you where to meet everyone. But there's no envelope for me.” Frank pauses reflectively.
⁵

“Later on I heard what happened. They're outside Maneri's crap game and they see him handing something to someone on the street. They think it's a pass, so they hit them right then and there. But it's cash, not drugs. Maneri hands ten grand to Simack. Not long after that, Maneri flees the country with Mauro and Caruso.”

Selvaggi lights a cigarette. “After that I requested a transfer to the Court House Squad. An agent could avoid trouble by joining the Court House Squad,” he explains. “Same with the International Group. Those groups could subpoena their suspects under the Thirty-Five Hundred Rule. They didn't need dope on the table, and they didn't have to testify in court.” And testifying in court was risky business, because slick criminal defense attorneys invariably claimed that the arresting agent had stolen money from, or planted evidence on, the defendant. But even at the Court House Squad, Selvaggi was on the frontlines, eyeball to eyeball with hoods, even if he wasn't turning them into informants anymore.

“I talked to everyone,” Selvaggi says with pride. “I talked to Genovese. I talked to John Ormento too. I was in the courtroom when he was sentenced. He was fifty-three years old and he got forty years. I was sitting behind him and he turned to me and said, ‘It's nothing, kid. I can do it standing up.' ”

As any FBN agent will attest, no one had the Mafia sources Frank Selvaggi had. But what made him strong also made him vulnerable. “I was doing pretty good,” Selvaggi says. “I'd made Valachi, and Rinaldo, and an
eleven-kilogram case on Frank Frederico. But then I made the mistake of telling Assistant US Attorney John Rosner that I didn't believe that Nelson Cantellops ever met Vito Genovese. I said that Genovese was the smartest of all the bosses, that he'd made more judges than anyone could ever know, and that there was no way a little nine-plus syphilitic Puerto Rican like Nelson Cantellops could ever get near him.

“Well, Rosner tells Bill Tendy at the Junk Squad. Tendy is tight with Ward and Dolce, and Tendy tells Dolce that I called Genovese ‘the frame of the century.' Tendy tells Dolce, and Dolce tells John Enright, who's my boss at the Court House Squad. And now Enright and Dolce both want me out!”

While tensions were mounting among the case-making agents in the New York office, the Italian police were doing their part to find three of the fugitives in the Rinaldo–Palmieri case. They had seen an American couple, Henry and Theresa Rubino, visiting Lucky Luciano in Naples. Something about the Rubinos aroused their suspicions, so they told Hank Manfredi and, at his request, they tailed the couple to the border of Spain. Spanish officials picked up the trail and followed them to a meeting with Vinnie Mauro and Frank Caruso. On 14 January 1962, FBI agents arrested Mauro and Caruso in Barcelona, and Sal Maneri in Majorca.
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The next day, in an attempt to curry favor with the FBI, Mauro called Luciano, and over Lucky's futile protestations, he explicitly mentioned drugs. The FBI was listening in, of course, and one week later the Italian police summoned Luciano for questioning about his conversation with Mauro. During the interrogation, Hank Manfredi taunted the once powerful boss of bosses. Complaining of heart palpitations, Luciano was released and proceeded under police escort to the Naples airport to meet Martin Gosch, a writer with whom he was co-authoring an exposé. As Gosch stepped off the plane, Luciano reached to shake his hand, and then collapsed on the tarmac and died of a massive heart attack.

Thirty minutes later, Deputy Commissioner Henry Giordano “revealed that [the FBN] had been on the point of arresting the powerful Mafioso for having introduced $150 million worth of heroin to American territory over the previous ten years.”
⁷

It's unbelievable that the FBN had decided to label Luciano as the mastermind of the Rinaldo–Palmieri ring on the basis of a phone call from
Vinnie Mauro. And it's incredibly uncanny that Luciano died half an hour before his arrest. It is an unlikely sequence of events that suggests that this was not death by natural causes. But the FBN would not have killed him. For over a decade he'd been a source on numerous drug traffickers, and during that time Harry Anslinger had shamelessly exploited him for publicity purposes. But Anslinger was on the verge of retirement, and perhaps Giordano felt that the
bête noire
had outlived his purpose. Or perhaps, as Sal Vizzini claims, the CIA was afraid of what Luciano might say if he was put on trial. The CIA knew that Luciano was concerned about his heart condition, and that American mobsters routinely sent vitamins to him in Naples. According to Vizzini, the CIA simply intercepted a delivery and substituted identical pills laced with an untraceable poison.