by David Howard
Fuller was pleased. The hit seemed derailed, and in the meantime, he sent another request to the FBI office in Cleveland for an agent to warn Mucci.
After learning of the plot, Mucci phoned Pro and confronted him. Afraid that word of the hit had spread, Pro called Trocchio, who, in turn, reached Weinberg—everyone trying to figure out who had talked.
“Mel, we got a leak,” Trocchio said. “The FBI told Mucci there’s a contract on him. Can we trust J.P.?”
“Absolutely,” Weinberg said. “J.P.’s a mob hitter. He’d never talk to the feds. Maybe there’s a tap on Pro’s phone, or yours.”
Either way, Trocchio was spooked. “Tell J.P. he doesn’t have to kill him, okay? We still want our money back, but it’s okay if J.P. just breaks his legs a little.”
But Weinberg said Pagett was angry about being stiffed. “I ain’t gonna push him, either,” Weinberg said. “I’m not gettin’ anything out of this, and he’d whack me out in a minute if he gets mad at me.”
—
Fuller was riveted to the phone calls coming through the wiretap on Pro’s phone. The con man talked in surging geysers of words, dexterously handling calls no matter how peevish or suspicious his clients had become about their long-delayed loans. One day he was claiming the stock market had closed early in London. The next: “Oh, didn’t you hear? They had a bad storm, and the cable through the Atlantic Ocean broke.”
Near midnight on the third day the wiretap was live, J.J. sat alone in the Trident offices. Pro had turned in, and Mangiameli was going out but was comfortable enough with Wedick to let him hang around. J.J. initiated a conference call with Kitzer and Brennan.
Phil had been drinking and was in a jovial mood. He decided that since Pro owed him for Seven Oak and was shamelessly stalling, as usual, they would rack up the most expensive conference call in history on Fred’s nickel. They called Captain Jack Elliott in Southern California and a mutual friend in London. Soon there were so many people on the line that it was tricky to keep up a conversation. But Elliott held everyone’s attention with an account of Vince Carrano’s antics. Carrano, a longtime promoter, had over the past year embezzled many of his customers’ precious metals and valuables—only to face a dilemma when a Swiss Vaults client showed up demanding his loot. “I think the problem is solved,” Elliott said, “because they’ve been robbed.”
Phil immediately guessed insurance fraud, and Elliott concurred that the theft was likely staged. “Hell, that shit’s been gone for six months,” Elliott said.
“That son of a bitch was trying to get me to buy that place,” Phil scoffed.
In January, Carrano had asked Phil whether he wanted whatever remained on deposit. Phil wasn’t interested in inheriting Carrano’s mess, but, true to form, he’d had another idea. In the past he’d worked with a Swiss con man named Marco Koenig. If Carrano had enough left on deposit to make it appealing, Koenig would purchase Swiss Vaults and pillage the remaining loot. A different promoter would be listed as the new owner—someone claiming to be a priest at the Vatican. That person would “simply return to the Vatican and drop out of sight,” Phil said.
Carrano had seemed interested, but he’d never advanced the proposal—and then, obviously, he’d come up with his own solution. “Well, maybe I’ll come down there and shake him down for a hundred thousand dollars,” Phil said.
Everyone laughed, and then Phil asked if the robbery had been staged plausibly.
“I believe the robbery, but I don’t believe [they had enough of] the tape it would take to bind him to a chair,” Elliott said.
Laughter filled the phone line. Before hanging up, Phil told Elliott to continue the call for as long as he wanted.
Later that night, J.J. phoned Fuller’s surveillance operation and asked if they’d recorded the conversation.
“What conversation?” the agent replied.
J.J. instantly knew what had happened. Under the rules of Title III, the FBI had to disconnect during conversations that didn’t involve illegal activities. When the agents had heard Phil’s boozy opening lines, they’d figured it was late-night nonsense and hung up. J.J. had read that the FBI had joined the Swiss Vaults investigation, and he knew agents out there would have found the recording useful.
“You gotta be kidding me,” he said. He and Jack would have to try to find another way to help.
—
J.J. was sitting in the FBI’s Kitzer war room in Indianapolis, waiting for Jack to arrive to plot out their next moves, when another agent poked his head in. Jack was in the parking lot and needed help carrying up evidence, he said. But when J.J. walked outside, he found Jack sitting in his Buick station wagon with Becky, their two boys tucked into the back, suitcases jammed into every crevice and strapped to the roof. J.J. stooped to peer in the window.
“You going on an eighteen-month vacation, Jack?” he said.
“Look, I’ll just be gone a few days,” he replied. In Alabama, with Becky’s family.
J.J. felt a surge of irritation, but there wasn’t much he could do. There were children in the car. Jack had probably planned this, to avoid a scene, J.J. thought.
He understood that Jack needed to spend time with his family, but he found it hard to relate to. He had a different life—and the case, for the moment, was his life.
“Okay,” J.J. said, lifting his forearms off Jack’s window. “You’re gonna come back, right?”
If he doesn’t come back, J.J. thought, I’m gonna kill him.
Jack assured him that he just needed a week, tops.
J.J. sighed. It was a delicate time. The First National Haiti situation loomed as a major quandary. Phil wanted them along for the trip to Port-au-Prince, but Lowie had called around about travel to the troubled Caribbean nation. The SAC in San Juan, Puerto Rico, had said the agents should definitely not work undercover there while Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier was in charge. Too much instability.
The agents had already elevated excuse making to an art form with Phil. They staged fights, one of them stalking off to go file a report. J.J. would say he was headed for a drink with a woman he’d met earlier. Or Jack would claim he had to call his corrupt commodities broker, which was a useful fib. Phil would sometimes turn to J.J. and say, “Come on, let’s go down to the bar—he’s talking to his pork-belly guy.” They invented tales of wilderness treks in Montana and camping excursions in Canada. It helped that Phil and the other promoters constantly spun outlandish tales. Jack, who’d grown up hunting and sailing in the South, plausibly described fictitious moose-hunting trips and sailboat races. “We would tell him,” Jack said, “whatever we thought he would believe.”
The irony was not lost on them that they’d built a vast undercover operation, then had to find ways to get away from their target.
The more outlandish the excuses Jack and J.J. invented, the more Phil and the others embraced them. Story was currency in its own right, and the chance to repeat a good one conferred some of the riches on the audience. So any tale was accepted at face value, and considered a challenge for the others to try to top.
Haiti was different. This was their signature project, and Phil wouldn’t countenance any casual excuses. If Jack and J.J. were going to be the president and vice president, as Phil envisioned, they needed to help set up the operation, which would include bribing government officials.
J.J. flew with Phil to Miami, feeling anxious. If he didn’t handle this right, he thought, Phil might drop them from the Haiti project. When they bought tickets to Port-au-Prince at the Royal Embassy Travel Service in the Sheraton Four Ambassadors, J.J. couldn’t delay any longer.
He pulled Phil aside. Several years earlier, he explained, he and Jack had been sailing the Caribbean when customs officials stopped them near Haiti, boarded the boat, and found an undeclared gun. They also had lots of cash. Customs towed the boat to Port-au-Prince, and J.J. and Jack paid some bribes to be set free—but the charge was still hanging over their heads. (The story, though embell
ished, was based on an incident Jack had once described involving a friend in Honduras.)
Phil looked at him. “Were there any drugs involved?”
J.J. avoided answering this. He wanted to leave some details to Phil’s imagination, let him fill in the gaps. J.J. had watched Phil do this with his marks, letting customers extrapolate details about Seven Oak from his tailored suits and gold-embossed paperwork.
“Why didn’t you tell me this earlier?” Phil said angrily.
J.J. apologized profusely. He found, to his surprise, that part of him actually felt contrite. He said he’d known that Phil was going to be unhappy and he’d just put it off—but that he and Jack really wanted to be involved.
Phil brooded a bit. “I always thought you guys were a little bit crooked,” he said finally.
Then he told his own story about being asked for his passport while riding a train through the Soviet Union. The blue book was littered with visas and entry stamps from around the planet, and the Soviets—perhaps thinking he was some sort of spy—pulled him off the train for thirty-six hours of questioning. When Phil returned home, he sent a letter cursing out Premier Khrushchev; after that, the USSR was among the few places he wouldn’t go.
J.J. smirked. He and Jack had to write off a Caribbean island, he said, but Phil couldn’t travel in half the Asian continent.
“It’s only July,” Phil replied. “Let’s do a recount in December.”
They both laughed, and J.J. knew he was forgiven.
—
J.J. again sensed trouble when he and Phil returned to New York a week later. Jack was still away, and Phil again expressed irritation that he was assuming all the grunt work to set up First National. He said he was no longer certain that he could count on the Junior G-Men. The effort had taken on a newfound urgency, too. While in Haiti, he’d received word that Scotland Yard had made another visit to Seven Oak, this time with a search warrant to obtain whatever evidence was available to show that the bank was fraudulent.
The agents knew that Phil’s relationship with Paul Chovanec had ended abruptly over some undisclosed rift. For his part, J.J. had spent the week working the phones solo, sometimes talking to mob figures. The job was getting edgy.
Plus, the city hummed with an apocalyptic vibe. Less than a week earlier, on the night of July 13, 1977, a series of lightning strikes had plunged New York into a twenty-five-hour blackout. Arsonists set more than a thousand fires, and rioters pillaged more than sixteen hundred stores from Harlem to eastern Brooklyn. The New York Post reported that “even the looters were being mugged.” The Son of Sam was still on the loose.
J.J. told Jack to get back to New York so they could reconnect with Phil. When Jack reported that the next day’s flights were sold out, J.J. told him to charter one.
“If you ain’t got a plane, find a plane,” he bellowed.
Jack chartered a plane to Atlanta, then caught a commercial flight to New York. He and J.J. knew the Cox brothers would go crazy when they saw that receipt, but by then they’d already had countless expense-reimbursement issues. What was one more?
When they all reunited and returned to work on July 20, Phil seemed pleased to have everyone back together. But even the cons felt grimmer. Jack Scharf, the promoter who dealt in weapons, wanted Phil to provide phony bid bonds for a deal with North Korea. The group met another con man, this one with a contract to provide pesticides to school districts and highway departments. The scam was simple: He poured a few quarts of kerosene into fifty-five-gallon drums, then filled them the rest of the way with water.
One night, the threesome headed home from an East Side bar at two a.m. and couldn’t find a cab. Phil suggested they cut through the park. J.J., the Bronx native, shook his head. “Guys, are you crazy? We’re taking our lives in our hands.”
They set off anyway, jumping at every rustle in the sticky Manhattan night, the honks of cars and the whoosh of traffic fading like old memories as they skittered through the dark. “Violence,” J.J. said, “was on everybody’s mind.”
Some of the mayhem hit unsettlingly close to home. The government’s case against Joe Trocchio and two accomplices for the theft of $2.5 million in stolen U.S. Treasury notes experienced significant setbacks: On July 20, a potential witness, John Quinn, a Long Island resident who dabbled in mob activities, was found shot to death, his body dumped in the woods in Staten Island. Four days later, the bullet-pocked body of Cherie Golden, his nineteen-year-old girlfriend, turned up in Brooklyn in the trunk of a 1974 Lincoln Continental registered to Trocchio’s girlfriend.
Maybe it was the palpable sense of society fraying around them, but Phil and the agents looked out for one another more than ever. One night J.J. fell asleep on the couch of their suite. Knowing his tendency to get cold with the air conditioner belching out chilly gusts, Phil spread a blanket over him. He had even offered the Junior G-Men their choice of rooms. He nudged J.J. to use his extra leather jacket when they headed out. Other times, J.J. borrowed his shirts and ties.
Phil often had stomach problems, sometimes even a searing pain in his midsection that he thought was an ulcer. Jack and J.J. took turns running to pharmacies for Pepto-Bismol and Tums. They carried his bags and fetched his dry cleaning.
Despite all this, Phil, as always, naturally gravitated toward fun. On a flight out of LaGuardia, a mechanical problem stranded them on the tarmac for an hour. Phil requested a deck of cards and organized a bridge game with Jack and some other passengers, ordering drinks and sparking laughter with his stories. When they went out, Phil taught Jack how to deploy his gold-plated Dunhill lighter. The key was anticipating the exact moment to swoop in next to a woman who’d just pulled out a cigarette. Jack experimented with the move, absentmindedly pocketing the device. Eventually Phil surprised him by buying him an identical model, and the two of them discussed the lighters endlessly afterward. During their nights out, Jack would return from cigarette-lighting excursions like a conquering king, wearing a triumphant grin.
They were their own band of three, and their protective bubble allowed some space for them to see beyond the carnage of the city. Walking down Third Avenue, barhopping, Phil scanned the skyline as if seeing the soaring parapets for the first time. For most of them to be built, he said, someone had to take a gamble on loaning millions of dollars. The buildings represented, in some form, trust. A group of strangers—bankers, contractors, insurers—had to believe in each other, and in a system, in a high-stakes game. From Phil’s perspective, it was miraculous that there were enough honest people to make it happen.
—
In late July, Trident Consortium employees were having phone issues and called for service. Listening in, Fuller heard a service technician tell Dorian Mangiameli that while inspecting the box in the basement, he’d discovered that the business’s phones were tapped. Mangiameli, shocked, spread the word that everyone should be careful about what they said.
Myron Fuller wondered whether the utility worker had connections to LCN—short for La Cosa Nostra, or the Mafia—because the mob seemed to be working its way into every legitimate enterprise. But there was good news: Fred Pro didn’t know that the FBI had also bugged his office. Fuller’s team could still hear everything said inside the office, and at least Pro’s half of his phone conversations.
Pro also seemed constitutionally incapable of keeping his mouth shut. He would warn people who called—the goddamn phone is tapped, don’t say anything—but then launch into an explication of an ongoing scam. Fuller later understood why: Pro had long heard that his phones were tapped; in one instance, someone had told him that his ex-wife or girlfriend had bugged him. “I really…think a lot of people are paranoid about it and I really did not seriously believe my phones were tapped,” Pro said.
Mangiameli, who told him about the bug, “had illusions of grandeur, too,” Pro said, “and I didn’t believe everything he told me.”
Pro had a booming business to run, and it defied every cell in his body to go silen
t. Fuller noted that Pro wasn’t just talking to victims. He also spoke regularly with people the FBI recognized as associates of the Genovese, Lucchese, and Gambino crime families: Joe Trocchio, Sonny Santini, and Vinnie DiNapoli, among others. Both Mel Weinberg and Sy Guthrie, Pro’s partner at Trident, told Fuller that many New York–based promoters were mixed up with the mob.
Guthrie was also now talking to the FBI. He had lost his appeal on a fraud conviction and turned himself in to the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York on July 20 to begin a forty-two-month sentence. He offered to cooperate with Fuller to shave off some time, and admitted that while working with Pro, he’d also been on DiNapoli’s payroll.
Everything Guthrie was saying, and that Fuller intercepted on the wiretap, aligned with what the FBI understood of the Mafia’s business methods. Historically the mob had focused on illegal activities like gambling and extortion. But during the previous decade, the five families had started tapping legitimate public enterprises as income sources. They cooperated in running construction and private sanitation firms and trucking and garbage-hauling companies. To mask their involvement, they took only a piece of the business, leaving a valid front in place. The mob took control of labor, after which “vast sums of money are siphoned from union pension funds, businesses are extorted in return for labor peace and an absence of strikes, and bribes are solicited for sweetheart contracts,” said one report on LCN activities.
It was a propitious time for such rackets. President Carter was formulating plans to rebuild the Bronx, which meant hundreds of millions of dollars in government contracts. The Lucchese family, for one, already had ten or fifteen different straw builders lined up to grab government money, Fuller learned.
Guthrie said the families sought three elements to operate their schemes: a bank, an insurance company, and government contracts. For the first two, they turned to experts like Kitzer and Pro. “Can you imagine Vinnie DiNapoli walking into a bank and asking for a loan wearing his pinstripe suit?” Guthrie told Fuller.
