Various Genovese associates came through in the course of an evening. The Chin, more CEO than schizophrenic, studied the numbers presented in various ledgers. A mobster named Angelo D’Acunto, head of a taxi drivers’ union, arrived one night. Gigante was spotted counting a large stack of bills just minutes later.
He would occasionally leave the town house and walk to a nearby pay phone, where lengthy calls ensued as agents watched in frustration.
The apartment’s phone was bugged in short order, capturing mostly lovey-dovey phone chatter between Gigante and Olympia 2. An October 17, 1985, taped call was typical: questions from the Chin about an injury to their son, suffered while boxing like the old man, and other tidbits of domestic trivia. The mobster and his mistress more often whispered sweet nothings like a pair of lovestruck teens.
“I love you,” said a laughing Gigante in one gooey exchange.
As Esposito begins coughing, the Chin advised her to stop smoking.
“All right,” she said before Gigante started making kissing noises into the phone.
“I love you,” declared Esposito.
“I love you,” the Chin responded.
“Toodles,” said Esposito before hanging up.
Constantly worried about intrusive federal ears, the Chin conducted some of his conversations in code. He used a series of whistles to communicate. One night, for instance, agents listened in as Gigante whistled and whistled at his son, who clearly had no idea what any of it meant. The exasperated Gigante, determined not to speak on the phone, handed the receiver back to underling Cirillo and barked, “I don’t want him to catch a cold. Tell him to put a coat on!”
The tale still brings a smile to Stamboulidis.
“They weren’t always proficient on the secret-decoder act,” he cracked. “It was those rare and unguarded moments of truth that helped to reveal Chin’s mental incompetency for the act that it was.”
Other calls were more comical. Pritchard recalled one of Gigante’s daughters calling a beauty salon for a price on getting her legs waxed—and balking at the price.
“And then she asks, ‘Well, how much for one?’ ” he said. “We laughed so hard! We had tears coming out of our eyes.”
There were snippets of tantalizing conversations—an order to “give Morris a call,” an apparent reference to Levy; another instruction to “tell Benny to be there at three-thirty,” possibly an order for underboss Mangano to show up in the middle of the night.
“Starting to rain,” Gigante once declared. Was it code or weather forecast?
* * *
After four months of Beaudoin’s eyes-on surveillance, the FBI—with plenty of probable cause—moved to get a bug placed inside the apartment. Beaudoin, who took some high-school drafting classes, did a bit of figuring and thought installation of the mike in the same room as the Chin’s dinner table was doable.
He whipped up an impromptu blueprint, illustrating how a hatch from the rental’s patio led to a boiler room, providing access to the Esposito apartment.
A top-flight, high-tech surveillance expert was dispatched from Washington to handle the particulars. Disaster ensued.
“Now a guy shows up—I call him ‘Mr. Black and Decker,’” said Beaudoin. “He’s got big trunks full of gear. He arrives in the daytime, because Vincent is only there at night. We waltz into the building, and he’s carrying all this stuff like he’s the Fuller Brush man with a bagful of samples. He gets all his things out, and then he says all non-FBI personnel have to leave the room.”
A special drill was employed, with the capacity to suck out the debris as it went and a sensor allowing the tool to reach within a fraction of an inch with the wall on the other side. Mr. Black and Decker went to work.
“We come back and he’s like, ‘Uh-oh,’” said Beaudoin. “And I’m asking, ‘What do you mean?’ He says, ‘I busted through the wall.’ There’s a hole, and this red sludge dripping down the wall. It’s the size of a .38-caliber bullet, and it looks like a gunshot wound. Now I realize there’s nothing we can do to salvage this. The whole caper’s gone.”
Sure enough, when Beaudoin next jumped to the yeshiva’s terrace, the party was over. Every blind on every window facing out of the East Side sanctum was drawn tight. The lights were out, and the inside of the duplex was pitch black.
It wasn’t the only bit of bad luck to beset the squad in their chase of the Chin: another bug in Olympia 2’s home wound up behind a refrigerator, where the hum of its working parts rendered impossible any attempt at listening to conversations.
A bug was installed, after much effort, inside Gigante insider Baldy Dom Canterino’s car. Within days word leaked that another Mob boss’s car was wired, eventually providing investigators from the Lucchese Squad with reams of recordings. Conversation in Canterino’s vehicle ceased almost instantly.
There was another aborted attempt to install a camera at the duplex to record the Chin’s rational behavior around his mistress’s home. Even the Reverend Al Sharpton, a rabble-rousing local civil rights leader destined for the national stage, was recruited to tote a recorder into meetings with Genovese soldiers. He carried a specially fitted Hartmann briefcase equipped with a microphone.
One FBI official recalled Sharpton as a very willing participant, albeit with one quirk. Before he was wired up, the rotund reverend would apply a large dose of extra-strength antiperspirant beneath both arms.
In addition to the taps on Olympia Esposito’s home phones, bugs were installed on Baldy Dom’s phone and Levy’s Manhattan office with information provided by Sharpton’s surreptitious work. All of these turned up nothing incriminating on Vincent Gigante.
The surveillance was now over on the Upper East Side, but the details of the adventure would stick with Beaudoin for decades.
“Our instructions were ‘don’t pay attention to the normal behavior, ’ ” Beaudoin said. “Watch for the criminal behavior. Performing normally isn’t evidence against him.”
Not for another decade, anyway.
* * *
The generous town house deal with Olympia Esposito wasn’t the only real estate transaction handled by music man Morris Levy on behalf of the rapacious Vincent Gigante and his Mob minions.
By now, the feds chasing the Chin were after the record business legend, too. Levy’s sprawling empire now included three record labels, along with forty retail record stores known as Strawberries. And a confidential informant told the FBI that Levy, like any Genovese capo, was kicking up cash to Gigante from his dealings in bootleg records.
One of Gigante’s brothers became a part owner of the record and tape emporiums, so the family was also bleeding Levy for a piece of his legitimate cash income, according to secretly taped conversations with Gambino family associate Joseph “Joe Bana” Buonanno.
[The Chin] developed and maintained a stranglehold upon Morris Levy’s recording industry enterprises, turning Levy into a subservient source of ready cash for the Genovese LCN family and its leaders, Agent Gerald King wrote in an FBI application for yet another fruitless bug inside the Triangle.
After his years of consorting with the Mob, Levy wasn’t above calling in a favor or two. Buonanno, speaking with the wired Sharpton, recounted how the music mogul tried to arrange a hit on the mobster’s brother for stealing from Levy. The request was shot down at a commission meeting.
Levy was also used as a front for the family to purchase other properties, moving their illegal cash into legitimate real estate. The East Seventy-Seventh Street transaction, exposed by the FBI, was the most obvious deal, but not the only one. Buonanno, in another taped chat, revealed that the Chin and his crew had Levy front the cost for real estate investments—to “buy buildings,” as he bluntly stated about their arrangement.
“You Jew cocksucker,” the Chin ranted at one sit-down with Levy, “you buy those two pieces of property or I’ll bury you.”
The properties, once purchased, were to be transferred into the names of two Genovese members
close to Gigante.
In a show of generosity laced with greed, the Chin had actually spared Levy from a 1982 Mob hit. Genovese member Joseph Pagano, a force in the family’s entertainment rackets, and the overseer of the family’s operations in the city’s northern suburbs, flew into a rage after Levy interceded with Gigante on behalf of a Pagano pigeon targeted for extortion.
Pagano wanted Levy whacked, but the Chin brokered a deal where Levy would, instead, pay Pagano $100,000 to settle the beef. Once he was cooled down, Pagano—in perhaps a first in the Mafia’s long history—forgave the debt. That was more than the Chin was willing to do.
Gigante told Levy that he was responsible for the music executive’s free financial pass, and informed the record maven that the cost of living was $10,000 for a down payment on an unidentified property.
The hapless Buonanno, prattling on during the taping in May 1984, made it clear that Levy’s position in the family had grown tenuous with time. Worn down by decades of Mob association, and with his old partner Eboli long dead, Levy was looking to find a way out of his business ties with the Genovese family.
The problem, Buonanno said, was that Levy “has only one way out”—and then mimed someone pointing a gun and pulling the trigger.
CHAPTER 12
HARD TIMES IN NEW YORK TOWN
IT WAS AN AMBITIOUS ITALIAN-AMERICAN PROSECUTOR WHO FINALLY brought the case that forever altered the decades-old war against the Mafia—and forever tilted the playing field toward the government. As word spread of the case against the Mob’s ruling commission, Gigante was left silently twisting in the wind as his Mafia contemporaries kept running their mouths.
Rudolph Giuliani was the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District, perhaps the most prestigious job in the Justice Department, short of attorney general. The Brooklyn-born Giuliani came from a family with its own Mob ties: his father had worked for a brother’s mobbed-up loan-sharking business.
But Harold Giuliani moved his family to the Long Island suburbs to keep his son away from the Mob influence. Giuliani arrived in the Manhattan office in 1983, and quickly allied himself with the new FBI squads targeting the five families. The prosecutor became one of the earliest proponents of a powerful, if still obscure, legal cudgel: the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act. Mobsters convicted of even two crimes linked to their organized crime families were now facing decades in prison.
Wiretaps soon provided the most damning evidence. The bugs were everywhere, from Salerno’s once-impregnable Palma Boys Social Club, on East 115th Street, to the dashboard of the Jaguar used by Lucchese boss Anthony Corallo to make his daily rounds.
Authorities collected hours of devastating conversations involving the highest echelons of the Mafia’s ruling hierarchy. The unexpurgated chats quickly established the existence of the commission and its powers to settle disputes, cut up illegal profits and discuss various mutual interests. But almost no one mentioned Gigante’s secret bedside ascension as head of the Genovese family, and the FBI and federal prosecutors pursued Fat Tony with the four other bosses.
There were some glaring exceptions ignored by the Mob’s pursuers when it came to Gigante’s lofty position.
Tapes from a 1983 meeting in a Brooklyn restaurant linked the Chin to various Mob activities, including a declaration from Colombo family boss Gennaro “Gerry Lang” Langella about problems that were raised “before the commission meet with Chin.”
A May 22, 1984, recording from Salerno’s headquarters was even more revealing.
The demoted Salerno, griping about the list of proposed candidates for made membership in the Genovese family, said he was unsure of the new members because “they didn’t put the nicknames on there.”
“They should have the nicknames down,” agreed the legendary family capo Matty “the Horse” Ianniello.
“But, anyway, I’ll leave this up to the boss,” said Salerno. “Send it, ah, to the Chin.”
Word of the impending commission prosecution was on the minds of the Mob’s ruling class, as Salerno noted in a February 1985 conversation with confidant Giuseppe Sabato, which exposed the Chin’s position atop the Genovese family.
“If they get the Chin, they’re all wrapped up,” said Sabato. “All the finagling, manipulating, manipulating, manipulating to fool the government . . .”
“He’s got to worry,” said Salerno, unaware of the recording device or his own imminent demise. “If he gets pinched, all them years he spent in that fucking asylum.”
“That’s what I’m saying,” agreed Sabato.
“For nothing,” Salerno declared.
One of the bugged chats captured in the Jaguar came as Tony Ducks Corallo headed to a commission meeting at a pizza supply house.
“But is Chin gonna be here?” asked Tony Ducks. “And Bobby [Manna]?”
“Oh yeah,” replied Lucchese consigliere Christopher “Christie Tick” Funari. “Gotta be there. Everyone’s gotta.”
The Chin was unsure what the feds knew, or whether he was a target of this unprecedented assault on the Mafia. But Gigante, despite his long and successful dodge of prosecutors, knew nothing lasted forever in his chosen profession. The Mob veteran braced for the worst and hoped for the best.
His answer came on February 25, 1985, when the heads of the five families—with Salerno representing the Genovese operation—were indicted in the federal government’s most far-reaching assault in the long history of the Mafia’s secret society. There were nine named defendants in the fifteen-count racketeering charge—and nary a one named Gigante.
Charged as the Genovese kingpin, Salerno was immediately held without bail.
“Chin fully expected he was going to be in the commission indictment,” said one federal prosecutor. “He was completely surprised when he wasn’t.”
His ruse of keeping Salerno as the nominal head of the family, plus his street theater and the impregnability of the Triangle, had spared Gigante. It would also create problems for other federal prosecutors still chasing the Chin a few years down the line.
Salerno was cuffed in his East Harlem apartment just as a food delivery order arrived; Fat Tony was taken away still suffering from hunger pangs. He was joined by Tony Ducks, Bonanno boss Philip “Rusty” Rastelli, the Colombos’ Langella and family member Ralph Scopo, Lucchese underboss Salvatore “Tom Mix” Santoro and consigliere Funari, along with Gambino head Paul Castellano and his underboss, Aniello “Mr. Neil” Dellacroce. A superseding indictment later added Colombo boss Carmine “the Snake” Persico.
Among the charges: the commission had sanctioned the 1979 hit on Bonanno boss Carmine Galante and four family associates. Galante’s bullet-riddled corpse was famously photographed with his ever-present cigar still in his mouth.
“This is a bad day, probably the worst ever, for the Mafia,” said Giuliani.
And a very good day for Gigante and the rest of his family.
* * *
After he dodged the indictments, the ever-careful Chin checked back into St. Vincent’s on March 4, 1985, for a two-week stay. Within five days of his release, it was back to business as usual: the FBI watched him meet routinely with a who’s who of the Genovese top echelon, including Canterino, Manna, Mangano and Cirillo.
His Gambino colleague Castellano quickly hired famed defense attorney James LaRossa, one of the New York bar’s best, as the heads of the five families prepped for trial. Big Paul’s wait was complicated by one renegade crew within his fractious family, and they were already plotting to ensure Castellano never heard the verdict. The Queens gang run by John Gotti was ready to impose its own sentence on the Gambino boss. And they didn’t intend to ask Vincent Gigante, Castellano’s close pal and the most powerful commission member, for his approval.
“They were too tight,” plotter Sammy “the Bull” Gravano said later of the Chin and Big Paul. “They had all their big money arrangements. So we decided, ‘Fuck Chin.’ If it comes down to it, we’ll go to war with them.”
“It’s Paul . . . him and Chin made a pact,” said Angelo “Quack Quack” Ruggiero, a member of Gotti’s crew who seemed comically inept at avoiding federal wiretaps. “Any friend of ours gets pinched for junk, they kill ’em. They’re not warning nobody, because they feel the guy’s gonna rat.”
Another taped call captured Ruggiero discussing a summons for Gotti to meet with Castellano over the drug dealing of Peter “Little Pete” Tambone.
“Johnny, you know that anybody who’s straightened out that moves babania (heroin) faces execution,” he said.
The problem was much closer to home for Gotti: His brother Gene, along with Ruggiero, was indicted for dealing heroin. The case included incriminating wiretaps, and Castellano wanted to hear the conversations before moving forward with any decision on their fate.
Strike one.
There were other disputes between the boss and his capo about money and Castellano’s purported greed. The Gotti group was also outraged when Castellano allowed Genovese killers to whack a Gambino capo in Connecticut. The Chin complained to Big Paul that Frank Piccolo was becoming a pain in the ass and needed to go.
Castellano, in a violation of La Cosa Nostra rules, quickly gave the okay for Piccolo’s killing. The move only raised Gambino capo Sammy Gravano’s admiration for Gigante.
“The Chin would never do that,” the Bull said later. “Nobody fucked with him. He ran a tight ship.”
Strike two.
The last impediment to Castellano’s execution went into the ground with the body of commission codefendant Dellacroce, a respected Gambino executive and Gotti mentor. Dellacroce, seventy-one, was a voice of reason in the family, and he had urged the Gotti faction to come clean with their boss. In a tape-recorded June 1985 conversation, the mobster, aka Mr. Neil, advised Gotti and Ruggiero that they had no choice under the rules of La Cosa Nostra but to surrender the tapes.
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