Salerno, while awaiting the commission trial, was indicted again that same year in another RICO case, with fourteen other defendants, including old pal Fish Cafaro. But the two had a falling-out over cash, and Cafaro became the first Genovese family made man to turn government witness since Valachi more than two decades earlier. He proved every bit as chatty as his infamous Genovese predecessor.
With Salerno placed in prison, Gigante’s name began surfacing in random news stories speculating about the new boss of the Genovese family. But the Mob power remained a cipher to most of America; those aware of the name most likely recalled apocryphal tales of the old mobster wandering the Village as if dressed by a color-blind homeless man.
The Chin’s long subterfuge was presented to readers of the New York Times in February 1988, when the newspaper exposed his strange existence in a 2,300-word piece by longtime organized crime chronicler Selwyn Raab. The exposé ran just two months before Fish Cafaro exposed the inner workings of the Genovese crime family before the U.S. Congress.
Almost every afternoon, a graying, unimpressively dressed man emerges from an apartment building on Sullivan Street in Greenwich Village and gingerly crosses the street to a dingy store, where he spends several hours playing cards and whispering to confidantes, Raab wrote to start his piece.
Although he behaves oddly at times in public, law-enforcement authorities say the man, Vincent (the Chin) Gigante has created one of the most impregnable mob strongholds in the country.
The story noted: [Gigante] was lightly regarded by law enforcement mob experts as a potential candidate for the hierarchy of the Genovese family. He was generally viewed as an old-fashioned capo who was so distressed by the fear of arrest that he feigned mental illness in an attempt to discourage attention from the authorities.
And it quoted Goldstock, the former head of the state Organized Crime Task Force, about Gigante’s strange reign—unlike that of any Mafia chieftain dating back to the creation of the five families in 1931.
“It is like a Howard Hughes syndrome,” Goldstock observed. “He locks himself up in a small area, and it is hard to understand what enjoyment he gets from being a mob boss. The only pleasure appears to be the pure power that he exercises.”
* * *
Vincent Gigante was into his seventh year atop the powerful Mob enterprise when the story appeared. Anybody who missed the Times piece was treated to a far more colorful, and personal, recounting of the Chin’s rise when Fish Cafaro came to Washington directly from no-man’s-land.
The Genovese family veteran, in the nineteen months since betraying his Mob brethren, had flipped and flopped more than a catfish on the end of a fishing line. He wore a wire for five months; and then, a year later, he changed his mind about cooperating.
Cafaro, initially a prized catch as the first Genovese family soldier to flip since Valachi sang for the U.S. Congress in 1963, didn’t deliver as authorities initially hoped. His efforts were widely denigrated as disappointing and disjointed.
Pritchard acknowledged that Cafaro tipped the FBI to Libo-rio “Barney” Bellomo, a suburbanite who was the hottest young star in organized crime.
“We didn’t even know he existed,” said Pritchard. “He was the ultimate sleeper.”
Overall, however, Pritchard said, the Fish was a poor catch.
“To me—and now again, I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings—I don’t think he gave everything,” the ex-FBI man said. “I don’t think he gave one hundred percent. When he did turn, a lot of people were blinded—‘Oh, wow, the Fish! Wonderful’—but he didn’t cooperate as fully as he could have. He was clever about what he coughed up or fessed up. He was given some reverence, misplaced, because he was the first Genovese guy to get on the bus.”
A federal prosecutor who encountered Cafaro in the late 1980s was more blunt: “He was a bitter, broken former capo with a lot of anger and a lot to drink.”
A different Cafaro arrived to sit before a congressional panel investigating organized crime. The Fish had finally decided his odds at survival were better with the feds than the goodfellas.
“Hundreds, if not thousands, of La Cosa Nostra members wanted him dead,” announced Cafaro’s lawyer, David Eames. One was son Thomas, who followed his father into the Mob family; the FBI (somewhat ironically) learned through another informant that the younger Cafaro was given a contract for the old man’s murder.
Cafaro’s disloyalty had almost cost Thomas his life, too. Bonanno family associate Joe Barone, whose father was a made man with the Genovese family, said the powerful but forgiving Barney Bellomo decided not to impose the sins of the father on the son. Thomas Cafaro, like Barone Jr. and Bellomo, had followed his old man into the Mafia.
“Fish had a son, and they were going to whack him,” Barone Jr. recounted, “but Barney gave the order to let him go. He gave him a pass. The kid was a good kid, you know?”
* * *
Those were the circumstances when Cafaro came to Capitol Hill on April 29, 1988, to offer his reflections on a Mob life that had begun in Fat Tony Salerno’s numbers operation in 1958—and finished under the rule of the Chin.
“Do you swear the testimony you give before this subcommittee will be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God?” asked U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations chair, Senator Sam Nunn, a Georgia Democrat.
“Yes, Senator,” the gangster replied. “My name is Vincent Cafaro, known to my friends as the Fish.”
The hypersecretive Chin’s domain was laid bare to the nation by Cafaro—especially Gigante’s long, successful psychiatric dodge, dismissed by the Fish as pure ruse by a respected boss determined to remain on his lofty perch.
“To the outside world, Gigante is known for his sometimes bizarre and crazy behavior,” Cafaro began. “In truth, he is a shrewd and experienced family member who has risen through the ranks from soldier to capo to boss. His strange behavior, insisting to the outside world that he’s crazy, helps to further insulate him from the authorities. In the meantime his control of the family’s activities is as strong and calculated as ever.”
“Could you give us an example of his so-called crazy behavior?” asked Senator Nunn.
“Well, he walks around with the robe and pajamas. He—”
Nunn interrupted: “You mean outside?”
“Outside, yes,” Cafaro continued. “By the club where he stays. He is always in his robe and pajamas, and says crazy things. He does crazy things.”
“You are saying he is not crazy?” asked Nunn.
“I do not think so,” replied the understated Cafaro.
The Fish recounted Chin’s nod for the 1980 whacking of Caponigro and the 1982 murder of Masselli. He testified about Gigante’s closed-mouth approach to Mob business, detailing how the Chin never confirmed his 1981 ascension to boss to most of the Mob’s ruling hierarchy in the Big Apple. Cafaro touched briefly, without details, on the Chin’s long association with Morris Levy and Roulette Records. He detailed the family’s sources of income: bid rigging, the 2 percent kickback on concrete, construction, gambling.
“But our real power, our real strength, came from the unions,” he declared. “With the unions behind us, we could shut down the city—or the country, for that matter—if we needed to, to get our way. . . . I would say at least half the locals in the city is run by wiseguys—carpenters, laborers—so that is all wiseguys involved.”
He made it clear that the no-nonsense Chin, who boasted a personal crew of thirty to forty hard-core loyalists, ran a tight ship. The Genovese family was a “very disciplined organization,” where the street soldiers were mandated to check in weekly with their captains. Those capos received a 10 percent kickup on all scores.
The family had fourteen capos, with approximately four hundred total members. Chin was the boss, with “Sammy Black” Santora serving as the underboss and Bobby Manna as the consigliere. When Gigante called, the capos came running—no questions asked, day or n
ight. Or middle of the night, the Chin’s preferred hours of operation.
“When you were a captain, you have to be there,” he testified. “You’re on call twenty-four hours a day in case there’s problems or beefs or whatever.”
He was unwavering in his assertion that the Chin imposed a total ban on drug dealing within the Genovese family. “No way in hell they would fool around with junk,” Cafaro said. “There might be some sneakers. But as far as I know, no.”
The soldier recounted his own introduction to the Mob, back when he was a teenage heroin dealer growing up in the shadow of the Palma Boys Social Club in East Harlem. Cafaro was busted with two ounces of heroin, and his grandparents brought him to see Salerno—a Mafia version of the Scared Straight program.
“Fat Tony took me aside and gave me some advice. ‘Leave the junk alone. If you need money, go out and steal,’” Cafaro recalled.
When Cafaro was twenty-four, Salerno reached out to offer an entry-level job in his numbers operation. “I said yes, and stayed with Fat Tony for the next twenty-five years,” Cafaro said. “In the end Fat Tony had become, in many ways, like a father to me.”
In 1974, at a ceremony in the Il Cortile restaurant on Little Italy’s Mulberry Street, the Fish was inducted as “a true amico nostro” at a ceremony overseen by underboss Funzi Tieri and consigliere Salerno.
“This is not something you ask for,” he made clear. “This is something you are offered by the family, if they feel you are worthy.”
Cafaro provided a quick lesson in Mob economics. When he became partners with Fat Tony in the West Harlem numbers operation, they handled about $80,000 a day in bets collected by seventy-two runners. In a good year he and Salerno split $4 million from the gamblers between 110th and 153rd Streets.
Nunn was somewhat incredulous about Cafaro’s income, which went out as fast as it came in.
“You said in some good years you made one million, two million a year. . . . Did you save any of it? Did you put it up?” Nunn asked.
“Nope,” said a rueful Fish. “I spent it, Senator. Just gave it away. I never got it all at once. I never had a big lump of money. As I was making it, I was spending it: women, bartenders, waiters, hotels. Just spending the money . . . If I had it to spend, I’d spend three million. I used to go out with five thousand to ten thousand in my pocket.”
It was money that finally fractured his near-lifelong friendship with Fat Tony, a sad insight that neatly encapsulated the Mob’s true loyalty: cold, hard cash trumped everything.
The Fish owed Salerno a $65,000 debt, but he was unable to pay it from his cell inside the Metropolitan Correctional Center after an arrest. Salerno was angry, and so was Cafaro. When the Fish was sprung, he made good on the debt. But he brusquely informed Salerno that he would no longer kick up the lucrative proceeds of his slot machines. Fat Tony had collected a hefty one-third of the take in the past.
“So he says to me, he says, well, he says, ‘I’ll pick this cane up and I’ll hit you with it,’” Cafaro recounted. “So I says to him, ‘Well, that’s the biggest mistake you’ll ever make, if you pick up that cane to me.’ And that’s how I think I turned.”
Nunn inquired about Cafaro’s health—or, more precisely, how worried the Fish was about it.
“So, if you were to get on the streets right now, you think you’d be a marked man?” the senator asked.
“Think?” replied the bemused Cafaro. “I know.”
* * *
Cafaro also recounted three meetings of the Mob’s ruling commission, an assembly of leadership from all five New York families, in 1984 through 1985. On the first two occasions Gigante, ever fearful of a tail or a wiretap, sent Fat Tony as his representative.
Both times, Cafaro served as Salerno’s chauffeur from the Palma Boys to a Staten Island luncheonette, where they were met by the doomed Gambino capo Tommy Bilotti as Gambino boss Castellano’s go-between. From there, they were driven to a house in the city’s smallest borough, the home turf of the imperious Castellano, for a business meeting about construction and concrete.
The attendees included Castellano, Lucchese underboss Tom Mix Santoro, and Colombo capos Dominick “Donny Shacks” Montemarano and Ralph Scopo. The Bonannos, still in post-Pistone disarray, were not invited.
Bilotti, Cafaro and four or five other amici nostri stayed upstairs while the meeting went on below. When it ended hours later, Cafaro was briefed about the topics.
“Every time there was a commission meeting with Paul, it was about business—money and business,” he recounted, echoing Gravano’s recollections. Gigante preferred to ignore such get-togethers.
The second time, Cafaro was ordered to wait in the luncheonette. On both occasions, Salerno had no fears about the prying eyes or ears of the FBI as they sailed into Staten Island.
Meeting number three was an unmitigated disaster.
The get-together was held close to the Chin’s Village base, at Bari’s on Houston Street, a business that sold restaurant equipment. Fish Cafaro drove Fat Tony to meet with Gigante, and they headed for the sit-down with Corallo, the Gambinos’ Castellano and Joe N. Gallo, and the Colombo family’s underboss Langella and Montemarano.
With the notoriously paranoid Chin involved, security was ramped up. Genovese capo Baldy Dom Canterino was dispatched to keep an eye on the street as Cafaro waited nearby to drive Fat Tony home. He was stunned to see a disheveled Salerno reappear far too soon. The rotund, cigar-chomping mobster was sucking air.
“Usually a commission meeting lasts four or five hours, six hours,” Cafaro explained later. “And he come back to the neighborhood [early] and I seen him. He’s huffing and puffing. I says, ‘How come you’re back so early?’ He says, ‘There were agents down there.... We had to get out.’ So rather than to get pinched or the agents go in, they all ran.”
Escape was easier said than done for the portly, poorly conditioned seventy-four-year-old Salerno.
“He says, ‘They had to push me out through the window to get out.’ He couldn’t fit,” Cafaro recounted, oblivious to the scene’s comedic value. “He was too fat. He got stuck in the window.”
Gigante, with the help of Donny Shacks, rushed to Fat Tony’s aid. With a few well-placed shoves from the Chin, Salerno finally popped through to freedom like a cork loosened from a champagne bottle. Fat Tony then ran to meet up with Cafaro and head for safer ground.
When they returned to the Palma Boys, “he was still out of breath over his escape,” Cafaro added.
“Who knows if there was an agent or there wasn’t an agent?” the “Fish tale” concluded. “I really don’t know.”
The Cafaro testimony made headlines, but was more of a petty annoyance to the Chin. The year 1988 proved crucial to Gigante’s reign for another reason: There was a real and very active rat within the Genovese family. And he was there at the Chin’s invitation.
CHAPTER 15
WANTED MAN
VINCENT GIGANTE HAD NO IDEA WHAT HIS FUTURE WOULD HOLD the first time he sat in a room across from Genovese family associate Peter Savino.
Savino, on the other hand, was pretty certain that he was about to take his last breath. The summons came two months after Pappa had already done the same.
It was 1980 when Savino walked inside Ruggero’s, a Mob-owned restaurant on Grand Street in Little Italy, to answer the call from on high. It was dark inside, and he was directed to an office upstairs.
“As we were walking up the stairs, there were no lights on, and we came to the top of the stairs, and I expected to be shot at any moment,” he later recalled.
To Savino’s surprise, he was still alive after reaching the landing. He walked into the office and his heart almost stopped: There was Gigante, along with Funzi Tieri and other high-ranking members of the Genovese hierarchy. He knew the Chin only by reputation, and found Gigante in the flesh to be even more terrifying.
Their first request proved almost impossible: “They asked me not to be nervous.”
&n
bsp; The next question involved his street boss, Genovese capo “Sally Young” Palimieri: Did the captain take control of Pappa’s street business, including a lucrative loan-sharking operation? Savino conceded that he had.
Gigante spit on the floor in disgust.
“Are these the new rules?” asked the defiantly old-school boss. “We take money from widows and orphans?”
Savino then confirmed the capo was handling drug money. Young was instantly demoted, and Savino learned he was about to be reassigned. “They said to me that I didn’t have to be with Sally Young anymore, if I wanted to pick someone I would be comfortable with,” Savino said.
In a strange and ultimately life-defining decision, Savino landed with the guy who made him most uncomfortable: Vincent Gigante. In an equally unlikely choice, the Chin, whose Mob radar was generally unerring, eventually took a shine to the quivering Savino.
But business would come before friendship. Though Savino was attached to the Chin, he would report to Genovese capo Joe Zito.
“We will tell you what to do through Joe,” Gigante announced.
Savino would also need to repay a $1 million debt owed Vic Amuso and Gaspipe Casso as the Genovese family took over the business that he shared with the two high-ranking Luccheses. The two soldiers, a pair of wild cards who would share a murderous rise to the top of their family, had invested $500,000 with Pappa in a scam involving four Mob families.
They wanted the money repaid—plus another $500,000 in profit for their troubles.
Savino considered the 100 percent markup a reasonable price to pay for his life. He sold $250,000 in bonds to make the first installment on his debt, delivering the cash inside a Sunkist orange crate during a meeting inside a Brooklyn bar. Zito tagged along with his new recruit.
“They were upset that the money was in fives, tens and twenties,” Savino said.
Zito rose quickly to his defense: “What is the difference? You got two hundred fifty thousand. That is what is important.”
Chin Page 18
