Garden State Gangland

by Scott M. Deitche

  2. Various sources give numbers between fifty-eight and sixty-two detained. The official 1958 State of New York report gives the number at sixty-two (or more) attendees, sixty detained, fifty-eight identified from out of town, and fifty-eight questioned. Later, twenty of the men were hit with federal conspiracy charges.

  3. United States v. Bufalino, 285 F.2d 408, (2d cir. 1960).

  4. Gary Hafer, “Mafia in Apalachin,” GreaterOwego.com, accessed November 12, 2016, http://www.greaterowego.com/apalachin/apalachin01.htm.

  5. Some sources have it as LaRasso.

  6. (Bridgewater, NJ) Courier-News. “Attend Outing,” May 14, 1928.

  7. John McCullough, “NJ Beer Baron Is Named Chief Suspect in Slayings,” Philadelphia Inquirer, September 23, 1930.

  8. Federal Bureau of Investigation, “Angelo De Carlo, Aka. AR,” memorandum from Special Agent in Charge, Newark Field Office, to Director, in Frank Sinatra FBI Files, November 7, 1962, https://archive.org/stream/SinatraFBI/sinatra09c_djvu.txt.

  9. Volz and Bridge, The Mafia Talks, 24.

  10. C. A. Evans, Criminal Intelligence Digest, US Department of Justice, government memorandum, 1964.

  11. The earliest records available indicate DeCavalcante grew up in Westfield, New Jersey, a town in Union County.

  12. Volz and Bridge, The Mafia Talks, 21.

  13. US Treasury Department, Bureau of Narcotics, Mafia: The Government’s Secret File on Organized Crime, 1st ed. (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), 284.

  14. National Commission for the Review of Federal and State Laws Relating to Wiretapping and Electronic Surveillance, Commission Hearings, Volume 2 (Washington, DC: 1976), text available at https://archive.org/stream/commissionhearin02unit/commissionhearin02unit_djvu.txt.

  15. Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania Crime Commission, 1975–76 Report (St. Davids: Pennsylvania Crime Commission, 1977), archived at https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/Digitization/49097NCJRS.pdf.

  16. Raymond Tuers, "The Mob and Ocean County: FBI Takes Show Penetration," Asbury Park (NJ) Press, February 2, 1970.

  17. The tapes were made public on June 10, 1969.

  18. Mike Sabella was a New York–based capo in the Bonanno family at that time; ziginette is a popular Sicilian card game. Volz and Bridge, The Mafia Talks, 98.

  19. National Commission . . . Surveillance, Commission Hearings.

  20. Volz and Bridge, The Mafia Talks, 165.

  21. Ibid., 174.

  22. Gaspar DiGregorio’s family is the Bonanno family. National Commission . . . Surveillance, Commission Hearings.

  23. The widows are the wives of Phil Amari and Nick Delmore. Volz and Bridge, The Mafia Talks, 97.

  24. National Commission . . . Surveillance, Commission Hearings.

  25. Ibid.

  26. Ibid.

  Chapter 7

  On the Wire

  By the early 1960s, the FBI had started to catch up with state and local authorities with regard to understanding the extent of the mob’s influence on crime and legitimate businesses. In the early part of the twentieth century the Federal Bureau of Narcotics was the dominant federal agency recognizing that there was a structured organized-crime syndicate responsible for a variety of criminal enterprises—among those narcotics trafficking, which is what first brought the mob to the attention of the Bureau of Narcotics, even before the FBI. But after the Apalachin fiasco, and years of reports from local and state agencies, the FBI field offices turned their attention from Communists to gangsters and within a few short years started to develop a broad understanding of the form and function of traditional organized-crime syndicates across the United States. But the early years of intelligence gathering were still hit or miss.

  A two hundred–page report by the FBI in 1963 outlined the activities of la Cosa Nostra in the United States, with a significant section dedicated to New Jersey, under the guidance of the FBI’s Newark field office. The list of mobsters that called the Garden State home was extensive. The Genovese family list had forty-two names, from the boss and the power players—Ruggerio Boiardo, Gerardo Catena, Charlie “the Blade” Tourine, and Anthony “Tony Pro” Provenzano—as well as lesser-known members—Joe “the Indian” Polverino, Anthony “Tony Ambrose” D’Ambrosio, Nicholas “Joe Bones” Bufania, and Peter “Andy Gump” Costello. The Bruno list had over a dozen members in both South Jersey and Newark, while the four other New York families’ lists were skimpy at best.

  In the fall of 1963, Congress held a series of hearings on organized crime in America. What set this set of hearings apart was the explosive testimony provided by of a mob insider, which helped elevate the Mafia even further into the public consciousness and give law enforcement a real glimpse into the inner working of the mob. The informant was Joseph Valachi, and the window he provided on the history of the Mafia in America to that point was the most informative in terms of outlining how the mob operated and the various linkages between crime families in different cities. He also introduced America to the term la Cosa Nostra (“this thing of ours,” used to describe the Mafia internally), amico nostro (a fellow member of Cosa Nostra), and borgata (one’s crime family).

  In his testimony before Congress, “Valachi said that the ‘Cosa Nostra’ was a highly organized unit with a strict code of fealty, which was guaranteed by blood ties and arranged marriages within the tightly controlled framework of the organization. He told authorities that the organization had been responsible for numerous gangland deaths throughout the country, including the slayings of gangster Albert Anastasia and Frank Scalise, and an attempt on the life of Frank Costello.”[1]

  But the testimony of one mob soldier wasn’t enough to generate cases against mobsters. The FBI also began an aggressive campaign of wiretapping crime bosses—as had amassed the DeCavalcante tapes. From Chicago to Miami, the FBI started listening in on numerous conversation between mobsters, their associates, and often their political contacts. In New Jersey, DeCavalcante was not the only mobster under the microphone.

  In the early 1960s the FBI illegally wiretapped the “barn,” a building behind the La Martinique Tavern on Route 22 in Mountainside, New Jersey, a small borough in Union County, just to the west of Elizabeth. The barn was the headquarters and everyday hang out of Angelo “Gyp” DeCarlo, a member of the Boot Boiardo’s Genovese family crew. Though the tapes were not released until the latter part of the 1960s, they provided a similar glimpse into the inner workings of the Mafia as had the DeCavalcante tapes.

  The wiretaps were in place to catch a good deal of conversation between Ray “Gyp” DeCarlo and other mob members as they watched the Valachi hearings on television. On October 1, 1963, DeCarlo asked an unidentified wiseguy, “How can they get to him?” The unknown male replied that “they’ll take him [Valachi] out of the country,” adding that “Joe and twenty-one other guys are in on it . . . they can get twenty-five years”—possibly talking about potential fallout from Valachi’s testimony. DeCarlo replied, “That’s right—the innocent go with the guilty.” Ray also told the men that “the New York Prosecutor’s office knew all the information [Valachi was giving them] before the hearings started,” adding that Congress and the hearings were “glorifying Valachi, who is a convicted narcotics user and a murderer.”[2]

  DeCarlo was always on the lookout for “stoolies”—a derogatory term for informants. One wiretapped conversation in June of 1964 had DeCarlo talking about a possible stool pigeon named Benedetto Indiviglio. “Certainly, Lucky Luciano sent the word over a long time ago—before he did—that he [Indiviglio] is a stool pigeon. He’ll get killed if they let him out.”[3]

  A lot of the DeCarlo tapes are snippets of day-to-day drudgery, from what they wanted to eat for dinner to watching the news. It quickly became apparent that the “glamorous life of the gangster” was in reality many times as mundane as the average Joe they so often mocked for working a regular job. DeCarlo and his crew did often engage in one of the pleasures of late-night New York City–area television of the era: The Joe Frank
lin Show, a longtime fixture on WWOR-TV, broadcast out of Secaucus, New Jersey.

  Some snippets of conversation from both the DeCarlo and DeCavalcante tapes related to how the crime families were set up and how they inducted new members. To officially be a Mafia member—or be “made” in the Mafia—you had to be formally inducted into the crime family. The requirements varied by crime group but generally maintained that the inductee must be of full Italian lineage and, at least according to some sources, that he had to have “made his bones”—or killed someone. Other sources say that big earners who brought in sizable amounts of money were also let in. But the Mafia’s governing Commission in New York kept a lid on how many members were allowed into a crime family and when the “book were open”—when new members were allowed to be inducted.

  According to FBI informants, the “books” were closed to new Mafia members in the early to mid-1960s. While the edict originated out of New York—supposedly due to the Gallo-Profaci war in Brooklyn, as well as the Apalachin conference—the prohibition extended across the border to New Jersey, with capable up-and-coming gangsters waiting patiently for their turn to become fully fledged members of the mob. This was backed up in recorded conversations and in tips from informants. In October 1962, Gyp DeCarlo was recorded at a meeting with other gangsters, stating that the books had been closed and would probably stay that way for a few more years. He did make a point of complaining that the Philly family was not following the rules and had recently inducted three new members to replace three that died. Louis Larasso—the DeCavalcante capo also at the meeting—agreed with DeCarlo, saying, “I’m going to tell you how we make guys. We were the only family, going back now five, no, four years, who could have made anybody. We had an okay for seven guys. You know we didn’t make anybody. Then after that big ——— in upstate New York, everybody got pinched and we couldn’t make anybody after that. I don’t know how the hell these guys do it.”[4] Larasso went on to point out to DeCarlo that the Elizabeth family was “very discreet and that only a few were known to outsiders.”[5]

  Louis Cocchiaro, then an associate of the DeCavalcante family, was training a crew of younger wiseguys in a program with “hit assignments and other dirty jobs that bind the mob together testing each individual mob member’s ability to stand up under pressure.” The FBI noted that this program may have been effective because “one of the problems with the hoodlum element today is that there are too many ‘leisure’ guys, those individuals who want the money from gambling and other activities but who do not want to murder anyone.”[6]

  Among the mobsters identified as part of Cocchiaro’s crew at the time were Gaetano “Corky” Vastola and Robert DiBernardo. While Vastola would become a made member of the DeCavalcante family, DiBernardo, who was living in Brooklyn at the time he was mentoring under Cocchiaro, became a made member of the Gambino family. His claim to fame was his vast influence in the porn industry in the seventies and eighties, before he was killed in June of 1986 on orders from John Gotti. Interestingly, Vastola also ran afoul of Gotti while they shared a cell together in the mid-1980s. Gotti believed Vastola could become a government witness and tried to recruit the leaders of the DeCavalcante family to go along with having Vastola killed. The FBI were bugging this conversation (among others), and the murder plot never got off the ground.

  Throughout the sixties, the feds were in deep on surveillance of suspected Mafia members. With the implementation of various wiretapping laws, enhanced budgets, and a willingness to cultivate a wide array of informants, the FBI spent a good part of the decade playing catch-up. But it was apparent to the wiseguys on the streets that their every move was now subject to surveillance and that even small gatherings of gangsters were now on law-enforcement radar. One example was when the FBI got wind of an important sit-down in Miami in January of 1968. The intel emerged from a group of mobsters and their wives that had chartered planes to Freeport in the Bahamas. Included in the group was Santo Trafficante Jr., Angelo Bruno, and mobsters Carl Samuel Ippolito and John James Simone. Bruno was returning to Miami, with Trafficante to follow suit on a another flight, where they were going to meet up with other mob figures in the Miami area, including capo Peter LaPlaca and a New Jersey mobster named Danny Polidori.[7]

  One area of particular concern for federal investigators listening to mobster conversations was finding the links between the underworld and the political world. In order for any organized-crime group to really gain a foothold in power there needed to be a level of political corruption. Early Jersey bosses like Longy Zwillman and Nucky Johnson knew how to straddle both sides of the political fence: neither side would get any favorable treatment unless it meant a seat at the table. Generally mobsters looked unfavorably on elected officials unless they provided something to further the goals of the gangsters. Gyp DeCarlo firmly believed that “The most degenerate people in the world come from Washington.”[8]

  Unfortunately for the image of the Garden State, New Jersey has long been associated with political corruption. One study of the subject says that “New Jersey was and remains an ideal laboratory to study political and public corruption and its corrosive effects on the body politics of government . . . what makes New Jersey unique and well suited for corruption to flourish is the fact that 521 municipalities populate the state, most with their own political structures and police departments. These fiefdoms of home rule are in and of themselves quite powerful in ensuring that the ‘good old boy’ network remains in place decade after decade.”[9]

  On the Gyp DeCarlo tapes, DeCarlo was caught in a number of conversations discussing ways to help certain candidates get elected and have others removed from their posts. This fascinating glimpse into how much power was concentrated into the hands of a few key mafiosi would be a boon to federal law-enforcement agents, who then used this information to go after many of the public officials named on the tapes. DeCarlo also bragged about a number of other political appointments and posts that he was able to control. One of their big pet projects was John V. Kenny, mayor of Jersey City, and long-term, powerful figure in Hudson County politics. DeCarlo told Jack Panels Santoli that he was with John Kenny on April 25, 1964, and he was pushing for the removal of Brendan Byrne from the position of Essex County prosecutor. Kenny had an in with the governor and told DeCarlo that Byrne was a favorite of the administration. DeCarlo told Kenny that he controlled two open judge positions and that he could get Byrne appointed to one if he were removed, or stepped down, from the prosecutor position.

  DeCarlo also talked about putting police on the payroll, comparing two cities in Middlesex County, New Jersey. “Perth Amboy is too big. You’d have fifty cops and all the detectives coming by to get on the payroll. You got to have a little town like Carteret with ten to fifteen cops. You put about ten of them on for a sawbuck a week, a fin a week, you can handle them.”[10]

  Richie the Boot and Gyp DeCarlo had their claws sunk into the mayor of Newark, Hugh Addonizio. The relationship between the mayor and the mob had been a long and fruitful partnership that allowed Boiardo, DeCarlo, Catena, and the rest of the crews in Newark to operate almost out in the open, especially since they also had deep ties to and a corrupting influence on the police department. An indication of how deeply entrenched the mob was with Mayor Addonizio was in evidence on November of 1964 when Boiardo took a vacation to Puerto Rico and stayed at the Americana Hotel in San Juan. Accompanying Boiardo were some of his crew, including Joe “Joe Beans” Bianco, owner of Valentine Electric Company in Newark; Joe Rizzolo, Boiardo’s bodyguard; and Andy Gerardo, who would later take over Boiardo’s crew after the Boot’s death. Staying at the nearby Caribe Hilton Hotel was Mayor Addonizio. On November 9, Boiardo held a cocktail party with a gambling session at the Americana casino for thirty guests, and Addonizio was among them. To summarize, the mayor of the largest city in New Jersey was drinking, gambling, and socializing with the biggest criminal in the city, at a resort hotel in Puerto Rico. To even Addonzio’s staunchest defenders, thi
s was indefensible. But in Newark in the 1960s it was how the mob was still able to control vast swaths of the city’s criminal landscape, some forty years after Longy and Ritchie the Boot had started carving up the city for their own profit.

  Addonizio later testified in court that he’d met with Boiardo in Puerto Rico. “I met him at a dinner for Saint Anthony’s Orphanage. . . . I also had occasion to meet him at the Pope Pius [XII] humanitarian-award dinner. . . . I also met him once in New York. . . . I also had an occasion to bump into him once on an airplane. . . . I also had occasion to see him in Puerto Rico on several occasions.”[11]

  A conversation indicating the depth of corruption in Newark was recorded on February 23, 1963, between Boiardo, DeCarlo, Louis Larasso, and Sam DeCavalcante.

  Boiardo: I don’t want to see Tony Bananas anymore. I told Louis, “You go back and tell Bananas that ‘Ham’ Dolasco has got a beef. That Dolasco still wants a piece of the monte game like it was originally set up.”

  DeCarlo: Is Tony Bananas still going with the money game yet?

  Boiardo: No, Dick Spina told him to stop. You know Dick Spina asked me, “Why don’t you and Ray DeCarlo get together and open up?” I said, “What is there to open up?” You know, Hughie Addonizio got hold of me; he said, “Look, tell Ray DeCarlo that the FBI knows about Irving Berlin. I’ll tell you how much the FBI knows.”[12]