Garden State Gangland

by Scott M. Deitche

  Mid-Atlantic was not attracting the big fish, so the state police decided to move operations up to Jersey City and expand the trucking firm. They renamed it Alamo Trucking and increased the size of their truck fleet. The mob starting coming by. In addition to members from the Genovese family, members of the Lucchese family and Bruno Newark crew started nosing about. The Alamo building, like Mid-Atlantic before it, was wired extensively, leaving Weisert worried that a mobster would find the hidden microphones under the planters and sundries about the office. “We were always under the constant fear that someone would pick up a wine bucket and that the tape would fall out or that it would malfunction and start beeping.”[10]

  The Alamo operation started spinning into ancillary avenues, and the three main targets, John DiGilio, Tino Fiumara, and Jackie DiNorscio, were all taking a piece of the business, as well as billing personal items to the business accounts—from soil tests of Fiumara’s lawn to a Disney vacation for DiNorscio’s family. But the success of the operation was also drawing attention from other law-enforcement agencies, both local and federal. That, coupled with the amount of information the operation gathered and the time it would take to develop that raw intel into cases, caused the state police to pull the plug on the operation in 1977.

  Two hundred FBI agents and state troopers fanned out across New Jersey early on the morning of September 28, arresting thirty-five wiseguys, including Fiumara and DiGilio. Bob Delaney’s undercover operation was one of the most successful in state history. Fiumara was convicted and sentenced to fifteen years in prison in 1979. It wasn’t a death knell by any means to the Genovese New Jersey operations but was a significant obstacle for them to overcome. Fiumara was, among other things, a good earner, and that trumped everything else.

  Project Alpha and other efforts by law enforcement in New Jersey to infiltrate organized crime and disrupt the mob's control of unions and legitimate businesses was helped by the passage of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, better known as RICO. With this new tool, passed in October 1970, law enforcement now had the ability to target the mob, and other organized crime syndicates, with patterns of criminal activity and the threat of longer prison sentences. It became one of the most valuable tools for prosecutors. But in order to apply the law, there needed to be strong intelligence and in-depth investigations of criminal activity. And New Jersey formed one of the country's most effective investigative bodies to delve deep into the underworld.

  1. Eric Pace, “Eboli Chauffeur Being Questioned,” New York Times, July 18, 1972, http://www.nytimes.com/1972/07/18/archives/eboli-chauffeur-being-questioned-tells-police-he-didnt-see-killer.html.

  2. Former New Jersey wiseguy, personal interview with the author regarding the Genovese family in New Jersey, e-mail, November 2016.

  3. Myron Sugerman, personal interview with the author regarding New Jersey organized crime, Newark, New Jersey, February 7, 2017.

  4. William Eastmond, “Indictment of Byrne’s Ex Law Partner Part of Wider Probe,” Asbury Park (NJ) Press, December 6, 1977.

  5. Today West Paterson is known as Woodland Park. Louis DiVita, Mob in New Jersey—Interview, phone interview, 2016.

  6. Ralph Blumenthal, “Illegal Dumping of Toxins Laid to Organized Crime,” June 5, 1983, http://www.nytimes.com/1983/06/05/nyregion/illegal-dumping-of-toxins-laid-to-organized-crime.html?pagewanted=all.

  7. Bob Delaney, Covert: My Years Infiltrating the Mob, with Dave Scheiber, 1st ed. (New York: Union Square Press, 2008), 95.

  8. Delaney, Covert, 95.

  9. Ibid, 82.

  10. Robert Rudolph, The Boys from New Jersey: How the Mob Beat the Feds, 1st ed. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995), 69.

  Chapter 11

  The State Commission of Investigation

  By the late 1960s the spotlight on organized crime had spread beyond the Garden State stage. National media had begun reporting on the in-depth penetration of the mob into labor unions, the garbage industry, and other legitimate industries. But when Life magazine reported on the levels of municipal corruption in the state, the legislature decided to take action. Not that there hadn’t been efforts in the past, but this time they sent a clear message that the corruption and municipal strife that had been plaguing the state would no longer be business as usual.

  The specially convened Forsythe Committee was tasked with figuring out how to adequately address the rise of organized crime in New Jersey. The committee studied various methods and came up with a creation of two separate entities, with a system of checks and balances to ensure that the entities would be free of corruption and mob influence. These were the Division of Criminal Justice and the State Commission of Investigation.

  The Division of Criminal Justice was a prosecutorial body, while the State Commission of Investigation (SCI) was designed to be the intelligence-gathering arm of law enforcement. The SCI was slated to begin their work on January 1, 1969, their initial investigation focusing on the intrusion of organized crime into the solid-waste industry, a subject the SCI would revisit numerous times over the next many decades years.

  The SCI’s initial investigative staff was comprised of three individuals who had come out of the NYPD organized-crime squad. They had expertise in organized crime and had worked with both the Kefauver Committee and the McClellan Commission. SCI staff later recalled, “There was a climate in the late sixties where a couple of things came together in a perfect storm to rip the lid off organized-crime involvement in business. There was that series of articles in Life magazine—about organized crime in the public sector in New Jersey—state police, legislature, and municipal corruption. There were federal corruption investigations that were underway in New Jersey. And Assistant Attorney General William Brennan III gave a speech to the state chapter of Sigma Delta Chi in December of 1968 where he echoed these themes.”[1]

  Brennan’s speech zeroed in on members of the New Jersey Legislature whom he felt were too closely associated with crime figures. As assistant state’s attorney, Brennan was overseeing a grand jury in Mercer County empaneled to investigate ties between the mob and local government. He told the journalists of Sigma Delta Chi, “Too many local governments are responsive more to the mob than to the electorate that put them in office.”[2]

  The three main politicians he was referring to were David Friedland, minority leader of the New Jersey General Assembly in the late 1960s, State Senator Sido Ridolfi from Mercer County, and Mercer County Assemblyman John Selecky. All three vehemently denied the allegations, saying they were victims of character assassination. They even spoke at a special session of the legislature in late December 1968 to call for disciplinary actions against Brennan.

  But the special legislative session asked the Supreme Court of New Jersey to look into the allegations. They found evidence that Selecky and Ridolfi had committed ethics violations. Selecky had once testified as a character witness for Sal Profaci, nephew of one-time New York–family boss Joe Profaci. Salvatore himself was a capo in his uncle’s crime family—which was to become known as the Colombo family after Joe Colombo took control, following Joe Profaci’s death. Sal Profaci was also married to Emilie Danzo, daughter of Joseph “Whitey” Danzo, a New Jersey labor leader and organized-crime associate. Ridolfi’s suspected ties to organized crime stemmed from his admission that he had helped Philadelphia mob member “Johnny Keys” Simone, purchase a home in New Jersey.

  The court held their opinion about David Friedland pending a grand jury investigation into Freidland’s handling of a case involving his client, Genovese mobster John DiGilio, who at that time had been a soldier under Bayonne Joe Zicarelli.

  A few weeks after the Brennan speech, the SCI was launched, on January 1, 1969, and wasted no time in delving into its investigation of organized crime and solid waste. In fact, the SCI would go back three times in the ensuing years to look at the status of the industry. The initial investigation, however, was set up to develop a framework for laws and regulations and
oversight for the industry. The SCI found that “organized crime rooted in New York was spreading into commercial garbage collection in New Jersey and warned that the industry was at dire risk of becoming rife with bribery, extortion, price-fixing, collusive bidding, and other forms of corruption.”[3] Solid waste was the first but by no means last legitimate business enterprise that the SCI investigated. Over the ensuing decades, the SCI investigated the role of the mob in boxing, the liquor and bar industry, official corruption throughout the state, and even the recycling and medical industries.

  The impetus for the investigation was found from a variety of sources: information gleaned from previous investigations, requests by the legislature, and even citizen complaints via a hotline.

  SCI staff were allowed to conduct their own surveillance. They were authorized to undertake wiretaps in conjunction with other law-enforcement agencies, and, if they found any wrongdoing, it was referred to prosecutors. The SCI was (and still is) as close as you can get to independent: its four appointed commissioners, two appointed by the governor, and two by the legislature, served staggered terms so there were checks and balances and overlap.

  The SCI also had the power to subpoena witnesses. Starting in 1969 they issued twenty-five subpoenas to major New Jersey organized-crime figures in hopes of gathering information on the structure of the mob in the Garden State—but also it didn’t hurt that the SCI had the power to offer limited immunity and that, if the witnesses refused to talk or plead the Fifth, the SCI could take them to the court and get a contempt judgment.

  This proved an important investigative tool, allowing the SCI to not only flesh out its picture of the underworld but also rattle some cages—and, in the case of nine mobsters, send them away for a while for contempt. The subpoenas also had the unintended consequence of displacing mob figures. Some of the men who were subpoenaed simply left town, reluctant to return until the SCI probe was complete. But if they were under the impression that the investigation was short-term, they underestimated the intent of the commission; some of the mobsters remained outside New Jersey for years, in some cases throwing their business interests and operations in to disarray. “The commission’s confrontations with organized criminals has been credited by law-enforcement authorities with having a major disruptive effect on the structure and operations of organized crime in New Jersey due to the prolonged incarcerations and the flight from this state of several underworld operatives to avoid being served commission subpoenas.”[4]

  One of the first people subpoenaed by the commission was not an organized crime figure but, rather, one of the most popular entertainers of all time and a New Jersey icon—Frank Sinatra. Rumors of Sinatra’s ties to the mob had dogged the entertainer for years, all the way back to his earliest days in Hoboken (and the allegations would stick to him, later reemerging after an infamous picture surfaced of the crooner backstage at his 1976 Westchester Premier Theater concert, his arms thrown around Carlo Gambino, Paul “Big Paul” Castellano, Jimmy “the Weasel” Fratianno, and Greg DePalma). The FBI amassed a voluminous file on the singer, who was tied to mobsters from Lucky Luciano and Charlie “the Blade” Tourine to Angelo Bruno and Sam Giancana.

  Sinatra was first subpoenaed to appear before the commission on June 25, 1969. He was scheduled to appear on September 19 but was opening a string of shows at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. Shortly after that, Sinatra left for the Caribbean, unaware that, when he failed to appear in September, a warrant was issued for his arrest on October 14, 1969. Though the warrant was enforceable only in New Jersey, his lawyers started filing a series of motions. They convincingly argued that the singer should not be forced to appear before the commission and won a restraining order, which prevented the commission from forcing Sinatra to return to New Jersey. “The complaint in this case seeks to restrain the New Jersey State Commission of Investigation from ‘taking any further action against or with respect to plaintiff.’ It appears that the commission is attempting to compel the plaintiff to appear before it and to supply information in connection with an investigation now in progress.”[5]

  In a statement to the press, Sinatra said, “For many years every time some Italian names are involved in any inquiry I get a subpoena. I appear. I am asked questions about scores of people unknown to me. I am asked questions based on rumors and events which never happened. I am subjected to the type of publicity I do not desire and do not seek. I am not willing to become part of any three-ring circus which will necessarily take place if I appear before the state commission of investigation in New Jersey whether the hearings be public or private.”[6]

  Sinatra’s lawyers tried one last motion, appealing to the US Supreme Court to reverse the commission’s decree. But the Court ruled four to three against Sinatra. Reluctantly, he agreed to testify. On February 17, 1970, he traveled to Trenton to appear before the commission. This appearance was sandwiched between two others of an entirely different sort—an appearance a week earlier at a Democratic National Committee event for Harry Truman in Miami Beach, and one the following week in Tucson, where he filmed scenes for one of his last films, Dirty Dingus Magee. The commission questioned Sinatra for just over an hour and, at the time, found him cooperative, though the actual transcript of his testimony was kept secret. After Sinatra’s death in 1998 a former SCI member told a reporter that Sinatra had actually been evasive and uncooperative, though he had not been called back to appear again in front of the commission.

  One of the first mobsters to appear in front of the commission to testify was Jerry Catena. He appeared in two private hearings—once on November 18, 1969, and again on February 17, 1970—but refused to answer over eighty questions about his involvement in organized crime. On March 4, 1970, Catena was found in contempt of court and “committed until such time as he purged himself of contempt.”[7] That purge was a long time coming; Catena was kept out of the rackets for over five years while his lawyers fought for his release from Yardville State Prison. Finally, on August 19, 1975, after a series of court rulings and legal arguments about his continued incarceration, Catena was freed.

  But while Catena was in Yardville, concerns about his status arose among some of his old business partners who were involved with the Vegas skim operations. One former mobster recollected the mood at the time.

  When I was in Israel, Doc Stacher, who was living in Israel at the Old Sheraton, ordered me to show up at the hotel for Shabbat lunch. I had no idea why Doc suddenly was turning religious. I found out why. When we were seated, Meyer Lansky walked in and took the empty seat reserved for him next to me. He was a real gentleman who engaged me in lengthy conversations about his affection and admiration for my father, and then we talked about the law, history, politics, et cetera. At the end of the long Shabbat lunch, after all the guests left, Messiers Lansky and Stacher took me to the end of the lobby where nobody was seated and couldn’t listen to the conversation, and they proceeded to ask me to give them an update on Jerry Catena concerning his incarceration together with the others who refused to testify and were held in contempt of court. Over a period of time, and because of situations which I was involved in, I realized myself that both Meyer Lansky and Doc Stacher were concerned for their flow of funds coming out of Las Vegas casinos (the rake) and that, since Mr. Lansky was no longer in control since he fled to Israel to avoid prosecution, it was now Mr. Catena who ruled. It was my own conclusion at the time that this was the purpose of the Shabbat lunch. It wasn’t intended to enhance the Sabbath with spirituality and prayer and the singing of Shabbat songs. I understood clearly that the order came from Mr. Catena to Abe Green to use me as the carrier pigeon to send the message to Doc Stacher that the faucet had been turned off. Years later, on September 13, 1991, I went down to Fort Lauderdale at the behest of Al Miniaci, who was a close associate of Frank Costello. He was hosting a party for his wife on her seventieth birthday. He told me that Mr. Catena had specifically asked if I was going to be at the party. I sat with him at his table all night, and he
shared intimate history with me, so I knew for sure that he in fact never turned off any faucet on Meyer Lansky because he held Meyer in such high regard.[8]

  The Genovese family was also represented by Funzi Tieri, who fled to Brooklyn to avoid his subpoena, making only occasional forays back into Jersey for business. Despite Tieri’s reluctance to appear in front of the commission, there was enough evidence presented during the hearings for a grand jury to indicted him on February of 1973, though it would be a number of years before he would be arrested and tried.

  Louis Anthony “Bobby” Manna, Hoboken-based Genovese capo, was called before the commission in 1972 and imprisoned in Yardville from 1972 until April 1977, while John DiGilio also fled to Brooklyn to avoid his subpoena. DiGilio was indicted in 1979 by a state grand jury for loan-sharking conspiracy based on evidence presented at public commission hearings. Two other Genovese mobsters sought by the SCI, Emilio “the Count” Delio and Pasquale “Patty Mack” Macchiarole, relocated to Florida.

  Another rising Mafia figure who appeared before the commission yet refused to testify was Nicodemo Scarfo. The young mobster was a member of the Philadelphia crime family, but his base of operations was Atlantic City, by then a run-down resort town whose best days were behind it. Scarfo was making waves in the South Jersey underworld and deemed important enough at the time for the commission to make him one of their top targets. But Scarfo followed in the footsteps of his boss and refused to testify, landing in Yardville from 1971 to 1973, sprung only briefly between November 22 and 25 of 1972 to spend Thanksgiving with his family.