Garden State Gangland

by Scott M. Deitche

  The rise of mega-ships and a surge in container ships brought unprecedented growth to the Port of New York and New Jersey. By 2014 record traffic meant filling the pockets of union members who worked long hours ensuring the uninterrupted flow of goods coming off the massive ships docking at Port Newark–Elizabeth Marine Terminal. Infrastructure in the area was being upgraded, and bridges, like the Bayonne, were raised to accommodate the massive new post-Panamax ships that were the future of shipping. And the Genovese family was taking their share as well.

  Fiumara was back on the FBI’s radar, as were his associates. The feds were determined to rid the port of the Genovese family once and for all. An indictment was handed down on September 10, 2010, naming eleven defendants on labor-racketeering charges. In late December 2014 Genovese family soldier Stephen “Beach” Depiro, along with two former ILA Local 1235 officials, pled guilty to taking tribute payments from annual bonuses given to dockworkers at the port. The scheme had been going on for decades, draining money from the paychecks of the hardworking laborers, padding the wallets of the mob and their union accomplices. Tino Fiumara was not part of the verdict. He died of cancer, six days after the indictment was handed down, on September 16, 2010.

  The mob may have been pushed back from the docks, but it was by no means out. In January of 2017 the New York Times ran an article about the continued presence of organized crime on the Jersey waterfront.[7] There are relatives of mobsters who are appointed to cushy jobs with high salaries and little responsibility. Tribute payments are still extracted from the longshoremen who work the docks. Though their numbers have diminished as technology has taken over a lot of the grunt work, and containerization of cargo has taken a lot of the stevedore work away, there are still thousands of workers who show up each day at the various facilities along the river between New Jersey and New York. And the mob is still there, the vestiges, some say, of a time long past, but still stubbornly hanging on.

  1. John Marzulli, “Dock Union Bigs Go on Trial Accused of Plotting with Mob,” New York Daily News, September 21, 2005, http://www.nydailynews.com/archives/boroughs/dock-union-bigs-trial-accused-plotting-mob-article-1.566257.

  2. Coppola was tracked down by the FBI and arrested in March of 2007.

  3. Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Committee on Governmental Affairs United States Senate, Waterfront Corruption (Washington, DC: US Senate, 1984).

  4. Ibid.

  5. Ibid.

  6. Ibid.

  7. Joseph Goldstein, “Along New York Harbor, ‘On the Waterfront’ Endures,” New York Times, January 6, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/06/nyregion/new-york-harbor-on-the-waterfront.html.

  Chapter 16

  The Receding Tide

  Lenny’s Brick Oven Pizzeria is located in a brick-faced strip mall in rural Washington Township, New Jersey. Housed next to a nail salon, and near the usual supermarket/fast-food nexus, Lenny’s is noted for good pizza, a rarity in this rural section of western New Jersey, near the Pennsylvania border. It’s one of hundreds of small pizza shops dotted across the Garden State landscape, the perfect kind of place for a late dinner or watching the game with a beer and a slice.

  But on the night of July 3, 2009, the customers at Lenny’s got an up-close-and-personal look at the ugly underside of the state—and a rare sighting of a mob boss. His name was Francesco “Frank” Guarraci, and he was the alleged boss of the DeCavalcante family, having taken over in 2007.

  Lenny’s had been owned by Lenny Palermo until his death in 2009. Two days after Palermo’s death, one of Guarraci’s associates approached the manager and told him that Guarraci was now the boss and that he’d be in to make sure everyone knew that, especially the manager. Later that night, while customers were enjoying their pizza, three men burst in to Lenny’s. Guarraci told the manager that the pizzeria belonged to him. Customers saw the situation escalating and left without paying their bills.

  According to the indictment, Michael “Mikey Red” Nobile, an ex-con with a penchant for utilizing a baseball bat for collecting outstanding debts, attempted to prevent the manager from calling the police. But some of the customers who’d fled the scene were already dialing 911. After Guarraci told the manager, “I run the show,” the men left, but police figured out their identities soon enough.

  Guarraci and Nobile were indicted on August 2, 2010, on charges of extortion. Guarraci was released on bail, but Nobile was remanded because of his violence-checkered past. That the boss of a Mafia family would be engaging in this kind of 1920s-style extortion indicates the sad state of the Mafia in the twenty-first century.

  And then, a few months after the pizzeria fiasco, January 20, 2011, became a watershed day in the history of organized crime. Cobbling together sixteen unrelated indictments, the FBI swept up all the named defendants in a mega-raid of epic proportions. Over 125 suspected crime figures and associates were brought in, from New York to Rhode Island. And, like many of the recent mega-busts designed to let the traditional Mafia know that the FBI has not forgotten about them despite the Justice Department’s War on Terrorism–centric priorities, New Jersey–based wiseguys were part of the mix.

  One if the indictments centered on the activities of Jerry Balzano and Joseph Collina, both alleged soldiers in the DeCavalcante family. Their crimes were decidedly old-school: extortion, dealing in stolen property and securities, and trafficking in contraband cigarettes. Coming on the heels of the Guarraci indictment, and considering the generally already-disheveled state of the crime family, it was certainly a blow to the small, insular group.

  But the blows against the DeCavalcantes only kept coming. In March of 2015, ten members and associates of the DeCavalcante crime family were arrested in New Jersey and Las Vegas. Mob member Charles Stango, consigliere Frank Nigro, and associate Paul Colella were charged with attempting to murder a rival mob member in New Jersey. The remaining defendants were part of a mob-backed cocaine-trafficking operation.

  Sources say that a new crew of the DeCavalcantes was operating in Toms River, a fast-growing New Jersey township, directly across Barnegat Bay from Seaside Heights. And it was members of this new crew that were arrested in the March 2015 sweep of DeCavalcante gangsters. Among other crimes, the group was charged with trafficking in cocaine and a prostitution ring in the township. Three Toms River men were arrested.

  Then, time came calling for two bosses in less than a year. John Riggi died on August 3, 2015, Frank Guarraci on April 14, 2016. Both men were laid out at the Corsentino Home for Funerals, with a mass at Saint Anthony’s Church, back in the old Peterstown neighborhood of Elizabeth. The family had fallen a long way since Sam DeCavalcante had died of a heart attack back on Friday, February 7, 1997, while at a rehab center in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. His funeral services were held in Hamilton Township, and he was buried in the Greenwood Cemetery in Trenton. The arrangements were also handled by the Corsentino Home for Funerals. The funeral home had been owned for many years by DeCavalcante family member Carl Corsentino. It was at the funeral parlor that, according to mob turncoat Anthony Rotondo, the DeCavalcantes utilized the double-decker coffin to dispose of bodies. There would be a false bottom in the casket, and they would stuff a murder victim’s body inside for disposal.

  Among New Jersey mobsters who turned government informant were a number of gangsters in the DeCavalcante family, including their acting boss Vinnie “Oceans” Palermo, stemming from the December 2, 1999, arrest of over thirty members of the crime family. Others in the crime family turned, including capo Anthony Rotondo and soldier Anthony Capo. By the mid-2000s over forty members of the DeCavalcantes were imprisoned, effectively crippling the family’s structure.

  The other crime families operating in New Jersey fared about as well. The Genovese family still maintained considerable influence and hold over their remaining rackets in New Jersey. In 2004, New Jersey State Police fanned out across the state and arrested over two dozen members and associates of the Genovese family, including sold
ier Joe “the Eagle” Gatto, son of the late capo Louis “Streaky” Gatto, a former Genovese power player who died in 2002. Though the Jersey Police’s case promised to rip the lid off a massive bookmaking operation that was tied to four other crime families, the Eagle escaped indictment, later dying in 2010. Joe Gatto also died in 2010, leaving his crew leaderless. By 2010 authorities had identified three main captains leading Jersey Genovese crews: Ludwig “Ninni” Bruschi, Angelo Prisco, and Silvio DeVita.

  The ranks of mobsters who left the life to start anew as protected witnesses increased, as did those who merely did what they needed to do to extricate themselves from a life that held little regard or loyalty or friendship. “Would I cooperate again?” asks one former Jersey wiseguy, rhetorically.

  I’d like to say no. But the essential self-serving nature of a wiseguy is still there. When you become part of the life, you piss your future away one way or the other. When you “turn,” my advice is to be cremated, because you deservedly deserve to have your grave pissed on. I was this “nothing” in the big picture. My legacy is, “That guy? Yeah, I remember that rat.” Unfortunate, because once it was, “That guy? Good kid.” No excuses, yet in a very self-serving, nonhypocritical way, I can live with it. You want to be a mob guy, leave your conscience at the door. Because in actuality it is a rat’s life. Brothers kill brothers, friends lug each other to get clipped when ordered. One day you get a call. “Did you hear so-and-so got clipped??” And you answer, “No shit! I just had lunch with him yesterday. Fucking shame. Okay, forget that, how did we do last night? We had a lot of action on the Knicks?” . . . Mob Life 101.[1]

  In 2016, the New Jersey State Commission of Investigation initiated a series of hearings into the lax regulation and oversight of the state’s waste-disposal industry—specifically, the disposal of contaminated soil and construction debris and the construction-recycling industry. The hearings stemmed from the SCI’s 2011 report, Industrious Subversion, which detailed “evidence that convicted felons, including organized members and associates, profit heavily from commercial recycling, which, through a lucrative adjunct to solid waste, has remained largely unregulated.”[2]

  It was a story that had been repeated over some forty-odd years. Despite the efforts of the SCI, organized crime was still finding ways to infiltrate the industry, albeit at a lower level than they had in the past when the unregulated nature of the industry had left things wide open. One of the examples the SCI cited as an example of a mob figure still in the industry despite SCI’s best efforts to keep him out was Joseph Lemmo Jr., described as a Genovese associate whom the SCI had cited as far back as 1989. With records for racketeering, tax evasion, firearms, and drug distribution, Lemmo kept his involvement in the industry with a South Plainfield, New Jersey, trucking company. Only after additional work by the SCI did the state finally bring the law down on Lemmo, and he sold his company in 2009.

  The report went on to detail other Genovese and Gambino crime figures and even the alleged one-time acting boss of the Philadelphia mob, Joseph “Uncle Joe” Ligambi, who were deeply involved in New Jersey waste-disposal, trucking, and recycling companies.

  In late 2016, a large-scale mob bust netted dozens of wiseguys from the Bonanno, Lucchese, Gambino, and Genovese crime families, as well as Skinny Joey Merlino, whom the feds believe is really the boss of the Philadelphia mob, even as he maintains he is retired in Boca Raton. Among those arrested were New Jersey–based guys Marco “the Old Man” Minuto, long-time Lucchese guy from Upper Saddle River, Anthony “Tony the Cripple” Cassetta from Belmar, and Daniel Marino Jr., son of a longtime powerful capo in the Gambino family. Daniel Jr. lives in Short Hills.

  The current director of the SCI was asked about the arrest, showing that, despite decades of law-enforcement action against traditional organized crime, the mob, though significantly depleted, is still around in New Jersey. “Tony Soprano may have gone off the air, but the mob never did. In the real world these guys are still active, and, as this indictment shows, they haven’t faded away—because there’s a lot of money to be made.”[3]

  As of the writing of this book, some of the mobsters arrested in the August 2016 sweep have pled out for reduced sentences, with only a few, including Joey Merlino, opting to go to trial. But it was only one of a number of mob arrests and indictment in the mid-2000s. With the redirection of federal agencies’ priorities shifting to terrorism in the post–9/11 world, there have been discussion about how the fight against organized crime has been affected and whether the Mafia would find a way with the decreased scrutiny to make a comeback. In some ways assimilation into greater society has lessened the recruiting pool for the Mafia, as it did for Irish- and Jewish-American gangsters in years prior. But as with any power vacuum, when there is one in the underworld, there are always groups quick to move in.

  In 2004, the SCI came out with a comprehensive overview of the changing nature of organized crime in New Jersey. And while that report is over a decade old, its conclusions are still valid in the current underworld scene. The report talked of the rise of “heavily armed drug-trafficking gangs”[4] and the rise of transnational organized-crime syndicates best exemplified but Russian and Eurasian criminal syndicates and the Mexican cartels. Many of these groups concentrate on individual criminal activities here in the United States, making it less likely they’ll succeed in infiltrating so many aspects of American life from legitimate businesses to politics as the mob did. And law-enforcement agencies are shifting their priorities and strategies to keep apace with new crime groups and the ways they do business. “Any time you have a demand for illicit goods and services you’ll have a group or groups to provide services.”[5]

  But for all the talk of the mob being dead, a vestige of the past, “elements of la Cosa Nostra are assiduously engaged in efforts to reclaim at least a share of the underworld empire they dominated until its dismantling by prosecutions and infighting during the 1980s and 1990s.”[6] The traditional mob is still operating out there. There is a ton of money to be made off illegal sports betting alone.[7]

  A former New Jersey wiseguy takes a little different view on things. “The mob isn’t going away. The talent pool has thinned, and that enhanced thinness will eventually seep into the cracks of law enforcement. The best guys ever in the mob were the guys from the greatest generation. Despite their proclivity for violence and criminal enterprise, they reflected the dedication of an entire generation.”[8]

  The Mafia in the United States might be a shadow of its former self, but in the New York/New Jersey metro area, there are still wiseguys and wannabes working scams, extorting businesses, running gambling, selling drugs, and branching out into white-collar crime. And they are continuing a tradition that’s over one hundred years old. But even with the dissolution of many of the crime-family crews in New Jersey, competition from emerging ethnic criminal enterprises and street gangs, and the relentless pursuit of law enforcement, the mob remains a presence in the New Jersey–underworld landscape.

  1. Former New Jersey wiseguy, personal interview with the author regarding the mob in New Jersey, in person, November 2016.

  2. State of New Jersey Commission of Investigation, Industrious Subversion.

  3. Ted Sherman, “Mob Arrests Show Wiseguys Still at Work in N.J., Feds Say,” NJ Advance Media, August 6, 2016, http://www.nj.com/crime/index.ssf/2016/08/another_big_mob_hit_this_one_b.html.

  4. State of New Jersey Commission of Investigation, The Changing Face of Organized Crime in New Jersey: A Status Report (Trenton: State of New Jersey Commission of Investigation, 2004), http://www.state.nj.us/sci/pdf/ocreport.pdf.

  5. Lee Seglem, acting executive director of SCI, and Mike Hoey, former SCI agent, personal interview with the author on the creation of the SCI, telephone, September 29, 2016.

  6. State of New Jersey Commission of Investigation, The Changing Face of Organized Crime.

  7. Lee Seglem, acting executive director of SCI, and Mike Hoey, former SCI agent, personal interview wi
th the author on the creation of the SCI, telephone, September 29, 2016.

  8. Former New Jersey wiseguy, personal interview with the author regarding the current state of mob in New Jersey, e-mail, January 2017.

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Abner ‘Longy’ Zwillman-Kefauver Hearings. Video clip. 1951. Posted at http://www.efootage.com/stock-footage/43939/Abner_Longy_Zwillman-_Kefauver_Hearings/.

  Addonizio v. United States, 573 F.2d 147 (3d Cir. 1978).

  Albany (OR) Democrat-Herald. “Feud at End,” May 17, 1929.

  Anastasia, George. Blood and Honor. 1st ed. New York: W. Morrow, 1991.

  ———. Mob Father. 1st ed. New York: Zebra, 1993.

  Around About Peterstown (Elizabeth, NJ). “John Riggi Passes at Age 90,” no. 101 (August/September 2015): 15. Archived at http://peterstownnewjersey.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/AAPAug15.pdf.

  Asbury Park (NJ) Press. “All Newark Bills Quashed by Porter,” January 28, 1940.

  ———. “Bassone Put on Year Probation.” May 24, 1930.

  ———. "Casino Policing Questions Unanswered." December 12, 1976.

  ———. “Delmore Farms, Doesn’t Worry.” August 7, 1953, 1.

  ———. “Enoch Johnson ‘Real Governor.’” April 2, 1929.

  ———. “Fear Bombs and Guns Will Pick Capone’s Successors.” May 18, 1929, 5.