Made Men

by Smith, Greg B.

  Not Joe Pitts.

  Joe Pitts had grown up in this neighborhood and feared no one, even from his wheelchair.

  Joe Pitts drove through the quiet residential brownstone neighborhood with its pizza shops and Italian pork stores and yuppie boutiques south on Court. The farther south he drove, the more uncivilized his neighborhood became.

  By the time he passed under the Gowanus Expressway, Joe Pitts had crossed over into another world. Gone were the orderly brownstones with flower boxes and kids on bikes. Now there was razor-wire fences and pocked streets and dangerous alleyways. Here, packs of dogs ran leashless through empty lots. Marty Lewis told Pitts to pull up to the curb on Lorraine Street past the highway overpass. This was where the guy with the money was supposed to be. Joe Pitts could not see the guy with the money anywhere in the rain and the dark, but he pulled over anyway.

  Marty Lewis took off one glove as he opened the passenger door and stepped out of the car. Rain thrummed on the windshield.

  Marty stood up outside the car, turned around, and leaned back in the Caddy. He had a revolver in his hand pointed at Joe’s head and he squeezed off six shots. Five entered Joe Pitts. Bullets entered Joe Pitts’s face, his right arm, his torso, and his right lung.

  “I can’t believe it was you,” Joe Pitts grunted. “Motherfucker.”

  Lewis stepped back, perhaps surprised by the fact that Joe Pitts was still talking. But Joe Pitts wasn’t just talking— he was driving. He put the car in drive and drove slowly away from the curb. The door shut as he accelerated, and when he got to the corner, Joe Pitts, nearly seventy years old, with five bullets in his body, clicked on his turn signal.

  Marty Lewis stood on the corner with the rain pounding down, watching the red light of that turn signal click on and off in the darkness. On and off, on and off. Marty Lewis almost had a heart attack on the spot as Joe Pitts drove away.

  Carrying five bullets, Joe Pitts not only managed to obey all traffic laws, but he somehow was able to navigate his huge automobile back to his social club on Court Street, bleeding all over the upholstery. Somehow he managed to get one of his cohorts, a big three-hundred-pound DeCavalcante associate, who lived in an apartment above the club, to come down to the car.

  The three-hundred-pound associate drove Pitts the seven blocks under the IND subway el tracks, over the foul waters of the Gowanus Canal, and right up to the emergency entrance of Methodist Hospital in Park Slope. They arrived at 6:17 P.M., and Pitts was placed on a gurney, where he remained for the next four hours, waiting for surgery.

  Because he had been shot, the police from the Seventyeighth Precinct were summoned. A detective asked Joe Pitts what happened. He said a black man from the Red Hook housing projects shot him. Clearly it was his intention to distract law enforcement while he took care of business himself. Clearly he believed he would survive to take care of business.

  At 10:22 P.M., Joe Pitts was still waiting when he had a heart attack and died.

  VINNY OCEAN At the hour of Joe Pitts’s death, Vinny Ocean was just arriving in San Diego in anticipation of Sunday’s big Super Bowl extravaganza. His mind was most likely on having a good time, on whether Green Bay would be as dominant as everyone was saying, on how much money he’d make if he guessed right on the spread. This was the good life—he was far away from the cold January streets of New York in sunny California with his first son, a stockbroker named Michael, and several of his closest friends. He could afford Super Bowl tickets. He could afford to be in San Diego. He was doing well, and was about to do even better.

  Vinny knew all about Joe Pitts. Mike of T&M had come to him and asked him for help after another DeCavalcante captain named Rudy Ferrone had died. Rudy had been put in charge of Joe Pitts and had essentially let him do whatever he wanted. Now that Rudy was dead, Mike went to Vinny Ocean and asked if it was okay to kill Joe Pitts. Joe Pitts was no longer a made guy, but he did have friends,

  and Mike didn’t want any trouble. Vinny Ocean had looked Mike in the eye and said, “What’s the matter with you? I don’t want to hear anything about this.”

  Mike, the FBI came to believe, had interpreted this as approval.

  After Joe Pitts was gone, Vinny Ocean could rightfully say that he had nothing to do with the chain of events. He could not say he had nothing to do with Joe Pitts. As a result of Joe Pitts’s death, Vinny Ocean wound up making a lot more money. When a wiseguy dies, somebody has to figure out what to do with all the money he’s taking in through various schemes. In this case, it was decided that Vinny would get Joe Pitts’s payments. He did this by putting his driver, Joey O, on the payroll of the victims’ companies in no-show jobs. Each week Joey O would get paid and kick his share up to Vinny Ocean.

  Immediately.

  Besides the weekly paycheck Joe Pitts had been extorting from Mike at T&M Construction, Joe Pitts had also been shaking down a man named Al Manti for $1,000 a week. Al Manti owned a bus company on Long Island called Manti Transportation. He was not a very good businessman, and as a result, his company was about to sink under a sea of debt. Still, a business is a business, and some business owners in New York City have been known to turn to subsidiaries of La Cosa Nostra for a little fast cash. Manti Transportation was such a company, and Joe Pitts had sunk his hooks into Al Manti for months. Now that Joe was gone, Vinny Ocean took over the task of collecting $1,000 a week from Al Manti to protect him from being exploited by some other unfeeling, unscrupulous Mafia family.

  Thus, on one rainy January night, Vinny Ocean got himself an extra $52,000 a year for doing exactly nothing. Each week Joey O would show up at T&M Construction and Manti Transportation and pick up his “paycheck.” He would keep half and send the other half up to Vinny. Of course, this arrangement was never called “protection.” It would be called something else.

  Salary.

  At one point Al Manti was not happy about this and actually complained in person to Vinny Ocean. “Why,” he asked Vinny, “do I have to pay protection to Joey?”

  Vinny Ocean frowned and shook his head sadly. “Let me tell you something,” he said. “You don’t ever mention that word in front of me. You’re not paying for no protection. I’m your partner. That’s my salary every week. Like your salary. Don’t ever ask that again.”

  Manti immediately backed down. “I was just kidding,” he said, handing over yet another envelope stuffed with ten $100 bills toward Vinny Ocean’s “salary.”

  In January 1998, that was how it was going for Vinny Ocean. The money was rolling in. Life was good. He was an experienced capo with a crew of both old-timers and newcomers. The strip club he secretly owned, Wiggles, was still up and running, having so far survived attacks from all sides by the politicians of Queens County and beyond. The city had passed a law shutting down all businesses that traffic in “adult entertainment” in residential neighborhoods or within five hundred feet of schools, churches, or day-care centers.

  “Wiggles” was within five hundred feet of just about everything. But the strip clubs of New York had hired a lawyer and banded together under the American flag, waving around the First Amendment and taking their case all the way through the New York courts. So far, they’d been losers. The courts weren’t buying the sex industry’s claim that the city was denying exotic dancers the right to express themselves through the medium of lap dancing. City officials, in fact, could legitimately state that they were not shutting strip clubs down. Instead, they were simply packing them off to urban Siberia, allowing them to relocate to industrial waterfront neighborhoods and other out-of-theway locales hard by the Fresh Kills Landfill and the Coney Island Cyclone. But the state’s top court had yet to issue a final decision on the question, and as a result, all the clubs were allowed to remain open for business three years after the strip-club law first passed in 1995. During that time, “Wiggles” had built up a loyal customer base of leering drunken men with fistfuls of sweaty dollar bills. And many of those sweaty dollar bills were secretly finding their way into Vinny
Ocean’s pocket.

  Plus there were many other deals. There was the $1,300 a week Vinny pocketed from his take of a gambling operation that took bets from across metro New York. There was the untold thousands in loan-shark interest Vinny picked up by buying his money at a point and a half weekly interest from a Gambino capo and putting it on the street at two points. Then there were the secret partnerships. He had designated himself a “partner” of T&M Construction, which then went and won a big contract to renovate the New Yorker hotel in midtown Manhattan. He was looking into becoming a secret partner in a new gambling boat operating out of Freeport, Long Island. None of this money showed up on his tax forms. All of it was collected in bundles of cash.

  Still, Vinny Ocean wanted more. Much of his income in 1998 came from the usual Mafia sources—preying on degenerate gamblers, lightening the wallets of loan-sharking victims, shaking down local unions. Thirty years after Joe Valachi first went on national television and revealed the inner secrets of the Mafia, these three activities remained the mainstays of the mob. In business terms, this refusal to evolve was not a good thing. This was like the automobile industry failing to predict the ascendancy during the 1970s of small, affordable Japanese cars that didn’t consume massive quantities of gasoline. Except in this case, Toyota was the FBI, and the FBI had long ago figured out how to investigate the mob when it was involved in gambling, loan sharking, and extortion. What the mob needed in the late 1990s was to figure out new ways to make money. And by 1998, some of the more clued in were doing their all-American best. Vinny Ocean was definitely one of the more clued in.

  Like most Americans who did not live in dark spaces beneath the ground, he was vaguely aware of the unusually strong boom in the stock market that was making some amateur investors a lot of money. Therefore, Vinny invested. He talked about puts and buys. He consulted with a DeCavalcante captain named Phil Abramo who thought of himself as the Michael Milken of La Cosa Nostra. He discussed “this new thing, this Viagra.”

  “Somebody’s going to make a lot of money on that one,” he said.

  But the stock market was still a risky place, and some of what Abramo was doing—secretly paying off brokers to pump up the worth of worthless stock and then dumping the stock when it peaked—was not exactly legal. Vinny Ocean was clearly looking for ways to go legit.

  Consistently he sought out business deals that might be considered forward-thinking. In January 1998, for instance, he was talking about investing in a cell-phone distributorship through the German communications giant Siemens. He had a partner. To the Germans they did business with, the partner’s name was William Cutolo, a businessman in a suit. Cutolo was like Vinny Ocean—a good-looking, fifty-something New York guy with silver sideburns that implied distinguished banker at work. Prudence was the message. Of course, on the streets of Brooklyn, Cutolo was known as Wild Bill. This was because Wild Bill had once beaten a man bloody with a baseball bat in front of a group of stunned Teamsters. This was the Wild Bill who was heavily involved in the Colombo crime family wars of the early 1990s, when ten gangsters and two innocent bystanders were shot down in the streets of Brooklyn because of a dispute over who would run the family. At that time one side of the family had decided it was better than the other side. In one episode of this twoyear saga, Cutolo lured to a suburban home in Staten Island a rival from the other side who many felt held too high an opinion of himself. When the rival showed up, he was pointed toward the stairs leading to the second floor and told to walk up. The rival began walking and looked up to see two men—a Colombo soldier named Carmine Sessa and Cutolo—standing there with weapons drawn. Cutolo, according to Sessa, suddenly thought he was in a movie.

  “Fucking godfather,” Cutolo muttered, emptying his revolver into the rival gangster at the foot of the stairs. Later, the rival was rolled up inside a rug and dumped in a landfill.

  Cutolo was a man who spent much time massaging his public image. He was, for instance, a fund-raising chairman for a local charity that raised hundreds of thousands of dollars each year for research into multiple sclerosis. He posed for photographs and offered toasts at annual dinners. Many of those who paid for tables at these dinners were members of unions the FBI believed were secretly kicking back thousands to Cutolo. But as of January 1998, Cutolo was not in jail, and was not anticipating spending any time in jail. He’d been acquitted of all charges for his alleged role in the Colombo crime family war and now he was out on the streets, behaving like a businessman just trying to make a little here and there. The Siemens partnership on the Russian cell-phone deal with Vinny Ocean, of course, was not exactly public knowledge. They worked behind other investors. Their names appeared on no documents. If Cutolo’s involvement in the deal became known, the Siemens deal would surely evaporate.

  For that reason, Vinny Ocean was looking to do business with a big-name entrepreneur. He yearned for the imprimatur of legitimacy. One of those risk takers with a big name was, according to the FBI, Bob Guccione, the founder and president of one of America’s favorite girliemagazine empires—Penthouse.

  Guccione was, of course, really a guy from Brooklyn with gold chains, the son of a Sicilian accountant. He grew up in a place where gangsters thrived but chose a legitimate way to make a living. He founded his General Media in 1967 and built it up to a $21 million company by outPlayboying Playboy. He was willing to do what hundreds of successful businessmen had done before to make a killing—take another step down. Of late, however, circulation of his slick porno magazines had taken a beating. He’d nearly defaulted on bond payments, had to cut forty jobs and shut two magazines. The extraordinary growth of the Internet and the new availability of product far raunchier than anything Guccione could dream up was killing him. Diversification, as they say in business school, was the only option. Thus Bob Guccione was talking about branching out into several new areas. One idea involved a vague plan to build a noncasino hotel with “masculine” amenities in Atlantic City. Guccione was in the process of finding investors.

  Another idea was strip clubs. He was thinking about using the Penthouse name to open a string of upscale topless clubs in New York and New Jersey. A lawyer his daughter knew had put him in touch with a very charming businessman who looked a bit like the actor Robert Wagner with silver sideburns. The man’s name was Vincent Palermo and he had much experience with a club in Queens called Wiggles. Palermo said he and Guccione were talking about getting together for a club in Manhattan, or if the mayor of the city didn’t like that, in the Five Towns on Long Island. Vincent Palermo believed that Guccione was impressed with Vincent Palermo. And it was clear from Palermo’s talks with one of the DeCavalcante family’s new associates, Ralphie Guarino, that Vinny Ocean was very much taken by Guccione and his millions.

  Ralphie, of course, was trying out the new secret-agent equipment given to him by the FBI, a fact he did not mention to Vinny. Ralphie pretended to be fascinated with Bob Guccione.

  “Does he go out much?” Ralphie asked.

  “No, not at all,” Palermo said as if he had known Guccione his whole life. “He goes to the summer house for the weekend.”

  Vinny made it clear he was on a first-name basis with “Bob.” He dropped in conversation numerous times that he had Bob’s home number, that he had visited Bob’s enormous town house on the Upper East Side with its built-in swimming pool and Icelandic goat pelts covering marble floors. Vinny claimed he was hoping to put together a club with Bob that would attract Wall Street guys, with door-todoor limousine service for convenience.

  “He said, ‘Vinny, you feel it is good,’ he says, ‘you got it.’ Swear on my kids. Forget about it. ‘You got it,’ he says.”

  Ralphie asked, “I wonder how much this guy makes a year.”

  “Ah, forget about it,” Vinny said. “Fucking unbelievable...He even says he is so far ahead of Playboy. Forget about it. Playboy ain’t even in the same fucking class.”

  Ralphie: “I think Penthouse is a nice magazine, actually.”

&
nbsp; “There is no comparison,” Vinny said, claiming the Penthouse Web site got more hits on the Internet “than anybody in the world. Right now.”

  “Does he really work anymore?”

  “No, he doesn’t go into the office, no. He was telling me a story, that he went to his office and the girl in the front there says, ‘Can I help you?’ Didn’t even know who the fuck he was.”

  Vinny mentioned that Guccione’s “right-hand man” was a lawyer named Gene, which made Ralphie light up like a game-show contestant with the right answer.

  “I know him,” Ralphie says. “I was in the can with him.”

  “You’re kidding me,” Vinny says.

  “Old man Gene,” Ralphie says. “You know what he does? He loves to knit. Swear to God.”

  Vinny: “He does what?”

  Ralphie: “To knit. He used to knit.”

  Vinny—who apparently knew nothing about knitting— got uncomfortable and tried to change the subject. “Oh, I don’t know about that.”

  “I’m serious. In the can, that’s what he did. He was a lawyer, he got caught up in a swindle.”

  “Yeah.”

  “A stock swindle. Gene Bo. I can’t believe that.”

  Vinny was beginning to like this Ralphie. Here was a street guy who was known as an earner. Vinny had heard that Ralphie was in a bit of a jam with the World Trade Center heist, but he was still impressed. It was true that the three guys Ralphie had picked to actually go inside and do the job turned out to be Moe, Larry, and Curly, but it appeared as if Ralphie had successfully insulated himself from their foolishness.

  Ralph had told Vinny he was confident the three were not competent enough to link him to the scheme. And it had been a bold scheme. It had taken place in the middle of a weekday morning in a building that had more security than a nuclear weapons factory. This was, after all, the World Trade Center, the place that a mere five years before had been attacked by a band of dedicated and none-toostable Islamic terrorists in a rented Ryder truck. Here were three of Ralphie’s guys actually getting in and out of the building without getting caught, and walking away with who knows how much cash. How much of it was still missing nobody knew for sure. This was the kind of bold plan that Vinny admired, and hoped it would inspire his second-rate crime family, the DeCavalcantes. This kind of thinking would, perhaps, result in added respect. Perhaps, if Vinny was lucky, the term farmer would go out of fashion.