Also by FRANK DIMATTEO
The President Street Boys:
Growing Up Mafia
CARMINE the Snake
CARMINE PERSICO
and His Murderous
Mafia Family
FRANK DIMATTEO
MICHAEL BENSON
CITADEL PRESS
Kensington Publishing Corp.
www.kensingtonbooks
All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.
CITADEL PRESS BOOKS are published by
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Copyright © 2018 Frank Dimatteo and Michael Benson
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.
AUTHORS’NOTE
Although this is a true story, some names and locations have been changed to protect the privacy of the innocent. When possible, the spoken word has been quoted verbatim. However, when that is not possible, conversations have been reconstructed as closely as possible to reality based on the recollections of those who spoke and heard the words. In places there has been a slight editing of spoken words, but only to improve readability. The denotations and connotations of the words remain unaltered. In some cases, witnesses are credited with verbal quotes that in reality only occurred in written form. Some characters may be composites.
CITADEL PRESS and the Citadel logo are Reg. U.S. Pat. & TM Off.
ISBN: 978-0-8065-3881-5
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available.
ISBN-13: 978-0-8065-3883-9
ISBN-10: 0-8065-3883-X
To my mother,
Dee DiMatteo,
who brought me into this life
—not to mention This Life.
Every extreme attitude is a flight from the self—the passionate state of mind is an expression of inner dissatisfaction.
—ERIC HOFFER, moral and social philosopher, 1898–1983
Table of Contents
Also by
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
INTRODUCTION - The Body Count
ACT I
CHAPTER ONE - Red Hook
CHAPTER TWO - Street Tough
CHAPTER THREE - The Murder of Stephen Bove
CHAPTER FOUR - Frankie Shots
CHAPTER FIVE - Making His Bones
ACT II
CHAPTER SIX - Winds of War
CHAPTER SEVEN - Snake Eyes
CHAPTER EIGHT - Indestructible Carmine
CHAPTER NINE - From Behind Bars
CHAPTER TEN - The Grim Reaper
CHAPTER ELEVEN - Operation Star Quest
CHAPTER TWELVE - La mia voce
ACT III
CHAPTER THIRTEEN - Cowboy Mike
CHAPTER FOURTEEN - The Last War
CHAPTER FIFTEEN - Billy Fingers, Missing
CHAPTER SIXTEEN - Famiglia
EPILOGUE - La vita è un sogno
BIBLIOGRAPHY
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
INTRODUCTION
The Body Count
Today, I sit down to write about a man that my dad on at least two occasions tried to kill. Other than that, no pressure.
FOR FORTY-FIVE YEARS I was in this life with blinders on. Once out, I looked back and reflected upon the only way of life I ever knew. It all seemed so normal to me—chicken wire on the windows, scores and swag, gunshots on the streets, suitcases full of cash, sudden violent death—but I realized that I only had the opportunity to walk away because I was lucky, and I had a dad who was unique and smart in a lot of ways.
I had the pleasure and opportunity to look back and dissect everything that happened to me, the things I’d done, witnessed, and believed in, and I came to the startling conclusion that I had lived a lie.
The world I lived in turned out to be smoke and mirrors. Every rule I learned had been broken many times before I showed up, but I couldn’t see that at the time—forest for the trees.
Now, I see.
My father was with the Gallo brothers from the time I was a baby, and I was raised to believe that the Gallo crew was my family. I called many of those guys “uncle.” They molded me into an up-and-coming hood, led me to believe that we were family—that we had to stick together. They taught me that everyone outside the family was wrong, bad, the enemy. I was taught to listen to Larry Gallo because he was the boss and we didn’t question him.
So, when I was told that Carmine Persico had been like a brother to Larry, but turned on him and tried to kill him and that Carmine was a snake, I believed it and didn’t ask questions. Mention his name on President Street, people hissed.
Now, reflecting over my own experiences and doing my homework, I realize that he was no more a snake than Joe “The Boss” Masseria was for murdering Salvatore D’Aguila, or Salvatore Mananzano for killing Alfred “Al Mineo” Manfredi, or Albert Anastasia for the Vincent Mangano killing, or Carlo Gambino for the Albert Anastasia killing, or John Gotti for the Paul Castellano killing. In that crowd, Lucky Luciano won the humanitarian award—he only made Frank Scalice step down.
Carmine Persico had no obligation to Larry Gallo. Carmine was always for Carmine, an old-school gangster. He did what he had to do to climb the ladder. He has been in jail most of his life and his men have been loyal. He remains respected and feared the way a real tough guy should be.
I know firsthand how to be loyal around tough guys and saw firsthand how you get stabbed in the back when you’re not needed anymore.
Trust me, Carmine Persico is for real. Behind the myth is a man. If there were more like him, this thing of ours, right or wrong, would be in a lot better shape. This is his story.
* * *
Some men’s lives are measured by wealth and power. By that standard, Carmine John Persico Jr. is a very successful man. His blood family is estimated to be worth upward of $1 billion. Even allowing for inflation, he became one of the richest gangsters ever. His superpower was instilling fear. He made many thousands afraid, and they paid him to stay safe.
From a warm-blooded human perspective, however, Carmine Persico’s life is best measured by what he destroyed, the pain and death and suffering he left in his wake. This book will detail only a fraction of the lives cut short, either by Carmine on his own or through his orders. He destroyed his own blood family. His older brother died in prison, his younger brother spent twenty-two years behind bars, both he and his eldest son will likely die in prison. Another of his sons was recently sentenced to five years. Family members that remain free are stigmatized by their name, a name that now wears a reptilian connotation because of Carmine’s reputed chilly manner of doing dark business.
He inadvertently helped to destroy his crime family, by insisting that the Persicos stay in charge across generations despite lengthy prison sentences, like kings (or the Corleone sons in The Godfather), rather than sticking to Mafia tradition and the meritorious method of succession, like popes.
Indeed, Carmine Persico will be remembered for the swath of destruction he left behind, a street kid who started out threatening, and sometimes beating children for their lunch money, one that carried that same “born to extort” manner into adulthood.
Using a combination of brashness, cunning, and an appetite for extreme violence, Carmine Persico rocketed from gang-banger on a Park Slope, Brooklyn, street corner to boss of the Colombo crime family, where he reputedly became the longest-reigning godfather in modern Mafia history—mostly from behind the bars of a federal penitentiary.
* * *
One of the first stories I ever heard abo
ut Carmine “The Snake” Persico was that, as a kid, he beat a guy to death with his bare hands in a gang fight. It was a story befitting a legendary hood. Unfortunately, it appears that it’s also untrue. True, there was a gang fight. True, Carmine was there. True, a guy died, and Carmine was arrested. But the victim was shot. Carmine was arrested again the following year in connection with another murder, a murder that involved many bullets and spraying brain matter, but again his fists had nothing to do with it.
I don’t know where the misunderstanding began, but it was formalized in Selwyn Raab’s fantastic book Five Families. When he cites the date of Carmine’s arrest, it is March 2, 1951, the day Carmine was nabbed for the shooting murder of Stephen Bove alongside the putrid Gowanus Canal.
I had to admit, I was disappointed that, as far as we can document, Carmine never beat a guy to death Boom Boom Mancini-style. For the first time, in this book, you’ll get the whole true story.
Don’t worry, there are plenty of other ultraviolent Carmine Persico stories that you couldn’t make up—Albert Anastasia, Joe Jelly, Frankie Shots, Larry Gallo, etc. Other things could never be pinned on him. Best we can say is that he was frequently in the vicinity of murder, that he left choppy waves of death, pain, and suffering in his wake.
* * *
Carmine understands that there’s no benefit in publicity, and he has managed remarkably well to keep his brand name off nefarious activities. We see him best when he is captured or wounded, twice by multiple gunshots, and once almost blown to smithereens by a car bomb, incidents that would have killed lesser men, murder attempts into which I have inside info.
Whenever possible, Carmine was the guy whose name wasn’t in the paper, the guy that eyewitnesses forgot to mention. He was the guy nearby. And so there are times in telling his story, when we must see all around him without seeing him at all, lucky if we catch a glimpse of shadow, as Carmine Persico quietly accrued power the way other men breathe.
ACT I
CHAPTER ONE
Red Hook
The first thing you need to know about gangsters back then is they were cowboys—and the streets of South Brooklyn was the Old West. Gangs ruled. The street corner Garfield Boys of Carmine’s youth were a starter program, a farm system, feeding the behemoth of Joseph Profaci’s South Brooklyn “brugad”—i.e., the borgata.
SICILY IS A TOUGH ISLAND off the toe of Italy. The poor soil refuses to grow food, and the weather is so harsh it’ll make a young person old. Throughout Sicily’s history, it has been overrun by the conquering armies of other nations. The Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Muslims, Normans, French, Spanish, Austrians, and Nazis all took turns being in charge. The natives, almost universally poor, acquired a feeling of helplessness. Out of this atmosphere was born la Mafia, a fraternal order, a secret society, which offered a structure of power and protection for the natives outside the usually corrupt government.
Today the term mafia is used generically for ethnic organized crime. We refer to “the Irish mafia,” “the Russian mafia,” etc., but the Mafia we’re talking about in this book is the original, the comarada, la Mafia, accent on the fi, with a capital M—the organization that initially formed in Sicily as a band of “Robin Hoods” to defend the peasants against the tyranny of the feudal lords by stealing from the rich and giving to the poor. (This is an idealistic view of what was actually going on, of course, as mob bosses from the start tended to be ruthless bullies and very rich, so at least some of the robbing was from the poor and to the rich.)
La Mafia came to the U.S. during the wave of immigrants from Italy and Sicily between 1880 and 1914. The American version developed both imported and homegrown. Some Sicilian Mafia leaders came over and continued their racketeering operations. Most Italian immigrants settled in American big cities where only the hardest work for the smallest pay was made available to them, so the industrious among them formed organizations along the lines of the Sicilian brotherhood.
Mafia members lived by the code of omerta, which said those who call the police are fools or cowards. Those who need police protection are both. If you are attacked, do not give the name of your attacker. Once you recover, you will want to avenge the attack yourself. A wounded man will pledge a vendetta upon his enemy, and say to his assailant, “If I live, I will kill you. If I die, you are forgotten.”
In the early days of the American mob, the top moneymaker was “The Black Hand.” The name came from the black handprint that would be left on the door of a family member who had violated the rules and was slated for death. In exchange for money, a person’s business would be “protected.” If the money wasn’t paid, bad things happened, often involving incendiary and explosive devices—or black handprints. The government called it extortion.
Prostitution was a big earner for the Mafia. Mobsters didn’t actually run the brothels, of course. That would be demeaning. Instead, they took a cut in exchange for protection.
The American families—called families because the men in their ranks were considered brothers—maintained the same military-like structure as the original in Sicily. You had your boss, underboss, the caporegima or captains (in Brooklyn, captains were sometimes called “Skipper,” like the captain of a ship or the manager of a baseball club; each captain ran his own crew), and the soldiers, a.k.a. button men or good fellows (spelled goodfellas today because of the movie). To become a member, you had to be recommended by a member, at which time a thorough vetting occurred to make sure there was no loose talk in the candidate’s past.
For years it was necessary for a prospective new member to “make his bones.” That meant participating in a murder. New members had to have Italian fathers (although the ethnicity of mothers and wives was open). New members were inducted only when membership was open and the commission said it was okay. There were very few new members brought into the fold during the late 1950s and early 1960s, which is why so many crews—like the one I knew on President Street, was comprised mostly of non-made guys (and in our case non-Italians). The last step before induction was an in-person interview with the boss, at which time the candidate’s willingness to kill, and to obey all orders without hesitation, was determined.
Before the days of Vegas and legal casinos, gambling parlors were a product of organized crime, back-room affairs—quieter, smokier, and more private than the huge, brightly lit, and oxygen-rich casinos that grew with legality. Before OTB, mob betting-parlors took action from an assortment of tracks. In Brooklyn the man at the end of certain bars took bets, daily double, trifecta, whatever you wanted. If you ran out of cash, money would be lent with a two-point weekly vig. Before Lotto, the mob ran numbers out of a policy bank.
Prohibition proved that alcohol was America’s favorite medicine, that boozers were many and the abstemious few. The Mafia went wholly into bootlegging and thrived, a welcomed alternative government in an era when the actual government was helpless to deaden pain or relieve despair. It was during the Depression that New York City mob organized into families.
Mobsters, being hotheaded and ambitious, sometimes did not get along with one another. Inter- and intra-family disputes erupted. Some battles were over turf. Others, internal battles over matters of leadership. There was always trouble if tribute payments failed to reach the top.
The bloody Sicilian tradition of the vendetta continued. Mobsters were the heroes of the day. They were brave, facing imminent death at all times. They flipped off a corrupt system that kept the Italians in their slums. By the mid-twentieth century, the mob’s skim was so ubiquitous that it raked in upward of $50 billion a year. And nowhere in America was the Mafia as in control and as influential in all elements of life as in Brooklyn, New York, particularly Red Hook, where Italian men had two choices: be a longshoreman and break your back on the piers or be a hood with a chance of rolling in dough.
In the mid-nineteenth century, the topography at Red Hook was altered as businessmen rendered it more suitable to commerce. In its natural state, the Gowanus Creek
flowed through abundant marshland into the Gowanus Bay portion of New York harbor. As the farmland around the creek urbanized, Brooklyn’s officials converted the creek into a canal. It took from 1849 to 1869. By that time, the land around the canal, through Red Hook and ending in the area known as Gowanus, had been filled in, fully inhabited, and industrialized. Almost immediately the water went bad as industries, in particular gas refiners dumped their waste into it, creating a gurgling stew thick with heavy metals and coal tar. In 1911, an attempt was made to improve the quality of the canal’s water, which had grown so sludgy in spots that it ceased to be technically liquid. They built a one-and-a-half-mile tunnel—called the Flushing Tunnel—that used the tides to provide a flushing system into Buttermilk Channel, the narrow waterway separating Brooklyn from Governor’s Island. The system was only marginally successful, and by 1930, as our story begins, the low-rent Red Hook section of Brooklyn was known first and foremost for its stink.
Red Hook was a grimy neighborhood of narrow cobblestone streets built upon a hook-shaped piece of land that protruded into New York Bay, forming a perfect place for cargo boats to pick up and drop off.
At the turn of the twentieth century, the area around the piers and the Gowanus was Irish. In the mid-1920s the Red Hook waterfront was run by a gang called the White Hand. They were ruthless bootleggers. They whacked guys—and shook down the unions, wharf owners, and barge owners alike. Peg Leg Lonergan, Aaron Heins, and Needles Ferry were rubbed out on January 9, 1926, in the Adonis Social Club speakeasy/brothel in Red Hook. The Italians and Irish fought sometimes, got along sometimes. Things never had a chance to get out of hand because they went together to Mass on Sunday at St. Stephens on Hicks Street between Carroll and Summit. The Italians gradually took over. Or maybe they just stayed behind after the Irish moved. By the time of the stock market crash in 1929, Red Hook was known to outsiders as Brooklyn’s Little Italy.
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