Carmine the Snake

by Frank DiMatteo

  “Let me talk about Lonardo just a little bit more. I don’t want to bore you with him. What did he come up here to say? Did he come up here to say anything about the construction? He don’t know anything about construction, he says that. Does he know Carmine Persico? No, he don’t know Carmine Persico. But he came up here to talk about Mafia and rules which Mr. Savarese said that alone can’t convict. You got to have direct evidence. You don’t have no direct evidence of Carmine Persico. He never met him. He said he met my son, Alphonse Persico, Carmine Persico’s son. When he met Carmine Persico’s son, they didn’t talk about construction, they talked about helping Alphonse Persico, his uncle, if he could come in and surrender and get five years—five years for slapping Joe Cantelupo. That says he was a shylock. Joe Cantelupo says that. They didn’t talk about construction.

  “How many people did Lonardo say he killed? Admitted? He had a hundred years, life plus twenty-five. It’s a lot of years. Talk about prejudice. That’s what they brought him here for: prejudice, to use the Mafia. He went back to 1927, how he killed a doctor because a doctor operated on his cousin, his cousin died with appendix and he went and killed the doctor. He says he’s a boss. Him. You have to take his word for it. There was no other evidence for it. I’ll talk no more about Mr. Lonardo.

  “Now they are going to bring the big evidence in this case. Mr. Chertoff, again in summation, said, you’ve seen the checks. Joyce Persico and Michael Persico’s check, two checks. He showed you the two checks but he didn’t tell you what the checks are. They just showed them, endorsement, nobody said what they are. They didn’t say they are supposed to be a pay to me through my wife. Mr. Savarese said the Mafia, they don’t write checks to the Mafia. You pay them cash, hundred dollar bills. That’s what they said. But if you write a no-show job check, bring it to Carmine Persico’s wife, Joyce, she’ll cash it. And then they bring it here. Ask them on that ride back. Ask them to tell us what the checks are for. What are they here for? Are they evidence? Evidence to what? Evidence that Gerry Langella knows Carmine Persico and knows Joyce Persico? What is it? What do they want you to believe from this? What inference do they want you to draw from this? Is this direct evidence? I don’t know. They showed them to you but they haven’t told us what they want us to believe from them. Maybe on the trip back they’ll tell us.”

  Carmine complained about the attention the government gave to his farm in Saugerties, how they made it seem like something out of a James Bond novel, a fortress. One thing they didn’t do. Show the jury photos. Carmine took care of that. “Smaller than you thought, huh?” he commented. “See how sinister.” That got a small laugh. Carmine reiterated that he didn’t even own the farm, not even a piece of it. It was owned by his son, Alphonse T. Persico. The attention the government paid to the property “since it was bought” was more “tinseltown, another cardboard front. What does this got to do with this case? Let them prove I own that farm. They did not.” They did the same thing with the cost of Joyce Persico’s two automobiles. They were gifts from sons Little Allie Boy and Michael. “Nothing was hidden from the government,” Carmine said.

  He discussed the meeting he’d attended that was raided and violated his parole. “I was running out the back, they said, and there with this person and this person and this person. I did five years for that. What does it have to do with this case? Nothing.

  “Another label: acting boss. Everybody acts for Carmine Persico but you never see Carmine Persico acting or doing anything. You see Little Allie Boy or Gerry Lang doing this or that, and the government infers that they are following orders. Oh-oh, here’s a picture of Ralph Scopo and Alphonse Persico talking. They spent fifteen minutes together in Dyker Heights. They didn’t mention that Allie Boy has an office near there, that his mother lives near there. They’ll have you think everything Alphonse T. does is for his father. They had a theory that trouble started because Donnie Shacks went off on his own and did something without Carmine Persico not knowing about it. Theories. They didn’t bring up one witness that said he talked to me, except Fred DeChristopher. They told you about all the phones they got tapped and Fred DeChristopher says I’m running a family through the phones. A prison phone is not an easy place to talk about criminal activity. The government has access to a list of every visitor I ever received in prison, of every phone call I made or received, and they introduced none of that into evidence here. I’ll leave it up to you to figure out why.

  “They come up with records from 1957, hotel bills from 1957. No phone records, no taps. Donnie’s phone was bugged, Gerry’s phone was, and Tom DiBella’s house was, Donnie’s club, Casa Storta, the restaurant, Scopo’s. Tell me something: why in 1982 if Tom DiBella is retired, they say he is, why would they be bugging his phone? If Carmine Persico is the boss and he is giving orders to his son, don’t you think they would tap the son’s phone? Get a court order and put a bug in his house? They don’t do none of these things. And they don’t have my voice on tape.”

  He’d been revving up, but now paused, took a sip of water, and when he started again he spoke softer and more slowly. Carmine told the jury he had heard and appreciated the cleverness of Mr. Chertoff’s using the phrase “bold and brazen” against him, as he presented legit witnesses who’d been victimized and had really suffered. He trusted the jury knew which of the government’s witnesses the phrase was meant to describe.

  “Fred DeChristopher was bold and brazen,” Carmine said. “The million-dollar roundtable man, insurance man. His wife, son, and son-in-law all said he couldn’t hear too good. While on this stand, seventy-seven times Mr. DeChristopher asked Mr. Chertoff to repeat the question. ‘Didn’t hear you,’ he said. Right after he married Katherine DeChristopher, for no other reason than to be a good citizen, he says, he went to the FBI and started giving them information. He says I went to his house on November 12. He accepted me at the house. He didn’t tell me I had to leave. He accepted me. He took me in the house and I stayed there for three months. He decided, the first time I went there, to give me up, but only after he goes to the post office and sees my wanted poster and the $50,000 reward.

  “It’s true. I fled. I came home from jail after four years, first time eight years, second time four years, and I ran away. Maybe, again, I was tired of going back and forth to jail. Maybe I was tired of being pulled into these courtrooms, being tried on my name, my reputation. Maybe I was afraid. Not again. For what? What could I have done being in jail for so long, so many years? When does it end? When do they stop? When do they leave you alone? When do they stop inferring? Why don’t they get proof, direct evidence?

  “So I went to Fred and Katherine’s house and I stayed there. Then I got caught and they put me on trial. Who comes to testify? Fred DeChristopher. The government puts him on the stand and he tells you, ‘Carmine Persico spoke to me.’ He says I knew Carmine Galante. Met him in jail. Played cards. That’s evidence? He got in all the key words though: boss, top man, organized crime family, control. He only came here to testify, do his duty. If you noticed, he never remembered. ‘I can’t recall.’ But as soon as you shook a piece of paper at him, he remembered. He only testified to what you showed him. And he talked about the things he says I told him. They never even tried to prove it was true. They took his word for it. Did he say, ‘Persico told me there are ten guns in this house,’ and they went there and found ten guns? No. It was just conversation. Even though there was always someone else in the house, Fred is the only one who heard these conversations. He owes a lot of people money, can’t pay it back, but he paid $800 a month for his girlfriend’s rent, paid for his daughter’s wedding, $20,000, $30,000, says he got scared seeing people come to his house, Anthony Scarpati outside his house, he’s not family. After I came, he left his house with six dollars and no teeth, owing money to everybody, without a dime in the world, and he wants you to believe he didn’t want the $50,000 reward money for turning me in, that he is here testifying because he’s a good citizen. They told you to bring your com
mon sense with you to this courtroom and I pray to God you brought it with you as we talk about Fred DeChristopher. When he came here to testify the government was paying him $3,000 a month. That is bought-and-paid-for testimony. He did pretty good for a man who ran away from home with six dollars and no teeth. The government gave him a new life, a new life to start with his girlfriend. Dedicated family man, worried about his children, left his whole life behind, never even called them, never even bothered to find out how they were doing, never bothered to send them money, didn’t care if they had money or not. Despicable? How much more despicable can you be than Fred DeChristopher?”

  Carmine paused for a drink of water and steadied himself for the final push.

  “Mafia, Mafia, Mafia. Take Mafia out of this trial, there’s no case here. Mafia and my past and that I have been in jail. That’s what they depended on to convict everybody here. How much longer do they want me to keep on paying for that mistake I made”—referring to his hijacking conviction—“to go to jail. Mafia, Mafia, and jail.”

  He came home from prison and they tailed him every second. He was on parole. Why didn’t they call his shadow to the stand? Because they never saw him doing anything, that was why.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, I can’t say that I never did anything wrong, because you know I have been to jail, but you can’t send me back to jail because I’ve been in jail. They have to prove I did something else. And the only thing in this country that makes anybody have faith in this justice system is the jury. Ask someone that knows. We have no faith in the prosecutor. We have no faith in the courts. We have faith in the jury because the jury is people with no ax to grind. They come in here, they promise to judge the evidence as they see it, and thank God for the jury system in this country. That is what makes us separate and apart from any other country. And our faith is in the jury.

  “You gave us your promise that you won’t be prejudiced, that you will look for the evidence, and I say if you look for the evidence, you will find no evidence against Carmine Persico that he extorted any money from any contract companies or had anything to do with the concrete companies.

  “Thank you, ladies and gentlemen.”

  He had spoken for ninety minutes.

  * * *

  The lawyers for the other defendants didn’t have Carmine’s advantage. Their clients had not been in prison when the crimes occurred. And their voices and images appeared in much of the surveillance footage the jury watched for more than two months. They argued that things were not as they appeared and sounded on those tapes. Their clients had not been extorting anyone. They’d been given a fee for mediating business deals. That’s all. Sure the defendants had met in Staten Island, sure they had a club of sorts, but that didn’t mean they were masterminding anything.

  The only defendant not in the club was Bonanno capo, Bruno Indelicato. He was in a different club, altogether. The jury had seen Indelicato in a surveillance video taken in Little Italy at the Ravenite Club—Neil Dellacroce, your host—only hours after the 1979 hit on Bonanno boss Carmine Galante, a death that hastened Indelicato’s criminal success. The video showed Indelicato being congratulated on the “good job” he did. On that evidence—and the fact that he left a palmprint on the getaway car, and was promoted from soldier to capo soon after the hit—he was on trial for Galante’s murder. Even if Indelicato did leave his palmprint on a getaway car, that didn’t mean he was an agent for any so-called Commission. It was all the government’s active imagination.

  The last word to the jury came from Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael Chertoff. He said that he disagreed strongly with the defense’s claim that belonging to the Mafia should not in itself be considered a crime. “The Mafia is very relevant in this case. The Mafia is relevant because it is the Mafia that makes possible this kind of concerted criminal activity,” Chertoff explained. The Mafia itself was on trial here.

  * * *

  The jury deliberated for five full days, repeatedly asking for tapes to be shown to or played for them one more time. The last tape they asked to re-hear was the one in which Salerno took credit for “making” all of the mob’s current members, and Tony Ducks said that killing firm and infirm men needed to be done with an equally cool dispatch.

  Early on the sixth day of deliberation the jury foreman informed the court that the jurors had reached a unanimous verdict—151 of them, in fact. The jury convicted the eight defendants on all counts. The defendants took it without outward emotion, all but Indelicato, who giggled inappropriately.

  * * *

  January 13, 1987, Carmine was sentenced in the commission case to one hundred years in prison. He was the only defendant to make a statement following his sentencing. Carmine addressed the court, “This case was prejudiced from the first day, and that is because of the slanted and unfair publicity the case received, all of this Mafia-mania that’s been flying around. Your honor, I urge you to focus on a defense accusation of prosecutorial misconduct instead of attempting to satisfy the public that he’s sending Mafia people to jail for one hundred years.”

  Looking at it from a gang-busting point of view, this had to be the best day ever. Here was the Mafia’s “board of directors.” Fat Tony Salerno, Genovese; Tony “Ducks” Corallo, Lucchese; and Carmine Persico, Colombo—all gone forever. Seven of the eight drew a century. Bruno Indelicato got forty years.

  The only defendant to sass the judge was Sal “Tom Mix” Santoro, seventy-two years old, Lucchese underboss. The evidence against him consisted of tapes of him mediating a loan-shark dispute with Tony Ducks.

  As the judge was about to read Tom Mix his sentence, “You are in the driver’s seat, Judge. Give me the hundred years.”

  “I’m just doing my job, Mr. Santoro,” Judge Owen said.

  “And you’re doing a good job,” was Santoro’s sarcastic reply.

  When Judge Owen was about to sentence Gerry Lang, his lawyer Frank Lopez pointed out that Lang was already doing a stint. “He doesn’t have that much more time to give to his country, Your Honor,” Lopez said. Lang nonetheless was sentenced to one hundred years, and would die at age seventy-four at the U.S. Medical Center for Federal Prisoners in Springfield, Missouri, on December 15, 2013.

  The judge was calm and efficient except for when he sentenced Fat Tony Salerno, who during the trial had spent more time thinking about his own discomfort than the legal matters being bandied about. Salerno was allowed to snack on cookies and candy while court was in session but still complained about getting a sandwich instead of a hot lunch at the noon break. There was a fuss when co-defendant Indelicato tried to slip Salerno a sandwich during court, but the transfer was spotted and the food confiscated. That stuff had annoyed the judge, but it was Fat Tony’s career synopsis that really pissed him off: “You have essentially spent a lifetime terrorizing this community to your financial advantage,” Judge Owen said.

  * * *

  Carmine, somewhat ludicrously, was on trial twice at the same time. Justice would seem to indicate that a guy facing life in prison should be able to take on his trials one at a time, so he could properly prepare for both. But Carmine was not given that consideration, mostly because he had co-defendants. Unless Carmine was to be tried separately, and the government did not want to do that, he was going to have to endure overlapping trials.

  While he was doing an admirable but imperfect job representing himself at the commission trial, the “Colombo trial” was also devastating Carmine’s chances for future freedom. Because there was overlap, both trials were held in Federal District Court in Manhattan.

  At the Colombo trial, U.S. Attorney Aaron R. Marcu, a Harvard Law graduate, offered the jury a short bio, saying that Junior killed his first human being in 1951, when he was seventeen years old. While it is true that Carmine was arrested for murder in March 1951, those charges were dropped and his brother Alphonse took the entire rap for shooting Steve Bove in the backseat of the Blue Beetle’s car. This wording on Marcu’s part, put together with Carmine’s
arrest following the Prospect Park rumble, may have been the origin of the story that Carmine as a teenager beat a kid to death with his bare hands.

  In November 1985, at the Colombo trial, with Judge John F. Keenan presiding, the first and star prosecution witness was Richard Annicharico, the bribable IRS agent that wore a wire while meeting with Carmine and others back in 1978. He was on the stand for four days.

  Annicharico had been allowed to listen to the tapes earlier and had initialed them. He testified as to the authenticity of their content. The tapes were admitted into evidence and played for the jury.

  The first tape was the clincher, the others window dressing. On that initial recording, jurors heard a meeting between Annicharico and McIntosh, in which McIntosh agreed to pay a hefty bribe, somewhere upward of $250,000, in exchange for Carmine’s early release from prison. There were other tapes supporting the notion that the bribe actually took place. Annicharico was on all of the tapes, of course. He was the one wearing the wire. The final tape was recorded on February 2, 1978, and on it defendant Hugh McIntosh could be heard discussing the $250,000 and saying there was “more where that came from.”

  Carmine Persico, Victor Puglisi, et al. were arrested in connection with the bribery case, but Puglisi disappeared. The bag of money, Annicharico testified, was never recovered by authorities.

  With the jury out of the room, the court heard testimony from Mush Russo’s lawyer, George L. Santangelo, who said that he objected to Annicharico’s testimony implying that witnesses before the 1978 grand jury hearing on Russo’s taxes were going to be bumped off. Judge Keenan sustained the objection, and Annicharico was allowed to say instead that he sought back in 1978 “to insure the witnesses didn’t have any problem.”

  * * *

  Another key prosecution witness was Arlyne Brickman, the professional goomada/informant from New Jersey who cursed a blue streak as she induced men to talk about business. She rode to the courthouse on the morning of her testimony in a van containing heavily armed FBI men. The van drove directly into the basement of the Manhattan courthouse. She wore slacks and high heels. A bit of a hot mess to begin with, she appeared particularly disheveled. She was a nervous wreck, and heard Carmine and his co-defendants snickering at her as she entered the courtroom and took the witness stand. Her presentation was sprinkled with malaprops. She wanted to say asterisks and instead said asteroids. She told her story though: on Belmont Stakes day she’d borrowed money from a loanshark who told her the money came from Anthony Scarpati. She was humiliated during cross-examination when Scarpati’s lawyer Jack Evseroff managed to work the word asteroid into his questions a few times and got a laugh each time. He asked her what she did for a living in 1981. She said she was a housewife, and that got a louder laugh. A more substantive cross came from Gerry Lang’s attorney David Breitbart, who attacked Brickman’s morality, and rattled her with detailed business questions. When Brickman was done, her ego in rags around her feet, FBI agents whisked her to an airport to start a new life.