by Joe Pistone
The rest of the history of Carmine Galante was a history of drugs. His first conviction for heroin distribution was in 1962, for which he got twenty years. But before that, Joe “Bananas” Bonanno had sent Galante to Montreal, Canada in the early fifties. There he got involved with the French Connection heroin trafficking operation. This route of heroin came from labs in Marseilles, France, and was smuggled mostly into Montreal and New York. In the mid-fifties, the Canadian government had had enough of the American-born Galante and deported him back to the States, where he continued working the French Connection heroin traffic in New York until his 1962 drug trafficking conviction.
When the French Connection heroin route was exposed by the NYPD and a crackdown got under way, Galante was already in jail serving his heroin sentence. By the time he got out in 1974, there was a bit of a heroin drought and therefore a greater demand for heroin due to: the crackdown on the French Connection (as dramatized in the movie of the same name); President Richard Nixon’s call for a War on Drugs in 1971; and the creation of the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) in 1973, a major expansion from the former Federal Bureau of Narcotics.
Even before he left jail, Galante saw an opportunity to fill a void using labs in Sicily. The morphine that would be turned into heroin in the Sicilian labs came from where it had always pretty much come from: Turkey. The heroin manufactured in Sicily would be put into shipments of cheese and other foods, and even into shipments of marble as Lefty pointed out to me at CaSa Bella’s. This was nothing new. For a few years after World War II, until pressure from the American government stopped it, the Italians manufactured heroin for pharmaceutical purposes and—surprise, surprise—drug traffickers smuggled it into America. One smuggling technique was to place the heroin in olive oil cans that had false bottoms. The top half of the can was pure olive oil; the bottom half was pure heroin.
But what Galante added was pizza.
When I left Mirra and went “on record” with Lefty, I got an earful from Lefty about “the scumbag Zips. Galante got them in pizza parlors. He got them from New York to Chicago and every little town along the way. They got pizza parlors in places I don’t even know where the fuck that is, and they got a fucking pizza parlor there. That way they can run the heroin from the pizza parlor to wherever he wants it. Then they can go launder the money in Switzerland.”
Lefty told me about the special relationship between Galante and the Zips. “There’s only a few people that Galante’s close to. And mainly that’s the Zips, like Cesare and those you see around Toyland. Those guys are always with him. He brought them over from Sicily, and he uses them for different pieces of work and for dealing all that junk. They’re as mean as he is. You can’t trust those bastard Zips. Nobody can. Except the Old Man. He can trust them because he brought them over here and he can control them.”
Of course he could. When Galante got hit in 1979 in the backyard of Joe and Mary’s Italian American Restaurant on Knickerbocker Avenue, Cesare Bonventre and Baldo Amato were supposed to be guarding him. They were not shot themselves, and they disappeared after the hit. That spelled a set-up by the very ones “he brought over here,” the ones he thought he could control. Although it was a hot summer day when Galante got it, both Cesare and Baldo were wearing leather jackets, signifying a need to protect their bodies from stray pellets or flying debris.
The hit was brutal and had the mark of the Zips on it. Three men in ski masks burst into the backyard and began shooting. The famous photo of Galante crumpled on the ground with his cigar still clenched in his dead jaw, makes people forget that two innocent bystanders were also whacked. Joe Turano of Joe and Mary’s was killed in front of his wife and two children, along with a friend who was there to discuss an insurance policy with Joe and Mary.
Not that Lefty and the rest cared one little bit about the innocent bystanders. “There’s gonna be big changes,” Lefty told me, full of excitement. That’s all that mattered to him. At that point, Lefty and I went from Mike Sabella to Sonny Black. Toto Catalano went from capo to street boss of the Zips. And Cesare Bonventre, the missing bodyguard, went from soldier to capo. At 28, Cesare was the youngest capo in Bonanno family history.
Looking at Cesare Bonventre helps to understand the treachery of the Zips as a group. When Tony Mirra got out of jail, Mirra was put in Cesare’s crew. Later, when Mirra contested Lefty’s claim on me and accused me of stealing $250,000 in drug money, sniffing the green smell of money Cesare backed Mirra. At the sit down, Cesare went so far as to lie that he saw me at Mirra’s disco, Cecil’s, every night with Mirra.
“He says you were with him every night,” Lefty told me during the Mafia litigation over me, full knowing that most nights I was with Lefty.
“And don’t forget,” Lefty added. “We’re fooling around with Zips. They’ll keep pecking. Greaseballs are motherfuckers. When a Zip kisses, forget about it. They hate the American people. They hate the American wiseguys.”
Lefty explained that the hit on Galante had required approval from the Zips in order for Rusty Rastelli to get approval from Big Paul Castellano and the other Commission bosses. Lefty said the reason Galante “got whacked is that he wouldn’t share his drug business with anybody else in the family.”
Lefty added an unnecessary cautionary comment: “If they can hit a boss, nobody’s immune.”
On June 19, 1979, a month before Carmine Galante was whacked and two years before I came out, police in Sicily had discovered that a suitcase shipped from New York contained $497,000 wrapped in pizzeria aprons.
According to Lefty and Sonny, Cesare Bonventre had been in league with the three capos who were whacked on May 5th, 1981. The four of them had planned to hit Sonny Black. But then Cesare changed his mind. Cesare Bonventre, who was in jail on a weapons charge on the day of the hit, had switched sides, bringing his Zips with him and dooming the three capos.
The Bonanno family’s biggest moneymaker was in the pizza-parlor heroin money-laundering business, and that enterprise depended entirely on the connection between the Zips and their relatives back home in the Sicilian Mafia. The boss who had the Zips was like the pirate captain who had the buried treasure. Galante’s offense was that he wouldn’t share any treasure with the rest of the family. So, after Galante was gone, Sonny Black promised to share some of the treasure with Big Paul Castellano, and that’s how Sonny got Big Paul’s approval to hit the three capos. Sonny Black could only promise to share some of the treasure with Big Paul as long as the Zips were with him. If the three capos had the Zips with them, it would have been a different story. As Rusty Rastelli’s strongest capo, Sonny would have gone.
The Zips had a unique power, but they also had their limits. They knew that, to begin with, they had to be subservient to some Bonanno family boss or other. There was no way they would have been allowed to operate in America or Canada on their own. Their cunning peasant instinct informed men like capo Cesare Bonventre and his street boss Toto Catalano as to where the biggest and safest deal was for them. No doubt, Cesare and Toto understood that bosses like Big Paul and the rest of the Commission bosses would have an instinctive leaning toward the jailed boss Rusty Rastelli over the upstart coup of the three capos. Sicilians like Cesare and Toto would have needed no instruction in the self-preservation instinct of the Commission bosses when they were making decisions over matters that, at first blush, seemed to have no bearing on them.
After the three-capos hit, Sonny Black told Lefty and me that Zip capo and former street boss, Sally Fruits Farrugia, wanted to make some of the Zips capos, but Sonny told him no.
“That would be crazy,” Sonny said to Lefty and me, “because those guys are looking to take over everything. That’s why those three guys were killed—they went against the Zips and the Zips came over to our side. We were the ones slated to get hit, but because Sonny Red screwed the Zips, they swung over to us. There’s no way we can make them captains. We’d lose all our strength.”
“You’re going to be in shit’s cree
k, Sonny,” Lefty said.
“Good. I been in shit’s creek eighteen years.”
“I advise you to be a little strong,” Lefty said, “because them fucking Zips ain’t gonna back up to nobody. You give them the fucking power, if you don’t get hurt now, you get hurt three years from now. They’ll bury you. You cannot give them the power. They don’t give a fuck.They don’t care who’s boss. They got no respect. There’s no family.”
If we use the legal standard lawyers use to prove causation—the “but for” standard—there is no doubt in my mind that but for Cesare Bonventre and the Zips switching sides to go with Rusty Rastelli, the three capos would have taken control of the Bonanno family. But for Cesare Bonventre and the Zips switching sides, Carmine Galante would have finished his lunch and his cigar at Joe and Mary’s, and Joe and the other murder victim would have gone on to live full lives with their families.
This is the essence of the intelligence I got on the Zips and the Bonanno family, the Sicilians and the Pizza Connection, and Carmine Galante and the three capos.
I know I’ve probably beaten this subject to death with a roll of dimes, and Jules would say “Amen” to that, but I want to take this last shot at putting my premature coming out in historical context at this point. Nothing for nothing, but when I was pulled, Sonny Black had just accomplished this incredible consolidation of power, bringing the Zips along with him, and I was seated at his right hand, reporting directly to him. I was also a few weeks away from Sonny being able to really confide in me the way he wanted to, and talk freely to me using explicit language. It’s like we had the keys to the vault, but suddenly threw them away.
CHAPTER 10
THE PIZZA CONNECTION, PART 2
THE PIZZA CONNECTION CASE took Rudy Giuliani and his crew over three years to build. Jules and I by no means handed them even the bare bones of a case. FBI Case Agents Carmine Russo and Charlie Rooney, and other agents under supervisors Lew Schiliro and Jimmy Kossler, all worked as a team with electronics expert Jimmy Kallstrom and his bug and wiretap crew. These dedicated and incredibly hard-working men had to go out and find the evidence to use in court to prove the crimes behind the intelligence that I had provided.
One thing that my intelligence on the Zips and heroin smuggling had helped produce, was a shift in FBI policy. From the beginning, the FBI avoided narcotics investigations. Drug investigations were the turf of local police departments and of other federal agencies such as the DEA. Hoover was convinced that narcotics could be a corrupting influence on his agents. In January 1982, President Reagan reversed the Bureau’s longstanding policy and announced that he had ordered the FBI to begin to take an active and leading role in the War on Drugs that Nixon had announced a little over ten years earlier.
Ten months later, in October 1982, President Reagan took the next logical step and gave a speech declaring an all-out federal effort against the Mafia. Jules, working out of Headquarters, had helped President Reagan develop the plan of attack that the president announced that day in October. No doubt the plan and the speech were encouraged by our first RICO victory in the Bonanno family trial two months prior to the speech. Part of the president’s speech sounded like my undercover job description.
“Today,” the president said, “the power of organized crime reaches into every segment of our society. It is estimated that the syndicate has millions of dollars in assets in legitimate businesses; it controls corrupt union locals; it runs burglary rings, fences for stolen goods, holds a virtual monopoly on the heroin trade. . . .”
Connecting a wiretap or planting a bug requires a search warrant. That’s the easy part. The warrant must have a sworn affidavit attached to it setting forth the facts that constitute probable cause for the issuance of the warrant by a judge. That’s the hard part.
Over the past forty years or so, the appeals courts have played with the definition of probable cause. Basically, while this is an over-simplification, an agent needs to set forth in the sworn affidavit enough facts that would allow him to arrest someone, but instead, he wants to listen in to get more evidence to support his arrest. You can’t just tap a phone or install a bug merely because you have a strong suspicion of wrongdoing or you have a cop’s hunch that you’re dealing with bad guys who are doing bad things on the phone or in the place being bugged.
The beauty of a RICO crime is that it allowed for a new concept of “dynamic probable cause,” because the crime was now the crime of being part of a criminal enterprise and not merely of committing a particular crime. Still, probable cause is never easy, and agents rely on prosecutors to steer the words in the affidavits through the tangled web of court rulings. Navigating the tangle of red tape necessary to get approval for phone wiretaps and premises bugs was never more fruitful than in the Pizza Connection Case. In this case, taps and bugs were approved and installed in pizza places throughout the northeastern part of the United States out to Chicago; in phone booths that were used by the smugglers and dealers to communicate; in import-export businesses where the goods were moved; and in other related businesses. After the electronics experts in the Bureau were finished tape-recording conversations for the Pizza Connection Case, they had enough taped conversations to play continuously for five and a half years.
The overwhelming number of these conversations was in the Sicilian dialect, which is almost a different language from Italian. The Bureau had four agents who spoke Sicilian and specialized in the Sicilian Mafia. They were under Carmine Russo, and they had to listen to every word on every tape and translate them into English. Additional interviews were conducted in Europe, and Carmine had to be present at every interview. Interrogations were conducted in Italy by the Italian investigators who were cooperating in the building of the case. Carmine had to be present for every interrogation.
When the indictment was handed down in 1984, there were 35 defendants from both sides of the Atlantic Ocean charged with smuggling $1.65 billion worth of heroin into America from 1975 to 1984. Remember, a billion dollars was a far more astonishing amount of money in those days than it is today. Using stockbrokers, they sent money back to the heroin suppliers in Sicily through banks in Switzerland. By the time the case went to trial in October 1985, the list of defendants had been pared down to 23. Then in February 1986, one died of lung cancer, and on the next day of trial, there were 22 defendants.
Cesare Bonventre had been one of the 35 indicted, but he was not among the 23 defendants to start the trial. Instead, shortly after the indictment and a year before the trial began, Cesare was whacked. Switching sides at the last minute to go with wherever you think the power lies can work in the Mafia, but only for a while. Sooner or later your pals begin to realize that you are not really a stand-up guy. They suspect that you are a one-way guy, too big for your britches, and when your character is tested by an indictment you might switch sides and turn against them. Within a week after he disappeared, Cesare’s body was discovered cut up into three parts in three separate barrels at a glue factory in New Jersey.
This was a RICO indictment with a cast of defendants with Sicilian last names, some of whom had never met each other. Would the jury understand that a RICO violation is the crime of conspiracy, and that the essence of RICO is that as long as each defendant is a member of the criminal enterprise and has committed specific crimes to further that enterprise, it doesn’t matter whether a particular defendant is connected to some other defendant’s particular crime or even knows that the other defendant has committed a particular crime? One defendant might be engaged merely in money laundering, while another might be murdering; as long as they are both intentionally acting to further the aims of the enterprise, they’re guilty of the same RICO crime.
The lead prosecutor was my old friend Louis Freeh. Along with him were the well-regarded crime fighters Robert Stewart, who was brought in from New Jersey, Andrew McCarthy, Richard Martin, and Robert Bucknam.
Because some of the defendants had two attorneys, there were 24 defense attorn
eys sitting with their clients at four long tables. The principal defense attorneys were Michael Kennedy, who had a national reputation, and Ivan Fisher, a New York attorney who years earlier had been retained by writer Norman Mailer to secure the release of convicted rapist and jailhouse writer Jack Abbott, a Mailer literary protégé. Much to Fisher and Mailer’s discredit, a few months after they sprung Abbott, he flew off the handle in a Greenwich Village restaurant and knifed another patron to death.
Michael Kennedy represented the 62-year-old kingpin of the Sicilian faction, Gaetano Badalamenti. Ivan Fisher represented the 44-year-old kingpin of the American Zips, Toto Catalano. These two defendants were the principal focus of the prosecution’s case.
The judge was Pierre Leval, a former United States Attorney in the days before RICO. Early in the trial, Judge Leval made a ruling that would permit at least part of my testimony to be heard by the jury. He ruled, “I have been persuaded by the government’s argument that the existence of the Mafia—and its structure and its rules—is integrally a part of the conspiracy charged, concerning trafficking in heroin and cocaine.” The other major part of my testimony dealt with the hit on Carmine Galante, but the judge’s ruling on that would come later, just before I took the witness stand.
