by Joe Pistone
There was an isolation booth for translators, and the Sicilians who did not speak English wore headphones and heard the witnesses through simultaneous translation, like at the U.N.
Jury selection began on September 30, 1985.There were twelve jurors selected, and twelve alternate jurors selected to take the place of any jurors who dropped out along the way. They were informed that their names were not going to be released to either side in the trial, nor to the media. They were not told the true reason for their anonymity, but this was to be an anonymous jury for their own safety and to prevent bribery attempts, or worse. Judge Leval told the jurors that the trial would take six months of their lives. He was wrong by nearly a full year. During the trial, despite the anonymity of the jury, one of the jurors had to be excused because her daughter had received a threatening phone call.
I once remarked in an interview that the trial itself was a circus. What I meant was that the defense attorneys made it a circus by their explosive arguments during recesses. They had their own conference room, but even with the door shut you could stand in the hallway and hear them screaming at each other. They argued over tactics and over who was betraying whom. It was dog-eat-dog. One lawyer’s defense of his client often undermined another lawyer’s.
During the long ordeal of the trial, it became obvious that a rift had developed between the Knickerbocker Avenue Zips headed by Toto Catalano, and the Sicilian faction headed by Gaetano Badalamenti.
With three months of trial left to go, one of the Knickerbocker Avenue Zip defendants, Tommy Mazzara, was found wrapped in two plastic garbage bags in the gutter in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, two miles from Knickerbocker Avenue. There were two bullets in his head and his body had been mutilated as if with a meat cleaver.
A week after that, bullets struck Gaetano Badalamenti’s nephew, the defendant Pietro Alfano, and an innocent bystander on a street in Greenwich Village. Alfano was the owner of a pizza parlor in Oregon, Illinois, a tiny town of about 3,800 lying 100 miles west of Chicago. At the time he was arrested on the indictment in April 1984, agents found an arsenal of weapons including submachine guns in his house and garage. Nevertheless, Alfano was out on bail during the trial. On the night he got shot, Alfano was shopping with his wife on the Avenue of the Americas near West Ninth Street. Alfano had just left the Italian gourmet delicatessen, Balducci’s, carrying a bag of Italian bread, cheeses, and salami. Two men approached him from behind. One stuck a .38 caliber gun in the small of Alfano’s back and fired three quick rounds. Bang, bang, bang. One bullet struck his spine. It permanently paralyzed him from the waist down. Another bullet passed through his body and lodged in the thigh of a passerby, a transit worker named Ronald Price.
The Bureau had had Alfano under physical surveillance for the first few days following Tommy Mazzara’s murder. In the course of following Alfano they noticed a Cadillac that also seemed to be following Alfano. They jotted down the license number. Later, when Alfano was shot, they worked backward from the license-plate number and solved the hit in no time. Three Brooklyn wannabes had been paid $40,000 to hit Alfano—$10,000 each and $10,000 for expenses.
Six days after Alfano’s shooting, the FBI arrested multimillionaire supermarket tycoon Patsy Conte, Sr. for the murder-for-hire of Alfano. Conte owned twelve Conte’s Supermarkets and was a director on the board of the Key Food chain of seventy-eight supermarkets sprinkled through the five boroughs of New York. Conte, a known heroin trafficker, was an ally of Toto Catalano. Conte refused to answer any questions. Unfortunately, down the road, the charges against Conte had to be dropped when the informants’ memories took a nosedive.
The trial itself began on October 24, 1985 and took seventeen months to reach a verdict. When it was over, it had generated 41,000 transcript pages of testimony from over 275 witnesses. Each prosecution witness was vigorously cross-examined, and each defense attorney had the right to participate in the cross-examination. The 24 jurors had to pay attention and sit like prisoners through every second of it.
Both the devil and the angel were in the details, and the jury was expected to remember it all. And they were expected to be able to deliberate and consider the evidence as to whether it applied or did not apply to each defendant as if there were 22 separate trials.
The principal witnesses were turncoats and me.
Tomasso Buscetta of Sicily, a lifelong friend of Gaetano Badalamenti, was the highest-ranking Sicilian Mafioso ever to turn. Almost a year and a half before the jury began deliberating, Buscetta was the first witness called by the prosecution. His testimony was “criminal enterprise” testimony. Buscetta told the jury that in 1957 he was present at a high-level meeting in Palermo, Sicily. He testified that among those present at the meeting were the defendant Gaetano Badalamenti, who was at that time the boss of the Sicilian Mafia; Lucky Luciano, the drug trafficker and American Mafioso who created the Commission in 1931 and who had been deported to Italy after the war; Bonanno underboss Carmine Galante; and his boss, Joe Bananas Bonanno. Buscetta testified that in 1959, at the suggestion of Joe Bananas, the Sicilian Mafia set up their own Commission patterned after the American Mafia Commission. Buscetta testified that a Mafioso in Sicily, Saca Catalano, told him that his cousin Toto Catalano was a capo in the Bonanno family in America under Joe Bananas. Buscetta said that he had turned on the Mafia out of concern for his family’s safety. He did not tell the jury that rivals in the Sicilian Mafia had killed several members of his family, including two of his sons.
Buscetta was in the Witness Protection Program, one of the powerful new law and order tools that were created in 1970 at the time of the passage of the RICO statute. Buscetta was amazed at how he could be protected in this program in America, still the land of opportunity. Basically, the Program is used as an incentive to get convicted wiseguys to turn and testify against other criminals. For their cooperation they get reduced sentences and then are placed with their families in a community far away where they have to make a new life for themselves as ordinary citizens. The Program—administered by federal U.S. Marshals who keep these guys in check—has been an invaluable tool in getting the goods on countless criminals in order to put them away.
Salvatore Contorno, a former member of the Sicilian Mafia, was the next witness. Contorno testified that he had been arrested in Italy on narcotics charges and began cooperating to lessen his punishment.
As far as I could ever tell, the only family that made a serious effort to outlaw narcotics trafficking was the Chicago outfit. Their fear was that narcotics arrests, carrying severe penalties, would create rats and jeopardize their lucrative gambling, labor, and extortion rackets, and their share of the Las Vegas skim. At the other extreme, the Bonanno family and John Gotti’s crew in the Gambino family practically specialized in narcotics. The rest of the bosses did the occasional narcotics deal or looked the other way when narcotics money flowed upstream, pretending not to know where the money came from.
Badalamenti and Catalano were able to operate pizza parlors as fronts for heroin smuggling in Chicago’s territory, in part I believe, because the Chicago outfit did not traffic in narcotics. Salvatore Contorno, as he put his hand on the Bible, was a poster boy for the Chicago outfit’s ban against narcotics.
Contorno testified that in February 1980 he attended a meeting in a house in a lemon grove in Bagheria, Sicily. Toto Catalano and Tommy Mazzara (the defendant later found in the gutter in Greenpoint) were also in attendance. The purpose of the meeting was to test the purity of a shipment of heroin bound for America.
Cuts and dots had been put on the bags containing the heroin. Contorno explained, “The envelopes had markings in order to avoid arguments. . . . They were particular markings so that the merchandise could not be confused. . . . The goods that we had seen in Bagheria had been lost, had been seized in Milan. . . . The police had seized it in Milan.”
Contorno testified that a cousin of one of the defendants had offered him an opportunity to invest in the defendant’s heroin smugg
ling operation. “He had pizza parlors here in America as a front, and there would be no problem in shipping the goods to America because he was a man of honor, as we were.”
Did Contorno invest? “No,” he explained. “I had no money.”
Of course not, he was a soldier.
On December 17, 1985, in the second month of the trial, Judge Pierre Leval summoned the jury into his courtroom and addressed remarks to them, saying, “Some of you may be aware that yesterday in New York City, a defendant in another trial in this courthouse was killed on the streets of the city. There has been so much publicity; it will come to your attention, if it hasn’t already. So now let me repeat something I have said to you many times before: Do not allow yourselves to be exposed to any publicity. There are certain to be many articles. Do not read or watch TV. Second, the events of yesterday have absolutely nothing to do with the case before you. There is no conceivable connection. Anyone have a problem with that? All right. Let’s proceed.”
On the evening before, at 5:15 p.m., the boss of bosses, 69-year-old Big Paul Castellano, and his right-hand man Tommy Bilotti had been whacked getting out of their Lincoln in front of Sparks Steakhouse on 46th Street in Manhattan.
At the time, Big Paul was a defendant in a Gambino family RICO trial involving a stolen-car ring. I didn’t testify in that case, but my intelligence helped establish probable cause for the bug in Big Paul’s White House. If our jury knew what was going on in that courtroom they would have demanded a transfer. The star witness in that trial was Vic Arena, “the gay hit man.” In exchange for his cooperation,Vic wanted his gay jailhouse lover to be put in the cell next to his, and he wanted Rudy Giuliani’s office to treat him to a face-lift.
Nothing for nothing, but things in our courtroom were about to get at least a little more colorful with the next witness. Luigi Ronsisvalle, 47 years old, came to Knickerbocker Avenue in 1966 at the age of 26 armed with a letter of recommendation to the Bonanno family from the Sicilian Mafia in his native Catania, and possessing a fourth-grade education.
Luigi confessed to 13 murders the way you or I might confess to having eaten the last slice of cake in the refrigerator. His first slice of cake was at 18 in Sicily. His last slice was the 1979 pay-for-hire shooting of a restaurant chef who had allegedly raped a Brooklyn father’s 14-year-old daughter. The girl’s father had gone to the Mafia instead of the criminal justice system seeking the death penalty to avenge his child. Luigi walked into the restaurant and asked to see the chef. The chef said, “That’s me,” and Luigi blew him away on the spot.
Luigi explained his hits to the jury in English with a heavy Italian accent. “That was a job. It had nothing to do with destroying people. . . . If you give me $30,000 to kill a person, you kill him, not me.”
Pressed further about the 13 hits, Luigi explained further: “I’m-a no kill. I’ma the messenger. The bullet kill. I’m-a just-a the messenger.”
I got to know Luigi during preparation for the trial. For some reason, he liked me a lot. He was nearly six feet, round and balding with glasses. He was a character and could make people laugh, but there was a dangerous edge to him. Everybody was afraid of him. We had a blue suit made for him to testify in, and the tailor was scared to death of him. “Where’s the red handkerchief?” Luigi wanted to know, pointing to the pocket on the suit jacket. He was a hell of a cook, too. He came in one day with a delicious birthday cake he had made for Louis Freeh’s birthday.
One morning the cross-examination droned on and on. Finally, close to one o’clock, Luigi turned to Judge Pierre Leval and asked, “How about lunch, your honor?” The jury exploded with laughter.
Luigi educated the jury on the art of transporting heroin through airports. He was always the last one to board the plane. He carried a garment bag to cover the bulge created by the two kilos of heroin taped to his body. About fifteen times he had been paid $5,000 a trip to drive 80-pound shipments from the Bonanno family in Brooklyn to the Gambino family in Manhattan. About fifteen times he availed himself of the Amtrak system to deliver 40-pound loads to pizza parlors in Chicago, again for the standard fee of $5,000.
Luigi recalled for the jury that in 1978 he and another Zip had driven 220 pounds of heroin from Miami Beach to Knickerbocker Avenue in the trunk of a red Porsche. Actually, Luigi the killer’s role was to guard the heroin with his pistola and shotgun. They were met on Knickerbocker Avenue by Toto Catalano, who went into the Café del Viale and walked out with another Zip who immediately took possession of the red Porsche and its load of heroin, and drove it away.
Regarding the Zip who had driven the red Porsche from Miami Beach, Luigi testified that, before the trip, in a conversation in a café with Toto Catalano in attendance, “He say, ‘Luigi, you know the pipe from Canada with the oil. Well we got the same thing, from Sicily, with heroina.’”
Luigi explained to the jury his motivation for initially turning himself in and cooperating in 1979, long before there was even a remote thought of a Pizza Connection Case happening some day.
Luigi had been hired by the crooked Italian financier Michelle Sindona to frighten a Wall Street figure into not testifying against Sindona. In true Sicilian Mafia fashion, Sindona had also offered Luigi $100,000 to whack the United States Attorney running the case against Sindona, John Kenney. Before he could whack anybody, Luigi got arrested for an attempted purse-snatching robbery. Luigi contacted Sindona’s right-hand man for $30,000 to help him with the robbery charge, and when Sindona refused, Luigi decided to fix him. Anger, resentment, and revenge became more important to Luigi than anything else. Luigi turned himself in and implicated himself in the 1979 murder of the suspected child rapist, even though nobody suspected Luigi. For the murder, he was sentenced to five to 15 years. But it was all worth it because Luigi got an opportunity to turn state’s evidence against Sindona and expose his efforts to intimidate the Wall Street witness and conspire to murder the prosecutor.
Two months after Luigi testified to all of this in the Pizza Connection Case in Manhattan, somebody poisoned Michelle Sindona in his jail cell in Italy. Someone higher than Sindona obviously suspected that Sindona might be sensing that his goose was truly cooked and he needed silencing before he could follow the lead of Luigi.
Then came my turn. But first the judge had to rule on whether I could testify about the predicate crime of the murder of Carmine Galante in 1979 in this heroin-smuggling RICO case. In his opening statement months earlier, Assistant United States Attorney Robert Stewart had described the murder to the jury and detailed the involvement of Baldo Amato and Toto Catalano in the hit.
Before recessing for the day, Judge Pierre Leval ruled that it would be prejudicial to allow me to mention the hit on the three capos, or anything pertaining to the importation of Zips to pizza parlors for the purpose of trafficking in heroin.
Overnight, Judge Leval considered the legal challenge to that part of my testimony concerning the Galante hit, and ruled that I could not mention that, either. The judge’s reasoning was that the Galante hit was not in any way in furtherance of the heroin smuggling conspiracy, but was Mafia politics and the result of an internal Bonanno family power struggle. Obviously, Louis Freeh and Robert Stewart and the rest of the prosecutors disagreed, or they would not have included the Galante hit as a predicate crime in the narcotics conspiracy charge. I certainly disagreed, but I had no say.
If I’d had a chance to address Judge Leval, I would have told him that, at least in one important way, the motive to whack Galante was clearly in furtherance of the narcotics conspiracy. The Commission considered Galante an illegitimate boss who was greedy and wasn’t sharing his narcotics-conspiracy treasure. For the Zips to continue their profitable heroin partnership with the Sicilians back home in the old country, they needed to side with the legitimate boss approved by the Commission, and that was Rusty Rastelli. And the time-honored golden parachute for a boss about to be forcibly retired is a shotgun blast or two. The time-honored method of showing your loyalty
to the legitimate boss sanctioned by the Commission is to whack the illegitimate boss yourself. In this case, the deceased heroin-smuggling Zip Cesare Bonventre and his childhood playmate Baldo Amato took active parts in the murders at Joe and Mary’s. Toto Catalano, as street boss of the Zips, equally participated in the murder of Galante because it was good for business. In fact, it was essential for the continued success of his heroin business.
At any rate, all I could do was take the stand and do the best I could on the issues I was being called to testify on, namely, the criminal enterprise, the structure of the Mafia, and details of the Bonanno family.
“The Commission,” I told the jury, “was the governing body of the Mafia.”
And, “Paul Castellano was one of the most powerful men on the Commission in New York City.”
Judge Pierre Leval permitted me to testify—without mentioning the Galante hit or the three-capos hit—that there was “friction and tension in the Bonanno family” and that Sonny Black met with Paul Castellano in 1980 after first forming a new alliance with the Zip faction of the Bonanno family, led by Toto Catalano. It was this new alliance that resolved the friction.
The prosecutor showed me a surveillance photo of Tony Mirra and Toto Catalano kissing each other, and asked me, “Agent Pistone, were you ever kissed . . . in this manner?”
“The whole assignment—till 1981,” I said, and the jury laughed.
The jury also seemed to be amused when I explained that the entire Mafia shut down for Mother’s Day every year. No one was allowed to work on that day.
I later read that Badalamenti’s lawyer, Michael Kennedy, said in the hallway that I was one of the bravest men he had ever heard of. He also said about me, “He’s pissed off because ninety percent of his testimony was cut out.” Kennedy called out to a newspaperman, “I’ve got your next headline—‘Pierre pissed on Pistone.’”
