Donnie Brasco: Unfinished Business

by Joe Pistone

  DeChristopher got to understand what these people were like shortly after he married Andy the Fat Man’s sister. One evening, DeChristopher and his wife went out to dinner with Andy the Fat Man and one of Andy’s associates. The associate said something Andy the Fat Man didn’t like, and so Andy jabbed the associate in the eye with his fork and pressed the fork into the eye, warning the associate that the next time he would take his eye out with the fork.

  DeChristopher had no say in the matter of Persico hiding out in his house, and Persico pretty much took over DeChristopher’s house. By the time the case went to trial, DeChristopher had divorced his wife. He testified that Persico bragged that he ran his “crime family” from jail through phone calls to his underboss and co-defendant Gerry Lang Langella.

  Furthermore, according to DeChristopher, Persico told him, “. . . Ralph Scopo was his front man in the cement and concrete workers’ union and that not a yard of concrete was poured in the city of New York where he and his friends didn’t get a piece of it.” DeChristopher quoted Persico on the Commission’s vote to sanction the hit on Carmine Galante. A few years earlier, Persico had shared a cell with Galante and told DeChristopher, “And quite frankly, I voted against him getting hurt.” Nevertheless, Carmine Persico voted, and that is the crime of participating in a criminal enterprise. It doesn’t matter which way he voted.

  Because he chose to represent himself and did not take the stand, the only question Persico answered was one DeChristopher asked from the witness stand. “Wouldn’t you like to see me down the sewer altogether?” DeChristopher asked.

  “I don’t think the judge would permit me to answer that question,” Persico answered in front of the jury.

  On cross-examination by one of the defense attorneys, DeChristopher explained why he decided to testify against Persico. “I think what they do is despicable. They are the most despicable people on the face of the earth.”

  The only witness called on behalf of the defense was DeChristopher’s exwife, Catherine. She tried to do what her brother Andy the Fat Man Russo put her up to do, but as a witness, she bombed. She described Persico’s stay at her home as a simple family visit where Persico cooked and they all played Trivial Pursuit. She claimed her ex had meetings with Carmine Galante at a time that Galante was in jail. We never heard that anybody put her eye out with a fork, so her brother must have been satisfied that his sister did her best.

  In his summation, Mike Chertoff, reminded the jury about Persico’s Mafia comment. “Ladies and gentlemen, it has been said that without the Mafia, there would not be a case here.” Mike looked at Persico. “Without the power of the Mafia, these defendants could not have taken control of an industry like New York’s cement industry, they could not have authorized the murder of Carmine Galante, could not have engaged in a loan sharking conspiracy, could not have taken over and dominated labor unions, could not have committed the crimes you have heard about during the course of this case. They could not have done any of these things you have heard about, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, without the Mafia. So that is why there is a Mafia in this case. That is what this case is all about.”

  In his summation, Carmine Persico complained, “They didn’t come here to try a case; they came to persecute people with the word Mafia.” Right on.

  During their deliberations, the jury asked to review only one piece of evidence. They asked to hear one more time the contemptible conversation recorded at the Palma Boys Social Club between Fat Tony Salerno and Tony Ducks Corallo in 1983:

  “If it wasn’t for me, there wouldn’t be no Mafia left. I made all the guys,” Fat Tony said.

  “You pick them and you kill them,” Tony Ducks replied.

  As far as I’m concerned, that snippet should have been played in anti-Mafia ads on New York TV, paid for out of Governor Cuomo’s budget. At times during the trial, two of the stars of The Godfather movie, James Caan and Robert Duvall, showed up to watch Carmine Persico do his thing. I hope the movie stars were present for that snippet.

  James Caan had some kind of close relationship with Persico’s capo Jo-Jo Russo, the son of Andy the Fat Man Russo. Jo-Jo was with Persico when Persico was arrested in Fred DeChristopher’s house.

  On November 19, 1986, after five days of deliberation, the jury returned verdicts of guilty on all 151 counts of the indictment. On January 13, 1987, Judge Richard Owen did the right thing. Judge Owen said, “The sentence has to be fashioned to speak to future [Mafia bosses].” Except as to Bruno Indelicato, Judge Owen handed out the 100-year RICO maximum sentence to every single defendant—even to Fat Tony Salerno, whose only predicate crime was participating in the Concrete Club.

  Because Bruno was a capo and not a boss in any of the three leadership positions in the Bonanno family, Judge Owen hit Bruno with a healthy 40 years. Compared to the eye-popping sentences the bosses got, 40 years seemed like a slap on the wrist, but it was a fairly substantial sentence.

  Carmine Persico addressed the judge during the sentencing procedure, saying, “This case and the attitude of the prosecutor and the court itself is in conformance with this mass hysteria, this Mafia mania, that was flying around, and deprived every one of us in this courtroom of our rights to a fair trial and impartial jury.”

  On a purely personal and a very minor note for me, considering what we just accomplished, we still didn’t know who killed Sonny Black. Or who did what and where on May 5, 1981 to the three capos. And despite Bruno’s conviction, we still did not know for sure who else was in on the Galante hit with him. And because of the Miranda rules, even though Bruno was convicted, we weren’t allowed to sit him down and question him about that hit or about anything.

  During the sentencing, the judge is required by the federal system to address each defendant individually and recite certain things. Lucchese underboss Tom Mix Santoro got impatient waiting for his turn to come, and said, “Ah, give me the hundred years. I’ll go inside now.”

  Tom Mix Santoro went inside, but he never came out. The Lucchese underboss died in the can in January, 2000. His boss, Tony Ducks Corallo, died in the can eight months later. Rusty Rastelli had already died in the can in June, 1991. Fat Tony Salerno, as he had predicted for himself, died in the can in July, 1992. And Ralph Scopo died inside in March, 1993.

  Colombo boss Carmine Persico, Colombo underboss Gerry Lang Langella, and Lucchese consigliere Christy Tick Furnari are still inside, waiting their turns to get out the only way they can.

  CHAPTER 13

  THE MAFIA’S WORST YEAR

  STARTING WITH THE BONANNO FAMILY verdict against Lefty and Sonny Black’s crew in 1982, and continuing through the ’80s as jury after jury spoke and judges did the right thing at sentencings, we knew that sooner or later we would slam the door (using RICO) on verbal sabotage by people like Governor Mario Cuomo who claimed the Mafia was not a criminal organization. Eventually, in RICO trials in the years that followed, the defendants themselves got wise and stopped contesting the existence of the Mafia as a criminal organization. They even stopped contesting their positions in the Mafia. The made men and their associates on trial began to restrict their defenses to denying that they committed the predicate crimes. Looking back twenty short years, it seems strange to remember that the Italian Mafia’s existence was ever in doubt. But at the time, we knew that when the jury foreman spoke the word “guilty” 151 times in the Mafia Commission Case, we had gone a long way toward accomplishing this important goal.

  And make no mistake about it; this goal was not merely a public relations goal. We had crucial practical considerations involved in nailing down the issue of the existence of the Mafia as a criminal organization. To serve the public and get our jobs done, we relied on public officials being willing to spend public money on extremely costly equipment and sufficient personnel to conduct even more costly RICO investigations and prosecutions. RICO was not cheap. The Pizza Connection Trial alone cost the government over $50 million in taxpayer money. Governor Mario Cuomo was a prom
inent politician who many people considered for a run at the White House. Senators and Congressmen who controlled our budgets listened to the governor of New York when he spoke about organized crime in New York City. We couldn’t financially afford to have a New York governor and Italian-American as influential as him continue to publicly use the ethnic equivalent of the “race card” to blame reporters and others for using the word “Mafia,” calling the very word “an ugly stereotype,” and worse, publicly declaring at press conferences that the idea of the Mafia as a criminal organization was “a lot of baloney.”

  I hate to imagine the press conferences if we had lost the Mafia Commission Case. I don’t know whether Mario Cuomo, as rumored, had some negative baggage when he decided not to seek his party’s nomination for president, but I had no negative baggage when I testified as an Italian-American—as an American first—that the Italian Mafia was a criminal organization and had the rules and the structure that I described. This was vital testimony in, among others, the Bonanno family case, the Local 814 Case, the Pizza Connection Case, and most importantly, the Mafia Commission Case—all within a five-year period after my surfacing.

  At the time I testified in the Mafia Commission Case, I felt as if I had been squeezed out of the Bureau before I could qualify for a pension. I personally did not rely on a federal paycheck anymore. I had no financial stake in whether these investigations continued to get the budgetary support they needed or not, but I still knew what side I was on.

  My favorite line at one of these press conferences was spoken by another New York Italian-American, Rudy Giuliani. “This [1982] has been the Mafia’s worst year. We keep making gains and they keep getting moved backward. If we take back the labor unions, the legitimate businesses, eventually they become just another street gang. Spiritually, psychologically, they’ve always been just a street gang.”

  The overriding practical goal of the Mafia Commission Case was to do nothing less than cause the Mafia’s stock to go into a severe decline and then crash over time. And like the stock-market crash of 1929, where financiers who lost everything leaped from Wall Street buildings to their deaths, and others trudged to the street corner every morning to sell apples, we looked for devastation and destitution in those three Mafia families whose leadership the case targeted.

  When leadership vacuums at the top suddenly appeared, due to previously unheard of 100-year sentences, we hoped for chaos and disarray. In two of the three families whose bosses were eliminated as family leaders by the Mafia Commission Case, we got more than we even hoped for. We got war and frenzy. In the Colombo family we got what Mafia expert Jerry Capeci called a “civil war,” and in the Lucchese family we got what he called a “killing frenzy.”

  Unfortunately, in the Genovese family, the conviction of boss Fat Tony Salerno—which sent him to the can to die eating chocolate candy bars from the commissary—did not lead to anything like a civil war or a killing frenzy. Unlike in Lucchese and Colombo, the boss in the Genovese family was the only Genovese leader convicted. There was still an underboss and a consigliere out there in a social club on Sullivan Street in Greenwich Village who had been untouched by the indictment, the months of trial preparation, the trial itself, and a 100-year banishment to a prison far, far away.

  This circumstance enabled a seamless transition of leadership for the Genovese, and gave them plenty of time to prepare for it. Keeping two-thirds of the leadership in place on Sullivan Street discouraged any wannabe capos from making a move to seize power. The new Genovese boss who took over the family’s leadership was the manipulative but powerful number-two man: Chin Gigante. In fact, some Mafia historians and some lawmen today say that Gigante had been the boss all along and that Fat Tony Salerno was a front man.

  I believe the facts show that Salerno was the boss when we prosecuted him, but either way, the Genovese—often called the Rolls Royce of Mafia families—unlike the Lucchese and Colombo families, did not have any violent reactions to the verdict. That doesn’t mean the Genovese didn’t suffer irreparably from the Mafia Commission Case. By exposing the Mafia and by beating the Mafia, every family structure was weakened. Those 100-year sentences and the conviction of each boss on every count were lessons that were not going to be lost on the rankand-file wiseguys when it came time to consider whether to take their chances at trial or to rat and save themselves in the Witness Protection Program.

  As Lefty once told me after the Galante hit, “If they can hit a boss, nobody’s immune.” The “they” was the Commission. That concept of a Commission that was more powerful than one’s own dreaded and respected boss kept the troops in line, out of fear. Now we were saying and proving a similar statement to the troops: “If they can convict all the bosses just for being bosses, and send them away for 100 years, nobody’s immune.” This time, the people of the United States of America were the “they,” we were more powerful than all the bosses put together, and we were the ones to be feared in the name of the law.

  And the name of that law, RICO, in turn sent Fat Tony Salerno’s successor Chin Gigante to the can. The Chin was convicted July 24, 1997, a mere ten years following the initial 100-year sentences.

  Chin had been indicted in 1990 but it took seven years to get him to trial, mainly due to his masterful manipulation of renowned psychiatric experts. The boss of the family that controlled the New York Teamsters, various other unions, the Fulton Fish Market, and other businesses, walked around Greenwich Village in a ratty bathrobe, pajamas, and slippers muttering to himself to prove his claim that he was mentally incompetent to stand trial. The Chin was “schizophrenic,” according to more than one examining psychiatrist. And if that wasn’t enough, according to Dr. Wilfred G. van Gorp, the director of neuropsychology at the prestigious Columbia University Medical School, the former professional boxer’s schizophrenia was complicated by “moderate to severe dementia which reflects significant underlying central nervous system dysfunction.”

  Twelve years earlier, Fat Tony Salerno had been picked up on a bug in the Palma Boys Social Club commenting on the Chin’s act: “If he gets pinched, all them years he spent in that fucking asylum would be for nothing.”

  When the Chin shuffled along in his schizophrenic garb of dementia over to the Italian festival every year (the Feast of San Gennaro) in the company of his brother, the Catholic priest, muttering to himself, he was probably calculating his take. One of the pieces of intelligence Lefty had provided me with was that the Genovese family controlled the Catholic feast. Nobody from the outside had a booth to sell a single sausage and pepper hero sandwich without paying the Genovese for it. Each Mafia family was provided a small section, but even then, if a Bonanno wanted a better location he had to pay the Genovese for it. Lefty paid to have his daughter’s watermelon stand moved closer to the action.

  Finally in 1997, there were enough turncoats available to testify that Chin was competent enough to stand trial. At that point, he was convicted of being the boss of the Genovese, of illegally controlling the installation of every window in every public housing unit in New York City, and of conspiring to kill John Gotti. The Chin, then 69, continued his incompetence act in court every day. The elderly Judge Jack Weinstein fell for it and gave Chin a mere twelve years, saying, “He is a shadow of his former self—an old man finally brought to bay in his declining years after decades of vicious criminal tyranny.”

  So, the Chin went to jail, where he continued to drool and act incompetent. He also continued to run the Genovese family from jail via visits from his son, Andrew, a non-made businessman who would communicate with his father using code and hand signals. For years, no Mafia member had been allowed to utter Gigante’s name. To refer to the boss, the member had to touch his own chin. Nevertheless, Chin and son were recorded and videotaped, and two Genovese members were prepared to testify. One, a loyal 79-year-old hit man, turned when he discovered he was on Chin’s hit list. Another associate flipped after his arrest on a murder conspiracy. This one wore a bug in his Role
x watch and gathered conversations in the social clubs about Chin still running the family.

  Long-distance from a federal prison in Fort Worth, Texas, is no way to run a crime family in New York.

  Chin’s experienced men who did not have bogus schizophrenia and dementia to stall their trials were already in jail thanks to the RICO Genovese family trials. Inexperience at the top led to the guy with the Rolex being able to infiltrate. An undercover NYPD detective working for the FBI known as “Big Frankie” also infiltrated. All this evidence in the new millennium took down six capos and more than seventy men. Cent ‘anni, Big Frankie.

  I had the pleasure of knowing that I had trained “Big Frankie” in undercover, schooling him in the way of the wiseguy while he was working. I was especially proud of the job he did.

  The Chin and son were indicted in 2002. Andrew got two years. The Chin pled guilty to obstruction of justice by faking mental incompetence and stalling his earlier trial for seven years. In open court, as part of the plea bargain, the Chin was forced to admit that he was faking all along and had fooled the psychiatric professionals who had evaluated him. Behaving very competently in court, Chin got another three years on top of the senior-citizen discount of twelve years. Still, Chin died in the can in 2005. They should have made him return the $900 a month he got for years in disability benefits from Social Security based on his mental illness scam.

  Because of underboss Neil Dellacroce’s death from cancer while under indictment in the Mafia Commission Case, and boss Big Paul Castellano’s murder while under indictment in the case, not a single member of the Gambino family was a part of the Mafia Commission Case. It was obvious that John Gotti was behind Big Paul’s murder, and it was soon clear that Gotti was the new boss.

  While I had testified in the Mafia Commission Case regarding the friction in the Bonanno family that led to the Galante hit, and that, friction or no friction within a family, a boss could not be killed without Commission approval, it was unclear that Gotti had such approval. But one thing was clear: Big Paul had been rendered vulnerable to a coup and a whack-out by virtue of the Mafia Commission Case investigation and the pending indictment.