by Joe Pistone
Amuso and Gaspipe told Little Al D’Arco that he would be appointed acting boss in their absence, but that they would still control the Lucchese family. Gaspipe detailed an elaborate code and system of communication using pay phones. Little Al D’Arco had been a made man for only eight years and had spent four of those years in jail on heroin trafficking charges. Little Al had been a capo for only a couple of years and functioned primarily as Amuso and Gaspipe’s personal bagman for operations like the Lucchese bosses’ control of the Hunts Point wholesale produce market. Little Al had his own son made and installed him in heroin deals, and the son became a junky. And now Little Al D’Arco was acting boss. How much things had changed in three short years since Judge Owen sent his message. A succession such as this would have been impossible with a strong Commission in place.
Gaspipe called Little Al frequently. Little Al would follow orders and the killings would continue. In one phone conversation, Gaspipe went on a tirade about ten particular soldiers, saying, “I’m going to kill them all because they took advantage of me while I was on the lam.”
Before Amuso and Gaspipe went on the lam, they were embroiled in a dispute with the long-time head of the Lucchese family in New Jersey, capo Tumac Accetturo. When Tony Ducks Corallo was boss, he had accepted $50,000 a year from Tumac regardless of how much the New Jersey family earned. Gaspipe wanted to change that arrangement and demanded half of whatever New Jersey earned. Tumac said no. Gaspipe labeled Tumac a rat, stripped him as capo and issued a contract to Fat Pete Chiodo and Little Al D’Arco. They were to kill Tumac, his wife Geraldine, and his son Anthony. But Tumac was nobody’s fool. Tumac traveled between New Jersey and Florida. While he was deserted by all but seven trusted men, those who deserted him still were not likely to kill him despite his outlaw status.
Little Al even went so far as to distribute photos of Tumac like the Bureau has in the post office. Little Al told everyone, “Accetturo is an outlaw and you have to make all efforts to kill him and his son and whoever sticks by him.
One day Fat Pete Chiodo, who had cost “Gaspipe $20,000 a bullet” in a failed hit in Florida, took Little Al aside and said, “These guys have a pattern of calling people rats and they are making guys rats and killing them. I got information that you and I are going to be killed and hurt.”
Little Al had some information of his own: Gaspipe told him to hit Fat Pete. The reason given was that Fat Pete had arranged a plea bargain for a ten-year sentence in two RICO cases, including the Windows Case, without first getting Amuso and Gaspipe’s approval even though Amuso and Gaspipe were on the lam and communication was not all that convenient. “Kill Fat Pete,” was Gaspipe’s order. Little Al tapped Fat Pete’s phone to track his movement, and sent a crew including Little Al’s junky son. They found Fat Pete in Staten Island and shot him twelve times without killing him. His body fat served him well; the bullets were slowed down and stopped by the fat. While not killed, he would be partially paralyzed and confined to a wheelchair.
On May 8, 1991 Fat Pete joined a number of other Lucchese family would-be targets and enrolled in the Witness Protection Program.
Fat Pete had been Gaspipe Casso’s right hand. He had participated in a number of the hits launched by Gaspipe’s paranoia. When Fat Pete turned, the Bureau learned for the first time about a good portion of the murderous rampage of Amuso and Gaspipe.
Gaspipe told Little Al to whisper to Fat Pete’s parents that if Fat Pete testified or cooperated, they would be killed. The parents scurried into the Witness Protection Program. Gaspipe then had Fat Pete’s uncle whacked. The lowest moment in all of this was when Fat Pete’s sister, Patricia, dropped her kids off at school, drove home, and was greeted as she pulled up by a masked shooter who opened fire with a pistol with a silencer, seriously wounding but not killing her. I would have loved to visit Tony Ducks Corallo to be the one to tell him about this botched hit on an innocent mother of three children.
Amuso and Gaspipe would sometimes secretly return to New York for a meeting. Such a meeting was held in Staten Island in July 1991. At that meeting Little Al was relieved of command as acting boss. He had botched the hit on Fat Pete and the hit on Fat Pete’s sister, and now Fat Pete was in the program. A committee of four capos, which included Little Al, replaced Little Al.
At a committee meeting in September 1991 at a New York hotel, Little Al went to the bathroom and noticed a bulletproof vest and a gun on a driver for one of the other capos. Little Al ran out and kept on running until he got home. The next morning Little Al’s parole officer called him to warn him that the FBI had learned that there was a contract out on him. Little Al was afraid that Gaspipe’s inside information, his Crystal Ball, had been coming from the FBI office in Manhattan and he was afraid to go there. So he packed up his wife, his son, and a few close relatives and drove north to the suburb of New Rochelle, where he turned himself in to the FBI office up there.
Now with Little Al’s debriefing, the Bureau really learned about Amuso and Gaspipe’s “killing frenzy.” In 1992, when Sammy the Bull Gravano hammered out a deal to turn and testify against John Gotti, he got a special Gaspipe clause in the agreement. Because Gaspipe killed relatives, Gravano could not be forced to provide evidence of any kind against Gaspipe.
And then Vic Amuso was caught. An informant gave details of where Amuso would be at a certain time on a certain day. Amuso would be at a particular pay phone at a shopping mall in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Amuso was at the phone as part of the elaborate communication scheme that very few people knew the details of.
While he was on the lam, the RICO Windows case against Amuso had mushroomed to include many predicate murders that Little Al and Fat Pete squealed about. In January 1993, with Gaspipe still on the lam,Vic Amuso, age 62, was found guilty in a major RICO indictment and got life without the chance of parole.
Meanwhile, although the Lucchese family was now so weakened and preoccupied that it had not been able to rein in the outlaw Tumac Accetturo, law enforcement had been able to. Tumac went to trial in 1993 and was found guilty in a RICO extortion case. Little Al had testified against Tumac, and after the trial Tumac threw in the towel and joined the Witness Protection Program.
I have to figure that Tumac did not like the idea of being cornered in a prison population where it would be easy for Gaspipe to finally have him killed. In fact, two Lucchese soldiers who sat at the defense table during trial and were convicted with Tumac were allied with Gaspipe and had been out looking for Tumac to kill him.
Tumac’s decision to flip brought three other Lucchese solders into the Witness Protection Program. This avalanche of ready-made witnesses caused guilty pleas from eleven other Lucchese members in a Lucchese family RICO case that included nine murders.
Speaking about the changes in the Mafia and in law enforcement agencies over the years, Tumac later told Selwyn Raab, the New York Times reporter, Mafia authority, and author of Five Families: “In those days, we were disciplined, coordinated and better organized than they were and we took advantage of that. Now it’s just the reverse. These guys are coordinated together and we’re trying to murder one another.”
On January 19, 1993, Gaspipe’s show closed on the road. Tracing the cell phone of a Lucchese member, Gaspipe was located at his girlfriend’s house in Mount Olive, New Jersey. He had pocket change with him totaling $340,000 and a large collection of police and FBI reports.
The Windows RICO Case for Gaspipe now, thanks to Little Al, Fat Pete, and Tumac, included 25 murders.
In his book Five Families, Selwyn Raab wrote that the Lucchese family was “more seriously affected than any other” family by the Mafia Commission Case.
Sure was.
CHAPTER 17
GASPIPE IMPLODES
IT TOOK HIM A WHILE, but eventually it dawned on Vic Amuso that his little road partner Gaspipe Casso had been a bit of a troublemaker all along. Amuso finally figured out that Gaspipe was the only one who could have tipped the authorities to the pay phone a
t the shopping mall in Scranton, Pennsylvania. While they were both in the can, Amuso stripped Gaspipe of the position of underboss. Amuso then stuck the rat label on the prince of rat labelers and spread the word in prison.
But before he was stripped, Gaspipe took the liberty of inducting into the Mafia a new member. It was the masked inept shooter of Fat Pete’s sister Patricia. The sacred ceremony was conducted in the john with the use of burning toilet paper to take the place of a card with a saint’s image on it. Of course there was no gun, no knife, just burning toilet paper and kissing in the shithouse. It works for me.
In February 1994, two weeks before his RICO and murder trial on the Windows Case, Gaspipe Casso looked at the list of cooperating witnesses against him. Gaspipe realized that Amuso had already tagged him with the rat label. Being stripped of power meant that Gaspipe could no longer engage in his favorite pastime, ordering hits. Gaspipe could not order a single beating from prison. Gaspipe flipped.
On March 1, 1994, Gaspipe pled guilty to fourteen murders, each carrying a potential sentence of life without the possibility of parole. His sentencing would be delayed while he cooperated and testified. If he did a good job on the witness stand, he would be accepted into the Witness Protection Program; the prosecutor would go to bat for him at sentencing; and the judge would be influenced to give him a break of some kind. It was a typical one, two, three deal. It all depended on what Gaspipe accomplished as a government witness.
Gaspipe was taken to what they call the Valachi Suite in La Tuna, Texas to be debriefed. The suite had been built for Joe Valachi at a time when there was no Witness Protection Program, to house the witness and his FBI agent protectors. Immediately, Gaspipe coughed up 22 more murders for which he had not been suspected. That made a total of 36 murders the government knew that their new star witness had committed.
One of these newly revealed hits was the bombing murder of John Gotti underboss Frank DeCicco in April 1986. The plan had been to kill both Gotti and DeCicco. Unknown to the bombers, Gotti was not there. Another wiseguy who looked like Gotti was with DeCicco. The bomber, Blue Eyes Pate, carried grocery bags past DeCicco’s car, dropped something, bent down to pick it up and slipped a bag with plastic explosives under the car. When DeCicco and the Gotti lookalike got to the car, a remote control device from a toy car detonated the bomb. The other guy had his toes blown off and DeCicco had everything blown off. Gaspipe was at the scene in a lookout car with a police scanner. Gaspipe said that Chin Gigante and Tony Ducks Corallo had ordered the hit as punishment for Gotti’s unsanctioned hit on Big Paul Castellano.
Another newly revealed killing by Gaspipe occurred in 1978 during the heyday of his drug trafficking. The Coast Guard had seized a shipment of 23 tons of marijuana and a half million Quaaludes. Gaspipe was concerned that the boat captain’s son might flip and identify Gaspipe as the owner of the drugs. Gaspipe invited the young man to go fishing. When the fellow showed up, Gaspipe promptly shot him in the face. Gaspipe put him in a grave he had dug, but the boy wasn’t dead. Gaspipe smacked him with the shovel and buried him alive. When asked by the prosecutors debriefing him if he felt bad about burying the boy alive, Gaspipe said, “No, it had to be done.”
Assistant United States Attorney George Stamboulidis, who put together a tremendous RICO case against the Colombo family, said that Gaspipe Casso had “more horrendous baggage than virtually any cooperating witness the government has ever signed up.”
And Gaspipe added to his “horrendous baggage” by attacking two inmates in a special section of the Manhattan Correctional Center for cooperating witnesses. He surprised and attacked one guy who was stepping out of the shower. Ever the paranoid, he suspected that guy had ratted him out for bribing guards for special food, vodka, and other favors. Gaspipe attacked another guy with a rolled-up magazine while that guy was playing cards. To call Gaspipe a loose cannon would be an insult to loose cannons. Meanwhile, never mind the attacks, what was he doing breaking the law by bribing guards?
With these attacks on other cooperating inmates, as cases went to trial, Gaspipe was not being used. This spelled disaster in his mind. The only way he could get leniency was by having a track record of cooperation. But how could he cooperate if the government wouldn’t call him? The last opportunity he had to testify was against the Chin in the case that finally ended Chin Gigante’s one-man play as a schizophrenic punch-drunk senile collector of Social Security disability payments. But although he was listed as a witness, the government didn’t call Gaspipe.
The prosecutor Gregory O’Connell said that “using him would be like putting Adolph Hitler on the stand.”
Gaspipe lashed out and wrote a letter to the judge, accusing the government’s star turncoat witnesses of lying under oath in Chin Gigante’s RICO trial that had finished off the Chin. Now this was not what government prosecutors had in mind when they asked for Gaspipe’s cooperation. The letter Gaspipe wrote was the letter-equivalent of a bomb in a paper bag. If the government’s star witnesses had lied under oath, then the Chin, and many others, were entitled to a reversal of conviction.
Gaspipe wrote the judge that Little Al D’Arco was guilty of résumé inflation when he testified that he had been acting boss of the Lucchese family. Gaspipe wrote that Little Al had never achieved that height. This was a minor point of no real legal significance. The big deal was that Gaspipe claimed that Sammy the Bull Gravano lied when he testified that he had never dealt drugs. Gaspipe said that he had sold large amounts of marijuana to Gravano in the 1970s and that Gravano had offered to sell him heroin from China. This claim had the ring of truth, and of course, years later Gravano got caught heading a Gravano family Ecstasy ring in Arizona.
However Gaspipe, as was his way, had gone a little overboard; had crossed the line into frenzy in his letter to the judge. Gaspipe claimed that the day after the Reverend Al Sharpton was stabbed, he and Gravano were chatting in a schoolyard in Brooklyn. Gaspipe wrote to the judge that Gravano told him he had ordered the stabbing of Sharpton. There were problems with that story. One, on that day, Gaspipe was on the lam and nowhere near a schoolyard in Brooklyn. Two, on that day, Gravano was in jail. Strike three—as a government witness, you don’t get to lie, not even once. Gaspipe, unable to get his murderous hands on others, had finally killed himself off.
The government prosecutors accused Gaspipe of violating the terms of his cooperation agreement by making false statements, bribing guards, and attacking fellow inmates. Gaspipe lost whatever deal he had, and in July 1998 he was sentenced to 455 years.
For his own protection, since he was a publicly exposed rat, Gaspipe—who had spent three and a half years in kinder, gentler prisons reserved for cooperating witnesses—would now be housed in the new “Alcatraz of the Rockies” in Florence, Colorado. It had been built to replace the maximum-security prison in which John Gotti died in Marion, Illinois, that had been built to replace Alcatraz. Gaspipe would be on lockdown while, by contrast, Little Al and Fat Pete would spend not a day in jail. Tumac would get a manageable 20-year sentence. He would be released in 2002 and settle down at age 63 somewhere in the South.
At the age of 56 and with 455 years to serve, Gaspipe would have plenty of time to write letters to judges and the media for attention until the day he died in the can along with his new archenemy, Vic Amuso. 60 Minutes paid attention to his allegations, which by now included a claim that he was double-crossed by the prosecution. 60 Minutes sent a film crew and interviewed him for a show. It didn’t do Gaspipe any good; the world seemed done with him.
Gregory O’Connell and his co-prosecutor Charles Rose had used the code name “Lucifer” for Gaspipe. O’Connell said about Gaspipe, “He had boundless enthusiasm for conspiracies and for murder. . . . Gaspipe was more dangerous than Amuso and more responsible for the mayhem that fortunately for us ruined the family.”
My sources told me that in 1992, when I was getting ready to return to the Bureau as an agent, the Lucchese family had been cut in half as a resu
lt of the Mafia Commission Case. In five years, half its made men were in jail, murdered, or had turned. Better believe we were never going to give the Lucchese or any other family a chance to rally. My last testimony against the Lucchese family was in the summer of 1993. Little Al and I testified in a RICO and murder case against Joey Bang Bang Massaro, whom I had met a few times while I was under.
But Little Al continued to testify over the years. Little Al even went against other families. In 1997 Little Al helped take down the Genovese boss Chin Gigante. Next, Little Al moved down the line and helped take down the Genovese consigliere James the Little Guy Ida. The Little Guy had turned down a plea bargain for fifteen years and got mandatory life at trial. Little Al was still testifying at trials in 2006. Having been through it, I’m not so sure jail wouldn’t be preferable to fifteen years of testifying.
In the mid 1990s, Little Joe Defede took over the Lucchese family as acting boss, the job Little Al had held in the early 1990s. By 2002, following a RICO conviction, Little Joe Defede followed Little Al and became a cooperating witness. From jail,Vic Amuso replaced the turncoat Little Joe Defede as acting boss with Louie Bagels Daidone, the former Indiana State football player who had tackled the escaping murder victim and stuffed a canary in his mouth. Along with Little Al, in 2004 Little Joe testified against his successor, Louie Bagels, and they helped tackle Louie Bagels and bring him to the ground for life for RICO and murder, including the murder of the tackled victim. Ironically, Little Al and Louie Bagels had been made on the same day in 1982, around the time I would have been made. The Mafia Commission Case launched Amuso and Gaspipe, and these two incapable and weird leaders gave us the gift that kept on giving.
By his “mayhem” Gaspipe had done far more to bring ruin to the Lucchese family before he was caught and turned than he ever did after he was caught and turned. When the decision was made not to use Gaspipe as a government witness—at first on a case-by-case basis, and then finally and forever after the poison pen letter about Sammy and Little Al—a number of prosecutions had to be dropped or plea-bargained way down.
