The Big Heist

by Anthony M. DeStefano

  Meanwhile, the furs were placed in large plastic garbage bags and taken to a home on Staten Island. It was at the house, according to the FBI, that Burke showed up and for a nice discounted price purchased 75 percent of the stolen shipment, or as many as 400 furs. With the help of DeSimone, who was still a free man at the time, Burke took away the furs and brought them back to Brooklyn where he had a number of places, including his own home, to use to sell all kinds of swag for a nice profit, spreading some it around to Vario. The small amount of furs that Burke didn’t buy—about 25 percent—was sold on consignment to a couple of the other thieves.

  One place Henry Hill remembered as an outlet where Burke fenced his goods was the Bamboo Lounge, a place he described as a “high class rug joint” on Rockaway Parkway in Queens, right near JFK. It was run by a mob associate known as Sonny Bamboo but whose real name was Angelo McConaugh. Rug joints were nightclubs that by gangster standards were supposed to be higher class but were really furnished in tacky style, complete with potted plants. But the real use Burke had for the Bamboo Lounge was as a bazaar for stolen property, or as Hill would later say, “a supermarket for airport swag.” Criminals and legitimate customers, from insurance adjusters to union delegates and discount-store owners, came by for bargains, according to Hill.

  “It was like an open market,” said Hill. “There was a long list of items in demand, and you could get premiums if you grabbed the right cargo.”

  Burke, Hill, and the rest of the Robert’s Lounge group had a great deal of success hijacking trucks. Dresses, furs, lobsters, cigarettes, coffee, televisions, watches, jewelry were always in demand, and Burke’s boys always found a way to get them to an army of eager buyers. But Burke was a bit of a rube when it came to dealing with stolen securities, which could prove lucrative as Robert Cudak and his clique had found at JFK. Hill and Burke did get involved in securities thefts but for a quick buck sold them for pennies on the dollar to Wall Street crooks who used them as fake collateral for big bank loans. Hill and Burke would later kick themselves for the way they so easily lost out on making millions of dollars.

  CHAPTER SIX

  TALES OF THE GOLD BUG

  PAUL VARIO COULD BE FOUND at two places in south Brooklyn with regularity. One was Geffken’s, the old German bar on Flatlands Avenue. The other was a sprawling junkyard on Avenue D in Canarsie where a trailer was Vario’s favorite place of business. The southern part of the borough, particularly the Old Mill section, was the spot where Vario grew up and where he always felt comfortable.

  Geffken’s had been in the family of Evelyn and Henry Geffken for as long as anyone could remember. The family had immigrated from Germany and settled on a piece of Flatlands Avenue, which contained a house and a bar in separate buildings. Vario and his crowd of mob associates adopted Geffken’s as a favorite watering hole sometime in the 1960s. On warm days Vario would sit outside and play chess. When he had marital problems and was separated from his wife, Vario took to living for a time in an apartment next to the establishment. Then when the Geffken family decided to sell the property for good in 1971 for $40,000, the buyer turned out to be a son of one of Vario’s friends, Peter Abinanti.

  Vario liked antique cars, so the junkyard was a place where he could also feel at home. Among his favorite old vehicles was a 1957 red-and-white Chevrolet, which he drove only on Sundays and never very far. If the prized vehicle needed spare parts, Vario just had to look through the piles of scraps he had outside the yard trailer. The junkyard was the place where Vario held court and could talk with people about anything, feeling secure enough that he wouldn’t be the object of snooping cops, in part because a lot of local officers would come by the trailer and pay their respects, take some illegal gratuities for favors given and maybe get a good deal on hubcaps. Vario also didn’t like using the telephone, the better to avoid wiretaps.

  As a grown man, Vario, although he only finished two years of high school, took to reading: medical and legal publications were his favorites. He would tell young associates to go to college and become a professional at something. In quiet moments, he listened to opera recordings. This intellectual side of Vario was in sharp contrast to the way he had grown up in Brooklyn. For a while he seemed destined for a life in the penitentiary, particularly in 1937 when a sixteen-year-old girl from Howard Beach named Frances said a twenty-one-year-old Vario and his friends sexually assaulted her after she had left a church function.

  The charges against Vario and his friends were serious and were widely reported in the local newspapers, notably the allegation that friends of Vario had threatened to “bump off” a witness, who was a friend of the victim, if she testified truthfully about the attack. The witness, identified in an article about the trial in the Leader-Observer newspaper in Queens as Millie Handelman, said that she had been sitting in a car with Frances when two men approached and chased her away, saying they only wanted the sixteen-year-old victim. Handelman named Vario as one of the young men in the attack but couldn’t identity his co-defendant Anthony Romano. Handelman had to be brought to court with police protection because, she testified, Vario and his friend had threatened to “bump her off.”

  Rape victim Frances (newspapers of the time had no qualms about identifying her by her full name) did identify Vario and Romano as her attackers but said she passed out and wasn’t aware of being attacked by three others. Vario and Romano were convicted of the rape and sentenced to a term of ten to twenty years in Sing Sing prison. Vario tried asking for a new trial but was rebuffed. A decade or more in prison was a pretty stiff ordeal for a young man, but under the laws and practices in place at the time Vario was paroled twice but returned to prison twice for various parole violations, according to a biographic report of him prepared by a New York State Senate investigative committee. It wasn’t clear what Vario’s new offenses were, but he had additional arrests in his life for burglary and dealing in stolen property. Vario finally earned a discharge from his state parole in 1962, the committee said.

  As a true gangster, Vario didn’t toe the legal line very long. After a major Long Island gambler known as Jake Colombo died, it was Vario who took over his operation in what was the Cedarhurst-Inwood sections, according to state investigators. Vario had moved in the mid-1960s to Island Park, a beachfront community in Nassau County, so the gambling activity was easy for him to keep tabs on. He later expanded his operations in Brooklyn and began making serious money.

  In 1965, officials on Long Island arrested Vario and eight other men on charges they ran a multi-million-dollar gambling ring and attempted to bribe a police officer who was taking money for the purported protection of the gamblers but in reality was working for ten months as a confidential undercover operative for the Suffolk County police commissioner. The officer, Sgt. Everett Hoelzer, had reported that a year earlier he was approached to take money to tip off the ring to wiretaps and investigations. To keep the investigation hush-hush, Hoelzer would meet commissioner John J. Barry in secluded places and pass along coded notes. Vario was identified in news accounts as being from Island Park and with an occupation as a florist, a reference to his Fountainebleu shop.

  Not to be outdone, Nassau County officials also targeted Vario’s gambling operations and in June 1966 arrested him and seventeen others on charges they ran a $30 million a year bookmaking operation. Vario, whom newspapers described as the “Czar” of the ring, wasn’t the only mobster charged in the case. Also indicted was Stephen DePasquale of Atlantic Beach, who was described by police as a soldier in the Lucchese family.

  Local gambling arrests went with the territory for Vario, and the legal problems were part of the cost of doing business. Each arrest burnished his reputation as a major up-and-coming player in the Lucchese family and made him a better target for law enforcement. Since gambling rings generate lots of cash, the Internal Revenue Service gets involved to track the money and find out who didn’t report that income. There was also the quirky law that required those involved in gambling
to purchase a federal stamp, and in February 1966, Vario and several other men were charged in Brooklyn federal court with not having procured the $50 stamp.

  Meanwhile, local authorities in Brooklyn were also becoming increasingly interested in Vario’s activities, in part because of corruption being uncovered among police after revelations by detective Frank Serpico led to the creation of the Knapp Commission in 1969. About two years later, William McCarthy, the first deputy commissioner of the NYPD, was so disgusted with the corruption problem among plainclothes police in Brooklyn that he decided to revamp the entire unit. Plainclothes cops were those who wore the regular silver shields and worked on gambling and other street-vice crimes. They became notorious for corruption. After the reorganization, one of the new plainclothes units noticed what one official said was “organized crime activity” at Geffken’s Bar, notably through the comings and goings of Vario and his crew.

  McCarthy’s interest was piqued, and he approached Charles J. Hynes, then a senior attorney in the rackets bureau of Brooklyn District Attorney Eugene Gold, to consider a joint investigation into Geffken’s and the gangsters who frequented it. With the revelations about systemic police corruption on everyone’s mind, Gold agreed but insisted that his office work with a new police anti-corruption unit. But McCarthy assured Gold that the newly revamped plainclothes squad could be trusted and the prosecutor agreed to go along and assigned Hynes to take the case.

  There were some immediate problems for investigators looking to probe Vario, not the least of which was the fact that Geffken’s was on a largely residential block and traditional surveillance by police would have been easily noticed. To become unobtrusive, police set up a Christmas-tree business diagonally across the street from the bar and staffed it with plainclothes detectives. Since they were in the neighborhood, the detectives were able to take coffee and lunch breaks at Geffken’s and blend in with the crowd of regulars, some of which were members of Vario’s criminal crew.

  The detectives’ lunch hours were productive. They spotted Vario inside Geffken’s, usually talking secretively with associates at a table in the rear of the bar. The cops also tuned their ears to conversations on a pay phone inside the building which clearly seemed to be related to sports betting. The next move by Hynes and the police was text-book investigative work: They got a judicial warrant for a wiretap on the Geffken’s telephone and soon learned that many of the calls were being made to another telephone at the junkyard that Vario owned in Canarsie. A second wiretap authorization was granted by the court and the junkyard telephone was also tapped, revealing more conversations about sports betting.

  Vario’s Bargain Auto Parts Inc., at 5702 Avenue D, was about more than old cars and junkyard dogs. Associates like Jimmy Burke and Henry Hill could stop by to pay homage to the Lucchese capo. They weren’t alone in doing so. Soon, investigators realized that Vario was seeing a great many Mafiosi at the trailer he used as an office. To get a better record of what was going on, Hynes and other investigators set up an observation post across from Bargain Auto inside space given to them by Nazareth High School and started logging in visits by some high-ranked mobsters to Vario’s yard. But pictures and telephone taps could only help so much in building a criminal case.

  “While our wiretap was productive in gathering information about illegal sports betting, loansharking, etc., we were unable to determine the purpose of the visits to the junkyard of the wise guys from the other [crime] families,” Hynes remembered years later. “We needed to install an electronic listening device in the trailer on the junkyard property.”

  Planting a bugging device in the trailer wouldn’t turn out to be an easy task. While Vario left the trailer on most days around 7:00 P.M., a night watchman showed up at that time and stayed until 7:00 A.M. To make access more difficult, the junkyard was surrounded by a fence topped with razor wire and patrolled by a German shepherd and Doberman pinscher. In order to get around such roadblocks, investigators benefited from human nature and a prosecutor named Henry Sobel who had worked for years as a licensed dog trainer.

  Detectives noticed that the watchman took a dinner break every night around 9:00 P.M. at a nearby bar and with his sandwich drank a shot of vodka and a beer to wash things down. That dinner took a good 90 minutes, more than enough time for technicians to sneak into the trailer and plant a bugging device in the ceiling, just above Vario’s desk. The big “if” was whether Sobel could neutralize the two dogs, which he did with steaks spiked with animal tranquilizer. The bug worked for months as an unsuspecting Vario held court with his myriad associates.

  One of those visiting Vario was a twenty-five-year-old Doug LeVien Jr. During his visits to the trailer, LeVien, who was a detective working for Gold’s office, posed as a cop on the make who was looking to tip off Vario to confidential investigative information—for a price. LeVien made thirty visits to Vario’s trailer and was paid $450 in alleged bribes, money that was vouchered as evidence and would come back to haunt Vario and make his life supremely miserable.

  In addition to LeVien’s undercover activities, investigators compiled a mountain of tapes from the bug, as well as over 36,000 feet of color movie film and 34,000 still photographs of those who were seen from the observation post entering the junkyard. This kind of surveillance operation was unheard of for city prosecutors and when it came time to take the wraps off things, Gold trooped the news media over to the trailer at Bargain Auto and showed them the bug in the ceiling. The evidence compiled, Gold said, was a window into “a crime story bigger than Apalachin and the Valachi papers combined.”

  It was October 16, 1972, that over 1,200 police officers fanned out across New York City and surrounding Westchester, Nassau, and Suffolk counties to serve hundreds of subpoenas on Mafia members and associates. In terms of the scope of people being hauled in for questioning, it seemed like Gold was trying to take out the Mafia families. However, pundits noted that it wasn’t clear how significant, apart from Vario, Gold’s targets were or whether he would be able to make good on his claim that he was involved in “the most massive investigation of organized crime in the history of this country.”

  In the face of such news from a local prosecutor in New York City, it was fair to wonder how far the FBI had gone in terms of Mafia investigations. The answer was not very far at all. The late FBI director J. Edgar Hoover hadn’t taken to investigations of the mob during his tenure. As a result, investigations into La Cosa Nostra were viewed with disfavor. However, with Hoover’s death in 1972, the bureau slowly began to change its mindset, and in New York City, FBI special agents started to focus on the local Mafia.

  But the problem remained that for a federal bureaucracy, the FBI stayed focused on just showing numbers of cases. So, as former special agent Jules Bonavolanta recalled in his book The Good Guys, the agents in New York were making a lot of gambling cases to boost their statistics and not focusing on the real power behind the Five Families.

  “Numbers, numbers, numbers—the Bureau was crazy for numbers,” recalled Bonavolanta. “How many investigations, how many arrests—more, more, more! It didn’t matter if 95 percent of the arrests were shitty or if the punk you had busted the night before was back on the street the next day. As long as the numbers kept piling up, you were golden.”

  The Mafia bosses weren’t targeted to any significant degree. The FBI also in the early 1970s had not attempted to use the new Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations law—known as RICO—to make cases against the crime families as the agency would later do. Gradually, things changed as new supervisors like James Kossler and Lee Laster revamped the New York City office of the FBI and refocused the agents onto more long-term and substantial cases. But it would be years, until 1980, before those efforts would bear fruit.

  Another problem was the ineffectiveness of the federal organized crime Strike Force concept. The strike forces were set up in major metropolitan areas and were supposed to work independently and as adjuncts to the regular U.S. Attorney
offices. But a congressional review found that about half of the convictions in Strike Force cases resulted in no incarceration or else the targets were minor Mafia soldiers who received relatively short prison terms.

  So, with the FBI or federal prosecutors not around to steal his thunder, Gold had the field to himself. Of course when it came to the Mafia, Gold had a habit of making grandiose investigative gestures in the past. Two years earlier his office had indicted thirty-five mobsters on charges of criminal contempt. Among those arrested were some men who were prominent Mafiosi of the day: Aniello Dellacroce and Anthony Ruggiano of the Gambino family; Benny Aloi of the Colombo family; and a number of Bonanno family leaders like Philip Rastelli, Natale Evola, Paul Sciacca, and Frank Mari, even though he had been missing since 1968. Added to the list of those charged was Vincent Asaro’s father Jerome. The charges eventually petered out; they were either dropped or led to inconsequential pleas.

  Still, the “Gold Bug” case as the investigation was called, brought trouble for Vario, one of his sons also named Paul, as well as his crime boss Carmine Tramunti. Vario and his associates like Jimmy Burke had long had police officers in their pockets, and a handful of cops were also targeted by Gold. In one case, an NYPD lieutenant named Meyer Rubenstein was suspended for visiting the junkyard where at one point he was overheard on a surveillance tape blurting out in the trailer to one of Vario’s associates, “Here’s what I want to tell you. I think your phones are being tapped.” Rubenstein was brought up on administrative charges in October 1972 at which time his attorney disclosed that the cop had “irrationally” blurted out the comment about the tap.

  Some 102 cops were investigated for visiting Vario’s junkyard and were suspected of being paid off for various favors, such as allowing tow-truck drivers to pick up abandoned cars and presumably bringing them to Bargain Auto Parts. However, only two officers appear to have been indicted as a result of the Gold Bug tapes. Detectives John Cuomo and Ralph Caccia were indicted on charges they arranged for a dismissal of a case against four women related to one of Vario’s associates. To make matters worse, Caccia was accused of meeting with Vario and two associates in the trailer, all within earshot of the bugging device, and asking for a bribe of around $600 for himself and Cuomo.