by Jerry Weber
After this unpleasantness is dealt with, the main business portion of the meeting is closed. Next Carlo successively points to each of his men around the room querying each for their observations and suggestions regarding various business issues. When it is Sam’s turn he recounts his chance meeting last weekend in Atlantic City with a young funeral director from Pennsylvania. He tells his associates about the wonderful world of cremating bodies; leaving no trace for the authorities to sniff around analyzing later.
“Not now or ever,” Sam recounts. “Consider the case of Jimmy Hoffa. For thirty years there have been theories as to what happened to him, his body, or if he is even dead. But, like you read in crime novels, no “corpus delicti’, no case. If Joe DeSilva’s body had been cremated two years ago, we wouldn’t be facing this expensive and time consuming problem today.”
Sam goes even further out on the limb with his next statement. “What if we owned or had use of our own crematory? We would be able to get rid of these inconvenient pieces of evidence permanently and completely. We obviously won’t be able to dispose of every body, particularly if the hit was done in public. But, if the hits are carried out privately in remote areas, we could take care of these bodies with cremation.”
Sam continues, “Think of all the effort and risk we take trying to bury bodies in cement to weigh them down in the bay. We know our friends in the garbage rackets have put many bodies in landfills, but even here there is the risk that even a small trace can be found and subjected to increasingly sophisticated analysis, DNA being only one example. Hell there is even a case where some bozos rented a tree chipping machine and ground up a body, oblivious to the fact that they were splattering traceable DNA samples throughout the machine and surroundings, which provided plenty of DNA samples for a conviction. On the other hand, cremation is neat, clean, and permanent.”
Carlo tells Sam, “Look, it seems far-fetched, but if we could pull this off there would be a lot less defense work for you in the future Sam. You might even be putting yourself out of a job (chuckles). Look into the matter and report back as to its feasibility for us next meeting.”
Sam says, “Okay, and we’ll code name the project ‘firestop.’ Meeting adjourned.”
CHAPTER 11
Reflecting
The next morning Sam is once again back in his corner office with his picture perfect view of the Brooklyn Bridge and the Manhattan skyline. But the beautiful day outside is far from his mind. He is thinking about how far he has come in three years. He had risen from a lawyer at the bottom of the ladder in a large firm, to being his own boss of a tony law practice catering to a mob family. Once onboard, Sam could never look back. With all of the perks and easy living, has come tremendous responsibilities. To say that the criminal side of his work is a matter of life and death is not an overstatement.
The organization Sam is fronting for relies on his judgement, connections, and sometimes high wire acts to survive. The family needs the authorities as far from their enterprises as can be managed at all times. Sam has to throw up as many legal delays and roadblocks as possible. On the civil law side, he is buying and selling properties, laundering and investing millions of dollars in places as close as New York and as far away as Switzerland and the Cayman Islands.
Among his many duties he defends against lawsuits and negotiates leases and deals for the many legitimate businesses they operate. The one thing that is different from regular law practices is the code of silence. Lawyers are supposed to conduct their affairs in confidence, mob lawyers have to take this discretion to a much higher level. Many of the names and companies are actually fictitious; they are smokescreens to hide the real players. Compared to ordinary business law, this is a lot trickier
Sam is well paid, but knows he is earning every penny. Plus, with all of this information in the confines of his head, he is now every bit as deeply involved as the rest of the family. In fact, by necessity he is now a “made man.”
Sam was far younger than the others around him and his original idea of working in the gray areas of the law are long since gone. He is a racketeer as defined by the government. It is like the old saw, “in for a penny, in for a pound.” All of this secrecy and time commitment has made a huge dent in Sam’s ability to have a permanent relationship with a woman. He has had many dates and short term romances with some fine and attractive women in New York, but the complexity of trying to fit someone permanently into his life always leads to an ultimate breakup.
As for his family back in Jersey, Sam gets to see them on holidays and special occasions. But even here, there is always a certain distance Sam feels as he can let no one, no matter how closely related, know his real career. It would be just too dangerous for them and him. So, Sam is conflicted. He has all of the material things he could ever want, but he is not progressing towards a possible family life, nor can he ever hope to change careers at this point. Sam knows it is the ultimate trade-off that every underworld figure has to make; he is no different.
Across town in his office sits Carlo Dellveccio, the mob boss for his family for the past fifteen years. We have all heard of the good old days, well Carlo feels this was certainly true for the five crime families that controlled New York. While there was the occasional bloodletting when new leaders or renegade soldiers of the various families attempted to expand their reach into another family’s area, these transgressions were always dealt with and harmony again prevailed in New York. But now a new threat, that wasn’t going to go away in a couple of weeks or even months, was rearing its ugly head.
The law was always a menace to the mob, but when you dealt with local authorities, you were up against one detective or at most a precinct Captain who was out to prove a point. However, when critical witnesses failed to show up for trials, there was little the local authorities could do. Sometimes it was necessary to pay off a couple of over vigilant cops or a meddling detective, but these were all manageable problems. The local authorities eventually lost interest as more pressing criminal matters were always at hand. Come the 1980s and new problems arrived.
This all went back to the early 1960s when Robert Kennedy became Attorney General in 1961 and began to investigate mob influence in legitimate businesses and unions. After his brother President John F. Kennedy was killed in 1963, Robert was out of the Attorney General’s office and the pressure was off. Whether Robert and John Kennedy’s assassinations had anything to do with the mob has never been proven, but it certainly did bode well for the families to have those two off of their backs forever. The other federal authority who could have been a threat to the crime families was J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI. But, Hoover had a long history of not wanting to get involved prosecuting organized crime in America. The reasons for this are not clear, but the results were good for the families across the nation.
Fast forward to the eighties and we have new problems. There is a law passed by Congress called RICO, an anti-racketeering statute that targeted the mob families. For the first time federal charges could now be brought for collusion to act together to commit crimes that were now punishable by federal instead of local statutes. Several Federal prosecutors in the States like Rudolph Giuliani in New York began to bring charges and get grand juries to indict, and later, in trials get convictions for mob members and their leaders. All of a sudden prominent family members had the light of the news media shone upon them, followed by aggressive prosecutions.
Carlo was one of the Dons who, while not himself indicted, had seen plenty of his peers make the ‘perp’ walk. When you add this to the development of much better forensic science especially DNA testing, it was getting easier for the authorities to get the evidence they needed for convictions. Thus the interest and need for the new ‘firestop’ project to be implemented.
Carlo had to at least slow down the advances made by the authorities on his turf. All of this for Carlo, this was a costly distraction to family business. He now has a couple of his Lieutenants under indictment and is being forced to pa
y for a costly legal defense. His lawyer, Sam, was more and more involved with these cases and Carlo had to spend countless hours in conference with him to guide the defense.
Worse, people who his soldiers dealt with, who paid ransom to the mob, were less fearful and more aggressive in their willingness to hold out. No, these were not the best of times for Carlo, but you have to play the hand that is dealt to you, and Carlo will soldier on.
CHAPTER 12
A Call to Action
It is Monday morning following the organization’s meeting and Sam has two new priorities to attend to. First, he contacts a criminal lawyer he has used in the past, one Saul Lassik. After a discussion of the Bruno Albino case particulars, Sam assigns the case to Saul. The two lawyers will stay in close contact, but for discretionary reasons, Sam will remain in the shadows on this one. Saul will be the Attorney of Record and do all of the courtroom work on the trial.
The second challenge is a bit more complex. For Sam it is completely out of his area of expertise. He now calls Mitch Gruber the ‘go to guy’ for finding out about how anything works in the business world. Mitch is asked to find out, how hard would it be to purchase and install a crematory in the New York metro area?
After two weeks, Mitch is sitting in Sam’s office with a binder that includes full color literature on the latest retorts (the name for a cremation oven) available for cremation.
Mitch says to Sam, “So, you want to have a primer on cremation. It is really a quite interesting and dark enough subject that most people aren’t going to want to know these details.
“First people have cremated the dead for as long as we have recorded history. The Hindus in India did and still do open fire cremations letting the ashes float down the Ganges River. They simply gather much kindling wood put the body on top and let it burn through the night. Besides not being good for tourism, it is quite toxic to the atmosphere. Fast forward to the eighteen hundreds and an Italian uses the technology already existent in gas commercial ovens like the kind used for baking. With a properly sized fire chamber, we can now accommodate a human body.
“The first modern crematory is born. This gives us a closed furnace usually fired by natural gas that is hotter, quicker, and much cleaner than open fire burnings. Fast forward another hundred years and the cremation manufacturers are now operating under even tighter pollution regulations and they respond with technology. Using computers and superchargers to blow high volumes of air onto the fire, temperatures are thereby increased substantially. The new retorts can get up to sixteen hundred to two thousand degrees Fahrenheit; this is the temperature that is needed to incinerate a body cleanly.
“With the EPA constantly decreasing the amount of pollutants allowed into the air, the companies respond by adding a second fire chamber above the main one housing the body. The purpose of this is to re-burn the gasses from the first chamber in order to further purify the toxic residue in the escaping vapors. The final result is that you will see no black smoke or smell anything standing next to the air exhaust stack of a crematory. It is for all observable purposes just hot air coming out.
“The residue from the approximate two hour burn cycle are called cremains by the industry and ashes by everyone else. However they are really not ashes, they are bone fragments from the larger bones still left after the cremation. These two pounds or so of bone fragments are fed into a grinder called a processor and the outcome is a fine gravel. This uniform sized substance is then usually poured into an urn for further disposition.
“The final thing is that once this is done there can be no DNA or any other kind of known testing to determine who was in fact cremated. You couldn’t even tell if it was man or woman, white or black.
The amount of ashes might give you some idea of the size of the person, but that would be very imprecise except that you may know it was an adult. If the remains are scattered or dumped in the sea there would soon be no trace of the ashes at all. And even if you recovered the ashes (cremains), they would be of no use for identification.
“This is a $50,000 – $75,000 piece of equipment and is a ten ton unit about the size of a car. It would fit into a one car space in a garage or any similar sized space. It is delivered on a truck in one piece, rolled into place and after the gas and three phase electricity connections are hooked up it is ready to go the same day.”
All of this corresponded to what Victor had told Sam in Atlantic City during their meeting.
“This is the easy part,” Mitch continues. “No one has their own private crematory. They are used to serve the public through funeral homes, cemeteries, and other service providers. Next, you need permits from the EPA and local authorities since it is an industrial furnace. In the New York metro area this could be a slow and arduous process as this would be one of the hardest areas in the country to quality with all of the additional local regulations. And this creates the third problem for you, how do you keep it secret. Once you apply for the permits everyone will know the name and address of the person/s who filed for the permits. Then, there are the constraints of the law for operating the retort. You need a signed cremation permit in every state for each body you run through the machine. This is why you can’t just go to a legitimate crematory with a body for cremation. Where would the paperwork be? How long could a doctor and a funeral director keep forging these documents without getting caught? What professional would want to risk prosecution for aiding and abetting such a scheme?”
After spending the rest of the morning trying to twist and reformulate the subject to fit the organization’s needs, Sam is pretty dejected. Sam feels, maybe this is why nobody has done this to his knowledge before, but there must be a way.
A couple of days after paying Mitch his $2,000 for the report, Sam is back in his office thinking about cremations. How do you justify the thing, if you don’t have a funeral home or a cemetery? What professional would risk his career being involved in such a scheme of illegal cremations? It then occurs to Sam, what if you do have a funeral home in somebody else’s name and it sits 100 miles from New York? An area much more secluded than Brooklyn, but less than three hours’ drive away? What if that area was Northeast Pennsylvania and the operator might be desperate enough to engage in illegal activities? Sam knows he somehow has to get to Victor Kozol in Duryea, Pa.
But, how to approach someone about something illegal when to the best of your knowledge, this person is not involved in any illegal activities? How do you turn an honest guy? There has always been one answer to this problem, money. You offer more money than the person is making or has any hope of earning legitimately.
“It is even better to approach someone who is willing to gamble because he is already up against the wall financially. This formula has worked for the over one hundred years that the crime syndicates have operated in America. From federal judges, to shoe shine boys, the lure of easy money has allowed the underworld to operate freely in the legitimate world. Sam, for just a moment, reflects—this is exactly how I became involved. He will need to find out everything there is to know about Victor before he even attempts to contact him.
This takes Sam back to his Rolodex where a quick call to Serge Vlassic gets you a computer search on the personal information of anyone in America. It ain’t cheap, but the info will have details you can’t get on Google. Things like bank and credit card balances and payment records, FICA scores, outstanding loans, divorce decrees, convictions, you name it, if it exists Serge will find it.
CHAPTER 13
‘Firestop’
Sam has good reason to be optimistic about his accidental contact with Victor Kozol bearing fruit. If information is power in this modern world, then Sam is powerful indeed. He now has dossiers on: Victor; the Kozol Funeral Home; Vic’s parents; the boro of Duryea Pennsylvania; Pennsylvania Funeral and Cremation Law; and more. Most important in this treasure trove is the up-to-the-minute financial position and transactions of Victor. He knows that Vic is getting close to insolvency and that without s
ome outside injection of cash, Vic will be out of business very soon. The only salvation other than Sam for Vic would be if his parents intervened and gave him more financial aid. Sam had to act first hoping to head off that exit for Vic.
So, Sam is ready to go to the next monthly meeting with a formal request for firestop.
Sam is so confident that he strides into the meeting at Rosselli’s without any of this financial and personal information on Vic. He knew that if he got permission none of that would be relevant. He will use it to hook Vic, but the members of the organization would only be bored by how he did it. Sam can only but think, After this deal goes down successfully, Sam Gianetti will be the man who beat police forensics at their own game. Firestop will go down as a turning point in the organization winning against law enforcement. The mob would now be able to operate with impunity without fear of the reach of the long arm of the law. Best yet, Sam will be identified forever with this coup and be a rising star in the organization. But, like all good things, this project will require a lot of effort. However, Sam is thinking no pain no gain.
Gathered around the same table at Rosselli’s are the same faces Sam has sat across from for the last three years. At the end of the business agenda, Sam proposes that the organization authorize him to make contact with Victor Kozol for the purpose of fronting a crematory in his small upstate Pennsylvania funeral home. Sam recommends that Kozol Funeral Home will be the legal entity that owns and operates the retort. Victor himself will have to actually run the equipment and dispose of the ashes. He will be paid about twenty five times what a regular cremation pays for his services. The entire cost to install and set up the retort will be up to $100,000 and less if a lease for the retort can be worked out instead of purchasing it outright.
