The Best American Crime Writing 2006

Jimmy Breslin : The End of the Mob

from Playboy

Late at night I am watching Bobby De Niro in some Analyze movie, and I feel sorry for him because these Mafia parts, at which he is so superb and which he could do for the next thirty years, soon will no longer exist. Simultaneously he could be forced into new subjects. Al Pacino, too.Which is marvelous because both are American treasures and should be remembered for great roles, not for playing cheap punks who are unworthy of getting their autographs. I would much prefer De Niro or Pacino to Sir Laurence Olivier in anything.

Now, watching the late movie, I am remembering where I saw it start for De Niro. It was on a hot summer afternoon when the producer of a movie being made from a book I wrote, The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight, asked me to meet De Niro because he was replacing Pacino in a big part. Pacino was going into some movie called The Godfather. De Niro was looking for his first major movie role.

We talked briefly in a bar, the old Johnny Joyce's on Second Avenue. De Niro looked like he was homeless. It was a Friday. On Sunday morning my wife came upstairs in our home in Queens and said one of the actors from the movie was downstairs. I flinched. Freak them. Downstairs, however, was De Niro. He was going to Italy on his own to catch the speech nuances of people in towns mentioned in the script. He was earning seven hundred and fifty dollars a week for the movie. I remember saying when he left, "Do not stand between this guy and whatever he wants."

What he wanted first was to play Italians who were in the Mafia. The crime actors had been mostly Jewish: Edward G. Robinson, Alan King, Rod Steiger, Eli Wallach, Paul Muni, Jerry Orbach. De Niro and Pacino took it over.They were the stars of an American industry of writers, editors, cameramen, directors, gofers, lighting men, soundmen, location men, and casting agents who were all on the job and on the payroll because of the Mafia.

Now the whole Mafia industry is slipping on a large patch of black ice. Soon it will be totally gone.

"We had one wiseguy in the first season," Bill Clark, former executive producer of the now departed NYPD Blue, told me the other day. "That was all, because they just couldn't make it as characters for us.Their day was gone."

Both of us remember when it wasn't.There was a hot late afternoon in July 1979 when Carmine Galante, the boss of the Bonanno Mob at the time, was shot dead at a picnic lunch in the backyard of Joe and Mary's Restaurant on Knickerbocker Avenue in Brooklyn. Bill Clark, then a homicide detective, was the first detective on the scene. He looked at Galante and grabbed the phone and called my office at the New York Daily News.

The great A.M., secretary, took the call. She was a Catholic schoolgirl who was a true daughter of the Mafia in the Bronx.

"Tell Jimmy that Galante is down on Knickerbocker Avenue," Clark said. Then he hung up. Inspectors were barging in to grab the phone and have it for themselves the rest of the day. There was no such thing as a cell phone.

Secretary A.M. sat on the call for one hour.

"People shouldn't know about a thing like this," she said.

Today, aside from grieving showmen, the only ones rooting for the mobsters to survive-or at least for keeping some of them around-are FBI agents assigned to the squads that chase Mafia gangsters across the hard streets of the city. Each family has a squad assigned to it. The squads are numbered, such as C-16 for the Colombo squad. Each agent is assigned to watch three soldiers and one capo in the family. The work is surveillance and interviews. Agents will interview a cabdriver or a mobster's sister. It doesn't matter. Just do the interview.Then they get to their desk and fill out FD-302 forms that get piled up in the office.They must do it in order to keep the FBI way of life in New York.They earn seventy thousand dollars or so a year, live in white suburbs, and do no real heavy lifting on the job. After a five-hour day they go to a health club, then perhaps stop for a drink with other agents, and they always talk about what jobs they want when they retire. If, after interviewing, surveilling, and paying stool pigeons, they do not come in with some Mafia dimwit whose arrest makes the news, they face doing true work for their country: antiterror-ism detail in a wet alley in Amman, Jordan, or tent living in Afghanistan.

"What do you want?" Red Hot said. He is on First Avenue, in front of the great De Robertis espresso shop.

"We just want to talk to you" one of the two FBI agents said.

"You'll have to wait here until I get a lawyer to stop by," Red Hot said.

"We just wanted you to take a ride with us down to the office."

"The answer is no," Red Hot said.

"We just want to get fresh fingerprints. We haven't taken yours in a while."

"That's because I was in jail. And nothing happened to the prints you have.What are you trying to say, that they faded? They wore out?"

His friend Frankie "Biff" LoBritto cut in,"Red Hot, if you go with them, you won't come back. They'll make up a case in the car."

When the agents left, Red Hot said in a tired voice, "They'll be back. They're going to make up something and lock me up. Don't even worry about it."

Some nights later Red Hot was walking into De Robertis when he dropped dead on the sidewalk.

"He ruined the agents' schedules," Frankie Biff said. "They were going to put him away for sure without a case."

I will now take you into intensive care to observe the last of the Mafia.

The floor under them didn't even give a warning creak before opening up and causing everybody to tumble into the basement. This happened in March of this year when the United States Attorney in Brooklyn announced that, in the 1990s, two detectives, Louis Eppolito and Stephen Caracappa, had killed at least eight people for money paid by Anthony "Gaspipe" Casso, a demented killer and a boss of the Luchese Mob.

From out of the basement climbed Tony Cafe. Immediately the FBI visited him for the second time. It needed some help. If there were any shooters roaming around Brooklyn, Tony Cafe had to stop them. For if any bodies appeared on the streets or in the gutters of Brooklyn, perhaps the FBI agents, in absolutely desperate trouble for having Eppolito and Caracappa accused of shooting people practically in front of them, would be thrown like miscellaneous cargo onto transport planes bound for Kabul and Baghdad.

Politicians and the news media claimed the two detectives had committed the most treacherous and treasonous acts in the history of the police department.Would that it were true. Police officers serve wonderfully well and in these times do not even take a free cup of coffee. But there are isolated madmen who still pass the test and who have guns and could use money, and over the years the belief has been that many Mob shootings in Brooklyn have been done by cops.

Tony's favor to the FBI consisted of finding the only two Mob gunmen left in Brooklyn and ordering them to keep their fingers still.

There were other issues for the Mob. As ordered by the mandates of Christmas for Mafia captains, collections were taken up late in 2004 for traditional presents for the bosses of the five New York City Mafia families. The bosses now mainly were worried defendants and long-term prisoners. There was only one recognized boss, Joe Massino of the crime family named for the late big old mobster Joe Bonanno. I don't know what the other families did about Christmas collection money, for there was nobody worth a gift certificate.

The men in the Bonanno crime family raised two hundred thousand dollars for Massino, the last boss. His liberty, however, was as shaky as a three-legged chair. He was in jail under the Gowanus Expressway in Brooklyn, held without bail while standing trial in federal court some blocks away. There were three murders and seven or eight prosecution witnesses of the type known as rats, including his wife's brother,"Good-Looking Sal" Vitale. Seated in the first row of the courtroom one afternoon was the wife, Josephine Massino. On the witness stand her brother was telling the court how Joe Massino's people came busting out of a closet and began firing away at three Bonanno mobsters he felt were dangerous dissidents.

Joe Massino sat at the defense table with a computer. He was good and overweight. He had a round, bland face and short white hair. The heritage of great suits ended at his plain blue suit and open-collar white shirt. Glasses were perched on his nose as his pudgy fingers touched the computer keyboard. I don't know what he was looking for.What he needed was an old movie of the battle of Dien Bien Phu, where he could identify closely with the French, who lost; the brother-in-law, Good-Looking Sal, would be shooting at him from the hillside.When Massino stopped typing, his hand went to the top of his head and, with thumb and forefinger, moved the glasses.This was the style of removing eyeglasses for all those in the underworld in Queens County.

On this day he noticed a reporter who had just had a death in the family. Massino mouthed, "I'm sorry." This was probably the last time we'd see someone in the Mafia showing the old-world class it was always reputed to have but rarely did.

Watching her brother destroy her husband, Mrs. Massino wailed softly, "This is the same as a death in my family.You don't know what I am going through."

"How could Sal do this? Joe taught him how to swim," Tony Rabito, from Massino's restaurant, the Casa Blanca, complained. Sal Vitale is on his way to prison for a whole lot of years.

Joe Massino always was a very good swimmer. He could swim from Coney Island all the way across a wide inlet to Breezy Point, on the ocean. He taught his wife's brother, Good-Looking Sal, how to swim. This is a very big thing; you teach a kid to swim so he never drowns. Joe Massino could do that. He taught all the strokes to Good-Looking Sal.A lot of good that did.

During the trial, from out of the past, from Jimmy Weston's on Fifty-fourth Street and P. J. Clarke's on Fifty-fifth, from Pep McGuire's on Queens Boulevard, from his scungilli restaurant on Second Avenue, came Tony Cafe, who is called that because he was always in saloons. He arrived at my building one night with a handwritten open letter from Joe Massino's daughter. She pointed out that Massino had been in prison and Good-Looking Sal Vitale had been running the Bonanno family when many of the murders were committed.While this was true, she was not able to cover all the murders. But she did try.

"I don't know why the government is so mad at Joe," Tony Cafe said. "He's a nice fat guy, likes food."

A t this time T ony was a blessed unknown, but that would change.

Tony Cafe's previous experience was to make the mistake of rolling through the nights twenty-five years ago with the whole Mob and its new big hitter, Donnie Brasco.

"He is Joe DiMaggio!" everybody said one night at the old Pep McGuire's on Queens Boulevard.

When next seen, Brasco took the witness stand in room 103, federal court, Manhattan.Tony Cafe (his courtroom name Anthony Rabito) sat listening with his lawyer, Paul Rao.

q: What is your name?

a: Joseph Pistone.

q: What is your occupation?

a: I am a special agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Tony was sentenced to eight years. Rao told the judge that Tony had served two years in the artillery in Korea, that both his brothers had served and that he deserved something for this.

the court: Mr. Rabito, is there anything you would like to add to what Mr. Rao has told us on your behalf?

defendant rabito: Judge, I think I got a fair trial.There are a couple of things I don't like. I fought for that flag. I was in the Army. I believe in the press. I believe in you.You open up somebody's head, you find love in my head, but in some people you find the little Italian flag.

The judge took two years off the sentence, one for each year Tony spent in the service. He did six years at Otisville federal prison in upstate New York. I didn't see him when he came out and never heard about him, so I figured he wasn't up to much, which I thought was good because a second sentence would run a thousand years. In court for one thing or another over several years,

I would take a look at the government's Mafia three-deep charts. The pictures of the Bonanno varsity players were mounted on cardboard. I never saw Tony's picture nor found his name in a news story, even if it was about guys at the bottom.

Bad things now happened in the courtroom. Joe Massino was convicted and faced sentences of more years than he had to give for his country.

Right away, in Washington, Attorney General John Ashcroft directed prosecutors in Brooklyn to start a capital punishment case against Massino for another murder.They find you guilty in federal court on any charge, from stealing a postage stamp to murder. If the federals said they wanted an execution case, Massino was going to die.

No, he wasn't. He called for a prosecutor and said he wanted to cooperate. He knows everybody and everything about the waning days of the Mafia. He is a traditional mobster. He eats until he can't fit at the table. He had a restaurant with the best pork braciola for miles. He flicks a thumb down and somebody dies. He has a wife and daughters and several girlfriends. He lives in Howard Beach, Queens, which had an overcrowding of big gangsters. His house was a few blocks from that of John Gotti and also Vic Amuso, another boss. The first sounds of anger about Massino's turning came from Vito from Metropolitan Avenue. He had put up fifteen hundred dollars for Massino's Christmas present.

"Joe is a rat. I don't give my money to rats," he said. "I want my money back."

"How are you going to get it from him? He's in jail," he was told.

"From his wife," he said. "You go ask his wife."

When mobsters are reduced to fighting under the mistletoe, there is no reason for them to exist.

And now, in this court building at the same time, you saw the reason the Mafia must die. Four members of Local 15 of the

Operating Engineers Union were in court to plead guilty to selling out workingmen. They work cranes, backhoes, bulldozers, and hoists.They are proud and physical and, along with Local 40 of the Iron Workers, were about the first to walk up to the fiery mountains of the old World Trade Center, fierce, powerful, unafraid, and did all the gruesome heavy lifting for the next year. They were Irish, and their union heads admitted to being controlled by Mafia gangsters.Tom Robbins of the Village Voice, who seems to be the only reporter in the city who thinks labor is important, called the union the Mob's Engineers.

The government indicted twenty-four Mob guys in Brooklyn, including one Jackie DeRoss, who was listed as a union member but was recognized on the street as an underboss in the shrinking Colombo family. His sons, John and Jamie, had union books and were placed on jobs where attendance might have been taken. In Manhattan another eighteen mobsters in the union were indicted; one was Ernie Muscarella, a reputed boss in the Mob.

The one that bothered the most was Tom McGuire Jr., the business agent for the local. Everybody in labor knew his father, who had been business agent before him. Junior, out of Manhattan College, was unable to wail that he had to steal in order to make it in life. He was in the son game, as in "son of…" If America is weaker at this time, blame the son game, the nepotism, as much as, in this case, the Mafia.

As Massino told agents stories that would end the Mafia, McGuire was in the same court building pleading guilty to a charge of selling union books. There were many other charges, including extorting fifty thousand dollars a year from a paving company and then giving an eighty-thousand-dollar bribe to the president of the International Union of Operating Engineers in order to become a vice president of the international. But selling the union books was the hideous crime. People beg, plead, and implore for a union book. If your son can get a book, you can sleep all through the night; union jobs pay up to forty-five dollars an hour, and your son has a fine living for life.Tom McGuire Jr., now sixty, pudgy, and arrogant, sold union books for twelve thousand dollars. He had a man running things for him, purportedly a Local 15 member, Anthony Polito. He took care of anything to do with organized crime.There were no-show jobs to be given to wiseguys or allowing work rules for health and safety to be ignored on any job where contractors had come up with money. Polito is in prison.

Reading through the government's indictment, I found that one of its legal standards for introducing evidence was based on United States v. Brennan, the defendant being "a former New York State Supreme Court justice who was charged with fixing four criminal cases," the indictment reads. "The government's witness, Anthony Bruno, served as a middleman."

I used to see Justice Brennan on Queens Boulevard, and we'd have a beer once in a while. He would walk across the street to the courthouse and fix narcotics cases and, I believe, a homicide for the Mafia. He was another one of those who come without a shred of shame. His was a complete character collapse that turned him into a cheap errand boy. Reading on, I found a page of testimony about the labor men pleading guilty in Brooklyn federal court to robbing their own.

Simultaneously Joe Massino sat in the jailhouse and bargained for his life, his ten million dollars in plunder, and his two houses, one for his mother and the second, larger one for his wife and daughters. For life and possessions he would give up the entire underworld he had sworn to keep secret.

There are murders all over the place, and he must solve so many of them for the FBI. This is catastrophic for the guys on the street. Any mobsters nearing the end of their sentence will be hit with new charges and never see civilization again.

The publicity stool pigeons, "Sammy the Bull" Gravano being the latest, are illusions. Massino will end the Mafia. All the murders and dialogue that have been a large part of this nation's culture will disappear. All Mafia books and shows, The Sopranos foremost, will be based on nothing and therefore too unrealistic to make.

Massino put himself into a small room with desperation with the murder of one Gerlando Sciascia, who was known as George from Canada because he was from Canada. According to testimony, Sciascia and Massino killed three Bonanno family dissidents in 1984. Sciascia then thought he was as good as Massino.They found Sciascia and his ambitions in a lot in the Bronx. Entire flights of stool pigeons immediately went to the grand jury to put a gun into Massino's hand in premeditated murder.And now he talks.

Bosses must go first.There are five families, and they are supposed to have bosses, but most of them change every forty-eight hours. The Gambino family had John Gotti. The old man of the Gambino crew, Joe N. Gallo, told Gotti,"It took one hundred years to put this together, and you're ruining it in six months."

This appears to be right.This old crime organization-which started in the narrow, wet alleys of Palermo and Lercara Friddi and other towns in Sicily, then rose out of the packed streets of the old downtown east side of New York, with names like Joe the Boss and Lucky Luciano, then with Al Capone coming out of Brooklyn and putting the Mafia into Chicago-had a murderous, larcenous hand everywhere. It weakened with time and the convictions of commission members in New York, but nothing matched the magnitude of what Gotti did to the Mafia. He had Paul Castellano hit in the midst of rush hour on the east side of Manhattan. It was brazen, and Gotti loved it. He failed to hear the sound of tank treads on Mulberry Street.They were bringing in an armored division to get him. They did.

He proudly put his son, Junior Gotti, in charge, and agents fell from the skies on him. He did six years and now is up for attempted murder, and he may not be seen for decades. The new head of the Gambino family was Nick Corozzo. He said he was exhausted from not working and needed a vacation. He flew to Miami and was on the beach for about half an hour when two men in subdued business suits walked along the beach toward him. "So what's up, fellas?" Nick said.

"You are," they said. They displayed FBI cards. Nick the Boss went off the beach in handcuffs and then to court, where nobody wins. He is back on the street now but is a loud target.

The family named after Joe Profaci, an old-time Mafia boss, was shot up by an insurgency group, the Gallos, in the 1960s. Crazy Joe Gallo was shot dead at Umberto's Clam House on Mulberry Street. The news business loved the story. Joe Colombo took over. He believed he was a legitimate citizen. He invented the Italian American Civil Rights League and ran a rally at Madison Square Garden during which his crowd shouted "Uno, uno, uno," the old Roman cheer for Benito Mussolini. New York Post columnist Murray Kempton observed, "The entertainment was provided by Diahann Carroll and Sammy Davis Jr., two striking illustrations of pre-Norman Sicilians."

Colombo then ran an outdoor rally at Columbus Circle during which he was shot, later dying from his injuries. The killing gave the Mafia a bad name. The next boss was Carmine Persico Jr., known as Junior. He is in federal prison in Lompoc, California, for about the rest of his life. During a succession disagreement, one Vic Orena, pronounced "Vicarena," was convicted of mayhem and sentenced to two lifetimes and one eighty-year sentence.

"Which one should I do first?" he asked Judge Jack Weinstein, who nodded to his clerk. "You name it," the clerk said.

"Put me down for the eighty years first," Orena said.

He went to Atlanta, and his lawyers entered a motion to throw everything out and let him come home. He was certain his motion would prevail over the whole government. He called Gina, his girl on Long Island, and told her,"Get my suits and have the tailor take them in. I've lost weight down here. Then go and get me some new shirts. I'm going to win this motion and make bail. We're going to Europe on the first day."

Orena was brought up by prison bus from Atlanta. His motion, a foot-high stack of paper, was on Weinstein's desk.The judge had studied it for some days.

Gina was in the courtroom with a suit for her now-slim love. The clerk called out "All rise," and Weinstein entered the courtroom. The door to the detention pens opened and a slim Vic Orena came in, his eyes glistening with hope.

"What is he doing here?" Weinstein asked. "He belongs in prison."

"He is here on his motion," the lawyer said. "Motion denied," Weinstein said. "Marshal, take this man back to prison."

Vic Orena, his one and a half minutes of hope over, went through the door and onto a prison bus that would stop five or six times at dingy county jails on the way to Atlanta.

His love, Gina, with his suit folded neatly over her arms, went back to Long Island.

Vic Orena is still doing the eighty-years part of his sentence; then all that remains for him to do is the two lifetimes.

There is now no real Colombo family boss whose name is worth typing.

The largest, fiercest, and busiest family, the Genovese, had Vincent "the Chin" Gigante as boss-the boss in a bathrobe. Babbling in pajamas, robe, and truck driver's cap, he staggered through the night on Sullivan Street in Greenwich Village and entered the black-painted private club at number 206, where the guys played cards all night. The Chin, suddenly alert, sat down at the game.The cards were dealt. He picked up his hand and without looking at it called "Gin!" Money was pushed to him. Next he tired of picking up the cards.While they were being dealt, he called "Gin!" Always he got paid.

When in front of Judge Jack Weinstein in Brooklyn, he flopped around in his chair and mumbled for hours without stopping. My guess, and it is well educated, is that he was saying the Hail Mary, a lovely prayer that is short and can be repeated without end. Lawyers presented results of new tests they said showed the Chin had Alzheimer's. Weinstein, who reads science periodicals every morning, was greatly interested in the new test, the PET scan. "Congratulations.You are on the cutting edge of science," he told the lawyers. "But you omitted one important part of your test. In order to show that it is Alzheimer's, you need an autopsy."

Gigante shook and went to prison. The outfit was left with nothing.

Now there were five families in name and no bosses.At the start of 2005, in the midst of all the squalling over the Christmas money that went to Joe Massino's wife, federal agents came through Brooklyn like armed locusts and arrested twenty-seven members of the Bonanno family.

It followed that one morning when Tony Cafe was at home in Brooklyn, where he lives with his eighty-year-old sister, the last of four sisters, the first three dead of cancer, he heard knocking on the door downstairs. He looked out. He could see two agents, each holding up identification.

Tony Cafe sighed. "I'll be right down," he called. He threw his wallet to his sister.

When he got downstairs there were three agents, one of them a little Irish woman who did the talking.

"Are you going to lock me up?"Tony asked.

"No, but you're number one."

She made it official. A week before, an article by Jerry Capeci appeared in New York magazine and was first to mention that Tony Cafe-proper name Anthony Rabito-was suddenly an important figure. Capeci, whose Gangland News is on the Internet, is the authority on the Mafia to the extent that all those left in crime know that on Thursday, when Capeci's work comes out on the Net and in the afternoon's New York Sun, they will find out where they stand, if anybody is left to stand. Now on Tony's stoop, the FBI confirmed that Tony was number one in the Bonanno family. He was in shock as the agent, Kim something, told him, "We don't want any bodies in the street, we don't want witnesses bothered, and we don't want agents threatened."

"I live upstairs with my sister. I don't have any money or guns in the house," he said.

The agents sniffed and left.

And now Tony Cafe, who is allegedly the boss replacing the last boss of the Bonanno family, was sitting alone at the bar of Bamonte's Restaurant on Withers Street in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, his hair short and turning white, his voice like gravel pouring from a truck, and his build entirely too wide.

Bamonte's appears to be an out-of-the-way place, but it is on Broadway in the world of New York people who know what they eat. It is a short drive across the Williamsburg Bridge. At lunchtime half the city seems to walk past the bar and into the dining room.

Here was police commissioner Ray Kelly coming in and shaking hands with everybody. At the bar Tony Cafe held out his hand, and Kelly grabbed it and then moved on. Later, in the gloaming, Tony Cafe sat in the empty restaurant and said, "The police commissioner shook my hand. How do you like it? He didn't know who I was. Nobody knows who I am. I don't know anybody else. They're all in jail. Once the top of the family turns like Joe did, nobody from the other families will talk to you."

"What was the worst thing to happen to the outfit?" he was asked.

"Gotti," he said slowly,"when he had the case against him with a woman prosecutor and he fixed the jury. That got the government mad. Nobody was safe after that. They got Gotti and then they came after everybody else. Because of him, all of a sudden I'm standing out here alone."

Jimmy Breslin was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Distinguished Commentary in 1986. His nationally syndicated columns have appeared in Newsday and various other New York City newspapers. He is the author of numerous works of nonfiction, including The Short Sweet Dream of Eduardo Gutierrez and, most recently, The Church That Forgot Christ. He lives in New York City.