My FBI

by Louis J. Freeh

  Mob clans are inherently unstable, but as the 1980s broke, the Bonanno family seemed to have arrived at some kind of inner harmony. Carmine Galante, who had headed the family through most of the previous decade, had been gunned down in July 1979. By 1981, Philip “Rusty” Rastelli seemed set to succeed Galante in what for the Mafia was a surprisingly smooth handover. Then just as I was arriving at the U.S. Attorney’s Office, three Bonanno captains were gunned down, and the air filled with lead once more. This time, though, we had our own guy right in the middle of the action: Joe Pistone, a.k.a. Donnie Brasco. (It was Brasco that Johnny Depp played in the film of the same name.)

  I’d known about Joe back in New York, before I ever went down to Washington. It was an open secret around the Organized Crime Division that he was being put in undercover full-time, although once he was inserted only a very few agents had any idea of his exact whereabouts or even what his cover was. (Joe had taken courses in gemology so he could pose as a jeweler and fencer of precious stones, a calling of considerable interest to men who like to sport large diamond rings and don’t expect to pay full retail for them.) By the time I returned to New York as an assistant U.S. attorney, Joe had already become an unsung law-enforcement legend. The Bureau had never before managed anything like this with any agent, never penetrated so deeply into one of organized crime’s core groups, but once the new war broke out, Joe’s very success became a problem. He was too trusted, too much a Mafia associate on the rise.

  Probably to test Joe and maybe also because he was short of guns, Joe’s captain, Sonny Black Napolitano, gave him a contract to kill a guy. If he fulfilled it, Joe would be a made man; he’d have his bones, something the Bureau had only in its wildest dreams thought Donnie Brasco might achieve. Joe would be right at the heart of the action, a pipeline to the top of one of the five families. The intelligence he already relayed had been unparalleled; now it would be truly amazing. And that, of course, is when the FBI pulled the plug on the whole operation. Penetrating the mob was one thing, but doing its dirty work, actually whacking somebody, was way beyond the bounds of the possible.

  Beware of what you wish for, the old proverb goes, and so it was at that moment with the U.S. Attorney’s Office. We had never had such access, and we almost never had to move so quickly. Indictments that had been projected for months down the pipeline were secured in a fraction of that time. Arrest warrants fell like rain. An incredibly complex prosecution had to be fast-forwarded by six to twelve months. And the stakes were huge: more than half a dozen major leaders of the Bonanno family were included in the indictments, along with a dozen-plus lesser soldiers. Bring them down, and we would drive a stake right into the heart of a major organized crime family. But how to do it in the time available? That’s where I came in, through the back door.

  The case was so big that John Martin wanted to try it. That was his privilege as the U.S. attorney, and no one could have been more up to the task. John would eventually go on to serve thirteen years as a U.S. district judge before joining the litigation department at one of Manhattan’s premier law firms, Debevoise & Plimpton. Another very senior attorney in the office, Bruce Baird, signed on as John’s number two. (Bruce would gain renown a decade later for his successful securities-crimes prosecutions of Michael Milken and Drexel Burnham Lambert.) In the number-three slot was the original workhorse of the team, Barbara Jones, my old mentor and friend from the UNIRAC investigation. Barbara is the one who secured the indictments on the fly and set up the whole intricate prosecution mechanism. That left room for a number four, a go-fer attorney to feed data, information, precedents, and whatever else was needed to the top three, and because we had worked together in the past and she knew I had experience with complicated gangland cases, Barbara asked me to fill that role. Then things began to unravel.

  For a variety of reasons, John Martin decided to take on another case. There were time considerations: U.S. attorneys have a lot of obligations, and this trial looked initially as if it might gobble up half a year or more. (It actually took slightly less than five months to try.) Simultaneously, the office got handed a Bronx public-corruption case that promised to be shorter and that seemed more in keeping with the sort of trials U.S. attorneys commonly take on. Not surprisingly, John jumped on it.

  Almost no sooner had that happened than Bruce Baird was reassigned. Within months of launching our prosecution, Barbara Jones was the lead attorney and I had moved up to number two. Thanks to Barbara’s trust in me and her generosity, I was a genuine number two, not just some go-fer dressed up in second-banana clothes. This was my first case of any consequence, and I got to put people on the stand, many of them old pals from the Sixty-ninth Street office of the FBI. Barbara let me do the opening statement. After she had done the summation and the defense had summed up its own case, she handed the rebuttal to me. I’m not sure I ever again had as hard a case to prove.

  Our secret weapon at the trial was a retired New York City police sergeant named Gene McDonnell, who worked in the U.S. Attorney’s Office as a technical expert; his ability to enhance audio tapes and prepare evidence for trail gave us a unique advantage. Gene was also a great investigator and supplied much-needed street smarts to the case. Still, we had no bodies. The three dead capos had gone swimming with the fish, just as the mob prefers. It was not until 2004, when former Bonanno boss Joey Massino decided to cooperate to save himself, that he gave the FBI the long-secret grave of the three Bonanno captains. (The FBI agent who broke the case was Joe Bonavolonta, my friend Jules’s son.)

  We had no eyewitnesses either, at least none who would come forward or admit to what they had seen. All we had to offer up were discussions on tape, things said to Joe in his guise as Donnie. And we did it. We put together a case on the fly; we ad-libbed as we went along; and in the end, we proved the murder of the three capos, put a lot of very bad wise guys behind bars, and took out a whole tier of leadership of one of America’s more evil crime networks. But we weren’t through with the Bonannos.

  We knew even before we went to trial that we had one large, unfinished piece of business waiting for us when it was through, and that’s what I turned to next: the Sicilians and what became known in the press as the Pizza Connection case.

  The Italian underworld divides into four principal groups: the Sicilian Mafia, based (obviously) in Sicily and the fountainhead of all the other Italian-based Mafias; the Camorra, or Neapolitan Mafia, out of Naples; the ’Ndrangheta, derived from the Greek for “courage” or “loyalty,” formed in Calabria in the 1860s by Sicilians banished from their island home; and the Sacra Corona Unita (United Sacred Crown) out of the Puglia region in southeastern Italy. The American Mafia, officially La Cosa Nostra (or, roughly, Our Thing), owes a debt to all four groups; but its greatest ties, far and away, are to the Sicilians.

  Historically, the Mafia and the Cosa Nostra kept an ocean between them, but by the late 1970s, the Sicilians were becoming commonplace on Bonanno family turf, particularly the area around Knickerbocker Avenue in Brooklyn. They seemed to own the narcotics trade, or at least they were heavily sharing in it with their American hosts. Some Sicilians could even be found in the Bonanno chain of command, but close as the ties were, the two groups operated in distinctly separate spheres, with radically different styles.

  The Cosa Nostra guys were arrogant to the point of recklessness. They would let key bits of information slip while talking on phones that could be easily tapped. Sometimes we wouldn’t have to wire the phones at all. One Italian-American gangster we kept close ties on liked to stroll out in front of his social club and do business in the street, standing next to a mailbox. So very late one night we stuffed an FBI agent into the box the goon liked to lean on and let him listen in. Unfortunately, we couldn’t retrieve our live microphone until the middle of the next night, but if he got a horrible backache, we got great intelligence.

  The Sicilians were just the opposite, more like KGB than Cosa Nostra. They’d use pay phones, and they wouldn’t s
tay on long. What’s more, they spoke a language that even native Italians have trouble understanding. The Sicilians trusted no one other than their own, and except for those few who had corporate ties to the Bonanno family, they reported to their own hierarchy back in Sicily. No FBI agent had ever been so embraced by the Cosa Nostra as Joe Pistone, but even “Donnie Brasco” couldn’t get beans out of the Sicilians.

  “I can’t get close to these guys,” he kept telling us. “They grunt and walk away because I’m not Sicilian.”

  Yet something had to be done. The deeper we dug into the Bonannos, the more we could see that the Sicilians were clearing hundreds of millions of dollars in narcotics profits, principally heroin sold by pizza parlor owners in New York City and up and down the East Coast, and into the Midwest as well. (That’s where the Pizza Connection moniker came from.) The question was how to get inside the Sicilians, how to bring them down. Then we learned that a courageous judge in Palermo, Sicily, Giovanni Falcone, was doing the same thing at the other end of the pipeline: trying to make a case against the same mob drug lords we were after but at far greater peril than we were facing. In America, it’s rare that a Cosa Nostra member even tries to bribe a judge or a prosecutor, and rarer still for a bribe to be taken. At least at the federal level, judges are almost incorruptible. Witnesses in America are often threatened, but they’re only seldom assaulted, much less killed. In Sicily, one Mafia investigation after another had come to grief in seas of blood: prosecutors, police, judges, witnesses murdered. The Mafia there even had a term for the government officials it had assassinated: The phrase translates as “excellent cadavers.”

  Judge Falcone and his staff were people of exceptional bravery and determination, and it wasn’t long, I think, before their best qualities began to rub off on us. We didn’t have enough corroborating evidence to get permission to put wiretaps on the New York Sicilians—we had no informants, no way to get inside their shell—but we knew from our Bonanno family investigations and from undercover work who some of them were, so we started watching them, maybe as they’d never been watched before, and as we watched, a pattern began to emerge.

  The Sicilians we already knew about would regularly drive up to street corners in Manhattan and deliver boxes and bags to men we didn’t know, who would then take the parcels into nearby hotels. From the hotels, the parcels went to banks down on Wall Street, where the money they contained was deposited into accounts from which transfers would eventually be made to numbered Swiss bank accounts. Or the money would go to some Wall Street brokerage house for laundering before finding its way to Zurich or Bern or Geneva. Whatever the routing overseas, the transactions involved vast sums of money, all of which started out as fives and tens and twenties. It smelled so much like drug-transaction proceeds that you could practically get a contact high just thinking about it.

  Simultaneously, Judge Falcone and his excellent colleague, Liliana Ferraro, were pushing backward from the other end—tracking the money from Sicily, where a lot of it ended up, to Bulgaria, for instance, where it was used to pay transporters who had brought in raw heroin shipments from Turkey and elsewhere, including Iran. It wasn’t long before the two sides, by pooling sources and intelligence, could begin to posit a global pattern at work: a drug network that connected the Sicilian Mafia to heroin sales in New York and Philadelphia, Chicago and Cleveland and Detroit. In time, they would limn a global network, operating on parts of four continents, that over the course of almost a decade, beginning in the mid-1970s, imported into the U.S. and distributed almost two tons of heroin and vast amounts of cocaine, netting over $1.6 billion.

  Falcone’s top investigators—Gianni De Gennaro and Antonino Manganelli, brilliant and fearless anti-Mafia police leaders—gave the FBI and me the blueprint to prosecute the case together with Falcone. Both of them now courageously lead the Italian National Police despite years of threats and efforts to kill them.

  As the pattern became clearer and the source of the revenue more definitely illicit drug sales, we had the standing to approach a variety of federal judges and ask for wiretap orders; and as the wiretaps came on line, we were able at last to breach the Sicilians’ wall of silence. Not that it was easy to understand a word they were saying.

  The greater New York area is full of fluent Italian speakers, even Italian translators. Like me, a lot of New Yorkers and New Jerseyites grew up with grandparents who were far more comfortable with their native tongue than their adopted one. But Sicilian is another matter. We had one and only one FBI agent in the New York office, Joseph Cincotta, who was fluent in the language—more that, really, than an Italian dialect. We quickly put this outstanding agent to work monitoring the phone taps, and because his wife, Rachel, and her brother, Dominick Buda, were fluent, we hired every one of them and handed them headsets.

  By 1984, though, even the hardworking Cincotta family couldn’t come near keeping up with the need. We had taps everywhere, and monitoring plants all around the city, and to handle them all, we brought in police from Sicily itself and swore them in as deputy U.S. marshals so that they could listen in to ongoing investigations. By any strict-procedure book, it was loosey-goosey at best, an inspiration that could turn south the minute one of our police-translators took it upon him-or herself to tip off the countryman he was listening in on. Just like the Bonanno case, we were making this one up on the fly. But the Sicilians we pressed into service proved as trustworthy as Judge Falcone himself, and those wiretaps were critical to piecing together the puzzle and teasing out of it a dramatis personae to indict.

  If anything, I was even more focused on this case than I had been on the one that spawned it. For starters, I had more riding on it personally. I was the lead prosecutor this time around. Among the tight community of assistant U.S. attorneys, this was the chance to earn my own bones. Beyond that, the case was just so complicated and fascinating, with a cast of characters—once we had finally assembled it—that Hollywood never could have dreamed up on its own.

  At the center of it all, at least initially, was Salvatore “Toto” Catalano. Fittingly, he was a Sicilian-American with a foot in both camps. He was born in Ciminna, Sicily, in 1941, and had come to America at age twenty-five, settled in Queens, where he had opened a bakery, and gone to work for the Bonannos on Knickerbocker Street. With Carmine Galante’s murder in 1979, Catalano completed a meteoric rise, emerging as “street boss” of the entire family, but the speed of his ascension was also part of the problem. He’d never really learned much English. That was okay with the Sicilian clans who were supplying the narcotics and pocketing a significant part of the profits, but Toto simply couldn’t communicate effectively with the Italian-American crews on this side of the Atlantic. Frustrated, he stepped down voluntarily after less than two years at the helm, ceding total control of the family to Rusty Rastelli, just prior to the outbreak of the warfare that had spurred our previous trial.

  Still, if he was no longer street boss when we began our investigation, Catalano was a key nexus, the essential ingredient for the kind of joint venturing the Bonannos and the Sicilians had entered into, and he led us, like a bee to honey, to the guy who would become the central figure in the case.

  Gaetano Badalamenti began as a voice somewhere in the ether, at the far end of one of the phone lines we had tapped, but what a voice it was! Whoever was speaking was clearly directing the entire narcotics operation, brokering deal after deal. In time, we traced the calls to, of all places, Brazil, and eventually, we were able to identify the voice as Badalamenti’s. (His nephew was plying the family trade in Chicago. We’d bugged his phone there, which helped with the identification.) And in Gaetano Badalamenti, we had the beginning of a very prime catch.

  Badalamenti had been born in 1923 in Cinisi, near Palermo in the northwest of Sicily. Like a lot of his fellow Mafiosi, he got involved in a variety of building projects and schemes throughout the island in the years after the war, but Badalamenti thought bigger than most of his contemporaries. In 1957, h
e took part in what was to become an infamous meeting in Palermo. Joe Bonanno and his capo Carmine Galante came from America. Lucky Luciano, exiled from the United States to Sicily and five years short of his own grave, was on hand to serve as intermediary and mentor. Among the locals present, in addition to Badalamenti, was Tommasso Buscetta, then maybe the most powerful of all the Sicilian dons and later to be one of our star witnesses in a trial that would put Gaetano Badalamenti behind bars for the rest of his life.

  The subject that day was narcotics, specifically how to globalize the trade. America had the money and the customer base, and the American Cosa Nostra had the infrastructure to serve it. The Sicilians, meanwhile, had access to the raw goods and a transportation network in place. Cigarette smuggling out of Turkey was the Sicilian mob’s growth industry. From tobacco to opium was not a far leap, especially since the smuggling routes out were largely the same, and in clannish, remote Sicily, the Mafia had the perfect place to refine morphine base into user-friendly heroin. An apostle of modern business practices, Luciano convinced everyone that a multinational undertaking just made sense, but even in organized crime, sea changes don’t happen overnight. Other, equally infamous, meetings in Sicily and New York would be needed to nail things down. For two decades to come, cigarettes, not narcotics, would continue to be the Sicilian Mafia’s main source of income. Still, this was the meeting that began to lay the framework for what would finally become known as the Pizza Connection. I was just seven years old.

  Lucky Luciano had a second agenda to press at the Palermo meeting. Now that he had been back in his native island for a number of years, he could see what a mess the mob there was. Mafia clans, named for the towns from which their members had come, were in constant warfare. There was no organization, no superstructure to help settle disputes peacefully. Money was going down the drain; inefficiency was everywhere. What the Sicilians needed, Luciano argued, was what he had done for organized crime in America: a board of governors, of sorts; a grand council. The Sicilians agreed with that, too. They called their new council the Cupola, and one of those to head the Cupola in its early years was none other than Gaetano Badalamenti.