By the mid-1970s, Badalamenti was Sicily’s boss of bosses—the most powerful gangster in one of the biggest mob strongholds on earth—but the fragile peace that the Cupola had fostered was beginning to fall apart. Cigarette smuggling was beginning to take a backseat. In its place, the heroin trade had blossomed into a fabulously profitable undertaking, and a particularly lethal Mafioso named Toto Riina of the Corleonesi began to get designs on taking it over. The more he decided he wanted it all, the more people Toto killed or had killed. Finally, in 1979, by which time every Mafia clan on the island was involved to a greater or lesser degree in heroin trafficking, Badalamenti fled the island to Spain and eventually to Brazil, where his old friend Tommasso Buscetta was now living with a new wife.
Undeterred by being run out of the Cupola and off his island—and now, of course, near almost unlimited supplies of cocaine to be added to the mix—Badalamenti set up shop in São Paulo and resumed direction of the Pizza Connection, and that’s where we found him at the other end of a phone line. Eventually, he and his son were arrested by Spanish police as they landed in Madrid for a visit, and we were almost ready to begin our prosecution.
The trial itself was an absolute three-ring circus complete with actors, thugs hamming it up, and enough defendants to field two football teams. More than three hundred witnesses took the stand. We introduced 15,000 exhibits, thirteen foreign depositions, and 41,000 pages of transcripts. From stem to stern, the whole thing took seventeen months—from September 30, 1985, to March 2, 1987—the longest criminal jury trial in the history of the U.S. Federal Courthouse where I would later sit as judge. My fellow prosecutors liked to joke that I had a baby conceived and born on the government’s direct case alone, eleven months in the presentation. Rudy Giuliani had become U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York by then. He supported me every inch of the way and I needed every bit of help I could get. The case was tried by Pierre Leval, one of the finest judges in the storied history of the Southern District bench. His rulings and decisions were as close to flawless as a judge ever gets.
Once again, the government’s case was almost entirely circumstantial. The only reason it succeeded was because agents such as Bob Paquette, Charlie Rooney, Carmine Russo, Pat Luzio, Joe Cincotta, and Mike Slattery—as well as customs agents Mike Fahy and Tom Loreto and DEA agents Tony Petruci and Mario Sessa—performed investigative magic every day. Paralegals Afredo Principe and Mary Ellen Luthy also helped us carry the day.
One defendant was murdered during the trial. We didn’t know it at the time, and to this day I don’t know why, but one day he just didn’t show up in the courtroom. We asked the judge to revoke his bail, and he did, and then we found out our defendant had been revoked altogether. Another defendant was shot the evening of his lawyer’s summation. His attorney finished up, the two of them went down to the Village for a little dinner, and before he knew it, he had a bullet in him that left him paralyzed. When we next saw him a few days later, he was shackled into a wheelchair. Yet another defendant was so sore at his attorney’s summation that he put out a hit contract on him. As the old saying goes, you just can’t make this stuff up.
Tommasso Buscetta was our sole cooperating Mafia witness, and he was an impressive one, from the highest ranks of Sicilian crime. Giovanni Falcone had basically talked him into the role: he was the first of the “pentiti”—the Italian Mafiosi who chose to repent and cooperate under pressure from Falcone. Since Italy had no equivalent to a federal witness protection program, Buscetta went into our own program for safekeeping while prosecutions were being prepared on both sides of the Atlantic. Whenever Judge Falcone’s people needed to interview him, they would fly over here for the meeting. It was an extraordinary act of cooperation between the two judicial systems. But Buscetta was a major narcotics dealer. He’d murdered people, and he had been living in Brazil when a lot of the action in question went down. There are no choirboys in cases like this, and Buscetta was great for identifying people authoritatively as Mafia members—“men of honor” as they’re known—but jury members weren’t likely to take his word on more refined matters of good and evil.
The wiretap transcripts were the true heart of our case. We had hundreds upon hundreds of hours of wiretaps to introduce. I’d had it all translated, and the translations had been authenticated. But what to do with the results? Wiretaps are only episodically interesting. Guys will talk for fifteen minutes about their dog or their bunions or the problems they’re having with the wife before they drop the ten words you’ve been listening for all along. If jurors had to read through all those pages just to get to the few nuggets buried inside them, they were bound to fall asleep. So I did something never tried before as far as I knew. I hired a troupe of actors—bona fide professionals, equity members—to take the parts of the defendants and other key players, and read their lines to the jury. One actor played Gaetano Badalamenti, another enacted Salvatore Catalano, and on and on.
The defense objected, naturally, and there was no precedent. But the judge ruled that I could present the case any way I wanted to, and the actors proved to be a huge hit. Day after day, they would show up and perform their roles, as if they were in some long-running off-off Broadway show that required new dialogue every day. The witness room became, in effect, the actors’ green room. I’d see them in there from time to time, slipping into their roles, putting on the characters. They all had great voices, and over time the jury came to love them, even anticipate their performances. (I kept thinking of my opera-loving grandmother. This was a spectacle she would have appreciated.)
As a delivery mechanism for evidence and general information, I still can’t think of a better approach than using those actors, but as always, the moments that really stand out in my memory are the ones with the real players: the defendants, the witnesses, the people who couldn’t leave the courtroom at the end of the day and switch back into being someone more normal.
Gaetano Badalamenti was our biggest net and in some ways our most theatrical. Most times in a trial like this, a defendant has to be crazy to take the witness stand. The upsides are minimal, the downsides many. But this case was so circumstantial in nature—built out of phone calls, translations from a language no one on the jury spoke, distant Sicilian connections, testimony from narcotics experts, and the like—that I really couldn’t blame Badalamenti for wanting to take the stand. It was the way he played his part that was a little mind-boggling.
At one point, I remember asking him on cross-examination why he felt it necessary to do business on pay phones from Brazil. Surely, there was a more convenient way to have a conversation.
“It’s because of the Normans,” he answered.
“The Normans?”
“Yes, Mr. Freeh,” he explained in effect. “We Sicilians have been conquered by the Normans, occupied by the Germans, and ruled by the French, the Spanish, the Austrians, and the Italians. We’re naturally a little suspicious of who might be listening in on our calls. That’s why we’re reluctant to talk on a regular phone.”
In his opening statement, Badalamenti’s lawyer had described his client as a member of the Italian partisans during World War II. As Badalamenti sat there smiling and doing his best to look bravely modest, his lawyer went into great detail about his client’s fearless exploits against the demonic Nazis. It was ridiculous. I was certain he was no partisan, but I had no proof, so we contacted Judge Falcone’s team and asked for their help, and they came through in spades. Turned out, Badalamenti had served in the Italian army and had taken part in several battles against the Allies and specifically American units. Even better, our Italian connection managed to find a photo of Badalamenti in his army uniform. On cross-examination I got a chance to revisit the matter.
“Now, who was it that you were fighting?” I asked him.
“The Germans.”
“Were you shooting at Germans?”
“Oh, yes, I was killing them.”
We showed him a picture of an Ame
rican GI then, and I asked if he shot at any of them.
“Oh, no,” he protested, “they were our friends.”
So I showed him the photo of himself in an Italian army uniform and recited his service record. Even then, he had some crazy explanation—he had an explanation for everything—but toward the end of his two days of cross examination, the jury had begun to laugh at him, not with him, and I knew then that Gaetano Badalamenti was toast, or maybe I should write that I knew it as surely as I could know anything in that roaring carnival of a proceeding.
In addition to the twenty-two people on trial at the defendant’s table, there were at least twenty-two lawyers. I tried the case with four extraordinary prosecutors: Bob Bucknam—who later became chief of staff at the FBI—Dick Martin, Bob Stewart and Andy McCarthy. Add in our bailiffs, my troupe of actors, a sea of witnesses, an avid press, and plenty of spectators, and you couldn’t tell the players without a program. And even then, people sometimes got it wrong. Witnesses would take the stand. I’d say, do you know Mr. Badalamenti or Mr. Catalano, and they’d say, oh, yes. Then I’d invite them to look around the courtroom and pick him out, and they’d examine that sea of faces and point to our own lawyers, FBI agents, you name it. The choices were just too many.
One of my favorite such witnesses was an Italian named Salvatore. He fancied himself a financier, but in fact he was a bagman. His job was to pick up the cash and deliver it—purely a middleman, at least in this operation, but a character through and through. Plump with big bifocals, he wore a seersucker jacket everywhere he went: the same jacket, literally everywhere. We would look at surveillance photo after surveillance photo taken over many months, at all times of the day, and we’d keep saying, “Isn’t that the same jacket?” And it was, always.
When we put Sal on the stand, one of the defense lawyers noted that he had a long history of passing bad checks, and Sal was quick to agree.
“Do you think that’s a serious offense?” the lawyer pressed him.
“No,” Sal answered without missing a beat.
“Why not?”
“Well, I also have received a lot of bad checks.”
From my point of view, Sal’s main role was to identify a lot of the guys who were on trial. He’d carried cash for many of them. But I wanted to make sure beforehand that he named the right guys.
“If you don’t see Mr. X or Mr. Y,” I told him, “just don’t pick anyone. Say you don’t see him.”
“Well, Mr. Freeh,” he asked, “could you indicate where they are, and then I’ll pick them out.”
“No,” I told him, “I can’t do that.”
“Just give me a hint.”
“No.”
So Sal comes into the courtroom, takes the witness stand, and gets sworn in. Then, instead of sitting down, he stands there with his hand over his eyes like a visor, darting glances around the room, trying to pre-identify everyone I’m going to ask him to point out. The defendants meanwhile, in a rare show of unanimity, were all trying to duck their heads under the table. What a scene!
As I wrote earlier, there was a light side in all this. Some of the goons we dealt with were genuinely funny, some of them genuinely warm … if you could ignore the fact that they broke kneecaps and shook people down and sometimes sent them to the bottom of the East River for a living. I think most federal prosecutors felt as I did. lf you didn’t laugh about these guys once in a while, you’d have to cry all day long.
What matters ultimately is that we won convictions on all counts against all the defendants save for four. Three of the twenty-two defendants were acquitted on two of the sixteen counts brought against them. Only Vito Badalamenti, Gaetano’s son, got off entirely, acquitted of the sole count he was charged with. Salvatore Catalano was sentenced to a total of forty-five years in prison and required to pay $1.15 million in fines and an additional $1 million to go toward the care and rehabilitation of those who had become addicted to narcotics through his criminal acts. Gaetano Badalamenti was also sentenced to forty-five years in prison, with mandatory release after thirty years—part of the extradition deal we made with the Spanish after he was arrested—and fined $125,000. Badalamenti would die in jail. Two other defendants drew thirty-five-year sentences; one got thirty years; one, twenty-five; three, twenty years; and so on. In all, the sentencing judge imposed almost $6 million in fines and restitutions.
Justice was done; the public interest was served. Just as important in some ways, the case became the template for future international cooperative efforts, especially once I became FBI director. The vital element, though, in the whole package was Giovanni Falcone himself. Over the course of the four years the case stretched on—two years for the investigations, two more years for the indictments and trial—Giovanni became both a dear friend and a hero to me.
Our trial in New York City reached record lengths for the federal courthouse involved, but Giovanni’s trials were by Cecil B. DeMille, with a cast of thousands. Ultimately 475 Mafioso were charged, and 338 of them were found guilty and sentenced to a collective 2,665 years in prison. Known appropriately in Italy as the Maxi Trials, the hearings took place in a specially built bunker next to Ucciardone, Palermo’s main prison. Security was extraordinary, and still eighteen of the defendants were murdered during the hearings. And the bloodshed wasn’t confined to the courtroom or even those directly involved in the trial. The period of and around the trials in Palermo became known as the Years of Lead. In the end, though, Giovanni and his fellow courageous jurists and police—along with Tommasso Buscetta and other “pentiti” they had convinced to talk—tore the veil of secrecy off the Sicilian Mafia and Italian organized crime generally. They shone light where it had never penetrated before, including on the corrupt politicians who made common cause with the gangsters and thugs.
Giovanni had been born in Palermo just before the war. He had been a judge since the mid-1960s, and had spent most of that time focused on organized crime. He knew the danger he faced, both because of his judicial decisions and because of his refusal to back down in the press. Death threats against him were common, yet he forged on. As the trials in Sicily wound down, he and his staff shuttled frequently between Palermo and Rome, where the Italian anti-Mafia task force was headquartered. Then on May 23, 1992, while riding on the autostrada between the Palermo airport and downtown, Falcone and his wife, Francesca Morvilio, a civil judge, were assassinated by explosives packed into a narrow underpass. Three members of their police escort were blown up with them.
I was shattered by the assassinations. I felt as if someone had come after me with a bomb, too. I had every intention of attending Giovanni’s funeral, but Gianni De Gennaro, my good friend and one of Giovanni’s top investigators, asked me not to come. Protecting the Italian officials at the funeral would be challenge enough, he said. I would be adding to a logistical nightmare and placing myself at great risk. Conditions were simply too dangerous. (And indeed Giovanni’s fellow crusading anti-Mafia judge, Paolo Borsellino, would soon be murdered himself.)
I wasn’t convinced, though. I admired Giovanni so deeply that I felt I had to be there, whatever the risks involved. Then I had a second conversation on the matter, this one even more emotional, with Liliana Ferraro, a judge who had worked as Falcone’s right hand during the Maxi Trials. She, too, told me not to come. They had yet to figure out who had murdered Giovanni and his wife, she said, and I had become so closely identified with him during the Pizza Connection cases that they felt I would be in grave danger. Back at home, Marilyn, who knew my capacity for pigheadedness better than anyone else, was equally opposed to my attending: I was a father, a husband. Finally, I agreed. Instead, a year later, in the fall of 1993, I flew to Italy to attend a memorial service in Giovanni’s honor. By then, I was FBI director. I have since gone back every year.
I’m not a big one for office decorations. When I was director, I kept framed artwork from my kids on the wall and not much else, but four photos hung there, where I could see them eve
ry day. One was of Frank Johnson, the federal judge and civil-rights hero who swore me in as director. The second photo showed Elie Wiesel, the great humanist and Holocaust survivor. I kept it on the wall as a reminder of what happens when police power is made to serve wholly political ends. (More about Elie in the next chapter.) The third photo showed Teddy Roosevelt in his Rough Rider uniform—he was also New York City police commissioner—and the fourth was of Giovanni Falcone. We can’t bring the dead back, but we can remember them and do honor to the causes they died for.
Being an Italian-American and having spent a career prosecuting La Cosa Nostra cases, I became deeply sensitive to the heroism and gifts that countless Americans of Italian heritage have bestowed on our nation. My involvement in the National Italian American Foundation and with its charitable and educational good works is how I try to balance the equation of the cases I prosecuted. Great jurists, warriors, doctors, captains of industry, benefactors, FBI agents, and entertainment pioneers—Antonin Scalia,Anthony Zinni, Tony Fauci, Lee Iacocca, Bill Fugazy, Lew Schiliro, Joseph Guccione, United States Marshal for Manhattan, the Scotti brothers—have more than made up for the misdeeds of a tiny minority of this great heritage.
CHAPTER 6
“That’s Moody’s Bomb”
When the Pizza Connection case finally wound to a close in 1987, I had been going almost nonstop for eleven years: four on UNIRAC, two on the Bonanno prosecution, and four more on the Sicilians and their drug deals. The only break of any sort I’d had was my eleven-month stint in Washington, and that wasn’t exactly R and R. For the most part, the work couldn’t have been more exciting—I loved it—but Marilyn and I had two sons by then, and I was determined not to give them or her the short end of the stick.
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