Wiseguys in the Woods

by John P. M. Wappett

An unexpected connection became clear when Falcone explained the historic ties between the Genovese family and the Camorra.

  “It should not come as a surprise. After all, Vito Genovese was born in Naples, not on Sicily, like most of the other capos.”

  “Capos?”

  “Apologies. Capo is Italian for ‘head’ or ‘boss’. As Genovese is the head of an entire crime family, with a number of capos, he is the ‘boss of bosses’ or ‘capo tutti capo’.”

  “Now the really interesting bit is what you asked me about on the phone, where you said you had some information on a possible mob meeting in Lake George in 1958.”

  Mike nodded: “We interviewed the son of the restaurant owner where the meeting was held. He couldn’t tell us much about what was discussed, but he did hear a reference to another meeting the previous year.”

  Falcone’s mouth slid into an amused half smile, “That may have been a reference to one of two major meetings of the American and Sicilian Mafia in 1957, most likely the one in Apalachin.” Seeing the blank looks on their faces, he continued: “It was in 1957 that the Mafia truly changed over from the gangster-loan shark-gambling-bootleggers of Al Capone’s days to the drug-fueled colossus that it is today.”

  Falcone had Mike, Guy and Dave’s undivided attention.

  “Put simply, the American La Cosa Nostra, although still claiming to be opposed to peddling hard drugs, was finding the potential profits to be too great to be resisted. They were just bad at it. Entire sections of the Five Families were being arrested and thrown in jail on drug smuggling charges. At the two meetings, it was decided that the Sicilian Mafia would do the dirty work of bringing heroin and cocaine into the U.S. and that the LCN would then control the distribution.”

  “Presumably for a price? Mike ventured.

  “Of course. The situation had become more complicated in 1956, with the Narcotics Control Act, a set of federal laws which imposed mandatory minimum prison sentences for drug trafficking offenses. This upset the pricing guidelines for heroin set by Meyer Lansky on behalf of the families, which had a percentage built in for a bribe fund to be used on federal judges to get light sentences for mob members convicted of such offenses. The mandatory sentences rendered the bribe fund obsolete.”

  “OK, but why would the Sicilians agree to take on a risk that their American cousins didn’t want?” Dave asked.

  “The Sicilians were good at moving the drugs over from Europe and staying under the radar. The U.S. cops just didn’t pay any attention to them. The resulting increase in interaction between the Sicilians and their American counterparts required rules and protocols. This process began with the first meeting, held in 1957 at the Hotel des Palmes, in Palermo, Sicily. They even had time for some housekeeping, consisting of agreeing to kill Albert Anastasia, their in-house assassin-in-chief, who had become too much of an embarrassment. Ten days after the Palermo meeting, Anastasia was gunned down in New York City while sitting in a barber’s chair. While the actual hit order came from Vito Genovese and Carlo Gambino, it had been ratified in Palermo, and Sicilian hitters were used. American law enforcement knew nothing of all this for another six years.”

  Falcone walked over to the only window in his office, opened it and aimed a small fan outward as he lit a cigarette.

  “La Cosa Nostra, the American crime families, held their first meeting in Livingston, New Jersey to discuss a potential arrangement with the Sicilians. This was in November of 1957. The following day, these mobsters, along with a who’s who of North American mafia, started to converge on a little town in southern New York, called Apalachin. It’s not too far from Binghamton. The meeting was hosted by a John Barbone, the then president of a major soft drink company. Among the attendees were most of the American delegates to the Palermo meeting.”

  Mike interjected. “Wait a minute! I’ve heard of this. This was the mob meeting that was broken up by troopers, and the mobsters were scrambling through the woods in their silk suits and loafers, trying to get away. For years afterward, local deer hunters reported finding stray $100 bills in the brush.”

  “Yes, you are quite right. The official account is that Sergeant Edgar Croswell noticed the odd collection of expensive cars going to a farmhouse and collected all available officers to conduct a raid. Even though some sixty main characters were picked up and briefly detained no one had a clue as to why they were there. For many years after, it was thought that the Apalchin meeting was held to formally ban narcotic sales in the mob. Instead, these meetings were arranged to facilitate the smuggling. Vito Genovese was especially big in drugs, until he was busted for a 160 kilo purchase of heroin, a real coup for the Feds until you find out that Vito was set up by Charles “Lucky” Luciano and Carlo Gambino, to get Genovese out of their hair.”

  “Why did you say ‘the official account’?” Mike asked. “Is there another?”

  “Actually, yes,” replied Giovanni. “There is considerable evidence suggesting that the police were tipped off by someone within La Cosa Nostra. One theory is that Carlo Gambino, who was notable for his absence from the meeting, dropped a dime on the meeting in order to embarrass Vito Genovese and hopefully supplant him in New York City. Another version is that Meyer Lansky, who had just bumped up the price to be charged for heroin in the wake of the 1956 Narcotics Control Act, feared that the participants might vote to have him killed.

  Falcone took a long drag on his cigarette. “Personally, I don’t buy either of these, but we may never know what really happened. I tend to believe another rumor that the real tipster was none of these, but was a lower level, but well connected mobster who did not want La Cosa Nostra or the Italian mafia to become ensnared into the narcotics smuggling trade. The informant who gave police the heads up on Apalachin was never identified.

  Dave asked, “If the meeting at Apalachin was broken up before it began, then what happened next? Was there another meeting?”

  “Yes, I think it fair to say that other meetings were held, although smaller and lower key than Apalachin. There have long been rumors of one held here in New York City the following year, as well as a possible get together in a traditional La Cosa Nostra meeting place, Lake George.”

  Mike looked skeptical. “Lake George a traditional meeting place? Since when?”

  Giovanni smiled. “Before international air travel and superhighways, the only safe methods of travel for mobsters were by car or train. Mobsters in New York City and Montreal often travelled by car and meeting at the halfway point, which was Lake George.”

  Chapter 12

  The first several days back in the office after the trip to Bermuda and then the stunning revelations from the INS associate in Italy about Enrico Madonna, made the standard whirlwind of catching up all the more hectic . Among the blizzard of messages was one from the librarian that she had received several positive responses to their inquiries for books on organized crime.

  As soon as the books began to arrive, he set himself to the task of reading them during lunch and at night, Peter soon found himself absorbed into the underworld of organized crime. This was one of the reasons that he loved his work so much. Depending on the case he could find himself learning about anything from ballistics to bugs, psychology to Santeria. For someone like Peter, with an innate love of learning and a mindful of scattered, seemingly useless information, the ability to get paid to learn even more was a wonderful perk. Needless to say, he was a real terror in trivia games and Eileen now insisted that he be her partner, and not out of affection.

  One book in particular, by Howard Abadinsky, a professor at the University of Chicago, really gave Peter a good overall picture of organized crime around the world. He was soon learning some of the traits and unique features of the various organized crime types and what they had in common. There were traditional groups like the Japanese yakuza, motorized versions like Hell’s Angels, the massive drug cartels like the Medellin of Columbia and even the Brighton Beach mob, of transplanted Russian mobsters, who had cut the
ir teeth on the KGB, so were doubly dangerous.

  He learned that organized crime was legally and academically defined as being an ongoing criminal venture, involving a number of persons, arranged in a hierarchal chain of command. The organization has a method of replacing members, allowing it to perpetuate itself, and the membership is limited or exclusive. The group usually has rules for conduct by its members and has specific goals or objectives – most often profit-based but sometimes including territorial control and fierce government opposition.

  As he dug into the sections concerning Italian organized crime, Peter was surprised to learn that there were actually four distinct forms of organized crime in that country, not just the Godfather Mafia families in and around Palermo, Sicily. The Sicilians were known as Cosa Nostra or “this thing of ours”, which referred to a way the early members used to introduce one another in code. One known to both people being introduced would indicate that they were all “la stessa cosa,” or “the same thing.”

  In the area of southeastern Italy at the heel of the boot, there were a number of clans known collectively as the Calabrian mafia, or ‘Ndrangheta. Peter stopped short when he read that one of the more powerful clans of this group was based in the town of Siderno. “Siderno” had been the label used by the task force on their chart, for a number of individuals in the Albany area and Canada. Peter wondered if he was the only one who had not known the significance of the name. The third organized crime group in Italy was known as the Camorra, located in and around the city of Naples in the Campania region. The fourth was by far the smallest of the four, known as “la Sacra Corona Unita” loosely translated, “the Sacred, United Crown,”

  When he reached the section on the area around Naples, Peter slowed his reading and began taking serious notes. The historic background of the Camorra seemed to offer more insight into their present behavior than would normally be the case. It seemed that the camorristi began as smugglers of contraband, especially untaxed cigarettes, sometimes working in league with Corsicans. Unlike their Sicilian cousins, the Camorra clans tended to recruit members from the several prisons in the region – not unlike the Russian organized vory v zakone, which got their start in the Soviet gulags. Not only did this policy tend to bring in more violent soldiers, but occasionally brought in someone who had been in a Sicilian crime family before being sentenced and shipped out to prison. These transplanted Sicilians provided expertise and connections back to their old families.

  Peter discovered that the Camorra began to explode in size and power in the 70’s as Don Raffaele Cutolo began to draw together the disparate Camorra groups and clans into a unified and coordinated organization, with him as the head. This became the New Camorra Organization (NCO). The NCO benefited greatly from the corruption of the rebuilding efforts throughout the region after a massive earthquake struck Italy in 1980. Cutolo, however, sought to keep the NCO out of the drug trade, and dissatisfaction with this policy led to a rebellion by a number of Camorra clans that formed a rival confederation, the Nuova Famiglia or New Family (NF), headed by Antonio Bardellino, and the Nuvoletta brothers.

  The NF joined up with various Sicilian families in the drug trafficking and the conflicts between the two Camorra groups resulted in the Camorra war of the 1980’s. In this conflict, hundreds of camorristi were murdered, often in unusually unpleasant ways and as of the publishing date of the book Peter was reading, it appeared that the Nuova Famiglia were gaining the upper hand, with the assistance of the Sicilians.

  ***

  A few weeks before the news of Sica’s true identity arrived from Italy, Dave Grace had gone around and invited a number of the task force members and his fellow INS agents to a Christmas party at his home in Lansingburgh, north of the City of Troy, on the second Saturday in December. Since Peter and Eileen were not heading out of town until the following weekend, Peter happily accepted. On the trip down, Peter explained that it would make the most sense if she drove them home that night, as they should always strive to put their best foot forward and she was certainly there best driver and he was their best navigator. She then gave a loud sneeze that seemed to contain the word bullshit within it. “Wow! That was subtle.” That was the best he could come up with in reply.

  The Grace’s home was a comfortable ranch design in a middle income neighborhood in the hills east of the Hudson River. Dave’s wife, Deborah, met them at the front door and introduced herself. Once inside, Peter was delighted to find that there were no other attorney-types present, just cops and agents. Peter led Eileen around and introduced her to everyone. She did not know any of them as she had always avoided functions like retirement parties and the like. It seemed that she piqued the interest of many of the cops because she had somehow put up with Peter for a lot of years, making her something of a novelty. She did brilliantly, mixing small talk with questions about the investigations, about which she had heard so much from Peter.

  The party went along well, with Dave occasionally walking up behind one of his guests and administering a wet willy, an old school prank which had been adopted by Special Forces and used during wrestling matches, in which he dampened his finger and inserted it into the ear of the unsuspecting target and wiggled. The guests, including Peter’s loving wife, thought it especially funny when Dave did it to Peter, causing him to jump, yell, turn, and blast Dave with obscenities, all in one motion. Peter noticed that, as the evening wore on, more and more of the guests began to stand with their backs to a wall, to avoid further ambush.

  It gave Peter a chance to look around the kitchen and living room area. It was all neat, but definitely lived in, with furniture that was comfortable if not new and matching. Peter happily declared to himself that this was a home, not just a house. Peter was especially pleased to notice that the Christmas tree ornaments were a hodgepodge of styles colors and materials, including a number of decorations that were clearly done by children. This was the way a tree should look, not all uniform and manufactured.

  Mike Connolly attended for a couple of hours, standing off slightly and chatting pleasantly with those who spoke to him, but not acting to engage others in conversation. Peter felt empathy for his new friend, as he usually felt and acted the same way at social functions.

  Peter had heard that Connolly had been divorced after a long marriage, but had a grown up daughter with whom he was still close. Peter popped open another beer, and YES, he had lost count of how many he had had, and walked over to stand next to Mike. Not surprisingly, the main topic of conversation throughout the evening had been the unmasking of Enrico Madonna.

  “Jeez, Mike. From what I’ve been overhearing tonight, everyone in this room had their Smith and Wesson stuck in Madonna’s ear when he was taken down. How do you explain that?”

  Mike chuckled slightly into his beer bottle. “Don’t let it bother you, Peter. They just want a little bit of reflected fame from the case.”

  “But is it really that big a deal? I mean, it can’t be that significant if it happened around me. Nothing important does.” Peter was not being modest, just feeling slightly confused.

  Mat reassured Peter. “It would be a big case anywhere, anytime. It becomes enormous because it happened here, and not in some big city where it would be expected. Do you have any idea how jealous other prosecutors are of you right now? The top Assistant Attorney Generals in the Organized Crime Task Force called me out onto the carpet the other day, wanting to know why I, who usually worked for them, hadn’t brought the case to them to handle. And you know about the FBI trying to worm their way in past Dave and Henry.”

  Peter nodded. “Yeah, Dave told me about the Feebies. But go back to the thing with OCTF. What did you say to them?”

  “I told them that the SIU and INS people were handling the investigation quite nicely and did not need help. They then asked me how the case was going to be prosecuted without experienced attorneys like them.”

  Peter smiled ruefully, “Well they DO have a point there.”

  “No
t really,” replied Mike. “I told them that we had gotten together right after Madonna was ID’d by Rome, and we agreed that you were our guy to handle the prosecution. You got us this far, so you finish it with us.”

  Dave Grace, who had walked over in time to hear the last couple of exchanges, grinned and put his hand on Peter’s shoulder, making Peter flinch his ear away.

  “Mike’s right. The way we see it, you’re a lawyer, but you’re OUR lawyer.”

  Peter was stunned, and could barely raise his eyes from the floor to look at them. At first, he could only clear his throat. “Huhmmm. Well, all I can say is ‘thanks’, and pray we don’t all live to regret this.”

  Dave reassured Peter. “Don’t worry. We won’t let you screw the pooch too bad. We’ll shoot you before it goes that far.”

  “I’m sure glad you guys have my back. Even if only as a target.”

  Eileen must have heard some of the same sentiment that evening, because during the drive home, she reached over a squeezed his hand. “Those guys seem to think you’re kind of special. Personally, I don’t see it, but..”

  “I know, dear, and I don’t follow it either.”