* * *
The payoff was linked to what became known as “the Windows Case,” a massive Mob conspiracy concocted by the crafty Savino in the late 1970s. At the time the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) launched an ambitious program to cut heating costs dramatically in public housing through the installation of new windows.
Tall, dark-haired and handsome, Savino looked into the double-glazed windows and saw millions of dollars in ill-gotten gains. To pull it off, he would need the full weight of New York’s families working in concert.
The Brooklyn-born Savino, a World War II baby, was involved with both organized crime and Local 580 of the Architectural and Ornamental Ironworkers Union during the 1960s. Both affiliations proved quite lucrative as the 1980s approached.
The Genovese family, through Savino, served as the lead group. The Luccheses controlled the window workers union, so they were given a piece. The Gambinos and the Colombos owned window-manufacturing companies, as did Savino—Arista Windows and American Aluminum. The bumbling Bonannos were frozen out.
“There are too many junk guys,” sniffed Salerno.
His partners in the business were Casso and Amuso, who made a single contribution to the operation: they built a handball court behind the Brooklyn offices, as Little Vic Amuso was an aficionado.
The operation was simple yet ingenious: Thirteen Mob-run companies rigged the bidding process, insuring the low bidder would win the contract at an outrageously high price. Any non-Mob window companies would pay a $2-per-window Mob tax for a piece of the installation action. The union, in addition to installing windows, would shatter any glass put in place by outsiders. Bribes paid to city officials kept everything running smoothly.
Savino once explained to a Colombo associate that winning a bid was like flipping a coin among the families.
“All right, you won this toss,” he said. “Now you get that one. The next one, I get.”
Savino wasn’t afraid to get his hands dirty to keep things running smoothly. When a Genovese-affiliated window manufacturer began listening to Lucchese overtures about switching affiliations, Savino and a second mobster turned up at their storage yard.
The pair, armed with machine guns, opened fire. When the bullets stopped flying, two hundred windows were reduced to glass shards.
Prosecutors later said the Mob won $151 million of the $191 million in window replacement contracts from the New York City Housing Authority between 1978–1989, turning a crooked profit estimated in the tens of millions of dollars.
The case offered yet another peek into the Gotti-Gigante dynamic—and their relative spots on the Mafia food chain. While the Chin and the Genovese family were making millions off the window scam, Gotti complained that his group—specifically, his brother Peter—were getting short shrift.
“Joe ‘Piney’ (Armone) and Sammy (Gravano)—he made my brother Pete get involved with that fucking asshole with the ‘Windows,’” Gotti moaned in a December 12, 1989, conversation above the Ravenite. “Never made a dime. He’s going to jail for it.”
Benny Eggs Mangano, by now the Genovese underboss, had previously rebuffed a Gambino family bid for a bigger piece of the multimillion-dollar action.
If their first meeting was fraught with terror on Savino’s part, his well-deserved reputation as one of the biggest earners in the Genovese family soon won Gigante’s admiration and respect. He dealt mostly with Mangano, who provided a quick primer on the family rules.
Number one: “Point to your chin and say ‘This guy.’”
Number two: “If anyone asked about the Chin’s act, reply only that ‘Vincent’s crazy.’ ”
Savino became a habitué of the Triangle, embraced by the Chin and welcomed into the boss’s tight inner circle.
“Savino is directly with Chin, face-to-face,” said ex-federal prosecutor Greg O’Connell. “The Chin took Petey under his wing. He loved Petey. Petey was a charismatic guy who was a huge moneymaker for the family.”
Although Savino was never inducted as a made man, his new status came with some strange and scary turns.
On one Triangle visit for a discussion of the labor racketeering business, the perpetually paranoid Gigante brought him into the back bathroom and turned on all the faucets. Only then did the Chin put his unshaven mug against the guest’s ear and whisper.
He asked, with unusual concern, if anybody in the Genovese family or the union was hitting Savino up for free windows. (Chin later asked for installations in Old Tappan for his wife and on the Upper East Side for his mistress.)
“Okay, I wanted to know if anyone was taking advantage of you,” the Chin said. He paused before continuing.
“Don’t be afraid to tell people I’m crazy, because you know I am crazy, right?” he said.
“Yes, I know you are,” Savino wisely responded.
He was summoned again in June 1982 to hear a request just as terrifying as Gigante’s call for Savino to chill out during his first trip to the Triangle. This time he was led through the side door connecting to the adjoining apartment building and taken to a first-floor landing to freeze out even the social club’s regulars.
Gigante, joined by consigliere Manna, had Savino in mind as a hit man. Could Savino, they wondered, get close enough to do the job? The target was a seventeen-year-old suspected of killing Edward Lanzieri, the father of a Genovese made man named Edward “Eddie Buff” Lanzieri.
“Take him out,” the Chin ordered icily.
The unnerved Savino, though a veteran of Mob murder from his days working alongside Pappa, knew the target. Instead of killing teenager Enrico “Eddie” Carini, he procrastinated until the plot eventually disappeared from the Chin’s radar.
There were lighter moments. Savino was invited back to Ruggero’s, this time to dine with Gigante. Capo Zito—owner of the restaurant—took a shot at his crew member’s lack of sartorial style, which ran to burgundy track suits and spotless white sneakers. The words were barely out of his mouth when the Chin rapped Zito between the eyes with the wooden duck’s head handle of a nearby umbrella.
“He dresses okay for me,” Gigante declared.
Savino was perhaps never as rattled as the time he was rousted from slumber and summoned to the Village by a 3 A.M. phone call from Canterino. “Get down here, right now,” growled Baldy Dom. It did not sound like a social call.
The two men met in the darkness on an empty Sullivan Street, walking through the stillness to a barbershop near the Triangle. Savino was certain he was about to get killed; why else avoid the endlessly bugged and FBI-monitored Triangle?
He arrived to find Vincent Gigante clutching a clothes catalogue in his hands. A light went on for the suddenly relieved Savino, who recalled giving Chin the catalogue, along with a promise to get Gigante any items that he desired.
He desired three jogging suits, in red, blue and green.
“It’s not for me,” Gigante allowed. “It’s for my kids. You can go now.”
Things turned heavy when Savino’s old body-burying buddy Ferenga was busted on a drug rap in 1987. The arrest of the truly obscure crook, in a truly unexpected turn, would lead prosecutors directly to the Chin. And it was all because the drug-slinging Bobby Ferenga believed chivalry was not dead.
* * *
Bobby Ferenga was a wisecracking mobster with a rapid-fire “dese and dose” style of speech honed on the streets of his native Brooklyn. Nobody considered him among the sharpest tools in the Mafia’s shed—not even Ferenga himself.
On Mob trips to Vegas with Lucchese associate Peter “Big Pete” Chiodo and other gangsters, Ferenga would visit the roulette wheel and plop down $50,000 on a single spin.
“I just want to get the losing over with,” he would moan.
On another occasion a prosecutor offered Ferenga a “Queen for a Day” deal—lawyer-speak for a one-time-only sweetheart plea bargain.
“Now dis guy’s calling me a queen!” the insulted mobster complained.
Fer
enga was lying in bed one night in November 1987, warmed by both the presence of his girlfriend and a $20,000 windfall in a coke deal, when the FBI bashed down the door of his apartment. Agents waved guns and a warrant. Ferenga left in handcuffs.
The feds were steered to Ferenga by another low-level crook, David Negrelli, a confidential informant for Brooklyn assistant district attorney Mark Feldman. The ADA shared his snitch with the FBI, and Negrelli steered them toward Ferenga, among others.
Negrelli was an unlikely candidate for the first falling domino in the probe. His strange ways led investigators at the Drug Enforcement Agency to blackball him, leaving Negrelli adrift until Feldman recognized his usefulness. He implicated Ferenga in a drug gang operating in Brooklyn.
More than twenty codefendants were busted, mostly organized crime guys, but the haul also included Ferenga’s girlfriend and her mother. There was even worse news for Ferenga: The coke deal was a sting, and he was caught on wiretaps discussing his illegal exploits. Ferenga was facing a twenty-five-year jail term. His leverage at this point was less than zero.
“Bobby Ferenga was a mess,” recalled O’Connell. “But being a chivalrous guy, Bobby had a guilt complex about the women.”
U.S. Attorney Charles Rose initially played hardball with the gangster.
“He was brought into our office, and we laid out the law for him,” Rose recounted four years later. “I told him, ‘You’re going to jail for the rest of your life. What can you tell us?’”
After a bit of back-and-forth, Ferenga confessed he was most bothered by the arrests of his gal pal and her mom. An offer was made: The charges against the women, peripheral figures at best in the case, would disappear if Ferenga agreed to flip. He briefly pondered his position, and reached a decision.
“Mr. O’Connell, I wouldn’t do this except for my girl and her mother,” said Ferenga, who was soon going steady with the Brooklyn prosecutors. Oddly enough, Ferenga’s beloved wound up dating another mobster, who landed in jail based on Bobby’s testimony two years later.
A street crook like Ferenga was never any closer during his life to Vincent Gigante inside the Triangle than he was to Pope John Paul II inside the Vatican. But O’Connell and the feds decided to roll the dice, squeeze their new informant and listen to his tale.
“Once you have a chance to poke your nose into the tent, good things happen for law enforcement,” O’Connell explained. “It wasn’t a shot in the dark for us. We knew this guy was connected, and could become a great source. When we were debriefing him, it was crystal clear that narcotics were secondary to a potential organized crime investigation.
“He opened the window, so to speak, for us.”
O’Connell recalled his first meeting with Ferenga, a super-secret session in the DA’s office. The prosecutor and his colleagues were joined by the FBI, a couple of Brooklyn DAs and two NYPD homicide detectives. While the feds were looking at the big picture, the cops’ concerns were more immediate.
“Greg,” said one cop, an inch of ash hanging from a still-burning cigarette, “we’re looking for bones. Give us some bones.”
Ferenga did just that, steering the squad to Savino’s old Brooklyn warehouse for a gruesome nighttime dig that was by parts macabre and comical. A search warrant was obtained, and Ferenga accompanied the law enforcers to Scott Avenue to point out the seven-year-old concrete graves.
The building’s head-turning current owner appeared to let the investigators inside.
“She’s wearing a cocktail dress—bright red—and she’s got her lawyer and the keys,” O’Connell recounted. “The lady in red stumbles as she steps into the building, and Bobby catches her arm. She says, ‘Thank you, you’re a gentleman.’
“And Bobby, without missing a beat, says, ‘Lady, I ain’t no gentleman. I am a criminal.’”
The digging commenced near the loading dock ramp, with the NYPD team using a backhoe and jackhammers in their search for Tommy “Shorty” Spero. The first bones they came across were too small for human remains, but Ferenga recognized them immediately: he, Savino and Pappa shared a take-out order of fried chicken while burying Spero’s body.
This was the right spot. When Spero’s body was found, Ferenga solemnly looked to the heavens as if in prayer.
“What are you looking up for?” asked an FBI agent.
“You’re right!” replied a tickled Ferenga, instantly tilting his head toward the hole.
Next was Richie Scarcella, buried beneath a urinal in a bathroom. How was Ferenga so sure of the location? The burial site became a running joke among the killers, who would use the bathroom and announce, “I’m pissing on Richie.”
Scarcella’s body came up, too. And so did the name of Peter Savino, who was joined at the hip with Ferenga in a variety of ways that would land him in jail, too.
“That night a decision was made to arrest Savino and try to roll him,” said Rose.
* * *
Savino, the Mob moneymaker and Chin comrade, was bizarrely enough already on the FBI books as an informant. Busted in 1973 on a New Jersey rap for smuggling bootleg cigarettes, he became among the most uncooperative of cooperating witnesses in history over the next fourteen years.
“I never volunteered information,” Savino later admitted. “I answered questions when they called, but withheld important information.”
This time, with two bodies attached to his old warehouse and Ferenga pointing the finger, Savino faced a far more troubling situation. Rose wasted little time in explaining the situation. He made no threats and provided zero wiggle room. Rose, instead, offered a simple recitation of the facts over coffee in a diner on East Twenty-Third Street. The whole thing lasted twenty minutes.
Rose later recalled his pitch—a fastball, high and tight: “I told him he was going to be indicted for homicide and racketeering, and he would go to jail for the rest of his life. I told him there was only one way out. Plead guilty, wear a wire against whoever we directed him to . . . and that he would have to testify against whoever we caught.
“He was in shock. I told him it was a ‘take it or leave it’ deal. There are no negotiations. I gave him forty-eight hours to make a decision.”
Savino was out of options. He agreed, for real this time, to go undercover for the government. And he reached the decision with hours to spare.
“He knew we had him dead to rights,” recalled O’Connell. “There was no need to persecute him. As we used to say, ‘When you’ve got ’em by the balls, the hearts and minds soon follow.’ ”
As O’Connell recalled, the directions to their new informant were simple: “We told him to talk to every wiseguy he saw, and we’ll see what happens. Now he’s going out to talk to people who would kill him in a heartbeat. He was seeing these guys all the time, and he was at risk of dying every day.
“It’s a very ballsy thing to do. Not many people in the history of organized crime had the balls for that.”
Not only did the feds need to protect Savino, they needed to keep Ferenga’s cooperation a secret. O’Connell recalled the crafty Benny Eggs, smelling a rat (or two), monitored Bobby’s case closely in search of even a tenuous link to Savino or any level of law enforcement.
Adding to Savino’s stress was a strict ban on FBI backup as he met day after day after day with high-ranking associates of the four families involved in the “Windows” operation. The operation went on for sixteen months, with Savino capturing hundreds of hours of incriminating Mob chatter—all while worrying that each day would be his last.
The pressure of his undercover work, hobnobbing with murderous mobsters, literally left Savino scared shitless. A report discussing his time as an informant noted that he was victimized by “periods of diarrhea” that were “associated with his undercover work.”
* * *
The case was almost blown up by a turf war between the Manhattan U.S. Attorney’s Office, headed by Giuliani, and the Brooklyn office, where Rose and O’Connell were based. Giuliani’s crew, fresh off the
commission victory, caught word of Ferenga’s arrest and decided to claim the witness as their own. They arrested Ferenga on a mail fraud charge and threw him in jail.
O’Connell recalled receiving a collect call from Ferenga, made from the federal lockup across the East River in Lower Manhattan.
“Mr. O’Connell,” the witness began, “you’re never going to believe what happened today. These guys just arrested me. And they said, ‘The only reason you’re in handcuffs, Bobby, is those two fucking scumbags, Rose and O’Connell.’”
Ferenga paused for effect.
“I don’t like these guys, Mr. O’Connell,” the loyal informant continued. “If they think my prosecutors are fucking scumbags, what do they think of me?”
The Brooklyn team sprang their witness from his cell, and the dispute was settled by a grand meeting at the FBI’s Manhattan headquarters in Federal Plaza. Giuliani was there, along with Brooklyn federal prosecutor Andrew Maloney. Both sides gathered to make their case to FBI officials in the crowded main conference room.
O’Connell told the tale of the phone call, and the Brooklyn office carried the day. Afterward, Chief Assistant U.S. Attorney Larry Urgenson of Brooklyn came over to O’Connell, who still remembered his boss’s one-liner: “That was really cool, the way you got ‘fucking scumbags’ in there twice.”
Now the work began. Savino signed off on a deal admitting to his part in the Spero and Scarcella murders, along with four other killings, and pleaded to a racketeering charge. He would face a maximum of twenty years in prison if he held up his dangerous end of the bargain.
Bugs were placed inside Savino’s Brooklyn office in early 1988. And he began wearing a concealed body mike to an assortment of Mob get-togethers, including meetings in the Village with Mangano. By now, Benny Eggs had developed a strong distaste for the high-rolling Savino, who, flush with the window cash, was living in a bigger Staten Island home and driving a black Rolls-Royce with a sand-colored leather interior.
During one March 1988 conversation Mangano sharply shut down a Savino line of inquiry.
“Vincent said when it comes time to . . . ,” Savino began.
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