Garden State Gangland

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Garden State Gangland Page 15

by Scott M. Deitche


  Joe Bruno’s relocation to New Brunswick put him into contact with more New Jersey–based mobsters. When he died in October 1946 of natural causes, his successor, Joseph Ida, maintained these connections, also living in New Brunswick, before he moved to Italy, abdicating the throne and letting Angelo Bruno (no relation to Joe Bruno) take over. Of the move one wiseguy commented, “He [Ida] used to stay home under the grapevine and read a book. He must love it in Italy, ’cause all he ever did in New Brunswick until they made him the boss was to read books. He never went no place until they made him the boss. And then he didn’t want to go to them meetings and all. He was a quiet man. His pleasure was reading books. Now in Italy he must feel right at home.”[2]

  It was at this time that an enterprising young Philly mobster, Anthony “Tony Bananas” Caponigro, made a move up to the City of Newark to find opportunity. Tony Bananas was made in Philadelphia in 1947 during Ida’s reign. Upon arriving in Newark, Caponigro first went to set up shop in the First Ward, then starting its decline as the premier Italian neighborhood of North New Jersey. However there was still money to be made there, and by 1947 it was firmly under the control of Richie Boiardo, who was having none of what Caponigro was trying to do. Rather than come in and try to work with Boiardo, Caponigro was looking to set up his own shop and own operations. After all, he wasn’t beholden to Boiardo’s family. But there was a lot of money to be made in the Newark area, so, wanting to remain in the area, Caponigro went a couple miles away to the neighborhood of Down Neck, where he felt there would be less in the way of competition.

  At that time, Down Neck was run by Anthony “Tee Vee” Verniero. Born in the First Ward of Newark in 1901, Tee Vee wasn’t a made guy, because he was half-Jewish, but he held considerable sway over numbers operations in the neighborhood. Caponigro saw an opportunity to team up with Verniero to expand their numbers and other rackets. He approached Verniero with a proposition to share costs and open up joint monte and craps games. To Tee Vee, this was a win-win proposition. Down Neck was still pretty open at the time, and having a made guy as a partner was a good bet against interference from other wiseguys looking to take a piece of Tee Vee’s action. But Tee Vee made a mistake: He turned around for one minute, and when he looked back, Bananas had taken over everything Tee Vee owned. Instead of being the boss of a vast gambling enterprise, Verniero was now a member of Caponigro’s crew. With that, the Philadelphia Mafia had a crew operating in Newark. Tee Vee was referred to as one of Caponigro’s principal operators when he was arrested in 1963 in a clothing store at 118 1/2 Mulberry Street in Newark and charged with possession of lottery slips and bookmaking.

  Tony “Bananas” Caponigro was a born leader in the mob. He cultivated and grew the Bruno operation in North Jersey with little support or oversight from his superiors in Philadelphia. George Anastasia, author and journalist, said of Caponigro, “I think he benefited from Bruno’s laissez-faire management style. Most guys either liked him or feared him, and they all knew they could make money with him, which is always the most important thing anyway.”[3] The location of Down Neck was not always conducive to favorable relationships between the crime family’s base of operations in South Philly and their far-north satellite operation. As a Philly mob source told a reporter in 2001, “Newark has always been an aggravation for Philly. All of North Jersey has. There’s so much money to make there, but it’s a big fuckin’ headache. Newark is so far from South Philly, and so close to New York. And you know what that means. Trouble!”[4]

  Tony Bananas was the man about town—at least in Down Neck—often visiting his games and making sure he looked the part to impress fellow mobsters and the women who often hung around his casino-style gaming rooms. “He was a real ladies man, this Tony.”[5] He owned the 311 Club on Ferry Street and often hung out at the Ironbound Republican Club at 113 Delancey Street, the Luso-American Bar at 71 Ferry Street, the Plaza Lounge on Commerce Street, and various social clubs around the neighborhood. Caponigro was known as a benevolent dictator among his crew, which he rapidly expanded after he took over Tee Vee Verniero’s gambling interests. “Bananas was vicious. He ran a tough crew, and he was a tough leader. He was very ambitious.”[6]

  Tony had a system for keeping his crew in line, financially. “He has several people on his payroll at ‘a yard and a half ($150.00) just to hang around.’ He said that even if he gets twenty-five thousand dollars in the kitty nobody gets a five thousand dollar score. Bananas stated that he felt it more practical to see that his men get a payroll each week rather than cutting up large sums at irregular intervals.”[7]

  In the early years, many in the Down Neck mob were lesser-known crime figures who avoided both the media and, for the most part, law-enforcement attention. They were guys like Louis Luciano and Jerry Fusella. “Bananas got all these guys made in 1954—Patty Specs (young), Jerry Fusella, Blackie Napoli, Louis Luciano.”[8] The guys that Caponigro made became loyal to him more than they were loyal to the Philadelphia leadership. That would get some of them into trouble in the years ahead. But back when Tony was starting out, it seemed like an easy way for the Philly family to stake a lucrative claim with a satellite operation. As long as the money kept getting sent back to South Philly, things worked.

  Joseph Anthony Bellina, aka Happy Bellina, was a longtime member of Caponigro’s crew in Newark. Born in 1909, Bellina was a longshoreman by trade and a burglar by skillset.[9] In 1936, Bellina was arrested in Massachusetts for a jewel robbery. He broke into the home of a Boston clothing-store owner, tying up the man’s wife and maid before leaving with over $125,000 worth of jewels. Sentenced to fifteen to twenty years in prison, Bellina was paroled in February of 1946. However, his penchant for crime returned with a vengeance. Though he was a Newark resident, the Boston area was fertile ground for his activities.

  In late October 1947, right before Halloween, along with five other crew members, Bellina and five other men, all wearing masks, stormed into the Westinghouse Electric Sturtevant plant in Boston, armed with sawed-off shotguns, and grabbed over a hundred thousand dollars in cash from the company’s payroll. The next day the crew hit a sugar refinery in South Boston for another payroll score of twenty-nine thousand. Police described the Westinghouse robbery as “the biggest and boldest in Boston police records.”[10] Bellina was arrested by FBI agents and Newark detectives and arraigned in Newark before being shipped up to Boston. Bellina was proposed for membership in 1954 into the Mafia, and some sources say that was when he was made. But an informant report from 1963 says that Thomas Pecora was approached by Louis Luciano and asked if they would support Happy Bellina’s membership in the Mafia. Luciano further stated that Bellina had just been released from prison. The report doesn’t say whether or not Happy was made, but at that time the books were still closed for New York families. But, as discussed in an earlier chapter, Philadelphia was still making new members, so it can be construed that Happy was looking to get made into the Angelo Bruno family, under his crew leader, Tony Caponigro. Certainly by the early 1980s, as stated in police reports, Bellina was considered a solider in the Philly Newark crew.

  Gerardo Carmine “Jerry” Fusella first appeared on the radar of Newark police when he was arrested and convicted for robbery. He then killed another man in a street fight in Newark on April 9, 1939. Only twenty-three at the time, Fusella skipped town and became a fugitive from the FBI. Over the next seven years, he stayed under the radar, evading capture. His wanted poster had this to say about his “peculiarities”: “wears mustache occasionally, frequents poolrooms, tries to look tough.”[11] Of course, just below that it said he carries two guns and was to be considered dangerous, so maybe looking tough was more than false bravado. The FBI caught up with Fusella in 1946 in Staten Island. He next showed up as a longshoreman in 1954 at the Port of Newark. He was denied his registration as a longshoreman by the Waterfront Commission who were investigating organized-crime ties in both unions and hiring practices at the various ports in New York and New Jersey. By
that time, Fusella was a made member of Caponigro’s crew.

  Another Down Neck mob member who is never really regarded as a Newark mobster, mainly because of his activities elsewhere, was Charlie “the Blade” Tourine. Born in Matawan, New Jersey, Charlie owned Zappia’s Tavern at 186 Oliver Street in Down Neck, a noted hangout for crime figures in the neighborhood. It was noted that “during the 1930s and 1940s Tourine had a very vicious reputation and was known as a killer.”[12] Tourine was never affiliated with the Caponigro crew. Like another Down Neck native, Jerry Catena, Tourine became a made member in the Genovese crime family. His arrest record dated back to 1926 when he was arrested for murder. Those charges were eventually dropped, but his run-ins with the law continued throughout his life, with over thirty arrests ranging from gambling to intimidating witnesses, robbery, tax evasion, and bribery, all before he was forty years old. In the 1950s Tourine left the confines of Newark, moved out to Manhattan, and started investing in casinos in Cuba, where he worked with Santo Trafficante Jr., the mob boss of Tampa, in some of his casinos—namely, the Sans Souci. Tourine remained active in the New Jersey rackets, overseeing gambling operations in the Newark area, especially after Castro took over Cuba in 1959 and kicked all the mobsters out. Tourine was considered by fellow mobsters to be tight fisted with a nickel, but his extensive array of crimes afforded him a lifestyle a lot of street-level guys were never able to achieve. He relocated to Miami in the sixties and became a senior Genovese figure for their South Florida operations.

  Other members of the Down Neck mob included Ralph Albert “Blackie” Napoli, born in Newark in 1914, was a solider in Caponigro’s crew. He had a long arrest sheet for loan-sharking, assault, and illegal gambling. In later years, he would step up and become a captain of his own crew when he relocated out of Down Neck. Nicholas Alfred “Turk” Cifelli was a gambling figure who ran bookmaking out of Francesca’s Restaurant in Down Neck and hung out at the Italian-American War Veterans in Newark. Pasquale “Patty Specs” Martirano, a younger member of the original Caponigro crew, would rise to capo in the mid-1980s, overseeing the Down Neck mob.

  Joseph “Scoops” Licata was another younger member of Caponigro’s crew who started in the late 1960s. He was a bookmaker and loan shark in Down Neck. It was said that “Scoops appeared to be very close to Tony Bananas, and he liked to brag it was because he was such a big earner.”[13] A former wiseguy who was around the Down Neck Bruno crew originally felt the same but changed his opinion over the years: “In the past, I spoke about Joe Scoops in a very unflattering way. In retrospect I wish I could take it back. The guy has always done his time. He worked hard both in the ‘life’ and in the legit world. I have redefined my understanding of ‘tough guy.’ He was a good family man and a survivor. My assessment stands corrected.”[14]

  The thing that set the Down Neck crew apart was that, with the exception of some moves Caponigro made into neighboring cities, they tended to run card games and gambling in their own neighborhood. From the 1950s through the 1990s they kept their activities very local. This may have been to ensure that the games would run smoothly, as well as to keep a close eye on the operators and bettors. One of the card games that was a popular mob-run racket in Down Neck was monte. As explained by one of the crew, in monte, which was similar to the game of baccarat, “one of the players acts as the ‘bank,’ betting against the other players. This means that, as the house, we were not betting against the bettors the way a casino does in craps or blackjack; instead, for holding the game and providing food, drinks, and other services, we took a ‘cut’ of every pot . . . our cut of the pot could add up to fifty thousand dollars or more per night.”[15] Bananas had “long been known to control gambling in Essex County” and operated the “largest monte game in the metropolitan New Jersey area, which gets very heavy play, particularly on weekends.”[16]

  Another popular card game was ziginette, a popular Sicilian card game that features a fifty-two-card deck—the eights, nines, and tens removed—and a metal card box from which one card is removed at a time. The basic idea is that the player bets on a table card to not be matched before the dealers. But it’s a little more complicated than that. The game’s popularity stems from its fast pace and the house’s ability to win regardless by taking a 10 percent cut of all player winnings. The FBI recorded Carl “Leash” Silesia and Gyp DeCarlo talking about the game:

  Leash: Do you want to open a joint?

  DeCarlo: Ah, well, let’s see.

  Leash: ’Cause I think I can get a spot Down Neck.

  DeCarlo: Oh, is that what you want to do? What can you open?

  Leash: Anything I want to. Ziginette.[17]

  Though the Down Neck mob was the main Philadelphia presence in New Jersey, there were guys throughout South Jersey. Many of them merely lived in the bedroom communities of Philadelphia, but there were some who had their own territories and were put in charge of their own crews that operated in the southern swath of Camden, Cumberland, Gloucester, Salem, Cape May, and Atlantic counties of New Jersey.

  Joe Scafidi and John “Keys” Simone lived in Trenton, New Jersey. Simone had been sent to Trenton in 1956 by Angelo Bruno to oversee the burgeoning operations in the state capital. Simone worked for a vending company but also ran a sizeable bookmaking operation. At that time he worked under Charles “Pinky” Costello, called the “boss of Trenton numbers and gambling.”[18] Though the state capital, Trenton was not nearly as lucrative a spot to run rackets as other New Jersey towns, including Newark, but it would be a base of operations for a Philly crew for decades. Interestingly, though the Philly family had the run of the state capital, there was very little in the way of political corruption at a state level being orchestrated by Angelo Bruno or any of his crime family capos or soldiers. The statewide corrupting influence was definitely directed more by the New York family crews in Jersey. Perhaps that’s because of the relative size of the Philadelphia Mafia compared to the five New York families, or compared to the older, and deeper, well of presence that the other crime families had that enabled them to gain more of a foothold through the political process than had the relative newcomers to the state. Part of it may also have stemmed from an aptness to Angelo Bruno’s moniker, the Docile Don, with his not wanting to rock the boat, being perfectly okay to keep his empire small and avoid unnecessary risk.

  As the Down Neck mob grew in size and influence, so did Caponigro. He was regularly meeting with higher-ups in the New York Mafia as well as the DeCavalcante family. An informant told the FBI in early 1967 that Bananas was “becoming more and more powerful in LCN [la Cosa Nostra] and that his activities are becoming more widespread.”[19] Kayo Konigsberg told the FBI that Caponigro had ten to twelve soldiers under him. He was looking to expand outside his backyard when he purchased a pizzeria in Wayne, in Morris County, New Jersey. He set up a network of numbers operators throughout the area, which included Parsippany and Caldwell.

  Louis Luciano was as close to a right-hand man as Caponigro had in the sixties. Luciano ran most of the gambling for Tony out of the Plaza Bar. Luciano also had his own small crew of men that assisted him in running the day-to-day of the Down Neck mob’s operations. Luciano was well respected by Caponigro but fell out of favor at some point.

  In the late 1960s Luciano moved out of Down Neck to suburban Roseland, west of Newark. On February 12, 1971, according to news reports, he arrived home and was getting out of his car, carrying a box of pastries. An associate was in the car as well. A car pulled up to the house with three men inside who were wearing ski masks. They opened fire. One of the gunmen jumped out of the car and “from about fifteen feet hits him with one blast right in the back. He goes down, the pastry box goes up in the air.” Then the gunman “moves to within about five feet of him and lets off two more blast in the back. There wasn’t much of Louis left.”[20] The bodyguard had dived under the car but was hit by stray bullets. The gunmen were using shotguns and a .38. After Luciano was killed, the assailants sped away in the car,
tossing the weapons out as they left the scene. Police recovered the car a few miles away in a ShopRite parking lot, but the gunmen were long gone.

  Within a year the police knew the whole story of the Luciano murder, from a turncoat. Luciano had been murdered by members of a violent crew, the Campisi mob. The core group was comprised of brothers and cousins, with a few nonrelatives as strong-arm men. They were not tied to any crime family (though two would be made in later years to different families). The Campisis ran gambling and a robbery crew across Central Jersey. They were known for their proclivity for violence and dealing with situations by force instead of reason. Lou Luciano had committed a few crimes that had brought him between the Campisis’ crosshairs. First, he had been moving in on some of their gambling operations, trying to poach independent gamblers who paid tribute to the Campisi. Second, he had tried to convince the son of the titular head of the crew, Anthony “Na-Na,” to join him instead of staying with the Campisis. Luciano told the young man, “You know you’re young yet. You’re a fool for sticking with you father and your cousins. They’re all gonna go some day. Come in with me, and you can do good with me—before it’s too late.”[21] The Campisis took this as a sign that Luciano might also have been plotting a move against them, angering Na-Na even further. Finally, there were stories that the tall, silver-haired, well-dressed Luciano had been sleeping with the wife of another Campisi, Tommy, who had been given the information by a local police officer, who showed him evidence of all the times Luciano and his wife had been meeting.

 

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