Garden State Gangland

by Scott M. Deitche

  For Scarfo, being together in Yardville with other high-ranking Mafioso was a career boon. Nicky Scarfo’s nephew, Phil Leonetti, who would later turn on the Philly family and become a government informant, said of his uncle, “While my uncle was in Yardville it allowed him to get closer to Angelo Bruno, which was a good thing . . . my uncle also started getting real close to guys like Jerry Catena, Nick Russo, Blackie Napoli, and Bobby Manna . . . my uncle and Bobby Manna became extremely close in Yardville. They were the same age and spent a lot of time together.”[9]

  Tony Bananas Caponigro fled for the warmer climes of Florida in 1970 when he received word that he was going to be called to appear. He spent most of the next four years out of New Jersey, staying for a time in Manhattan and covertly driving back into Newark to keep tabs on his crew, as well as his home in Milburn, New Jersey. On New Year’s Eve,1974, Bananas was at his home when he saw a car parked outside. The short-tempered Caponigro assumed it was a process server. He got into his car and took off down the street, sideswiping the other car as he drove off. It wasn’t a process server in the vehicle but an FBI agent, staking out the house. Bananas was arrested and booked into Milburn Jail and soon after arrested by the FBI. He was also presented with a subpoena. Caponigro’s ramming of the FBI car did not sit well with Angelo Bruno and other New Jersey mobsters. Law-enforcement officers were considered off-limits and immune from reprisal. The thinking was that, if police and FBI agents were harassed or attacked, they would bring even more heat down on mob operations. It had been a long-standing Mafia rule, and Bananas broke it. His transgression stained his reputation.

  Another member of Caponigro’s Down Neck crew, Ralph “Blackie” Napoli, was called before the commission in 1971 and refused to testify. After two years, he experienced a change of heart and told the SCI that he was ready to talk. But after changing his mind once again, he was sent back to Yardville, where he remained through 1977, serving six years in total.

  Trenton-based Bruno-family member Carl “Pappy” Ippolito crossed the border into Bristol, Pennsylvania, to avoid being called. He neglected to change his dentist, though. One afternoon, while sitting in the dentist’s chair in Trenton, Ippolito was served. He appeared, and “Some 182 questions were put to him at the SCI hearing. He refused to answer ninety-eight of them, claiming his Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination.”[10] The SCI challenged his right to take the Fifth, and the court battle dragged on until 1978 when the Supreme Court of New Jersey ruled that he did not have to answer questions without immunity. Ippolito was asked to appear again but refused. He was arrested and convicted in 1980 for contempt, drawing a fine of five thousand dollars. Ippolito’s fellow Trenton mobster Johnny Keys Simone avoided the probe altogether by moving first to Florida and then Yardley, Pennsylvania.

  The DeCavalcante crime family was also represented in the commission’s first batch of subpoenas. Crime-family boss Sam the Plumber DeCavalcante was asked to testify on December 29, 1973. Over the next couple years, he was ordered an additional seventeen times to appear but only showed up for seven appearances, citing various health conditions. It should be noted that DeCavalcante lived another twenty years, though from his lawyers’ pleas to the SCI it sounded as the don was at death’s door. He moved to Florida and tried in 1979 to have the subpoena quashed once and for all. He was denied. “The court noted the record does not demonstrate harassment or oppression. The continuances over the years have been requested by the commission, DeCavalcante, and by counsel. DeCavalcante’s poor health has been a factor in the prolonged proceedings.”[11]

  Frank Condi Cocchiaro, referred to by DeCavalcante as a “rough guy I have to watch,”[12] actually fled the hearing room rather than be compelled to testify, as did another DeCavalcante solider, Robert “Basile” Occhipinti. Like others, Cocchiaro fled to Florida, living under the nom de guerre Frank Fagnotta. Unfortunately for Cocchiaro, a 1972 traffic accident gave up the ruse, and he was set back to New Jersey in June of that year. He pled guilty to criminal contempt and appeared before the commission after serving a six-month term.

  Three Gambino mobsters fled to Florida to avoid the SCI. Joseph “Demus” Covello—a mobster based in Belleville, New Jersey—took off for South Florida and ran illegal gambling operations with members of other crime families. Newark-based Frankie “the Bear” Basto’s time in the sun was cut short when he was arrested in Florida for a jewelry robbery in 1974. He was returned to New Jersey where he was indicted on a series of home break-ins that had occurred in Essex County. Gambino capo Joseph Paterno relocated to Florida in 1974. On a trip back to New Jersey in 1978 he was caught by a process server and testified in front of the commission in 1979.

  For the mobsters who did not skip town and ended up being sentenced for contempt, time in Yardville was nothing like time in maximum security. If anything, it was more like the prison scene from the movie Goodfellas. “Their quarters on the second floor of the Clinton building consist of a common living room, which has a color television set, a refrigerator for foods of their special liking, and a hot plate for warming snacks . . . Mr. Catena has been seen swinging a golf club and practicing his chip shots on the lawns.”[13] The wiseguys socialized with each other, and some even received weekend and holiday furloughs. But even with such amenable accommodations, being locked up in close proximity with other wiseguys sometimes led to temper flare-ups and to lapses in judgment and protocol.

  Johnny “Coca-Cola” Lardiere was not unknown to law enforcement. He had been interviewed by the FBI in 1959 about the Apalachin conference and the attendees from New Jersey, already part of their Top Hoodlum Program. Throughout the early 1960s Lardiere was a frequent companion of Jerry and Eugene Catena, as well as of Anthony “Tony Pro” Provenzano, top labor racketeer in New Jersey. In 1964 Lardiere was hired by Local 945 of the Teamsters as a business representative, earning a salary of just over ten thousand dollars. But he was also supplementing his income with gambling activities in Paterson, New Jersey, as part of Catena’s crew.

  Lardiere was jailed for contempt in August of 1971. While the time with other mobsters in Yardville was a boon to the careers of some—like Nicky Scarfo—it didn’t do much to help others. Some time during the stay, according to sources, Johnny Coca-Cola said something that offended Blackie Napoli as well as Jerry Catena. One source said that Coca-Cola told Catena to fuck off. Mouthing off to Catena, the most powerful mobster in New Jersey, was a death warrant.

  In April of 1977, Lardiere was still in custody, having been moved to the Clinton Correctional Facility in New York, when he received a weekend furlough for Easter, along with Napoli and Bobby Manna. They were released from the facility at 7 p.m. on Saturday, April 9, with orders to return by 9 p.m. the following day, Easter Sunday. Lardiere ended up at the Red Bull Inn, a motel in Bridgewater, New Jersey, at 2 a.m. early Sunday morning. He went into the hotel lobby to get the keys for his room. When he went back out to his car to get a suitcase, a gunman emerged and shot Lardiere with a .22, which jammed. Lardiere entered mob legend when he supposedly asked the gunman, "What are you gonna do now, tough guy?”[14] The gunman then pulled out a .38 and shot Lardiere three times, in the head, neck, and stomach. The sixty-eight-year-old Lardiere was dead.

  After the shooting, the gunman left the .38 and a hat, which authorities kept as evidence. Though they knew it had been a mob hit, the case went cold and over time seemed destined to become another unsolved underworld hit. Then in the mid-1990s, Tommy Ricciardi, a New Jersey Lucchese mobster, decided to flip and become a government witness. He told the FBI that he knew who had killed Johnny Coca-Cola, fingering a Genovese soldier named Michael “Mikey Cigars” Coppola.

  With this new information, the FBI retrieved their long-held evidence, which included a hair they had found on the .38, and were now able to test it for DNA evidence. The FBI visited Coppola at his home in the Shore town of Spring Lake in August of 1996 and asked for a DNA sample. Though the mobster obliged, the feds did not detain him. Whe
n they left, so did Coppola and his wife. Over the next thirteen years, the FBI focused on finding the fugitive. Coppola was even featured on the popular television program America’s Most Wanted, and reports of sightings of the mobster all across the globe poured into the FBI. But one tip said that Coppola was close to home, nesting on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Sure enough, it was there that on March 9, 2007, police found Coppola, bringing to end a long manhunt, and, they hoped, closure in the Lardiere case. Coppola went to trial for racketeering, including the Lardiere murder, in 2009. Though he was convicted of racketeering, he was acquitted of killing Johnny Coca-Cola.

  The SCI continued its investigations through the 1970s, receiving an extension to its mission from the governor. The initial probe into mob activities started winding down by 1979, but the organization has kept its mission active through the present day. The work they did in first exposing the citizens of New Jersey to the range of Mafia activities in the state brought a lot of law-enforcement pressure on the seven mob families there. But even time in prison was not enough to dissuade some from a life of crime.

  Genovese soldier Anthony “Little Pussy” Russo had a rough start to the 1970s. The State Commission of Investigation called him in January 1970 and gave him limited immunity to testify. He refused and was sent to Yardville, like so many others. He also had a perjury conviction from the state, which resulted in his transfer to a second state facility in late 1970. But the commission intelligence on Russo and his operations gave prosecutors enough evidence to charge him with tax evasion for his involvement with a construction company in Monmouth County. Russo pled guilty to those charges and was fined fifty thousand dollars and sentenced to eighteen months in federal prison. While in prison he was sitting down for lunch in the mess hall when another inmate stabbed him in the neck. Russo unsuccessfully tried to sue the state for ten thousand dollars in damages. He was released from federal prison in 1973 and sent right back to Yardville.

  Russo finally agreed to testify in front of the commission in 1974. His lawyer said the mobster “could no longer bear the pressure of incarceration.”[15] Plagued by circulatory problems in his legs, Russo had been in and out of prison medical facilities though much of his time behind bars. Russo testified before the commission in a closed-door session in late April 1974, but his testimony was not made public. Now back on the streets, Russo made for his home in Long Branch, New Jersey, where he went right back to work, scheming for ways to make money. His vision turned westward to the gambling and entertainment mecca of the United States, Las Vegas. Russo was going to own a casino.

  1. Lee Seglem, SCI acting director, and Mike Hoey, former SCI agent, personal interview with the author on the creation of the SCI, telephone, September 29, 2016.

  2. Chris Baud, “‘Entirely Too Comfortable’ with the Jersey Mafia,” Trentonian, December 2, 2001, text available at http://www.capitalcentury.com/1970.html.

  3. State of New Jersey Commission of Investigation, Industrious Subversion: Circumvention of Oversight in Solid Waste and Recycling in New Jersey (Trenton: State of New Jersey Commission of Investigation, 2011), http://www.state.nj.us/sci/pdf/Solid Waste Report.pdf.

  4. New Jersey State Commission of Investigation, Report to the Special Committee to Review the State Commission of Investigation (Trenton: New Jersey State Commission of Investigation, 1995.

  5. Sinatra v. New Jersey State Commission of Investigation, 311 F.Supp. 678 (D.N.J. 1970).

  6. Charleston (WV) Daily Mail, “Frank Sinatra to Spurn N.J. Crime Inquiry,” October 22, 1969, 12.

  7. Catena v. Seidl, 66 N.J. 32, 327 A.2d 658 (1974).

  8. Myron Sugerman, personal interview with the author regarding New Jersey organized crime, Newark, New Jersey, February 7, 2017.

  9. Philip Leonetti, Scott M. Burnstein, and Christopher Graziano, Mafia Prince: Inside America’s Most Violent Crime Family and the Bloody Fall of la Cosa Nostra (San Diego: Running Press, 2014), 39.

  10. In Re Ippolito, 75 N.J. 435 (1978).

  11. New Jersey State Commission of Investigation, Report to the Special Committee.

  12. Volz and Bridge, The Mafia Talks, 116.

  13. Walter H. Waggoner, “Accused Mobsters Still Silent,” New York Times, November 24, 1974, http://www.nytimes.com/1974/11/24/archives/accused-mobsters-still-silent-catena-practices-golf-the-silent-nine.html.

  14. Guy Sterling, “Arrest Ends Long Search for Suspect in Mob Killing,” (Newark, NJ) Star-Ledger, March 13, 2007, text available online at http://johnnieupahts1.proboards.com/thread/36. The gunman then pulled out a .38 and shot Lardiere three times, in the head, neck, and stomach. The sixty-eight-year-old Lardiere was dead.

  15. Press State House Bureau, “Russo Is Freed after Agreeing to Talk with SCI,” Asbury Park (NJ) Press, April 12, 1974.

  Chapter 12

  The Big Bets

  The Jolly Trolley casino was not one of the higher-class casinos on the Vegas Strip. Located at the corner of South Las Vegas Boulevard and West Sahara Avenue[1] on the North Strip, the Trolley had borne other names before its rechristening in 1977—the Big Wheel, the Centerfold Club. Though the name changed, the casino always managed to retain its somewhat-unsavory reputation. When it was the Centerfold, it was known for its topless dancers. The Trolley advertised, “Burlesque is Back—Naked but Nice.” The casino had good deals in addition to the strippers: one-dollar, single-deck blackjack and a breakfast special of eggs, bacon, toast, and coffee for sixty-nine cents.

  The Jolley Trolley was also renowned for serving “steak by the ounce,” where the servers would bring out a full piece of meat and diners could choose how much they want cut off and cooked. It was one of a few gimmicks the Trolley employed to bring in customers, and it became a successful operation, drawing crowds from politicians to locals. It also drew local underworld figures like Anthony “Tony the Ant” Spilotro, Chicago’s man on the ground in Las Vegas. In 1978, Spilotro was a regular diner at the Trolley, much to the chagrin of local law enforcement.[2]

  The Trolley had no hotel rooms, unlike larger resort-style casinos further south on the Strip, but with any gambling in Las Vegas there was money to be made. And back then Vegas was truly a mob town. When the casino became the Jolly Trolley in 1977, the new owners from New Jersey had a hidden partner in the mob. And for the next five years the mob attempted to skim away as much of the profit as they could. Most of that money went back east and up the chain of the Genovese crime family, through Anthony “Little Pussy” Russo.

  Russo was well-respected, though not necessarily well-liked, in the underworld and, though only a soldier, regularly rubbed elbows with significant mob figures from across the country. He spent a good deal of time in South Florida in the 1960s. He was regularly spotted in the company of mob bosses like Santo Trafficante Jr., of the Tampa crime family. Russo was overheard by the FBI counseling Trafficante on how to avoid law-enforcement surveillance:

  You live here, you’re a native. Where are they going to chase you? The only thing you can do, if it was me—I can’t advise you—but if it was me, get a couple of goodfellows [sic], let them run, let them handle everything, so your name is going to be thrown around, let them throw it, but the right people you gotta sit down with, you sit down with . . . but you’re not in any of these spots, like they say about me, Pussy got this, Pussy got that. Yeah, I got it, but prove it, sure I got it.[3]

  Russo’s main base of operations was at the Jersey Shore, specifically the town of Long Branch. Originally a beach resort town, Long Branch, by the 1960s, had become a growing residential community, one that was ripe for corruption and easy for one man to significantly influence. Starting in 1967, a series of high-profile investigations targeted public corruption in the town. Law enforcement suspected that Russo “controlled the mayor and city council,” and “official reports indicated mob figures were operating in an atmosphere relatively secure from law enforcement.”[4]

  All aspects of the town were under Russo’s control. When a city manager star
ted looking into the gambling establishments, he was removed from his position by the city council. Russo approached the fired manager and told him that if he wanted his job back he would have to look the other way while Russo expanded his illegal gambling. The police department was not that effective in tackling the organized-crime issue either. A police chief in the mid-1960s was thwarted in his attempts to raid Russo’s gambling establishments when news of the impending raids was leaked from within the department. After his death in 1968, the new police chief “lacked the integrity and the will to investigate organized crime and attempt to stem its influence.”[5]

  After he was released from prison as a result of the SCI investigation and after his convictions for tax evasion and perjury, Russo ran into the three men who were looking to buy into the Jolly Trolley. He saw this as an opportunity to make some serious money far away from New Jersey law enforcement and the SCI. First he needed to convince the three investors that they needed a fourth partner for the casino venture. Through first persuasion and then overt pressure, Russo managed to squeeze his way into 25 percent ownership of the casino.