Garden State Gangland

by Scott M. Deitche

  South Jersey became as important during the Scarfo era as the streets of South Philadelphia. Though much of the business was centered on Atlantic City, there was a wide area to operate where the New York families had little to no representation. “If you’re not from this area, it’s hard to understand, but South Jersey is in large part a Philadelphia suburb. Guys move back and forth. And the Jersey Shore is their summertime place.”[12]

  Other South Jersey operatives in the Scarfo organization were Salvatore Frank Sparacio, who operated out of Gloucester Township in New Jersey and was “involved in sports bookmaking, loan-sharking, and drug trafficking.”[13] Lawrence Merino lived in the seaside town of Margate, New Jersey, long a popular summertime vacation spot for the Philly family. Soldier Tommy DelGiorno lived in Ocean City, New Jersey, in a rented condo, which state police eventually bugged, leading to DelGiorno’s eventually turning state’s evidence and becoming a protected witness.

  Sal “Blizzard” Passalacqua, who lived in Pennsauken, New Jersey, was a longtime gambling operative in South New Jersey. Born in 1909, his active years with the Philly family spanned back to the pre–Angelo Bruno days, though he had chosen to keep a low profile, and title, never rising above a soldier. By 1990, he was partnered with Frank Iannarella and hung out at the Medford Village Country Club on Golfview Drive in Medford, New Jersey. Blizzard also hung out with Salvatore Sparacio as part of his crew. Sam Scafidi was out of Bridgeton, New Jersey. Born in 1922, Scafidi’s uncle Gaetano and cousin Rocco were longtime Bruno-family soldiers.

  Post-Scarfo South Jersey guys included John Stanfa—the driver for Bruno the night of his murder—who lived in Medford when he took over as boss following his release from prison in 1991. Ray Esposito lived in South Jersey. He was a Stanfa loyalist and hit man for the mob. Ralph Natale, another former boss, lived in an apartment on the Cooper River in Pennsauken, near Camden, when he was in charge. Anthony Staino lived near Swedesboro, New Jersey. And Ron Previte, who later became a federal witness against the family, lived and operated in Hammonton, New Jersey.

  With Scarfo’s paranoia increasing and the number of men wiling to testify against him growing, it was only a matter of time before his bloody throne was toppled. Scarfo and fifteen members of the crime family were indicted on a variety of racketeering charges in 1987 and in 1988 were convicted of a host of crimes, ranging from murder to extortion. Scarfo’s reign at the top was one of the most bloody and destructive to any crime family and was fairly short, compared to his predecessor’s.

  But there was one region that was overlooked by Scarfo during that time, the Down Neck Newark crew. Even though the seeds of the ultimate destruction of the crime family emanated from the streets of the Ironbound, the mob war never hit the shores of the Passaic River. Rather, the Newark family kept their heads down and their ears open for potential trouble. They also kept earning, running the monte and ziginette games that were such a big part of their revenue stream. But trouble was coming for the Down Neck crew, from one of their own.

  After Tony Bananas Caponigro had been killed, leadership of the crew had gone to Blackie Napoli. Fresh out of prison for the SCI investigation, Blackie Napoli was the natural choice, having been a loyal soldier under Caponigro but also enjoying connections and ties back to Philly. He ran the crew for five years before stepping down in 1985 to allow Pasquale “Patty Specs” Martirano to take over. Napoli had had enough of the boss job, and with the Philly mob war in full swing at that point he may have felt it wise to lay low. Patty Specs took over in 1985 and brought some new blood into the crew.

  One of the associates particularly close to Martirano was George Fresolone. The two men grew up together in Newark and ran in the same crowds, though they were separated in age. Fresolone looked up to Specs as almost a father figure. Specs was well respected across Newark. Members of all the other crime families knew who he was and worked well with him on joint operations. Fresolone and Martirano were arrested in the late eighties and charged with a variety of crimes, including gambling. After his arrest, Fresolone was approached by the New Jersey State Police, who wanted him to cooperate with their investigations. Fresolone at first refused but then, in order to protect Patty Specs, decided to become an informant. Fresolone felt that by controlling the pieces of information he fed to the State Police he could keep investigations away from Specs, if not outright ask the troopers to shield him from their inquiries. Fresolone still felt loyalty to Specs and some of the guys he was around. But one time the State Police came to George and played him a tape that shattered Fresolone’s image of his so-called friends. They played Fresolone a recording of “Slicker” Attanasio and Turk Cifelli talking about him: “Who the fuck does he think he is? He ain’t straightened out. In fact, he ain’t shit. It’s time we put him in his place.”[14] That sealed the deal for Fresolone. He decided that he wanted to get out once and for all. He wore a wire on all the members of the Newark crew. Fresolone’s fateful decision happened to coincide with Patty Specs’s move to make new members into the Newark Crew.

  The average crew member was getting a little long in the tooth. Old-timers like Happy Bellina and Jerry Fusella were still around, and, though there were a few younger made guys like Scoops Licata, Patty Specs wanted to get approval to make a new batch of loyal soldiers One of those he tapped was Fresolone. For the state police, this was a potential gold mine. It would be one of the first times that a making ceremony would be recorded.

  The making ceremony that Patty Specs and Anthony Piccolo oversaw took place on July 29, 1990. It was at the Bronx home of John Praino. The soldiers who were to be formally inducted that day included Praino, Turk Cifelli, Vincent “Beeps” Centorino, Nicky Oliveri, and Fresolone. Cifelli was a longtime Down Neck crew member, and at sixty-eight years old the eldest of the inductees. Fresolone was wired and recorded the entire ceremony. Afterward, the police pulled the plug on his informant status, spiriting him away into the Witness Protection Program.[15]

  The Fresolone tapes recorded at the induction ceremony called into question the real status of the men made by Patty Specs. Because the ceremony had been infiltrated, the soldiers were not recognized on the street as legitimate. It further cast a cloud over the Newark crew. But Patty Specs wasn’t around long enough to see how much damage Fresolone had done to the organization; he passed away soon after the ceremony, late in 1990. Speculation ran rampant that Fresolone’s protecting Patty Specs meant Specs had also been an informant, passing his own information on to authorities; but that was not the case. “After his death, people whispered that Patty Specs was ‘bad.’ Tommy Adams said so on a tape I made. For the record, the first question I asked the New Jersey State Police and the FBI at the time of my arrest was, ‘Was Patty bad?’ The answer is no. He was unaware of George Fresolone’s defection. I’m sure George protected him.”[16]

  When Fresolone was pulled off the streets and the police swept in, it was the latest blow to the beleaguered Philly crime family. Scarfo had decimated the ranks on the street through the many killings and making many of the rest so miserable with the life that they turned to the government to get out. His mismanagement began to take down his entire administration, leaving a power vacuum that other, younger Philly guys looked to move into. The Philly family would never totally recover, plagued by internal warfare throughout most of the nineties as well as by additional turncoats, including their one-time boss Ralph Natale, who decide to cooperate with the feds after his short stint at the head of the table.

  But the Philly family wasn’t the only crime group in the 1980s that was feeling the force of law enforcement’s concerted efforts against organized crime. Since the passage of the RICO Act in the early seventies, the FBI had eaten away at the mob’s power base, virtually eliminating many smaller families in cities like Denver and Saint Louis. But even in major mob strongholds like New Jersey it had become almost impossible to keep track of all the trials, arrests, and convictions through the 1980s. A front-page headline the New York Times in 1
988 asked if a battered and ailing Mafia was losing its grip on America. While that may have signaled the eventual demise of the mob in the Northeast and Chicago, it was the death knell for Cleveland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and a dozen other cities where the combined forces of immigrant assimilation, enhanced law-enforcement techniques, the RICO Act, and the passage of time collaborated to eliminate once-powerful mob families. The FBI was making up for lost time, and the mob was so thrown off course that everywhere they looked was either a secret microphone, video surveillance, a trusted member waiting to inform, or another waiting to kill them. In New Jersey the homegrown DeCavalcantes were sailing through the morass relatively unscathed, but that was about to change, even with their dynamic leader at the helm.

  1. Lyrics from Bruce Springsteen, “Atlantic City,” Nebraska, Columbia Records CBS 2794, 1982, LP.

  2. Philly.com, “Mob Scene: ‘Tony Bananas,’” YouTube video, 4:12, posted June 2, 2009, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPnCotgE9GM.

  3. Anastasia, Blood and Honor, 91.

  4. Ibid, 92.

  5. Dennis M. Culnan, “2 Bruno Associates Found Executed in New York,” (New Jersey) Courier-Post, April 30, 1980.

  6. Fresolone and Wagman, Blood Oath, 60.

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

  8. Maria Gallagher, “Boom Times for the Mob?” Philadelphia Daily News, January 20, 1984.

  9. Ibid.

  10. J. Robert Pearce, Angelo Bruno, aka, Special Summary Report, Philadelphia, FBI, 1962.

  11. Pennsylvania Crime Commission, Organized Crime in Pennsylvania: A Decade of Change; 1990 Report (Conshohocken: Pennsylvania Crime Commission, 1991), archived at https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/Digitization/133208NCJRS.pdf.

  12. George Anastasia, personal interview with the author regarding the Bruno-Scarfo family, e-mail, March 6, 2017.

  13. Pennsylvania Crime Commission, Organized Crime in Pennsylvania.

  14. Fresolone and Wagman, Blood Oath, 159.

  15. George Fresolone died at age forty-eight of a heart attack on March 17, 2002.

  16. Former New Jersey wiseguy, personal interview with the author regarding Newark and the Down Neck mob, email, January 2017.

  Chapter 14

  The Eagle and Video Gambling

  John “the Eagle” Riggi first appears in FBI documents in the early 1960s with his father, Emanuel Riggi. Emanuel was a business agent of Local 394 of the Hod Carriers’ Building and Common Laborers’ Union in Elizabeth and a close confidant and friend of Nick Delmore, then-boss of the Elizabeth crime family. Emanuel was sentenced to two years on a racketeering conviction in 1957. Around that time, John Riggi was brought under the wing of Sam DeCavalcante and appeared on a number of recordings that made a part of the FBI’s surveillance of DeCavalcante’s Kenilworth Plumbing.

  Initially a soldier, John Riggi was elevated to the position of capo in the early 1960s after Sam DeCavalcante had grown unhappy with labor decisions made by a capo at the time, Joe Sferra. As a member of the Hod Carriers’ Union, Sferra’s job had been to make sure that family men were taken care of first when it came to getting jobs and keeping them on the payroll; but he had been unable to do his job properly.

  Sam: You see, Joe, over here I’m trying to build up a good relationship with everybody in the Commission. Our brigata [brigade] is small, but we can do things as good as anybody else. And I told you—as long as they are amico nostri [sic], I don’t want them to go to the hall. I want them to keep working before everybody else.

  And so, after Sferra failed to make an impact after repeated warnings, Sam DeCavalcante brought John Riggi in to take Sferra’s place. Sferra was taken out of the union and demoted from his capo position in the crime family.

  Sam: I’m going to let you take over this decina [branch]. Now this fellow is supposed to be treated with the utmost respect [Joe Sferra]. He’s still an amico nostro. What he done, stays with him, understand? This is your future, John, but you have to take care of these men.

  Riggi: The least of your worries will be our people. I can tell you that.

  Sam: I’ve always said I like Joe Sferra. But more than I like Joe Sferra, I like our people.[1]

  Sam next brought Riggi into a position as treasurer at St. Joseph’s Orphanage of Ribera, Sicily. DeCavalcante was the third boss to serve as head of the charity, succeeding Amari and Delmore before him. His choice of Riggi as treasurer showed that he was grooming the young capo for a bigger role. By 1969, John Riggi appeared on the FBI’s org charts of mob families as a capo in the DeCavalcante family, following in his father’s footsteps. When Sam DeCavalcante went away to prison in March of 1971 for his role in a massive gambling conspiracy, Riggi’s star was on the rise, and he was named acting boss, bypassing older, more-seasoned soldiers like Frank Majuri. And when DeCavalcante was released on December 20, 1973, he decided to take a step back from his leadership role. It’s unclear exactly when Riggi became DeCavalcante boss, if it was immediately after Sam the Plumber’s release or not, but by the mid-seventies Sam was living in Miami Beach and Riggi was the man to see in New Jersey.

  Unlike many mob guys who never finished high school, John Riggi had graduated from Linden High School in 1942 as a lettered athlete and class president. The following year, he enlisted in the US Army. Among the residents of the Peterstown neighborhood of Elizabeth, Riggi was highly regarded. “He answered the call of the churches, organizations, and government when buildings needed repair or when parks and ballfields were needed.”[2] Though he lived in Linden, New Jersey, he was a regular presence in the Peterstown, stronghold of the DeCavalcantes. Viewed by neighbors as a generous benefactor to the community, Riggi made a point of keeping crime-family business out of sight, eschewing violence in his early years— though later events changed that policy.

  Riggi exuded power to those around him. “I visited Riggi when he was in prison in Cumberland, Maryland. This was the mid-nineties. Even in that environment he was a man familiar with the use of power. He was a war hero. The impact of the Greatest Generation even affected members of Cosa Nostra. They had a pride in the immigrant community at that time. I don’t think that was ever lost on him.”[3]

  John Riggi’s influence even extended outside New Jersey, which for the small DeCavalcante family was a feat. Here they were, a crime family of less than fifty, in the shadow of the Five Families of New York City, and even still, Riggi commanded respect. “The minute you said to anyone in Jersey or New York, you said the name Riggi, it was an automatic. It was incredible, the power he had.”[4] And Riggi knew it. He was overheard on a wiretap enjoining an associate to “Learn how to use the power.”[5]

  One contemporary says of him,

  John Riggi mentored me in a lot of aspects of life. We remained in contact until his passing a few years ago. Riggi was a great man. Not a great mob guy. A great man. In fact, he aborted my induction into the Colombo family while I was in prison. John Pate, who was my captain at the time, offered to “straighten me out” in the bathroom at Otisville Federal [Correctional Institute]. Riggi put the kibosh on it. He was looking down the road. He saw clearly that I could be “more.” and I will always view him with great affection and appreciation as well. A month later, Pate was removed in the middle of the night and cooperated.[6]

  A large part of that power base came from Riggi’s control of labor not only in the Hod Carriers’ Union but also in Local 394, where Riggi held a position for thirty years. “What made him powerful was that in the summertime the building trade was biggest source of summer jobs. Having the ability to put people to work, giving out labor contract to contractors.”[7] This labor control was one of the main DeCavalcante rackets since the days of Nick Delmore. Despite all the government crackdowns on their activities, the small Elizabeth family was able to keep their hooks in the union. But labor racketeering was a big priority for the FBI. And, unbeknownst to Riggi, he was under investigati
on for racketeering.

  In 1990 Riggi was arrested at his home in Linden and charged with racketeering. The labor power broker was looking at a sizable sentence if convicted. Riggi was indicted with his two sons, Vincent and John J. Riggi. Also brought into the case with Riggi were capo Jimmy Palermo and Salvatore Timpani, a soldier based in Toms River, New Jersey. The racketeering charges included extorting over one million dollars from a Fords, New Jersey, construction company, Akron Construction Company, and infiltration of a number of small construction companies. The trial lasted eight weeks. Riggi was convicted of eight of the thirty-three charges, Timpani convicted of one.

  Riggi was sentenced to twelve years in prison, but he did not abdicate the throne. He wanted to run things from behind bars, so a series of acting bosses were put in place. Upon taking over, John D’Amato put Emmanuel Riggi “on the shelf”—a term used to mean forced retirement—at the behest of his son, John. As Anthony Rotondo, a soldier in the family who later turned state’s evidence, testified, “It was at the request of John Riggi.”[8]