Garden State Gangland

by Scott M. Deitche

  After Riggi began serving his time, the former underboss to Sam the Plumber, Louis “Fat Louie” Larasso, was reported missing by his wife. Police later discovered his car, which had been parked at JFK Airport in a feeble attempt to make it look like Larasso had skipped town. In reality, he had been murdered on October 21, 1991. He’d been lured to a meeting by Vincent “Vinny Oceans” Palermo and killed by Anthony Capo, Greg Rago, and Louis “Louie Eggs” Consalvo, who were all made into the crime family for the hit. Larasso had allegedly been killed on orders from Riggi, who thought him a threat to his leadership. There had been a meeting of DeCavalcante men not loyal to Larasso to vote on whether or not Fat Louie should go. The meeting was held at the childhood home of Anthony Rotondo, who later testified about the decision to kill Larasso.

  Q: And the result of the meeting.

  (Rotondo) A: He was to be murdered.

  Q: In your own mother’s house with cold cuts?

  A: Cold cuts came later, yes.

  Q: The home outside where your own father had been murdered, execution-style, a few years back?

  A: Yes.

  Q: This vote you mentioned, sir, you alluded to this on direct [that this meeting] basically was a complete charade?

  A: Right.

  Q: You told us yesterday the outcome was preordained?

  A: Yes.

  Q: That is the only reason the vote was unanimous?

  A: Yes, they left out a couple captains.[9]

  The next on the hit list was John D’Amato, acting boss of the crime family. He was murdered on January 6, 1992. Though the popular theory is that D’Amato was murdered because he was gay, in reality he was getting too close to New York for some family members’ liking, and there was jealousy that he was chosen to be acting boss over other favored candidates. Once again, Anthony Rotondo was involved with the murder. He recruited Anthony Capo, a young up-and-coming wiseguy in the DeCavalcante family’s New York faction.

  Q: And you, Anthony Rotondo, directly ordered Capo to shoot D’Amato dead?

  A: Yes.

  Q: To your knowledge Capo and the other guy then went and assassinated D’Amato right near his girlfriend’s home?

  A: They shot him in the car.

  . . .

  Q: Afterwards, sir, you refused to drive upstate with Farone and Palermo to help dispose of the body?

  A: That night, yes.

  Q: You couldn’t bring yourself to do that, could you?

  A: No.[10]

  The D’Amato killing was done without first consulting other capos in the crime family. So Jake Amari went to some of the captains and laid out the allegations of financial and sexual impropriety, making the case for D’Amato’s killing. The captains were unaware that D’Amato had already been slain but went ahead and voted for him to be whacked. This double-crossing and political maneuvering between the factions was destabilizing the organization, slowly weakening it over the next eight years, which would end in the massive takedown of thirty DeCavalcante members and associates in 1999. And from that rubble, high-ranking members, including acting boss, Vinny Oceans Palermo, would decide to turn state’s evidence and became federal witnesses against the remaining crime-family members. The DeCavalcantes suffered a serious blow to their family structure. John Riggi was also caught up in that latest assault against the family and hit with additional charges in the early 2000s while still in prison.

  One of the crimes that Riggi was charged with was the murder of Fred Weiss. One of those involved in the Weiss murder was Anthony Rotondo, son of Vincent Rotondo. Vincent “Jimmy the Gent” Rotondo, had been murdered on January 4, 1988, in front of his Brooklyn house. He was found with a fish in his lap, echoing the scene in The Godfather where Tessio receives Luca Brasi’s vest with a fish inside, code that the enforcer “sleeps with the fishes.” Jimmy the Gent’s alleged miscalculation had been introducing a federal informant to the DeCavalcantes and Gambinos. His murder was ordered by John Gotti, who showed up to his funeral with a posse of twenty Gambino mobsters, to show their strength over the beleaguered Elizabeth family.

  Anthony Rotondo had recruited two other DeCavalcante men to hit Weiss on September 11, 1989. Riggi later admitted in 2003 that he had ordered Weiss’s murder. Riggi said matter-of-factly at his plea hearing for the Weiss murder charge that, “Pursuant to the agreement, Fred Weiss was murdered. That’s it.”[11] In court in 2005, Rotondo also testified about the murder:

  Q: Two of your executioners gunned down this total stranger right outside his own home; isn’t that a fact?

  A: Yes.

  Q: Slaughtered him in cold blood, right, sir?

  A: He was killed.

  . . .

  Q: Afterward you brought all the fellows home for some coffee and cake?

  A: We went to change cars at my house.

  Q: Did you bring them for coffee and cake?

  A: We had coffee.[12]

  By the mid-1980s and into the 1990s, the Gambino’s powerhouse in New Jersey was Robert “Bobby Cabert” Bisaccia. He was promoted to capo after meeting with John Gotti in 1987 at a nightclub in Seaside Heights, New Jersey. Bobby Cabert operated out of Belleville, Bloomfield, and Newark, overseeing Gambino-family concerns in the Garden State, especially their lucrative bookmaking and loan-sharking operations. Bisaccia was also involved in the video-gambling-machine industry, an especially profitable quasi-legitimate racket for the mob across the country, especially in the Chicagoland area.

  In New Jersey, Bisaccia controlled accounts and routes, blocking competition from other mobsters and legitimate vendors of the machines. He aligned himself with some of these vendors to expand his territory, offering them his name and protection in exchange for a piece of their profits. An operator later testified to the SCI about threats Bisaccia made should anyone encroach on his territory: “These are my locations, and if anybody goes in there, they are going to have a problem.”[13]

  The gambling machines were placed in bars and bodegas, mainly in lower-income and blue-collar neighborhoods. “Well, . . . you go to poorer areas of these cities like Elizabeth, Newark, Paterson, Trenton and walk in these stores, and you would see a lot of these— a lot of these games. . . . I mean, just in Down Neck alone, every store I walk in on Ferry Street has got them, and out of the small radius of maybe seven, eight blocks, you’re talking— maybe you got a hundred machines there.”[14]

  One of the mob’s biggest suppliers of machines in the New York/New Jersey area was Myron Sugerman, whose father, Barney Sugerman, owned Runyon Sales. Myron Sugerman recounted, “My strength was that I knew the gambling machine business from the fact that I was born and raised in the coin-operated gaming business. I understood it. I understood what makes it work. I understand it backwards and forwards. In the heyday of New Jersey/New York gaming, there were thousands of machines operating in Bodegas, social clubs, barber shops, shoe-shine parlors, bars, restaurants, beauty salons, et cetera.”[15]

  Myron had known Newark gangster Joey Sodano for years; they’d grown up together at the same time. Sodano was in Tony Bananas Caponigro’s crew and had an arrest record for bookmaking and robbery. In 1977, Myron had given some machine to two old coin-machine operators in the Bronx on a revenue-sharing basis. Every Tuesday, Myron went to the Bronx to collect the money. “One Tuesday, they don’t show up. I call them, and they say, ‘We bought the machines.’ I say, ‘We had a revenue-sharing deal, and those machines were still mine, and you still owed me the weekly income. That was the deal.’ They say, ‘Do what you got to do.’ So I called Joey Sodano, and he went up to the Bronx with his brother, who I named Jimmy Rogers. Joey and Jimmy were convincing with two pistols, and I got my machines back.”[16]

  Before long, there was a meeting with Sugerman and some wiseguys from the crews of Tony Bananas and Gambino mobster Frankie Locascio.[17] They put a restrictive covenant on Myron’s operations, knowing how essential he was to the slot-machine business. But Angelo Pinball, a guy who worked for the two Bronx men who’d attempted
to steal Sugerman’s machines, went to Genovese soldier Louis DiNapoli, who was operating in East Harlem. Angelo Pinball told him that they needed to get into the gambling machine business because of all the money to be made, educating them about the opportunity.

  Louis DiNapoli, in turn, went to see Louis “Streaky” Gatto, a Genovese capo who ran the Lodi crew in North Jersey. Streaky Gatto was in the Pete LaPlaca crew, and when LaPlaca died, Gatto had taken control. Based on the long-ago partnership between Myron’s father, Barney, and Jerry Catena, the Genovese family believed Sugerman should rightfully be under them. “Louis came to see me and told me, ‘Welcome home.’”[18]

  There was nothing Sodano could do at this point, though by this time he had been made as a member of the Bruno-Scarfo family. Sodano went to tell Tony Bananas that the Genovese had claimed Sugerman and his gambling-machine business. But Bananas knew the rules, and though he had a lot of clout in the Jersey underworld, in terms of sheer size and influence, he was dwarfed by the Genovese family.

  The SCI found that “The Sugerman operation was such an important source of revenue to the Genovese family that, according to information picked up in 1983 by federal electronic surveillance, the family boss, two capos, and an associate often made decisions involving the firm’s daily operation.”[19]

  After Gatto moved in and brought Sugerman under the Genovese umbrella in 1982, Sodano set his sights on the Jersey Shore and set up operations with the Storino brothers in a company called SMS Manufacturing, located in Point Pleasant. The Storino brothers were the nephews of Vincent “Jimmy Sinatra” Craparotta. Sodano was officially made into the Bruno-Scarfo family in 1981 and became a consistent source of revenue for Nicky Scarfo, sending the boss four thousand dollars a month from his bookmaking and video-gaming operations.

  Myron Sugerman said,

  Once I became liberated, I broke the market wide open. In due time we operated two thousand machines and sold thousands of machines. I had partnerships with every ethnic group imaginable—Israelis, Irish, Italians, Russians, Greeks, Cubans, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, et cetera. I was an international magnate. I speak seven languages, and so everybody came to me, and we did deals with everybody. We supplied machines. We had good, solid relationships. I didn’t know 99 percent of these guys’ last names. We knew them by nicknames such as Fat Mikey, Cuban Georgey, Dominican Joe, KGB, Puerto Rican Eddy, Tommy Irish, Spiros the Greek, Miracles, Corsican Eitan, Frenchy Eitan, et cetera. All that we had was their phone numbers and their beeper numbers, but they came religiously. It was a very smooth relationship until the market became saturated.[20]

  In 1981 Sal Miranda worked for me. His father was with Joey Sodano, but Sal was the sales manager and with me. We got in trouble with the feds with our knockoffs of popular video games like Pac-Man, Donkey Kong. We got knockoff boards from Japan, and we used them to make machines. The Storinos manufactured the machines, and we marketed them. We made millions in two months. Then we got raided by the FBI for copyright infringement. I stopped the feds from getting to the Storinos.[21]

  After the raid, at a sit-down at the Vesuvius Restaurant, the Lucchese family found out that Jimmy Sinatra was making money off the video-gambling machines but kicking money back up to the leadership. The fallout from the sit-down had repercussions that tore apart the New Jersey Lucchese family. And it started after the sit-down when Tommy Ricciardi went down the Shore to see Jimmy Sinatra and find out why he was keeping the money for himself instead of doing the right thing and sending some of it up the ladder to Lucchese leadership. Ricciardi was planning on giving Jimmy Sinatra a beatdown with golf clubs to show him that the Lucchesi were not happy that he was holding back from them. Unfortunately, things got out of hand, and Jimmy Sinatra died from the beating. It was not the outcome that Ricciardi had wanted. It was described by street sources as one of the more unfortunate killings in Jersey mob history. The beatdown was only supposed to have sent a message, to get a longtime Jersey guy back in the fold, back on track.

  Not long after the Jimmy Sinatra killing, the mob’s New Jersey video-gambling business was gutted in March of 1985 when more than five hundred police officers confiscated hundreds of machines in New York City and ten New Jersey counties. The effort was called Operation Ocean and was a significant blow to the industry that had been generating tens of millions for organized crime. Operation Ocean resulted in over fifty arrests and severely disrupted, eventually landing a mortal blow to, the video-gambling business in New Jersey.

  Close to a decade after the Sinatra killing, the feds indicted Michael Taccetta, Anthony “Tumac” Accetturo Sr., Thomas A. Ricciardi, and an associate, Michael Ryan, on racketeering charges, which included the Jimmy Sinatra murder. Accetturo, of Newark, was the head of the Lucchese family’s New Jersey operations in the early 1970s when the SCI subpoenas were coming down. Rather than facing SCI, or spending time in jail for contempt, Accetturo left for Florida. In his place, Michael Taccetta was appointed head of the Lucchese Jersey crew. Taccetta’s crew included his younger brother, Martin, and Michael Perna, two younger Lucchese mobsters who rose through the ranks in the 1980s to become heavy players in illegal gambling and other rackets in New Jersey.

  In 1986, Tommy Ricciardi, Accetturo, and Taccetta were among nineteen Lucchese mobsters indicted for a host of racketeering charges in one of the largest mob cases in Jersey history. Later the subject of a book and movie, the trial was a massive federal indictment against the Lucchese family as well as against Bruno solider Jackie DiNorscio, who had transferred over to the Lucchese during the bloody Philly mob war. Jackie represented himself at trial (and was played by Vin Diesel in the movie). His crowd-pleasing demeanor, coupled with the massive complexity and length of the case trial, lasting from November of 1986 to August of 1988, resulted in acquittal for all the defendants.

  While the 1980s trial was a good outcome for Ricciardi, the Jimmy Sinatra case was not looking like it would result in the same return. The case was against him was strong, there was solid evidence, and Ricciardi was looking at a long prison sentence if convicted. Plus, there were internal issues that had been brewing for years in the Lucchese family between the New York and New Jersey factions, and between Accetturo, Ricciardi, and Taccetta. Whispers of murder contracts, or double-crosses, and of targets on people’s backs had everyone on edge.

  Another issue was eating away at the Lucchese family: turncoats. In 1991 Fat Pete Chiodo, an overweight capo, decided to become a government informant after he was the victim of an unsuccessful hit attempt—he was shot twelve times—on May 8, 1991. Also that year, acting boss Alphonse D’Arco, fearing he was next to be killed by Lucchese bosses Victor Amuso and Anthony “Gaspipe” Casso, also became a government witness. Then, after a rupture in the alliance between Michael and Martin Taccetta and Tumac Accetturo, Tumac was on the defensive, with the Taccettas gunning for him. There was a contract out on Tumac. He was also arrested while living in North Carolina and sent back to New Jersey to face contempt charges for failing to appear before a state grand jury. With pressure mounting from three sides, Tumac also decided to become a government witness.

  So the cards were stacked against Ricciardi, and the old, noble stand-up-guy myth of the Mafia was shattering all around him. The Luccheses had gone from one of the most powerful New Jersey Mafia crews to a crippled mess, hobbling along without knowing from which direction the next problem would appear. With all this in mind, Tommy Ricciardi became a government witness. He decided to testify against the other defendants in the Jimmy Sinatra trial. They were all found guilty. For his cooperation Ricciardi served some time in prison and entered the Witness Protection Program in 2001. Tommy Ricciardi’s decision to turn and work for the government affected the course of the Lucchese family’s fortune in New Jersey, but it also affected members of his real family.

  My brother? Tommy Ricciardi? I’m often asked about him. And I often don’t answer at this stage of my life. But, yeah, He cooperated. He was a made guy, eventually a captain. T
his is the deal, and anyone who is truthful and who understands the life and is honest with themselves who knew him will tell you he was a man’s man, a true believer in Cosa Nostra and its rules. No one believed in Cosa Nostra more than Tommy. They had a strong crew, all friends since they were kids, they were young, they had it all, but eventually the greed, the treachery, paranoia, and distrust—basically, the nature of the life ruined it all in the end.

  It has been many years since I’ve spoken with him or have seen him or my other brother, Danny. It really has nothing to do with their defection. There was a significant age gap between us, and we simply never got along. I was also a wild kid, always trying to prove myself, and it usually backfired on me. I have no agenda in defending him. It has been years since we’ve had contact. And most likely never will again.

  When Tommy flipped, I was midway through my five-year bid [in prison]. The FBI came to Otisville [Correctional Facility] and told me part of Tommy’s agreement was that I be released. I was in total shock. But I declined the offer. I appreciate my brother trying to help me. I also respect myself for my accountability in refusing the opportunity to “walk.” Anyway, when I got out, Petey Black [Pete Campisi] sent for me. He vouched for me and wanted to take me to New York for induction into the Colombo family. He assured me no one held me accountable for my brother’s actions. I declined Petey’s offer, and having known him from childhood, he graciously understood.

  I look back on it and see that my brother saved me and opened a new world for me. I got a job selling cars. I prospered. I wound up in LA working in movies. What John Riggi saw in me was happening. I began to act and write, and that allowed me to see a whole different side of my life and the world around me. I met my wife. I have a son and a legitimate business. Recently I returned to New Jersey to attend the wake of a boyhood friend. Many people were there that I hadn’t seen in twenty-odd years. It was great to see them, and they genuinely were glad to see me. One guy, a made Gambino guy, told me he was proud of me. Why? Because I didn’t flip? No, because I had created a legitimate life for myself. I don’t judge anyone, or tell anyone how to live their lives, but, for me, back then, thinking about it now is so far removed. It was a terrible way to live.[22]