Made Men

by Smith, Greg B.

  Never again would he be just another guy from the fish market.

  Now he was amico nos—a friend of ours. He was part of a much larger organization that included five crime families in New York City and one in New Jersey. All six had their moments of fame over the years that became gilded and polished and placed squarely in the gauzy mythology of gangster-dom. At the time that Vinny Ocean became amico nos, the DeCavalcante family was a small but respected organization. It had a virtual lock on most of the unions that did construction work in northern New Jersey and a good relationship with the five New York families who ran the gangster world. Small but respected. And Vinny Ocean was a part of all that.

  Nearly thirty years later, the mob wasn’t what it used to be.

  In Vinny’s family, the FBI had successfully planted a bug in Sam the Plumber’s office and captured nearly two years of conversations. Sam the Plumber was convicted and ultimately retired. The New York families were in even more of a mess. The Colombo family had lost itself in two terrible, bloody wars in the streets of Brooklyn. Its members were being prosecuted one by one. The Luchese family had gone underground ever since one of its middle managers decided it would be a good idea to violate mob “rules” and try to shoot the sister of an informant. The Bonanno clan, the smallest of the New York five, was a shell of its former self after being kicked out of the mob’s famous ruling body, the Commission. The boss of the Genovese family, Vincent (the Chin) Gigante, had taken to wandering through the streets of Greenwich Village in a bathrobe, unshaven and muttering to himself about Jesus. Subpoenas were everywhere. When he was indicted, his own lawyers said he was insane.

  As of 1994, the most powerful family in America—the Gambino family—was on the ropes, brought down by its boss, John Gotti, the Dapper Don, a man whose mountainous ego was surpassed only by his inability to keep his mouth shut. The high-living Gotti dodged not one but three prosecutions (mostly by fixing juries), ate at fine Manhattan restaurants, danced till dawn, and offered a raffish Al Capone smirk to reporters who dogged his every move. By 1992, he was finished, convicted of murder and racketeering and just about every Cosa Nostra sin imaginable. He now sat in a maximum-security prison, fuming about all the rats who’d turned on him, unaware that his own words, captured by FBI bugs, were the true reason for his downfall.

  Different theories emerged about the downfall of the mob. Some believed it was simply an extraordinary effort by law enforcement. Some said it was sloppy behavior by a secret society that was no longer so secret. A few saw something else—a group of criminals done in by their own mythology.

  With Gotti, there was practically a cottage industry between the movies and books and talk-show discussions. His image as a boastful, well-dressed hoodlum catered to the notion that the mob was a glamorous American institution. Gotti was seen in some circles as an antihero, a guy who thumbed his nose at law enforcement while impressing the working people with old-fashioned fireworks displays every Fourth of July in his Queens neighborhood. Even Gotti believed it. He talked about “my public” as if he were George Raft or Paul Muni or Robert De Niro. Here was the myth of the crime boss as Robin Hood. Here was The Godfather of Mario Puzo, who had somehow managed to create the Men of Honor fiction.

  In 1994, the Gambino crime family had become material for popular culture. If Jay Leno or David Letterman needed a Mafia joke, inevitably they would mention the Gambino crime family. Gotti had made the cover of Time as the face of organized crime in America. When people made jokes about “sleeping with the fishes” and “make him an offer he can’t refuse,” they thought of Gotti and the Gambino crime family, even though its power and strength had been considerably weakened by Gotti’s conviction two years earlier.

  When people thought of the Mafia in 1994, they most certainly did not think of the DeCavalcante crime family— New Jersey’s only homegrown Mafia clan. By the time the protesters took to marching outside Vinny Palermo’s strip club in Queens, the DeCavalcante crime family had fallen into a near-permanent stupor. Within seven years, the family’s underboss had been murdered, the boss had been jailed, and the man who’d been appointed to replace him as acting boss on the street had been murdered by his own men. The guy left in charge, Giaciano (Jake) Amari, had cancer and was slowly dying. Most of the leadership of the family consisted of extremely old men stuck in the old ways. There was one exception in the DeCavalcante crime family in 1994—an up-and-coming capo named Vinny Ocean.

  THE “FARMERS” He was clearly headed to the top of the corporate hierarchy. Vinny Ocean’s problem was that he was in the wrong corporation. If the other Mafia families of New York City were airlines, they would be Delta and USAir and American. The DeCavalcante family would be Bob and Joe’s Airlines. They were openly called “farmers” by the New York goodfella crowd, and there wasn’t much they could do about the name, mostly because it was true.

  For years they had always been forced to glom on to other families to earn a living. For a short time when Sam the Plumber was running things, they were seen as a fairly sophisticated group, coming up with smart new ways to suck the blood out of local union pension funds. By the mid-1990s, they had reached a new low. For an aggressive, ambitious guy like Vinny Ocean, this was good news.

  Vinny was an optimist. He was aware that the family’s boss, John Riggi, remained in prison with no chance of walking on a sidewalk until at least 2003. There was a perception that no one was really in charge, which for Vinny could be a good thing. And while the New York families had gotten all the glamour from the mythology machine, they had also received most of the unwanted attention from law enforcement.

  The way Vinny Ocean saw it, the so-called farmers of New Jersey were now ready to fill in the void. And with Vinny Ocean’s help, they were doing just that. Slowly, the farmers of New Jersey were finding their way across the Hudson River and into the boroughs of Queens, Brooklyn, Staten Island, and even Manhattan. They were expanding because nobody was really paying any attention to them. The way Vinny Ocean saw it, the DeCavalcante crime family could definitely be a player in the 1990s in a way that could exceed even what the family’s namesake, Sam the Plumber, had imagined. The key, as Vinny would tell his underlings, was cooperation. Like the namesake of his family, Vinny Ocean had made a career out of cultivating relationships with other families. He set up a lucrative loan-sharking deal with one Gambino capo and a bookmaking operation with another. He was working on a deal

  to partner up with a Colombo captain and kept in touch with members of the Genovese crime family he knew from the fish market. For the most part, he was well liked. He was, in the truest sense of the word, an “earner” who got the job done.

  By 1994, Vinny had established himself in the usual Mafia businesses. According to the FBI, he was shaking down construction companies in the city through his control of several laborers’ unions. Some of that money he put back on the street through loan-sharking and gambling operations, which allowed him to collect thousands of dollars every week in off-the-book cash. He became an off-thebook partner of one of his loan-shark victims’ businesses. He opened up Wiggles in Rego Park, a tremendous source of cash.

  There were only three hundred problems—all of them standing on the sidewalk outside Wiggles nearly every night, hollering about kids and morality and property rates. They were protected by the same First Amendment Vinny Ocean mentioned on the sign outside his club to justify opening an all-nude club on a mom-and-pop Queens street. They had a right to protest. And it was that very right that gave Vinny Ocean an unusual idea.

  What if you use the First Amendment to fight back? He had been talking with his lawyers about filing a freespeech lawsuit against the neighborhood activists, arguing that their aggressive behavior was scaring off his customers in violation of his rights to do business as an American. It is, he would argue, positively un-American, and certainly antientrepreneurial, to allow such a thing to continue.

  On September 1, 1994, less than a month after the big protest, Wiggles
officially fired back. One of Palermo’s lawyers, Stanley Meyer, filed a lawsuit—one of the first of its kind—in Queens State Supreme Court arguing with a straight face that protesters were violating Wiggles’s right of free expression. Meyer asks a judge for an injunction ordering the protesters to immediately cease and desist from yelling and screaming outside the door. They alleged that the protesters had repeatedly violated the privacy rights of customers by videotaping license plates. They also claimed the protesters had violated the right to be free of flying foodstuff. Wiggles employees—even those who kept their clothes on at work—had been hit by airborne tomatoes and other unspecified fruit. Granted, there was no better than a slim chance that Palermo would actually win. But Vinny Ocean knew that his quixotic effort of wrapping himself in the American flag and filing suit might, in the end, not matter a bit.

  That was because the protests had actually increased business. All that publicity had been good for the club. In fact, in the city of New York in 1994, no other strip club could boast of getting so much publicity with so little effort.

  All of which made Wiggles’s prospects pretty good. When a reporter asked Meyer, the club’s lawyer, what he thought the future would bring for Queens’s only all-nude strip club, he answered swiftly and succinctly.

  “We will outlast them.”

  SAM THE PLUMBER

  February 11, 1997 Two hours past noon at Corsentino Home for Funerals in Elizabeth, New Jersey, and the cars had filled up the parking lot and jammed Second Avenue. Agents with the State of New Jersey’s Organized Crime Racketeering Bureau walked from vehicle to vehicle, jotting down license-plate numbers. Agents in a van with tinted windows videotaped the men and women entering and leaving Corsentino’s. This was a big day for the funeral home. This was the day that New Jersey’s one and only Mafia don, the eminent Simone Rizzo DeCavalcante, was to be waked.

  This was the funeral of Sam the Plumber, the founding father of the DeCavalcante crime family, who managed to live a life as a racketeer and die of a heart attack in what the FBI deemed “semi-retirement” at the respectable age of eighty-four.

  Sam the Plumber definitely fell into the category “old school.” With his carefully combed silver hair and his Italian suits, DeCavalcante made a practice of claiming to be a descendant of Italian royalty. Whether or not this was true, no one knew. He was nicknamed “the Count” and was allegedly one of several real-life Mafia bosses said to have inspired Mario Puzo’s entirely fictional Don Vito Corleone, the patriarchal boss of The Godfather. He was also the owner of Kenworth Heating and Air-conditioning in Kenilworth, New Jersey, which had earned him his nickname as a seller of sinks and pipes. Law enforcement seemed to have a certain respect for Sam the Plumber. They noted that he managed to win a spot on the Mafia’s Commission, the ruling body that once governed the mob in America. They referred to him as “diplomatic” and noted that he was able to double the number of associates and made guys in his crime family between 1964, when he took over from the previous boss, and 1969, when his secret life as a mob boss became not so secret.

  For a brief and strange moment during the Summer of Love, Sam the Plumber became a national sensation. On June 10, 1969, the FBI suddenly released 2,300 typed

  pages of transcripts gathered during a two-year wiretap of Sam the Plumber’s office. On tape, Sam the Plumber was given to philosophizing about “honor.” He was known to say things like “I’d give my life for our people.” His most famous quote was “Honest people have no ethics.” He said this because he was furious that the cops and judges he was paying off wouldn’t always do what he wanted.

  “Those people just don’t stay fixed,” he complained. Sometimes he’d settle disputes over who was allowed to shake down whom in the manner of, say, a Roman senator. Revealing how he resolved one such affair of state, Sam the Plumber explained that he’d ordered a trusted lieutenant to administer a beating. “Then he hit him another one. He started hollering, ‘Help! Help!’ There were sixty guys outside, but I guess the room was soundproof.”

  At times Sam was a father figure. When one of his soldiers did not show sufficient respect to one of his capos, his response was quite paternalistic.

  Sam: “Joe, you owe John an apology.”

  Joe: “Okay, I apologize.”

  Sam: “Joe, do you mean that? Shake hands. I won’t permit it this way. Joe, I’d give my life for our people.”

  The tapes undermined the Count’s royal legacy. They captured forever the fact that he was cheating on his wife with a secretary named Harriet, with whom he sometimes conversed in Yiddish. Sam the Plumber was momentarily famous, but also bound to spend some time in jail. On the day in 1971 when he and fifty-four of his cohorts were indicted, he was at the height of his power and the family that bore his name was as famous as it would ever be.

  He pleaded guilty to running a $20-million-a-year gambling operation around the same time that a state report claimed that he and another crime family controlled 90 percent of the porno shops in the city of New York. The loquacious Sam the Plumber did two years of his five-year sentence and was released early because of good behavior and heart problems. He retired to an ocean-view high-rise condo on Collins Avenue in Miami Beach, Florida, and the crime family that bore his name was never quite the same. By the time the 1990s rolled around, law enforcement continued to believe he was advising the family on criminal matters, but in documents they listed his “hangouts” as “Miami Heart Institute.”

  After DeCavalcante left jail, he appointed first as acting boss and then as boss a well-spoken, extremely polite, and profoundly ruthless man named John Riggi. Riggi was business agent of Local 394 of the International Association of Laborers and Hod Carriers in Elizabeth, New Jersey, and he managed to stay out of jail until he was indicted in Newark in 1989. He was convicted the next year and began serving time, continuing to serve as boss of the family from his cell in Fort Dix federal prison.

  At the time of Sam the Plumber’s funeral, there was word of yet another potential void in the leadership of the DeCavalcante crime family. Riggi was still technically the boss, despite his having been in jail for seven years. Riggi had appointed an acting boss to handle matters on the street. The man’s name was Jake Amari, a broken-down septuagenarian who ran AMI Construction in Elizabeth, New Jersey. Jake had always been close to Riggi, from the days when Riggi actually walked on city streets and hung around the now-defunct Café Italia in Elizabeth. Now Jake the acting boss—and by extension, his friend and real boss, Riggi—had a big problem. Jake was slowly dying of stomach cancer.

  Everyone knew it, and no one talked about it. It was certain that when he passed, there would be a move to see who was in charge. As the New Jersey law enforcement agents ran their video cameras and scribbled down license plates at Sam the Plumber’s funeral, they looked for clues as to where the DeCavalcante family was headed. They made some predictable findings—Jake Amari was there. So was Stefano Vitabile, the alleged consigliere who once had been Sam the Plumber’s chauffeur when he traveled to New Jersey, driving a car registered to a sand and fill company. There was Charlie (Big Ears) Majuri, a captain and son of Sam the Plumber’s former underboss Frank Majuri, driving a car registered in his wife’s name. There was Frank Polizzi, an old-time captain who was once busted in the old Pizza Connection heroin case and then released from prison because he claimed he was dying. He was still alive.

  These were all men who could end up running the family, which would make them potential targets of any investigation. The agents wrote down everything they could, and noticed that most of the license plates were from New Jersey. There were a handful of New York plates, including one from Brooklyn captains named Anthony Rotondo and Rudy Ferrone and a longtime, profoundly unsuccessful bookmaker named Joey O Masella.

  But on that day, as members young and old paid their respects to the man who claimed to possess royal blood, one name did not surface on any of law enforcement’s radar screens—Vincent Palermo. In fact, as of 1997,
Vinny Palermo was able to attend the funeral of his mentor and did not have to worry that his name would show up on some law enforcement database listing who’s who in organized crime. At the time Vinny Ocean did not exist to the FBI. For more than thirty years, Vinny Ocean had stayed off the FBI’s radar.

  That was about to change.

  2

  January 8, 1998 In the heart of a New York City winter it was actually sixty-five degrees in Central Park. People strolled giddily down sidewalks in shirtsleeves and sneakers. Stuck in traffic, they snickered when the radio said it was thirty-six degrees in Albany and trees were exploding in a Maine ice storm. By midday a thick fog settled on Manhattan from the Bronx to the Battery, turning the great architectural icons of New York into ghosts. At the bottom of the island, this meteorological oddity enshrouded the World Trade Center so that the nearly all of the massive twin towers seemed to disappear into a cloud.

  From where he stood down near Battery Park, a short, chubby Brooklyn guy with a receding hairline and expanding midsection gazed up at the Trade Center towers. His name was Ralph Guarino and he was trying to see exactly where the towers ended and the fog began. It was an

  inspiring sight, filled with the casual majesty that is everywhere on the street corners of Manhattan. Here was one of where on the street corners of Manhattan. Here was one of story citadels of power as tight as the Federal Reserve, swallowed up whole by the sky. The mighty towers seemed almost fragile this way. Fragile was a word Ralphie Guarino needed to explore.

  He was aware that the World Trade Center was known as one of the most secure public spaces in the world. First, the huge complex of towers and office buildings was positively brimming with cops. There were all kinds of cops in there—New York City cops, Port Authority of New York and New Jersey police, Federal Police officers with their unrecognizable initials, FPO. Inside the two towers just about every federal law enforcement agency imaginable was well represented—the United States Secret Service, the U.S. Customs Service, the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms—you name it. Cops were everywhere.