Ralph: “Well, you had it right the first time. I don’t know what we did wrong.”
Sal: “We didn’t. We did everything fucking right.”
They pulled up to the restaurant and walked inside. Ralph ordered a half-dozen cherrystone clams, an order of shrimp, and a Coors light for himself, and a sixteen-ounce Coke for Sal.
“Medium sauce?” asked the waitress.
“Medium sauce,” Ralph says, turning back to Sal. “Feels funny without Richie here. Ah, he’ll be all right. I don’t know the answer anymore. You know when you don’t know the answer anymore?”
Sal: “Right.”
Ralph: “You get fucking razzle dazzle, dazzle razzle. I’m fucking losing my speech. I’m losing every fucking thing.”
For Sal, there were certain pressures. Believing he would become a wealthy member of society once the World Trade Center score came rolling in, Sal had gone out and done a little spending in anticipation. Specifically, he’d dropped $20,000 on a new, improved bathroom, another $22,000 on an upgraded kitchen, and another $8,000 to tidy things up in the living room. All on his credit cards.
“Now all these bills that are coming, I got to take care of my credit cards. Oh my God, you got to see my cards. Oh man. I got the guy that came yesterday for the granite. I’m staying away from everybody.”
Ralph had similar problems. He owed a particularly nasty member of the Gambino crime family named Joey Smash $40,000. Joey Smash was so unpleasant he had two nicknames—Joey Smash to his face, and “the Ugly Guy” behind his back. Joey Smash knew all about Ralphie’s World Trade Center caper and had decided Ralphie was sitting on a pile of money and holding back. Again and again he reached out to Ralphie to remind him of the money he is owed.
“He says, ‘You know, you’re gonna be all right, you know.’ I says, ‘Joe, what are you fucking worrying about?’ I says, ‘Monday, I start bringing you money.’ I gotta cash this fucking money. I gotta pay him. Hgggggh. He’s driving me crazy. He’s like a fucking old washwoman.”
And Joey Smash was not the only one who knew about Ralphie’s involvement in the caper. Other wiseguys out there from Bayonne to Bensonhurst were speculating, which was something they often did when they thought somebody might have some money they could acquire. Some had even offered to help out. There was this Jimmy Gallo, a crazy guy from New Jersey who shot his partner Joe Pitts many years ago. He’d suggested to Ralphie he could find a place to exchange foreign capital for U.S. dollars. All he wanted was a mere 50 percent. Fifty percent! Ralphie was furious about it. And now Sal was telling him that somebody was bad-mouthing Ralphie as a beat artist.
Ralph: “Beat artist? How can you be a beat artist? Is that what they’re trying to say? Jerk-offs. Yeah, fuck them. I don’t pay attention to them. People are just buzzin’ because they don’t fucking know how to get around us. Don’t you understand? Everybody wants to know how to get involved in this fucking thing, you understand?”
Sal: “Everybody’s got an opinion.”
It was a matter of not having enough information. These people out there calling him a beat artist clearly did not have enough information to know exactly what he was going through. And Ralphie himself did not have enough information to dig himself out of his hole. He could not be sure what the police knew and what they did not know. He didn’t worry so much about Melvin Desmond Folk or even Michael Reed, because they didn’t really know him and could say little to implicate him in the heist. Richie Gillette was an entirely different situation. There was a chance Richie Gillette might talk, and then they would come for him. That was the most likely scenario. But Ralph could not be sure. Richie’s cousin was already calling Ralphie asking for money to send to Richie, who was still sitting in a New Mexico jail cell. Ralphie had to decide whether sending money was a good investment. If he did not send it, obviously Richie would talk. If, on the other hand, he did send it, Richie could decide to talk anyway, and then the money would have been wasted.
There was one other option. He could turn to Vincent Palermo, a smart, well-respected guy everybody called Vinny Ocean. Ralph was aware that Palermo was doing very well financially, and that he was known as a man who could come up with sensible resolutions to allegedly insurmountable problems. Ralphie could go to Vinny Ocean, borrow some money, pay off Joey Smash, keep paying off Richie Gillette, and slowly exchange the pile of foreign currency he was sitting on. The only problem was Vinny Ocean was out of town, headed to San Diego for Super Bowl XXXIII, and there was no way to reach out to him until January 26 at the earliest. Usually this would not have been a big problem. But each day the weight grew heavier. A quick solution was essential.
Sitting in the restaurant with Sal, Ralphie tried not to think about his many problems. He asked Sal if he’d put on weight. Sal replied, “You don’t know how to eat clams, so I’m going to teach you. Look. Let me show you. Watch.”
When they were finished, Ralph had to pick up his daughter and get her to a basketball game. He and Sal went their separate ways, promising to keep talking until they figured out what to do.
THE KNOCK Sometime between the end of Sal and Ralph’s seafood dinner and the next day, Ralph was at his home in Staten Island when he heard a knock on the door. His wife answered. Two men entered the living room and sat down. Ralph walked into the room and sat down, too. Even before they opened their mouths, he knew who they were. One of the men handed over a business card. In the middle was the man’s name embossed in blue script over the title special agent. In the left-hand corner was a gold embossed image of a badge topped by an eagle looking to the left. Below that was the address, 26 Federal Plaza, where Ralph knew he was going to be spending quite a bit of time. In the top right-hand corner was the title in blue: FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION, New York Division.
They talked for a moment to be polite, and then they made it clear Ralphie needed to come with them to downtown Manhattan. When they left Ralph’s house, it was dark. This was a good sign for Ralph. That meant that his neighbors probably would not notice him walking away with the two men. Ralph surmised that this might be an important point in the days and months to come.
3
January 23, 1998 The trucks arrive at dawn, pulling up to the vacant storefront on Second Avenue in a faded little New Jersey town called Elizabeth. They are miles away from the make-believe world of movies and television, but they have a job to do, and it involves pretense. They begin scrubbing off the graffiti on the storefront, sweeping off the sidewalk in front, removing debris from inside. They wipe months of grime off the windows and repaint the front door green. In the windows they hang cured hams and trussed pig carcasses, coils of pink-and-beige sausages, a denuded chicken with beak and feet still in place. All of it is plastic. Over the entrance, they mount a sign that has never hung there or anywhere before—CENTRANNI’S PORK STORE. There is no Centranni’s in this world. The people of Elizabeth would fail if they tried to pick up some pro
sciutto or a pound of mozzarella inside this pork store. This is pure fakery, but it looks like the real thing. This is the work of David Chase, who grew up a few miles away in nearby Caldwell, New Jersey, under the name DeCesare. He is filming a pilot for a new television show he has dreamed up about a Mafia family from New Jersey. His is a different spin on the usual Mafia shtick. He sees real people doing real-people things, such as worrying about which college their daughter will get into or complaining about the price of gasoline. In between, these real people belong to a secret society of killers who pledge total allegiance to their “thing” and promise to shoot or, if that’s not possible, beat to death anyone who informs on their secret. The project does not yet have a title, but film crews have been dispatched with camcorders throughout the streets of northern New Jersey scouting locales. Authenticity is paramount. In fact, authenticity is already causing the show many problems. Chase wants to make sure the characters are not portrayed as either too good or too bad. He wants his protagonist, Anthony Soprano, a capo in a New Jersey crime
family, to be sympathetic, but also to be willing to break someone’s head with a baseball bat. He has built Centranni’s in the heart of Elizabeth because that is where Tony will hold court. As a result of all this authenticity, the major networks have taken a pass on Chase’s project. He is in talks with HBO-TV about working a deal, and in the end, it will be said that authenticity was very important to his idea.
Just a few blocks away from the pretend Mafia pork store, Centranni’s, there is a real pork stork called Sacco’s. Inside Sacco’s there are no plastic chickens. Pigs and sausages hanging on hooks are real. In Chase’s yet-to-benamed television show, Uncle Junior is a hard old nut of a man who will sit at a table near the back of the fake pork store, and the other members of his TV Mafia family will come to him for favors and advice. He gives orders. He plots murders. He is a king.
His little kingdom is also remarkably similar to the real pork store a few blocks away from the TV pork store. In Sacco’s, the seasoned gangster is named Joseph Giacobbe, who is known as Uncle Joe. He is a hard old nut of a man who comes to the store every morning for coffee and a roll. The FBI sees him come and go so much they scribble in their notebook, “Giacobbe and other members of the DeCavalcante family regularly hold meetings inside Sacco’s.” If you call Sacco’s on any given morning and ask simply for Joe, Giacobbe will come to the phone.
JOE PITTS On the Friday afternoon of January 23, 1998, sixtyseven-year-old Joseph Conigliaro drove his four-year-old black Cadillac up Smith Street through the miserable winter rain. This was Red Hook, the neighborhood in south Brooklyn where Conigliaro grew up. Everybody knew him and everybody called him Joe Pitts. But this was no longer the same Red Hook of Joe Pitts’s wild years. Everywhere there was evidence that he was a stranger in his own neighborhood. A French restaurant had opened up, followed by a store that sold precious little ceramic objects made on the premises. Next came painfully hip boutiques with retro clothes for bohemians. The yuppies were coming and there was nothing Joe Pitts could do about it.
Joe Pitts was a dinosaur.
Red Hook wasn’t even called Red Hook anymore. It was now Carroll Gardens, a name dreamed up by realestate developers intent on softening the neighborhood’s
longshoreman image. It was no longer just a traditional Italian neighborhood where outsiders were considered a form of infectious disease. Into this insular neighborhood in the early 1990s had come an invading army dressed all in black. They were artists, people who made a living with their hands but not in the same manner as the people of Red Hook. Most of the old shipbuilding factories down by the water were long gone, and the sons and daughters of the men who built the ships of World War II were left scrambling for a new way to get by. Now came the artists, fleeing absurd Manhattan rents for cheap space on Smith Street. They opened galleries and shops and restaurants catering to young hip people of modest means. They changed Red Hook’s neighborhood for good.
Joe Pitts—who was as much a part of the neighborhood as the cracks in the sidewalks—was now beginning to stand out. His notorious social club, the One Over Golf Club, hidden behind tinted black windows and a gate that was always shuttered, had become a relic. Perhaps he knew it. Most likely he did not. He lived in Carroll Gardens, but if you asked him, he’d say he lived in Red Hook. Red Hook was where he came from. It was part of his DNA. It was a place he could understand.
Red Hook back in 1973 was to gangland what New Orleans was to jazz, a rough waterfront neighborhood where much gangster lore originated. From Red Hook came Crazy Joey Gallo, who kept a scrawny half-sized lion in the basement of a tenement on President Street. This was the Joey Gallo who spent hours watching old gangster movies of Paul Muni and Jimmy Cagney and Edward G. Robinson, and learned to imitate their body language. Years later, a Hollywood actor would come to Brooklyn and meet with Joey, who would let the clueless thespian in on how to walk and talk like a “real” gangster, without revealing that he himself was just a sucker for the silver screen. It was art imitating life imitating art.
In the Red Hook of 1973, Joe Pitts had been somebody. He was a known soldier in the crime family of Carlo Gambino. He was a made guy. You couldn’t raise a hand to him without getting permission from the bosses. He made money just by walking into a business and declaring himself partner. To some, his story rivaled Crazy Joey Gallo’s, mostly because no one believed half the things that were said about Gallo. The story that went along with Joe Pitts was hard to believe, but had a basis in truth. Because after it happened, Joe Pitts had to spend the rest of his days in a wheelchair.
At the time, back in 1973, Joe Pitts was forty-two years old. His partner was one of Joey Gallo’s distant cousins, Jimmy Gallo, a DeCavalcante soldier. Joe Pitts and Jimmy Gallo were looking for a Brooklyn gambler named Vincent Ensulo. Ensulo had borrowed $1,200 and within a week owed $1,600, but that’s not why they wanted him. Gallo and Joe Pitts had learned that Ensulo had begun secretly cooperating with law enforcement. Both men were extremely interested in finding Ensulo, and on a particular day they just happened to see him driving out of a gas station in Red Hook. They jumped into action, pulling open both doors of Ensulo’s slowly moving car. Joe Pitts and Jimmy Gallo jumped inside the car, one on each side. They both drew guns and pointed them at Ensulo. Joe Pitts, who was at the wheel, began to drive away.
Within three blocks, Ensulo, who was either insane or so crazed with fear he didn’t know what he was doing, suddenly jerked the wheel away from Joe Pitts. Immediately both Joe Pitts and Jimmy Gallo began firing their weapons, temporarily forgetting that there were three large men jammed inside the front seat of a moving sedan. Joe Pitts, or “Mr. Conigliaro,” as the New York Times would later call him, shot Jimmy Gallo once in the left side. Jimmy Gallo (“Mr. Gallo”) shot Joe Pitts twice in the right shoulder. The temporarily lucky Vincent Ensulo suffered only minor wounds, which allowed him to jump out of the car and flee into the Brooklyn night. Jimmy Gallo survived his wounds more or less unscathed, but Joe Pitts was partially paralyzed forever.
Both men were charged with shooting each other, and both pleaded guilty to weapons charges. Joe Pitts did his time in a wheelchair. When Gallo got out of prison, the FBI says, it took only a few days before Vincent Ensulo’s body was discovered with one bullet in the head. Jimmy Gallo was later charged, but he was acquitted. He was later heard bragging about the time he “beat the system” when he “shot a rat and got away with it.”
In the years that followed, Joe Pitts and Jimmy Gallo remained partners and pals, running a loan-sharking business out of John’s Luncheonette in Red Hook well into the 1980s. But times changed. In 1972, Joey Gallo was gunned down at Umberto’s Clam House in Little Italy. He had spent the evening at the Copacabana with the actor Jerry Orbach, who was about to play a version of Joey in the movie The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight.
The apartment building where Joey kept his lion had been demolished and replaced by subsidized senior housing with a sign, KEEP CHILDREN AND PETS OFF THE GRASS. By 1998, Crazy Joey Gallo wouldn’t have recognized the neighborhood he had once ruled.
He certainly wouldn’t have recognized Joe Pitts. By 1998, Joe Pitts was a bitter old man trapped in a wheelchair. He was sixty-seven years old and had been demoted from soldier to mere “associate” in the Gambino crime family by infuriating nearly everyone he came in contact with. He was now viewed by many of his peers as a washed-up, 210-pound tough old bastard who bled his victims dry. Joe Pitts the made guy wasn’t what he used to be.
At this hour, as Joe drove down Smith Street toward the Gowanus Canal, few artists in black could be seen walking the rain-soaked streets. It was too early. He was alone in his Caddy. He had a nasty German shepherd that he kept in the One Over Golf Club. The dog accompanied him everywhere and barked and snapped at the invading yuppies. Joe Pitts would laugh when the dog did this. Everybody debated who was worse—Joe Pitts or his dog. On this night he intended to collect some money he decided to leave the dog behind.
It was all arranged.
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He had put himself on the books of a struggling company called T&M Construction. T&M was owned by a would-be wiseguy named Mike. He was a source of regular cash for Joe Pitts. The arrangement was simple. Pitts would come by T&M and Mike would hand over a fat envelope of cash. In return, Joe Pitts would “protect” him from being shaken down by other gangsters. Mike hated Joe Pitts. Lately Joe Pitts had been stopping by more often, insisting that the fat envelopes be even fatter, and Mike was getting very tired of this.
Joe Pitts pulled up to Mike’s apartment on Smith Street. Mike dashed through the rain to the Caddy. Sitting in the front seat, he told Joe Pitts there was a guy waiting with the money at Joe’s social club, the One Over. They drove the few blocks to the club and Joe Pitts pulled up to the curb.
A guy called Marty Lewis came out of the club by himself. He was not the guy Mike had said would be there, but he was a guy Joe Pitts knew. Marty was a guy known to other guys. He had driven around with Joe Pitts hundreds of times and pushed him in his wheelchair when the old man needed pushing. He was wearing gloves in the rainy winter night, and he jumped in the backseat. Marty Lewis said the guy with the money was waiting just a few blocks away, but Mike said he couldn’t go because he needed to get back to his apartment. Joe Pitts drove him home and dropped Mike off.
Lewis got in the front seat and told Joe Pitts the guy with the money was waiting on Lorraine Street.
Lorraine Street was down near the Gowanus highway overpass next to a bedraggled housing project. There were auto-body shops and garbage-clotted empty lots. Most New Yorkers would hear they were supposed to meet somebody on a winter night in the rainy darkness on Lorraine Street and they would drive quickly away, never to return.
Made Men Page 5