Vinny made a managerial decision that he would one day regret: he decided to put Ralphie with his driver and longtime friend, Joey O. That way he could keep an eye on this up-and-coming kid Ralphie.
And Ralphie could keep an eye on him.
4
By the time the FBI knocked on Ralphie Guarino’s front door, much had changed in La Cosa Nostra regarding the ramifications of becoming a dreaded rattus norvegicus.
In the autumn of 1963, the ramifications were simple. You talk, you die. When sixty-year-old Joseph Michael Valachi sat in a roomful of United States senators and television cameras and became the first made member of the American Mafia to publicly reveal the corrupt inner machinery of his claustrophobic world, everyone knew he was a human target from then on. At the time, Valachi portrayed his decision to turn informant as a kind of business maneuver, a matter of pure pragmatism. His boss, Vito Genovese, had given him a theatrical “kiss of death” inside the federal prison in Atlanta, labeling him to the rest of gangland as an informant. This, of course, meant he should be killed as soon as possible. At the moment this occurred, Valachi was actually not an informant. A few months later, after pondering the fact that his own boss had publicly
turned on him, he decided, “If the shoe fits . . .” As a result, he rejected his oath of omerta, knowing there was a $100,000 contract out on him, and talked. And talked and talked and talked.
In his talks, Valachi portrayed some members of his Mafia (the ones he still admired) as “men of honor.” He never talked about his own family, and he was acutely aware that what he was doing ran contrary to everything he’d believed for most of six decades. He seemed almost to find acceptable the fact that anyone even loosely affiliated with any family from Bayonne to Berkeley would try to kill him if they could. In those days, the vow of omerta was serious business.
Nevertheless, Valachi did something that was a little ahead of its time. Despite the constant threat of sudden death, he decided to write a book, or more specifically have Peter Maas write it for him. The result was The Valachi Papers in 1969. It was a huge success and even became a Charles Bronson movie. It was the first of its kind, but far from the last.
Who could have known what this thug from East Harlem would inspire?
Thirty-one years after Valachi made his TV debut and wrote all about it, becoming an informant in La Cosa Nostra was old news. It started off slow. A low-level associate turned informant here, a slightly higher-up soldier decided to blab there. Then capos—midlevel bureaucrats in the mob hierarchy—jumped on the government bandwagon and agreed to tell all. There was Joe (Fish) Cafaro and Joe Cantalupo and Jimmy (the Weasel) Fratianno. The stakes grew. Phil Leonetti, the underboss of a Philadelphia crime family, flipped in 1986. Five years later, on September 21, 1991, Little Al D’Arco, acting boss of the Luchese crime family in New York, called up the FBI even before he was arrested and offered to help out. Forty-eight days later, on November 16, 1991, Salvatore (Sammy the Bull) Gravano, the underboss of what was then the nation’s most powerful crime family, the Gambino clan, decided that he, too, had had enough of “the life” and agreed to cooperate. Gravano boasted openly during his court testimony that when he got out of prison, he would go back into the construction business and live a normal life. That pretty much made it official—the notion of a feared code of silence in which talk meant death had pretty much become a national joke. The secret society was no longer such a secret.
In fact, it was now a commodity. There was money to be made in all this chatter.
Some of the informants—including Gravano and Leonetti—showed up as the central characters of books. Criminals who hadn’t even informed decided to get in on the action. The brother and godson of Sam Giancana wrote a book about the infamous Chicago crime boss. The boss of New York’s Bonanno crime family, Joseph Bonanno, wrote his own self-serving book, making sure to declare that “Informers don’t deserve to be called omu (men).” Sammy the Bull read both Giancana’s and Bonanno’s book.
The negative image of the “rat” was altered forever. Thirty-three years after Joe Valachi, you now had one Lawrence Mazza, known to his friends as Legitimate Larry.
Here was a young associate rising through the ranks of the Brooklyn-based Colombo crime family, jailed in a murder-racketeering indictment that could keep him in prison for twenty years. Not surprisingly, he decided to become a witness for the prosecution. Sitting in the Metropolitan Correctional Center in lower Manhattan, Legitimate Larry had a series of conversations with his father and mother in which he outlined the rationale and benefits of becoming what he, for years, derisively referred to as a rat.
In his many talks, all of which were recorded (with his knowledge), he outlined a complex rationale for informing on friends and associates that started with the premise that the Mafia wasn’t what he thought it was. This “men of honor” stuff somehow seemed overblown.
“We’re thinking we just have to be, you know, loyal and honorable,” he tells his father. “But it’s bullshit. Like that’s why I don’t feel anything derogatory toward myself for this. Nothing at all. I really don’t. Put it this way: If I had something to stand up for, I think you’d know I would stand up. This life isn’t what I thought it was, so I’m not turning on it. I’m not turning on a loyal bunch of friends, real close guys, family guys. You know, they break every other rule, and I’m not supposed to break this rule?”
Legitimate Larry then let a tiny bit of momentary fame get to him. According to a March 1994 Daily News article in which his exploits as the protégé of a particularly deranged Colombo gangster named Greg Scarpa had been dutifully recorded, his relationship with Scarpa was somewhat unusual, even by mob standards. Legitimate Larry was actually conducting a regular sexual relationship with Scarpa’s common-law wife of twenty years, and Scarpa— who was dying of AIDS—heartily approved. Now, as he sat in the Metropolitan Correctional Center in lower Manhattan chatting with his father, Legitimate Larry got an idea.
“I’ve been writing a lot,” he revealed. “First I did just like notes. Now I’m trying to make it in a, you know, story form.”
“Well,” offered his father, “if you get one of the big guys interested, all these big book publishers....” Larry’s idea was to sell his story to the newspaper reporter who had written the News feature, who would then turn it into a bestseller that could possibly make Legitimate Larry... well, legitimate.
Over the weeks he refined his idea. Talking with his mother, he scoffed at the idea that any one would actually try to kill him for revealing the inner secrets of this reputedly secret society.
“I’m not afraid of them at all,” he said. “Don’t worry about that.” He then brought up, again, the newspaper article that he hoped would lead him to Hollywood. By now he was working on theme development. “The article that came out was good,” he says. “It showed how I started out one way and, you know, wound up with the devil.”
Mother: “Yeah.”
Larry: “Like I says, hopefully I could write somethin’ good.”
Mother: “Yeah, that would be good, too.”
Larry: “That would be nice. Others have done it. And I’ve got a very good story there, so... from here to the war.”
Mother: “Yeah, yeah.”
Larry: “You know?”
January 20, 1998 For hours and then days Ralphie Guarino sat with FBI agents in a windowless room inside 26 Federal Plaza in lower Manhattan learning things. He first learned that the FBI had collected not a little bit of evidence indicating that he was the criminal mastermind behind the World Trade Center heist. He learned that he could go to jail for twenty years and watch his two children grow up only from the confines of a prison visiting room. He would lose everything he had—his real estate, his wife, his family. There was an option. He could reject all he had been told about the evils of the informant, the rat, the squealer, the canary, and agree to cooperate with the Manhattan United States Attorney’s Office.
“Where do I sig
n?” Ralphie asked. It was true that his friends in the DeCavalcante crime family still referred to informants as rats and would kill him on the spot if they knew. It was true that several members of the DeCavalcante crime family who were believed to be rats had, in fact, been killed. In fact, over the years the DeCavalcante family had earned a particularly nasty reputation when it came to disposing of informants, both suspected and real. In 1989, members of the family murdered a guy named Fred Weiss in August and a guy named Joseph Garofano a month later. Both were suspected informants. The boss of the family, John Riggi, ordered the deaths of Danny Annunziata and Gaetano (Corky) Vastols— also suspected rats. Both men escaped death. These were facts Ralphie Guarino had to face.
Still, it wasn’t like the old days. Guys who flipped and became government witnesses survived and even thrived. Look at Sammy the Bull. As of early 1998, he’d killed nineteen people, including his brother-in-law, testified against his boss, John Gotti, and lots of other wiseguys, and received just over five years in jail for his behavior. Now he was living large somewhere in America, having earned nearly $1 million from his book, and had even gotten the opportunity to smile knowingly at Diane Sawyer during a carefully arranged TV interview at an undisclosed but sunny location.
There were many good reasons for making the leap to Team America. Facing the possibility of becoming an informant was, perhaps, a bit like being the captain of a sub
marine in one of those old clichéd World War II movies. The American captain takes his aging sub down deeper than perhaps it should go to avoid being detected by the German destroyer patrolling the gray Atlantic above. The hull makes funny groaning noises, sweat collects on the brow of the captain and every member of his crew, and gauges and rivets sprout ominous leaks. The pressure is enormous. Thousands of tons of water threaten to crush the hull and the crew. The captain brings the sub up far enough to keep it from being crushed by a million pounds of water pressure but not so far that it’s detected by the enemy.
Becoming an informant was just like that. You brought the sub up just enough but not too much. It was a middle ground of reason. Ralphie Guarino faced the facts. He had a wife, a daughter, a son, a goomad, a house on Staten Island, a failing cigar restaurant in yuppie Brooklyn, and real-estate holdings all over New York that had to be maintained. He’d been busted by the federal government just eleven years ago and served his time, and that would become part of the equation the federal judges would use when deciding how long a guy from Brooklyn should spend in a federal facility. It was called “prior criminal history” and it could mean an extra five years in jail. That, of course, would be on top of whatever one got for a Hobbs Act Robbery conviction, which carried an exposure level of up to twenty years.
For a guy in his mid-forties, twenty-five years in jail was serious business. He had much to lose by keeping his mouth shut. Omerta schmomerta. Silence no longer equaled death. Silence now equaled many sad years in a lonely prison cell away from everyone you loved and everything you knew.
A day after the FBI showed up at his house in Staten Island, Ralphie was back on the street. That was the idea— make it seem as if nothing had happened. Meanwhile, his life was forever changed. He was now meeting with his “handlers,” working out the arrangements of his deal. Maria Barton, the assistant United States attorney assigned to Ralphie’s case, said he could plead guilty to three charges related to the World Trade Center robbery: one count of conspiracy to commit robbery, one count of committing a violent felony that involved a firearm, and one count of interstate receipt of stolen property. Under the guidelines federal judges must abide by in meting out sentences, Guarino would still face twenty years in prison, but with a very important caveat: If the prosecutors wrote him a nice letter saying what a great job he had done informing on his friends and neighbors, the number of years he would have to spend in jail would drop precipitously. That would allow him to walk out of prison while he was still a relatively young man and spend the rest of his life with his family living under an assumed name somewhere out there in America.
The only problem was that he had to deliver the goods. He had to go out on the street and collect incriminating statements from members of the criminal class. He had to make the FBI’s case.
He had one advantage. At the time he was escorted to a windowless room in a high-security section of the FBI’s headquarters at 26 Federal Plaza, the bureau’s New York office had become very interested in doing something about that pesky little DeCavalcante crime family over in New Jersey.
For years, the DeCavalcante family had simply been ignored. New York–based federal prosecutors in Manhattan and Brooklyn spent twenty years east of the Hudson, systematically attacking the five New York crime families. In the fall of 1998, the boss of each family was sitting in prison cells doing serious time: John Gotti of the Gambino family, Carmine Persico of the Colombo family, Vincent Gigante of the Genovese family, Vittorio Amuso of the Luchese family, and Joseph Massino of the Bonanno family. Accomplishing this feat had not been inexpensive. The Department of Justice had expended much time and money on New York.
New Jersey was a different matter. The FBI’s Newark office and New Jersey attorney general’s Organized Crime Task Force did the best they could, making arrests here and there. But without the major resources of the New York office, it could not stop these farmers from Jersey from growing into a seventy-member outfit and expanding their criminal organization across the river and into New York. They remained much smaller than the most powerful New York family, the Genovese clan, with its three hundred members. But sometimes size is not an advantage.
“There’s a different trend now,” said Prosecutor Barton. “The five [New York] families are somewhat crippled in their leadership. The DeCavalcante family is still very active... The DeCavalcante family is a strong organized crime family that has been very active for years. The only lucky thing that has happened for them is that they have been off the [New York] law enforcement radar for quite some time.”
Until Ralphie Guarino came along.
As is true in comedy and cooking, timing is everything, and Ralphie had got it just right. Here was a trusted DeCavalcante associate, a good earner, a known schemer, a knock-around guy from the neighborhood. A perfect guy to take up a new career—acting. The actual role of the informant was relatively simple. The informant gathered information and handed it to his “handler,” an FBI special agent assigned to supervise the case. In this instance, it was Special Agent George Hanna. Hanna was known for his work with informants. He had worked with Sammy the Bull and knew how to win the confidence of career gangsters by following a simple rule—tell them the truth. He told Ralphie the truth: If you wear a wire and collect enough incriminating evidence to convict most of the DeCavalcante crime family, you will spend not a day in jail. If you don’t, prepare for a life at Fort Dix.
Hanna made clear to Ralphie the informant’s role. The informant gathered as much information as possible without crossing that delicate legal line and creating crime. Creating crime was not allowed. The informant had to convince people to talk openly about criminal acts without setting off their rat radar. And to make matters more difficult, the informant had to do all this while wearing a small but incredibly easy-to-detect recording device under his Gapwear. The FBI usually taped the device to the informant’s body and prayed that the informant’s violence-prone cohorts didn’t check too closely. If they did, it was all over. Wearing a wire, they called it. It was, to put it mildly, a very tricky job.
Others had tried and failed.
The legendary FBI agent Joseph Pistone, who posed as mob wannabe Donnie Brasco and gained the confidence of a Bonanno crime family crew (as well as a book and a movie), wore a wire only rarely. Most of his testimony was based on his memory. Pistone’s position was that wearing a wire was much too dangerous.
For Ralphie, however, there was no choice. He was a low-level mob associate, not even a made member of a real crime family. He had almost nothing of evid
entiary significance to offer about the DeCavalcante hierarchy. He had to go out there and get the facts, and get it all on tape. He would have to wear the recording device on his person, and agree to have the FBI install a bug in his car.
And the FBI had a new idea they’d been toying with for quite a while. They would give Ralphie cell phones to hand out to his buddies (specially wired up by the FBI). He had no choice. It was wear the wire or serve the time.
He started out small.
January 21, 1998 Around 11:40 on the morning of January 21, 1998, Ralphie placed a call from a pay phone in Brooklyn that the FBI had bugged. At a prearranged time, with his handlers listening in, Ralph punched in the number of Sal Calciano, his coconspirator in the World Trade Center heist. This was a mere eight days after the crime of the century, which was beginning to look more like an episode of I Love Lucy. Since the heist, Sal had no clue that Ralphie had been arrested and was now working with the FBI. Ralphie’s job was to pretend that everything was normal. This would not be such a problem for Ralph. He was the kind of guy who pretended every day. He could make you feel like you were the driver even as he himself steered the car. He reached Sal on his cell phone. Sal was in Bay Ridge at the time, getting his weekly manicure.
“Hey, smiley,” said the unsuspecting Sal. Within seconds of his very first FBI-recorded call, Sal noticed some kind of sound on the phone. “Hello . . . Are you okay on the phone you’re at?”
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