Made Men

by Smith, Greg B.

  “I’m on a pay phone,” Ralphie explained. Sal did not hang up.

  During their chat, Sal discussed an unnamed wiseguy who wanted his share of the robbery “now” and mentioned that the wiseguy “doesn’t want it in foreign, he wants it in

  U.S.” They made arrangements to meet for lunch at a pizzeria, as soon as the manicure was over. Ralphie did not mention the name of the pizzeria. He simply referred to it as “our pizzeria.”

  Already he was in character, talking evasive. The idea was if you talk evasive, you must be hiding the same kind of something everybody else was hiding, therefore you couldn’t possibly be a rat. Everyone talked evasive. “I gotta see a guy about a thing”—that kind of talk. Ralphie was comfortable doing this, though he had not yet gotten comfortable in his new role. Whatever conversation took place at “our pizzeria” that day was not recorded.

  Throughout January and February 1998 Sal Calciano was the star of Ralphie’s show. The two men met or talked on the phone nearly every day, and Ralphie encouraged Sal to believe that the danger of arrest in the Twin Towers robbery had passed. The more the two conspirators talked, the more Ralph tried to convince Sal that this was so.

  “I’m burned out,” Ralphie says. “I can’t think anymore.”

  “You’re burned out?” Sal answers. “I’m confused like a motherfucker.”

  “I mean the only thing I’m glad about is the angel of death passed over us. That I know this is over. You know what I’m trying to say?”

  Naturally he and Sal cast blame elsewhere. They blamed the three robbers—Melvin, Mike, and Richie—for picking up the wrong bags. They suspected one or two or all three stuffed cash in their coats on the way out. They generally made themselves feel better about the fact that Melvin, Mike, and Richie were in jail and they were not. Ralphie apologized a lot.

  “I had this thing down to a science,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  “That’s just not you,” Sal said. “They’re the fuckups.”

  “No, but you know what? What I would say, Sally, is we’re okay. You know what? Money don’t mean a fucking thing. I’ll say it to all of them. ’Cause with all the money in the world, you can’t spend it.”

  Sal: “I know that.”

  “All right,” Ralphie concluded, “so consider ourselves lucky. Does that make sense?”

  “Of course,” Sal said, happy to believe he was free and clear. Sal, who still had to go to work at the Trade Center every day as if nothing had happened, said the Port Authority police were concentrating on a Brinks employee they believed was in on the robbery, which was wrong and that made Sal happy. He was even more delighted that after the robbery, the Port Authority was forced to change its security. Now all employees had to get new IDs that were checked under an ultraviolet light. Sal called it “an ultra light.”

  “There’s things, there’s ribbons in there,” he said.

  “No shit,” Ralph said.

  “It’s wild to see how you fucked up everything and made them change their whole system,” Sal said.

  Ralphie: “It’s supposed to be the most secure building in the whole world.”

  Sal: “Well, how do you say it? After the cow got out of the kennel? Some shit like that.”

  The resurgence of self-confidence inspired Ralphie and Sal to get back in their old scheming mode, to come up with a list of scams to commit now that they weren’t going to jail for stealing piles of foreign currency they couldn’t spend. This was normal. People like Ralphie—who wouldn’t be caught dead working an honest day in his life—spent hours dreaming up scams. Anything could inspire them. A conversation in the subway. A conductor talking about picking up his paycheck at the Bergen Street stop would send Ralphie into a tailspin of speculation: Where is the money kept? When does it come in? Is there somebody inside who could be bought off? Chatting with Sal, Ralphie knew it was all right to suggest schemes, but it was not all right to create crime. He tried not to forget this FBI warning as he began recording his talks with Sal. It would turn out that with Sal, creating crime was not a problem. Sal was a willing participant. In fact, at times Sal seemed to be trying to outdo Ralphie. He bragged about all the crimes he knew about. He especially liked to brag about crimes involving celebrities. He talked of a friend of his hitting the celebrity jackpot.

  “He already took Madonna’s dress that time that was worth a fortune. Remember that place?”

  Ralphie: “Who?”

  Sal: “There was a place around here that had it.”

  Ralphie: “Madonna’s?”

  Sal: “She had a storage room in Manhattan and they stole it.”

  Ralphie: “Madonna?”

  Sal: “Yeah, Madonna. Madonna the babe.”

  “Yeah?” said Ralphie, always willing to listen. “Go ahead.”

  Sal: “You know the dress she wore in ‘Like a Virgin’? It was worth fucking money.”

  Ralphie: “No shit.”

  The two knock-around guys began to perform a Mafia version of the dozens, seeing who could come up with the best scam. Ralphie suggested selling fake oil paintings as “masterpieces” over the Internet. Sal did him three better.

  First, he suggested selling an original Wizard of Oz screenplay stolen from some kid’s grandfather. Then he suggested a blackmail scheme that involved photographs of a married Staten Island college professor engaged in sexual acts with a married sanitation worker. Then he suggested renting a drug-sniffing dog from a corrupt cop and checking out warehouses on the Brooklyn and New Jersey waterfront.

  “It’s got to be a good dog,” Sal said. “A smart one that knows.”

  Ralphie said, “Well, a fucking dog’s a dog, no?”

  Sal said, “Well, he’s got to be one that’s going to walk up to the fucking gate and smell it and start scratching on the door. I know that’s it. I tag it. Bingo. That’s one. There’s fucking four thousand rooms. I walk him through the whole fucking building in the middle of the night. I’ll get him in. Getting him in, believe me, I’ll have no fucking trouble.”

  “Can we rent a fucking dog?” Ralphie asked.

  “No,” Sal admitted. “I mean, I tried. Believe me. I had a guy fucking train one for me. He wanted like twenty grand.”

  Finally Sal came up with his version of Ocean’s Eleven, a brilliant plan in its own right: selling swag on the Internet.

  “The fucking thing really works, huh?” Ralphie asked.

  “Sell it in no time... I don’t give a fuck what it is, you can sell anything. Any fucking thing.”

  Ralphie said, “Anything and it doesn’t come back to you.”

  “How can it come back?” Sal asked. “They don’t even know who I am and shit. I bought it in a flea market. Who’s to say I didn’t buy it in a flea market? You should’ve seen some of the shit I sold on there. Forget about it.”

  Ralphie said, “Are you serious?”

  “Ridiculous shit,” said Sal. “Comic books are one of the hottest items on there.”

  The idea was simple: Sal had a friend who was an expert in rare comic books. Pay somebody to draw a fake version of the first Superman comic or the first Batman comic, have Sal’s pal check it to make sure it looks real, print up a thousand copies, and sell them on the ’net. Simple.

  “That would kill the comic industry,” Sal said.

  “Will it?” Ralphie asked. “Nobody ever did that, huh?”

  Sal said, “Nobody every fucking thought of it before. I got such an evil mind, only because I know the big shots in the business. I’ve talked to him. He says if you can make me a book where I can’t tell the difference between mine and yours, it’s going to make millions. We’ll make fucking millions. Duplicating it, it’s cheap fucking rag paper... We made fucking two hundred Superman Ones, for the next ten years, fifteen years, we’re sitting pretty. We buy property all over the place.”

  Ralph said, “No shit.”

  Sal said, “Superman One is worth a hundred fifty thousand dollars, tops... Then, after, we make copi
es of Batman One at eighty thousand. Now we push one of each out of every fucking—”

  Ralphie said, “And you think we could sell them?”

  Sal said, “I don’t think. I know. Yeah. There’s always something. As long as you keep your fucking eyes open, and you got an evil mind like me. You can always see something. I got an evil fucking mind.”

  The more Ralphie performed, the better he got. Within days he was testing his limits, seeing what he could get away with. He openly discussed his ability to listen in on other people’s cell-phone conversations. It was a kind of test, this talk.

  “I listen in on everybody’s phone calls,” said Ralphie, who at that moment was secretly recording his friend’s words. “I can sit five blocks from your house and listen to every conversation.”

  Sal: “You’re a fucking electronic whiz.”

  Ralph: “Everything you’re talking about.”

  Sal: “On the portable?”

  Ralph: “On the portable.”

  Sal: “But on the regular phone, no.”

  Ralph: “No, just on the cordless.”

  Sal: “I never knew that.”

  Ralph: “Everything you’re talking about I can hear and record.”

  Sal: “That’s terrific.”

  Ralph: “Sure. I love to know what’s going on. One day I was sitting on the fucking thing listening. I’m sitting on my desk playing on my computer. I hear two niggers talking on the cellular phone on my scanner. One says ‘All right, bro, we gonna take these motherfucking white boys. We’re gonna take this fucking hundred thirty thousand cash. We’re just gonna meet them on the corner and we’re gonna take this fucking hundred thirty grand and go two different ways.’ I’m sitting there going, ‘What fucking corner, you motherfuckers? Say what corner!’ I’m getting dressed, my wife says, ‘What are you doing?’ I says, ‘Nothing.’ I was waiting to say what corner they were going to rip these guys and I was gonna rip them off.” He pauses.

  “I’m already fucking dressed, ready to run out of my fucking house,” he confides to Sal.

  “But they never said.”

  Unfortunately for Ralph, capturing Sal and his “evil fucking mind” was not what the FBI had in mind when it signed up its new informant. Ralph was spending much of his time talking with a low-level street nobody about one caper that was already solved and numerous new capers that would probably go exactly nowhere. The FBI had something else in mind. Three days after strapping on his secret device, Ralph was talking with a DeCavalcante associate named Tommy DiTorra about this and that when DiTorra mentioned a Vinny. No last name, just Vinny.

  DiTorra was explaining how the DeCavalcante crime family had decided to take over a financially unstable school-bus company, Manti Transportation, which was run by one of their loan-shark victims. The guy owed everybody—the banks, the taxman, his landlord, and, most important, the DeCavalcante crime family. Therefore this Vinny with no last name had decided that he was going to make himself partner of the company and put one of his people on the payroll at Manti Transportation. That way Vinny with no last name could keep the company afloat and make some money. This Vinny put his driver, Joey O, on the payroll as employee of the month at Manti, and the bus-company owner was complaining to the mystery Vinny. DiTorra recounted the conversation for Ralphie in fairly obvious terminology anyone familiar with the average Mafia movie would know and understand completely.

  “He didn’t want Joey O to shake him down,” DiTorra said. “He said, ‘Who is he to threaten me?’ and everything. ‘They’re gonna block my buses in and bah, bah, bah.’ It’s all bullshit, now he can’t even pay. Now he don’t even have enough money to pay. Then he told Vinny at the table, ‘You know, I gotta pay protection.’ Vinny said, ‘Let me tell you something. You don’t ever mention that word in front of me.’ ” DiTorra laughed. “He’s such a fucking jerk when he talks, this guy Manti.”

  This Vinny had come up before in Ralphie’s talks with Sal. The FBI wasn’t sure who he was. Ralphie had mentioned Vinny as someone powerful enough to help him out. He implied that Vinny, who was, at the time, at the Super Bowl, might be able to get him cash when he returned while Ralphie figured out how to exchange foreign currency stolen from the Trade Center.

  “You know he knew about this,” Ralphie said. “Maybe he’s got somebody who’s reasonable, maybe ten, fifteen percent. But I don’t mind giving him a kick. You know, give him fifty thousand.”

  Then Ralphie mentioned Vinny as someone powerful enough to be obeyed. Ralphie mentioned that Vinny had sent down an order to stop trying to get rid of the foreign money all at once. “Let me explain to you what’s going on,” he said. “Vinny Ocean sends this message to stop peddling. The whole neighborhood is talking about it. So I just stopped.”

  And there it was—Vinny Ocean. Vincent Palermo. At the time when Ralphie signed up as a government informant and the New York FBI decided it wanted to cross the Hudson River, Vincent Palermo was a name the bureau wanted to hear about on tape. They knew very little about him. His name emerged hardly at all in organized-crime intelligence files. He was the future for the DeCavalcante crime family: a made guy who really looked like a legitimate guy. He was a smart businessman, had been married to a niece of Sam the Plumber, and had only one arrest in his background—a misdemeanor charge for stealing frozen shrimp down at the Fulton Fish Market in lower Manhattan. The brief mention of him by Ralphie and DiTorra was hardly enough to get a grand jury to indict, but it implied things. If Ralphie was able to work his way closer to Vinny Ocean, there could be developments.

  It would not be easy. There was a reason Vinny had no significant arrests during his more than thirty years in the Mafia. He said very little, spoke only to a very few close associates, and stayed the hell out of social clubs. He was known as a wiseguy who would much rather attend the Italian Day parade in Little Italy with his family than hang out at the Ravenite Social Club on Mulberry Street to exchange inflated tales of self-worth with John Gotti and Sammy the Bull. He was, in short, extremely difficult to get. He was also Ralphie’s Get-Out-of-Jail-Free card, and Ralphie knew it.

  5

  March 24, 1998 Late in the morning Joey O Masella sat in traffic in lower Manhattan with his old friend Ralphie Guarino. Ralphie was driving, Joey O was talking. The traffic down by the World Trade Center was miserable. The exit ramp from the Battery Tunnel had dumped its morning load of Brooklyn commuters into the claustrophobic streets near Battery Park City, and Ralphie was having a tough time negotiating through them. He was trying to get near enough to 17 Battery Place to see what he had to see. The two men were discussing the mayor of New York, Rudy Giuliani, a former federal prosecutor who was now forcing the police to enforce every little law ever enacted in the city’s history. For the first time ever, jaywalking in New York City was illegal.

  “I want to go a hundred miles an hour,” Ralphie mut

  tered, his speedometer hovering around the three-milesper-hour mark. “Fucking Giuliani with his new laws,” Joey O fumed. “Speeders, kissing, cursing—it’s all fucking illegal.”

  The two men were stuck in lower Manhattan in order to watch a man walk out of 17 Battery Place and get into his car. For more than an hour they parked in different spots near where they believed the man would come out of the building, hoping to catch a glimpse of his face. The man was involved with a jewelry business, and on this day his job was to deliver a bag filled with jewels to a spot in midtown Manhattan. Joey O and Ralphie were following him because they planned on ripping him off.

  Just like Ralphie, Joey O was a knock-around guy. He talked about criminal acts the way normal people discussed buying a minivan. He was always trying to get over on some unsuspecting dupe. The life of getting up in the morning, putting on a white shirt, taking the subway to work with a little bag of lunch—this was a life Joey O could not imagine. He was saying to Ralphie how he was thinking about opening up a car wash on Staten Island with his brother-in-law from New Jersey, the big vice president of some
paper company over there. But maybe not. Maybe he would just stay in the knock-around life. Even if it had turned out to be not quite what he had originally thought it would be.

  Joey O’s Mafia was most definitely not the Mafia portrayed in the movies.

  Joey O did not have a guy to get out of the car first to open the door and hold Joey O’s coat for him. He did not eat lunch gratis in the back rooms of the best Little Italy restaurants. He did not own a diamond pinkie ring or drive a new black Lincoln with tinted windows. He did, however, own a beat-up late-model BMW with mechanical troubles. He had diabetes. He had two wives—an ex who’d run off with a plastic surgeon and left their daughter with him, and a new wife whom the daughter ignored in front of him just to make him crazy. His mother-in-law lived at home with him. He had a girlfriend, but she smoked too much weed and Joey O had got it into his head that her breasts needed to be bigger. He was going to fund the necessary surgically implanted enlargements. This would mean yet another expense for a guy whose liabilities overwhelmed his assets. He owed everybody—the Gambinos, the Colombos, the Lucheses, and, naturally, the DeCavalcante crime family that gave him his status. Everybody said he owed these people $100,000 or more, but nobody knew for sure.

  As they drove around lower Manhattan looking for the jewelry guy’s blue Pontiac, Joey O and Ralphie began to talk about something they often talked about—getting and keeping money. Joey O’s new boss, Vinny Ocean, had lots of it, while neither Ralphie nor Joey O seemed to have any at all. Joey O had just been “put with” Vinny Ocean, a capo, after his former boss, a capo named Rudy Ferrone, had died of natural causes.

  As they crawled through city traffic, Ralphie had quietly triggered the FBI recording device hidden inside his car. He was aware that he had to get Joey O to stop talking about Joey O and start talking about all the illegal activity Joey O was performing for his boss, Vincent Palermo. His FBI handlers had made it clear to him that doing undercover work involved knowledge of “biology.” By beginning with the species of mafioso at the bottom of the food chain, you can work your way to the top of the food chain. Ralphie has been trying for some time now to get Joey O to talk about Vinny, so he brought up one of Vinny’s many business ventures, a Chinese restaurant in Flushing, Queens. The owner owed Vinny a lot of money, so Vinny decided to make himself a secret partner in the restaurant. The owner’s name was Frankie and he was Korean. Ralphie was asking Joey questions designed to illicit the exact nature of Vinny’s ownership, but Joey was having none of it. Instead, Joey decided to let Ralphie know his opinions regarding Koreans in general.