“They are very funny people. You can’t say ‘fuck’ in front of them,” Joey O explained. “One day he wanted to be needled. I told him, ‘All you want to do is fuck.’ He said, ‘Joey, please don’t be offended, but we don’t talk like that.’ I said, ‘What do you mean? What do you do?’ He said, ‘You can say anything you want but “fuck.” ’ ”
“He told me the same thing,” Ralphie said.
Joey O had clearly been perplexed by this behavior. He recounted for Ralphie the time he casually threw money onto a table for Frankie, and Frankie offered up what Joey perceived as a “Korean” response. “I had to give him back fifty dollars. I took the fifty dollars out of my pocket and I threw it on the desk. He picked it up and handed it back to me. He said, ‘Did I throw the money at you?’ I said no. So he says, ‘Please, we are very easily offended people, hand it to me.’ So I handed it to him.”
“He’s right,” Ralphie said.
This was a typical conversation with Joey O. Days would pass, Ralphie would find himself again and again trying to get Joey O to provide the government handlers probable cause to keep the tapes rolling. Then he hit on an idea—Joey O’s former boss, Rudy the capo, had always cut Joey some slack, forgiving his debts, getting Joey out of scrapes with other gangsters. Vinny Ocean did not have the same bottomless reserve of patience for Joey O’s many problems. This was a source of much concern to Joey O, and Ralphie decided he could exploit it to learn more about Vinny Ocean. He asked Joey about the good old days with Rudy.
“When that guy—Rudy—died,” Joey O said, “my life went with him.”
Ralphie asked, “Why?”
“They ain’t gonna make them like that anymore,” Joey O said. “I would trust him with a hundred million dollars of my money.”
Ralphie was curious about Joey O’s relationship with Vinny as opposed to Rudy. “You don’t have that trust with your goombatta, huh?”
Joey said, “Nope.
“Is he that bad with money?”
“It’s fucking greed.”
“Really?” said Ralphie. “I mean, how could he be where he is if he’s greedy? He can’t be greedy. You got to be able to give and take.”
“He’s got a lot of people bullshitted. I know the real him. I’ve seen him rich, I’ve seen him broke. And I’ve seen him rich again.”
To Joey O, Vinny Ocean was changing from a knockaround guy to a guy who didn’t want anything to do with his roots. He told Ralphie about the days when Vinny acted like a real wiseguy.
“He’d spend money like a wiseguy. We walked in elevators; the kid was in there with the papers and we would give the kid a hundred dollars. Like a paper route. Here, this is for you. I would see him blow fucking money unbelievable.”
But Joey O also saw Vinny Ocean when Vinny ran out of money and had to scramble to support his growing families. “He would fucking run bad and he got like a crazy man,” Joey recalled.
As soon as Vinny Ocean started making money again, Joey O claimed he forgot all the people who helped him get where he was. “He started making it again and fucking greed took over. Maybe he was afraid that he would go broke again, I don’t know. You know what I mean? He fucking changed unbelievable. I know him all my life. I mean, I know things about him that fucking wiseguys don’t know.”
They spotted the blue Pontiac in a parking lot with only one exit, so they double-parked on the street nearby and waited for a spot to open up. From where they sat, they thought they might be able to make out the jewelry man’s face, but they weren’t sure. Ralphie decided to push a little harder to keep Vinny in the talk.
“Thank God that you’re very close to Vinny, you know what I mean? ’Cause you’re going to go right to the top, you know that.”
“He’s a maneuverer.”
“You see Vinnie’s young. He’s alive. You know, I mean, there’s still a lot of earning power in him.”
“I was with him yesterday,” Joey O said. “I met him eleven-thirty. I left him at a quarter to four. I went home, showered, shaved. He was going to the city. He called me eight o’clock. I was in the city. He was in Queens. ‘Do you want to go for dinner?’ I says, ‘Nope. I’m going the fuck home.’ ”
Ralphie pushed a little harder. “I guess he’ll come and hang out.”
“Yeah, he’ll come. He’ll hang out. He’ll pass by!” Joey O said. “He never hangs out nowhere. You don’t see him by the club. Never.”
Ralphie: “What, he drives around all day?”
“He drives around all fucking day,” Joey O said. “He don’t stay nowhere. You’ll never catch him in a club.”
Ralphie went all the way, asking questions not usually asked. “Not in a club? I was talking about the office, the apartment, the back room, right?”
“Very rare,” Joey said. “Very rare.”
Now Joey—who was born without any evidence of a gift for patience in his DNA—began to get distracted sitting in the car all morning with nothing to do but talk to the always-patient Ralphie.
“You want to sit here all fuckin’ day?”
“I don’t care,” Ralphie said. “We just see him get in the car. I just want to see. You know what I mean? You’re right, I don’t want to sit all day, but I mean, things don’t come easy, Joey.”
“Yeah, I know that. But I got fucking things to do.”
“Oh, you got things to do.”
Joey said, “Well sure.”
Ralphie pointed out the window at the World Trade Center across the street, scene of much embarrassment and humility for Ralphie. “Do you know how long I sat in those buildings down the block? Six fucking months. You know what? I see this, this is nothing for me.”
“You want coffee? I’ll get a cup there.”
Joey O got out of the sedan and went into a deli on the corner. The minute he walked inside, the jewelry guy they were waiting for and a woman companion walked out of 17 Battery Place and got into a blue Pontiac. Joey came out of the deli with the coffee just in time for Ralphie to pull away from the curb and begin to follow their mark.
“I didn’t see what he was carrying,” Ralphie said. “Did he open the trunk? Did you see anything?”
“He drives like a fucking Hebe,” Joey replied.
“You go out for coffee, the fucking guy gets in his car,” Ralphie said.
“All right, fuck him,” Joey said. “If he gets out for coffee, goes into a restaurant, whatever the fuck he does, we hit the car.”
“What’s the name of that wine you wanted?”
“It’s not an Italian wine,” Joey said. “I don’t know what the fuck it is. Old Mary she drinks.”
“Old? Are you sure?”
“Yeah, it’s Old Mary, some shit. Peno agretio is good.”
“Peno,” Ralphie said. “You want a case of peno agretio.”
“Yeah, Santa whatever-the-fuck-it-is.”
The men inched through the traffic, trying to keep far enough away but not too far. Their plan was to wait until the man parked the car and went into a restaurant or anyplace, then walk over, pop the trunk, and walk away with the bag of jewels. The hope was that the woman who was with him would go inside as well, so they would not have to do anything that would attract attention. That was the plan.
The man with the jewels drove across town, uptown, downtown in no apparent direction. Soon he pulled over and dropped the woman at curbside. That was one less problem for Ralphie and Joey O. He pulled back into traffic, still unaware he was being followed. Soon he pulled over again and walked inside a restaurant.
Ralphie parked a few cars back, walked over to the blue Pontiac, and returned to his car with a bag from the Pontiac in his hands. He headed for the Battery Tunnel leading out of lower Manhattan back to Brooklyn.
Paying the toll at the Battery Tunnel plaza, Ralphie steered the sedan into the streets of Red Hook driving toward a building he owned on Sixth Avenue and Eighteenth Street in Brooklyn’s Windsor Terrace. It was a typical three-story walk-up with a commercially zo
ned first floor just a few feet away from the perpetual thrum of traffic on the Prospect Expressway. A junior high school was across the street. When they arrived, Joey O used the phone inside to beep Vinny Ocean. He wanted Vinny there when they got the jewels appraised. They dumped the contents of the bag on a table. Inside there were twenty-five diamond set pieces, eighteen emeralds, thirteen sapphires, and six rubies. They figured they had $200,000 in their hands but would take $65,000 if they could unload the whole thing at once.
Soon enough Vinny Ocean showed up and all three of them piled back in Ralphie’s car. Ralphie suggested having some guy named John the Gypsy give them an estimate on the stones, but Vinny had his own guy. They headed toward Third Avenue and deeper into Brooklyn.
In the car, Vinny was clearly in a good mood. Lately all he talked about was the problems he was having with this Giuliani and the mayor’s insistence that all strip clubs should be driven out of New York City. That would include Vinny’s club, Wiggles, which at the time was making Vinny rich. It was depressing to be around Vinny when he started talking about Wiggles. But now Vinny was talking giddily about opening up a new strip club where Mayor Puritan could not touch him because it would be located across the Hudson River in New Jersey.
“My brother said he found a beautiful fucking disco that’s doing really bad,” Vinny said. “I’ll turn it into topless. Beautiful. Forget about it. Five million, ten million . . . What a fucking place, Joey.” Vinny directed his conversation to Joey, whom he knew better. He was just getting used to Ralphie.
“It’s ten thousand square feet, commercial area,” Vinny said. “Parking for fucking one thousand, fifteen hundred cars, three big rooms, two big bars, plus it’s a regular disco. Just walking around, I spent a half hour in there. The fucking ideas what I could do with that.” He said he has reached out to the DeCavalcante crime family members in New Jersey to see who the landlord of the disco “[was] with.” Vinny was going on and on about the strip club when Ralphie felt it was time to talk about Vinny’s guy, the guy who was going to look at the stones. Ask some questions, but not too many.
“These guys, are they stonecutters?” he asked. “They still cut stones?”
Vinny said, “Yeah, he cuts stones.”
“Like he does it himself?”
“Yeah, they got their own cutter, oh sure. He would chop them, you know, the big ones, take it off a little bit, two points, two percent, just to change it. It’s amazing.”
Ralphie acted like a babe in the woods for a day, making everybody else sound smarter than him. “Oh, that’s what he meant by taking off two points,” he said. “I didn’t know what he meant.”
“Yeah,” Vinny said. “This way nobody knows. These fucking things are like taking a car. They all look the same. These motherfuckers, I don’t understand it. They know. They’ll cut them all down a little bit, you know? So you ain’t getting no headache.”
Ralphie said, “Change the look?”
“Yeah, but he buys lots of this and that, sells them. He does very, very well. I mean, I was setting up a deal with him to buy, ah, stuff. A guy wanted two million dollars, he said no fucking problem.”
It was not much of a conversation, but to the FBI agents who were listening in as they drove around Brooklyn several car lengths behind Ralphie and Vinny and Joey O, it was music to their ears.
It was the first time that their new informant, Ralphie, had managed to capture on tape the words of a ranking member of the crime family they were targeting. The first time the previous week, Vinny told Ralphie he was trying to open a gambling boat with the help of a retired county judge in Nassau County who had the “hook” to obtain a license for the boat. Not a word was recorded on tape. This time, every syllable came through and a ranking member of the crime family was recorded saying something incriminating. Granted it was just a little cryptic chat about fencing stolen swag. It was not operatic conversation about severing the head of an enemy or Godfather dialogue about ordering somebody dead because they’d refused to “come in” when called by a boss. But it was enough to give the FBI the magic words they needed to keep their informant on the street with a Sony strapped to his undershorts. Those words were probable cause, and without them, the investigation would have been dead in the water.
PROBABLE CAUSE The FBI, working with prosecutors in the Southern District of New York, hoped that Ralphie would lead them all the way to the top of the DeCavalcante crime family. They knew that to reach this goal, they would have to listen to a lot of talk about a lot of things. To be allowed to do that, they needed to go back to a federal judge every three months and show him what they’d found. If they overheard discussions of crimes past or future, they would have “probable cause” to continue listening. If they went for months and no crimes were discussed, the judge would turn off their tape recorders and that would be that.
With that in mind, the case agents in charge of the investigation—George Hanna and Andre Cicero—had to listen to every word, figure out who was talking, and write down their interpretation of what was being discussed. This was not always easy. Often the gangsters and wannabe gangsters talked eliptically or in code. They often made references to people by first names only, which could get confusing when you had more than one Vinny or a halfdozen Joey’s dropping into the dialogue.
Each day the agents would summarize the meaning of conversations. They were supposed to make a distinction between what they deemed “pertinent” (talk of crimes past, present, and future) and nonpertinent (talk of girlfriends, wives, and diabetes). But making that distinction was not always simple. Gangsters, for instance, never put anything in their own name. Everything went under the names of their wives and children. To avoid missing a pertinent conversation buried deep within a nonpertinent conversation, the agents simply listened to everything. This put them in an unusual position—here they were chasing bad guys but listening in on conversations that were extremely personal. It was true that perhaps half the time these guys opened their mouths they were discussing some new scheme to make money illegally. But it was also true that the other half of the time they were discussing what most people discuss—life. In FBI summaries, life looked like this:
Discussion about sex; a stripper sucking air out of a can and getting high (called whipping it). Discuss movies, red wine, and steak.
Discuss speeding tickets.
Discuss eating and local restaurants.
Discuss how, due to safe sex, kids today don’t get laid as much as they [themselves] did when they were kids.
In one tape, Ralphie picked up two low-level associates identified only as “SS” and “RD” for a wired-up drive to Atlantic City. The agent who was forced to listen to this voyage summarized the drama and excitement of the trip:
SS says wife pissed because he bought himself shoes for Xmas. SS rambles on on how generous he is to others during the holiday and how he deserves to purchase a gift for himself. Bought his son a Rolex, gave him cash. SS angry at wife’s attitude toward him. [Ralphie] and SS discuss fine dining, caviar, champagne, wines, Dewar’s, and alcohol. SS discusses eating, relaxing, and watching TV. He enjoys sitting on the couch and having a cigarette. RD falls asleep in backseat.
In their summary notes the day Vinny Ocean and Ralphie and Joey O drove around Brooklyn looking to fence stolen gems, the agents wrote down everything they could hear and tried to make sense of it. When Vinny talked about boats the FBI agent wrote down, “Vinny talks about the boat show, and buying a 26-foot boat.” Then the boat grew. “Vinny says that Paul is going to get a boat, a 63-foot Manhattan Sunseeker, and that he is going to keep it at Pier 66.” The agents made no distinction between the felonious and the mundane. They scribbled down their interpretation of what the three men were talking about. Sometimes it was clear, sometimes it was not.
Listening in on Joey O was a particular challenge. He had an unfortunate tendency to say things that were meant to impress people. He was always talking about some huge scheme that was going to
put him over the top so he would no longer have to hustle sports books. He talked about delivering beatings. One guy owed a DeCavalcante associate named Joey Cars $10,000. Joey Cars said he firebombed the guy’s van, so the guy went out and bought another van. Joey Cars put sugar in the gas tank and slashed all four tires. Joey O said that wasn’t enough.
“Every time you see him, give him a fucking beating until he comes up with the money. He only works across the street from you... Give him another four fucking flats.”
“I’m going to burn it this time,” Joey Cars replied. “It’s a Volvo. I want to burn it.”
Who knew if any of this was true?
In the piles of paper the bureau created to track Ralphie’s progress, Ralphie was always referred to as CW for “Confidential Witness.” This was done to protect his true identity. In these summaries, it was clear the FBI agents made note of everything CW and his talkative friends said, even if the agents had no clue what was being discussed. They did this because they were never sure what could potentially become relevant down the line. Thus, Vinny Ocean’s chat about buying a failed disco in New Jersey—hardly a crime, though perhaps not a wise business move—could become important later if, for example, somebody found either a body or piles of cash in the disco’s basement.
The FBI summaries also made it clear that gangsters liked to brag. On one FBI tape, Vinny Palermo boasted of his involvement in a half-dozen big-money business deals. He talked about stolen Ming dynasty paintings he owned, about a twenty-three-karat diamond he stole, about how he was going to get a huge maintenance contract to clean buildings owned by Leona Helmsley. All of these guys, in fact, were premiere name-droppers. They dropped more names than a gossip columnist, and the FBI was there to write them all down.
Made Men Page 9