Made Men

by Smith, Greg B.

  At the end of the FBI summary of the March 24, 1998, conversation, the agent wrote that Vinny, Joey O, and CW (Ralphie) got out of the car and went to see Vinny’s jeweler. Everything that happened outside of the car remained a mystery because the bug stayed in the car. When the three men returned to Ralphie’s car, where the bug was still running, the FBI summarized their disappointment regarding their meeting with Vinny’s jewelry appraiser: “They get back in the car and discuss the fact that the stones are not worth what they thought.”

  At no time during the entire day did Joey O or Vinny Ocean figure out that Ralphie was not what he seemed. They confided in him, they drove all over New York with him trying to fence stolen property. They never noticed the FBI van tailing far behind. They had no way to know that the jewels Ralphie boosted from the jeweler’s car were actually put there by the FBI. It was all a big setup designed to keep Ralphie credible with his criminal peers. Anyone who talked about crime but did not actually commit it was sure to attract attention. The idea was to give Ralphie a “crime” to commit to make him fit in.

  The pursuit of probable cause was no simple matter.

  6

  July 31, 1998 The civil servants arrived on a warm Friday evening, traditionally a busy night at Wiggles. They slapped big Day-Glo–orange stickers on the smoked-glass front door. The signs warned that “use and occupancy” of Vinny Ocean’s prized all-nude strip club was against the law. The city inspectors who did the slapping explained that the club was being shut down temporarily because undercover police officers had made several visits in the previous months and witnessed dancers “engage in acts simulating sex.” This was vague, but the city promised to explain in court in six days, at which time it would ask a Queens judge to shut down Wiggles for good.

  For four years a legion of city officials had tried unsuccessfully to shut down Wiggles. Now they had the law on their side.

  The law prohibited “adult establishments” from operating either in a residential neighborhood or within five hundred feet of schools, churches, synagogues, and day-care centers. Wiggles had all four as neighbors. Vinny Ocean tried to find a way to get around this law, but it was not easy. Chatting on the free cell phone Ralphie had given him with Gus, one of the workers at Wiggles, he was getting one wave of bad news after another.

  “A lot of the girls are worried about the new law,” Gus was saying. “They worry you don’t come around anymore because you’re afraid of getting into trouble.”

  “They’re morons,” Vinny replied. “They’re a bunch of fucking morons.”

  With one of his best soldiers, Anthony Capo, Vinny indulged in whining. “I might be out of a fucking job,” he said. “Can you believe that? What the fuck am I going to do?”

  He had hired plenty of lawyers, and they had found what they’d thought was a loophole big enough to drive a bus through. The sex-club law the mayor had championed defined “adult establishments” as businesses in which 40 percent or more of the square footage was devoted to selling some form of sex—videotapes and strippers being the two most common. An “establishment” like Wiggles could get around the law by simply keeping the “adult” square footage to less than 40 percent. There were many ways to do this. The strippers, for example, could start wearing bikinis. Vinny Ocean was having none of that. Or Wiggles could confine the strippers to one location in the middle of the room, onstage, and keep them from taking off their clothes in other parts of the club. That became the plan. The only problem was that the strippers had a habit of wandering out of the “adult” area into the “nonadult” area to perform lap dances, sometimes on undercover cops. This expanded substantially what the city considered “adult square footage.” The crew at Wiggles brainstormed to make the 40 percent rule work. One of them, Frankie Stellini, suggested reducing the adult square footage by putting flower beds on stage with the strippers.

  “I don’t think so,” said Vinny.

  Instead, Vinny came up with an idea. Shortly after the big orange stickers went up, he called up the real owner of the construction company he secretly controlled, T&M Construction, and put him to work building walls inside the huge, cavernous space. The idea was to wall off more sections of the club and keep the strippers in the main room only. He hired an architect to keep the “adult space” to 38 percent. The architect had to get out a calculator and compute the maximum amount of space allowed in which adult men could sit and watch adult women wearing nothing but jewelry gyrate to electronic music. The precision was almost comical—997 square feet of “viewing area,” 2,289 of “nonviewing area.” The viewing area ing area,” 2,289 of “nonviewing area.” The viewing area foot stage set four feet off the ground and two brass poles around which the artists created their art. The rest of the club would be chopped up into several individual “lounges” and rooms—the poolroom, the TV room, the cigar room. The club looked more or less like what it had always looked like, except now the dancers had to make sure to put on bikini tops and bottoms when wandering into the newly sectioned-off rooms. And there were plenty more rules. Each night each dancer had to sign a form that explained twelve rules. The forms were written in extremely simple English. They included:

  I will not engage myself in prostitution inside or outside the premises. Customers cannot touch me on stage. I cannot touch myself on stage—specifically my breasts, buttocks or groin area. I cannot accept a tip between my breasts or in any other way except in my hand.

  I cannot do a lap dance! If the dancer violated the rules, she was fired. If the customer violated the rules, he was asked to leave by one of the bouncers Vinny employed to act as sex police. The bouncers—who called all the customers “degenerates”— had to keep action inside the main room from becoming a violation of the 40 percent rule. They were, in a sense, like cowboys keeping the horses in the corral. If a horse strayed, their job was to rope it and quickly move it back into the corral. This was especially tricky in the cigar room, which consisted of eighteen small couches with mirrors on the walls and ceiling. There a customer could buy a cheap cigar and watch a dancer who was allowed to dance a few inches away, clad only in a full bikini. This was called “bikini entertainment.” Or, as bouncer Michael Peranio put it, it was a “simulated lap dance.”

  “No contact. Meaning the guy cannot put his hands on the girl, the girl cannot put her hands on the guy. No lap dancing. No grinding. Just a dance. A simulated lap dance. About two or three inches away from the customer. A customer would sit down, a girl works under, over, around, but still three, four inches away. Very far away from the customer. A simulated lap dance. That’s all it is. If anything happens, it’s by accident. The girl taking off her dress slips, falls, what can you do? It’s an accident.”

  “It’s not a whorehouse, it’s a club,” said Evelyn Coffin, a barmaid and floor manager of Wiggles. “There is no spreading onstage, no touching the genital area onstage. No smoking, no drinking, no drugs, okay? My God, the list is long. We will be here all night.” If a customer did not like the rules, Coffin would tell them, “We don’t make the rules. We just follow them. Write to Giuliani.”

  To keep the errors to a minimum, Vinny Ocean was willing to spend money. He installed video cameras everywhere and set up a bank of monitors in a back office. He hired a retired Queens vice-squad cop to watch over everything—the dancers, the bouncers, the barmaids, the customers. If a bouncer saw a dancer handing a customer her business card, the customer was asked to leave and the dancer was to be fired. If a dancer saw another dancer performing a dreaded lap dance, she was to inform on her sister artist. This was the new Giuliani strip club—sex with a thousand rules.

  For two days in August hearings were held in the Supreme Court of Queens. During this hearing Vinny Ocean learned there were some problems with Wiggles’ adherence to the 40 percent rule. The Queens vice squad had made several undercover visits in the previous few months and discovered many incidents involving alleged or perceived nonsimulated lap dances in the so-called cigar room. The
undercover officers alleged the dancers were exposing all parts of their anatomy and rubbing themselves against the customers. These undercover officers had had to endure this illegal behavior several times. Some of the officers had gone back on more than one occasion just to make sure that all this exposing and rubbing was, in fact, illegal. One, a Sergeant Vincent LaRocca of the Queens vice squad, asked a Wiggles dancer, “What about taking care of me with a blow job?”

  She had replied, “That’s two hundred dollars in a room where we’re alone.” This was the wrong answer for Vinny Ocean. This gave the city the ammunition it needed to shut Vinny Ocean down. On August 12, 1998, Judge Stephen Fisher of the Supreme Court of Queens ordered Wiggles closed permanently because of math problems—specifically, the inability to stay within the 40 percent rule.

  “I tell you, I’m sick,” he told one of his top lieutenants, an old-time gangster named Joseph Giacobbe. Uncle Joe they called him, an aging DeCavalcante soldier who hung out in Sacco’s pork store in Linden, a few blocks away from the fake pork store those people in Hollywood used for their TV show The Sopranos. He rarely left New Jersey.

  “He just wants to see every place closed,” Giacobbe said, referring to Giuliani. “That’s what all this bullshit is about.”

  “Either that or move into the designated areas.” “Yeah, but that’s down in no-man’s-land, you know what I’m saying? Who the heck wants to go there?”

  “Yup,” Vinny said.

  “Only the real tough degenerates.”

  “My customers would be scared to go,” Vinny said.

  As far as timing went, the closing of Wiggles was the worst.

  BIG EARS MAJURI The house on Ercama Street looked like Leave It to Beaver. It was small, a one-story brick ranch on a corner lot with a magnolia tree in the middle of the tiny front lawn. A plastic deer stood guard next to rows of salmon and pink impatiens and a red Japanese maple. The lawn looked like it was mowed every day. In the front bay window, a foot-tall blue plastic Madonna perched on the sill, her arms outstretched, her head slightly tilted, impassive. Next to the front door was a big sign made of ersatz wood: MAJURI. It was hard to make out the letters in the dark, but the three men sitting in a stolen car across the street from the plastic deer knew it was the right house.

  There they sat, three grown men in a parked car on an empty suburban Linden, New Jersey, street in the middle of the night. It was Joey O Masella and two of the nastiest soldiers of the DeCavalcante crime family—Jimmy Gallo and Anthony Capo. Both men were made guys who had committed multiple murders. Both were willing to do so again. They were parked across from a sign that read NO PARKING 7 A.M.–11 A.M. TUESDAY. They had made sure that it wasn’t a Tuesday. This was their second visit and they had learned.

  Inside the house, Big Ears Charlie Majuri slept unaware. He was, according to the FBI, a member of the ruling panel of the DeCavalcante crime family. He was the son of the family’s longtime underboss, Frank Majuri, and he had been involved in “the life” since he was a teenager. His résumé included gambling, larceny, stolen property, and bookmaking. He was once involved in shaking down a record company. He was a hulking, 210-pound, extremely ugly fifty-eight-year-old man with sticking-out ears whose parents—including the former underboss— were still alive. In fact, they both lived with him in this tiny ranch house. His underboss father was now ninety-one years old.

  Big Ears Charlie was in a situation. In the last few months, John Riggi, the boss of the DeCavalcante crime family, had implemented some corporate restructuring. His acting street boss, Jake Amari, had finally died of stomach cancer. He himself was not scheduled to leave his federal

  prison cell until the year 2003. The way the FBI saw it, Riggi decided to create a ruling panel to run the family business that would include two men named Palermo who were not related—Vinny Ocean Palermo and Girolamo (Jimmy) Palermo. Vinny and Jimmy were to make decisions that would benefit the DeCavalcante family and result in more money being sent up to John Riggi. The plan had not worked out as intended. Big Ears Charlie—who had been around forever and whose father had been one of the group’s founding members—threw a fit. He insisted that he be made part of the panel. When no one listened, he decided to eliminate the two unrelated Palermos, Vincent and Jimmy. That would leave Big Ears in charge. He asked Jimmy Gallo to take care of Vinny Ocean Palermo. Jimmy Gallo, who had been around, immediately went to Vinny Ocean with this information.

  Vinny Ocean made a plan of his own. He was aware that Charlie Majuri controlled a union local in New Jersey and had lately been kicking wiseguys of other families off the payroll. This was making Big Ears extremely unpopular, which would mean there would be many suspects should anything happen to him. Vinny Ocean told Jimmy Gallo that he would appreciate it if he and Joey O and Anthony Capo would investigate the possibility of killing Big Ears Charlie. Vinny then made plans to visit Florida so he could be far away when the event in question took place.

  This was night two of staking out Big Ears’ tidy little ranch house. It didn’t look like the home of a Mafia boss. It was tiny, especially compared with the home of the other two panel leaders, Vinny and Jimmy Palermo. Vinny had a huge waterfront mansion on Long Island with a hundredfoot pier. Jimmy Palermo had a sweeping estate in Island Heights, New Jersey. Big Ears Charlie had a plastic deer. Jimmy Gallo had to be thinking he’d made the right choice. He dreamed up a way to get the job done.

  His plan was to check out the house, wait until there were no cars around or people on the street. They would sleep in shifts. When the moment presented itself, Jimmy would walk up to the front door in the middle of suburbia and ring the doorbell next to the Madonna. If Big Ears’ mother or father came to the door, Jimmy would ask for their son. The mother and father knew him. If Charlie himself opened the door, boom!

  “This is stupid,” Joey O said inside the car. “There’s a cop three houses down.”

  This was true. Several houses away was a lieutenant from the local police, whose cruiser sat in the driveway. That’s where most of the cars in the neighborhood sat—in driveways. The car with Joey and Jimmy and Anthony was the only one parked by the curb.

  “It’s a deserted area,” Joey O said. “You sit there for three hours...”

  The other two men ignored him. They watched Big Ears’ house in the dark.

  “Sit there for three hours, they’re gonna see you,” Joey O said out loud but to himself.

  “Anthony, you want me to go shoot the guy now, I’ll shoot the guy now. But not here. I pass on the way youse wanna do this.”

  “No,” said Anthony Capo. “We got everything figured out.”

  The night passed and Big Ears Charlie was still alive to read his morning paper.

  In a few days, Joey O flew down to Florida to give Vinny Ocean the bad news. Vinny would listen and consider the circumstances. He would decide that Big Ears was not a threat, and that he was infuriating so many other wiseguys that somebody else might just take care of the job for him. In the end, Vinny decided to call off the hit.

  WALKER, TEXAS RANGER As the summer of 1998 ended, Vinny Palermo—just a few months from his fifty-third birthday—sat nearly at the top of the crime family to which he had sworn his allegiance thirty-five years before. He has had to make executive decisions. Once he became a boss, he had to step down as captain of his crews in New Jersey, New York, and Florida and give each of them new assignments. He named as his replacement the old soldier Uncle Joe Giacobbe, promoting him to capo. Now he got calls from people asking for help with their everyday problems. An old family friend named Karen called to say her son and two friends had gotten into a fight with an off-duty cop. What could he do to help? He was now a boss, and everybody knew it.

  At the same time he surrounded himself with legitimacy. He could, on any given day, spend an afternoon chatting about a plan to shoot Charlie Majuri in the head in front of his parents, and in the evening sit down with a vice president of Smith Barney to discuss a multimillion-dollar deal. In J
uly of 1998, for instance, the FBI carefully chronicled many Vinny Ocean business deals in the making. On July 2, 1998, Vinny met for two hours at the Upper East Side home of Penthouse magazine founder Bob Guccione, who had no idea Vinny Ocean was anything more than a guy with big ideas. There they discussed convincing deeppocket investors to sink millions into a hotel in Atlantic City that would be modeled after the old Sands Bugsy Siegel created in Las Vegas in the 1950s. During the meet

  ing at Guccione’s extravagant house, a vice president for Smith Barney showed up. “These people were very interested in the Atlantic City project,” Vinny was overheard saying. “Either way, they could do all the financing. Their eyes lit up when he [Guccione] mentioned the Sands.”

  A few hours later the same day, the FBI recorded a talk in which Vinny Palermo claimed he’d just signed a contract with the German telecommunications giant Siemens to distribute cell phones in Russia. The deal went through, Palermo said, because his connection had promised the Germans that Chuck Norris, the TV tough guy known as Walker, Texas Ranger, would be the company’s spokesman. One of Vinny’s lawyers, John Daniels, was saying, “Now that’s got to be worth some money if a guy like Chuck Norris is willing to lend his name to a product.”

  “Yeah,” said Vinny, “but he’s gonna want to get paid from Siemens. Where do we come in?”

  “We’ll get a piece of it,” Daniels said.

  “In other words, if we can get him on there.”

  “If we can get him on there,” Daniels replied, “I mean his show in Russia is the number-one show. Walker, Texas Ranger. Norris’s show.”