Made Men

by Smith, Greg B.

  “Oh.”

  “And the number-one show in Germany.”

  “Wow.”

  “So Siemens can relate to that.”

  “Yeah definitely,” Vinny said. “Not only that, maybe we can get close to him that way.”

  Nothing was too small. One day he was discussing the possibility of opening up McDonalds’ franchises in Russia. The deal would probably take years to consummate, but there was a possibility the Russian government would help finance it. A few days later he was talking about doing business with the Reverend Sun Yung Moon. Palermo’s thoughts on working with the good reverend were simple: “He’s a good connection,” he said. “Total cash.”

  He was no longer just another guy from the Fulton Fish Market, working all night in the middle of the winter schlepping pallets of frozen mackerel for middle-class wages. Now he was near the top. He claimed to have Bob Guccione’s unlisted phone number. He was doing deals with big guys. He had a hundred-foot dock at his waterfront mansion in Island Park. He had a twenty-by-fortyfoot heated pool. He was taking his second family—his wife, Debbie, his daughters, Danielle and Tara, and his son, Vincent Jr.—to Disney World.

  Here was the big crime boss and hard-charging business man cruising along, buoyed by luck and talent. Who would have imagined the personal problems a man like this could face?

  For instance, there was the Jet Ski incident.

  His daughter Tara and one of her girlfriends, Vinny couldn’t remember which one, were at the house on a Saturday while his wife was out. He was Mister Mom. The two of them wanted to use the Jet Skis, but Vinny was busy eating his lunch. He wasn’t paying attention. Tara said, “Come on, Daddy” again and again, and he said, “Okay, go outside and get ready, I’ll be right out.” But he didn’t come right out, and the girls got on the Jet Skis and went for a spin. Unfortunately they were both only thirteen years old, which meant they weren’t even supposed to be on the things. There was an accident. The friend was thrown off her Jet Ski and cut her leg good enough to pick up five stitches and be hospitalized. When his girl went to visit her friend, she brought flowers but the girl’s father started asking questions about what happened.

  “The father’s questioning her,” Vinny was telling a friend named Frank. “Like, ‘Did you have life jackets on?’ You know what I’m saying.”

  “Like he was pumping her for information,” Frank said.

  “Yeah, but she was smart. She says, you know, ‘Sure we had life jackets on’.”

  “Maybe it’ll appease him.”

  “I don’t think so,” Vinny said. “He looks like a miserable bastard.”

  “Really? It’s shitty, eh. Is the kid all right?”

  “Yeah, she’s got five stitches on her leg. But you know what happens when you go to a lawyer. She was gonna model her legs. She wanted to be a model. And she’s saying she can’t sleep and—”

  “Yeah, I know, it’s upsetting,” Frank said. “I understand.”

  “It’s upsetting because I’m mad at myself. ’Cause I never let them go out without me. And I was eating and I says, ‘Ten more minutes, we’ll go out.’ ‘No, come on, come on.’ ‘Ten minutes, let me finish eating.’ ‘Okay, we’ll stay behind the house.’ ” He paused. “Well, that’s kids. What are you gonna do?”

  Meanwhile he’s got his older daughter Danielle being stalked by the son of one of his more promising crew members. Ralphie Guarino’s boy, a high-schooler, was repeatedly calling Danielle, claiming he was madly in love with her and insisting that she see him. She wanted nothing to do with him. She told him again and again, but he kept calling and even showing up outside the family home. He even swore he would take the train out from Brooklyn and stay in the Long Beach hotel every night until she agreed to see him. Vinny was forced to call Ralphie, and Ralphie promised to take care of things. It was embarrassing.

  But perhaps his biggest problem at the time was his old friend and driver, Joseph Masella. Good old Joey O. The man seemed positively insistent on crashing and burning. No one could say for sure how much and how many he owed, but it was definitely six figures and more than one crime family. He owed this guy and that guy and he was making many headaches for Vinny. It was not right to have a guy like Joey O refusing to pay and then going out and gambling and dropping big bucks on his dope-smoking girlfriend. The Joey O problem had become a very public problem. Vinny was now watching a guy he had known most of his life fall apart in front of his eyes.

  For years, Joey O had been there for him, picking up his blood pressure medicine, getting him coffee and breakfast, listening to his plans. Joey O was the one he trusted to pick up the little envelopes of cash that fueled the Palermo fortune. When he took him on as a crew member after Joey’s old mentor, Rudy, passed away, Vinny knew he was picking up some baggage. He did not know how much. Now Joey’s baggage had become Vinny’s baggage, and that was not good for a man in his position.

  His frustration emerged during a talk with Joseph Abruzzo, a DeCavalcante associate who also happened to be Joey O’s brother-in-law. Vinny Ocean had put Abruzzo in to run a gambling boat he controlled that operated on Long Island. The boat shuttled hundreds of gamblers just far enough off the coast of Long Island to enter international waters and be free of New York’s gaming laws. The Long Island officials who’d given a license to the company that ran the boat, had no clue that it was just another moneymaker for the DeCavalcante crime family. Joseph Abruzzo was listed as chief executive officer. Vincent Palermo’s name was nowhere in sight. When Abruzzo brought up his brother-in-law, Joey O, with Vinny, he clearly had no idea how infuriated his boss was on the subject.

  “You hear from Joey?” Abruzzo asked innocently.

  “I told him just don’t fucking call me no more,” Vinny fumed. “I don’t even want to fucking talk to him. He’s such a fucking asshole. I wish I never see him again.”

  The two men then presented a clear case of gangster logic: It’s all right to have a goomad and spend all your money on her, as long as you take care of your wife and kids first.

  “When you neglect your family, you’re a fucking asshole,” Vinny said. “You wanna have somebody on the side, you fucked ’em, you chased ’em, whatever you gotta do. You know what I’m saying?”

  “Yeah,” Abruzzo said.

  “He’s a fucking moron is what he is. He’s a lowlife. I told him, you got a lot of money and you take care of your wife and your kids.”

  “And then you wanna do something else, fine,” said the brother-in-law Abruzzo. “Now he’s being nice nice.”

  “Yeah, nice nice. Because the girl don’t want no part of him no more. It’s the same fucking story all the time. He’s with a nice broad, he’s feeding her all kinds of money and jewelry and champagne and everything, and that’s why she’s with him. She figures, ‘Look, what a score.’And then all of a sudden on the one or two days you don’t do it, that’s it. They leave.”

  “That’s right.”

  “But in the meantime, when it’s happening, he thinks she’s in love with him and he don’t need nobody else. And you know this is it.”

  Vinny Ocean now presented an imaginative litany of epithets to describe his old and close friend Joey O, then railed against gambling while failing to note that he was personally pocketing hundreds of thousands of dollars a year from it. “It’s just like drugs,” he said. “It’s no different.”

  “It’s like my son,” Abruzzo said. “You know my son did the same thing. I had to bail him out—fifteen hundred bucks.”

  “You got to stop him quick,” Vinny said.

  “I said, ‘That’s it.’ I said, ‘Now you learned.’ I said, ‘You won once and now you thought it was an easy score.’ I said, ‘No more. I’m not bailing you out anymore.’And he stopped.”

  “The one time you win, you lose ten,” Palermo said. “Stupid.”

  And then Vinny began to refer to Joey O in the past tense. “He had the world by the balls,” Vinny declared, “and he blew it.”

&n
bsp; September 16, 1998 Back from Disney World, Vinny Ocean has turned around his problems with Wiggles. The city inspectors had returned after he had the new walls installed and tightened up enforcement of the sex-police rules. It had not been easy. After the city first shut him down in July, Wiggles showed up on the cover of Newsday. His lawyers had gone back and forth to the courthouse in Jamaica several times in an all-out effort to convince the judge to reopen the club. They filed legal briefs; they brought in witnesses during a three-day hearing. The night before Vinny called his stockbroker son, Michael, and said, “Say a prayer for me.” During the hearing, his lawyers showed off a new, improved Wiggles, and on September 16, 1998, a Wednesday, Administrative Judge Fisher of the Supreme Court in Queens declared that Wiggles was no longer a “public nuisance.” Within hours, the doors were open and the dancers were back onstage.

  Within two days, Palermo was on the phone talking with his lawyer, John Daniels, as if Wiggles had never shut its doors. In fact, it was clear he had embraced the saying that no publicity is bad publicity because he was now talking about how high profile the Wiggles name was. He talked with Daniels about how he had been negotiating with Bob Guccione to open up a strip club under the Penthouse name in New Jersey, but now that Wiggles had picked up so much publicity, he didn’t seem to care if the Penthouse strip-club deal went through.

  “Put a Wiggles up in Jersey,” Palermo suggested. “It’s a tremendous name. It’s got the best name in the business now.”

  “It certainly made the papers,” Daniels replied, and both men had a good laugh.

  7

  BOOBIE AND DONNIE In the world of what is now called “traditional” organized crime, where rules allegedly exist to keep criminal activity organized, nicknames can get a little disorganized. Some have an old-world charm to them. Vincent (Chin) Gigante got his either because his Italian name is Vincenzo, or because he was a not-very-successful boxer who led with his chin. Some are easy to understand. Vinny Ocean once worked in the Fulton Fish Market, where the most felonious thing he ever did was to get caught with boxes of allegedly stolen shrimp. Tin Ear Sclafani has a bad ear. Big Ears Charlie Majuri’s nickname is easy to understand if you see him in person. Some nicknames are complex. Anthony Casso, a truly scary guy who confessed to killing thirty people, got his nickname—Gaspipe—because his father worked for the gas company. Some nicknames imply a man’s place in the food chain. John A. Gotti is called Junior because he will always be first and foremost the son of John J. Gotti, who got his nickname—the Dapper Don—strictly for sartorial reasons. Then there is Boobie Cerasani.

  John Cerasani, whose nickname was Boobie, was a square man with a face like a closed fist. He wore black turtlenecks and black suit coats to court, even if his lawyer told him not to. He was also a made guy in the Bonanno crime family.

  It is hard to know this Boobie. He had been a soldier with the Bonannos for nearly twenty years, according to the FBI. In 1985, he pleaded guilty to a racketeering conspiracy that included conspiring to rob a bank and possessing marijuana, cocaine, and heroin. In 1994, he pleaded guilty to criminal possession of narcotics in the fifth degree. At the time he was under investigation by the FBI, which believed he was an enforcer for the Bonanno family in a scheme to take control of a corrupt stockbrokerage house. Most important, Boobie had been involved in numerous crimes in the 1970s and early 1980s when an FBI agent named Joseph Pistone succeeded in infiltrating the Bonanno family using the name Donnie Brasco.

  Donnie Brasco, it should be noted, had no nickname. During the time Donnie the FBI agent was hanging around with Boobie and his boss, Dominick (Sonny Black) Napolitano, who has black hair, Donnie described Sonny as “quiet and smart, a chess lover.” He also described Boobie as “one mean fucker.” Donnie the FBI agent recalled another gangster, Lefty Guns Ruggiero, describing how Boobie and three other gangsters were involved in shotgunning to death an enormous Mafia capo named Dominick “Big Trin” Trinchera (the origin of whose nickname is self-evident). Ruggiero did not actually say that Boobie

  pulled the trigger, but he did say that after the deed was done, the assassins had difficulty disposing of Big Trin’s body because it was so, well, big. Boobie, Ruggiero claimed, somehow managed to pick the guy up.

  “I was amazed,” Donnie quotes Ruggiero as saying, “Boobie could move him. They cut him up and put him in green plastic garbage bags.”

  In 1982, Donnie the FBI agent left his life as an undercover associate of the Bonanno crime family and began testifying in court. Boobie and numerous others with whom Donnie had spent many loquacious hours were indicted, but Boobie was acquitted of all charges. He was never charged with murdering Big Trin, never mind moving him or cutting him up and placing him in green plastic garbage bags.

  In 1987, Donnie the FBI agent wrote a book about his experiences. Presumably Boobie read it, being that he was mentioned in it fifty-five times, including the description of Big Trin’s demise. The book, Donnie Brasco: My Undercover Life in the Mafia, made the New York Times bestseller list, and Boobie made not a peep.

  Ten years later times had changed in La Cosa Nostra. Gone were the days when a wiseguy said with a straight face that the Mafia did not even exist. No longer did a goodfella describe any allegation against him as mere fabrication. Gone were the days when silence was the universal response to newspaper stories, TV exposés, and even movie spectaculars portraying life in the mob. By 1997, if you were a gangster and you didn’t like what people were saying about you in a book, you didn’t whack the author. You sued.

  Sometime in 1996, years after the book debuted, somebody managed to sneak a video camera into a prerelease screening of Donnie Brasco, starring Johnny Depp and Al Pacino. The unnamed somebody managed to get a pirated copy of this soon-to-be-released movie to Boobie Cerasani. This time he was not amused.

  In the movie, the actor who portrays Boobie and several other gangsters portrayed by actors are seen kicking the owner of a Japanese restaurant in the face and smashing him in the head with a garbage can. Worse, the actor playing Boobie is seen blasting three gangsters with a shotgun, blowing off pieces of one head and a chunk out of the leg of another. The Boobie character is then seen helping other gangsters saw the bodies into pieces for disposal in garbage bags, which, unlike the description in the book, are black, not green. When Boobie saw this, he reached for the phone.

  A series of letters ensued.

  Boobie’s lawyer, Barry Slotnick, threatened to sue for libel and defamation of character, even though the picture had not yet been released. He argued that because enough people had seen the pirated version, the damage was already done to Boobie’s reputation. This worked, somewhat. Sony Pictures Entertainment shortened the murder scene and deep-sixed a scene in which the Boobie character reloads during the shotgun murder. They also changed the Boobie character’s name to Paulie. They did this by having actors dub the name Paulie every time they had previously said Boobie. They missed one reference, so when the picture was released in early 1997, there was still one Boobie involved. In addition, the Boobie character, now named Paulie, still helps dismember a victim with what is described by all involved as a “sawlike knife.”

  On April 3, 1997, Boobie Cerasani—who was not satisfied with the Paulie version of the film—took the position of the new gangster and filed suit in Manhattan Federal Court. He sued Sony, he sued the distributor, the executive producers, the producers, the director, even the screenwriter. He alleged many things. There was “damage to his reputation in an amount exceeding $50,000.” He alleged that the film had caused him “extreme emotional distress, including fear of retaliation by organized crime seeking revenge.” This onetime “mean fucker” was now asking a federal judge to protect him from the Mafia. He did not even bother to deny the existence of the Mafia. In fact, he acknowledged its existence to collect damages. He demanded compensatory damages, punitive damages, and, of course, financial reimbursement for the cost of bringing suit.

  United States District Co
urt Judge Denny Chin got Boobie’s case. A few months later he got another case involving Boobie. This time it was a new criminal indictment that came out of the stock-fraud investigation. Boobie was charged with being an enforcer and threatening stockbrokers and promoters to do what they were told so the mob could capitalize on the booming stock market through illegal “pump and dump” schemes. These were, of course, mere allegations. Judge Chin allowed Sony Pictures to file a motion demanding that Boobie’s suit over Donnie be tossed out. He then took a full six months to make up his mind.

  On January 15, 1998, Judge Chin issued his opinion. In thirty-four typewritten pages, double-spaced, the judge did the only responsible thing a distinguished member of the court could do. He laughed Boobie out of court.

  First, Judge Chin wondered why Boobie hadn’t sued when the Donnie Brasco book came out eleven years earlier. Then Judge Chin declared that Boobie was “generally reputed to be an associate of organized crime,” and, even worse, “not a model citizen.” Finally Judge Chin declared Boobie “libel proof.” This is an extremely rare declaration that essentially says you are such a bad person no one can possibly defame you. “I hold that Cerasani’s reputation is so ‘badly tarnished,’ that, even assuming the pre-release version of the film is defamatory, he can suffer no further harm and hence no reasonable jury could award him anything more than nominal damages,” Chin wrote.

  Boobie declined to appeal, and a few months later pleaded guilty before Judge Chin in the stock-fraud case. One defense lawyer pointed out privately that Judge Chin was relatively new to the bench and probably had little grounding in the history of “traditional” organized crime. This defense lawyer wondered if Judge Chin would have even been aware of Boobie’s involvement in the Donnie Brasco case if Boobie hadn’t told him.

  June 5, 1998 The movie in question was Carlito’s Way. It was the somewhat predictable story of New York heroin dealer Carlito Brigante, who is released from prison and is determined to go straight. The prisoner, of course, finds himself slipping back into his old and larcenous ways. It stars Al Pacino, who presents a toned-down version of the psychotic Tony Montana character he played in his Scarface remake a decade earlier. It was the kind of performance and the kind of movie that would impress guys like Joey O Masella and Ralphie Guarino. As they cruised down Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn looking for an electronics store called the Wiz, Ralphie was driving and Joey was explaining about Carlito’s Way. It was a typical Joey explanation—elliptical, filled with digressions. It started with Joey telling Ralphie about his trip the previous day to Seaside Heights on the New Jersey shore. Joey drove Vinny Ocean down to the shore to visit with Giuseppe Schifilliti, a capo in the DeCavalcante crime family. Nobody called him Giuseppe. Everybody called him Pino. Pino was a veteran gangster with a little white Vandyke beard who owned a restaurant, By The Sea Too, right on the boardwalk, next to a cigar store owned by a guy who shows up as an actor in movies a lot. This fact had impressed Joey O mightily.