Made Men

by Smith, Greg B.

  “That’s why it’s like a joke now,” Joey O said. “When you ever hear all this shit?”

  “You know it’s a scary thought,” UM said. “I have a two-year-old and a three-year-old.”

  “And it’s getting worse,” Joey O said.

  “Fucking right,” Ralphie said.

  “Did you get chocolate ice cream?” Joey O asked.

  “Will you shut up and watch the movie?” Ralphie said.

  “I didn’t say a word,” Joey O said.

  “I gained like five, six pounds,” Ralphie said. “Right back in my fucking gut.”

  “It’s your fucking fault,” UM said.

  “All you wanna do is eat,” Joey said. “I never seen a guy eat so much.”

  “I’m depressed,” Ralphie said. “Hanging out with you. I think I’m gonna start taking Prozac.”

  June 18, 1998 In the afternoon the FBI tape machine whirred away. In Ralphie and Vinny and Joey’s hotel room, the guy whose voice the FBI did not recognize—Unidentified Male— was gone. Only Joey O and Ralphie were left. Ralphie sat in a sofa chair right next to the FBI camera, while Joey O sat on the couch directly in front of the camera. Both were drinking beer. Ralphie was wearing a sport shirt and pants, but Joey was wearing only his bathing trunks. Joey kept sitting down and getting up, pacing back and forth across the carpet. His gut hung over the edge of the suit; his gold chain flopped up and down on his sagging chest. As he talked he got increasingly agitated. Obviously something was on his mind. The FBI agents started paying closer attention. Probable cause seemed in the works.

  There was some “business” Joey O started talking about. It was why he had been summoned to Florida. It was why Vinny Ocean was already in Florida. It had to do with a kind of corporate restructuring that was taking place within the DeCavalcante crime family. Joey O was vague on the details. All he knew was that the boss of the family, John Riggi, and the alleged consigliere, an old Sicilian named Stefano Vitabile everybody called “the truck driver,” had come up with a plan that was becoming increasingly common in La Cosa Nostra. They had appointed a “ruling panel” of wiseguys who would be in charge on the street. This was no easy task. There was always with these panels resentment and animosity. Riggi— who was, by nature, a survivor—tried to choose well. Joey O said Riggi had picked two men he’d known for years—Vincent Palermo and Girolamo Palermo—to serve as his corporate representatives on the street until he could do his time. Both Palermos, who had been active partici

  pants in the DeCavalcante family for decades, liked this idea very much. Charlie Majuri—who had also been an active participant for decades—did not. As a result, Joey O had been advised to whack Big Ears.

  Joey O was now explaining the murder plot as he paced back and forth in the hotel room in Fort Lauderdale while the FBI videotape rolled. Now here was some probable cause. Joey was going on and on about his problem with the “business.” Joey O told Ralphie (and the FBI) that Vinny Ocean had assigned him to monitor the Majuri hit. This was the first time the FBI had any evidence of Vinny Ocean’s involvement in a crime of violence.

  Joey O told Ralphie that he was supposed to act as Vinny’s eyes and ears on the Majuri job, reporting back on all events of note. Vinny, who always retreated to Florida when a “piece of work” he’d ordered was to be carried out in New York, had summoned Joey O to the Sunshine State for an update on the progress of the task. Unfortunately for Joey O, there was no progress to report.

  Joey O explained to Ralphie the details of the planned hit, which he clearly felt was turning into a Marx Brothers movie. He paced back and forth in front of the TV set on which a basketball game was quietly playing. He said there were three men involved—himself, Jimmy Gallo, and Anthony Capo. As Joey saw it, both Gallo and Capo were disturbed individuals who were incapable of ordered thought. Joey recounted for Ralphie his conversation with Vinny Ocean about the job. Joey said Vinny told him, “ ‘I want you to do this. I want you to go there. Joey, I know you. I’m not asking you to do this. You never did it before. You don’t wanna do it, I understand.’ I said, ‘Vinny, I’ll do anything for you. If I have to do this, I’ll do it.’ He said, ‘I want you to do it because they’re assholes.’ ”

  “They are,” Ralphie agreed.

  “Anthony has no brains,” Joey said.

  “I know that,” Ralphie said.

  “He’s Wild West. Jimmy, now, he’s worse than Anthony. You know what Jimmy Gallo wanted to do? Ring the doorbell, when he came to answer the door, shoot him. In front of the mother and father.”

  “No silencers,” Joey O said. “With a police captain directly across the street. Four, five houses on the block. It’s a deserted area. So if you sit there for three hours, they’re gonna see you. What are they gonna do? There’s a brown car sitting here for three hours with three guys sitting in it. With a license plate. Fucking cops all over the place.”

  The day before, Joey O had told Vinny in private about the ludicrous nature of Jimmy and Anthony’s crazy plot to kill Charlie Majuri in front of his ancient parents. When they talked, Vinny asked him first thing, “Is it done?” Joey told him he had walked away from the plan. Now Joey O was not sure where he stood with Vinny. He was hearing that another gangster was walking around claiming that Jimmy and Anthony were blaming Joey O for the failure to kill Charlie Majuri.

  “They blamed you,” Ralphie said.

  “Yeah,” Joey O said, trying to convince himself that he’d done the smart thing by walking away from the Majuri hit. As he always did when he was upset, he began talking about himself in the third person. “They say when he looks at something he may be a cocksucker, he may do this, he may do that, but I know when he looks at something, he sees the whole picture. Which I do. That’s one thing I gotta say, that’s one of my traits. One of my fucking traits.”

  Ralphie said, “That’s why Vinny made you go up there.”

  “If I look at something, I’ll tell you it’s good, it’s bad. When I seen this, I says, ‘That’s life in jail.’ Too many ifs, ands, and buts.”

  This talk made Ralphie come to believe that Joey O’s relationship with his lifelong friend and mentor, Vinny Ocean, was in deep trouble. Vinny had asked Joey to get involved in the most sensitive of missions, and the mission had been a failure. Now Joey seemed convinced Vinny might no longer protect him from the many people who wanted to do him harm. He didn’t actually say this. It was just obvious from the way he kept trying to reassure himself that Vinny was still, in fact, his friend. He began to drink more heavily in the middle of the sunny Florida day. Joey stood on the balcony, letting a blast of Florida air into the air-conditioned suite to fog the room’s mirrors. He’d been drinking beer since noon and it was now halfpast three.

  Ralphie said from inside the room, “You’re gonna fucking fall down, Joey.”

  Outside, Joey stared down at the beach and tried talking about hooking up with two women he’d met earlier on the beach—an older redhead and a younger blonde. Even discussing the possibility of sex, he kept returning to Vinny. They were supposed to meet up with Vinny later, but Joey was now convinced Vinny would simply not show up. This would be further proof of Vinny’s disrespect. Again he warned Ralphie not to repeat what they’d discussed.

  “No matter how fucking drunk you get, don’t ever mention it,” Joey said.

  “Would you listen to me?”

  “God forbid,” Joey said. “If he ever tells me to do it, I do it.”

  Ralphie said he, too, would do whatever he was told. “Do you need me for anything, Vinny? I’ll be there.”

  “This is a serious thing,” Joey said, starting in again with a dose of self-pity about his pitiful position within the La Cosa Nostra universe. Joey again began talking to himself. Vinny, he said, was a big enough deal in the Mafia to attend sit-down meetings with other families that resulted in big decisions. “Where do you fucking go?” he asked himself. “Where do you go? You go to put a fucking bet in and then you get yelled at for putt
ing the bet in.”

  “Come on, Joey, stop.”

  “You should have made a move like a horse, you should have fucking won the race a long time ago.”

  “Well, it’s not too late.

  “You gotta start giving a fuck,” he said, again referring to himself.

  Ralphie tried to steer the conversation back to the women Joey met on the beach, trying to get him to stop his wallowing. He suggested they would have to decide which one would pair up with the older one and which one with the young one. The two women were getting manicures and massages. Joey suggested the younger one for Ralph.

  “Joey,” Ralphie said, “I don’t know how to deal with young girls.”

  “Just fuck around with them,” Joey said.

  “I don’t know.”

  “They like older men.”

  “Yeah, but what are you supposed to say?” Ralphie said. “At least you got hair.”

  “I gotta take two Viagras,” Joey O said.

  “I forgot the redhead’s name,” Ralphie said.

  The FBI agent wrote “END OF TAPE.”

  8

  On the very same day that Ralphie and Joey O discussed weight loss and Viagra inside an air-conditioned Fort Lauderdale hotel room, filming began on the television series about a New Jersey Mafia family. The show was called The Sopranos. Three major television networks rejected it because it was too realistic. That meant it had too much realistic profanity and too much realistic sex (although, it was interesting to note, not too much realistic violence). It was to be presented by the “premium” cable channel, Home Box Office, which prided itself on pushing the envelope regarding what was acceptable material for the living-room TV set.

  The show promised to present both the personal and the professional worlds of a completely fictional New Jersey crime family. The characters would be shown as they were, sometimes in an unflattering light. They would be vain and self-effacing, mean-spirited and altruistic, loyal and conniving—often in the same episode. The people who put

  this together went out of their way to do exactly what was not expected. What was expected, it can be presumed, was Don Vito Corleone and the nostalgic, mythic world created by Mario Puzo in The Godfather. Anyone who read or saw The Godfather would come away believing that all gangsters were essentially hardworking, noble men born in the wrong century. The characters portrayed in The Godfather possessed a flair for the theatrical. There was a dead fish wrapped in a bulletproof vest. There was a gangster shot in the eye because he got too greedy. There was the claim that gangsters only shot one another and always for business purposes. Each of these characters was honorable in the same way, say, as Billy the Kid or Ned Kelley or Robin Hood was honorable. They were outsiders who wished to gain their rightful place at the American table. Wasn’t that how legitimate men like J. P. Morgan and William Randolph Hearst and Andrew Carnegie got to own huge corporations? It was true that other movies had undermined this “men of honor” Godfather mythology. Goodfellas and Casino made clear there was little integrity and plenty of duplicity among the pinkie-ring set. Married to the Mob and The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight made fun of these very serious Roman senators and their very serious business. But the image of Marlon Brando mumbling philosophies and applying corporate logic to determine who will live and who will die—this was the image of the Mafia that most people believed. This was the image of the gangster as proud antihero that most Americans believed was real.

  This would soon change.

  In The Sopranos, the protagonist is a fairly intelligent capo named Tony Soprano. He’s in the mob because his father was in the mob, and he never wavers from the belief that “the life” is the only way to live. This was all very Godfather-like. But Tony Soprano also has a wife who runs up credit-card bills, two children who evince all the signs of adolescent angst common to suburban progeny, and a group of gangsters around him who complain more than a bunch of old ladies in slippers playing mah-jongg. He lives in a very nice suburban home and writes down on his tax forms that he is in the waste-disposal industry. He begins seeing a psychiatrist after having a nervous breakdown. He never sits in a darkened room in a tuxedo allowing real working people to kiss his ring and beg favors. He never uses fish to communicate a message. Opera he disdains. He listens to Steely Dan.

  The Sopranos, its creator, David Chase claimed, was going to show these people to be just what they were— people. They had families, they had back problems, their hair was thinning, their cars broke down. Yes, they killed one another for business purposes, but sometimes they did it for spite, or because of ineptitude. This was to be the real Mafia, every Sunday night.

  Don Vito Corleone would have had a stroke.

  The similarities between the real world and the TV world were mostly predictable. Many of the themes and schemes portrayed on The Sopranos were based on the Big Four of well-known Mafia activities: murder, extortion, loan sharking, and gambling. In real life and on TV, the mob loaned out money at exorbitant interest rates, then beat their customers with baseball bats if they were slow to pay. They took over businesses by becoming secret partners with entrepreneurs who got in over their heads. They ran high-stakes, all-night poker games for legitimate businessmen. They paid off corrupt cops. They headed to Fort Lauderdale or, better yet, Sicily when word leaked that the FBI was about to show up with arrest warrants in hand. They routinely killed informants, who were inevitably referred to by the all-purpose epithet rats. They set up “pump and dump” schemes on Wall Street and beat on brokers who refused to hype bogus stock. They were imaginative with the use of the word fuck. All of this predictable stuff that was found in hundreds of mob investigations that had been written about and played out on TV ad ridiculum found its way into The Sopranos.

  Some of the TV plots seemed to have been lifted straight from the headlines. Take Junior Gotti, for instance. In January 1998, John A. (Junior) Gotti, the son of Gambino crime boss, John Gotti, was indicted in New York on racketeering charges that included his alleged involvement in something known as a phone-card scam. In this version of how to steal from your fellowman, the mob set themselves up as distributors of phone cards by buying millions of dollars of credit from a big phone company. They then sold thousands of bogus cards, refused to pay the company for the credit, and went out of business. The company would then cut off the phone cards, leaving thousands of clueless callers hearing only dial tone. Gotti’s phone card was very patriotic. It featured a photo of the Statue of Liberty and could be purchased in poor neighborhoods throughout New York. His name, needless to say, was not included on either the back or front. At the time Gotti was indicted, this was the first time the mob had been implicated in this type of phone-card scam.

  Somehow, The Sopranos managed to mention this same phone-card scam a year later in a midseason episode.

  This occurred again and again. In the case with the phone cards, Gotti was also charged with another new Mafia scheme that had never been revealed before. In New York City, groups of black and Latino construction workers would descend upon white-controlled construction sites and demand jobs. Sometimes they did this by smashing equipment and beating up workers with iron pipes. These so-called coalitions had operated for years, and no one was quite sure how they were allowed to operate in an industry that was allegedly controlled by the mob. The answer, it turned out, was simple—some of the coalitions were also controlled by the mob. In the January 1998 indictment, prosecutors alleged that members of Gotti’s crime family had for years secretly paid the coalitions to show up and make threats. The good-hearted gangsters would then step in and and tell the harassed constructioncompany executive the problem could be “fixed” for a fee, usually substantial. The contractor would pay this protection money and hope for the best, unaware that the gangster would then dole out some of this fee to the coalition leader as payoff for a job well done. That this extremely cynical scam was run by the mob was not known to the general public at all until January 1998—just months before The
Sopranos episode in which Tony Soprano does the very same thing to a make-believe construction company called Massarone Construction.

  It happened again with airline tickets. In November 1999, prosecutors in Atlanta unsealed a racketeering indictment against one of Junior Gotti’s associates, a New York businessman named Steven E. Kaplan. Among the many charges, Kaplan was accused of corrupting two Delta Airlines employees by “comping” them at his Atlanta strip club in exchange for dozens of reduced-fare airline tickets. This was the first time prosecutors had charged the Mafia with systematically stealing airline tickets. Coincidentally, The Sopranos included the same scheme in a show that was filmed months before these charges were made public.

  And then it occurred with Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI). In the summer of 2000, the FBI raided a South Carolina doctor’s office and carted away boxes of documents. They were looking into what they believed was the Mafia’s newest scheme. An associate of the Gambino crime family had set up a company that leased out MRI equipment. A South Carolina doctor, they were told, got kickbacks to recommend expensive MRI testing to patients who didn’t really need it. In some cases, they were told, he’d gone so far as to recommend MRI tests for patients who did not exist. The doctor then referred the patients to a company in the Bronx. This company, which was secretly controlled by a reputed gangster, leased out MRI equipment. The company would run the patient through the MRI machine, then submit the bill directly to the insurer. In this way the MRI company was able to pocket millions of dollars in insurance fees for care that was either completely unnecessary or nonexistent.

  This new scam had found its way into the Mafia grapevine shortly before The Sopranos went into production and was not revealed to the public until the middle of the year 2000. The entire scam was mentioned on the episode of the show that had been wrapped up long before the public knew anything about the Mafia’s alleged involvement in the highly profitable business of MRIs.