Made Men

by Smith, Greg B.

  In many instances, the activity depicted on television was remarkably similar to the activity of the real-life Mafia, activity no member of the public had ever been privy to. And nowhere were these similarities more obvious than in New Jersey’s only homegrown version of La Cosa Nostra—the DeCavalcante crime family.

  Many had whispered about the DeCavalcantes’ alleged connection to the silver screen. It was said that Don Vito Corleone of The Godfather was modeled on Sam the Plumber DeCavalcante. But many questioned such a connection. Who could imagine a guy offering up unforgettable philosophical bons mots while sitting in a beat-up heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning office in industrial New Jersey? Whether Mario Puzo took Sam the Plumber into consideration while writing his novel will never be known because Puzo always maintained that he made the whole thing up. No matter. With The Sopranos, though, the connection with the DeCavalcante name was obvious.

  Events and circumstances that occurred in real life but had not yet been made public made their way into the scripts of The Sopranos. Some were innocuous. Most of the names on the show, for instance, came straight out of your average Mafia Yellow Pages—Johnny Boy and Uncle Junior and Philly and Patsy and Richie. One was very unusual—Big Pussy Bonpensiero. No other family had a Pussy, Big or Little, save the DeCavalcante crime family. His name was Anthony (Little Pussy) Russo, a guy who once bragged to an acquaintance about the time he stuffed a murder victim inside a furnace.

  Both the TV family and the real family suffered from a persistent inferiority complex caused by the repeated ridicule of the New York crime families, who referred to them as “farmers.”

  The TV family and the New Jersey family both had bosses in prison who’d designated others to run their operations. At the start of The Sopranos, a guy named Giacomo Aprile, known to friends and family as Jackie, is acting boss and slowly dying of stomach cancer. Jackie Aprile’s slow death creates a leadership vacuum that threatens to turn deadly. In the DeCavalcante family, the acting boss was a guy named Giaciano Amari, known to friends and family as Jake. Jake Amari was slowly dying of stomach cancer, and his impending demise was creating a leadership vacuum that threatened to turn deadly. This was a fact known only to members of the DeCavalcante crime family and law enforcement on both sides of the Hudson who made it their business to know such things.

  One of those agents theorized that the writers of the show were communicating with real members of the DeCavalcante crime family. “They’ve got to have somebody over there,” said the agent, who did not want his name used as he pointed out other coincidences.

  In the TV family, Tony Soprano ends up with a secret ownership interest in a hotel owned by Hasidic Jews. Inside the hotel, Tony runs a high-stakes poker game that goes all day and all night. In the DeCavalcante crime family, a real-life associate ran a high-stakes poker game out of a community center operated by Hasidic Jews.

  On the TV show, Tony Soprano the acting boss promoted to capo one veteran soldier named Paulie Walnuts over another named Big Pussy, inspiring in Big Pussy jealousy and resentment. In the DeCavalcante family, Vincent Palermo the acting boss promoted one veteran soldier named Uncle Joe Giacobbe over another named Joey (Tin Ear) Sclafani, prompting scorn and derision in Sclafani.

  On TV, the resentful soldier, Big Pussy, is secretly charged with a crime that can put him away for a decade. The FBI then offers to let him walk away with only minimal jail time if he agrees to cooperate and wears a secret device to record inculpatory statements of old friends. In the DeCavalcante crime family, a longtime associate named Ralphie Guarino was arrested on charges that could put him away for a decade. He agreed to wear a wire for the FBI and began recording the conversations of his friends within the DeCavalcante crime family.

  On the TV show, the gangsters hang out at a New Jersey strip club called the Bada Bing; in real life, the DeCavalcante crime family hung out at a strip club in Queens called Wiggles. To make things even stranger, when the makers of The Sopranos went looking for an authentic Mafia-owned strip club, they must have possessed special Mafia radar. The actual club on a busy thoroughfare in Lodi, New Jersey, where the show was filmed had once been known as Satin Dolls. According to the State of New Jersey’s Commission of Investigation, Satin Dolls was for years secretly controlled by Vincent Ravo, an associate of the Genovese crime family. Ravo, it should be noted, also secretly owned another bar down the road in Garfield, New Jersey, by the highly imaginative name of Goodfellas. One of his front men in that venture was one Daniel Conte, who had a small role as a mob associate in the movie Goodfellas and claimed to be a close friend of Joe Pesci.

  As the hype started to build in 1998 for the premiere of the show, its creator, David Chase, insisted The Sopranos would be anything but predictable. This was a tricky task. Although The Sopranos would be realistic, he claimed, it would never be about real people. In an Internet interview published by HBO to help explain how the show was put together, Chase was asked how he managed to accurately portray the lifestyles of the Mafia in his series.

  “We try to write about human behavior with all its warts and glories, and we do our research,” he replied. “And having grown up in New Jersey helps.”

  “Are the Sopranos based on a specific person or group of people or just purely invention?” Chase was asked. “Purely invention,” was his terse electronic reply.

  Not long after Chase gave that answer, a group of FBI agents with surveillance cameras sat freezing off their cannolis inside a van parked on Mulberry Street in New York City’s Little Italy. This was shortly before Christmas and the van was bathed in the electric red-and-green glow of the thousands of festive lights that emerge from their hiding places each holiday season in Little Italy. It was parked across from one Mafia social club and three blocks away from John Gotti’s former hangout, the Ravenite. Across the narrow street the agents kept an eye on a low-key popular restaurant known as Il Cortile. Inside the exposedbrick-walled classic Italian eatery was focaccia “Puddhica” con Brie for $7.50, lobster ravioli for $25, and a well-attended Christmas party thrown by the Colombo crime family.

  The FBI agents—who had not been invited—were interested in the comings and goings of the party’s hosts, James (Jimmy Green Eyes) Clemenza, a reputed Colombo capo, and his brother, Jerry, a reputed family soldier. At some point they recognized the two men making their way down Mulberry and into Il Cortile. A few minutes later they got a little surprise. There were two other men—a Frigidaire-size guy with a full head of black curly hair and a smaller but extremely compact guy with a pompadour gone silver at the temples.

  Here were mob soldiers Big Pussy and his pal, Paulie Walnuts. Actually it was Vincent Pastore, an actor who played the gangster named Big Pussy, and Tony Sirico, an actor who played the gangster named Paulie Walnuts on The Sopranos.

  But there was more. Another guy ambled by who was a little tougher to recognize but still within reach for anybody who’d watched movies during the 1970s. It was James Caan, the actor who became famous after playing the volatile Sonny Corleone in The Godfather, wandering down Mulberry. He was a guest at the Colombo crime family’s Christmas party, too.

  At the time it was a significant moment—a vanful of government workers had just made a documentary record of art mimicking life. There now existed a videotape that featured both real live gangsters and real live pretend gangsters, all hanging around the same restaurant around Christmas. It was significant—if not surprising. That’s because all three actors—Pastore, Sirico, and Caan—had long known reputed members and associates of organized crime.

  For years Pastore had been friends with Danny Provenzano, the grand-nephew of the late Anthony (Tony Pro) Provenzano, a mob-connected Teamsters official who was long suspected in the death of Jimmy Hoffa. Danny Provenzano was also a moviemaker of sorts, hiring Pastore to play gangster-type roles in films with names like This Thing of Ours. Pastore would one day show up at a New Jersey courtroom to show support for Provenzano, who at the time would be indicte
d on charges of using beatings and kidnappings to extort money from more than a dozen men he referred to as “business associates.” “I don’t know him as a gangster, I know him as a filmmaker,” Pastore told the Associated Press after the court hearing.

  Caan, who also had a small role in Provenzano’s This Thing of Ours (English for la cosa nostra), long had been associated with a top Colombo family guy named Andrew Russo.

  Sirico was in a class by himself.

  During the 1970s, he had affected a gangster style that included wearing white suits and getting arrested repeatedly on charges of threatening to do bad things to disco owners if they didn’t hand him envelopes stuffed with cash. By 1999, of course, those days were long gone. Sirico was now a respected actor who’d worked in dozens of films, winning praise from the likes of Woody Allen and, of course, David Chase, the creator of The Sopranos. In particular, Sirico was credited for his unusually vivid portrayal of gangsters.

  After news of the Colombo Christmas party leaked out, Sirico admitted that he had known the Clemenza brothers forever. “I know them, I know everybody. I’ve been around.” He admitted he had eaten at Il Cortile “maybe five times” in the past few years, often with Pastore. He did not, however, recall the details. There may have been a Christmas party, and then again, maybe not. “I have been to so many dinners and parties and charities, I have no idea,” Sirico said, before launching into his shtick about how the things he did way back are things he’d rather forget now and would certainly never repeat.

  “I don’t want to be mixed up with a lot of bad guys,” he said. “All that tough guy stuff went out the window years ago. If I was at a place where there were mob guys, I’m sorry to hear it. I’m sorry for me . . . If I was there, I wasn’t hanging out with nobody. I haven’t seen these guys in a hundred years. I haven’t seen this kid Jerry [Clemenza] in a thousand years.”

  And clearly he had changed. Here was a guy who had been fingerprinted more than once worrying now about a file somewhere deep inside the FBI. “I hope they don’t have my name on a list,” he said. “I’m an actor. I hope they know that.”

  But it was easy to get confused. There would be times when these guys would come up to him on the street and make, for lack of a better term, suggestions. These were guys Sirico recognized as being “in the life,” as he might have once put it. “I’ve had guys come up to me, I don’t want to tell you,” he said. “They say I should have been a little harder in some scene. I don’t know what to tell them. What do you say? I mean, what can you say?”

  9

  GOODFELLASEXPLAINS IT WELL When Carmine Sessa was a kid growing up in Brooklyn, he started his climb up the Mafia ladder by shining shoes in clubs and bars in his neighborhood. That was how it all started. It was just like being an aspiring actor waiting tables in a Manhattan restaurant frequented by Broadway casting agents. You were there to be seen. Perhaps you would get lucky. Except instead of casting agents, you had people who made a living by getting over on others, determined never to work a legitimate day in their lives. “That’s how I’m meeting these people,” he says.

  Carmine signed up for the program.

  “Eventually I started stealings things and selling them for these people. I also started working in card games and getting to know more people. They got to know me as a good kid, a thief, a tough kid, a stand-up kid. From there

  the crimes started escalating eventually to murder and seemed never to stop.” He became associated with a well-known gangster from Gravesend named Greg Scarpa Sr. Scarpa was one of the scariest, most devious gangsters the Colombo family or any other family had ever seen. He killed for fun. Then he talked about it, again and again.

  Young Mafia wannabe Carmine would spend hours hanging around Scarpa’s social club, the Wimpy Boys’ Club, scheming and dreaming of being a made man. He was there the time the poodle walked up with the ear in its mouth.

  At first Carmine had no idea what was in the little dog’s mouth, but then he realized. It made sense, in a way. He and Scarpa had just killed the girlfriend of a mobster who was suspected of being an informant. The girlfriend, it was thought, would also be able to provide the federal government with information that Greg Scarpa and his protégé, Carmine, might not want them to have. So they had shot her in the face inside the Wimpy Boys’ Club, not realizing that the blast had blown off her ear. They proceded to cut the girlfriend into small pieces and dispose of the parts. They thought they’d done a great job cleaning up. They missed the ear, which must have fallen down behind a couch. The poodle had found it.

  This was the life Carmine chose. He rose all the way to consigliere, committing murders when he was told to. It didn’t matter who it was or why. It was part of the job. “I saw friends get killed,” he said. “One day you are a friend and the next day somebody said he’s got to go, for whatever reason, and sometimes you are a part of it or even have to pull the trigger. You find yourself telling the families,‘We don’t know what happened but we’re going to find out.’ And they believe you.”

  In the early 1990s, there was a disagreement within the Colombo crime family over who was in charge. The boss of the family, Carmine Persico, who was nicknamed “the Snake” by other gangsters because even they found him to be unusually duplicitous, was in jail for a thousand years. He anointed a loyal minion named Victor Orena as the acting boss to handle matters on the street, but he secretly very much wanted his son, Allie Boy, to step into the CEO suite as soon as Allie got out of jail. When Victor Orena finally realized this, all hell broke loose.

  There were shootings on the streets of Brooklyn. Twelve people died, mostly gangsters, but also an innocent nineteen-year-old kid who had the bad luck to be working in a bagel store owned by a gangster. Carmine Sessa participated in this gunfighting, as he was instructed to do. Greg Scarpa Sr. also participated, with enthusiasm and even relish. He shot a guy putting up his Christmas lights. He shot a guy lying on his driveway who said, “What did I do?” He shot a guy sitting in his car, blowing off half his skull. Scarpa would have continued shooting, but he was arrested. Carmine Sessa the protégé somehow managed to get out of town.

  For more than a year he remained a fugitive, one of the most wanted on the New York FBI’s list. Then he suddenly was arrested outside St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Manhattan. Within a week he was cooperating with the FBI and the United States attorney in Brooklyn. Facing the possibility of spending the rest of his life in prison, he had a change of heart about “this thing of ours” called La Cosa Nostra.

  “The movie Goodfellas explains it well,” Sessa said. “Meaning, everybody gets killed by a bunch of animals or so-called friends. This thing I thought I respected so much as a young man had no respect at all, but it did have plenty of disrespect. All the families hate each other and within the families they hate one another. It is a disease that keeps growing and spreading. You cut off the head and a new one grows. You cut off an arm and it grows a new one. To me, the more I wanted to be left out... I was pulled in and appointed to a position of consigliere, a position I didn’t want. I was looking to keep far away and asked them not to give it to me, but to no avail.”

  These things he told the judge on the day he was sentenced. He had served seven years in jail and participated in four murders. He had testified in several trials and looked across the courtroom at many of his “so-called friends” and pronounced them murderers and thieves. The government told the judge he was an excellent informant. Now he stood alone in a government courtroom in the town in which he had grown up, and he was letting the world know that the real Mafia wasn’t like the movie Mafia at all.

  “I hate everything about the life I led,” he told the judge in a nearly empty courtroom. “I hope that it ends sometime soon, because it keeps destroying families and young kids who are infatuated with it and can’t wait to be a goodfella. I wish I could tell them what it really is and not what they think it is. I don’t like what I’m doing putting people in jail. But I don’t want this thing to
keep growing. I accept responsibility for my crimes and blame no one else—not my associates, not my environment, just me. Thank you, Your Honor.”

  The judge looked down from his bench and made remarks about how unusual it was to hear such candid expression from a member of organized crime, and then he pronounced sentence: time served. And then Carmine Sessa walked out of court, a new man with a new name, a new social-security number, even a new birth certificate, leaving Brooklyn behind.

  May 29, 1998 Every business has a hatchet man. He is paid to be the in-house son of a bitch. He yells at people in front of their colleagues, he relocates them to small windowless offices, he questions their manhood. The hatchet man is an important corporate tool, necessary to maintain order in the chaos of capitalism. In the DeCavalcante crime family, one of the hatchet men’s names was Anthony Capo. On this spring Friday evening, Ralphie Guarino was driving through New York traffic on his way to pick up the hatchet man himself.

  “I’m going to get Anthony, it’s four forty-five, going to the Yankees game, it’s a Friday night,” he said into the hidden recording device rigged to the inside of his car. “Gonna go to Wiggles to pick up Joey O.” He yawned. The radio played. The FBI agent listening in wrote all of this down.

  Grinding through the Friday rush hour, Ralphie picked up Anthony in Brooklyn and drove toward Queens Boulevard and Wiggles. Capo was a big pale young man with reddish hair and a look of contempt that never left his wide face. He was a soldier in the DeCavalcante family and the only evidence in public that he paid little attention to the law was his 1985 conviction on charges of performing the job of enforcer for a loan shark named Vincent Rotondo. He was known as a Wild West kind of guy who loved to golf. He was always talking about his game and about giving people a good beating. He sometimes used the same implements for both. On this night he was complaining about the weather. It was headed for summer, but there would be a chill breeze passing through Yankee Stadium.