Made Men
Page 16
“You’re my skipper,” Capo finally said to Rotondo. “If you want me to do this, tell me to do it and it will be done.”
Rotondo then reluctantly told him to shoot and kill D’Amato. In his usual unsubtle manner, Capo had succeeded in making Rotondo an accomplice. And he had done it right in front of Vinny Ocean. With Anthony Capo, you were in for it all or you were not to be trusted.
That day Capo was given a gun. He and DiChiara picked up D’Amato in a sedan at a prearranged spot and drove him to a garage in Brooklyn, There D’Amato was shot in the head. Capo and DiChiara then drove back to Rotondo’s office, cruising slowly by and signaling out the window that D’Amato was dead in the trunk of the car. They all met at the nearby home of another capo, where Rotondo helped clean up the car and wrap the body for disposal. Capo asked Rotondo to help get rid of D’Amato’s body. Rotondo demurred, although this time it wasn’t to return a toy to Toys “ ” Us. This time, he had to go back home and see his wife.
Anthony Capo smoked his cigar on the ride to Queens with Ralphie, expressing his philosophy of survival. He talked openly about “the life” and how he hated “rats” and he complained that his home telephone was tapped and that he couldn’t get life insurance because the FBI was always following him. Then he was complaining about another soldier named Vinny, who was owed a debt and was not doing much of anything to collect it, even after the debtor told him flat out he could not pay.
“Vinny said, ‘What was I gonna do?’ I said, ‘Listen to me, did it bother you what he said?’ He said, ‘Yeah.’ I said, ‘Then you should do what youse got to do.’ He said, ‘Yeah?’ I said, ‘Vinny, you’re telling me you didn’t like what the guy said to you. If you don’t like that guy’s shirt, and you tell him to take it off, and he wears it the next day, what are you gonna do? Rip it off his fucking back, right?’ ”
“Well, you know what?” Ralphie said. “There’s an old saying. I grew up in the street. There’s an old saying—”
“Put up,” Anthony Capo said, “or shut up.”
They picked up Joey O at Wiggles. He drove, Anthony got in the backseat; Ralphie stayed in front. The car was
bugged but Ralphie was not. That meant the FBI could not hear anything that was said during the entire Yankee–Red Sox game at Yankee Stadium. This turned out to be a long period of time because there was a rain delay of more than two hours. There were several hours of no sound. The FBI had no idea what Anthony was saying to Joey, or what Joey was saying to Ralphie, or what the announcer at Yankee Stadium said to the thousands of fans who braved the unusually chilly May night to watch the Yankees beat the Red Sox six to two.
What the FBI and Ralphie did not know at the time was that Joey O was an endangered species. He owed everyone in the universe a lot of money, and was no longer sure what to do about that. He had gone to his old friend Vinnie Ocean hoping for help. What he needed was for Vinnie— a guy everyone respected—to tell the rest of the Goodfella crowd that Joey O was okay and that, in the end, he would come up with a way to pay off his many debts. Vinnie had known Joey O for years, so surely he’d be a stand-up guy and get Joey out of the hell he found himself in.
That was the plan, anyway. It didn’t work out. He went to Vinnie and begged and pleaded, and in the middle of the talk he made a big mistake. He said to Vinnie, “Don’t worry, Vinnie, I won’t tell anybody about Staten Island.”
Those ten words made Vinnie stop his usual manner of listening to Joey O, which was to not really listen, and pay close attention. Vinnie knew well what Joey O meant by “Staten Island.” He meant the Fred Weiss killing, the piece of work that made Vinnie a respected member of La Cosa Nostra but also a candidate for a murder prosecution. And here stood Joey O mentioning the unmentionable. It could only mean one thing—Joey O was thinking about becoming an informant.
In the coming weeks, Vinnie Ocean summoned Anthony Capo to a meeting away from his usual haunts. The two men sat down and Vinnie made his wishes known—he told Anthony to start doing “homework” on Joey O, his friend and constant companion. The guy who got Vinnie his coffee and picked up his blood pressure medicine. Vinnie kept the conversation general, but the message was clear. Joey O had to go.
10
June 25, 1998 Joey O was swapping Mafia gossip with Ralphie—who was in, who was out, all the stars in the DeCavalcante constellation—when he made a little joke. He said, “I wouldn’t be surprised if I disappear.” He made the little joke in such a way that it could be translated as not a little joke. He was beginning to see where he stood in the food chain.
Ralphie was not interested in Joey O’s problems. He was trolling for probable cause. By the summer of 1998, just six months after Ralphie Guarino first began taping conversations for the bureau, the FBI had accumulated so much probable cause they were now thinking of doing something that had never been done before—indicting an entire crime family. They would do it in stages, but they would do it nonetheless. Vinny Palermo, the man viewed as most likely to succeed, was now well within the bureau’s reach. And by now Ralphie was comfortable ask
ing Joey O just about any question imaginable and Joey volunteered everything. He told Ralphie that Vinny Ocean had been officially promoted to the leadership committee, which meant he had to reassign all his crew members to different captains. He explained how one soldier had been promoted, how another had been passed over, and how nobody wanted a third. Joey even used nautical references.
“Everybody’s gotta go to different skippers,” Joey said. “Vinny’s not supposed to have nobody under him. Nobody wants Anthony.”
“What about us?” Ralphie asked. “No, we’re still together. No, anybody who’s straightened out guys gotta go to different skippers.”
“You mean the guy second-in-command can’t have nobody under him?”
“Can’t have nobody under him. Well, everybody’s under him. But these guys only gotta answer to a captain first, then him.”
“So you’re gonna be with Joe now?” Ralphie asked.
“No, we’re still with Vinny,” Joey said. “No, it’s not us. It’s everybody. It has nothing to do with us.”
He was talking as if everything was on track, but uncertainty permeated his every word. It had reached the point where no one knew what he was going to say or do next.
His life was a train wreck waiting to happen. He was living in Staten Island with two daughters from his first marriage, his second wife, Rosemary, and her mother. He now openly referred to his first wife as “the asshole” and his second as “the witch.” His older daughter had come to him asking for money for sessions with a psychologist. He refused and told her to move out. He slapped her and she called the police. Then he thought better of it and decided that both daughters should move out. The FBI recorded him talking to a neighbor about his problems.
“I told [my ex-wife] the other fucking night, come and get your daughters,” he said. “I can’t take it no more.”
“What’d she say?” the neighbor asked.
“She said, ‘Oh, you gotta understand.’ Understand what? You’re living nice on a nice lake somewhere, and you left me this responsibility. I’m fifty years old. I can’t fucking breathe, I’m dying over here.”
He complained to everybody. In one June cell-phone conversation that the FBI carefully recorded, Joey O even complained about his daughter to his boss, Vinny Ocean.
“She came home, I didn’t say nothing to her,” Joey said. “She didn’t say nothing to me.”
Vinny the mob boss temporarily transformed himself into Vinny the parent, suggesting that Joey should let the daughter see the psychologist.
“I think you should go with her to talk to this—”
“Wednesday night,” Joey O said. “She’s got an appointment with this lady. I’m gonna go.”
“You gotta go,” Vinny said, dropping into his best “these kids today” mode. “I don’t understand it. I don’t know. I think I’m in another fucking country. Or world.”
; “Me, too,” Joey said. “Me, too.”
The agents heard everything. All about his problems having sex, about the debate he had whether or not to use Viagra. The recorded conversations between Joey and his girlfriend, the one whose breasts Joey felt needed improvement. She had asked him to buy her hydroponic marijuana and Ecstasy, and Joey had failed once again.
“You didn’t get the hydra?” the girlfriend said.
“No,” Joey sadly admitted.
“Or the Ecs?”
“No. Tonight.”
“That’s what I asked you for, baby.”
“Baby, what do you want me to tell you?”
“Damn.”
In August, Rosemary Masella threw all of Joey’s clothes out onto the lawn. Rumors circulated that he tried to kill himself. He called up his girlfriend on the cell phone and claimed he’d gone out for milk at the corner store and gotten lost in Brooklyn. He said he was disoriented and had just hit a car. He ranted that he was going to kill his wife. His girlfriend begged him to pull over so somebody could come get him, but he refused. He blamed everything on the antidepressants he was taking, and hung up. A few days later he was hospitalized in Staten Island with chest pains, but released when the doctors found nothing wrong.
In one talk with Vinny Ocean, Joey O said, “I just don’t give a shit anymore.”
“When did you ever?” Vinny replied in disgust.
Ralphie was aware that Vinny was running out of patience with Joey. Vinny now referred to Joey simply as “the asshole,” as in “Where’s the asshole?” Ralphie tried to cool things down.
“He knows you’re mad at him,” Ralphie told Vinny the boss. “He don’t know what to do. He’d rather kill himself.”
“He’s a fucking asshole.”
“Kiss and make up.”
“Yeah,” Vinny said sarcastically, “I’ll kiss.”
In July, the FBI recorded Vinny Ocean practically foaming at the mouth about Joey O. “I listened to him and now I’m an asshole for listening to him,” Vinny told an underling. “Even if Joey’s half-right, it’s a score. But in the meanwhile, I should’ve figured he’s all wrong. He’s never fucking right.”
“Not one fucking story does he get straight. Nothing. It’s amazing. I can’t deal with it no more. I’d rather not see him. I mean I’d fuck him. He’s a fucking moron. A real fucking moron. He wants to gamble, ruin his fucking life. You never get even. You get worse.”
“This is it. He’s a fucking moron is what he is. He’s a fucking lowlife. A cocksucker. That’s what he is, this motherfucker. I told him, ‘You got a lot of money and you take care of your wife and your kids.’ ”
Ralphie was assigned the task of keeping Joey O on track. Repeatedly he urged Joey to pay off his debts. He played the role of mediator, parent, and counselor, advising Joey that conflict with Vinny the boss was not such a good idea.
“I told you last week, I’ll tell you again—don’t challenge the man,” Ralphie said.
“I don’t even want to talk to him,” Joey O said.
“That ain’t the answer,” Ralphie said. “You know why?”
“I can’t deal with the man.”
“You know what? Put your relationship on the back burner. Just deal with him like on a business level. He’s the boss. Don’t challenge him.”
Ralphie even suggested that Joey O try to get “straightened out”—become a member of the DeCavalcante crime family. For years, Joey O had talked of getting “made.” This would involve his swearing his allegiance to the DeCavalcante family and burning the palm card of a saint in his hand. He would then take an oath of silence, promising to burn just like the saint if he ever gave up the secrets of the secret society to which he had just become a member. Joey O had certainly hung around with wiseguys long enough to know what was involved. He’d watched all the movies. He knew all the famous names and all the famous lines. He had helped beat up loan-shark victims who were behind in their vig. He had firebombed cars. But he had never pulled an actual trigger of an actual gun aimed at an actual head.
Perhaps, Ralphie seemed to suggest, if he were to accept such an assignment, all his troubles with money would go away. Ralphie decided to approach the question directly.
“How come they never tried to straighten you out?” he asked.
“I don’t want it,” Joey said.
“All the fucking stuff you did?”
“Yeah?” Joey said. “So what’s the big deal?”
“You might as well get straightened out.”
“And go to jail for the rest of my life?”
“What does that mean, you gotta go to jail?”
“They want to leave me alone, let me be happy,” Joey said. “I don’t want to get into this shit. I want to go do what I gotta fucking do. I’m very happy the way I am. Who the fuck needs it? I don’t want the headaches that go with it.”
“If you’re gonna live in this life, you might as well fucking live in it.”
“The whole fucking life,” Joey O said. “Who the fuck wants it? I don’t.”
June 30, 1998 Joey and Ralphie went for a drive in Ralphie’s special FBI-bugged car. Ralphie noticed right away that something was wrong.
“Bad?” he asked
“Bad,” Joey replied.
Ralphie knew that Joey had had yet another meeting
with the boss, Vincent. The day before Joey met for two hours at Vinny’s big house out on Long Island. The house was big because Vinny was making lots of money, some of it because of Joey O’s many schemes. But it was clear that the meeting at Vinny’s did not end with what one might call rave reviews. Joey went into the meeting knowing that his pulling out of the plan to murder Charlie Majuri had done nothing to improve his relationship with Vinny, and knowing that he owed tens of thousands of dollars to gangsters across metropolitan New York. But Joey had decided to come clean. He’d decided to be brutally honest with his old friend.
He told him straight out that he could not pay his bills. Not to the Gambinos. Not to the Bonnanos. Not to the Colombos. He tried to explain his situation to Vinny, his old pal. Always Joey was just one step ahead—borrowing more and more to put more out on the street and hoping that he hit, but it just never seemed to work out.
“I told him, I says, ‘Vinny, I got all fucked up.’ I says, ‘You always accuse me of drugs and fucking gambling.’ I says, ‘We’re shylocks. Just take my salary and just pay him. I can’t do it anymore.’ He says, ‘You gotta be fucking kidding me.’ He says, ‘You know this is not my money.’ ”
Ralphie says, “It’s always money, huh?”
“Yeah,” Joey said, “that’s all.”
Joey had then tried to do what Joey did best—provide
Vinny with a new scheme. Joey told the boss his aunt was going to sell her house. He said she’s looking at three-fifty, they offered three-ten. She’d borrow on the sale and lend him the money. Also he’d get help from his good friend Ralphie.
“Yeah,” said Ralphie. “Of course.”
And that was that. In four words, Joey described Vinny’s reaction. “He went fucking crazy,” Joey said. Vinny had ordered Joey to stop making pickups from
the gambling and loan-shark customers in Queens. Vinny would now collect it himself and pay it directly to the Gambinos, who were number one on the “Pissed Off at
Joey” list.
“Okay,” Joey says. “There went that.”
And then, Joey’s voice rises a little bit, telling Ralphie
what happened next at the big meeting at Vinny’s house.
He recalls exactly what Vinny said that made Joey’s bad
heart skip a beat.
“You know,” Vinny told him, “by rights, I gotta kill
you.”
Ralphie stopped talking. Then he said, “Is that what he
said? Why? But why would he say that? Why would he say
that?”
“I stole his money.”
“You stole his money?”
at it. He’ll never get it back. I says, ‘You’ll get it back.’ I
says, ‘I’m working with Ralph.’ I left. I was there for two
hours.”
“Everything negative,” Ralphie said. “Nothing positive.”
They drove along, but Joey was losing steam. He knew
something had changed with Vinny.
“Let me ask you a question,” Ralphie said. “I mean,
you’ve been loyal to him all these years?”
“That don’t mean nothing,” Joey said. “Money is their
God.”
“He got that angry?”
“Thank God I went to his house. He woulda shot me
right there.”
“I can’t believe he’s like that.”
“Oh, I do. I knew that. I fuckin’ knew that. I didn’t
wanna go, but I had no choice.”
Ralphie said, “No, you got no choice.”
“I have no choice. I have no money to pay him.” Joey owed $50,000, due many yesterdays ago. Or
maybe $80,000. He can’t be sure. Ralphie suggests that
Vinny is just a guy who likes to blow off steam, but Joey
is not so sure. He has known Vinny for years, has made
lots of money for him in the past. He has been there for
Vinny, collecting a thousand here, a thousand there from
customers all over New Jersey, Brooklyn, Staten Island.
He has been there as Vinny slowly rose through the ranks,
from soldier to captain and now to boss. And he is confident that Vinny’s star will continue to rise. He knows that
Charlie Majuri is history, and that soon Vinny will run the
DeCavalcante crime family. And when that day comes,
Joey is sure that everything will be okay. He just has to get
from Point A, which isn’t so great, to Point B.