Made Men

by Smith, Greg B.

  “It’s a sad, sad fucking way to end after all these years,”

  he said. “I’m telling Vinny, I’m putting my life in your

  hands. Either you kill me, or you help me outta it.” “And what’d he say?”

  Joey recalled Vinny’s very brief message: “You know

  what I gotta do.”

  September 9, 1998 By nine in the morning, Joey O was on the phone trolling for cash and getting nowhere. He was scheduled to take a stress test and he was not looking forward to it. Talking with a bookie named Wes Paloscio, Joey O said the stress test was supposed to be “an all-day affair. They gotta give me some shit. They take pictures. I gotta wait two hours, they take more pictures.” He complained that Vinny was avoiding him, perhaps because he knew Joey O wanted to borrow more money off him.

  Four hours later, at 12:50, Joey was driving down Kings Highway in Brooklyn when he called Wiggles on his cell looking for Vinny. During the talk he almost got in an accident.

  The manager at Wiggles, Tommy Salvata, asked, “How do you feel?”

  “Ah, my fucking luck,” Joey said. “I go to take the stress test. The machine breaks. Just my fucking luck.”

  “What about your eyes?”

  “The eyes are three-thirty today. Amazing. Got all the tests, got already to go. The machine malfunctioned. Gotta call the mechanic. He can’t come until Tuesday.”

  “You got no luck at all.”

  Joey O asks about Vinny and says, “Tell him I said I love him, I’m still alive.”

  Tommy laughed.

  The next night Vinny tracked him down to his home in Staten Island. The two men stood alone in the house, talking about Joey’s many problems with money. Actually it was mostly Vinny, yelling.

  “You owe this one, you owe that one,” roared Vinny, becoming increasingly agitated.

  “What do you want me to do?” Joey pleaded. “I’m desperate.”

  “You got some pair of balls,” Vinny said, and then Vinny kicked Joey in the testicles, sending him reeling.

  The next day, early in the morning, Joey O called Ralphie in New Jersey. “Florida,” he said. “Maybe I’ll go to Florida.”

  “Really?”

  “What am I gonna do? I don’t want to hang around here. When he kicked me in the balls, I couldn’t believe it. After all these years.”

  “Did he hurt you?”

  “Yeah,” Joey said. “He gave me a nice kick in the balls.”

  “I feel bad for you,” Ralphie said. “I mean, maybe you don’t have anything left. Maybe you should go to Florida.”

  “Everything’s falling apart. I ain’t got five cents in my pocket.”

  “That’s terrible.”

  “It’s no way to live,” Joey said. “I had to beg him. I says, Vinny, I paid a hundred dollars for these pills. He said, ‘I need the hundred. Take it off what you owe me.’ ”

  September 25, 1998 Again Joey O was on the phone first thing in the morning. This time he was howling at Westley Paloscio, who had promised him again and again to hook him up with money. Paloscio was a young man who had recently gotten married to his pregnant girlfriend and lived at home with his mother. He had a nasal twang when he talked, and was prone to making such pronouncements as “I’m fuckin’ thirty years old and I never worked a day in my life.” He was viewed by some as smart with numbers, but as a bookie he was almost as big a failure as Joey O. He was referred to in some circles as “Mickey the Dunce.” On this morning, Joey O started the conversation by calling Paloscio “a major mental fucking retard.”

  “Hello,” Paloscio said. “Why am I a major fucking retard?”

  Joey O said the guy Wes had promised would meet Joey at a diner with $3,000 at quarter to eight that morning had, of course, not shown up. “I left you a message five times,” Joey complained.

  “I told you,” Paloscio said. “I was in Lamaze.”

  “I was with him till nine-thirty”

  “I hadda watch pregnancy.” Then Wes mentioned “this kid Steve.” He said he had a Wall Street guy who gambled and owed him a lot of money, that Joey O could meet with him and get money from him.

  October 9, 1998 Joey O was on the go. He’d finally reached a state of positivity. That was important. Positivity meant maybe he could get out of this unbelievable situation he’d gotten himself into. Negativity meant he’d wind up stuffed inside some fifty-five-gallon drum buried deep within that Fresh Kills Landfill in Staten Island. Money was the key to positivity. And his friend Westley Paloscio now claimed to have plenty.

  Westley’s customer Steve seemed promising. Westley gave Joey Steve’s beeper number, and after a few calls that went nowhere, it was looking like Steve was actually going to come through. Joey was on the phone at two in the afternoon on a Friday now that Steve the big Wall Street guy had finally returned the beep.

  “Okay,” Joey said. “You got my money?” “Yeah,” said Steve. “I’m picking it up now, as a matter of fact.”

  Joey suggested meeting in the city; Steve wanted to meet on Long Island. Joey finally agreed on Brooklyn. Joey suggested he’d send somebody to pick up the cash. Steve seemed surprised.

  “You’re not going to meet me?”

  Joey needed the money, so he compromised. He agreed to call Steve back for an address in Brooklyn. Joey O got upset only when Steve complained about how much money he had to pay.

  “Yeah, well, I don’t give a fuck,” Joey said. “I don’t

  wanna hear it. I was promised by Friday I’ll have it. Today’s Friday.”

  October 10, 1998 Things were looking up. The old confidence was back. Joey O rushed out of his house on Rhett Avenue in Staten Island, which his forgiving wife, Rosemary, was allowing him to live in for the moment. He was on his way to meet the actual Steve at the Sea View Diner in Canarsie down at the bottom of Brooklyn. Steve had said 7:30 sharp, and Joey could almost smell the $10,000. He’d get his money, he’d give it to the Gambino guy, he’d let Vinny his boss know he gave it to the Gambino guy, and he’d be back on the street in Vinny’s good graces making money in no time. He could picture it all. And although he had never actually met Steve and had only spoken to him on the phone just once, he was, nonetheless, brimming with confidence.

  It was a mild October evening, temperatures had reached into the fifties; it was a little damp. Joey got in his aging BMW sedan and pulled out of the driveway and headed for the Sea View Diner and redemption. Money was out there in the Brooklyn night, waiting for Joey O to pick it up.

  Inside the Sea View, they had giant apple turnovers wrapped in plastic on the counter and plenty of hot coffee in thick white mugs. There were old-style jukeboxes that played Louis Prima and plastic Madonna statuettes next to a mirrored wall. But there was no Steve. Joey looked all around, even heading into the dining room with the fake fireplace. No Steve that he could see. Joey headed back to his BMW. He sat in the lot and waited for a beep.

  And waited. The breeze off of Jamaica Bay began to flow in chilly gusts. Here was a place technically within the city limits that seemed as far removed from the glitter and glory of New York as Patagonia. Sitting in his battered car, Joey could look across at the Belt Parkway less than twenty feet away, cars and trucks whizzing by heading out to the Island. Perhaps one of those cars contained Steve. By nine o’clock, it was clear that none of those cars contained Steve.

  Now Joey was unhappy. In fact, he was going crazy. He beeped Steve again and again but got no answer. He tried Westley on his beeper, his cell phone, but got no response. Finally, at 9:19, Westley called back at a pay phone outside the diner. Standing there in the chilly wind, the sound of a highway behind him, Joey got the word from Westley that Steve was running behind and would meet him at a parking lot a half mile away alongside the Marine Park Golf Course. Joey jumped into his car, furious but still happy that he was finally going to get paid.

  He drove west on the Belt, pulled off at the next exit north onto Flatbush Avenue, and had to make a U-turn to get into the Marine
Park Golf Course. As he pulled into the huge parking lot of the municipal golf course, he discovered that there was not a streetlight in sight. He had the place to himself.

  As he drove into a corner of the deserted lot, the dark and frigid-looking golf course was on his left. On his right, on the other side of Flatbush, he could make out the lights of the tiny houses jam-packed into the Mill Basin subdivision, which sits perched right on the water. Some had little piers that serviced giant fishing boats. The parking lot he sat in was dotted with broken clamshells dropped by seagulls. The shells made a crunchy sound as he pulled into one of several hundred empty spaces. It was fair to say that he was alone in the world at that moment. All he could hear was the whoosh of cars speeding by on the Belt and the occasional cry of a gull. The water that was no more than twenty yards away was called Dead Horse Bay.

  He was there maybe five minutes when a brown twodoor late-model Oldsmobile wheeled into the lot and drove slowly toward him.

  The car stopped a few feet away. Joey O got out. He began to walk toward the driver’s side. As he approached, he could make out Steve—a white man in his forties with heavy eyebrows and a thick mustache, heavyset, wearing a black cap and black leather jacket, sitting alone at the wheel. As Joey got closer, he probably had time to see at least one muzzle flash before he collapsed onto the broken pavement.

  As he lay dying, he managed to hear the car screech away.

  Motorists on nearby Flatbush Avenue heard the gunshots and investigated. A woman doctor and her male passenger pulled up and saw a man lying on the lot next to his open car door, the lights in the car still on, the engine idling. The doctor called the NYPD, and two patrol officers from the Sixty-third Precinct who were at the station house headed out for a meal got the case. They showed up within minutes.

  It was bad. Joey had been shot numerous times, but he was still awake and aware of his surroundings. As he lay on the ground of the empty and dark parking lot, Police Officer Steven Esposito moved in close and began asking questions.

  “Who shot you?”

  “Steve.”

  “Steve who?”

  “I don’t know his last name.”

  Joey had some difficulty responding, because bullets had pierced one of his lungs, his liver, his pancreas, his stomach, his spleen, and his intestine, not to mention one of his major arteries, which was spilling his life all over the crushed clamshells in the lot.

  “Where do you know him from?” PO Esposito inquired. “Where did you meet him?”

  “I just have his number,” Joey O declared, and recited it. “It’s a beeper number.” Joey was always good with numbers. He continued giving the cop number after number, being interrupted now and then by Emergency Medical Service technicians, who’d showed up and gone to work on him. They ripped off his shirt and began applying bandages to stop the bleeding. PO Esposito kept asking questions.

  “So how come you were down there with Steve?”

  “Picking up money for Wes,” Joey O replied.

  The cop misheard him and asked, “Who’s West?”

  “A friend.” He gave PO Esposito another number and described what had happened in the parking lot in brief terms: “Steve pulled up on the left side of my car. I got out of the car and Steve started shooting. Call my daughter Danielle.” He gave out one final number.

  This was his dying declaration. People who are dying usually have few reasons to lie. Joey O probably told the cop what he thought was the truth, although he certainly did not provide all the details. A detective carefully wrote all of this down, later, in triplicate.

  Joey was transported by ambulance east on the Belt and up Rockaway Parkway to the emergency room at Brookdale Hospital. At no time, while he was lying in the parking lot, lying in the ambulance driving down the Belt, or lying in a bed inside Brookdale, dying, did Joey O say anything about his boss, Vinny Palermo. He did not mention his name even once. He was shuttled into the trauma room, and after the doctors got a look at him, into the operating room he was sent.

  At 2:10 the next morning, October 11, 1998, Joseph Masella was pronounced dead of multiple gunshot wounds. His death was ruled a homicide, motive unknown. Joey O was no longer a problem for the DeCavalcante crime family, or more specifically, for the family’s rising star—Vincent Palermo.

  11

  THE GOOD OLD DAYS Bob Buccino grew up in the streets of North Jersey with wiseguys and wannabes. He knew their names but he was not one of them. He became a cop and ultimately one of the most informed members of law enforcement regarding the crime family of Sam the Plumber. He only met Sam once, and he recalled that he seemed to be a polite senior citizen. He watched the DeCavalcante family for nearly thirty years for the state attorney general’s Organized Crime Task Force. He knew where it came from and where it was going.

  In the old days, which he would ultimately come to look upon with a certain misty nostalgia, the wiseguys seemed to play by certain rules. The way he remembers it, DeCavalcante would insist that his crews hold legitimate jobs and wear suits if possible. He made sure they didn’t kill anybody but one another. When he was boss, DeCav

  alcante crime family members never broke the oath of silence. Sam the Plumber always insisted that when they were arrested, they would refuse to answer questions, but would do so politely.

  “He was a very sharp guy. Always well dressed. I never saw him without a shirt, a tie, and a suit. He was old school. There was strong discipline. He played by the rules. They same thing with drugs. I’m not going to say they weren’t involved in drugs, but the rule was if you were involved you couldn’t use the family name. When Frank Polizzi [Sam the Plumber’s underboss] opened a restaurant, he made all of the family show up and he chewed out one crew for not wearing suits.”

  After DeCavalcante retired and appointed John Riggi the boss, the adherence to certain rules continued. Buccino remembers his pursuit of John Riggi in the 1980s almost wistfully. At the time Riggi controlled the construction industry in north Jersey. He was a small man who served on governmental boards and attended charity fund-raisers while pocketing millions in extortion payments to maintain “labor peace” on construction sites across Jersey. He once wrote a letter to a respected businessman in Union County, New Jersey, advising him to take up vegetarianism.

  Mostly Buccino remembers John Riggi the vegetarian as a guy who almost never said anything that even resembled probable cause. On one occasion, the Organized Crime Task Force got a call from a local contractor who wanted to use nonunion workers and had been contacted by Riggi. The businessman told the investigators that Riggi had summoned him to a meeting for lunch at the Sheraton Hotel in Linden, New Jersey. The task force— which had been surveilling Riggi for months with no success—decided to bug the table in the hotel restaurant where the two would meet. The day of the meeting, they were sweating. The restaurant, which was usually half-full at lunch, was jammed. They couldn’t figure out why. When Riggi showed up they weren’t sure if the hotel would do the job they were instructed to do and place him at the right table. But the receptionist came through and Riggi sat down to lunch with the contractor as the task force listened in.

  Throughout the lunch they waited for incriminating statements. They listened for Riggi to demand cash payments in envelopes. They waited for threats of labor disruption or, even better, violence. Instead, Riggi sat down and said, “I’m John Riggi and I just want to tell you that New Jersey is a very pro-union state.”

  Then, one at a time, one union leader after another got up from a nearby table and came to Riggi’s table. They shook his hand and said what a great guy he was, then returned to their lunch. The leaders of nearly every local in north Jersey did this. It was, Buccino remembers, very impressive. Without saying a thing, Riggi made it clear whom he knew and what he could do. The contractor ultimately opted to hire union workers for his job.

  When the task force finally got enough evidence to indict Riggi on racketeering charges in 1989, Buccino went to the boss’s comfort
able home in Linden early one morning. Riggi opened the door in his underwear and asked the agents if they would let him shave and put on a suit. They complied, then took him to court. He later went to trial and was acquitted of all serious charges but found guilty of the minor charges. Years later law enforcement indicted Riggi on charges of buying off a juror in the case.

  Today Buccino thinks what’s left of the mob is a spoiled-brat version of the real thing. Today, he says, the younger soldiers are even greedier than their fathers were and far less patient. Half of them have become informants, and half of that number have worked out book deals. The whole thing has become a movie.

  He remembers a time when he was listening in on a social club, hoping for incriminating conversation. Agents can spend hours listening to talk about baseball scores and the best place to get prime ribs before hearing a word about crime. Buccino and his fellow investigators had wired up the social club and were listening in when suddenly they heard someone say, “He’s a rat! Let’s get him!”

  They didn’t know what to do. They had an obligation to prevent a murder, but the bug in the social club would become useless if they called in the local police to bust in and stop whatever atrocity was unfolding. They heard someone say, “Get the knife.” They were about to send in the cavalry when suddenly they heard something that made them stop.

  A commercial for dishwashing soap.

  “We got all upset,” Buccino says. “We thought there would be a murder going down. We got ready to go in when we hear the commercial. It was a movie.”

  October 11, 1998 The day after Joey O ended his astonishing Mafia career in a dark and empty golf-course parking lot littered with broken clamshells, there was much wringing of hands and second-guessing down at 26 Federal Plaza. The FBI agents who had spent nights and days listening to Joey O were at a loss for words. The constant money problems, the daughter’s psychologist bills, the girlfriend’s breast implants—all of that was over. In all those hours, it had never seemed that Joey O could emerge as a candidate for a mob hit. True, there were a lot of people in this world who were not happy with Joey O. But he owed everyone money, and if he was dead, he couldn’t pay. Or so the logic went.