Made Men

by Smith, Greg B.

  When Marshmallow didn’t get the message and kept trying to talk about this subject, Vinny beeped him with another number to call. The only problem was the number wasn’t registering and Marshmallow had run out of quarters for the pay phone.

  “I’m fucking anxious to hear what you got to say because I have no fuckin’ idea what you’re talking about, I swear on my kids’ life,” Vinny yelled. “You’re a fucking— out of your fucking mind. Did it come in?”

  “No,” Marshmallow said. “Yeah.”

  “Okay, call me on that number.”

  This was how Vinny had to behave. He had known for months, ever since he saw the FBI agents watching his house from a boat on Long Island Sound, that he was under surveillance. And he knew that the people whose job it was to follow him around every day were likely pretty ticked off that his driver had been terminated right under their noses. He had now entered a new world, where the wrong word uttered in the right context could lead to a dance with RICO. Vinny Ocean now lived his life under the spotlight of the Racketeering Influence and Corruption Order Act.

  Joey O was gone, but his ghost remained.

  The FBI was going crazy. They now had Vinny Ocean—who for months said nothing incriminating on the telephone and was the sworn enemy of probable cause— twitching like a squirrel. He was speaking in obvious code. The cool and collected Vinny Ocean they had come to know was now a paranoid, amateur prevaricator. Although they were unhappy that Joey O, a living, breathing human being, had been executed on their watch, they knew that the target of their investigation was obviously rattled. And that meant opportunity for the bureau.

  They had, by the date Joey O was killed, nearly ten months of taped recordings in hand. Ralphie Guarino had worked his way up the ladder at least far enough to implicate Vinny Ocean in a number of crimes, including a conspiracy to murder Charlie Majuri. He had managed to convince Joey O that he was his friend, and as a result, Joey O had grown comfortable telling Ralphie just about everything he knew or had heard. Ralphie had captured hours of candid talks with Joey about loan sharking, extortion, stealing anything that wasn’t nailed down, and murder. Lots of probable cause. And Ralphie’s number-one contact with Vinny had consistently been Joey O, who had managed to offer up more incriminating statements about his boss than about anyone else in the entire DeCavalcante crime family. Joey O was practically a repository of damaging information about Vinny Ocean and everyone else in the underworld with whom he had had even a passing acquaintance. And he was history. There would be no more Joey O explaining who was in charge, who was on the ins, who was on the outs. Ralphie was still out there wearing a wire, but his Virgil was dead.

  The FBI now sat back and waited. When a member or associate of organized crime dies, the hierarchy has to deal with both his assets and his debts. And if the deceased had been supervising anybody, the supervisee had to be reassigned to a new supervisor. It was all very civil service. Ralphie was now in a position to be reassigned. The options were limited. He was from Brooklyn, and so were most of his loan-shark customers and sports book clients. So it made sense to put him with a soldier in the New York wing of the family. The only question was, who?

  The answer came quickly. A week after Joey O’s funeral, the family put Ralphie with a fifty-four-year-old oldschool gangster from Staten Island who was proud to report to anyone who would listen that once, a long time ago, he had actually known Joe Valachi. His name was Joseph Sclafani, but everyone called him Tin Ear because he was deaf in his right ear. The FBI had a light file on him, listing him as a soldier with a handful of arrests for minor gambling charges and one weapons count. He was not a well-known gangster, but he was Ralphie’s.

  The fact that Ralphie had been put with a made member of the family was a sign that they trusted him, and that was good news for both the FBI and Ralphie. They now had long talks about where the investigation was going and how to keep Ralphie on the street with his little wire device. They decided to cook up a new “robbery” that Ralphie could take to Sclafani to impress him and gain his confidence. They had no idea how easy it was going to be to do just that.

  12

  It is a well-known fact that many of the actors who make a living pretending to be gangsters either grew up with or know real gangsters. James Caan, who played Sonny in The Godfather, was good friends with a Colombo captain named Jo Jo Russo. Joe Pesci modeled his psychotic Tommy character in Goodfellas on a Gambino gangster named Bobby Basciano. And Jerry Orbach spent hours hanging around with Crazy Joey Gallo, right up until the last hours of Joey. Sometimes the relationship between pretend wiseguys and the real thing gets even cozier.

  When The Sopranos began filming, it would hold daylong casting calls for extras. Hundreds, even thousands of people from New York and New Jersey who saw themselves as looking like members of the Mafia would stand in line for hours, résumés in hand. One such aspiring goomba was a twenty-five-year-old actor from Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, named Thomas Bifalco.

  Bifalco was cobbling together a résumé by making walk-on appearances on TV shows. He’d snagged a walkon on the show Spin City and landed a role in a small production on Long Island with the mysteriously multiethnic title, Meshuggener Godfather. He decided to put up with the long line at the Sopranos show-up. He endured and landed a walk-on.

  But this would not pay the bills. Bifalco had a sideline. He had opened up a boiler room down on Wall Street. This type of operation had become a big moneymaker for the mob in the late 1990s, operating on the principle that where there’s money, there’s opportunity for larceny. Bifalco’s boiler room was the usual setup. A group of young hustlers sat in an anonymous office down in the winding streets near Wall Street, working the phones. In Bifalco’s case, there were eight phones. The “brokers” would coldcall unsuspecting victims, usually senior citizens, and try to berate them into buying stock in a worthless company. They would make the worthless company—in Bifalco’s case, something called Falcon Marine—seem like the deal of a lifetime. They would then con the elderly persons to invest everything they had saved all their lives. And they had to act quickly because the deal was going to disappear.

  In this manner, Bifalco and his colleagues managed to steal $300,000 from thirty elderly victims.

  During Bifalco’s sentencing on securities-fraud charges, John Panagopoulos, the New York assistant attorney general who prosecuted The Sopranos walk-on, tried to make a distinction between the real world and the TV world, but it wasn’t easy. “He did not realize this is not The Sopranos. This is not television. He cannot shake down real victims and walk away unpunished.”

  Bifalco got two years in state prison. He will most likely not be making any more appearances on The Sopranos.

  November 4, 1998 The courtroom of Administrative Judge Steven Fisher sits far out in Jamaica, Queens, in an aging Tammany Hall–built monstrosity that refuses to enter the late twentieth century. It is one of those ancient structures of New York’s outer boroughs that are frozen forever in the past, stuck in a time when political machines rewarded the loyal with jobs for life in obscure municipal backwaters. Here the underachievers of the Democratic Party could file and refile overstuffed boxes of dry, yellowing documents of consequence to few. The whole place was run by dozens of civil servants who could have been characters in Bleak House—powerless bureaucrats who knew all the right ways to torture the unsuspecting citizens who ventured into their musty, dusty realm. On this miserable frigid day in November, Vincent Palermo was one of those unsuspecting citizens.

  The hearing in question was listed in the civil docket as 16705/98: City of New York v. Din Din Seafood, DBA Wiggles. The file was impressive. The case had amassed enough motions and replies and memoranda of law that it took up four binders that stacked a good three feet high. Lawyers on both sides had generated millions of words and hundreds of billable hours. The city lawyers said New York Police Department vice-squad detectives had paid the twenty-dollar cover to get into Wiggles, where they discovered adult activity
taking place in far more than 40 percent of the club. Lawyers for the club denied it, but the city shut down Wiggles anyway and took its case to Judge Fisher. One by one the city’s witnesses took the stand, re

  creating for Judge Fisher just exactly what was going on inside the pink walls of Wiggles. As the hearing droned on, Vinny Ocean sat in the back of the room, wondering how it had all come down to this: Was or was not booby pool a violation of New York State law?

  Detective Eugene Jung of the Queens vice squad was sitting in the witness chair. Detective Jung was describing a night in October when he was having a little chat with a dancer named Camille. His problem was that he had just had a lap dance in the cigar room, and now he was running out of the money the city allowed him to spend to prove that there was vice in the night. He came out of the cigar room and sat down at the bar, and another dancer named Lena walked over.

  “Would you like to play booby pool?” she asked. This was, for Detective Jung, a new one. He was intrigued. He asked, “What’s that?”

  “It’s a game of pool and the main thing is that when you take a shot, I will try to block your shot with my boobs.”

  “And did you play booby pool with her?” asked the city attorney with a straight face.

  “Yes.”

  Unfortunately for Detective Jung, in the middle of the booby-pool game a fight broke out in the room outside and Lena the dancer went running out to see what was what. The fight ended and Lena returned to finish the boobypool game. When Detective Jung would lean down to take a shot, Lena would lean down, too. In the middle of this she asked him if he wanted another lap dance. She said she’d seen the one Camille had provided and was not impressed.

  “She was lazy,” Lena contended. “She was just lying on you. I can do better.”

  Detective Jung, however, had run out of municipal funding. He gave her his last five dollars and left.

  Next on the witness stand was Lena herself, whose real name was Myan Leroi Masterantonio of Oyster Bay, Long Island. For eighteen months before Detective Jung had showed up, Myan had worked at Wiggles from six o’clock at night to two the next morning, three to five nights a week. She acknowledged playing booby pool but denied touching Detective Jung in any manner. In the cigar room, she insisted that she always wore what she called a “European bottom, which means it has to be basically mainly covered, with a little bit hanging.”

  All of this amounted to a pretty tough case to make against Wiggles and Vinny Ocean. Lena had denied lap dancing but freely admitted to leaning suggestively over a pool table, and the city had only Detective Jung talking about a single lap dance. There was no pattern to show that the 40 percent rule had been broken repeatedly inside Wiggles, which was the heart and soul of the city’s allegation. It was Vinny Ocean’s forty-fifth birthday coming up on Saturday, and as the hearing was winding down, he had reason to believe he might get to reopen Wiggles after all. Things were looking up. Then came Frank Stellini, otherwise known as Frankie Pina.

  Frankie was being called by Weinstein, the lawyer for Wiggles. The idea was that Frankie would rebut the city’s claims that sex was running out of control throughout the entire strip club, instead of being relegated to 40 percent. At Wiggles, Frankie Pina was just another mortadella who got a job because he knew somebody. He called himself the assistant general manager, but two days after the city came in and shut the place down, Frankie became the general manager. This happened because the real general manager, a guy named Tommy, had a heart attack. The first thing Frankie did after taking the witness stand was tell a little joke when they asked him to identify himself.

  “They nicknamed me Mussolini because I did not tolerate nothing,” he confided to the judge.

  He was asked to explain where the rules were posted. He said they posted the rules for all the dancers to see “very inconspicuously—they were right in the middle of the mirrors where they put on the makeup.”

  Frankie Pina then explained the rules according to Frankie Pina. “Any such activity that does not inquire with the rules is supposed to be reported to the manager.”

  The lawyer Weinstein did his best to keep Frankie on track. He asked what steps the club took to ensure that the 40 percent rule was adhered to. Frankie replied as best he could.

  “We took every step we could possibly take. Sometimes it might look like what you are doing, but they are not doing exactly what they think they are doing. Because in this business, it is imagination more than anything else.”

  Presumably the judge knew what Frankie was talking about. Frankie allowed that sometimes accidents did happen. “Another dancer by accident... maybe a top might come off. One of the girls solicited for the so-called unquote blow job. The girl told me.”

  But Frankie insisted that these incidents were unusual. He explained that the “industry” was “under attack” and that Wiggles had been forced to do a “configuration of the situation.” This meant they started making the dancers sign a set of rules that prohibited prostitution in the club. “So I kill two birds with one stone, as they say.”

  Then it was the city lawyer’s turn. The city lawyer began asking Frankie just exactly what went on inside the cigar room. Frankie was ready with an answer.

  “I tell the customer if you want to spend private time with a girl, enjoy nice cheap cigars, it costs this much.”

  The city lawyer wanted to know how it was that he was selling cigars when he did not have a license to sell tobacco. Again Frankie was ready for him.

  “We give them away. That’s why they are cheap.”

  He explained why customers need to spend “private time” with a dancer by contending, “Sometimes they will do anything to hear something nice from a girl which they don’t hear from their wives.”

  The trouble was, the more questions the city lawyer asked, the more times Frankie was forced to confess to another “accident” during this “private time” with the dancers. The city lawyer pressed further, demanding to know how often a breast might “fall out” of a halter top, as Frankie had put it. Frankie explained that he had lived with three girls his whole life and “sometimes it happens.”

  “So,” the city lawyer demanded, “there are times that a breast may be exposed?”

  “Sometimes,” Frankie admitted. “A big breast, a small bra. It might fall off. It’s uncontrollable.”

  “No further questions,” said the city lawyer.

  The judge reserved decision and all Vinny Ocean could do was wait. He couldn’t be sure if Frankie Pina had simply hurt the case or if he had completely blown it to pieces. He had a lot of deals going and would survive no matter what the judge decided, but Wiggles was a major element of the Vinny Ocean empire. In a way, Vinny benefited from Wiggles’s notoriety as much as from its steady stream of crumpled-up five- and ten-dollar bills. He controlled another strip club called Gentlemen’s Quarters on Long Island, but who had ever heard of that? Wiggles was in the news. When he was dealing with Bob Guccione, he was able to brag about a known commodity to show the clout he had in “the industry.” The closing of Wiggles wouldn’t kill Vinny Ocean, but it sure would hurt.

  Around midday November 19, 1998, Administrative Judge Steven Fisher made it short and sweet: Wiggles was history. The club, Judge Fisher found, had clearly violated the 40 percent rule and would hereforth be prohibited from doing business. Booby pool and everything else was to cease and desist immediately. The city had won in every way; the residents of Rego Park who had protested in rain, sleet, and snow won in every way. Both groups issued press releases proclaiming victory. Newspaper photographers and TV camera people schlepped all the way out on Queens Boulevard to take a photo of Wiggles’s front door with the big orange “Closed” sticker. Vinny Ocean was out of the strip-club business in Queens.

  One of his nephews called him to tell him the news at 6:25 P.M., hours after the decision had come in. With the FBI listening in, the nephew said he thought they lost because of Frankie Pina’s big mouth. Vinnie agreed. He hung up, and
within five minutes he had Frankie himself on the line. Vinny, who usually evidenced a certain modicum of self-control, lost it completely on Frankie.

  “You dirty motherfucker asshole moron dirty cocksucker,” Vinny screamed. “You’re looking to hurt me, you motherfucker. You destroyed my life, that’s what you did.”

  The next day was worse. He must have been stewing in it, turning over certain moments of testimony, recalling the little asides to the judge that Frankie had offered up. On the phone with one of his lawyers he promised to kick Frankie “in the balls.”

  “This fucking bastard, fucking wiseass bastard greaseball,” he added for effect. “They think they know everything.”

  He called Frankie again on his cell phone and screamed: “I went for a hundred thousand dollars to prove that they’re wrong and it don’t happen back there and you fucking admit that it does happen! You were trying to make the judge laugh! You think this is a laughing matter? This is my fucking life, man!”

  Vinny slammed down the phone.

  Over the next six months, Vinny had his lawyers appeal. They lost. He looked all over the city for another storefront to place Wiggles. He found nothing. He immersed himself in his other deals, with Guccione, with the Siemens people in Germany. He had his crew sitting in noshow jobs at T&M Construction, which meant a percentage of all the hotel renovation jobs they were working at the hotels in Manhattan. He had another guy in a no-show job at Barr Industries, the oil company he was fighting over with the Colombo family. He had his other strip club in Long Island and his restaurants in Queens. His soldiers were complaining that he had plenty but never seemed to have enough. Tin Ear Sclafani confided to Ralphie what a lot of the members of Vinny’s crew were thinking: “Vinny always says he’s broke. He’s a multimillionaire.” But Vinny had headaches. Both his kids from the first marriage were on their own and doing well, but he was still paying their college bills. And now his three children from the second marriage, Tara, Danielle, and Vinny Jr., were about to enter the college years. Jaw-dropping demands for money were headed his way. Wiggles, Vinny’s numberone source of cash, was gone and Vinny Ocean needed money, and he needed it right away.