Made Men

by Smith, Greg B.

  To solve it, he asked Ralphie to help out. Ralphie could not refuse without inspiring great suspicion in his new mentor. And Ralphie and his FBI handlers faced a dilemma as well: how to extricate Ralphie from the plot to murder, which was surely not allowed in any FBI handbook, without tipping their hand and losing their insider informant. Losing their informant would have been a very bad idea at a time when Tin Ear Sclafani was providing them with so much probable cause.

  Much of the probable cause came out of Tin Ear’s obsession with killing D’Amato. This was a kind of puzzle to the FBI. They couldn’t figure out why anybody wanted this guy dead. He earned for the family and he had been around for a long time. True, he was the brother of the onetime acting boss, John D’Amato, who’d been killed by orders of the family hierarchy in 1991. But that was a long time ago. And from what the FBI could pick up, it was clear that Vincent Palermo really did not like Frank D’Amato. Whatever the reason, when Vinny gave the “piece of work” to Sclafani, Tin Ear immersed himself in the details like a lawyer with a new deep-pocket client.

  And so, in the spring of 1999, Tin Ear Sclafani enrolled Ralphie Guarino in the Sclafani School of Mob Technique. He overwhelmed Ralphie with stories about this wiseguy and that wiseguy. He distinguished between real wiseguys and pretenders. The truth was that Joey Sclafani seemed to like Ralphie, the way a father takes a son under his wing and teaches him, say, the correct way to tie a trout fly or the perfect stance to assume when hitting a curveball. In this case, Joey Sclafani was teaching his newfound protégé the correct way to kill a guy. And throughout the lessons, there was a hint of resentment over not being appreciated. At times Sclafani sounded like a government worker complaining about how so-and-so won a promotion in clear violation of civil-service rule such-and-such. Always he was there with the longevity business.

  “I’m here over forty years,” he would whine. “I did things for them.”

  The lessons were daily and Joey Sclafani never seemed to tire of them. They would talk about everything—about Sclafani’s failed efforts to quit smoking, about his recent experimentation with Viagra. They talked in Ralphie’s car, in Joey’s social club on Bay Ridge Avenue, during trips to Florida to check in with the DeCavalcante branch office. But in the spring of 1999, Tin Ear mostly talked with Ralphie about the best, most convenient way to kill Frank D’Amato.

  He seemed to rely on movies to guide his way.

  During a March 20, 1999, conversation, Sclafani— intentionally or otherwise—kept referring to scenes from Goodfellas as he discussed his plans. He said that when a guy was murdered on orders of the bosses, the guy’s name was simply never mentioned again. “Like our Joey O,” he said. “If they take you, you’ll never hear of him no more. They had a guy. I says, ‘What happened to that guy?’ ‘Oh, we don’t talk about him no more.’ ”

  “Don’t they okay it with everybody first?”

  Joey Sclafani gave the ultimate Brooklyn reply: “Yeah. No. No no no no. It’s okayed. It’s sanctioned. But they don’t want John Doe to know. Like, me to know. If you took a guy, I’m not supposed to know it. They pack ’em up, and say go to a farm or something, like five miles away or wherever the fuck it is. They don’t know where the body is, except one guy. They dig the hole. Somebody digs a hole first, and that’s the guy that takes it. He just dumps it in and covers it. Nobody knows but that guy.”

  “That’s the right way, Joey.”

  “Unless you and me did it. We could both dig the hole and put it in. That’s the way they do it.”

  “That’s terrific,” said the chronically enthusiastic Ralphie.

  Then Joey brought up the motorcycle plan. He had decided that Frank D’Amato was an extremely difficult old guy to kill. Frank had been around forever and knew everybody, and because his brother had been murdered, he trusted no one. He would be a tough job. Which was how Joey Tin Ear came up with the motorcycle plot. He was going to pull up alongside Frank’s car as he was driving along the highway and blast away. Then he’d speed off into the night while Frank careened off the road, perhaps into a busload of septuagenarians headed for Atlantic City, but you couldn’t worry about things like that.

  The motorcycle plot had many problems. For instance, Tin Ear did not own a motorcycle. He had been bugging Ralphie to get one from an acquaintance in Florida, and now he was pestering Ralphie again.

  “Why are you bringing the motorcycle back up?” Ralphie said. He was clearly not convinced that the plan was a good one, plus he had been instructed by the FBI to delay Joey Sclafani from carrying out his plan for as long as possible. The idea was to collect as much incriminating information while still preventing a death.

  “I want it to whack that guy,” Tin Ear said, and Ralphie laughed.

  “I know, I know.”

  “I’m dying to whack him.”

  “I know, I know. Well you have to take me with you.”

  “I’ll get that cocksucker. Even if you ain’t there. I go by myself sometimes.”

  “Yeah, but you got to take me,” Ralphie said.

  “No, I know, you’ll be there. If I got to put him in the trunk half-alive and bring him to you and say, ‘Here, finish this guy off,’ ” Tin Ear said, and they both laughed.

  There was another problem with the motorcycle plan. Tin Ear Sclafani—who claimed he’d been in the Mafia forty years and had twenty bodies—had never ridden a motorcycle in his life.

  “They got to teach me how to do it,” he confided.

  “No, no,” Ralphie said. “You just sit on the back.”

  “No, I want to learn how to ride. God forbid you get shot at, too, and get hit in the leg. I got to learn how to ride.”

  “One guy in the front and one guy in the back,” Ralphie offered, “and you just drive up next to him and ‘bango!’ ”

  “We’ll get him,” Joey Sclafani said. “This guy has got to be gone.”

  During the next week, Joey Sclafani told Ralphie he had tried four times to kill Frank D’Amato. This was one tough piece of work. The two were told to meet with Vinny Ocean on a street corner outside a diner in Brooklyn. The FBI was very excited about this meeting. There was a good chance that Ralphie—who would be wired to the gills— would be involved in a conversation with Vinny Ocean and Tin Ear about the ongoing unsuccessful attempts to kill Frank D’Amato. This kind of talk would constitute what the government liked to call an “overt act” and would be of use in the conspiracy case they were trying to cobble together against Vinny Ocean. Why they termed it an “overt act” was a mystery. None of the “overt acts” committed by the Mafia were ever “overt.”

  Nevertheless, on the day of the meeting, they got a disappointment. Tin Ear told Ralphie to stay in the car while he walked over and had a little chat with Vinny the boss. Ralphie waited in the car, and Tin Ear returned a few minutes later, smiling. “We are all right with him, believe me,” he told Ralphie as Vinny drove away in another car.

  “What’d he say?”

  “You hear me talking to him? Well, I could tell you a little bit,” Sclafani said, and the FBI leaned forward and turned up the volume. “He says, ‘Joey, did you go for the guy?’ ‘Yeah, I went four times. Yeah, all right. I didn’t get him.’ ”

  Ralphie asked, “Did you tell him you were with me?”

  “I didn’t say nothing.”

  “Oh, okay.”

  “Nothing about you. When it’s done, I’m going to say, ‘Okay, me and Ralphie. Nobody knows, only him.’ ”

  “He wants it done when?”

  “Well, I got to do this.”

  “So let’s get the motorcycles.”

  Joey Sclafani made it clear that killing this Frank D’Amato would not be an easy task. He pointed out, for instance, that nobody else in Anthony Rotondo’s crew had assisted in any of the previous attempts. “All four, five guys, I’m the only one who went. By myself I went three times.”

  “If he gives us a mission, we’ll take care of it,” Ralphie said.

  �
�We got permission,” Sclafani said, demonstrating why they called him Tin Ear. “I got it.”

  “No, I said mission,” Ralphie said. “We’ll take care of it.”

  The problem was not only that familiarity bred contempt, but in the case of the suspicious Frank D’Amato, it also bred high paranoia. This was a familiar Mafia phenomenon—the closer you got to the people with whom you do business, the less you trusted anybody. Tin Ear knew he could not get close enough to D’Amato to kill him because D’Amato knew him too well.

  “I got to get a stranger,” he told Ralphie, “because he knows it. He stays away. You follow me?”

  But with the FBI listening in, Tin Ear Sclafani made it very clear that despite all the little details, despite all the little problems—none of that mattered. His boss, Vincent Palermo, had consulted with the other bosses and the consigliere of the family and there was now no question about what had to be done.

  “Vinny said, ‘I don’t give a fuck, he’s got to go,’ ” Sclafani said. “He’s gone. This motherfucker is gone. Like a fucking spaceship.”

  In the spring and summer months that followed, the FBI began piling up the evidence for probable cause. There was talk of murder, there was actual murder. There was loan-sharking galore. And plenty of extortion. Extortion seemed to be a daily occurrence in Tin Ear Sclafani’s life, especially complicated extortion. In the case of Barr Industries, the complexity of shaking down a hapless and frightened businessman had risen to new levels. With the DeCavalcante and the Colombo families bickering over who would obtain the bigger pound of flesh, the owner of Barr, Marcantonio, had decided it was a good time to get out of town. He and his wife bought tickets, boarded a plane, landed in Miami, and then pretended that no one would find them there. This pretense lasted only a few days before members of both families found out where Marcantonio was hiding. They were not pleased. The guy claimed he wasn’t running away, that he was just on vacation. But there was the discovery that he had emptied out some of his bank accounts just before his plane took off for the Sunshine State. And then there was the glaring fact that he had sold his house in New York and bought a new house in Florida. And he opened a restaurant, which by happenstance was listed only in his wife’s name. For a guy who owed gangsters hundreds of thousands of dollars and who was claiming he was broke, these were considered brazen acts.

  Sclafani was explaining all this to Ralphie while he waited for Marcantonio of Barr Industries to beep him. “I’m trying to get straight in my mind what to tell him,” Tin Ear said. “But there ain’t nothing to tell him. The guy, he’s out of order. He’s talking too strong. I don’t like the way he’s talking.”

  He said he had talked to DeCavalcante capo Anthony Rotondo, who effectively washed his hands of the matter. The decision had been made to leave the owner of Barr Industries to the mercy of the Colombo crime family and Chickie Leto, who had already made it clear that he was going to kill the guy because the guy owned him $450,000.

  “He says let them do what they want,” Tin Ear said. “They got a free hand with him.”

  For Ralphie, the conversation about Barr was complicated by his inability to participate in or contribute in any way to a murder plot. His job was to convince Sclafani not to hurt the guy, or at least postpone things long enough for a case to be made against everybody involved in the plot.

  “You know what I’m thinking?” Ralphie asked. “What if they look to hurt him and then he comes back and says, ‘You know, you were right, Joey. I didn’t do the right thing. I apologize.’ ”

  “Then I go back to them and we can make a deal,” Sclafani said. “I’ll say, ‘Well, what are you gonna do here? You came off, you robbed this money, you robbed a half a million dollars. Right after you robbed it, these guys start threatening you, then you put me on the books. You never

  even came back with fifty thousand, a hundred thousand. You never came back to take care of anybody. You took off to Florida, where you bought a house. You canceled all your businesses here and everything and you said nothing to nobody. You never called me, but you put me on the books so I could keep these guys away from you.’ ”

  Tin Ear was not happy with the position this put him in. Here he was, brought in for protection by a guy who then hit the road and bought a house. In a way, this Marcantonio seemed to be mocking everyone involved. Tin Ear was nearly finished with him. He was considering telling the Colombo soldier Chickie about another piece of property and another business the guy owned.

  “I gotta give him all the help I can give him, because he’s a wiseguy, you know?”

  “I think that works, Joey,” Ralphie replied. “That’s the right move.”

  “I gotta do it this way,” Joey said. “This kid is too cocky. I really don’t know how to handle him but to hurt him. Because he’s a legit guy. He’s not a street guy. I could go there with a couple guys, break his fucking head. I could say, ‘Ay, you gotta listen to me.’ But that ain’t gonna accomplish nothing. Whatever he’s doing, I want guys close to me to work with me. You know what I’m saying? I don’t want them to fear me. Well, fear me in the sense that they know if they fuck me they’re gonna die.”

  July 29, 1999 The hardened gangster with twenty bodies on his underworld résumé sat on a hotel sofa in his underwear drinking a beer. He wore a sleeveless white T-shirt, a pair of print boxer shorts, and dark socks. He looked like any man in his middle fifties beaten down by a life of hard living—his whole body slumped a little, as if it was running out of gas. His hair was disheveled, his gut was inching over his belt line. When he talked he sometimes seemed distracted by events taking place inside his head. He sat splay-legged on the couch facing Ralphie Guarino, who was wearing a polo shirt and shorts and looked ready to hit the beach as long as he could stay out of the sun. The men were sitting around chatting, and only one of them was aware that the United States government had hidden a camera in a wall fixture. The camera faced Joseph Sclafani head-on, and Ralphie sat next to him in a cushioned chair, sneezing from the air-conditioning. A cooking show played quietly on the hotel television with the volume low enough that the agents could hear every word as Joey Sclafani explained how wonderful it was to be a member of the Mafia.

  “You can never get killed here,” he said to Ralphie. “To get killed, you got to fuck a guy’s wife. You got to be a rat, or you got to do something really bad. Like, say, I took your money, fuck you, I’m not paying you, I don’t give a fuck what you do. But they take care of it their own way. No bullshit this way.”

  “I believe sometimes guys go because other guys are just jealous,” Ralphie said. “But that’s all the other crews. Not this.”

  “No, they’re not jealous over here. Well, there’s jealousy in every crew. But it’s different over here. It’s not the—”

  “They are more civilized.” Sclafani sat in his underwear and complained about his septuagenarian captain, Uncle Joe Giacobbe. Uncle Joe had recently committed a major-league La Cosa Nostra faux pas—he asked about a guy who’d been killed. Sclafani was implying that Uncle Joe, who had been col

  lecting Social Security for a decade, was beginning to lose it. He said Uncle Joe had asked not once but three times about the whereabouts of a guy who’d been murdered, which was essentially like Martha Stewart forgetting to set out the salad forks. It was simply not done. He was recalling the entire conversation for Ralphie.

  “Don’t you know you haven’t seen him in two years, and you’re asking about him? Nobody here, Joey. You asked about him three times already. Every time you opened your mouth, they look back and walk away. He says, ‘Yeah, I was wondering why.’ What do you mean, wonder why? He says, ‘Oh, oh, all right.’ Now you know. Don’t ask about him no more. You understand?” Once again Sclafani launched into his “why me” shtick, complaining about less capable people being promoted to captain when obviously he should have gotten the nod.

  “This is what I’m saying. He may be older than me— he’s seventy-five, seventy-six—but he ain’t
got as much as I got.”

  Sclafani was beginning to sink into his old war stories mode. The more difficult it was to think about the present, the easier it was to drift back into the past. He began telling a story about a plan to rob an armored car on the west side of Manhattan near Greenwich Village. “My score again,” he said. “I always come up with the score.” The driver on the job was a gangster named Joey Farrone. They decided to do a dry run. Sclafani instructed Joey Farrone to drop him off on a corner of Varick Street, then drive around the block several times until an appointed time. The problem was Joey Farrone could not handle even the simplest of instructions.

  “Joey’s got no mind, you know? He always gets lost,” Sclafani said. “ ‘All you have to do, I don’t give a fuck what you do, just keep making right turns. Just make right turns, Joe. If you make a right turn, you gotta come back here.’ ” Ralphie was, by now, laughing out loud. “I’m serious,” Sclafani said.

  The day of the dry run, Sclafani packed away a pistol with the intention of doing the job if the conditions were right. If they were not right, he would simply check out the details, walk out of the building, and get picked up by his driver, Joey Farrone, for a clean getaway. As planned, Joey Farrone dropped Sclafani off on the corner of Varick and immediately got lost in the winding streets of Greenwich Village. Meanwhile, Sclafani and another gangster walked into the building and right up to the two armored-car guards carrying sacks of money. They did not make a move, but instead saw what they needed to see and walked out of the building. When they got outside, Joey Farrone was nowhere in sight.

  “I just keep going around the block,” Sclafani said. “Do you believe he left me on the corner for three hours? He just couldn’t find me. He took the car home to my house in Brooklyn. Three hours I’m in New York, and I’m calling my wife. She said, ‘Joey? Yeah, Joey’s here. He dropped the car off and he says he got lost. He says he couldn’t find you.’ She says, ‘It happened again, Joe.’ My wife, she knows.”