Ralphie was still laughing when Sclafani said, “I had to take the subway home.”
The phone rang and Ralphie said, “Who the fuck?”
“Keep it fuckin’ ringing,” Sclafani said. “I hope they ain’t listening to us.”
“Oh no,” Ralphie said, picking up the phone. When he was done, Sclafani brought up something he’d obviously been thinking about for a long time.
“I’m gonna put you up,” he said. “I’m gonna propose you.”
For anyone who knew anything about La Cosa Nostra and the secret society and the history and the mythology and everything else, this was a huge moment for Ralphie Guarino. Joseph (Tin Ear) Sclafani had just said he was going to propose Ralphie Guarino for membership in the DeCavalcante crime family. This meant he would be formally inducted into the family. There would be a ceremony and everything, where they’d burn the picture of the saint in his hand and warn him that he would burn just like that if he ever informed on his brothers in crime. He would swear allegiance to the DeCavalcante crime family above all others, including his own family. He would be a made man, a button man, a man of honor. He would have to pay a percentage of his earnings each week to his captain, but no one could touch him without permission from the family hierarchy. His name would grow in stature in certain circles. The fact that Sclafani was willing to do this showed how much he trusted his friend and protégé. It also showed the success of the FBI’s daring ruse. They had planted a listening device in their secret informant, and somehow he had thrived. It was rare indeed for someone to be proposed as a made member of organized crime. Some Mafia associates work for years hoping in vain for that magic moment. Here was an FBI informant being proposed for membership. Scalfani was putting his reputation on the line. He was vouching for Ralphie. He had no idea how wrong he was.
“I want to do it,” he said.
“Well, thank you,” Ralphie said.
“Now, when you’re proposed, you’re like a wiseguy.”
“I know, I know.”
“You know what that means? That it’s just a matter of time.” He explained that he had the support of the three bosses, Vinny Palermo, Jimmy Palermo, and Charlie Majuri. “Though Charlie can’t say nothing anyway.”
“I can’t believe this,” said Ralphie, playing his role.
Sclafani then began talking to Ralphie as if he were a bride getting ready for the big day: all the do’s and don’ts. “First of all, you’re not supposed to get in no trouble, no fights. No problems with wiseguys. But we’ll keep you out of that anyway.” He was very excited about the whole thing. He warned Ralphie it could take some time. Another associate named Vic, who’d been proposed months before, still had not been inducted into the family. But Sclafani was enthusiastic about getting moving quickly. He was confident he had made the right choice.
“I’d rather you get proposed right away,” he said to Ralphie, and to the FBI agents listening in. He asked Ralphie if he wanted another beer, but Ralphie said no.
They discussed heading down to the pool, then Ralphie talked on the phone with his wife and told her he bought white T-shirts and confided that he only wore black underwear but that he bought a white pair so he would wear them under a white outfit.
“You wanna talk to me or you wanna call me back later or something,” he said to his wife. “You seem like you’re involved in something. I heard the bathroom flushing. Are you finished now? Are you feeling better or are you still hungover?” Pause. “Boy oh boy. What’d you take, mean pills this morning? Hold on.” He took another call from Joey Smash, who demanded to talk to him in person. He came back to his wife and said good-bye.
The two men then put sunscreen on each other.
“That’s why I do it in the room, because I don’t like doing it down there,” Ralphie said.
“Why?”
“Because people look at you. You can’t put it on right, you know? I put it on my head,” Ralphie said, rubbing lotion on his growing bald spot.
“You should of bought a fucking hat,” Sclafani said. “Should I put some of that stuff on my leg?”
“Sure,” Ralphie said. “Otherwise you’ll cook out there, Joey. I tell you, I can’t believe how fucking fat I got. I can’t believe how fat I am.”
“I need that little bag,” said Sclafani, the trained killer.
“What do you gotta bring the little bag down there, right? I don’t have a bag. You go down there with bags, they’ll think we’re shopping-bag ladies. Joey, do me a favor,” Ralphie said. “Put this on my back. Yeah. Now the shoulders. This is good stuff.”
“Yeah?” said Joey.
“Bain de Soleil. Now I’ll do your back. That’s where you get it, on the back. You don’t realize it. The front, you know it when you’re hot. The fucking back, you got no control.”
“Nope,” said Tin Ear Sclafani, veteran soldier of the DeCavalcante crime family.
“I don’t believe how fat I got,” said Ralphie, gangster in the making. “Fucking fat.”
15
Sometime in the summer of 1999, the DeCavalcante crime family became aware there was a rat in the ranks. The FBI, of course, did not yet know this.
By the summer of 1999, in fact, they were quite pleased with themselves. They had collected thousands of hours of secretly recorded conversations implicating numerous high-ranking members of the DeCavalcante crime family. They had enough, in fact, to bring an indictment. But they faced a dilemma. In the middle of their investigation, one of the key players, Joey O Masella, had been murdered right under their noses by persons unknown. With that in mind, they had pressed Ralphie Guarino to get back out there and see what he could see about the murder of Joey O.
After his many months of wearing a wire, Ralphie had by now grown quite comfortable in his role as secret agent. He had worked his con to such so effectively that he was about to be proposed for membership in the mob. The FBI
and Ralphie both felt Ralphie could ask aggressive questions in order to figure out who killed Joey O. The problem was, with Tin Ear Sclafani, it was difficult to know what was actual knowledge and what was inference. Ralphie had grown weary of Sclafani’s stories. It got to the point where he began his work day by talking into his recording device before he headed out to meet Tin Ear.
“Going to meet Joey Sclafani,” Ralphie would say into the tiny microphone. “See what his story is today. Every day he’s got a new story.”
On this day he was again trying to find out who killed Joey O.
“If somebody killed your nephew, wouldn’t you like to know what happened?” Ralphie had asked Tin Ear in one FBI-monitored discussion. “What’d he do wrong that he had to be killed?”
“I know who did it,” Sclafani said. “I have the best idea who did it.”
Ralphie said it had to be Vinny who ordered Joey O murdered. “He got mad,” Ralphie said.
“No, it wasn’t Vinny,” Sclafani said.
“No? No? I thought it was.”
“Possibility.”
With Sclafani, nothing was clear. He said Westley Paloscio knew more than he was saying, but that was all he would say. The bureau sent Ralphie to talk with Westley. He found him in a state of pure terror, convinced that someone was going to kill him, though he wouldn’t say who. All he would admit was that the Steve who called Joey O the night of the murder wasn’t Steve, that he was Steve and that he had pretended to be Steve to lure Joey O to the deserted parking lot at the bottom of Brooklyn. That was as far as it went. The more questions Ralphie asked about Joey O’s murder, the more nonanswers he and the FBI received.
Then Vinny Palermo stopped using the free cell phones Ralphie had been providing. In fact, Vinny Palermo seemed to stop talking on any phone. Somehow getting information was becoming more and more difficult, and the FBI did not know why.
Inside the DeCavalcante crime family the guessing game was under way: Who was a rat?
Every gesture was scrutinized. Every question was second-guessed. Innocent comments beca
me infected with nefarious intent. Allegiances were formed, lines were drawn. Who could be trusted? In a world where lying was an everyday event, this was not a simple question.
Everybody had their favorite suspect; usually it was the guy you hated most. Tin Ear Sclafani, for one, had decided Anthony Capo had to be the rat. He hated Anthony Capo because he believed that in his world of criminality Capo was a man you could not trust. He had heard that Capo wanted to kill Westley Paloscio because of the murder of Joey O Masella. Westley was considered “with” Sclafani, so, if proper Mafia etiquette was followed, Anthony Capo should have approached Sclafani and explained his reasoning. Perhaps Sclafani would have given him permission to do what had to be done. But Capo had ignored Sclafani, and Sclafani was furious. He sought a meeting with Vinny Ocean and Vinny had instructed both men to work out their differences. Sclafani felt that Vinny was protecting Capo because he needed Capo around to do his dirty work. Vinny wanted proof. Sclafani kept going back to Vinny, warning him that Capo was trouble, but Vinny stood by his guy: “If my guys did something wrong, I’ll kill them
tonight. Before the sunrise, tonight, there’ll be two dead bodies there. You got proof they did it?”
Other culprits were found.
By midsummer, it was decided that Thomas Salvata, the front man at Wiggles, was an informant. Salvata was a silver-haired middle-aged wiseguy wannabe who’d served for years as Vinny Ocean’s eyes and ears at Wiggles, watching the money and making sure Vinny got his fat envelopes of unreported cash every week. He had also been involved in collecting loan-shark payments from T&M Construction. After Wiggles closed and he recovered from a heart attack, Salvata had been put in charge of Gentlemen’s Quarters in Babylon, Long Island. Then he went off the radar screen. This was out of character for the doggedly loyal Salvata, and whenever a wiseguy did anything out of character, he immediately became suspected as an informant.
A new suspect was picked in November 1999. His name was Frank Scarabino, a hulking DeCavalcante associate who had acquired the nom de wiseguy Frankie the Beast. There were actually several Frankie the Beasts in various families. This particular one had been sitting in a backup car when Vincent Palermo and others shot the would-be Staten Island real-estate mogul Fred Weiss in 1989. Frank Scarabino had been around a long time. Now, with word of an informant circulating faster than police gossip through a doughnut store, the bosses of the family decided that this particular version of Frankie the Beast was acting funny. This Frankie had been asked to show up to a meeting, and he had refused. He had even gone into hiding. As a result, a hole was dug in a remote urban wasteland section of northern New Jersey that was just big enough to encompass Frankie the Beast’s enormous frame.
•••
On a September day in 1999 Vinny Ocean and his trusted and hard-of-hearing soldier, Tin Ear Sclafani, stood on a street corner on the Brooklyn waterfront chatting. They were down near the bottom of Fulton Street in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge. This was the site of the old Brooklyn ferry that had inspired Walt Whitman to write his famous poem. This was also a spot seen in a thousand movies and TV shows—the swirling edge of the East River, the most beautiful bridge in the world, the Manhattan skyline in magnificent display on the far shore. This was a popular spot for tourists in buses and braver tourists who’d taken the subway over from Manhattan and wandered down to water’s edge. It was not an easy spot to find.
At this time Joey Sclafani was doing the best he could. In the past year he had made a few thousand here and there selling “a pallet of this, a pallet of that” stolen from tractor trailers and warehouses on the Jersey and Brooklyn waterfronts. There was the 2,250 cases of stolen Due Torri Pinot Grigio wine, 1,630 cases of stolen Gucci clothing, 29,000 packages of stolen Centrum vitamins. Joey and his cohorts would take anything. A truck trailer filled with Kraft food products. A load of 56 Minolta copy machines and accompanying toner cartridges.
The theory was, somebody would buy this stuff.
At that moment Sclafani was not swimming in money. Much of the time the FBI sat listening in on his many lengthy conversations with Ralphie, Sclafani whining about how broke he was. Sometimes he would complain that Vinny the boss was a multimillionaire and didn’t pay attention to the needs of his soldiers, but usually he remained loyal and willing to do whatever had to be done. Lately there had been a lot of missions but little action. The Big Ears Charlie Majuri hit had been nixed when all sides agreed Big Ears Charlie wasn’t worth killing. The Frank
D’Amato hit was not succeeding because D’Amato was too difficult to kill. None of this had resulted in the boss being in a better mood. Of late, Vinny Ocean was as unpredictable as, say, the ocean. One moment he would be asking about a person’s family, how everybody was faring; the next minute he’d explode into a tirade about respect.
On this day the two men were meeting on a street corner to discuss business. Vinny was getting an update on the lack of progress in the continuing effort to kill Frank D’Amato, a guy Vinny Ocean really did not like. Tin Ear Sclafani was making it clear the job was not going to happen anytime soon. They were unaware that the FBI was watching from a van parked across Fulton Street right in front of the building that once housed the old Brooklyn Eagle newspaper and its intrepid scribe, Walt Whitman. The agents could not hear what was being said, but they could see what was going on.
They saw two men, one in his fifties and one nearly sixty-two. The younger man, Vinny Ocean, gesticulated and talked on and on in an agitated manner. The man in his sixties, Joey Sclafani, nodded patiently but said nothing. As the two men talked, a hapless tourist wandered up and asked for directions.
The flustered Vinny Ocean broke away from his conversation about homicide, stepped back, looked at the tourist, and suddenly began frisking the tourist down, right there on the street.
The tourist, unfamiliar with the customs of the New Jersey Mafia, backed off quickly and headed away from the agitated man. He seemed baffled yet grateful to be walking away. The FBI watched as Vinny Ocean and Joey Sclafani walked away in different directions. The agents watching this were aware that Vinny and other members of the family knew they were being watched. Twice in the last few months agents had been forced to warn members of the DeCavalcante group that they were targets of intended hits, as they are required to do when they learn of any potential homicide. But usually it was all a little game—the good guys watched in secret, knowing the bad guys knew they were being watched. The bad guys went about their business, fully aware they were under surveillance but pretending nobody could see what they were up to. Rarely did either side acknowledge the other. Vinny’s loss of control on the street corner indicated that the game had changed. The FBI was not yet sure how.
September 3, 1999 “I don’t like to talk on the phone no more,” Tin Ear told Ralphie. The two were discussing a sample of counterfeit Tommy Hilfiger jeans Ralphie had obtained from fellow DeCavalcante schemers. They were waiting for Wes Paloscio to show up with the truckload that Ralphie estimated could be worth $20,000.
Sclafani asked, “This could be a steady thing?” Of late, Sclafani was scrounging. His plan was to sell the jeans and put the money on the street at usurious interest rates. “I know I gotta steal in the street. I may have to do a stickup or something pretty soon.”
Ralphie had been kicking around a plan to rob a payroll delivery at an office building in Times Square. He had talked it up as a huge score, leaving out that it was just an FBI setup designed to keep him on the street. Joey Sclafani was very interested in the score and impressed with his protégé. He was more confident than ever about proposing Ralphie for membership. He said he had both Palermos— Jimmy from New Jersey and Vinny Ocean—on his side,
which should seal the deal. “They love me, so if they love me and they like you, where you gonna be?” Ralphie wanted to know if they should accept Vinny Ocean’s invitation to visit his new gambling boat. This was Vinny’s replacement for Wiggles, which had been closed for almost a year. Vinny was
a secret partner in a casino boat running out of New York. The idea was to take advantage of the fact that if you cruised two miles offshore, you were in international waters and no longer subject to the laws of New York State that prohibited casino gambling. Vinny’s casino boat sailed through the strict approval process for two reasons—Vinny was not listed on any paperwork as the actual owner, and Vinny had hired a former judge to handle the matter. The ship was an instant success, which inspired Tin Ear Sclafani and Ralphie and just about every other low-level gangster in the DeCavalcante family to believe that Vinny was rolling in the green.
“He’s got money all over the place. He could cover anything. They close one joint, he opens a boat. He’s covered. I’m not covered,” Sclafani said. “Imagine a two-milliondollar boat, a three-million-dollar boat. Where did they get this money?”
But there was a problem with this boat. Sclafani said Ralphie could visit the boat but he could not because the FBI was watching the boat. “They’re taking pictures of it already,” he said. “Like a wake. Who’s going in there, who’s going out.” He laughed. “You know what they’re going to do when they find out he owns that fucking boat?” The FBI was everywhere. They were on Long Island taking pictures of Vinny’s boat, they were in New Jersey watching Jimmy Palermo. “They came there to break his balls,” Sclafani said.
Clearly Sclafani knew the FBI was getting closer, but he felt so comfortable around Ralphie that he began, for the first time, openly talking about the hierarchy of the DeCavalcante crime family. He was practically sketching out a diagram of corporate structure. He did not bother with code.
“For five years he was number two over there,” Sclafani said of Jimmy Palermo.
“Why didn’t Jimmy Palermo take over everything?”
Made Men Page 24