Made Men

by Smith, Greg B.

  The FBI was there, too.

  On this day, as money was being made, microphones hidden inside the walls of DMN Capital picked up every word spoken, every curse uttered. The Dow was cruising back toward 11,000, the government was cranking out reports that made everyone feel good about dumping their life savings into the stock market, and the FBI was taking

  notes about the events unfolding at DMN. The dozen brokers and promoters sat at their desks amid stacks of papers and lists of names, hammering away, keeping those customers confident, unaware that somewhere, documents were being drafted.

  DMN, after all, was really just a branch office of the Bonanno crime family. It was controlled by a Bonanno captain named Robert Lino, who was called the Little Guy because he was, in fact, little. He was a young man with a Julius Caesar haircut who stood about five foot two inches tall and spoke quietly and deliberately. Every week he showed up to pick up his fat packages of money. In exchange, he lent his name and the prestige of the Bonanno family to DMN. This made DMN an unusual place.

  For instance.

  A few months earlier, a Colombo family associate who believed DMN owed him $40,000 stormed into the office, pulled out a .38, and shot up a computer.

  A stock promoter who wasn’t doing what he was told was sucker-punched in the head and knocked out cold in the company’s conference room. His colleagues then stripped off his shirt to make sure he wasn’t wearing a wire.

  The three DMN partners—Jeffrey Pokross, Sal Piazza, and James Labate—were actually Bonanno associates. Pokross had actually once been a broker but had his license revoked for making unauthorized trades. Labate and Piazza couldn’t tell yield burning from short selling, but they liked to make money. As the lunch hour ticked by and the Dow crawled north, the DMN partners sat in the conference room. They were not talking tech stocks or bitching about blue chips. They were discussing another investment they had made in a New York Police Department detective named Stephen Gardell.

  Detective Gardell, a decorated veteran of the New York City Police Department who looked exactly like a decorated member of the New York City Police Department, lived on Vineland Avenue in Staten Island. He had snow-white hair, a ruddy complexion, and the look of a man headed straight for the pension board at age fiftytwo. He’d solved many of the city’s toughest cases as a member of the Brooklyn homicide squad and his name had appeared in the paper under the heading HERO COP. He’d risen through the ranks to collect an $80,000 salary. This did not make him a millionaire, but he did all right. He lived in a rented house with a $3,000 aboveground swimming pool in the backyard. The pool had been constructed expressly for his use, though it was built on land owned by someone else. This was not a problem for Detective Gardell, because he had not paid out a dime. A friend of his took care of the whole thing. The friend was his neighbor from down the street, James Labate, who everybody called Jimmy. As it happened, Jimmy Labate was an associate in the Bonanno crime family of La Cosa Nostra.

  In Staten Island, this was considered normal. After all, somebody has to live next door to the Mafia.

  Because Labate and Detective Gardell were neighbors, they had come to know and like each other. Gardell both knew and did not know about Labate’s “affiliation.” Labate said Gardell once asked him “a funny question: Am I a gangster? I said, ‘Do I know people? I know a lot of people.’ ”

  Ultimately, each realized he had certain things to offer the other.

  Gardell had been with the NYPD for twenty years and still had to struggle to pay his rent. He wanted a little something more. Labate was glad to help. He had a friend of his build Gardell the big backyard pool. He arranged to have the veteran detective comped at a nice casino in Las Vegas and Atlantic City, and sent Gardell and his girlfriend to San Francisco for a weekend. They found him a stolen mink coat, and special computer chips for his TV to snag DVD programs from the stratosphere.

  Detective Gardell was to provide a little something in return.

  He had worked his way up into the top offices of the Detectives’ Endowment Association, the union that represents police detectives in New York. He was the treasurer of the union, which made him aware of the immense size of the union’s $175 million pension fund. Labate and his friends at DMN decided that the pension fund should begin investing some of its money through DMN Capital Investments, for a fee.

  “If this fund works out right and you can open up doors for more funds,” Labate told Gardell and his girlfriend, Sharon Kilcoin, “you won’t have to work as long as you live.”

  “I know,” Gardell said.

  “That’s a hell of a parachute,” Labate said.

  “I won’t have to work Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday,” a gleeful Gardell gushed.

  “Will I have to work?” his girlfriend queried.

  “No,” he said.

  “I know what I want,” she said. “A Mercedes truck.”

  Besides helping gangsters get ahold of the pension funds of New York City cops, Gardell provided other little favors when he could. He got Labate a permit to carry a weapon and, perhaps even more important, eight special New York Police Department parking permits that allowed Labate and his Mafia friends to park anywhere they felt like.

  Sometimes though, Labate felt there was more give then get.

  “I’m very annoyed,” Labate said. “He got a threethousand-dollar pool we bought.”

  Sal Piazza, Labate’s partner at DMN and a Bonanno associate, defended the investment: “I was happy to set the guy up. If I need the guy, I would expect him to be there.”

  Labate said, “I didn’t say I don’t like him, I just keep saying the same thing. I think that we give, give, give, give, and get very little back. It’s an observation.”

  But Labate knew there was potential with this investment in Gardell. “He knows a lot about everything. He knows all of this business. If you think not every phone, every cop is feeding him information, every detective is feeding him information, you’re out of your mind. If you think there’s no half a dozen wiseguy rats talking to him, you are out of your mind.”

  Labate’s partner at DMN, Pokross, a small, balding man with a rat-tail thin mustache who looked like an accountant with an attitude, frequently mentioned being “with some fellows from Avenue U.” This was a street in the heart of Brooklyn where gangsters were known to collect their mail. Pokross liked hanging around guys from Avenue U, but he was smart enough to know that you had to be discreet. Pokross mentioned that Gardell was boasting he had made charges against a Bonanno associate named Michael Grecco disappear. Grecco had beaten up a recalcitrant stock promoter with a pool cue, and the promoter had actually filed charges. After three weeks, the charges suddenly disappeared. Gardell was walking around openly claiming credit. Pokross worried that this boasting could bring attention to Gardell, just when he was providing information the Bonanno crime family needed.

  “I don’t come to work with black turtlenecks,” Pokross said. “We don’t need him to interface with the other half in Brooklyn. It will be obvious I don’t want to look like a mob social club when he comes in.”

  The three men at DMN were obviously very interested in preserving Gardell as their very own leak at One Police Plaza. Labate asked Lucille, a secretary, to call Gardell on the office phone. Gardell was supposed to be checking into the new Paris Hotel in Las Vegas, the one with the fiftystory half-scale Eiffel Tower, the faux Opera House, the bogus Louvre, and the ersatz Arc de Triomphe. There, Detective Gardell was to spend the next few days, comped by the Bonanno crime family. Lucille got the hotel and Sal Piazza got on the line and left a message for Gardell: “Stephen, it’s Sal. Jimmy and everyone want to know how you got there and if the room’s okay.”

  The FBI agent recording this conversation noted the time in his logbook—1:18 P.M. They had to be wondering exactly what was going on in the mind of Detective Gardell. He was giving the Mafia parking permits and claiming credit for a disappearing assault charge and all he got out of the deal was a lousy $3,00
0 swimming pool? Aboveground? What else was he giving them? They were very confident they would find out, because they had one tremendous advantage over the Bonanno crime family. One of the men in the room talking was actually secretly cooperating with the government. Jeffrey Pokross, who didn’t wear black turtlenecks but liked to mention Avenue U, was actually at that moment a government informant, steering the conversation. And now he said something that surprised even the FBI agents who were monitoring his every word.

  “What’s the story with this Gardell thing for tomorrow?” Pokross said. He wanted to know about the impending arrest of members of organized crime that was scheduled to take place the following day and whether Robert Lino, the Little Guy, was on the list.

  “Who’s getting pinched?” he asked. “It don’t involve the Little Guy?”

  “Not at all,” Labate said, and that was the end of the conversation.

  Pokross seemed to think the arrests involved the Bonanno crime family, but the stunned FBI agents listening in knew better.

  For weeks, the FBI’s New York office and New York City Police Department detectives assigned to the Organized Crime Task Force had been secretly planning a massive arrest of forty members of the DeCavalcante crime family. The sweep was to take place at dawn on December 2, 1999, and it involved hundreds of federal agents and city cops. Several law enforcement personnel would be assigned to each arrest. They would meet at a prearranged spot, then approach the suspects’ homes just before six in the morning. This was a tried-and-true method for arresting members of organized crime, who were known for sleeping late. Usually these Mafia arrests went smoothly. For reasons that are not entirely clear, many of these men who think nothing of murdering their best friends are extremely polite when the FBI comes calling. Nevertheless, any agent or police detective assigned this task is aware that sometimes things don’t go as planned.

  Sometimes people have guns, and sometimes they get funny ideas. Big arrests are thus viewed as big headaches.

  They are also viewed as difficult to keep secret. The more people who need to be arrested, the more police and agents need to be involved, the more potential there is for a leak. In this instance, Detective Gardell, who was well known and liked by most of the city’s major-case detec

  tives, was in a position to know who was going to be arrested and when. A list had been drawn up, which was supposed to be confidential. It was not. Somehow Gardell must have got a look at it and the information was transmitted to the parties concerned.

  This was somewhat distressing to the NYPD and the FBI. They had intended for the DeCavalcante arrests to come off with as much secrecy as possible. If members of the DeCavalcante crime family knew about the arrests, they might want to try to leave the country. Several times in the last decade the gang’s members had tapped into a pool of funds saved for fugitives and fled the United States for obscure villages in Sicily. One of the family’s veteran capos, Pino Schifiletti, had gone on such a trip with his wife a few months earlier. The FBI knew this because other gangsters had discussed it with Palermo.

  Now that the list was out, the FBI had to move quickly. The bureau first had to get its prized informant, Ralphie Guarino, off the street as soon as possible. They were worried that some of the brighter members of the DeCavalcante clan might notice that Guarino—who knew nearly all of the people on the arrest list—was not on the list himself. This could present certain problems, since the FBI was also aware that the DeCavalcante family had suspected for weeks now that one of their own was an informant.

  Hours after learning that the sweep had been compromised, the FBI quickly made arrangements for Ralphie, his wife, and two children to get out of their Staten Island home and into the witness protection program. United States marshals were sent to the home to escort the family out. The family was given only a few hours to pack as much as they could.

  Next, the lead agent in the case, George Hanna, went through the logistics of arresting forty people in sixty minutes across Brooklyn, Staten Island, and New Jersey. Each suspect was expected to be at a certain spot. Expected was the operative word. Some suspects were more predictable than others. Tin Ear Sclafani, the soldier, spent most nights at home with his wife in Staten Island, and Uncle Joe Giacobbe, the aging capo, woke up every morning and drove to his usual table at Sacco’s meat market in Elizabeth. Sal Calciano, the World Trade Center maintenance employee who had helped Ralphie in the Twin Towers robbery, lived in an apartment building in Brooklyn with his mother- and father-in-law. Others would be more complicated. People like Jimmy Gallo and Anthony Capo could be anywhere. For years, Vincent Palermo religiously had returned home each night to his second wife and their three children. Since the screaming incident at his daughter’s wedding, this was no longer true. For days, the agents had tried unsuccessfully to find him during surveillance runs. He was off the radar screen.

  On the night of December 1, the case agents in charge of the case did not go to bed. They stayed up, making last-minute preparation, getting ready for that moment when they had to knock on a stranger’s door. On TV, thousands stood in Rockefeller Center to watch the lighting of the big spruce and it was apparent from all the flushed faces that it was going to be a cold dawn.

  December 2, 1999 Sunrise was still an hour away and the temperature was in the middle twenties when the agents came knocking on the door of Anthony Stripoli in Brooklyn. He was a big young guy with a full head of black hair who played football long ago and now worked as a bookmaking and loan-shark collector for the Colombo crime family. When he felt like golfing, he drove out to the best country club he could find, pretended to be a member, signed in as Tom, and played a few rounds. Nobody bothered him. At 6 A.M. a half-dozen agents stood on his doorstep and one knocked on his door.

  “What’s the charge?” Stripoli asked, standing there in his underwear as the agents swarmed past him and into his home.

  “Shylocking,” the agent replied. He called up to this wife, “Get dressed! I’m getting locked up!”

  She called down,”What do you mean ‘locked up’? How do you know that?”

  “Believe me, they’re not here to play golf,” he said. “Ding ding bang bang, they come early to catch you off your guard.” He turned back to the agents, one of whom was wearing a shirt that read RUSSIAN ORGANIZED CRIME TASK FORCE.

  “You got the wrong shirt on,” Stripoli said, making a little early-morning joke.

  The agents told him he was under arrest and to go upstairs and get dressed. One of Stripoli’s daughters woke up from all the commotion and started crying. One of the agents, playing Good Cop, told Stripoli, “Listen, she’s up there crying. I want you to go upstairs and tell her it’s going to be all right. It’ll make it a lot better.”

  “No way,” said another agent, playing Bad Cop.

  “Listen,” said Good Cop. “I’m taking him up there.”

  Good Cop escorted Stripoli upstairs and he sat on the bed with his daughter, who was sobbing. He told her, “It’s all right. I sold bad fish to somebody I’ll be home tonight. I don’t want to go, but I have no choice.” He told his

  daughter not to cry, that she didn’t have to go to school that day. He said, “I’ll be home tonight.”

  “You better be home tonight,” his daughter replied.

  The agents asked him if he had any guns. He said, “They’re all over the house.” He claimed he had a license for each one, and he helped them find them. They asked him about a safe; he told them where it was. They asked him for his loan-shark records; he said he didn’t have any.

  “Then sit down,” said another agent, a woman, promising to go back and get a search warrant to check the entire house. “We’re going to be a while.”

  Stripoli made a decision on the spot. He decided to help them find whatever they needed to find but not tell them anything. They found a book with a list of names in it, including Robert Lino’s. Stripoli did what he could because he did not want to delay the search too long. He had this image of a thousan
d FBI agents in jackets that said FBI in huge letters swarming around his home and him being hauled off in handcuffs just as the school bus pulled up to pick up his daughters for school.

  Stripoli quickly got dressed and was in the car by seven. The agents turned on a tape recorder and started asking him questions. They asked him if he knew this guy and that guy.

  “I’m not going to talk,” he replied. “No disrespect. You do your job and I do my job, but I’m not capable of doing business with you.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” an agent said. “We’ve got thirty-five of your friends. You’ll all be together.”

  SCLAFANI He wanted to hit a big score. He’d been talking about robbing somebody just for a quick score. He didn’t want his wife of thirty-five years to work anymore. He’d lived in the same small home on St. George Road in Staten Island for nineteen years, his wife’s home. He still liked to sleep late. Before dawn on a winter morning was not a time of day he wanted to see.

  The agents came into the house and they told him to change, he was going down to New York FBI headquarters at 26 Federal Plaza in lower Manhattan. They followed him upstairs into this bedroom, where he began to change into jeans and a sweatshirt. While he was changing he opened a closet door. An agent happened to notice something long and cylindrical wrapped in a ratty old towel. He asked what it was.

  “Oh, that,” Sclafani said. “That’s my brother-in-law’s gun.”

  It was a fully loaded .22 rifle rigged as a semiautomatic. They asked if there were any more guns. At first he acted as if he did not understand the question, simple as it was. Then he recalled that there might actually be another gun, just a little one, tucked away somewhere over there near his bed. The agent found a cabinet next to the head of Sclafani’s bed and began pulling items out of it. He found a brown paper bag, and Sclafani said, “No not those.” The agent then reached inside the cabinet and pulled out an unusual object, a sock into which was stuffed a loaded .380 semiautomatic handgun still in its holster. Sclafani seemed surprised at the sight of the gun. The agent asked him why he kept a gun near his bed.