Made Men

by Smith, Greg B.

  “I believe, Your Honor, these are all the elements that I am proposing,” Celedonio said.

  “So the real issue is the weapons,” Judge McKenna said. “Let’s talk about them.”

  In the federal system, a judge must hold the accused in jail if the prosecutor demonstrates that the person is a danger to the community. In Joseph Sclafani’s case, the fact that the FBI found loaded weapons in the man’s bedroom did not help Sclafani’s argument that he was a danger to no one. Celedonio knew this, but he had a plan. He began an unusual argument—one that had never before been proposed in the history of the American Mafia—to get his man out on bail.

  It would not be easy. The government had alleged that Tin Ear—at the age of sixty-two, deaf in one ear, suffering from various stomach ailments, etc.—was a danger to the community because besides all these things, he had been a made member of organized crime for forty years. Many gangsters did not live that long. He had sworn a blood oath to live and die for the mob when the prosecutor, Korologos, was not yet born. When the FBI had come for him, they had discovered not one but two loaded guns in his bedroom. He voluntered to the agents that he needed the guns in his bedroom just in case somebody came to get him. No particular somebody, just somebody. The government lawyer, Korologos, had reminded Judge McKenna of this statement on several occasions.

  Celedonio asked Judge McKenna to have an open mind.

  “Aside from the weapons that were found in his home, it is important to note that despite this assertion—that he is an active member, that he is engaged in violence, that he has been a member of this alleged crime family for thirtyfive or forty years, my client has never been accused— prior to this indictment—of participating in any crime family.”

  Korologos the prosecutor turned back to look at Celedonio. She tried not to display a trace of emotion, but her face betrayed her. She seemed to have produced, just for a second, a smirk.

  Celedonio, an impassioned veteran of lost causes who claims never to have read Don Quixote, argued on. “The weapons, although they were found in his home, were not his weapons,” he said. “They were his brother-in-law’s weapons.”

  Prosecutor Korologos practically snorted out loud at this one, and she clearly rolled her eyes. She jumped right in, noting that the brother-in-law had been dead for nearly three years, and reminding Judge McKenna that Sclafani had been caught on hours of tape—both video and audio— discussing murders and extortion and loan sharking and gambling and just about every criminal option available to a soldier of the DeCavalcante crime family. Or as the defense lawyer might put it, the “alleged” DeCavalcante crime family. And now he was blaming his brother-in-law.

  Celedonio barely flinched. He had just begun. He now attacked the argument that Tin Ear was a member of the Mafia. Long ago, in the 1960s and even 1970s, defense attorneys often argued with a straight face that the Mafia did not exist. Celedonio tried a new approach.

  He argued that the Mafia was now just a movie.

  “The disclosures that the government refers to, that certain murders are alleged to have been sanctioned, is no great piece of information that requires extensive surveillance or extensive investigation,” Celedonio said. “Just from watching the movie Goodfellas one knows that with people alleged to have involvement in crime families, the assassinations may or may not be sanctioned.”

  Prosecutor Korologos nearly turned completely around. Even Judge McKenna of the open mind smiled a little bit. He wasn’t sure he was hearing what he was hearing—that Sclafani was blaming a movie for his troubles.

  “You don’t necessarily believe whatever is in a movie,” Judge McKenna said. “But on the other hand, the United States against Locascio, in the Court of Appeals’ opinion—the testimony of the FBI experts in that case was to the effect that may or may not be in Goodfellas or something else—that killings had to be sanctioned by the boss. In that case, I believe it was John Gotti. So you can find these things out more reliably than by only seeing Goodfellas or The Godfather.”

  The prosecutor, Korologos, now mentioned again the hours and hours of Sclafani going on and on about this murder and that murder. There was Sclafani describing how he would happily kill anybody he even suspected of being an informant for the government. On a motorcycle even. There was Sclafani talking about all those rules about killing people who slept with wiseguys’ wives and so on. She waved a transcript as she said this, and Sclafani shook his head as if saddened by the whole state of affairs.

  Celedonio the lawyer was unfazed. He now argued that his client—in his many hours of recorded conversation with the FBI informant Ralphie—was merely trying to get the informant to pay him money owed. He was, in effect, conning the con man with his Goodfellas dialogue. Or so Celedonio claimed.

  “You don’t have to be a member of any crime family,” he pleaded. “The Gambino crime family, the DeCavalcante crime family. You don’t even have to be a learned individual to know that if there is such a thing, if someone becomes a cooperator, then yes, there is likely going to be some level of retribution.”

  He claimed Sclafani told Ralphie what Ralphie wanted to hear. “In exchange for money, my client gave Ralphie an elaborate story based on nonsense, based on nothing more than what I can speculate on by watching television, by watching The Sopranos, by reading a novel by Mario Puzo. There is nothing to say that my client’s assertion that someone who sleeps with someone’s wife can be a candidate for an assassination. The assertion itself doesn’t make it so and it doesn’t imbue anyone with any specific insight into what these alleged crime families do or don’t do.” He was on a roll. No one interrupted. The prosecutor’s face by now had changed from puzzlement to amusement. She wanted this to go on.

  “I could have told Ralphie if someone is a member—or alleged member—of an organized crime family, and that person becomes a cooperator, like Sammy the Bull, then he is going to be a target.” Celedonio dropped in Sammy the Bull without mentioning his last name, as if he were a movie character familiar to all. “That doesn’t imbue me with any specific knowledge as to this alleged crime family. It just means I read the newspapers, I follow the news and watch TV.”

  The argument went on for a few more minutes. Celedonio tried the sick-client approach—mentioning Tin Ear’s tin ear, listing the names of several pills Sclafani was taking. The prosecutor countered by arguing that Sclafani claimed he could do one hundred push-ups, although she was uncertain on the exact number.

  “As you can tell by looking at him, he is somebody that either lifts weights or does a hundred or a hundred and fifty push-ups a day,” she said.

  “I can’t tell from here,” the judge said. “You may be right, you may not, but I can’t tell. He has got a shirt on.”

  But the momentum was gone. The movie defense had collapsed. Celedonio the defense lawyer was merely dancing in an empty auditorium. His audience was gone. Even Judge McKenna wasn’t buying at this bake sale. The government prosecutor, Korologos, now literally brought out both guns—the .380 semiautomatic pistol and the .22 rifle—two magazines of bullets, the ratty old sock the pistol came in. She offered to pass them up to the judge, after promising not to wave them at his deputy. He declined, and said he would reserve decision on whether to release Tin Ear Sclafani on bail.

  Throughout this performance Tin Ear continually fiddled with his hearing aide and shrugged his shoulders, implying that he wasn’t hearing anything. His family in the spectator row waved as he was led off. He gave them another shrug and walked away through the side door into the holding cell, a marshal on each side, just another wiseguy headed back to the pen.

  The hearing was over. Joey Sclafani would be shuttled back through a series of halls and tunnels to the Metropolitan Correctional Center behind the courthouse. There he would be placed back into the prison’s general population. The Sclafani family surrounded the lawyer, pelting him with questions about when their Joey would be getting out. The lawyer Celedonio said he did not know, it was up to the ju
dge. He said it in such a way that it was clear Joey Sclafani was not going anywhere.

  The two Sclafani sons glowered at the prosecutor and the newspaper reporter; Mrs. Sclafani looked at the floor, defeated. The three Sclafanis then shuffled out into the hall, took an elevator to the lobby, and walked outside into the glorious spring afternoon, knowing that they were not in any movie and that they might not see their Joey again for a long, long time.

  February 21, 2001 The temperature had dropped below freezing on Sixth Avenue as the black limousines pulled up to the curb outside Radio City Music Hall. The group of photographers did their job with frozen fingers as the celebrities strutted quickly into the warmth of the ornate theater. It was a premiere, but it was most definitely not a normal premiere. It was a Bridge and Tunnel premiere. The celebrities looked like they had come straight out of the neighborhoods of Brooklyn and Staten Island and New Jersey. You had your Gravesend representatives, your Todt Hill contingent, your Elizabeth crew. It was the season premiere of HBO-TV’s The Sopranos, and the phony wiseguys were out in force.

  Inside Radio City, the room was filled with gindaloos and gindalettes, mamaluks and mortadellas. Men wore black turtlenecks with black suit coats. Some wore black leather jackets and sunglasses indoors. There were many guys who looked like they came straight from the social club and were more comfortable in jogging suits and wraparound shades than suits that seemed just a little too small. One girlfriend had the big hair and a backless gown the color of swimming-pool water at night. Guys built like home appliances walked down the aisle wearing actual

  pinkie rings. One guy had on a black leather knee-length jacket perfect for hiding large-caliber weaponry. A gaggle of gindalettes screamed out in unison, “Vinneeeeee!!” from the balcony as “The September of My Years” played loudly off ornate art deco walls the color of gold and bronze.

  “When I was twenty-one,” Frank Sinatra sang, “it was a very good year.”

  All the cast members of the TV show were present, dressed in expensive suits and evening gowns, looking just like they did on TV except shorter. The only one who seemed not to fit in was the guitarist-turned-actor, Steven Van Zandt. He strolled toward his reserved seat wearing his usual bandanna and a black leather jacket and waved to the crowd. The crowd cheered.

  In a middle seat, Robert Funaro sat with his brother-inlaw watching in awe. Robert had snagged a job playing Eugene, an associate who works with the character Ralphie in controlling the carting industry in New Jersey. He was a tall, bulked-up guy with blue-black hair, wearing a light suit with dark shirt and tie. For the crowd assembled, this was very conservative attire. Nevertheless he had the look. The look was hard to describe. You knew it when you saw it. It was partly in the walk and partly in the talk. In Robert Funaro’s case, it was also in the childhood.

  He had grown up in Bensonhurst and knew both made guys and wannabes. He was working booking acts at Caroline’s Comedy Club in Manhattan when James Gandolfini, the star of the TV show who pretends to be a Mafia boss, came in and suggested he audition for the show. At Caroline’s, he’d booked Goomba Johnnie. “I don’t know him by any other name,” Funaro said. “He had a date that he had to cancel once because of that problem.”

  Goomba Johnnie was actually John Anthony Sialiano. That problem was Sialiano’s arrest in January 1998. At the time Sialiano was living a rather colorful life. He was handling the morning-drive time slot at WKTU-FM in New Jersey, where he cultivated his wannabe gangster shtick as Goomba Johnnie. Goomba Johnnie had come to realize that gangsters can be funny guys. He was trying to break into comedy, and was working on a TV show with his partner, Sean (Hollywood) Hamilton, dubbed Let’s Get Stupid. He had also been a bodyguard and bouncer at strip clubs around New York for years, including a club called Scores in midtown Manhattan. There, it was alleged, he got involved in extorting the owners for the Gambino crime family. He was indicted with John A. (Junior) Gotti and others on charges of pocketing $230,000 from shaking down Scores and gambling. The day after his arrest, Goomba’s legitimate employer, WKTU-FM, issued this unusual statement: “John is an exemplary employee. The matter being investigated is related to a second job.”

  At Caroline’s Comedy Club, where Robert Funaro booked the acts, Goomba Johnnie had to cancel at the last minute due to indictment. Some of his Goomba buddies showed up anyway, demanding to know where their paisan was.

  “There’s guys who talk about it and guys who don’t talk about it. The guys who talk about it, you know they’re not the real thing. These guys come in the night Goomba Johnnie didn’t show. Some of these guys showed up, saying ‘Where’s Goomba Johnnie?’ They had the rings on, the suits, the whole thing. They weren’t the real deal.”

  Now Robert Funaro sat in Radio City Music Hall, surrounded by anything but the real deal. There were pretend capos sitting next to pretend soldiers hanging out with pretend associates commenting on the pretend boss. Funaro prepared to watch himself on a giant movie screen pretending to be a gangster. He described his role cryptically, the way a real gangster might describe his. “I’m going to play Eugene and I’m going to be working my way in to the family more and more,” he said. “I can’t really talk about it.”

  The room went dark and two episodes of the TV show played on Radio City’s huge screen. When it was over Funaro stayed to see his name in the credits for one last time. Some guy called out, “We love you, Paulie!” and Tony Sirico, the actor who plays Paulie Walnuts, waved to his unseen fan. Slowly they filed out into the frigid night air, walking a few blocks to the big party for cast members and their guests that would surely resemble a scene from a Staten Island wedding.

  Three years had passed since the first day in January 1998 when Ralphie Guarino strapped on a federal recording device and began talking to his friends. On the day the FBI convinced Guarino to work with the bureau, no member of law enforcement involved in the case could have imagined what damage he would do. Ralphie’s tapes set off a chain reaction that resulted in seventy arrests and ten informants. His tapes first revealed that many of the members and particularly ranking members of the family did not like hatchet man Anthony Capo. Soldiers and captains could be heard discussing how the family leadership did not know what to do with Capo. He was a soldier who had done dirty work for the family on numerous occasions, and thus he was feared for both his knowledge and his hairtrigger personality. Within a short time after his arrest, the FBI brought him in and played certain tapes. These were not tapes in which he discussed his golf handicap. On the tapes other wiseguys discussed murdering Anthony Capo with permission from higher-ups. He listened to the tape, thought about life for a few days, then decided to cooperate with the United States government.

  Now it was time for Anthony Capo to mention something he’d been holding in for years. Anthony Capo told the FBI what he knew about Vincent Palermo and that morning in Staten Island more than ten years before. This would be the same Vincent Palermo who wasn’t even on the government’s radar screen during the first twenty-five years he was in the Mafia. The Vincent Palermo who was an up-and-coming crime boss. The Vincent Palermo who was talking about doing multimillion-dollar deals with Bob Guccione and selling cell phones to the Germans. The Vincent Palermo who had something going with the Gambino family, the Colombo family, the Genovese family, and the Bonanno family.

  The FBI took down all that Anthony Capo had to say about the murder of Fred Weiss. Capo, the newly minted informant, put Vincent at the scene with a gun in his hands, pulling a trigger, shooting Fred Weiss in the face. Capo also implicated Vinny Ocean in the murder of John D’Amato, although in that case he—Capo—had pulled the trigger. He told them all about the abandoned plot to kill Big Ears Charlie Majuri and another unsuccessful effort to kill Frank D’Amato. In each case, Vinny Ocean was implicated. The FBI and the lead prosecutor in the case, Assistant United States Attorney John Hillebrecht, had enough information to charge Vinny Ocean with even more crimes. They took this information to Vinny Ocean.

>   From the start, Vinny was leaving his options open. The lawyer who represented him at bail was John Serpico, who had represented him on many other occasions. Within a month Vinny had fired Serpico and hired a new lawyer, Gregory O’Connell. To anyone who knew O’Connell, the implication was obvious. O’Connell was a veteran federal

  prosecutor from the Eastern Disrict of New York in Brooklyn. He had specialized in prosecuting gangsters—not defending them. He could not be called a “mob lawyer.” He was, instead, a negotiator. This is an attorney who is known to accept clients who are willing to cooperate with the federal government. When a gangster hires a negotiator, it’s clear right away he’s at least thinking about going over to the other side.

  In Vinny Ocean’s case, the process of becoming an informant could certainly not be called, as it often is, “flipping.” Flipping implies fast action.

  For months Vinny Ocean sat down with O’Connell and prosecutors Hillebrecht and Korologos and the FBI, working to come up with a deal in which he would plead guilty to some of the crimes he committed, but not all, so that he would not have to go to jail forever. His major concern was to get a prison term that would allow him to spend as much time as possible with his three younger children, even if they did have a new last name.

  That was the implication. If he decided to become an informant, his family would have to go into the Witness Security Program—Witsec. This would mean that his two youngest children would suddenly disappear from their Catholic high schools and never see their friends again. The daughter at Fordham would have to quit and enroll elsewhere. The United States marshals would arrange to have new transcripts made up to reflect lives lived elsewhere in the country so nobody could trace them back to New York. They would be given new social-security numbers, new birth certificates, new names. They would be told it was not wise to contact relatives. Vinny’s son from his first marriage, Michael, had just had his first child— Vinny’s first grandchild. Vinny would not be able to see his new grandchild, at least for a long, long time. The entire family would relocate to another neighborhood in another part of the country where they knew no one and where they could blend in. They would drive down unfamiliar streets and receive mail addressed to unfamiliar people. The Palermos would cease to exist.