Made Men

by Smith, Greg B.

  The alternative was simple. Vinny Ocean could go to trial and watch the faces of jurors as the FBI played tape after tape after tape. Although he was not on many of the tapes, some of his trusted soldiers had had quite a lot to say. Between Joey O Masella’s ghostly voice and the nonstop color commentary of Tin Ear Sclafani, Vinny would certainly face a tough audience.

  He knew what he had to do. In the late summer of 2000, he agreed in principle to plead guilty to shooting Fred Weiss, as well as to his participation in the John D’Amato murder. And there was more.

  Vinny Ocean told the FBI about the murder of Fat Lou LaRasso, a holdover from the days of Sam the Plumber, whom John Riggi had decided was a “subversive threat” to his leadership. In late 1991, Palermo and Capo participated in the decision to have LaRasso killed. His enormous body was found stuffed in the trunk of a car parked at Kennedy International Airport in Queens a short while later.

  Vinny Ocean talked about attempts. There was the Big Ears Charlie Majuri matter, and the Frank D’Amato matter, and the aborted attempts to kill Thomas Salvata, his manager at Wiggles. Tommy had a bad heart and it was felt he would become an informant, so a decision was made to kill him. The same was true for Frankie the Beast Scarabino, for whom a hole was dug but never filled somewhere in New Jersey.

  There was only one small concession. Vinny Ocean had been charged in the murder of Joey O Masella, his longtime driver and the guy who once made him laugh. The FBI was no longer convinced that Vinny had anything to do with Joey O’s death. If anything, it was an act of omission. It was thought that when Vinny told Joey O he would have to kill him and Joey O told everyone else, the end of Joey O came to be. The FBI came to agree that the allegations that Vinny Ocean deliberately and willfully ordered Joey O’s death—the worst charge in the indictment, the death-penalty charge—were based on purely circumstantial evidence. The Joey O murder charge was dropped.

  Vinny began to tell them everything he knew, starting back in 1965 when he first became a made man in the DeCavalcante crime family. He told them about other crimes involving other people. He implicated just about everybody else in the crime family of his mentor, Sam the Plumber, three years in the grave. He started with the boss, John Riggi, and worked his way down and back in time.

  One after another, the members and associates of Sam the Plumber’s legacy fell. On the day in December 1999 when the FBI found Vinny Ocean at Long Beach with his bags packed, they had arrested him, an acting boss, along with two captains, three soldiers, and a busload of socalled associates—guys who hang around but are not made guys. Guys with names like Joey Cars and The Kid. Despite the press conference and the parade of officials, the first arrest was in a larger sense a minor event. It made the TV that night but barely registered in the next morning’s papers. It hardly marked the end of the DeCavalcante family. There were, the FBI estimated, seventy members of the group, including the boss of the family, two other acting bosses, a consigliere, a half-dozen more captains, and a score of soldiers, all still on the street. They were now well aware that their organization was under siege, which meant that they would likely stop talking about their criminal activities except in the most cryptic manner possible. They were on notice, so they would now be far more difficult to arrest. Probable cause would all but disappear. Ralphie the informant—a lifelong resident of New York City—was now out of town for the first time in his life and unavailable for future government work. The game was over.

  With Vinny Ocean cooperating, all of that changed. The wave wrought by Vinny Ocean and Anthony Capo hit on October 19, 2000. That morning the FBI and NYPD moved across New Jersey and New York and arrested most of the rest of the DeCavalcante family hierarchy, starting with boss John Riggi, who was sitting in jail expecting to be out in two years. They worked their way down the list, picking up Big Ears Charlie Majuri and Jimmy Palermo, the two other acting bosses; Stefano Vitabile, the alleged consigliere; and Frank Polizzi, a capo and sometime boss of the family. They went further, adding on Phil Abramo, another capo who was known for his involvement in Wall Street schemes long before any gangster in New York and was, perhaps, the family’s biggest earner. For good measure they threw in a handful of soldiers and associates. All were dragged before federal magistrates in Manhattan and labeled dangers to the community.

  Within days of the October arrests, paranoia once again gripped Sam the Plumber’s legacy. The indictment unsealed by prosecutors Hillebrecht and Korologos included the names of eleven members and associates of the DeCavalcante family. One name was conspicuous in its absence—Giuseppe Schifilliti, known to all as Pino. The FBI considered him one of the nastier members of Cosa Nostra who’d been involved in at least one murder and conspired with others to kill the Frankie the Beast they suspected was an informant. Now it was Pino’s turn. Pino had been in

  dicted separately and the court paperwork kept sealed. This occurred because Pino had fled to Italy shortly before the arrests. When the indictment was handed down, the FBI was still in the process of finding him. It made sense to the FBI to keep the indictment separate and sealed, but it had an unintended effect: other gangsters started believing that Pino had become an informant.

  Within a month, the FBI discovered that other members of the family were conspiring to kill Pino, regardless of his locale or circumstances. The FBI alleged that an associate known as Charlie the Hat was hired for the job. As best they could tell, Charlie the Hat—who was sometimes called the Mad Hatter, though never to his face—devoted four months to the cause of finding Pino before realizing the FBI had done the job and was bringing him back as a defendant, not an informant.

  Killing Pino because the family thought he was an informant fell within the alleged rules of organized crime. Informants were to be killed, no questions asked. But in the DeCavalcante family, rules often viewed as incidental. Another “rule” said no member of a member or associate’s family was to be killed. Occasionally, although extremely rarely, this rule was broken. The Luchese crime family tried to kill the sister of an informant known as Fat Pete Chiodo (and did not succeed). In October of 2000, the DeCavalcante crime family took this rejection of the rules one step further.

  Francesco Polizzi was charged along with the rest of the family on the same October day. But he was not sent to jail, primarily because he’d told the court he was dying of spinal disintegration and several other ailments. He was, he said, confined to his bed on Long Island. This laundry list of physical problems allowed Frank Polizzi to show up in court by Speakerphone alone. During proceedings, his raspy voice would sometimes interrupt lawyers and say, “What? What did you say?” This arrangement, the FBI came to believe, afforded him an opportunity.

  Polizzi, who had been released from prison seven years previous after claiming he was about to die but was, seven years later, still alive, was in a position to know better. He had been around since the days of Sam the Plumber, and had even been appointed acting boss for a period in the 1970s before Riggi. In the days after his arrest in October 2000, the FBI says he forgot all about any alleged rules and decided that Anthony Capo was an informant. He planned and plotted, and decided to seek retribution—not on Capo, but on his wife and three young children. This was a total rejection of mob protocol. Capo’s family was moved from New York City shortly after Capo began cooperating, and by February 2001, nothing had come of Polizzi’s alleged plot.

  A month later, in March 2001, the disintegration of Sam the Plumber’s family continued. Mary Jo White, the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York, had unsealed yet another indictment against Sam the Plumber’s family, this time including just about everybody left on the street. Now a new group of made guys and wannabes was dragged through Manhattan Federal Court, and Prosecutor Hillebrecht was able to stand before a judge and announce the final blitz on the DeCavalcante crime family.

  Hillebrecht sometimes had trouble keeping track of the numbers. There were now sixty individuals arrested, including ten defendants who had d
ecided to cooperate with the FBI. Besides Ralphie and Vinnie Ocean and Anthony Capo, the list of informants now included several low-level associates, many of whom had been suspected by the family hierarchy at one point or another of helping the government. An astonishing one in six of those arrested was now working for the FBI, and nearly an entire Mafia family had been arrested and charged.

  The decimation of Sam the Plumber’s family illustrated just how far things had come since the days when the FBI dropped two thousand three hundred pages of transcripts recorded in Sam’s Kenilworth, New Jersey, plumbing office into the public domain. The Staten Island developer Fred Weiss was killed. One of the conspirators in the Weiss killing, Joey Garofano, was himself killed. An old gangster who was once John Riggi’s closest friend, Fat Lou LaRasso, had been ordered killed. John D’Amato, the acting underboss, had been killed. Joe Pitts, the old gangster in the wheelchair, had been killed. Joey O Masella was gunned down in a parking lot. And there were other killings no one had ever linked to the DeCavalcante crime family—a low-level associate named John Suarato. A street hustler named William Mann.

  Conspiracy after conspiracy emerged from the testimony of Vinny Ocean and Anthony Capo and all the rest. The scope of the paranoia and bloodletting was astonishing, and the results of the investigation profound. The family that thought it was a TV show was now, more or less, cancelled.

  John Riggi—the boss of Sam the Plumber’s family— now sat in a prison cell in the Metropolitan Correctional Center in lower Manhattan, indicted once again. He was seventy-four years old and faced the likely prospect of remaining in jail for the rest of his life. This was how it was to be. Once he was a powerful man who sat in a hotel restaurant and received the praise of much of northern New Jersey’s union leadership. In 1990, he was one of only three members of the DeCavalcante crime family invited to the Mafia event of the late twentieth century—the wedding of John Gotti’s son, Junior, at the Helmsley Palace in Manhattan. He’d made a fortune, lived in a big house in Linden, and two days before Christmas 2000 an event occurred that made all of that seem like nothing.

  His wife of forty years, Sarah, had been fighting cancer for months. She died early on the morning of December 23, 2000, at their home. Because Riggi was incarcerated and newly indicted, it was not a simple matter for him to attend his own wife’s funeral. His lawyers had to ask the federal judge overseeing his new case permission in an emergency petition.

  They filed papers, and on the day before Christmas Judge Michael Mukasey granted the request of Inmate No. 12317-016—to a point. He did not allow Riggi to attend the funeral service at St. Elizabeth’s Church in Linden or the burial at nearby Rosewood Cemetery. He did allow Riggi a private “viewing,” supervised by United States marshals. “The viewing,” Judge Mukasey instructed, “is to last no longer than fifteen minutes.”

  Around noon on the day after Christmas, a marshals’ van escorted by two sedans pulled up curbside at Second Avenue and John Street in Elizabeth. The temperature had warmed up from the teens but was still below freezing. The sky was nearly cloudless. Here was Corsentino’s Home for Funerals, where three years earlier the funeral of Riggi’s mentor and the man who started it all, Sam the Plumber DeCavalcante, took place. The marshals led Riggi through a frigid wind and upstairs to a second-floor viewing room.

  No other family members were allowed to be present in the funeral home when Riggi was there, and no one—not even funeral-home staff—was allowed in the room. Riggi was led in and greeted by the owner of Corsentino’s, who then left the room. The aging boss was then allowed to spend his last moments with his wife of many years in the company of two United States marshals, who were instructed to time the event.

  He got exactly fifteen minutes, as dictated by the criminal justice system that would soon consider his fate. When the time was up, he was led back out of the funeral home and into the government van with tinted windows. He was headed out of the State of New Jersey and back to New York to a jail cell that would always be waiting for him. He was, perhaps, the last boss of a crime family started by a man who once said, “Honest people have no ethics.”