Deputy Chief Inspector James E. Knott led the investigation. He said he was fairly certain that those responsible for the shooting were among those he’d rounded up. Figuring out which ones, of course, was a different matter. The President Street crew was mum.
The day after the attempt on Carmine’s life, it was announced that a special squad of veteran detectives had been assigned to keep their eyes on Red Hook gang activity around the clock, and they were known as PISA, the Police Investigating Suspected Assassins. The word assassin was esoteric at the time, but it went way mainstream that autumn in Dallas.
* * *
Desperate for money to keep up the battle, the Gallos took contributions. One of their benefactors was a local businessman named Emil Colantuono. Recruiting other contributors, however, became difficult when Colantuono was the victim of a homicide on June 6, 1963.
That same D-Day, they found the body of gun-dealer and Gallo-associate Alfred Mondello. Authorities suspected Mondello had been supplying arms to the Gallos.
June 12, someone shot at Punchy. In the return fire, Vincent DiTucci was killed by Chitoz, who was arrested in connection with DiTucci’s death but later released for insufficient evidence.
* * *
Some Profaci guys defected to the Gallo side. We don’t know why. Maybe they, like the Gallos, were disgruntled over the excessive tribute money. Maybe they wanted to side with the guys with the biggest onions. Maybe they just preferred the underdog role.
Such a man was fifty-nine-year-old Joseph “Bats” Cardiello, one of the brothers from the bar where Carmine whacked Frankie Shots. Bats was once Profaci, now pro-Gallo, and on August 9 was cut down in daylight by a volley of slugs in Brooklyn. Cardiello was shot four times from a high-powered black car as he sat in his own auto waiting for a light to change. He was a good guy from the neighborhood. We could compile a short list of probable shooters, and Carmine Persico would be at the top. For one thing, Carmine’s top guns were at that very moment out on Long Island.
Only hours after Cardiello bought it, about 1:30 P.M., fifty miles to the east, Carmine’s team—including forty-seven-year-old John J. “Moose” Battista, a longshoreman who lived on Coney Island Avenue in Brooklyn, and twenty-nine-year-old Tony Fats Regina, the Long Island sharpshooter—were out on a hunt, driving along the Nesconset Highway near Port Jefferson, Long Island, with their target in sight.
The subject of the hunt was Gallo crewmember “Cadillac” Louis Mariani, twenty-six, the boyfriend of my mom’s friend Nancy.
The gunmen drove alongside Mariani’s car and fired twelve shots. Also in the car was twenty-six-year-old Anthony Getch, and the thirty-three-year-old Mrs. Dotty “Vavavoom” Vivino.
Four bullets had plowed into Getch’s body, and he was taken to a Port Jefferson hospital where he fully recovered. Mrs. Vivino, in the excitement, forgot to say she’d seen and heard nothing and instead blurted out to first responders that “Fats” was the one shooting, referring to Regina.
Suffolk County police subsequently put together a winning case against Regina and Battista. The trial was in Riverhead, Long Island, Suffolk County Judge George F.X. McInerny presiding. Cops kept Getch in hiding, and he became the star witness of the four-week trial.
From the witness stand, Getch said that Regina was driving the vehicle that pulled up alongside the victims’ car. Tony Fats Regina was also the shooter. Battista was one of three others in the shooting car. Getch said he knew who Regina was because he’d seen him cruise by in a car a few times while Getch was standing on the sidewalk in Brooklyn. Getch said he knew Battista because he’d seen him ten to fifteen times over a two-year period. On cross-examination Getch admitted that he’d never spoken to either of the defendants.
The prosecution didn’t call Mrs. Vivino to the stand, but the defense did. Under cross, she denied saying anything about Tony Fats after the shooting. She’d been hysterical.
During summary, the Suffolk County D.A. made it plain: these two guys were “assassins assigned to the Profaci top gun, Carmine Persico”—Carmine “The Snake” Persico, the guy who held the “contract to liquidate” the Gallo gang.
Following more than two days of deliberation, the jury convicted both defendants of murder one, and Carmine Persico’s army suffered a different kind of attrition, losing two gunmen to the law.
* * *
Carmine’s multiple legal troubles were put temporarily on hold each time he was wounded in an attack, but even when he was convalescing, the war went on without him.
On July 24, 1963, Gallo crewmember Ali “Baba” Hassan Waffa was shot to death in Hoboken, New Jersey. Waffa was forty-nine years old, a short and swarthy Egyptian, a guy that Joey Gallo met in prison, a seafaring cook, thief, and hashish smuggler. He’d been known to supply weapons to both grown-up and teenaged gang members. In 1955, he’d been prosecuted for “piracy on the high seas.” Legend had it that Ali Baba was murdered by Joe Yack and Sonny Pinto.
That summer Joe Magliocco plotted with Joe Bonanno to kill rivals Tommy Lucchese and Carlo Gambino in an attempt to take over the commission. Magliocco made the mistake of ordering Joe Colombo to hit the two bosses, but instead Colombo told Gambino and Lucchese of Magliocco’s plan. Magliocco somehow survived this sequence of events. On September 3, Magliocco was given an offer he couldn’t refuse and “retired,” that is, he stepped down as Profaci’s replacement. Joe Colombo became boss and the war against the Gallos ended. The boss no longer held a grudge against the Gallos because of a kidnapping incident. The Gallos no longer hated the boss because of his excessive demands. It was time for peace.
Magliocco, as it turned out, had a startlingly short retirement. He almost immediately had a heart attack and was rushed to Good Samaritan Hospital Medical Center in West Islip, Long Island, where he died on December 28, 1963.
Given that he was ousted after being caught scheming to kill other commission members, Magliocco’s quick demise was considered highly suspicious—despite the fact that all outward appearances indicated natural causes. (In 1969, an FBI wiretap picked up a New Jersey mob boss, Sam DeCavalcante chitchatting about Magliocco’s death, saying in his humble opinion, the commission had him hit with some sort of poison that wouldn’t make itself obvious unless you went looking for it. The feds decided that they would go looking for it, exhumed Magliocco’s body from its not-so-final resting spot in St. Charles Cemetery in Farmingdale, Long Island, and found no poison.)
In 1964, the name of the family was changed to the Colombo Family. The death toll in the civil war, according to FBI figures, which may be low, was nine dead, three missing and presumed dead, eleven injured and nine fired at but missed. The FBI didn’t know all of it, though. Some wounds were treated by mob doctors—“bite the belt”—and never became public.
* * *
It was in 1964 that Carmine Persico and the work “kingpin” first appeared together in a daily newspaper. During the wee morning hours of October 27, 1964, squads of detectives rousted as many bookies as they could find from their beds and hauled them, thirty-five of them, to Brooklyn’s antiracketeering headquarters. Twelve more were being sought. According to D.A. Aaron J. Koota, the prize among those captured was gambling “kingpin” Carmine Persico. Koota said Carmine was the “overlord of the operation,” which brought in upward of $35,000 a day. Koota said that his investigation had bared a conspiracy between the hoods, the cops, and employees of the New York Telephone Co. One of the “prime movers” in the conspiracy was, Koota said, William J. Hussey, a fifty-eight-year-old former chief of the security division of the phone company.
Despite Koota’s proclamations, Carmine was back on the street without missing a shave.
* * *
With Colombo secure as boss, Carmine moved up yet another notch. One of Colombo’s first executive orders was to promote Carmine to caporegime. Carmine and the boss could regularly be seen in conference, their heads together, no one else privy to the topic.
Colombo was respected but not popu
lar. No one said anything nice about him. Carmine, on the other hand, was the popular choice, the competent, street-savvy leader they wanted to take orders from. Persico had that tough-guy reputation. He was the way they liked to envision themselves. He scared the shit out of people, a power that often benefitted those who worked under him. Guy gets behind in his payments, say, “You don’t want I should tell Junior.” Guy pays up like that. Worked just like Crazy Joey’s lion. Carmine was the incredible earner, chilly cold killer, creator of plans that worked, former legendary teen phenom, and made-man at an age when others were still running errands. A fucking legend. Carmine was the real deal, a hood’s hood.
* * *
One of Carmine’s top hit men during the Gallo war was Dominic “Little Dom” Cataldo, whose chiseled features made the ladies swoon. He dressed as if valeted by Damon Runyon, straight out of Guys and Dolls. Cataldo eventually married Albert Anastasia’s niece. A housewife from Kansas could’ve taken one look at him and ID’d him as a New York gangster. He made his bones taking contracts from Carmine Persico, at the expense of the President Street Boys. Still, Cataldo remained un-made because of the moratorium on new buttons. Cataldo had an uncle who ran casinos in Havana until Castro came, and a tough grandmother, former bootlegger Ervolino Cataldo, who by the 1960s was using her East New York house as a front for a horse and sports book. Little Dom used his well-dressed tough-guy image to loan-shark at the track. His image was such that violence was often not necessary, just an insincere smile and a poke in the chest did the trick. No one wanted he should tell Junior. Dominic finally got his button after Carlo Gambino’s death in 1976 when the “books were opened.” Technically, you weren’t supposed to be bumping guys off without permission, and you weren’t supposed to be dealing drugs, but Cataldo had been doing both for years and now he had a button himself. He was also in on the 1980 hit on Gerard Pappa, who had connections with both the Colombo and Genovese families. Cataldo had his own restaurant, place called Villagio Italia where he reputedly whacked guys in the back room, put them in the trunk of his car and, according to Sal Polisi, dumped them upstate off the Taconic Parkway. Like many hoods of the era, Cataldo worked himself into a nice coke habit in the 1980s, and his resulting paranoia led to ever-increasing amounts of bloodshed. Cataldo was convicted in the Pizza Connection case in 1987 of smuggling more than $1 billion in heroin over the previous decade. He died of natural causes in prison ten years later.
The government learned much about the commission’s existence in 1962 through their ace informant. Only many years later would the source be revealed as Gregory Scarpa, a guy who ostensibly worked only for Carmine Persico. (It was not unheard of for the government to use hoodlums in unexpected ways. Mob guys came in very handy for U.S. intelligence services during World War II, offering up their knowledge of Sicilian and Italian geography before allied invasions there. There was cooperation between feds and hoods over Cuba after Castro took over and kicked the mob out. The mantra was “Just because I’m a hood don’t mean I ain’t a patriot!”)
The source said that the commissioners were the heads of the families and considered of equal rank. There were five in New York, and one each in Florida, Arizona, Nevada, California, Pennsylvania, Detroit, Boston, and Chicago. When a problem arose that the commission needed to rule on, there was a team of two or three men who went around the country and contacted the commissioners with the where and when of the meeting. The commissioners—or, after Apalachin, a panel that they appointed—would listen to both sides of the beef, like the Supreme Court, and the ruling was binding throughout what was essentially a national crime organization. Scarpa said that the former Profaci family had about four hundred members, made guys. Of the five NYC families, he said, the Gambinos were the most populous, with a membership of about one thousand. He said that when the head of one of the families died or was imprisoned, the commission would “recommend” a replacement, who would serve as a member of the commission. If a commissioner got out of prison, they would resume their position on the commission and their replacement would step down.
* * *
Colombo thought all of this La Cosa Nostra business, everyone quoting Valachi, was out of control. Too many headlines. Too much star status. Business was best done without a light shining on it. Their cover story needed freshening and brightening, and this was the sort of thing he was good at. He formed the Italian-American Civil Rights League, a loudmouth group whose job was to convince the world that La Cosa Nostra was a figment of Valachi’s imagination, that all of those Mafioso he described were actually legitimate businessmen trying to get their piece of the pie, trying to live the American Dream. The IACRL’s chaplain was Father Louis Gigante, brother of Vincent the Chin.
* * *
During the summer of 1965, there came to light an audio tape of a police detective, James Daly, and Francis J. Farrell, an agent for the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, trying to force an ex-con to shake down Carmine Persico. The recording was made from a phone booth not far from the Journal-American newspaper office building in Manhattan.
The tape made headlines largely because it had ghoulish appeal. The ex-con, Joseph Kadlup, was already dead by the time the tape played. Papers got to talk about a “voice from the grave,” through the miracle of Memorex.
On July 31, 1965, Kadlup was killed by a cop, after he killed a brother officer, in a wild shoot’em-up in a Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, tavern. The detective and agent were under investigation by a grand jury for the plot. The tape was made by Kadlup “for two newspapermen” from the Journal-American, it was reported.
The plot, it was explained, was to collect $2,000 a month from Carmine Persico. To earn this, they would threaten him with a false drug arrest. Carmine, the theory went, wouldn’t fear being arrested—but being associated with drugs would be defaming. He’d pay, they figured.
Kadlup approached the reporters on July 27, 1965, a vulnerable three-time loser. One more conviction meant life. He told the reporters, “That’s what the cops and the feds are holding over my head. I’m caught in the middle.”
Kadlup told the newspaper that he’d gone as far as to make a date to meet Carmine, but was frightened off, suspecting he’d been double-crossed by Farrell and Daly. When Kadlup first spoke to the reporters he told them, “I’m going to be hit by a cop or a fed. Believe me, I know what I’m talking about.”
To protect Kadlup, Dom Frasca, city editor at the paper, gave Kadlup a note addressed to the fed and the cop saying, “This is to let you know I have tapes which are going to be used if anything happens to Joseph Kadlup.” The note was found in Kadlup’s home after his death, reported D.A. Aaron E. Koota.
Koota later explained that there was no connection between the tapes and Kadlup’s death. Despite the fact that the targets of the D.A.’s investigation were members of law enforcement, Koota said, “I concluded that the matter was of the greatest importance to law enforcement and required a thorough investigation before a grand jury where all the facts and circumstances could be fully and completely explored. As of now, I have formed no definite opinion as to whether the detective and the narcotics agent were engaged in some form of skullduggery or criminal conduct.”
Both the fed and the cop denied the charges. Farrell told his supervisor, according to the New York Times, that he had just been “joking along” with the ex-con. Their defense was predictable:
Look at the accuser! He was diagnosed as a psychopath. He’d done a long stretch in that hellhole in Dannemora, and he died a cop-killer. Who are you going to believe?
* * *
The 1960s was Carmine Persico’s best decade. He had dough, power, and a healthy sex drive. Just as in the 1950s, he went to jail periodically but was always granted quick release. He lived the life of a well-to-do hood: part most wanted, part celebrity.
On any given night Carmine and his friends could be seen sitting facing the door, in one of his three favorite Brooklyn restaurants, either New Corners or Romano’s in Bensonhurst or
the Ember Steakhouse at 100th Street and Third Avenue near Fort Hamilton.
Sometimes he hung out in the old neighborhood, at his cousin Mush’s club, on Sackett Street between Third and Fourth avenues. Junior and Mush dated starlets. According to reports, Carmine went out with Goldie Hawn on his arm, who at the time was a barely legal dancer looking for a break in show biz. Mush dated Lainie Kazan, a graduate of Hofstra University drama school and then veteran of one episode of the TV comedy, Car 54, Where Are You? In 1966, Goldie and Lainie were complete babes—Lainie was in Penthouse. Beautiful women of all occupations were drawn to top organized-crime figures. There was the money sure—but there was danger, too. It’s been known to get women worked up. Hawn, of course, went on to bigger and better things, first as a break-out star of the revolutionary TV show Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In, parlaying that fame into a movie career that won her an Oscar for her role in Cactus Flower. She has never commented on her experiences with Carmine. That would be indiscreet as he was and is a married man. Lainie Kazan went on to have a successful singing and acting career and returned to the limelight in the more recent past as the mom in My Big Fat Greek Wedding.
Carmine was in with the in crowd. He hung out in hip nightspots, like the dark and narrow Bachelor’s III, the super-swinging joint owned in part by New York Jets quarterback, and future Super Bowl hero, Joe Namath. Carmine wasn’t the only mobster who held court at Bachelors III. Police surveillance, both human and electronic, had determined that hoods were both hanging out and doing business in Joe’s place. There was evidence of one meeting in the back in the dark that included thirteen “undesirables,” eleven of whom were involved in the rackets. The connection between Broadway Joe and mob stuff dated back to 1966, not long after the Pennsylvania-born Namath graduated from the University of Alabama and came to New York to play for the Jets. As a rookie still wet behind the ears, Joe was alleged to have had meetings with gangsters about co-owning nightclubs in Manhattan. By 1969, the situation became so notorious that Pete Rozelle, the long-time Commissioner of Football, ordered Namath to give up his fifty percent share in the nightclub or face suspension. Namath showed nads of steel and told the commissioner to go fuck himself, and announced his retirement from football. It was the NFL that backed down. Namath eventually sold the bar but only after Jets coach Weeb Ewbank asked him to.
Carmine the Snake Page 10