“They put the fear into a guy and then they shake him down,” Cantelupo explained.
And the government knew it.
So, even though Joe Yak was technically the acting boss, for all practical purposes, Carmine took charge of the Colombo family in 1972 at the youthful age of thirty-nine. The official switch probably occurred some time in 1973.
* * *
America’s relationship with the mob, along with the mob’s vision of itself, changed drastically in 1972 with the release of Francis Ford Coppola’s masterpiece, The Godfather. That movie cast a deep spell over America and the world. It was a wildly romantic vision, and an incredible artistic achievement. Just maybe the greatest movie ever made. It presented the American Mafia the way people wanted it to be—hell, it presented the mob the way mobsters wanted it to be.
Everyone loved the movie, even though some of the inside guys said its notions were imaginative. “I can’t see an American kissing another American’s ring, no matter how Italian they are,” one hood close to Carmine Persico commented, but added that the music was the best he’d ever heard.
On the impressionable, the movie had a startling effect. There was now a new crop of hoods and hood wannabes that dreamt one day of living just like those guys in the movie, but most of them never did. The film presented a world of familial dynasties in which bloodline was king—instead of money being king, which was the way it was in real life.
During production of The Godfather and after its release, there was interaction between the movie’s players and real gangsters, like Carmine Persico. The actors were drooling to get some inside tips on playing real-life gangsters, and it was Carmine Persico who said if the Hollywood boys wanted to learn about the life, they were free to hang out with him and his crew. According to Eric Pooley, writing in New York magazine in 1992, Carmine was a “technical advisor” on the movie and had allowed the actors, James Caan in particular, to hang around with him to “soak up real mob color.”
Coppola had no more than called “Action” for the first shot when Joseph Colombo himself and a small crew, one of them as big as a house, visited the set and told the director, along with producer Albert Ruddy, that the word “Mafia” was not to appear in the movie. La Cosa Nostra either.
“Why not?” Coppola asked.
“It is demeaning to Italians and Italian-Americans,” Colombo said.
And so those words were deleted from the script, but . . .
“Okay,” Coppola said. “But I want him in my picture.”
The director pointed at the middle of the chest of the man-mountain standing over Colombo’s shoulder. Colombo nodded and turned to leave.
“Lenny, talk to the man. He wants to make you a star,” Colombo said, unaware that he’d never have a chance to see the picture.
The man was Lenny Montana and he played Luca Brasi in the movie. Truth was, Montana—all six-six, three-ninety of him—had some show-biz experience. In fact, Montana was a stage name of sorts. He’d been born Lenny Passofaro in Brooklyn in 1926. He’d been in the pro wrestling biz. Starting in 1953, he’d worked under many names: Lenny “The Bull” Montana, Chief Chickawicki, Zebra Kid, Mighty Sico. He once won the NWA World Tag Team belts with Hard Boiled Haggerty. Things went bad in 1960 when Montana broke a leg in a match against Verne Gagne. After that he went to work for Mr. Colombo. Not just as muscle, either. He was an innovative arsonist, too—used to tie kerosene-soaked tampons to the tails of mice, light ’em up, and release them into a structure.
So Hollywood and South Brooklyn broke bread. The relationship was not always a smooth one, mostly because Caan could be an asshole. He thought he was funny, but someone could’ve gotten hurt. After one uncomfortable interaction with Carmine, Gianni Russo—the actor who played Carlo Rizzi in the movie, the real-life godson of Frank Costello—came to hate Caan and could never again be in the same room with him. During the second week of filming, Rizzi said, sometime in the summer of 1971 before Carmine went away for hijacking but after the attempted assassination of Joe Colombo, cast members were having drinks at Jilly’s, a west-side tavern known for being Frank Sinatra’s favorite. Caan, ever the smug prankster, told Russo that Carmine Persico was in the back room with his daughter, that he should go back and pay his respects. So Russo went back to see Carmine, and sure enough there he was with a beautiful woman.
Russo said, “Your daughter is gorgeous. What a beautiful girl.”
Carmine’s face dropped.
It wasn’t his daughter, it was a broad he was with, and Caan had purposely lied to Russo. Some of the boys at Carmine’s table got up to teach this idiot a lesson, but Tommy Bilotti stepped in: “Honest mistake, honest mistake. The woman is beautiful.”
So Russo didn’t get a beating, but he has hated Caan’s guts ever since.
Bilotti was best man at Russo’s wedding, but his peace-keeping days ended on December 16, 1985, when he came down with a serious case of lead poisoning outside Sparks Steak House in the same hit that killed Big Paul Castellano.
Despite that one faux pas, Carmine and the film people got along. Caan and Andy Mush Russo became life-long friends. Carmine allowed Coppola access to genuine locations that lent the film supreme authenticity.
There are solid indications that Carmine shared some of his favorite stories with the Hollywood boys. In The Godfather Part II, which came out in 1974, there is a scene in which the character Pentangeli is being garroted in a dark and empty bar when the murder is interrupted by a cop on the beat—a clear reference to the attempted murder of Larry Gallo in the Sahara Lounge.
* * *
The feds didn’t give up on Carmine just because he was facing serious hijacking time. They knew he was a killer and went after him harder than ever. On November 11, 1971, Carmine went on trial for thirty-seven counts of usury, coercion, extortion, and conspiracy. The charges, in a nutshell, were that Carmine had been running a loansharking business out of a Manhattan fur shop.
As was often true in cases with multi-indictments, there was a lot of repetition from charge to charge, and before the trial Judge Postel trimmed the indictment down to ten counts.
During the trial’s first day, with the jury outside the courtroom, Justice George Postel of the New York State Supreme Court began to act strangely. By this time Carmine knew more than the average joe about courtroom machinations. There was something about the judge’s tone, his mannerisms, his body language that made Carmine feel good inside. The judge, with just a touch of paranoid fervor, warned the reporters in attendance that they were to confine their accounts to the indictment and the testimony, and to eliminate any descriptions of the defendant’s background, which might serve to bias the jury.
“I don’t want anything in the papers that doesn’t come out of this courtroom. If you repeat it tomorrow, you’ll be in the can,” His Honor exclaimed.
In particular, the judge objected to usage in print of Carmine’s nickname “The Snake,” mention of his designation by the feds as a member of organized crime, or the word “hijacking.”
Judge Postel’s pronouncements were in response to Carmine’s defense attorney, Maurice Edelbaum, who’d asked for a mistrial based on news stories that ran in The New York Times and Daily News describing Carmine’s past as a criminal and member of organized crime. The judge ceremoniously polled the jury, and each said they hadn’t read the articles. Judge Postel denied the motion for a mistrial. For purposes of the record, Prosecutor Samuel A. Yasgur asked the judge upon which law he was basing his ruling. Judge Postel replied “Postel’s Law,” and informed the press of the new ground rules.
The incident caused the managing editor of the Times, A. M. Rosenthal, to issue a statement saying that the paper was sensitive to fair-trial issues, yet believed under the First Amendment that the decision as to what to print must rest with the newspaper “in accordance with responsible journalistic standards.”
As the trial proceeded, and public interest grew, Carmine’s notoriety approached superstar
status. Judge Postel in response took further steps to prevent his courtroom from being contaminated by Persico fever.
Counsel on both sides were forbidden to make statements to the press. The court transcripts, legally the possession of the court stenographer, were by the judge’s order sealed until the jury verdict was in.
He eventually barred the public and newsmen from the trial. Five reporters—Richard Oliver of the Daily News, David Burnham of the Times, Jack Robbins of the Post, Howard Rieser of the Long Island Press, and Edward McCarthy from UPI—tried to sit in the courtroom in defiance of the ruling, and the judge promptly had them removed. Reporters and photographers began peeking through the windows in the courtroom’s outer doors so Judge Postel had green blotters placed over the windows. The public trial would go on in essence privately.
That privacy was most controversial. The Sixth Amendment provides that a defendant shall have the right to a public trial. The counter to this was that, although this might be true, the removal of the public and press was done because of complaints by the defendant and his defense team that he could only get a fair shake if the trial was held in private, so Carmine Persico had in essence waived his right to a public trial. To this, members of the press argued that the right to a public trial was not at the discretion of the accused alone. The right of the people to know was also to be considered. A public trial is necessary in all cases, the press argued, because a trial held “in camera,” that is outside the public’s view, always, justifiably or not, gave rise to suspicions that the proceedings weren’t on the up and up. The press, after all, was not at trials just to inform the public but also as a guard against miscarriages of justice. It was that role that was being denied by Judge Postel.
All of the fuss about who was and wasn’t supposed to be in the courtroom proved to be beside the point. The defense really had nothing to worry about as the prosecution’s case fell apart regardless of the fact that no one was watching.
First of all, one of the prosecution’s witnesses vanished just before he was supposed to take the stand. This, purposefully or not, served as a message to the others scheduled to testify against Carmine.
The prosecution’s key witness, Mrs. Sylvia Winograd, was supposed to implicate Carmine in a loansharking operation. Although she endured six grueling days on the stand, she somehow failed to ever incriminate Carmine Persico.
Judge Postel overruled prosecution objections and promised Winograd that, in exchange for her truthful testimony, not only would her guilty plea for loansharking be wiped out, but her amnesty would include a guilty plea in another case involving possession of stolen furs. Mrs. Winograd and her husband Joseph owned a fur shop and had pleaded guilty to thirty-seven counts of possession of stolen goods. They were scheduled to be sentenced in December.
Before Mrs. Winograd’s testimony, prosecutor Yasgur asked that she be considered a hostile witness, a designation that allowed the prosecutor to ask leading questions. The judge refused to do so, but finally relented several days into Mrs. Winograd’s testimony.
During her testimony, Mrs. Winograd said that she had known the defendant for seven to ten years. She and her husband knew him as “Junior.” Yasgur played for the jury a recording of a 1968 wiretap, a phone conversation between Mrs. Winograd and Samuel Lessner, a fourth defendant in this case that had disappeared. Mrs. Winograd admitted that it sounded very much like her voice on the tape. She admitted that Lessner worked with her in a loan-shark operation. She said that Lessner had been missing since April 30, 1969, last seen getting into a car with one of Carmine’s crew.
On the tape Lessner, who Winograd accused of stealing $30,000, was fearful for his life. Mrs. Winograd assured him that he had nothing to fear from either her or The Kid, an apparent reference to Carmine.
Yasgur asked the witness: “When you say Lessner stole $30,000 from you, you meant that he stole it from your business, a business that Mr. Persico has an interest in, correct?”
“ No. ”
“Mrs. Winograd, during the course of the conversation did you not tell Mr. Lessner that Mr. Persico, in your language, ‘feels like a jerkoff’ if you could do this to him and he’d do nothing about it?”
“Yes, I said that.”
“Now, when you said that, ‘if you could do this to him’ in the context of the conversation, isn’t it a fact that you were referring to what Lessner had done when he had stolen the $30,000?”
“He stole that money from me.”
“Mrs. Winograd, what I’m asking you is, in the context of the conversation, when you said that to Lessner, ‘if you could do this,’ isn’t it quite clear that you were referring to the fact that Lessner had stolen the $30,000 from the money-lending business?”
“I was talking in the heat of anger, I don’t know exactly what I meant.”
“Did you ever discuss your business with Mr. Persico?”
“No, never.”
“Have you ever discussed with Carmine Persico the fact that Lessner has, as you previously testified, stolen money from you or the lending business?”
“Absolutely not . . . I think I told Mr. Persico that Mr. Lessner had robbed me but not from my money-lending business.”
“Did Mr. Persico ever warn Lessner to stay out of the fur market?”
“No, that was a figment of Mr. Lessner’s imagination.”
And on and on it went. Not just with this witness, but with all of the other prosecution witnesses as well. No one could testify that Carmine did anything illegal ever. So it came as no surprise that, on December 8, 1971, the jury found Carmine not guilty on all charges.
When Judge Postel first prohibited the press and public from the courtroom, Carmine’s defense team filed suit. The courts being the way they were, by the time a court got around to looking at the suit, Carmine’s trial was over. In January 1972, the Court of Appeals briefly considered Carmine’s request for a retrial, but he was acquitted so no new trial was necessary.
The subject didn’t go away completely however, as legal efforts were made to prevent Judge Postel’s rulings from happening again. In March the seven-man New York State Supreme Court unanimously decided that Judge Postel had been wrong when he closed Carmine’s trial to the press and the public. Right to a public trial meant just what it said. However, again because of Carmine’s acquittal, the Supreme Court dismissed a lawsuit brought by the five reporters who’d been kicked out of the courtroom. The dismissal was not because the reporter’s claims were without merit, but because the trial was long over and “the relief requested now served no purpose.”
In his decision, Chief Judge Stanley Fuld explained that it was up to the judge to prove there was an imminent threat to the integrity of the trial before taking action to limit the First Amendment’s guarantees, and Judge Postel had not done that. You don’t bar the press, Fuld wrote, you sequester the jury.
* * *
The 1959 hijacking still hung increasingly heavy around Carmine Persico’s neck, a bloated and blindfolded albatross. When Carmine was first in the case years before he’d been offered a deal: plead guilty, do three years, parole in one.
Instead, Carmine fought and fought and fought, good news for the lawyers he hired but not so great for him. He was eventually sentenced to fourteen years. As he listened to the judge, his first thought was of how much he’d changed, grown, since the crime was committed. At the hijacking he’d been a dour-faced street punk. Now he was a dapper and wealthy man. He’d played cards with billionaires and fucked movie stars.
He’d been offered three, got fourteen. Was it a blunder? Best bet is that he felt he’d done the right thing. It was worth it just to tell those federal fucks to go fuck themselves.
“Mushy, you and Tommy are boss while I’m gone,” Carmine said to his cousin Andy Russo, referring to Thomas DiBella.
According to sources close to Carmine, he ran the Colombo family from behind bars, using his brothers Alphonse, Teddy Boy, and Hugh McIntosh as messengers to Mush. As boss, Carm
ine demonstrated a new level of cooperation with the Gambino family, making himself indispensable to the Boss of Bosses.
Just as Carmine was going into prison, Joey Gallo was getting out. Crazy Joey was angry and suffering from a genuine personality disorder. He just wanted to kill everybody.
Once again war was in the wind. Tensions grew between the family—now known as the Colombos—and that old thorn in their ass, the President Street Boys. Carmine, as he adjusted to prison life, came to understand that there could be no peace on the outside until the Gallos were dead.
* * *
On April 7, 1972, “Crazy” Joey Gallo was killed at Umberto’s Clam House. Because my dad worked with Joey and the guys who were supposed to guard Joey, I learned a lot of inside dope on what went down that night, and still none of it makes much sense.
Earlier in the year we’d noticed that Joey wasn’t on the block as much as the old days. We’d still see him once or twice a week, but that was it. He’d moved on. He had a new wife and a new life in the city. He had to know he was a target, yet he’d walk around without protection.
He thought the Colombos were too chickenshit to shoot him. Kid Blast tried to convince Joey that being careful out there wasn’t a sign of weakness, it was a sign of wisdom. Joey heard him and didn’t hear him. He had my Godfather Bobby Darrow and Pete “The Greek” Diapoulis watching his back, and he said that was enough for him. But it wasn’t. Once the bullets started flying, Bobby and Pete did him no good at all. Bobby had met a girl that night and Joey sent him off with her to have fun. Pete was a guy no one liked because he was all muscle and no brain, but he’d been a pretty good bodyguard, up there until the very end. Joey got shot dead and Pete the Greek got shot in the ass. According to the stories we heard, the hit was ordered somewhat spontaneously. A guy named Joe Lupacelli spotted Joey and his family coming into Umberto’s, and quietly slipped a dime into a nearby payphone. He called Yak. Yak said he’d take care of it.
Carmine the Snake Page 12