Carmine the Snake

by Frank DiMatteo

  Pete the Greek maintained his innocence with a desperate fervor right from the start, but was eyed suspiciously from then on.

  That same weekend when Joey was whacked, one of the New York dailies ran an “expose” on the Colombo family. It said that Carmine was in charge, but that Joey’s death was not a Colombo hit. Not that hitting Joey in retaliation for the vegetablization of Joe Colombo didn’t occur to Carmine. He must’ve wanted Joey dead very badly, but he reportedly decided against it because he didn’t want it to interfere with one of his perpetual upcoming court appeals—another refrain that would follow Carmine from cell to cell. (If this story was true, Yak apparently didn’t consider Carmine’s plight when he decided Joey Gallo had to go, knowing well that Carmine would not be heartbroken by the news.)

  * * *

  On April 7, 1972, the same day Joey Gallo was murdered, Gennaro Ciprio, a Brooklyn restaurateur, was shot to death by a rooftop sniper as he exited his place onto the sidewalk. (This sounds like the same Persico sniper who later took out a couple of Gallo guys on President Street, shootings to which, as you’ll see, I had an uncomfortable proximity.) We don’t know if Joey Gallo and Ciprio were friends, but interestingly, Ciprio was rumored to have been the guy at Columbus Circle that killed Colombo’s shooter and disappeared. Officially, the case of the shooter of the shooter was wide open, without suspects. So many had a motive, apparently, that it was hard to narrow it down.

  Police investigators learned that, since Joey’s death, members of the Persico crew had been hiding out in Upstate New York in the town of Saugerties. There, Carmine had an impressive compound where it was cool and quiet in the summer, a nine-bedroom villa built on fifty-nine acres of land. The farm was called the Blue Mountain Manor Horse Farm. It was Carmine’s even though, for tax purposes, the on-paper ownership shuffled around, at one time technically belonging to Donnie Shacks.

  Watching the farm from afar with really good binoculars, investigators could see that the men at the farm always carried long arms, either shotguns or rifles, whenever they went outside. Seventeen days after Joey’s death, Allie Boy (just now entering the scene after spending two decades away for the murder of Stephen Bove), Gerry Lang, and Colombo-captain Charles Panarella and his girlfriend, twenty-three-year-old April Ballanger, were arrested as they drove away from Carmine’s farm. Feds had the impression plans were—again—being made to eliminate the Gallo crew. Not that they could charge them with that. Not yet. What they did was charge Alphonse with “making a false statement in application for a bank loan.” Lang was charged with possession of fireworks. Panarella and his goomada were charged with state weapons violations.

  Agents from the FBI, and the Treasury Department, as well as state policemen, raided the farm a second time on August 12, 1972. Only Allie Boy and his family and brother Teddy were home. Allie Boy was picked up on a previous arrest warrant. This was a disappointment as agents were seeking Joe Yak and Carmine DiBiase in connection with the Joey Gallo hit, and had hoped they were in Saugerties.

  DiBiase, a.k.a. Sonny Pinto, was a bad drinker. Pete the Greek from the Gallo crew said of him, “He was no big earner or mover. Sober, he was nothing, but drunk he’d blow your head off.”

  In December, DiBiase was indicted by a Manhattan grand jury for Joey’s murder. DiBiase promptly disappeared and was never seen again. Best bet is that, sooner or later, he was victim to the White Death.

  It was one thing to be a target, another to be a target and everyone knows it. A couple of weeks after Joey Gallo was killed, the Associated Press released a story to newspapers everywhere that Kid Blast and the remaining members of the Gallo crew were next on the Colombo family’s hit list. The papers said the Gallo upper rank was “marked for assassination.” The deposition said that the Colombos had thus far been responsible for two Gallo losses, Joey Gallo and Gennaro Ciprio. The source was an FBI nameless informant with “known reliability.” The information went public when it was included in a Kingston, New York, State Supreme Court deposition in application for a search warrant for Carmine Persico’s farm.

  A confessed participant in Joey’s killing, Joseph Luparelli, turned himself in to the FBI because he thought his accomplice was going to rat on him. He told the FBI, contrary to what unnamed sources were telling the New York newspapers, that Yak ordered the Joey hit. He said that he’d been in Umberto’s when Joey came in, and quickly ran to a nearby restaurant to inform four members of the Colombo Family.

  Joey was buried in Green-Wood Cemetery not far from the grave of Albert Anastasia. At the funeral Joey’s sister screamed, “The streets are going to run red with blood, Joey!”

  Despite denials in the papers—which sounded like they might’ve come from Carmine directly, or someone close to Carmine—the Colombo family had another Civil War on its hands, Persico vs. Gallo—a grudge match!

  This time, there was still a riches gap, with Carmine’s crew having far more assets than the Gallos, but in terms of manpower the numbers were surprisingly close: one hundred eighteen Colombo men compared to ninety-eight Gallos, according to The New York Times anyway. (I would’ve put the number at around fifty. I don’t know who did the counting. Reporters, I guess. Maybe it was the Pizza Squad, the cops who needed to file something after a day’s surveillance at the end of President Street.) Those numbers, it said in the paper, were evened out by the fact that more of the Gallo men were combat-ready, veterans of the Profaci war. Profaci’s men were replaced, many of them, by Colombo guys that had never been to war.

  When Carmine finally went into a federal pen for hijacking, Hugh McIntosh made frequent trips down to Atlanta to visit him. The FBI monitored McIntosh’s visits but gathered no evidence that their conversations involved Colombo business.

  Now that Colombo was out of commission, would the Profaci guys who’d had to step aside when the olive oil king passed away be allowed to return, guys like Harry Fontana, John Oddo, and Sal Mussachio? Best guess was that who was in and who was out was entirely up to Carmine. Importantly, there had also been an upheaval at the top of the Gallo family since the last war. Larry died in 1968. Joey got whacked, and Blast was in charge, smartest of the brothers, sure, but not an aggressive man by nature.

  * * *

  Time magazine, among other media outlets, followed the Persico /Gallo wars closely, and used “inside” sources, never named, to prognosticate future casualties. Blast and Punchy were said to be on the Snake’s hitlist. On the Gallos’ list was Allie Boy and Yak. The Gallos were also looking to bump off their old buddy Nick Biano, who had a big mouth.

  While Carmine and his buttons holed up in an apartment building on Fifth Avenue in Brooklyn, once again chicken wire had been put over the windows of the President Street social clubs, and the boys were hitting the mattresses in the basement, some of them right where the lion used to be caged.

  The two sides approached the war in purely military terms. Their outposts were well-guarded. They had scouts and spies that went on reconnaissance missions into enemy territory. And of course, they had guns that went out to plug any enemy soldier with his ass exposed.

  * * *

  One set of piers not controlled by the five families was on the west side of Manhattan. On that waterfront, it was Irish mob all the way—the Westies, in particular. I heard that the Westies were supposed to be even deadlier than their Italian counterparts—dishing up big plates of corned beef and carnage. The Westies were the Lords of Hell’s Kitchen, a neighborhood that no longer exists, that then consisted of rotting tenements, shadowy rat runs, and elevated trains, and is now a sun-drenched and gentrified community called Clinton.

  The Westies’ leader during the bad old days was a guy named Mickey Featherstone, who lied his way into the Green Berets and fought in Vietnam. He came home, but continued to wage war, now as a soldier-of-fortune nicknamed “Jungle Killer,” a broken-sidewalk mercenary.

  Each hit created a power vacuum, one that the Westies would promptly fill. Featherstone once walked into a
west side bar and sprayed the joint with machine-gun fire. The Westies looked at the battle for the streets of South Brooklyn as a money-making opportunity, and earned big by hiring out their services to both sides.

  And this gang-for-hire arrangement was nothing new. The Westies had been carrying out hits for Carlo Gambino for years in exchange for money and power considerations. Featherstone was convicted in 1979 of counterfeiting, and in 1986 of murder.

  * * *

  On Friday, August 11, 1972, Carmine was seven months into his hijacking sentence and word was out that brother Alphonse, along with bodyguards Gerry Lang and Hugh MacIntosh were going to be in a meeting at the Neapolitan Noodle, a small restaurant on East 79th Street in the city. At the meeting, those men were joined by Ernest LaPonzina and Joseph Gentile, who that spring had allegedly attempted to bribe an IRS agent with $4,000 and free golf lessons. The men had gathered to discuss a possible expansion of Colombo rackets.

  Special for the occasion, an outside hitman named Ted was imported from Las Vegas to kill them all, right there in the eatery. According to an FBI report, Little Allie Boy, Carmine’s teenaged son Alphonse, was also there but his name was withheld by the police because of his age.

  Ted might have been technically a professional, but he didn’t act that way. There were a couple of issues. For one thing, Ted didn’t exactly blend. He was a stocky guy wearing shades (at 9:30 P.M.), and a wig of long black straight hair hanging down his back. Every other guy in the joint was wearing a tie. Not Ted. He sat down at the bar on the end stool, placed a ten-dollar bill on the bar and ordered a scotch.

  Ted also entered the bar having no idea what his targets looked like. So a kid from the crew had been added to the op. His only job was to point out for Ted where Allie Boy and the others were sitting.

  Trouble began when, after the kid pointed out the targets, they moved, quietly exiting the bar area and switching to a table to eat. Result: Ted set his drink down, pulled two pistols and fired nine shots. He hit four kosher meat wholesalers—total innocents. Two of them died.

  Mistakes like that were very bad for business. But they did, nonetheless, intimidate the opposition. Some say it was the shooting in the Noodle that convinced Joe Yak to leave town and leave Carmine Persico officially in charge of the Colombos.

  Because Carlo Gambino was the most famous of the city bosses, he took the brunt of the bad publicity. New York City Mayor John Lindsay ordered the NYPD, thirty thousand strong, to drive the hoodlums into the sea. He said the shootings were an “outrage which demands the romanticization of the mob must be stopped.”

  No strategy was offered. The violence, authorities opined, was the result of a booming narcotics market, and an influx of impatient and hot-blooded buttonmen unwilling to let natural causes take out the mob’s elderly dons.

  * * *

  The Saturday after the Noodle, Big Allie Boy, a man who had spent his twenties and thirties in prison and was just now adjusting to freedom, was arrested for unlawfully receiving firearms in interstate commerce. One goddamn rifle. By Tuesday he was in U.S. District Court in Foley Square in Manhattan, pleading not guilty. The head of the fed strike force against organized crime, Edward M. Shaw, asked that bail be set high.

  “Alphonse Persico, as of late,” Shaw told Judge Arnold Bauman, “has been avoiding his usual hangouts and seldom goes home.”

  Allie Boy was defended at the hearing by the very pregnant Nancy Rosner, who argued that the police version of events was under question and Allie Boy should be allowed to remain free “in his own recognizance.”

  Judge Bauman and the prosecution both alluded to the fact that there’d been a recent attempt on Allie Boy’s life and perhaps he was safer in jail.

  Rosner would have none of that. She said that there had been no attempt on her client’s life. The mere fact that Allie Boy was in a restaurant during a shooting did not mean he was involved in any way. To believe that Alphonse was a target in the shooting, one had to believe in a gunman three-quarters blind. Rosner found it hard to believe that Allie Boy—tall, nattily dressed, black hair slicked back—could be mistaken for a middle-aged butcher.

  Allie Boy was released on $100,000 bail and posted bond through the Public Service Mutual Insurance Company of New York.

  * * *

  Later that year, The New York Times published yet another mob story based on “inside info.” It said Carlo Gambino was plotting to reduce the number of families in New York from five eventually down to one, with himself as the lone boss of New York City mob business. That notion must have put a damper on the bromance between Gambino and Carmine Persico. Further indication that the two families no longer had a cooperative relationship came when the Gambinos openly tried to recruit men they admired to jump ship and join them. As always, Gambino was firm that anyone who spoke out of turn—or sold drugs—was going to be thoroughly ventilated.

  * * *

  In Red Hook, snipers were climbing to the rooftops and taking shots at members of the Gallo crew down on President Street. This is an important part of the story for me, just eighteen at the time, because twice I was standing out on the sidewalk when friends of my dad’s and mine were gunned down.

  On September 2, 1974, I was on the sidewalk on President Street and Louie “The Syrian” Hubela was shot. Louie was a gunman who owned a joint on Atlantic Avenue where you could gamble or borrow money. I had turned my back to him for a second, heard the shot, and turned back to see him on the ground bleeding from the head. He was taken to Long Island College Hospital and reported in poor condition.

  Nine days later I was standing at the corner of President and Columbia Streets when Punchy Illiano was shot in the neck and shoulder as he was buying a hot dog from the hot-dog guy on the corner.

  Louie the Syrian and Punchy were both in the hospital for more than a month. Punchy was never the same, suffered nerve damage that would affect him for the rest of his life. He died in 2014 after a long illness.

  One of the ugliest incidents in Colombo family history came in 1974 when underboss Sonny Franzese discovered that a Colombo soldier named Carmine Scialo was nailing his wife. Scialo was found under a cellar with his severed cock and balls stuffed in his mouth.

  * * *

  Allie Boy was back in trouble in 1974. He was subpoenaed to appear before a federal grand jury (Eastern District of New York) investigating the effects of racketeering on legitimate businesses. Racketeering in this case being defined as patterns of criminal activity that cannot be perpetrated profitably by small criminal systems. Only a few years had passed since J. Edgar Hoover’s death, and the feds were just starting their 1970s publicity campaign about the dangers of the mob and how crushing organized crime needed to be prioritized. They said that the mob ran all but a pittance of the nation’s illegal gambling, that they were the principal importers of narcotics. They had monopolies in seemingly legitimate businesses, such as coin-operated machines like juke boxes and cigarette machines. And the mob controlled the government far more than the government wanted to admit. They had guys in their hip pocket at all levels, in the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of government—local, state, and federal. There was a need to have new legislation to plug in the loopholes in the mob’s system. Mob bosses were difficult to prosecute because there was always a couple of strata between the guy who ordered the crime and the guy who did the dirty work. Up till then, the feds had had the most success nabbing hoodlums because they had extravagant lifestyles but didn’t like to pay their taxes. What was needed was a law that made it illegal to be part of an organization that committed crimes. (Of course they were describing what would become known as RICO.) They decided to have a hearing, gather intelligence on how the mob was making life harder for the average joe.

  Allie Boy waived his rights regarding self-incrimination, was given “testimonial immunity,” and agreed to testify in the Cadman Plaza courthouse.

  Robert Del Grosso asked the questions. He was a former Marine who earned both a P
urple Heart in Vietnam and a law degree at Fordham. Del Grosso identified himself to the court as a “Special Attorney of the Organized Crime Section of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, appearing on behalf of the U.S. Attorney.”

  Del Grosso asked, “Mr. Persico, do you run a gambling business?”

  “Sure.”

  “In what sort of gambling do you deal?”

  “Horses. Sports. Numbers.”

  But that was as far as he was willing to go. Allie Boy refused to identify any employees in his business. They asked him about specific conversations he’d had with those employees.

  During this exchange the witness learned more than the questioner. Allie Boy realized by the way the questions were worded that there had been a bug, either at a location or on a person, so he said, “I refuse to answer on account of illegal electronic surveillance.”

  The court ruled that that wasn’t an adequate excuse and ordered Allie Boy to answer the questions. But Allie Boy still refused. The judge found Allie Boy in contempt and ordered him to sixty days in the custody of the marshal.

  Allie Boy served his sixty days stoically—if there was one thing he knew how to do, it was time—and when he walked out free he rolled his eyes as he was instantly subpoenaed again to appear before the same grand jury.

  The whole process was repeated, Allie Boy again clamming up when it came to his employees. This time, with a couple of months to plot, Allie Boy and his attorney had a new excuse. Alphonse was refusing to answer because he didn’t think Del Grosso had the right to ask him questions at all, due to Del Grosso’s convoluted association with the U.S. Attorney’s office. That excuse didn’t fly either. But hearings were held to justify Del Grosso as Allie Boy’s questioner, and while that was going on, it was realized that Allie Boy was never going to talk about the employees in his illegal gambling operation, and he was allowed to get off the legal merry-go-round.

  * * *

  By the mid- to late-1970s the Gallos were through as their own entity. What was left had its own war—a Civil War within a Civil War—of Blast versus not-Blast guys.