Slotnick’s point was that the tag of crime boss would potentially hurt Carmine’s chances of winning early parole or qualify for work-release programs.
Prosecutor Cohen said that the government agreed to the compromise because he didn’t see that there was a significant difference between “head” and “upper-echelon.” Not big enough to argue, anyway. If they were happy, he was happy.
Cohen also pointed out that proving something like who was or wasn’t the head of a crime family involved using a lot of undercover surveillance stuff, and it was difficult to present that evidence in court without potentially outing an undercover informant or a useful surveillance system.
Regarding the changing of “head” to “upper-echelon,” Judge Nickerson, with a real ha-ha sense of humor, quipped: “Do you use the word echelon on the theory that no one in prison will understand it?”
* * *
In 1975, a woman named Arlyne Brickman began her career as a call girl/informant for the Fort Lee, New Jersey, police after her daughter got in bad with a Colombo loanshark whose standing with the family deteriorated once Gerry Lang was in charge of his operation. Brickman was so good at her job that she found steady work, making serious money spying for the DEA and FBI, taking advantage of hoods that talked in and out of bed. Her crowning achievement however was the part she played years later in the RICO investigation of top Colombos, namely capo (and Prospect Park killer) Anthony “Scappi” Scarpati, Little Allie Boy, and his dad Carmine. She got people to mention the Persicos and their longtime brain trust by name, on video, but did it in such a foul-mouthed puttana manner that the FBI was worried schoolmarm jurists might disapprove. (Not a problem, as it turned out.) Of concern to Brickman was her daughter, who used drugs, was sweet on the shylock who’d victimized her, was hip to mom’s government job, and didn’t like being related to a rat. Brickman ended up paying off her daughter to keep her quiet.
* * *
According to an FBI report, in January 1982, Carmine allegedly put a hit on a pair of guys who were keeping more than their share of the profits from the hit porn movie Deep Throat. The guys were Joseph Peraino Sr. and Jr., who had financed the making and distribution of the number-one all-time blockbuster XXX movie and didn’t feel like paying the tribute. “I’m being robbed by my own family!” Peraino Sr. had been overheard complaining. So it was the Frankie Shots deal all over again. The Perainos had to go.
The hit was exceptional, sadly, because of its collateral damage. In fact, for a God-fearing hoodlum, it was the worst that could happen. One of the members of the hit team was Salvatore Miciotta, and it’s his version of events (told after receiving a new I.D.) that follows.
The plan was hatched in an Avenue U social club. Two sawed-off shotguns arrived at that location by a discreet messenger. Both the targets and the shooters were on foot in the Gravesend section of Brooklyn. Others were there, Miciotta said, but it was he and Jimmy Angellino with the guns. The Perainos knew they were targets. In fact, Sr. had one arm in a sling, a remnant of a previous gunshot wound, as he and his son stood on the south edge of the Gravesend Cemetery on Village Road. They spotted men approaching, bearing sawed-off shotguns. They made a run for it, the gunmen in pursuit. The Perainos ran about one-hundred yards before picking a random two-family house around the corner on Lake Street. The fleeing men galloped up the outdoor stairs toward the front door of the second-floor apartment. The gunmen stopped at the base of the stairs and gathered themselves.
Two shotgun blasts echoed down the street. Buckshot blew a hole in Jr.’s chest, killing him instantly. Buckshot tore through Sr.’s spine, through a window into the upstairs apartment, and through the head of fifty-three-year-old, Brazilian-born Veronica Zuraw, a former nun of the Pallottine order that ran a Bensonhurst storefront helping arriving Italians just off the boat. She had left the convent to get married, but had once been known as Sister Mary Adelaide, a teacher for the Brooklyn Catholic Diocese school system. She was a beloved character to whom children flocked, and was folding and putting away the laundry when death came suddenly.
Miciotta said he shot and killed Peraino Jr. in those stairs, while Angellino shot and wounded Sr., leaving him forever paralyzed. The FBI report noted that it was allegedly Angellino’s shot that killed the innocent bystander. There was no one to disagree with Miciotta’s story.
By the time Miciotta told the story in 1999, Angellino was dead, himself a victim of a hit allegedly carried out by Carmine Sessa in November 1988 in a reputed mobster’s home in Kenilworth, New Jersey.
Veronica’s husband, Louis Zuraw, was in his mid-sixties and became despondent after his wife’s death, drank himself sick, and died in the VA Hospital next to Fort Hamilton in 1986.
In 2012, the story of that notorious hit was again told, this time in a Brooklyn federal courtroom with a different cast of characters. On trial was Tommy “Shots” Gioeli. Prosecution witness Big Dino Calabro was all set to say he heard Tommy Shots confess to killing the nun, adding the lament, “I’m going to Hell.” Gioeli was charged with six murders, none of them the nun or Peraino Sr. She only came up because the prosecution wanted to hear evidence regarding the Gravesend hit in front of the jury, but Judge Brian Cogan said no, stick to the six in the indictment. That ruling was overturned as the defense announced its plans to call character witnesses on Tommy Shots’ behalf, at which time the prosecution would be allowed to use the nun-killing evidence in cross-examination. Calabro was called to the stand, but only to discuss Gioeli’s involvement in the six murders with which he’d been charged. The closest he came to mentioning the shooting of the nun was to say Gioeli had taken up prayer, and was frequently seen on his knees in a Long Island church’s outdoor grotto.
Reportedly, Gioeli vehemently denied having anything to do with Veronica Zuraw’s death.
* * *
During 1984−85, three mob commission meetings were held, the Colombos repped by Donnie Shacks and Gerry Lang. According to the April 29, 1988, Washington, D.C. testimony of Fish Cafaro, the third meeting turned into a bit of a comedy when fed agents were spotted and the hoods took off. Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno, Cafaro testified, took after his nickname and got stuck in a window while trying to escape. The fat man was pulled to safety in the nick of time.
CHAPTER TEN
The Grim Reaper
“I love the smell of gunpowder,” Gregory Scarpa would say with eyes dancing.
BY THE TIME CARMINE MATURED out of his youthful reputation as an up-close-and-personal killer, his days of freedom were down to a few and he chose as his battle leader a true psychopath, a guy who would kill his own grandmother if she looked at him funny—or if the price was right. He was Gregory “The Grim Reaper” Scarpa, a stylishly dressed ladies’ man who carried thousands in cash on him at all times in case he needed to pay out an emergency bribe. Scarpa was a trip and a half, happy as a clam with a gun in his hand.
He was nuts, thought he was James Bond, and told his kids that he worked for the government. In a sense it was true, but holy shit. He was a tough guy, five-ten, 210 pounds, with a heavy build and pitch-black hair. Dating back to the 1960s, he’d been a Colombo, involved in extortion, loans, and reportedly narcotics, getting his instructions from the boss, be it Profaci, Colombo, or Persico.
By his willingness to take on the most difficult and distasteful hits, he had made himself a wealthy man, with homes in Vegas and in three of the five New York City boroughs. He once bragged that killing enemies was such a gas, he wished he could ghoul the bodies from their graves and snuff them one more time.
Scarpa HQ was the Wimpy Boys Social Club on Thirteenth Avenue in Dyker. His record was long, but he always walked, sometimes with probation, other times with the charges dropped outright.
Scarpa may have had some personality traits in common with Carmine Persico, but unlike the stoic Junior who would rather do time than rat every single time, Scarpa was not averse to cooperating with authorities.
In fact, almost bizarre
ly, Scarpa was a rat from the get-go. According to FBI documents, Scarpa was initially contacted in August 1961 at the start of the Gallo-Profaci War. At that time Scarpa lived in a freestanding house on a quiet street on Staten Island. The feds came to visit him at the social club he owned. They came back two or three times. Scarpa was friendly with the agents, but he didn’t give up any info. He told the feds not to contact him again because people were starting to talk about why agents kept visiting his club. The agents agreed and told him that if he changed his mind about supplying info, there was money to be made, and they gave him a number to call. Scarpa’s actual co-operation with the U.S. Government went at least as far back as 1964 when the feds used him to help solve the “Mississippi Burning” murders of three civil rights workers in 1964. Somewhere there’s a tape of Scarpa cajoling a KKK member to disclose where the bodies were buried—and by cajoling, I mean he beat the shit out of him and stuck a gun in his mouth.
FBI documents seem to indicate that, at the time the FBI recruited Scarpa, they didn’t know he was a killer. They saw him as a white-collar mobster, running various scams while calling himself a self-employed clothing salesman. They did, however, know that Scarpa had been “consorting with others with evil reputations.” Carmine Persico was mentioned. Hugh McIntosh, too.
Scarpa’s deal with the feds placed him in deep, deep cover. Only his handlers knew of the arrangement. It was kept a secret from the rest of the FBI and federal prosecutors. The deal was that Scarpa’s information could be used to help the feds bust racketeers, but Scarpa was never, under any circumstances, to be called as a witness before a grand jury or at a trial.
* * *
On September 24, 1984, the elder Alphonse Persico’s thirty-one-year-old ex-girlfriend, the stunningly gorgeous Mary Bari was found murdered and dumped in the street, all identification removed. She was ID’d by her sister, who recognized the tattoo of a peach on her ass. Bari was called in the papers Allie Boy’s “longtime paramour.”
She’d thought she was going to a job interview for a cocktail waitressing gig in a Bensonhurst tavern. The joint was called the Occasions Bar and run by Carmine Sessa. Bari was dressed to impress, wearing high-heeled boots, designer jeans, and a black halter top.
But there was no interview. According to the New York Post, it was a father and son job. Gregory Scarpa Jr. put Mary in a bearhug while dad, Greg Sr. pumped three bullets into her head.
Senior would be dead before he could be prosecuted for this murder, but his son went away to the fed pen in Florence, California, in part because of his role in the Bari hit. (In 1988, Scarpa was suffering from a bleeding ulcer and received a gift that kept on giving, a transfusion from a member of his crew, a bodybuilder who shot steroids with a dirty needle and died of AIDS. Scarpa was himself diagnosed with AIDS in 1991, a fact kept private. Everyone noticed his emaciated and ravaged appearance, however, as he lost fifty pounds.)
Mary Bari’s body was cocooned in canvas and dumped in a street two miles away, where it was found only hours later. Scarpa had been tipped off that Bari was talking to the FBI by his FBI buddy Roy Lindley DeVecchio. Scarpa and DeVecchio, as we’d later learn, had a very strange relationship. Scarpa would help DeVecchio with his investigations, and DeVecchio would help Scarpa with his mob business, including allegedly at least five hits. Both were paid on the taxpayer’s dime.
Later, Carmine Sessa, proprietor of Occasions Bar, told the FBI that he’d witnessed Bari’s murder. Sessa said a member of Scarpa’s crew lured Bari to the club where Scarpa shot and killed her. Bari was murdered, Sessa said, because she knew where Allie Boy was (he had been on the lam for four years after skipping his sentencing hearing for extortion) and, now that she was cooperating with the feds, was apt to disclose his location.
That was what Sessa said, but the FBI only partially agreed. The mere suspicion that she was an FBI informant was enough to order her murder, regardless of the other factors. For one thing, they didn’t think Bari knew where Allie Boy was hiding. She was his ex-girlfriend. Allie Boy moved from place to place. He and Bari had been out of touch for years.
“Not even his family knew where he was,” said Victor Oboyski, the deputy U.S. Marshal in charge of the search for Alphonse Persico. “His wife and daughter would drive toward Connecticut, but a meeting would be set up at a neutral site, usually a diner.”
Oboyski was troubled by Bari’s murder because it was, in essence, one FBI informant rubbing out another. Oboyski had asked for permission to question Bari regarding Allie Boy’s whereabouts but had been told no because of the FBI’s “special relationship” with her.
Larry Mazza, who admits being a Scarpa gunman, was at the shooting of Mary Bari and its aftermath, aspects of which he found extremely troubling. After the killing there was a “celebration” at an Italian restaurant on 13th Avenue in Dyker Heights. Scarpa and his crew, including Mazza, were there. So was Sessa and his wife. Some of them had a big laugh about the hit. It was a joking, festive type of atmosphere. Someone said that when Bari was shot her ear went flying off. Mrs. Sessa then joked that a dog found the ear lying on the ground and couldn’t figure out what it was. Scarpa pulled the trigger himself he said because it was hard to find someone to kill women. A lot of guys didn’t have the stomach for it. But it didn’t bother Scarpa—or, apparently, his kid.
In my crowd, this whole Mary Bari thing was very disturbing. Best guess is that Scarpa was fucking her and caught her stepping out on him. Allie Boy had nothing to do with it. It was personal. To tell the truth, it wasn’t even a mob hit. It was sick twisted shit, more like something that would be done by a father/son serial-killer team. I wonder about that “festive” atmosphere after, too. A lot of people will play along because they don’t want to enrage a psycho killer, but once alone they feel differently. It was fucked up. Even the most desensitized hood had to see that.
In the meantime, Mary Bari’s ex, Allie Boy, was not captured for another three years, in November 1987, hiding in West Hartford, Connecticut. (More about Allie Boy and his time on the lam in Chapter Eleven.)
Karma had a field day with the truly evil Scarpa. By December 29, 1992, Scarpa was wasted with AIDS to the point of being barely recognizable. And, yet things still managed to turn drastically worse for him. In what was described as a drug transaction near his Brooklyn home that had nothing to do with Colombo business, Scarpa took a bullet to the left eye but lived to die a wasting death.
One of the weak points in Scarpa’s deal with his fed handler DeVecchio, was that the rest of the FBI had no clue about him, and if they wanted to prosecute him for his many crimes, there was nothing DeVecchio could do to help him.
“If they catch you, I don’t know you,” DeVecchio said.
Scarpa was confident that he’d never be caught. But by 1993 he was sick, and the feds were closing in. Racketeering charges ensued. Scarpa took a plea. Even after the bust he continued to inform to DeVecchio, even as he was begging for a way out.
DeVecchio knew he could outwait the situation. Scarpa looked like he was about to keel over at any second. “The Grim Reaper,” a nickname now swollen with irony, just barely managed to stand for his sentencing. Judge Jack B. Weinstein said he was “worse than a wild animal,” gave him ten years, but the actual Grim Reaper visited Scarpa weeks later in a prison hospital.
Scarpa ended up causing the justice system just as much trouble in death as he had in life. DeVecchio was arrested, his behavior having gone above and beyond his legal role as handler of an informant. They offered to a grand jury plentiful evidence that DeVecchio, even when around other feds, seemed to have forgotten his role as an FBI agent and was thinking of himself as an active player for Carmine Persico’s team.
He, they said, was an accessory to murder. The initial attempt to prosecute DeVecchio didn’t take. The Justice Department concluded there was insufficient evidence to indict. The agent agreed to retire with his pension. He swore up and down that the info he collected was a one-way street—and he a
sserted that working as a catalyst for mob mayhem, dividing and conquering, was good for the bureau, because the resulting chaos begat defectors and backstabbers, canaries and rats. Being a provocateur, therefore, was in the best interests of the bureau as well.
The problem with that statement was that it made DeVecchio’s and Scarpa’s evidence harder to use in a courtroom. Guys arrested on Scarpa’s info grew harder to prosecute, as they could now say there was an undercover fed in the works tipping the scales to make them look guilty. Nineteen hoods were acquitted or had their convictions reversed in Appellate Court. Juries were willing to believe that an agent of the FBI and an agent of Carmine Persico would work hand-in-hand in the underworld if they had a common enemy. Nineteen men returned to the streets—although many were re-prosecuted for similar crimes, this time successfully, when new vocalists discovered their voice. (Jumping ahead for a moment, the justice department never forgot about DeVecchio. He was indicted many years later in 2006 for helping Scarpa on four hits, and spent eighteen months free on $1 million bail before the case against him fell apart when Scarpa’s live-in girlfriend contradicted herself, saying she both did and didn’t know details of the relationship between Scarpa and DeVecchio.)
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Operation Star Quest
Scarpa went out ugly, sure, but the damage he did to the Colombos was uglier. The feds had already known most of the games the boys played. Scarpa told them who did what and how the organization was put together. Feds asked Scarpa: “Who’s the boss?” “Junior,” Scarpa said. Wasn’t it obvious?
ON OCTOBER 14, 1984, Carmine Persico—just out of prison for parole violation—and the entire upper echelon of the Colombos were indicted on racketeering charges. The indictments, announced by straight-laced Attorney General William French Smith, claimed that the Colombo crime family, operated by Persico and others, was engaged in the usual nefarious activities, i.e., a “pattern of racketeering.” Smith added that the Colombos had strong “influences” within New York City’s construction and restaurant industries.
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