Carmine the Snake

by Frank DiMatteo

  * * *

  During the first half of the 1990s, the FBI’s codename for Cowboy Mike Lloyd was “Snake Charmer.” When Mike had earned his deal, the feds tried to set him free but ran into an unexpected obstacle. In order for Mike to enjoy freedom, the State of Pennsylvania had to forget about his state rap and release him for extra special good behavior. They didn’t want to.

  As a result of this wrangling between the state and federal powers, word leaked that Mike was a rat, and suddenly his time at Lompoc became more difficult. He instantly plummeted on the social scale from being an honorary member of the Italian-American Cultural Club to being a cyst on the ass of the prison.

  In 2001, the Pennsylvania Board of Pardons reviewed Mike’s case again and unanimously recommended he be released. After all, his work as an informant had resulted in the prevention of the assassination of two federal officers and had resulted in criminal charges being filed against dozens of hoods.

  But again there was an unexpected obstacle. Pennsylvania Governor Tom Ridge refused to commute Michael Lloyd’s sentence. Ridge said that Cowboy Mike blew the deal when he picked up a knife and held it to a correctional officer’s throat. He remained in prison in solitary confinement with a false identity until at least 2005 despite federal efforts to reward him for a job well done.

  * * *

  Part of Carmine’s remote-control problem was the increasing physical and familial distance between himself and the guys on the outside who were supposed to be following his orders. Both his brother Alphonse and son Alphonse were having troubles staying healthy and free.

  Carmine saw his eldest son, Alphonse T. Persico, as the heir apparent to the Colombo family. With dad absent much of the time, Little Allie Boy had lived the life of a prince, growing up in Carroll Gardens and Bensonhurst, where his name was revered. He was taller and better looking than his dad, and he was the first Persico since Grandpa Carmine the stenographer, to get a decent education. In fact, Little Allie Boy was extremely well-educated by organized-crime standards. Carmine had long regretted not becoming a lawyer and urged Allie Boy to follow that path. But, Allie Boy never came close to the bar exam. He got in two years of pre-law at St. John’s University in Queens, New York, before going to work for his father. He was never a soldier, beginning his time in the life as capo, college functioning similarly to officer-training school in the service.

  According to Aaron Marcu, Little Allie Boy emerged from his college experience as “a swaggering classic wannabe.” Marcu went on and on about his lousy character, saying Allie Boy was resentful that he didn’t command as much respect as his old man. It was hard. Dad was considered a god by the people of Bensonhurst, while Allie Boy was considered just a man. Nonetheless, Marcu said, Alphonse was “taken by the life,” and enjoyed nothing more than “bossing people around.” (Marcu himself switched sides after his prosecution of the Persicos, and has had a lucrative career defending men of the country-club set accused of white-collar crimes.)

  Little Allie Boy’s first arrest came in 1983 at age twenty-nine; the charge, trafficking heroin. Colombo lawyers flocked to his aid and, upon closer examination, the charges were dismissed. As we’ve seen, he was convicted in the 1986 Colombo trial. This turned out to be a key to the tumultuous future of the Colombo family. If Little Allie Boy had remained free, Carmine most likely would have made him acting boss after Big Allie Boy went to prison, and the copious bloodshed that followed might have been avoided.

  Carmine’s brother Alphonse missed much of his youth because he was in prison for the murder of Stephen Bove and didn’t become a prominent gangster until the 1970s in the Colombo family. When Carmine went away, brother Alphonse became acting head of the Colombos. Convicted of extortion in a federal court in June 1980, Big Allie Boy disappeared before he could be sentenced before Judge Jack B. Weinstein of Federal District Court. Wanted by the U.S. Marshals Service fugitive squad, he went on the lam, became a transient, changing his name with each location. Because he had a good business relationship with Connecticut boss William Grasso, Allie Boy hid out for a long time in West Hartford, under Grasso’s protection. Persico wasn’t the only wanted man that Grasso took care of. When Salvatore “Mickey” Caruana was busted for distributing $173 million worth of weed, he was put up in a Middletown apartment that Grasso arranged for. Grasso was known as a go-to guy for hoods on the lam. He had a DMV insider making fake I.D. cards.

  The arrangement for Allie Boy worked well until marshals caught up with him in an apartment in West Hartford on November 9, 1987. The raiding marshals later said that Allie Boy never saw it coming and was startled as he was making sauce when the officers barged in. (Grasso himself came to a bad end in 1989 when a warring crew bumped him off and dumped him in a patch of poison ivy next to the Connecticut River.) Allie Boy’s flight had merely delayed the inevitable.

  Two days after his arrest he was denied bail, and ordered returned to New York to attend the extortion sentencing he’d lammed on seven years before. At that hearing, he was sentenced to twenty-five years by Judge Thomas C. Platt of Federal District Court, beginning his sentence in “Camp Fed,” the Lompoc Federal Penitentiary. He died in a Springfield, Missouri, prison hospital of cancer of the larynx on September 12, 1989, at the age of sixty-one, survived by wife Dora and daughter Suzanne Farese, and two brothers, Carmine and Theodore.

  * * *

  When neither of the Alphonses was around to run the family for Carmine, he appointed a three-man “Ruling Committee” to pilot the ship. It consisted of his cousin, and capo of Little Allie Boy’s crew, Vittorio Giovanni “Little Vic” Orena, another cousin Joseph Russo, and Benedetto Aloi.

  Orena, as he always did when given the opportunity, took charge. Carmine made it clear that Orena’s position was temporary. As soon as Little Allie Boy was free, the top spot would go to him.

  Blood, after all, was thicker than water.

  As it turned out, putting the sad-eyed Orena that close to power was a massive mistake. Cousin Vic, Carmine learned too late, hungered for control.

  * * *

  In 1989, the State of New Jersey Commission of Investigation’s annual report, included an essay called “The Colombo/Persico /Orena Family,” which gave a supposedly thorough and understandably Jersey-centric analysis of the gang.

  The family included, it said, 120 made men, plus 450 associates. They were in the business of gambling, loansharking, arson, extortion, labor racketeering, cigarette smuggling, pornography, bankruptcy and mail fraud, tax evasion, counterfeiting, and narcotics.

  New Jersey believed Carmine’s crew was still heavily into hij ackings, in particular the series of recent hijacks near JFK airport. The borgata also dabbled in coin-operated machines, restaurants, and deciding who does and who doesn’t get a liquor license. They’d even been experimenting with investing in motion pictures. Although the youngest of the five families started out as a Brooklyn thing, the report said, the members had spread out over the generations, and now lived on Long Island, and in Florida, Nevada, and California.

  The State investigation revealed that the Colombo family had been on a steady downslide dating back to the moment Joe was vegetabled. Timing, the report said, had a lot to do with it. The Colombo family’s disarray coincided with John Gotti’s rise to power in the Gambino clan, and the Gambinos took over a lot of the rackets that had formerly been Colombo. Things improved for the Colombos when acting boss Thomas DiBella retired and Carmine moved into the acting boss spot (Joe Colombo remaining technically the boss until the day he died). Persico got a grip on business and the drain of revenue loss to the Gambinos stopped. The commission report stated that it was when Colombo died that Carmine became boss. The Colombo family’s surge in power lasted, however, only until Persico went away. Twenty-six members of the Colombo family also were incarcerated, and that left the ranks depleted. The Jersey analysis saw Salvatore Profaci, son of the pre-Colombo boss, as the greatest threat to Carmine’s power. Despite the top guys all going away, the C
olombos continued to operate and profit. The report concluded, “It has been theorized that the group has to some extent become self-sufficient, and that the presence of leadership has only been necessary to make command decisions and settle disputes. This internal strength can be attributed to the organization’s ability to amass large profits from selected activities.”

  On May 30, 1990, Colombo underboss Benedetto “Benny” Aloi was among those named in a sixty-nine-count indictment. Carmine’s three-man ruling committee was down to two.

  As it turned out, the Jersey commission had been wrong about one very important thing: Sal Profaci was not Carmine’s worst nightmare. That distinction went to cousin Vic.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  The Last War

  Little Vic wanted to be boss—so determined that, during the early 1990s, the blood of hoodlums again stained Brooklyn streets. Out of this bulb of carnage, paranoia bloomed. You couldn’t tell friends from enemies, and an aria of canaries sang their cowardly betrayal.

  VITTORIO ORENA, the round little man who would square off against Carmine in what would be called “The Last War,” was born on August 4, 1934, and rose up from the bottom. Raised by a single mom, the hoods were his father figures, his source of guidance and wisdom. They were the big shots in his neighborhood, the only ones with money, and he wanted to grow up to be just like them. School devolved into Reform School, then to no school at all—but he learned the labor racket just fine, and used his expertise to transform himself into a fellow who dressed in finely tailored suits and projected himself as a legitimate businessman.

  Despite his soft appearance, Little Vic had intense green eyes that could go cold and scare the shit out of a guy. He skimmed millions off the pensions of unions under Colombo control and lent that money to degenerate gamblers.

  His expertise was washing money. He could’ve called his end of the business Dummy Corp. The feds later learned that Orena’s laundry consisted of eleven companies and more than 150 bank accounts—a system allegedly set up with the help of Orena’s lawyer, Dennis Pappas. Feds knew that loan-sharking money and other family assets were ending up in the paychecks of mobster’s family members, no-show jobs at ghost companies that didn’t seem to do anything other than exist. Authorities could only estimate the millions of dollars that were being laundered because they could never completely determine how the money-go-round worked. It was like deciphering a Rube Goldberg drawing. Pappas’s alleged work was so complicated, such an intricate juggling act, that he was known as the Colombos’ “finance consigliere.” When one of Pappas’s accountants smelled something fishy in the numbers he was given, he received a package: a dead fish wrapped in newspaper, a crystal-clear message.

  Despite his gangster status, Orena had a very short criminal record: gambling, perjury, loansharking. The man was in his fifties, and he’d served a total of four months in jail—a weekend vacation compared to the Persicos.

  Carmine considered his cousin Vic Orena to be obedient and profitable. Only one of those attributes turned out to be true.

  * * *

  Orena had friends outside the family, influential friends—John Gotti, some guys near the top in the Lucchese family. He grew into an extraordinary earner, shaking down labor for their union dues over broad swaths of lucrative turf in New York and Jersey.

  Carmine was not quick to figure out Orena’s intentions. In fact, during his tenure as acting boss, Orena had several times asked for executive privileges that normally would have been reserved for the boss himself. Each time Carmine said okay. He trusted Vic’s judgment. So Orena had the power to recruit new membership and order hits. And he used his power.

  In November 1989, Orena ordered a hit on Thomas Ocera, a Colombo guy. It was a shame, too, because Ocera at one time had been useful. He was on the Board of Directors at a plush catering establishment on Long Island called Massapequa Manor, where the clientele was there to be seen—sort of a Russian Tea Room for hoods. But Ocera, who lived in Merrick on Long Island, had sticky fingers, and he’d gotten caught. He was not only skimming the tribute money, but his skimming was so sloppy that it led to the police seizure of loan-sharking records. He was alleged to have been the trigger for a hit on one of Gotti’s crew. He’d fucked up twice and needed executing.

  Orena gave the word and Gregory Scarpa murdered Ocera with a piece of piano wire.

  * * *

  From the day Orena was made acting boss, Carmine bombarded him with a steady stream of orders. For two years Orena put up with it, but he knew it wasn’t working. Carmine was trying to run a business from afar, and it was impossible. The world was changing. The way you went about operating a business was changing. Stuck in prison, Carmine—Orena felt—had lost touch.

  Then, the last straw: A TV network approached Carmine and asked if he was interested in making a biography of himself. Carmine liked the idea. Orena was appalled. The boss was thinking about TV instead of business. Besides, there was nothing like the power of TV to bring the heat—and there was enough federal scrutiny on Colombo activities as there was.

  By the spring of 1991, Orena was sick of it. He didn’t like being an acting boss let alone being a lame-duck acting boss, destined to be replaced by Little Allie Boy as soon as he became available.

  Orena had a talk with John Gotti and they dealt. If Vic pulled a coup d’etat, Gotti had his back.

  * * *

  It was spring 1991 when Orena decided he was fed up. He tried to do it in a civilized way. He took his plight to the commission and asked that they remove Carmine Persico as boss of the Colombo family and install himself in that position instead.

  The commission said no fucking way. There was tradition involved. They would do it the way their fathers and grandfathers had done it. They would poll the capos as to who they wanted as their leader.

  Orena instructed consigliere Carmine Sessa to poll Colombo capos with the question: Who should be boss? Orena thought he would easily carry the vote. True, there were some die-hard Persico boys among the capos, e.g., Carmine’s brother Theodore. What Orena didn’t see coming was that the vote would never happen.

  Just asking for a vote was an act of treachery. Without the Persicos, Orena wouldn’t be the rich man he was today. One of Orena’s jobs was to make sure the Persico family continued to get their cut of the take, even though the men were behind bars. And now Orena was trying to supplant Carmine.

  Sessa knew he wasn’t going to get through this without at least one powerful man pissed off at him. He decided that his loyalty was with Carmine. It was Junior who’d made Sessa an officer in the family. So, instead of polling the capos as Orena had ordered, he ran to Carmine, telling him the acting boss was attempting a takeover.

  Carmine was level-headed about the situation. He calmly weighed pros and cons. On one hand, Vic was a relative, a man in whom Carmine had placed absolute trust. On the other, he was insubordinate, treasonous—and action needed to be swift and final.

  Carmine ordered Sessa to put together a team to take care of Orena. This, Sessa did—a five-man team led by Sessa himself. On June 20, 1991, the team parked itself across the street from Orena’s Cedarhurst, Long Island, home and waited for their opportunity. They were too obvious, however. As Orena drove home, he spotted them and fled urgently.

  As he drove away, wheels squealing, heart pounding, Orena did some quick computing in his head. That was a hit team, he was the target, and the only person with the juice to order a hit on a man of his stature was Carmine Persico, who was thousands of miles away.

  After that, there were ninety days of peace talks. Nobody did a head count, but usually at those meetings there were about three times as many crew members loyal to Orena as there were supporters of Carmine. Again, it went to the commission. Was Persico the boss of the Colombo family or not? The Commission refused to take sides, and that meant war.

  Cousin Vic sent a message to the Persicos. No way he was stepping down when Allie Boy was released. No way was he sharing the profit
s from his rackets with the Persicos. Those loyal to the Persicos would be shuffled off the goddamned mortal coil.

  One of Orena’s key assets was capo Salvatore “Jersey Sal” Profaci, son of Joe, who ran Colombo business west of the Hudson. An FBI bug in a Jersey lawyer’s office caught Profaci discussing the reason for his loyalty. He said that Orena was capable, qualified, and a “beautiful person.” Carmine, on the other hand, was nuts, and wanted to do stupid things like talking to the press.

  “He wants to be on 60 Minutes with Barbara Walters,” Jersey Sal said.

  Just as some of the street gangs of Carmine’s youth had had two leaders, one for thinking and one for fighting, Carmine knew that, in order to win the upcoming internecine war, he was going to need a fighting leader, a general to lead the troops in a winning war effort. He chose the “Grim Reaper” Gregory Scarpa.

  The first salvo, not counting Sessa’s aborted attempt to kill Orena himself, came on November 18, 1991, when Orena capo William “Billy Fingers” Cutolo sent a team, including Michael “Mikey Spats” Spataro and Joseph Campanella, to kill Scarpa. Take out Carmine’s top gun, the thinking went, and his army lost its generalissimo.

  After three days of being watched and followed, Scarpa was ambushed in his car, with his daughter and granddaughter in a car directly behind him, but despite a hail of bullets, everyone was okay. According to daughter Linda Scarpa, twenty-two years old at the time, she followed her father’s car out of the driveway and noticed a van speeding down the block.