Carmine the Snake

by Frank DiMatteo

  “When I backed out,” she said, “I cut the van off. It almost slammed into me and started driving again.”

  At the end of the street she saw a truck blocking the intersection. She pulled up close to her father and waited for the obstruction to clear, looked down to check on her eight-month-old son and heard popping noises, which she at first thought were firecrackers. She looked up and saw men in black, including black ski masks, carrying long guns with silencers. They surrounded both hers and her father’s cars and fired. Thip, thip, thip, thip. She saw her father duck down. She couldn’t tell if he was hit. Joe “Fish” Marra, a friend of her dad’s, jumped out of his car and began to return fire in a decidedly non-silenced way. Her dad’s car looked like swiss cheese. As Linda grabbed the baby and ran back into the house, Greg’s car started to move. There was just enough room between a stop sign and the blocking truck for her dad’s car to fit through, and somehow he managed to get out of the intersection. There was more shooting. She hysterically told her mom, “Big Linda,” that Scarpa had been shot to death, a bit of an exaggeration as Scarpa himself soon walked through the door.

  He looked at his daughter and said, “You saved my life. You realize that, right? Don’t worry. Everything’s OK. I’m going to take care of this. They are all fucking dead. They’re going to fucking die, starting tonight.”

  He was referring of course, to the Orena faction of the Colombo family.

  On November 24, Persico-loyalist Henry “Hank the Bank” Smurra was shot in the head and killed as he sat in his car outside a donut shop in the Sheepshead Bay section of Brooklyn. He’d been one of the guys back in June who waited at Orena’s house. Joseph Campanella quipped, “Hank wanted a donut, but all he got was a hole.”

  On November 29, Larry Sessa, nephew of Carmine Sessa, was exiting a barbershop when he was chased down 86th Street, the main drag in Bensonhurst, by a group of gunmen, reportedly including Campanella. Sessa escaped by jumping into a car driven by an acquaintance. When the gunmen opened fire, the driver of the car was wounded in the shoulder and hand. The bleeding acquaintance managed to drive to safety despite his wounds, but not without hitting and injuring three pedestrians, including a four-year-old girl.

  On Tuesday, December 3, Scarpa sent a hit squad to whack thirty-eight-year-old Joseph Tolino, nephew of Orena capo Nicholas Grancio. The shooting took place outside a social club in the Gravesend section of Brooklyn. Tolino was wounded in the foot, but his companion at the time, a retired Genovese soldier, seventy-eight-year-old Gaetano “Thomas” Amato, was shot dead.

  In a memorable example of perfect mob etiquette, Carmine sent the shooters to offer an apology to the Genovese family for their regrettable fuck-up. Amato, it was agreed, had the misfortune of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  The cops were trying hard to follow the plotline, but as they used to say at Ebbets Field, you can’t tell the players without a scorecard. But they did figure out that Tolino was the target.

  At 1:00 A.M. on December 5, 1991, seventy-eight-year-old Rosario “Black Sam” Nastasa was shot and killed as he played cards in the Belvedere Social Athletic Association clubhouse on 63rd Street in Bensonhurst. Nastasa was the second septuagenarian victim in three days. He was Genovese but known for his loyalty to Carmine, so police immediately suspected Orena guns. There was minor collateral damage as Nastasa’s forty-seven-year-old girlfriend didn’t quite get her tits out of the way and suffered a graze wound to the right breast.

  Throughout the war, Scarpa always found time to keep his FBI handlers up to date on who hit who and why. For his efforts, he was paid $158,000 by the Federal Government—our tax money at work.

  On December 6, at 3:55 P.M., thirty-year-old Persico soldier Vincent “Fat Vinny” Fusaro was hanging a Christmas garland on the door of his Bath Beach home when he was shot once in the back of the head and killed. He lived there with his mother and grandmother. (Reportedly, Greg Scarpa committed this murder with a rifle.) Bath Beach was a southern suburb of Bensonhurst, a strip along the ocean between Dyker Park and Coney Island. Reporters knocked on doors seeking eye- or ear-witnesses to the shooting, but induced only grim silence. “In this neighborhood, mum’s the word,” one neighbor said to the guy from the Times.

  Fusaro was the night manager of the Venus Diner on Fourth Avenue in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn (no longer there), a twenty-four-hour eating establishment known for its mobby clientele, especially during the graveyard shift.

  They’d never admit it, but the authorities looked at the war as a boon to the taxpayers, bullets saving them years of complex prosecutions. Historians noted that the Persico-Orena war was the bloodiest in Brooklyn since the first nine months of 1947 when eleven wise guys were rubbed out in Bath Beach and Bensonhurst, almost all in rat-tat-tat-tat drive-by fashion by men in speeding black sedans.

  Then, in one horrible day, the mood of the war changed.

  * * *

  December 8 was the day that things got really stupid. Early that morning, twenty-one-year-old James Malpiso was shot and wounded. Malpiso had never been arrested, but investigators quickly learned that his father was Louis “Bobo” Malpiso, a reputed Orena soldier.

  James Malpiso was dropped off at Coney Island Hospital with a hole in his chest at 9:00 A.M., and retaliation was almost instantaneous. Twenty-two minutes later, bullets were flying in Bay Ridge. Gunmen shot up a bagel shop on Third Avenue owned by two reputed members of the Persico faction. The store was in a three-story brick building on a block of small specialty shops. Shot dead in the ambush was an innocent eighteen-year-old boy named Matteo Speranza, who lived with his parents in Bensonhurst, and was making bagels. Speranza was standing behind the counter when the gunmen entered. He was shot first in the head, and there was a pause as the killers watched him slide down the wall, leaving a trail of gore. They shot Speranza twice more, once in the back, and once in the chest, before calmly walking out of the shop.

  Speranza had been working at the bagel shop for two months while studying for his GED. He hadn’t even been slated to work the day of the shooting, but subbed for a friend, who’d called him the night before saying he wouldn’t be able to open up. Speranza had only been in Brooklyn for two years, having grown up in Florida, the son of a Burger King manager. He got the job at Wanna Bagel because his mother was a friend of the mother of one of the owners, Anthony Ferrara. Police records showed that Ferrara had five previous arrests for grand larceny and robbery. Ferrara’s partner, Frank Guerra, a friend of the Persicos, had been arrested for grand larceny auto just weeks earlier.

  Orena proclaimed his innocence. He said the bagel shop hit wasn’t his call, and apparently he was telling the truth. The smell of blood was so strong in the streets of Brooklyn, that careless guys, amateur wannabes, looking to make their bones were carrying out unauthorized hits. Anthony Libertore, a Colombo guy of not much reputation, and his father, wanted to take action like big men but were shocked to learn that it didn’t work that way. The sadness of Matteo Speranza’s death made the entire underworld feel a collective shame.

  And it forced law enforcement’s hand. Brooklyn District Attorney’s office slapped subpoenas on as many members of the Colombos as they could find. They made sure they recruited guys from both sides. Persico supporters, Orena supporters, everyone in the courtroom. Ninety subpoenas were issued. Forty-one of them were served. Twenty-eight hoods showed up at the courthouse.

  Kings County D.A. Charles Hynes told the press, “They’ve turned this into a B-movie. We’re not going to allow this county to become a massive shooting gallery where innocent people are being gunned down.”

  Outside the grand jury room of the State Supreme Court in Brooklyn, the mobsters kept their shoulders around their ears. Some of them wore sunglasses. They all kept their heads down just in case someone was taking a photo. Judging from this scene, not much had changed since 1952 when the numbers runners of Frankie Shots’ crew were rounded up and brought in. Robert D. McFadden was a spectator in the courtro
om and said that a lot of the boys looked like “underworld extras” in Hollywood.

  There were twenty-eight hoods and almost as many lawyers, the mouthpieces all looking identical with their crisp manner, brief cases, and good posture. One by one the boys were called into the grand jury room, slouching a bit more as they passed a cluster of press armed with pencils and cameras.

  The hearings lasted for three hours, less than six minutes per guy. The D.A. offered each of them immunity from prosecution if they’d just tell them something that might help stop the war. To this most of the witnesses made rude suggestions.

  Afterward, Dennis R. Hawkins, a St. John’s University Law School graduate and chief of the organized crime control bureau in the District Attorney’s office, said that there had been some progress. Not all of the hoods had turned down the immunity offer. Hawkins wasn’t specific but did say there would be guys coming back to testify for the grand jury. Of course, he might have been just messing with the boys, promoting discord by making them wonder whose tonsils had loosened.

  * * *

  After a spell of daily death, the war cooled. A week passed without bullets flying, and the D.A.’s office was certain the subpoenas were the reason. On the streets there was a different theory: Matteo Speranza. The pause allowed both sides to consider ways of better controlling their guns. A third theory said it was a holiday ceasefire, like they had in the trenches of World War I. Sure enough, only a week into the New Year, gunfire resumed.

  On January 7, 1992, sixty-two-year-old Colombo captain and Orena loyalist Nicholas P. “Nicky Black” Grancio was found shot in the head in his car parked under the elevated train on McDonald Avenue at Avenue U. Wounded in the attack was twenty-six-year-old Anthony Bianco, who had a graze wound to the head. Grancio was the uncle of Joseph Tolino, wounded in a shooting a month earlier. Nicky was whacked by Larry Mazza, a guy who told his secrets from the other side of the witness-protection program. As a seventeen-year-old grocery-store delivery boy, he had been invited in for lemonade by a thirty-something woman wearing a sexy black jumpsuit that had a zipper conveniently running down the length of the front. Her name was Linda Schiro and she was the libidinous goomada of Carmine’s top gun, Greg Scarpa. (Yes, Scarpa had a wife, daughter, and mistress all named Linda.) When Scarpa caught Mazza with Linda, Mazza thought he was dead meat. But, as it turned out, Scarpa didn’t want to kill him, he wanted to use him. Mazza didn’t die, but owed Scarpa a long series of favors, all involving blowing somebody’s brains out.

  “I killed four people for him and I still owed him a favor,” Mazza recalled.

  Because of Scarpa’s still unbelievable relationship with the FBI, it was a busy scene during the last minutes of Nicky Black’s life underneath the elevated train at Avenues U and McDonald. Two surveillance teams had their eyes on Nicky. One was a task force of feds and NYPD detectives, and the other was Scarpa’s crew, with Mazza sitting in the backseat holding a shotgun.

  Law enforcement was tailing Grancio because they knew he was involved in the Persico-Orena war. The Scarpa crew picked up Grancio at Lady Moody Triangle on Avenue U and Village Road in Gravesend. They tailed him to the location under the el, and spotted the car full of cops and waited.

  At some point the cops got a call, the surveillance was off, time to move on to other things. Some of the guys thought it was odd to be pulled off a job in the middle of a tail, but they did as they were told. As soon as the cops left, the Scarpa crew went to work.

  It appeared that the feds, given the choice between cooperating with the NYPD or with Scarpa, chose Scarpa. But that couldn’t be the case, could it? This was Bizarro world. And real. Many years later, the guy that called off law enforcement was prosecuted.

  According to Mazza, Scarpa himself was in the car as they pulled up alongside Grancio’s car. Mazza rolled his window down and thrust his entire upper torso outside the car through the window.

  Scarpa shouted, “This one’s for Carmine!”

  Mazza put the shotgun to Grancio’s head and pulled the trigger. He later recalled, “I actually saw his facial features splatter on the windshield. It was surreal.”

  * * *

  The same crew that knocked off Grancio was back for more on May 22, 1992, to erase long-time Colombo soldier Lorenzo “Larry” Lampasi. Using intelligence reportedly gathered by the FBI and given to Scarpa, Mazza shot Lampasi from a car as Lampasi pulled out of his driveway in his 1988 Cadillac in the Kensington section of Brooklyn. Lampasi got out of his Caddy to close and lock his gate when the crew pulled up. Mazza hit Lampasi with his first shot, but the target managed to convulse his way onto the sidewalk where he writhed in agony. The Scarpa car began to pull away but stopped. The entire crew piled out, surrounded Lampasi on the sidewalk, and pulled their weapons. Lampasi managed to spit out, “What did I do?” The answer to that question was twofold—Lampasi had sided with the wrong team, plus he owed Scarpa money—but went unspoken. They answered by shooting him as one until he was still and quiet.

  Not all of Scarpa’s hits involved the Persico-Orena war. Even before the Colombo Civil War broke out, Scarpa was avenging wrongs with death dished out in brutal fashion, often based on info acquired during federal surveillance operations. Scarpa had his son Joey’s eighteen-year-old buddy Patrick Porco whacked during the 1990 Memorial Day weekend because, the FBI told Scarpa, he was about to implicate Joey in a murder committed on Halloween 1989.

  On March 25, 1992, John Minerva and Michael Imbergamo were shot and killed as they sat in a champagne-colored Cadillac parked outside the Broadway Café, a coffee shop in North Massapequa, Long Island. Imbergamo had no mob connections. Minerva, the target, was a wiseguy who’d recently switched allegiance from Persico to Orena. (Years later, in 2013, Anthony Colandra was convicted of lying to investigators about this double homicide. Colandra refused to admit that he was one of the gunmen in North Massapequa, but did say the double hit was sanctioned by Colombo street boss, Thomas “Tommy Shots” Giolli. Colandra, it is said, left the Mafia, became an informant for the Drug Enforcement Administration, and today lives in relative normality with a job at a church and coaching Little League baseball.

  The ramped up Persico-Orena war brought a fresh offensive from the feds. Before they were done, the U.S. Government had indicted sixty-eight mobsters. They convicted fifty-eight, while the remaining ten cooperated.

  * * *

  The war had paused but not stopped following the accidental death of Matteo Speranza. The victim’s dad, retired maintenance man Umberto Speranza, was outspoken about his anger: “They say the Mafia doesn’t makes mistakes. They say that when they hit, they hit the right people. That’s baloney. They kill innocent people.”

  Who pulled the trigger on young Speranza was a mystery until Christopher Liberatore was given a great deal, considering his crimes, and a spot in the Witness Protection Program, at which time he said, okay, it was me that shot the kid on Third Avenue. He told a Brooklyn Federal Court in 1995 that the hit on the bagel shop had been ordered only minutes earlier, by Colombo captain Louis “Bobo” Malpeso, whose son James had just been shot. There would be no moment for planning strategy or tactics, vengeance was to be immediate. Wanna Bagel was chosen because it was owned by members of Persico’s faction.

  As Liberatore testified, Umberto Speranza seethed with fury. Liberatore had cut a deal and was going to have a life, unlike his Matteo. Sure, Liberatore was facing life in prison. But that wasn’t going to happen, he feared. He was going to walk free. “They should hang him, put him in the electric chair,” Speranza said, imagining a rich vengeance in which his enemy would die twice.

  For four days Liberatore testified. Speranza said, “So filthy, so bad. How can they be snaking around in the community? They belong nine feet under the ground.”

  As it turned out, Liberatore was convicted of almost all of the charges against him. The jury, however, for reasons unknown, found him not guilty of the murder of Matteo Speranza. The government kept its word. Libera
tore was not sentenced to life in prison. Instead, he got seventy-five years. The joke was on him, and Umberto Speranza slept a little better.

  * * *

  With bullets flying, cousin Vic Orena thought of little other than personal safety. He had fashioned an apartment for himself in the basement of his girlfriend’s new suburban house, still under construction, which made it a great hiding spot. Nobody shot at him, but when the police wanted him, somehow they knew just where to look. Cops took him from his underground bunker in Valley Stream, Long Island. During the arrest, police seized four shotguns, enough ammo for a pitched battle, and a bulletproof vest. Orena had planned to shoot it out, but ended up giving up without a fight. He was charged with, among other things, ordering the 1989 murder of Thomas Ocera, the Long Island caterer who’d been caught skimming from Colombo rackets and had been garroted by Greg Scarpa with a piano wire.

  Through the hard work of fed prosecutor George Stamboulidis, Orena went down on December 22, 1992, another RICO victim, convicted of racketeering and the Ocera murder, and sentenced to three life sentences plus eighty-five years in the fed pen.

  Orena’s permanent incarceration put the Colombo family more firmly than ever under the control of factions loyal to Carmine Persico. By the time Allie Boy got out, Orena was in jail, and the coast was clear.

  * * *

  Violence and arrests continued, however, and the split Colombo family was in deep trouble. Persicos and Orenas had been prosecuted without prejudice. Orena’s sons, Vic Jr. and John, went down. The Orenas had a zillionaire friend Tom Petrizzo who made his fortune skimming off of major construction projects. He went down, too. Carmine lost three close allies in the prosecutions: brother Teddy, cousin Mush, and Hugh McIntosh.

  McIntosh’s experiences pointed how difficult it was for parolees in the life to avoid parole violations. When your blood family, friends, and entire social life are all jam-packed with “known criminals,” it can be impossible to avoid consorting with them. McIntosh had been paroled in 1992 after serving ten years for racketeering but was again arrested on September 12, 1992, for parole violation—i.e., he’d been seen speaking for twenty-five minutes to Carmine’s nephew Daniel on May 23, 1992, at an outdoor table in front of a Brooklyn bar near his home. (McIntosh returned to prison in Springfield, Missouri. In 1997, his daughter filed a lawsuit that he was being mistreated in prison. He died several months later in a Springfield hospital at age seventy.)