Carmine the Snake

by Frank DiMatteo

  The day after her husband’s disappearance, Marguerite received a visit at their home from Allie Boy’s underboss and Carmine’s brother-in-law Jackie DeRoss, who insisted on rifling through Billy’s things, searching for something.

  Unaware that Cutolo’s son had a tape recorder rolling, right out in the open on the dining-room table, DeRoss told the Cutolo kids that they should let the FBI know that Allie Boy had nothing to do with their dad’s death, and if they didn’t bad things could happen to them.

  Clearly, Cutolo had been the victim of a lupara bianca style murder—a “white death” in which the body was not easily, sometimes never, found. That style of murder, of course, was more difficult to execute, as the target had to be snatched before he was killed, rather than just shooting him in a restaurant or barber shop or the street, where the body is left lying there posing inside a chalk line for tabloid photographers.

  * * *

  As Allie Boy’s Florida term for guns possession neared an end, the feds went back to work, and on January 24, 2001, the day he was released, picked him up (along with 120 others) and indicted him on loan-sharking charges, and for masterminding a “massive stock fraud scheme.” Allie Boy and a team of sketchy stock brokers, including cousin Frank Persico, allegedly invented a financial entity called DMN Capital Investments, Inc., and used it to launder funds. The feds called the operation to bust the scheme Operation Uptick. The scheme, feds alleged, was to eventually divert and steal the entire pension fund of the Industrial & Production Workers Local 400. Local 400 was founded by Billy Fingers. The attempted crime didn’t come off when union pension fund administrator Kathleen Joseph refused to turn the $50 million fund over to the mobsters. Only days after Cutolo disappeared, her refusal earned her a personal visit from Frank Persico.

  Following his stock-fraud indictment, Carmine’s son Alphonse would never again be free. The evidence against him consisted of documents that allegedly indicated multiple loan-sharking operations, statements made by a surprise witness, and all pertinent material seized from Allie Boy’s Florida and Brooklyn homes. The loan-shark businesses, investigators learned, included one formerly operated by Cutolo, who at that time had been missing for two years.

  Allie Boy was transported back north. On January 26, 2001, only two days after his Florida release, he was in Brooklyn Federal Court with Barry Levin at his side attempting to have bail set. Assistant U.S. Attorneys Amy Walsh and John Kroger argued that Allie Boy should be held without bail. Allowing him to be free, they said, was allowing him to resume his duties as the boss of one of New York City’s crime families. Judge Reena Raggi ordered Allie Boy held without bail.

  Afterward, Levin maintained his public pressure on “surprise-witness” Chris Paciello: “I would bet my law license that Paciello has ratted on Persico to get off the hook from a thirty-three-year prison term he faces.” Levin characterized allegations that Allie Boy was boss of the Colombos as “preposterous.”

  Paciello was indeed the prosecution’s ace in the hole, a worst-kept secret since the previous November, when, on the eve of Paciello’s sentencing for murder, he disappeared and authorities refused to comment.

  “We are going to ask for a quick trial and Alphonse Persico will be acquitted,” Levin summed up.

  During pre-trial hearings, Levin argued on Allie Boy’s behalf that the search of his Park Slope apartment by FBI agents was illegal. The search warrant specified that the search was for one of Allie Boy’s phones, the contents of which the feds thought would incriminate him. However, during the search the phone was found almost immediately, but was thought to be the wrong phone. As the search continued, the feds found the cash and documents now being used as evidence. If the feds had recognized that they had found the correct phone, the rest of the search would not have been warranted and the evidence would never have been found.

  Judge Raggi ruled that the phone incident had been an “honest mistake” by the FBI agents, and against the defense’s arguments.

  * * *

  Cutolo top gun and muscle, Joseph “Campy” Campanella of Dyker Heights, was not a man with vices. He didn’t drink or do drugs. He married his high-school sweetheart, was known as a family man—but when he wanted to, he could scare the shit out of a guy. Cutolo once dispatched him to frighten someone who was behind on his payments. Campy broke the guy’s arm. They scare better when their arm is breaking, it seemed to him.

  On July 16, 2001, Campy exited his gym and noticed a green van following him. Thinking it was the feds, he tried to lose the van, thought he had, and drove to Coney Island for a swim. But there, returning to his car, he saw the green van again. This time he recognized the guys in it. “Hey Joe,” said one. Another got out of the van with a towel-wrapped gun in his hand. Vincent “Chickie” DeMartino fired five shots from a .357 Magnum, two of them striking Campanella, once in the upper arm as he tried to protect his face and the other in his sneakered foot as he ran, blowing off a toe.

  DeMartino, Giovanni “John the Barber” Floridia, and Michael “Mikey Spats” Spataro were eventually convicted of this shooting. It only went to show that you couldn’t tell the players even if you had a scorecard.

  During the Persico-Orena war, Campanella, DeMartino, and Spataro had all been on the same side, Orena’s side. However, after the war, with Allie Boy in charge, DeMartino and Spataro were loyal Allie Boy soldiers and Campanella was marked for death as a turncoat. (Campanella survived, but returned to a life in which his crew had been stolen away and his family left destitute. He served three years for extortion, turned snitch, helped convict the guys who shot him, turned down Witness Protection, opted to keep his own name and face, and moved—but not that far.)

  It was five days before Christmas 2001, the end of a very bad year in America, and Allie Boy and Barry Levin could read the writing on the wall. The prosecution had the goods. Allie Boy’s best bet was to deal, so he pleaded guilty to all the RICO bullshit and was sentenced to thirteen years. As part of the plea deal, Allie Boy had to publicly admit that he’d been the acting boss of the Colombo crime family.

  Despite the deal, Allie Boy’s legal difficulties continued unabated. In 2004, Allie Boy and Jackie DeRoss were indicted for the Cutolo murder. When news of the new charges got to Allie Boy’s dad, Carmine admitted he was worried about his son.

  “This is the end for him,” Carmine said.

  * * *

  The first trial for the Cutolo murder took place in Brooklyn Federal Court over five weeks during the autumn of 2006, with U.S. District Judge Sterling Johnson presiding. The prosecutor was Assistant U.S. Attorney Thomas Siegal. Allie Boy was defended by the young and beautiful Sarita Kedia, who could not have looked or sounded less like a mob lawyer. Born in India and raised in the deep south, she was experienced, having defended John Gotti Jr. back in 1999 when she was still in her twenties. Her beauty aside, she was well-respected as a courtroom adversary, one prosecutor referring to her as a “straight shooter and a very good lawyer.” Her soft-spoken nature was deceptive, as she was a tenacious and extremely confident mouthpiece.

  The trial’s star witness was Kathleen Joseph, the pension fund administrator who had said no and had lived to tell about it. She testified, “Local 400 President John Gannone and stockbroker Frank Persico wanted some documents. He wanted the names of the trustees of the pension fund, the name of the attorney for the fund, the actuaries, the accountant.”

  “Did you give the documents to him?” asked Siegal.

  “ No. ”

  She said she thought Frank Persico was acting strangely, and had been for a while, even before she refused to give him the documents. Frank said that he was not aware that William Cutolo was missing, yet replaced Cutolo as V.P. of the union without bothering to hold an election. It smelled to her like a power grab.

  That accomplished, he demanded to become a trustee of the pension fund. There was no opening so Gannone resigned, which allowed Persico to move in. Persico, Joseph testified, subsequently attempted
to get rid of the fund manager, Smith Barney, so that he could have the fund managed by his “own cronies.”

  After five days of deliberation, the jury passed a note to Judge Johnson, saying they were hopelessly deadlocked.

  After a mistrial was declared, Kedia said: “I had hoped for an acquittal, but it sure beats the other alternative.”

  Siegal noted that there was no hurry, both of the defendants were already locked up. “I have a strong case,” he said, “and sometime next year I will file a motion for retrial.”

  A second trial was held, and this time defense attorneys had successfully argued for a change of venue because of the case’s intense local notoriety. The new trial was held in a courthouse in Central Islip, Long Island, during November 2007 with John Bu-retta, Deborah Mayer, and Jeffrey Goldberg as the new fed prosecutors. Once again Allie Boy and Jackie DeRoss were tried as co-defendants.

  The star prosecution witness at the second trial was Marguerite Cutolo, Mrs. Billy Fingers, who said goodbye to her husband in 1999 and never saw him again. Her appearance at the trial was a bit of a surprise. She skipped the first trial while in the FBI’s Witness Protection Program. This time her testimony was strong: “I’ve been distressed and depressed for eight years because I don’t know where my husband was. My husband would never have run away.”

  Allie Boy’s defense team tried to convince the jury that Cutolo had faked his own death, and that Mrs. Cutolo knew all about it. They tried to turn Marguerite into the villain, said that she had stashed someplace all the money from her husband’s loan sharking racket.

  This “stashing” accusation was not totally unsubstantiated, as Marguerite admitted that, yes, she did at one time have $1.65 million hidden in an air-conditioning vent in her home. It wasn’t there anymore because the central air system broke down and a repairman, who just happened to be defendant DeRoss’s nephew, came to make the repairs, so she moved the money.

  She admitted during her testimony that when she became part of the Witness Protection Program, she took the money with her. Why? Because those were his instructions.

  “My husband always told me that, if anything happened to him, you give them nothing.”

  On cross-examination, DeRoss’s lawyer, Robert LaRusso, produced ledgers that said her husband had $2.7 million when he disappeared. Marguerite said those ledgers weren’t the real ones.

  “My husband kept two sets of books,” she explained. “One real one and one to be seen by the Colombo family.”

  She said that she didn’t know why the number in the book differed from the money she’d had hidden in the vent.

  “I only know what I counted,” she explained. “The government let me have the money. I had to take care of the kids.”

  She had a theory as to where some of the money went. Her son, William Jr., could spend money like water. Junior was also the family member who was most cooperative with the FBI’s investigation after his father’s disappearance.

  But that was all defense obfuscation. The point was rather simple. Marguerite last saw her husband as he left for a meeting in Bay Ridge.

  “I know he was meeting Allie Boy,” she testified. At the time she thought it an odd time to have a meeting. A Wednesday? Her husband was a man of habits. His Wednesday schedule was set in stone. Mornings at his union office in Manhattan, haircut, and then dinner with his crew at the Friendly Bocce Club in Brooklyn.

  Marguerite wasn’t done with the damning testimony. She told the jury that DeRoss visited her Staten Island home the day after William’s disappearance.

  “Did he seem upset?”

  “Let’s put it this way. There wasn’t a tear in his eye.”

  “Mrs. Cutolo, do you believe there’s a chance your husband is alive, that he ran away?”

  “My husband never ran away. I’m appearing here for my husband. For his death.”

  After Marguerite left the stand, the prosecution called Cutolo’s daughter, Barbara Cutolo Cardinale. She said that she had reason to believe Jackie DeRoss in particular was involved in her dad’s disappearance. Someone at the top of the Colombo family had been responsible for her dad being gone, and she hadn’t been shy about saying it out loud, so much so that she received a visit from DeRoss.

  “He warned me to shut my mouth,” she said. “What he didn’t know was that my brother, who was there with me, was recording him.”

  “What was it he didn’t want you to say?”

  “I wasn’t to express my belief that Carmine Persico ordered the hit on my dad.”

  And so DeRoss’s threats were recorded. He told her that bad things could happen to the mother, children, husband, and siblings, if she cooperated with investigators.

  Defense attorney Sarita Kedia later argued, “There is not a single piece of evidence to prove to you that Billy Cutolo is really dead.”

  The U.S. attorneys not only assumed Cutolo was murdered, they were willing to put Cutolo’s murder in historic context: “The Colombo war never really ended, at least not in the minds of men like Alphonse Persico.”

  In her closing argument, Deborah Mayer told the jury that in 1999, when he disappeared, Billy Cutolo was a powerful man. His crew was large. He was power-hungry, had what the prosecutor called “boss mentality.” She reminded the jury that it had been wartime, the Persicos versus the Orenas, and Cutolo sided with the man on the outside over the man on the inside. When the war was over, Cutolo no doubt was hoping for a little forgiveness. He wanted to be allowed to keep his place in the business, but that was not to be. It was when Allie Boy was sentenced to eighteen months for his Coast Guard bust that action needed to be taken. Cutolo knew how to fill a void, and Allie Boy’s imprisonment created one. So, to prevent a coup, Cutolo became a void himself, nothingness where there once stood a man. Mayer said that Cutolo was killed and his body taken to a marina in Linden-hurst, put on a boat and buried at sea (which turned out to be incorrect). She said that one month after Cutolo disappeared, one of the men responsible received $50,000 from Carmine Persico.

  On December 28, 2007, Allie Boy was convicted of murder in aid of racketeering. He was subsequently sentenced to life in prison. He began his term in the U.S. penitentiary near Coleman, Florida, but in 2015 was transferred to the Federal Correctional Institute in McKean County, Pennsylvania, near the city of Bradford, a medium-security facility built in 1989, where he currently resides.

  The Pennsylvania prison was salmon and gray, the buildings showing a Native American influence, low, modern. The entrance for visitors was air-conditioned and softly carpeted. Tropical plants were part of the décor. In the distance were manicured playing fields. There was a running joke among the staff: How long after a visitor arrived for the first time would he compare McKean to a college campus.

  * * *

  On October 6, 2008, FBI agents acting on a tip dug up a partially decomposed body wearing Italian loafers and wrapped in a tarp in a shallow grave in East Farmingdale, Long Island. The body, like that of William Cutolo, was missing the tip of its right middle finger. It was officially identified as Cutolo’s by dental records. Prosecutors were somewhat disappointed to find only one body in the hole. The tip had said there would be three, the other two belonging to Richard Greaves who disappeared in 1995 and Carmine Gargano, a Pace University student who disappeared in 1994. The story was the killers feared Greaves was going to turn rat—so the kill was a preemptive strike. Gargano had been offed, the story went, because he had a cousin in the wrong crew.

  * * *

  The murder of Billy Fingers last came up in a courtroom in 2014, when Colombo soldier Dino Saracino was successfully prosecuted by U.S. Attorney Loretta Lynch in Brooklyn for being part of a decades-long racketeering conspiracy, which included his role in the Persico-Orena war and the 1999 murder of William Cutolo. He got fifty years. He was the seventieth member or associate of the Colombos to be put away by the feds.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Famiglia

  In everyone’s family, rain mu
st fall, and it is no different with the Persicos. Being a Persico is a blessing—and a curse.

  ON FATHER’S DAY, 2000, Mob afficianado Selwyn Raab wrote an article for The New York Times in which he compared John Gotti and Carmine Persico, both reputed leaders of crime families, both said to be conducting business from behind bars, and both having sons—John A. Gotti, and Alphonse T. Persico, who were also behind bars largely because they’d inherited the family business when dad went away. Raab pointed out that, by appointing their successors and keeping leadership of their organizations under family control, both Gotti and Persico had broken from Mafia tradition, which held that, although it was perfectly acceptable to recruit close family members into the fold, the choosing of one’s successor as boss is not at the sole discretion of the old boss.

  No previous bosses had named their son as the new boss before Persico and Gotti, Raab said. They were following the rules of kings rather than bosses. Gotti and Persico crowned their sons, who were paying a dear price for it.

  The traditional method of succession was meritocracy. The new boss was the guy who’d paid the most dues, and whose command his soldiers most respected. A former director of a state crime commission and mob intelligence chief said that great dissension built up in the Colombo and Gambino families because of nepotism. Guys simply didn’t think the sons deserved it. One of the primary reasons for the Orena war was Carmine’s insistence that Orena relinquish control when Little Allie Boy got out of prison. Keeping with the Father’s Day theme, Raab made it clear that neither Gotti Jr. nor Little Allie Boy blamed their dads for their predicaments. Both loved their fathers and would have called them to wish them a happy Father’s Day if regulations had not prevented them from making telephone calls to inmates in other facilities.

  Sure, the sons loved their dads, but former FBI supervisor J. Bruce Mouw said he wondered if the dads loved their sons back in the same way: “What father, if he had any love or compassion for his son, would encourage him to become a mob boss or even a mobster? Who would want his son to be in danger of being killed or of being sent to jail?”