by Legs McNeil
PAT LIVINGSTON: From Bill Kelly’s, I went to Bill Brown’s house in Coconut Grove. I jogged and ran down Old Cutler Road—ten miles, maybe—to Bill Brown’s house. Then I drove back to Louisville.
Nancy called me the next day. She said it was serious with Dad. I didn’t get back down to Miami until Monday.
VICKIE LIVINGSTON: Pat’s parents read the paper on a Saturday morning and on Sunday night his dad was already having chest pains. They took him to the hospital Sunday night, and he had a massive heart attack.
I came home from school at about nine o’clock—the kids were already in bed—and Pat was sitting on the side of the bed like he was in a trance or something.
I said, “What in the world is the matter with you?”
He said, “I just got a phone call.” I thought he said it was about my dad, and I started to get really upset. But then he said, “No, it’s not your dad, its mine.”
NANCY LIVINGSTON: Pat went alone to see my father. He told him exactly what was going on, but I don’t know what was said.
PAT LIVINGSTON: My dad couldn’t talk. God, that was devastating. I had so much I wanted to say. He had eye movement, his lips moved, he understood, but he couldn’t talk.
So I tried to say the things that would bring him back. I tried to assure him that everything was okay with me—that there was no problem, that things were going to work out fine.
NANCY LIVINGSTON: All Pat said when he came out is that Dad understood everything. From that time on, Dad got progressively worse.
VICKIE LIVINGSTON: He died about ten days later.
PAT LIVINGSTON: I was at the hospital when he died. He was on strictly life support, pacemaker, tubes. We could see he was dead already. It was a decision of shutting down or keeping him alive.
BILL BROWN: I went to the funeral. It was unbelievably sad. I mean, Pat was pretending; there was not one ounce of genuine emotion at that funeral. That was such a personal tragedy for Pat. I mean, there was just no way anything was going to get through to his insides at that point. He was acting like a host at a cocktail party.
PAT LIVINGSTON: I really tried to avoid thinking about whether I had caused my father’s death or not—but the reality was there. He had read about it in the paper on Saturday, had the brief heart attack Sunday and the serious heart attack Monday.
I kind of blocked it out. I just wasn’t ready for it.
BILL BROWN: Pat was like a piece of cast iron now. I mean, he didn’t tell the girl, who he was making love to, that his father died. When she found out, she said to Pat, “You mean your father died, and you didn’t tell me?”
Pat was like, “Yeah, he died last month.”
It was striking to me how a person could be so emotionless. Of course, the reality was he was dying inside.
ED HORNING: I read Pat had been caught shoplifting, but I didn’t give it a second thought until I got the phone call. Pat was already out of jail—the FBI had already provided a good lawyer to represent him. But then an FBI agent I had gone to college with called and said, “This phone call did not take place. Do you know about Pat Livingston? The agent that was arrested for shoplifting?”
I said, “Yeah.”
He said, “He needs a lawyer—a real lawyer—somebody who can take care of him, who can defend him on this, because the bureau’s gonna push him in front of the bus.”
I said, “He’s got a lawyer.”
My friend said, “No, he’s gonna get fucked by the bureau. He’s gonna get fucked. Will you talk to him? Can you help him?”
ED SHARP (FBI SPECIAL AGENT): I was the first one who decided to fire Pat from the bureau. Did I have any qualms? No. The deciding factors were his attitude at the time and the fact that he didn’t use good common sense; he had his son locked in the car while he was shoplifting. His judgment was poor; he got arrested for a crime. As an agent—not a support employee—he’d had better training than that.
That he lied initially—that didn’t help him.
ED HORNING: I scheduled an appointment to meet Pat. This guy pulls up in this Datsun 280Z in front of my office, and he looks like a pimp. He had on a sport coat and one of those gold chains with a medallion. He had a goatee. My impression of the FBI was the kind of agents you’d see on TV. So I thought, “This can’t be Pat.”
But it was.
Even after I got the charges dropped, Pat was still really stressed out, so I recommended he go see a doctor to get some help.
FRED SCHWARTZ: Yelvington and Blasingame in Louisville were both old-line J. Edgar Hoover types—who were only concerned that Pat lied to them—and didn’t want to look at the underlying reasons.
I think that philosophy eventually carried away the bureau. It got to the point, I was told, that there were two letters on the director’s desk—one that recommended keeping Pat—and helping him—and one that recommended firing him. And the director went with the old-line guy and fired him.
PAT LIVINGSTON: On May 12, 1982, Michael Griffin said, “Let’s go up and see Blasingame.”
Blasingame was sitting there like a little Cheshire cat stuffed into his three-piece suit. And Griffin says, “Sit down on the couch.”
Blasingame just handed me a letter. Being the bright agent I am, I read it and figured out I was fucking fired.
MIAMI HERALD, MAY 15, 1982: FBI BOOTS OUT MIPORN UNDERCOVER AGENT: “Celebrated FBI agent Patrick Livingston, who says he was torn apart emotionally by his dual life as a high-rolling undercover pornographer, has been fired by the FBI.”
ED HORNING: Here’s a clean-cut, all-American guy who’s on a golf scholarship to the University of Florida and ends up in the FBI—and they turn his whole world upside down.
They put him in a pink Cadillac with a bunch of pimps, take him away from his wife and two kids, and make him hang around with sleazeballs who make porno movies.
And then when he gets jammed up in Louisville they fire him. It’s amazing. I’ve never seen anything like it.
BILL BROWN: When Pat was suspended by the FBI, I went to them and accused them of shooting their wounded. Pat was wounded, and they were terminating him—because he embarrassed them.
I mean, Pat was the lead person that was going to testify in the MIPORN cases. Now his credibility was on the line—and the FBI’s credibility was on the line.
ED SHARP: “Don’t Embarrass the Bureau” was a term that was talked about at the time. You’ll never see that in writing—no official documents—but you heard it all the time.
BILL BROWN: I mean, the FBI had acknowledged that there was a problem because they sent Pat to see a psychiatrist before anything happened. Even during the MIPORN investigation there were all kinds of problems.
So when Pat was arrested for shoplifting and terminated by the FBI, I felt it was unfair to Pat because he was wounded in the line of duty. Psychologically wounded, but no less wounded. And my accusation, frankly, resonated in the bureau, and they understood that at a certain level, it was true. But the bureau just wanted to get rid of him.
FRED SCHWARTZ: James Yelvington and James Blasingame were people to whom Pat had been a great pain in the ass. He was an agent on their books that they really couldn’t use very much. He hurt their travel budget. He was a smart-ass; a wise guy. They were just appalled that this could happen.
PAT LIVINGSTON: It had been a full six months since the shoplifting—that’s an inordinate amount of time for the bureau to let something like this hang. The criminal charges had been dropped, so I didn’t have to go through a trial. So the firing was unexpected; I didn’t know it was going to come.
ED HORNING: The FBI kind of set themselves up because they had suggested, in order to justify their position, that Pat was unstable—mentally, emotionally, whatever.
So I thought, “Fine. If you want to dismiss him, I’m gonna help get this guy on some kind of federal disability. I want a worker’s compensation claim.”
FRED SCHWARTZ: Had Pat still been in Miami with the people who he had worked with�
�who he had brought glory to and who understood the situation—I think it would have been different. I think the coming together of Louisville and his personality is what caused the bureau to react the way they did.
MARCELLA COHEN (U.S. ATTORNEY): The arrest—combined with other information we received—led us to the conclusion that we could no longer use Pat Livingston as a witness. His credibility had become a source of great concern. So Judge Spellman, who was the trial judge, set up hearings to determine what should be done under the circumstances.
BILL KELLY: We had a four-day hearing before Judge Spellman about Livingston’s credibility—and Pat just couldn’t give that judge a straight answer. The judge would say, “When you went into that department store and were arrested—were you Pat Livingston or Pat Salamone?”
Pat says, “Gee, I don’t know, your Honor. I might’ve been this; I might’ve been that….”
I listened to this for four days. The judge finally gave up and said, “All of your credibility is gone.”
So we had to reindict all the MIPORN defendants based on the testimony of Bruce Ellavsky alone.
BRUCE ELLAVSKY: I was not real happy being the only witness in all these trials.
BILL KELLY: Out of fifty-five defendants we had to drop six—because only Pat had evidence on those ones—and one of those six was Reuben Sturman, the most important pornographer in the world. So it was a tragedy.
It is the all-time horror story of FBI undercover operations.
DAVE FRIEDMAN: I told Dick Phinney, “Boy, I’d hate to be in your outfit. In my outfit in the army, if some guy screwed up, we stood behind him. But you guys evidently don’t.”
Phinney just turned red and said, “Beat it.”
RUBY GOTTESMAN: Do I think Pat was crazy? Yeah. I think the undercover work got to him. I think what happened was, in some way, he wasn’t an FBI guy no more. Now he was a mob guy, a gangster. He thought he was a wiseguy, and he liked that better.
PAT LIVINGSTON: I killed my father.
Grave’s End
BROOKLYN
1982
MIAMI HERALD, FEBRUARY 27, 1980: DEATH OF MOB’S PORNO KING TAKES WRAPS OFF GUNMEN: “The death of organized crime’s pornography czar, Michael (Mickey) Zaffarano, will touch off a gangland war among Mafia chiefs seeking control of the multibillion-dollar porno industry, according to knowledgeable law-enforcement sources.”
BOB HANSON (NYPD DETECTIVE): Back in the early eighties was the beginning of the big Columbo war, where there was a couple of factions of the Columbos splitting up. They were starting to have a little strife amongst themselves—but greed is usually the overwhelming reason why people kill people.
MIAMI HERALD, FEBRUARY 27, 1980: DEATH OF MOB’S PORNO KING TAKES WRAP OFF GUNMEN: “Zaffarano’s key role as the arbitrator among the various Mafia families lusting after profits from the porno business makes Zaffarano’s unexpected demise a serious concern. His death ‘brings violence back’ to the smut business, according to one law enforcement source.”
CHUCK BERNSTENE: Mickey kept the peace a lot. That’s what he was, a peacemaker. When he died, who filled that role?
BILL KELLY: Joe “the Whale” Peraino and his son—whose name was also Joe—were in the Gravesend section of Brooklyn when these two gunmen came after them. One of the gunmen had a pistol, and I think the other one had a shotgun; they were being chased down the street in a residential area.
The two Perainos ran up on somebody’s porch and started beating on the door trying to get in. The woman who lived there, Veronica Zuraw, was hanging up clothes in the house. So when she gets to the door—here comes a blast of a shotgun. Hit her right in the head and killed her, dead. A completely innocent victim.
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS, JANUARY 5, 1982: 2 DIE, 1 HURT BY SHOTGUN: “As the two reached the porch and began to bang on the door, the gunmen jumped from the car and fired at least five shotgun blasts in what police called an apparent gangland hit.
“Joseph Jr. was struck in the chest and killed instantly. His father was hit in the buttocks.
“Veronica Zuraw, 52, was killed by a stray shotgun blast that tore through the window of her kitchen on the second floor.
“‘She was hanging up a shirt in the closet and the blast blew her head off,’ said a police officer.”
BILL KELLY: The young Joe Peraino got hit and killed. I don’t know how many times he got hit. Some police officer or FBI agent told me that Joe “the Whale” got hit nine times—but because he was so fat, the bullets never hit a vital organ. So he survived.
Can you imagine getting shot nine times and surviving?
NEW YORK TIMES, JANUARY 5, 1982: TWO SLAIN AND ONE HURT IN MOB-STYLE SHOOTING: “Joseph Peraino, Sr., who was convicted in Miami on December 6, 1981 of six counts of interstate shipments of pornography, was the target of the gunmen, according to other law enforcement officials familiar with the case.”
JAY DOLTON (NYPD DETECTIVE): Mr. Zuraw states that he had come up from the basement with six pairs of trousers. He said, “Ronnie was in the kitchen. She was going to the guest closet in the hallway to get hangers. I heard what sounded like machine-gun fire. I turned and saw Ronnie on the kitchen floor. I went to Ronnie to try to help. I ran up to the bedroom and called 911. When the police arrived, I had to unlock the door to let them in.”
NEW YORK CITY MEDICAL EXAMINER’S REPORT: “On January 6, 1982, the M.E.’s office received a call from Detective Morrison, and he stated to the assigned, that deceased Joseph Peraino, Jr., the cause of death was shotgun wounds to the face, neck, head, and brain.
“He also stated the cause of death of Veronica Zuraw was shotgun wounds to the face, neck, head, and brain.”
JAY DOLTON: Joseph Sr. has been shot by seven bullets in the right buttock. He’s in stable condition but not critical. No major vessels or bones or other organs are involved in the injury. However, his condition is perceived to be “serious.”
MICHAEL CROISSANT (NYPD DETECTIVE): Mr. Peraino is at this time a patient at the Helen Hayes Hospital for injuries he received from the shooting. Mr. Peraino was asked by the assigned if he could state what happened the night of January 4, 1982.
At this time, he stated that all he could remember is that he and his son, Joseph Jr., went for a walk, and while they were walking, men with guns started to chase them, and they ran down a street and up a stoop seeking shelter. When they were at the top of the stoop, they were shot, and that is all he can recall. Mr. Peraino was then shown photos and asked if he could identify any of the photos as the perps of this shooting. He stated that he could not identify the perps even if he was shown life-size photos, due to the quickness of said event, and it was dark.
BOB HANSON: Henry Pastori, one of the alleged shooters, was killed six weeks later. I think Henry Pastori was assigned to do this, and he didn’t do it right, because the old man, Joe the Whale, lived. So that’s one problem that he had. The other problem was that he killed an innocent bystander.
MICHAEL CROISSANT: Mr. Peraino was shown a photo and asked if he knew Mr. Henry Pastori…. Mr. Peraino stated that he did not know Pastori, nor does he remember ever seeing him. It has been established that Peraino and Pastori were acquaintances.
BOB HANSON: It’s the second problem that he has to be concerned with—because a lot of government agencies are not as concerned when one bad guy kills another bad guy, even though we investigate it like any other case. Society itself doesn’t get that upset about it.
But society is very upset when innocent bystanders get killed. That brings heat on everybody. So odds are that Henry Pastori screwed up—botched the hit—and ended up getting killed for it.
MICHAEL CROISSANT: According to an FBI informant, Henry Pastori pointed out the Perainos to two Columbo soldiers, who killed Joseph Peraino, Jr., and Veronica Zuraw.
On February 12, 1982, Henry Pastori was shot and killed in the Six-one Precinct and was our complaint number 2169. After viewing the foregoing fact that the perpetrator is deceased and cannot
be prosecuted, this reports that the case be now closed: EXCEPTIONAL CLEARANCE.
BOB HANSON: It was the Columbos who were behind the hit. Rarely do we find out the exact reason it happened, but usually it has something to do with money. Money or disrespect—those are usually the two reasons we end up with.
NEW YORK TIMES, JANUARY 6, 1982: BYSTANDER KILLED IN MOB SHOOTING WAS A SOCIAL WORKER AND EX-NUN: “Mrs. Zuraw was born in Brazil as Veronica Vestena. She had become a nun, and as Sister Mary Adelaide received an undergraduate degree from Fordham University’s School of Education in 1964.
“Her 1974 wedding to Mr. Zuraw was attended by Anthony J. Bevilacquia, now Auxiliary Bishop of Brooklyn.
“Father Failla said Mrs. Zuraw had actually run the Italian Board of Guardians office, an affiliate of Catholic Charities of Brooklyn at 1781 Seventy-third Street, Brooklyn.
“A funeral mass is to be offered Friday at 9:30 A.M. at St. Mary Mother of Jesus Church, Twenty-third Avenue and Eighty-fourth Street, Brooklyn.”
The Trial
FLORIDA/LOS ANGELES/BELIZE/THAILAND/JAPAN
1982–1984
DAWN SCHILLER: After they arrested John, they drove me back to Louise’s house—the stripper—and I stayed there until I heard from my father. He called after he opened the paper and read, “John Holmes was arrested in Miami Beach.”