“The guy I recognize had a gorgeous Irish girlfriend, a stripper named Autumn Leaves. We were trying to get her to work for us when I was in Group Three. We went up to her apartment in Riverdale, and Patty Biase took her cabaret card. But she was tough and wouldn’t fold. And while we’re there she gets a call. I’m on the extension and I hear the guy say, ‘Tell them to get the fuck out!’ He slams the phone down and comes over. He pounds on the door, and when he comes in, he starts screaming at us.” Frank is somewhat awed. “The guy’s Guido Penosi. He’s a made guy from the Bronx. He’s a friend of Frank Dioguardia and Trafficante, and that’s why he’s in Florida at the same time I am, in August 1965. He’s there to bid on the French connection shipment that goes to Dioguardia in the Nebbia case.1
“You have to understand,” Selvaggi stresses, “that Guido Penosi was not my friend. His brother-in-law, Tony Castaldi, was a defendant in the Rinaldo case, and we put Penosi in the case as an unindicted co-conspirator. So there was that, along with the incident with his girlfriend. But there’s no way I could refuse to face him over drinks at the table.
“At the time, my informant, Sal Rinaldo, is the main witness in a huge conspiracy case against dozens of traffickers. There’s a million-dollar contract on his life, and I’ve got him living in my house in Valhalla, painting the rooms. I’m secretly taking him to various locations to testify against violators in Italy, upstate New York, and Canada. The prosecutors want to take some of the pressure off him, so they ask me to talk to everyone I know, to see if anyone wants to cut a deal – which is why I think it’s okay to talk with Penosi, even if someone is watching. And someone is. I know, because I see them sitting in a line of cars parked bumper to bumper on Collins Avenue. They’re taking pictures of everyone, so I go out and show them my badge. Then I get the plate number off Penosi’s Cadillac and give it to a Miami agent.
“So what? So they know.
“When I get back from vacation, Dolce is gone. He’d quit. But there’s a rumor floating around about what happened down in Miami. Then Tendy calls me and says, ‘Come to the office. Somebody’s got a beef on you.’ They think I flew down to Florida with the mob and was picked up by the mob at the airport. There’s a rumor that I used Penosi’s car when I was there. They think he paid my motel bill. $690.” Selvaggi shakes his head in disbelief. “I offered to go down and drag him back, but the US Attorney said, ‘Don’t do it.’
“Now I’m getting hot, and Lenny Schrier says, ‘You need to cool down.’ That’s when he sends me to Georgia with Frankie Black, and we arrest the warrant officer, and make the ninety-five-kilogram case in Columbus. By the time I get back to New York, it’s January 1966. Fluhr gives me a note that says, ‘See Belk.’ I go to his office. Greenfeld’s there, and he shows me a photograph of me and Penosi. They’ve been checking it out for five months! The guy I gave the plate number to, an agent from California, had only been in Miami for a few days and he didn’t remember.” Frank scowls. “And why did Hundley at Organized Crime sit on it for six months? Did they want to see what would happen in Georgia? Things were happening so fast, I couldn’t put it together at the time.”
Selvaggi lights a cigarette. “Just last year I met an FBI guy in Florida. I knew him in New York during the Rinaldo case, and he’d been with the Strike Force in Miami in 1965. Belk said that ‘an outside agency’ had provided the photograph of me and Penosi, so this FBI guy does some checking and tells me it was ‘the Whiz Kids,’ meaning Wachenhut.* And I start wondering how come everyone else’s reservation went through; how come Penosi just happened to be there.
“You know,” Selvaggi says quietly, “I used to be Charlie’s chauffeur when he came to town. One time he had me take him to the CIA pad where he met a CIA agent, an Irish guy with graying black hair, well dressed and tough-looking, like Frankie Waters, but taller. I’m listening in the other room and I hear the guy ask Charlie if he knows anybody in the mob that can kill Castro. Charlie looks at him, then turns to me and says, ‘Ask him.’ ”
Frank suggested, “Somebody like Guido Penosi.” But he qualified his suggestion by asking, “What are you going to give him in return? He’s not going to do it for patriotism.”
“Now it’s 1966,” he continues, “and guys are jumping to BDAC. It was easy to go over. Charlie Mac goes over, Russ Dower, and Jack Brady too. They wanted me to go, but I couldn’t do it, because I’m finally making cases again with Richard Lawrence.”
Selvaggi takes a drag on his cigarette. “Richard Lawrence is a Black guy who’d been a deserter in the Second World War. He’d killed a guy in a crap game and done ten years to the day. I got him from his parole officer, and he went to work for me bringing [undercover Agent] Jack Peterson around. Lawrence made about twenty cases, including one that leads to Leon Aikens, the biggest dealer in Harlem at the time, up on 110th Street. Joe Bendenelli is another. Pure heroin, weight to the T.
“One day Lawrence says, ‘I’ll get you into Joey Beck’s brother.’ Joey Beck is Joe DiPalermo. His brother was short and fat and was always playing cards at the union hall. Lawrence knew him from Attica.
“So Lawrence orders a kilo from Joe Beck’s brother, and Scrocca takes him down to the Lower East Side in a cab. I’m covering the meet. We’ve already got one buy, then a faction from the SIU starts knocking off our cases. When Scrocca and me go to arrest Beck’s brother, Vinnie Albano’s in the hall. That’s SIU Detective Vinnie Albano, who was later killed by the mob. Well, it’s a federal case, but he’s ‘Just nosing around.’
“Then Sal Giovino’s protégé, Mike Antonelli, comes down from Buffalo and starts working with [SIU detectives] Burmudez and Watson. First they grab Lawrence, then they knock off Wilbur Johnson, another one of my informants.”2
Selvaggi is steaming. “The one rule is, ‘Never hit another agent’s informer.’ But Belk does nothing. Yellow sheets† are showing up on the street, five cases in a row get blown, and Belk suspects the worst.
“After Dolce left, we all rejoiced. Then the desk smellers come in, and we’re audited by the IRS. Two IRS guys start picking up our informers and everyone’s laying low. I get a lead to Rocco Sancinella, and he tells me about a guy who’s bringing in dope from Rangoon in a boat. There were leads to Allie Romano, who had the French connection behind Dioguardia in Georgia. But we’d all stopped taking chances by then, because of Andy’s Rangers.
“Meanwhile the Rinaldo case is climaxing and I’ve got to testify.” The trial had begun in Italy in February 1967. Seven defendants were tried in Italy, several others were fugitives, and some were in jail in the United States. “When it comes time to try the people here,” Selvaggi continues, “the Italians insist on trying the case on Italian soil, at the Italian Embassy in New York. I’m told that the Italian judge wants to see me first, and that the head of the Carabinieri wants to make sure I’m presentable. Tony Consoli’s the interpreter, and the first thing General Oliva asks me is, ‘What’s your rank?’ ”3
Selvaggi lowers his eyelids. “I meet the judge at the CIA pad on Sutton Place. Big deal. He’s with his girlfriend.
“By May 1967, it’s all coming home. The three main witnesses are Sal Rinaldo, Matteo Palmieri, and Vito Agueci. I’m the only agent who’s going to testify. I’ve got Rinaldo at my house, and I’ve got Palmieri stashed in a motel nearby. Agueci’s in prison. In late May, I’m called to testify. Al Krieger’s the defense attorney. He asks me, ‘Who was your informant in the case? Who gave you Rinaldo?’4
“ ‘Shorty Holmes,’ I say. Holmes was one of Valachi’s customers, and Valachi turned him over to Rinaldo. Well, Holmes is dead, and he can’t deny it.
“Then in early June I’m called back. Krieger asks me, ‘Was there a wiretap?’
“The case hung on that point, and Krieger thought he had my ass, because if the information was the fruit of an FBN wiretap, the federal case is gone.
“Well, the truth is that there was a wiretap, but it was a police wiretap.
“So Krieger asks me, ‘
Why were you there that day?’ I tell him that the cops overheard Palmieri telling Rinaldo that something ‘big’ was coming in. He gave the details about where and when the ship was coming in. The cops told us, and that gave us the right.
“Meanwhile, Andrew has me slated for the sacrificial altar.” Selvaggi heaves a heavy sigh. “When Andrew was working for Charlie, he was nice to me. He was Charlie’s pilot fish back then, doing all of Charlie’s paperwork. Then he started calling it ‘My Bureau,’ and that’s when the calls start coming in. An agent calls and says, ‘We’re choosing up sides.’ Then they start asking, ‘How much money did you steal when you were on the Gambling Squad?’ I’m riding around with Rinaldo, whose got a milliondollar price tag on his head. The Gambino family is going to shoot me up in the Bronx. It was getting crazy,” Selvaggi says in dismay, snuffing out his cigarette. “The bottle was my only friend.”
He looks away for a moment. “Finally an anonymous letter comes to the office, naming twenty-seven agents who are corrupt. We didn’t know it as fact, but from the language you could tell it was written by an Italian from the Bronx. Meanwhile Feldman’s on the block, so I asked for a transfer to the fugitive squad. Two weeks later Belk says, ‘You’re being transferred to San Francisco.’ But my wife was pregnant with our fourth kid, and she didn’t want to go.
“At that point I didn’t know what to do anymore, so in August I quit. They threw a farewell party for me at Toot Shores, and some of the Assistant US Attorneys were there. John Bartels [who became the first head of the DEA in July 1963] was there, and Rudy Giuliani [later mayor of New York], and Tendy. But no Belk, no Fluhr, no Matouzzi – Matouzzi, my friend, who had nineteen years on the job, and whose head was on the block too.
“After I quit I took a job with the sheriff’s office in Westchester. But I’m not a federal agent anymore, and I’ve got enemies. Patty DeLuca hated my guts. DeLuca worked for Benny DeMartino in bookmaking, not drugs, but he loaned his car to Johnny Montera, who delivered half a kilogram of heroin to an agent. When Lenny Schrier arrested Montera, he put DeLuca in the case because Montera was in his car. Later on I arrested DeLuca. And when he gets out of jail, he’s seeking revenge.
“One night after work, I go to Tony Amandola’s place, the Chateau Pelham, where Scrocca got married. Nick Panella’s there with some other agents. DeLuca walks in and starts yelling out remarks. I’m not an agent anymore, but no one else is saying anything!” Selvaggi makes a gesture. “Well, I’m the same man, with or without the badge. So I tell him, ‘You’re out of order. You’re throwing rocks at the jailhouse.’
“I had to retaliate,” he says, “but when I leave the place, DeLuca and three other guys are in the parking lot. They shove me around. Next time I go back to the Chateau Pelham, Amandola tells me I’m not welcome anymore. This is a guy whose son I went to high school with!
“Next I lose the job at the sheriff’s office. Andrew has [FBN general counsel] Don Miller call them up, and that’s that. So I took a job teaching business administration at New Rochelle High School. But the phone calls are still coming in, so my wife and I decided to sell our house, and I took a job collecting money for an insurance company in Florida. Eventually we used our savings to set up a delicatessen, and I spent the next ten years slicing baloney.
“Picture that,” Frank Selvaggi says sardonically. “Me, slicing baloney.”
* * *
*Wachenhut is a private investigations firm formed in 1954 and staffed largely by retired FBI agents.
†Yellow sheets are first draft, official FBN reports that contain confidential information, misinformation, or speculation that is excised in finished reports that are presented in court or otherwise distributed outside the office.
28
ANDY’S GANG
“We had 300 agents worldwide:
290 were working integrity cases on each other,
and the other ten were keeping score.”
Agent Joseph A. Quarequio
If you talk to his supporters, Andy Tartaglino comes across as the FBN’s high priest and exorcist. But if you talk to the agents he targeted in his integrity investigation, you hear about a “scorpion” or a “tarantula” (a play on his name, even though in Italian it means “little turtle”), a merciless grand inquisitor who used his bureaucratic powers to destroy his personal enemies.
According to one of his victims, Chuck Leya, “When Andy came back from Italy, he was unassigned and started hanging out at the Court House Squad. By all appearances he was a good guy. Then he gets into Internal Affairs and gets a taste of blood. Soon it becomes an obsession. The man becomes rabid, and before you know it, a lot of innocent people get dragged in.” Leya’s words are laced with venom. “He sold himself as the strong-willed enforcer of principles, but he had his own problems, and among ourselves, we questioned his motives.”
“Andy was a good agent before he went to Washington,” George Gaffney agrees. “Then he changed. He developed an unbridled ambition.”
He’d also become very powerful. He was serving as executive assistant to David Acheson, the Treasury Department’s assistant secretary for law enforcement, and since 1965, he had been the engine of an anti-corruption unit that included Acheson’s personal assistant for FBN affairs, Tony Lapham (the CIA officer who told Tartaglino to shut down the MKULTRA pad on 13th Street in New York); Henry Petersen at Main Justice; and Vernon “Iron Mike” Acree, the chief of IRS Inspections. By late 1966, Acree’s team had assembled enough data on the targeted agents to allow Tartaglino to begin his inquiries.1 But there was no way to conceal the investigation, and FBN Commissioner Henry Giordano was able to insist that New York District Supervisor George Belk be kept fully informed. Belk in turn assigned Art Fluhr, his trusted executive assistant, as his liaison to the IRS, and thereafter Fluhr kept Giordano abreast of any important developments.
Tartaglino and Inspector Irwin Greenfeld moved into an office on lower Broadway and began squaring agent net-worth and tax statements. “In one case an agent deposited $60,000 in his bank account,” Tartaglino recalls with a mixture of amazement and contempt. “One deposit! I checked to see what cases had happened at the time, and found that two days before the deposit, the agent had arrested a guy with $300,000.” He shakes his head and asks, “How stupid can you get? They think that because they’re cops, they’re above the law, and that no one will challenge them.”
Inevitably, Tartaglino’s integrity investigation uncovered corruption within the NYPD, as well as the FBN, and he began working with the NYPD’s Office of Internal Affairs. Also joining him at this time was IRS inspector Thomas P. Taylor, a hard-bitten former New York detective. Since March 1967, Taylor had been investigating the NYPD for everything, in his words, “from attempted bribery and shakedowns, to sticking up crap games, to allegations about corruption in the Special Investigations Unit and the Bureau of Special Services and Investigations.
“I’d gone to the Journal American reporters who’d done the Kadlub investigation,” Taylor explains, “and they turned their notes over to me, including the anonymous letter naming twenty-seven FBN agents as being involved in corruption. Some of the allegations were specific, so I sent the letter to Washington where it landed on the desk of Acheson’s replacement, James Hendricks. Then came the June 1967 arrest of Secret Service Agent Gene Ballard and FBN Agent Jesse Spratley. They’d raided an apartment in New York, seized half a million dollars in counterfeit bills, and kept twenty grand for themselves. So this was a cumulative thing, with more and more people getting involved as the investigation expanded.
“We had information on informants,” Taylor adds, “plus allegations about agents, and agents resigning – all of which culminates with the arrest [on 12 December 1967] of Frank Dolce and Jack Gohde. Dolce and Gohde had quit the FBN in 1966 and gone to work for the Nassau County narcotics squad, and they were actually selling dope out of their office. Gerson Nagelberg and his wife, Vivienne, were their source of supply, but we couldn’t show it, beca
use the informants were deathly afraid of Gohde, who’d allegedly killed someone for the love of Viv.”
THE NAGELBERGS
Gerson “Gerry” Nagelberg played a central role in Tartaglino’s integrity investigation. Born in 1912 in Germany, he came to America as a young man, became a citizen and served in the Second World War. Afterwards he made enough money in bookmaking to buy several nightclubs, which he used as fronts for his drug dealing operations. As an insurance policy, he paid former NYPD narcotic detectives to manage his bars, and his bar on Amsterdam Avenue in Harlem was a favorite hangout for several FBN agents. Morty Benjamin says, “They’d go in for a drink, have dinner on the house, and then Gerson’s wife Vivienne would ask a small favor: ‘Will you run a plate for me?’ If they did, Viv would say, ‘Let me thank you.’ She had a stable of gorgeous girls who provided the favors, and that was her hook. A few weeks later she’d call the agent again, wanting to know the price of an ounce of heroin on the street. She got them to violate small rules first, then once she got her hooks into them, she got them to break the big rules.”
Nagelberg came to the FBN’s attention in the late 1950s, and Lenny Schrier arrested him in 1961. Charlie McDonnell and John Coursey did the undercover work on the case, at the Place Pigale on Amsterdam Avenue. Nagelberg became Schrier’s informant, although it’s unclear how many cases, if any, he enabled Schrier to make over the next few years. What’s known is that in 1965 Nagelberg traveled to Marseilles and acquired a French connection through Dimitrio Porcino, an associate of the Guérini crime family in Nice. Couriers were hired and the machinery set in motion, and all went well for Nagelberg and Porcino until 1967, when Bob DeFauw uncovered their operation.
“Schrier and Frankie Waters were always calling me,” DeFauw says irritably, “asking about the Guérinis. Schrier even talked to Antoine through an interpreter. So I had Joe Catalanotto set up a delivery into Montreal.” DeFauw notified Customs Inspector Frank Cornetta (a former FBN agent) about the delivery, and on 27 May 1967, two of the Nagelbergs’ couriers were caught bringing six kilograms of heroin into Dorval International Airport.
The Strength of the Wolf Page 59