by Joe Pistone
In the 1960s, Joe Bananas had plotted to kill two bosses,Tommy Lucchese and Carlo Gambino. His ally in the plot, ailing boss Joe Magliocco, gave the contract to one of his capos, Joe Colombo. Instead of violating Commission rules by carrying out the contract, Colombo exposed the plot, and the Commission rewarded him by making him boss of the newly named Colombo family after Magliocco died of a heart attack. To avoid being killed on orders of the Commission, Joe Bananas staged his own kidnapping and hid out for a couple of years. Or, as he claimed, maybe his cousin, the Buffalo boss in those days, Stefano Magaddino (who, like Joe Bananas, was an original boss on the Commission), may have actually kidnapped Joe Bananas and held him against his will for a couple of years.
The omnipotent Mafia Commission replaced Joe Bananas with one of his capos. Joe Bananas replaced himself with his son, Salvatore Bill Bonanno. This upheaval at the top, which split the family in two, led to the Bonanno War in which several Mafia soldiers were killed on the each side of the Bonanno family. In 1968, Joe Bananas knew he couldn’t beat the Commission, threw in the towel, and retired to Arizona.
When Rudy subpoenaed Joe Bananas three months before the Mafia Commission indictment came down, the former boss, then living in style near Tucson, refused to cooperate with the grand jury investigation despite having been granted immunity. Joe Bananas ended up doing 14 months in jail for contempt of court rather than testify in the Mafia Commission trial. At an early point in the sideshow, Joe Bananas told Rudy, “You’re doing a good job.”
Rudy Giuliani wasn’t the only one to see the implications of Joe Bananas, the author, admitting the existence and the functioning of the Commission at a time when RICO was starting to be used against the Mafia.
A tape recorder picked up a March 28, 1983 conversation between Lucchese underboss Tom Mix Santoro and a Lucchese soldier named Sal Avellino, whose Jaguar was bugged by members of Governor Cuomo’s New York State Organized Crime Task Force. The Task Force apparently had artistic differences with their boss, the governor. Tom Mix Santoro and Sal Avellino had just seen Joe Bananas’ performance on 60 Minutes.
“I was shocked,” said Sal Avellino, “What is he trying to prove, that he’s a man of honor? But he’s admitting—he, he actually admitted that he has a fam; that he was the boss of a family.”
What was Joe Bananas trying to prove?
Tom Mix Santoro remarked about Joe Bananas’ contention that he was never involved in drugs. “You know, like he says, he ain’t never been in narcotics—he’s full of shit. His own fucking rule; he was making piles of money. . . .”
One of the many myths perpetrated by many bosses in the Mafia was that they didn’t sanction the narcotics trade. This was an important lie for those Mafia bosses to perpetuate. For decades, the Mafia needed to enable corrupt police, like Captain Donahue in Tampa, to rationalize their bribe-taking by believing that the Mafia primarily dealt in “victimless” crimes, like gambling and loan sharking. Once the Mafia’s rampant dealing in narcotics was exposed, it would become harder for the Mafia bosses to buy police and political protection.
Nine days after the conversation between Santoro and Avellino, Lucchese boss Tony Ducks Corallo went for a drive in Sal’s bugged Jaguar. Avellino told Tony Ducks what Joe Bananas had said on 60 Minutes about having been the boss “of a family.”
“He said that?” Tony Ducks Corallo asked. “They could call him in and lock you up under this act over here.”
“This RICO Act,” Avellino, who had attended college, said. “He admitted that he was in charge of a family. . . .”
“Now they could call him in,” Corallo predicted. “They call him as a witness. . . . What are you going to do then?”
At around the same time in 1983 at the White House, in a bugged conversation about Joe Bananas’ revelations in his book, Big Paul Castellano revealed that he understood what was likely to happen as a result of the book. “They’re going to make us be one tremendous conspiracy.”
Nothing for nothing, but I know these bosses. They never change. In my opinion, Joe Bananas knew when he wrote the book what everyone else instantly knew when they read the book. For sure, the publisher and the publisher’s attorneys discussed the legal implications with him before the book went to the printer. Joe Bananas was about to announce what politicians had denounced: the existence of the Mafia as an organization with a ruling Commission. The very year the book came out, there was a Mafia trial in Chicago where the defense was that there was no such thing as the Mafia. The Mafia had been denying its own existence as an organization for fifty years. The penalty for admitting there was a Mafia was death.
This so-called “man of honor,” who came to America from Sicily in his twenties, now fifteen years after being banished in disgrace to Arizona, got his revenge on the Commission by admitting its existence and confessing to having been on it from its first day of existence. At the same time, by virtue of his book tour, he became a public relations promoter and instigator of the Mafia Commission indictment that followed his book by two years. In fact, Rudy used the book in his pitch to get approval from Headquarters and from the Justice Department to initiate the expensive Mafia Commission Case investigation. Joe Bananas really meant it when he said to Rudy, “You’re doing a good job.”
Before trial, Rudy said about the Mafia Commission Case indictment, “The case should be seen as the apex of the family cases. . . . It is an attempt, if we can prove our charges, to dismantle the structure that has been used since the beginning of organized crime in America.” Twenty years later, I still get chills reading those words.
At the Mafia Commission trial, even without Joe Bananas, there were 85 government witnesses and over 100 tapes introduced into evidence.
The defendant lineup at trial was:
1) Boss of the Genovese family and star defendant, Fat Tony Salerno, who had bragged on tape that he “made all the guys.”
2) The entire leadership of the Lucchese family: Boss Tony Ducks Corallo, Underboss Tom Mix Santoro, and Consigliere Christy Tick Furnari.
3) The top two-thirds of the Colombo leadership: Boss Carmine Persico and Underboss Gerry Lang Langella.
4) Ralph Scopo, Colombo soldier and Concrete Club operator who was on trial under RICO for carrying out Commission orders.
5) Bruno Indelicato, Bonanno capo, on trial like Ralph Scopo for a RICO charge involving the predicate crime of murder on behalf of the Commission, and not on trial for the murder itself.
In his opening statement to the jury, Mike Chertoff stated the theme he would expound upon throughout the trial. “Mafia families have a single overriding purpose, and that purpose is to make money—to make money illegally, to make money criminally, to make money using corruption, fear and violence.”
With the mountain of evidence Mike would introduce, there was no need for breaks going our way, but we got a really big one when Colombo boss Carmine Persico decided to represent himself. This way, Persico got to address the jury directly in an opening statement and in a summation. Persico also got the opportunity to inject his own version of the facts into the questions that he asked. And he got to make all these statements to the jury without testifying directly and subjecting himself to cross-examination. Persico also had the ego that no doubt relished the role of trial lawyer. He loved studying his trial notebook when he questioned a witness; and he loved calling himself “Persico” when he referred to himself in the question; and he loved saying things to the judge like, “My appeal is still pending in the Second Circuit.”
It’s also likely that Persico saw the handwriting on the wall from his conviction earlier that summer of 1986 in the separate Colombo family case. Aaron Marcu had been the prosecutor in the seven-month trial that nailed eight Colombos, including Persico and his underboss Gerry Lang Langella, when the jury came back with guilty verdicts on Friday the Thirteenth of June, 1986. The seven-month trial must have cost Persico a bundle in legal fees, and he probably thought he’d cut his losses by representing himself.
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But he didn’t seem to have learned anything from that seven-month RICO trial. Persico clearly did not understand the crime of RICO when he stated in front of the jury in the Mafia Commission Case, “Without the Mafia, there wouldn’t even be no case here.” Precisely.
The Mafia Commission trial was a history lesson for the jury. It all began with two New York State Troopers who had surprised the Mafia at Apalachin, in New York state, in 1957. Although Joe Bananas could not be forced to testify at the trial, Mike Chertoff did the next best thing and played Joe Bananas’ 60 Minutes interview, where Bananas acknowledged the Commission’s existence and gave the history of its formation.
The 75-year-old former underboss of the Cleveland family, Angelo Lonardo, gave live testimony on the Mafia Commission’s formation and the lineage of the families—who was boss and when. Lonardo admitted that he was testifying in exchange for leniency and that he had lied on numerous occasions while under oath in trials in the past.
Another turncoat witness was Joe Cantalupo, a Colombo family associate who testified that his apartment was once used for a Mafia Commission meeting. At the time, Cantalupo testified, he was given instructions: “Tomorrow night have your wife make a large pot of black coffee, go out and buy a couple of pounds of Italian cookies, and set the table for five. We’ll be over as soon as it gets dark.”
One of the lesser, but still significant, predicate crimes in the indictment was loan sharking in Staten Island. On cross-examination, “Clarence Darrow” Persico accused Cantalupo of agreeing to testify because Persico’s brother once beat up Cantalupo as punishment for failing to pay a loan-sharking debt. As Persico put it to Cantalupo, “You was angry because you was beat up and you was beat up because you didn’t pay back the money?” Precisely.
Cantalupo, like Angelo Lonardo from Cleveland, admitted that he was testifying in exchange for leniency and that he had lied on numerous occasions while under oath in trials in the past. Cantalupo also admitted that, for about a decade, he had been a paid secret informer against his Colombo family friends because he had gotten into money trouble and needed the FBI’s paydays.
Although no longer an FBI agent, I couldn’t wait to get on the stand and go under oath and answer Mike Chertoff’s questions in the case Jules and I had dreamed about. In his book, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to the Mafia, Jerry Capeci characterized my testimony as follows:
“Hero FBI agent Joe Pistone, who penetrated the Bonanno family by playing the role of a jewel thief, gave the jurors an important overview of the structure and rules that mobsters live by, as well as the function of the Commission, from the witness stand. He also testified about information he gleaned about Galante’s killing while working undercover against the Bonannos, as well as the Commission’s involvement in the leadership affairs of the Bonanno family. Pistone was a key witness because he didn’t have the negative baggage carried by Mafia turncoats.”
On cross-examination, all 5’7” of Carmine Persico, with perpetual bags under his eyes, challenged me. Persico had forgotten the time he pulled up with his son Little Allie Boy in his Rolls Royce for an outdoor meeting in Brooklyn with Tony Mirra, and I was present. Persico was already pleased with the idea that his voice was not on any of the tapes, when he asked me, “You never met me, did you?” The defense attorneys all jumped up at once to object, because his question opened the door for me to tell the jury about that meeting that was otherwise irrelevant to this case. Tough break for them, but the smart ones knew it didn’t pay to try to cross-examine me. When I testified in this case, I didn’t even have the slight baggage of being employed by the government that was doing the prosecuting.
Nothing for nothing, but I’ve seen many a good case lost because it relied on turncoats’ sworn testimony, and the criminality of these turncoats raised a reasonable doubt in the juries’ mind about the turncoats’ oath to tell the truth. They were cooperators, and there was always the danger that they had a greater motive to cooperate than to tell the truth.
Here, too, in the Mafia Commission Case, there was an abundance of tape recorded conversations and bugs and wiretaps which, as long as they are properly explained, also have no “negative baggage.” I appreciate what Jerry Capeci said about me, but for my money the best witness in the courtroom was a tape recorder.
From the Palma Boys Social Club bug, the jury heard Fat Tony Salerno picking the next president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. I wondered if it reminded any of the jurors of Jimmy Hoffa’s disappearance a few years before that tape, and the statement of Tony Ducks Corallo: “You pick them, and you kill them.”
The jury heard Fat Tony Salerno, speaking for the Mafia Commission, avert an impending war over who should be the boss of the Buffalo Mafia family. Buffalo consigliere Joe Pieri was heard complaining about current boss Joe Todaro, who had men “walking around with machine guns.” On tape, Pieri said, “I killed a few guys who were against him, and he got to be boss. He’s not fit to be boss. He started neglecting me.” Instead of referring Pieri to counseling for his abandonment issues, Fat Tony warned him not to take any action and to tell Todaro, “The Commission wants it straightened out. . . . Let the Commission decide. . . . Tell him it’s the Commission from New York. Tell him he’s dealing with the big boys now.”
The jury heard Fat Tony Salerno quote Tony Ducks Corallo regarding the decision to boot the Bonanno family from the Commission: “Tony Ducks told Rusty, he said, ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘take care of your family first. Straighten out your family and when you straighten them out, then we talk about the Commission.’” In another Palma Boys tape, they heard Fat Tony Salerno on the same point regarding Rusty Rastelli: “. . . this guy wants to be the boss. He can be the boss as far as I’m concerned . . . but he cannot be on the Commission. One vote is enough to throw it out. Cause, the Commission thing, it’s supposed to be such a sacred thing.”
From a bug in one of his cars, Ralph Scopo was recorded talking to one of the contractors about the Concrete Club and about his own vulnerability to the bosses on the Mafia Commission, should he hypothetically ever get arrested.
“Now I get indicted and they’re afraid,” Ralph Scopo said. “The only guy they got to worry about is me. If I open my mouth they’re dead. So to kill the case—bango.”
“Really?” the contractor said.
“Yeah. Here I am all my life making them money. I’m taking the fucking chances in the street. I’m willing to go to jail, never gonna open my mouth, but they’re not sure of that, see? . . . Say this thing kind of blows up. I’ll be one of the first guys to get arrested.”
“Why?”
“Because of this club shit. Now when that happens, no matter how much faith they got in you, there’s always that little bit. They say, ‘Oh, geez, maybe he’ll open his fucking mouth.’ And then you don’t see the guy no more.”
Midway through our trial, on October 15, 1986, we got the fantastic news that Rusty Rastelli, Nicky Glasses Marangello, and Big Joey Massino had been convicted in the Local 814 case I testified in across the East River in Brooklyn. Bravo, Laura Brevetti. Mike Chertoff was encouraged by the news, but he was putting in 18-hour days and we couldn’t take too much time to celebrate. Our case itself was going extremely well, but the prosecutor’s art here was to keep the judge in mind. If we won, we would win little if the bosses did not get substantial jail time at sentencing. The better the judge understood the evil, the more chance there was of that indispensable part of our plan—to put the bosses away a long time.
In our courtroom, the jury saw terrific surveillance photos of bosses leaving a Mafia Commission meeting on May 15, 1984. An informant had told Agent Joseph O’Brien that a Mafia Commission meeting was taking place in the Staten Island home of a relative of a Gambino soldier. O’Brien and his partner, Andris Kurins, staked out the house and took photos of Gambino boss Big Paul Castellano and many of the Mafia Commission Case defendants as they left the house one at a time, including Genovese boss Fat Tony Salerno
, Lucchese underboss Tom Mix Santoro, Lucchese consigliere Christy Tick Furnari, Colombo underboss Gerry Lang Langella, and Ralph Scopo.
It was the first Mafia Commission meeting ever caught on film. We never learned what had been discussed at that meeting, but Ralph Scopo’s presence made it clear that some aspect of the Concrete Club had been on the agenda. We knew that normally at these meetings they discussed such things as new members who were being proposed, disputes that had arisen, and contracts—like the one that the Mafia Commission had put out on me at a similar gathering. Ralph Scopo’s presence was not needed at any of these meetings. We just managed to get the right meeting for our case. All the photos were put on display in court for the jury to view.
A couple of concrete contractors who had been given immunity testified about how the Concrete Club worked.
The jury heard Lefty tell me on tape: “Now you’re going to get straightened out, Donnie.” The jury heard Lefty recommend that Sonny Black, as acting boss, should start a war against the Zips, and they heard Sonny’s response: “I can’t do that. It’s Commission rules.”
During a recess, the very capable retired NYPD Detective Gene McDonald offered Fat Tony Salerno a granola bar to take the place of the chocolate candy bars he ate. “Who the fuck cares,” Fat Tony said, “I’m going to die in the can anyway.”
One of my favorite witnesses was Fred DeChristopher. When the indictment came down, Carmine Persico had hid out at DeChristopher’s house in Wantagh, Long Island. DeChristopher was an insurance agent whose wife was a cousin of Carmine Persico. She was the sister of Persico’s right-hand man and future acting boss, capo Andy the Fat Man Russo.