by Joe Pistone
At the end of the visit the head guy said to Nick, “Tell Joe I am sorry to tell him there are three Russian Mafia spies in the audience at his lecture.”
“Nick,” I said. “I don’t want to insult the guy, but is there anything else we should know? And how does he know there are three spies in the audience?”
The head guy laughed as if I had just told the funniest joke in the world. To begin with, whenever you ask a Russian a question they answer by telling a story. He continued to laugh and finally said in so many words, “Everything is not what it seems to look like. Tell Joe we do our homework.”
“Well,” I said.“Tell him we’ll tell the colonel tomorrow about the three spies.”
“Joe doesn’t have to tell the colonel anything,” he said. “We will solve the problem.”
The hell with it, I thought. It’s their problem, not mine. If he doesn’t want me to say anything to the colonel I won’t. As far as I know I’m not teaching anything that would be of value to the Russian Mafia anyway.
The next morning and for every day’s lecture thereafter, I looked out at three empty seats where before there had been men in uniform. No one else ever sat in those vacated seats.
These five men in black were very good company. They took us out for dinner a couple more times, picking my brain on undercover work. But they never said a word about the three empty seats and we never asked.
CHAPTER 16
THE LUCCHESE FAMILY
TRIAL TESTIMONY OF JOSEPH D. PISTONE IN THE MAFIA COMMISSION CASE:MICHAEL CHERTOFF:When he said Tony Ducks, did you know who he was referring to?
JOSEPH D. PISTONE: Tony Ducks Corallo.
MC: Had you at any point ever met Mr. Corallo in the course of your undercover operation?
JP: Sure did.
MC: Who did you understand Mr. Corallo to be at that time?
JP: At that time I understood him to be a boss.
MC: Did you know then which specific family?
JP: Lucchese family.
That testimony may not sound like a big deal today, but it sure did the afternoon when the Mafia Commission Case jury heard it. It was crucial to our case that we establish Tony Ducks Corallo as the boss of a crime family known as the Lucchese crime family. Without it, we had no case. The moment I said, “Sure did,” the jury knew that as a Bonanno family member I had met Tony Ducks Corallo in the capacity of the boss of the Lucchese family. I was an eyewitness to that indispensable proof in a RICO trial. And the source of that proof brought no “negative baggage” to the witness stand that would inject doubt or cause a jury to wonder about the truth of it. I was not facing a life term. I had sold heroin to no one. I had killed no one while trying to buy a flea collar in a pet store. I was an undercover FBI agent who had put his life on the line to gather this information, and the jury understood that.
The Lucchese family had been a very stable family ever since the formation of the Commission in 1931. The existence of the Lucchese family was not known to the public until 1963 when Joe Valachi turned and became the first made man in history to violate the Mafia’s sacred oath of omerta.That code of silence required Mafia members and associates to: deny the existence of the Mafia; admit nothing; never speak about family matters to outsiders; and certainly never provide information, evidence, or testimony to the law. Valachi, at the time he turned, was a Genovese family soldier who believed that the boss of the family, Vito Genovese, had ordered his murder while they were in federal prison together in Atlanta serving lengthy sentences for heroin trafficking. Vito Genovese was the Mafia enforcer for Italian dictator Mussolini. Genovese ordered Carmine Galante to murder the New York anti-Mussolini newspaperman Carlo Tresca.
At a nationally televised Senate hearing in 1963, Joe Valachi identified the Lucchese family as one of the five New York Mafia families. Joe Valachi identified Tommy Lucchese as the boss of the family that had been started by Tommy Gagliano in 1931, with Tommy Lucchese then as the underboss.
Tony Ducks Corallo was only the third boss the family had ever had from 1931 until the Mafia Commission Case in 1986. There had been no upheavals; this was a well-oiled machine. Gagliano died of natural causes in 1954, and Lucchese the understudy underboss took over and was boss when Valachi testified. Lucchese died of natural causes in 1967 and Tony Ducks Corallo took over.
After the 100-year sentences in 1986, believing it likely that his entire administration would never get out of jail alive, Tony Ducks Corallo appointed Vic Amuso as boss and Anthony “Gaspipe” Casso as underboss of the Lucchese family.
In his Complete Idiot’s Guide to the Mafia, Jerry Capeci succinctly summed up the effects the Mafia Commission Case convictions and Judge Owen’s 100-year sentences had on the Lucchese family: “The conviction of Lucchese boss Tony ‘Ducks’ Corallo and his underboss and consigliere brought chaos to that family. Vittorio ‘Vic’ Amuso and Anthony ‘Gaspipe’ Casso began a family killing frenzy that left dozens of mobsters and associates dead.”
Then that “killing frenzy” left dozens of made men with no choice but to cooperate and go into the Witness Protection Program to keep from getting whacked by Amuso and Gaspipe. But for Judge Owen stepping up to the plate and sending a strong message to current and future Mafia bosses, the Lucchese family would not have begun a journey into impotency that was fueled by cooperation with the FBI at every level of the family.
Jerry Capeci wrote that Amuso and Gaspipe “were totally out of their league when it came to the subtleties of running such an operation.” The family had many capos that would not have been out of their league, men who had been made decades ago.Amuso and Gaspipe’s initiation as made men had only occurred in 1974.
That Gaspipe was never considered a powerful man in the Mafia before he was made underboss can be seen by an attempt to whack him that took place in September 1986, the month we began picking the jury for the Mafia Commission Case.
Gaspipe had a beef with a Gambino capo, Mickey Boy Paradiso. The beef was over money, naturally—who was entitled to what on a heroin deal. Normally, the Mafia Commission would mediate a money dispute between members of two different families. There’d be a sit-down presided over by the Commission. But at that time, the Mafia Commission was indisposed in a federal courtroom. They could not afford to get photographed conducting sit-downs and giving Mike Chertoff more evidence against them.
So Mickey Boy, not respecting Gaspipe’s power, not thinking a soldier like Gaspipe could generate a backlash if he were eliminated, dispatched four hit men. Gaspipe was lured to a meeting and, while parking his Lincoln on a street in the Flatlands section of Brooklyn, a car pulled alongside and four men began firing. A shotgun blast went through the driver’s window. Gaspipe was hit twice, but managed to get into a restaurant and then to a hospital.
In processing Gaspipe’s Lincoln, the NYPD found a highly classified list of license plate numbers. They were the numbers of the unmarked cars used by the NYPD in physical surveillance and tails. The only thing Gaspipe would tell the NYPD is, “There’s nobody who don’t like me. I don’t know nothing about organized crime.”
Besides all this, Amuso and Gaspipe had another black mark. They were primarily drug traffickers. Tony Ducks claimed to be against drugs. Yet Amuso had served four years for heroin trafficking and Gaspipe had beaten drug trafficking charges, almost getting himself whacked in a drug dispute with Mickey Boy Paradiso. I couldn’t even get made in Sonny Black’s crew if I took a drug bust. Both Lefty and Sonny warned me on this subject when they told me I was going to be made that December of 1981. And I was in the Bonanno family, the family with the reputation for heroin smuggling. One of the Palma Boys Social Club tapes that were used in the Mafia Commission Case included Fat Tony Salerno’s disapproving critique of the Bonannos’ involvement in narcotics: “Yeah, they took too many junkies in there, the Bonannos.”
If Tony Ducks was searching for quality leadership, like Donald Trump he’d have excluded drug traffickers. Because of the extremely long sentences
and the difficulty of beating the charges, drug traffickers, more likely than, say, hijackers, have a tendency not to stand up. The drug policy of the bosses while I was under should really have been expressed this way: “We love drug trafficking and we appreciate the large sums of money you send upstream, but if you get caught on a serious drug charge, we will whack you.”
It was a heroin trafficker, Joe Valachi, who had exposed the Lucchese family to the public to begin with.Valachi feared being hit by his heroin trafficking boss, Vito Genovese, who suspected that Valachi would rat to shave time off his heroin sentence.
So why did Tony Ducks Corallo appoint two drug traffickers with very little leadership experience to the top spots in the family? Gaspipe had never served as a capo and had never even led a crew. Gaspipe, a soldier, was so little regarded in the Mafia that he got no respect from Gambino capo Mickey Boy Paradiso. What made them qualified?
The way I see it, unlike Donald Trump, Tony Ducks’ primary consideration was not finding the most qualified leaders. The primary consideration now was the Lucchese leaders’ court appeal and the slim hope of getting their convictions overturned.
If a miracle happened and they won their appeals, appeals of a pretty much untested RICO law, these three bosses would need loyal men as acting boss and underboss, men who lacked ambition, men who would treat them with respect when they returned from jail.
Gaspipe Casso led the league in oily displays of loyalty and lack of ambition. Earlier in his career Gaspipe had turned down the job of capo and suggested Vic Amuso for the job. This was a foxy show of loyalty and lack of ambition. It happened when Christy Tick Furnari got upped and was made consigliere. Christy Tick offered the capo spot of his former crew to Gaspipe. In turning it down, Gaspipe said that he’d rather stick to Christy Tick’s side, since a consigliere is allowed to keep one soldier as an aide de camp. Then after the 100-year sentences, Amuso and Gaspipe were told by Christy Tick that they were each being considered for boss. Again Gaspipe deferred to Amuso, asking to be underboss. This subservient act by Gaspipe fooled Christy Tick Furnari.
But once in as underboss, Gaspipe wasted no time in proving that he was full of what Mario Cuomo might call “a lot of baloney” when he had played the humble role with Christy Tick Furnari. My sources in the Bureau assured me that Gaspipe was the true dominant force of the two new leaders—the brains, the strategist, the master manipulator. As second fiddle, Gaspipe was the one who orchestrated things. And under Gaspipe’s baton, Amuso began to seize the reins of power with a vengeance.
Jerry Capeci wrote: “Their main idea of management was to kill anyone who displeased them in any way. Their secondary plank was to kill anyone whom they thought might displease them.”
They just banged them out. They killed one capo just because Tony Ducks Corallo had been considering the guy for boss before he settled on Amuso. They killed another capo thinking he might be a potential challenger, but really, they ended up getting the dead capo’s loanshark book which was worth seven million dollars. Whoever owed money to the recently departed capo now paid that vig to Amuso and Gaspipe. They cremated one guy in a funeral parlor that they used to dispose of bodies. He was a long-time made man who was being replaced by a non-made man in a garment industry racket. This was not how wiseguys were supposed to be treated. The made man protested the loss of his position to a non-made man. What was the value of your button if a non-made man could replace you? The guy referred to his replacement as “a Jew bastard,” and was promptly whacked.
One poor guy saw the handwriting on the wall and fled to California. Gaspipe tracked him down and sent a four-man hit team to gun him down. This hit, even more than the others, illustrated how much of an act Gaspipe had put on for Christy Tick. The man who had fled to California was former underboss Tom Mix Santoro’s nephew.
In one hit, the guy smelled trouble while he was walking into an auto body shop garage with his friends who were going to kill him. The guy bolted and ran for the exit. Soldier Louis “Bagels” Daidone had been a quarterback on Brooklyn’s New Utrecht High School football team and had a short stay at Indiana State on a football scholarship. Louis Bagels made an open-field tackle and brought the guy deeper into the garage where they whacked him. Louis Bagels had killed and frozen a canary, saving it for the occasion. He stuffed the canary in the deceased’s mouth and that was the way he was found. The idea of the canary was that the guy had begun to sing to the feds. The guy had committed another sin, too. He had failed to visit Gaspipe when Gaspipe was recuperating from the attempted hit in September 1986. Gaspipe kept score his own special way.
With all of these hits, and many others, there was a certain amount of “cleaning the house” that had to be done. It is accepted that if you whack a guy you need to “clean the house.”You need to be sure to whack whoever you believe will seek vengeance. It was partly “cleaning the house” that caused Sonny Black to give me the hit on Bruno after they whacked his father Sonny Red. The guy who Louie Bagels tackled had two good buddies. The three of them were jewel thieves together. For obvious reasons, I hate to see jewel thieves get whacked. But these two were gunned down. One of them was suspected of having homosexual tendencies, so he was shot in the groin a few times.
Any time there was a federal investigation, Amuso and Gaspipe did not wait to see who might be indicted.They just whacked out people.They hit a Democrat Party district leader and former union leader as he left his mistress’s apartment. They hit another leader of a union that was being investigated. The man was wounded with the first surprise shot and, before he was finished off, he looked up at the shooters, his friends, and said in disbelief, “I’m not a rat.”
Gaspipe ordered a hit on the architect of his $1.2 million house. The reason given was always the same—suspicion of informing. The architect had been tortured with bullet wounds, stabbings, and cigarette burns before being finished off. There was a rumor that the architect had had an affair with Gaspipe’s wife.
They killed another guy who had allowed Bonanno family associate Gus Farace to hide out in his apartment. Gus Farace had shot and killed a DEA agent, Everett Hatcher. After Gus Farace gunned down Hatcher in the street, certain law enforcement authorities had visited the bosses and demanded Farace’s head. The guy who hid Farace was told to kill Farace right there in his apartment and failed to do it, no doubt not wanting to kill someone in his own apartment, but his excuse was not accepted and he was whacked.
One of Gaspipe’s neighbors made the mistake of griping to Gaspipe that the neighbor’s daughter’s ex-boyfriend couldn’t take no for an answer and still came around to the house despite the fact that his daughter was now engaged to another man. Gaspipe had the forlorn lover whacked as an act of neighborliness.
There were also many murder attempts that went awry. Gaspipe paid 400-pound Fat Pete Chiodo $40,000 to go to Florida to whack a soldier. Fat Pete fired two bullets into the soldier, but the guy lived. Gaspipe complained, “Petey cost me $20,000 a bullet.”
But for the success of the Mafia Commission Case, these killings and many others would not have happened. You can’t feel good about hits like these, but not because it’s wrong. I mean, who really cares when they kill each other? It’s just an excuse to arrest them for murder and put them away. The reason you can’t feel good when the job you did has led to hits like these, is that you know that there were others also, innocents, who were killed “but for” the job you did.
In the Mafia Commission Case there was a bug on Sal Avellino’s Jaguar. That bug led to incriminating comments by Lucchese underboss Tom Mix Santoro and by Lucchese boss Tony Ducks Corallo. Those taped statements were introduced into evidence against the Lucchese family at the trial. Sal Avellino was embarrassed and lost face over the bugging of his Jaguar. To reclaim his self-respect he asked Gaspipe to whack the businessman who had given the New York State Organized Crime Task Force information that helped provide probable cause to authorize the bug.
Robert Kubecka, age 40, had
been determined not to pay tribute to the Mafia or to let the Mafia drive him out of his family business as a waste hauler on Long Island. Kubecka cooperated with the New York State authorities. On August 10, 1989, Kubecka and his brother-in-law Donald Barstow showed up for work at 6 a.m. Within minutes these two valiant men were gunned down by two of Gaspipe’s cowards. Kubecka and Barstow left behind wives and children. Kubecka’s father, Jerry, missed being killed by staying home from work that day. I can’t even imagine what that family has lived with.
Donald Barstow died instantly, but the courageous Kubecka, before he succumbed to his mortal wounds, had managed to reach one of the two shooters and injure him in some unknown way and to such an extent that the shooter left a trail of blood.
In the days before they were killed, these true American heroes had asked the state to provide security cameras for their office and to have a cop car sit out front off and on as a warning. They were denied any support. Because the state failed to protect them, their families sued for negligence and at least got a monetary settlement.
In May 1990, three years after taking over, Gaspipe got inside information from what he called his Crystal Ball, that he and Amuso were about to be indicted with a number of bosses from the other families in what came to be known as the Windows Case. It was a RICO case involving the Mafia’s control of the installation of windows in all public housing in New York.
Amuso and Gaspipe met with Lucchese capo Little Al D’Arco, a Korean War veteran, and told him they were going on the lam. Amuso and Gaspipe said that they wanted the RICO Windows Case to proceed to trial without them. That way, when they returned, their lawyers would have the benefit of the trial transcript and they would stand a better chance of beating the case in court. This was the same successful tactic used by Big Joey Massino in the Bonanno family trial when he hid out at Goldie Leisenheimer’s parents’ vacation house in the Poconos.