Donnie Brasco: Unfinished Business

by Joe Pistone

  Hayes and Cutler, however, had heard enough from Gaspipe to know that they were listening to preposterous lies. In the end, Gaspipe had too much “horrendous baggage” for either side to call him as a witness. Unless he breaks out of jail some day, I’ve got to think that we have finally heard the last from Gaspipe Casso.

  When it was time for the defense to begin, Eddie Hayes went on the lam, so to speak. An associate of Hayes’s showed up for court, but no Eddie Hayes. When Judge Weinstein asked where Hayes was as the defense was about to begin, the associate explained that Hayes had an important meeting on a case in Los Angeles and was, at that moment, at the luxurious Hotel Bel-Air. “He’s not in California with my permission,” Judge Weinstein responded and ordered the lawyer to return to Brooklyn.

  Neither defendant took the stand. They had sat through the trial as motionless as an oil painting. Maybe their defense was to try to present themselves to the jury as if they were sitting in a frame like a Rembrandt. The complete defense lasted one measly hour. Hayes called a couple of witnesses on a minor point. Cutler opened a shoebox full of commendations for the eleventh most decorated officer in the history of the NYPD—a cop who before he smeared himself, his family, and his badge with slime and blood had been accustomed to newspaper headlines like this one from 1973: “Eppolito Does It Again.”

  Eppolito was quoted outside of court saying, “I don’t think there was much of a defense because that’s not what he was supposed to be doing. I have faith in Bruce and always will.” Always is a long time. That was April 1, 2006—April Fools Day. Was Eppolito only fooling?

  In his summation, federal prosecutor Dan Wenner put to rest the idea of a frame by Burton Kaplan. “Think how dangerous it is to frame a cop. Cops have paperwork. They have time cards. Burton Kaplan testified about things that happened on certain days. How would he know that the cops weren’t somewhere else on those days?”

  The trial had lasted twelve days; it was supposed to have taken eight weeks. The government ended up paring its witness list from over 100 to 34 who actually testified.

  On April 6, 2006 the Mafia Cops were convicted on all seventy counts of the RICO indictment. As if he had won instead of lost, Eppolito embraced and backslapped Cutler like Gotti did when he was acquitted. Eppolito forgot that he was starring in a different movie.

  “My mother is feeling pretty good today,” Mike Guido said. “More at ease. . . . Me, I feel like an anchor has been lifted off my chest. Someone is paying for killing my kid brother. Finally.”

  Thomas Repetto, author and NYPD historian of a police department that he loves, spoke as if his heart ached. “In the 160-year history of the police department, there have been shocking cases, but nothing like this where police officers committed murders for gangsters.”

  Eppolito’s 29-year-old daughter, Andrea, a marketing specialist in Las Vegas, took to the microphones outside the courthouse and said, “People have called this the worst case of corruption that New York has ever seen. And I agree with them, but it was not on the part of my father. It was not on the part of Steve Caracappa. The corruption came from the government.” Andrea wrote a letter to Judge Weinstein asking him to overturn the jury’s verdict and not force her father “to pay for the sins of his father and the family that came before him.”

  Andrea’s brother Tony will pay for his own sins. But doesn’t it sound like Tony was brought up “like the family that came before him”? Remember what his father said about the crystal meth—“No problem, I’ll have my son set it up. Tony can handle that for you.”

  A week later, Bernardo Provenzano—boss of all bosses of the Sicilian Mafia—was captured after forty-four years on the lam.

  Ten days after the verdict, by telephone from jail, Lou Eppolito gave an interview to a reporter for the New York Daily News. “I wanted to take the stand,” he said. “I begged them. I said, ‘Put me up there. This is my life I’m fighting for. . . .’ I just don’t know what they were thinking.”

  It turned out that Eppolito had only been fooling on April Fools Day. He said, “We were abandoned by our lawyers. They put up no defense for our lives. I believe you have to fight.”

  As for the verdict, Eppolito said, “It was a perfect frame. There’s no more perfect a frame than this.” He blamed the 1984 accusation over the classified folder and said, “I was the most perfect scapegoat in history.” He blamed prejudice over his Mafia family ties and said, “It was a perfect stigma.” Perfect four times. As somebody in the business of reading scripts, I could see why the Vegas call girl thought Eppolito was a lousy writer. Too repetitive.

  “I would not have been arrested if I had not written the book,” Eppolito said. “Still, there are no regrets, not a one. . . .”

  On a personal note, following this case reinforced in me how grateful I was to have had Jules protecting me when I was under for six years. The Mafia Cops illustrate why no one outside our immediate little group, not even my supervisor in the field office in the South to which I was assigned, could be trusted to know much about me or my activities out of concern that I could have ended up like Otto Heidel, changing a tire and landing in the gutter in my own blood.

  When I got a call with news of the jury’s verdict, I looked back over twenty years and reflected on Bob Blakey’s RICO statute and the Witness Protection statute; Rudy Giuliani’s appointment to U.S. Attorney in July 1983; the technical advances in electronic bugging equipment; the use of the anonymous jury; and the Mafia Commission Case and Judge Richard Owen’s 100-year sentences for each boss across the board.

  But for the clean sweep in the Lucchese family, its top leadership would have continued to be stable; there would have been no “killing frenzy” and no reason for the likes of Little Al to ever turn; and the paranoid hotheaded Gaspipe Casso would no doubt have gotten himself whacked in some other drug dispute along the way with the likes of Mickey Boy Paradiso.

  Eppolito’s book came out in 1992, the year I returned to the Bureau. I could live with Eppolito’s assessment in his book of what he called “low-life FBI agents who trailed these mobsters. . . . They all had tunnel vision. They saw things one way, in black and white.” Fuggeddaboudit. In the end it was a detective in his own proud department, Tommy Dades, who saw things one way—in black and white.

  CHAPTER 21

  THE COLOMBO FAMILY AND THE SCARPA DEFENSE

  IN NEW YORK CITY, except for the Lucchese family losing all three bosses, no family was as affected by RICO and the Mafia Commission Case as directly as the Colombo family. Their downfall had a special meaning to me since the Colombos were my original entrée into the Mafia as Donnie Brasco in the early seventies.

  Jerry Capeci pointed out in the Complete Idiot’s Guide to the Mafia, that the result of Colombo boss Carmine Persico’s guilty verdicts in the Colombo family case and the Mafia Commission Case was that “Carmine Persico’s permanent incarceration led to a civil war within his family.”

  And unlike in Buffalo a few short years earlier, there was no fully functioning Commission, no “big boys,” in a position to do a thing about the bloody Colombo civil war.

  Persico was the youngest of the convicted Mafia Commission bosses at 53. Maybe that’s why he was the only boss convicted in the case who refused to relinquish power when he went to jail. Or maybe it was his ego and his desire to build a dynasty with his son, Little Allie Boy, who was in his early twenties at the time and not yet ready to take over. At any rate, there was no fully functioning Mafia Commission in a position to insist that Persico step down.

  Historically, the Colombos had been the first New York family since the Commission was formed in 1931 to engage in an internal war. The crew belonging to Larry Gallo and his brothers, Crazy Joey Gallo and Kid Blast, started a war in 1961 against boss Joe Profaci. Carmine Persico was with the Gallos at the start, but quickly defected and began killing his former combat brothers. Behind his back he earned the nickname, “The Snake.” The ineptitude exhibited during the war prompted a book by Jimmy
Breslin, and a movie of the same name, The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight.

  Because boss Joe Profaci seemed to have it under control, the Mafia Commission did not offer to help in the Gallo War. During the war, Larry Gallo was almost killed by a garrote in a bar. He was saved when a cop walked into the bar to check on a door that was ajar and interrupted his murder. (That incident, by the way, was copied in The Godfather.) Larry Gallo refused to cooperate with the NYPD, but it was known that Persico was part of the hit squad. Persico got shot up when the back door of a truck opened and a rifleman, Larry Gallo, fired at Persico’s car. Persico sustained permanent damage to his left hand. Persico also did not cooperate with the NYPD.

  Nevertheless, the NYPD ended the war. The Gallo side lost Crazy Joey to a lengthy jail sentence. Seventeen other Gallos were indicted.

  The war killed 12. During the war, boss Joe Profaci died of natural causes in 1962; his successor did the same a year later. The Mafia Commission installed Joe Colombo as the new boss and all seemed settled until Crazy Joey got out of jail in March 1971.

  Boss Joe Colombo founded the Italian-American Civil Rights League. Its purpose was to persuade the public into believing there was no Mafia. At a League rally at New York’s Columbus Circle in June 1971, a black man posing as a photographer shot Colombo. The shooter was immediately killed. Fingers pointed at Crazy Joey as the orderer of the hit. Nine months later, in March 1972, Crazy Joey was whacked in Umberto’s Clam House in Little Italy. Gallo was shot while celebrating his birthday with a small group including the late Law and Order actor, Jerry Orbach. Orbach refused to answer a single question posed by the founder of the NYPD organized crime homicide unit, Detective Joe Coffey.

  Thirty years later, my co-writer Charles Brandt revealed in the book I Heard You Paint Houses that Frank Sheeran—the right-hand man of Colombo’s dear friend, Pennsylvania boss Russell Bufalino—had shot Gallo. When I was under I used to see Bufalino and Sheeran in Bufalino’s New York restaurant, the Vesuvio. By then Sheeran was drinking heavily. Before his death, Sheeran confessed the Gallo hit to Brandt. A civilian eyewitness later corroborated it. That eyewitness, a NewYorkTimes editor, was at the next table and positively identified Sheeran as the shooter. It was Detective Joe Coffey’s case and Jerry Capeci covered it as a young reporter. Both agreed that Sheeran was the shooter on behalf of Bufalino. And Bufalino could not have ordered the hit unless he knew it would meet with the Commission’s approval.

  Shortly after the hit on Crazy Joey, the Gallos retaliated. Intending to kill Persico’s brother Allie Boy and three others in a New York restaurant called the Neopolitan Noodle, their hit man killed two innocent Jewish businessmen instead.

  In the midst of this mess, with Colombo in a coma and Persico in jail, the “big boys” stepped in and moved the entire Gallo crew into the Genovese family. You can almost hear the Commission say in unison, “Enough already.” The Gallo crew was not heard from again. I have it on good authority that the surviving brother, Kid Blast, now owns a piece of Mike Sabella’s former restaurant CaSa Bella’s, a short stroll down Mulberry Street from where his brother Crazy Joey got hit.

  Colombo never came out of his coma and died in 1978 while I was under. I had already left Jilly Greca’s crew in the Colombo family and switched over to Tony Mirra and Lefty in the Bonannos.

  Persico went to jail in 1972 for 14 years for a hijacking charge that was eleven years old by the time he started his sentence. Persico’s father had been a legal stenographer. That might be one reason Persico played lawyer in the Mafia Commission Case. It might also explain how he played the legal system from 1959 until he went to jail in 1972. In 1959 Persico turned down a plea bargain that would have had him out of jail in a year. In 1961 he went to trial on a hijacking charge and there was a hung jury. In 1962 he was convicted, but on appeal he got a new trial. In 1963 he got a mistrial for medical reasons so he could recover from the bullet wounds inflicted when a rifleman opened up at him from the back of a truck. In 1964 he was convicted, but again on appeal he got a new trial. Meanwhile, Joe Valachi, the first made Mafia soldier ever to do so, had turned and agreed to testify. Valachi had appeared on television before the U.S. Senate, and now the judges, the juries, the FBI, and the media were taking the Mafia seriously. In 1968 Persico was convicted for the third time, but this time the appeals court left it alone. In this 1968 trial, Joe Valachi testified as a witness for the first and only time in court. When the conviction was upheld, “Clarence Darrow” Persico had turned a one-year bit into a 14-year sentence.

  Persico exercised control over the Colombo family from prison using his two brothers and his cousin, Andy the Fat Man Russo. The Fat Man’s son Jo-Jo still has some kind of relationship with one of the actors who showed up at the Mafia Commission trial, James Caan.

  After serving almost twelve years of his fourteen-year sentence, Persico got out in 1979, the year Galante got whacked at Joe and Mary’s and the year Tony Mirra introduced me to Persico and his son Little Allie Boy outside Persico’s Rolls Royce one night on a dark street corner in Brooklyn. With Colombo dead after seven years in a coma, it was common knowledge among my Mafia crewmembers that Persico was now officially the boss of the Colombos and was grooming his son Little Allie Boy to take over someday.

  Persico enjoyed almost a year of freedom, spending time at his Nesta Social Club in Brooklyn, his Long Island home, and his horse farm in upstate New York.

  In November 1980 Persico was indicted for having his cousin Andy the Fat Man bribe an undercover IRS agent to get Persico special treatment in jail and to squelch the tax problems of Persico and commercial realtor John The Redhead Francis—the Russell Bufalino associate who drove Frank Sheeran the night Sheeran whacked Crazy Joey Gallo. Even though I experienced first-hand how these wiseguys keep showing up in connected dots, these connections never cease to amaze me. Persico got a five-year sentence out of this bribery charge and was back in jail until 1984.

  Since 1971, Persico had been out of jail less than three years when his convictions for the Colombo family case and the Mafia Commission case put him back in for 139 years. Would anybody in his right mind want a job like that, with that kind of downside?

  Persico’s son and heir apparent, Little Allie Boy, was convicted in the Colombo family trial and got 12 years.

  In 2001 Little Allie Boy got another 13, and in a plea bargain, admitted that he was acting boss of the Colombo Mafia family. This admission would have been unimaginable when there was a fully functioning Commission. Little Allie Boy’s co-defendant, an old-school wiseguy and underboss, refused to plea bargain if he had to admit to the existence of the Mafia. He went to trial without Little Allie Boy at his table. The old-school wiseguy beat the major charge and went down on a minor count, puffing out his chest the whole way. Nothing for nothing, but you’ve got to admire that in your enemy. This was the kind of tough made man that Lefty and Sonny Black were.

  After getting banged for 139 years, Carmine Persico installed a short, chubby 54-year-old capo named Little Vic Orena as acting boss. Little Vic had been a soldier in Little Allie Boy’s crew, and when Little Allie Boy went to jail, Little Vic had been appointed capo to run the crew. Upped to acting boss, Little Vic was to follow orders from Persico in prison and warm the boss’s seat until Little Allie Boy got out.

  Carmine Persico, who looked like a man with a Napoleon complex in the Commission Case, and who would get out of jail at the age of 109, insisted on long-distance rule and repeatedly made personnel changes in the family. Without a fully functioning Mafia Commission to fear, Little Vic decided this arrangement made no sense.

  Worst of all, Carmine Persico began to negotiate with a film company for the TV rights to his life story. The Mafia had had a bite out of that banana before with the Joe Bananas book, A Man of Honor. At that time, the Mafia Commission couldn’t stop Joe Bananas because he was no longer on the Commission and couldn’t be threatened with being booted off. The Mafia Commission couldn’t stop Carmine Persico, e
ither, because it no longer had the capability or potency to do so.

  Little Vic didn’t want to hand the top job over to Little Allie Boy, when the time came. Little Vic asked the family consigliere, Carmine Sessa, to poll the family capos to vote Little Vic in as boss instead. But Carmine Sessa ratted out Little Vic to Carmine Persico in jail in California.

  Thus began the two-year “civil war” between the forces of Persico and the forces of Little Vic. On June 20, 1991, a little over four years after Persico got his hundred years, Little Vic spotted a car full of hit men, including Carmine Sessa, waiting for him near his home. Little Vic did a U-turn and sped away.

  At the beginning of the civil war, the Little Vic faction had about 100 made men while the Persicos numbered around 25. Joe Colombo’s four sons sided with Little Vic. Capo Wild Bill Cutolo was Little Vic’s strongest ally with the toughest crew.

  Jersey Sal Profaci, son of the family founder Joe Profaci, sided with Little Vic. Jersey Sal complained to Philly boss John Stanfa, “. . . Persico is losing his mind .

  . . calling press conferences. . . . He wants to go on 60 Minutes, Barbara Walters interview . . . . A hundred people say it’s not right what he’s doing, and he’s got a hundred-year sentence.”

  By far the deadliest Persico ally was capo Greg Scarpa. Scarpa had bravely fought alongside Persico in the Gallo War and was known to have said, “I love the smell of gunpowder.” When a soldier criticized the performance of Scarpa’s son on a bank robbery, Scarpa whacked the man where he stood.

  My sources told me that Scarpa envisioned himself as a James Bond type with 007’s license to kill. Scarpa’s favorite TV show was Mission Impossible. In 1986 Scarpa had hernia surgery and refused the hospital’s blood. Scarpa wanted blood only from the made men in his crew. One of those who gave blood unknowingly had AIDS, and Scarpa got it and knew it. So while he was engaged in this bloody “civil war,” he was even more fearless than normal because he knew his days were numbered anyway.