When he entered Judge Ross’s courtroom, Valenti looked like any aging, balding grandfather. He was nicely dressed in a jacket and tie and, like Asaro, didn’t have the slightest air of malevolence. Of course, the very first question to him from Nicole Argentieri was whether he was involved with organized crime. Yes, was the reply. From the late 1960s until 2008, Valenti said he was an associate with the Bonanno crime family and was under the command of his cousin Vincent Asaro. Together, they committed a long list of crimes, he explained.
“What was the most serious crime you committed?” Argentieri asked.
“Lufthansa,” answered Valenti.
“What did you do at Lufthansa?”
“We robbed the Lufthansa air freight company.”
“Approximately when?”
“Nineteen seventy-eight.”
“Who directed you to do that?”
“Vincent Asaro.”
Argentieri had certainly jumped to the chase with that line of questioning, raising expectation that the heist would be the first thing to be illuminated. But just as soon as Lufthansa was brought up, the interrogation moved to the more historical as the prosecutor had to set the table through Valenti’s testimony and show how both he and Asaro bonded over the years and carried out a host of crimes charged in the indictment. This was the foundation needed to prove the case, to show why Valenti was a reliable source of information and to reveal in graphic details the crimes Asaro was accused of committing.
Like many of the young men who grew up in the South Ozone Park area in the 1960s, Gaspare Valenti, who completed twelve years of high school but never got a diploma, was looking for a purpose to his life. Growing up in the area known as The Hole and across the street from Asaro, Valenti started committing crimes as a teenager. Nothing too serious. A burglary of a small store perhaps. But, eventually he graduated to things more serious.
One day, Asaro’s father Jerome approached him and said, “We have a score,” meaning a robbery and asked if he wanted to be part of it, recalled Valenti. The way Jerome Asaro pitched the idea was as if it was a rite of passage for an aspiring gangster.
“He explained it to me that everyone has lust sitting in their hearts. Some people have more lust. It’s up to you if you want to commit this crime with two other people,” Valenti remembered the elder Asaro telling him. Valenti agreed to join in, and he and two others robbed seventeen people in the office of the Long Island Press, a newspaper, of $63. What stood out in Valenti’s mind was his naïveté about the ways of the street criminals. Just before the robbery, he was told to “come dressed” and Valenti said he did his best to do that.
“I wore a seersucker jacket, white and gray stripes, burgundy pants, a burgundy shirt and burgundy patent leather boots,” said Valenti.
He was the best dressed robber on the scene, but when his fellow criminals saw him show clothed that way, they laughed. “Come dressed” means to come with a pistol, Valenti was told, and when he described the incident in the courtroom, there were chuckles. Valenti and his two cohorts split the cash with Jerome Asaro. Later, the elder Asaro asked Valenti if he wanted to continue in the life as a criminal, and Valenti said yes and learned he would be working under his uncle.
At that point, Valenti was a mob associate, someone who had to report to a Mafia member he was “on record” with to reveal what he was doing and to split some of the proceeds from any crimes. Valenti remembered that he had to clean up his act and shave his moustache and to make sure he acted respectfully. He spent more and more of his time with his cousin Vincent, drinking at the Colonial House, a bar in the nearby City Line section of old East New York. When the time came, Asaro told Valenti that they had to do a favor for an important Bonanno crime-family member named Michael Zaffarano. It was their first assignment together and it involved the sale of pornographic films.
In the annals of the Mafia, Zaffarano, who happened to be Asaro’s uncle, was something of an icon. In a business career that spanned decades, Zaffarano became a well-known porn merchant who made a few shrewd real estate deals in the Times Square area. In the buildings Zaffarano purchased on Broadway, he established the famous Pussycat Theater and leased out some of his property for topless dancing venues and other sex businesses. When the area became targeted for a major urban-renewal project, Zaffarano’s land would be worth over $15 million. So significant was Zaffarano’s clout in the sex industry that he traveled back and forth to California to settle business disputes and sign deals with porn actresses.
Asaro brought Valenti a box of video tapes of porn films to sell with the admonition, “Don’t screw up with these; these are Uncle Mickey’s. You will get killed.” Valenti said he sold the films, passed along the money to Asaro and got nothing in return.
Valenti said he did better financially with some other arrangements with Asaro. When Asaro and Jimmy Burke pulled hijacks together, Valenti said he sold some of the stolen goods for his cousin, including shirts. Burke was a good man to know because if you got on his right side you could make money with him. You wanted to be on Burke’s right side because “he would kill you just as soon as earn with you,” remembered Valenti.
But over time, Valenti got comfortable enough with Burke that he hung out several days a week at the Irish gangster’s Robert’s Lounge. There, Valenti would hobnob with other club denizens like Henry Hill, Thomas DeSimone, French McMahon, and Angelo Sepe. Robert’s Lounge was like the alien cantina in the first Star Wars film, a place where the brigands, schemers and killers of the mob universe gravitated to make deals, plot the next score or just get drunk.
When committing so many crimes, the crew at Robert’s Lounge would occasionally get caught and when they did they had to spend some time in jail, at least until they were able to pay a cop and get out, said Valenti. One incident in 1969 stood out in particular. Burke and a number of his crew including Asaro were arrested at a warehouse in South Ozone Park, which Paul Katz used to store hijacked goods, said Valenti. Everyone—except Asaro—was freed after Burke said “they paid their way out,” which Valenti said meant they bribed a cop. It took a day for Asaro to get released and he was angry, recalled Valenti.
For years, Katz had been working with Burke’s crew on hijacks across the city and floated between Robert’s Lounge and Henry Hill’s bar The Suite. But in October 1969, Katz’s luck started to turn when he and four others were arrested in the Bronx after they hijacked an armored truck carrying $100,000 in gold and platinum. Katz, then twenty-eight-years-old, made bail and then appeared to start to secretly cooperate with police, according to law-enforcement records. The same records showed that detectives in Queens had a wiretap on Katz’s home telephone. Around November 1969, Katz told his police contact about a drop site for hijacked goods, which police then promptly hit and apparently arrested Burke, Asaro, DeSimone, and the others, the records showed. But as it turned out, Burke was cut loose and not reported as being a defendant, allegedly because $5,000 was paid to a cop.
Katz continued to meet with his police contact, sometimes on the rooftop of a parking lot by his apartment on the Horace Harding Expressway, other times at a bar. If Katz believed his clandestine passing of information to the police would remain a secret, he was wrong. According to information later given by Hill to NYPD officials, Burke had a contact inside the office of then-Queens District Attorney Thomas Mackell. (While he had his own problems years later, Mackell wasn’t implicated in the corruption Hill alleged in his debriefings.) The contact would pass along information whenever an informant gave information to detectives. Burke soon learned of Katz’s cooperation, and his fate was sealed.
It was a Saturday, December 6, 1969, that Delores Katz noticed her husband Paul acting nervously. The telephone at the couple’s apartment had been ringing incessantly with one of the callers being Katz’s detective contact in the NYPD and a man named Joe Allegro, a suspected hijacker who had been arrested in the Bronx earlier with Katz, according to law-enforcement records. At some point, Allegro
had stopped by a drugstore near the Katz apartment and told Katz that Burke wanted to see him, the records stated. While Katz initially entered Allegro’s car he had a change of heart and left, returning home and telling his wife that he believed Burke knew he had told the cops about the hijack drop point.
About 6:00 P.M. that night, Katz took another telephone call from Allegro, told his wife that he was going to a drugstore and that if he didn’t return in about fifteen minutes to call the NYPD. While Delores Katz didn’t want him to leave, her husband went out. She never saw him again. Mrs. Katz then filed a missing person’s report with the police.
From the very beginning, as soon as Katz disappeared, allegations arose that crooked cops helped instigate Burke in carrying out the hijacker-informant’s demise. Intelligence reports said “that Burke’s entrée to police was set up by Vincent ‘Jimmy’ Santa, an ex-NYPD officer who left the force under a cloud. Police records show that Santa, also known on the street as “Santos,” left the NYPD in April 1961 without giving notice to the department and forfeited all rights to any pay that was due. Santa was closer to Burke’s age and to some seemed more simpatico with the Irishman than the younger Hill, who some saw as an errand boy, although a very trusted one. In any case, the intelligence reports said it was Santa who introduced Burke to cops at the Queens District Attorney’s Office. This was the period of the 1960s when the police department in New York City was rife with corruption problems, when detectives were openly cozy with drug dealers, mobsters, and all manner of wise guys. Anyone who doubts that state of affairs only has to read the Knapp Commission report and the stories about cop Frank Serpico whose whistleblowing ripped the lid off the systematic corruption in the department at the time.
According to statements Hill later gave to investigators, the night after Burke had learned Katz was an informant, he came through the rear door of Hill’s club The Suite on Queens Boulevard with an NYPD detective and Santa. After the chef was chased from the kitchen, Hill said he was given (he didn’t specify by whom) Katz’s wallet and a handgun to dispose of, according to law-enforcement records. Hill said among the papers in the wallet he noticed Katz’s driver’s license. The cop, Burke alleged, had told him about Katz’s informant status and later was seen hanging around The Suite, getting patted on the back by patrons as they were having drinks. (About fourteen years after Katz’s death, the detective in question told an investigator that Hill was a junkie and a liar. He was never charged criminally and died in 2007.)
It was under further questioning by Argentieri that Valenti recalled a telephone call he got from Asaro with a request to get him a place so he could have a meeting with Burke. The request seemed pretty straightforward, and to accommodate his cousin, Valenti selected a newly constructed and unoccupied home on 102nd Road. Valenti’s father had constructed a row of houses on the street, and when he died management of the properties became his son’s responsibility, so he had unfettered access to the buildings.
The next day was a Sunday and since no one was working, the homes were empty. Valenti remembered that Burke and Asaro pulled up in a car which they backed into the sloping driveway of the model home. Then, according to Valenti, Asaro told him the purpose of the visit.
“ ‘We have to bury somebody,’” said Asaro, according to Valenti’s testimony.
Valenti was taken aback and thought his cousin might be kidding. But then he went down to the basement where Burke told him to open the door and then stay outside to make sure nobody entered the premises. Valenti did what he was told and for about three hours stood guard outside the house. Valenti said that during the time he stood watch he heard the sound of a sledgehammer hitting concrete. Eventually, Burke left and Asaro drove his cousin to a fence company Asaro owned to get some concrete, according to Valenti.
“What did he say to you at that time?” asked Argentieri, referring to Asaro as they drove to the fence company.
“He says he did most of the digging because Jimmy had hurt his hand when he killed Paul,” answered Valenti.
“What did he say to you about how Paul Katz was killed?”
“They strangled him with a dog chain,” Valenti answered, although he didn’t specify who he meant by “they.”
Asaro inadvertently revealed the name of Katz during the drive and apologized to his cousin, telling him he shouldn’t have ever mentioned the name, testified Valenti.
“‘I’m sorry I said that name to you. Never, ever mention that name again or this incident,’ ” Asaro said, according to Valenti.
* * *
After returning to the basement grave, Valenti said he spread lime over the corpse to hasten its decomposition. Then he cemented over the hole, which he described as being oblong. The body had to be dropped in because of the shape of the grave, remembered Valenti. He also learned that a water pipe had been damaged during the digging, something that years later would bedevil the FBI evidence team when it re-excavated the grave.
A few days later, Valenti remembered visiting his uncle Jerome with Vincent at a diner on Cross Bay Boulevard. Jerome was apologetic, but told Valenti the issue was closed for discussion.
“‘I am so sorry that this happened,’” Jerome said, according to Valenti. “‘This should have never happened with you, but it did happen. We are going to discuss this one time and it should never be spoken about again with no one.’”
Jerome then said that only a handful of people knew about what had happened to Katz but that among them was Paul Vario, the Lucchese captain who was Burke’s boss.
According to Valenti, Burke eventually bought the house with the body in the basement through a straw purchaser, a man who owned a dress factory adjacent to Robert’s Lounge. FBI agents said that the property was actually registered to the wife of the factory owner, a man by the name of Jerry Vitta, who was the straw buyer Valenti referred to. For years, the secret burial went undisturbed. But in the 1980s while he was in jail Burke began to feel uncomfortable with a corpse buried in one of his homes. It seemed he was getting paranoid about someone revealing the burial site, so Asaro had another job for Valenti: to dig up the body at the house. Armed with a sledgehammer and a shovel, Valenti and Asaro’s son visited the basement grave and dug up the remains.
What was left of Katz’s corpse was folded in the grave, just the way his body had been left. The exhumation must have been strange and macabre as Valenti said that he told Jerome nothing about the identity of the body they were removing. Valenti said that he and Jerome took the bones and bits of corduroy and put them in some cardboard boxes. The floor was then re-cemented. (As the FBI discovered years later during the agency’s own exhumation in 2013, there were enough of the bones still in the pit that they could be identified by DNA analysis as those of Katz.) Jerome took the bones and placed them in paint cans, which were filled with cement, and took them to a hunting lodge he owned in upstate New York, recalled Valenti.
Later on in the case, forensic anthropologist Brad Adams would go into more detail and reveal how the remains in the basement were indeed those of Katz. But just by describing how Katz’s body was buried and then disinterred, Valenti had put some compelling testimony before the jury. If the jury believed Valenti, Asaro would be in some serious trouble.
Valenti’s cooperation had fleshed out for investigators what had happened to Katz on the day he disappeared in 1969. But in the intervening years, Delores Katz, her children and even Katz’s sister Joyce would try in vain to find out what had happened to the young hijacker. The women visited Robert’s Lounge and fished around for leads. Someone suggested that Katz was in the witness protection program and yet another, a cop, reported that he had been murdered and buried in the Bronx.
In the 1970s, according to law-enforcement records, some investigators began to suspect that a police leak about Katz had led to his death. Allegations surfaced from an FBI informant that ex-cop Santa had even paid $25,000 to police officers to get Katz’s name from the police and then personally killed him. Joey All
egro, the man who reportedly called Katz and saw him the day he disappeared, was also suspected of being the killer. The information about Allegro surfaced in police records during an interview of his associate Albert Wilkins who told cops in April 1974 that Allegro confided to him about tricking Katz to come out of his house and then putting a “dog choke” around his neck, killing him. Allegro then said he delivered Katz’s body and that “they” disposed of him.
The stories about Allegro, who was part of Burke’s circle of thieves, were consistent with what Valenti testified about what he knew about the method of Katz’s demise, although there was no mention of Asaro’s involvement in the actual murder. A hard drinker, drug user, and brawler, Allegro was killed on January 7, 1971, in an auto accident on Queens Boulevard after he left The Suite bar. Police suspected the brakes on Allegro’s car had been tampered with. Wilkins didn’t fare any better. Police reports show he was murdered at a Queens motel in March 1975.
By the mid-1970s, special prosecutor Maurice Nadjari began to look into the Katz disappearance. The NYPD, records show, also conducted internal investigations into at least two detectives who Hill and others said were around Burke and the Robert’s Lounge crowd. Because of civil-service rules at the time, the police department was unable to bring administrative charges against one of the officers before he retired. The other officer, according to police records, was found guilty in a department administrative trial of having leaked information about a criminal case to a defense attorney, information that was detrimental to the prosecution’s case. The allegations raised by Hill that this officer might have been involved as an accomplice after the fact in the Katz murder were looked at by the NYPD in the late 1970s, but couldn’t be substantiated to the satisfaction of the department, and the detective retired in 1980. No criminal cases were ever filed as a result.
Delores Katz dutifully talked to investigators for years, telling them essentially the same version of events surrounding her husband’s disappearance. At one point Delores alleged that NYPD Det. Sal Petix had been seen by one of her daughters with her husband after he left the house the day he disappeared, something that flatly contradicted her previous recollection of events. Not long after her husband disappeared, Delores Katz moved upstate with her children to Sullivan County where she worked as a waitress. She died in 2001. Petix died in 2007.
The Big Heist Page 20