The Quiet Don: The Untold Story of Mafia Kingpin Russell Bufalino

by Birkbeck, Matt

  Hoffa was the keynote speaker, and he spoke about how loyal Sheeran had been to him and to the Teamsters all these years. But the conversation from the night before still resonated, and Sheeran feared for his friend. Sheeran tried having a word with Hoffa, but the conversation was short and brief. Sheeran later told Bufalino there wasn’t much anyone could do to change his mind and stop Hoffa from running.

  There were some people, such as Tony Provenzano, who wanted to end Hoffa’s life immediately, and with prejudice. Provenzano had enough of Hoffa’s threats and believed the best way to deal with him was to silence him permanently. Bufalino, on the other hand, didn’t share Provenzano’s thoughts on the subject. Bufalino had known Hoffa for thirty years, and deep down he knew that Hoffa wasn’t a rat. Even when word filtered at the Teamster convention in April 1975 that Hoffa was cooperating with the FBI, Bufalino didn’t believe it, and his faith in Hoffa was restored when Hoffa took the Fifth Amendment during testimony before a grand jury investigating his old Detroit local in May 1975. But others weren’t so sure, and the groundswell within the ranks of organized crime for Hoffa’s untimely end grew stronger. Bufalino kept them at bay, and Hoffa remained alive longer than others had wanted.

  FIFTEEN

  The U.S. Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities was formed in January 1975 to gather information on the CIA and FBI. The Senate wanted to take a closer look at the nation’s intelligence operations after a series of articles that appeared in the New York Times in late 1974 revealed that the CIA was involved in toppling foreign governments and spying on U.S. citizens.

  The committee, headed by U.S. senator Frank Church, R-Idaho, began holding hearings to confirm whether the CIA had conducted such operations, covert or otherwise, abroad and in the United States.

  Following the end of World War II, the nation’s attention was focused on its new Cold War with the Soviet Union, and stemming the tide of Communism was considered the number-one priority for the new agency. Foreign leaders were secretly disposed, and governments were compromised while an ambivalent nation enjoyed its postwar prosperity.

  The Church Committee looked at a variety of topics, including the CIA’s plots to kill foreign leaders, among them the assassination attempts against Fidel Castro of Cuba. Surprisingly, the CIA confirmed that it not only tried to kill Castro, but in a shocking admission, the agency admitted that it had recruited members of the Teamsters and organized crime to help in that effort. The committee immediately sought to talk to Sam Giancana, Jimmy Hoffa and Johnny Roselli.

  Word that the committee was looking at the mob’s role in the CIA plots became public in the spring of 1975. But then, on June 9, 1975, came the Time magazine article. The piece was entitled, “CIA: Mafia Spies in Cuba,” and it rehashed a previous article quoting “reliable sources” that claimed the CIA had recruited Giancana and Roselli to assassinate Fidel Castro. But the new story went a step further, and identified Russell Bufalino and two associates, James Plumeri and Salvatore Granello, as having worked with the CIA to help with the preparation of the Bay of Pigs invasion. According to the story, the CIA learned that Bufalino, Plumeri and Granello had left $450,000 in Cuba before fleeing the island (it was closer to $1 million), and the agency decided to recruit the men to conduct surveillance with their Cuban sources to gauge the potential success of an invasion and to help identify roads leading into Havana. The gangsters supposedly gave little, if any, information.

  Bufalino had never before been implicated in the CIA plots, which were first mentioned by journalist Jack Anderson in 1970. After Anderson’s column appeared, people began to die. Granello was found dead first, in an upstate New York cornfield, shot several times in the head. Plumeri, a longtime Bufalino associate, had been strangled in his car a year later.

  The matter seemed to fade away, until the Church Committee decided to take a closer look. On June 19, ten days after the Time piece was published, Giancana was entertaining a small group of friends and family at his modest brick home in suburban Oak Park, Illinois. He had just returned from Houston, where he underwent a successful gallbladder operation, and the small affair was a sort of welcome-back-home dinner.

  Giancana, sixty-six, had given up his top role in the Chicago mob years earlier. After a lengthy stay in Mexico, he was subpoenaed to testify before a grand jury that was probing organized crime activity in Chicago. Giancana testified once and gave prosecutors nothing.

  After his party broke up and his guests left, just before midnight, Giancana walked down to his basement kitchen to fry some sausages and spinach. Someone was with Giancana, someone he knew and trusted, because soon after starting his meal, he was taken down by six gunshots to the mouth and neck with a .22 pistol.

  Police initially believed Giancana got what he had coming. It was, by all accounts, a standard mob rubout, save the use of a .22 handgun, which was somewhat unusual. Another theory soon made the rounds, and that was that Giancana was done in by the CIA. He was scheduled to testify before the Church Committee, and some thought that Giancana might actually discuss his role in the agency’s attempts to kill Fidel Castro. The aging Roselli, now sixty-nine, had testified a few days earlier before the committee and apparently made such a good showing that the committee wanted to hear more.

  But CIA Director William Colby quickly doused any notion the CIA had a role in Giancana’s murder.

  “We had nothing to do with it,” he said.

  With no leads and few clues, the case quickly grew stagnant.

  With Giancana gone, plans were being made in Scranton to address Jimmy Hoffa. For more than a year, Russell Bufalino had fought and lobbied to keep Hoffa alive amid his loud boasts and threats to turn over sensitive information on Teamsters loans and to bare all about the union’s ties to the mob. The threats were more like a defense mechanism for Hoffa against the calls by the Teamster hierarchy and Mafiosi to step aside. Hoffa didn’t just want the Teamsters back; he wanted his revenge against those who stripped him of his title and forced him to part ways with an organization he had helped build while spilling his own blood.

  Hoffa no doubt held many secrets from the past. Secrets about the Kennedy assassination, Cuba, the fleecing of the Teamster pension fund and much more. And word filtering through underworld circles was that he threatened to use that information if anyone tried to stop him from regaining his union.

  For his part, Bufalino kept reassuring others, including Santo Trafficante and Carlos Marcello, that Hoffa was simply boasting. But Bufalino’s tone quickly changed after he was named in the Time article, and he once again called on his old friend Frank Sheeran.

  * * *

  THE WEDDING OF William Bufalino’s daughter was scheduled to take place on Friday, August 1, 1975, at William’s home in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, and among the more than 500 guests would be William’s cousin Russell, Frank Sheeran and their wives.

  Sheeran had tried throughout the summer to convince Hoffa to quiet down. Sheeran knew that the only reason Hoffa was still breathing was because of his friendship with Russell Bufalino. About a week before the wedding, Sheeran asked Bufalino for permission to call Hoffa at his cottage in Michigan. Sheeran desperately wanted again to try to talk sense into his friend, and Hoffa agreed to meet with him and Bufalino later that week when they were scheduled to arrive in Detroit.

  The plan was for Sheeran and his wife to drive to Kingston, Pennsylvania, to have dinner with Russell and Carrie, and then they’d leave early Tuesday morning in Sheeran’s Cadillac for the twelve-hour drive to Detroit. During dinner, Sheeran mentioned softly to Russell that he was going to be with Hoffa on Wednesday for his planned meeting with Provenzano and Tony Giacalone. A sizable portion of Hoffa’s angst came from his continuing feud with Provenzano, and Hoffa believed if he could make peace with Tony Pro, then the rest was easy. But he wanted Sheeran there, just in case.

  Bufalino said nothing an
d continued to eat. Not long after, the waiter told Bufalino he had a phone call. When he returned, Bufalino tugged on Sheeran’s arm and whispered there would be a change of plans. Instead of leaving early the next morning, they would wait until Wednesday.

  Sheeran didn’t make any facial movements or ask any questions. He knew better. When Russell Bufalino said something, consider it an order. Sheeran said nothing to Hoffa. On Wednesday, Sheeran, Bufalino and their wives struck out early for the drive to Detroit. They were near Lake Erie when Bufalino suggested the women take a long smoking break. After they got out of the car, Bufalino and Sheeran drove to a small private airport, where a plane was ready to take Sheeran to Detroit.

  SIXTEEN

  It was 10 P.M. on Wednesday, July 30, when Josephine Hoffa realized something was wrong.

  Her husband had not returned home from his afternoon meeting at the Machus Red Fox Restaurant in nearby Bloomfield Township, which was less than twenty miles northwest of Detroit. Jimmy would usually call just to let his wife know he was all right, but the call never came, and by 8 A.M. the next morning, it was the police who were called, and thus began an investigation that ultimately resulted in more than two hundred FBI agents scouring for clues into the disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa.

  Agents knew he had been at the restaurant, where they found his green 1974 Pontiac Grand DeVille. And they also learned that he went there intending to meet Tony Provenzano and Tony Giacalone, a high-ranking Detroit underworld figure. The two men denied they had scheduled a meeting, with each saying they were busy doing other things. Provenzano said he was getting a massage in New Jersey, while Giacalone was attending to one of his businesses.

  A grand jury was impanelled in December 1975, and witnesses were subpoenaed, which aside from Provenzano and Giacalone consisted of a core group of men that included Charles O’Brien, a self-described “foster son” of Hoffa; Salvatore “Sally Bugs” Briguglio, a Detroit Teamster business agent; Thomas Andretta and his brother Stephen; Frank Sheeran; and Russell Bufalino. When they arrived to testify, they were accompanied by their attorney, William Bufalino, who advised each man to take the Fifth Amendment, which they did. Their testimony notwithstanding, the FBI was still able to put together a list of the chief suspects, and Bufalino, Sheeran and Provenzano were at the top.

  The FBI developed a theory that Hoffa’s boasting finally resulted in his demise, and the agency was sure he had gotten into a car with O’Brien and several other men, including Briguglio, around 2:30 P.M. that Wednesday afternoon.

  Whatever happened after that was well planned and handled in a precision-like manner.

  Along with the almost unbearable pressure exerted by the FBI, New York authorities had begun pressing Bufalino on his remaining garment-industry interests. Bufalino once controlled dozens of shops and manufacturing plants but now only had interests in six, including Fair Frox Inc., on New York’s Fifth Avenue. Bufalino claimed he had been employed at Fair Frox since 1972 and collected a regular paycheck. The firm had been in business since 1956. In June 1976, Bufalino was interviewed by New York investigators at the Consulate Hotel. With him were Max Stein, Fairfrox’s treasurer, and Al Flora, the ex-fighter who was now Bufalino’s part-time bodyguard and chauffeur. The quizzing by the New York investigators was pointless but part of what Bufalino perceived to be the FBI’s unrelenting effort to get him, or someone else involved in the Hoffa disappearance, to crack.

  Two months later, in August 1976, Johnny Roselli met his demise. He was found dead, stuffed inside a drum floating in a Miami bay. Roselli had been tortured; no doubt his killers wanted to know exactly what he told the Church Committee.

  Roselli had testified twice and gave the committee limited information. He was subpoenaed for a third time and scheduled to testify again in September, but his death, along with those of Giancana and, they believed, Hoffa, led the committee to deliver its incomplete report on the CIA’s relationship with organized crime.

  Despite its full-court press, the FBI couldn’t develop enough evidence to charge anyone in the Hoffa case. But that didn’t stop the agency from pursuing the chief suspects for other crimes. The government lived by a certain credo. If it couldn’t prosecute you for one serious crime, it would surely get you on something else. And that was never more true than for the men who were the chief suspects in the Hoffa case, who were hounded for several years.

  Union leader and Genovese family captain Tony Provenzano was subsequently tried and convicted in 1978 for the 1961 murder of a Teamster official. Anthony Giacalone was sentenced to ten years in prison for income tax fraud. Salvatore Briguglio, who had been under intense federal pressure and was connected with Provenzano to the 1961 Teamster murder, was shot and killed in New York in March 1978. Frank Sheeran was indicted in 1980 on several charges, including two murders, but he was acquitted. He eventually went to prison in 1982, following his 1981 conviction on labor racketeering, and was sentenced to thirty-two years in prison. Prosecutors had tried for several years to convince Sheeran to flip, even offering him a limited prison term if he would tell all he knew about the Hoffa murder and Russell Bufalino. Sheeran declined.

  As for Bufalino, the slightest of threats from a man who spent a lifetime saying little gave the FBI all it needed to put the Quiet Don away for life.

  * * *

  ON THE MORNING of October 27, 1976, FBI agents from Philadelphia arrived at Russell Bufalino’s home in Kingston to take him into custody on federal extortion charges related to a run-in Bufalino had with a Brooklyn bartender, Jack Napoli, who had used Bufalino’s name as an introduction to a jewelry dealer who had diamonds Napoli had wanted. A federal grand jury in New York handed down the indictment against Bufalino and three other men. When the agents awakened Bufalino, now seventy-two, they allowed him to dress before taking him to a preliminary hearing in Wilkes-Barre, where he was released on $50,000 bond.

  Around the same time in Brooklyn, FBI agents knocked on the door of the Bensonhurst home of Joseph Lapadura, seventy-two, who was one of the other men included in the indictment. Lapadura, a talkative fellow, had for years run floating crap games for Bufalino and had numerous arrests dating back to 1922. He told the agents he didn’t know why he was being arrested but said he was willing to talk about his old friend. The two men had been friends for years, often meeting at the Vesuvio restaurant, and as far as Lapadura knew, Bufalino’s only business was a dress manufacturing company in Manhattan. Lapadura was arraigned and released on $10,000 bond.

  According to the indictment, Napoli bought the diamonds for $25,000, but the check he wrote bounced. When word got back to Bufalino that some low-level wise guy not only bounced a check buying stolen diamonds, but had used Bufalino’s name in the process, the old don was furious.

  Napoli got wind that Bufalino was unhappy, and he ran to the FBI. Napoli was subsequently called to a meeting at the Vesuvio restaurant, and when Napoli arrived, Bufalino couldn’t control himself. Napoli was a large man at six feet six inches and around 240 pounds, yet Bufalino threatened to kill him with his own hands unless he returned the diamonds immediately.

  “I’m going to kill you, cocksucker, and I’m going to do it myself and I’m going to jail just for you.”

  It was the rarest of exceptions to see Bufalino that angry, but what Napoli did was, in Bufalino’s mind, beyond disrespect. Napoli had taken Bufalino’s name and stomped on it. Napoli was told to make good on the diamonds. Unbeknownst to Bufalino, Napoli already knew he was in trouble and ran to the FBI. Napoli had been wired for the meeting, and everything Bufalino said was caught on tape.

  Following his indictment, Bufalino’s solution to beat the rap was to kill Napoli before he could testify. For help, Bufalino reached out to Jimmy “the Weasel” Fratianno.

  Aladena James Fratianno was born in 1913 in Naples, Italy, and his family later immigrated to Cleveland, Ohio. As a teenager, Fratianno committed a variety of petty thefts and earned the nickna
me Jimmy the Weasel after throwing a rotten tomato at a policeman and running away. The act caught the attention of some older boys, who said, “Look at him running, just like a weasel.” The cop wrote on his report, “They called him a weasel,” and the name stuck.

  In 1946, Fratianno moved to Los Angeles, where he owned several businesses, including a cigar store in Santa Monica, that were fronts for bookmaking, loan sharking and other illegal activities. He became a made member of the Los Angeles mob in 1946 and over the next thirty years took part in ten murders. In 1960, an argument with the mob hierarchy forced Fratianno to seek protection in Chicago under Sam Giancana. He was sent back to Los Angeles in 1975 to help run that family following internal discord.

  In 1977, Fratianno became a government witness after he was charged with the murder of Danny Green, a union official in Cleveland who was killed after someone put a bomb under his car. It was Fratianno who introduced Green’s killer to the Cleveland mob. Promised no more than five years in prison for his various crimes if he cooperated, Fratianno served only twenty-one months and was placed in the Witness Protection Program. Fratianno told the feds about Bufalino’s plot to kill Jack Napoli. Fratianno said he first met Bufalino in September 1976 at the Rainbow Room in New York. Gangsters from around the country had all come to New York to see Frank Sinatra, who was making his second appearance at the Westchester Premier Theater, in nearby Tarrytown. The 3,500-seat facility had opened a year earlier and was owned by three men, New York mobsters Gregory DePalma and Richard Fusco, and Eliot Weisman, a securities salesman, with the financial help of Carlo Gambino, who headed the New York family that now bore his name.