See No Evil

by Ron Felber

  Up until that time, thanks to the blackmailing of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover by Frank Costello, even the term Mafia was not used by Hoover or anyone else at the bureau. The go-between in the blackmailing of Hoover was, not surprisingly, the ubiquitous attorney, Roy Cohn. According to Cohn, Lewis Rosenstiel, multimillionaire founder of Schenley’s liquor and close ally of Costello, had engaged in bizarre sex orgies with the FBI director for years and had had the presence of mind as early as 1948 to take photographs of Hoover dressed in women’s clothing, face daubed with lipstick and makeup, wearing a wig of ringlets while sitting on the laps of unidentified males.

  More recent photos, held by Cohn in his office safe at the New York law firm of Saxe, Bacon, were even more explicit depicting Hoover having sex with top FBI man and longtime lover Clyde Tolson. “You know how many FBI agents were assigned to ‘organized crime’ before Apalachin?” Cohn bragged to a group that included Silvio, Ruggiero, Gene Gotti, and Elliot during one of their lost weekends at Studio 54. “Six. In the whole freakin’ country, there were six federal agents investigating the Mafia in the United States, a country of a 170 million. That’s the kind of clout a few photographs and a well-placed comment or two will get you. Rosenstiel was the brains, Costello was the muscle. The old Jew and Italian, one-two punch!”

  All of that held true, even through the Kefauver Special Committee investigations into organized crime. But it was Apalachin that instigated the McClellan Committee hearings, an entirely new assault, where Chief Counsel Bobby Kennedy relentlessly pursued the entangled relationships between labor leaders like Jimmy Hoffa and the underworld and its leadership. Through all of these changes, betrayals, and power plays, one of the few constants that remained was the ban on drug trafficking. This was the reason that Angelo Ruggiero was so thankful about Elliot’s deep-sixing any evidence that might prove his nephew’s involvement in the sale of heroin.

  Rules or no rules, by the late 1970s, drugs permeated the five New York families, confirming the wisdom of the Sicilian traditionalists, but there was just no stopping it. The drug train was in full gear throttled by incredible profits, ease of entry, and in the end, the delusions of grandeur that only a nonstop high can bring along with it. The collision of the runaway drug train’s momentum with stark reality happened for Elliot with the closing of Studio 54. It began when owner Steve Rubell, during an interview with Dan Dorfman of New York magazine, let his ego and his addiction get away from him. “Studio 54 is a cash business where profits are astronomical,” he was quoted as saying. “Only the Mafia does better!”

  Not smart. And if that wasn’t enough to whet the appetite of headline-hungry U.S. attorneys, information provided by disgruntled ex-employee Donald Moon was just what the doctor ordered. As part of a witness protection-immunity deal, Moon told federal agents about a secret safe filled with skimmed cash and, worse, about a trove of cocaine and other illegal substances stored in Hefty bags hidden in a gap between the hard and drop ceiling in the club’s basement. Inevitably, on December 14, 1979, fifty agents from the IRS and DEA swarmed all over the place. Of course, they headed straight for the basement where, when demands for the accounting books were made by federal agents, the drugged-out ex-model who was running “finance” asked, “Do you want the second set, too?”

  Also not smart. So that even when heavyweight attorney Roy Cohn rushed to the scene, comparing the raid to the “wanton acts of the Nazis!” and, ironically, “worse than the McCarthy hearings!” it was too late. According to Rubell, the feds confiscated $900,000 in cash along with a stash of cocaine and amyl nitrite “party favors” he would slip into the palms of celebrity guests, with the street cost of the drugs literally tagged onto them.

  But what worried him more, Rubell later confided to Elliot during a late-night sex and drinking binge, was his relationship with Gambino Family loan shark Sam Jacobson, a frequent visitor to Studio 54 offices. IRS agents investigating the club’s alternate set of books had discovered a five-column accounting sheet headed “Steve Rubell-Sam Jacobson‚” Rubell told him, with weekly dates and payoffs ranging up from $2,500 to $25,000 kept by Rubell’s co-owner, Ian Schrager. More than the fines and jail time, it was his fear of FBI interrogation about Studio 54’s family connection that scared him to death, Rubell confessed. “What if they think I’ll rat on them, Elliot? You don’t think they’d think that, do you?” he asked, petrified that a contract was about to be put out on him.

  On January 18, 1980, Steve Rubell was sentenced to three-and-one-half years and a $20,000 fine for tax fraud. So what did he do? He threw a gala “going-away-to-prison” party that Nicky Micelli, Frank Silvio, and Elliot attended. Of course, it couldn’t be the same as the unbelievably wild Halloween or New Year’s Eve parties of the past because basically Rubell’s “going away” was nothing to celebrate. Steve’s old buddies like Andy Warhol, Liza Minnelli, and David Geffen were there while something like 1,000 people parried to the sounds of Gloria Gaynor’s “Queen of Disco” and Donna Summer’s “Last Dance.” Still, somehow, Elliot couldn’t help but feel that everything had changed and that guys like Rubell with their arrogance and drug-throttled egos had fucked up everything, the life that they’d been living.

  “So, what’s with you?” Nicky asked, getting Elliot’s attention with a shove that half knocked him over. “We got booze—which I know you don’t drink. We got coke—which I know you don’t snort. Better, we got broads—which I know you like two at a time—crawlin’ out the freakin’ woodwork. So what’s with you?”

  “The place is different, that’s all.”

  “Different? How?”

  “Changed—everything,” Elliot said, watching Silvio as he danced with a long-legged twenty-five-year-old wearing a white mask, G-string, and pasties with thigh-high platform boots. “I mean look at Frank over there. He looks ridiculous.”

  “Hey, fuckin’ Frank was always ridiculous, you just didn’t notice before.”

  “Yeah, well, for me the whole thing’s getting kind of scary. Everybody’s screwed up on drugs all the time. Nobody knows what the hell they’re doing anymore. I mean, Steve’s a friend of mine, but how can anybody be so stupid? Jesus, Nick, if people skim from a cash business, they’ll take 10 percent, maybe 15 percent, 25 percent. But these guys skimmed $5 million in one year! Probably 80 percent of their gross.”

  “Okay, they’re assholes. So what?”

  “So what? These guys know our people, Nick. They were handing out cocaine and amyl nitrite like candy. They had animals like Roy DeMeo in here bragging about heroin deals, chopping people up like they were veal chops. I mean, what did Rubell and Schrager think was going to happen? What are they doing to people like us?”

  “Ya know somethin’, Elliot. I know you’re a doctor and real fucking smart and all that shit, but sometimes you think too much,” Nick said tapping his forefinger to his temple. “Now, I’m goin’ to the John to get a taste a some a this Colombian pure I got here in my pocket. And please, when I get back, have yourself a diet soda, and I’ll introduce you to a nice piece of Puerto Rican ass, maybe two, if you’re nice to me. But don’t talk to me no more about this drug shit. I don’t like it, understand?”

  As Nick left for the men’s room, Elliot watched Steve Rubell and Diana Ross make their way up to the D.J. booths where the ex-Supremes lead singer began crooning “My Way” while Rubell gyrated wildly, finally falling backward over the second-floor railing. Fortunately for him, someone caught him by the belt of his pants and pulled him back up, or he might have killed himself. Typical of that night, but untypical of Studio 54, not a soul was laughing and David Geffen shouted at him, “Stop with this ‘My Way’ shit, and grow up already!”

  To Elliot, the collapse of Studio 54 and Steve Rubell was like a metaphor for the way he was feeling about his own out-of-control existence, even Paul Castellano’s and John Gotti’s. Drugs like some kind of virus had crept into their world, contaminating it so that they all were infected in one way or another, making po
or decisions based on greed, violence, and revenge without considering the long-term consequences for rules that had been in place for generations. The world was changing around La Cosa Nostra just as it had changed around Studio 54, and suddenly they were freaks standing naked in the glaring sun of the outside straight world.

  In the case of Castellano, it was revenge involving wholesale killer and cokehead Roy DeMeo that would help to bring about his downfall.

  According to Silvio, sometime in September 1980 after hearing his son-in-law, Frank Amato, a hijacker and butcher at Dial Poultry, was beating his pregnant daughter, Castellano contacted capo Nino Gaggi, DeMeo’s supervisor, and ordered Amato hit. The reason may have been sound, but Castellano’s reasoning was not, as DeMeo was more than a car-ring crew leader and murderer. He was a serial killer who had literally butchered at least thirty-seven men and women as much for sport as for business. A drug dealer on the side, he would later be indicted for possession with intent to sell 23 tons of marijuana, 500,000 Quaalude tablets, and 25 pounds of cocaine.

  “This is how it goes with this maniac,” Silvio, who seemed to enjoy talking about these subjects, confided to Elliot over a drink at Elaine’s. “See, there’s this apartment in Brooklyn that DeMeo keeps as both an execution chamber and a butchery where he gets to use his skills. When the guy walks in, somebody shoots him in the head with a silencer. He wraps the guy’s head with a towel to stop the blood from flowing while another guy stabs him in the heart to stop blood from pumping. After that, they drag him into the bathroom, put him in a shower, bleed him, put him on a pool liner in the living room where they take him apart and package him. The packages wind up, wrapped small and individual, in cardboard boxes that they take to a city dump that Castellano controls so there are never any questions.”

  “Frank, I like you a lot,” Elliot said “but please don’t ever tell me anything like that again. It gives me heartburn, really. Promise?”

  Silvio agreed, and the conversation ended. But facts are facts, and everything that Silvio had said was probably true because Frank Amato disappeared on September 20, 1980, and was never seen again. The remaining problem for Big Paulie, however, was the fact that he’d allowed himself to be connected to the disappearance of a relative through a capo who was not only a homicidal maniac, but a careless drug addict as well. Realizing the error, Nino Gaggi would once again be contacted by the boss, but this time the hit was on DeMeo.

  On January 10, 1983, Roy DeMeo’s bloody career ended, his body found riddled with bullets in the trunk of his car. But for Castellano, all of this was too late. The FBI was already investigating DeMeo’s multimillion-dollar car-theft ring, along with highly visible New York City labor leader and Columbo Family capo Ralph Scopo, who’d been taped delivering Roy’s epitaph. “Paul had to put him away,” Scopo was recorded saying. “The guy was crazy and had cast-iron balls.”

  In the case of John Gotti, it was not revenge but greed that was laying the seeds of his destruction at the hands of nemesis Rudy Giuliani as the babania virus wormed its way through to even the most trusted members of his Bergin crew. Through most of his mob career, Angelo Ruggiero remained adamant about steering clear of the huge profits to be made from the heroin trade that his younger brother, Salvatore, had entered into full bore in 1977. Now, in the 1980s, Angelo, too, had become a slave to its allure, participating in international narcotics-trafficking deals with Salvatore and a half-dozen other Bergin associates including John Gotti’s brother, Gene.

  What Angelo didn’t know was that he, along with Scopo and dozens of others, had been named in an electronic surveillance request as a target of a RICO investigation into the Gambino Family. With permission granted, on November 9, 1981, Ruggiero’s home was wiretapped and bugged and would remain so for years to come. During that time, the FBI would listen in on conversations about gambling, loansharking, and drugs, but more damning—for him and the world of La Cosa Nostra—a subject even more sacrosanct than the family’s longstanding ban on drugs. In a tape-recorded discussion with Bonanno Family associate Frank Lino, Angelo Ruggiero talked about the secret backbone of the United States Mafia, the Commission, a transgression punishable by death.

  Angelo “Quack Quack” Ruggiero was not a man without means, however, and through a corrupt FBI agent, he would learn not only about the surveillance, but also about the damning evidence the agency had collected on him. Unfortunately for Angelo, his godfather Paul Castellano would also hear about those tapes and their existence and would set off a civil war between the two families within the family, Dellacroce’s and Castellano’s that was nothing short of cataclysmic.

  When it was all sorted out, Paul Castellano would be shot dead in front of Sparks Steak House on East 46th Street in Manhattan, the FBI would be investigating itself, and John Gotti, an Americanized Neapolitano, would emerge as the most powerful gangster in America.

  19

  GIULIANI VS. GOTTI

  “Stories like that stay with you deep inside like a bright and shiny piece of nuclear waste.”

  When Elliot thought back on the stories his Uncle Saul told, the Litner family was always running, as if in constant flight, either from something or toward something. He couldn’t say for sure what that was, maybe freedom, maybe even from themselves, but in the turmoil after the Russian revolution with Lenin at the head of the Communist Party and Kerensky leading the Socialists, life became unbearable for the Jews who were blamed for all that was wrong in Russia.

  With their property confiscated and possessions stolen, many began traveling from town to town to make a living, but it was quite difficult. The soldiers all had guns. They would hide in the woods, and if a Jew was caught on the road, he was lucky not to be killed. Renegade generals with whatever troops they had would come into a town and round up as many Jews as they could find. Those who couldn’t escape were locked up in the synagogue and held for ransom with a deadline to raise money. If their friends and families couldn’t raise it, the soldiers would gleefully burn down the synagogue with the Jews inside!

  Elliot and his brother heard stories like that a hundred times growing up as kids from Saul, the proud owner of 174th Street’s finest, and only, laundry along with dozens of others that spoke of tragedy and outright shock at the hatred their very existence as Jews inspired. Stories like that stay with you deep inside and lay there like a bright and shiny piece of nuclear waste in the pit of your stomach radiating something, maybe hostility or anger or mistrust of the system and the “authority” of which you were supposed to be so respectful or frightened.

  Well, Elliot was not so respectful or frightened, and in his own way, if it was hostility he carried around with him, it was hidden even from him at that time and showed itself in ways that were too diffused to see, let alone comprehend. Maybe his incredible appetite for gambling and women was part of that or the fact that he was living a two-track life, one hovering at the top of, or perhaps even above, normal society as a surgeon; the other, equally real and substantive, running below, like some dark underground river that wended its way below society in what was appropriately called the “underworld.”

  The point for Elliot was that everybody he knew in any kind of power, politicians more than anyone else, carried that same black river within themselves. The difference was that the Mafia guys he knew were honest about it. They rarely pretended to be what they weren’t. They knew they were gangsters, modern-day outlaws basically, and they were, in their way, proud of it. They didn’t try to tell people they were something other than what they were as Bobby Kennedy and Rudy Giuliani spent their lives doing. They weren’t phonies.

  Roy Cohn, who genuinely despised Giuliani, told Eliott about a time Rudy met John Gotti on the street when they were both coming up through their respective ranks that said a lot about both men. It seemed Giuliani, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York at the time, was driving around Manhattan’s Lower East Side with Gail Sheehy, who was writing a story about him for Vanity Fair magazin
e. From Giuliani’s standpoint, this was just great. Already graduated from his earlier phase of setting up “New York’s finest” for conviction through ex-cop and informer Bob Leuci, he had come to the same realization as Dewey and Kennedy before him: There was a wealth of political capital to be found mining the vein of Mafia takedowns. So what could be better than tooling around Little Italy, bragging to a wide-eyed best-selling author about your Brooklyn altar boy background and all the macho things you’d done to “bring down” the Mafia?

  “‘See that place,’ Cohn said imitating Giuliani with his monk’s face and lisp. ‘That’s Umberto’s, right there on Mulberry Street. It’s a piece of mob history because Joey Gallo was hit, there—right there—you can still see the bullet holes in the wall outside! And that place. See it,’” Cohn went on with his Rudy routine, “‘S.P.Q.R. That’s where John Gotti, the famous gangster had dinner just last night!’ And here is this broad, ‘oohing’ and ‘ahhing’, hanging on every word, writing it down on a notepad, while he’s taking her on this ‘tour of the underworld’ with Rudy no doubt thinking to himself, ‘what a freakin’ deal I’ve got here! On the one hand this broad, being Irish Catholic, is going to fall hook, line, and sinker for all my ‘I went to Bishop Loughlin prep school’ and ‘I was thinking about a life as a Christian Brother myself’ spiel. So she’ll write this sucker up like the second coming of Jesus.’ On the other, Giuliani being one of the great cunt-hounds of all time, is also probably thinking, ‘You know, this isn’t half-bad, if I can get her to suck my cock while I’m driving, wouldn’t that be great?’