by Ron Felber
It was several nights later that Elliot got a chance to discuss his meeting with New York’s most powerful capo with Silvio, who knew a lot more about Gotti and the undercurrents within the Gambino Family than Elliot ever wanted to. The entire episode struck Frank as out of school. “An unspoken La Cosa Nostra rule is that a made man, especially a capo like Gotti, is not supposed to violate another man’s wife or children,” Silvio explained. “In sleeping with Shannon Grillo, Gotti seems to be violating two sacred oaths with the same woman. Even so, technically, it may not be a violation,” he mitigated. “After all, Ernie Grillo is a scumbag who is only an associate, not a made man, and Sandy Dellacroce is not the daughter of Neil’s wife, though he’s the father of a baby they adopted at birth.”
The coming days would be filled with explanations both subtle and profound. But no amount of lawyering, not Cohn’s, Giuliani’s, or even John Gotti’s, could prevent the collision of forces that were building both inside and outside of La Cosa Nostra. For Elliot Litner, even as he saw and felt those forces hurtling about him, there was little he could do but watch and hope that somehow the better men among them would survive. In retrospect, he was uncertain that it came out exactly that way, but in a game of life-and-death poker, he would learn that blood beats technicalities.
21
RICO REDUX
“The Commission’s tentacles reached into virtually every aspect of New York City life, but in no instance was their presence more demonstrable than in the construction industry.”
Elliot Litner’s life had more than the usual share of ups and downs. While the general trend was spiraling downward, there were, to be sure, moments when good fortune came his way. One of those occurred in late 1983 when, after months of living with her father, Hanna and the twins came back to their home in Englewood.
Elliot remembered the rainy November day they returned. That night, after Samantha and Rachel had gone to bed, he and Hanna sat in their living room, a fire blazing in the hearth. From Elliot’s standpoint, the subject of reconciliation, temporary though it was, would never have been broached except that Hanna would not let him escape it.
“I love you, Elliot, you know that, don’t you?” she asked. “Not in some glamorous, romantic way, but for who you are—especially during moments like this when you’re relaxed and able to talk to me like I’m someone important in your life.”
“You are important, even if I don’t tell you that all the time. You and the girls are all that I live for, really.”
“Then why aren’t you happier around us? It’s like you think you don’t deserve to be happy, or you’re afraid to be happy, and so you keep yourself in a constant state of jeopardy with your gambling and friends and other women.”
“No, it’s just that I have trouble sometimes connecting deeply. I know what I feel, but I can’t explain it, and maybe I don’t express it very well. I don’t know why.”
“There’s a word for that, you know. It’s ‘estranged.’ You’re a man who is estranged. It means you ‘arouse enmity or indifference in where there had formerly been love.’” Hanna recited the definition as if reading from the dictionary. “Frankly, Elliot, I think you need to see a psychiatrist.”
That was classic Hanna, a woman who had to put everybody in a box, usually on one side of a line or the other marked good and evil. In Elliot’s case, however, she’d made a careful exception. He was estranged, not good or evil, just there, like an eternal eunuch who for psychological reasons she couldn’t engage in either unconditional love or mortal combat.
Understanding that, Elliot resolved to take things as they came, happy to be living with Hanna, ecstatic to be part of his daughters’ lives again. Moreover, the reconciliation helped to stabilize him so that for a while, at least, he took a hiatus from Las Vegas junkets and Atlantic City all-nighters to play the role of a caring husband and father. As fortuitous, the combination of high-profile lectures, his work as professor of surgery at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, and the dozens of articles he’d published led the Winthrop-Breon Committee to select him as the recipient for the prestigious American College of Chest Physicians Scholar of the Year Award. That kind of press didn’t go unnoticed at the hospital, and around that time, Al Rosengarten suggested they break bread at the “21” Club to “discuss the future.”
Entering the restaurant, Elliot was met by Rosengarten in the large anteroom that stood separate from the bar and dining area. Dressed to the teeth in a dark-blue business suit with gold embossed cuff links and a flashy red tie, Rosengarten clasped Elliot’s hand and clapped his back as he led him to his table where a snifter of Talisker single malt lay waiting.
“What will you have to drink, Elliot?” Rosengarten asked, angling himself into his chair. “Oh, that’s right, you’re the ‘Diet Coke’ man,” he said teasingly, “is that what you’ll be having?”
Elliot nodded. Rosengarten motioned to the waiter, then took a thoughtful pull from his snifter of Scotch. “You know, we’re proud of you, Elliot. Really. Genuinely proud. And impressed. The Winthrop-Breon awards, well, that helps. It helps a great deal.”
“Thank you, but I’m not sure I understand, Al.”
“I’m telling you that it’s official. Dr. Dak will be retiring as director of cardiac surgery at the hospital in June. More to the point, Simon has confided that it’s you who he’ll be proposing to the board as his successor.”
“Me?”
“Yes, Elliot, you. So, what can I say except congratulations! This is a moment of significance,” he proclaimed, clinking his snifter of Talisker’s against Elliot’s glass of Diet Coke, “something worth celebrating, am I wrong? What, with you, Hanna and the twins back together, and now this? These are the times you move, even at an early age, from journeyman to master. From Simon’s understudy to one of the cornerstones of the Mount Sinai tradition.”
He studied Elliot’s expression, one of total consternation, then guffawed. “Look, Elliot, I know what goes on. So does Mr. Castellano and these other friends of ours. The past couple of years have been tough on you and your family. We know that. The pressures of daily surgeries, the travel, the writing. Jesus! No one knows where you get the goddamned energy!” The seventy-six-year-old Rosengarten reached across the table placing his hand, nails manicured and polished, over Elliot’s. “What I’m trying to say is this, you’ve been good to us, and now we want to return the favor. Dr. Dak will put your name forward, and the Mount Sinai board will unanimously approve that nomination. I guarantee it.”
Elliot sipped his Diet Coke, “W-why thank you, Al. You’ve been like a brother to me. And I appreciate what you and Dr. Dak and Mr. Castellano have done for me.”
The multimillionaire mogul and Gambino Family stalwart nodded his large head lovingly. His eyes glistened as he withdrew his hand, smiling. “While these two things are in no way connected, Elliot, I did want to bring up one last situation before we start dinner. We need you to carry a package back from Sao Paolo for us. Call it a final gesture on your part. Like before, it will be Carmine that contacts you with the details. Really, it won’t be much of anything. A formality, really.”
“Sao P-Paolo? Sao Paolo, Brazil?”
Rosengarten took a sip of Talisker. “Exactly.”
“But I don’t know anyone there. I have no contacts. There are no lecture dates on my calendar. Nothing!”
“What do you mean?” Rosengarten asked incredulously. “Elliot, you’re a visiting professor at Prontocor Hospital in Bello Horizonte. This was done by special appointment. Board initiated February 1978.”
“Visiting professor? Al, I’ve never b-been to Prontocor Hospital in Bello Horizonte, Brazil!”
Al Rosengarten sat back in his chair. He held his empty glass out to the waiter, who plucked it from his waving hand. Then, his eyes narrowed, small and shiny. “Elliot,” he said as if he was talking to the densest primitive on the planet. “You’re not going to make me go through all of that again, are you?”
So, tha
t was the way it worked. When the goodfellows wanted something done, they didn’t ask twice. Nor did they think they had to. That’s just the way it was in their world. No matter what Elliot did or how he tried to fool himself, at this point, he was entrenched in the Mafia, and there was no way out. More, whether he wanted to admit it or not, like Gotti and like Giuliani, he was hooked on the narcotic of power.
True, he still owed nearly $75,000 from past and recent excursions to Caesar’s, the Dunes, Aladdin, and other mobbed-up casinos in Las Vegas and Atlantic City, but the fact of the matter was he coveted that directorship the way a sex addict lusts for a beautiful woman; wanted it badly, and that was all his Gambino Family friends needed to know. It would be several weeks later, in January 1984, before Carmine Lombardozzi contacted him with what eventually became two jobs, one to Tel Aviv, then another, his last, to Sao Paolo.
If the old Bronx and Brooklyn neighborhoods produced anything at all in the hearts and character of its alumni, it was brass balls and an incredible appetite for success. While Elliot was busy trying to become director of cardiac surgery at Mount Sinai, John Gotti was relentless in his pursuit of the title of bosses of bosses within the ranks of the American Mafia.
Still, there was no one among them, incubated in the ghettoes of those virulent New York enclaves, who burned with more white-hot ambition or worked more feverishly than Rudy Giuliani. What Elliot couldn’t know at the time, however, was that that feverish work ethic and white-hot ambition were, in effect, turning on him.
Piecing together bits of information gathered from the Ruggiero/Corallo bugs and wiretaps and the testimony of well-placed informers like Willie Boy Johnson, U.S. Attorney Giuliani put together a fifty-one count indictment against Paul Castellano and twenty-one others making it the largest RICO case ever. Among other charges, the indictment alleged that Big Paulie had ordered Anthony Gaggi to kill Roy DeMeo. While DeMeo was alive, the indictment alleged, Castellano participated in the profits from the multimillion-dollar stolen-car ring that DeMeo ran and that Paul had ordered him, Gaggi, and a third man to kill two Gambino Family con artists who’d staged a phony charity event in 1979 attended by first lady Rosalyn Carter. The scam had embarrassed Castellano, who, a federal witness, later testified considered himself “an upright businessman,” to the point where he simply wanted DeMeo dead.
If the godfather’s sensibilities were offended by the indictment, considered the worst publicity for the Gambino Family since Albert Anastasia’s Murder Incorporated was brought to light, Castellano would find little solace in the proceedings to follow. In sworn testimony, witness Vito Arena, a homosexual member of DeMeo’s crew, dubbed “the Gay Hit Man” by the press, recounted the brutal slayings of rival stolen-car dealers Ronald Falcaro and Kaled Darwish by DeMeo killer Henry Borelli. DeMeo then ordered the corpses “cut up,” Arena explained, and since it was lunchtime and they were hungry, the team of butchers ate pizza and hot dogs while they dismembered the bodies using small saws and boning knives to parcel arms, legs, and torsos into Hefty bags for later disposal. During the exercise, one of them got so carried away with the dissection of the victim’s private parts that a readily identifiable organ slipped through the floor vent and could not be retrieved. “DeMeo went crazy,” Arena told the astounded grand jury members, “because he considered it unprofessional.”
So how did RICO umbrella this scenario? Dominick Montiglio, Gaggi’s nephew, testified that it was he who brought $20,000 in cash payments from the car-theft ring each week to Castellano’s warehouse in Brooklyn. Additionally, it was he who accompanied his uncle, Nino Gaggi, to Dial Poultry, a Castellano chicken distribution firm, where sums of cash, at least that large, were turned over to their godfather. Under RICO, this was as clear a case as anyone had ever made. Big Paulie had profited from the car-theft ring and sanctioned all the murders that went along with it including Roy DeMeo’s. In other words, racketeering-influenced corruption at its worst and most obvious.
Working with attorneys Roy Cohn and James LaRossa, Castellano was released almost upon arrest on $2-million bail, but still he must have been wondering how the feds, and Giuliani, in particular, had learned so much about his La Cosa Nostra dealings. After all, this was his first brush with either local or federal law enforcement since his arrest on an armed robbery charge in 1934 at the age of nineteen. Now seventy-years-old, he no doubt blamed this latest misfortune on Angelo Ruggiero and his stupidity for talking so openly and allowing his home and telephone lines to be bugged and tapped in the first place. You have to figure that somewhere in the godfather’s subconscious, he must have anguished was there more? Additional information that a moron like Quack-Quack was capable of bragging about after two glasses of wine, information about family loansharking, gambling, political payoffs, pornography, union racketeering, construction bid rigging, extortion, drugs, and the dozens of family-related hits to which he could be tied.
But as knowledgeable as Paul Castellano had become during his nine years as godfather and chairman of the Commission, he was not yet aware of two potentially cataclysmic situations. First, in addition to Ruggiero’s house being bugged, the FBI had in May 1983 performed a “black bag” job at Castellano’s Todt Hill enclave, drugging his Doberman attack dogs with shots from a dart gun, incapacitating the security system and motion-detection devices, then picking the lock to the garage’s pedestrian entrance door to gain access to the estate.
Once inside, they knew where family business was carried out thanks to interrogations of Castellano’s mistress, Gloria Olarte. The agents planted omni-directional listening devices within the estate so that conversations between Castellano and his capos were transmitted to a command center located in a neighboring house where they were recorded unencumbered. The second problem, that even Castellano couldn’t imagine, was that Ruggiero and he were picked up on separate surveillance tape recordings discussing the unthinkable: the Commission and the vast scope of the five families’ operations nationally, internationally, and most specifically, in the State of New York.
As Elliot discovered later, it was through these tapes and information obtained from informants that Giuliani put a puzzle together that was custom made for RICO. It was long known that the five families controlled the New York construction industry through their infiltration of the construction workers’ unions. For Giuliani, however, a pattern was emerging so that he could now prove there was an organization, the Commission, that acted as a governing body to carry out these crimes. By controlling the unions through bribery, blackmail, and murder, the mob controlled the labor supply at a given construction site as well as the supply of critical building materials such as concrete and steel girders.
The Commission’s tentacles reached into nearly every aspect of New York life from trucking to the manufacturing of clothing, entertainment, even garbage collection, but in no instance was its presence more demonstrable than in the construction industry. The Commission had organized the principal building contractors into what they called the “club.” If a contractor was not in the club, he couldn’t bid on a construction job in New York City. Of all the locks La Cosa Nostra had on unions, there was none more firm, or deadly, than the one it held through Ralph Scopo, a soldier in the Columbo Family and president of the Concrete Workers District Council, LIUNA.
On all concrete-pouring contracts up to $2 million, the Columbo Family extorted 1 percent in kickbacks. Contracts from $2 to $15 million were reserved to a club of contractors selected by the Commission. These contractors were required to kick back 2 percent of the contract price to the families, whose members would split the money.
Thanks to the bugging of Castellano’s estate and Ruggiero’s loose lips, Giuliani had on tape discussions related not only to the “Concrete Club,” but more important to his RICO case, the existence of the Commission. His aim now was twofold. He needed to target Scopo as the definitive link between the unions and the Mafia. As vital to his case, he needed something more than just vague references to the
Commission’s existence. He needed proof positive of its overseeing role in La Cosa Nostra, proof that would link racketeering with conspiracy. In May 1983, Giuliani saw his golden opportunity with the release of a landmark work on the history of organized crime written by, of all people, Joseph Bonanno, the only living original member of the Commizione del Pace, or the “Commission” as it was called in the United States.
22
STAR WARS
“What can I say about these people? To me, they are strangers.”
In his autobiography, A Man of Honor, the seventy-eight-year-old Joe Bonanno, then living in Tucson, Arizona, and fifteen years retired, wrote in intricate detail not only about his own extraordinary life, but the formation of the American Mafia. He described his role in establishing the Bonanno Family in Brooklyn, his rise to a position of power among the five families of New York, and the formation and operating procedures of the Commission.
His assault on Mafia overlords, Rudy Giuliani claimed, began one evening when he saw the former godfather being interviewed by Mike Wallace on “60 Minutes.” Bonanno was promoting the book, which at the time Giuliani knew nothing about, when the idea occurred to him. “Look at this,” he said to his new wife Donna in amazement. “He’s describing the Commission. How it started in 1931, how it functioned in the 1960s, how the members were the bosses of the five families from New York, how they coordinated disputes and put out contracts. This is a RICO enterprise!”
Running out to the bookstore the next morning, Giuliani devoured A Man of Honor, convinced that he’d discovered the linchpin that could translate FBI recordings, the testimony of informers like Willie Boy Johnson, the targeting of Concrete Workers District Council president Ralph Scopo, and Bonanno’s written history, into a racketeering conspiracy indictment.