by Ron Felber
Soon after, Rudy flew out to Tucson to interview Bonanno, who lay in a bed at St. Mary’s Hospital recovering from a heart attack. The goal was to gain a deposition regarding the existence and operation of the Commission, but the meeting turned into something else. Talking to the ailing godfather was one thing, but getting a man as cagey as Bonanno to, in effect, testify against others was an impossible task. Amiable, even talkative, the former boss of bosses had a good time with the forty-year-old prosecutor telling “off-the-record” stories about old pals Frank Costello, Lucky Luciano, Joe Kennedy and his sons John and Bobby, even Al Capone, but nothing about the Commission.
Frustrated by his inability to pin down Bonanno, Giuliani left St. Mary’s Hospital angry and with nothing but a copy of A Man of Honor in his hand. However that shouldn’t have surprised him. Bonanno, a college-educated man and a Mafioso in the Sicilian tradition, was no easy mark and would have died before turning on a fellow member of the Honored Society, even if it was someone he considered a greedy man like Castellano or a raffish one like John Gotti. All Rudy had to have done was read the book for its content, not its value as potential evidence, and he would have understood that, at least in Bonanno’s mind, he was up against centuries of tradition, not merely an old, sick man.
Even a man like Elliot who had only a nodding acquaintance with the traditionalist “Mustache Petes,” as the younger guys called them, had learned that these old-timers were unshakable. And if he had any doubts about that, they were dispelled in discussions that he had years later on the subject, first with Bill Bonanno, then his aging, but still mentally agile father, Joseph, shortly before his death at his home in Tucson.
“A key component in Mafia relationships is honor,” the younger Bonanno told Elliot. “In our world, you defined honor by respect. That has nothing to do with good manners or even deference. It has to do with acknowledging power, yours and someone else’s.”
“What about Giuliani?” Elliot asked. “When your father agreed to meet with him, was he acknowledging his position, his power?”
“A man of honor is someone willing to acknowledge the power of another, say a legislator, a judge, even a prosecutor, but he isn’t willing to accept an insult to his own honor in that relationship. The abuse of the weak by a bully, for example, is an act against honor that a man like Joseph Bonanno would never tolerate or be party to.”
Later that same day, Elliot had an opportunity to meet the last living member of the Commission, Joseph Bonanno, a man he’d heard about since his earliest affiliations with La Cosa Nostra. Bonanno spoke in broken English and was dressed in a manner not unlike that of Carlo Gambino, simple and plain. Even his home, a modest, post-World War II split level, was sparsely furnished, and seeing him, sitting on a sofa alone, frail, and ascetic looking, reminded Elliot of the vast differences between these early Mafia kingpins and the newer ones like Paul Castellano, with his estate on Todt Hill, or John Gotti, with his movie-star status and penchant for headlines. Here was a warrior, surely capable of living a life of luxury, who’d shunned the spotlight for all of his Mafia career, choosing instead to live a life as a true Mafioso.
Elliot began by asking Bonanno about a recent movie that had been made about his life. “Did you like it?” he asked.
“Why would you ask me a question like that? The movie is about my life. If I didn’t like the movie, what would I be saying about myself?”
“What about your b-book, A Man of Honor?” Elliot finally got around to asking. “Why did you write it?”
“It was my declaration that my tradition has died in America. What Americans refer to as the Mafia is a degenerate outgrowth of that lifestyle. Friendships, connections, family ties, trust, and loyalty—this was the glue that held us together. In America, the glue that holds people together is only economic. By that I mean money.”
“What do you think of the current leadership, men like Gotti and Gravano from the Gambino Family?”
“What can I say about these people? To me, they are strangers. If they engage in illegal activities, what concern is that of mine? They’re all trying to make money. That’s all I see. The Mafia is not about money. It is a process, not a thing. Mafia is a form of clan cooperation, and its members pledge lifelong loyalty to it. What makes this process work is that it is based on friendship and honor.”
The old man leaned forward then, as if to tell a secret he had kept hidden for a very long time. “Do you know why Americans are so fascinated with the Mafia and movies like The Godfather? It’s because in it they see people that possess family pride and act with personal honor. The reason Americans are so attracted by this is that they know they are witnessing the erosion of all of those things in their own culture: trust in their government, faith in their religions, belief in a family structure that is falling apart. Americans yearn for closeness. They long for family. What they need and want is a father.”
If Elliot ever doubted what Rudy Giuliani was up against in trying to get Joseph Bonanno to testify against the rulers of La Cosa Nostra, past or current, he knew after meeting him that day that there was a better chance getting the pope to convert to Orthodox Judaism. Nevertheless, Giuliani would get his revenge.
Months after Giuliani’s visit, the ailing godfather was subpoenaed to appear before a grand jury in New York where he would be forced to review passages of his book to have him say yes, there was a Commission. When lawyers argued in court that Bonanno was too sick to travel from Arizona to New York, Giuliani ordered a court-appointed medical staff to Tucson to examine him. When the government’s doctors confirmed that Bonanno was, indeed, too weak to travel or undergo the ordeal of testimony, Giuliani was incensed, arguing that if the witness couldn’t be delivered to the court, the court would be delivered to the witness. The argument carried, and the conference room at St. Mary’s Hospital was converted into a temporary courtroom where Joseph Bonanno was interrogated and videotaped.
As expected, Bonanno, in an oxygen tent suffering from chronic heart problems, held true to his code and refused to discuss anything to do with the Commission, citing Fifth Amendment rights. Giuliani knew that he couldn’t indict a man who’d been retired for fifteen years as a conspirator or anything else, so he demanded that the judge cite Bonanno for civil contempt, a charge that would allow the government to jail him for the duration of the trial or until he agreed to testify. So, in an atmosphere that resembled something out of a Kafka novel, the seventy-eight-year-old Bonanno was put on a gurney and taken to an ambulance, rushed to the Tucson airport, flown to Kentucky, and then hustled by medevac to a federal penitentiary in Lexington. There, the mortally ill Joseph Bonanno remained imprisoned for seventeen months until November 1987 when the landmark Commission trial ended and sentences were handed down.
As much as Giuliani’s indictments against Big Paulie and rumblings over Angelo Ruggiero’s FBI tapes had exacerbated tensions between the Gotti and Castellano factions of the Gambino Family, Elliot’s life within La Cosa Nostra was also being tested. It wasn’t until January 1984 that Carmine Lombardozzi contacted him for the second leg of his international travel. This time the destination was Brazil, which Rosengarten had discussed with him. He’d already made the promised “one additional” trip to Tel Aviv.
Contacts had already been made on his behalf either by Al Rosengarten or Dr. Dak, he didn’t know which, and all went as planned. He was received by the staff at Prontocor Hospital in Bello Horizonte as a visiting professor and held seminars on two of his favorite subjects, intraoperative cardioplegia and echocardiography, all the while knowing that as he lectured, his room was being entered by a perfect stranger who would place two neatly wrapped parcels deep into the interior of his luggage for him to courier back to family contacts in the United States. Elliot did not know what the parcels contained and did not want to know. The only guarantee he asked for was that they didn’t contain illegal drugs such as cocaine or heroin.
Arriving back into the U.S., this time through Newark Airp
ort, Elliot made his way through the preselected customs’ line without inspection or hassle of any kind, showing his passport and exiting through the baggage claim area. Outside, waiting for him in his black Lincoln Continental, with engine running, was Carmine. Elliot nodded a curt greeting, then popped open the trunk where he put his luggage, taking from it the two parcels, both tightly bound with string and wrapped in plain brown paper.
Elliot got into the front seat. Carmine extended his hand. “Welcome back, Dottore. How was your trip?”
“Not too bad. I’m here s-safe and sound anyway,” he answered, still petrified with fear from the possibility of getting caught by customs on this, the last of his adventures in smuggling God knew what for these guys.
Elliot shook Carmine’s hand then gave him the two parcels, each weighing something like sixteen ounces and about the size of a cigar box. Carmine took them into his right hand, one at a time, gauging their weight, then shaking each one as if to assess their content. Satisfied, he looked into Elliot’s eyes, grinned broadly, then placed the two packages between them on the front seat and drove off toward the New Jersey Turnpike.
“You don’t look too good, Dottore,” Carmine laughed. “Maybe you need a doctor.”
“Look, Carmine,” he shot back still shaking, “I’m nervous as hell, okay? I’m a damned d-doctor, not a smuggler, can you try to understand that?”
“You worry too much,” Carmine said pulling onto the highway.
“I don’t even know what’s in those boxes. I mean, I swear to God, Carmine, everyone promised it wouldn’t be d-drugs, and I just hope to Christ it isn’t.”
“Well, don’t worry, Dottore. It ain’t drugs. It’s gems. Diamonds and emeralds. About $3 million worth.” He turned to Elliot. “Maybe you want a stone for one of your girlfriends?”
“I don’t have girlfriends, Carmine!”
Carmine smiled. “I think we both know better, Dottore,” he said, eyes twinkling with a secret understanding on the subject of Elliot’s sex life that he didn’t bother to share. “But that’s beside the point because if you have to know, these stones are bought with cash made from drugs, then converted back to cash in Manhattan. I make runs like this twice, maybe three times a month, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, even Vietnam and Cambodia. What do I pick up? Sometimes it’s stones, sometimes it’s Treasury bonds, hell, sometimes it’s freshly minted American Express certificates. But before you get to feelin’ too fucking bad about what we do, maybe you should know that for years, we did most of it with the help of your good old Uncle Sam.”
“What are you talking about? The government?”
“You got it,” Carmine said with a slow wink. “How do you think the U.S. props up these so-called democracies and tinhorn generals in Central and Latin America? It’s no different now than it was in the 1960s with Batista in Cuba, Duvalier in Haiti, or Noriega in Panama. We worked with the CIA side by side, until they realized they didn’t need us no more. ‘Better to do it in-house,’ someone must have figured out. That’s why there’s all this fucking heat now from Giuliani and these other assholes. Don’t you see? We’re the goddamned competition!”
Elliot shook his head in amazement. During those days, he was beginning to believe just about anything was possible, even the idea that our own federal government was using money from illegal drugs smuggled into the United States to fund CIA operations and make payoffs to foreign leaders around the world.
“Hey, one other thing,” Carmine mentioned, swiveling around to the backseat. “You see that paper there?” he asked pointing toward a copy of that morning’s New York Post. “Neil told me to give that to you. Said you might be interested.”
Elliot retrieved the newspaper. It was turned to page three, with a tiny two-by-two-inch article circled with blue ballpoint ink. MAFIA PUSHER FOUND DEAD IN CAR TRUNK, the headline read.
“Pull over to the side of the road,” Elliot blurted.
“What?”
“Pull over to the side of the road now!”
Carmine did as he was told, staring as Elliot opened the car door and proceeded to vomit.
The “Mafia pusher” they were writing about was Nicky Micelli. He’d been shot three times through the head execution style in what was suspected to be a “drug deal gone bad.” Though he couldn’t be certain, parked there on the side of the New Jersey Turnpike that night, Elliot was pretty sure that he knew better.
23
HURRICANES, TORNADOES, AND PESTILENCE
“My friends, the ones you met here at the house and in Manhattan: I’m going to tell you something I probably shouldn’t, but even I could get hurt by what’s going on with all of this.”
There are bad things that run their course or go away in life. Hurricanes, tornadoes, some pestilence are like that, but one of the things that does not go away for members and associates of the Mafia are federal law enforcement agencies, or FLEAS as they are known in the world of La Cosa Nostra. In New York, the Commission investigation had been split into two divisions. One collected interviews from cooperating witnesses, some of whom, like Ralph Scopo, held positions within the families. The second involved evidence gained through electronic surveillance including videotapes and thousands of hours of audio recordings gained through wiretaps and bugs placed in the cars, homes, and offices of mob bosses, most prominently, Paul Castellano.
On both levels, Elliot speculated, federal investigators had pieced together a puzzle, despite the non-cooperation of Joseph Bonanno, that clearly demonstrated the existence of a leadership body called the Commission that ran the New York construction industry. One boss remarked, in context and with remarkable audio integrity, “not a yard of concrete is poured in New York” without the Commission’s say-so. Worse for Castellano, not only did the law enforcement agencies have references from multiple sources, such as Ruggiero, about payoffs made through Scopo, but through bugs placed within his Todt Hill estate, agents had learned he’d become partners in S&A Concrete with “Fat Tony” Salerno of the Genovese Family, who saw to it that their company got a greater cut of the jobs!
By September 1984, Giuliani, armed with thirty volumes of evidence, believed he had nearly enough to put forward an indictment, but waited to see what additional secrets the bugs in Castellano’s home might yield about the inner workings of the five families. In particular, Rudy was interested in John Gotti, the Bergin crew capo so closely aligned with Gambino Family underboss Aniello “Neil” Dellacroce, who’d recently been diagnosed with cancer of the brain. Through it all, possibly through ignorance, but more likely through arrogance, Gotti remained unconcerned about Giuliani, the fallout from President Reagan’s commission on crime, and even RICO. He carried on as if he was still an ordinary soldier hijacking trucks from JFK Airport, despite the fact that within the family, he’d become much more than that.
Even Elliot, from his peripheral vantage point, could see that Gotti’s flamboyance could be a huge problem for “Mustache Petes” like Vincent “the Chin” Gigante, who’d already tried to assassinate him after the Bergin’s drug connection had been brought to light, and Castellano, who viewed him as unwelcome competition to his throne. Never was the forty-four-year-old capo’s poor judgment in better evidence than in September 1984 when Gotti became embroiled in a street fight with Romual Piecyk, a gruff walk-in refrigerator repairman, who soon after must have wondered if he, himself, wouldn’t be found hanging dead like one of the animal carcasses his refrigerators were meant to house.
The date was September 11 when Piecyk, a burly six-feet, two-inch strongman, was driving his truck through Maspeth, Queens, and came upon an empty double-parked car belonging to John Gotti and an associate, Frank Colletta, blocking the street. Gotti, there to visit two gambling dens under his control, was shocked to hear the blaring horn of Piecyk’s truck.
Who did this guy think he was dealing with? Colletta flew from the Cozy Corner bar, reached through the open drivers’ window, and proceeded to bash Piecyk in the face. P
iecyk then got out of the truck, and a scuffle began that Gotti joined, smacking Piecyk, kicking him, then taking $325 from his pocket, assumedly a fee for the aggravation he’d caused him. Finally, once Piecyk had had enough, Gotti reached into the waistband of his pants as if ready to draw a gun and growled, “You better get the fuck out of here if you know what’s good for you.”
No question that after that incident, in their respective graves, Carlo Gambino must have muttered “Cazu!” and Al Capone must have sat up and said “Bravisimo!” such was the difference in temperament between the Sicilian and the Neapolitan branches of the Mafia. Assuming that Piecyk knew who Gotti was, and understanding that anyone who’d dare to press charges would know they were signing their own death warrant, Gotti and eight other family members including Colletta nonchalantly moved down the street to drink espresso at a local café.
In the meantime, the doltish Piecyk, who understood none of these things, called the police. A car from the 106th Precinct arrived almost immediately, manned by a rookie officer named Ray Doyle. Moments later, when they confronted Gotti and his associates about who had committed the assault, in a show of unity, all ten stood up. Piecyk was insistent, and Doyle handcuffed Gotti and Colletta.
“Do you know who I am?” Gotti asked Piecyk. Then turning to the cop, he said, “Look, why don’t you reach into my front pocket. You’ll find $3,000 in cash there. Why would I rob a miserable son of a bitch like this guy of $300 when I got $3,000 on me of my own?”
The logic was unconvincing to Doyle, who booked them once Piecyk pressed charges, never imagining that he had just arrested the heir apparent to Carlo Gambino’s dynasty. Within weeks, however, Piecyk was hearing and reading about the notorious John Gotti. Now realizing the predicament he’d set himself up for, Piecyk became paranoid, buying a gun and moving his pregnant wife out of their home. He cut off all communication with the Queens district attorney. After having sworn to the crime and identifying Gotti under oath, it just wasn’t that simple. The D.A.’s office understood that since Gotti had served two sentences for hijacking and another for the McBratney murder, these two additional felony arrests for assault and robbery could put him behind bars for years.