by Ron Felber
But it was New York’s Mafia leaders who watched in white-knuckled dread because it was there that two federal cases threatened to tear apart the entire structure of organized crime. Both revolved around Ralph Scopo.
It began in October 1984 when after a three-year FBI investigation called “Star Quest,” Rudy Giuliani announced a fifty-one-count federal indictment against eleven members of the Columbo Family including its boss, Carmine Persico. In what amounted to a dry run of the Commission case, the Columbos were charged with “a pattern of racketeering that included extortion, theft, loansharking, gambling, bribery and drug trafficking.” But the allegation that worried the hierarchy of the families was not any of these single charges. Rather, it was the indictment’s primary focus that involved “influencing New York City’s construction industry by controlling several unions identified in the indictment.”
The reason for this concern was not apparent until after the Commission indictments were released in February 1985 and testimony was underway in the Columbo trial. More than the random acts of greedy union officials looking for kickbacks, Asst. U.S. Attorney Aaron Marcu seemed intent on making Giuliani’s larger point in the secretly recorded taped conversations and scores of witnesses and hundreds of surveillance photos he was presenting as evidence. That point being that there existed a Mafia “board of directors” that had ruled the underworld for more than a half century and continued to do so.
If that premise were granted by the jury in the Columbo case, the same information linking payoffs from construction companies through Scopo to the five families that ran the Commission was all Giuliani needed to prove the existence of “racketeering influence” through a “corrupt organization,” a RICO win large enough to put away the hierarchy of the New York Mafia for the rest of their lives.
Ralph Scopo couldn’t have been enjoying any of the proceedings starting from day one when the indictment was presented to the jury. A grossly overweight chain smoker with a wife and two grown sons, who were also involved with the union, he suffered from angina, hypertension, and as it was later discovered, coronary heart disease. Initially, he may have seen a way out as Marcu read from the indictment charging that from 1981 up to October 1984, he had wrongfully “obstructed, delayed and affected commerce” by extortion while conspiring to obtain the property of the construction companies identified through “actual and threatened use of force, violence and fear.”
Up to that point, it might not have seemed too bad to Scopo. The prosecution had a couple of witnesses, who were shaken down, and maybe some tape recordings of telephone conversations that could be incriminating. Scopo’s guys had beaten worse in court.
But that was only page 115 of the 230-page indictment. There was more to come, and it was the charges that followed, specifically those made on page 119, that gave Scopo and wizened mob counsel Barry Slotnick something to think about.
During that same period, the U.S. attorney continued, the ruling body of La Cosa Nostra, called the Commission, “organized and controlled” a scheme to extort various New York contractors who poured concrete. The Commission established a club that would designate which contractor would be permitted to make the successful bid on a particular contract. The Commission “controlled the decisions of the Union and agreed to the payment of bribes to coconspirator Ralph Scopo.” The Commission enforced the rules of the club by “causing the contractors’ supplies of cement to be stopped, as well as other forms of economic punishment, acts of violence, physical harm and murder.”
“This is not good,” even a tough guy like Scopo must have been concluding at about that time, “but it’s a long fucking way from making accusations about conspiracies and actually proving it. After all, what good were tapes and a pack of pissed-off contractors without a living witness to link it together? And that wasn’t gonna happen, so Marcu might as well try to make the jury believe in UFOs ’cause no-fucking-body’d be stupid enough to try to rat out the Commission!”
The Commission “controlled the allocation of concrete pouring contracts by exercising control over the decisions of the Cement and Concrete Workers’ Union and specifically the actions of coconspirator Ralph Scopo,” Marcu elaborated. By exploiting its control, coconspirators Anthony Salerno, Antonio Corallo, Christopher Furnari, and Salvatore Santoro and defendants Gennaro Langella and Carmine Persico and “members of the Commission and bosses, and underbosses of La Cosa Nostra families were able to induce concrete-construction companies to join this club and to extort payments from these contractors” in the amount of 2 percent of the contract price of “any concrete-pouring construction job in the New York City area in excess of $2 million” including the $15 million Rivergate Project, Dow Jones & Company headquarters, Manhattan Federal Building, and $30.4 million Jacob Javits Convention Center.”
“Holy shit!” Scopo, along with Slotnick, must have realized almost immediately upon hearing the words. “This isn’t just about me or even the Columbo Family. This is about the Commission. This is about the entire, motherfucking organization.” Even Ralph Scopo must have finally understood that “the link is not some low-level stoolie or empty suit wannabe. The fucking guy who links these two cases together is me!”
The days following the beginning of testimony in the trial of the Columbos and the announcement of the Commission indictments were no less painful for Scopo. Named as a principal in both cases, his hours in Manhattan’s federal courthouse were spent surrounded by attorneys, in the company of his boss, Carmine Perisco, and nine other members of the Columbo hierarchy, listening to witness after witness, tape after tape of contractors describing the manner in which they had been shaken down by the district council president.
In one tape of a meeting between Robert Sisto, a contractor, and Scopo at the Bow Wow restaurant in Howard Beach, Queens, on May 17, 1984, played for the jury, Sisto tells Scopo that he’s going to “give him two [now]” and would pay him “four next week.” In a second FBI taped conversation of a meeting between Scopo and Carlo D’Arpino, of Cedric Construction, the district council president is heard asking D’Arpino, “How much you got here?” “Fifteen,” D’Arpino replies. “Well you still owe me eighty-five,” Scopo answers. In yet another discussion between Scopo and Mineo D’Ambrosi, of All-Boro Paving, taped on March 19, 1984, Scopo tells D’Ambrosi “you can’t bid on projects over $2 million … those are awarded to members of the club, who pay two points, not one.” When D’Ambrosi complains asking, “Who do I got to go see?” Scopo replies, “You got to see every family. And they’re going to tell you ‘no.’ So don’t even bother.”
All of this by itself would seem ambiguous and hardly solid evidence in light of the fact that most witnesses were themselves involved in one scam or another and had gotten immunity in return for their testimony. Nevertheless, these were living witnesses who, if they could not testify credibly about the operation of the Commission, could at least support the context and veracity of the tapes in a court of law. More, through their testimony and the subpoenaed financial records of the companies they ran, a detailed accounting of payoffs was created that, representing only a fraction of the Commission’s total take, accumulated well into the millions for the years 1981 through 1984: XLO Concrete Corporation, $619,000; S&A Structures, $240,000; G&G Concrete, $117,000; Technical Concrete, $235,000; Century Maxim, $377,000, to name only a few of the dozens the indictment listed.
It was soon after, on November 13, 1985, that an incredible turn of events occurred affecting Elliot irreparably. While listening to prosecution tapes of himself secretly recorded by the FBI in the midst of the Columbo racketeering trial, Ralph Scopo began a response, stared strangely out into the courtroom toward his wife and two sons, then clutched his chest in agony. Struggling for breath, the 300-pound, fifty-six-year-old Mafia capo stood up, grasped the oak railing behind him, then collapsed.
Moments later, Scopo was put on a gurney and rushed to the Beekman Downtown Hospital where he was treated for severe chest pains resulting fr
om angina and hypertension, his condition listed as “serious but not critical.”
By year’s end, the prognosis for Elliot Litner, M.D., would not be nearly so good.
25
THE HIT ON SCOPO
“Heart disease,” he added with a sense of irony that only Elliot could appreciate, “thousands of people die from it every year.”
Federal prosecutors held more than one ace up their sleeve for the upcoming Commission trial: two informers within the Gambino Family, Willie Boy Johnson and John Gotti confidant Billy Battista; the tapes recorded in Tony “Ducks” Corallo’s Jaguar, along with Angelo Ruggiero’s ramblings about drugs and the Commission. Most stunning of all, however, were the secretly recorded dialogues of the boss of bosses himself, Paul Castellano. The prosecution would not waste these legal haymakers on preliminaries like the Columbo trial. They would be held back for the main event, their epic battle to put behind bars the entire leadership of the New York Mafia. Jury selection for Giuliani’s Mafia coup de grâce began in September 1985. But even as that was happening, seismic underworld rumblings involving the ongoing Columbo Family racketeering trial and the Gambino car-theft ring trial were setting the stage for the tsunami to follow.
No question Paul Castellano was in ever deepening trouble as chief prosecutor Walter S. Mack’s case against ten Gambino Family members and their godfather unwound at federal district court in Manhattan. On December 3, 1985, thirty-seven-year-old Vietnam war veteran and family-associate-turned-government-witness Dominick Montiglio testified to being a “collector” for Castellano’s loansharking and extortion activities and a “go-between” in “big narcotics transactions.” He went on to tell a hushed jury about rigging hand grenades to automobile ignitions to “blow to pieces” Castellano’s enemies and about the murder of nineteen-year-old Cherie Golden, girlfriend of a suspected informer, by DeMeo crew members Joey Testa and Anthony Senter. According to Montiglio, the two hit men flanked the petrified girl in a car, and while Testa drew her attention toward him by talking to her, Senter “blew her brains out” from the opposite side.
If Castellano was concerned about what was going on in his car-theft case, other Commission members like Tony “Ducks” Corallo, Rusty Rastelli, “Gerry Lang” Langella, and “Fat Tony” Salerno must have found the direction of Carmine Persico’s Concrete Club trial even more alarming. The reason was simple. More than tapes, which were subject to interpretation; worse than informers, whose own sordid backgrounds could be called into question by clever attorneys like Roy Cohn, government prosecutors had Columbo capo Ralph Scopo, the only direct link between contractors, unions, and the Commission, by the balls.
Day after day, members of the Columbo trial jury were treated to a litany of incontrovertible evidence against Scopo. Too bad if it sealed Persico’s fate, but now the Commission indictment had been handed down, and the government’s RICO strategy was visible for anyone to see. Scopo’s guilt would be used by Giuliani and his prosecutors like a scabbard to gut the Columbo Family hierarchy while establishing the Commission’s existence at the same time. Afterward, with the premise of their RICO case in place, the feds would use that same weapon to convict each one of the defendants for criminal conspiracy, with potential sentences ranging in the hundreds of years. In the minds of these men, starting with Castellano and Persico, something had to be done about the “Scopo problem.” In other words, he had to be hit.
Of course, all of this was unknown to Elliot at that time, though a man didn’t have to be Albert Einstein to figure out that somebody, somewhere, would put out a contract on a witness so important to Giuliani as Scopo. Nearly every morning and night, Frank Silvio and Elliot would discuss the latest word on what had evolved into three ongoing government proceedings against “our friends.” Some news came from Silvio’s contacts within the family, but most came from newspapers like the New York Times, Daily News, and New York Post, all of which relished recounting dramatic details from the day’s court testimony.
On November 21, Barry Slotnick, argued that his client, who’d been hospitalized on November 13 from hypertension and angina, couldn’t withstand the strain of further questioning during the Persico trial and that his case should be severed. Judge John F. Keenan, who reviewed opinions by doctors for both sides, concluded publicly that there was “no greater danger to Scopo’s life now than at the beginning of the trial.” But according to Silvio, Keenan privately ordered the government to provide a paramedic along with a wheelchair and oxygen tanks at all future sessions. This, a signal that while the prosecution maintained Scopo was faking his dizzy spells, chest pains, and shortness of breath, there was medical credence to his heart condition that even Judge Keenan was forced to acknowledge. Elliot didn’t press him on the subject, but Silvio claimed to have seen Scopo’s medical records at Beekman Hospital where he’d been treated earlier and concluded that he suffered from coronary artery disease caused by atherosclerosis, an accumulation of fatty deposits on the inner lining of the walls of arteries that could indeed be life threatening.
Given the prepping that Silvio had revealed and the fact that constant battering by government prosecutors could only aggravate Scopo’s condition, Elliot wasn’t totally surprised to receive an invitation to dinner from Al Rosengarten on the afternoon of December 4, just three hours after Judge Keenan decided to sever Scopo’s case from the other defendants based on poor health. They met that night at the Plaza Hotel, another of Rosengarten’s favorite Manhattan hangouts. He was waiting at the bar sipping a vodka martini when Elliot arrived, and as in the past, they were ushered to his favorite table the minute Elliot got there.
Rosengarten had grown up in Manhattan’s Hell’s Kitchen, but was now one of the wealthiest men in the city because of his early alliance with Carlo Gambino, and just seeing him would lead a person to assume he was rich—it showed in the way he carried himself, from polished nails to his carefully coiffed, thinning black hair. But while he posed as a businessman-philanthropist, to Elliot, he had the look of a gangster from the old Arnold Rothstein school of crime.
Rosengarten’s dress, while meticulous, was overdone, from his custom-made white shirt to the monogrammed cuff links and red handkerchief peeking out from the pocket of his hand-tailored Italian suit. With Al, even polite conversations took on the air of something illicit, his body leaning forward and his right arm hooking around a man’s back as he rumbled observations or instructions, staring into his companion’s eyes like an ardent lover. Rosengarten’s face, tanned from his most recent jaunt to Eleuthera, had a worn look to it, the skin around his eyes noticeably darker than the rest of his face while the eyes, glinting and beguiling, possessed no warmth whatsoever and were capable of transforming midsentence into a withering storm of cold-blooded calculation.
In fact, if there was a single word that came to Elliot’s mind, seeing the clever, old businessman-mobster that day, it was “reptile” as Rosengarten finished off his martini with a kind of thirst Elliot never thought him capable of—a sign of the times, he guessed. The small talk was nearly nonexistent as the waiter brought Elliot his Diet Coke and Rosengarten swapped an empty glass of Absolut for a full one.
“Times are not easy,” Rosengarten observed. “Our friend in Staten Island has his hands full, and unless things start to straighten up, most people think he won’t make it. Maybe you’ve been following what’s going on?”
“Not much. Just the papers like everybody else.”
“Well, Elliot, everybody always said you were a stand-up guy. Hell, from the very beginning back in, what was it, the Bronx? It was no different for me. My father was a German Jew and a tailor, can you imagine? When Carlo first laid eyes on me, I was a kid with ambition, smarts, and a set of brass balls. What did I know about life? Nothing. But I knew about suits and dresses, and that was all it took for Mr. Gambino to cut me a break. I’ll never forget him for that, God rest his soul. No different for you, I’d venture, and that was the goddamned charm of our world. It was entrepr
eneurial! No one asked where you came from. If you had the brains and the cojones, you were given the opportunity to become an earner. That was the freedom we enjoyed before this bloodsucker Giuliani put his fangs into our lives!”
“Look, Mr. Rosengarten, if you don’t mind, maybe we should order something because I’ve got to get back to the hospital later tonight.”
“Right you are, young man!” he said reaching across the table, resting his hand on Elliot’s. “These are the virtues that Simon and I always admired about you. You cut to the chase, Elliot, and that’s what I’m going to do tonight. No bullshit!” Rosengarten leaned forward across the table and dropped his voice to a whisper. “So let me tell you now that tomorrow morning a patient is going to be admitted into Mount Sinai for cardiac cauterization. His name is Ralph Scopo. Now, after the testing, he most probably will need to have bypass surgery, which you will also perform.” He looked straight into Elliot’s eyes. “You know who Ralph Scopo is?”
“I’ve r-read about him in the Times.”
“He’s the government’s key witness in that lynching of Carmine Persico that’s passing for justice down at federal district court. And, while he’s got nothing to do with Mr. Castellano’s current proceedings, he’ll also be acting as Giuliani’s star witness in this Commission circus they’re trying to dredge up. It’s a case that’s got some important men extremely concerned.”
“Yes, I know about that, too.”
“Good,” Rosengarten concluded, sitting back in his chair, “because if you understand those facts and what it means to these friends of ours, you’ll understand why it’s got me wondering about the risks involved in a bypass surgery like the one Scopo is about to have. I mean exactly what kind of survival rate is there for a man of Ralph Scopo’s age, with his being so overweight and such a heavy smoker?”