by Lamothe, Lee
No one could afford not to be in the game: the Sicilian clans and the American Mafia families all recognized the vast profits at hand and had members work their way into the heroin trade just to maintain the status quo in the underworld, if nothing else. The Bonannos were out in front, but the Gambinos were close behind. Any question that selling drugs had been “banned under pain of death” by the senior members of the American Mafia had long since been abandoned, even by those few who actually tried to stick to that code. In Buffalo, for instance, the old Mafia boss Stefano Magaddino reaped huge profits from his soldiers’ drug deals while ordering them to sell dope only in the black neighborhoods. Vito Agueci, the Toronto-based brother of the Sicilian trafficker Alberto Agueci, who helped run a piece of the French Connection, was inducted into the Buffalo family by Magaddino on the strength of his contribution to the heroin trade.
No family was above it. It was a sport without spectators.
Sciascia was the Sixth Family’s lead player in the New York distribution, lining up customers, keeping an eye on their activities and continually working to ensure that the family’s interests were not overlooked. As a captain in the Bonanno Family, he carried weight beyond the kilos he was offering.
With Sciascia was Joe LoPresti, his direct Montreal liaison. Both were close friends and distant family of Vito Rizzuto, and among the inner circle of the Sixth Family. Around them in New York were dozens of well-connected salesmen who had their own networks of buyers along the eastern seaboard and farther afield in American cities. These Sixth Family constituents had been slowly increasing the organization’s output and efficiency in New York for at least three years since they first started to make their way onto police radar through street snitches and drug probes. The more business they generated, the more police started to hear of them. To keep the money flowing satisfactorily, however, they needed to boost their sales volume. And that required careful client management.
Sciascia was a consummate salesman. He was always ready with product, always prepared to cut a deal. And he looked after his buyers, wanted them for himself and often lied to them that they were his only customers.
“How’d you make out with George?” John Carneglia, a Gambino soldier, once asked his mob colleague Angelo Ruggiero, brother of the fugitive who died in the plane crash, after Angelo had met with Sciascia to arrange a drug deal.
“Very good,” Angelo replied. “Excellent. He doesn’t want to do anything with anyone else but us.” Both Ruggiero brothers had become well acquainted with Sciascia and LoPresti from their frequent sales calls. Salvatore Ruggiero was Sciascia’s first major client in the Gambino Family. Along with Gotti’s brother, Gene, the Ruggiero brothers formed an extensive drug-trafficking network within the Gambinos. Ostensibly, John Gotti himself was never involved in the drug trade, but with two of his closest friends and his own brother so tightly involved with Sciascia and LoPresti, it is impossible to believe that he did not know and approve of their activities, and profit from them. Like the other families, the Gambinos developed a heroin wing within their organization; it was often managed by the boss’s brother.
Unlike Angelo, Salvatore Ruggiero had graduated from street thuggery and become a multimillionaire, selling a range of drugs, from major shipments of marijuana to heroin and cocaine. Wanted on several charges, he had become a fugitive, hiding out with his wife, Stephanie, under various names in New Jersey, Florida, Pennsylvania and Ohio. His prime heroin supplier was Sciascia.
When the Gates Learjet carrying Salvatore plunged into the Atlantic Ocean in May 1982, Salvatore had been on the run for six years. Being a fugitive had not slowed his drug-dealing activities; at the time of his death, he had yet another shipment of heroin, taken on credit from Sciascia, stored in his house awaiting resale.
After Angelo was notified of his brother’s death, he, along with Gene Gotti and Carneglia, went to Salvatore’s hideout in Franklin Lakes, New Jersey, searching for the heroin and hidden cash. A few months earlier, however, hoping to catch up with the elusive Salvatore and to gain evidence to indict John Gotti, the FBI’s Gambino Squad had thoroughly wired Angelo Ruggiero’s home in Cedarhurst, Long Island. Not only was his telephone line bugged, but microphones were placed in his kitchen, den and dining room. Federal agents recorded Angelo’s attorney, Michael Coiro, offering condolences to Angelo on the death of his brother, and then saying: “Gene found the heroin.”
The talk of heroin in the wake of Salvatore’s death—and the connection to a Gotti—seized the attention of investigating agents. The fishing expedition on Angelo suddenly held the promise of reeling in big fish. Targeting Angelo for electronic surveillance had been a perfect call for another reason. Often known as “Quack Quack”—because of his inability to stop talking—Angelo was a constant chatterbox, providing a running commentary on everything going on around him. Everyone who visited Angelo had to endure endless gossip, complaints and general indiscretions. It was ridiculously loose talk, doubly so because he knew he was under investigation. On one of Sciascia’s sales visits, he heard how Angelo had suspected he was being monitored and the steps he had taken to ensure he was not; all of it, meanwhile, recorded by the FBI. Angelo had answered the doorbell one day to find a workman from the telephone company outside.
“What the hell do you want?” was Angelo’s greeting.
“I come here to fix the phone,” the workman said.
“Come here to fix the phones?” Angelo bellowed. “You [were] fixing the phone before!”
“Me? Not me,” the confused workman said. “This is my area. Mister, I don’t know who those [other] people were.” Ruggiero called in a counter-surveillance expert, a retired detective, to check the entire house.
“It was clean,” Angelo told Sciascia. Too bad for Sciascia, LoPresti, Gene Gotti and any other gangster who stepped near Angelo’s house, that it was not quite true. Tipped off to the planned sweep, the FBI turned its bugs off the day of the scheduled search. With Angelo now relaxed in his supposed privacy, he again started to chatter wildly—and the bugs were turned back on.
Salvatore’s death hit Angelo hard. Afterward, he was often heard wistfully speaking of his brother to Sciascia and LoPresti.
“He made money,” Angelo said to Sciascia one day. “He knew how to make money.” In the mob, there were few more adoring words one could say about someone. Salvatore, clearly making money hand over fist through his connection to the Sixth Family, was a source of awe for Angelo, who tried his best to emulate him.
“He made me make money,” Angelo said. “I was in debt six months ago. I’m way out of debt now. I bet you—I’m no fucking millionaire, I got no million dollars—but I know what I got. And I gambled. Gambled. I mean I’m sitting on $400,000. What the fuck has my brother got? If I’m sitting on four, what does my brother got?” Such was the quick return on the Sixth Family’s merchandise. The day after the memorial service for Salvatore, a distraught Angelo worried that people who owed money to his brother would renege on their debt and deprive Salvatore’s children.
“We’re up against lice in this world,” Angelo said. “Listen, I ain’t no scumbag. I’m not asking nobody for nothing, you hear? All I’m telling you is this: If I find out anybody’s lying, a year from now, six months from now, and if anybody is holding back anything from my brother … I promise youse this, youse are gonna die the same way my brother died—in pieces. I give you my word on it. … My brother was good to everybody. My fucking brother helped every fucking one of youse.”
The love between the brothers spilled out again as Angelo spoke to LoPresti, who had arrived to discuss yet another shipment and answer a question from Angelo, to which he said he would “refer it to people in Canada.” LoPresti also talked about a scheme to double their profit—selling drugs to someone “and then we’ll whack him.” But Angelo, for once, was not so interested in talking about heroin. The talk of whacking someone seemed to spur in him another bout of wistful regret.
“You know, I
lost my brother,” he told LoPresti. “I said to myself: ‘I’ll have to get drunk.’ I had two vodkas … I went in my room, I closed the door and I cried … If they would have found him in the street and he would have [been] shot in the head, I would have accepted it, because this is a part of our life. Next week, the week after, we would have got even [with] whoever did it, right? We would have accepted it. Not this way. This is … this is …” He could not find the words.
To LoPresti, Angelo was like a child, a product of a Mafia that LoPresti, Vito, Sciascia and the rest of the Sicilian traffickers had little use for except as an outlet for their heroin. LoPresti let the distraught Angelo pour out his heartbreak.
“Let it out,” LoPresti said. But when Angelo was finished crying, LoPresti was right back at it: How much can you take? Take it, take it, take it.
Had LoPresti known that each of the sales calls made by him and Sciascia were being monitored and documented by the FBI, he might also have felt like crying. So much time spent with a man whose home was so thoroughly penetrated by the FBI could only mean trouble. From an unexplained plane crash, the quiet commerce of the Sixth Family’s operations would be partially exposed.
CHAPTER 21
THE BRONX, SUMMER 1981
On July 1, 1981—a national holiday in Canada, marking the creation of the Dominion of Canada in 1867—Gerlando Sciascia remained in New York, with his house secretly watched by the FBI. It was the fifth day of surveillance by agents assigned to monitor the home on Stadium Avenue in the Bronx, and this was the first day the agents had spotted their quarry.
At 11:30 a.m., Sciascia walked out of his home, climbed into his green 1979 four-door Peugeot and drove off along Route 95. Agents tailing him watched as he pulled off the freeway and stopped at a service station to fill up with diesel. He then resumed his journey, south on Route 95, and agents watched him drive through the tollbooths at the Throgs Neck Bridge and soon lost him in traffic. It was a rather inauspicious start to a new federal racketeering investigation into Sciascia’s activities. All evidence, however, suggested they should not give up.
Sciascia had been targeted for investigation after several years of reports continued to pile up in the FBI’s offices showing that he was an increasingly active part of both the Sixth Family’s drug trade and the Bonanno Family. When agents were assigned to take a closer look at him and the people he was working with, they soon found themselves bumping into other investigators from other agencies who had also found their way to Sciascia through their own leads. FBI agents probing the links between the Bonanno Family members and the Sicilian drug traffickers on Knickerbocker Avenue were interested in him; the agents monitoring the wires in Angelo Ruggiero’s home were interested in him; the Drug Enforcement Administration was tracking him, as were Canadian police. In 1981, the information was starting to be pooled and a federal racketeering investigation was officially launched.
Sciascia’s involvement in heroin distribution in New York preceded the Bono wedding; even before the last of the Violi brothers had been killed. By early 1980, FBI agents were already writing internal reports on Sciascia and his Sixth Family kin, noting suspicious transactions by an import/export company linked to Montreal as well as meetings in New York by Canadian visitors. The Canadians seemed to have a lot of friends in a lot of places, agents noted. An internal FBI report filed in February 1980, noted that the Canadians—in the deadpan bureaucratic argot of the FBI—had “a multitude of telephonic interaction” with contacts in the United States, Italy, France, Switzerland, Venezuela and Canada, particularly Montreal. In November 1980, in the days leading up to the Bono wedding, New York City Police Department intelligence officers had watched Sciascia meet with visiting Sicilian traffickers, who were likely in town for Bono’s celebration.
Previous reports of Sciascia’s movements were re-examined. There had been meetings in New York’s Plaza Hotel and in several homes between Sciascia, other known Canadian traffickers, and American Mafia members of all stripes, some of them freshly released from prison after serving time for narcotics offenses. Each time a visitor from Montreal met with Sciascia, the agents pulled the phone records for their hotel rooms, and each time they were astounded at the scope of their contacts. After one visit in September 1981, calls had been traced to Monaco, Caracas, Rome, Lima and Montreal. On another visit, calls were made to Germany, Paris and Bogotá. Paolo Renda also attracted the attention of agents, apparently in connection with an address to which calls were traced, FBI documents say. A report noted that Renda “from time to time” traveled between Canada and Venezuela.
Canadian police were asked to conduct background checks on the increasing number of Canadians appearing in their investigations. Later, the DEA and the FBI also agreed to cooperate on, rather than compete over, Sciascia. A meeting was arranged between the respective agents who had been monitoring Sciascia; they had so much to say that a follow-up meeting needed to be scheduled a week later.
For one month—from January 8 through February 8, 1982—federal agents intercepted Sciascia’s mail, checking it before it was delivered to his home. Registers that recorded every phone number dialed were placed on his home telephones. A corporate records check revealed him to be a founding officer of Pronto Demolition, which appeared to be a through-and-through Mafia enterprise. Joining Sciascia in the boardroom were Giuseppe Bono, Giovanni Ligammari and Giuseppe Ganci, who was the right-hand man of Sal Catalano, the new Zip street boss of Knickerbocker Avenue. The agents’ search also led them to California Pizza, the pizzeria Sciascia ran in the Green Acres Mall in Long Island where Cesare Bonventre and Baldo Amato had been caught with guns in their Cadillac. In the pizza business, Sciascia had partnered with Giuseppe Arcuri, a relative of the man who had hosted the final Montreal sit-down between Nick Rizzuto and Paolo Violi and another of the Sixth Family’s staunch supporters in New York. The mingling cut both ways. Police in Canada had noted repeated visits by Cesare Bonventre and Baldo Amato to both Montreal and Toronto. Amato in particular was a frequent visitor.
On the morning of May 17, 1982, 11 days after Salvatore Ruggiero’s plane crash, two FBI agents watched Sciascia leave his home, accompanied by a tall, dark-haired visitor. (Two days later, the RCMP showed the agents a photograph of Joe LoPresti and the agents confirmed that he was the mystery man.)
The pair got into Sciascia’s second vehicle, a black Jeep Grand Cherokee, a vehicle much-loved by members of the Sixth Family, and drove to a Queens Dunkin’ Donuts outlet, where they were met by Cesare Bonventre. After a short chat over coffee at the counter, the three men drove to the Green Acres Mall. While LoPresti and Bonventre walked into the mall, Sciascia headed into his pizzeria. When Sciascia left his restaurant a few minutes later and went into the mall, the agents followed him inside. There they watched Sciascia, LoPresti and Bonventre standing in the center of the busy mall, deep in discussion, in an apparent attempt to thwart being picked up by an electronic bug. LoPresti, who was always surveillance-conscious, spotted an agent watching them from 30 feet away. When he pointed the interloper out to his colleagues, the three men scattered.
“He looked in my direction and he looked back at the other two individuals and said something and at that point the three dispersed and each went in a different direction in the mall,” said Special Agent Charles Murray, one of the surveillance officers. “I tried to observe them as best I could,” he said. One agent later saw Bonventre making a call at a pay phone; the other spotted Sciascia at a pretzel concession. Sciascia, realizing he was being followed, stopped suddenly and feigned interest in a store window, forcing the agent to continue walking past him. Then Sciascia started to follow the agent. Realizing their folly, the agents left. LoPresti, despite his size, seemed to vanish. He headed for the airport and flew back to Montreal that afternoon.
It was one of several meetings by Sixth Family members that police were aware of. When authorities in Italy learned that Giuseppe Bono was consorting with drug traffickers in New York and in Ca
nada, they rekindled an investigation that had been put on hold when he fled. The Italian probe ran straight into the Sixth Family as well.
On June 12, 1982, Italian police were monitoring Bono as he met at the Gallo Rosso, a luxurious restaurant in Milan, with Michelangelo LaScala, an old Sixth Family contact from Venezuela who had flown to Milan from Caracas. On June 24, the two got together again. This time, while they ate and chatted, Bono took a telephone call. On the other end of the phone was Nick Rizzuto, according to surveillance reports from the Polizia di Stato, the Italian national police. Bono and Nick discussed the movement of a “suitcase,” which agents believed was likely traffickers’ code for a drug shipment. Investigators determined that Nick had already sent three large shipments of furniture from Italy to Canada, which police believed had drugs hidden inside. Police reports say the listed recipient of the shipments was Maria Renda, Nick’s daughter. Nick spent most of that summer in Milan, where he was “in constant contact” with Bono, usually by telephone.