Last Rites

by William J. Craig

  The VFW club in Revere where Paul Strazzulla’s body was dumped and the car was set on fire.

  On December 11, Anthony Diaz, Strazzulla and Ciampi were driving around East Boston late at night when Diaz pulled out a gun and shot Paul Strazzulla in the head. The men dumped the car at the Beachmont VFW parking lot on the Revere–East Boston line. Then they got into a parked car and drove away. Diaz, fearing that he had left some trace of evidence or a fingerprint that could be traced back, went and got Cote. They returned to the parking lot, and Cote set fire to the vehicle with Strazzulla’s body in it. The Revere Fire Department responded to the scene and found a 1988 Oldsmobile Cutlass burning out of control. After extinguishing the fire, they discovered Strazzulla’s body. He was reputed to be a close friend of Rico Ponzo. Earlier in the evening, Cote and Ciampi had gone to see Matricia, who escaped because he believed the two men had come to kill him.

  On December 15, the FBI served a search warrant at 151 Bennington Street. The warrant allowed the FBI to recover ballistic evidence.

  In January 1995, a federal grand jury handed down a thirty-seven-count indictment against Frank Salemme and six other members of the Boston mob. Whitey Bulger was also named in the indictment, along with Stephen Flemmi. James Ring, former supervisor of Boston’s FBI organized crime squad, stated, “It’s kind of a stake through the heart.” It would take over five years to bring these men to trial.

  Salemme went into hiding just before the indictments were announced. While on the run, he left his brother Jackie as acting boss of the family. He was eventually caught in August 1995 in West Palm Beach, Florida.

  On May 17, 1995, Mark Spisak, Ciampi and Anthony Rizzo happened by chance to spot Stephen Rossetti on the highway while they were returning from a roast beef sandwich shop in Revere. Spisak, who wanted to avenge himself for failing to kill Rossetti a year earlier, offered to do the hit. They found Rossetti’s van parked near his parents’ home on Waldemar Avenue in East Boston. Spisak exited the vehicle and hid behind a fence with a semiautomatic weapon. The other two men were waiting approximately seventy yards away in the getaway car. In the driveway between 122 and 124 Waldemar Avenue, Spisak accidentally made a noise and alerted Rossetti as he approached. Spisak lurched out of the shadows at Stephen Rossetti and began firing at him. After the first shot, the glove that Spisak was wearing got jammed in the firing mechanism. Rossetti, stunned at first, immediately began to wrestle with Spisak. Finally, he was able to get out his gun and get off a couple of shots before making his escape. The first bullet passed clearly through Spisak’s leg, another shattered his right arm and a ricochet hit him in the head. Spisak almost immediately heard sirens coming from the direction of Suffolk Downs Racetrack. Ciampi pulled up to Spisak and called out, “Oh Mark. Oh my God, Mark.” Rossetti turned and ran. Rizzo was screaming at Ciampi, “Come on. We’ve got to get the fuck out of here.”

  Boston Police officer Michael Leary found Spisak walking aimlessly. A search of the area turned up a jammed semiautomatic weapon with a matching glove to the one Spisak was wearing in the grass. There was a single spent 9 mm cartridge and eleven cartridges in the magazine. Police officers also discovered five other shell casings on the ground from a different gun. Boston Police blanketed the area but were unable to turn up Rossetti. Spisak was arrested and taken to Massachusetts General Hospital. After Spisak was released from the hospital, he stayed with Anthony Ciampi and his family. While living there, he and Ciampi outlined how to get the others on a list of at least fourteen people who were strong Salemme loyalists. The group was attempting to find out through the Registry of Motor Vehicles where Rossetti lived but was unsuccessful.

  Gigi was finally able to obtain the information on Rossetti’s address in Revere. Romano then parked a stolen car outside of his house and placed a video camera in it to monitor his movements. He bought the camera and night vision goggles with the proceeds from marijuana that Cote, Ciampi and Arciero had stolen from a dealer and sold. Despite Spisak’s performance in the two botched hits, Romano still relied on Spisak to provide security when he met Bobby Luisi Jr. inside Kelly’s Pub in East Boston. This meeting was an attempt to possibly hammer out an uneasy peace or truce. It was at this meeting that Luisi informed Romano that Devlin hadn’t been targeting Ciampi. Rather, when Devlin was killed he had been looking to kill Gigi. This conversation helps to show just how powerful Salemme perceived Gigi to be. The hierarchy of the New England mob believed that Gigi might someday soon make a play against them, and if successful, he would be next to take the throne. At that time, a truce was attempted to be negotiated, but it was too little too late.

  During this time, Gigi and his drug network were becoming more entrenched in the New England landscape. However, Gigi was becoming increasingly more paranoid. Around this time, Gigi began to befriend a mob wannabe named Smiley Mele. In July 1996, Mele was caught with one hundred pounds of marijuana in the trunk of his car. He had a gun on him but was able to pass it off to the passenger, who subsequently went to jail for possession of a firearm. The DEA, pressuring Mele, was eventually able to turn the twenty-nine-year-old East Bostonian into an informant. Mele was able to keep his arrest from Gigi, and he began to ingratiate himself further into Gigi’s close circle. Mele even went so far as to sell a $10,000 pickup truck to Gigi for $3,000. Fearing that it may have been bugged, Gigi never drove the vehicle.

  On a federal wiretap, Mele attempted to get Gigi and Bobby Nogueira to discuss any criminal activity that they may currently be involved in.

  Gigi: “He [Nogueira] knows where to put it, how to use it, how to move it. How long would it take you to take a head off ?”

  Nogueira: “With the Spider?”

  Gigi: “With the Spider, sharp as a motherfucker.”

  Nogueira: “About a minute.”

  Mele: “A minute, Bob?”

  Nogueira: “A minute.”

  Gigi: “The spine’s the hardest part.”

  Mele then asked Nogueira if he was haunted by the memories of those he had killed.

  Mele: “It doesn’t, it doesn’t bother ya? You don’t wake up at night?”

  Nogueira: “No, I relive.”

  Mele: “You do relive it? How? What do you do, dream about it?”

  Nogueira: “It’s just as good as the real thing.”

  Mele: “God. I couldn’t do that.”

  Gigi: “What do you mean, you relive it?”

  Nogueira: “I dream it.”

  Gigi: “Do you really?”

  Nogueira: “Yeah.”

  Gigi: “You gotta love it, but that’s a rare dream. That’s about as rare as a wet dream. Bob, let’s put it this way right? Ninety, 99.9 percent of the time it’s what, well deserved, right?”

  Nogueira: “Oh, maybe a hundred.”

  Gigi: “So there’s no conscience with it because it’s necessary.”

  Mele even pestered Gigi to sell him coke, and when he learned that Gigi was going to visit his son in Arizona, he ingratiated himself further with Gigi and the group in an attempt to go on the trip. In December 1996, Mele convinced Gigi to purchase five kilos of cocaine for $15,000, which would be shipped to him in Massachusetts. Gigi, McConnell and Mele would meet at a later date in Las Vegas and Arizona with undercover DEA agents to finalize the deal. Mele even went so far as taking Bobby Nogueira out to buy Christmas gifts for his children and paying for Nogueira’s room at the Comfort Inn on his credit card. This is possibly how the hit men learned where Nogueira was staying, since he was under an assumed name.

  On November 14, 1996, bloody remains were found in a Danvers, Massachusetts dumpster. At a car wash business, a man found two bloody MVP gym bags, lime and clothes in a dumpster. Police quickly linked a missing Medford woman and two deadly drug overdoses in Stoneham to a North Shore ex-con with mob ties. Originally, it was believed that the girl was killed because she was an informant who ratted on Gigi’s gun-running operation; however, this was not the case. It turned out that Aislin Silva was killed because sh
e allowed police to find a cache of high-powered weapons that a friend had stolen from Gigi. An ex-con named Kevin R. Meuse had been seen around the time of the murder with a known Portalla associate. Stephen DiCenso suffered permanent brain damage from his drug overdose and his two friends, Stephen Yorks and Paul McCarthy, both died from their overdoses. It was widely speculated that Gigi had supplied the heroin that killed them. DiCenso was ruled incompetent to stand trial and face federal gun charges. Silva was last seen with DiCenso getting into a 1991 Ford Explorer two days before her tissue was found in the dumpster along with Meuse’s fingerprints. Meuse drove a 1991 Explorer that matched the vehicle’s description. He had been released in 1996 from Massachusetts Correctional Institute at Cedar Junction Walpole after serving seventeen years for armed robbery and attempted murder. Meuse was working out at the time at Paul’s Gym in Woburn, Massachusetts. The gym is owned by Paul DeCologero, who, with three relatives and a family friend, was facing federal drug charges. The family also has ties to Gigi.

  Additionally, in December Gigi drove to New York to talk to the head of the Gambino family, the traditional ally of the Patriarca family. On the way to New York, he stopped off in Providence to visit Luigi “Baby Shanks” Manocchio, who operated out of Café Verde on Federal Hill. Salemme had installed Baby Shanks as acting head of the family while he was going through the trial for his life. Gigi cruised Atwell Avenue for at least thirty minutes searching for the café. Running late for his meeting, he gave up the search and headed to New York. For the moment, at least, Baby Shanks was still in power. The meeting with the head of the Gambino family helped to establish that Gigi was planning to make a move and was seeking permission from one of the most powerful families on the commission.

  Baby Shanks Manocchio was a small man with a receding hairline and eyes of steel. He was well read, spoke several languages fluently and could be called a kind of renaissance gangster. He was even an international fugitive. He fled the country when he was indicted for his role in the murder of two renegade bookmakers in 1968. By July 1979, he was tired of running, so he returned to Rhode Island and surrendered himself. In 1983, he finally stood trial for the murders he had helped to plan. He and several other men killed Rudolph Marfeo and Anthony Melei, who had defied Patriarca’s order to shut down a gambling operation that had not been sanctioned. For his role in the double murder, he was sentenced to two life terms plus ten years. In 1985, the Rhode Island Supreme Court overturned his conviction because the essential prosecution witness who was involved with the murders and agreed to cooperate was suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. The same government witness was also encouraged to lie by FBI agent Paul Rico in the trial of Maurice “Pro” Lerner, one of the seven involved in the murder. He then pled guilty to conspiracy, was credited for the two years he had already served and was released. In the past twenty years, he has been able to stay out of trouble and avoid prosecution.

  During this time, George Lubell, a former corrections officer at Deer Island and Suffolk County House of Corrections at South Bay in Roxbury, was terminated for unnecessary force against inmates, according to records in 1994. Lubell was an associate of Gigi and believed to be a shooter in the crew. Lubell was known for his short fuse and propensity toward violence, along with his nasty disposition. During a drug buy in Bellingham Square, Chelsea, in 1995, he was shot in the face. The deal evidently went bad, but Lubell survived. He was also a suspect in the 1997 slaying of Charles Olivolo, a twenty-eight-year-old weight lifter and auto store clerk in Peabody. His decomposed body washed up in Boston Harbor. Lubell was also implicated in dealing drugs in South Bay County Jail. According to court documents, he and Suffolk County Sheriff L.T. Douglas Racca distributed Percocet, marijuana and anabolic steroids in the Boston area. Lubell was shot in the back outside of the Powerhouse Gym on Charger Street in Revere when he was shaking down a drug dealer. After the attack, Lubell went into the gym and requested that they call an ambulance. It appeared that the gunman fled on foot down Squire Road. He was described as a dark-haired male in his early twenties.

  An unrelated investigation revealed further information on federal wiretaps from Town Line Ten Pin Bowling Alley. The wiretaps revealed the information about Lubell and Racca, Lubell’s shooting and their drug ring.

  A day after Gigi was shot at outside the Caravan Club, Jackie Salemme was in federal court answering an eight-count indictment that dated back to 1993, when he was operating a football-betting ring in Massachusetts and Rhode Island.

  CHAPTER 7

  THE TRIAL

  In December 1996, Gigi, McConnell and Mele all took a trip out to Las Vegas first and then Arizona. During the trip, Gigi met with an undercover DEA agent who hammered out a deal to ship cocaine to him through the mail. The agent attempted to sell McConnell an automatic rifle for $10,000, but he declined. Gigi got to see his son and spend some time with him, and he needed to get away from all of the problems back home. On the day the men left for the trip, a federal grand jury had handed down an indictment of Gigi for a drug deal that took place in November that had been video and audio taped. Presumably, Smiley Mele had helped the government set up the surveillance.

  It had been about two weeks since Gigi’s attempted assassination, and things were looking up, or so it seemed. On December 14 at 7:30 a.m., as Gigi and McConnell were exiting the plane at Logan Airport on their return home from Arizona, they were greeted by U.S. Drug Enforcement agents, who arrested them as they stepped off the plane. Gigi asked the agents how they had known where he was. DEA special agent Anthony Roberto jokingly suggested that a tracking device had been implanted in his buttocks when he underwent surgery to remove the bullet from the shooting in Revere. Gigi was charged with possession of cocaine with intent to distribute and conspiracy to violate the narcotic laws. McConnell was charged with conspiracy. Two days later, on December 16, 1996, Gigi’s brother Eddie was arrested in a separate case and charged with possession of cocaine and intent to distribute. Shortly after Gigi was put into custody, a warrant was served on his Nahant home. DEA agents searched the home and seized guns and bulletproof vests. U.S. District Court Magistrate Judge Robert Collings ruled that Gigi was a danger to the public and a possible flight risk, so he was ordered held without bail pending trial.

  As Gigi was being held in jail without bail, the government was amping up its case against the New England mob. The U.S. federal district attorney was going to bill the alleged actions of the accused as a bloody struggle by a rogue faction attempting to take over the remnants of the New England mob. Assistant U.S. attorney Jeffrey Auerhahn was assigned to the case. He was going to put ten men on trial and place the majority of the blame on Robert “Bobby Russo” Carrozza. In his opening statements, Auerhahn stated, “This case will be about organized crime, the mafia, and about La Cosa Nostra.” He went on to say, “The glue that holds it all together is that man—Bobby Russo.” They planned to put Sean Cote and Mark Spisak on the stand to testify against their former friends. They were originally on the indictment but agreed to cooperate with the government. Defense lawyer Martin Weinberg countered in his opening by stating that the government’s case was built on “professional criminals” and an FBI informant who were hoping to have their sentences reduced. The defendants included John Patti III, Eugene “Gino” Rida, Vincent “Gigi” Marino/Portalla, Nazzaro “Ralph” Scarpa, Paul DeCologero, Christopher Puopolo, Anthony Diaz and Robert “Bobby Russo” Carrozza. Three other men reached plea agreements prior to trial: Leo Boffoli, John Arciero and Enrico Ponzo.

  The week before the trial was set to begin, Leo Boffoli entered into an agreement with the government. Assistant U.S. attorney Auerhahn asked that Boffoli be able to serve his time in protective custody and, upon release, enter into the Witness Protection Program. Boffoli was charged with conspiracy to murder, attempted murder, illegal use of a firearm and four counts of perjury. However, he ended up pleading guilty only to conspiracy to murder and one count of perjury. The government then requested a di
smissal of the other charges.

  Boffoli was one of 208 potential witnesses whom the government could have possibly called to testify. The coup de grâce of the government’s evidence was the wiretap of the mafia induction ceremony held in Medford, Massachusetts, in October 1989.

  The strangest moment of the trial occurred after Boston Police officer Ralph Amoroso was done testifying about the grisly scene of murder victim John Souza. When he stepped down from the witness stand, he walked past the members of the jury and shook hands with the defendant, Michael Romano Sr. Amoroso had walked a beat in East Boston for twelve years and Romano had spent his entire life there.

  Just weeks before the government’s star witness was due to testify, he died in custody. Sean Cote was dead at the age of twenty-seven. It appears that Cote died in his cell in the federal prison in Allenwood, Pennsylvania. His death was ruled a heart attack. Cote was in the Federal Witness Security Program waiting his turn to testify. It is believed that his long history of drug use and chain smoking led to his demise. His death did not have any indications of foul play. His death had a psychological effect on the prosecution for the moment, but that would soon pass.

  The defense lawyers centered their arguments on the shootings of Michael Prochilo and Cirame and the stabbing of O’Toole. They used the fact that these men all could not identify their assailants and the witnesses all gave conflicting descriptions. One of the most damaging pieces of evidence was a letter dated December 16, 1996, written by Michael Romano and addressed to his cousin Gino Rida, who was incarcerated at the time. The letter suggests that Rida was having a problem with LaCorte and Romano was schooling him on how to handle the situation. The letter even referenced a club in Maverick Square, East Boston, that was unofficially owned by Carrozza and his half brother, J.R. Russo. In a P.S., Romano stated, “Raymond Jr. asks about you all the time. He knows how much I care about you.” This loyalty to Patriarca on the part of Carrozza’s followers might be surprising, since they helped engineer the end of his reign. The defense lawyers argued that the letter, while damaging, could not establish a causal relationship between these men and the crimes that they were on trial for. They went on to say that it was reasonable to believe that Romano might have possibly been bragging or blowing off steam, especially since the letter had overtones that Romano and Rida were possibly in danger and were name dropping out of fear, as a means of self-preservation.