Last Don Standing

by Larry McShane

  “What are we gonna do?” asked Vadino.

  “I’ll tell you what we’re gonna do,” Natale snapped. “We’re gonna turn right on Snyder Avenue and go see the chief.” The tone indicated this was the last answer coming from Natale for the rest of the ride. The two men drove on, accompanied only by the sounds of the car’s engine and its four spinning wheels. Vadino parked out front and waited outside as Natale knocked gently on the boss’s front door.

  Bruno was blunt when Natale came inside: “It’s about the Irishman in your neighborhood. He’s trying to be something he ain’t.” It wasn’t the first time that the two had had this conversation, and Natale assured the boss that everything was under control.

  “Don’t worry about it,” said Natale. “I’m gonna go up and see him.”

  Bruno was just as blunt about Allen: Not only would he live, but he would join Natale’s crew over in New Jersey. And so it was said, as Natale often observed, and so it was done.

  “Make sure he makes a living,” Bruno counseled. “Because he gave up McGreal about killing you, and maybe killing me, too.”

  “Angelo Bruno inadvertently caused the downfall of me and my crew and opened the doors for the treachery in Tony Bananas’ heart,” Natale said decades later. Ralph found a place for Allen with his crew, handling chores from arson for hire to extorting local businesses to truck hijackings.

  Natale made his second trip to Lewisburg in six months, meeting again in the visitors’ room with McGreal. The sit-down was brief, with McGreal implausibly insisting that he had said nothing to anyone about the union situation—much less a word to anybody from the New York families. He thanked Natale for the help coming his way once he returned to the streets. The two men shook hands, with Natale looking into McGreal’s eyes and seeing nothing.

  On the ride home, Natale thought of an old adage: “If a man does not listen to the first note of the song, he will never listen to the rest.”

  The trip that Natale never took was the one he most wanted to make: a visit with Charlie Allen.

  “I woulda went to see him,” Natale said. “I woulda killed him and anybody he’s with. I don’t care if he’s in his mother’s house—she’s gonna go, too. I’m gonna kill him. And now I’m looking at Blinky. What am I gonna do?”

  The loyal soldier and friend, instead of following his instinct, did nothing. He even gave Allen a second pass after the mob underling griped that his partner in a series of hijackings deserved a bigger cut of the pie.

  “I said, ‘More? For what?’” Natale recalled. “I looked at him. You know what was in my heart? I’m gonna kill him. I told him, ‘Why don’t you meet me tomorrow, at the Holiday Inn, in the back? Seven o’clock in the morning, we could talk.’

  “That morning, I got in the car. In the five-minute ride, I said, ‘What a mistake I made.’ Truth on my children. I see his car back there, and I said, ‘I can’t kill this guy. I gotta give him a chance.’ So this is my life, and I didn’t kill him.”

  Charlie Allen, like a bad penny, would resurface to remind Natale of his error in judgment. But Natale now had something more pressing on his plate: the murder of McGreal, as directed by his boss.

  “Joe McGreal’s fate was sealed, as sure as the spring follows winter,” Natale decided. “I said to myself, ‘Joe McGreal is a dead man.’”

  Three years after McGreal watched in disbelief as Natale whacked Feeney, it was his turn—on Christmas night 1973, on direct orders from Angelo Bruno. After Natale left his family around the television, he went to meet with his unsuspecting target. McGreal—godfather to one of Natale’s daughters—never realized the end was near until they pulled into the darkened parking lot outside a shuttered restaurant.

  During the ride to meet with McGreal, Natale reflected on the past. McGreal’s cause of death, in Natale’s mind, was putting his trust in a weasel such as Allen to keep his mouth shut. McGreal’s destiny was now controlled by the person sitting in the backseat of a car, and his name was Ralph Natale.

  “Boom boom boom!” Natale recalled. “Three shots in the same hole.”

  The timing of the killing particularly bothered Natale, who was typically immune to such thoughts. He even considered calling the whole thing off. But in the end, he pulled the trigger and pumped three hollow-point bullets into McGreal’s head.

  “When you take a man’s tomorrows, there’s more than just saying it,” he reflected years later. “More, more. No matter how cold-blooded, coldhearted. Could there be a reason why? Not that there’s a good reason to take anybody’s tomorrows. But sometimes, it has to be done.”

  Joe McGreal was gone before the Christmas lights of South Philly came down.

  The local TV news blared news of the mob hit throughout the next day. Natale knew that Bruno would be pleased, and his Atlantic City partners placated: the boss had picked the right man to protect their future interests.

  A young Philly Turk once told Natale that his handiwork with a gun was greatly admired among the local mob cognoscenti. Wayne Grande, who later emerged as one of the most treacherous and untrustworthy mobsters in Philly’s long and twisted history, recalled his dad providing a glowing review of Natale the shooter.

  “He said, ‘You know, Ralphy, when I was a kid—boy, how things get around,’” Natale said. “‘My father, when Joe McGreal was found in the car dead, the next day my father said, “That was Ralphy.”’ And that was the truth.”

  Natale made his share of enemies—with the keen eyes of his wife, Lucia, sparing him from one hit attempt by a vengeful pal of McGreal in the midseventies.

  Natale was hanging out at the Holiday Inn bar opposite the Garden State Race Track, waiting for Lucia to meet him for dinner. Their son dropped her off, and she came inside to see her husband holding court with his crew. Outside, Rick Conte sat stewing behind the wheel of his car, the murder of Ralph Natale occupying his every thought.

  “All the guys stood up—‘Lucia, sit here.’ She said, ‘Ralphy, before I sit down, can I speak to you?’ I knew something was up,” Natale remembered. “We walk into the lobby. She says, ‘That guy, Rick, he’s out in the parking lot. He’s in his car, and when he saw me, he sort of bent his head down.’

  “I said to myself, ‘Oh, this motherfucker—he was a pretty good boxer and a good friend of Joe McGreal. He was going around, drinking and talking: ‘I’m gonna do this. I’m gonna do that. I’m gonna get even.’”

  Natale assured his wife it was nothing and told her to sit down and have a drink. Then he asked his bartender pal Franny McDonnel if a certain shipment of wine had arrived.

  “He knew what I meant,” Ralph recalled. “I go back in where the wine is, and I told him, ‘Get your .38 and come around from the back. That punk’s out there. He wants to get even? I’m gonna let him try.’ This is five thirty at night. The last race is over. I said, ‘I’m gonna kill this motherfucker right now, in broad daylight.’ I don’t care.

  “But he saw Franny, and then he knew I was coming. He pulled away.”

  Natale summoned his deadliest associates, Mike Marrone and Ronnie Turchi, and began scouring the local mob hangouts for the would-be shooter—only to come up empty. But Natale was not one to forget even the smallest of slights, much less an aborted attempt to put two bullets into his head. When their paths unexpectedly crossed a year later, every detail came flooding back.

  “Ang had sent word to meet him at one p.m. at Freddie Iezzi’s bar,” Natale recalled. “I brought along Mike Marrone because in those days you never knew if your number was coming up, you know? There’s a group of men sitting in the back of the bar with Ang and Phil Testa. Then I knew everything was all right. Ang just liked having me around.”

  The party included Russell Bufalino, who ran the mob’s operations in northeast Pennsylvania. Natale greeted the boss with a handshake and a kiss on the cheek—a violation of Bruno’s usual rules, but one that was ignored among this small group of important mafiosi.

  The other guests, to Natale’s d
isbelief, included Conte—now working for Bufalino. Ralph, though outwardly calm, felt the surge of a murderous payback rise in his suddenly boiling blood, enough that Bruno could see the signs of anger in Natale. The underling said nothing to anyone as the two bosses conducted business and watched silently as Conte left with Bufalino. Natale remained quiet even as Bruno asked him for a ride to lawyer Jacob Kossman’s office. Bruno sat up front, and underboss Testa took the backseat.

  The uncomfortable ten-minute quiet was finally broken by the boss. “Why did you look so aggressive when you were introduced to that young guy? What was the problem?”

  The enraged Natale, throwing mob protocol to the wind, spoke the brutal truth about his feelings toward a fellow mobster from another family: “I said something that I don’t think anybody ever said to any boss at any time—‘The next time I see that guy, I’m gonna kill him. I don’t give a fuck.’” Looking in the rearview mirror, Natale saw a small grin flash across the face of the typically dour Testa—“the first time I ever saw him smile.”

  Bruno was stunned by the declaration: “You’re gonna give me a heart attack.” But Natale recounted the racetrack tale and Conte’s boozy threats in the barrooms of South Philly. When Bruno heard the details, he offered to handle the killing personally.

  Natale became even angrier at the mere suggestion. “You know what I told him? ‘If you do that for me, you’ll lose me for the rest of my life. You can’t take care of my personal business.’ He’s got a little smile on his face, and he said, ‘Okay, just drop me off. Tomorrow morning, just make sure you come over and have coffee.’”

  Natale explained his reasoning at the breakfast get-together: “Ang, I love you, but nobody’s catching me with my pants on the ground. ’Cause if you take care of it, that means I’m not the man you think I am. Is that what you want him to think?”

  The postscript: Natale never laid eyes on Conte again, probably the best thing for both parties. “I never found that bastard,” he said ruefully.

  With Natale and his growing family in the Jersey suburbs, he landed a legitimate gig tending bar once again—this time at the Rickshaw Inn, a popular spot opposite the racetrack in Cherry Hill. The place doubled as Natale’s base of illegal operations.

  “I wanted to make some extra money, and I enjoyed it,” he said of his decision to get back behind the stick. “The owners thought I could keep a lot of trash out of there. What a magnificent place! I would meet different people there. You knew who you could trust. And it was five minutes from my house.”

  11

  UNION SUNDOWN

  When the call came, Ralph Natale reflected on exactly how long it had been since he’d laid eyes on Jimmy Hoffa. Their final meeting was tinged with melancholy rather than the bravura of their initial get-together—a sad coda to a close friendship. Hoffa was reaching out after a run of hard luck and hard times.

  For more than four years, Hoffa ran the powerful International Brotherhood of Teamsters from behind bars in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, with his handpicked general vice president, Frank Fitzsimmons, representing the boss on the outside. Hoffa, after a brutal and bruising legal war with the government, went to jail in 1967 after convictions for conspiracy and misusing the union’s pension funds.

  Hoffa cut a 1971 deal for his freedom, but it came with a price: the veteran labor organizer agreed to resign his post atop the Teamsters and never again serve as a union official. Hoffa was promised, before heading to prison, that his successor Fitzsimmons could resign and surrender the union once Hoffa was back on the streets.

  But things had changed in his absence, and Fitzsimmons—with the backing of some prominent mob leaders—wasn’t going anywhere. Hoffa was undeterred and began angling to regain control of his union and its top spot.

  “Fitzsimmons went to see (Genovese family boss) Fat Tony Salerno, who told him, ‘Don’t worry about him. Jimmy Hoffa will be talked to, and this will be straightened out,’” said Natale. “Of course, nobody kept their word.”

  The possibility of Hoffa’s running for the union’s top spot in 1976 soon emerged as his likeliest road to Teamsters redemption. Hoffa, behind the scenes, contacted some of his old friends to see if such a move was plausible—a clandestine tour to see who was willing to back his play.

  Natale was hardly surprised by this bold move: “They couldn’t change Jimmy. They could tell him what to do, but they couldn’t change his manhood. He was a great union leader. And he had some balls. I heard he was gonna do this or that.”

  The final meeting of Natale and Hoffa took place in the Rickshaw Inn, a restaurant with a gold-flecked roof and a huge half-a-horseshoe-shaped bar opposite the Cherry Hill racetrack. A few days earlier, Natale was at the offices of Local 170 when the phone rang. It was John Greeley, head of the South Jersey Local 676 and one of area’s most influential labor leaders.

  “Calls me out of the clear blue sky,” said Natale. “John says, ‘That guy’s in town. He wants to see you.’ I knew what he means. And I said, ‘Oh, yeah? Okay.’”

  Natale, unsure what to expect, arrived for the 1:00 p.m. get-together with two killers from his crew, Turchi and Marrone—the latter a truly terrifying figure who once attended a wedding reception with a hatchet tucked in the small of his back. “Just in case,” he explained.

  Natale figured he was better safe than eternally sorry. “I never knew when people called me what’s gonna happen,” he said. “’Cause in those days, everything was comme ci, comme ça—I might have some crazy people wanna take a shot at me. I’m gonna go down blazing. I ain’t gonna walk into something.

  “In our life, you’re only killed by your friends—or people pretending to be your friends. That’s our life.”

  His fears were unfounded. And unlike their previous meeting in Detroit, when the union world belonged to an all-powerful Hoffa and the future appeared limitless, a feeling of impending doom lingered this time.

  “Anyway, I went and it was just terrible,” Natale recounted. “It’s about one in the afternoon, it’s dark in the lounge. At the far end of the horseshoe, there’s Jimmy and John Greeley. Jimmy comes up and shakes my hand. We hugged like men.”

  The old friends exchanged pleasantries, and before long Greeley excused himself, leaving Hoffa and Natale to discuss the business at hand: the reincarnation of James Riddle Hoffa.

  Hoffa spoke first: “I heard you’ve been busy.” Natale smiled, and then Hoffa got down to business: “I guess you know why I’m here.”

  “I said, ‘I hear a lot of things through the grapevine.’ I’d heard different people telling me about it, people that meant something.

  “He said, ‘Ralph, I’m gonna need some help in Jersey. John Greeley already said he was with me, if I run.’ And John would. He was that kind of man. Jimmy said, ‘The next convention, I’m gonna take the thing back by acclaim and I need your help. Would you help me like you always helped me?’”

  Natale looked directly at the powerful union leader, a look that expressed both his admiration and the dilemma he was now facing. Finally he spoke: “Jimmy, you know who was I with since I was a boy—before I was a boy. When I was in my mother’s womb, my father was with them, and I’m with them. So let me tell you one thing first: ‘A man cannot serve two kings.’”

  Hoffa offered a wry grin before responding, “Ralphy, I knew you were going to say that.” Unmentioned was the name of Angelo Bruno, who would make the ultimate decision on Philly’s support of Hoffa.

  Natale then offered a biblical reference to his boss: “Listen, if he—like Pontius Pilate—washes his hands of it, says he’s not involved in all this stuff against you, I’m gonna help you in a minute. I know Fitzsimmons broke his word to you, I was told by a hundred people.”

  Hoffa was expecting the answer, and he knew Ralph’s response meant support from the Philadelphia faction was a pipe dream. He looked right back at Natale: “I knew you would say that. And I respect that. But I wish you said, ‘If he looks the other way, I’ll help you an
d do whatever you need.’”

  The mood turned darker than the dim bar lights as the two old friends sat in silence, their brief conversation signaling with a black future for Hoffa. The implications were not lost on Natale, either.

  “He already knew the answer, but he had to ask me,” Natale said. “When he said he understood, I felt like I was at his funeral. I could smell the dirt of the grave on him. That’s how I felt, right then and there in that room. I hadn’t felt, up to that time, so bad in all my life, until I looked at him. I’m pretty coldhearted about these things, but my heart went out to him.

  “He was dead. He was a dead man talking to me. I said, ‘Jim, are you sure?’

  “And he said, ‘I have to do this. It’s the only thing I have.’ I looked at this man, who could get killed for doing what he thought was right. And he was right—he was ten times the man that Fitzsimmons was.”

  Natale awoke the next morning and drove directly to Bruno’s house to speak with the boss about the Hoffa situation. Bruno’s wife, Sue, answered his knock, and invited Ralph in for a cup of coffee and a few minutes of her husband’s time. When Bruno appeared, Natale recounted his meeting at the Rickshaw.

  The boss’s response was hard and fast: “You know I love Jimmy. But there’s no reason for him to do this. It’s wrong. Even if he calls you and says it’s an emergency, stay away. That man up in Jersey [Tony Provenzano] is going to take care of this. Please, don’t forget what I said.”

  Natale, as usual, kept his mouth shut and remembered every word. The boss’s edict was final, a Philadelphia epitaph for Hoffa’s reign. “And I thought, ‘Oh my God.’ It wasn’t long after that he disappeared,” Natale recalled.

  He never saw or spoke to Jimmy Hoffa again. The mighty labor boss disappeared on July 30, 1975.

  “I couldn’t get over it for weeks. I felt terrible—oh, I felt bad,” Natale recalled. “And for me—I seen a lot of things, I done a lot of things—it bothered me. I respected him so much as a man.”