Murder Machine

by Gene Mustain

  On February 17, however, the day after Joey’s and Anthony’s visit to Freddy, and after an informant said the crew would move drugs that day, a large task force team was positioned around R-Twice Collision, the Canarsie body shop where, in the post-DeMeo era, Joey and Anthony and other crew members hung out. The stakeout included two federal officers unaccustomed to drug raids—Artie’s FBI partner, Marilyn Lucht, and Leslie Lauziere, a postal inspector—but Walter had imposed the task force model on his team.

  In several two-way radio-equipped cars and a van, the team took turns picking up and handing off Joey as he drove out of R-Twice, then drove back and parked in front. Sergeant Joseph Coffey from homicide and Lieutenant John O’Brien from auto crimes, the operation’s ranking officers, had picked up his trail last. Harry Brady was with them. “Joey took a package from the trunk! Let’s move!” Coffey screamed over his radio.

  As Coffey’s undercover car screeched up, Joey bolted inside R-Twice. The three cops jumped out with unholstered pistols and ran right in after him as other undercover cars roared to life. Gunning his toward R-Twice from a gas station across the street, Frank Pergola hit a speed bump, blew out a tire and lurched the rest of the way on shredded rubber.

  Inside, the first cops to arrive pointed pistols at Anthony and other crew members—“Don’t anybody get excited!” Brady shouted. “Don’t anybody move a fucking muscle, or I’ll blow your fucking brains out!”

  Having wanted this moment a long time, some of the cops were pumping more adrenaline than the crew. Especially Joseph Coffey, as he chased Joey into a bathroom and saw him flushing what appeared to be cocaine down a toilet. “You motherfucker!” he yelled, then rapped Joey in the head with his gun, grabbed him by the back of the neck and shoved his head into the toilet bowl. “You flushed the coke down, asshole. Now go get it!”

  “Are you fucking nuts?” Joey gargled, squirming back up.

  Coffey dragged Joey back into the body shop as Brady ordered the well-dressed suspects to lie face-down on the grease-streaked floor.

  “What about our fucking clothes?” Joey protested.

  “Fuck you and your clothes!” Coffey barked. “Lie down!”

  After everyone calmed down, Kenny McCabe asked Coffey, a good friend, about the supposed package he said he saw Joey taking from the car. From the look on Coffey’s face, Kenny concluded there was no package, that whatever Joey flushed away was a personal-use amount, and that Coffey had not seen a package and had just decided it was time to arrest these particular crew members. “You fucking guys,” he said to Coffey and O’Brien.

  Kenny was disappointed because he had hoped to snare Joey’s new buddy Carlo Profeta in a drug deal. Profeta had been with the crew since Freddy was jailed in 1981. Under the pressure of drug charges, Profeta might have filled in more gaps in crew history. “Carlo,” Kenny said, “could have given us some more bodies.”

  Coffey, however, insisted he did see a package. He and Brady visited the home of a nearby federal judge and obtained a search warrant for R-Twice based on Joey’s frantic dash to the bathroom. No drugs or package were found. The other cops kept the suspects handcuffed in the grease a while, then took them to see Walter, who gave them his ritual greeting and invitation to be cooperative. All declined.

  Ronald Jivens, another auto crimes officer, tried changing the mind of crew member Ronald Turekian, the man who had helped Vito Arena and Richie DiNome bury Joseph Scorney in cement five years before. Other than that, Turekian was not a big fish, but he did come up with a memorable reply to Jivens’s pitch on behalf of Walter Mack.

  “What am I, a canary? That guy Mack is a flag-waving son of a bitch. I ain’t gonna work for no Wally’s Pet Shop.”

  CHAPTER 26

  Lassie Comes Home

  The situation was again ripe for dying on the street with a gun in his hand—but on February 25, 1984, the day the task force chose to arrest Anthony Gaggi, he was unarmed. He was grabbed as he left a Bensonhurst diner and walked to a small clothing store his wife and daughter now owned and operated a few steps away.

  Had he been armed and begun shooting, he would have died a hero, in the minds of some Bath Beach–Bensonhurst legend-makers, because of the way the cops came upon him. Ronnie Cadieux nearly ran him over as he drove his car up on a sidewalk and down it to block Nino’s path, as another undercover car boxed him in from behind.

  “Stop, Ronnie, stop!” screamed Cadieux’s partner, Frank Pergola, as their car barreled down the sidewalk. Ronnie, eager for action because he was away during the R-Twice arrests, braked to a stop within a couple of feet of the startled suspect.

  From the second car on the sidewalk, an old Gaggi adversary jumped out and delivered the news: “You’re under arrest, Nino,” Kenny McCabe said.

  “State or federal?” was fifty-eight-year-old Nino’s only reply, probably because he thought the Brooklyn District Attorney was coming after him for the Eppolito fix.

  “This is the big one,” Kenny said.

  Other than that, handcuffed Nino had nothing to say on the ride to Walter’s office. There, he also sat in stony silence, impressing his captors as a man who would hold up well as a prisoner of war.

  The arresting officers then escorted Nino out of Walter’s office for further processing at FBI headquarters, a short walk across Foley Square in downtown Manhattan. It was raining, so they decided to drive. Frank Pergola saw there would not be enough room and began walking.

  “No, get in, Frank,” said Kenny. “I’ll put Nino in the trunk.”

  Nino managed a tight smile. In FBI headquarters, he relaxed a bit more. Seeing Artie Ruffels cleaning his eyeglasses, he uttered his first words since being taken into custody many hours before. “You ought to try a pair with lighter frames. My son’s an optometrist. He’s on Madison Avenue—stop in and see him.”

  Artie and Nino then tried on each other’s glasses. “I see what you mean,” said Artie. Like the others arrested so far, Nino was arraigned and released on bail to await certain indictment by the grand jury.

  It was now time for Freddy DiNome to fish or cut bait. Kenny and Artie took him out of the MCC and placed him in a motel on Long Island. Marilyn Lucht talked his wife Carol into going there for three days of talks. Carol, Freddy’s second wife, told Marilyn she would listen, but she was not going to change her mind and go with him to Kansas or any state like it. “Without his friends, he’ll just have me to beat up on.”

  On the last day of the meetings, Artie poured it on: “Look, Carol, this is your last chance. These people we’re dealing with might grab you, they might grab one of your kids. How do I know this? This is Paul Castellano, head of the Mafia, we’re talking about. If we take your husband back to the MCC—his friends already know we took him out—he’s going to get killed. You can’t do that to him, as a wife and as the mother of his kids.”

  Carol did not reply. Artie took that as a waiver. “All right, let’s go,” he said. He brought more agents to the scene, bundled everyone up in government cars, drove to a ferry crossing to Connecticut, declared a national emergency at the dock, ordered several other cars off the ferry, and sailed away into the witness wilderness with Freddy, Carol, and their children.

  After a couple of weeks of debriefings, Freddy officially came on board on March 14, 1984, and testified to the grand jury on that day—the third and last major witness against Paul, Nino, and the crew. He was an exclamation point to Vito and Dominick, but also a supplier of many missing puzzle pieces—among them, rogue cops such as Avenue P graduate John Doherty and Gemini Lounge drinker Thomas Sobota. In time, Doherty would be called before the grand jury, where he pleaded the Fifth Amendment; because the statute of limitations had run out on some of his alleged crimes and because other evidence against him was weak, the task force assigned him a low priority and eventually forgot about him because he had already resigned from the NYPD. Sobota, who had quit drinking after Patrick Penny was killed, would make a deal and become a cooperating witness.

/>   Freddy still had to complete the remaining few months of his Empire Boulevard sentence, but before he was transferred to a new prison with a witness-security unit, and before his wife and children were turned over to the marshal’s service, Kenny, Artie, and Marilyn treated the family to several days of vacation.

  At first, Freddy was in a buoyant and crass mood. He cracked a sick joke about his clumsiness in the dismemberment murders of Ronald Falcaro and Khaled Daoud—“After them, Roy demoted me from cutter to wrapper”—and lasciviously told Artie, “I’d like to fuck that bitch Marilyn.” Ridiculous as the idea was, he tried flirting with her. “Oh, Freddy,” Marilyn would say with remarkable patience, “you’re not my type, and you’re a married man!”

  The agents treated Freddy and his family to dinners, movies, and trips to a museum and historical places. They tried to choose events that might benefit Freddy’s sixteen-year-old daughter and eleven-year-old son, who, like a son from Freddy’s first marriage, was named Freddy, Jr. After a few days of such sights, Freddy fell into a deep funk and stopped talking. Only in hindsight did Artie and Marilyn realize why: Freddy had spent most of his life in the company of skels and was beginning to see how different he was from normal people. The cultural trips made him feel inadequate, a social loser. Carol DiNome had told Marilyn that their children were not allowed to have books around the house, because if Freddy could not read, neither could they.

  On the last night of vacation, before Freddy was to return to prison, Artie’s wife Inger joined everyone for a farewell dinner. Mostly, Freddy sat and stared at the ceiling. “Freddy could be pleasant if he wanted, he’s not such a bad guy,” Inger told her husband, “but he’s freaking out. I’d worry about him.”

  * * *

  Near the end of March, with the pivotal support of his influential new boss Rudolph Giuliani (who had pulled the right levers in Washington) Walter won his turf battle with the Eastern District. He got permission to include Paul in his case.

  Alarmed by Nino’s arrest, Paul dispatched a Machiavellian New York attorney, Roy Cohn—the communist-hunting wonder boy of the Senate Army-McCarthy hearings in the early 1950s—to tell Walter and Giuliani what a wonderful meat salesman Paul was. “Do you really believe a man such as Mr. Castellano is involved in auto theft?” Cohn asked.

  Joseph Coffey, attending the meeting in his role as chief of the NYPD organized crime homicide squad, felt like tossing Cohn out a window, but the government lawyers politely listened and let Cohn earn his promotional fee without giving him anything useful or comforting for Paul.

  Soon Walter’s grand jury voted a massive firepower seventy-eight-count RICO indictment against Paul, Nino, and twenty-two crew members or hangers-on and sometime associates—such as paralegal Judy May Hellman. For being Nino’s ringer on the Eppolito jury, pretty, doe-eyed Judy, and her husband and father-in-law, would stand trial with several of the most notorious killers in United States criminal history. Because so many victims were never found and evidence in other homicides was not up to legal requirements, the indictment alleged only twenty-five murders; still, it was the most ever charged in a federal case.

  As part of the turf-war settlement, Walter did not include John Gotti in his indictment. While investigating loanshark Sol Hellman, the task force had come across crimes for which Gotti was vulnerable, but the Eastern District desired Gotti for yet another case in the works, so Walter threw his rival prosecutors what was then a comparatively insignificant bone.

  Walter’s indictment was kept secret until March 30, when the task force arrested Paul, who unlike the others, was allowed to surrender at the Manhattan office of his trial attorney, James La Rossa—Nino’s lawyer in the Eppolito case.

  The agents and detectives were against the special treatment for Paul. They wanted to arrest him on the street like the others because a surprise arrest often yielded new information—a telephone number in a wallet, a diary in a jacket pocket—but Giuliani and Walter decided to grant Carlo Gambino’s successor the dignity of an orchestrated, consensual arrest.

  Task force members got together beforehand and elected Kenny McCabe as the one to say the magic words—“you’re under arrest”—to Paul at La Rossa’s office. In two cars, Kenny and seven other team members then escorted Paul to Wally’s Pet Shop. Paul, unlike Nino, was courteous and seemingly relaxed from the start, but his message to Walter was the same: Take a hike.

  As handcuffed Paul was escorted to the FBI, Kenny on his left, Joseph Coffey on his right, other task force members trailing behind, Coffey happened to recall how he once met Carlo Gambino.

  “He was a real gentleman,” added Kenny.

  Paul turned and gave Kenny a wounded look, as if concerned Kenny believed he did not measure up to Carlo, his late cousin and brother-in-law. “What? I’m not a gentleman!”

  “I didn’t say that,” Kenny said diplomatically.

  Later that day, new United States Attorney for the Southern District Rudolph Giuliani took the spotlight at a press conference and announced the indictment. Never before had the government accused so many members of an organized criminal enterprise at once. Giuliani described it as “the most important chapter” in the history of the federal government’s war against the Mafia, and veteran reporters noted with interest that Giuliani lavished praise on the NYPD before mentioning the FBI and other federal agencies.

  The story made the national newscasts and dominated local late news shows. Retired auto crimes intelligence officer John Murphy watched them in silent satisfaction. Walter had invited him to the press conference, but Murphy was still too laid low by his heart attacks to endure Manhattan stress. “We did it, didn’t we, Walter.”

  “We did, but it isn’t over yet.”

  Henry Borelli, Dominick Montiglio’s good friend once upon a time, was among those defendants eventually arraigned on the indictment. He was brought from prison to Walter’s office, where he growled his way through the pedigree. As it happened, on a prison document, he had read that Kenny and Artie were behind his transfer from a camplike facility in Pennsylvania to a maximum-security dungeon in Arkansas.

  “I know it was you guys,” he said with an ice-cold stare.

  Kenny and Artie just stared back, waiting for Henry to make a threat—and pick up another predicate act. Henry turned away.

  All the defendants pleaded not guilty—except two who could not be found: Joey’s brother Dennis, believed to have gone with the wind, and Joseph Guglielmo, aka Dracula, believed to have been murdered, probably to pieces, because he knew too much about the paint jobs on the floor in his Gemini apartment. Everyone was granted bail.

  * * *

  Walter’s statement to Murphy that the case was not over yet contained more truth than even the most cautious prosecutor could have ever imagined. The road to the end of the case would feature sudden curves and deep ruts that knocked him and the task force off course several times. Right after the indictment, from the prison where he was doing time for his robbery spree, Vito Arena telephoned the New York Post city desk, described himself as the case’s “star witness” and announced he was not going to testify because the government was treating him shabbily.

  In reality, Vito was just upset because Dominick and Freddy were now on board and the case did not hinge on him anymore. He had lost some of his leverage, but eventually Walter got him some Bruce Springsteen music tapes and new tennis shoes, and he calmed down—for a while.

  Then, six months after the indictment, to all of Walter’s friends’ anger and dismay, Rudolph Giuliani named Barbara Jones, the assistant U.S. attorney who first interviewed Dominick, to be the new chief of the Southern District’s organized-crime unit, replacing Walter. Jones, a veteran organized-crime prosecutor, was respected by all members of Wally’s Pet Shop, but in their minds the demotion was about politics, not performance; Giuliani did not want independent-minded Walter running all the other high-profile cases against other Mafia families that were about to break. All of these had begun on Wa
lter’s watch, and would attract tremendous publicity. With Walter out of the way, the politically ambitious Giuliani could grab the glory for himself.

  Walter kept his own counsel about the demotion. Outwardly, he was angrier about a tragedy that had occurred half a world away: the slaughter of two hundred thirty-nine Marines in a terrorist car bombing of a barracks in Beirut. He could not believe Marine commanders had placed so many men in a compound so poorly guarded a civilian car drove right inside. The risk to the Marines could have been minimized with rational planning; their commanders let them slip into a predictable routine; they forgot their greatest enemy was habit. Meanwhile, the most he would say on his demotion was that he and Giuliani had “differences of opinion” over how to proceed on cases—including the Castellano-Gaggi-DeMeo case. Giuliani thought Walter was taking too long.

  Though he did mind the loss of title, Walter did not mind the loss of personal publicity that went with it. Unlike Giuliani, he did not try to curry favor with the press; he did not leak. Though married to a reporter, he felt the press should report on a criminal case on only two occasions: when an indictment was announced and when a jury returned a verdict. Intellectually, he understood that such docile scrutiny invited government abuse, but in his experience a nosy press added too many impurities to the process.

  Giuliani told confidants he was merely exercising a right to place assistants of his own choosing in key positions. Whatever, Walter refused to criticize him publicly and dove into the Castellano case. In a similar situation, most assistant U.S. attorneys with his experience and credentials would have resigned and doubled their salary by taking a job with some establishment Wall Street firm. Walter, however, had promised John Murphy that he would stay with the case until the end.

  Apart from all the pretrial legal wrangling with the battery of expert defense attorneys retained by Paul, Nino, and the crew, keeping the witnesses on an even keel became Walter’s biggest worry. For example, before Freddy was released from prison to join wife Carol in the witness protection program, she made a request of her federal marshal: “Do we have to tell Freddy where me and the kids are? I’m afraid of him. I want a divorce.”