32
Although I was not yet an initiated member of the family, I was close enough to learn two prevailing theories of what had happened that day and why. The first theory was the most obvious. Colombo's unprecedented activity with the Italian-American Civil Rights League had heightened his profile and that of La Cosa Nostra. This was bringing heat down upon the five families. The mob's high commission had ordered him to cease and desist, and he had refused. That was a capital offense.
Crazy Joe was known as an opportunistic guy. Still smarting from losing to Colombo in a power play for the family's leadership a decade earlier, he perhaps now sensed an opening. Colombo's grip on the family had eroded, and his support among the other families was now either thin or nonexistent, so Crazy Joe may have seen it as the opportune moment for taking his revenge.
In truth, few imagined that Crazy Joe had aspirations to take over the family. A prison term had weakened his power, and his soldiers had never been very loyal-a factor attributed to his tightrope walk with sanity. The general feeling was that Crazy Joe, who had met Jerome Johnson in prison, had paid his friend to take out Colombo for the sheer joy of it.
But again, the Colombo family was, at the time, in its most vulnerable position in its forty-year history. Colombo was off in left field, fancying himself the Martin Luther King Jr. of Italians. His two most powerful "caporegimes" (underbosses), Carmine "the Snake" Persico Jr. and Sonny Franzese, were in prison. With Colombo out of the picture and my father and the Snake locked away, maybe Crazy Joe really did think that he could make one last mad dash for family leadership. Who knows for sure?
The second theory, the one supported by Persico, the man who eventually took over the Colombo family, was that the government had set up Johnson to kill Colombo because they were afraid of the power he was gaining through the Italian-American Civil Rights League. The plan was, as Persico saw it, that after the shooting, Johnson was supposed to be arrested, not killed. He was then set to "roll over" on some specified La Cosa Nostra target, possibly Persico himself. Johnson would get immunity to testify, go into the Witness Protection Program, and would never have to do a day for the murder. The feds would have Colombo dead and his replacement indicted for murder, a one-two blow that might have destroyed the family.
Whatever the truth in all of this, one thing is certain: Jerome Johnson's bullet, which turned Colombo into a vegetable, burst the bubble of the Italian-American Civil Rights League. The organization quickly crumbled into dust. But not before my participation in its affairs had sown seeds in my life that would one day bear evil fruit.
33
As Joe Colombo lay in his bed, stripped of his mental capacity, his crime family spun out of control. Because Colombo had focused on keeping my father in jail and disbanding Dad's loyalists, Carmine Persico's soldiers were allowed to stay together. That placed Persico in a position to mount a successful coup from behind bars. He installed Thomas DiBella, an aging, low-keyed capo, as the acting don, pending his own parole.
Following the assassination attempt on Joe Colombo, my personal life also seemed to become unfocused. I now found it very difficult to concentrate on my studies. Counting the years that would be required for medical school and internships, I suddenly realized that I faced a decade of intense study before I could become a doctor. This fact was brought into focus by what now appeared to me to be a much quicker route to success.
As frightening as the Intrada hit and the Colombo shooting were, there were aspects of the mob that I found intriguing. The stories I had heard on the picket line about the money that could be made through various legal and illegal business ventures excited me. I needed money because I had come to believe that money was the key to winning Dad's release from prison. And I didn't have ten years to wait. I decided that I would continue to study, but with a reduced class load, so that I could take a stab at a few business opportunities-legitimate ones at first.
Among my father's many scattered business interests was an automotive body shop in Mineola, Long Island. I had once worked there after school and learned how to paint and restore car exteriors. I figured that might be a good place to start.
I paid a visit to the new owner, an upbeat man named Frank Cestaro, and explained that I had worked for the previous owner and was interested in a job. This approach was mostly a ruse to see, meet, and scrutinize the person who had taken over the place. Cestaro, no doubt making the connection, called me the next day. I admitted that I wasn't really interested in working for him as an employee and offered to lease half the shop and operate my own business there. Cestaro agreed.
I began digging wrecked Ford Pintos and Chevy Vegas out of junkyards, restoring them, and selling them for a healthy profit. The two makes, America's first attempt to counter the successful small Japanese cars, were so flimsy and cheaply built that it took little more than a fender bender for an insurance company to total them. Many junked Vegas and Pintos were actually in relatively good shape and could be fixed in a day or so and sold for $1,500 to $2,000. Although this effort did turn a profit, I quickly realized that a half-interest in a body shop wasn't going to buy me a mansion on a hilltop, so I began looking for other opportunities.
About that time, I received a call from Tony Morano, a stout man in his late thirties with a head of curly sandy-blonde hair. Morano had experience in the auto-leasing business (along with a criminal record, although he wasn't connected to La Cosa Nostra). Morano and I hit it off, formed a partnership, and rented a corner lot on Cherry Valley Road in West Hempstead.
Next, we needed some financing. We approached Mel Cooper, a man I knew in the finance business, and asked him to direct us to a company that would assist with our start-up financing. Cooper sent us to a man named Vince who was in the garbage business. Vince heard us out and recommended Equilease, a company run by two brothers. We talked the brothers into giving us a $500,000 line of credit to begin our West Hempstead automobile leasing operation. Within a few months, M.B.E. Leasing was turning over ten to twenty automobiles a month, and I was pulling down $500 a week.
Meanwhile, Frankie Cestaro was struggling to turn a profit with the body shop. I took over the entire operation and moved the equipment to the West Hempstead lot. The business, now in a better location, started turning around, and from that operation, I was soon putting another $500 into my pocket each month.
Six months later, during my sophomore year of college, Tony and I sectioned off a corner of our Cherry Valley property and opened a used-car lot. This segment of our rapidly expanding operation started kicking another $1,000 a month into my swelling kitty.
My success in West Hempstead did not go unnoticed. Some of Dad's friends started coming around, looking over the operation and trying to figure how they could get a piece of the action. I played them nice and easy, giving up nothing, but leaving doors open and making sure no one left insulted. Pretty soon, instead of trying to squeeze their way in, they came to me with partnership offers on other ventures.
One such offer, for instance, was for a pizza restaurant in Lindenhurst, Long Island. Vinnie Perozzi told me about a location he had scouted in a shopping center near the commuter railroad tracks there. I checked it out and saw what Vinnie had seenlots of hungry people waiting for trains. I kicked in a month's take from the leasing business and opened a small pizza place. I named it Sonny's Pizza. I instructed Vinnie to open early and serve breakfast during the morning rush hour. The strategy worked, and the restaurant was soon turning a profit of $800 a month for each of us.
In twelve months of part-time work, I had started four successful businesses and was pulling down close to $5,000 a month in profits.
34
Around this time, another part of my life began to take form-my love life. Early in my freshman year at Hofstra, Leslie Ross, the neighbor who was forbidden by her parents to date me, introduced me to a coed named Maria Corrao. Maria, the daughter of a well-off Italian jeweler and his Polish wife, favored her mother. She had long blonde hair
, blue eyes, and the sparkling look of the proverbial all-American girl.
An education major, Maria was far more intelligent and refined than the party girls I was accustomed to dating. She was also more mature and serious. I was surprised to discover that she lived within a mile of my home in Roslyn. Although we were the same age, we had never met. I had dated her best friend for a while but had never even seen Maria around the neighborhood. She explained that she wasn't the type to wander the neighborhood checking out the guys.
At the time Maria and I were introduced, I was dating an archaeology major from Holy Cross named Barbara DeVito. Leslie Ross despised Barbara and thought that if I went after Maria, at least I wouldn't be with Barbara. I took her bait and asked Maria to a college dance. Although the relationship got off to a slow start and wasn't grounded in romantic fireworks or a burning physical attraction, I was drawn by Maria's character. Everything about her was very nice. It was a quality that my parents picked up on immediately. Mom, who could be a "pill" when it came to my dating girls she didn't like, approved of the squeaky-clean Maria from the start, and Dad liked her, too. Shortly before he went to jail in 1969, we all spent a happy New Year's Eve together at the Copacabana.
Maria had appeared during the most stressful point in my life (and my mother's), and she turned out to be the perfect salve for us both. Instead of being frightened away by the family's reputation and deepening troubles, she drew closer. A nurturing type, she comforted me during my worst days of anger and frustration over my father's conviction and was there to help my mother any way she could. Often, while I was working or out doing other things, Maria would be at our house visiting or babysitting the younger children to allow Mom to work on Dad's case.
The more stressed and turbulent our lives became, the more understanding Maria seemed to become. After the Colombo assassination, a salient event that would have telegraphed to a thousand girls that this wasn't the kind of family to get involved with, Maria responded by hanging tough. In doing so, she soared beyond nice in our estimation and into the realm of sainthood.
Everybody loved "Saint" Maria-my mom, my dad, my brothers, my sisters. I cared for her a whole lot, too, and with my time divided between school and the expanding business interests, a thoroughly undemanding girlfriend like Maria seemed ideal for me.
Although Maria and Mom were as thick as thieves, what impressed me the most about Maria was how unlike Mom she was. She was low-keyed, easy to please, and, most of all, quiet. She had minimal concern for fancy clothes and material things, knew little and cared less about furniture, and had a healthy notion about the acceptable standards of household cleanliness. She never complained or asked anything of anyone, and she was always there when anyone needed her. She was, in essence, the kind of woman who would never give her boyfriend any reason to break up. There was no doubt that Maria would make a perfect wife and mother, a quality Mom pointed out to me what seemed like a few hundred times a day.
Maria and I were engaged in 1973, and we set the date for our wedding for the following year. As that date neared, however, I became increasingly nervous about the whole matter and eventually canceled the wedding. I liked Maria and cared for her, but I still wasn't sure if I loved her and wanted to spend the rest of my life with her. Also I wasn't quite ready to give up the less saintly girls I occasionally dated, the kind who overflowed with passion and little else.
Maria was crushed by my decision, but, true to character, she didn't show it. She just waited for me to come around and set another date.
35
With all the business deals I was now involved in and the domestic drama whirling around me, I never lost sight of my primary goal-freeing Dad from prison. Everything I did was geared toward that, and every dollar I saved was reserved for it. When a private detective named Matthew Bonora, a former police detective, contacted me about the possibility of getting his hands on my father's missing police surveillance records, I jumped at the opportunity and paid $5,000 to Bonora as a retainer.
Some time later, Bonora called and told me to come to his office at the Mineola Courthouse. The first thing I noticed when the detective greeted me was that he was wearing white gloves. Inside the office, he acted nervous and spoke softly, as if he possessed something so secretive that we were in danger merely by being in the same room with it.
Bonora opened a locked drawer and gingerly removed a stack of papers. He told me I could look at the material but couldn't touch it or change the precise order of the pages. He explained that they were the original records and were there only so I could confirm that they existed. They would have to be returned that same day, and we couldn't even risk copying them. He explained that if the records were stolen, they wouldn't be allowed in court.
I looked the papers over, and they appeared to be exactly as Bonora had represented them. There were names, times, and dates of every place my father had gone and everyone he had met. I was certain that somewhere in that stack of papers was a sheet covering the exact time and date the bank robbers had said they met with Dad. This was the critical evidence that had mysteriously vanished during the bank robbery trial. I was equally certain that this information would place Dad at a completely different location.
The detective said we would have to try to find a way to legally obtain the papers. I left the office more confident than I had been since the day Dad left home that this would help him. I told Mom, and she, too, was elated.
Unfortunately, Bonora could never get his hands on the records again. He told me that his source had dried up and that the papers had been moved. Meanwhile, prosecutors and police continued to deny the very existence of the papers. I kicked myself for not having grabbed them when I'd had the chance, especially when Bonora later told a newspaper reporter that the entire incident had never taken place.
36
Just as that door slammed shut, another one opened-seemingly by accident. Next to Sonny's Pizza in Lindenhurst was a bar called the Village Pub. Although I didn't drink, I occasionally dropped by the bar to sip a club soda and talk with the owners. In this way, I became friendly with a waitress there named Dee.
One afternoon, Dee's latest boyfriend, a seedy-looking dude with dark hair and a bushy mustache, was in the pub talking about the wild and crazy time he'd had with his previous girlfriend. She was a woman named Rusty who wore red wigs and had a habit of marrying serious criminals. He said she had told him that her husband and his friend had framed some big mob guy and were in serious trouble.
I had been listening to him halfheartedly until he mentioned the framing of a "big mob guy," and then I perked up. I let the man go on for a while, then I asked him if the mob guy that had been framed might possibly be Sonny Franzese.
"Yeah, that's him," the man said. "Franzese."
"That's my father," I said.
The poor man nearly had a seizure. I told him I wanted to meet Rusty, who I was sure must be Eleanor Cordero, widow of the slain hit man Ernie "Hawk" Rupoli and now the wife of John Cordero, one of the bank robbers who had testified against my father. After some arm-twisting, the ex-boyfriend gave me his name, address, and phone number and promised to arrange a meeting.
The following day, he called. He said that the woman had agreed to meet me that night. We would meet at midnight in the parking lot of a diner on the Sunrise Highway in Lindenhurst. She would be in a red Mustang parked in the back of the lot.
I told Mom about this possible breakthrough, and we contacted a family attorney, Herbie Lyons, to seek advice. The attorney advised me that it might be beneficial to wear a recording device to the meeting because I might never have the opportunity to talk with Eleanor Cordero again. I considered this, but something inside told me "not this time."
When I pulled into the diner a few minutes after midnight that night, sure enough, there was a red Mustang in the back of the lot. As my headlights flashed through the car, I could see the figure of a woman sitting in the passenger seat. I parked my car, walked over, and got into the
Mustang on the driver's side.
Although the woman was wearing a new wig, I recognized her instantly.
"Hello, Eleanor," I said.
Without the usual formalities, Eleanor pulled out a .32 and pointed it at my head.
"If you're wired, you're dead," she said.
Then, with her free hand, she searched my chest, thighs, crotch, and armpits-anywhere the recording device could be concealed. I remembered the debate earlier in the afternoon and breathed a sigh of relief that I hadn't used the device.
"I'm clean," I said.
"You're lucky. What do you want?" she growled.
37
I stared at Eleanor Cordero. She was one tough, ugly woman, about five-foot-five, chunky, totally unappealing. She had scars on her arms and hands, markings I didn't remember her having before. I marveled at the fact that she had never lacked for husbands or lovers, even if they were hit men and junkie bank robbers.
"I want the truth, Eleanor. I need your help," I confided.
She relaxed her grip on the gun but still held it to my head.
"Your father's innocent. They set him up. I know everything, and I can get him out. But I want money, and I want protection from my husband and from the government."
It was clear that Eleanor feared the FBI as much as she did her criminal husband, and I understood that.
Before I answered, it occurred to me that maybe she was wired. I would have to choose my words carefully.
"I'll help you any way I can," I ventured, "but I can't give you money. That would make it appear that I had bought your testimony. But if you do this for me, I'll be very grateful"
"What about protection?"
"I can protect you. Don't worry about that. But you'll have to come to the lawyer's office and make a statement."
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