Authors: Greg B. Smith
Made Men (10 page)
It was not much of a conversation, but to the FBI agents who were listening in as they drove around Brooklyn several car lengths behind Ralphie and Vinny and Joey O, it was music to their ears.
It was the first time that their new informant, Ralphie, had managed to capture on tape the words of a ranking member of the crime family they were targeting. The first time the previous week, Vinny told Ralphie he was trying to open a gambling boat with the help of a retired county judge in Nassau County who had the “hook” to obtain a license for the boat. Not a word was recorded on tape. This time, every syllable came through and a ranking member of the crime family was recorded saying something incriminating. Granted it was just a little cryptic chat about fencing stolen swag. It was not operatic conversation about severing the head of an enemy or
Godfather
dialogue about ordering somebody dead because they’d refused to “come in” when called by a boss. But it was enough to give the FBI the magic words they needed to keep their informant on the street with a Sony strapped to his undershorts. Those words were
probable cause,
and without them, the investigation would have been dead in the water.
The FBI, working with prosecutors in the Southern District of New York, hoped that Ralphie would lead them all the way to the top of the DeCavalcante crime family. They knew that to reach this goal, they would have to listen to a lot of talk about a lot of things. To be allowed to do that, they needed to go back to a federal judge every three months and show him what they’d found. If they overheard discussions of crimes past or future, they would have “probable cause” to continue listening. If they went for months and no crimes were discussed, the judge would turn off their tape recorders and that would be that.
listen to every word, figure out who was talking, and write down their interpretation of what was being discussed. This was not always easy. Often the gangsters and wannabe gangsters talked eliptically or in code. They often made references to people by first names only, which could get confusing when you had more than one Vinny or a halfdozen Joey’s dropping into the dialogue.
Each day the agents would summarize the meaning of conversations. They were supposed to make a distinction between what they deemed “pertinent” (talk of crimes past, present, and future) and nonpertinent (talk of girlfriends, wives, and diabetes). But making that distinction was not always simple. Gangsters, for instance, never put anything in their own name. Everything went under the names of their wives and children. To avoid missing a pertinent conversation buried deep within a nonpertinent conversation, the agents simply listened to everything. This put them in an unusual position—here they were chasing bad guys but listening in on conversations that were extremely personal. It was true that perhaps half the time these guys opened their mouths they were discussing some new scheme to make money illegally. But it was also true that the other half of the time they were discussing what most people discuss—life. In FBI summaries, life looked like this:
Discuss movies, red wine, and steak.
Discuss speeding tickets.
Discuss eating and local restaurants.
Discuss how, due to safe sex, kids today don’t get laid as much as they [themselves] did when they were kids.
In one tape, Ralphie picked up two low-level associates identified only as “SS” and “RD” for a wired-up drive to Atlantic City. The agent who was forced to listen to this voyage summarized the drama and excitement of the trip:
SS says wife pissed because he bought himself shoes for Xmas. SS rambles on on how generous he is to others during the holiday and how he deserves to purchase a gift for himself. Bought his son a Rolex, gave him cash. SS angry at wife’s attitude toward him. [Ralphie] and SS discuss fine dining, caviar, champagne, wines, Dewar’s, and alcohol. SS discusses eating, relaxing, and watching TV. He enjoys sitting on the couch and having a cigarette. RD falls asleep in backseat.
In their summary notes the day Vinny Ocean and Ralphie and Joey O drove around Brooklyn looking to fence stolen gems, the agents wrote down everything they could hear and tried to make sense of it. When Vinny talked about boats the FBI agent wrote down, “Vinny talks about the boat show, and buying a 26-foot boat.” Then the boat grew. “Vinny says that Paul is going to get a boat, a 63-foot Manhattan Sunseeker, and that he is going to keep it at Pier 66.” The agents made no distinction between the felonious and the mundane. They scribbled down their interpretation of what the three men were talking about. Sometimes it was clear, sometimes it was not.
to impress people. He was always talking about some huge scheme that was going to put him over the top so he would no longer have to hustle sports books. He talked about delivering beatings. One guy owed a DeCavalcante associate named Joey Cars $10,000. Joey Cars said he firebombed the guy’s van, so the guy went out and bought another van. Joey Cars put sugar in the gas tank and slashed all four tires. Joey O said that wasn’t enough.
“Every time you see him, give him a fucking beating until he comes up with the money. He only works across the street from you... Give him another four fucking flats.”
“I’m going to burn it this time,” Joey Cars replied. “It’s a Volvo. I want to burn it.”
Who knew if any of this was true?
In the piles of paper the bureau created to track Ralphie’s progress, Ralphie was always referred to as CW for “Confidential Witness.” This was done to protect his true identity. In these summaries, it was clear the FBI agents made note of everything CW and his talkative friends said, even if the agents had no clue what was being discussed. They did this because they were never sure what could potentially become relevant down the line. Thus, Vinny Ocean’s chat about buying a failed disco in New Jersey—hardly a crime, though perhaps not a wise business move—could become important later if, for example, somebody found either a body or piles of cash in the disco’s basement.
The FBI summaries also made it clear that gangsters liked to brag. On one FBI tape, Vinny Palermo boasted of his involvement in a half-dozen big-money business deals. He talked about stolen Ming dynasty paintings he owned, about a twenty-three-karat diamond he stole, about how he was going to get a huge maintenance contract to clean buildings owned by Leona Helmsley. All of these guys, in fact, were premiere name-droppers. They dropped more names than a gossip columnist, and the FBI was there to write them all down.
At the end of the FBI summary of the March 24, 1998, conversation, the agent wrote that Vinny, Joey O, and CW (Ralphie) got out of the car and went to see Vinny’s jeweler. Everything that happened outside of the car remained a mystery because the bug stayed in the car. When the three men returned to Ralphie’s car, where the bug was still running, the FBI summarized their disappointment regarding their meeting with Vinny’s jewelry appraiser: “They get back in the car and discuss the fact that the stones are not worth what they thought.”
At no time during the entire day did Joey O or Vinny Ocean figure out that Ralphie was not what he seemed. They confided in him, they drove all over New York with him trying to fence stolen property. They never noticed the FBI van tailing far behind. They had no way to know that the jewels Ralphie boosted from the jeweler’s car were actually put there by the FBI. It was all a big setup designed to keep Ralphie credible with his criminal peers. Anyone who talked about crime but did not actually commit it was sure to attract attention. The idea was to give Ralphie a “crime” to commit to make him fit in.
The pursuit of probable cause was no simple matter.
July 31, 1998
The civil servants arrived on a warm Friday evening, traditionally a busy night at Wiggles. They slapped big Day-Glo–orange stickers on the smoked-glass front door. The signs warned that “use and occupancy” of Vinny Ocean’s prized all-nude strip club was against the law. The city inspectors who did the slapping explained that the club was being shut down temporarily because undercover police officers had made several visits in the previous months and witnessed dancers “engage in acts simulating sex.” This was vague, but the city promised to explain in court in six days, at which time it would ask a Queens judge to shut down Wiggles for good.
For four years a legion of city officials had tried unsuccessfully to shut down Wiggles. Now they had the law on their side.
ing either in a residential neighborhood or within five hundred feet of schools, churches, synagogues, and day-care centers. Wiggles had all four as neighbors. Vinny Ocean tried to find a way to get around this law, but it was not easy. Chatting on the free cell phone Ralphie had given him with Gus, one of the workers at Wiggles, he was getting one wave of bad news after another.
“A lot of the girls are worried about the new law,” Gus was saying. “They worry you don’t come around anymore because you’re afraid of getting into trouble.”
“They’re morons,” Vinny replied. “They’re a bunch of fucking morons.”
With one of his best soldiers, Anthony Capo, Vinny indulged in whining. “I might be out of a fucking job,” he said. “Can you believe that? What the fuck am I going to do?”
He had hired plenty of lawyers, and they had found what they’d thought was a loophole big enough to drive a bus through. The sex-club law the mayor had championed defined “adult establishments” as businesses in which 40 percent or more of the square footage was devoted to selling some form of sex—videotapes and strippers being the two most common. An “establishment” like Wiggles could get around the law by simply keeping the “adult” square footage to less than 40 percent. There were many ways to do this. The strippers, for example, could start wearing bikinis. Vinny Ocean was having none of that. Or Wiggles could confine the strippers to one location in the middle of the room, onstage, and keep them from taking off their clothes in other parts of the club. That became the plan. The only problem was that the strippers had a habit of wandering out of the “adult” area into the “nonadult” area to perform lap dances, sometimes on undercover cops. This expanded substantially what the city considered “adult square footage.” The crew at Wiggles brainstormed to make the 40 percent rule work. One of them, Frankie Stellini, suggested reducing the adult square footage by putting flower beds on stage with the strippers.
“I don’t think so,” said Vinny.
Instead, Vinny came up with an idea. Shortly after the big orange stickers went up, he called up the real owner of the construction company he secretly controlled, T&M Construction, and put him to work building walls inside the huge, cavernous space. The idea was to wall off more sections of the club and keep the strippers in the main room only. He hired an architect to keep the “adult space” to 38 percent. The architect had to get out a calculator and compute the maximum amount of space allowed in which adult men could sit and watch adult women wearing nothing but jewelry gyrate to electronic music. The precision was almost comical—997 square feet of “viewing area,” 2,289 of “nonviewing area.” The viewing area ing area,” 2,289 of “nonviewing area.” The viewing area foot stage set four feet off the ground and two brass poles around which the artists created their art. The rest of the club would be chopped up into several individual “lounges” and rooms—the poolroom, the TV room, the cigar room. The club looked more or less like what it had always looked like, except now the dancers had to make sure to put on bikini tops and bottoms when wandering into the newly sectioned-off rooms. And there were plenty more rules. Each night each dancer had to sign a form that explained twelve rules. The forms were written in extremely simple English. They included:
Customers cannot touch me on stage. I cannot touch myself on stage—specifically my breasts, buttocks or groin area. I cannot accept a tip between my breasts or in any other way except in my hand.
If the dancer violated the rules, she was fired. If the customer violated the rules, he was asked to leave by one of the bouncers Vinny employed to act as sex police. The bouncers—who called all the customers “degenerates”— had to keep action inside the main room from becoming a violation of the 40 percent rule. They were, in a sense, like cowboys keeping the horses in the corral. If a horse strayed, their job was to rope it and quickly move it back into the corral. This was especially tricky in the cigar room, which consisted of eighteen small couches with mirrors on the walls and ceiling. There a customer could buy a cheap cigar and watch a dancer who was allowed to dance a few inches away, clad only in a full bikini. This was called “bikini entertainment.” Or, as bouncer Michael Peranio put it, it was a “simulated lap dance.”
“No contact. Meaning the guy cannot put his hands on the girl, the girl cannot put her hands on the guy. No lap dancing. No grinding. Just a dance. A simulated lap dance. About two or three inches away from the customer. A customer would sit down, a girl works under, over, around, but still three, four inches away. Very far away from the customer. A simulated lap dance. That’s all it is. If anything happens, it’s by accident. The girl taking off her dress slips, falls, what can you do? It’s an accident.”
spreading onstage, no touching the genital area onstage. No smoking, no drinking, no drugs, okay? My God, the list is long. We will be here all night.” If a customer did not like the rules, Coffin would tell them, “We don’t make the rules. We just follow them. Write to Giuliani.”
To keep the errors to a minimum, Vinny Ocean was willing to spend money. He installed video cameras everywhere and set up a bank of monitors in a back office. He hired a retired Queens vice-squad cop to watch over everything—the dancers, the bouncers, the barmaids, the customers. If a bouncer saw a dancer handing a customer her business card, the customer was asked to leave and the dancer was to be fired. If a dancer saw another dancer performing a dreaded lap dance, she was to inform on her sister artist. This was the new Giuliani strip club—sex with a thousand rules.
For two days in August hearings were held in the Supreme Court of Queens. During this hearing Vinny Ocean learned there were some problems with Wiggles’ adherence to the 40 percent rule. The Queens vice squad had made several undercover visits in the previous few months and discovered many incidents involving alleged or perceived nonsimulated lap dances in the so-called cigar room. The undercover officers alleged the dancers were exposing all parts of their anatomy and rubbing themselves against the customers. These undercover officers had had to endure this illegal behavior several times. Some of the officers had gone back on more than one occasion just to make sure that all this exposing and rubbing was, in fact, illegal. One, a Sergeant Vincent LaRocca of the Queens vice squad, asked a Wiggles dancer, “What about taking care of me with a blow job?”
This was the wrong answer for Vinny Ocean. This gave the city the ammunition it needed to shut Vinny Ocean down. On August 12, 1998, Judge Stephen Fisher of the Supreme Court of Queens ordered Wiggles closed permanently because of math problems—specifically, the inability to stay within the 40 percent rule.
“I tell you, I’m sick,” he told one of his top lieutenants, an old-time gangster named Joseph Giacobbe. Uncle Joe they called him, an aging DeCavalcante soldier who hung out in Sacco’s pork store in Linden, a few blocks away from the fake pork store those people in Hollywood used for their TV show
The Sopranos.
He rarely left New Jersey.
“He just wants to see every place closed,” Giacobbe said, referring to Giuliani. “That’s what all this bullshit is about.”
“Yeah, but that’s down in no-man’s-land, you know what I’m saying? Who the heck wants to go there?”
“Yup,” Vinny said.
“Only the real tough degenerates.”
“My customers would be scared to go,” Vinny said.
As far as timing went, the closing of Wiggles was the worst.