Authors: Greg B. Smith
Made Men (23 page)
“You gotta be able to change,” Reynolds said. “The world’s constantly changing—that’s why, you know what?”
“I’m old school, you know that,” Tin Ear said.
“Change,” Reynolds said. “You gotta change.”
“I can’t change,” Tin Ear said. “How the fuck, after all these fuckin’ years?”
“Let me tell you something,” said Reynolds, using his favorite phrase. “A good guy, you can get any good guy you know, any fuckin’ guy you know. A man’s man. Goes and does fifteen years, comes home. How long is he home?”
“Three months,” Ralphie answered, knowing just where Reynolds was headed.
“How come?” asked Reynolds the teacher.
“Because he’s the old school,” Tin Ear answered, trying to learn.
“Because he don’t know the fuckin’ street no more,” Reynolds said. “The street has changed.”
“Well, I’m changing,” Tin Ear promised. “It’s hard.”
Later that night, after dinner and a visit to a strip club, Ralphie and Tin Ear had a conversation in which they critiqued a new TV movie about Joseph Bonanno, former boss of the Bonanno crime family. Bonanno was now living in Arizona, where anyone who needed to find him could do so by opening up the phone book. He had written a book about himself and got himself a TV-movie deal to boot. The book and movie essentially glorified the good old days of the Mafia, spent much time discussing the “men of honor” myth, and presented the story of Joe Bonanno in a particularly self-serving manner. It was also the first time a boss had confirmed the existence of “the commission,” the ruling panel of bosses that controlled Mafia life in the United States. Because of this, an ambitious prosecutor named Rudy Giuliani used the book to indict the bosses of all five New York families in what came to be known as “the commission case.” Not surprisingly, the book and movie were not exactly viewed by the wiseguy set as positive developments.
“You’ve been on the street since you were thirteen years old,” Ralphie said to Tin Ear. “Big difference, no?”
Tin Ear: “Well... I robbed apples when I was fuckin’ seven, eight years old from the pushcarts. Elizabeth Street, Mulberry Street. There was no fuckin’ food. We had respect when we were kids. I was born into this fuckin’ life. I dream of ’em... makin’ a movie. If I ever get the chance, I’m the right kinda guy. I don’t mean one of them fuckin’ Bonanno movies. I wonder what they said about that movie, anyway.”
“That fuckin’ movie, boy, it’s all over the place,” Ralphie said. “But, ah, that guy.”
Ralphie was referring to Reynolds; he wasn’t sure about him. He was speculating about the possibility that Reynolds was an informant. This was an interesting subject for a guy who was himself an informant to discuss.
“Did you hear what Reynolds said?” Ralphie asked Tin Ear. “He didn’t give up one guy on Bath Avenue. I thought he gave up everybody.”
“He’s a fucking rat,” Tin Ear said.
Tin Ear and Ralphie noted that becoming a rat did not necessarily mean that one’s career was over. In fact, fame and fortune could be involved.
“They’re making movies and television,” Tin Ear said. “And he appeared on it, am I right or am I wrong? I didn’t see it.”
“I didn’t see it either,” Ralphie said, and then he started to discuss Salvatore (Sammy Bull) Gravano, the Mafia hit
“That’s the name of your family, he’s on TV telling them about us,” Tin Ear said, outraged that Gravano could name names and describe specifics and even dare to confirm that there was, in fact, a Mafia. “We’re not supposed to say that there is anything,” Tin Ear said. “I’m gonna start believing in the movies.”
In the movies and in real life, everybody knew that if you started talking about a contract hit with someone else, that person automatically became a coconspirator. By simply listening to talk about a planned murder, you entered into a contract. You became vulnerable. Ralphie had been wearing a recording device for the FBI out on the street for nearly a year and a half and he had discussed his own participation in many crimes—loan sharking, gambling, stealing pallets of Totes slippers. He had never been asked to commit a murder. Now, on this late evening, Tin Ear Sclafani changed all that.
There was a “piece of work.” There was a guy, though Sclafani wouldn’t say who. Ralphie was going to have to help in some way. Ralphie said of course, knowing in the back of his mind that the FBI would allow you to participate exclusively in so-called crimes of nonviolence but never in anything resembling a murder plot. Now the genie was out of the bottle. Tin Ear had chosen to talk about this planned hit with Ralphie. Ralphie was now part of the crime.
For the first time since the investigation of the DeCavalcante crime family had begun in January 1998, Ralphie was in a situation.
In Walker Percy’s 1961 novel,
The Moviegoer,
the protagonist, John Binkerson (“Binx”) Bolling, describes a process he calls “certification.” He had concluded that movie life was more real than real life, a phenomenon he first observed while watching a movie at a small neighborhood theater in New Orleans. He was watching
Panic in the Streets
, a 1959 film noir starring Richard Widmark as an earnest navy doctor trying to stop an epidemic of plague before it races through New Orleans. Binx notices that the neighborhood shown in the movie is the same one he’s sitting in watching the movie. The movie had “certified” Binx’s neighborhood. He extrapolated certification further, arguing that a real-life street one traversed daily became certified as real if it appeared as an on-location shot in a movie. Sitting in a movie theater watching your street on the screen made the street real. Life had no meaning until it was part of a movie.
The
Sopranos
took place on January 10, 1999, almost a year to the day since Ralphie Guarino first strapped on a recording device for the United States government. As it unfolded, the show took unprecedented steps to knock down the wall between what was real life and what was purely fictional.
To recapitulate: It was well-known that James Caan had grown up with members of the Colombo crime family and he was, in fact, good friends with Anthony Russo, acting street boss of that family. Russo himself had been convicted of shaking down a producer of
Raging Bull.
Joe Pesci had also grown up with gangsters. Mickey Rourke, who played a gangster wannabe in
The Pope of Greenwich Village,
had visited Gambino boss John Gotti’s trial in 1991 and kissed the alleged godfather’s ring. And the legendary Joey Gallo, it was said, had spent hours watching gangster films and modeling himself on Richard Widmark in
Kiss of Death
and Paul Muni in the original
Scarface.
In the 1960s, the story goes, an actor who will remain unnamed visited Gallo to learn the correct way to be a gangster. Gallo quicky imparted the wisdom he’d learned from a previous generation of actors.
The Sopranos
carried on this tradition. Dan Grimaldi, who played a wiseguy named Patsy Parisi in the TV show, had a sister named Louise Rizzutto who was the girlfriend of Anthony Spero, the acting boss of the Bonanno crime family. When Spero wound up on trial, Grimaldi the actor who played Patsy the wiseguy showed up in Brooklyn Federal Court to lend his support. When
Daily News
writer Mike Claffey asked Grimaldi about the irony of a fictional gangster showing up in court to lend support to a real-life gangster, the response was typical of the show’s publicrelations line.
But
The Sopranos
went a step further. It was hyped for its extreme realism, but the hype never made clear just
how
real it all had become. The line between fact and fiction disappeared. Real-life gangsters auditioned for parts and got them. The FBI had videotaped two TV actors known for playing gangsters attending a Christmas party thrown by actual gangsters. And more remarkable, real-life gangsters started viewing the show as a kind of justification for their behavior. The characters on
The Sopranos
became heros to the underworld. They were names to be dropped. Santo (Buddy) Sirico, a Gambino associate, started telling people that Tony Sirico, the actor who played capo Paulie Walnuts in the television show, was his cousin. He did this to impress people. Sirico the actor denied the relationship up and down, but the deed was done. TV gangsters had become the ideal to which real wiseguys aspired.
The name Barr Industries appeared stenciled of the sides of Dumpsters from the east end of Long Island deep into the heart of Brooklyn. It was a waste container company owned by a man named Anthony Marcantonio. There were offices near Red Hook in Brooklyn and Ronkonkoma way out in Suffolk County, Long Island. It was a going concern, with one exception. A growing dispute had emerged between Barr and a company called Madison Oil over a $450,000 “debt” Madison claimed it was owed by Barr. Barr was refusing to pay. Usually such matters are hashed out in litigation, with both companies agreeing to settle and at least two law firms walking away with sizable commissions. In this case, that was not to be.
supervisor, a capo named James Clemenza, were the secret owners of Madison Oil. And the “debt” they claimed Barr Industries had to pay was simply protection money. Now, Barr was willing to pay protection money. Barr, after all, was in the waste container business in New York, which had long been an open piggy bank for organized-crime families. The trouble was that the owner of Barr, Marcantonio, had decided that $450,000 was too much. Through his father, he reached out to a member of the DeCavalcante crime family whom his family had known for years— Joseph Sclafani, better known as Tin Ear.
The owner of Barr had learned a disturbing thing in January 1999—that Chickie Leto wanted to kill him as soon as possible. He called on his friend Tin Ear, who agreed to help out in any way he could for his good friend, as long as Barr put him on the payroll in a no-show job for a set weekly fee that would start out low and surely rise. Tin Ear, in turn, went to a captain, Anthony Rotondo, who arranged a series of sit-down meetings with Leto and Clemenza. The two families, the DeCavalcantes and the Colombos, then began negotiating who would be picked to suck the lifeblood out of Barr Industries for as long as possible before Marcantonio had to file for bankruptcy. It was purely mercenary, and Marcantonio clearly had no clue what was about to happen to him.
One of the meetings took place at a diner in Queens where Rotondo and Sclafani were supposed to meet with Leto and Clemenza. They’d heard the Colombos were going to bring two more guys, so they did the same, taking along Ralphie and a low-level hanger-on named Billy, who was always joking around.
On the drive to Queens, the DeCavalcante family members felt comfortable complaining about the Colombo family and all their arrogance. There was not a high level of trust evident on either side. Tin Ear had met before with his Colombo counterpart, Leto, and Leto had told him they would have to wait for two other men to show. Tin Ear, who had been all by himself, refused to wait. Now they were driving to Queens for another meeting and already they were hearing that the Colombos wanted them to get in another car and go someplace else when they arrived.
“You know I ain’t going,” Tin Ear told Rotondo. “They ain’t going to do nothing anyway. What are they going to do? They have to be out of their fucking minds if they have something on their fucking minds.”
As both Sclafani and Rotondo saw it, the Colombo family was acting as if they were the big-name sophisticates from Brooklyn who were not impressed by the farmers from New Jersey. There was a possibility that the entire meeting was a setup and that they would arrive and shots would be fired. This was just a possibility. Cooler minds on both sides believed that this violence would simply be bad for business and that there was enough of the Barr Industry pie to go around.
“They make rumors about the Jersey guys, that they’re farmers,” Sclafani said. “That they don’t know.” He paused. “Now they know.”
As Scalfani was about to make clear, something had happened recently that had made the DeCavalcante crime family a little more respectable in the eyes of the New York families.
Sopranos
?
What the fuck are they?”
“You ever watch it?” Ralphie asked, not sure if it was a
good idea to admit to such a thing.
“Is that supposed to be us?” Sclafani said, implying that he’d watched but not saying whether he paid close
attention.
“You are in there,” Rotondo said, and Ralphie laughed.
“They mentioned your name in there.”
Tin Ear—hesitating between belief and suspicion—
said, “Yeah? What did they say?”
“Watch out for that guy, they said,” said Billy, a knockaround guy who thought he was pretty funny. “Watch that
guy.”
“Every show you watch,” Rotondo said. “Every show
you watch, more and more you pick up somebody. Every
show.”
Clearly Anthony Rotondo—highly respected capo in
the DeCavalcante crime family, a man whose father had
been murdered by the Mafia when he was just a young
man—was a fan of the new TV Mafia show. He began
talking about the many similarities between people and
places he knew and the TV show that claimed to be so authentic. The first name he mentioned was Gaetano Vastola,
but he called him by his street name—Corky. Corky Vastola was a legendary DeCavalcante captain who was sixfoot-two and weighed 260 pounds and who once broke the
jaw of a loan-shark victim with one punch. He was a big,
tough muscle guy who got the job done and never complained. He was, Rotondo felt, the model for Paulie Walnuts, a big, tough guy who got the job done without
complaining.
Then Rotondo mentioned Jake Amari, the onetime
acting boss of the DeCavalcante family who had died,
slowly, of stomach cancer. By the end of the first show,
The Sopranos
had presented Jackie Aprile, an acting
boss of the TV family who was dying, slowly, of stomach cancer. To Rotondo, he was “the guy that died and
had stomach cancer.”
“They had a guy die with stomach cancer?” Billy the
club owner asked.
“Yeah,” said the still-skeptical Sclafani, “but where do
they get that information from?”
“Ah,” Rotondo said. “Where.”
“Joey,” said Billy. “There’s somebody close to you
there, Joe.”
“Huh?”
Rotondo was clearly a
Sopranos
fan. He had found out
that parts of the show were actually filmed “right on Third
Avenue” in a bookstore. Third Avenue was a reference to
Third Avenue in Elizabeth, New Jersey, where Sacco’s
meat market was located. As the FBI noted in one of its
many memos written during the second month of
The
Sopranos
’s debut season, “Uncle Joe Giacobbe and other
members of the DeCavalcante family regularly held meetings inside Sacco’s meat market.” In the first episode of
the TV show, the members of the Soprano crime family
meet inside Centrani’s pork store, a few blocks away from
Sacco’s. In later shows the name would be changed to Satriale’s and the filming moved elsewhere, but the idea
stayed the same.
“Sacco’s,” Rotondo said.
“No,” Sclafani said. “That’s not Sacco’s.”
“Oh, it’s supposed to be,” Ralphie said.
“Is it?” Sclafani asked, clearly impressed.
“That’s the block,” Billy answered.
“They always sit outside,” Rotondo said, either of the
make-believe gangsters in the show who sit on chairs on
the sidewalk in front of the pork store, or the real-life
gangsters like Uncle Joe Giacobbe who did the same. “Yeah, they do,” Billy said. “It’s Sacco’s.”
Rotondo was so into the show he’d noticed that a taco
joint that appeared in one of
The Sopranos
episodes shots near the fictional pork store mimicked a taco joint located
near Sacco’s.
“Jesus,” Ralphie said.
“Really?” Sclafani asked.
“I’m telling you,” Billy said. “You gotta watch.” “So what do they say?” Sclafani said, continuing his futile effort to convince his peers that he was’t terribly interested in any of this.
“Aren’t they funny?” Rotondo said. “I’m telling you,
you ever watch that, Ralph?”
“Yeah, I caught it one night,” Ralphie said. “I didn’t
think it was really that bad.”
“What characters,” Rotondo said. “Great acting.” “Is this the car?” Ralphie asked, bringing them all back
into the real world.
“We’re supposed to meet them over there,” Sclafani
said.