Made Men (11 page)
Authors: Greg B. Smith
The house on Ercama Street looked like
Leave It to Beaver.
It was small, a one-story brick ranch on a corner lot with a magnolia tree in the middle of the tiny front lawn. A plastic deer stood guard next to rows of salmon and pink impatiens and a red Japanese maple. The lawn looked like it was mowed every day. In the front bay window, a foot-tall blue plastic Madonna perched on the sill, her arms outstretched, her head slightly tilted, impassive. Next to the front door was a big sign made of ersatz wood:
MAJURI
. It was hard to make out the letters in the dark, but the three men sitting in a stolen car across the street from the plastic deer knew it was the right house.
There they sat, three grown men in a parked car on an empty suburban Linden, New Jersey, street in the middle of the night. It was Joey O Masella and two of the nastiest soldiers of the DeCavalcante crime family—Jimmy Gallo and Anthony Capo. Both men were made guys who had committed multiple murders. Both were willing to do so again. They were parked across from a sign that read
NO PARKING 7 A
.
M
.–
11 A
.
M
.
TUESDAY
. They had made sure that it wasn’t a Tuesday. This was their second visit and they had learned.
Inside the house, Big Ears Charlie Majuri slept unaware. He was, according to the FBI, a member of the ruling panel of the DeCavalcante crime family. He was the son of the family’s longtime underboss, Frank Majuri, and he had been involved in “the life” since he was a teenager. His résumé included gambling, larceny, stolen property, and bookmaking. He was once involved in shaking down a record company. He was a hulking, 210-pound, extremely ugly fifty-eight-year-old man with sticking-out ears whose parents—including the former underboss— were still alive. In fact, they both lived with him in this tiny ranch house. His underboss father was now ninety-one years old.
Big Ears Charlie was in a situation. In the last few months, John Riggi, the boss of the DeCavalcante crime family, had implemented some corporate restructuring. His acting street boss, Jake Amari, had finally died of stomach cancer. He himself was not scheduled to leave his federal
prison cell until the year 2003. The way the FBI saw it, Riggi decided to create a ruling panel to run the family business that would include two men named Palermo who were not related—Vinny Ocean Palermo and Girolamo (Jimmy) Palermo. Vinny and Jimmy were to make decisions that would benefit the DeCavalcante family and result in more money being sent up to John Riggi. The plan had not worked out as intended. Big Ears Charlie—who had been around forever and whose father had been one of the group’s founding members—threw a fit. He insisted that he be made part of the panel. When no one listened, he decided to eliminate the two unrelated Palermos, Vincent and Jimmy. That would leave Big Ears in charge. He asked Jimmy Gallo to take care of Vinny Ocean Palermo. Jimmy Gallo, who had been around, immediately went to Vinny Ocean with this information.
Vinny Ocean made a plan of his own. He was aware that Charlie Majuri controlled a union local in New Jersey and had lately been kicking wiseguys of other families off the payroll. This was making Big Ears extremely unpopular, which would mean there would be many suspects should anything happen to him. Vinny Ocean told Jimmy Gallo that he would appreciate it if he and Joey O and Anthony Capo would investigate the possibility of killing Big Ears Charlie. Vinny then made plans to visit Florida so he could be far away when the event in question took place.
This was night two of staking out Big Ears’ tidy little ranch house. It didn’t look like the home of a Mafia boss. It was tiny, especially compared with the home of the other two panel leaders, Vinny and Jimmy Palermo. Vinny had a huge waterfront mansion on Long Island with a hundredfoot pier. Jimmy Palermo had a sweeping estate in Island Heights, New Jersey. Big Ears Charlie had a plastic deer. Jimmy Gallo had to be thinking he’d made the right choice. He dreamed up a way to get the job done.
His plan was to check out the house, wait until there were no cars around or people on the street. They would sleep in shifts. When the moment presented itself, Jimmy would walk up to the front door in the middle of suburbia and ring the doorbell next to the Madonna. If Big Ears’ mother or father came to the door, Jimmy would ask for their son. The mother and father knew him. If Charlie himself opened the door,
boom!
“This is stupid,” Joey O said inside the car. “There’s a cop three houses down.”
This was true. Several houses away was a lieutenant from the local police, whose cruiser sat in the driveway. That’s where most of the cars in the neighborhood sat—in driveways. The car with Joey and Jimmy and Anthony was the only one parked by the curb.
“It’s a deserted area,” Joey O said. “You sit there for three hours...”
The other two men ignored him. They watched Big Ears’ house in the dark.
“Sit there for three hours, they’re gonna see you,” Joey O said out loud but to himself.
“Anthony, you want me to go shoot the guy now, I’ll shoot the guy now. But not here. I pass on the way youse wanna do this.”
“No,” said Anthony Capo. “We got everything figured out.”
The night passed and Big Ears Charlie was still alive to read his morning paper.
In a few days, Joey O flew down to Florida to give Vinny Ocean the bad news. Vinny would listen and consider the circumstances. He would decide that Big Ears was not a threat, and that he was infuriating so many other wiseguys that somebody else might just take care of the job for him. In the end, Vinny decided to call off the hit.
As the summer of 1998 ended, Vinny Palermo—just a few months from his fifty-third birthday—sat nearly at the top of the crime family to which he had sworn his allegiance thirty-five years before. He has had to make executive decisions. Once he became a boss, he had to step down as captain of his crews in New Jersey, New York, and Florida and give each of them new assignments. He named as his replacement the old soldier Uncle Joe Giacobbe, promoting him to capo. Now he got calls from people asking for help with their everyday problems. An old family friend named Karen called to say her son and two friends had gotten into a fight with an off-duty cop. What could he do to help? He was now a boss, and everybody knew it.
At the same time he surrounded himself with legitimacy. He could, on any given day, spend an afternoon chatting about a plan to shoot Charlie Majuri in the head in front of his parents, and in the evening sit down with a vice president of Smith Barney to discuss a multimillion-dollar deal. In July of 1998, for instance, the FBI carefully chronicled many Vinny Ocean business deals in the making. On July 2, 1998, Vinny met for two hours at the Upper East Side home of
Penthouse
magazine founder Bob Guccione, who had no idea Vinny Ocean was anything more than a guy with big ideas. There they discussed convincing deeppocket investors to sink millions into a hotel in Atlantic City that would be modeled after the old Sands Bugsy Siegel created in Las Vegas in the 1950s. During the meet
“These people were very interested in the Atlantic City project,” Vinny was overheard saying. “Either way, they could do all the financing. Their eyes lit up when he [Guccione] mentioned the Sands.”
A few hours later the same day, the FBI recorded a talk in which Vinny Palermo claimed he’d just signed a contract with the German telecommunications giant Siemens to distribute cell phones in Russia. The deal went through, Palermo said, because his connection had promised the Germans that Chuck Norris, the TV tough guy known as
Walker, Texas Ranger,
would be the company’s spokesman. One of Vinny’s lawyers, John Daniels, was saying, “Now that’s got to be worth some money if a guy like Chuck Norris is willing to lend his name to a product.”
“Yeah,” said Vinny, “but he’s gonna want to get paid from Siemens. Where do we come in?”
“We’ll get a piece of it,” Daniels said.
“In other words, if we can get him on there.”
“If we can get him on there,” Daniels replied, “I mean his show in Russia is the number-one show.
Walker, Texas Ranger.
Norris’s show.”
“Oh.”
“And the number-one show in Germany.”
“Wow.”
“So Siemens can relate to that.”
“Yeah definitely,” Vinny said. “Not only that, maybe we can get close to him that way.”
Nothing was too small. One day he was discussing the possibility of opening up McDonalds’ franchises in Russia. The deal would probably take years to consummate, but there was a possibility the Russian government would help finance it. A few days later he was talking about doing business with the Reverend Sun Yung Moon. Palermo’s thoughts on working with the good reverend were simple: “He’s a good connection,” he said. “Total cash.”
He was no longer just another guy from the Fulton Fish Market, working all night in the middle of the winter schlepping pallets of frozen mackerel for middle-class wages. Now he was near the top. He claimed to have Bob Guccione’s unlisted phone number. He was doing deals with big guys. He had a hundred-foot dock at his waterfront mansion in Island Park. He had a twenty-by-fortyfoot heated pool. He was taking his second family—his wife, Debbie, his daughters, Danielle and Tara, and his son, Vincent Jr.—to Disney World.
Here was the big crime boss and hard-charging business man cruising along, buoyed by luck and talent. Who would have imagined the personal problems a man like this could face?
For instance, there was the Jet Ski incident.
His daughter Tara and one of her girlfriends, Vinny couldn’t remember which one, were at the house on a Saturday while his wife was out. He was Mister Mom. The two of them wanted to use the Jet Skis, but Vinny was busy eating his lunch. He wasn’t paying attention. Tara said, “Come on, Daddy” again and again, and he said, “Okay, go outside and get ready, I’ll be right out.” But he didn’t come right out, and the girls got on the Jet Skis and went for a spin. Unfortunately they were both only thirteen years old, which meant they weren’t even supposed to be on the things. There was an accident. The friend was thrown off her Jet Ski and cut her leg good enough to pick up five stitches and be hospitalized. When his girl went to visit her friend, she brought flowers but the girl’s father started asking questions about what happened.
“The father’s questioning her,” Vinny was telling a friend named Frank. “Like, ‘Did you have life jackets on?’ You know what I’m saying.”
“Like he was pumping her for information,” Frank said.
“Yeah, but she was smart. She says, you know, ‘Sure we had life jackets on’.”
“Maybe it’ll appease him.”
“I don’t think so,” Vinny said. “He looks like a miserable bastard.”
“Really? It’s shitty, eh. Is the kid all right?”
“Yeah, she’s got five stitches on her leg. But you know what happens when you go to a lawyer. She was gonna model her legs. She wanted to be a model. And she’s saying she can’t sleep and—”
“Yeah, I know, it’s upsetting,” Frank said. “I understand.”
“It’s upsetting because I’m mad at myself. ’Cause I never let them go out without me. And I was eating and I says, ‘Ten more minutes, we’ll go out.’ ‘No, come on, come on.’ ‘Ten minutes, let me finish eating.’ ‘Okay, we’ll stay behind the house.’ ” He paused. “Well, that’s kids. What are you gonna do?”
Meanwhile he’s got his older daughter Danielle being stalked by the son of one of his more promising crew members. Ralphie Guarino’s boy, a high-schooler, was repeatedly calling Danielle, claiming he was madly in love with her and insisting that she see him. She wanted nothing to do with him. She told him again and again, but he kept calling and even showing up outside the family home. He even swore he would take the train out from Brooklyn and stay in the Long Beach hotel every night until she agreed to see him. Vinny was forced to call Ralphie, and Ralphie promised to take care of things. It was embarrassing.
But perhaps his biggest problem at the time was his old friend and driver, Joseph Masella. Good old Joey O. The man seemed positively insistent on crashing and burning. No one could say for sure how much and how many he owed, but it was definitely six figures and more than one crime family. He owed this guy and that guy and he was making many headaches for Vinny. It was not right to have a guy like Joey O refusing to pay and then going out and gambling and dropping big bucks on his dope-smoking girlfriend. The Joey O problem had become a very public problem. Vinny was now watching a guy he had known most of his life fall apart in front of his eyes.
For years, Joey O had been there for him, picking up his blood pressure medicine, getting him coffee and breakfast, listening to his plans. Joey O was the one he trusted to pick up the little envelopes of cash that fueled the Palermo fortune. When he took him on as a crew member after Joey’s old mentor, Rudy, passed away, Vinny knew he was picking up some baggage. He did not know how much. Now Joey’s baggage had become Vinny’s baggage, and that was not good for a man in his position.
His frustration emerged during a talk with Joseph Abruzzo, a DeCavalcante associate who also happened to be Joey O’s brother-in-law. Vinny Ocean had put Abruzzo in to run a gambling boat he controlled that operated on Long Island. The boat shuttled hundreds of gamblers just far enough off the coast of Long Island to enter international waters and be free of New York’s gaming laws. The Long Island officials who’d given a license to the company that ran the boat, had no clue that it was just another moneymaker for the DeCavalcante crime family. Joseph Abruzzo was listed as chief executive officer. Vincent Palermo’s name was nowhere in sight. When Abruzzo brought up his brother-in-law, Joey O, with Vinny, he clearly had no idea how infuriated his boss was on the subject.
“You hear from Joey?” Abruzzo asked innocently.
“I told him just don’t fucking call me no more,” Vinny fumed. “I don’t even want to fucking talk to him. He’s such a fucking asshole. I wish I never see him again.”
The two men then presented a clear case of gangster logic: It’s all right to have a
goomad
and spend all your money on her, as long as you take care of your wife and kids first.
“When you neglect your family, you’re a fucking asshole,” Vinny said. “You wanna have somebody on the side, you fucked ’em, you chased ’em, whatever you gotta do. You know what I’m saying?”
“Yeah,” Abruzzo said.
“He’s a fucking moron is what he is. He’s a lowlife. I told him, you got a lot of money and you take care of your wife and your kids.”
“And then you wanna do something else, fine,” said the brother-in-law Abruzzo. “Now he’s being nice nice.”
“Yeah, nice nice. Because the girl don’t want no part of him no more. It’s the same fucking story all the time. He’s with a nice broad, he’s feeding her all kinds of money and jewelry and champagne and everything, and that’s why she’s with him. She figures, ‘Look, what a score.’And then all of a sudden on the one or two days you don’t do it, that’s it. They leave.”
“That’s right.”
“But in the meantime, when it’s happening, he thinks she’s in love with him and he don’t need nobody else. And you know this is it.”
Vinny Ocean now presented an imaginative litany of epithets to describe his old and close friend Joey O, then railed against gambling while failing to note that he was personally pocketing hundreds of thousands of dollars a year from it. “It’s just like drugs,” he said. “It’s no different.”
“It’s like my son,” Abruzzo said. “You know my son did the same thing. I had to bail him out—fifteen hundred bucks.”
“You got to stop him quick,” Vinny said.
“I said, ‘That’s it.’ I said, ‘Now you learned.’ I said, ‘You won once and now you thought it was an easy score.’ I said, ‘No more. I’m not bailing you out anymore.’And he stopped.”
“The one time you win, you lose ten,” Palermo said. “Stupid.”
And then Vinny began to refer to Joey O in the past tense. “He had the world by the balls,” Vinny declared, “and he blew it.”