Made Men (19 page)
Authors: Greg B. Smith
The day after Joey O ended his astonishing Mafia career in a dark and empty golf-course parking lot littered with broken clamshells, there was much wringing of hands and second-guessing down at 26 Federal Plaza. The FBI agents who had spent nights and days listening to Joey O were at a loss for words. The constant money problems, the daughter’s psychologist bills, the girlfriend’s breast implants—all of that was over. In all those hours, it had never seemed that Joey O could emerge as a candidate for a mob hit. True, there were a lot of people in this world who were not happy with Joey O. But he owed everyone money, and if he was dead, he couldn’t pay. Or so the logic went.
Now the bureau was confronted with the possibility that they had somehow miscalculated. They had a duty to intervene if there was an indication that someone was about to be killed. And in Joey O’s case, there had been some not-so-subtle hints.
In conversation after conversation, it was clear that gangsters across New York and New Jersey were getting seriously tired of hearing Joey O’s long list of excuses. The day before he died, he was working the cell phone, trying to keep members of at least two New York Mafia families happy. In a midmorning call it was Joey Smash, a Gambino soldier to whom he owed tens of thousands of dollars. That day Joey O was supposed to deliver cash to Joey Smash, but Joey O didn’t show up.
“What happened?” Joey Smash said.
“I can’t drive, Joe. It’s all fucked up. I tried driving, forget about it. I’m shakin’. My sugar is dropping. And I can’t do nothing until I get to this doctor Tuesday. He told me keep it elevated.”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, Joey,” a furious Joey Smash responded. “Now let me ask you a question. You’ll be here Monday for sure, Joe?”
“Hopefully,” Masella said. “Most likely.”
“Ahhhhh...”
Two hours later Joey was on the phone with a Colombocrime-family soldier named Anthony Stripoli. Stripoli was a hulking man who was involved in several pump-anddump stock scams without actually knowing much about the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Joey O owed Stripoli and his partner more tens of thousands, and he had once again failed to deliver on time. Joey O was there with the excuses.
“Yeah, no, ’cause you know my partner was flippin’ out.”
“I know,” Joey said. “I don’t blame him.”
“ ’Cause it’s the first week and he just doesn’t like anybody trying to take a shot.”
“I don’t blame him at all,” Joey said. “He’s got my sugar going crazy.”
Then there was Sal the Baker. Sal had called Joey O two weeks earlier screaming into the phone about $40,000 Joey owed him. “I don’t want to hear no bullshit,” he shouted. “This don’t fly with me, Joey. You know what I’m saying?”
The suspects were piling up. And at the top of the heap was one of Joey’s oldest and closest friends—Vinny Ocean. The FBI was now going back and reviewing the transcripts of those conversations in which Joey O had the audacity to tell Vinny he simply couldn’t pay what he owed. They had all the transcripts and all the actual taped conversations, during which they could clearly hear Vinny Ocean losing all pretense of civility when the topic of Joey O came up. While he was discussing Joey O with one of his subordinates, Joseph Abruzzo, back in July, the fury was obvious in the words and in the tone of voice when he said. “He had the world by the balls and he blew it.” And they had Joey O’s own words, when he’d told Ralphie all about his confession to Vinny and how Vinny had told him he had to kill him. “You know what I have to do,” Vinny had said. Then Vinny physically attacked Joey O, kicked him in the testicles, and told Joey O to stay away from him.
And the fact was that Joey himself was letting just about everybody know Vinny had given up on him. He told Ralphie all about it, and he even told a veteran DeCavalcante soldier named Uncle Joe Giacobbe. Just eleven days before he died, Joey was on the phone with Uncle Joe, talking about how Vinny Ocean was heading off to Russia to talk about selling cell phones overseas. Joey O was disappointed that Vinny hadn’t invited him to tag along.
“He’d probably leave you there,” Uncle Joe joked, but the FBI agents heard no evidence that Joey had responded with a laugh.
It was now clear that in the days leading up to Joey O’s death, Vinny the boss was furious with Joey. Worse, Joey had made the mistake of letting the world know that Vinny had implied he’d have to be killed. Although this would be merely circumstantial evidence in most criminal murder cases, in the world of La Cosa Nostra, this was not the kind of information one would wish to have distributed on the Internet. In effect, Joey had made a huge mistake. He’d told the rest of gangland that it was okay to kill him—the boss said so.
Adding to the mix was the fact that the FBI had noticed a pattern with Vinny Ocean. Every time he wanted a murder committed, he flew to Florida. The time he ordered Big Ears Charlie Majuri terminated, he’d headed straight for Fort Lauderdale for a warm June weekend. As it happened, Vinny Ocean had jetted down to the Sunshine State just two days before Joey O died. He returned that very day, late in the evening. The idea, the bureau theorized, was that Vinny Ocean could not be tied to the crime because he’d been out of town.
As a result of this second-guessing and reexamination of the taped records and confluence of circumstances, the FBI decided that Vincent Palermo was now the numberone suspect in the murder of Joseph Masella. For the first time in his career within La Cosa Nostra, Vinny Ocean was the subject of a murder investigation.
As a result, the bureau made extra efforts to monitor Vinny’s phone conversations. They went looking for implications.
On this chilly Tuesday a death notice appeared on page 30 of the
New York Daily News
in between a story about a Rhodes scholar and a terrible accident on the Mexican border. The notice appeared under the name Masella, Joseph N., and it was the only notice to mention a street nickname—Joey O. He was described as a “beloved husband” of Rosemary Abruzzo Masella, and “loving father” of three daughters by marriage, and a stepson and stepdaughter. Joey O was enshrined as the “loving brother” of Marie Beard. It was noted that he was survived by three grandchildren. At the time the notice went into the paper, Joey O’s body was in repose at the Cusimano and Russo Funeral Home way down in the Gravesend section of Brooklyn. A 9:30 Mass was set for the next morning at St. Jude’s Roman Catholic Church, and there was no need to mention that Joey O would be memorialized under the silent gaze of the Patron Saint of Lost Causes.
Vincent Palermo, who had known Joey O most of his adult life, had spent all day Sunday with his former driver’s wife and daughters in their Staten Island home. He had consoled them in their grief and assuaged them of their guilt. He had expressed both shock and remorse. By Tuesday, he was on his FBI-supplied cell phone dialing up his Mafia pals.
At a little past ten in the morning, he called Sacco’s Meat Market, the pork store in Elizabeth, New Jersey, that served as unofficial headquarters of Uncle Joe Giacobbe, a veteran DeCavalcante family soldier. This was the real
pork store used as a mob hangout that was located a few blocks away from the fake pork store used as a mob hangout depicted in
The Sopranos.
When Vinny called up all he had to do was ask for Joe. The worker knew just who to get.
“How are you?” Uncle Joe answered.
“All right.”
“What the heck happened?” Giacobbe asked. “Hello,” Vinny answered. “I can’t hear you.” Vinny then went into deep code. He said, “I went to see
the truck driver,” which was a clever agreed-upon way of referring to Stefano Vitabile, the alleged consigliere of the DeCavalcante crime family. Vitabile owned a sand-andgravel company and apparently knew how to drive a truck. Vinny then went into an uncomfortable explanation about how he had wanted to visit with Uncle Joe in person, but the traffic on the Jersey Turnpike was too miserable to allow such a thing.
“What’ll we do?” Uncle Joe asked, clearly meaning “What do we do about Joey O?”
“Nothing,” Vinny said.
“Nothing.”
“Nothing,” Palermo repeated. “No, I told the truck driver,” he said, making it clear he had already discussed the matter with the family leadership.
To the FBI agents listening in, this could be read two ways: either the family had approved of the hit, or the family was now formulating a method of responding to the hit. Either way, it indicated that Joey O’s death was clearly family business.
“I’ll explain it to you when I see you,” Vinny said, and they agreed to meet later that week.
A few minutes later he was on his cell phone with another unnamed man claiming that “a good friend of mine just had a heart attack.” Twenty minutes after that he was on the phone with his cousin Eric, making cryptic references to a meeting. “I went over there,” he said. “I’ll talk to you when I see you.”
“Everything all right?” Eric asked.
“No, it wasn’t . . . it was that committee, you know?”
“Oh,” Eric said. “Okay, good.”
The FBI interpreted “that committee” as a reference to the three-man panel appointed to run the DeCavalcante family. The fact that Vinny would even mention it was strange, but there had not been a murder within the DeCavalcante family for at least two years, so this was a highly unusual moment. Three minutes later Vinny was on the phone with his lawyer, John Serpico, and this time he had a different explanation for Joey O’s death. They chitchatted about Serpico helping close on an upscale apartment in a new yuppie neighborhood near the Brooklyn Bridge. Then Serpico brought up Joey O.
“I heard Joey died,” he said. “What happened?”
Now Vinny was off the heart-attack story and on to a robbery story. “Somebody tried to rob him,” he said. “He went to a diner on Rockaway Boulevard and he took out money to pay the bill—a lotta money—and they followed him and they took all his money, all his jewelry, and they shot him.”
“You’re kidding?”
“No. Unbelievable,” Vinny said. “I got back from Florida Saturday and that’s what I came back to. And I’m all day with his daughters, because his daughter, one of them got a problem to begin with. Her boyfriend got killed not long ago. Right in front of her. And we’ve been going through hell with her. Now this happens, and we were with her all day yesterday, all day Sunday. We laid him out last night and then again today and tomorrow. You know tomorrow we’re going to bury him.”
“What a shame,” the lawyer Serpico said, and the two men finished up some other business and Vinny signed off. Twelve minutes later he dialed up Joey O’s grieving wife, Rosemary, a woman Vinny had known for decades. She informed him she was headed off to the hospital in Brooklyn where her husband had been pronounced dead of multiple bullet wounds. She had to “pick up the property. Even though they said it’s nothing, but I figured I would get it.”
“Aha,” Vinny said. “Unnnh.”
Rosemary explained that “some guy named Ralphie” called the house. “He didn’t even know” Joey was dead, she said. “He was looking for him.” She mentioned the death notice in the
News,
and then she wanted Vinny to explain what had happened to her husband, the father of the children. “I just can’t make any sense out of it or anything,” she said. “They’re just saying the same thing over and over again.”
Vinny acted as if he never met Joey O in his life and had no idea that poor Joey O actually owed someone some money. He seemed to be talking to himself, or talking for somebody to hear. He said, “What’s he owe them money?”
“That’s what I don’t understand,” Rosemary Masella said. “I mean, if I could see if he had money, if he was a big shot, if he was something.”
“No, the guy owed him money,” Vinny said. “He didn’t want to pay him.”
“I mean, for nothing,” Rosemary responded, obviously not listening to a word he’d said.
“He owed him a lot of money,” Vinny continued. “I mean a lot of money.” He realized he was making it seem that the mysterious “Steve” might have been justified in shooting Rosemary’s beloved. He quickly corrected himself: “I mean, there’s never enough for that. I mean...”
“I mean you coulda yelled and screamed and made a payment plan or something,” she said. “I mean people hung him up before. I can’t tell you how many times.”
“It’s crazy,” Vinny said, and the two promised to meet at the funeral home later that day.
At Cusimano and Russo’s, he got a call from a man the FBI agents listening in couldn’t identify. He was listed merely as Joey LNU for Last Name Unknown. Now Vinny was back on the heart-attack story regarding Joey O. He told a different story depending on who asked. When Joey LNU asked “Which Joey?”—an extremely reasonable question—Vinny responded, “You know, Mozzarella.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“So,” Vinny said. “How you doing? What’s going on? How’s business? All right, let me get done with all this shit and I’ll give you a buzz tomorrow.”
“Whatever’s good for you,” Joey LNU said. “I mean, I know you’re busy.”
Vinny said no problem and the two made arrangements to meet the next day. By the time the funeral was over, Vinny was back on the job, yowling at the workers at Wiggles about renovations, talking with lawyers about his big deal with Bob Guccione. He was a man of business, and when Rosemary Masella kept calling him about certain things that she wanted to talk about over the telephone, Vinny Ocean tried to walk that thin line between sympathetic and just plain rude. “You know, I wanted to tell you something,” she said the day after the funeral. “Do you have a minute?”
He put her on hold, took another call, came back to Rosemary. He had to go, he couldn’t talk on the phone about this. They would talk later.
Guilt arrived. Vinny called Joey’s house in Staten Island and got the machine. Joey’s voice was still on the machine. He quickly hung up. He then began calling people to tell them how much he missed his old friend, Joey, what a great guy he was. He sounded very different from the days when he was calling Joey “a sick bastard,” kicking him in the balls, and warning him that he would have to have him killed.
“Son of a bitch,” he said to his son Michael. “It’s hitting me now, you know what I’m saying? Because he used to help me out. I’d say, ‘Joey, I need blood pressure pills. My beeper, Joey, my beeper.’ Jesus Christ. He would say anything funny. You go away with him, he’d make you laugh all day long. I don’t know.”