Made Men (2 page)

to partner up with a Colombo captain and kept in touch with members of the Genovese crime family he knew from the fish market. For the most part, he was well liked. He was, in the truest sense of the word, an “earner” who got the job done.

By 1994, Vinny had established himself in the usual Mafia businesses. According to the FBI, he was shaking down construction companies in the city through his control of several laborers’ unions. Some of that money he put back on the street through loan-sharking and gambling operations, which allowed him to collect thousands of dollars every week in off-the-book cash. He became an off-thebook partner of one of his loan-shark victims’ businesses. He opened up Wiggles in Rego Park, a tremendous source of cash.

There were only three hundred problems—all of them standing on the sidewalk outside Wiggles nearly every night, hollering about kids and morality and property rates. They were protected by the same First Amendment Vinny Ocean mentioned on the sign outside his club to justify opening an all-nude club on a mom-and-pop Queens street. They had a right to protest. And it was that very right that gave Vinny Ocean an unusual idea.

What if you use the First Amendment to fight back? He had been talking with his lawyers about filing a freespeech lawsuit against the neighborhood activists, arguing that their aggressive behavior was scaring off his customers in violation of his rights to do business as an American. It is, he would argue, positively un-American, and certainly antientrepreneurial, to allow such a thing to continue.
On September 1, 1994, less than a month after the big protest, Wiggles officially fired back. One of Palermo’s lawyers, Stanley Meyer, filed a lawsuit—one of the first of its kind—in Queens State Supreme Court arguing with a straight face that protesters were violating Wiggles’s right of free expression. Meyer asks a judge for an injunction ordering the protesters to immediately cease and desist from yelling and screaming outside the door. They alleged that the protesters had repeatedly violated the privacy rights of customers by videotaping license plates. They also claimed the protesters had violated the right to be free of flying foodstuff. Wiggles employees—even those who kept their clothes on at work—had been hit by airborne tomatoes and other unspecified fruit. Granted, there was no better than a slim chance that Palermo would actually win. But Vinny Ocean knew that his quixotic effort of wrapping himself in the American flag and filing suit might, in the end, not matter a bit.
That was because the protests had actually increased business. All that publicity had been good for the club. In fact, in the city of New York in 1994, no other strip club could boast of getting so much publicity with so little effort.
All of which made Wiggles’s prospects pretty good. When a reporter asked Meyer, the club’s lawyer, what he thought the future would bring for Queens’s only all-nude strip club, he answered swiftly and succinctly.
“We will outlast them.”

pages of transcripts gathered during a two-year wiretap of Sam the Plumber’s office. On tape, Sam the Plumber was given to philosophizing about “honor.” He was known to say things like “I’d give my life for our people.” His most famous quote was “Honest people have no ethics.” He said this because he was furious that the cops and judges he was paying off wouldn’t always do what he wanted.

Sometimes he’d settle disputes over who was allowed to shake down whom in the manner of, say, a Roman senator. Revealing how he resolved one such affair of state, Sam the Plumber explained that he’d ordered a trusted lieutenant to administer a beating. “Then he hit him another one. He started hollering, ‘Help! Help!’ There were sixty guys outside, but I guess the room was soundproof.”

At times Sam was a father figure. When one of his soldiers did not show sufficient respect to one of his capos, his response was quite paternalistic.

Sam: “Joe, you owe John an apology.”
Joe: “Okay, I apologize.”
Sam: “Joe, do you mean that? Shake hands. I won’t permit it this way. Joe, I’d give my life for our people.”

The tapes undermined the Count’s royal legacy. They captured forever the fact that he was cheating on his wife with a secretary named Harriet, with whom he sometimes conversed in Yiddish. Sam the Plumber was momentarily famous, but also bound to spend some time in jail. On the day in 1971 when he and fifty-four of his cohorts were indicted, he was at the height of his power and the family that bore his name was as famous as it would ever be.

He pleaded guilty to running a $20-million-a-year gambling operation around the same time that a state report claimed that he and another crime family controlled 90 percent of the porno shops in the city of New York. The loquacious Sam the Plumber did two years of his five-year sentence and was released early because of good behavior and heart problems. He retired to an ocean-view high-rise condo on Collins Avenue in Miami Beach, Florida, and the crime family that bore his name was never quite the same. By the time the 1990s rolled around, law enforcement continued to believe he was advising the family on criminal matters, but in documents they listed his “hangouts” as “Miami Heart Institute.”

After DeCavalcante left jail, he appointed first as acting boss and then as boss a well-spoken, extremely polite, and profoundly ruthless man named John Riggi. Riggi was business agent of Local 394 of the International Association of Laborers and Hod Carriers in Elizabeth, New Jersey, and he managed to stay out of jail until he was indicted in Newark in 1989. He was convicted the next year and began serving time, continuing to serve as boss of the family from his cell in Fort Dix federal prison.

At the time of Sam the Plumber’s funeral, there was word of yet another potential void in the leadership of the DeCavalcante crime family. Riggi was still technically the boss, despite his having been in jail for seven years. Riggi had appointed an acting boss to handle matters on the street. The man’s name was Jake Amari, a broken-down septuagenarian who ran AMI Construction in Elizabeth, New Jersey. Jake had always been close to Riggi, from the days when Riggi actually walked on city streets and hung around the now-defunct Café Italia in Elizabeth. Now Jake the acting boss—and by extension, his friend and real boss, Riggi—had a big problem. Jake was slowly dying of stomach cancer.

Everyone knew it, and no one talked about it. It was certain that when he passed, there would be a move to see who was in charge. As the New Jersey law enforcement agents ran their video cameras and scribbled down license plates at Sam the Plumber’s funeral, they looked for clues as to where the DeCavalcante family was headed. They made some predictable findings—Jake Amari was there. So was Stefano Vitabile, the alleged consigliere who once had been Sam the Plumber’s chauffeur when he traveled to New Jersey, driving a car registered to a sand and fill company. There was Charlie (Big Ears) Majuri, a captain and son of Sam the Plumber’s former underboss Frank Majuri, driving a car registered in his wife’s name. There was Frank Polizzi, an old-time captain who was once busted in the old Pizza Connection heroin case and then released from prison because he claimed he was dying. He was still alive.

These were all men who could end up running the family, which would make them potential targets of any investigation. The agents wrote down everything they could, and noticed that most of the license plates were from New Jersey. There were a handful of New York plates, including one from Brooklyn captains named Anthony Rotondo and Rudy Ferrone and a longtime, profoundly unsuccessful bookmaker named Joey O Masella.

But on that day, as members young and old paid their respects to the man who claimed to possess royal blood, one name did not surface on any of law enforcement’s radar screens—Vincent Palermo. In fact, as of 1997, Vinny Palermo was able to attend the funeral of his mentor and did not have to worry that his name would show up on some law enforcement database listing who’s who in organized crime. At the time Vinny Ocean did not exist to the FBI. For more than thirty years, Vinny Ocean had stayed off the FBI’s radar.

inspiring sight, filled with the casual majesty that is everywhere on the street corners of Manhattan. Here was one of where on the street corners of Manhattan. Here was one of story citadels of power as tight as the Federal Reserve, swallowed up whole by the sky. The mighty towers seemed almost fragile this way.
Fragile
was a word Ralphie Guarino needed to explore.

He was aware that the World Trade Center was known as one of the most secure public spaces in the world. First, the huge complex of towers and office buildings was positively brimming with cops. There were all kinds of cops in there—New York City cops, Port Authority of New York and New Jersey police, Federal Police officers with their unrecognizable initials, FPO. Inside the two towers just about every federal law enforcement agency imaginable was well represented—the United States Secret Service, the U.S. Customs Service, the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms—you name it. Cops were everywhere.

Added to that was an atmosphere of paranoia inspired by an incident that occurred just before noon on February 26, 1993. On that day, a group of Islamic fundamentalists drove a yellow Ryder van into the garage underneath One World Trade, parked it in a spot near a bearing wall, and quickly drove away in a beat-up sedan. A few minutes later the van, which contained canisters of liquid hydrogen and extremely volatile urea nitrate, blew into a thousand pieces. In all, six people died and thousands more were injured. A class of suburban elementary-school students was trapped in an elevator for hours. Thousands of employees had to trudge down thousands of stairs through thick black smoke, emerging from the building with their faces smeared with soot, coughing and wheezing and happy as hell to be out of there.
Ralphie knew all about this from his friend Sal Calciano, a guy from the neighborhood in Brooklyn who had worked inside the Trade Center twenty years. Calciano was a supervisor with American Building Maintenance, the company that kept the Trade Center clean, and he’d been inside one of the towers when the bomb went off. He’d carried a woman who was having problems breathing down many flights of stairs. He’d helped many others find their way out and then stayed outside watching for his coworkers, making sure they’d all escaped.

Then, in the weeks and months that followed, Sal told Ralphie, the building changed. Consultants were hired. Reports were drafted. Jersey barriers were trucked in and laid end to end around the entire building. Steel gates were erected to shut down access to certain parts of the plaza between the towers. Huge concrete flowerpots were plopped down in front of building entrances nobody had ever noticed before. And there were cameras. Lots of cameras, covering every angle—on every floor, in corners, in elevators, in dark garages. Twenty-four/seven the cameras ran, recording the face of every individual who entered or exited. And after the bomb, the building management made every employee who worked in the building wear a special plastic identification tag so they could keep track of who was doing what.

The inspiration for all these changes was simple—it’s one thing when some terrorists from across the sea drive into your building and blow it up once. To allow such a thing to happen twice was simply out of the question.

Just last month Sal had told all of this to Ralphie as the two were sitting in a car in Brooklyn. Ralphie had been working on Sal for weeks. During their talk, Sal had finally agreed to hand over to Ralphie one of those special new ID badges the Port Authority gave out only to trusted employees like Sal.

Sal told Ralphie other things as well—such as the precise day and time the Brinks truck arrived each week with money to be delivered from Bank of America’s many branches to the bank’s foreign currency unit on the eleventh floor of One World Trade. He told Ralphie which freight elevator the guards took, how many guards stayed with the money during the eleven-story ride, how much time it took to get to the eleventh floor, approximately. He couldn’t say exactly how much money the Brinks guards transported on any given day, but he knew it was a lot because the bags sure looked heavy.

Ralphie had much in common with Sal. Both had grown up near the South Brooklyn waterfront. The two men knew many of the same knock-around guys who hang out at social clubs, putting money on the street and gambling on nearly anything that moves. Ralphie always enjoyed hanging around with these guys, and he picked up a very specific type of education as a result. Stealing things, for instance, had become his career. He had been arrested many times and had cobbled together an impressive record that culminated in charges brought by the United States attorney for the Eastern District in Brooklyn in 1987 involving fraud and larceny and general felonious behavior. In fact, Ralphie had just finished paying off the fine he had incurred in that case just a few weeks ago. Over the years he stole many things from warehouses on the Brooklyn and New Jersey waterfront and sold them to a fence in a wheelchair named “Wheels.” Ralphie was definitely a knock-around guy himself. He told stories about Joey Gallo and Joey Gallo’s lion, although it was never sure that he ever actually met Joey Gallo or his lion. Ralphie had lots of brothers, some of whom had gone to jail at one time or another.

“In 1972,” he confided to Sal, “me and my bro Tony were on a hijacking case. Four brothers in jail at one time. My mother did not know which way to run.”

For all his knocking around, he didn’t have much to show. He was also forty-one and worried about putting his two kids through college. He put sunscreen on his bald spot and obsessed about his weight. “I can’t believe how fat I got,” he said. “Fucking fat.” He drank his coffee black with Sweet’N Low, liked to get a manicure once in a while, and could spend endless hours discussing the good things in life—caviar, champagne, the correct cigar. He drank Dewar’s and smoked Mohegans. He was vain as hell, but very talented at getting what he wanted by convincing others that they were smarter than he was.

“If I’m rich or poor, I act the same,” he said. By this he meant, in good times or bad, if there was a scam to be had, Ralphie was a willing participant.

Ralphie on Ralphie: “Everybody says if you ask anybody in the neighborhood, Sally, he’s a stand-up guy. They don’t tell you what he does ’cause—”

Sal: “They don’t know it.”
Ralph: “They don’t know. Nobody knows my fucking business. Nobody knows what I’m fucking capable of. Nobody. They summize...”
Sal could relate to Ralphie. He lived twenty years in a three-family tenement on Twenty-third Street in south Brooklyn, a tough little no-name neighborhood that lies between the Brooklyn Piers and Greenwood Cemetery. Sal had not had it easy. His father was an alcoholic who threw Sal out of the house when he was thirteen and stepped in front of a train when Sal was thirty-eight. Sal had to identify the body. One of his brothers died in a motorcycle accident; his sister went to a party in 1984 and never came home. Another sister died from AIDS. He had a wife who was afraid to leave her house and a twenty-one-year-old son who still lived at home. Only his daughter seemed to have promise—she was an honor student at a Catholic prep school and was headed off to college, hopefully on scholarship. Sal thought “hopefully” because if not, Sal— at the age of forty-one and collecting only limited legitimate income—had no clue how he was going to pay for it. The way Sal saw it, Ralphie might just provide the answer.
He had known Ralphie for years and had come to believe that Ralphie was smart. Still, he liked him just the same because Ralphie was not the kind of guy to hold it over you that he was smarter. And Sal—who considered himself a kind of evil genius in his own right—saw Ralphie as a comrade in crime.
Now Ralpie and Sal both needed a score. Ralphie owned real estate all over Brooklyn, collecting rent from working people and people who didn’t work. With his many needs, this was not enough. Sometimes he had to hire junkies as superintendents and then forget to pay them because he felt he should place his limited supply of cash elsewhere. Such as in the restaurant he was trying to run down by Hudson River near the Brooklyn anchorage of the Brooklyn Bridge. The idea of it was to grab on to the cigar craze that was sweeping New York as part of the biggest financial boon in Wall Street history. Plenty of yuppie types lived in nearby Brooklyn Heights and the neighborhood just south of the Heights that used to be called Red Hook. Some were even moving into the old factory buildings between the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges. People like Sal and Ralphie who had grown up in these old Brooklyn neighborhoods now felt like they no longer belonged there. Their only form of revenge was to gouge the hell out of the yuppie hordes at “upscale” restaurants like Cigargoyles. And perhaps at some point, such a thing would occur. But for now, Cigargoyles was an endless chasm into which Ralphie poured his hardearned cash and out of which he received nothing but aggravation.
“I’m tired of fucking earning,” he says to Sal. “I mean I want to fucking spend money with broads and have fun. You know, the usual bullshit. But I don’t want to sit in fucking social clubs all day either.”
Recently Ralphie had confided in Sal that he had a girlfriend who liked to spend time in the best of Manhattan’s hotels.
Sal said, “How’s your wife doing? She’s nice. A very nice person, your wife. I met her a few times. Your daughter’s beautiful. And you got a girlfriend, too.”
Ralph: “I’m telling you, I can’t fucking afford her.”
“You know it and I know it.”
“I’ve got a wife. I’ve got a girl,” Ralphie says. “I’m telling you I’m so pressed up here. You have no idea. I’m fighting with my girl. I’m all day with her. My credit card is up to the fucking sky limit with these fucking hotels. Everybody’s running out of patience. I’m running out of patience.
“You know what?” Ralphie asked. “This is sad.”
Ralphie had come to the realization that he was, in fact, dead broke. Stealing maybe $3 million from the Bank of America inside the world’s safest building could perhaps resolve that dilemma.