Made Men (26 page)

D’Amato hit was not succeeding because D’Amato was too difficult to kill. None of this had resulted in the boss being in a better mood. Of late, Vinny Ocean was as unpredictable as, say, the ocean. One moment he would be asking about a person’s family, how everybody was faring; the next minute he’d explode into a tirade about respect.

On this day the two men were meeting on a street corner to discuss business. Vinny was getting an update on the lack of progress in the continuing effort to kill Frank D’Amato, a guy Vinny Ocean really did not like. Tin Ear Sclafani was making it clear the job was not going to happen anytime soon. They were unaware that the FBI was watching from a van parked across Fulton Street right in front of the building that once housed the old
Brooklyn Eagle
newspaper and its intrepid scribe, Walt Whitman. The agents could not hear what was being said, but they could see what was going on.

They saw two men, one in his fifties and one nearly sixty-two. The younger man, Vinny Ocean, gesticulated and talked on and on in an agitated manner. The man in his sixties, Joey Sclafani, nodded patiently but said nothing. As the two men talked, a hapless tourist wandered up and asked for directions.

The flustered Vinny Ocean broke away from his conversation about homicide, stepped back, looked at the tourist, and suddenly began frisking the tourist down, right there on the street.

The tourist, unfamiliar with the customs of the New Jersey Mafia, backed off quickly and headed away from the agitated man. He seemed baffled yet grateful to be walking away. The FBI watched as Vinny Ocean and Joey Sclafani walked away in different directions. The agents watching this were aware that Vinny and other members of the family knew they were being watched. Twice in the last few months agents had been forced to warn members of the DeCavalcante group that they were targets of intended hits, as they are required to do when they learn of any potential homicide. But usually it was all a little game—the good guys watched in secret, knowing the bad guys knew they were being watched. The bad guys went about their business, fully aware they were under surveillance but pretending nobody could see what they were up to. Rarely did either side acknowledge the other. Vinny’s loss of control on the street corner indicated that the game had changed. The FBI was not yet sure how.

Ralphie wanted to know if they should accept Vinny Ocean’s invitation to visit his new gambling boat. This was Vinny’s replacement for Wiggles, which had been closed for almost a year. Vinny was a secret partner in a casino boat running out of New York. The idea was to take advantage of the fact that if you cruised two miles offshore, you were in international waters and no longer subject to the laws of New York State that prohibited casino gambling. Vinny’s casino boat sailed through the strict approval process for two reasons—Vinny was not listed on any paperwork as the actual owner, and Vinny had hired a former judge to handle the matter. The ship was an instant success, which inspired Tin Ear Sclafani and Ralphie and just about every other low-level gangster in the DeCavalcante family to believe that Vinny was rolling in the green.

“He’s got money all over the place. He could cover anything. They close one joint, he opens a boat. He’s covered. I’m not covered,” Sclafani said. “Imagine a two-milliondollar boat, a three-million-dollar boat. Where did they get this money?”

But there was a problem with this boat. Sclafani said Ralphie could visit the boat but he could not because the FBI was watching the boat. “They’re taking pictures of it already,” he said. “Like a wake. Who’s going in there, who’s going out.” He laughed. “You know what they’re going to do when they find out he owns that fucking boat?” The FBI was everywhere. They were on Long Island taking pictures of Vinny’s boat, they were in New Jersey watching Jimmy Palermo. “They came there to break his balls,” Sclafani said.

Clearly Sclafani knew the FBI was getting closer, but he felt so comfortable around Ralphie that he began, for the first time, openly talking about the hierarchy of the DeCavalcante crime family. He was practically sketching out a diagram of corporate structure. He did not bother with code.

Sclafani said of Jimmy Palermo.
“Why didn’t Jimmy Palermo take over everything?”
Ralphie asked, pressing for more probable cause. “Why
did Vinny?”
“He got lazy, so they took him down. He wasn’t active
enough. You need somebody running around,” Sclafani
said. He kept referring to John Riggi, the actual boss of the
family who was sitting in a jail cell in Fort Dix, New Jersey, as “the other guy.” As in “When the other guy went to
the can, nobody knew how to run the company. When you
gotta run the company today and you’re a made guy, and
he’s in the can, they put in a committee of three. That’s the
deciding vote. You got three guys, and the consigliere
picked three guys. That’s three guys to run the family.” He went on to disclose more rules and regulations, and
expressed increased confidence that Ralphie would be
accepted as a made member of the family and that he himself would soon win his promotion to skipper he’d been
seeking practically since 1982, when he first became a
soldier.
“If I become skipper, you’ll be with me,” he said, and
grumbled again about where Wes was with the Hilfiger
counterfeits. Wes was, as usual, late. Then Sclafani got
weepy. He made it clear that he was proposing Ralphie in
order to leave behind a legacy. He seemed convinced that
he was going to die.
“God forbid I get killed tomorrow, they know you’re all
right,” he said. “I put my life up for you already. I want you
to be with me all the way.”
“This way we can go together, do things,” Ralphie said. “Let me explain something to you,” Sclafani said. “This
is very important. You can’t get into no trouble right now.
No fights. I mean, if your back’s against the wall . . .” He
was referring to the $40,000 Ralphie owed to a soldier in
the Colombo family, who was not happy of late with
Ralphie.
“I’m gonna go slow,” Ralphie promised. “I’m not
gonna lie.”
“I’m gonna say you’re over here with me,” Sclafani
said. “I’m your guardian knight. You’re established. The
main thing is make money. Don’t bother them with no
money problems.”
One of Wes Paloscio’s friends showed up and said Wes
was stuck in traffic with the truckload of counterfeit goods.
They agreed to reschedule for the following Tuesday. The
score was off for the moment.

nearby university. But there was a dark cloud. Word was out that there was an informant walking around with a wire. Vinny Ocean knew this because one of the family’s soldiers had told him. The assumption was that the informant’s earnest efforts would ultimately result in the arrival of federal agents and the unveiling of multipaged indictments with numerous references to organized crime.

Vinny Ocean decided what was said was said. All he could do now was damage control. His solution was to fight fire with fire, or more specifically wire with wire. He went out and bought two little microcassette recorders small enough to fit in his pocket. He figured that if he recorded his conversations, he could collect what lawyers called exculpatory evidence. In simple terms, this means proof that he was really just a modestly successful business guy from Long Island who had a couple of restaurants and was working on selling Penthouse lingerie to the Chinese. His name could be found on no documents. In addition to all the cash he took in, he also had plenty of traceable income from legitimate businesses, like the restaurants. He looked the part of successful businessman. He did not look like a guy who shot Fred Weiss in the face on a Staten Island morning exactly ten autumns ago. He could pull it off. The trick was to secretly record dangerous people without anyone discovering he was walking around with a wire. Naturally, if he was discovered, this could prove to be very dangerous to his well-being.
On this October day, he tried out his new machines on a deli owner named Joseph. He’d loaned Joseph $15,000 to pay his mortgage, which Joseph had agreed to pay back at a rate of interest that could crush small animals. When he was unable to pay, Vinny put one of his people in a noshow job at the man’s deli. The man’s salary went to Vinny. Now Vinny met Joseph at his restaurant in Queens, Sea World. He had the tape recorder turned on, and he said hello. It was an odd moment in the history of the American Mafia, an acting boss of a crime family sitting in a Chinese restaurant secretly recording a loan-shark victim to prove his innocence. Imagine Don Vito Corleone secretly recording the words of the undertaker promising to “use all my skills” to patch up the body of his assassinated son. It was difficult to picture.
The idea was to have a conversation in which any action that could be interpreted as an act of extortion or loan sharking could instead be explained as an act of extreme altruism by a charitable soul and all-around great guy. Vinny got right down to business.
“Did I ever give you any money?”
Joseph’s answer was unintelligible. The tape was turned off, then back on. Vinny continued, abandoning any pretense of subtlety.
“Did you ever give me money?”
Again the answer from Joseph was unintelligible. Vinny was an amateur in the James Bond game.
“Did I ever put that guy in the deli? Did I ever extort you?”
“No,” Joseph said, keeping it simple.
“No,” Vinny continued, helping Joseph out. “I never extorted anybody in my whole life. You hear what I’m telling you?”
“Yeah,” said Joseph.
“Never,” Vinny said. “Today is October twenty-seventh, 1999. They could look till October twenty-seventh of two million, they will never, never, never find anybody to say that they gave me one penny. Never. I never did that in my whole life.”
“I agree with you,” Joseph said helpfully.
With the tape running, Vincent Palermo tried to explain himself. At times he seemed to be talking directly into the microphone, as if Joseph was not there. “Maybe it’s on their mind, the question I asked you with the deli. Did I know that guy?” He didn’t say who “they” were. He seemed to have lost his train of thought. “I mean, I always treat you like my brother.”
“I know,” Joseph replied.
“The problem, the one time you were behind on your mortgage, remember? You needed the fifteen thousand dollars. I borrowed under my name from the business where I was working to help you with that.”
Joseph’s answer was unintelligible. Cars beeped in the background.
“You know what I’m saying? And I told you, Joe, don’t worry about paying me back. Whenever you have it. And you came to my house and said, ‘Why are you doing this? Don’t you understand? My own family don’t do this.’ I said, ‘Joe, I like you.’ What could I tell you? ‘I like your family, you’re a family man, I see you work hard, you’re a good man, and I helped you.’ Huh? What’s wrong with that? Everybody should do that.”
Joseph, who by now was an active participant in the little one-act play, said, “I agree with you.” This clearly was his favorite line.
“As far as taking a penny, I never, ever took a penny from anyone in my whole life,” Vinny said. “Ever. Okay?”
“I agree with you.”
Then the tone of Vinny’s little chat took a turn toward the slightly menacing.
“It makes me angry that certain people mention certain things that’s not true,” he said. “And they listen to some asshole who’s maybe jealous. You know what I’m saying, Joe?”
Before it got ugly, the wife of Vinny’s partner in the restaurant walked over to the table and said hello. He called her Mrs. Kim. Vinny asked her how she was, said his wife was asking for her as well, then began using her to augment his argument. He told her he was about to reopen Wiggles the following Monday. He was headed over to the club to supervise preparations for the big reopening of the legitimate business that he secretly owned.
“If I start now, I’ll be done at five, five-thirty in the morning,” he said, launching into his favorite bootstraps monologue. “I worked my whole life. Eleven, twelve years old. Two jobs. All my whole life. I love to work. People see that you have a nice house, a nice car, they figure maybe you did something wrong. My whole life, Mrs. Kim, never never did I do one thing wrong. That I know of.”
Mrs. Kim laughed nervously.
“Because I don’t have to. I like to take something, keep moving up. Understand? My house, I bought my house, my car. Nobody gave me these things. All my life I’ve been a workaholic. Three jobs, four jobs. Even now, I put in fifteen, eighteen, twenty hours sometimes a day, all week long. Working. Some people are jealous, some people are stupid. They say, ‘Oh, nice house, uh-huh, there must be something wrong.’ ” He began to get angry. He assumed the persona of the furious taxpayer. “That’s bullshit! I worked, I pay my taxes. I don’t do nothing wrong! Some people have big, big mouths, that’s the problem. Everybody keeps quiet, you wouldn’t have a problem. It’s all bullshit.”
The tape continued to play, but there was no more chatter, just the background sounds of the restaurant. As he headed outside, he stopped by to make one more comment to Mrs. Kim.
“Just wanted to stop by and say hello,” he said, and then the tape went dead.