Made Men (27 page)
Authors: Greg B. Smith
The wedding reception was held at a banquet hall on the South Shore of Long Island and it was well attended. Renee Palermo, New York City schoolteacher, was to wed Emil Onolfi. She was about to receive her master’s degree. He was a heavy-equipment mechanic for the county of Nassau on Long Island. It was a late-blooming romance. They had been dating for two years. He had two children from a previous marriage. They were planning on moving to the south shore of Long Island.
The father of the bride, Vincent Palermo, had five children from two marriages, but this was his first daughter to get married. He invited his family, and with seven siblings, that was a lot of people. He also invited all his friends, including the entire hierarchy of the DeCavalcante crime family. They all showed up with envelopes of cash for the bride and groom. For Vinny Ocean, it was supposed to be a happy day.
And it was. Until he happened to spot the men outside the banquet hall with telephoto-lens cameras. The men were walking from car to car, jotting down license plates— just like in
The Godfather.
Everyone knew this was part of the little dance with the FBI. They wrote down your license plates and took pictures of your guests; you pretended they weren’t there.
But the pressure had been mounting.
The service was over, the guests were eating dinner, and Vinny was boiling like a teakettle. He could not believe they had the cannolis to show up at the wedding of his daughter. Was there no honor? Was there no respect? Despite warnings from his associates, Vinny suddenly broke away from the crowd and ran outside.
The agents were taken by surprise. There they were,
doing their jobs, playing their parts, when all of a sudden this crazy person came running out of the banquet hall in his tuxedo, frothing and fuming. He waved his arms passionately and shouted epithets that the priest from Sacred Heart Roman Catholic Church who was inside probably did not hear.
The agents backed away but did not leave. They moved across the street and continued to do their jobs. Vinny Ocean walked back inside to his daughter’s wedding reception and that was that for the rest of the day.
The day after Thanksgiving, the Christmas season kicked off in New York City officially, although it had been up and running for weeks. The crowds grew heavier at Rockefeller Center and along Fifth Avenue. Vinny Ocean’s wife went about her usual business of shopping and keeping house. The two youngest kids went to classes at their private schools, and the oldest daughter continued her freshmen year at Fordham University in the Bronx. Everything seemed normal, with one exception. The agents who staked out Wiggles weren’t seeing any sign of Vinny Ocean. He had stopped using the cell phones Ralphie Guarino had given him and they hadn’t heard his voice in a long time. Ralphie asked around, but nobody could say for sure where he was. After a few days of searching, the agents reached a conclusion.
16
DO YOU OWN
THE GODFATHER
?
There was a time in the 1960s and 1970s when prosecutors had to spend a good amount of time educating jurors about the ways of the Mafia. They would bring in expert witnesses to explain a little history of the secret society, talk about the difference between a capo and a soldier, shed some light on the concept of
omerta.
There would be charts and graphs and other visual aids. In those days this was new territory. People had to learn the language before they could even consider the case itself. It was all a little mysterious, even exotic. By the end of the twentieth century, the mystery was gone.
The change was best illustrated by jury selection in
United States
v.
Steven Kaplan.
Kaplan was identified as an associate of the Gambino crime family who was running first a nightclub in Boca Raton, Florida, and then a nude club in Atlanta, Georgia. He was indicted by federal
prosecutors in Atlanta on racketeering charges for allegedly paying protection to the Gambino family. In exchange, they let him use the Gambino name to get what he wanted. It was an unusual case in that most of the big traditional organized-crime prosecutions take place in New York and New Jersey, where people are somewhat more familiar with the quirks and jargon of the genre. The presence of the family run by John Gotti south of the MasonDixon presented both sides with a challenge: How would the Mafia play in mainstream America?
It was difficult to know going into the case what the people of metro Atlanta knew or thought about the Mafia. During jury selection, the defense attorneys and federal prosecutors haggled over what questions to ask to weed out potential prejudice in either direction. They questioned people about their feelings regarding strip clubs (“Do you have any particular feelings toward nude dancing establishments which may interfere with your ability to be impartial in this matter?”). But they spent a lot of time inquiring about the Mafia and, more specifically, Mafia movies.
“Do you or your spouse have any specific interest in or fascination with the Mafia?” was one of the first mob questions. It assumed that everybody knew what the Mafia was. Jurors were then asked if they had known anyone associated with the Mafia. They were then given a Mafia primer, and asked if they were “familiar with the terms ‘La Cosa Nostra,’ ‘made man,’ ‘soldier,’ ‘captain,’ or ‘LCN’?” Specifics about the real-life Mafia followed: “Have you ever heard of John Gotti?” “Have you ever heard of the Gambino crime family?”
Then came questions about the pretend Mafia of TV and movies and even the Internet. They asked jurors if they watched
The Sopranos
or visited Mafia Web sites. They asked which books jurors had read “on the subject of the Italian Mafia.” They asked jurors to list all the mob movies they’d watched in the last five years, and specifically whether they’d seen any of
The Godfather
movies. “If yes, how many times and do you own any of these movies?”
During jury selection, most of those who were asked these questions had some familiarity either with the TV show or the movies. One woman admitted she was a big
Sopranos
fan, which prompted concerned questioning by Assistant United States Attorney Arthur Leach, who was afraid she might be a kind of Mafia groupie.
The Sopranos
presented the capos and soldiers and their families as somewhat sympathetic figures, which was a concern to a prosecutor who was about to present the Gambino crime family as the epitome of evil. Leach thus found himself asking this juror about totally fictional gangsters in his effort to prosecute real-life gangsters. He asked about Tony Soprano, the fictional mob boss, and the woman said she liked him. A bad sign for Prosecutor Leach, but perhaps not reason enough to justify kicking someone off the jury as being prejudiced against the government. He decided to ask about another TV character named Big Pussy, a soldier who becomes an informant against the people he’d grown up with.
The sixteenth-floor office of DMN Capital Investment looked like hundreds of other small investment firms located deep in the heart of capitalism. It was located right on Hanover Square a few blocks from Wall Street, and it included all the trappings of high finance, which is to say legitimacy. If an investor took the time to check out DMN, he would find oak wainscoting, fake masterpieces, and ersatz walnut furniture in the hallway and
DMN CAPITAL
in gold block letters on the polished oak doors. Inside the office there was plenty of blond wood furniture, green-blue carpet, and two dozen plastic telephones trilling away. A smart conference room with a door to shut out the trill-trill-trill looked out on the old Farmers Insurance building, one of the premiere landmarks of lower Manhattan. If the diligent investor had the time, he would watch and listen as a dozen brokers and stock promoters worked the phones, cold-calling senior citizens culled from specially prepared lists. The investor would hear the hard sell, as aggressive young men hyped overthe-counter chop stocks, stocks that allowed the willing investor to bet on the fortunes of tiny companies nobody had ever heard of. Companies that owned health clubs in the American Southwest. Companies that sold in-home nursing care or recycled roofing shingles. Companies that claimed to operate Web sites. And those phones were humming, with the biggest bull market in the nation’s history charging forth to make everybody rich. Everybody—not just the descendants of the
Mayflower
’s original passenger manifest. Everybody! Taxi drivers. Toll collectors. Chinese-food deliverymen. And DMN was right there at 5 Hanover Square, surrounded by the happy drone of capitalism, ready to make some money.
The FBI was there, too.
On this day, as money was being made, microphones hidden inside the walls of DMN Capital picked up every word spoken, every curse uttered. The Dow was cruising back toward 11,000, the government was cranking out reports that made everyone feel good about dumping their life savings into the stock market, and the FBI was taking
notes about the events unfolding at DMN. The dozen brokers and promoters sat at their desks amid stacks of papers and lists of names, hammering away, keeping those customers confident, unaware that somewhere, documents were being drafted.
DMN, after all, was really just a branch office of the Bonanno crime family. It was controlled by a Bonanno captain named Robert Lino, who was called the Little Guy because he was, in fact, little. He was a young man with a Julius Caesar haircut who stood about five foot two inches tall and spoke quietly and deliberately. Every week he showed up to pick up his fat packages of money. In exchange, he lent his name and the prestige of the Bonanno family to DMN. This made DMN an unusual place.
For instance.
A few months earlier, a Colombo family associate who believed DMN owed him $40,000 stormed into the office, pulled out a .38, and shot up a computer.
A stock promoter who wasn’t doing what he was told was sucker-punched in the head and knocked out cold in the company’s conference room. His colleagues then stripped off his shirt to make sure he wasn’t wearing a wire.
The three DMN partners—Jeffrey Pokross, Sal Piazza, and James Labate—were actually Bonanno associates. Pokross had actually once been a broker but had his license revoked for making unauthorized trades. Labate and Piazza couldn’t tell yield burning from short selling, but they liked to make money. As the lunch hour ticked by and the Dow crawled north, the DMN partners sat in the conference room. They were not talking tech stocks or bitching about blue chips. They were discussing another investment they had made in a New York Police Department detective named Stephen Gardell.
Detective Gardell, a decorated veteran of the New York City Police Department who looked exactly like a decorated member of the New York City Police Department, lived on Vineland Avenue in Staten Island. He had snow-white hair, a ruddy complexion, and the look of a man headed straight for the pension board at age fiftytwo. He’d solved many of the city’s toughest cases as a member of the Brooklyn homicide squad and his name had appeared in the paper under the heading
HERO COP
. He’d risen through the ranks to collect an $80,000 salary. This did not make him a millionaire, but he did all right. He lived in a rented house with a $3,000 aboveground swimming pool in the backyard. The pool had been constructed expressly for his use, though it was built on land owned by someone else. This was not a problem for Detective Gardell, because he had not paid out a dime. A friend of his took care of the whole thing. The friend was his neighbor from down the street, James Labate, who everybody called Jimmy. As it happened, Jimmy Labate was an associate in the Bonanno crime family of La Cosa Nostra.
In Staten Island, this was considered normal. After all, somebody has to live next door to the Mafia.
Because Labate and Detective Gardell were neighbors, they had come to know and like each other. Gardell both knew and did not know about Labate’s “affiliation.” Labate said Gardell once asked him “a funny question: Am I a gangster? I said, ‘Do I know people? I know a lot of people.’ ”
Ultimately, each realized he had certain things to offer the other.
Gardell had been with the NYPD for twenty years and still had to struggle to pay his rent. He wanted a little something more. Labate was glad to help. He had a friend of his build Gardell the big backyard pool. He arranged to have the veteran detective comped at a nice casino in Las Vegas and Atlantic City, and sent Gardell and his girlfriend to San Francisco for a weekend. They found him a stolen mink coat, and special computer chips for his TV to snag DVD programs from the stratosphere.
Detective Gardell was to provide a little something in return.
He had worked his way up into the top offices of the Detectives’ Endowment Association, the union that represents police detectives in New York. He was the treasurer of the union, which made him aware of the immense size of the union’s $175 million pension fund. Labate and his friends at DMN decided that the pension fund should begin investing some of its money through DMN Capital Investments, for a fee.
“If this fund works out right and you can open up doors for more funds,” Labate told Gardell and his girlfriend, Sharon Kilcoin, “you won’t have to work as long as you live.”
“I know,” Gardell said.
“That’s a hell of a parachute,” Labate said.
“I won’t have to work Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday,” a gleeful Gardell gushed.
“Will I have to work?” his girlfriend queried.
“No,” he said.
“I know what I want,” she said. “A Mercedes truck.”
Besides helping gangsters get ahold of the pension funds of New York City cops, Gardell provided other little favors when he could. He got Labate a permit to carry a weapon and, perhaps even more important, eight special New York Police Department parking permits that allowed Labate and his Mafia friends to park anywhere they felt like.
Sometimes though, Labate felt there was more give then get.
“I’m very annoyed,” Labate said. “He got a threethousand-dollar pool we bought.”
Sal Piazza, Labate’s partner at DMN and a Bonanno associate, defended the investment: “I was happy to set the guy up. If I need the guy, I would expect him to be there.”
Labate said, “I didn’t say I don’t like him, I just keep saying the same thing. I think that we give, give, give, give, and get very little back. It’s an observation.”
But Labate knew there was potential with this investment in Gardell. “He knows a lot about everything. He knows all of this business. If you think not every phone, every cop is feeding him information, every detective is feeding him information, you’re out of your mind. If you think there’s no half a dozen wiseguy rats talking to him, you are out of your mind.”
Labate’s partner at DMN, Pokross, a small, balding man with a rat-tail thin mustache who looked like an accountant with an attitude, frequently mentioned being “with some fellows from Avenue U.” This was a street in the heart of Brooklyn where gangsters were known to collect their mail. Pokross liked hanging around guys from Avenue U, but he was smart enough to know that you had to be discreet. Pokross mentioned that Gardell was boasting he had made charges against a Bonanno associate named Michael Grecco disappear. Grecco had beaten up a recalcitrant stock promoter with a pool cue, and the promoter had actually filed charges. After three weeks, the charges suddenly disappeared. Gardell was walking around openly claiming credit. Pokross worried that this boasting could bring attention to Gardell, just when he was providing information the Bonanno crime family needed.
“I don’t come to work with black turtlenecks,” Pokross said. “We don’t need him to interface with the other half in Brooklyn. It will be obvious I don’t want to look like a mob social club when he comes in.”
The three men at DMN were obviously very interested in preserving Gardell as their very own leak at One Police Plaza. Labate asked Lucille, a secretary, to call Gardell on the office phone. Gardell was supposed to be checking into the new Paris Hotel in Las Vegas, the one with the fiftystory half-scale Eiffel Tower, the faux Opera House, the bogus Louvre, and the ersatz Arc de Triomphe. There, Detective Gardell was to spend the next few days, comped by the Bonanno crime family. Lucille got the hotel and Sal Piazza got on the line and left a message for Gardell: “Stephen, it’s Sal. Jimmy and everyone want to know how you got there and if the room’s okay.”
The FBI agent recording this conversation noted the time in his logbook—1:18
P
.
M
. They had to be wondering exactly what was going on in the mind of Detective Gardell. He was giving the Mafia parking permits and claiming credit for a disappearing assault charge and all he got out of the deal was a lousy $3,000 swimming pool? Aboveground? What else was he giving them? They were very confident they would find out, because they had one tremendous advantage over the Bonanno crime family. One of the men in the room talking was actually secretly cooperating with the government. Jeffrey Pokross, who didn’t wear black turtlenecks but liked to mention Avenue U, was actually at that moment a government informant, steering the conversation. And now he said something that surprised even the FBI agents who were monitoring his every word.
“What’s the story with this Gardell thing for tomorrow?” Pokross said. He wanted to know about the impending arrest of members of organized crime that was scheduled to take place the following day and whether Robert Lino, the Little Guy, was on the list.
“Who’s getting pinched?” he asked. “It don’t involve the Little Guy?”
“Not at all,” Labate said, and that was the end of the conversation.
Pokross seemed to think the arrests involved the Bonanno crime family, but the stunned FBI agents listening in knew better.