Made Men (28 page)
Authors: Greg B. Smith
For weeks, the FBI’s New York office and New York City Police Department detectives assigned to the Organized Crime Task Force had been secretly planning a massive arrest of forty members of the DeCavalcante crime family. The sweep was to take place at dawn on December 2, 1999, and it involved hundreds of federal agents and city cops. Several law enforcement personnel would be assigned to each arrest. They would meet at a prearranged spot, then approach the suspects’ homes just before six in the morning. This was a tried-and-true method for arresting members of organized crime, who were known for sleeping late. Usually these Mafia arrests went smoothly. For reasons that are not entirely clear, many of these men who think nothing of murdering their best friends are extremely polite when the FBI comes calling. Nevertheless, any agent or police detective assigned this task is aware that sometimes things don’t go as planned.
Sometimes people have guns, and sometimes they get funny ideas. Big arrests are thus viewed as big headaches.
They are also viewed as difficult to keep secret. The more people who need to be arrested, the more police and agents need to be involved, the more potential there is for a leak. In this instance, Detective Gardell, who was well known and liked by most of the city’s major-case detec
tives, was in a position to know who was going to be arrested and when. A list had been drawn up, which was supposed to be confidential. It was not. Somehow Gardell must have got a look at it and the information was transmitted to the parties concerned.
This was somewhat distressing to the NYPD and the FBI. They had intended for the DeCavalcante arrests to come off with as much secrecy as possible. If members of the DeCavalcante crime family knew about the arrests, they might want to try to leave the country. Several times in the last decade the gang’s members had tapped into a pool of funds saved for fugitives and fled the United States for obscure villages in Sicily. One of the family’s veteran capos, Pino Schifiletti, had gone on such a trip with his wife a few months earlier. The FBI knew this because other gangsters had discussed it with Palermo.
Now that the list was out, the FBI had to move quickly. The bureau first had to get its prized informant, Ralphie Guarino, off the street as soon as possible. They were worried that some of the brighter members of the DeCavalcante clan might notice that Guarino—who knew nearly all of the people on the arrest list—was not on the list himself. This could present certain problems, since the FBI was also aware that the DeCavalcante family had suspected for weeks now that one of their own was an informant.
Hours after learning that the sweep had been compromised, the FBI quickly made arrangements for Ralphie, his wife, and two children to get out of their Staten Island home and into the witness protection program. United States marshals were sent to the home to escort the family out. The family was given only a few hours to pack as much as they could.
Next, the lead agent in the case, George Hanna, went through the logistics of arresting forty people in sixty minutes across Brooklyn, Staten Island, and New Jersey. Each suspect was expected to be at a certain spot.
Expected
was the operative word. Some suspects were more predictable than others. Tin Ear Sclafani, the soldier, spent most nights at home with his wife in Staten Island, and Uncle Joe Giacobbe, the aging capo, woke up every morning and drove to his usual table at Sacco’s meat market in Elizabeth. Sal Calciano, the World Trade Center maintenance employee who had helped Ralphie in the Twin Towers robbery, lived in an apartment building in Brooklyn with his mother- and father-in-law. Others would be more complicated. People like Jimmy Gallo and Anthony Capo could be anywhere. For years, Vincent Palermo religiously had returned home each night to his second wife and their three children. Since the screaming incident at his daughter’s wedding, this was no longer true. For days, the agents had tried unsuccessfully to find him during surveillance runs. He was off the radar screen.
On the night of December 1, the case agents in charge of the case did not go to bed. They stayed up, making last-minute preparation, getting ready for that moment when they had to knock on a stranger’s door. On TV, thousands stood in Rockefeller Center to watch the lighting of the big spruce and it was apparent from all the flushed faces that it was going to be a cold dawn.
Sunrise was still an hour away and the temperature was in the middle twenties when the agents came knocking on the door of Anthony Stripoli in Brooklyn. He was a big young guy with a full head of black hair who played football long ago and now worked as a bookmaking and loan-shark collector for the Colombo crime family. When he felt like golfing, he drove out to the best country club he could find, pretended to be a member, signed in as Tom, and played a few rounds. Nobody bothered him. At 6
A
.
M
. a half-dozen agents stood on his doorstep and one knocked on his door.
“What’s the charge?” Stripoli asked, standing there in his underwear as the agents swarmed past him and into his home.
He called up to this wife, “Get dressed! I’m getting locked up!”
She called down,”What do you mean ‘locked up’? How do you know that?”
“Believe me, they’re not here to play golf,” he said. “Ding ding bang bang, they come early to catch you off your guard.” He turned back to the agents, one of whom was wearing a shirt that read
RUSSIAN ORGANIZED CRIME TASK FORCE
.
“You got the wrong shirt on,” Stripoli said, making a little early-morning joke.
The agents told him he was under arrest and to go upstairs and get dressed. One of Stripoli’s daughters woke up from all the commotion and started crying. One of the agents, playing Good Cop, told Stripoli, “Listen, she’s up there crying. I want you to go upstairs and tell her it’s going to be all right. It’ll make it a lot better.”
“No way,” said another agent, playing Bad Cop.
“Listen,” said Good Cop. “I’m taking him up there.”
Good Cop escorted Stripoli upstairs and he sat on the bed with his daughter, who was sobbing. He told her, “It’s all right. I sold bad fish to somebody I’ll be home tonight. I don’t want to go, but I have no choice.” He told his
daughter not to cry, that she didn’t have to go to school that day. He said, “I’ll be home tonight.”
“You better be home tonight,” his daughter replied.
The agents asked him if he had any guns. He said, “They’re all over the house.” He claimed he had a license for each one, and he helped them find them. They asked him about a safe; he told them where it was. They asked him for his loan-shark records; he said he didn’t have any.
“Then sit down,” said another agent, a woman, promising to go back and get a search warrant to check the entire house. “We’re going to be a while.”
Stripoli made a decision on the spot. He decided to help them find whatever they needed to find but not tell them anything. They found a book with a list of names in it, including Robert Lino’s. Stripoli did what he could because he did not want to delay the search too long. He had this image of a thousand FBI agents in jackets that said
FBI
in huge letters swarming around his home and him being hauled off in handcuffs just as the school bus pulled up to pick up his daughters for school.
Stripoli quickly got dressed and was in the car by seven. The agents turned on a tape recorder and started asking him questions. They asked him if he knew this guy and that guy.
“I’m not going to talk,” he replied. “No disrespect. You do your job and I do my job, but I’m not capable of doing business with you.”
“Don’t worry about it,” an agent said. “We’ve got thirty-five of your friends. You’ll all be together.”
He wanted to hit a big score. He’d been talking about robbing somebody just for a quick score. He didn’t want his wife of thirty-five years to work anymore. He’d lived in the same small home on St. George Road in Staten Island for nineteen years, his wife’s home. He still liked to sleep late. Before dawn on a winter morning was not a time of day he wanted to see.
The agents came into the house and they told him to change, he was going down to New York FBI headquarters at 26 Federal Plaza in lower Manhattan. They followed him upstairs into this bedroom, where he began to change into jeans and a sweatshirt. While he was changing he opened a closet door. An agent happened to notice something long and cylindrical wrapped in a ratty old towel. He asked what it was.
“Oh, that,” Sclafani said. “That’s my brother-in-law’s gun.”
It was a fully loaded .22 rifle rigged as a semiautomatic. They asked if there were any more guns. At first he acted as if he did not understand the question, simple as it was. Then he recalled that there might actually be another gun, just a little one, tucked away somewhere over there near his bed. The agent found a cabinet next to the head of Sclafani’s bed and began pulling items out of it. He found a brown paper bag, and Sclafani said, “No not those.” The agent then reached inside the cabinet and pulled out an unusual object, a sock into which was stuffed a loaded .380 semiautomatic handgun still in its holster. Sclafani seemed surprised at the sight of the gun. The agent asked him why he kept a gun near his bed.
“In case they come to get me,” he said, “I’ll be ready.”
The agent asked him to describe what he meant by
“they.” Sclafani stopped talking and continued to get dressed. As he dressed, he told the agents that he did a hundred to a hundred and fifty push-ups each day. He let them know that if he were a younger man, there surely would have been a disturbance when they knocked on his door at six o’clock in the morning. He told the agents how he was with the Special Forces when he was in the United States Army from 1955 through 1957.
The agents nodded and remembered what they could without writing it down. They then escorted him out of his home and his Staten Island neighborhood and took the sixty-two-year-old pensioner into the city to face a list of charges that could put him in jail for the rest of his life.
The agents first visited Vinny Ocean’s isolated waterfront palace in the suburban town of Island Park. It was located in an island accessible by only two roads and was surrounded by the man-made channels that lead to the natural Broad Channel, which funnels into the Atlantic Ocean. It was a neighborhood that would clearly know when a stranger was driving through. It was a difficult place to get into and out of. The house itself lay behind an ornate six-foot cement wall with an eight-foot wrought-iron gate. In the dawn chill, the agents broke through the gate, drove past the basketball hoop in the driveway, and knocked on the front door. Palermo’s wife, Debra, and son Vincent Jr., came to the door. Debra informed the agents that she had no idea where Vinny Ocean was or could be. This would be the same Vincent Palermo she’d been married to for more than a decade who came home nearly every night. The agents left, in search of Vinny Ocean.
They did not have far to drive. Palermo and several other members of the DeCavalcante family were known to hang around a certain beach house in nearby Long Beach when they wanted to avoid detection. The agents took the bridge into the popular beach resort town and drove to the beach house just as Vinny Ocean and one of his most trusted soldiers, Jimmy Gallo, were walking out of the house. Vinny Ocean was carrying two bags. One was packed with clothes, as if Vinny was considering taking a little trip. The other contained the two recording devices Vinny had used to create his own record in the event he was arrested by agents of the United States government, as happened to be the case.
By noon, thirty-three of forty defendants had been rousted out of bed in their underwear. FBI agents and New York City cops showed up with arrest warrants in towns across New Jersey, Long Island, and New York City. They found one gangster in an apartment in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and one in a house trailer in Las Vegas. All the locals were shuttled to windowless holding pens inside the upper floors of the FBI’s New York headquarters in lower Manhattan. They were herded into the same room so they could all get a look at one another. Some knew others well. Others had never met. In a few cases, low-level associates got to meet the bosses for the first time. Appropriate respect was shown, though discussion was kept to a minimum. One soldier of the Colombo family, Anthony Stripoli, recognized one soldier from the DeCavalcante family, Anthony Capo. He knew him from youth football on Staten Island. They talked about football. Another asked Stripoli about his uncle Jerry Lang, a Colombo capo sitting in jail. Stripoli looked at the guy like he was asking about the color of his sister’s underwear.
The newly assembled group of friends and strangers began the tedious and mysterious practice known as “intake,” in which they would be fingerprinted, photographed, and interviewed by low-paid Justice Department employees with checklists of questions about their jobs and wives and prior experience with the criminal justice system. Usually they would all be presented to a federal magistrate who would hear them plead not guilty and assign them a District Court judge. Because there were so many bodies to process, nearly everyone involved— from defendants to prosecutors to defense attorneys to court workers to the judge himself—dreaded the day ahead.
A press conference was set for 1:30
P
.
M
. in the lobby of the office of Mary Jo White, the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York. The television people set up their bank of cameras, facing a podium with a blue curtain and the Justice Department seal as background. Blue, it was said, worked best on TV. Stacks of indictments were made available. At a little past the appointed time, White walked out and faced the gaggle of television, radio, and print-media representatives who usually showed up for her press conferences. This was a slightly smaller gaggle than usual. Lewis Schiliro, the head of the FBI’s New York office, stood nearby, along with a posse of FBI agents and detectives with the New York City Police Department. Many of the cops and