Authors: Greg B. Smith
Nothing But Money (2 page)
It was heading toward midnight, and Robert Lino had to know what was about to occur. He was twenty-two years old now. No longer just a kid taking bets for his dad’s sports-bookmaking operation. This was more than getting coffee for the guys at the social club. This ride in the middle of the night, this was the real deal. He knew his father well. He knew his father’s friends and cousins. He knew that when they called him to come out here like this, he was now officially on his way to becoming just like them.
There was cousin Frankie Lino. Officially, he was another honored soldier in the legion of deceit named after Joseph “Joe Bananas” Bonanno. Frankie was a made guy ten years in now, one of the originals. He was famous among a certain set for a photograph in the newspaper from a long time ago. There he was being led by two detectives in that great New York tradition known as the perp walk, and Frankie was leering into the camera, his eyes black-and-blue, his cheek bruised, his hair wild. He was the very image of the stand-up guy. The New York City Police Department had dragged him to the precinct to ask him some questions about the shooting of a cop. This was 1962, and Frankie had said nothing, even when they enthusiastically applied cigarettes to his genitals. When Frankie limped out of court with his arm in a sling and his face all black-and-blue, Frankie’s brother, Anthony, had hollered out for the benefit of the assembled press, “Lookit what they did!” Frank had dutifully scowled and muttered, “Shut up, you moron-ya!” and walked away. This experience with the cops and the cigarettes had a profound effect on Frankie. From that day, he would be unable to control nervous blinking, earning him a second nickname, “Blinky,” among a small number of acquaintances from the neighborhood.
Then there was cousin Eddie Lino. Officially he was a proud member of the Gambino organized crime family, run by the world’s most famous gangster, John Gotti. Eddie was considered a big deal within the Lino family. The FBI had told everyone that Gotti was Public Enemy Number One and that the Gambinos were the worst of the worst, more powerful than Bechtel or IBM. And Eddie was one of them. He told people John Gotti was one of his close personal friends. Plus Eddie was known to be crazy. He once decided to shoot a man in the head because the man said something nasty about the wife of one of cousin Eddie’s friends. Actually Eddie shot the guy because he just didn’t like him. In a few years Eddie would be found sitting in his Lincoln, shot in his own head, but for now he and Robert Lino’s father and cousin Frankie were the best of friends. They broke all the laws they could find together—New York Penal Code, Federal Criminal Code, you name it.
Driving in Staten Island in the dark hours before dawn, Robert Lino knew what was coming. He pulled off Arthur Kill Road into the fence company parking lot he’d been instructed to find. His tires growled on the gravel, the spokes of his headlights swimming through a sea of blackness. The Island Wholesale Fence sign was the only object providing light, a ghostly presence in the claustrophobic blackness. There was nothing else out here but the lonely Outerbridge Crossing, the southernmost bridge in New York City that took you out of Staten Island and into the wilds of New Jersey. In the headlight beams, Robert could make out a beat-up white trailer, probably the fence company’s office, stacks of concrete barriers choked with weeds, rusting rows of abandoned vehicles with leering gap-toothed grills. And then he saw what he was looking for—a group of men standing around, rubbing their hands and stomping their feet against the cold. In the center of the group something lay on the ground, unmoving.
Robert Lino now knew precisely what he would be doing for the next hour. He got out of the car, and there was his father and cousin Frankie. There was also a guy everybody called Kojak because he’d shaved his head, along with a friend of Frankie’s named Ronnie, and worst of all, a guy named Tommy “Karate” Pitera. Robert knew all of these guys, but sometimes wished he didn’t know Tommy Karate. Tommy was the kind of guy who liked to kill people, really enjoyed it. Plus he liked what happened after, when he would personally cut up his victims into pieces convenient for disposal. He was known to have his own method. He’d shoot you in your house, drag you to your own bathtub, slit your throat to drain the blood, cut off your head and hands to eliminate identification issues, then go to work with a hacksaw to create four or five bagfuls of parts. On this night, however, Tommy Karate apparently did not have access to a bathtub because there, on the frozen ground, was Gabriel Infanti—dead, but in one piece.
This was the reason the father had summoned the son in the middle of the night. Not to take in a baseball game. Not to help paint the living room. Not to spend some quality time chatting about the best way to land a striper or who was the best athlete of all time, Babe Ruth or Muhammad Ali or Michael Jordan. This was an unusual father-son outing, one chosen by the father. And the son had done his part. He’d shown up. He had not questioned the father. Something needed to be done, and like any good son, Robert Lino did what he was told.
It was just a job. It was like everything else about this life. There was a problem; you fixed it. Take the guy on the ground, Gabriel Infanti. For years, Infanti was not a problem. He was a go-to guy within the family Bonanno, doing a piece of work when requested, kicking tribute up the ladder, the whole thing. He was one of the guys, a man of honor. Now he was just a problem. First he had failed what would appear to have been a fairly simple assignment. He’d been told to dispose of the body of yet another colleague. The colleague had been placed inside a metal drum and concrete poured in with him, and Infanti was supposed to make sure the drum and its contents disappeared. It didn’t work out as planned, and the New Jersey State Police discovered this special little package inside a warehouse in New Jersey days after the homicide. Strike one against Infanti. Then, during another bad day at the office, Infanti—the only made guy on the scene—was supposed to be present when another victim was dispatched. If Infanti had been where he was supposed to be, he would have had the authority to call off the hit because the victim was waiting to meet another guy who wasn’t supposed to be a victim. As it turned out, Infanti got nervous before the job and stepped out for coffee at Nathan’s. As a result, the hit went forward, and now they had to kill two guys—the guy they were supposed to kill and the guy who showed up without making an appointment. All of this caused much anxiety for the leadership down at Bonanno corporate headquarters, plus it raised doubts about Infanti’s commitment to the cause. If a person is a participant in a murder conspiracy, that person is as vulnerable as everyone else. He is a part of the team. If that person chooses to step out for coffee at Nathan’s at just the right moment, questions are raised as to motive. The implications are that a person is attempting to extricate himself from criminal activity, something that implies the person may actually and truly be secretly cooperating with other organizations. Specifically, the FBI. The bosses of the Bonanno family decided Infanti was about to sign up as an informant and go on the government payroll, so it was decided that Infanti had to go.
Not surprisingly, Tommy Karate was the guy who did the deed. Everything was arranged. Infanti was supposed to meet a guy at an empty office space in Ridgewood, Queens, unaware that Tommy Karate was there already, waiting. So was Frankie Lino, who waited outside as lookout while Robert’s father, Bobby Senior, waited inside in the dark. Cousins in crime. Frank saw Infanti driven up to the office in Queens by a Bonanno gangster named Louie, and he saw the two men walk into the building. Frank waited a minute or two, then followed them inside. There lay Gabriel Infanti on the floor of the empty office, blood pouring from a head wound. The guy Louie looked like he was going to wet himself. He’d been standing next to Infanti when he was shot. Tommy Karate was still holding the pistol with the silencer. They rolled Infanti up in a rug and carted him out to Arthur Kill Road.
And here Infanti was, stretched out on the ground, no longer a man of honor. And there was Robert Lino, ready to help out his dad.
It wasn’t going to be easy. The problem was obvious. It was December, and the earth of Staten Island was harder than Arctic ice. Tommy Karate and Kojak were banging away with their shovels. Frankie Lino tried for a bit. So did Bobby Senior. Now Robert Lino stepped in and took the shovel in his hand. The only light came from the headlights of the assembled cars.
Robert Lino was a small guy—five feet two inches tall, squarish but not terribly bulked up. Little Robert, his uncles called him, mostly because of his father with the same name but also because of his size. He looked a lot like the other Linos—prominent nose, thick black eyebrows, hair black as a Lincoln. Here he stood, the youngest man in the group, ready to do his part. He swung the shovel and hit the ground and nothing came of it. Again and again. They all did. Tommy dug, Kojak dug, Frankie, Bobby Senior and Robert Lino—they all tried their best, chipping away at the hardened ground, all to no avail. It was like trying to clear a beach of sand with a tablespoon. You worked and worked and nothing seemed to change, and digging a hole the size of a man is a lot of work. Ideally you have to dig pretty deep so if the rain comes a hand or a leg or a head won’t come popping out of the ground. In December, with the ground frozen, getting the job done right could take a long time.
And time was important on a job like this. For instance, it would not be a good idea to be standing out there with Gabriel Infanti lying on the permafrost when the sun came up and people started showing up to buy split rails or pickets or whatever they needed to fence in their little slice of Staten Island heaven. The men continued chipping away. In a few minutes, everybody was out of breath.
Tommy Karate and Kojak said they would handle the job themselves. Tommy was a very practical guy. He had brought along a bucket of lye. The lye would go on Gabriel Infanti, and in no time at all, Gabriel would be all gone. For Tommy Karate, Gabriel Infanti was just another job. Standing there in the headlights, he and the bald guy, Kojak, began to joke about how scared Louie looked the moment Tommy shot Infanti in the head. Kojak cracked up thinking about how he’d fished $2,500 cash out of Infanti’s pants after Tommy had put a bullet in the guy’s brain. All that was easy. This business of making Gabriel Infanti disappear, this was anything but. They’d thought they’d come out here and dig a hole and dump in Gabriel and the lye and then everybody goes home to their nice warm beds. Who would have thought they’d still be out here after two miserable, frigid hours, with nothing to show for it but Gabriel still lying there and the sun coming up at any time?
But they kept at it, and soon the hole was dug, the body dumped, the lye applied. The work was over. Robert Lino, the good son, said good night to his father, as if they had just watched a baseball game at Yankee Stadium and now it was time to go home. Bobby Senior and cousin Frankie drove off for a late dinner at one of their favorite restaurants, Villa Borghese in Brooklyn. They were hungry. That’s what you did when you were hungry. Robert didn’t quite have the appetite. He drove back to his home in Midwood, Brooklyn. The night’s work was done.
It was different now for Robert. Now he was officially implicated. He was what the lawyers called an accessory after the fact, the fact being a homicide, the after being the digging part. And this was because of his own father. This was how the father wanted it for his son. In murder, if you’re there when they bury the body and you don’t run to the police, you’re an official accomplice. A co-conspirator. That was Robert Lino’s new relationship with his father; instead of “Hey Dad,” or “Hey son,” they could say, “Hey co-conspirator.” Perhaps the father thought this would bring him closer to the son. Perhaps the father did not think at all.
In a few hours, the sun rose on Arthur Kill Road. Off the gravel road by the Island Wholesale Fence warehouse, a mound of freshly dug dirt could be seen—if you knew where to look. The crew had done a good job of making Infanti disappear. He was hidden by rotting wrecks and weeds and concrete barriers. Customers would show up and buy their wares, and business would be transacted as it had been yesterday and the day before. In a few days, Gabriel Infanti’s wife in New Jersey would report Infanti as a missing person. She’d tell the police that he’d left the house with a big pile of cash. He was going to buy a car from a guy. That was all she knew. That was pretty much the extent of what she knew in general about her husband. He was always going off to see a guy about a thing. She was upset, but for the Bonanno crime family, it was as if nothing had happened at all. Christmas was coming, and Gabriel Infanti would be spoken of no more.
CHAPTER TWO
October 19, 1987
The young man of means awoke in his thirty-eighth-floor Manhattan aerie high above the East River. Below he watched the sun rise up over Queens and spread across the towers of the Upper East Side. He could see the millions just beginning to awaken. The lights on the 59th Street Bridge still twinkled in the gray dawn, and one by one, the good people of Manhattan were rising to face the day. Lights went on all around him. He was up at 5:30 a.m. every weekday, out the door by 6:30, at his desk by 7. He embraced his early morning enthusiasm. He couldn’t wait to get to work. He was going to make money, lots of money, more money than a young man of twenty-seven deserved to make. This was it. He had arrived. He stepped into the shower and prepared to march forward.
He told people he lived on Sutton Place, an address synonymous with wealth and Upper East Side taste. He told people he lived down the street from the secretary general of the United Nations, who lived in a house built for the daughter of J. P. Morgan. Henry Kissinger was his neighbor.
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