See No Evil (15 page)

The Commission’s tentacles reached into nearly every aspect of New York life from trucking to the manufacturing of clothing, entertainment, even garbage collection, but in no instance was its presence more demonstrable than in the
construction
industry. The Commission had organized the
principal
building contractors into what they called the “club.” If a contractor was not in the club, he couldn’t bid on a
construction
job in New York City. Of all the locks La Cosa Nostra had on unions, there was none more firm, or deadly, than the one it held through Ralph Scopo, a soldier in the Columbo Family and president of the Concrete Workers District Council, LIUNA.

On all concrete-pouring contracts up to $2 million, the Columbo Family extorted 1 percent in kickbacks. Contracts from $2 to $15 million were reserved to a club of contractors selected by the Commission. These contractors were required to kick back 2 percent of the contract price to the families, whose members would split the money.

Thanks to the bugging of Castellano’s estate and Ruggiero’s loose lips, Giuliani had on tape discussions
related
not only to the “Concrete Club,” but more important to his RICO case, the existence of the Commission. His aim now was twofold. He needed to target Scopo as the definitive link between the unions and the Mafia. As vital to his case, he needed something more than just vague references to the Commission’s existence. He needed proof positive of its overseeing role in La Cosa Nostra, proof that would link racketeering with conspiracy. In May 1983, Giuliani saw his golden opportunity with the release of a landmark work on the history of organized crime written by, of all people, Joseph Bonanno, the only living original member of the Commizione del Pace, or the “Commission” as it was called in the United States.

I
n his autobiography,
A
Man
of
Honor,
the
seventy-eight-year-old
Joe Bonanno, then living in Tucson, Arizona, and fifteen years retired, wrote in intricate detail not only about his own extraordinary life, but the formation of the American Mafia. He described his role in establishing the Bonanno Family in Brooklyn, his rise to a position of power among the five families of New York, and the formation and operating procedures of the Commission.

His assault on Mafia overlords, Rudy Giuliani claimed, began one evening when he saw the former godfather being interviewed by Mike Wallace on “60 Minutes.” Bonanno was promoting the book, which at the time Giuliani knew nothing about, when the idea occurred to him. “Look at this,” he said to his new wife Donna in amazement. “He’s describing the Commission. How it started in 1931, how it functioned in the 1960s, how the members were the bosses of the five families from New York, how they coordinated disputes and put out contracts. This is a RICO enterprise!”

Running out to the bookstore the next morning, Giuliani devoured
A
Man
of
Honor,
convinced that he’d discovered the
linchpin that could translate FBI recordings, the testimony of informers like Willie Boy Johnson, the targeting of Concrete Workers District Council president Ralph Scopo, and Bonanno’s written history, into a racketeering conspiracy indictment.

Soon after, Rudy flew out to Tucson to interview Bonanno, who lay in a bed at St. Mary’s Hospital recovering from a heart attack. The goal was to gain a deposition
regarding
the existence and operation of the Commission, but the meeting turned into something else. Talking to the ailing
godfather
was one thing, but getting a man as cagey as Bonanno to, in effect, testify against others was an impossible task. Amiable, even talkative, the former boss of bosses had a good time with the forty-year-old prosecutor telling “
off-the-record
” stories about old pals Frank Costello, Lucky Luciano, Joe Kennedy and his sons John and Bobby, even Al Capone, but nothing about the Commission.

Frustrated by his inability to pin down Bonanno, Giuliani left St. Mary’s Hospital angry and with nothing but a copy of
A
Man
of
Honor
in his hand. However that shouldn’t have
surprised
him. Bonanno, a college-educated man and a Mafioso in the Sicilian tradition, was no easy mark and would have died before turning on a fellow member of the Honored Society, even if it was someone he considered a greedy man like Castellano or a raffish one like John Gotti. All Rudy had to have done was read the book for its content, not its value as potential evidence, and he would have understood that, at least in Bonanno’s mind, he was up against centuries of
tradition
, not merely an old, sick man.

Even a man like Elliot who had only a nodding
acquaintance
with the traditionalist “Mustache Petes,” as the younger guys called them, had learned that these old-timers were unshakable. And if he had any doubts about that, they were
dispelled in discussions that he had years later on the subject, first with Bill Bonanno, then his aging, but still mentally agile father, Joseph, shortly before his death at his home in Tucson.

“A key component in Mafia relationships is honor,” the younger Bonanno told Elliot. “In our world, you defined honor by respect. That has nothing to do with good manners or even deference. It has to do with acknowledging power, yours and someone else’s.”

“What about Giuliani?” Elliot asked. “When your father agreed to meet with him, was he acknowledging his position, his power?”

“A man of honor is someone willing to acknowledge the power of another, say a legislator, a judge, even a prosecutor, but he isn’t willing to accept an insult to his own honor in that relationship. The abuse of the weak by a bully, for example, is an act against honor that a man like Joseph Bonanno would never tolerate or be party to.”

Later that same day, Elliot had an opportunity to meet the last living member of the Commission, Joseph Bonanno, a man he’d heard about since his earliest affiliations with La Cosa Nostra. Bonanno spoke in broken English and was dressed in a manner not unlike that of Carlo Gambino,
simple
and plain. Even his home, a modest, post-World War II split level, was sparsely furnished, and seeing him, sitting on a sofa alone, frail, and ascetic looking, reminded Elliot of the vast differences between these early Mafia kingpins and the newer ones like Paul Castellano, with his estate on Todt Hill, or John Gotti, with his movie-star status and penchant for headlines. Here was a warrior, surely capable of living a life of luxury, who’d shunned the spotlight for all of his Mafia career, choosing instead to live a life as a true Mafioso.

Elliot began by asking Bonanno about a recent movie that had been made about his life. “Did you like it?” he asked.

“Why would you ask me a question like that? The movie is about my life. If I didn’t like the movie, what would I be
saying
about myself?”

“What about your b-book,
A
Man
of
Honor
?” Elliot finally got around to asking. “Why did you write it?”

“It was my declaration that my tradition has died in America. What Americans refer to as the Mafia is a
degenerate
outgrowth of that lifestyle. Friendships, connections,
family
ties, trust, and loyalty—this was the glue that held us together. In America, the glue that holds people together is only economic. By that I mean money.”

“What do you think of the current leadership, men like Gotti and Gravano from the Gambino Family?”

“What can I say about these people? To me, they are strangers. If they engage in illegal activities, what concern is that of mine? They’re all trying to make money. That’s all I see. The Mafia is not about money. It is a process, not a thing. Mafia is a form of clan cooperation, and its members pledge lifelong loyalty to it. What makes this process work is that it is based on friendship and honor.”

The old man leaned forward then, as if to tell a secret he had kept hidden for a very long time. “Do you know why Americans are so fascinated with the Mafia and movies like
The
Godfather
? It’s because in it they see people that possess family pride and act with personal honor. The reason Americans are so attracted by this is that they know they are witnessing the erosion of all of those things in their own culture: trust in their government, faith in their religions, belief in a family structure that is falling apart. Americans yearn for
closeness.
They long for family. What they need and want is a father.”

If Elliot ever doubted what Rudy Giuliani was up against in trying to get Joseph Bonanno to testify against the rulers of La Cosa Nostra, past or current, he knew after meeting him
that day that there was a better chance getting the pope to convert to Orthodox Judaism. Nevertheless, Giuliani would get his revenge.

Months after Giuliani’s visit, the ailing godfather was
subpoenaed
to appear before a grand jury in New York where he would be forced to review passages of his book to have him say yes, there was a Commission. When lawyers argued in court that Bonanno was too sick to travel from Arizona to New York, Giuliani ordered a court-appointed medical staff to Tucson to examine him. When the government’s doctors confirmed that Bonanno was, indeed, too weak to travel or undergo the ordeal of testimony, Giuliani was incensed,
arguing
that if the witness couldn’t be delivered to the court, the court would be delivered to the witness. The argument
carried
, and the conference room at St. Mary’s Hospital was
converted
into a temporary courtroom where Joseph Bonanno was interrogated and videotaped.

As expected, Bonanno, in an oxygen tent suffering from chronic heart problems, held true to his code and refused to discuss anything to do with the Commission, citing Fifth Amendment rights. Giuliani knew that he couldn’t indict a man who’d been retired for fifteen years as a conspirator or anything else, so he demanded that the judge cite Bonanno for civil contempt, a charge that would allow the government to jail him for the duration of the trial or until he agreed to testify. So, in an atmosphere that resembled something out of a Kafka novel, the seventy-eight-year-old Bonanno was put on a gurney and taken to an ambulance, rushed to the Tucson airport, flown to Kentucky, and then hustled by medevac to a federal penitentiary in Lexington. There, the mortally ill Joseph Bonanno remained imprisoned for seventeen months until November 1987 when the landmark Commission trial ended and sentences were handed down.

As much as Giuliani’s indictments against Big Paulie and
rumblings over Angelo Ruggiero’s FBI tapes had exacerbated tensions between the Gotti and Castellano factions of the Gambino Family, Elliot’s life within La Cosa Nostra was also being tested. It wasn’t until January 1984 that Carmine Lombardozzi contacted him for the second leg of his
international
travel. This time the destination was Brazil, which Rosengarten had discussed with him. He’d already made the promised “one additional” trip to Tel Aviv.

Contacts had already been made on his behalf either by Al Rosengarten or Dr. Dak, he didn’t know which, and all went as planned. He was received by the staff at Prontocor Hospital in Bello Horizonte as a visiting professor and held seminars on two of his favorite subjects, intraoperative cardioplegia and echocardiography, all the while knowing that as he
lectured
, his room was being entered by a perfect stranger who would place two neatly wrapped parcels deep into the
interior
of his luggage for him to courier back to family contacts in the United States. Elliot did not know what the parcels
contained
and did not want to know. The only guarantee he asked for was that they didn’t contain illegal drugs such as cocaine or heroin.

Arriving back into the U.S., this time through Newark Airport, Elliot made his way through the preselected
customs
’ line without inspection or hassle of any kind, showing his passport and exiting through the baggage claim area. Outside, waiting for him in his black Lincoln Continental, with engine running, was Carmine. Elliot nodded a curt greeting, then popped open the trunk where he put his
luggage
, taking from it the two parcels, both tightly bound with string and wrapped in plain brown paper.

Elliot got into the front seat. Carmine extended his hand. “Welcome back, Dottore. How was your trip?”

“Not too bad. I’m here s-safe and sound anyway,” he
answered, still petrified with fear from the possibility of
getting
caught by customs on this, the last of his adventures in smuggling God knew what for these guys.

Elliot shook Carmine’s hand then gave him the two parcels, each weighing something like sixteen ounces and about the size of a cigar box. Carmine took them into his right hand, one at a time, gauging their weight, then shaking each one as if to assess their content. Satisfied, he looked into Elliot’s eyes, grinned broadly, then placed the two packages between them on the front seat and drove off toward the New Jersey Turnpike.

“You don’t look too good, Dottore,” Carmine laughed. “Maybe you need a doctor.”

“Look, Carmine,” he shot back still shaking, “I’m nervous as hell, okay? I’m a damned d-doctor, not a smuggler, can you try to understand that?”

“You worry too much,” Carmine said pulling onto the highway.

“I don’t even know what’s in those boxes. I mean, I swear to God, Carmine, everyone promised it wouldn’t be d-drugs, and I just hope to Christ it isn’t.”

“Well, don’t worry, Dottore. It ain’t drugs. It’s gems. Diamonds and emeralds. About $3 million worth.” He turned to Elliot. “Maybe you want a stone for one of your
girlfriends
?”

“I don’t have girlfriends, Carmine!”

Carmine smiled. “I think we both know better, Dottore,” he said, eyes twinkling with a secret understanding on the subject of Elliot’s sex life that he didn’t bother to share. “But that’s beside the point because if you have to know, these stones are bought with cash made from drugs, then
converted
back to cash in Manhattan. I make runs like this twice, maybe three times a month, Colombia, Costa Rica,
Dominican Republic, even Vietnam and Cambodia. What do I pick up? Sometimes it’s stones, sometimes it’s Treasury bonds, hell, sometimes it’s freshly minted American Express certificates. But before you get to feelin’ too fucking bad about what we do, maybe you should know that for years, we did most of it with the help of your good old Uncle Sam.”

“What are you talking about? The government?”

“You got it,” Carmine said with a slow wink. “How do you think the U.S. props up these so-called democracies and tinhorn generals in Central and Latin America? It’s no
different
now than it was in the 1960s with Batista in Cuba, Duvalier in Haiti, or Noriega in Panama. We worked with the CIA side by side, until they realized they didn’t need us no more. ‘Better to do it in-house,’ someone must have figured out. That’s why there’s all this fucking heat now from Giuliani and these other assholes. Don’t you see? We’re the goddamned competition!”

Elliot shook his head in amazement. During those days, he was beginning to believe just about anything was possible, even the idea that our own federal government was using money from illegal drugs smuggled into the United States to fund CIA operations and make payoffs to foreign leaders around the world.

“Hey, one other thing,” Carmine mentioned, swiveling around to the backseat. “You see that paper there?” he asked pointing toward a copy of that morning’s
New
York
Post.
“Neil told me to give that to you. Said you might be interested.”