See No Evil (17 page)

“Oh, my G-God!” Elliot moaned hitting the channel up button seeing Mary Martin of CBS reporting the story, then ABC’s Pablo Guzman, finally stopping at the airing of yet another “live” press conference held by Giuliani outside the federal office building earlier that day.

“Today we exposed the structure of organized crime on a scale never done before,” Rudy crowed to a gaggle of
journalists
including
Daily
News
gangland reporter, Gene
Mustain,
New
York
City
Newsday
’s Murray Kempton, and CBS Radio’s Eileen Cornell. “This indictment proves beyond a doubt that the Commission was formed in 1931 by Salvatore Maranzano to regulate family relationships and that its
current
membership used murder as a regulatory tool—the
con
temporary
group had also formed a club of contractors and used extortion to gain control of all concrete jobs in New York City over $2 million.”

“Honey, what is it? What’s happening, Elliot?” Hanna asked, startled at his horror, as she sat down, putting her arm around his shoulder. “Why are you so upset?”

“Mr. Castellano has been arrested—and Mr. Salerno and Corallo,” he lamented, barely able to say their names.

“You know these men? They’re friends of yours?”

“Yes, I know them, as patients, but this is unbelievable! Those men are the ones you met here at the house that time and in Manhattan. Silvio, Sal, even Mr. Gotti … it seems too amazing to believe, but I’m going to tell you something that I probably shouldn’t, Hanna, but me, even I could get h-hurt by what’s going on with all of this …”

“Elliot,” she said, the color draining from her face, “I’m frightened. I’m frightened for you and for our family. I want to call my father. I want to tell him everything that’s gone on so that he can talk to Dr. Dak and Mr. Rosengarten. Elliot, these friendships, these associations, they could affect your career.”

“Don’t!” he said, taking hold of her wrist. “Don’t talk to anyone now, Hanna. We’ve got to
think
, to
wait,
until we know for sure what’s happening!” His mind raced through these associations like a Rolodex gone wild, each name he scanned involved with the family at least as deeply as himself.

“No,” Hanna finally snapped, tearing her arm away from him. “I’ve listened to you long enough. I don’t trust you
anymore
,
Elliot. I don’t know who you are anymore, and
sometimes
wonder if I ever really did. I’m going to call my father. He knows people at the hospital who can make certain no one misunderstands and thinks you’re in some way
involved
in any of this.”

It was at that moment, as his loving wife of nearly ten years stared at him frightened, with thoughts of his best friend, Nicky Micelli’s murder and funeral, visions of himself and the quiet destruction of medical records, all-night sex and gambling sprees, his role as international courier, and his
tenement-home
upbringing in the Bronx, that Elliot suddenly realized the depth of his vulnerability as a doctor, husband, and human being. The thought of those things, at that
particular
moment, chilled him to his core. Whether he saw it that way or not, federal prosecutors hearing about Elliot Litner would contend that he was in the Mafia, as complicit as any associate or soldier. The thought of that, and all that went with it, terrified him.

O
n the night of February 25, 1984, when two FBI agents named Kurins and O’Brien showed up at Big Paulie’s estate on Staten Island, the hulking grandfather was speechless and hadn’t the slightest idea what the RICO
conspiracy
charges against him meant. Silently, wearing a bathrobe and slippers, he led them through his home to the kitchen, where his doctor sat with Gloria Olarte as she was preparing a roast beef dinner.

“Do you mind if I change into a suit?” Castellano asked the agents, glancing out of the estate’s enormous bay
windows
where media people were already gathering with video cameras and television crews were setting up for live coverage of the arrest.

“No problem,” Kurins responded.

Moments later, as the agents waited in the foyer, Nina Castellano, the godfather’s wife of fifty-two years, entered the house along with daughter Connie and her husband, who was holding their one-year-old baby. When Castellano heard the commotion, he reappeared dressed resplendently in a
double-breasted
blue suit with a striking red tie and Italian black leather, slip-on shoes. He greeted his family, kissed his
granddaughter
, and watched stoically as his wife, mistress, and daughter cried.

“I think we should go now, Mr. Castellano,” suggested O’Brien.

Castellano nodded. The FBI agents handcuffed him as his family looked on, then escorted him out the front door to the flash of cameras and the badgering questions of dozens of newspaper and television reporters who sought to shove microphones in their direction. Though it was already dark, it appeared like daytime at Todt Hill such was the degree of illumination given off by television camera crews trying to capture this moment for the late evening news and posterity.

“Who was it got me?” Castellano asked the two agents as they led him to a team of others waiting to transport him. “Giuliani? Was it Giuliani got me?”

“Yeah, it was Rudy who got the indictment,” Kurins answered.

“Well, if you got to get fucked, at least let it be by
another
paisan, huh?”

The two agents said nothing as Paul Castellano entered the car, one agent on each side of him. “So, I guess you two Boy Scouts disapprove of me and what I do. That’s what this is all about, ain’t it? The federal government wakes up one day and decides it don’t like the way certain guineas earn their daily bread. Okay, fair enough. But don’t you two guys ever think that I’m wrong and you’re right because it just ain’t that fucking simple, and that’s the part that burns my ass. Come on. We’re not fucking children, are we? Your laws are, how can I say it, a convenience. A convenience when you guys need to fuck a guy like me. A convenience for your bosses when they decide to make some money for themselves and just look the other way.”

Castellano, flanked by attorney James LaRossa and “Fat Tony” Salerno’s attorney, Roy Cohn, sat through a
two-and-one
-half-hour hearing after which underbosses arrested that night were released on $1-million bail and bosses on $2
million
each. For Castellano, that made a total of $4 million in bail posted to preserve his freedom, a number that caused pause among other family members including John Gotti and rapidly rising Bergin crew member, hit man Sammy Gravano.

Big Paulie’s support among the family, especially Dellacroce’s faction, never strong, was now further eroding with suspicions that facing lifetime imprisonment and
perhaps
the death penalty for multiple murders committed by the DeMeo crew, he might make a deal with federal
prosecutors
and turn state’s evidence. As critical, from Gotti’s side, was the fact that a mortally wounded godfather might be even more dangerous to him than a stable one in that Ruggiero never had turned over the tapes Castellano had demanded after numerous threats. Further, fully
understanding
the consequences of narcotics trafficking and the
longstanding
history of its ban by the Commission, Big Paulie could have Angelo, Gene, the Teflon Don, and even Neil Dellacroce whacked with a simple phone call. “Look at what he did to DeMeo, that cocksucker,” one can imagine Gotti arguing to future underboss Sammy Gravano. “He orders Roy to push a button on his slime-bucket son-in-law, then has him iced three fucking months later. Believe me, paisan, it’s fucking Machiavelli with this fucking
cazu
every fucking step of the way!”

Soon afterward, motivated on multiple levels, John Gotti began hatching a plot. According to Litner and Gambino Family members who would talk about it years after the event, Castellano had severely underestimated Gotti’s savvy and ruthlessness as a blue-collar, street guy and strategist. In a
meeting Paul called after his release on bond for his two
pending
federal cases, Gotti was summoned to Todt Hill where the godfather sought to placate him with an “if I go to prison” scenario that went something like this.

First, Castellano would still run the family from prison. Second, understanding that Neil Dellacroce was dying from cancer, a triumvirate would be formed composed of Carlo Gambino’s son, Tommy, Castellano’s longtime associate, Tommy Bilotti and, finally himself, John Gotti, who would take over the faction of the family formerly controlled by Dellacroce. When Dellacroce died, Bilotti would be named underboss.

This seemed a remarkable turnaround for Gotti, who played the role of flattered underling. So remarkable, in fact, that he didn’t buy it. Gotti knew there existed no example in the world of La Cosa Nostra where three men ever wielded equal shares of power for very long. Always, one was the genuine boss just waiting for the appropriate moment to assassinate his counterparts and take control of the family. Gotti concocted his plan with the knowledge that Castellano loyalists like Frank DeCiccio and Jimmy Failla were having their doubts about Paul, and even members of the Commission had quietly put out feelers among their troops about their growing dissatisfaction.

Out of respect for Dellacroce, Gotti would not kill his godfather until his mentor was finally taken from this world by cancer. Prior to that time, however, Gotti would lure DeCiccio and Failla to his side and put together a hit team made up of his best and most trusted soldiers called the Fist of Five because their secret needed to be held that tightly—Sammy Gravano, John Carneglia, Eddie Lino, Salvatore Scala, Vinnie Artuso—along with backup gunmen Anthony “Tony Roach” Rampino, Iggy Alogna, Joe Watts, and Angelo
Ruggiero all would be recruited for an assassination plot so daring that mob historians would have to reach back to the days of Al Capone and the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre to find its equal.

The following year, 1985, was probably the most
devastating
twelve months in the history of La Cosa Nostra and easily the most gut-wrenching of Elliot Litner’s life. In Cleveland, Chicago, Milwaukee, and Kansas City, family
bosses
were convicted and given lengthy sentences for conspiring to skim vast sums of cash from the Las Vegas casinos that they controlled through the use of teamster pension funds. In Boston, the hierarchy of the Patriarca Family was found guilty of multiple RICO counts ranging from loansharking to murder. In Philadelphia, family boss Nicky Scarfo, target of an all-out federal RICO assault, was sentenced to life in prison.

But it was New York’s Mafia leaders who watched in white-knuckled dread because it was there that two federal cases threatened to tear apart the entire structure of
organized
crime. Both revolved around Ralph Scopo.

It began in October 1984 when after a three-year FBI investigation called “Star Quest,” Rudy Giuliani announced a fifty-one-count federal indictment against eleven members of the Columbo Family including its boss, Carmine Persico. In what amounted to a dry run of the Commission case, the Columbos were charged with “a pattern of racketeering that included extortion, theft, loansharking, gambling, bribery and drug trafficking.” But the allegation that worried the
hierarchy
of the families was not any of these single charges. Rather, it was the indictment’s primary focus that involved “influencing New York City’s construction industry by
controlling
several unions identified in the indictment.”

The reason for this concern was not apparent until after the Commission indictments were released in February 1985
and testimony was underway in the Columbo trial. More than the random acts of greedy union officials looking for
kickbacks
, Asst. U.S. Attorney Aaron Marcu seemed intent on making Giuliani’s larger point in the secretly recorded taped conversations and scores of witnesses and hundreds of
surveillance
photos he was presenting as evidence. That point being that there existed a Mafia “board of directors” that had ruled the underworld for more than a half century and
continued
to do so.

If that premise were granted by the jury in the Columbo case, the same information linking payoffs from construction companies through Scopo to the five families that ran the Commission was all Giuliani needed to prove the existence of “racketeering influence” through a “corrupt organization,” a RICO win large enough to put away the hierarchy of the New York Mafia for the rest of their lives.

Ralph Scopo couldn’t have been enjoying any of the
proceedings
starting from day one when the indictment was
presented
to the jury. A grossly overweight chain smoker with a wife and two grown sons, who were also involved with the union, he suffered from angina, hypertension, and as it was later discovered, coronary heart disease. Initially, he may have seen a way out as Marcu read from the indictment charging that from 1981 up to October 1984, he had wrongfully “obstructed, delayed and affected commerce” by extortion while conspiring to obtain the property of the construction companies identified through “actual and threatened use of force, violence and fear.”

Up to that point, it might not have seemed too bad to Scopo. The prosecution had a couple of witnesses, who were shaken down, and maybe some tape recordings of telephone conversations that could be incriminating. Scopo’s guys had beaten worse in court.

But that was only page 115 of the 230-page indictment. There was more to come, and it was the charges that followed, specifically those made on page 119, that gave Scopo and
wizened
mob counsel Barry Slotnick something to think about.

During that same period, the U.S. attorney continued, the ruling body of La Cosa Nostra, called the Commission, “organized and controlled” a scheme to extort various New York contractors who poured concrete. The Commission established a club that would designate which contractor would be permitted to make the successful bid on a
particular
contract. The Commission “controlled the decisions of the Union and agreed to the payment of bribes to coconspirator Ralph Scopo.” The Commission enforced the rules of the club by “causing the contractors’ supplies of cement to be stopped, as well as other forms of economic punishment, acts of violence, physical harm and murder.”

“
This
is
not
good
,” even a tough guy like Scopo must have been concluding at about that time, “
but
it
’
s
a
long
fucking
way
from
making
accusations
about
conspiracies
and
actually
proving
it.
After
all
,
what
good
were
tapes
and
a
pack
of
pissed-off
contractors
without
a
living
witness
to
link
it
together?
And
that
wasn
’
t
gonna
happen
,
so
Marcu
might
as
well
try
to
make
the
jury
believe
in
UFOs
’
cause
no-fucking-body
’
d
be
stupid
enough
to
try
to
rat
out
the
Commission!
”

The Commission “controlled the allocation of concrete pouring contracts by exercising control over the decisions of the Cement and Concrete Workers’ Union and specifically the actions of coconspirator Ralph Scopo,” Marcu elaborated. By exploiting its control, coconspirators Anthony Salerno, Antonio Corallo, Christopher Furnari, and Salvatore Santoro and defendants Gennaro Langella and Carmine Persico and “members of the Commission and bosses, and underbosses of La Cosa Nostra families were able to induce concrete-
construction
companies to join this club and to extort payments from these contractors” in the amount of 2 percent of the contract price of “any concrete-pouring construction job in the New York City area in excess of $2 million” including the $15 million Rivergate Project, Dow Jones & Company
headquarters
, Manhattan Federal Building, and $30.4 million Jacob Javits Convention Center.”

“
Holy
shit!
” Scopo, along with Slotnick, must have realized almost immediately upon hearing the words. “
This
isn
’
t
just
about
me
or
even
the
Columbo
Family
.
This
is
about
the
Commission
.
This
is
about
the
entire
,
motherfucking
organization
.” Even Ralph Scopo must have finally understood that “
the
link
is
not
some
low-level
stoolie
or
empty
suit
wannabe
.
The
fucking
guy
who
links
these
two
cases
together
is
me!
”