The Good Rat (4 page)

So while it was true, Cutler said, that his client’s father,
uncle, and cousin had been mobbed up, Eppolito finished Erasmus Hall High School in 1966 and became a cop at age twenty. At which time, says the lawyer, his client “turned his back on the family and protected the elderly, the children, and was so highly honored by the police for his heroism and devotion.”

He says that all the government has against him is the word of a crooked informer who moved in on Eppolito after the cop retired. Louie wanted only to write movie scripts and books. The stories on the accountant’s tapes were all cops-and-mobsters tall tales in the tone of I’ll-break-your-head.

“I heard two hundred hours of those tapes,” Cutler says. He explains the way men speak about violence and states that his client, Eppolito, was merely a creator of canards.

The U.S. Attorney says that three pages of Eppolito’s book prove he should not be bailed, because he belonged in a zoo. On one of the three pages, Eppolito stated, “Bugs never went anyplace without his handy sawed-off—and he fought like hell even when I had him on the ground with my thirty-eight stuck halfway down his throat.”

Back in the precinct, Bugs said, “Do what you gotta do, pig.”

Eppolito reports himself saying, “I must have punched Bugs forty times in the head. But he wasn’t talking. The guy wore out my arms. My hands were swollen. And he just sneered.

“Finally I took him into a back room, and filled a bucket
with the hottest hot water I could find. I emptied half a jug of ammonia into the bucket. I couldn’t even put my face near it without my eyes burning. Then I grabbed Bugs’s head and dunked. He came up screaming. His face was mutating into a giant purple blotch. But when he caught his breath, he turned to me and told me to ‘Fuck off.’”

Cutler says that Eppolito’s talent, “his forte, his stock in trade,” was “as a creator of apocryphal stories…. Last year Eppolito told about seven motorcycle Hell’s Angels coming to his house when a contractor, a friend of theirs, wouldn’t do the work and Eppolito threatened to kill him in front of his wife, parents, kids, friends, and waved a hatchet as he said this.”

The federal prosecutor says that “words are important, because words are a window into what’s in someone’s mind.”

Cutler has on a light khaki summer suit that could have used ten pounds less to cover. He mentions all Eppolito’s exaggerations while leaning over the lectern and speaking in a pleasant voice, constantly saying, “Your Honor.” Gone was the old Cutler style when he defended John Gotti with a bellow, marching around the courtroom and throwing an indictment into the wastebasket. He is now wonderfully understated. For good reason. Nobody does anything except what Jack Weinstein wants him to do.

Weinstein’s response to the lawyers’ pleadings is to set bail for both cops, $5 million each, which today can easily be raised on family houses. The New York real-estate market has risen so dramatically that you can put up a couple of
common homes in any neighborhood and bail out your uncle for child molesting.

Later, the cops are upstairs in the courthouse, where two of their lawyers, Bettina Schein and Rae Downes Koshetz, go over bail papers with clerks and jailers. I sit there talking with Cutler when Eppolito comes into the hallway and tells me he remembers a St. Patrick’s Day afternoon that we spent in a bar on Third Avenue with another detective, Jimmy McCafferty. It never happened. If there is one part of life that I can recall, it is anything that happened in a saloon. While Louie is talking, Caracappa slips out and is soon alone, staring at the harbor water on the ferry going home to Staten Island.

There had been so many years when it was so secret that nobody knew it existed. There were the five New York Mafia families and I heard of some of them only because I lived on 101st Avenue in Queens and up the street, past the old Jerome Theatre, was a place called the Bergin Hunt and Fish Club, with a big plate-glass front window that had a fish in it. Inside were men wearing hats and smoking, playing cards. They were safe, almost completely protected by the ignorance of our times. The head of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, declared there was no such thing as the Mafia. The Mafia agreed. Federal agents looked no further.

When I was in grammar school, walking to the Ace movie theater, we passed the house on the corner where a woman died. There was a tall pole sticking out of a grass plot. Atop the pole was a big spread of flowers. One of us—Elmo Ryan maybe, he knew all things—told us that the house belonged to a big gangster in the Mafia, Vito Genovese, whose wife had passed away. I had no idea what he was talking about.

Then I was twenty and one step off the copyboy’s bench when Curly Harris, the press agent for the Teamsters, pulled me out of a bar and off to lunch at Dinty Moore’s in the
theater district. I had seen Moore’s name many times in the gossip columns. Walking into the place, my feet felt important. Harris had me at a table with Frank Costello. They called him the “Prime Minister of the Underworld.” He was with a friend named Joe who was with the Internal Revenue. That’s nice, I thought. He has a legitimate friend. Costello assured me, “This Mafia is a dream so that they could sell it to the public in movies. It don’t exist. You’re starting off. I don’t want you to look silly.”

It wasn’t much later that a gangster named Joe Valachi got up and showed the world three-deep Mafia organizational charts.

Because I came from Queens, which nobody in the history of New York newspapers ever wrote about or even saw, I was reputed to be streetwise and tough. Which was untrue. I didn’t fight. I chased stories, not beatings. But I knew where to find people who were somewhat less than our civic best, and so editors clung to the illusion. At the old
Herald Tribune,
they asked me one Thursday night if I could cover the sentencing the next day of Tony Provenzano in federal court in Newark. He was the Teamsters’ second to Jimmy Hoffa and had been convicted of extortion. They really wanted to get Tony Pro for pushing somebody down an elevator shaft, which he sure did. The reporter who’d been covering the trial had written about Tony’s two wives, who in unison called for him to be injured.

So I was walking into the federal courthouse in Newark,
and in the hallway was Tony Provenzano with a cigarette holder in his mouth and a group of his guys from the Teamsters. Tony began to mutter, “Eugene is a friend of mine, he will do it anytime….” He then punched Eugene on the shoulder. Punched him hard.

As Tony’s hand moved, his great diamond pinkie ring glared in the sun coming through the lobby windows. It made you blink. On his way in, Matt Boylan, the chief prosecutor, said to me, “Take a look at that ring. It’s the size of the thing they have in India.”

What did Eugene do after being hit? He gave the same little chant, this time about Nunzi doing anything, and he gave Nunzi a whack on the shoulder.

Now all the Teamsters were hitting each other, and sometimes the punches were good enough to knock a guy off balance.

Tony Pro looked up at me and figured why I was there. He came over and said, “What paper are you wit’?”

I told him. He said, “What happened to the guy was here?”

“He took off.”

“They leave you to the fuckin’ wolves.”

“They got no wolves here. Just union men.”

It was just a remark, but you could tell by Tony’s face that it settled things. He had one eye drooping and the other full of evil.

“You think that was right?” he said.

“What?”

“To put my girlfriend’s name in the newspaper so my wife could see it?”

“I wasn’t even here. I didn’t know any girl. I never did anything.”

“It hurt my wife. I got kids. Do you think they should of done something like that, put a woman’s name in the story?”

“I guess.”

“My lawyer says I got a good suitcase against your paper.”

I knew the lawyer, Henry Singer from Brooklyn. He was so sure a Teamsters trial in Newark was an open bazaar that he began his defense by remarking to the judge, “I can fix your teeth.”

Meanwhile, the one who did make a bazaar of it was Robert Kennedy, then the attorney general of the United States. He was almost crazy in those days. During the case he was on the phone asking the judge, Robert Shaw, to read him the charge to the jury. Shaw’s clerk had written it. Kennedy listened, then snarled to Shaw, “Why don’t you just apologize to Provenzano?!” Shaw revised the charge to call for everything short of execution. He entered the courtroom with his normal pint bottle of whiskey buried in his robe pocket and an intention to stay out of trouble with this young mad dog Kennedy.

The jury convicted Tony Pro, and now, on sentencing morn, the whole group left the hallway and went into the big courtroom. I couldn’t keep my eyes off him. He sat with
an arm draped over the back of his bench, and his ring hand dangled so that each twitch of his fingers caught the sunlight crashing through the high windows and made the diamond flash with the strength of a small spotlight. In the row behind Tony Pro, hands gripped the back of the bench, openly bidding for the ring if marshals came and lifted Tony into the detention pens.

The judge, severe-faced on this day, gave a short statement about extortion being an animal crime. He then gave Tony fifteen years, and that is a lot of time. The hands behind Tony itched. But the judge let him and his ring remain out on bail pending appeal.

It was the first thing I saw when I walked into the 20 Green Street bar an hour later. Tony Pro was at the bar with a drink in his hand, and when I came through the door, the light streamed in and found his ring finger.

“I got a suitcase against your paper,” he said.

“So sue,” I said.

I wrote about it all, including the ring. At the newspaper this was regarded as exceptional. Reporters had written about tough guys before, but not about their jewelry. There was sudden new respect for me. I knew exactly how to take it. I announced I was great. Big JB Number One. It happened that you needed no extra ability to do such a story. It was all there, like an order in a store being placed on the counter in front of you. A moron can pick it up and go home. Just write down what they do and say. But I declared that it took tremendous courage and talent to do the story.
I had to contend with murderers! Why shouldn’t I boast? I wasn’t out of some Harvard or Princeton that gets people jobs on their school name. I attended John Adams High School, Ozone Park, Queens, the full five years. Was I nervous about the mobsters? You want to be afraid of something, be afraid of being broke. I remember that John O’Hara wrote me a letter. I made sure everyone was looking when I threw it on the floor. “I don’t need him.” Garson Kanin also wrote. “Who is he?” I flipped that one away, too. I then went out into the night for a thousand drinks. I went everywhere. I walked into the Copa like a heavyweight contender, and at the bar, Jules Podell, who ran the place, was talking to Jiggs Forlano and Ruby Stein, who were the two biggest shylocks in the country.

“You’re in the papers too much,” Jules told them. “Jiggs and Ruby. Jiggs and Ruby. It sounds like an act. The federals see it and start foaming. They got to get you. Give it up, this Jiggs and Ruby.”

“Ruby and Jiggs,” Ruby said.

Ruby Stein even started calling me at the office to get his name in the paper. I met him often at the Pompeii Room on Park Avenue, where the mob was hanging out then. “Ruby and Jiggs!” he called out when he saw me. Of course Jules was right about the publicity. One night Ruby was coming out of a place called the Kiss, and the Gallo mob had a couple of people there to kidnap him. Ruby hooked his arms around the canopy poles and screamed,
and they couldn’t pull him off so he lived. Lived to call me up and ask me to write something about it.

Later, when David Berkowitz sent me a letter that became famous, I was asked why this dangerous fruitcake wrote to me.

I said, “What are you, crazy? Who else would he write to?”

Then it was 1968, in Chicago, when they were trying Paul “the Waiter” Ricca and a roomful of others on charges of extortion and misuse of lead pipes, knives, guns, and stout ropes. I was in town for a speaking date, but I still needed a column, so I went to the federal courthouse. They were picking the jury and broke for lunch as I arrived. Paul the Waiter went for a walk. I went right with him.

“You’re from New York,” he said. “I used to go there to the track.”

“How did you do?”

“I used to go behind this trainer, Fitzsimmons. ‘Sunny Jim,’ they call him. When he went to the window, I’m behind him. He was all hunched over. I looked over his shoulders to see what he bets. I did very good,” Ricca said.

I knew for a fact that Sunny Jim Fitzsimmons of Chicot Court, Ozone Park, never went to the pari-mutuel windows, because he never bet. He trained the greatest horses in the world, but only once or twice in a year would he say, “Give me a dollar,” and he put up his own dollar and sent
somebody to place the wager. His creed was, “If I knew anything, do you think I’d be out here at five in the morning looking at horses?”

I wrote all this as a column, saying that Paul the Waiter didn’t have any truth in him even in casual conversation. It ran in New York, and it also appeared in the
Chicago Sun-Times.
Next morning Paul the Waiter’s lawyer rushed up to the judge waving the paper. “The jurors saw this! They’re contaminated!” he cried. As they were talking, in came the
Chicago’s American
newspaper, with a column by Jack Mabley, who hated gangsters. He had a piece on Ricca that called him a mad dog. That did it. The judge, Lynch, ordered a recess. He was an old reliable with the Chicago guys. He declared a mistrial in the afternoon. He said it was a sensitive moment, picking jurors, and you couldn’t have inflammatory stories going around. All jurors were sent home.

I was gone on an early plane and didn’t hear what had happened. “The judge made such a splash when he went into the tank that even the boys got wet,” Mike Royko told me later. The story of Paul the Waiter’s mistrial because of news stories was printed in New York.

Now I am back in my house in Forest Hills one morning when in comes a retired detective who had been good and helpful to me in the past. He said that Junior Persico was going on trial in federal court in Brooklyn, and he had given the detective a couple of mob murders that nobody knew about. “He’s in for heavy time, and he don’t want to
do that anymore,” the retired detective said. “You could write about the murders when they pick the jurors. Everybody will read it, and they can ask for a mistrial.”

Only shortly before this, Persico had a string of federal trials in Brooklyn dealing with various alleged crimes, and each time there was a conviction, it was overruled on appeal because each time the same prosecutor put in some outrageous error. Someone who knew about these things told me, “We got a hook in there.”

I told the old detective that I might write about the new murder cases, but only after Junior’s trial. When I started to check on the killings, I couldn’t verify one bullet hole.