Made Men (15 page)
Authors: Greg B. Smith
The Godfather,
wandering down Mulberry. He was a guest at the Colombo crime family’s Christmas party, too.
At the time it was a significant moment—a vanful of government workers had just made a documentary record of art mimicking life. There now existed a videotape that featured both real live gangsters and real live pretend gangsters, all hanging around the same restaurant around Christmas. It was significant—if not surprising. That’s because all three actors—Pastore, Sirico, and Caan—had long known reputed members and associates of organized crime.
For years Pastore had been friends with Danny Provenzano, the grand-nephew of the late Anthony (Tony Pro) Provenzano, a mob-connected Teamsters official who was long suspected in the death of Jimmy Hoffa. Danny Provenzano was also a moviemaker of sorts, hiring Pastore to play gangster-type roles in films with names like
This Thing of Ours.
Pastore would one day show up at a New Jersey courtroom to show support for Provenzano, who at the time would be indicted on charges of using beatings and kidnappings to extort money from more than a dozen men he referred to as “business associates.” “I don’t know him as a gangster, I know him as a filmmaker,” Pastore told the Associated Press after the court hearing.
Caan, who also had a small role in Provenzano’s
This Thing of Ours
(English for
la cosa nostra
), long had been associated with a top Colombo family guy named Andrew Russo.
Sirico was in a class by himself.
During the 1970s, he had affected a gangster style that included wearing white suits and getting arrested repeatedly on charges of threatening to do bad things to disco owners if they didn’t hand him envelopes stuffed with cash. By 1999, of course, those days were long gone. Sirico was now a respected actor who’d worked in dozens of films, winning praise from the likes of Woody Allen and, of course, David Chase, the creator of
The Sopranos.
In particular, Sirico was credited for his unusually vivid portrayal of gangsters.
After news of the Colombo Christmas party leaked out, Sirico admitted that he had known the Clemenza brothers forever. “I know them, I know everybody. I’ve been around.” He admitted he had eaten at Il Cortile “maybe five times” in the past few years, often with Pastore. He did not, however, recall the details. There may have been a Christmas party, and then again, maybe not. “I have been to so many dinners and parties and charities, I have no idea,” Sirico said, before launching into his shtick about how the things he did way back are things he’d rather forget now and would certainly never repeat.
“I don’t want to be mixed up with a lot of bad guys,” he said. “All that tough guy stuff went out the window years ago. If I was at a place where there were mob guys, I’m sorry to hear it. I’m sorry for me . . . If I was there, I wasn’t hanging out with nobody. I haven’t seen these guys in a hundred years. I haven’t seen this kid Jerry [Clemenza] in a thousand years.”
And clearly he
had
changed. Here was a guy who had been fingerprinted more than once worrying now about a file somewhere deep inside the FBI. “I hope they don’t have my name on a list,” he said. “I’m an actor. I hope they know that.”
But it was easy to get confused. There would be times when these guys would come up to him on the street and make, for lack of a better term, suggestions. These were guys Sirico recognized as being “in the life,” as he might have once put it. “I’ve had guys come up to me, I don’t want to tell you,” he said. “They say I should have been a little harder in some scene. I don’t know what to tell them. What do you say? I mean, what can you say?”
GOODFELLAS
EXPLAINS IT WELL
When Carmine Sessa was a kid growing up in Brooklyn, he started his climb up the Mafia ladder by shining shoes in clubs and bars in his neighborhood. That was how it all started. It was just like being an aspiring actor waiting tables in a Manhattan restaurant frequented by Broadway casting agents. You were there to be seen. Perhaps you would get lucky. Except instead of casting agents, you had people who made a living by getting over on others, determined never to work a legitimate day in their lives. “That’s how I’m meeting these people,” he says.
Carmine signed up for the program.
“Eventually I started stealings things and selling them for these people. I also started working in card games and getting to know more people. They got to know me as a good kid, a thief, a tough kid, a stand-up kid. From there
He became associated with a well-known gangster from Gravesend named Greg Scarpa Sr. Scarpa was one of the scariest, most devious gangsters the Colombo family or any other family had ever seen. He killed for fun. Then he talked about it, again and again.
Young Mafia wannabe Carmine would spend hours hanging around Scarpa’s social club, the Wimpy Boys’ Club, scheming and dreaming of being a made man. He was there the time the poodle walked up with the ear in its mouth.
At first Carmine had no idea what was in the little dog’s mouth, but then he realized. It made sense, in a way. He and Scarpa had just killed the girlfriend of a mobster who was suspected of being an informant. The girlfriend, it was thought, would also be able to provide the federal government with information that Greg Scarpa and his protégé, Carmine, might not want them to have. So they had shot her in the face inside the Wimpy Boys’ Club, not realizing that the blast had blown off her ear. They proceded to cut the girlfriend into small pieces and dispose of the parts. They thought they’d done a great job cleaning up. They missed the ear, which must have fallen down behind a couch. The poodle had found it.
This was the life Carmine chose. He rose all the way to consigliere, committing murders when he was told to. It didn’t matter who it was or why. It was part of the job. “I saw friends get killed,” he said. “One day you are a friend and the next day somebody said he’s got to go, for whatever reason, and sometimes you are a part of it or even have to pull the trigger. You find yourself telling the families,‘We don’t know what happened but we’re going to find out.’ And they believe you.”
In the early 1990s, there was a disagreement within the Colombo crime family over who was in charge. The boss of the family, Carmine Persico, who was nicknamed “the Snake” by other gangsters because even they found him to be unusually duplicitous, was in jail for a thousand years. He anointed a loyal minion named Victor Orena as the acting boss to handle matters on the street, but he secretly very much wanted his son, Allie Boy, to step into the CEO suite as soon as Allie got out of jail. When Victor Orena finally realized this, all hell broke loose.
There were shootings on the streets of Brooklyn. Twelve people died, mostly gangsters, but also an innocent nineteen-year-old kid who had the bad luck to be working in a bagel store owned by a gangster. Carmine Sessa participated in this gunfighting, as he was instructed to do. Greg Scarpa Sr. also participated, with enthusiasm and even relish. He shot a guy putting up his Christmas lights. He shot a guy lying on his driveway who said, “What did I do?” He shot a guy sitting in his car, blowing off half his skull. Scarpa would have continued shooting, but he was arrested. Carmine Sessa the protégé somehow managed to get out of town.
For more than a year he remained a fugitive, one of the most wanted on the New York FBI’s list. Then he suddenly was arrested outside St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Manhattan. Within a week he was cooperating with the FBI and the United States attorney in Brooklyn. Facing the possibility of spending the rest of his life in prison, he had a change of heart about “this thing of ours” called La Cosa Nostra.
“The movie
Goodfellas
explains it well,” Sessa said. “Meaning, everybody gets killed by a bunch of animals or so-called friends. This thing I thought I respected so much as a young man had no respect at all, but it did have plenty of disrespect. All the families hate each other and within the families they hate one another. It is a disease that keeps growing and spreading. You cut off the head and a new one grows. You cut off an arm and it grows a new one. To me, the more I wanted to be left out... I was pulled in and appointed to a position of consigliere, a position I didn’t want. I was looking to keep far away and asked them not to give it to me, but to no avail.”
These things he told the judge on the day he was sentenced. He had served seven years in jail and participated in four murders. He had testified in several trials and looked across the courtroom at many of his “so-called friends” and pronounced them murderers and thieves. The government told the judge he was an excellent informant. Now he stood alone in a government courtroom in the town in which he had grown up, and he was letting the world know that the real Mafia wasn’t like the movie Mafia at all.
“I hate everything about the life I led,” he told the judge in a nearly empty courtroom. “I hope that it ends sometime soon, because it keeps destroying families and young kids who are infatuated with it and can’t wait to be a goodfella. I wish I could tell them what it really is and not what they think it is. I don’t like what I’m doing putting people in jail. But I don’t want this thing to keep growing. I accept responsibility for my crimes and blame no one else—not my associates, not my environment, just me. Thank you, Your Honor.”
The judge looked down from his bench and made remarks about how unusual it was to hear such candid expression from a member of organized crime, and then he pronounced sentence: time served. And then Carmine Sessa walked out of court, a new man with a new name, a new social-security number, even a new birth certificate, leaving Brooklyn behind.
Every business has a hatchet man. He is paid to be the in-house son of a bitch. He yells at people in front of their colleagues, he relocates them to small windowless offices, he questions their manhood. The hatchet man is an important corporate tool, necessary to maintain order in the chaos of capitalism. In the DeCavalcante crime family, one of the hatchet men’s names was Anthony Capo. On this spring Friday evening, Ralphie Guarino was driving through New York traffic on his way to pick up the hatchet man himself.
“I’m going to get Anthony, it’s four forty-five, going to the Yankees game, it’s a Friday night,” he said into the hidden recording device rigged to the inside of his car. “Gonna go to Wiggles to pick up Joey O.” He yawned. The radio played. The FBI agent listening in wrote all of this down.
Grinding through the Friday rush hour, Ralphie picked up Anthony in Brooklyn and drove toward Queens Boulevard and Wiggles. Capo was a big pale young man with reddish hair and a look of contempt that never left his wide face. He was a soldier in the DeCavalcante family and the only evidence in public that he paid little attention to the law was his 1985 conviction on charges of performing the job of enforcer for a loan shark named Vincent Rotondo. He was known as a Wild West kind of guy who loved to golf. He was always talking about his game and about giving people a good beating. He sometimes used the same implements for both. On this night he was complaining about the weather. It was headed for summer, but there would be a chill breeze passing through Yankee Stadium.
“Yeah,” Ralphie said, “I was gonna wear a sweater, too.”
“My hands are so dry. I haven’t been out all week... I gotta go to the manicurist tomorrow.”
“Best stuff in the world,” Ralphie said, sparking up a cigar.
Anthony joined him and soon the car was filled with smoke and complaints. Anthony loved to complain. On this spring evening he dredged up one of his favorite gripes—his boss, a captain named Anthony Rotondo. Rotondo was the son of Vincent Rotondo, the loan shark for whom Anthony Capo had once worked collecting money. Vincent Rotondo, whom everyone called Jimmy for reasons that were never quite clear, was a respected Mafia figure. He lived in a huge house in Bergen Beach, Brooklyn, and made a lot of money for the DeCavalcante family looting a longshoremen’s union local for twenty-four years. He had been shot to death as he sat at the wheel of his 1988 Lincoln, which was parked curbside in front of his house. The police revealed that he had just come from a fish store. Beside him on the seat of the car was a container of squid. Jimmy Rotondo was a legend. His only son, Anthony, was anything but.
Anthony Rotondo was known for disappearing when it was time to do the dirty work but showing up when the money was counted. Because Anthony Capo had worked for the legendary Jimmy Rotondo, he was now assigned to work with the less-than-legendary son. Respect, it could be said, was an issue.
“If we got a problem, he has to go home,” Capo said about his boss. He then told Ralphie the story of how Anthony Rotondo went home.
“We went to work on a guy,” Anthony Capo was explaining to Ralphie. He said “the guy,” and he never named him, came into Capo’s bar in Staten Island near the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. It was called the Narrows Tavern. The guy demanded payment. Anthony Capo responded by going to the guy’s house with a friend named Victor, whom he described as a bodybuilder.
“I handled myself pretty well. I pat myself on the back. I hit him good. He gets up and goes, ‘I got our number and your number,’ ” Capo said. “He didn’t die, he didn’t die. I beat him, I cut him, I chopped him up so bad, then I stick him in the car. I called his brother. I said, ‘Here, here he is.’ He said, ‘Where’s my brother?’ I said, ‘Your brother’s under the car.’ He said, ‘Who did this to him?’ I said, ‘I did this to him. This is why... ba, ba, ba.’”
After Anthony Capo delivered his message to the guy’s brother, he drove to see his capo, Anthony Rotondo, to ask him for help disposing of the body in the trunk of his car. The way Capo saw it, Rotondo was a guy who could easily order a murder but would not be willing to assist in carrying out the job. Anthony Capo told Ralphie that his boss was not interested in helping to do what had to be done. His capo, Rotondo, had better things to do than bury a body.
“He said ‘I promised my kids.’ He said, ‘I have problems with a toy. I gotta take it back to Toys “ ” Us.’ I said, ‘We got a problem. This kid’s in the trunk.’ Now, I don’t want to throw rocks at the guy, but he’s just not my type. That’s why this stays here in the car with me and you.”
“Of course. I stand up with all these guys,” said Ralphie as an FBI agent somewhere scribbled furiously.
These were the kinds of stories Anthony Capo loved to tell, in between talking about golf. He could spend hours talking about his game. But discussing “going to work on a guy” really seemed to float his boat. At the time of this chat on the way to Yankee Stadium, Anthony Capo talked like this to everyone without fear. The hatchet man was well aware that people were afraid of him. He was practically proud of his extremely short temper. He was happy there were many stories about him. He was involved in this hit, he was involved in that hit. No one was quite sure what to believe, and Anthony Capo liked it that way. Mostly people stayed away from him. In one story, Anthony Capo went to a wedding in Staten Island with a woman who was wearing an extremely revealing dress. The woman began to drink and flirt with several members of the wedding party. Anthony Capo became enraged and threatened to kill one of the recipients of this drunken woman’s sloppy affections. One of the man’s friends intervened, telling Anthony Capo it wasn’t the guy’s fault, the woman was hitting on him. This did not amuse Anthony Capo. He made his intentions perfectly clear.
“I will kill you and they will never find your body,” he said to the man, who then had to leave the wedding and go into hiding for several weeks.
“There was something very wrong about that guy,” said the man. “He was disturbed.”
In the spring of 1998, when the boss of the family, John Riggi, was thinking about setting up a panel to run things, no one knew what to do with Anthony. Vincent Palermo was to be promoted from capo to one of three men on the ruling panel, so he would have to reassign all the members of his crew to other captains. “No one wants Anthony,” Palermo told his driver, Joey O. “I gotta keep him with me and that’s not allowed. I don’t know what the fuck to do with Anthony.”
Yet Anthony remained. And Vinny was giving him big assignments, such as the order to go out and kill Charles Majuri, another member of the ruling panel. Some wondered why. If everybody hated this Anthony, why was he always around Vinny Ocean? The answer to that question was simple.
Anthony Capo knew something about Vinny Ocean that inspired in Vinny an intense loyalty.