Made Men (16 page)
Authors: Greg B. Smith
Around 7:30 on the morning of September 11, 1989, three big American sedans with stolen license plates cruised softly through the awakening streets of Staten Island. This was the one New York City borough that had no subway, and most of the people who lived there wouldn’t get on a subway car anyway, so even at this hour the streets were filled with the one tool essential for life on Staten Island—the automobile. Even though it was early, the three cars fit right in as they cruised past the huge Staten Island Mall and turned onto Richmond Hill Road. They climbed the hill past one condominium development after another, jammed up next to one another like boxes of shoes on a shelf. This was a neighborhood that desperately wanted to be suburban but somehow could not escape its urbanity. Here one found lawns green as a golf course next to abandoned trucks covered with graffiti. The three sedans turned right onto a dead-end street called Wellington Court, the type of Anglophile name commonly applied to low-rent condos. The sedans drove past a series of complexes dense as tenements, but with nice landscaping. One sedan parked curbside almost immediately at the entrance to Wellington Court. This was the crash car. If the police arrived, the crash car would pull out in front of the cop and cause an accident.
The two other sedans continued until they passed 121 Wellington, a four-story redbrick affair with a glass-brickand-black-marble entrance that looked like it was built in 1970. It was clearly a place that wanted to be something it could not ever be. They pulled to the end of the road,
which emptied into acres of tangled woods pocked with abandoned cars and laced with dirt paths where teenagers went to smoke and drink. On Wellington Court, there was only one way out—past the sedans filled with men.
The sedans turned around to face the way back out and edged close to 121 Wellington. Inside the car closest to 121, Anthony Capo sat at the wheel. It was his wife’s car, but he had switched the plates. In the car with him were Jimmy Gallo and Vincent Palermo. Both were making sure the guns they held in their hands were fully loaded and that the safeties were off.
They waited.
At a few minutes past 8:30
A
.
M
., a middle-aged man with a silver pompadour and a rumpled businessman’s suit emerged from 121. He had a briefcase in his hand. He was a real-estate developer of questionable reputation named Fred Weiss. He had just spent the night at the condo apartment he shared with his girlfriend. He walked toward his two-year-old dark green four-wheel-drive Jeep parked curbside. He got out his keys.
At that time Fred Weiss was known as a marginally sophisticated hustler who lived at the edge of legitimacy. For a while he worked as city editor of the
Staten Island Advance,
where he was viewed as an up-and-coming hustler who seemed to know everybody on the island. But he wanted to be rich, so he soon gave up the journalistic calling to enter the slightly more mercenary world of Staten Island real estate. “Freddy was the kind of guy who wanted to be a wheeler-dealer,” said one of his former newspaper colleagues, “but he wasn’t very good at it.”
One of the things he wasn’t very good at was picking business partners. Weiss hooked up with two men connected to the Gambino crime family, Angelo Paccione and Anthony Vulpis. Calling on all their powers of creativity, they cleverly named their companies W&W Inc. and A&A Land Development. They bought up property by abandoned railway yards in a working-class neighborhood in the Arlington section of Staten Island. At first the neighbors did not complain about the handful of trucks that were rolling in and out of the property late at night. But soon the handful became a midnight convoy. Then the neighbors began noticing rats scurrying about in the woods next to the property. Finally they and their children began to suffer allergic reactions, itchy eyes, rashes they’d never seen before. They complained to everyone they could think of: city councilmen, congressmen, the FBI. An investigation followed, and soon the world knew what the neighbors of Arlington had long suspected—the developers had turned the empty lot near the railyard into one of the biggest illegal dumps in New York City. And it wasn’t just any dump. They’d arranged to dump thousands of tons of infectious red-bag medical waste, including, investigators said, human body parts from area hospitals. They had created their very own thirty-five-foot pit of bubbling sewage. The neighbors were furious that the FBI knew this was going on for months before they announced indictments and shut the place down.
In June 1989, Weiss was one of those charged with dozens of crimes that would put him in jail for decades. Weiss was not viewed as a “street guy” who could take this kind of time behind bars. He was viewed as soft. He told his friends he had “nothing to worry about.” The then boss of the Gambino family, John Gotti—a man who once declared he would personally sever the head of a gangster who’d shown disrespect to him—thought otherwise.
Weiss knew many things about the Gambino crime family that Gotti wished to keep from the public. Gotti reasoned that Weiss would therefore transform himself from Weiss the mediocre real-estate developer into Weiss the enthusiastic government informant. He ordered that Weiss be murdered as soon as possible. Because Weiss was a DeCavalcante associate, the job was theirs to complete.
The DeCavalcante boss, John Riggi, saw this as a positive development. He summoned Vinny Ocean and told him that John Gotti wanted a favor, something big that would put the DeCavalcante crime family “back on the map.” Riggi—who’d done well in organized crime by saying little of substance—did not tell Vinny to kill Fred Weiss. Instead he carefully insulated himself from possible future prosecution by doing what any good manager would do—he delegated a subordinate, Anthony Rotondo, to handle the details.
Rotondo told Vinny Ocean that Fred Weiss had to be killed as a favor to John Gotti and specifically told Vinny Ocean that he was to be one of the shooters. This was a big moment for Vinny Ocean—perhaps the biggest moment in his entire mob life. After nearly twenty-five years as a made man, Vinnie was now being ordered to participate in an act the boss of the family believed would put the DeCavalcante crime family “back on the map.” If the job went as planned, his status as a star within the family would be assured forever.
Vinny was given a gun. He was told that Weiss would be lured to another man’s home, where Vinny Ocean and Anthony Rotondo would be waiting. Vinny and Anthony showed up at the house to learn that Weiss could not be located.
They went to Plan B.
They knew Weiss had separated from his wife and had for the last few weeks been living with his girlfriend at the condo behind the mall. Vinny Ocean organized three teams—a hit squad, a car filled with backup shooters, and the crash car that could block the way in case police showed up. As it happened, Vinny Ocean and Jimmy Gallo sat in the hit-squad car, designated hitters at 8:30 in the morning.
In the chilly morning light, Weiss apparently did not notice the two sedans filled with men until he was behind the wheel of his Jeep. By then it was too late. Jimmy Gallo and Vinny Palermo exited Capo’s wife’s car with pistols in hand. Both men fired repeatedly at Weiss, who swung open the sedan door and made a feeble attempt to flee. He fell facedown on the street. He was shot twice in the face and once in the arm. A witness later described Weiss lying on the cold pavement, his dark blue real-estate-developer suit soaked with his own blood. His expensive left shoe had fallen off and lay by the curb.
“The killers,” wrote the
New York Times
the next day, “fled unseen.”
Within a day of the Weiss hit, Vinny Ocean and Anthony Rotondo met with a capo in John Gotti’s crime family to deliver the news. The Weiss matter, they said, was resolved. Weiss’s death was seen as a real shot in the arm for the DeCavalcante family because the man who wanted it done, John Gotti, was now a satisfied customer. A potential informant was gone and nobody had been arrested. Those who participated in the killing attained a level of credibility unparalleled for “farmers” of their ilk.
The Weiss killing launched Vinny Ocean, made man, into the ranks of the big time.
It had a downside. In the days that followed, the participants began to understand fully that they would now be linked together in sin by the killing of the former city editor—forever.
Including Anthony Capo.
Vinny knew that Capo had seen what he, Vinny, had done. In 1989, to the outside world, Vinny Ocean was a legitimate businessman whose only brush with the law involved shrimp theft nearly twenty years earlier. Vinny Ocean wasn’t even listed on the intelligence databases of law enforcement that tried to keep track of who was in and who was out of the mob. A murder charge would bring down Vinny Ocean for good. Vinny Ocean knew this; Anthony Capo knew this. Each had much to fear from the other, and they had a good reason for their fear.
Within weeks of the Weiss killing, one of the men in the crash car during the Weiss hit began to act funny. His name was Joseph Garafano. He expressed nervousness about being found out. Again and again he expressed this nervousness. A little nervousness is okay. A lot is not. This inspired other participants in the Weiss hit to worry that Garafano might decide to cooperate with law enforcement to save his own skin. As a result, it was decided that Joseph Garafano had to go. A soldier named Victor DiChiara convinced Garafano to come to his house. There, he told Garafano not to be so nervous, that he was going to be given money in the morning and sent off to Florida to lie low until the police forgot about their interest in the murder of the real-estate guy Weiss. Garafano’s birthday was September 21, only a few days away, and he apparently decided that everything was going to be all right. He stayed at DiChiara’s house that autumn night, and in the morning DiChiara drove to a prearranged drop-off spot. There Garafano got out of DiChiara’s car and into another car with Anthony Rotondo and other members of the DeCavalcante crime family. That was the last anyone saw of Joseph Garafano.
Vinny Ocean and Anthony Capo knew all about Joseph Garafano and the unseverable bond they now had with each other because of their participation in the end of Fred Weiss.
In the fall of 1991, Vinny Ocean knew Anthony Capo was a guy who did not panic when the bullets started flying, and that he could therefore rely on Anthony the golfer to carry out another important job. More often than not, the jobs the Mafia needed done involved making a problem go away. In this case, the problem was one of the biggest ever for the family. The problem was the acting boss.
In 1991, the boss of the family, John Riggi, was in jail. He had thoughtfully appointed a man he trusted to run things from the street as acting boss. The man’s name was John D’Amato. There was a problem. Practically nobody liked the man, and nearly everyone agreed that Riggi had become interested primarily in John D’Amato at the expense of the DeCavalcante crime family. To make things worse, John D’Amato was infuriating the other New York families. He was borrowing money from the Gambinos and the Colombos, and he was not paying it back. At the same time he was out partying, spending freely, making it seem as if it was okay for him to spend other people’s money and never pay it back. Perhaps worst of all, John D’Amato was reinforcing the image of the DeCavalcante family as a bunch of amateur farmers.
Vinny Palermo and the rest of the DeCavalcante hierarchy decided it was time for John D’Amato to go.
On November 11, 1991, the FBI announced it had recruited a new Mafia informant named Salvatore Gravano, the underboss of the Gambino family. At the time Sammy Bull Gravano was not a household name. He was just a guy who was always seen on the street with John Gotti. Now he was front-page news. The FBI made it clear Sammy Bull was telling them a lot of things they had never
John D’Amato had been involved in business with Sammy Bull, so he figured it was only a matter of time before the FBI showed up at his door. He decided this was an unpleasant image, and so he hit the road for Florida to stay out of sight until the Gravano hurricane subsided. While D’Amato was in Florida, his peers plotted his death in New York. Shortly before Thanksgiving, 1991, D’Amato suddenly showed up again in New York. Palermo and the reluctant capo, Anthony Rotondo, summoned two men to Rotondo’s office—Victor DiChiara and Anthony Capo.
During the meeting, DiChiara and Capo were ordered to kill D’Amato that very day. In the discussion, the other captains present—including Vinny Ocean—were willing to give the order themselves. They were not shy about becoming participants in this particular murder. One of the captains, however, was not quite as willing. Anthony Rotondo just sat there in silence, not saying one way or the other whether he wanted the job done. Anthony Capo— who’d been assigned to Rotondo, but did not respect him—was not happy about this. He then made it clear that anyone who asked him to go out and kill somebody would have to become part of the crime—a coconspirator. This was insurance. Rotondo, Capo felt, was trying to protect himself from implication by keeping his mouth shut.
“You’re my skipper,” Capo finally said to Rotondo. “If you want me to do this, tell me to do it and it will be done.”
Rotondo then reluctantly told him to shoot and kill D’Amato. In his usual unsubtle manner, Capo had succeeded in making Rotondo an accomplice. And he had done it right in front of Vinny Ocean. With Anthony Capo, you were in for it all or you were not to be trusted.
That day Capo was given a gun. He and DiChiara picked up D’Amato in a sedan at a prearranged spot and drove him to a garage in Brooklyn, There D’Amato was shot in the head. Capo and DiChiara then drove back to Rotondo’s office, cruising slowly by and signaling out the window that D’Amato was dead in the trunk of the car. They all met at the nearby home of another capo, where Rotondo helped clean up the car and wrap the body for disposal. Capo asked Rotondo to help get rid of D’Amato’s body. Rotondo demurred, although this time it wasn’t to return a toy to Toys “ ” Us. This time, he had to go back home and see his wife.
Anthony Capo smoked his cigar on the ride to Queens with Ralphie, expressing his philosophy of survival. He talked openly about “the life” and how he hated “rats” and he complained that his home telephone was tapped and that he couldn’t get life insurance because the FBI was always following him. Then he was complaining about another soldier named Vinny, who was owed a debt and was not doing much of anything to collect it, even after the debtor told him flat out he could not pay.