The Good Rat (14 page)

He left the sixth grade at age sixteen unable to read, but he could make out some letters. Over the years he deciphered T-O-W, which was good enough. By now he owned two tow trucks, which he kept in his collision garage next to his parking lot. His wife was not only literate but efficient: She filled out and mailed promptly the bills for having your vehicle towed.

Somebody always hangs out at a collision shop. With Franzone it was a guy named Frank Santora who was around in 1978 or so. Santora had an Oldsmobile that was damaged and asked Franzone to work on it. He came around three or four times a week and rode tow-truck days with Franzone. He let Franzone pay for lunch. He said he was a salesman, but when Franzone asked what he sold, he talked about good barbers for his hair, which he was proud of. He was around for years, and when Franzone moved to the Nostrand Avenue lot, Santora came with the sale.

Late one afternoon in the mid-eighties, Santora told Franzone that he wanted him to meet his cousin Lou Eppolito. Santora introduced him as a cop in the Sixty-third Precinct. Eppolito was alone with his gold chains and jewelry in a car parked at the curb, on Nostrand Avenue. He came around like this several times.

It only followed that one afternoon Eppolito pulled in to the parking lot and went down a few spaces and backed the car into a space along the fence. It only followed because these rodents scratch their way into somebody’s life, into your building, your car, your business, anything that isn’t theirs, and then they declare that they are in. And so Louie Eppolito sits in his car. Yes, I am here whether you want me or not. And now you are part of this whether you want it or not. There is a sudden blur in the corner of Franzone’s eye, three people walking into the lot. One was Santora. Alongside him, in beard and yarmulke, was Israel Greenwald, Jeweler Number Two in Burt Kaplan’s testimony. On the other side of Greenwald was a guy with a trench-coat collar covering one side of his face. Franzone said he had the coat buttoned “like when you see in movies, like when you’re watching their movies, they always have the guy with the lapels that go up around his ears.” Franzone made him as Caracappa.

The three walked shoulder to shoulder to garage number four. Franzone watched as Santora closed the door and then in a little while walked out with the trench coat to the front gate. Where’s the third guy?

He found out. Santora called him in. The third guy was
dead against the wall inside the garage. Pete Franzone was told to start digging a hole in the garage floor.

“Just dig, or we’ll kill you and your family,” Franzone says Santora told him.

Franzone glanced around as he threw dirt and saw the seated Greenwald. He must be dead because he is not breathing. I will not be next. Pete Franzone dug for his life in the hard dirt. He was a couple of feet down in the garage floor. He got the hole down to about the required six feet, and then he and Santora threw the body of Israel Greenwald into the hole. That is the last time he does business with us, Santora said to himself. Santora brought in cement, lime, and water from his trunk. The garage was baptized with its first mob death.

The next time he saw Louie Eppolito drive into the lot, Franzone tried to flee. But then came Santora in a white Cadillac. He parked at the entrance to the collision shop and summoned Franzone. Santora opened the car trunk. It was empty. Pete saw this as a prelude to something ugly. The trunk was empty so there would be room for something later on.

Santora said he would be joined by some other people. Franzone went to his hut in hopes he would be forgotten during the meeting. Santora called him from the collision shop. “It is too hot here,” Santora said. “You have to come over and turn off the heat.” Pete went to the shop, pulled a switch, and kept his eyes on the ceiling and thus away from anything frightful. As he started to leave, a hand came up
to stop him. “He was like on his knees wrapping a body up,” Franzone says. “He says, ‘You have to help me get this thing into the trunk.’” Pete didn’t want to know the guy’s name. He was wrapping the body like a butcher would tie a roast. He had it inside a blanket, and he threaded the rope over and tied it and then under and moved down the package and kept tying.

Then the guy yelped that Franzone had touched the packaged body without wearing gloves. “You left fingerprints! You could bury us.” The guy kept muttering as he wiped the blanket.

They gave Franzone gloves, and he helped stuff the body into the trunk of Santora’s car. Finally Franzone was able to get out, and he left, but he knew it would never end.

Later, when he was asked if he had called police or any federal agencies, he said, “Never, because you know they would probably call up Louie Eppolito and say I got a nut here saying you killed somebody and this, that, and the other, and I figured that he’ll come and get me and kill me or lock me up and have somebody in jail kill me. Then they would kill my family.”

Franzone despised what he had been forced to do. Later, when his son was born, Frank Santora brought around baby clothes in a garbage bag. He came with his wife and daughter. Look what we brought you, isn’t this sweet? The clothes still had tags on them. Franzone acted grateful. Then Santora left, and Franzone threw the clothes out. “I didn’t want my son to wear anything from Frankie Santora.”

She didn’t know who he was, and therefore we cannot give her credit for extraordinary courage, and besides, she was only following her heritage of thievery.

Her driver pulled up at Park Avenue and Fifty-ninth Street, and she was out and running right at Tony Café, who is standing on the corner with a cane because he has just had a knee operation. He is scouring the traffic for his ride.

“Poppy!” she called through the Christmas crowd. “Oh, my Poppy, Poppy.”

The gypsy was on him before he knew she was there.

“Oh, Poppy. How’s my Poppy?” A scarf covered half of her face, and she kept her head down. Right away she tapped his bad leg.

All of a sudden she is touching his shirt inside his jacket. “How is it coming along? Oh, Poppy, you just get better.”

For one second he made her for a nurse, because just last week he had been in the big hospital down at the end of the block. All the nurses loved him. How could you not like Tony Café? Everybody knew who he was.

Hey, now what is this? Hands all over him. He steps back.

“Good-bye, Poppy. You get better.”

She was in the car and gone.

Tony Café went for his wallet. It was still there. He looked inside. The money was there. I guess she was a nurse. Now he put his hand in his pants pocket for his roll. Which was gone. Four hundred eighty-five dollars.

“She beat me. She is a fucking gypsy and she beats me out of four hundred and eighty-five dollars.” How could such a thing happen to the boss of a Mafia family from Brooklyn? For a girl to dip him is past anything we even imagined. It is the end of the year 2006. They are mugging Mafia bosses on the street.

“I just gave him a check for fifty thousand,” Tony Café is telling me the last time I saw him, a couple weeks after he got mugged. He indicates the lawyer, David Breitbart, who is walking ahead of him up the steps of the Queens County Criminal Court on Queens Boulevard, New York City.

“What did he say?”

“He said, ‘Oh, you kept your word.’ What does he think I do, not live up to it? He asked me for seventy-five and I said I’d have fifty today. That’s what I have.”

“How much more do you owe him?”

“He is doing the case for three hundred thousand. He knows I looked around. Lefcourt wanted seven-fifty. Goldberg wanted four hundred. I thought Breitbart would be the best. He handled our people before and he knows us.”

“Our people” means the Bonanno family, one of the five outfits that once ruled the streets and now fill courtrooms. For years, Tony had been mostly, happily, invisible. I looked at these Mafia charts that prosecutors put up on courtroom easels for the benefit of juries, and I never once saw Tony’s face there. I never read his name in the papers either. Good boy, Tony Café.

Then, in 1982, Joe Massino of the Bonanno family gets indicted along with about fifty others for murder, robbery, and obstruction of justice. And Anthony Rabito, aka Tony Café, rises from blessed obscurity to a spot on a stage that has suddenly exploded into hot white light beaming all over him.

There was a knock on the door one day. Somebody is down on the street banging, and Tony is upstairs in his house in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, with his eighty-eight-year-old sister, with whom he lives. He looks out the window. There are three lawmen there, but two are on the front stoop and he can’t see them. One agent steps out onto the sidewalk so Tony can see.

“FBI!”

“Yeah, so?”

“We want to talk to you.”

Now the other two come on the sidewalk. One is a female agent named McCaffrey. Typical FBI, an Irish woman sent to humiliate an Italian.

“I’ll be right there,” Tony said.

He gives his wallet to his sister, in case he isn’t coming back. He goes downstairs.

“Are you arresting me?”

“No.”

“Then what do you want me for? I live upstairs with my sister. Eighty-year-old woman sick with cancer. There are no guns or money in the house. I have to call my lawyer.”

Tony remembers the Irish woman telling him, “You’re number one now. We don’t want any bodies in the street. We don’t want witnesses intimidated. We don’t want agents threatened. You’re number one. You make sure.”

Later, as he walks the streets of Greenpoint, which now is virtually a desert, he tells himself in wonderment, “I’m a boss!”

They came back a couple of weeks later. Tony remembers the male agent saying, “Could you do us a favor?”

“We always did little favors for the FBI,” Tony recalls. “Nobody gets hurt if we help them. They help us back. So the agent says, ‘We can’t have any bodies around. It’ll cause us a lot of trouble with our bosses. Could you do us a favor and tell them all, don’t have any murders?’

“At this time,” Tony is saying, “there were only two people who were doing that kind of work.” He made a gun out of his hand. “I had to go out and find them or get somebody to find them and tell them, ‘Don’t do nothing.’”

The law next came on a Sunday morning, banging on the
door and calling on the phone at the same time. When he answered the phone a city detective outside yelled, “Open the door!” He did and was arrested. They led him out of the house. The FBI did not exactly renege after he had helped them. The woman, McCaffrey, was there writing down notes, but it was an arrest by city detectives on a Queens County bookmaking charge having nothing to do with the federal government. He was in a week until he was released on million-dollar bail, for which he posted two houses in Greenpoint, including the one where he lives. He does have a woman friend in Manhattan, someone of appropriate age for Tony, now in his early seventies.

We pick up Tony Café and his lawyer going into court on that bookmaking charge. It should be nothing too serious, except that his role as the new leader of the Bonanno family makes even a gambling offense insurmountable. On this case he was charged with running a web of twenty-two cell phones for a large bookmaking and loan-sharking business in Brooklyn and Queens. He was an old target, with straw sticking out from earlier government arrows, but still a target.

The others arrested with him on this day were seven men over seventy. Three others in their late sixties were all seriously ill with ailments of the aged. There can be no surer enforcement against the Mafia than a stopped heartbeat. Sal Scudiero, seventy-two, charged with being the gunman, was too weak to stand in court.

Tony’s past was right across Queens Boulevard from the courthouse. The lights at Pep McGuire’s bar always shrieked
in the night for Tony Café, who spilled out of his car with a huge smile and plunged into the place. He was named Tony Café by Pep himself because that was the only place you ever saw Tony, in a café. Pep and Johnny McGuire threw Tony Café at as many women as they could, and he beamed and drank and exploded with joy.

Tony rolled through these nights thirty years ago with a whole mob and, for a time, their new heavy hitter, a tough guy named Donnie Brasco.

When last seen, Brasco was taking the witness stand in room 103, federal court, Manhattan. Tony Café and others of the Bonanno crew sat with lawyers.

• Q:
  What is your name?
  
• A:
  Joseph Pistone.
  
• Q:
  What is your occupation?
  
• A:
  I am a special agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
  

There are times when the expression “the roof caves in” has a certain validity. Sitting in the back row on this day, and lucky to be there, Fat Thomas took a huge breath. “I am having a cardiac arrested.”

Tony Café was sentenced to eight years. He told the judge that he had fought two years in Korea, that both his brothers had served there, too, and that he deserved something for this. The judge took two years off the sentence. Tony did six
years at Otisville federal prison in upstate New York. He happened not to like it. As I said, I didn’t see him when he came out and never heard about him again, so I figured he wasn’t up to much, which was good, because thanks to RICO a second sentence would run him a thousand years.

But now, instead of having a dance floor under his feet, Tony Café is on the wrong side of Queens Boulevard. He trudges up the cement courthouse steps and goes into a large courtroom with low lights. The defendants, while seated, look like they should be waiting on a bench outside a supermarket pharmacy window somewhere in Florida.

When the case is called, the lawyers stand in front and the defendants wait two rows behind them. The purpose of the appearance is to make sure everybody has a lawyer and that all tapes and photos and other evidence are made available to the defense by the assistant district attorney, a Ms. Kane.

One of the old men calls out, “I don’t want a lawyer.” Another one, in a blue shirt, is asked, “Do you have a lawyer?” He does not reply or even move. Somebody says, “He can’t hear.” A court officer talks directly into the man’s ear. He says something back. “He is going to get a lawyer,” the court officer announces.

Alexander Noce, seventy-two, told his lawyer, Mathew Mari, “I can’t afford nothing. Make sure I don’t have to pay nothing.”

The prosecutor now mentioned fifty thousand dollars
bail. Mari spoke out immediately to the judge. “Your Honor, my client can’t tie up that much money. For a very good reason. He won’t be able to feed his family.”

The judge lowered it to twenty-five thousand dollars.

“Your Honor, thank you,” Mari said.

“What did he do?” the client, Noce, said.

“He cut it to twenty-five thousand dollars.”

Noce groaned loudly.

Mari clasped his hands in prayer and held them at Noce’s face. “Shut up or I’ll ask the judge to remand you. You don’t deserve a lawyer like me.” Another date is set for a hearing on evidence, and all the old men shuffle out of the room.

The combined cost of lawyers figures to be about a million dollars.

The defendants go from Queens Boulevard to Withers Street in Greenpoint, in Brooklyn, a short, narrow block off an expressway that rises to the Williamsburg Bridge, which crosses the East River to downtown Manhattan. On one side of Withers Street are three-story stone houses where families have lived for years. There used to be a piano teacher there who rented her kitchen and phone to bookmakers working for James “Jimmy Nap” Napoli. He, too, was in education: He sponsored a college scholarship fund for the children of friendly police officers. Among the neighborhood children taking music lessons there was Arlene D’Arienzo. The piano was in the living room, she remembers. The bookmakers on the phones in the kitchen kept
pleading, “We can’t hear nothing. How long does she have to go?”

On the other side of the street is Bamonte’s, with the longevity of a pyramid. The men from court walk into the afternoon dimness of the restaurant. Their leader, Tony Café, tells the waiter, “We’re not going to eat. We may eat later. Right now we’re just holding court.”

All sit at a large, round table. Their worries are about the aftermaths of heart surgeries and, simultaneously, the criminal charges traditionally reserved for young Mafia racketeers. Tony Café nods at the others.

“They took away our Social Security,” Vinny, seventy-one, says.

“They stopped all our Social Security,” Salvatore, seventy-three, says.

“They can’t do that. Not on a gambling charge,” someone says. “Only when you’re convicted.”

“I get Social Security eight hundred a month,” Georgie says. “If I don’t get that, I live in the street. My daughter gets four hundred a month. If they ever take that away from her…”

“They can’t stop your daughter’s check,” one of them says.

“Can’t,” Frank says.

“They can do anything they fucking want,” Al says.

“They stopped my Social Security and VA benefits,” Tony Café says.

“He was in Korea in the army, and they take away his VA benefits. How can they do that?” Georgie says.

“I get altogether two thousand a month,” Tony Café says. “That’s what I live on. How can they take my VA?”

“I stood next to you when we were getting sentenced,” Red says to Tony Café. “They asked you if you wanted to say something, You said, ‘I was in the army in Korea for this country. I love the flag. I love everybody.’”

Tony says, “The judge took two years off what he was going to give me. I only had to do six.”

“I’m standing next to you,” Red says. “I tell myself, ‘This is going to be all right.’ Then he gave me twenty years.”

“Do you know between us we have four open-heart surgeries?” Frankie from Staten Island says. “How do you like it? A big police raid and they get four guys over seventy who had open-heart surgery. You call us threats?”

“Four open hearts,” another says.

“They got diabetes. Blood sugar,” Anthony says.

“I got two broken toes,” Tony Café says. “The doctor says it’s from diabetes. What am I going to do in jail?”

“You think they care?” Salvatore from the neighborhood says. “When they came in on me the one held a gun right to my head and another gun right in my side.”

“Why?”

“I had a gun in the house. It had dust on it. They said if I moved, they blow my head off. Move? I can hardly take a breath.”

“When they arraigned us,” Sal says, “one of the agents
said, ‘Cover the back door so he don’t try to run out.’ The judge said, ‘Run out? He can’t walk.’”

“They spent more time writing down the medicine we had to have,” Vinny says.

Now the men have gone home for afternoon naps or early dinner, and Tony Café sits alone at the bar.

Bamonte’s appears to be an out-of-the-way place, but it is on Broadway in the world of New York people who know what they are eating. It is a short drive from Manhattan, and at lunchtime half the city seems to walk past the bar to the dining room. Police Commissioner Ray Kelly came often, shaking hands with everybody he saw. Once Tony Café held out his hand, and Kelly grabbed it and then moved on.

Today, in the gloaming, Tony Café sits at the empty restaurant and says, “The police commissioner shook my hand. How do you like it? He didn’t know who I was. Nobody knows who I am. I don’t know anybody else. They’re all in jail. Once the top of the family turns, like Joe Massino did, then nobody from the other families will talk to you.”