The Good Rat (6 page)

Elizabeth said, “I was in work when my girlfriend called and told me that they’d found Annette. I knew right away that Jimmy had done it with Bering. When he came home, we all knew he did it. Nobody said nothing to him, and he didn’t talk to us. It was obvious that something terrible had happened. Then the next thing, he was ducking and scared of this Casso.”

Hydell and Casso had some history even before they were joined by bullets.

• A:
  I was supposed to meet an attorney, Jerry Shargel, at the 19th Hole where Chris Furnari was, and we were
  standing outside the bar, and the owner of the Chinese restaurant two doors away came in to talk to Chris, and he told Chris that there’s some drunken kids in his place and they had a Doberman dog and they were causing all kind of havoc and the customers were afraid and they were leaving. And Chris went to Angelo Defendis—they all came outside at that time, and I heard Chris say to Angelo Defendis, Didn’t I tell you to straighten this kid out to stop causing problems in the neighborhood? And Angelo Defendis said, I told him. I warned him. So Chris said, Go in there now and get him out of there. And Angelo went into the Chinese restaurant, and he came out with Jimmy Hydell and another kid and—with a big dog—and Angelo started pointing his finger at Jimmy Hydell, and every time he pointed his finger, the dog started to snap at him.
  

And Gaspipe came along, Casso, and he saw it, and he told Jimmy Hydell, Hold on to that dog and don’t let that dog look to intimidate Angelo. And Angelo started yelling at him again; the dog came at him. And Gaspipe said, I told you, watch that dog, and Jimmy paid him no mind. Gaspipe went into the luncheonette, he got a pistol, put a silencer on it, and shot the dog twice. Casso told Hydell, Now pick up the dog and put him in the trunk of the car and get out of here.

• Q.
  Casso told Jimmy that?
  
• A.
  Yes.
  

Like most of what has gone bad in the Mafia, this story also involves John Gotti. I speak of a time in the early eighties when he was still an up-and-comer in the Gambino crime family. His boss was Paul Castellano, who had famously stated that members of his family were forbidden to deal in drugs. The government had bugged Gene Gotti, John’s brother, and caught him in a heroin deal. Castellano heard the tape and decided he had to execute Gene Gotti for the big crime of selling heroin and the almost-as-big crime of not turning over any of the money. To save his brother’s life, and also to make a little room at the top, John Gotti got the idea to move Castellano into a new home. A funeral parlor.

On December 16, 1985, Castellano visited the LaRossa law office to give Christmas greetings. Afterward he left for a meeting at Sparks Restaurant on East Forty-sixth Street in Manhattan. It was only a few yards from Third Avenue, from whose buildings came the start of the rush hour. Johnny “Crash” Casciola, an operating engineer working a construction job some yards from the restaurant, had just shut down his crane for the day. He was singing “Fine and Dandy.” He had a date that night to play his accordion for a fee at an affair in Jersey. He noticed several men in fur hats and raincoats in the river of people. As Castellano’s car pulled in front of the restaurant, the fur hats rushed up and started shooting. Soon Castellano was dead. The driver, too. The fur hats dissolved back into the throng. Johnny Crash also disappeared. He needed no time to think. He moved by instinct.

A car passed by. John Gotti looked out the passenger window at the carnage. The driver was Sammy Gravano.

Two days later, when asked to remember this, Johnny Crash said, “What are you talking about, somebody got shot? I was home.”

Shooting a boss supposedly required Mafia commission sanction. There was no real commission left, but there was Vincent “the Chin” Gigante. He thought, If you kill Castellano, then I, Vincent Gigante, also can be killed. Something had to be done about Gotti, Gigante decided, so he hired Gaspipe Casso to put a bomb in a car parked on a Sunday morning in front of the Veterans and Friends social club on Eighty-sixth Street in Bensonhurst. Never mind that a bomb was also against the Mafia rules that the Chin claimed to uphold. Gotti was inside the club. He left one of his men, Frank DeCicco, in the car. Gotti was supposed to come right out. He tarried. The bomb did not. Mr. DeCicco became dust.

As the Mafia always was slightly relaxed about keeping secrets, a hundred people knew by midafternoon who had set the bomb. One of whom was Gotti. He had to make Casso go away right now. Gotti told Bobby Boriello, Mickey Boy Paradiso, and Eddie Lino to take care of it, and they sent Jimmy Hydell and Robert Bering. To do the work involved in pulling a trigger, they hired a third person, a twenty-six-year-old drug peddler and killer named Nicky Guido. He was heartless and fairly stupid. They hunted Casso in a blue Plymouth Fury that had a siren and a red light on the dashboard to resemble an unmarked police car.

On September 14, 1986, Casso was driving a Lincoln Town Car leased to Progressive Distributors of Staten Island, which was Burton Kaplan’s clothing business. Kaplan had given Casso the car as a token of his high esteem. Casso parked it illegally at a bus stop. Why shouldn’t he? He was Brooklyn royalty, a boss of the Mafia. He was allowed to do anything he wanted. He stopped in a no-parking space because he felt like ice cream from a Carvel stand. He was also there to meet a guy selling stolen corporate checks.

Instead Hydell, Bering, and Guido pulled up. While appearing to park legitimately, they scraped the driver’s side of the car being driven by Gaspipe, whose gangster instinct sent him crawling across the seat and scrambling like a crab out the passenger door.

Guido had a near-perfect shot at Casso. He had a nine-millimeter semiautomatic weapon and could have hit the man twenty times. But the gun was clogged. Why not? These people live busy lives and don’t have time to be cleaning guns.

Hydell, sitting in the backseat, then broke out his shotgun, which he fired five times.

Casso remembered for police, “I just finished parking the car. I just shut the engine off. When I seen the car pulling up very close like, too close to my car, and then I turned around, and then I seen the flash of the gunfire.”

Casso was hit in the shoulder and neck. He fled the car and ran into the Golden Ox restaurant. He was on the
restaurant’s kitchen floor with his back against a freezer, bleeding.

The car carrying Bering, Hydell, and Guido rushed away, but an off-duty police officer caught the license plate.

Other lawyers and prosecutors from around the courthouse have come to hear Burt Kaplan tell the story. The jury is breathless.

• Q:
  After the shooting of Casso, did you have a conversation with Vic Amuso about it?
  
• A:
  Yes.
  
• Q:
  And, again, who was Vic Amuso at that time?
  
• A:
  He was a capo in the Lucchese crime family.
  
• Q:
  Okay. What did Amuso say to you about the shooting or after the shooting?
  
• A:
  He came to my house. I had relatives from Ohio over my house, we were all sitting on the porch, and he called me down. And I went to speak to him, and he said, We’ve got a problem. He said, They tried to kill our friend. I said, Who? What? He said, They tried to kill Gas. I said, What happened? He said, They started to shoot him in the car, and he’s in the hospital, and I want you to go to the hospital and find out what’s going on.
  I said, Vic, I’m on parole. If I go to the hospital and talk to him, I’m going to get violated. And he said, You’re right. I didn’t think about it. He says, I’ll handle it, and he left.
  
• Q:
  Okay. Do you know what police precinct Casso was shot in?
  
• A:
  Six-Three.
  
• Q:
  And do you know whether Mr. Eppolito had worked in that precinct at all?
  
• A:
  Yes, at that time he worked in the Six-Three.
  

In the investigation file, Detective Caracappa found the license-plate number of the car containing the thugs who tried killing Casso. He used that to put together a packet of information on the shooters. Shortly after, Burt Kaplan received a visit from his old prison buddy Frank Santora, who brought a present.

• A:
  He comes and meets me with a manila envelope with a bunch of papers from a crime-scene investigation and some—a couple of pictures, and I opened it and I looked in it, and there was a picture of Jimmy Hydell. Then I read the crime-scene reports, and it named who the participants were, what kind of car they were driving, what license-plate number, where they lived. It was very, very helpful, very efficient, and I said to Frankie, This is terrific, Frankie, what do we owe you? And he said, This is a gift from my cousin and his partner. This is just to show you the kind of things that they would do. They wouldn’t take no money, because this was someone looking to hurt you, and
  they wouldn’t take money under those circumstances. We’re not that kind of people.
  
• Q:
  So after you got this packet of information, Mr. Kaplan, what did you do with it?
  
• A:
  I made an arrangement to meet Casso.
  
• Q:
  When you wanted to meet with Casso, how would you typically contact him?
  
• A:
  I would—now that I was on parole, I would send Tommy Galpine, kid who worked for me, to his house to make an appointment. I made an arrangement to meet Gas at a social club on Thirteenth Avenue. It was a club operated by a gentleman by the name of Swaggy—he was a made member, I believe, of the Genovese crime family—and I walked into the club, and he was there with Victor Amuso, and I said, Gas, do you know who shot you? And he got very indignant. He says, No, and you don’t either. I said, Well, it was Jimmy Hydell. He says, You’re crazy, it couldn’t have been Jimmy Hydell. I just got him a job with the unions, and we made friends, and we have been close for the last year. I said, Here, and I handed him the envelope. I said, See for yourself.
  
• Q:
  Did the envelope you handed him have the photograph of Jimmy Hydell in it?
  
• A:
  Yes. I left him with the package, because I was on parole, and I left, and it was a couple of days later when I seen him again.
  
• Q:
  What did Casso ask you?
  
• A:
  What do I owe them for this? I told him the story that they wouldn’t take no money because someone tried to hurt him, and he shook his head, he said, Boy, that’s really nice of them. They must be pretty good guys.
  

I have good reason to remember the period in Brooklyn in the 1960s when the family named for Joe Profaci, the old-time Mafia boss, was getting shot up from within by an insurgency group, the Gallo brothers. There were three of them—Larry, Joe, and Albert. They came out of 51 President Street, only yards up from the Brooklyn waterfront.

As the newspapers called her, “Big Mama,” the grandmother of the Gallos, also lived there. She would spit at a forest fire. When her grandsons decided to campaign against the incumbent, Joseph Profaci, she sat at the kitchen table and counseled them. Grandson Joey would call newspapers and complain if they did not run his nickname, “Crazy Joe.” He kept a young lion in the basement. Joey would bring people who owed loan-shark payments to the door to hear the animal roar. The night waiters at the Luna Restaurant on Mulberry Street knew every hair on the lion’s mane. This was because Joey walked in one night with the wild beast panting at the end of a chain. A man sat alone at a table while his woman companion was in the ladies’ room. Joey and the lion strolled over, and the animal’s bloodred eyes glared at the guy, who scrambled and fled the premises. Joey Gallo and the lion were gone from the restaurant
by the time the woman returned to her seat. When she asked about her companion, the waiter said, “I guess he just ran out on the check.” The woman swore, paid, and went home alone.

Joe Gallo did several hard years at Attica. Big Mama remained at the kitchen table. One look at her told you that you were in the presence of greatness. She had gray hair pulled back. Her eyes were somber, then twinkling, and always in command. With grandson Joey in prison, there was little money in the house. With a sigh, she told of one of the crowd who lost his way coming home from a much-needed bank robbery. He was returning to President Street with the money in the backseat of the car in canvas bank bags. The guy saw a hot-dog cart on the curb on the other side of the street, and he pulled over illegally and was eating a hot dog and sauerkraut when a cop came up and admonished him and began writing a ticket. The officer’s gaze fell on the bank bags in the back.

“What are these?” he said.

The guy half choked. “They let me have them.”

“Yeah, well, just don’t move,” the cop said, his gun now out.

In her kitchen, recounting this, Big Mama said, “I told him, You got to do two things. First, you got to rob the bank. Then you got to get away. He forgot.”

She sighed again. She then mentioned that the police had been around earlier looking for her grandson Larry.

“Why do you want him?” she asked the detectives.

“We just want to talk to him. Somebody was shot.”

“Who was shot?”

“Anthony Abbatemarco was shot.”

Big Mama nodded. “This-a Abby. Is he dead?”

“No. Hurt.”

“Oh.”

The cops left. Later, when Larry came home, Big Mama said to him, “Larry, what’s the matter? You no can shoot straight?”

Some nights later I am at the bar of Gallagher’s on Fifty-second Street in Manhattan with Dick Dougherty, who was the deputy police commissioner at the time, and Abe Rosenthal of the
Times
newspaper, and I said, “I don’t have to worry anymore about day labor with these columns. I have the way out. I’m going to write a book called
The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight.
”

Both of them thought it was a great title. Now all I had to do was make up a book. I go home to Forest Hills and begin typing. Soon I look out the window, and I see gangster Mike Marino’s big brick fortress on the next block. It had a driveway on the side onto which the kitchen door opened. Frequently I would see his wife come outside in a fur coat covering her nightgown to start the car. Marino was inside his brick house, his arms folded over his head, holding his breath. When the car did not explode from dynamite in the starter, Marino came out and the wife slipped out of the car. He kissed her, she went back to the kitchen,
and Marino got in the car and drove off to his day’s business, which was stealing.

Late at night I am watching Bobby De Niro in some mobster comedy on TV, and I feel sorry for him because these Mafia parts, at which he is so superb and which he could do for the next thirty years, will soon no longer exist. Al Pacino, too. Which is marvelous, because both are American treasures and should be remembered for great roles, not for playing cheap, unworthy punks. I much prefer De Niro or Pacino to Olivier in anything.

Now, watching this movie, I remember a hot summer afternoon when the producer of a movie they were making of
The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight
asked me to meet this young actor, Bobby De Niro, because he was replacing Al Pacino in a big role. Pacino was leaving our film to be in another movie, called
The Godfather.
De Niro was taking over his first big movie part.

We talked briefly in a bar, the old Johnny Joyce’s on Second Avenue. De Niro looked like he was homeless. It was on a Friday. On Sunday morning I saw him again. He was going to Italy to learn the speech nuances of people in towns mentioned in the script. He was going there on his own. He was earning $750 a week for the movie. When he left, I remember thinking, Do not stand between this guy and whatever he wants.

What he wanted first was to play gangsters well. Second, he wanted the world. I think he got both. He came
along at the end, give or take a show, of the Mafia. “We had one wiseguy role in the first season,” Bill Clark, the old homicide detective who became executive producer of
NYPD Blue,
was saying the other day. “That was all because they just couldn’t make it as characters for us. Their day was gone.”

Today, aside from needy showmen, the only ones rooting for the mob to survive are FBI agents assigned to the squads that chase gangsters across the streets of the city. Each family has a squad assigned to it. They have numbers—such as C-16, for the Colombo squad—and each agent is assigned to watch three soldiers and one captain in the family. Their work is surveillance and interviews. They will watch a numbers runner for a month, then interview a cabdriver or a mobster’s sister. It doesn’t matter. Just do the interview. A full-time occupation is obtaining court orders for wiretaps. “We get promoted by the number of wiretaps we get signed,” an agent admitted.

FBI agents in New York fill out FD-302 forms that pile up in an office. They must do this in order to maintain their way of life. They earn seventy thousand dollars or so a year, live in white suburbs, perform no heavy lifting. After a day at work, they go to a health club, then perhaps stop for a drink with other agents and talk about the jobs they want when they retire. If, after so much interviewing, spying, and paying of stool pigeons, they still do not come up with some Mafia dimwit whose arrest makes the news, they face
true work for their country: antiterrorism detail in a wet alley in Amman, Jordan, or a tent on a snowy mountain in Afghanistan.

“What do you want?” Red Hot said. He is on First Avenue in Manhattan, in front of the DeRobertis pastry shop.

“We just want to talk to you,” one of the two FBI agents said.

“You’ll have to wait here until I get a lawyer,” Red Hot said.

“We just wanted you to take a ride with us down to the office.”

“The answer is no,” Red Hot said.

“We just want to get fresh fingerprints. We haven’t taken yours in a while.”

“That’s because I was in jail. And nothing happened to the prints you have. What are you trying to say, they faded? They wore out?”

His friend Frankie Biff advised from the sideline, “Red Hot, if you go with them, you won’t come back. They’ll make up a case in the car.”

When the agents left, Red Hot said in a tired voice, “They’ll be back. They’re going to make up something and lock me up. Don’t even worry about it.”

Some nights later Red Hot was walking into DeRobertis when he dropped dead on the sidewalk.

“He ruined the agents’ schedules,” Frankie Biff said. “They were going to put him away for sure without a case.”