The Short Sweet Dream of Eduardo Gutierrez (10 page)

Eduardo had never heard of either of them, and Giuliani had nothing to do with him, but unfortunately Teitelbaum did. Teitelbaum covered the distance from City Hall to Williamsburg and was the connection, the pull, the clout, in the city administration. He was the major fund-raiser for Giuliani in the Hasidic communities. The position of fund-raiser is one of the few with power in a government. The word
power
is almost always misused, for most municipal gnomes have none, except in the case of Teitelbaum, who took over something called the Vacancy Control Board. This is a one-man group hidden from view in the basement of City Hall; it decides who can work in city government, who can be transferred, and who can be pushed out of work. Nobody knows what the Vacancy Control Board is except for those begging for a job and pledging to break any rule, tell any lie, bury any report.

Simultaneously, there were no rules for a builder, particularly in Hasidic neighborhoods, other than putting up money on demand for politicians.

Politicians recall first noticing Teitelbaum at a Giuliani rally in
the Hasidic Borough Park section of Brooklyn. He didn’t understand what he was doing, but he acted as if he did. Which immediately irritated Dov Hikind, the state legislator who ran the rally. It created an atmosphere of intense dislike that later caused Hikind, on trial in federal court for the totally false charge of stealing, to claim that Teitelbaum had put him there. Hikind went on to say that the day was soon coming when Teitelbaum would cry on the way to prison. This deepest dislike shot up from the platform at that first outdoor rally. It was the usual and understandable procedure for a campaign. In all of them, people hand out leaflets and rumors; many of the faces are crossed with insanity. In this case, the venom lasted beyond normal loathing.

Bruce Teitelbaum turned into a city figure when he rose out of a seat at Lincoln Center, where he sat with Mayor Giuliani at a concert of the New York Philharmonic in honor of the United Nations leaders. In the great hall was the Palestine Liberation Organization’s Yasir Arafat, who had received tickets from the United Nations. Immediately, the flames shot ceilingward from Mayor Giuliani and his aide, Teitelbaum. How could this murderer be allowed at your concert? Teitelbaum asked Giuliani. Yes, Giuliani said, I don’t run concerts for killers. Get him out of here.

Teitelbaum got up and walked over to Arafat and his two aides. It was during the second movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Teitelbaum told Arafat and his aides that they had to leave. The mayor didn’t want them.

He told this to Arafat and his people while looking to the left and then the right and then up above. At least a few nearby noticed that Teitelbaum displayed such nervousness that it appeared he would collapse. Arafat sat there for a few moments. One of his aides said they had thought about staying because of the mantle of the UN, which was what Giuliani expected. That he had embarrassed them would be sufficient. Then he could say Arafat stayed
because of the anti-Israeli UN. But Arafat decided to let them drown in acid. He and his aides stood and walked out in the middle of the performance.

Bruce Teitelbaum, high apprehension subsided, now swaggered like a wild boar. He was indisputably the most important Jewish name in city affairs. He was next to a mayor who did virtually nothing each day except to get into the papers or to meet girlfriends. He was content to have Teitelbaum keep the people in love with him, and if it meant Teitelbaum giving contracts out to Jewish organizations, then let him do all he wants of it. Giuliani was going to run for president or vice president or senator, whatever, and it would cost tens of millions, and Teitelbaum knew how to get the money.

Much of it came from builders, who are crooks with blueprints and are thus at ease with people in City Hall. Teitelbaum handled anything that was needed to keep someone like Eugene Ostreicher, the father, sending in the cash. Joseph Spitzer, who lives in a building on Fifty-ninth Street in Brooklyn’s Borough Park along with Richie Ostreicher, the son, is celebrated for bringing $83,000 into Giuliani campaigns. Nothing in New York—no fire chief complaining, and certainly no young Mexican—is allowed to get in the way of that. “How could you say that we gave him the city for his eighty-three thousand?” Teitelbaum said. “We raised eight hundred and thirty thousand dollars from builders. Spitzer gave eighty-three thousand.” Spitzer was given a placard that allowed him to park almost anywhere in the city. He usually could be found in the City Hall offices of Teitelbaum and then his successor as the chief of staff of the Giuliani office, Anthony Carbonetti. Whatever Spitzer needed done, they did.

A
T FIRST, THIS SEEMS
to start in another universe from an obstacle to building in Williamsburg that required help from City Hall. In the 1930s, Louis Carbonetti and Harold Giuliani, the mayor’s father, grew up together in East Harlem, on the streets of Tommy (Three-Finger Brown)
Lucchese, Joey Rao, and Trigger Mike Coppola. Harold Giuliani pulled burglaries and holdups. He told the court he did it because of unemployment. He went to Sing Sing prison for sixteen months. Carbonetti did not go to prison. Louis Carbonetti became a second for professional fighters, a bucket carrier who between rounds would lean over the ropes and clean a fighter’s cuts. While Carbonetti attended school on First Avenue and in Stillman’s Gymnasium on Eighth Avenue, he received a merit appointment as assistant secretary to a new state supreme court judge, Thomas Aurelio. Carbonetti’s merit was that he knew Aurelio, and also every mob guy in his district. A wiretap of Frank Costello, prime minister of the underworld, and Aurelio was played in public by authorities hoping to block Aurelio. On it, Aurelio said, “Francesco, how can I thank you?” And Costello said, “When I tell you it’s in the bag, it’s done.”

When he came out of prison, Harold Giuliani married a young neighborhood woman and moved to Brooklyn, where he worked saloons, collecting for bookmakers and loan sharks. His son, Rudy, was born in Brooklyn. Harold took his son to East Harlem on Sundays, where they saw neighborhood friends and then went with the father’s friend, Lou Carbonetti, to games at Yankee Stadium. Harold Giuliani then moved Rudy to the Long Island suburbs, taking him away from street life.

Carbonetti wound up being defeated for a Democratic district leadership in East Harlem. That left him jobless; you can’t be in a judge’s office if you lose your own district. But he had his own cut man, East Harlem’s city councilman, the Rev. Louis Gigante. His brother, Vincent (The Chin) Gigante, ran the underworld, but he never as much as served mass for his brother. Father Gigante was to become a true builder of his city, as opposed to a cheap talentless developer. At the most searing, disturbing time in the Bronx, when fires and hopelessness were beyond anybody’s capacity to repel, Governor Nelson Rockefeller sent his housing administrator, Edward
Logue, to visit Gigante at his parish, St. Athanasius. “Is there some way you could build up here, or are the threats and violence too much?” he asked Gigante.

“We do not tolerate violence. We do not accept threats,” Gigante said.

With state subsidies, Gigante took empty buildings and turned them into new apartments. Over three thousand people lined up for a day and a half to apply for his first apartments.

“God bless Father Gigante forever,” Logue announced.

Logue then wrote a famous memo to Rockefeller: “Suppliers and sub-contractors and vandals tend to hesitate before bothering Father Gigante.”

Father Lou often could be found in the 115th Street clubhouse of Anthony (Fat Tony) Salerno, who was the second in charge of Vincent Gigante’s gang. Tony was the Tip O’Neill of the underworld and would reside forever in Rudy Giuliani’s mind. Rudy had to know Tony from early years just by walking the street with his father and Carbonetti. Fat Tony was twelve when he drove a truck for Dutch Schultz. Later, Fat Tony’s club, the Palma Boy Club—there is no s because there is no s—on 115th was around the corner from Lou Carbonetti’s Democratic district clubhouse.

The man from around the corner from Fat Tony’s old headquarters, Louis Carbonetti, now became the first Carbonetti to work in City Hall. When Abe Beame was the mayor and Father Gigante’s friend, and Stanley Friedman was his chief assistant, Father Gigante took Carbonetti down to City Hall and as much as put him in an office and said, “Here’s where you work.”

He had a son, Lou Carbonetti Jr., who would be the first to follow him onto the city payroll.

Rudy Giuliani went on to become the United States attorney for New York. He made sure he became famous as the zealot who broke the Mafia. Familiarity. At the same time he had a fascination with mafiosi and even imitated Fat Tony Salerno’s speech. A Giuliani
indictment brought Fat Tony into federal court in a trial of Mafia bosses. Giuliani did not prosecute Fat Tony himself, but it was his indictment. At a break one day, Fat Tony got up and brushed past guards who were supposed to stop him and went to the railing in front of the spectators’ rows. A man waiting at the rail handed Fat Tony a cigar. Fat Tony inspected it. The day before, when the same man had brought Fat Tony a cigar, the mobster had exclaimed, “Bring me a thing like this!” and broke the cigar in half and threw it on the floor. This time, the man said, “It’s Cuban, Tony.”

Salerno grunted and put the cigar in the breast pocket of his suit.

Now he said, loudly enough for the large room to hear, “Did you bring me a gun?” He pointed at the prosecutor. “I want to shoot this prick.”

Then he motioned to the judge. “I’d like to fuckin’ shoot her, too.”

Later in the trial, they played a wiretap of Mafia capital punishment jury deliberations. Fat Tony put on a large yellow headset to listen. It also could be heard on speakers in the courtroom. The tape played for about a half hour, and every voice in crime except Fat Tony’s was on it voting to have someone killed. In the spectators’ front row, Fat Tony’s man brightened. He gave a satisfied nod to Fat Tony. Listening through the earphones in the front of the room, Fat Tony made a face that said, all right.

At this moment there came over the tape the one decisive vote of the mob. It was the unmistakable voice of Fat Tony Salerno calling out, “Hit!”

Fat Tony shrugged. What are you going to do? “Good night, Irene,” he muttered to the guys at the defense table,

The Carbonettis—father, son, and eventually grandson and wife—worked in the two mayoral campaigns of Harold Giuliani’s son, Rudy. When Giuliani won, he had Lou Carbonetti Jr. helping to hand out city patronage jobs. Then Lou junior had a private copying business that folded and he owed $100,000. It was discovered that he used two driver’s licenses. He had to leave the regular city
government and take over a private neighborhood organization called a Business Improvement District. His former wife, JoAnna Aniello, received a job in city housing.

The grandson, Anthony Carbonetti, was made the patronage dispenser for the city, under Bruce Teitelbaum. He then was made the chief of staff of the whole administration. Carbonetti’s resumé is nonexistent. His last job before City Hall was that of a bartender in Boston. On his 1994 financial disclosure forms he listed a scorching hand at Atlantic City as a source of income.

By 1998, he didn’t need slot machines. His salary at City Hall was $115,000. Public jobs are never supposed to give the appearance of impropriety. While gambling in Atlantic City is legal, and you’re even entitled to report winnings no matter how preposterous the claim, for somebody in New York’s City Hall, it still looks at least lousy.

Carbonetti and the English language were opponents. Some of the most painful moments in City Hall came whenever he sat in his small office and dictated letters. Incidentally, the size and location of a government office is meaningless. Bare and shabby are common. It is the phone or the memo that does it.

Anthony Carbonetti also was as subtle as a thrown brick. On the phone, he told commissioners, “You’ve got to do this. Just do it. Don’t ask me anything. Just do it. This is for a friend of the mayor’s.” His special interest was the Brooklyn Hasidic community. He didn’t have to bother with calls and return calls with Hasidim. Sitting in his office was Joseph Spitzer, who owns a huge four-story house in Borough Park. It has a marble front and a stoop with polished brass banisters. Records show that residents of this house included Chaim Ostreicher, Eugene’s son, and Faye Schwimmer, Ostreicher’s daughter and Leon Schwimmer’s daughter-in-law. It was helpful to find this on record, for Ostreicher and those around him denied the fact that the house even existed. “We don’t know Spitzer,” one yelled. “He has zero to do with us.”

Spitzer talked to Carbonetti, and Carbonetti talked to a commissioner.

If you had building violations or even a building collapse and were Hasidic, City Hall took care of everything. What did a report by a building inspector or a fireman mean? The builder was the mayor’s friend, or had relatives raising funds for him.

A Mexican immigrant like Eduardo Daniel Gutiérrez didn’t count.

CHAPTER TWELVE

E
duardo moved into a space on an upstairs floor in an attached frame house that was across the street from Grady High School in Brighton Beach. The landlord, who lived on the first floor, was never seen, and the Mexicans were crowded onto the second. There was a kitchen, bathroom, a small bedroom, and a large front bedroom with dark brown paneling and a blue carpet. The large bedroom had two windows looking down at the stoop and street. A television set was in one corner of the room. Eight from Mexico slept and lived there when Eduardo arrived. They slept on the floor on thin pads and pillows. You picked your place to sleep and then it became yours. Eduardo slept between Alejandro and Mariano Ramirez, Gustavo’s brother. They had their heads to the wall under the windows. The room was long enough so that their feet did not touch those of the others sleeping with their heads against the opposite wall.

Eduardo was stunned by the bathroom. Never before had he seen one in a house. With nine people and one bathroom, there was an implied agreement that each would take no more than ten minutes. He soon learned that each time somebody slipped past
him, it would be ten minutes of listening to running water. Let three get ahead and you lose a half hour. He realized that he had to stand around as if thinking of something and then suddenly jump at first click of the bathroom door opening. He often lost out to a shoulder and a fully slammed door. The most familiar sound in the house was that of someone rapping on the bathroom door to get the occupant to hurry.