The World's Most Evil Gangs (9 page)

The most convincing of the many versions of Jimmy Hoffa’s
death, however, was that of yet another hitman, one of ‘Big Man Russell’ Bufalino’s lieutenants, Frank ‘The Irishman’ Sheeran, who implicated Bufalino, Provenzano and Briguglio in the killing. Sheeran was certainly an authority on Mafia assassinations, being named by the then US attorney Rudy Giuliani as one of only two non-Italians on the list of 26 top mobsters. In the final months of his life, Sheeran poured his heart out to a former prosecutor turned author, Charles Brandt. He died in 2003, aged 83, six weeks after reading the finished manuscript – and after having the writer drive him to a priest to receive his final confession.

Sheeran, who was 6ft 4in with a fair Irish complexion, told the author how he carried out a previous contract, on Joseph ‘Crazy Joe’ Gallo at Umberto’s Clam House in New York’s Little Italy. ‘I don’t look like a Mafia shooter,’ said Sheeran. ‘I look like a broken-down truck driver with a cap on, coming to use the bathroom.’ Gallo’s death, in front of his wife and young daughter, had until then remained a mystery.

‘The Irishman’, who served as a Teamster boss in Wilmington, Delaware, became a close confidante of Hoffa, but when he got the order to assassinate his old friend, he knew he had no choice. It was a case of kill on command or die for disobedience. He told Brandt how he lured Hoffa into an empty house and shot him twice in the back of the head. Brandt called his book
I Heard You Paint Houses
– the first words Hoffa uttered to Sheeran. The phrase was Mob slang for a killer, as in splattering blood over floors and walls. Sheeran replied that he was also a carpenter – Mafia-speak for someone who disposes of bodies. But because a second Mafia squad actually disposed of Hoffa’s body, even Sheeran could not solve the mystery of where ‘the biggest little guy in the USA’ is buried.

N
owadays the transformation of the Mafia is complete. Thanks to a new class of crooks with business brains, those migrant Mafiosi have swapped their humble working garb for slick suits and a sickening veneer of corporate ‘respectability’. But at least they no longer shed each other’s blood on the streets. Three factors have changed the face of the modern Mafia in the United States of America: high-tech evidence gathering, low-life supergrasses and one amazing lawman, who was the Mafia’s nemesis.

He was Rudolph William Louis Giuliani, federal prosecutor in the war on organised crime before becoming Mayor of New York City. The single most devastating enemy the Mob has ever encountered, ‘Rudy’ Giuliani would have died a thousand deaths had all the threats against him been carried out. He has
always shrugged them off, even using the best ones in the speeches he gave to prove that his side was winning! ‘They can threaten all they want,’ he said, as he cracked down on organised crime in the mid-Eighties. ‘I believe in telling the Mob that nothing will deter me.’

His passionate pursuit of mobsters stems from a hatred of the Mafia by his father, a bar owner in Brooklyn, where ‘Rudy’ was born in 1944. Appointed ‘gangbuster’ by President Ronald Reagan, Giuliani drew up a massive Cosa Nostra chart detailing every single tentacle nationwide and hung it in his office. He then managed to coordinate decades of investigation by hundreds of FBI agents, city and state police forces. Then, with a force of 130 attorneys in America’s largest federal prosecutor’s office, he launched an uncompromising war against the Godfathers. ‘Until a few years ago, law enforcement tactics were directed against individual Mafia members,’ he explained. ‘More recently, the FBI went after the Mr. Bigs. I just took it a logical stage further, and went for the board of directors governing all the Mafia families. It makes sense. You don’t cut off the tail or the toes of the monster – you cut the head.’

Accordingly, armed with law books instead of a service revolver, Giuliani personally oversaw hundreds of top Mafiosi frogmarched into court, some of them sent to jail for a long stretch. In what was termed ‘The Mafia Commission Trial’, which ran from February 1985 to November 1986, he indicted 11 organised crime figures, including the heads of New York’s ‘Five Families’ – Genovese, Bonanno, Lucchese, Gambino and Colombo. He utilised the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (known as the RICO Act) which allows for the leaders of a Syndicate to be tried for the crimes which they
ordered others to carry out. Under this federal law, the Godfathers were convicted of charges including extortion, labour racketeering and murder for hire. Eight defendants were found guilty on all counts and subsequently sentenced on 13 January 1987 to hundreds of years imprisonment.

Time
magazine quoted Giuliani as saying, ‘Our approach was to wipe out the Five Families’, and credited his success in so doing as ‘the most significant assault on the infrastructure of organised crime since the high command of the Chicago Mafia was swept away in 1943.’ Guiliani was congratulated by President Reagan and was given a special reward by the Italian government for his help in cleaning up some of the Mafia mess in their country.

A second significant reason for the Godfathers’ downfall over this period was that the computer age had made the Mafia miserably outdated. Founded on an almost feudal system of overlords and chieftains, enforcers and soldiers, La Cosa Nostra managed to maintain a hold over a frightened public for longer than most oppressive governments ever did. But one area the Mob were tardy in entering, and one that has caused it most damage, is electronics. While the torpedoes were still out on the streets offering ‘protection’, the law enforcers were learning about the newest sophisticated eavesdropping devices.

Taking lessons from the CIA, local police forces and the FBI tooled up with the sensitive micro-technology used by spies. They planted bugs in the homes, cars and offices of top Mafiosi, including Gambino leader ‘Big Paul’ Castellano, Lucchese gang boss Antonio ‘Tony Ducks’ Corallo and Genovese captain Matty ‘The Horse’ Ianiello. When Paul Castellano had a new home built in 1979 – an opulently tacky replica of the White House in exclusive Todt Hill, Staten Island
– he demanded plush fittings but also got a couple he didn’t order. In the ensuing years, his conversations were picked up by FBI bugs and mentioned in evidence as his trial opened.

Unfortunately for Castellano, he felt so superior as head of the Gambinos, America’s most powerful crime family at the time, that he constantly bad-mouthed the other Godfathers who sat on the Commission. When transcripts of the tapes were released, as required by law, his fellow members went ballistic. An FBI agent was quoted as saying: ‘The other bosses had never liked the arrogant Castellano but now they detested the man with a passion. Those tapes probably did more to seal his fate than anything else. It certainly gave one of his ambitious underlings, John Gotti, the excuse to eliminate his boss.

On 16 December 1985, while on $3 million bail from The Mafia Commission Trial, Castellano was driven by his equally unpopular underboss, 46-year-old Thomas Bilotti, to Manhattan’s Sparks Steak House, where a hit team of four gunmen were waiting, with Gotti and his close friend Sammy Gravano observing the scene from a car across the street. Castellano and Bilotti were shot several times.

In releasing the Castellano tapes, the FBI had not intended to cause the 70-year-old Godfather’s death, only to turn the Commission members against each other – to divide and conquer. The tactic was already working successfully by the time of the hit on Castellano. The Feds had placed a bug under the bed of Castellano’s bitter rival for the position of Godfather, Gambino enforcer Aniello ‘Mr. O’Neil’ Dellacroce, as he lay dying in a New York hospital. Lung cancer and diabetes got him two weeks before the bullets of his followers got Castellano. But during the last two months of 71-year-old
Dellacroce’s life, dozens of mobsters visited the hospital to pay their respects to the departing don – and to broadcast details about family business.

A little electronic device was somehow affixed behind the car dashboard of another don, Tony ‘Ducks’ Corallo. The 73-
year-old
head of the Lucchese family earned his nickname because of an uncanny knack throughout his life of dodging arrest and prosecution. But this time he’d forgotten to duck. His conversations with his driver and capo, Salvatore Avellino, were picked up by the bug and recorded by agents tailing the car from a distance. For four months the little transmitter spewed out fantastically detailed information about the inner workings of the Cosa Nostra, with names and places and specifics on the rackets that Tony ‘Ducks’ and the others were running. The case against Corallo was also built on 80 other bugging devices and 90 telephone wiretaps that picked up his many indiscretions. In 1986 he was found guilty and sent to prison, where he died in 2000.

Another transmitter was planted in the car of Colombo mobster Ralph Scopo, a 56-year-old former cement workers’ union boss. Yet another went into a Brooklyn restaurant used by the family’s acting boss, 48-year-old Gennaro ‘Jerry Lang’ Langella. Both of those detailed the widespread corruption in the construction and restaurant industries.

Key evidence in the trial against 66-year-old Matthew ‘The Horse’ Ianiello consisted of 7,000 tape and video recordings of him and his cronies at work. They were made by hidden transmitters planted by the Feds in Ianiello’s New York offices and proved beyond doubt that ‘The Horse’ was the secret proprietor of five restaurants and topless bars from which he skimmed millions of dollars. He had denied ownership.

When government agents were investigating Mob control of the waterfront, they planted four dozen bugs in strategic spots, thereby obtaining 146 indictments and 118 convictions. Union president Anthony Scotto had one in his fancy desk, which picked him up vociferously complaining that his
rake-off
hadn’t come in on time. Bizarrely, additional secret tapes were acquired by an FBI couple posing as lovers aboard a yacht.

Apart from transmitters, the FBI made extensive use of telephone taps to secure vital evidence. The mobsters often spoke in code while on their own phones but were more open when sneaking out to public payphones. But they got lazy and would use the same ones time and again. The lawmen noted them and put wiretaps on them too. In the mid-1980s, the FBI taped more than 7,000 hours of evidence in less than two years. With bugs and phone taps and the use of a dedicated Washington computer that cost $4 million a year to operate, the FBI nailed such Mafia overlords as Carlos ‘Little Man’ Marcello of New Orleans, Nick Civella of Kansas City and Russell Buffalino of Pennsylvania.

But the most publicly dramatic success of the entire war against the Mafia was the nailing of the brutal Godfather who ascended to the head of the Gambino family after the brilliantly executed killing of ‘Big Paul’ Castellano. After that putsch, John Gotti, 46, became an overnight underworld star, glorying in his nickname: ‘The Dapper Don’.

Born in Brooklyn to dirt-poor Italian immigrants on 27 October 1940, Gotti became a teenage street fighter, whose first arrest was in 1958 for burglary. When he was 22 he was accepted as a part-time soldier by the Gambinos, who put him onto gambling and construction union matters. In this role, he met Salvatore Gravano, nicknamed ‘Sammy the Bull’ because
of his muscular frame. Gravano came from the same background but lacked Gotti’s ambition. As the latter rose up the ranks, Gravano was happy to be a loyal underboss. So blindly subservient was he that he would later say: ‘John Gotti was my master and I was his dog. When he said “Bite”, I bit.’ But the dog was later to turn on his master in the most sensational manner.

Gotti took the faithful ‘Sammy the Bull’ with him as he climbed the Mafia command ladder over three decades. His first conviction, for unlawful entry, was in 1966. The next year, he headed a Mafia crew that used phoney passes to get into New York’s JFK Airport and hijack a truckload of electronic equipment. Four days later they did it again, this time taking a truck full of women’s clothing. They were nabbed and he served three years in prison. In 1973 Gotti and two others shot to death another mobster in a Staten Island bar. Charged, he plea-bargained for attempted manslaughter and served two of his four years. When he came out, he became a capo, heading a particularly tough crew of seven soldiers, and set out to make his way to the top.

Gotti’s principal loyalty was to Gambino family enforcer Aniello Dellacroce, the Number Two to Paul Castellano. But when the popular Dellacroce died in December 1985, Castellano instead chose his bodyguard, 45-year-old Thomas Bilotti. By eliminating both of them, Gotti ended up the new Godfather.

To his admirers, the new Capo di Tutti Cappi was a generous guy who kept the drug-dealing scum away from ordinary, decent folk. Every year, he held a fireworks display on America’s Fourth of July Independence Day, releasing thousands of dollars worth of rockets to the delight of the neighbourhood.
On the street, the ‘Dapper Don’, in his $4,000 silk suits and his pure cashmere coat, would acknowledge the respectful greetings of well-wishers as he made his way to the Ravenite Social Club, a nondescript tenement in the heart of Little Italy. It was behind these doors, armoured and alarmed, that the Godfather held court – and the veneer of the philanthropist was dropped. This was the office of the Godfather. Gambling, corruption, liquour sales, prostitution, drugs and murder were his business and he did it well. So well, in fact, that he earned another title; the FBI called him the ‘Teflon Don’ as no indictment they threw at him ever stuck.

Gotti’s film star looks made him a celebrity far beyond New York’s Italian community. The subject of awe-struck media profiles, he lived in an impressive house in suburbia. He had a wife, Victoria, a married daughter and a grown-up son, John. His other son, Frank, had been just 12 in 1980 when he rode his bicycle out from between two parked cars and was killed instantly. It was a complete accident. The horrified driver of the vehicle was Gotti’s neighbour, John Favara, who four months later disappeared for good. Witnesses saw him being hit over the head with a board and then bundled by two men into a van. Informers told police that Gotti, eaten up with hatred, had the neighbour brought to a disused warehouse, where he personally cut the man to pieces with a chainsaw.

Gotti never forgot disfavour, and one of those doomed to find out the hard way was Wilfred ‘Willie Boy’ Johnson, a
low-level
soldier in Gotti’s crew who later turned FBI informant. ‘Willie Boy’ had been living under an assumed name in Brooklyn ever since his testimony led to the convictions of several Mob figures, not least of all Gotti’s brother Gene, subsequently sentenced to 22 years for heroin trafficking. One
morning in August 1988, as ‘Willie Boy’ left home to go to work on a construction site, three hitmen stepped out of the stolen car and riddled him with 14 bullet holes. The main triggerman was ‘Sammy the Bull’ Gravano.

In 1985 Gotti was accused of assaulting a repairman and robbing him of $325 in a petty argument over a parking space. As soon as the repairman learned who Gotti was, he checked into a hospital and said he had developed amnesia. The charges had to be dropped. A year later, Gotti was accused of running a racketeering enterprise and hit with three charges including murder. He beat the rap. In 1992 he made it a hat-trick when jurors ruled he did not order the bungled contract-killing of a union official who wasn’t paying his dues. But it was the loyal, psychotic lieutenant ‘Sammy the Bull’ who did most of the dirty work. On his own admission, by the late Eighties he had become kill-crazy and committed so many murders that he actually forgot many of them.

On 11 December 1990 FBI agents and New York City detectives swooped on the Ravenite social club and arrested Gotti and Gravano. Although this was the fourth indictment since Gotti’s bloody rise to leadership, it was the first time he was charged with the murders of Castellano and Bilotti. At this time, the prosecution was relying on dozens of wiretaps and on the hearsay evidence of informants, including Philip Leonetti, former underboss of the Philadelphia crime family, who had since become a government witness. Leonetti was prepared to testify that Gotti had bragged about Castellano’s execution while at a meeting of Philadelphia crime leaders. But the FBI suddenly knew they had a cast-iron case – when, hardly able to believe their luck, ‘Sammy the Bull’ Gravato, who had only served time in the past for low-level offences like hijacking and
theft, offered to become the highest ranking informer in criminal history. It transpired that Sammy, who was tipped to be the heir apparent to the Gambino family, had a dread of ending his days in prison.