"Yeah," Ralphie says, "they know, huh. Because, remember you said, you're gonna be all hot because of that building."
Sal: "Everybody's thinking I know about it."
Ralph: "Really."
Sal: "Hey. I'm not 'fessing up to nothing. I don't give a fuck. The only one I told, between me and you, believe it or not, is my wife." Sal stopped talking.
Ralphie says, "Say it."
Sal: "I told her my Jewish partner came over. I says, 'Steve, listen, do you know me?' And he knows me. Me and him do everything together. He's embarrassed. I says, 'Just tell me one thing. If I do get fucking nailed on this, if I gotta do twenty, will you look after my family?' He says, 'Sal, they will want for nothing.' That's all I needed to hear. So that's why I tell my wife. She's going crazy right before I'm locked up. I'm going alone."
Ralph: "Yeah, of course."
Sal: "Ain't nobody coming with me. She says, 'I know that.' She says, 'I knew it was you, you fuck.' "
They both laughed, but only for a minute.
Sal: "She says to me, 'Why?' I don't know why. Who the fuck knows why?"
Sal said the Port Authority has two detectives working on the case and they have no leads. "Everybody's protected," he says.
"Richie is protecting us, that's all I care about," Ralphie says. "All right. So what do you want to do with this money? That's the next problem. I don't want to send it away again, I don't want to keep it around me. You know what I mean?"
"My fucking head hurts when I think about it," Sal says. "I says to myself, I'm sitting here talking on the computer and I'm talking to this fucking girl in Florida. I wanna go see this girl in Florida. She's a Jewish girl. She's fifty-four years old. She is fucking twenty years older than me. She's very attractive, though. I like that in older women. She wants me to come down and spend the weekend with her and I am talking to her and I'm thinking, 'I can do this. I know I can fucking do this.' But why ain't I doing it? I don't know what we did wrong."
Ralph: "Well, you had it right the first time. I don't know what we did wrong."
Sal: "We didn't. We did everything fucking right."
They pulled up to the restaurant and walked inside. Ralph ordered a half-dozen cherrystone clams, an order of shrimp, and a Coors light for himself, and a sixteen-ounce Coke for Sal.
"Medium sauce?" asked the waitress.
"Medium sauce," Ralph says, turning back to Sal. "Feels funny without Richie here. Ah, he'll be all right. I don't know the answer anymore. You know when you don't know the answer anymore?"
Sal: "Right."
Ralph: "You get fucking razzle dazzle, dazzle razzle. I'm fucking losing my speech. I'm losing every fucking thing."
For Sal, there were certain pressures. Believing he would become a wealthy member of society once the World Trade Center score came rolling in, Sal had gone out and done a little spending in anticipation. Specifically, he'd dropped $20,000 on a new, improved bathroom, another $22,000 on an upgraded kitchen, and another $8,000 to tidy things up in the living room. All on his credit cards.
"Now all these bills that are coming, I got to take care of my credit cards. Oh my God, you got to see my cards. Oh man. I got the guy that came yesterday for the granite. I'm staying away from everybody."
Ralph had similar problems. He owed a particularly nasty member of the Gambino crime family named Joey Smash $40,000. Joey Smash was so unpleasant he had two nicknames-Joey Smash to his face, and "the Ugly Guy" behind his back. Joey Smash knew all about Ralphie's World Trade Center caper and had decided Ralphie was sitting on a pile of money and holding back. Again and again he reached out to Ralphie to remind him of the money he is owed.
"He says, 'You know, you're gonna be all right, you know.' I says, 'Joe, what are you fucking worrying about?' I says, 'Monday, I start bringing you money.' I gotta cash this fucking money. I gotta pay him. Hgggggh. He's driving me crazy. He's like a fucking old washwoman."
And Joey Smash was not the only one who knew about Ralphie's involvement in the caper. Other wiseguys out there from Bayonne to Bensonhurst were speculating, which was something they often did when they thought somebody might have some money they could acquire. Some had even offered to help out. There was this Jimmy Gallo, a crazy guy from New Jersey who shot his partner Joe Pitts many years ago. He'd suggested to Ralphie he could find a place to exchange foreign capital for U.S. dollars. All he wanted was a mere 50 percent. Fifty percent! Ralphie was furious about it. And now Sal was telling him that somebody was bad-mouthing Ralphie as a beat artist.
Ralph: "Beat artist? How can you be a beat artist? Is that what they're trying to say? Jerk-offs. Yeah, fuck them. I don't pay attention to them. People are just buzzin' because they don't fucking know how to get around us. Don't you understand? Everybody wants to know how to get involved in this fucking thing, you understand?"
Sal: "Everybody's got an opinion."
It was a matter of not having enough information. These people out there calling him a beat artist clearly did not have enough information to know exactly what he was going through. And Ralphie himself did not have enough information to dig himself out of his hole. He could not be sure what the police knew and what they did not know. He didn't worry so much about Melvin Desmond Folk or even Michael Reed, because they didn't really know him and could say little to implicate him in the heist. Richie Gillette was an entirely different situation. There was a chance Richie Gillette might talk, and then they would come for him. That was the most likely scenario. But Ralph could not be sure. Richie's cousin was already calling Ralphie asking for money to send to Richie, who was still sitting in a New Mexico jail cell. Ralphie had to decide whether sending money was a good investment. If he did not send it, obviously Richie would talk. If, on the other hand, he did send it, Richie could decide to talk anyway, and then the money would have been wasted.
There was one other option. He could turn to Vincent Palermo, a smart, well-respected guy everybody called Vinny Ocean. Ralph was aware that Palermo was doing very well financially, and that he was known as a man who could come up with sensible resolutions to allegedly insurmountable problems. Ralphie could go to Vinny Ocean, borrow some money, pay off Joey Smash, keep paying off Richie Gillette, and slowly exchange the pile of foreign currency he was sitting on. The only problem was Vinny Ocean was out of town, headed to San Diego for Super Bowl XXXIII, and there was no way to reach out to him until January 26 at the earliest. Usually this would not have been a big problem. But each day the weight grew heavier. A quick solution was essential.
Sitting in the restaurant with Sal, Ralphie tried not to think about his many problems. He asked Sal if he'd put on weight. Sal replied, "You don't know how to eat clams, so I'm going to teach you. Look. Let me show you. Watch."
When they were finished, Ralph had to pick up his daughter and get her to a basketball game. He and Sal went their separate ways, promising to keep talking until they figured out what to do.
THE KNOCK.
Sometime between the end of Sal and Ralph's seafood dinner and the next day, Ralph was at his home in Staten Island when he heard a knock on the door. His wife answered. Two men entered the living room and sat down. Ralph walked into the room and sat down, too. Even before they opened their mouths, he knew who they were. One of the men handed over a business card. In the middle was the man's name embossed in blue script over the title special agent. In the left-hand corner was a gold embossed image of a badge topped by an eagle looking to the left. Below that was the address, 26 Federal Plaza, where Ralph knew he was going to be spending quite a bit of time. In the top right-hand corner was the title in blue: FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION, New York Division.
They talked for a moment to be polite, and then they made it clear Ralphie needed to come with them to downtown Manhattan. When they left Ralph's house, it was dark. This was a good sign for Ralph. That meant that his neighbors probably would not notice him walking away with the two men. Ralph surmised that this might be an important point in the days and months to come.
3.
January 23, 1998 The trucks arrive at dawn, pulling up to the vacant storefront on Second Avenue in a faded little New Jersey town called Elizabeth. They are miles away from the make-believe world of movies and television, but they have a job to do, and it involves pretense. They begin scrubbing off the graffiti on the storefront, sweeping off the sidewalk in front, removing debris from inside. They wipe months of grime off the windows and repaint the front door green. In the windows they hang cured hams and trussed pig carcasses, coils of pink-and-beige sausages, a denuded chicken with beak and feet still in place. All of it is plastic. Over the entrance, they mount a sign that has never hung there or anywhere before-CENTRANNI'S PORK STORE. There is no Centranni's in this world. The people of Elizabeth would fail if they tried to pick up some pro sciutto or a pound of mozzarella inside this pork store. This is pure fakery, but it looks like the real thing.
This is the work of David Chase, who grew up a few miles away in nearby Caldwell, New Jersey, under the name DeCesare. He is filming a pilot for a new television show he has dreamed up about a Mafia family from New Jersey. His is a different spin on the usual Mafia shtick. He sees real people doing real-people things, such as worrying about which college their daughter will get into or complaining about the price of gasoline. In between, these real people belong to a secret society of killers who pledge total allegiance to their "thing" and promise to shoot or, if that's not possible, beat to death anyone who informs on their secret. The project does not yet have a title, but film crews have been dispatched with camcorders throughout the streets of northern New Jersey scouting locales. Authenticity is paramount. In fact, authenticity is already causing the show many problems. Chase wants to make sure the characters are not portrayed as either too good or too bad. He wants his protagonist, Anthony Soprano, a capo in a New Jersey crime family, to be sympathetic, but also to be willing to break someone's head with a baseball bat. He has built Centranni's in the heart of Elizabeth because that is where Tony will hold court. As a result of all this authenticity, the major networks have taken a pass on Chase's project. He is in talks with HBO-TV about working a deal, and in the end, it will be said that authenticity was very important to his idea.
Just a few blocks away from the pretend Mafia pork store, Centranni's, there is a real pork stork called Sacco's. Inside Sacco's there are no plastic chickens. Pigs and sausages hanging on hooks are real. In Chase's yet-to-benamed television show, Uncle Junior is a hard old nut of a man who will sit at a table near the back of the fake pork store, and the other members of his TV Mafia family will come to him for favors and advice. He gives orders. He plots murders. He is a king.
His little kingdom is also remarkably similar to the real pork store a few blocks away from the TV pork store. In Sacco's, the seasoned gangster is named Joseph Giacobbe, who is known as Uncle Joe. He is a hard old nut of a man who comes to the store every morning for coffee and a roll. The FBI sees him come and go so much they scribble in their notebook, "Giacobbe and other members of the DeCavalcante family regularly hold meetings inside Sacco's." If you call Sacco's on any given morning and ask simply for Joe, Giacobbe will come to the phone.
JOE PITTS.
On the Friday afternoon of January 23, 1998, sixtyseven-year-old Joseph Conigliaro drove his four-year-old black Cadillac up Smith Street through the miserable winter rain. This was Red Hook, the neighborhood in south Brooklyn where Conigliaro grew up. Everybody knew him and everybody called him Joe Pitts. But this was no longer the same Red Hook of Joe Pitts's wild years. Everywhere there was evidence that he was a stranger in his own neighborhood. A French restaurant had opened up, followed by a store that sold precious little ceramic objects made on the premises. Next came painfully hip boutiques with retro clothes for bohemians. The yuppies were coming and there was nothing Joe Pitts could do about it.
Joe Pitts was a dinosaur.
Red Hook wasn't even called Red Hook anymore. It was now Carroll Gardens, a name dreamed up by realestate developers intent on softening the neighborhood's longshoreman image. It was no longer just a traditional Italian neighborhood where outsiders were considered a form of infectious disease. Into this insular neighborhood in the early 1990s had come an invading army dressed all in black. They were artists, people who made a living with their hands but not in the same manner as the people of Red Hook. Most of the old shipbuilding factories down by the water were long gone, and the sons and daughters of the men who built the ships of World War II were left scrambling for a new way to get by. Now came the artists, fleeing absurd Manhattan rents for cheap space on Smith Street. They opened galleries and shops and restaurants catering to young hip people of modest means. They changed Red Hook's neighborhood for good.
Joe Pitts-who was as much a part of the neighborhood as the cracks in the sidewalks-was now beginning to stand out. His notorious social club, the One Over Golf Club, hidden behind tinted black windows and a gate that was always shuttered, had become a relic. Perhaps he knew it. Most likely he did not. He lived in Carroll Gardens, but if you asked him, he'd say he lived in Red Hook. Red Hook was where he came from. It was part of his DNA. It was a place he could understand.
Red Hook back in 1973 was to gangland what New Orleans was to jazz, a rough waterfront neighborhood where much gangster lore originated. From Red Hook came Crazy Joey Gallo, who kept a scrawny half-sized lion in the basement of a tenement on President Street. This was the Joey Gallo who spent hours watching old gangster movies of Paul Muni and Jimmy Cagney and Edward G. Robinson, and learned to imitate their body language. Years later, a Hollywood actor would come to Brooklyn and meet with Joey, who would let the clueless thespian in on how to walk and talk like a "real" gangster, without revealing that he himself was just a sucker for the silver screen. It was art imitating life imitating art.
In the Red Hook of 1973, Joe Pitts had been somebody. He was a known soldier in the crime family of Carlo Gambino. He was a made guy. You couldn't raise a hand to him without getting permission from the bosses. He made money just by walking into a business and declaring himself partner. To some, his story rivaled Crazy Joey Gallo's, mostly because no one believed half the things that were said about Gallo. The story that went along with Joe Pitts was hard to believe, but had a basis in truth. Because after it happened, Joe Pitts had to spend the rest of his days in a wheelchair.
At the time, back in 1973, Joe Pitts was forty-two years old. His partner was one of Joey Gallo's distant cousins, Jimmy Gallo, a DeCavalcante soldier. Joe Pitts and Jimmy Gallo were looking for a Brooklyn gambler named Vincent Ensulo. Ensulo had borrowed $1,200 and within a week owed $1,600, but that's not why they wanted him. Gallo and Joe Pitts had learned that Ensulo had begun secretly cooperating with law enforcement. Both men were extremely interested in finding Ensulo, and on a particular day they just happened to see him driving out of a gas station in Red Hook. They jumped into action, pulling open both doors of Ensulo's slowly moving car. Joe Pitts and Jimmy Gallo jumped inside the car, one on each side. They both drew guns and pointed them at Ensulo. Joe Pitts, who was at the wheel, began to drive away.
Within three blocks, Ensulo, who was either insane or so crazed with fear he didn't know what he was doing, suddenly jerked the wheel away from Joe Pitts. Immediately both Joe Pitts and Jimmy Gallo began firing their weapons, temporarily forgetting that there were three large men jammed inside the front seat of a moving sedan. Joe Pitts, or "Mr. Conigliaro," as the New York Times New York Times would later call him, shot Jimmy Gallo once in the left side. Jimmy Gallo ("Mr. Gallo") shot Joe Pitts twice in the right shoulder. The temporarily lucky Vincent Ensulo suffered only minor wounds, which allowed him to jump out of the car and flee into the Brooklyn night. Jimmy Gallo survived his wounds more or less unscathed, but Joe Pitts was partially paralyzed forever. would later call him, shot Jimmy Gallo once in the left side. Jimmy Gallo ("Mr. Gallo") shot Joe Pitts twice in the right shoulder. The temporarily lucky Vincent Ensulo suffered only minor wounds, which allowed him to jump out of the car and flee into the Brooklyn night. Jimmy Gallo survived his wounds more or less unscathed, but Joe Pitts was partially paralyzed forever.
Both men were charged with shooting each other, and both pleaded guilty to weapons charges. Joe Pitts did his time in a wheelchair. When Gallo got out of prison, the FBI says, it took only a few days before Vincent Ensulo's body was discovered with one bullet in the head. Jimmy Gallo was later charged, but he was acquitted. He was later heard bragging about the time he "beat the system" when he "shot a rat and got away with it."
In the years that followed, Joe Pitts and Jimmy Gallo remained partners and pals, running a loan-sharking business out of John's Luncheonette in Red Hook well into the 1980s. But times changed. In 1972, Joey Gallo was gunned down at Umberto's Clam House in Little Italy. He had spent the evening at the Copacabana with the actor Jerry Orbach, who was about to play a version of Joey in the movie The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight. The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight.
The apartment building where Joey kept his lion had been demolished and replaced by subsidized senior housing with a sign, KEEP CHILDREN AND PETS OFF THE GRASS KEEP CHILDREN AND PETS OFF THE GRASS. By 1998, Crazy Joey Gallo wouldn't have recognized the neighborhood he had once ruled.
He certainly wouldn't have recognized Joe Pitts. By 1998, Joe Pitts was a bitter old man trapped in a wheelchair. He was sixty-seven years old and had been demoted from soldier to mere "associate" in the Gambino crime family by infuriating nearly everyone he came in contact with. He was now viewed by many of his peers as a washed-up, 210-pound tough old bastard who bled his victims dry. Joe Pitts the made guy wasn't what he used to be.
At this hour, as Joe drove down Smith Street toward the Gowanus Canal, few artists in black could be seen walking the rain-soaked streets. It was too early. He was alone in his Caddy. He had a nasty German shepherd that he kept in the One Over Golf Club. The dog accompanied him everywhere and barked and snapped at the invading yuppies. Joe Pitts would laugh when the dog did this. Everybody debated who was worse-Joe Pitts or his dog. On this night he intended to collect some money he decided to leave the dog behind.
It was all arranged.
He had put himself on the books of a struggling company called T&M Construction. T&M was owned by a would-be wiseguy named Mike. He was a source of regular cash for Joe Pitts. The arrangement was simple. Pitts would come by T&M and Mike would hand over a fat envelope of cash. In return, Joe Pitts would "protect" him from being shaken down by other gangsters. Mike hated Joe Pitts. Lately Joe Pitts had been stopping by more often, insisting that the fat envelopes be even fatter, and Mike was getting very tired of this.
Joe Pitts pulled up to Mike's apartment on Smith Street. Mike dashed through the rain to the Caddy. Sitting in the front seat, he told Joe Pitts there was a guy waiting with the money at Joe's social club, the One Over. They drove the few blocks to the club and Joe Pitts pulled up to the curb.
A guy called Marty Lewis came out of the club by himself. He was not the guy Mike had said would be there, but he was a guy Joe Pitts knew. Marty was a guy known to other guys. He had driven around with Joe Pitts hundreds of times and pushed him in his wheelchair when the old man needed pushing. He was wearing gloves in the rainy winter night, and he jumped in the backseat. Marty Lewis said the guy with the money was waiting just a few blocks away, but Mike said he couldn't go because he needed to get back to his apartment. Joe Pitts drove him home and dropped Mike off.
Lewis got in the front seat and told Joe Pitts the guy with the money was waiting on Lorraine Street.
Lorraine Street was down near the Gowanus highway overpass next to a bedraggled housing project. There were auto-body shops and garbage-clotted empty lots. Most New Yorkers would hear they were supposed to meet somebody on a winter night in the rainy darkness on Lorraine Street and they would drive quickly away, never to return.
Not Joe Pitts.
Joe Pitts had grown up in this neighborhood and feared no one, even from his wheelchair.
Joe Pitts drove through the quiet residential brownstone neighborhood with its pizza shops and Italian pork stores and yuppie boutiques south on Court. The farther south he drove, the more uncivilized his neighborhood became.
By the time he passed under the Gowanus Expressway, Joe Pitts had crossed over into another world. Gone were the orderly brownstones with flower boxes and kids on bikes. Now there was razor-wire fences and pocked streets and dangerous alleyways. Here, packs of dogs ran leashless through empty lots. Marty Lewis told Pitts to pull up to the curb on Lorraine Street past the highway overpass. This was where the guy with the money was supposed to be. Joe Pitts could not see the guy with the money anywhere in the rain and the dark, but he pulled over anyway.
Marty Lewis took off one glove as he opened the passenger door and stepped out of the car. Rain thrummed on the windshield.
Marty stood up outside the car, turned around, and leaned back in the Caddy. He had a revolver in his hand pointed at Joe's head and he squeezed off six shots. Five entered Joe Pitts. Bullets entered Joe Pitts's face, his right arm, his torso, and his right lung.
"I can't believe it was you," Joe Pitts grunted. "Motherfucker."
Lewis stepped back, perhaps surprised by the fact that Joe Pitts was still talking. But Joe Pitts wasn't just talking- he was driving. He put the car in drive and drove slowly away from the curb. The door shut as he accelerated, and when he got to the corner, Joe Pitts, nearly seventy years old, with five bullets in his body, clicked on his turn signal.
Marty Lewis stood on the corner with the rain pounding down, watching the red light of that turn signal click on and off in the darkness. On and off, on and off. Marty Lewis almost had a heart attack on the spot as Joe Pitts drove away.
Carrying five bullets, Joe Pitts not only managed to obey all traffic laws, but he somehow was able to navigate his huge automobile back to his social club on Court Street, bleeding all over the upholstery. Somehow he managed to get one of his cohorts, a big three-hundred-pound DeCavalcante associate, who lived in an apartment above the club, to come down to the car.
The three-hundred-pound associate drove Pitts the seven blocks under the IND subway el tracks, over the foul waters of the Gowanus Canal, and right up to the emergency entrance of Methodist Hospital in Park Slope. They arrived at 6:17 P P.M., and Pitts was placed on a gurney, where he remained for the next four hours, waiting for surgery.
Because he had been shot, the police from the Seventyeighth Precinct were summoned. A detective asked Joe Pitts what happened. He said a black man from the Red Hook housing projects shot him. Clearly it was his intention to distract law enforcement while he took care of business himself. Clearly he believed he would survive to take care of business.
At 10:22 P P.M., Joe Pitts was still waiting when he had a heart attack and died.
VINNY OCEAN.
At the hour of Joe Pitts's death, Vinny Ocean was just arriving in San Diego in anticipation of Sunday's big Super Bowl extravaganza. His mind was most likely on having a good time, on whether Green Bay would be as dominant as everyone was saying, on how much money he'd make if he guessed right on the spread. This was the good life-he was far away from the cold January streets of New York in sunny California with his first son, a stockbroker named Michael, and several of his closest friends. He could afford Super Bowl tickets. He could afford to be in San Diego. He was doing well, and was about to do even better.
Vinny knew all about Joe Pitts. Mike of T&M had come to him and asked him for help after another DeCavalcante captain named Rudy Ferrone had died. Rudy had been put in charge of Joe Pitts and had essentially let him do whatever he wanted. Now that Rudy was dead, Mike went to Vinny Ocean and asked if it was okay to kill Joe Pitts. Joe Pitts was no longer a made guy, but he did have friends, and Mike didn't want any trouble. Vinny Ocean had looked Mike in the eye and said, "What's the matter with you? I don't want to hear anything about this."
Mike, the FBI came to believe, had interpreted this as approval.
After Joe Pitts was gone, Vinny Ocean could rightfully say that he had nothing to do with the chain of events. He could not say he had nothing to do with Joe Pitts. As a result of Joe Pitts's death, Vinny Ocean wound up making a lot more money. When a wiseguy dies, somebody has to figure out what to do with all the money he's taking in through various schemes. In this case, it was decided that Vinny would get Joe Pitts's payments. He did this by putting his driver, Joey O, on the payroll of the victims' companies in no-show jobs. Each week Joey O would get paid and kick his share up to Vinny Ocean.
Immediately.
Besides the weekly paycheck Joe Pitts had been extorting from Mike at T&M Construction, Joe Pitts had also been shaking down a man named Al Manti for $1,000 a week. Al Manti owned a bus company on Long Island called Manti Transportation. He was not a very good businessman, and as a result, his company was about to sink under a sea of debt. Still, a business is a business, and some business owners in New York City have been known to turn to subsidiaries of La Cosa Nostra for a little fast cash. Manti Transportation was such a company, and Joe Pitts had sunk his hooks into Al Manti for months. Now that Joe was gone, Vinny Ocean took over the task of collecting $1,000 a week from Al Manti to protect him from being exploited by some other unfeeling, unscrupulous Mafia family.
Thus, on one rainy January night, Vinny Ocean got himself an extra $52,000 a year for doing exactly nothing. Each week Joey O would show up at T&M Construction and Manti Transportation and pick up his "paycheck." He would keep half and send the other half up to Vinny. Of course, this arrangement was never called "protection." It would be called something else.
Salary.
At one point Al Manti was not happy about this and actually complained in person to Vinny Ocean. "Why," he asked Vinny, "do I have to pay protection to Joey?"
Vinny Ocean frowned and shook his head sadly. "Let me tell you something," he said. "You don't ever mention that word in front of me. You're not paying for no protection. I'm your partner. That's my salary every week. Like your salary. Don't ever ask that again."
Manti immediately backed down. "I was just kidding," he said, handing over yet another envelope stuffed with ten $100 bills toward Vinny Ocean's "salary."
In January 1998, that was how it was going for Vinny Ocean. The money was rolling in. Life was good. He was an experienced capo with a crew of both old-timers and newcomers. The strip club he secretly owned, Wiggles, was still up and running, having so far survived attacks from all sides by the politicians of Queens County and beyond. The city had passed a law shutting down all businesses that traffic in "adult entertainment" in residential neighborhoods or within five hundred feet of schools, churches, or day-care centers.
"Wiggles" was within five hundred feet of just about everything. But the strip clubs of New York had hired a lawyer and banded together under the American flag, waving around the First Amendment and taking their case all the way through the New York courts. So far, they'd been losers. The courts weren't buying the sex industry's claim that the city was denying exotic dancers the right to express themselves through the medium of lap dancing. City officials, in fact, could legitimately state that they were not shutting strip clubs down. Instead, they were simply packing them off to urban Siberia, allowing them to relocate to industrial waterfront neighborhoods and other out-of-theway locales hard by the Fresh Kills Landfill and the Coney Island Cyclone. But the state's top court had yet to issue a final decision on the question, and as a result, all the clubs were allowed to remain open for business three years after the strip-club law first passed in 1995. During that time, "Wiggles" had built up a loyal customer base of leering drunken men with fistfuls of sweaty dollar bills. And many of those sweaty dollar bills were secretly finding their way into Vinny Ocean's pocket.
Plus there were many other deals. There was the $1,300 a week Vinny pocketed from his take of a gambling operation that took bets from across metro New York. There was the untold thousands in loan-shark interest Vinny picked up by buying his money at a point and a half weekly interest from a Gambino capo and putting it on the street at two points. Then there were the secret partnerships. He had designated himself a "partner" of T&M Construction, which then went and won a big contract to renovate the New Yorker hotel in midtown Manhattan. He was looking into becoming a secret partner in a new gambling boat operating out of Freeport, Long Island. None of this money showed up on his tax forms. All of it was collected in bundles of cash.
Still, Vinny Ocean wanted more. Much of his income in 1998 came from the usual Mafia sources-preying on degenerate gamblers, lightening the wallets of loan-sharking victims, shaking down local unions. Thirty years after Joe Valachi first went on national television and revealed the inner secrets of the Mafia, these three activities remained the mainstays of the mob. In business terms, this refusal to evolve was not a good thing. This was like the automobile industry failing to predict the ascendancy during the 1970s of small, affordable Japanese cars that didn't consume massive quantities of gasoline. Except in this case, Toyota was the FBI, and the FBI had long ago figured out how to investigate the mob when it was involved in gambling, loan sharking, and extortion. What the mob needed in the late 1990s was to figure out new ways to make money. And by 1998, some of the more clued in were doing their all-American best. Vinny Ocean was definitely one of the more clued in.
Like most Americans who did not live in dark spaces beneath the ground, he was vaguely aware of the unusually strong boom in the stock market that was making some amateur investors a lot of money. Therefore, Vinny invested. He talked about puts and buys. He consulted with a DeCavalcante captain named Phil Abramo who thought of himself as the Michael Milken of La Cosa Nostra. He discussed "this new thing, this Viagra."
"Somebody's going to make a lot of money on that one," he said.
But the stock market was still a risky place, and some of what Abramo was doing-secretly paying off brokers to pump up the worth of worthless stock and then dumping the stock when it peaked-was not exactly legal. Vinny Ocean was clearly looking for ways to go legit.
Consistently he sought out business deals that might be considered forward-thinking. In January 1998, for instance, he was talking about investing in a cell-phone distributorship through the German communications giant Siemens. He had a partner. To the Germans they did business with, the partner's name was William Cutolo, a businessman in a suit. Cutolo was like Vinny Ocean-a good-looking, fifty-something New York guy with silver sideburns that implied distinguished banker at work. Prudence was the message. Of course, on the streets of Brooklyn, Cutolo was known as Wild Bill. This was because Wild Bill had once beaten a man bloody with a baseball bat in front of a group of stunned Teamsters. This was the Wild Bill who was heavily involved in the Colombo crime family wars of the early 1990s, when ten gangsters and two innocent bystanders were shot down in the streets of Brooklyn because of a dispute over who would run the family. At that time one side of the family had decided it was better than the other side. In one episode of this twoyear saga, Cutolo lured to a suburban home in Staten Island a rival from the other side who many felt held too high an opinion of himself. When the rival showed up, he was pointed toward the stairs leading to the second floor and told to walk up. The rival began walking and looked up to see two men-a Colombo soldier named Carmine Sessa and Cutolo-standing there with weapons drawn. Cutolo, according to Sessa, suddenly thought he was in a movie.
"Fucking godfather," Cutolo muttered, emptying his revolver into the rival gangster at the foot of the stairs. Later, the rival was rolled up inside a rug and dumped in a landfill.
Cutolo was a man who spent much time massaging his public image. He was, for instance, a fund-raising chairman for a local charity that raised hundreds of thousands of dollars each year for research into multiple sclerosis. He posed for photographs and offered toasts at annual dinners. Many of those who paid for tables at these dinners were members of unions the FBI believed were secretly kicking back thousands to Cutolo. But as of January 1998, Cutolo was not in jail, and was not anticipating spending any time in jail. He'd been acquitted of all charges for his alleged role in the Colombo crime family war and now he was out on the streets, behaving like a businessman just trying to make a little here and there. The Siemens partnership on the Russian cell-phone deal with Vinny Ocean, of course, was not exactly public knowledge. They worked behind other investors. Their names appeared on no documents. If Cutolo's involvement in the deal became known, the Siemens deal would surely evaporate.
For that reason, Vinny Ocean was looking to do business with a big-name entrepreneur. He yearned for the imprimatur of legitimacy. One of those risk takers with a big name was, according to the FBI, Bob Guccione, the founder and president of one of America's favorite girliemagazine empires-Penthouse.
Guccione was, of course, really a guy from Brooklyn with gold chains, the son of a Sicilian accountant. He grew up in a place where gangsters thrived but chose a legitimate way to make a living. He founded his General Media in 1967 and built it up to a $21 million company by outPlayboying Playboy. Playboy. He was willing to do what hundreds of successful businessmen had done before to make a killing-take another step down. Of late, however, circulation of his slick porno magazines had taken a beating. He'd nearly defaulted on bond payments, had to cut forty jobs and shut two magazines. The extraordinary growth of the Internet and the new availability of product far raunchier than anything Guccione could dream up was killing him. Diversification, as they say in business school, was the only option. Thus Bob Guccione was talking about branching out into several new areas. One idea involved a vague plan to build a noncasino hotel with "masculine" amenities in Atlantic City. Guccione was in the process of finding investors. He was willing to do what hundreds of successful businessmen had done before to make a killing-take another step down. Of late, however, circulation of his slick porno magazines had taken a beating. He'd nearly defaulted on bond payments, had to cut forty jobs and shut two magazines. The extraordinary growth of the Internet and the new availability of product far raunchier than anything Guccione could dream up was killing him. Diversification, as they say in business school, was the only option. Thus Bob Guccione was talking about branching out into several new areas. One idea involved a vague plan to build a noncasino hotel with "masculine" amenities in Atlantic City. Guccione was in the process of finding investors.
Another idea was strip clubs. He was thinking about using the Penthouse Penthouse name to open a string of upscale topless clubs in New York and New Jersey. A lawyer his daughter knew had put him in touch with a very charming businessman who looked a bit like the actor Robert Wagner with silver sideburns. The man's name was Vincent Palermo and he had much experience with a club in Queens called Wiggles. Palermo said he and Guccione were talking about getting together for a club in Manhattan, or if the mayor of the city didn't like that, in the Five Towns on Long Island. Vincent Palermo believed that Guccione was impressed with Vincent Palermo. And it was clear from Palermo's talks with one of the DeCavalcante family's new associates, Ralphie Guarino, that Vinny Ocean was very much taken by Guccione and his millions. name to open a string of upscale topless clubs in New York and New Jersey. A lawyer his daughter knew had put him in touch with a very charming businessman who looked a bit like the actor Robert Wagner with silver sideburns. The man's name was Vincent Palermo and he had much experience with a club in Queens called Wiggles. Palermo said he and Guccione were talking about getting together for a club in Manhattan, or if the mayor of the city didn't like that, in the Five Towns on Long Island. Vincent Palermo believed that Guccione was impressed with Vincent Palermo. And it was clear from Palermo's talks with one of the DeCavalcante family's new associates, Ralphie Guarino, that Vinny Ocean was very much taken by Guccione and his millions.