Authors: Greg B. Smith
Made Men (21 page)
Around midday November 19, 1998, Administrative Judge Steven Fisher made it short and sweet: Wiggles was history. The club, Judge Fisher found, had clearly violated the 40 percent rule and would hereforth be prohibited from doing business. Booby pool and everything else was to cease and desist immediately. The city had won in every way; the residents of Rego Park who had protested in rain, sleet, and snow won in every way. Both groups issued press releases proclaiming victory. Newspaper photographers and TV camera people schlepped all the way out on Queens Boulevard to take a photo of Wiggles’s front door with the big orange “Closed” sticker. Vinny Ocean was out of the strip-club business in Queens.
One of his nephews called him to tell him the news at 6:25
P
.
M
., hours after the decision had come in. With the FBI listening in, the nephew said he thought they lost because of Frankie Pina’s big mouth. Vinnie agreed. He hung up, and within five minutes he had Frankie himself on the line. Vinny, who usually evidenced a certain modicum of self-control, lost it completely on Frankie.
“You dirty motherfucker asshole moron dirty cocksucker,” Vinny screamed. “You’re looking to hurt me, you motherfucker. You destroyed my life, that’s what you did.”
The next day was worse. He must have been stewing in it, turning over certain moments of testimony, recalling the little asides to the judge that Frankie had offered up. On the phone with one of his lawyers he promised to kick Frankie “in the balls.”
“This fucking bastard, fucking wiseass bastard greaseball,” he added for effect. “They think they know everything.”
He called Frankie again on his cell phone and screamed: “I went for a hundred thousand dollars to prove that they’re wrong and it don’t happen back there and you fucking admit that it does happen! You were trying to make the judge laugh! You think this is a laughing matter? This is my fucking life, man!”
Vinny slammed down the phone.
Over the next six months, Vinny had his lawyers appeal. They lost. He looked all over the city for another storefront to place Wiggles. He found nothing. He immersed himself in his other deals, with Guccione, with the Siemens people in Germany. He had his crew sitting in noshow jobs at T&M Construction, which meant a percentage of all the hotel renovation jobs they were working at the hotels in Manhattan. He had another guy in a no-show job at Barr Industries, the oil company he was fighting over with the Colombo family. He had his other strip club in Long Island and his restaurants in Queens. His soldiers were complaining that he had plenty but never seemed to have enough. Tin Ear Sclafani confided to Ralphie what a lot of the members of Vinny’s crew were thinking: “Vinny always says he’s broke. He’s a multimillionaire.” But Vinny had headaches. Both his kids from the first marriage were on their own and doing well, but he was still paying their college bills. And now his three children from the second marriage, Tara, Danielle, and Vinny Jr., were about to enter the college years. Jaw-dropping demands for money were headed his way. Wiggles, Vinny’s numberone source of cash, was gone and Vinny Ocean needed money, and he needed it right away.
On Thanksgiving Day, 1998, the sky turned black and opened up. Torrential rain soaked the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade, and Spider-Man had to be deflated in the thirty-miles-per-hour gusts. The temperature dropped, and it was so dark, parade vehicles turned on their headlights. Babe the Pig had to be dragged down Central Park West and Broadway all the way to Herald Square. Out in Staten Island, it was cold and wet when two guys knocked on the door of the suburban home of Westley Paloscio’s mother. She was a tolerant woman, but she was tired of the nonsense. Here was her son, in his thirties, still living at home with his new bride and their new infant, and now there were two guys knocking on the door on Thanksgiving Day with all the relatives inside thanking the Good Lord for their bounty.
Wes came to the door and the holiday-induced smile vanished from his face. Standing in the rain was Anthony Capo, official hatchet man of the DeCavalcante crime family. He also was not smiling. He stood there with another guy Westley did not know. Capo demanded that he step outside, but Westley refused. He stood there in his mother’s doorway in the pouring rain, looking at two unsmiling visitors who were definitely not invited to the Thanksgiving good times unfolding a few feet away in a well-lighted dining room.
Anthony Capo had a message for Westley: Pay back the money that Joey O owed to Joey Smash. He delivered his message and walked away with his silent but hulking friend.
The next day Westley was furious. Driving on the Belt Parkway in Brooklyn with Ralphie, he ripped into Anthony Capo.
“I’m getting three of my friends and I’m going to leave him dead in his fucking house. I told him, ‘You think I give a fuck? You’re gonna come to my house? I have a family.
This is my house on Thanksgiving. I got a family. A fucking house full of people.’ ”
“I can’t believe it,” Ralphie said.
Westley said Capo had asked him to come outside the house and Westley refused. He was convinced he would have been shot down right there if he had complied.
“This Joey O thing did you in,” Ralphie said.
“Listen,” he said, “You learn from your own mistakes. The guy happened to be a nice guy, Ralphie.”
“Yeah,” Ralphie said. “A funny guy.”
Three weeks later two FBI agents showed up at Westley’s mother’s home. They knocked on the door and asked politely to speak to Westley alone. They had something to tell him. What they told him was that Anthony Capo wanted to kill him. They did not say how they had become aware of this information, but they did mention that they had a duty to tell him.
To Westley, this was a plausible scenario.
For a long time Westley had feared and disliked Anthony Capo. He saw him for what he was—an unstable man who saw everything as a personal insult and was happy to commit acts of extreme violence at a moment’s notice. The FBI also let Wes know that they knew he’d had a hand in the murder of Joey O. Then they got in their car and left. This was a tactic, and everyone involved in the little dance between federal agents and members of organized crime knew it was a tactic. It happened all the time. The bureau—which pretended to go about its business unseen—would suddenly step out of the shadows and onto center stage as a kind of deus ex machina. The agents would deliver dire messages and leave. The agents returned to their headsets; the gangsters returned to their social clubs. Everybody went back to pretending they were smarter than the other guy. The agents would then listen even more carefully to see if the information they had imparted inspired conversations involving probable cause.
Between the Gambino family and the FBI, Westley was beginning to come undone.
Driving along the Belt, he suddenly admitted to Ralphie, “There was no Steve,” referring to the guy Joey O was supposed to see the night he died. Here was Westley admitting to Ralphie (and, by proxy, to the FBI), that Steve was a made-up person. In fact, “Steve” was really Westley. Westley had called up Joey O and disguised his own voice (barely) to lure Joey O to the empty golf course with the broken clamshells way down at the bottom of Brooklyn.
In just a few offhand comments, the FBI decided that Westley had successfully implicated himself as an accomplice to a murder.
For the FBI agents listening in to the Belt Parkway conversation, this admission definitely fell under the category of probable cause. The trouble was, the bureau did not yet possess a smoking gun. Westley Paloscio would not say how he came to be involved in the killing of Joey O. He merely implied things. He implied that the boyfriend of his mother-in-law, a wiseguy wannabe named Anthony, might have been involved in the shooting of Joey O. But he would not say more. Ralphie was instructed to push harder.
In a conversation that took place on December 8, 1998, Ralphie outlined the FBI’s theory of the Joey O murder without mentioning the FBI. The theory was that Vinny Ocean—either by explicit order or by the deliberate indifference of, say, Pontius Pilate—had caused the death of Joey O. “Sometimes I would just like to get to the bottom of it, just for my own personal satisfaction,” Ralphie said. “Because nobody gets killed over money. But you know what happened here.”
“Ralph,” Westley agreed, “you don’t get rid of a guy over money if he owes it to you.”
“I believe that Joey owed fifty thousand dollars to somebody and they ran to Vinny Ocean, because they knew Vinny was involved,” Ralphie said. “And Vinny went like this”—here Ralphie brushed his hands together—“and said I wash my hands. You understand what I’m saying?”
“Now—” Westley started to say.
“He owed you fifty thousand,” Ralphie said, getting all riled up. “You know Joey O had nothing but bad luck the last two months of his life. Fucking up everybody, robbing people, not doing nothing right. You think they could kill him without Vinny’s okay? I mean that’s the bottom line.”
And then Westley did what any marginally intelligent felon would do—he deflected attention from himself by implicating another criminal he didn’t like. “Nobody really knows this guy Anthony,” he said, meaning Anthony Capo, the guy who allegedly wanted to kill him.
“Everybody knew he was with Vinny,” Ralphie said, interrupting Westley. “This guy, I mean you go to every wiseguy joint anywhere, these guys all knew Joey O. He went to sit-downs. You understand? He was a bum the last year of his life, but prior to that he was a real fucking man. You know he did the right thing. So somebody had to go like this”—Ralphie again brushed his hands together— “and okay that.”
Westley was stuttering, talking about how much Joey owed, but he was not going any further. He was very nervous, specifically about his mother-in-law’s boyfriend.
“He’s the type of guy that he don’t shoot to kill you, but he’ll shoot to maim,” Westley said. “Somebody’s going to get shot.”
St. George Road sits in the heart of Staten Island between the new and the old. To the north lies a popular golf course with grass of a greenness not commonly seen within the confines of New York City. This color seems almost too green to be natural. Men in white shoes and green plaid shorts drive little carts up and down the hills. Just to the south and west of St. George is the old Staten Island, a fully re-created Revolutionary War–era historic site called Richmond Town. It includes a livery, an old wooden schoolhouse, a hoop maker, and none of it is real. All of it was created from drawings and other documents to duplicate what Staten Island looked like in the seventeenth century, long before golf courses and malls and the Mafia.
At the very end of St. George, where it turns a corner and merges with another road, sits a two-story white wood-frame house. It is an old house for this area, built in the 1950s. It is of the faux-Tara variety, with bogus
columns at the front door. There is a gazebo and a fake wooden bridge that arches over a manufactured stream to the left of the front door, and a modest-size pool with a curving blue slide in the right-side yard. A plastic raccoon sits near the entrance. What with all these accoutrements, there is hardly any yard left over. It is the only house on the entire block without a name on the mailbox.
As houses go, this one would be extremely difficult to surveil.
There are no houses across the street, just woods leading up a steep hill to the golf course. Any tinted-window van filled with FBI agents would stand out. Any car filled with gangsters gunning for the house’s occupants would also stand out. It is, in many ways, extremely secure, and that was one of the reasons Joseph Sclafani had bought it.
He kept a handgun in a sock next to his bedstead. He kept a shotgun in his closet next to his sweaters. Both were loaded.
Sclafani was an old-school gangster. The FBI had a big fat file on him, listing him as a soldier with a handful of arrests for minor gambling charges and one weapons count. He was suspected in several homicides. He was now Ralphie’s boss.
Tin Ear knew the FBI had designated him as a made member of organized crime, and in some ways, he seemed proud. “I was on camera before, so it don’t make a difference,” he told Ralphie. “They know I’m a wiseguy.”
Timing, of course, is everything, and Ralphie was assigned to Tin Ear Sclafani just about the same time as Tin Ear learned he had missed the boat. The high priests of the DeCavalcante crime family passed over Tin Ear for promotion to skipper. In his stead, they appointed the seventyyear-old Uncle Joe Giacobbe who lately had been forgetting the names of people he was talking to. To add insult to injury, Uncle Joe was now to be Tin Ear’s skipper. All of this left Tin Ear not a little resentful. The Friday afternoon after Thanksgiving he and Ralphie were sitting in Tin Ear’s social club, the Bay Club, on Bay Ridge Avenue in Brooklyn. Tin Ear was complaining.
“I’m no left fielder,” Tin Ear assured Ralphie, who was wearing a wire under his shirt. “It’s just I had a couple of bad breaks. But I’ll get out. I always got out. All my life, I had no problem. It’s just that it’s a little rougher now.”
Ralphie was surprised at how quickly Scalafani had come to like him and tell him things that perhaps he should not have told. The FBI agents who were listening in were also surprised. Pleasantly.
“You know what it is,” Ralphie said, slipping into his “comfort the afflicted” persona. “You’re a little more cautious.”
Tin Ear touched on the subject that seemed to haunt his every conversation—how the old-world wiseguys he knew and loved seemed to have been replaced by a new breed of
goombatta
he simply could not understand. “A lot of this is new,” he said.
“You know what the thing is?” Ralphie said. “All these other guys you grew up with, you know what? A lot of these guys, they are all settled in their place already. They’re all strong. They’re all bosses.”
“I could of did that,” Tin Ear said. “I could of hung out with them. Right now I could.”
They discussed Danny Annunziata, a DeCavalcante captain who lived in a $4 million mansion on Staten Island and owned four health clubs around New York that raked in the big bucks. They sounded like envious stock traders discussing Warren Buffett.
“I don’t know what the fuck he was worth,” Sclafani said. “His house was four million.”
“He got off big,” Ralphie agreed. “He got rich.”
“Rich? Forget about it! They have ranches. They have mansions.”
Tin Ear was the old-school guy who came up through the ranks. He hijacked trucks at midnight, he strong-armed officials of union locals, he eliminated informants by order of bosses he’d met only once at a wedding. He was a muscle guy. He didn’t go for manicures and pedicures. He was a short, squat guy with a full head of hair at the age of fiftyfour, close-cropped and combed back to keep his permanent scowl prominent. Truth be told, Tin Ear was the spitting image of Jimmy Hoffa, without the suit. He had the flattened nose, the boxer’s stare, the rolling walk of a guy who could give a fuck. He dressed like a longshoreman and lived with his mother and mother-in-law on Staten Island. He had been a private first class in the United States Army during the Korean conflict, and he went around telling people he’d been in the Special Forces, where he learned how to snap a man’s neck. He still collected two-eighty a week army pension. He knew the rules, and he still believed in them.
When he came out of prison in 1974, he was flat broke. He borrowed money from his nephew, a Gambino associate, and put it out on the street. To make his payments up the ladder, he was forced to rob a payroll on West Fiftythird Street in Manhattan. Then he got wise and began targeting warehouses in small towns in New Jersey. He knew that during the night shift only one or two officers were on duty covering a huge area, which allowed Tin Ear and his cohorts to easily break into warehouses and “pop the seals” on containers.
Nothing was too ridiculous to steal.
Totes slippers. Toner cartridges for copiers. Espresso machines. Tiny glass bottles of perfume. Anything that could be carted off in the middle of the night and sold as swag the next day. They hit the Jersey waterfront, they hit Kennedy International Airport. “A pallet of this, a pallet of that,” Tin Ear would say. “I was the score guy. We stole mink coats from Jews in Boro Park. We’d sit in a car, see them walking down the street. You ripped it right off ’em, jump in the fucking car, and you’re gone.”
“You got a day’s pay,” Ralphie agreed.
Now everything was changing. It was the end of the twentieth century, the Mafia’s century, and the New Mafia had arrived. A late-twentieth-century wiseguy had to come up with new, more sophisticated ways to scam and scheme. Wall Street pump-and-dump operations. Internet fraud. Health care rip-offs. These were plots that left Tin Ear Sclafani confused. He was used to using a baseball bat or a .28 to get the job done. He yearned for the old
On the Waterfront
ways in a time when the waterfront was gone. He still operated a social club when nobody went to social clubs anymore. He still openly boasted about his son’s involvement in various crimes when most gangsters did not want their sons to get involved in “the life” in any way. He was a Luca Brasi kind of guy in a Tony Soprano world.
He would tell anybody who’d listen that he had “twenty bodies.” This was his way of saying he’d participated in twenty murders, which was more than, say, Gary Gilmore or Jeffrey Dahmer. He claimed he’d learned the correct way to garrote somebody from a guy named Tommy Karate. He claimed he’d shot some guy in the head, then buried him in a spot near the Brooklyn end of the Williamsburg Bridge where a police precinct now sat.
Who knew if it any of it was true?
He watched all the movies and knew the lines. He dropped names. “I know Johnny Depp,” he told Ralphie soon after the two began working together. “I know movie stars and producers.” At times he seemed more interested in the image of the Mafia than in the Mafia itself. Several times during their many months together, Sclafani and Ralphie talked about television shows and movies. The FBI agents didn’t always record those talks because they were considered “nonpertinent.” But the agents always noted the fact of these talks in their notebooks.
On this day after Thanksgiving in 1998, the agents scribbled in their notes, “JS and CW talk about TV show, talk about old neighborhood.”
Soon Tin Ear and Ralphie got up and left the Bay Club, taking a walk through Bay Ridge. The FBI heard no conversation. The two returned to the club, then got into a car and went for a drive. In Brooklyn they pulled over when they recognized a guy they knew, Bobalu. Before they reached the curb, Sclafani told Ralphie that Bobalu was “a hard-on” and that he said he was Italian but he really was not.
Ralphie asked Bobalu what had happened to a man named Jamesie. Jamesie had been run over and killed after stepping out of a Brooklyn bar called Two Toms. Jamesie owed a lot of bad people a lot of money. Scalfani said, “The same thing happened to Joey O. He went out of control betting and tried to beat the bookmakers.”
They left Bobalu behind and drove through Brooklyn. Tin Ear pointed out the window at a social club he used to frequent that was once run by Anthony Rotondo’s father, Jimmy Rotondo. Jimmy was the guy who was gunned down by unknown assailants sitting at the wheel of his Lincoln at the curb outside his home in Bath Beach, Brooklyn, with a package of squid on the seat next to him. That was back in 1989, and still they were talking about it. Jimmy Rotondo had known Sclafani for years. He’d controlled a New Jersey union local and made a lot of money. The home he was sitting in front of when he died next to the squid was huge. He’d kicked back money up the ladder and over the river to John Gotti. At the time no one was completely sure why the assassination had happened.
As Sclafani began to talk, the FBI agents listening in hoped he would answer that question. Instead, they got the World According to Tin Ear.
“I know him all my life,” Tin Ear said. “There was no reason for him to get hit.”
Ralphie said, “He was a gentleman.”
“Oh yeah. He was a good guy. A tough guy.”
“We still get compliments about him.”
“I don’t know what the fuck he got hit for, this guy.”
“I was in the can when they got him,” Raphie said.
“There’s no reason for this kid to get hurt,” Tin Ear said. “He’s not a rat, you understand? I don’t believe in hitting nobody if he’s not a rat.”
“Right.”
“Or he fucks around with your wife or kids or something like that. Or your family. You know? That’s the only two reasons I go for the guy. Then you can’t just turn around.”
“Right.”
“If you, like, say a guy wants to screw around with your wife.”
“Ohhhfff,” Ralphie said.
“That’s gone.”
“Chop his head right off,” Ralphie voluteered.
“He’s gone,” Tin Ear said. “Or he’s a rat. That’s the only two reasons. For money, you’re not going to give it to him.”
Suddenly Tin Ear gave Ralphie the scare of his life. “There are agents right there,” he said, pointing out the car window.
“Where?” Ralphie said, doing his best to remain calm. “Right there.”
“It’s a dealer’s car,” Ralphie said.
“I don’t know,” Tin Ear said. “They’re driving with two guys. The guy just put his light on us. Fucking cunt. So we’ll work it out, Ralphie.”
“Let’s hope we can do something.”
They drove deeper into Brooklyn, and Sclafani seemed to have forgotten about the agents. They talked about this score and that score, about a restaurant in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, being controlled by a member of the Colombo family, about a porno magazine being controlled by a member of another Mafia family. They bitched about traffic in downtown Brooklyn and talked about the yuppies moving into warehouses and driving up the real estate. And, as usual, Sclafani talked about the good old days, about how the yuppie neighborhood once belonged to Joey Gallo. They no longer talked about the FBI. Ralpie was glad. The FBI was glad, too.