Raising the Curtain on Organized Crime

Feds Are Aiming to Decommission Mob

This series was prepared by a Newsday reporting team consisting of Michael Arena, Maurice Carroll, Anthony DeStefano, Walter Fee, Richard C. Firstman,

July 9, 1986

It was a small home in a nondescript neighborhood, suitable for the purpose at hand. The owner, someone who knew someone, had been advised to leave for a few hours. Then, late in the afternoon on this day on Staten Island in May, 1984, the men began arriving. They came in four cars.

Among the visitors, according to the FBI, was Anthony Salerno. A younger man held the car door open for him. He walked slowly, a cigar in his mouth, a fedora on his head. There was Paul Castellano, a tall man with a commanding presence. There was Gennaro Langella, in a gray business suit, standing in for his superior, Carmine Persico, who was in jail.

In all, according to photographs taken by the FBI, 10 men converged on the little borrowed house on Cameron Avenue in South Beach that day. Federal prosecutors believe they represented the upper echelons of four of the five organized crime families in New York. The main item on the agenda, investigators say, was a discussion of the group's illegal interests in the construction industry of New York City. And they believe the occasion was a meeting of what has come to be known as the Commission - the ruling body of the New York branch of the Cosa Nostra.

Starting tomorrow in U.S. District Court in Manhattan, the alleged members of the Commission will go on trial - the first time in more than 50 years of prosecution that the ruling council of the Cosa Nostra will be judged in a courtroom.

U.S. Attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani's office will argue that the bosses of the mob families have collectively conducted an ongoing criminal conspiracy - a violation of the federal Racketeer-Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO. The prosecutors will try to prove that at meetings like the one on Staten Island, the bosses of the Cosa Nostra conspired to control several of the city's industries, legitimate and otherwise - and that they used murder and other violence to enforce their rule.

The Commission trial represents the culmination of a four-year assault on organized crime by federal, state and local authorities in the New York area - a crackdown that has brought 300 alleged mobsters and their associates under indictment and stocked the city's federal courtrooms with enough drama to fill several screenplays. An unprecedented use of court-ordered electronic surveillance - bugs hidden in the cars, homes and hangouts of mobsters - has allowed the Justice Department to bring the inner workings of the Cosa Nostra in New York and other cities into public view.

The resulting trials have included charges of virtually every kind of criminality: drug trafficking and bribery, loan-sharking and extortion, car theft and union racketeering. And murder. The current round of trials began with three simultaneous cases in Manhattan last fall, including the so-called "pizza connection" heroin-trafficking case.

The assault extends across the nation: More than a dozen family bosses have either been convicted or are now under indictment. In New York, nearly all the defendants in the Commission case are awaiting either trial or sentencing on other indictments that prosecutors see as the building blocks of the Commission case - which they promote as the most important mob trial in history.

It is the trial's dimensions that concern some defense attorneys. They argue that such a broad indictment of so many people is unfair. Barry Slotnick, whose firm has represented reputed Gambino boss John Gotti, says that in cases such as the Commission trial, so much evidence is presented that the quantity takes on importance, rather than the quality.

Another attorney who has defended accused organized-crime figures, Herald Price Fahringer, has expressed concern that the use of the RICO law to prosecute numerous defendants in one case amounts to proving guilt by association.

Impact on Organized Crime Questioned

And some other members of the criminal justice system wonder whether the trial, regardless of the outcome, will result in any permanent damage to organized crime. Speaking generally in 1985, Judge Irving R. Kaufman, chairman of the President's Commission on Organized Crime, remarked about the long-standing struggle between prosecutors and mobsters: "It seemed to me, as I observed this over the years, that nothing really changed . . . You will put an important [mobster] in jail for 20 or 40 years, but the business goes on."

The Commission indictment, handed up in February, 1985, named the leaders and other key members of the city's five crime groups: Castellano and Aniello Dellacroce of the Gambino family; Anthony Corallo, Salvatore Santoro and Christopher Furnari of the Luchese family; Langella and Ralph Scopo of the Colombo family; Salerno of the Genovese family, and Philip Rastelli of the Bonanno family.

Deaths and conflicting trial schedules have thinned the ranks of the defendants in the trial. Rastelli has been severed from the Commission case because he is on trial on other charges in federal court in Brooklyn. And Castellano, considered the most powerful of the Commission members, was gunned down in front of a restaurant in Manhattan last December, two weeks after his reputed underboss and codefendant, Dellacroce, died of cancer. Although their deaths have removed the Gambino family - regarded as the city's most powerful with 400 known members - from the Commission case, 16 of the group's members were indicted three months ago by a federal grand jury in Brooklyn on murder, racketeering, gambling and extortion charges.

The Commission trial, though, will still feature big names - in testimony if not in person. Through the tapes made from the bugs planted and the testimony of mobsters-turned-informants, prosecutors will attempt to show how the Cosa Nostra in New York has dominated major industries at public expense. And in so doing, they may offer some new insights into the organization of organized crime.

Some of the results of the electronic surveillance - a hint of what jurors will hear during the next months - are contained in affidavits by FBI agents and in other pretrial documents filed with the court and obtained by Newsday.

In one conversation, picked up by an FBI bug placed in Castellano's home in 1983, Castellano was heard bragging to his maid about the power he wields. He used the Waldbaum's supermarket chain as an example: "They run all Waldbaum's stores, right? So now, they pay me. You know why? Because of my influence. When I sit down, I talk to the man. `Oh, oh, Paul, how ya feel? How's everything?' . . . I don't care who it is. If the president of the United States, if he's smart, if he needs help, he'd come. I could do a, some favor for the president. I can't, I, I'm not like the president. The president is a big man, I'm not like him. But everybody can do somebody a little favor. You understand, Gloria?"

Some clues also emerge about the relationship of Castellano's murder outside Sparks Steak House last December to the rise of John Gotti, who law enforcement experts believe became Castellano's successor as boss of the Gambino family.

Why Castellano Was Killed

According to surveillance transcripts and statements in court by federal prosecutors, Castellano's murder was probably the culmination of mounting friction between him and a faction of the Gambino family headed by Gotti, who had the support of Dellacroce. Although no charges have been filed, investigators believe Castellano's murder was finally triggered by the death last Dec. 2 of Dellacroce, who had been seen as the Gotti crew's voice at the top.