Home : Working America :Being A Gangster
It's a Tuesday evening in New York City's Little Italy, and the enclave of old-school bars, souvenir shops, and tourist-driven restaurants is beginning to fill up, largely with British tourists who want to add a Sopranos safari to their vacation. As they walk past a sleepy restaurant on Mulberry Street, little do they know that the two men seated near the front door are high-ranking officers of an organized crime family. Dozens of other high-ranking organized crime figures would be hauled in by police in of one of the largest arrests in city history. All told, federal prosecutors would hand out 80 indictments to 62 men, mostly members of the Gambino crime family, on charges ranging from murder of a court officer to extortion of union funds. The indictments would reveal just how alive the government believes the Mafia is, and prosecutors would hail the busts as yet more nails in a coffin they've been steadily burying since the '50s. The Mafia, has long since adjusted to prevent any one raid from interfering with its business. Gone are the days when it maintained a stranglehold on everything illegal; the new Mob is all about using its traditional ferocity to break into legal enterprises, thereby limiting its exposure to prosecution. At the same time, it's still struggling to maintain its self-proclaimed traditions of honor, loyalty, and justifiable violence even as its members increasingly see them as anachronistic. The Italian Mafia is not the verge of extinction, knowledge that comes almost exclusively from The Godfather, GoodFellas, and The Sopranos. Its life cycle, at least according to pop culture, had gone something like this: At the turn of the 20th century, a feudal Sicilian and Italian organization called the Black Hand emigrated, along with millions of Italians to America where it got rich and powerful off bootlegging, extortion, and loan sharking. In New York City, factions engaged in wholesale slaughter over profits until 1931, when a 34-year-old rising crime star named Charles "Lucky" Luciano created the "five families" structure, in which territories and rackets were carved out to prevent intramural squabbling and unnecessary attention. It built a monopoly of vice and spread its enterprise across the country. Somewhere in there a lot of guys were shot in barber's chairs, Al Capone became head of a sister organization in Chicago, and Michael Corleone testified to the Senate a crime family boss.
In the golden age of the Mafia, in their mind, what they did was honorable. They were the people immigrants could come to when they had a problem. In exchange for that, you could walk into their stores and they would give you the best of what they had. Things changed in the '80s, right about the time Sharon Stone's Casino character was doing lots of drugs in Vegas, along came a U.S. attorney named Rudy Giuliani. He made it his mission to break up the Mafia in New York. In one of his cases, known as the "pizza connection," 22 wise guys were arrested in conjunction with a billion-dollar heroin trade. In a second case, Giuliani helped indict the heads of all five families. "Our approach," Giuliani said at the time, "is to wipe out the five families." The final death knell seemed to come when John Gotti was arrested. Known as the Teflon Don, the well-coiffed Gotti was a fixture on TV and in newspapers, almost flaunting his ability to conduct business outside the reach of the law. Eventually, the Feds busted him, and in 1992 Gotti was given a sentence of life without parole. After his incarceration, it was said that the Gambino crime family, of which he was the head, would never be the same. When John Gotti and his crew got busted, it actually made the family stronger. The organization learned from its mistakes. There are now contingency plans for when arrests come. According to one member of the Gambino family, the organization currently has more than 2,000 made men across the United States. Each made man could have between to and 15 associates earning underneath him in businesses that encompass everything from construction to unions and entertainment to nightclubs. The Luccheses always had the sanitation routes. The Genovese family had the gambling. The Bonannos had the heroin. But the Gambinos have been involved in everything from A to Z. It's been estimated that the Gambinos are a multibillion-dollar enterprise. If something happens, it can create a hiccup in the national economy. As an example, trucking companies, there's maybe 28 major companies from Little Italy to Queens, which have long been Gambino territory. All legitimate businesses, but let's say many of them have a 'connection' to the family. When you think about the number of items that are delivered by trucks daily, any hitch could stagger a local economy. The soda you have with lunch, the food you eat at the restaurant, it all gets delivered by a truck. That's how involved the Mafia is in your everyday life.
Even as the Mafia has maintained its interest in trucking, it has also expanded into new territory. The game and its economics have changed. The days of breaking legs over $500 are over. Now if you owe me money, you've got a way to get it and you don't even have to break the law to do it. What's your credit score? If you can get someone with a 700 credit score, I'll hook them up with someone at a bank and they'll get a $100,000 line of credit. The prized catches in the bust were, Feds believe, the Gambino family's acting boss, John "Jackie Nose" D'Amico; acting underboss, Domenico "Italian Dom" Cefalu; and consigliere, Joseph "Jo Jo" Corozzo, along with the brother and nephew of the late John Gotti, three other Gambino captains, and three acting captains. At the press conference trumpeting the bust, Police Commissioner Ray Kelly said, "This was a bad day for organized crime."The indictments included charges of a 1976 assassination of a Brooklyn court officer, the 1977 murder of an associate of the Gambino family, and the 1990 slaying of an armored car driver during a Kennedy Airport theft. It also contained several charges of racketeering conspiracy and extortion. Today we serve notice that anyone who aspired to a position in organized crime will meet the same fate," said Brooklyn U.S. Attorney Benton Campbell. "We will not rest until we rid our communities and businesses of the scourge of organized crime." The indictments were allegedly helped along by a government informant named Joseph Vollaro, the owner of Andrews Trucking, a Staten Island—based firm that was believed to have earned $400,000 for the Gambino family. Though Vollaro was not recognized as a made man, it is believed the ranking Gambino officers violated their own protocol by speaking with him on a regular basis. They did this while Vollaro was wearing a government wire.
But what's the difference between people who know you and people who fear you? Where is the line between legitimate and criminal? There is no line, that's the idea. If you're the government and you want to find the line, good luck. That's why these raids only happen when there's a rat. They draw the line for the Feds. Otherwise they wouldn't be able to find it with a fuckin' map. The bust is just another attempt by elected officials to grandstand and show an apathetic public that they are doing their jobs. All 62 guys were put under the same indictment. Officers operate largely above the Mafia's daily grind. Soldiers are the guys who struggle to "make a nut" for their bosses, often with their fists. Paranoia keeps you alive in this line of work. Being a gangster is no different than if your grandfather's a cop, your father's a cop, so you become a cop. The question every gangster asks himself: How do I get 20 percent of what you have, in perpetuity, until you're dead? Working for the Mob is like any other job, only a street guy doesn't pay taxes to the government; he pays them to his family — in this case, the head of his crew. A good earner might kick as much as 50 percent of what he makes. The head of his crew takes a piece and kicks the rest up, and so on. For that tax, you receive the protection of the family. If you've got a problem, you've got the muscle to solve it. The flipside of that equation is that there are no mitigating circumstances surrounding that 50 percent. Former street guys are everywhere — cops, firemen, Wall Street. Prosecutors offered plea deals to 60 of the 62 defendants. "As a practical matter, it is highly unlikely that all 62 defendants will proceed to trial," Assistant U.S. Attorney Joey Lipton wrote in court papers. "Plea agreements will likely reduce the numbers." Only the two defendants charged with murder — Charles Carnegha and Nicholas Corozzo — were not offered a plea. It's all about money. If you've got it, you can get a good lawyer and stay out of jail. If not, you do time. It's part of the job. Some things never change. Early death, vast segments of a life swallowed by prison, betrayal at the hands of your closest friends. Why still do it? The money, the girls, the action — what more could you ask for?
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