You're listening to Law and Order Criminal Justice System, a production of Wolf Entertainment and iHeart podcasts.
In the Criminal Justice System, landmark trials transcend the courtroom to reshape the law. The brave man and women who investigate and prosecute these cases are part of a select group that is defined American history. These are their stories. March nineteen eighty three, Salvator Avellino's Jaguar, New York City.
Lu Casey Mobster's Salvator Avellino and Tony Dux Carala are inside Avellino's car discussing the new book written by former boss Joe Banana. Both men are incensed Banano has openly revealed the inner workings of his former crime family and in turn, the mob as a whole. They think he's fishing for a movie deal and some fast cash. I know that, But then they talk about something that troubles
them even more. The book admits to the existence of the Commission, that there is a governing body overseeing all the families. No Mafia member has ever said this before publicly, Obedien. The two men also talk about another crime boss who's becoming a problem. They hint at their possible response, something drastic, something.
Violent than some example other people like they talk a lot.
That's why going to fall.
What Avelino and Corlu didn't know was that their conversations were being recorded a hidden microphone had been secretly planted by law enforcement. The audio clips you just heard, though at times hard to decipher, capture their every word. You're not with the mob because you want to be.
It's the gangster that decides whether you're his associated on.
If you like your life, you will vote to acquit. I'm Anisee and Nicolazzi, my father should have been a dead man from Wolf Entertainment and iHeart Podcasts. This is Law and Order Criminal justice system. By the late seventies and early eighties, the FBI was deploying an array of resources to gain the upper hand against the mob. They created specialized task forces, targeted mafia leadership, and even bugged the homes of mob members, but it continued to be
an uphill battle. The mafia's coat of silence protected the bosses who sat at the top calling the shots, and the heads of the families were more than willing to sacrifice a few pawns so long as their business kept booming. The Commission's priority keep the peace, keep the throne. But little did they know there was a new strategy brewing within law enforcement, and it had less to do with how to catch criminals and more to do with how to prosecute them. And by the dawn of the new decade,
the tides were beginning to turn. As the FBI was secretly blitzing the families with bugs and wire caps. The State of New York was assembling it its own task force and it was led by a former prosecutor with a fresh plan to dismantle the.
Mom formerly Ronald Goldstock, but Ron Goldstock for our purposes and I was the director of the New York State Organized Crime Task Force. Our jurisdiction was the investigation of multi county organized crime.
Bad news for Kosa Nostra. They were about to be flanked from all sides FBI, NYPD and now New York State.
We also had a fabulous tech unit to install taps and bugs, and it was a unit that was, as far as I know, better than anything else in the state.
Even with less than one hundred employees on the payroll, Ron's team did have a notable advantage over the FBI.
We were very nimble. If you went to the Organized Crime Task Force as a whole, so we need a wire tap, we would do it in a day. As a result, we became very popular. We were competitioned. To the FBI, the.
Rules of economics applied. When more than one service is available in a given market, the quality of that service tends to improve.
It is the competition that breeds innovation, that breeds change, that breeds experimentation. The assistant director of the FBI said, you are like a vanguard. You can move quickly where like a battleship. It takes us forever to turn the ship around, but once we get where we're going, we can knock out anybody in sight. And I think that was a pretty accurate description of both US and the Bureau.
And he had his work cut out for him. As Ron put it, law enforcement hadn't been able to accomplish much against the mob.
Organized crime was in its heyday. There were very few prosecutions that led to significant convictions of groups of individuals. At the time, you still had a mob that could replace people who had been taken out by prosecutions or through death.
But what was now being captured on recordings started to change it all. You could sense that momentum was starting to shift in law enforcement's favor.
The FBI began to use electronic surveillance to investigate the MOB, and they began to learn through the taps and bugs they had put in a great deal about the mob's structure.
That deeper understanding of mob hierarchy and the web of loyalties and rivalries that ran through it would definitely come in handy, especially when it came time to prosecute. It was hard, dangerous work, but they were the best of the best. Here again is former Special Agent Joe Cantamasa, the FBI's undercover phone man.
You had to be capable, confident, and dedicated to the mission. We had ninety nine percent success rate.
However, being one of the most in demand black bag men came with a major pitfall, the toll on his personal life.
There was just non stop work at the busy time. We could do three entries in one night. For the two years eighty two eighty three, I worked literally one hundred hours a week, so I was generally not around. I was divorced and my mother spent most of the time taking care of my daughter. When I was just not there.
On top of all that was a frustration. He couldn't escape that for every low level soldier you put away, there was another to take his place. But here's the thing. As Ages placed the bugs and listened to hours upon hours of recordings, they had no idea the gold mine they had uncovered. These tapes, instead of being scattered across various case like before, were about to be woven together to form the backbone of the Commission case, a landmark
moment in their investigation. Back in the late sixties, G Robert Blakey was a law professor at Notre Dame. He had been warning the government for years about the need to pivot how they went after organized crime. Here's Ron Goldstock on the man once described as the government's canary in a coal mine.
Blakey had served in the organized crime section of the Department of Justice under Robert Kennedy, and he understood what was needed to deal with the problem of syndicated crime as opposed to individual crime or small conspiracies.
And with this new understanding, Blakey got to work. He authored many of the electronic surveillance procedures, or title threes as they're called, that law enforcement used to this day. But Blakey's lasting legacy was his role in creating what is known as RICA.
In nineteen seventy he did the Organized Crime Control Act, which provided for RICO, the Racketeer, Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. RICO not only allowed you to use the term organized crime, but in effect required you to. The individual who was charged had to be part, either employed by, or associated with, an enterprise, and an enterprise in many organized crime cases was either the family or a crew from that family.
RICO was passed and signed into law by then President Richard Nixon. All Blakie had to do next was convinced the justice system to adopt it.
I met blake for the first time, probably around nineteen seventy three, and we became friends, and at some point he called me he had just gotten a grant to create an institute on organized Crime at Cornell to train state and local prosecutors on how to investigate and prosecute organized crime. And so I left the DA's office, went to Cornell, and the two of us put together this program. What we did think was it made sense to bring federal investigators to the summer sessions that we put on
for a week at Cornell. It was a chance to keep them in on RICO. Jim Costler from the FBI came up. Blakey gave that seminal speech that everybody remembers on RICO not only as a prosecutive tool, but an investigative tool. That is, you think not of investigating individuals for the commission of an act, but you think more broadly of the enterprise. You think of the pattern of
criminal activity rather than individual acts. And the other part is that the RICO Statute allows for civil and criminal forfeiture.
Blaky harp on three important methods of investigation. One, don't waste time on the level gangsters, instead focus on leadership. Two attack them where it hurt the most, go after the money. And three more bugs, more wiretaps. It remained the single best way around the Mafiast code of silence, and.
Blakie remains to this day the smartest person that I know. He just saw a different approach was needed and fundamentally changed the way the criminal justice system dealt with syndicated crime. And incidentally, it took good investigators like Costler to appreciate the brilliance of the statute and what it could do.
After attending the conference and learning about the groundbreaking Rico Statute, Jim Costler headed back to New York to get his house in order and make Robert Blake's dream come true.
The day we were leaving, he came up to the car or I was sitting in the car and he says, you know, he said, I dream of the day that you guys put all the busses of the families in jail in one place. And I said, good luck with that. But it actually happened.
After decades of chasing thugs, setting up stings, and rounding up low level soldiers, it took a law professor to finally discover the answer. And could you have done it without the Rico Statute.
No way. The Rico Statute brought in all the crimes that we didn't have jurisdiction over. It gave us all kinds of ability to use the wiretaps and microphones that we didn't have before.
In nineteen eighty, as the new Organized Crime supervisor of New York, Jim quickly pinpointed the bureau's fundamental problem. Agents were working independently investigating single acts and single people, but they weren't connecting the parts to the whole.
We were putting people in jail. We weren't solving the problem. So basically, when I became a supervisor, I threw out the code or the rule book on how agents that I worked for me worked together. They worked as a team, sometimes five or six working on a particular project, sometimes ten guys working on a particular project, with one agent in the lead and me watching over everybody.
It was pure poetry. Jim would run his teams like a mafia captain ran his crew of soldiers.
The problem in New York was that we had three different groups of agents working organized crime in three locations, and sometimes they would all be investigating the same people. It made no sense. So I basically said, this is what's going to be. These people up here. They'll have the Genoviees family, the people over here, the Lukes people
over here, that cam Be and and so forth. So anything that came in for those particular families would go to that squad, and that way you would streamline the flow of information.
Now he had separate squads to mirror the various families, and as the investigations progressed, he soon realized that each of his squads held important pieces to this interconnected puzzle.
Sharing of the information was so important to our success. Sometimes I would get information to come to me from the Luksey squad and I had already seen something that came similar to that from the Genevies squad, and I'd say, hey, listen, you guys got to get together and share this information because both of you have it, but you don't know it.
And I would have meetings every Thursday. Every Thursday morning, I had all the supervisors come in and bring their agents so that we all knew what each others was doing. And from that point on we were off and running.
It was time to go full tilt with the bug. They knew just where to start. The Palma Boys Social Club was the East Harlem headquarters of Genevi's boss, Fat Tony Sealerno with his black bag expertise. Special agent Joe Cantamasa was once again the FBI's man on the inside. But infiltrating the club would be no easy task.
It had two padlocks on it and the steel gate you couldn't move in an inch without screeching, and it was very loud and very noisy.
But being a native New Yorker, Joe had some pretty good ideas how to avoid detection.
The night we were going to do the entry, it was raining. We had already lined up the noisiest garbage truck in the New York Department of Sanitation's fleet, so we were ready to have noise cover. Everything is good to go. One of the issues with lots of places in Manhattan were street lights. Now I can remember sitting a couple of doors down waiting for the agent's name was Jim Curry to go over to the pedestal and turn off the street light.
A pedestal is a metal box that houses breaker switches and controls for the street lights.
I'm sitting there for an hour or more and all I'm watching on the street in front of the place is the rat show. Well, Jim shows up. He gets to the pedestal. It doesn't even have a door on it like it's supposed to, but there's rats all over the place, and he decides he's not reaching in there to do anything. He pulls the wires out with his flyers and just cuts something. And the next thing I see is sparks flying out of the pedestal. I'm thinking,
oh jeez, but the light goes out. Next thing happens, we're ready to go. We quietly operate the locks. We're ready to do the roll up now, so we call for the garbage truck. It's white like New York City Sanitation was at the time, pulls down to the corner, starts operating the diesel at high rev starts operating the hydraulics. If we were standing six inches apart, you couldn't hear me speak. That's how noisy it was.
And then the beauty of teamwork. Joe surveillance team had previously let them know that every time the last guy came out to close the gate for the night, he first looked down to the ground.
The roll ups up, we call a time out. We looked down the bottom of the door to find out is there a lock down there that we couldn't see. And there's a piece of thread across the bottom of the door between the door and the door jam.
A nearly undetectable piece of security that would have foiled the operation had it gone unnoticed.
If you didn't put that thread back when you were done, you were in big trouble, which meant somebody had been in there other than you who locked it up the night before, so we see that, we know what it is. We save it. We get inside and there's a school of thread on the counter, so at least we didn't have to relock the old thread to put it back. When we left.
Inside the club, they got to work installing a microphone and running the connection to a terminal in the club's basement.
There's rats all over the place, but fortunately they are happy to leave when you shine lights on them and make noise. That microphone worked well.
But not every operation went so smoothly.
Probably the most difficult installation of my daytime scenarios happened to be the Castellano installation.
As in Paul Castellano, head of the Gambino family. He was suspected of ordering a multitude of hits from his lavish mansion on Staten Island. It wasn't a stretch of the imagine nation to think he may have been one of the bosses involved in Carmen Galanti's murder. But overall, there was more than enough cause to get a listening device inside.
Now we had a monitoring plant set up on a different block near the house.
They learned that the notoriously careful and reclusive boss never talked business over the phone, so Joe would have to plant a bug inside the house. Their first attempt involved trying to get Castellanos made Gloria to.
Help with the entry, and they decided early on to approach Gloria's family in Bogatah and offer them twenty thousand dollars if they could get Gloria to leave the door open when they went food shopping, and lo and behold, the next day they hear, quote, the FBI is trying to get into your house. Unquote. We were not going to get Gloria help, and she must have told Paul, and it came back to me that that wasn't going to work. And that's when I said, Okay, you know, I'll figure something else out.
Plan B posing as a cable repairman to install a hidden microphone while Castellano's bodyguard shadowed his every move and that house was never empty, so Joe would need to install the microphone during the day while the Gambino boss and his associates were there, so he created a reason for a repairman to be called.
Cable boxes were very new back then. That's the scenario that I used. I created a problem for them. That was coordinated and introduced by another agent on another pole down the block.
Joe's agent scrambled the cable signal from the telephone pole and when they called for a repairman, they intercepted it, so.
He was there when I got there, and then he's out of sight. And then Tommy Belotti and another older gentleman who I did not know, they're watching me and they're walking me through the house to see if I can identify the problem.
Do you feel that suspicion?
Oh?
Absolutely, watching me.
With Bollotti and another mobster keeping eyes on him. Joe identified the cable box, and with his agent's help from a block away, they replicated the problem that had gotten him into the house initially.
And on my keywords, he would create the problem that they were having, and we got to associate the problem that they thought they had with the particular area of the house that I wanted to put the mic in.
Connecting the microphone was going to be much harder than Joe initially thought.
The reason that it was so difficult is in order to get this connection done, the wire that I needed to get connected to to replace the device that had the microphone in it was actually custom installed into a kitchen countertop and cabinet.
Once again, time for Joe to use his magic get the targets to help seal their own fate.
And so we had this adversarial exchange. I maintained my bad New York attitude to fit the occasion, and I said, listen, if we're going to do this, you've got to help me take this thing apart.
And they did, and.
We literally disassembled part of a kitchen counter cabinet in order to get access to the connector for me to replace this equipment. And part of my scenario for how I do this is I teach them along the way. I explain what I'm doing. I'm not doing this in silence. I'm helping them understand the approach.
And you're actually planting a microphone at the same.
Time, exactly Well, if you had the microphone in your hand, you wouldn't know you had a microphone in your hand. So we had pretty good concealment options back then.
Needless to say, these were high risk, high reward situations, but you never know what might be the key to breaking a case. So they came up with more creative ways to gather intel, including one place mobsters least expected to be bugged their cars and over at the New York Organized Crime Task Force, Ron Goldstock was about to strike gold in the form of a glistening black nineteen eighty two Jaguar. It was owned by a captain in the Lucazy crime family, sal Avelino. Avelina was also the
chauffeur to Lucasey boss Tony dux Carllo. Gold Stock suspected that sneaking a bug into the Jaguar would deliver priceless intel, but it wouldn't be easy.
Our tech team, which as I said, was just exceptionally good, got a similar Jaguar and then practiced. They had to first figure out how to attach the bug to the battery without draining the battery. Then they had to locate where the bug was going to be so that there was an ambient noise that would interfere with the clarity of their recordings. And once they did that, they had to be able to do it very quickly, because they
wanted to do it in the shortest time possible. Once they knew it, they took the car apart, put it back together again, and then began with a stopwatch. They still had to pull off the whole front part of the inside the dish and install it and prop it put it back together again. At the end they knew that it was the fastest they could do it.
Then the team just had to watch and wait for the perfect moment to make their move.
It was installed when Avelino was going to a location in Huntington.
I believe it was the Huntington Townhouse because when I saw that reading, I was like, I think I had my senior prompt.
Well, not sure. It may have been your senior problem. And he was invited, but in any events, he parked his car in the lot, and fortunately for us, he had gotten there late, so there was only parking away from the location. One problem was it started to rain, not very heavy, but enough so that we would concern that there would be water in the car. But the tech team was all set. They had tarps plastic to
put over it. They saw him pull in, He went to the townhouse, They went to the car, they got in, picked the lock, they took out the tarps and the plastic. They entered the car, did their stop watch things, installed the bug, and then they were out.
But the team's job was far from over because to record from the Jaguar bug you also had to follow it.
This was not a recording device, this was a transmitter. If you had a car behind following, particularly a van, where you were recording the conversations, because you had to have the equipment, it would be seen. So we set up chase cars with repeaters. There were three or four chase cars, all different. One would follow for a while and the repeater would throw the signal back to the van out of sight of the Jaguar, which would then
record the conversation. And then the chase car would drop off and another one would pick up and it would repeat the signal. And this went on day after day. In fact, the people in the van used to sing the song We're watching you. Wherever you go, whatever you do, we will be watching you. That became their theme song.
With the chase cars in pursuit and the bug successfully transmitting Avelino and Carlo's exchanges were recorded and the results were instantaneous.
Within a day. It's just what you want, Tony Ducks. Corlo was in the car with Avellino. Coralo was the grumpiest person, just constantly griping and grumping about everything that occurred, and yeah, these people are following me all the time. Now, he had no idea.
That we were.
So Avelino says, well, yeah, but you know you're the boss of the family, so of course they're going to be following you. And he says, yeah, I am the boss of the family.
So I just picture of him sanway did he just actually say yeah.
Yeah, yeah, That's why I said it was funny. Within the first day or two we had the mob structure. They would be talking about other people and we could map out the family. And somehow it got into the Daily News of the New York Post and they put in a little org chart of the Lukesy crime family and Avellino showed it to Corlo, and Corlo turned to him. He says, you know, for the first time, they got it right. If you have to prove the existence of an enterprise, it was done.
Rumor and legend were turning into facts and evidence and evidence is how you built a winning case.
Our bug was producing incredible conversations about the commission. When the meetings were where they were what was discussed.
Were those conversations the first pieces of actual evidence of the Commission's existence.
There was nothing before it. What we had was proof beyond the reasonable doubt of the existence of the commission. These were the seminal conversations in that regard.
Investigators now had valuable information about the commission, given unintentionally by mobsters themselves. Then, to the FBI's amazement, one mafia boss was about to give even more, and this time they wouldn't need to bug him. He'd willingly share it on National TV.
Joseph Banano, for three decades was one of the top mafia figures in the United States. For more than a quarter century, he headed the New York organized crime family that bore his name. Banano, now seventy eight and in failing health, wanted to tell us that all his life he has been misunderstood.
Sometimes in life, patience and perseverance make all the difference, and law enforcement had shown plenty of both. And there are also times that you get a gift. It might come in the form of a recovered murder weapon, a cooperating witness, or in this case, a very public interview on sixty minutes.
A man of honor, old man of honor, I was the most respected man in New York. In Alova, the country.
In a now famous television interview, a recently retired Joe Banano decided to brazenly defy the Justice Department and the mob.
Why you fight for sharvive to protect your life?
Next?
Sure that's you, society.
Banano appeared to promote his self glorifying memoir, A Man of Honor.
I want the more of a respectful way. I wanted to honorable way all my life. I've been misunderstood.
But within the very pages of A Man of Honor was an unexpected bonus for law enforcement. Joe Banano had laid out a blueprint of the Commission, what it did, its purpose, its power, and how mob families were organized. It was a roadmap to an actual indictment of the Commission itself, utilizing all the evidence collected and amassed over the years. The only missing link to building the case was a hungry prosecutor willing to take on the challenge.
In nineteen eighty three, a man was thumbing through Banano's book. When he finished, he turned to his assistant and said, if Banano can write about a commission, I can indict it. That man was a young US attorney named Rudy Giuliani.
The question you here increasingly now is who's Rudolph Juliani and what does he want?
Well, I'm the United States Attorney and what I want.
Is to be as effective as I can be as a United States Attorney.
What I say to my students is there's two kinds of lawyers and the dime a dozen lawyers are those that you go to you lay something out, and they can tell you what all the issues are. The good lawyers are the ones that have a can do personality. Let's figure out what we want to do and how we can legally do it and use the law to back us up rather than stop us. Julianni was that type of prosecutor. I trusted him. I should say he
was a different person than that he is today. He was the right person at the right place, at the right time. I gave Rudy a call and sketched out for him how we could do the commission as an enterprise and indict the heads of the five families. He was ready to go.
You go from Jaegar Hoover referencing that there was no mafia that was fictitious, It did not exist. Two decades later, a prominent prosecution not only saying that Klosinostra exists, but we are identifying and we are going to utilize this to dismantle organized crime by cutting off its head. I mean, it was a seismic event in terms of the war against the mafia. Just absolutely historic.
The dominoes were falling, leading to a defining moment in American history. The Mafia Commission.
Case next time on Law and Order Criminal Justice System.
So the threat was, if you don't pay us what we want, we all shut your job down.
We all knew that to kill a boss and a family you had to have commission approval.
And his idea was we do a case involving the board of Directors of the American Mafia.
It was an incredible feeling on several levels. Whose bright idea was that to entrust this case to guys of this experience level, no matter how confident you may or may not think they are.
Law and Order Criminal Justice System is a production of Wolf Entertainment and iHeart podcasts. Our host is Anisega Nicolazi. This episode was written by Chandler Mays and Anisega Nicolazi. Executive produced by Dick Wolf, Elliott Wolf and Stephen Michael At Wolf Entertainment on behalf of iHeartRadio. Executive produced by Alex Williams and Matt Frederick, with supervising producers Trevor Young and Chandler Mays and producers Jesse Funk, Nooms Griffin, and
Rima El Kali. This season is executive produced by Anna Sega Nicolazzi, story producer Walker Lamond. Our researchers are Carolyn Talmage and Luke Stents. Editing and sound designed by Jesse Funk, original music by John O'Hara, original theme by Mike Post, additional music by Steve Moore, and additional voice over by me Steve Zernkelton. Special thanks to Fox five in New York, ABC and CBS for providing archival material for the show.
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio and Wolf Entertainment, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Thanks for listening.