S1 E4: Breaking Omerta

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 many women who investigate and prosecute these cases are part of a select group that is defined American history. These are their stories. April nineteen eighty three, The home of Joe Bonano, Tucson, Arizona.

You have said the US government has tried to destroy you, that's sure.

Why have they.

Failed to destroy you?

They haven't failed you.

They haven't failed well yet they may still get you.

For sure.

All my life I've been misunderstore it. I just the rule of my family.

As a father.

When Joe Banano, the head of the Banano crime family, went on sixty Minutes in nineteen eighty three, he did something nobody had expected him to do. He admitted the very existence of the mafia. In his book, he all but confirmed the cooperation between the five major crime families, including things like dividing territory and sharing profits.

Why was your fight to survive?

To protect your life?

Make sure dot you so sick?

Banano was promoting a memoir of his life in crime, a public display of hubris that would have been unheard of in Lucky Luciano's day. So while being the first former boss to publicly acknowledge the existence of the mafia, Banano had also made a grave miscalculation.

Back then, every time an OC figure was arrested and go to Troo or something like that, the defense atorneys. Their argument was this stake organized crime, lacos and nostra. This is like a miss. This is a government's theory. I mean, this doesn't exist. So that was the defense back then.

Charlotte Lang is a former FBI supervisor who spent years investigating organized crime.

What had happened was Banano. His book was about his problems with the Commission, and he basically tells you that the commission existed, and he hid out from the four other bosses for a period of time.

The commission was like the executive board of the five families running and ruining New York City and beyond, and Banano's admission of its existence gave law enforcement a new angle of attack, because proof of a commission meant a way to link the families together and prove a conspiracy. No longer would crime bosses be insulated from the ruthless and violent crimes of their underlings. They could be held responsible for every act of extortion, theft, bribery, or murder

I had in one morning and Pap turned to me and he said, Rudy wants that book that Bonano wrote.

Through the eyes of New York's top cop. Banano's book was essentially a manual for taking down the mob.

Question you here increasingly now is who is Rudolph Juliani and what does he want?

What he wanted was clear, put these bosses in front of a jury and behind bars.

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. Did you know anything about organized crime before you are now assigned to an organized crime task force.

No.

I had seen the movie The Godfather, but that was it.

Charlotte's story of becoming an FBI agent is a unique one.

When I was in college, the first two years, I was in pre med because I was either going to be a psychiatrist or veterinarian, was what I was thinking. And after I finished my sophomore year, I thought to myself, I don't want to do this. I would read the Washington Post and I saw this article the CIA was

So instead of the CIA, Charlotte applied to the FBI, thinking she'd travel the world instead. Charlotte soon ended up in New York working one of the most notoriously difficult beats in the Bureau Organized Crime. Adding to the challenge, remnants of the FBI's outdated g man culture, man being the operative word.

A particular supervisor said to me, I didn't ask for you. Women can't work organized crime. You will be the only woman on this squad as long as I'm here. That was my introduction to Welcome to New York.

But despite the challenges, Charlotte hit the ground running, getting her first assignment from Jim Kostler.

Jim said to me, I'm going to put you on the Genevieve's squad until everybody's here and we're up and running.

Charlotte joined street teams, rounding of low level gangsters and drug dealers.

I mean, yes, it was dangerous in many instances, but it was exciting.

Her skills were soon recognized, even by the boss who'd believed that women didn't belong working organized crime.

He quickly realized that he could depend on me.

Charlotte was eventually partnered with Pat Marshall to gather evans that would later be crucial to the Commission case.

So the squad that I was assigned to was the Bonano family squad, and there were a couple ti capos in the family that we were going to zero in on.

And part of that was looking to the past, namely the assassination of Carmine Galante. While it occurred a couple of years before Charlotte joined the Bureau, they sensed its significance.

We all knew that to kill a boss in a family, you had to have the commission approval. So, in other words, if you a boss of a family and you go to a meeting where there's only four of you, it's like, you know, somebody is in trouble at that particular point.

Which means if they could solve Galante's murder, they might have the evidence they needed to prove a criminal conspiracy between the five families, and like Domino's Down, they would fall. And while Charlotte and the FBI were gathering their evidence, the ambitious new US Attorney for New York, Rudy Giuliani, was tasked with a different job, assembling a rockstar team of young lawyers to take on the city's most infamous criminals.

My name is Michael Cherdoff, and in nineteen eighty five was a relatively new assistant United States Attorney in the Southern District of New York U S Attorney's.

Office Michael Chertoff is a former Secretary of Homeland Security and the co author of the US Patriot Act. But when he started in the US Attorney's office, he was still pretty green, a recent law school graduate eager to earn his stripes.

So I started in the four of eighty three. I tried three or four small cases in what they called general crimes in order to begin to just get accustomed to trying cases in front of a jury in a courtroom.

But with his command of the courtroom, Michael quickly attracted the attention of his superior, who was eager to surround himself with just the right personalities and skill sets for his fight against the mob.

The assignment actually came to me in eighty four, and what happened was I had been in general crimes, and the US Attorney at the time, whose name will be very familiar to you, Rudolf W. Guliani, reached out to my unit chief and said, I've got an idea for a case I want to prosecute and try myself. I want you to assign Michael Cherdoff to help me do that. Who helped me put the case together, do the investigation,

Michael's first step was learning to plan.

The way the US attorney was thinking about it was this there had been a series of cases under the Racketeering Statute that were focused on attacking an entire organi crime family as an organization, because the Racketeering Statute really allowed you, for the first time to build a case that was organizationally focused in not just individual crimes.

In other words, it was custom made for taking down the mob.

And his idea was supposing, instead of just looking family by family, we do a case involving the board of Directors of the American Mafia, which is known as the Commission.

And central to their strategy would be Joe Banano's ill conceived criminal memoir, and in the.

Book he discussed his experiences as a mob boss, including talking about being on the Commission, and Giuliani thought, well, that's great, this is a roadmap to a case involving the Commission. And actually we're going to try to force Banana to testify so we can actually use his evidence about the background of the Commission.

But it was harder to deal with than they'd hoped. By this time, he had moved to Tucson, Arizona, and was claiming to have a number of health issues.

Even in nineteen fifty seven he feigned his heart attack and that he would die if he had to travel.

But Giuliani was persistent. At first, Banana claimed he was too ill to go to New York and provide testimony, so the government went to him.

Well, of course, Rudy being Rudy, he was like, we're going out there and we're going to do it at the hospital.

Just picture the scene. It's an entire army of agents, prosecutors, defense attorneys, judges all getting on a plane.

This was like this traveling show from New York. This was like big news in Arizona because his famous United States attorney in New York who's taking the mob down, is coming to Tucson. And so what happened was we had this proceeding as to whether he was physically fit enough to testify. Of course, his doctor gone on and said that he had this going on, and that going on.

Banano's doctor was a member of his family and just a med student. But the government had their own expert too.

We had a doctor from New York who had examined him. And this doctor, of course was stellar, and with his credentials in every sale the cent, there's no reason why he can't travel to New York.

Still, Banana refused to travel or cooperate, but Giuliani wasn't done. He asked the judge to hold Banano in contempt of court. The judge complied, and from there Banano went to prison, the longest time that this aging mobster had ever been locked up, and he stayed there for over a year.

There had been a series of family based investigations going on, and some of those involved very extensive electronic surveillance wire tapping your bugs.

In addition to secret recording devices. The FBI embarked on more target emissions too, surveilling specific suspects to witness their interactions with other mobsters firsthand. Here's former FBI agent Charlotte Lang.

There were certain days where I used to say to myself, I can't believe I'm getting paid to do that.

On multiple occasions, Charlotte was sent in undercover infiltrating the Genevese family to eavesdrop on conversations.

When we had information from the wires, like when fat Tony Sellerno would meet with Paul Castellano, and of course they would go to really nice restaurants in New York and we would go in maybe two women, sometimes there were three of us, try to get at a table close to observe what was going on two.

Of New York's most infamous mob bosses, Tony Sellerno of the Genovese family and Paul Castellano, head of the Gambino family. It was no small feat to go after Paul Castellano. At the time, the Gambino family was arguably the most powerful of all the families, and Castellano sat at the top. He was a savvy businessman known for his cutthroat approach to negotiating major deals. When it came to the financial

Karin Higgins, who was on the Columbo squad, she was about seven months pregnant, and so when we went into this restaurant, I spotted them. As soon as we came through the door, I said to the may Or D, I said, can we sit over there, as you could see, my friend is pregnant and she shouldn't be sitting in a draft or anything like that.

The Maitre d sat the women directly next to Castellano and Salerno, access unheard of from any of their male counterparts.

When we went back to the office to write up the three to two of what we saw what we heard, I said, I didn't think this was ever going to come to an end. They were very animated because they were disputing the profits that were coming from the shakedowns of the cement companies.

Salerno was also a major focus in the investigation, particularly because the Genovese family was so involved with the construction industry, and as Michael Cherdoff explains, that concrete business was big business for the mob, including the Commission.

It was all about this construction issue. How they controlled all the concrete being poured to build buildings in Manhattan, and two percent went to the family that controlled the particular labor union, and the other two percent went to the Commission to be divided up among the members of the Commission and their families.

So basically, the money first went to the top and then trickled down within each family from there, and the FBI heard all about it. The Concrete Club, as it became known, would become key evidence, so its inner workings became extremely familiar to the prosecutors working the case, including another prosecutor who soon joined the team.

My name is John Savarice, and I was an assistant US attorney in the US Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York here in Manhattan. I think I didn't know a whole lot more than anyone who saw the Godfather movies knew all of which of course I had seen because they're terrific films, but you very quickly realized that that's Hollywood and it's not, in fact, anything like what the Mob is really like.

John was assigned to assist Michael Chertoff and Rudy Giuliani.

So the first things I started working on was helping to put witnesses into the grand jury, helping to assemble additional evidence that would go into the grand jury, and helping to craft what would be the ultimate superseding indictment, the one that we went to trial on.

By this time, enough evidence had been gathered that prosecutors felt ready to present their case to a grand jury, which meant this case was likely heading for true and one of the central pieces to their case would be concrete.

What we were doing was trying to build out what is called the Club scheme or the club aspect of the Commission case, and that was the whole narrative around the extortion of the concrete industry in New York to extract penalty from each concrete contractor in order that they be assured labor peace because the Mob had infiltrated the chief unions that did that kind of work.

Labor unions cooperated because of bribes, corrupted leadership elections, and of course physical violence.

And so the threat was, if you don't pay us what we want, we'll shut your job down. We'll have the union that we essentially control go out on strike, and that is devastating obviously to a construction company.

The Mob pushed city construction costs up by about twenty percent. By the late eighties, it was reported that as much as seventy five percent of New York's construction industry was controlled by the MOB.

We spent a lot of time with several leaders of construction companies that had been victimized by this commission driven scheme to get an understanding of what building projects were impacted by the scheme, how they felt, what drove them to do what they agreed to do, and why.

But the cooperation of these legitimate business owners was given at great risk to lives and livelihoods.

I do remember getting the strong sense of the fear that they felt from Ralph Scopo, who was sort of the chief enforcer of the scheme.

Ralph Scopa was a member of the Columbo family. While he sat as president of their youth union. Concrete contractors were forced to pay thousands of dollars for labor peace a one percent kickback was given to Scopo on their projects such as the public library in the Bronx, a police station in Brooklyn, and in addition to the city jail on Rikers Island. He was a man who was not afraid to intimidate others.

We had a tape recording of Ralph Scopo in a conversation with one of these contractors and he referenced something that had been in the newspapers about a mob hit someone who had been murdered. He said roughly something like, well, you know, you don't want that to happen to you, which, of course was terrorizing the person on the receiving end of that message.

But despite the huge scale of the operation, most of these transactions were handled in person by mob members, and this worked to the FBI's advantage because it's easier to tail a couple of soldiers than the commission itself.

It's happening usually in cash, person to person, and we did have tape recorded evidence at trial of various members of the mob who were the kind of footmen on the ground running the scheme.

And because it was also profitable, it was something that all five of the families participated in, so cracking the Concrete Club would be the surest way to prove their criminal cooperation. So law enforcement worked from all angles, planting bugs and wire taps, conducting surveillance, hoping to gather incriminating conversations about the Concrete Scheme that could be used in court. And the results spoke for themselves.

Did you still on your opinions?

Yeah?

Gable only to win?

Hey, I done, glad book.

That's little Ralphie Scopo talking to a man named alphonsald Ambrosia, a fellow member of the Colombo family, and they But Ralph Scopo and fat Tony Sealerno weren't the only mobsters that Charlotte kept tabs on. In the last episode, we talked about the nineteen eighty two bug planted in the black Jaguar of the Luksey Captain Salvator Avellino won.

Provided that your guys, price is right.

Could price it's the same as DNA price.

When you have a boss, an underboss and Consiglieria being driven around and they're chatting away about all their illegal activities. I mean, it was a treasure trove of information.

That Jaguar in the and the Jaguar bug would be a critical source of information in the government's case against the commission. Another piece of evidence they wanted the cooperating testimony of one of the conspirators themselves. Every time a mobster was picked up on charges and facing possible jail time, it was an opportunity to trade up for a higher

Then we had another boss by the name of Angelo Leonardo, and he was the boss of the Cleveland family, and he went to jail for drug charges.

But would this Cleveland mob boss agree to cooperate and provide evidence from the witness stand The FBI was patient and persistent.

And there was an agent in Cleveland that used to go and visit him, say hey, Angelo, how you doing and everything I got So basically this agent got Angelo to flip.

Lenardo was facing life for narcotics trafficking, so ultimately, in exchange for a reduced sentence, he agreed to spill everything he knew.

He would basically say, how it works. You have associates, you have soldiers, you have made members. I called him

His story speaks to why the mafia has proven to be so popular and even romanticized in pop culture. Despite their crimes often heartless and brutal, many could also be disarmingly charming. Leonardo was one of them.

He was polite, he was intelligent. He was able to give background about the commission, how the commission worked, what kinds of things they decided, general background on the way the mob operates.

But before the case went to trial, the man in charge of the entire investigation, who had staked his reputation on success, would make the shocking decision to step away and instead handle a political case that he believed would be even higher profile. And of course we're talking about the future mayor of New York, Rudy Giuliani. Here's Michael Cherdoff.

Now, the original concept was Rudy would try it, Giuliani, and I would be his second chair and assistant, so there'd be a more experienced prosecutor leading the entire prosecution. So what happened is late eighty four or early eighty five, I got called in by my unit chief and she said to me, you've read about this new indictment of Stanley Friedman, who is the Bronx Sparrow president. He's been

According to Giuliani, he believed the Commission case to be air tight, and he trusted his young lawyers to bring the convictions home. His critics say that the city corruption trial promised us squaring off against a political rival, and that Giuliani hoped to ride that victory straight to the Mayor's office. But regardless of his motives, his exit from the commission case left leadership in the hands of the thirty two year old Michael Cherdoff.

So it was a little bit like that famous play All About Eve, where the understudy winds up stepping into the starring role. All of a sudden, I found myself as the lead prosecutor in the commission case.

Sitting in the second chair was an even younger John Savay's Gil Childers crossed over the river from the Brooklyn DIA's office to fill out the team. Together. They had less than fifteen years experience in the courtroom, and these three were about to face off with the entire New York City mob. Here's Gil.

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 competent you may or may not think they are.

It was the kind of case that could make or break careers, but more importantly, a win that could finally break the mafia stranglehold on the citizens of New York. And while they're at it, they might even solve a murder. The three lawyer team decided to dig deeper into the murder of Carmen Galanti. Michael Cherdoff says it may have been the most important piece of the case.

An act of violence has a dramatic effect, unlike tapes or people talking about paying money, and it makes in a very real way, the jury understand that we're talking about here is not just you who gets money from a contract, but who lives and dies. And the fact that you have a criminal organization that is willing to chose someone in a restaurant, I think makes everybody sit up and take notice.

As you'll remember, Carma Galanti had emerged in the late seventies as the de facto of the Banano crime family while the actual boss, Rusty Rostelli, was in prison. When Galante was gunned down at a Brooklyn restaurant, his assailants may have disappeared, but investigators knew that it could only happen with approval from the Commission, which, if proven, would

Someone had the bright idea, well, maybe this is not a fingerprint, maybe this is a palm print.

I think that the person was Michael Chertoff, And that's one of the things I love about homicide investigations. There's always something new. They thought about how someone actually opens a car door, not with your fingertips, but with your open palm. So just maybe it was a pomp print that could break this case that had sat dormant now for years.

A palm print at first blush looks very much like a fingerprint depending on where it comes from, but you know the same swirl patterns, et cetera. It was decided that we needed a full set of what are called major case prints, which include not only the fingers but also the palms of each of the person's hands.

It would prove to be a major break in the case.

There had been a fair amount of inform and information that a Banano soldier at the time in nineteen seventy nine, Brunlan Delcado was one of the shooters.

If you'll remember Bruno and Dela Kado was someone that Joe Cantameso ran into on a wiretap job and Dela Kado was a nervous wreck after his father sonny Red, was shot dead just a few blocks away. That was part of the so called Three Kapos murder.

His prints were among those who were compared to that print in the car on the door handle and with no avail, with no match, so Bruno was still a person of interest, but there was nothing to tie him to.

It, that is until they tested his pom prints.

He was brought in and got a full set of prints, including his palm prints, and those were immediately sent to the police NYPD. The fingerprint expert gus Lesnovitch looked at it and took no time at all and banged at Bruno's pom print on that door handle. It was really big. Vich had the crimes guys removed the door handle from the car. He had that door handle in his office, but you could see that no one could have opened that door handle after that print was left without obscuring

The importance of the discovery cannot be overstated. It was proof of the identity of one of the shooters in Carmangalanti's murder, which had eluded law enforcement for years. It also linked to another piece of evidence that had been gathered the same day of the murder, which once again pointed to in Delacado.

There was a club in Lower Manhattan called the Ravennite, and this was a Gambino family social club, and it was run by the underboss of the Gambino family at the time. And if you weren't a member of the family and more specifically the crew that sort of ran and hung out in that social club, you wouldn't go into that.

Club, and authorities just happened to be surveilling the club on the day Glante was murdered.

And about half an hour after the murders took place in Delocado and a couple of other Banano guys show up at the ravenite and guys come out of the ravenite. Bruno never goes in, but the consolieri of the Banana family comes out of the ravennite with another guy or two Gambino guys, and they have discussion, very animated discussion with Bruno and these other guys, and then there's this congratulatory handshake with Bruno and sort of a slap on

Together with the pomp print evidence, this meeting served as proof of what law enforcement had long suspected. One that Bruno and Delakato was one of the people who murdered Carma Galanti, and two his appearance at the club also tied at least two families together in the crime. This was the bow, if you will, one of the final and most important puzzle pieces to tie the Commission case together.

It makes real in a way that just talking about construction fraud and construction shakedowns doesn't that the mob is a violent organization. It crystallizes what is the essence of what lies behind the mob's power, which is the ability to carry out violent actions, including murder.

But the video of the Indelacado meeting was not the only riveting show in town.

There was one instance where the Commission as a whole met somewhere in Staten Island and the FBI got wind of itd was would say photographs.

A tip about the meeting came in from an anonymous source, so on May fifteenth, nineteen eighty four, an FBI team staked out the area and waited. Finally, around four pm they got what they needed.

The agents went out there with cameras and they photographed all the bosses of the families and their number two guys going into this house at the same time and coming back out at the same time.

That was former FBI special Agent Jim Kostler, who oversaw the team that captured the landmark meeting of mafia bosses. Not since the Apple Likan meeting in nineteen fifty seven. Had there been more clear proof of a commission gathering that.

Tony Solearro, Paul Costelano, Tony Tuscarolo, sam f Santaorro.

Was that the first time that you had them photographed, actually, that you had this physical documentation of a commission meeting, because you had the heads of all five families coming and going.

Yeah, exactly, yeah, that was the first time we'd ever seen them all together in one place.

The table was set. Chirt Off on his team finally had everything they needed. They had bugs revealing conversations between mob bosses and commission members. They had a number of witnesses and turncoat mobsters willing to testify. They had evidence of meetings with all the crime family leaders assembled together, and they had commission members sanctioning acts of violence, specifically murder.

So you know, those were all the kind of major sources of evidence. And what I had to do, which took me about a year from nineteen eighty four into early nineteen eighty five, I had to listen to everything. I had to make sure it was accurately transcribed, and then based on that I had to build the theory of a case and that would lead to the indictment.

In February of nineteen eighty five, the lengthy indictment was complete, including names of four mob bosses and five underbosses, Paul Castellano, boss of the Gambino crime family, fat Tony Salerno, boss of the Genoviz crime family, Tony Dux Caralo, boss of lou Casey crime family, and Philip Rusty Ristelli, boss of

We had made the decision from the get go because so many squads were involved in this. People from the Columbo squad were going to arrest Carmine Pertico, new Rochelle was going to handle arresting Fat Tony. That decision was made that the different squads would handle the arrest and I guess there was going to be some sort of pupp felicity that was coming out. They were afraid it was going to come out on the news.

In fact, a leak to the press almost blew their element of surprise. A week before the scheduled arrest. News of the gigantic case landed on the front page of the daily news the next day. Taking no chances that any of their targets would flee, agents rounded up the major players. The mob bosses were charged and arranged a

My bureau car was in the shop, so I was catching a ride to go home with an agent on the Genoese squad and we're sitting at the hall in tunnel and we aren't listening to the radio, we aren't doing anything, and he drops me off. I get home, I start doing stuff and I turned on the TV and that's how I found out the Castelano had been killed.

Shakespeare said of kings, uneasy lies the head that wears a crown. The same might be said of those who rise to the top of organized crime. They get there by violence, and often as not they leave by violence.

Next time, on Law and Order Criminal Justice System, we.

Were right there in the thick of things whenever the bodies were still laying on the street. It was chaos.

When the trial was first getting underway, the courtroom was absolutely packed.

Well, you're most nervous about are the witnesses? Are they gonna wither under cross examination? Are they gonna be able to stand up?

He just sounded like a mob loost and the jury was like hanging on every word he was saying.

You know, you certainly didn't want to be known as the three guys who let the mob get off.

Law and Order Criminal Justice System is a production of Wolf Entertainment and iHeart podcasts. Our host is Anna Sega Nicolazzi. This episode was written by Trevor Young and Anna Sega Nicolazzi. 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, Nolms Griffin and Reali.