Speaker 1(00:03):
You’re listening to Law and Order Criminal Justice System, a
production of Wolf Entertainment and iHeart podcasts.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
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.
Speaker 3 (00:39):
You have said the US government has tried to destroy
You’s sure? Why have they failed to destroy you?
Speaker 4 (00:46):
They haven’t failed you.
Speaker 3 (00:48):
They haven’t failed well yet they may still get you.
Speaker 4 (00:50):
For sure. All my life I’ve been misunderstore it. I
just the rule of my family as a father.
Speaker 1 (01:00):
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.
Speaker 4 (01:24):
Why was your fight to survive? To protect your life?
Make sure dot you so sick?
Speaker 1 (01:34):
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.
Speaker 5 (01:52):
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 the government’s theory.
I mean, this doesn’t exist. So that was the defense
back then.
Speaker 1 (02:12):
Charlotte Lang is a former FBI supervisor who spent years
investigating organized crime.
Speaker 5 (02:19):
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.
Speaker 1 (02:35):
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
(02:59):
and violent crimes of their underlings. They could be held
responsible for every act of extortion, theft, bribery, or murder
that occurred at their behest. In short, it was a
game changer and an opportunity not lost on Charlotte Lang,
her FBI partner Pat Marshall, and the newly appointed US
Attorney for New York.
Speaker 5 (03:20):
I’ve had in one morning and Pa turned to me
and he said, Rudy wants that book that Bonano wrote.
Speaker 1 (03:28):
Through the eyes of New York’s top cop. Banano’s book
was essentially a manual for taking down the mob.
Speaker 4 (03:34):
Question you here increasingly now is who’s Rudolph Juliani and
what does he want?
Speaker 1 (03:40):
What he wanted was clear, put these bosses in front
of a jury and behind bars.
Speaker 6 (03:58):
You’re not with the mob because you want to be.
Speaker 7 (04:01):
It’s the gangster that decides whether you’re his associated on.
Speaker 5 (04:04):
If you like your life, you will vote to acquit.
Speaker 1 (04:08):
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
(04:31):
organized crime task force.
Speaker 6 (04:33):
No.
Speaker 5 (04:34):
I had seen the movie The Godfather, but that was it.
Speaker 1 (04:40):
Charlotte’s story of becoming an FBI agent is a unique one.
Speaker 5 (04:45):
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
recruiting people. A friend of mine who was really really
(05:08):
close to I said to her, I said, I’m seriously
thinking of putting in for it, and she goes, oh, no, no, no,
no no. And she told me why because she had
a good friend who was a CIA agent. You don’t
want to do this. You won’t be able to keep
your pets and everything like that. So I thought to myself,
the FBI, Well that’s kind of similar.
Speaker 1 (05:30):
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
(05:51):
the operative word.
Speaker 5 (05:53):
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.
Speaker 1 (06:08):
But despite the challenges, Charlotte hit the ground running, getting
her first assignment from Jim Kostler.
Speaker 5 (06:15):
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.
Speaker 1 (06:24):
Charlotte joined street teams, rounding of low level gangsters and
drug dealers.
Speaker 5 (06:28):
I mean, yes, it was dangerous in many instances, but
it was exciting.
Speaker 1 (06:34):
Her skills were soon recognized, even by the boss who’d
believed that women didn’t belong working organized crime.
Speaker 5 (06:41):
He quickly realized that he could depend on me.
Speaker 1 (06:46):
Charlotte was eventually partnered with Pat Marshall to gather evans
that would later be crucial to the Commission case.
Speaker 5 (06:54):
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.
Speaker 1 (07:06):
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.
Speaker 5 (07:19):
We all knew that to kill a boss in a family,
you had to have the commission approval. So, in other words,
if you have 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.
Speaker 1 (07:39):
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 in New York, Rudy Giuliani,
(08:01):
was tasked with a different job, assembling a rockstar team
of young lawyers to take on the city’s most infamous criminals.
Speaker 8 (08:10):
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.
Speaker 1 (08:20):
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.
Speaker 8 (08:35):
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.
Speaker 1 (08:49):
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.
Speaker 8 (09:02):
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.
(09:24):
Who helped me put the case together, do the investigation,
and then he can assist me at the trial. My
unit chief came to me and said, the US Attorney
would like you to work on this case with him.
He’ll try it, but you’ll get an opportunity to be
at the trial and participate and do the investigation. And
it’s a great opportunity. So I said, fine, I’m happy
to do it.
Speaker 1 (09:45):
Michael’s first step was learning to plan.
Speaker 8 (09:48):
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.
Speaker 1 (10:13):
In other words, it was custom made for taking down
the mob.
Speaker 8 (10:17):
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.
Speaker 1 (10:31):
And central to their strategy would be Joe Banano’s ill
conceived criminal memoir, and in the.
Speaker 8 (10:37):
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.
Speaker 1 (10:59):
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.
Speaker 5 (11:07):
Even in nineteen fifty seven he feigned his heart attack
and that he would die if he had to travel.
Speaker 1 (11:14):
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.
Speaker 5 (11:25):
Well, of course, Rudy being Rudy, he was like, we’re
going out there and we’re going to do it at
the hospital.
Speaker 1 (11:32):
Just picture the scene. It’s an entire army of agents
and prosecutors, defense attorneys, judges all getting on a plane.
Speaker 5 (11:40):
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
(12:03):
said that he had this going on, and that going on.
Speaker 1 (12:07):
Banano’s doctor was a member of his family and just
a med student. But the government had their own expert too.
Speaker 5 (12:15):
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.
Speaker 1 (12:28):
Still, Banano 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.
(12:49):
With or without Joe Banano’s testimony, they would need hard
evidence proving that the five families had conspired to commit
crimes of all shapes and sizes, including In nineteen eighty five,
(13:14):
Michael Cherdoff was a young federal prosecutor in the office
of then US Attorney Rudy Giuliani, who was building a
case that they hoped would take down the New York
mob once and for all, the scope of the investigation
was huge.
Speaker 8 (13:29):
There had been a series of family based investigations going on,
and some of those involved very extensive electronic surveillance wire
tapping your bugs.
Speaker 1 (13:40):
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.
Speaker 5 (13:55):
There were certain days where I used to say to myself,
I can’t believe I’m getting paid to do that.
Speaker 1 (14:01):
On multiple occasions, Charlotte was sent in undercover infiltrating the
Genevese family to eavesdrop on conversations.
Speaker 5 (14:09):
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.
Speaker 1 (14:29):
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.
(14:49):
He was a savvy businessman known for his cutthroat approach
to negotiating major deals. When it came to the financial
dealings of the mob, Castellano was arbitern. For Charlotte, listening
in on a mob boss was just another day at work,
and as it turned out, the female FBI agents had
(15:09):
some advantages that the old guard had underestimated.
Speaker 5 (15:13):
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.
Speaker 1 (15:34):
The Maitre d sat the women directly next to Castellano
and Salerno, access unheard of from any of their male counterparts.
Speaker 5 (15:43):
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.
Speaker 1 (16:01):
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.
Speaker 8 (16:17):
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.
Speaker 1 (16:38):
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.
Speaker 6 (17:00):
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
(17:21):
realized that that’s Hollywood and it’s not, in fact, anything
like what the Mob is really like.
Speaker 1 (17:29):
John was assigned to assist Michael Chertoff and Rudy Giuliani.
Speaker 6 (17:33):
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.
Speaker 1 (17:51):
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.
Speaker 6 (18:05):
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
(18:28):
be assured labor peace because the Mob had infiltrated the
chief unions that did that kind of work.
Speaker 1 (18:37):
Labor unions cooperated because of bribes, corrupted leadership elections, and
of course physical violence.
Speaker 6 (18:45):
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.
Speaker 1 (19:02):
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.
Speaker 6 (19:15):
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.
Speaker 1 (19:37):
But the cooperation of these legitimate business owners was given
at great risk to lives and livelihoods.
Speaker 6 (19:44):
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.
Speaker 1 (19:55):
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
(20:16):
not afraid to intimidate others.
Speaker 6 (20:19):
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,
(20:41):
of course was terrorizing the person on the receiving end
of that message.
Speaker 1 (20:48):
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.
Speaker 6 (21:02):
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.
Speaker 1 (21:17):
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
(21:38):
conversations about the Concrete scheme that could be used in court,
and the results spoke for themselves.
Speaker 4 (21:45):
Did you have still on your opinion?
Speaker 5 (21:47):
He’s yeah, gable only to win.
Speaker 6 (21:54):
Hey, I done, glad book.
Speaker 1 (21:57):
That’s little Ralphie Scopo talking to a man named Alphonsal
d 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,
(22:21):
we talked about the nineteen eighty two bug planted in
the black Jaguar of the Luksey Captain Salvator Avellino.
Speaker 9 (22:29):
I won provided that your guys, price is right. Could
price It’s the same as DNA price.
Speaker 5 (22:45):
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.
Speaker 1 (22:57):
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,
(23:17):
it was an opportunity to trade up for a higher
ranking member of the family. Members of the mafia were
notoriously hard to flip, but the more incriminating evidence the
FBI gathered, the stronger their leverage, and eventually they hid Peydr.
Speaker 5 (23:34):
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.
Speaker 1 (23:45):
But would this Cleveland mob boss agree to cooperate and
provide evidence from the witness stand The FBI was patient
and persistent.
Speaker 5 (23:55):
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.
Speaker 1 (24:04):
To flip Lenardo was facing life for narcotics trafficking, so ultimately,
in exchange for a reduced sentence, he agreed to spill
everything he knew.
Speaker 5 (24:16):
He would basically say, how it works. You have associates,
you have soldiers, you have made members. I called him
Ange because we got to spend a Christmas together. Ange’s
story was his father was the head of the family
at one particular point, but his father was murdered, and
(24:39):
the story goes, I think Ange might have been a
teenager at the time, and his mother walked him down
to a particular building and she handed him a gun
and said, you go in there and you kill so
and so, because she had determined that’s who had killed
her husband. And that’s what Angelo did to this club,
(25:01):
shot him and ran out.
Speaker 1 (25:04):
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.
Speaker 8 (25:19):
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.
Speaker 1 (25:33):
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.
Speaker 8 (25:57):
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
(26:18):
Stanley Friedman, who is the Bronx Sparrow president. He’s been
indicted for corruption charges five a Southern district. Rudy has
decided he’s going to try that case, so you’re obviously
going to take over being the lead lawyer in the
Commission case. And she said, I always thought this might happen,
and I kind of warned you about this.
Speaker 1 (26:40):
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
(27:01):
the Commission case left leadership in the hands of the
thirty two year old Michael Cherdoff.
Speaker 8 (27:08):
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.
Speaker 1 (27:21):
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.
Speaker 7 (27:41):
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.
Speaker 1 (27:53):
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.
(28:20):
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.
Speaker 8 (28:30):
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
(28:52):
up and take notice.
Speaker 1 (28:55):
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
(29:17):
tie them all to the crime. But to prove that,
the team knew they would have to start with the
murder itself, a case that had so far gone cold.
They went back with the one clear piece of evidence
that they had the getaway car. A witness had identified
(29:37):
the make and model, as well as a partial license plate.
From that information, police quickly recovered the car. A print
had been lifted from the back passenger door, but had
not led to any identifications, at least not yet. But
later investigators would have a Eureka moment.
Speaker 7 (29:56):
Someone had the bright idea, well, maybe this is not
a fingerprint, maybe this is a palm print.
Speaker 1 (30:03):
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.
Speaker 7 (30:24):
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.
Speaker 1 (30:45):
It would prove to be a major break in the case.
Speaker 7 (30:48):
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.
Speaker 1 (31:01):
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.
Speaker 7 (31:18):
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.
Speaker 1 (31:31):
To it, that is until they tested his pom prints.
Speaker 7 (31:37):
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.
(32:00):
Vich had the crime se 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
that print. So you could effectively argue that the last
person who touched that door handle was the last person
(32:22):
in that car. So it became pretty convincing proof that
in Delcata was one of the mass shooters and had
jumped into the backseat of that car.
Speaker 1 (32:32):
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.
Speaker 7 (32:52):
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.
Speaker 1 (33:13):
Club, and authorities just happened to be surveilling the club
on the day Glante.
Speaker 7 (33:18):
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
(33:40):
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 the back. I mean, it’s not like
they were popping champagne corks, but it was sort of like,
all right, something happened.
Speaker 1 (34:03):
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.
Speaker 8 (34:27):
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.
Speaker 1 (34:47):
But the video of the Indelacado meeting was not the
only riveting show in town.
Speaker 8 (34:53):
There was one instance where the Commission as a whole
met somewhere in Staten Island and the FBI got wind
ofvid it was would say photographs.
Speaker 1 (35:02):
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.
Speaker 10 (35:17):
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 the same time and coming
back out at the same time.
Speaker 1 (35:32):
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.
Speaker 10 (35:47):
Tony Solearro, Paul Costellano, Tony Tuscarolo, sam f Santaorro.
Speaker 1 (35:54):
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.
Speaker 10 (36:04):
Yeah, exactly, Yeah, that was the first time we’d ever
seen them all together in one place.
Speaker 1 (36:09):
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.
Speaker 8 (36:35):
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.
Speaker 1 (36:58):
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 Geneviz crime family, Tony Dux Caralo, boss of
Lukesey crime family, and Philip Rusty Ristelli, boss of the
(37:19):
Banano crime family, as well as multiple underbosses. Investigators got
the green light to make the arrests. So Charlotte Lang
and her FBI team, along with multiple other law enforcement organizations,
developed a synchronized plan to grab everyone at the same time.
Speaker 5 (37:37):
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
(37:59):
pupp felicity that was coming out. They were afraid it
was going to come out on the news.
Speaker 1 (38:05):
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
(38:26):
trial date was set. In the meantime, the mobsters were
allowed to return home and await their day in court,
where they could only speculate and stew about potential traders
in their midst According to one informant, some vowed revenge,
while others were thought to be plotting to assassinate the
very lawyers who were poised to put them away, a
(38:48):
course of action ultimately rejected by the Commission. One thing
was clear. The government had mafia leadership feeling trapped, but
when backed in a corner, they might prove to be
they’re most dangerous.
Speaker 5 (39:03):
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.
Speaker 3 (39:27):
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.
Speaker 2 (39:48):
Next time, on Law and Order Criminal Justice System, we.
Speaker 10 (39:52):
Were right there in the thick of things. Whenever the
bodies were still laying on the street. It was chaos.
Speaker 6 (39:57):
When the trial was first getting underway, the courtroom was
absolutely packed.
Speaker 8 (40:02):
Well, you’re most nervous about are the witnesses? Are they
gonna wither under cross examination? Are they gonna be able
to stand up?
Speaker 5 (40:09):
He just sounded like a mob loost and the jury
was like hanging on every word he was saying.
Speaker 7 (40:16):
You know, you certainly didn’t want to be known as
the three guys who let the mob get off.
Speaker 2 (40:25):
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
(40:49):
Alex Williams and Matt Frederick, with supervising producers Trevor Young
and Chandler Mays and producers Jesse Funk, Nolms Griffin and Reali.
This season is executive produced by Anna Sega Nicolazzi, story
producer Walker lamond. Our researchers are Carolyn Talmage and Luke Stentz.
(41:13):
Editing in sound design by Rema Alkali, 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
(41:33):
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.
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