Manhattan Mafia Guide (21 page)

Larry Quartiero was convicted on RICO charges in April 1983, receiving a one-year prison sentence and five years’ probation. However, a federal appeals court dismissed the charges in October 1983, blaming “overzealous prosecutors” for “misusing the system.”
¹¹¹

R
AO
, J
OSEPH

453 114
^th
Street, 1920; 413 East 117
^th
Street, 1930; 337 East 116
^th
Street, 1950s

Alias: Joey, Joseph Cangro, Cangero

Born: March 12, 1901, New York City

Died: May 10, 1962, New York City (stroke)

Association: Luciano/Genovese crime family

This veteran gangster is rarely written about these days, but he was one of the twentieth century’s most influential and visible mobsters. Joey Rao earned his criminal stripes as one of the earliest and most dedicated members of the murderous Dutch Schultz gang, before joining his brother-in-law (and sometimes partner in crime) Joseph “Stretch” Stacci in the Luciano (Genovese) family.

Rao grew up in East Harlem with his widowed mother, Frances, who immigrated to New York from Italy in 1883. He married his wife, Lena, in 1923 and had two children with her by 1930 while living at 413 East 117
^th
Street.

Joey Rao mug shots.

With a record dating back to 1920, this Harlem gangster’s criminal career was a long and rocky one. His dedication to Dutch Schultz nearly got him killed in a 1931 bootlegging war with Vincent “Mad Dog” Coll, a former Schultz enforcer who branched out with his own gang. On July 28, 1931, Rao survived a brazen summer’s eve hit outside the crew’s Helmar Social Club at 208 East 107
^th
Street. Six men with shotguns and automatic weapons fired more than sixty shots from a speeding automobile. The assassins missed their target, but five children were hit in the attack, one of whom died.

To give an idea of the sentiment toward Italians in the slums at the time, the following is a passage from
Time
magazine regarding the shooting:

Life in 107
^th
Street reaches its noisiest, most ebullient phase after the dinner hour. Fat, oily women, some without shoes, rattle dirty dishes. Their men sit smoking in front of the Helmar Social Club. Their litters of children play and quarrel shrilly all through the street. Into this babble and filth and smell one evening last week came Terror.
¹¹²

The courtyards behind East 107
^th
Street, facing east from Third Avenue, in 1900.
Library of Congress
.

While serving a two-year term on Welfare Island Penitentiary for assault and conspiracy in the early 1930s, five-foot-seven, two-hundred-pound Rao was one of three “prison bosses,” running a gang that organized a narcotics and gambling operation and sold special privileges to other inmates. During his stay, Rao famously raised pigeons and lived in the spacious hospital ward, to which he referred as “politicians’ flats,” where he made homemade beer, held parties, kept a personal radio and had iceboxes full of snacks and non-prison-issued delicacies. (A 1939 Warner Brothers film starring John Garfield, entitled
Blackwell’s Island
, roughly fictionalizes Rao’s pampered prison life during this time.)

A row between Rao’s followers and a rival gang led to a riot and the death of one inmate in 1932, prompting a raid on the prison and a shake-up in the administration. The prison would close for good after 110 years in 1936, when a new city prison was built on Riker’s Island, which is still in operation.

In January 1935, with just a month left on his sentence, Rao was convicted on a two-year-old charge for the assault of a police officer outside an East Harlem dancehall on January 4, 1932, and sentenced to two years in Sing Sing, a term he served immediately after being released from Welfare Island.

In April 1939, Rao, Joseph Stacci and two others were arrested for vagrancy in a restaurant at 2246 First Avenue, but charges were almost immediately dismissed. Another vagrancy charge failed to stick in 1943.

In 1946, Rao and Michael “Trigger Mike” Coppola were implicated in the election day murder of Joseph Scottoriggio, a Republican party district captain who was viciously clubbed and stomped to death in front of his wife on the way to an East Harlem polling station. The men were held without bail for over a year as material witnesses, but neither was convicted.

By the 1950s, Rao was, according to the FBN, the “undisputed boss of all [heroin] rackets in the area of 1
^st
Avenue and East 116
^th
Street.” He was also the top man in Anthony Strollo’s crew and was instrumental in expanding the family’s racketeering operation into the shipping ports and terminals of New Jersey.

In May 1950, Joey Rao was listed by the Justice Department as being among the “top 150 racketeers” in the country, in the company of mob heavyweights like Frank Costello, Joe Adonis, Ralph Capone, Mickey Cohen and Meyer Lansky.
¹¹³
During the 1952 Crime Commission Hearings, several witnesses, including Gaetano Lucchese, were questioned about their relationship with Joseph Rao.

R
AO
, V
INCENT

161 East 108
^th
Street, 1910; 235 East 107
^th
Street, 1930s

Alias: n/a

Born: June 21, 1898, Palermo, Sicily (b. Rao, Vincenzo Giovanni)

Died: September 25, 1988, Florida

Association: Lucchese crime family consigliere

Vincent Rao, not related to Joseph, was born in Palermo to Antonio Rao and Liboria Colletti before moving with his family to East Harlem in 1899. Rao’s father is listed in a 1910 census report as a laborer, and older sister Mary is listed as a cigar maker.

Vincent’s older brother, Calogero “Charles” Rao (born January 2, 1889), joined him in several semi-legitimate business ventures, making a fortune in the construction industry by the 1930s —specifically, in lathing, hoisting and plastering. The brothers owned their own construction businesses and held stock in several others. Calogero replaced Anthony “Little Augie” Carfano as head of the mob-backed Ace Lathing Company after the gangster was shot to death on a Queens street in 1959.

Vincent Rao was also a real estate investor, owning several East Harlem properties, including his home at 235 East 107
^th
Street, where Joe Valachi and two other gunmen assassinated a man named Stefano “Steve” Rannelli on November 19, 1936.

Joe Valachi later claimed that Rao was a member of the Mafia Commission.

235 East 107
^th
Street,
1912. Library of Congress
.

R
UGGIERO
, B
ENJAMIN

125 Oliver Street, 1930; 10 Monroe Street

Alias: Lefty Guns, Lefty Two-Guns

Born: April 19, 1926, New York City

Died: November 24, 1994, New York City

Association: Bonanno crime family

Benjamin Ruggiero is probably best known for unknowingly sponsoring undercover detective Joseph Pistone into the Mafia, as portrayed by Al Pacino in the movie
Donnie Brasco
.

“Lefty Two Guns” was born to Fiori and Frances Ruggiero in the Fourth Ward neighborhood of the Lower East Side, where he formed early relationships with fellow future mobsters like Anthony Mirra. Both were initiated into the Bonanno organization about the same time (by the 1950s) and would serve in the same crew throughout their lives.

Over the following couple of decades, Ruggiero staked out slivers of several small fencing, bookmaking and loan-sharking operations and invested in a handful of semi-legitimate businesses.

Insiders remember “Benny” (which his family and neighbors called him) as being a simple and generally affable man. He wasn’t a “what are you looking at?” kind of guy, and he didn’t have grandiose ambitions of taking over La Cosa Nostra. Ruggiero was said to be a loyal and enthusiastic wise guy but was content with his position in the pecking order and managed to remain below the radar throughout most of his criminal career.

That all changed the day Anthony Mirra introduced him to “Donnie Brasco” in the 1970s. The supposed jewel thief and the aloof gangster hit it off. Ruggiero never suspected Brasco to be an undercover FBI agent named Joseph Pistone. The oversight ended up leading to dozens of convictions and the murders of Anthony Mirra and Dominick “Sonny Black” Napolitano, Bonanno members who initially introduced Brasco to the family.

In the 1997 film
Donnie Brasco
, based on Pistone’s 1987 book,
Donnie Brasco: My Undercover Life in the Mafia
, the viewer is left with the impression that Ruggiero was killed in retribution, but that is not the case. The sixty-eight-year-old succumbed to lung cancer just three years before the movie was released.

When I asked a neighborhood old-timer how well Pacino captured the gangster’s personalty, he replied, “Acceptable.”

S
ALERNO
, A
NTHONY
M
ICHAEL

344 East 116
^th
Street, 1950s

Alias: Fat Tony, Punchy

Born: August 5, 1913, New York City

Died: July 27, 1992, Springfield, Missouri

Association: Luciano/Genovese crime family front boss

With a criminal record dating back to 1932, East Harlem native Anthony Salerno was a respected veteran mobster who got his start just as Prohibition came to an end, working for the Charlie Luciano family’s uptown crew led by “Trigger Mike” Coppola.

Earning the reputation as an intelligent and trustworthy associate, Salerno gained more and more responsibility through the decades, becoming one of the Genovese family’s most successful leaders of all time. The low-profile mob boss not only generated an enormous amount of money for the organization, but he also had a knack for counseling disgruntled underlings, settling disputes, averting unnecessary wars and avoiding prison (at least until the end of his career).