The Good Rat (18 page)

On a day in June 2005, Sammy the Bull Gravano is in the town of Hackensack, New Jersey, the county seat of Bergen County. It is just across the George Washington Bridge from Manhattan. Looking out the window in Hackensack, you can see the skyline. It is a thousand miles away.

All the cement in between seemed to speak for all the bodies left under roadways by Gravano, who was in handcuffs while being lugged out of a van in the empty parking lot and into a suburban courthouse where homicide cases usually arrive under the headine
WIFE KNIFES HUSBAND
.

Gravano was in the painful silence of the end of informing. He was also sick with this Graves’ disease, which has to do with the thyroid. It had pulled out his hair and left a head that was bald and pink. Folds of flesh were in place of eyebrows.

Once, years before, Lou Eppolito and Steve Caracappa had supposedly tried but been unable to blow Sammy away, according to Burt Kaplan. Who can remember why? All these men had ample reasons for wanting one another deceased.

The killer cops staked out Gravano’s construction company on Stillwell Avenue in Brooklyn. They followed Gravano to his house a few times. They also staked out Tali’s
bar and grill on Eighteenth Avenue, where Gravano hung out. But Sammy continued to live.

• Q:
  What did Santora tell you had happened?
  
• A:
  He told me that they stopped surveilling the business, because a detective who knew Louie or Steve came up to them in a car and started a conversation with them about how you doing, what are you doing here, and they said they are just there to meet somebody, and they didn’t think they should go to that spot anymore. They followed Gravano to his house and from his house on a lot of occasions, but they could never catch him alone. They told me he was too cautious and [was] always dropped off by somebody.
  

Maybe Gravano would have been better off if the cops had completed that particular piece of work. He lived to sit here in near anonymity in a small-town courtroom in New Jersey where nobody cared enough to come look at him.

“I want to take a polygraph,” he said. “I want the others to take a polygraph, too.”

“We can’t force people in this state to take polygraphs,” the judge said.

Gravano wanted something like that because there was no way he was guilty of this particular homicide.

Once Gravano was known as “the Bull,” and when he came to a major federal courthouse in Brooklyn, he arrived by helicopter with television cameras catching him from a
distance, with FBI agents walking ahead and alongside with their trouser cuffs flapping in the harbor wind. The sidewalks in front of the courthouse were always filled with cameramen.

There was, on this Jersey morning, no television truck nor caravan of unmarked police cars. Only a state trooper dressed like General Patton standing at the entrance to the courthouse parking lot.

“Keep going, keep going.”

He waves away the morning air. Behind him, Gravano was being unloaded. Some yards down, at the courthouse ground-floor entrance, another guard, a little man, is standing at the door with his hands out. “No, not open,” he says. There were maybe ten people waiting. Then came a rasp over a hand radio. Gravano was inside safely, and the guard was gone. People walked in. The guard was running a metal detector. After his machine was another metal detector. Up one flight to the courtroom floor, where there was another.

The halls were lined with Bergen County sheriffs in the running for the avoirdupois championship of East Coast law enforcement.

Inside the courtroom I took a seat in the empty first row. The doorway on the side of the courtroom was open to a corridor crowded with lawmen the size of living-room couches. There were only a few people in the pews and not one news reporter until a man with a pad and pen slid in alongside us. He was Kibret Markos from the
Bergen Record.

“I didn’t know this was going on,” he said. “I was walk
ing past the building, and I saw the new metal detector, and I decided to see what was up.”

The prosecutor, Wayne Mello, thin, tanned, in a dark suit and salmon tie, came over to say hello to Jerry Capeci, whose Gang Land site on the Internet is quite famous. Mello had the dress and manner of a politician prowling for more career. He was, however, in an empty courtroom out of which could only come the enemy of ambitions, apathy.

He had the only murder case that could be called silly. Twenty-five years ago, Richard “Iceman” Kuklinski was arrested for killing a New York detective, Peter Calabro, in a gangland-style hit on a Saddle River, New Jersey, road. All these years later and Kuklinski had a jailhouse interview on television and announced he had killed the cop. “I should know. I killed more than a hundred people,” he announced. “I killed him for Sammy Gravano,” he announced. “Sammy don’t like cops.”

This allowed him to be featured in three HBO specials. And had Gravano indicted for killing a cop here in Bergen County, where he never was.

“I never heard of the fucking guy,” Gravano said. “Why would I get some guy hit over here when he was a cop down in New York all the time whenever I wanted him, which I didn’t.”

Gravano, for a time America’s greatest stool pigeon, was listed as being in prison somewhere. Maybe in Florence, Colorado, where they keep human beings thirty-one feet
underground and are proud of it, or in Phoenix, Arizona, where the sheriff has convicts sleep in tents in the 100-degree heat. Wherever you looked or called, they said Gravano was not there. He was hidden, like an heirloom, in the Witness Protection Program.

Kuklinski, in Trenton State Prison, sat down with Gravano’s lawyer, Anthony Ricco. He took a legal pad and wrote in pencil in a heavy hand that he would “make the case go away” and clear Gravano for two hundred thousand.

He showed this to Gravano’s lawyer and his associate.

He then tore the page into small pieces and put them into his mouth and, like an old bookmaker with bet slips, swallowed hard.

“Now yez know what I want, but you can’t show nobody proof against me for extortion,” he said. “This is how a real criminal does it. And I’m a real criminal.”

Ricco looked at the yellow pad. The indent left by Kuklinski’s heavy hand on the next page was completely readable. A laboratory could raise it in letters as large as those on a billboard. The next day Gravano’s lawyer, Ricco, asked that the murder charge against Gravano be thrown out. The judge is holding a hearing on the matter.

A sheriff came to the front of the room to announce, “The judge does not like gum chewing in the room. He’ll call you on it.”

The only people who appeared to be chewing gum were about half the sheriffs.

Looking through the pack of sheriffs in the doorway, you
got a glimpse of a pale blue prison shirt. Suddenly, without a rustle, Gravano, in handcuffs, came through the door.

Long ago, Sammy the Bull Gravano was out on bail for one trial and in the mornings before court he came down the hill to Gleason’s, a fight gym at the end of the street leading from the court to the East River. Sammy sparred with Eduardo Viruet, a trainer. More than a trainer. Viruet had boxed twice, going the distance each time, against Roberto Duran, who around then was maybe the best fighter in the universe. To start his gym workout, Gravano rushed at Viruet. He threw a punch. “Oooohhhh!” Viruet said. He had picked the punch off with his elbow. “You’re so strong today. You will hurt me.” Gravano threw a punch at Eduardo’s jaw. “Ooooohhhh!” Viruet said. The punch grazed a moving chin, if it even did that. Gravano went three rounds, during which he was sure he was crippling Viruet. He has not hit Viruet yet. Nor has Viruet hit Gravano. The urge to throw twenty-five punches into Gravano’s face was almost overwhelming. Viruet’s pocket prevailed. You do not punch the rent.

Gravano paid Viruet three hundred dollars for the rounds and paid it every day. Gravano swaggered out with a big guy who drove him.

“The big guy is not the big guy,” Viruet told trainer Teddy Atlas. “The little guy is the big guy.”

Gravano was allowed to drop his nineteen murders into the courtroom trash basket and go off into the Arizona sun
set. He suddenly had a life again. But a man living with crime in his blood knows only villainy. Gravano tried to corner the ecstasy trade. It is a pill that causes instant chaos. He threatened dealers with the same frightful carnage as he caused in Brooklyn. His reputation was his weapon. He brought his wife, son, and daughter into the business with him. The four were arrested. He had shucked off nineteen murders and was back in a prison jumpsuit.

The ecstasy case went into Brooklyn. Sammy was brought back to the federal courthouse, on Cadman Plaza. He sat with defendants who were in their twenties, a couple of them, poor fools, in college. Disease had sucked the weight and muscle off Sammy and put a gallon of fright into his blood. He could not control his shaking. He kept looking behind him at the spectators as if they were Gotti murderers who would rush up and strangle him. He was shipped back to prison in Arizona for more courtroom, which is his life at the end of so much murder and informing.

Liz Hydell, Jimmy’s sister, found out during the trial that Caracappa was living under house arrest in his mother’s place on Kramer Street in Staten Island, around the corner from her own mother’s house on Grasmere Avenue. Elizabeth Hydell drove around the corner and got out at Caracappa’s house. “I was scared to death, but I was going to do it,” she said. She went up the front walk and rang the bell. She heard a noise, and Caracappa came out of the alley from behind the house.

“Who are you looking for?” she remembers him asking.

“You.”

“Who are you?” he asked.

“Jimmy Hydell’s sister. You motherfucker. I want to see you when they put handcuffs on you and take you away for the rest of your life.”

She remembers Caracappa saying something about calling his lawyer, and then he went back up the alley.

“I’ll see you,” she called.

Staten Island is a large landmass that steps out of the harbor of the city with its two wide, deep channels—the Buttermilk
and the Narrows—both able to handle aircraft carriers, supertankers, and common traffic of ferryboats and weekend sailboats. A slender stretch of water on the far side of the island separates it from New Jersey.

Freighters and great liners move through the sparkling water and pass under the Verrazano Bridge into the harbor or into the first rolling waters of the Atlantic. Always, tugboats throw white water into the sky.

The island became the protectorate for the Mafia beginning in the late 1950s. Steadily, as people of color spread through Brooklyn, the city realigned itself. The Italians left East New York and Canarsie and Bensonhurst for Staten Island. Of the tens and tens of thousands of Italians who crossed the bridge, there were a few who owned police records attesting to their membership in the Mafia.

Staten Island changed Mafia life, which went from walkups with fire escapes running down the fronts, from streets of pork stores and funeral parlors, from clubhouses and small restaurants with cars pulling into curbs for conferences, into neighborhoods of semisuburban streets with imitation mansions.

While he lived, the boss of the Mafia, Paul Castellano, did so in a large white house with a circular driveway in an area of Staten Island called Todt Hill. So many other mobsters try even now to imitate him. They want big, which is easier to have on Staten Island than in the other boroughs, and isolation. You leave the wife in the large, gleaming kitchen and the kids in school, and they are all safe while you
roam through the rest of the city and have fun with your girlfriends.

Hylan Boulevard, the road going along the south shore of the island, the ocean side, is a parking lot. The stores are Nails, Hair, a Subaru car lot lined with flags, Goodfellas, Bueno Jewelers, Agua “newly decorated banquet room,” A Class Limousine, Tattoo, Wok, Nails, 122nd Precinct, Excelsior Grand Catering Hall. You go off into these Mafia culde-sacs, one of which, Nicolosi Loop, has big mansions with gargoyles and stone lions in front. Number 57, the FBI sheet informs, is the home of Richard Cantarella, true mobster. A house on another block has an elevator visible through the large window running from just over the front door to the peak of the roof. This has to be the home of an absolute mass murderer.

Gaspipe Casso had eight pay phones around Staten Island that he used to talk to Eppolito and Caracappa when he was on the lam.

Remain driving and you are on Barlow Avenue, where Anthony Rotondo lived in a brick ranch house that is larger by far than the regular one-family frames owned by legitimate people. He sold drugs and was involved with murders and then became a stool pigeon and got lost in witness protection. Somebody currently lives in the house but answers no doorbells or knocks.

The children rarely go to public schools. They can be found in St. Joseph Hill Academy, which is near Paul Castellano’s old house on Todt Hill. The wives and other family
women drive to the expensive Short Hills shopping center in New Jersey. “No Brooklyn Eighty-sixth Street,” one woman answered when asked where she shopped.

Federal raids keep snatching twenty and thirty at a time. Many collapse during the ride to the FBI offices and give up everybody they know and their brothers, too, if needed. They crowd into the Witness Protection Program and leave Staten Island for good. The stand-up guys say nothing and pronounce their names clearly to an intake officer at a federal penitentiary, also far away.

In legitimate life, Staten Island votes race and Italian Republican. The revered politician is Rudolph Giuliani, who filled the jails as a federal prosecutor in New York. You have Staten Island people shivering with excitement at a prosecutor becoming a president but simultaneously approving of these big tough mafiosos.

People outside Staten Island like to talk about the end of organized crime, but here they know there will always be a Mafia. Just like during Prohibition, mobsters will do things nobody else wants to do. They will find little services that nobody else will provide. There is shortly going to be a great big Indian casino in a desolate part of New York called Monticello. As soon as it opens, they will have to find somebody to supply clean tablecloths and napkins and sheets and towels. They will need somebody else to haul away garbage. Somebody else will have to park the cars. And for the gamblers, private banking will be needed. Somebody will have to lend them money once even the
credit-card companies turn them away. The Mafia will offer all this and more.

Here in the dawn was Sal Reale’s Mercedes, its exhaust a white spiral in the dark sky and snow on Sutter Avenue in Ozone Park, Queens. He was known as John Gotti’s man at Kennedy Airport, to which he could almost walk. He was head of Local 851 of the Teamsters, which meant he was in charge of the snowplows that clear the runways and ramps to let big jets tear into the sky.

The airlines will pay anything to have the runways cleared so their planes can take off. If they do not pay, the Teamsters’ drivers in Reale’s union will not plow. It is that simple. Either you see your planes taking off on a cleared runway or you stare out the window at them sitting in deep snow.

At this same dawn hour, in Woodmere, Long Island, the shortest of drives to the airport, Harry Davidoff runs out of his house like a child going sledding. He whoops it up in the falling snow.

Harry was the president of Teamsters Local 295, which is alongside Sal Reale in their union headquarters at the airport.

Harry Davidoff was one of the Davidoff brothers of Brownsville, in Brooklyn. Harry is known as “Little Gangy,” and he has a brother, “Big Gangy,” who at this time was well away in a state prison, and Avrom or “Boomy” or “Bummy,” last name changed to Davis for fight show cards. He was considered the nonviolent man of the family. In a main
event at Madison Square Garden, he got mad and fouled the other fighter ten straight times before the cops reached the ring. He died chasing a couple of holdup men out of a saloon he had just sold to a friend. Everybody loved him, and he had the biggest funeral Brownsville ever saw.

Reale and Big Gangy got to the union offices early to take the first frantic calls from airlines.

Once they had Delta for three hundred thousand dollars a year, whether eight feet of snow fell or no snow at all. The money ensured that the airline would be the first to have ramps and runways cleared and planes in the sky.

There were other paid-up airlines being serviced right at this moment. A hundred thousand from this one, another hundred thousand from the next. A good snowfall was worth two million, Sal Reale said. “That’s for one snow. The next snow is another two million or so.”

The paws of the mob did not stop there. Snow had to be carted away from the airport. It was taken by truck to the Canarsie landfill, which was only a short drive away. Each truckload cost a coupon that went for a hundred and fifty dollars and was paid by the union. They bought thousand-dollar books of coupons. A man sat at the landfill entrance in a wood shack with a potbellied stove and a small window from which he directed many trucks to enter on the exit side, which had no electronic device counting the number of trucks passing through. Only the trucks he directed to the entrance lane paid the coupon. The others gave him fifty dollars instead of the coupon. The city lost millions that
way. The mobsters tried every way there was to cheat. If there was no snow, then you could always steal rolls of butterscotch candies from airport newsstands.

“Harry Davidoff had so much money piled in his house he couldn’t see his wife,” Reale said.