The Quiet Don: The Untold Story of Mafia Kingpin Russell Bufalino (22 page)

The grand jury also relayed how a gaming board attorney, Don Shiffer, took a keen interest in the DeNaples investigation.

Shiffer was an attorney from Scranton who had gained his job with the help of former board member William Conaboy (who had been appointed to the board by Robert Mellow), so it wasn’t lost on anyone that Shiffer would have an interest in Mount Airy’s license.

In an odd quirk, Shiffer was actually assigned to work as the licensing attorney for Mount Airy’s chief competitor, Pocono Manor. Despite having a larger facility, higher gaming-revenue estimates and a world-class gaming executive, Dennis Gomes, to serve as its president, Pocono Manor was not in Mellow’s senatorial district and was thus directly competing with DeNaples.

Once he arrived, Shiffer immediately requested that he be reassigned to work the Mount Airy application, and he even stated that he knew a few people involved with Mount Airy. After his request was denied, Shiffer approached another attorney, Lisa McClain, who was working the Mount Airy application and asked if she would be willing to swap applicants. McLain said no. Shiffer nevertheless interjected himself in the Mount Airy application process, requesting to see drafts of DeNaples’ suitability report and at times making the requests claiming to be the licensing attorney assigned to Mount Airy.

On another occasion, McLain testified how she couldn’t locate a box of documents relating to the Mount Airy application. Acting on a hunch, she went to Shiffer’s office and found them under his desk. Near the end of the DeNaples licensing review, Shiffer again asked to work on the Mount Airy application and was given the task of vetting several paragraphs of information relating to key employees, including DeNaples’ daughter Lisa.

Shiffer was invited by Ray Angeli, the board member appointed by Mellow to replace William Conaboy after Conaboy’s 2006 resignation, to attend DeNaples closed-door suitability hearings as an advisor. Angeli was the president of Lackawanna College, where DeNaples’ brother Dominick served as a board member, and was yet another lackey appointed to help along the DeNaples application.

During the suitability hearings, Shiffer was seen writing notes to Angeli and whispering in his ear, but his presence was seen as a conflict by others, given he was responsible for the Pocono Manor report.

“Everybody knew he was there for Louie DeNaples,” said Kwait and others.

Near the end of the hearing, Shiffer approached board chairman Tad Decker and complained that BIE was “dirtying up” DeNaples and favoring Pocono Manor. Decker called over to Kwait.

“Is it true that you weren’t properly investigating Pocono Manor? Instead you were trying to dirty up Louie DeNaples?”

Kwait testified that he looked at Shiffer and said, “Did you say that to him? You are too fucking close to this DeNaples thing.”

Decker had a somewhat different recollection of the incident. During his testimony, he said he recalled DeNaples testifying to alleged violations regarding campaign contributions and the Katrina trucks.

“And what we got—what happened is Ray—I think it was Ray, could have been Shiffer, said to me, ‘Why are we spending so much time on DeNaples? It isn’t really fair.’ And then I said, listen, the guy pled nolo to a crime how many years ago, 17, 18, 25 years ago, whatever it was, I forget to be honest. I said, we have a duty to do that and also we have these issues with people complaining about Katrina trucks or, you know, something else. I said, we’re here to investigate. And the response was, we spent—and I think it’s probably true—we spent more time on DeNaples than we did on everyone else combined. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but that was kind of what was said back. And then Shiffer and I sort of got into an argument about it.

“Shiffer would eventually leave the board for private practice, and within a month, he took a job with a Scranton law firm, Wright and Reihner, and was assigned to an office inside Mount Airy to represent the firm and the casino. In essence, said the grand jury, Shiffer was rewarded by becoming Mount Airy’s de facto in-house counsel, and the grand jury determined that Shiffer’s employment with Wright and Reihner was “a subterfuge to hide the fact that he left the Board to work immediately for Mount Airy.”

In October 2008, Shiffer was formally hired by Mount Airy as its general counsel and, subsequently, a vice president.

As a key employee, Shiffer had to submit to a background investigation, and the report revealed that Shiffer’s connections to Mount Airy ran deep during his tenure with the gaming board. Cell phone records showed that he made ninety-one calls to Lisa DeNaples and three hundred calls to Ray Angeli, which the grand jury found to be significant. In examining the calls, the grand jury found that Shiffer spoke with Lisa DeNaples during supposedly private gaming board executive sessions and board meetings and following a state Supreme Court ruling that Pocono Manor could use certain exhibits as they appealed the denial of their license.

Shiffer claimed that he had developed a professional friendship with Lisa DeNaples and that he simply made himself available to her to answer questions. But the grand jury found that Shiffer’s contact with both DeNaples and Angeli was significant and enough to “raise serious questions about the integrity of the process.” In effect, Louis DeNaples had his own attorney spying for him inside the gaming board.

Further in its report, the grand jury revealed that at least one board member was prepared to vote against the DeNaples application. Despite the direct evidence involving the Katrina trucks and political contributions and alleged ties to organized crime during his December 2006 closed-door suitability hearings, DeNaples was found suitable for a slots license. With the final vote approaching, board member Ken McCabe told BIE’s David Kwait and Roger Greenback that he needed something concrete on DeNaples so he could vote against Mount Airy.

Greenbank subsequently gave McCabe a report on a Scranton-area businessman, Frank Pavlico, who had been charged in the money-laundering case that snared Billy D’Elia. During interviews with BIE, Pavlico said he was D’Elia’s cousin and was all too familiar with the lengthy business and personal relationship between D’Elia and DeNaples. Some of the information reported by Pavlico relayed business and family events D’Elia and DeNaples attended together, including meetings with other members of organized crime.

The Pavlico interview had been excluded from DeNaples’ suitability report after the board determined it was secondhand information, but McCabe got a copy. In addition, Greenbank contacted D’Elia’s attorney, James Swetz, requesting an interview with D’Elia, who was being held without bail in a Pike County prison after he was charged in October 2006 in a superseding indictment with conspiring to murder a witness in his money-laundering case.

D’Elia fired his attorney Philip Gelso, and the courts appointed Swetz to represent D’Elia. Swetz subsequently told Greenbank to contact the U.S. attorney’s office, but it declined the interview request. BIE, as federal, state and local prosecutors had warned, was a civilian agency, and criminal information could only be shared with other law enforcement agencies. Without D’Elia, and with a warning by gaming board counsel Frank Donaghue to toe the line, McCabe reluctantly voted to award the license to DeNaples and Mount Airy.

Despite its damning and eye-opening report, the grand jury did not recommend criminal charges. Instead, it recommended a laundry list of necessary changes to state gaming law.

Greg Fajt, the former secretary of the Department of Revenue who now served as the gaming board chairman, saw the report as a victory and proudly proclaimed that, in his words, “no one was indicted.”

N
INETEEN

T
he disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa remained a mystery and the subject of countless investigations, grand juries, books and movies and yet another FBI review in 2003.

It wasn’t until 2004 when Frank Sheeran, then eighty-four years old and seeking to make his peace with God, finally confessed to killing Hoffa to author Charles Brandt, who told Sheeran’s story in his book,
I
Heard You Paint Houses
.

Sheeran had long been one of the FBI’s prime suspects, along with Bufalino, Tony Provenzano, Sally Briguglio, Anthony Giancala and brothers Steve and Tom Andretta, only prosecutors never had enough evidence to charge them.

For his part, Sheeran said he never knew who, aside from Bufalino, had planned Hoffa’s murder. He had attended a meeting in New York at Bufalino’s Vesuvio restaurant several days after Hoffa disappeared with Bufalino, Provenzano and several others. All seemed relieved that Hoffa was gone, he said.

It was just a week earlier when Sheeran said he and Bufalino were driving with their wives to Detroit to attend the wedding of Bill Bufalino’s daughter when they dropped the women off at a diner near Lake Erie in Port Clinton, Ohio, under the premise they had some business to take care of. Russell always had stops to make, so this one wasn’t unusual. After leaving the women, Bufalino and Sheeran then drove to a commuter airport with a grass airstrip, where a small, single-engine plane was waiting to take Sheeran to Detroit, which was about one hundred miles away.

Sheeran said nothing to the pilot, and an hour later, the plane landed at an airfield in Pontiac, which was north of Detroit. Waiting for Sheeran was a gray Ford with the keys under the mat, and he drove into Detroit to a nondescript brick house in a quiet neighborhood. When Sheeran walked inside the house, he saw Sally “Bugs” Briguglio and the Andretta brothers. All were waiting for Chuckie O’Brien.

The plan that was conceived was for O’Brien, Sheeran and Sally Bugs to drive to the Red Fox restaurant to pick up Hoffa and then bring him back to the house. Seeing O’Brien, who had been raised by Hoffa, and Sheeran together was designed to put Hoffa at ease. Only O’Brien had no idea as to the plot that was about to unfold.

O’Brien, Sheeran and Sally Bugs drove to the restaurant and saw an obviously irritated Hoffa walking to his green Pontiac. Hoffa had been waiting hours for Provenzano and Giacalone and believed he had been stood up. When he saw O’Brien pull up, he was furious and didn’t hide his feelings when he was introduced to Sally Briguglio, who said he was with Provenzano.

When Hoffa began questioning O’Brien and Briguglio, he looked inside the car and saw Sheeran. Briguglio said his “friend” wanted to be at the meeting. Sheeran explained his tardiness by saying there were delays getting to Detroit, but he was here now with his “friend,” whom Hoffa knew was Bufalino.

Seeing O’Brien and Sheeran quieted Hoffa, and he dropped his guard and got into the maroon Mercury. When they pulled up to the house, only Sheeran and Hoffa would leave the car. As O’Brien drove away with Briguglio, Hoffa walked just ahead of Sheeran up the stairs, through the front door and into a small vestibule.

Hoffa expected to see several men there, including Bufalino, Provenzano and Giacalone. Instead, the house was empty, and Hoffa knew what was about to happen. He immediately turned around to reach for the door, but Sheeran had pulled out his gun and shot him twice in the back of the head.

Sheeran calmly walked out of the house and got into the gray Ford, and he drove back to the airstrip in Pontiac, where the plane was waiting. When he arrived back in Port Clinton, Bufalino was still there in Sheeran’s black Lincoln. They picked up their wives and drove to Detroit for the wedding.

Sheeran learned later from Bufalino that the Andretta brothers were the “cleaners” who tidied up the house and took Hoffa’s body to a nearby incinerator, where it was cremated. They then picked up Sally Briguglio and flew to New Jersey.

The plan to kill Jimmy Hoffa was carried out with precision. Years later, after Sheeran’s 2004 confession, questions followed. To investigators, the press and inquisitive public that for years sought resolution, it was a cut-and-dried case of Hoffa infuriating his organized crime partners, who responded in their typical and extremely prejudicial fashion.

But there was another theory, one that was originally suggested by, of all people, William Bufalino, who said in 1978 that he believed that the CIA was involved and that Hoffa was quieted because he was scheduled to testify before the Church Committee.

And it wasn’t so much that anyone feared Hoffa would talk about underworld figures but that he would connect certain people to assassination plots against Fidel Castro, and possibly provide information about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

Russell Bufalino never believed Hoffa would talk. But when he saw his own name splashed across the
Time
magazine article, Bufalino didn’t wait. He had long relied on a simple saying he once had framed: “There is no conspiracy when only one remains.”

* * *

RUSSELL BUFALINO TOILED
in the federal prison in Danbury for eight years. Despite his incarceration, he maintained firm control over his family into the late 1980s, sending orders through Billy D’Elia.

In Bufalino’s absence, D’Elia had become the undeniable star of the family, and his rapid ascent was noted by the FBI in their RABFAM reports.

“D’Elia has emerged as a much more prominent individual in the overall family operations,” read one telex.

D’Elia was one of the few remaining members of the Bufalino hierarchy who wasn’t dead or in prison. Hit-man Jack Parisi died in December 1982 of natural causes, as did capo Philip Medico, who passed in February 1983. Bufalino’s closest friend, Casper “Cappy” Giumento, died of natural causes in March 1987. And Steven LaTorre, one of the original Men of Montedoro, passed away in July 1984. He was ninety-eight years old.

Along with Bufalino, among those imprisoned were James Osticco, who was sentenced to eight years for obstruction of justice for fixing the 1977 Louis DeNaples’ trial. Osticco and Casper Guimento were also charged in July 1983 with supplying dynamite from Medico Industries to Frank Sheeran and hit man Charles Allen. In poor health, he was released in 1988 and died two years later. Frank Sheeran was sentenced to eighteen years in federal prison after he was charged in 1980 with mail fraud, labor racketeering and taking bribes. Consigliere Edward Sciandra was charged with failing to report income tax and sentenced to two consecutive eighteen-month terms. Capo Anthony Guarnieri, who with Billy D’Elia handled many of the important assignments, was sentenced to thirty years in prison in 1989 for a variety of offenses, including labor racketeering and conspiracy.

The RABFAM investigation was finally shut down in December 1983 but not before it documented the Bufalino family at the height of its power. D’Elia and Guarnieri, with Bufalino’s blessing, expanded the family’s stake in Nevada, taking control of the Edgewater Hotel and Casino in Laughlin, Nevada, following meetings with Tony Spilotro, the Chicago mobster whose violent life was portrayed by Joe Pesci in Martin Scorsese’s 1995 film
Casino
.

D’Elia and Guarnieri also opened new channels with the Lucchese crime family in New York. The family was also doing business outside of its traditional territories in Baltimore and Miami.

When the FBI finally closed the RABFAM investigation, the agency credited the probe with “decimating” the Bufalino family, touting how “the most significant members of the Russell A. Bufalino LCN Family have been convicted or are in the early stages of judicial proceedings.”

Truth be told, most of the successful prosecutions came outside of RABFAM’s circle. Bufalino, for instance, was prosecuted by the U.S. attorney in New York. Nevertheless, RABFAM did provide the Justice Department with reams of intelligence on the Bufalino family, and as the family shrunk, so too did its national prestige.

But not until Russell Bufalino’s long tenure as a mob boss officially ended, in 1989, after he suffered a stroke. Wheelchair bound, he was transferred to the federal medical facility at Springfield, Missouri. It was there that he was reunited with Frank Sheeran, who suffered from severe arthritis and had been sent to Springfield to finish out his sentence. Though confined to a wheelchair, Bufalino enjoyed playing bocce and eating ice cream. He also attended mass regularly, something he had done on and off most of his life.

Bufalino had always been known as the Quiet Don. He eschewed many of comforts enjoyed by his contemporaries, who opted for fine Italian silk suits, flashy cars and large, often ostentatious homes. Bufalino preferred to live in the shadows and behind the scenes. For him, living modestly, at least in public, was just good business, something he learned long ago from the first Sicilians to arrive in the United States.

Following his release from prison, in 1991, Bufalino was moved into a nursing home near Scranton, where he was treated royally. When visitors came by to pay their respects, they stopped at the front of his bed and kissed his feet.

Russell Bufalino died of natural causes on February 25, 1994.