The Sixth Family (31 page)
Authors: Lee Lamothe
The love between the brothers spilled out again as Angelo spoke to LoPresti, who had arrived to discuss yet another shipment and answer a question from Angelo, to which he said he would “refer it to people in Canada.” LoPresti also talked about a scheme to double their profit—selling drugs to someone “and then we’ll whack him.” But Angelo, for once, was not so interested in talking about heroin. The talk of whacking someone seemed to spur in him another bout of wistful regret.
“You know, I lost my brother,” he told LoPresti. “I said to myself: ‘I’ll have to get drunk.’ I had two vodkas … I went in my room, I closed the door and I cried … If they would have found him in the street and he would have [been] shot in the head, I would have accepted it, because this is a part of our life. Next week, the week after, we would have got even [with] whoever did it, right? We would have accepted it. Not this way. This is … this is …” He could not find the words.
To LoPresti, Angelo was like a child, a product of a Mafia that LoPresti, Vito, Sciascia and the rest of the Sicilian traffickers had little use for except as an outlet for their heroin. LoPresti let the distraught Angelo pour out his heartbreak.
“Let it out,” LoPresti said. But when Angelo was finished crying, LoPresti was right back at it: How much can you take? Take it, take it, take it.
Had LoPresti known that each of the sales calls made by him and Sciascia were being monitored and documented by the FBI, he might also have felt like crying. So much time spent with a man whose home was so thoroughly penetrated by the FBI could only mean trouble. From an unexplained plane crash, the quiet commerce of the Sixth Family’s operations would be partially exposed.
CHAPTER 21
THE BRONX, SUMMER 1981On July 1, 1981—a national holiday in Canada, marking the creation of the Dominion of Canada in 1867—Gerlando Sciascia remained in New York, with his house secretly watched by the FBI. It was the fifth day of surveillance by agents assigned to monitor the home on Stadium Avenue in the Bronx, and this was the first day the agents had spotted their quarry.
At 11:30 a.m., Sciascia walked out of his home, climbed into his green 1979 four-door Peugeot and drove off along Route 95. Agents tailing him watched as he pulled off the freeway and stopped at a service station to fill up with diesel. He then resumed his journey, south on Route 95, and agents watched him drive through the tollbooths at the Throgs Neck Bridge and soon lost him in traffic. It was a rather inauspicious start to a new federal racketeering investigation into Sciascia’s activities. All evidence, however, suggested they should not give up.
Sciascia had been targeted for investigation after several years of reports continued to pile up in the FBI’s offices showing that he was an increasingly active part of both the Sixth Family’s drug trade and the Bonanno Family. When agents were assigned to take a closer look at him and the people he was working with, they soon found themselves bumping into other investigators from other agencies who had also found their way to Sciascia through their own leads. FBI agents probing the links between the Bonanno Family members and the Sicilian drug traffickers on Knickerbocker Avenue were interested in him; the agents monitoring the wires in Angelo Ruggiero’s home were interested in him; the Drug Enforcement Administration was tracking him, as were Canadian police. In 1981, the information was starting to be pooled and a federal racketeering investigation was officially launched.
Sciascia’s involvement in heroin distribution in New York preceded the Bono wedding; even before the last of the Violi brothers had been killed. By early 1980, FBI agents were already writing internal reports on Sciascia and his Sixth Family kin, noting suspicious transactions by an import/export company linked to Montreal as well as meetings in New York by Canadian visitors. The Canadians seemed to have a lot of friends in a lot of places, agents noted. An internal FBI report filed in February 1980, noted that the Canadians—in the deadpan bureaucratic argot of the FBI—had “a multitude of telephonic interaction” with contacts in the United States, Italy, France, Switzerland, Venezuela and Canada, particularly Montreal. In November 1980, in the days leading up to the Bono wedding, New York City Police Department intelligence officers had watched Sciascia meet with visiting Sicilian traffickers, who were likely in town for Bono’s celebration.
Previous reports of Sciascia’s movements were re-examined. There had been meetings in New York’s Plaza Hotel and in several homes between Sciascia, other known Canadian traffickers, and American Mafia members of all stripes, some of them freshly released from prison after serving time for narcotics offenses. Each time a visitor from Montreal met with Sciascia, the agents pulled the phone records for their hotel rooms, and each time they were astounded at the scope of their contacts. After one visit in September 1981, calls had been traced to Monaco, Caracas, Rome, Lima and Montreal. On another visit, calls were made to Germany, Paris and Bogotá. Paolo Renda also attracted the attention of agents, apparently in connection with an address to which calls were traced, FBI documents say. A report noted that Renda “from time to time” traveled between Canada and Venezuela.
Canadian police were asked to conduct background checks on the increasing number of Canadians appearing in their investigations. Later, the DEA and the FBI also agreed to cooperate on, rather than compete over, Sciascia. A meeting was arranged between the respective agents who had been monitoring Sciascia; they had so much to say that a follow-up meeting needed to be scheduled a week later.
For one month—from January 8 through February 8, 1982—federal agents intercepted Sciascia’s mail, checking it before it was delivered to his home. Registers that recorded every phone number dialed were placed on his home telephones. A corporate records check revealed him to be a founding officer of Pronto Demolition, which appeared to be a through-and-through Mafia enterprise. Joining Sciascia in the boardroom were Giuseppe Bono, Giovanni Ligammari and Giuseppe Ganci, who was the right-hand man of Sal Catalano, the new Zip street boss of Knickerbocker Avenue. The agents’ search also led them to California Pizza, the pizzeria Sciascia ran in the Green Acres Mall in Long Island where Cesare Bonventre and Baldo Amato had been caught with guns in their Cadillac. In the pizza business, Sciascia had partnered with Giuseppe Arcuri, a relative of the man who had hosted the final Montreal sit-down between Nick Rizzuto and Paolo Violi and another of the Sixth Family’s staunch supporters in New York. The mingling cut both ways. Police in Canada had noted repeated visits by Cesare Bonventre and Baldo Amato to both Montreal and Toronto. Amato in particular was a frequent visitor.
On the morning of May 17, 1982, 11 days after Salvatore Ruggiero’s plane crash, two FBI agents watched Sciascia leave his home, accompanied by a tall, dark-haired visitor. (Two days later, the RCMP showed the agents a photograph of Joe LoPresti and the agents confirmed that he was the mystery man.)
The pair got into Sciascia’s second vehicle, a black Jeep Grand Cherokee, a vehicle much-loved by members of the Sixth Family, and drove to a Queens Dunkin’ Donuts outlet, where they were met by Cesare Bonventre. After a short chat over coffee at the counter, the three men drove to the Green Acres Mall. While LoPresti and Bonventre walked into the mall, Sciascia headed into his pizzeria. When Sciascia left his restaurant a few minutes later and went into the mall, the agents followed him inside. There they watched Sciascia, LoPresti and Bonventre standing in the center of the busy mall, deep in discussion, in an apparent attempt to thwart being picked up by an electronic bug. LoPresti, who was always surveillance-conscious, spotted an agent watching them from 30 feet away. When he pointed the interloper out to his colleagues, the three men scattered.
“He looked in my direction and he looked back at the other two individuals and said something and at that point the three dispersed and each went in a different direction in the mall,” said Special Agent Charles Murray, one of the surveillance officers. “I tried to observe them as best I could,” he said. One agent later saw Bonventre making a call at a pay phone; the other spotted Sciascia at a pretzel concession. Sciascia, realizing he was being followed, stopped suddenly and feigned interest in a store window, forcing the agent to continue walking past him. Then Sciascia started to follow the agent. Realizing their folly, the agents left. LoPresti, despite his size, seemed to vanish. He headed for the airport and flew back to Montreal that afternoon.
It was one of several meetings by Sixth Family members that police were aware of. When authorities in Italy learned that Giuseppe Bono was consorting with drug traffickers in New York and in Canada, they rekindled an investigation that had been put on hold when he fled. The Italian probe ran straight into the Sixth Family as well.
On June 12, 1982, Italian police were monitoring Bono as he met at the Gallo Rosso, a luxurious restaurant in Milan, with Michelangelo LaScala, an old Sixth Family contact from Venezuela who had flown to Milan from Caracas. On June 24, the two got together again. This time, while they ate and chatted, Bono took a telephone call. On the other end of the phone was Nick Rizzuto, according to surveillance reports from the Polizia di Stato, the Italian national police. Bono and Nick discussed the movement of a “suitcase,” which agents believed was likely traffickers’ code for a drug shipment. Investigators determined that Nick had already sent three large shipments of furniture from Italy to Canada, which police believed had drugs hidden inside. Police reports say the listed recipient of the shipments was Maria Renda, Nick’s daughter. Nick spent most of that summer in Milan, where he was “in constant contact” with Bono, usually by telephone.
In August 1982, shortly before his departure from Italy, Nick met with Bono in person, but police could not get close enough to intercept their conversation. Nick had a busy time in 1982 and 1983, constantly shuttling between Caracas, Milan and Montreal.
“The suspected purpose of these meetings was to discuss heroin shipments from Italy to the United States,” the FBI concluded. The Venezuelan authorities were also helping to build the case, providing the FBI and the RCMP with a detailed report of their investigations into the Sicily-Canada-U.S.-Venezuelan axis, listing several Canadian, Sicilian and American Mafia members.
Taking into account the meetings between Nick and Bono in Italy, the sales calls by Sciascia and LoPresti to the Gambino soldiers in New York and the extensive international telephone contacts made by visiting Montrealers, FBI agents were sure they were on to something huge.
“The targets of these investigations are probably the largest and most significant group involved in importing heroin through Sicily into the United States,” states an FBI report dated June 14, 1982. “This group’s illegal activities are the most graphic example of internationalization of the Mafia. Their drug importation network is the Cadillac in the New York area, involving staggering amounts of heroin and money.”
There were clear overlaps between this probe and the massive Pizza Connection case that focused on Sal Catalano, the Zips’ Brooklyn street boss, and his coterie. Agents tracking Catalano in Brooklyn and Sciascia in the Bronx were frequently comparing notes. Many of the players overlapped. Telephone records showed members of different groups in constant contact with each other; surveillance reports showed an astounding interplay, as seemingly unrelated and unconnected players from different Sicilian and American Mafia families networked busily. Bonventre, Amato, Sciascia, LoPresti and Catalano; the same names kept surfacing. Giovanni Ligammari, one of the Zips photographed alongside Vito Rizzuto, Sciascia and Joe Massino on the day after the murder of the three captains, was also arranging the payments from investors in the Pizza Connection heroin network.
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