GENOVESE FAMILY: LEADER OF THE PACK PART III: SUN SET
"Cent Anni"
“Cent Anni”-“May You Live a Hundred Years.”
Traditional Sicilian toast.
On Tieri’s death, the family had to face up to the problem of succession. If Phil Lombard had in fact been the official boss behind the scenes, he was out of the race now. Old and infirm, he was hospitalised. Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno appeared to be the new head. Elected by the family’s administration, he was apparently running the family from his headquarters in East Harlem.
Born in 1911 and raised in East Harlem, Salerno rose quickly through the ranks of the family. By the mid-1950s, he was a very rich man, rich enough to have bought a 100-acre farm and home at RD 1 Oriole Mills Road, in Rhinebeck, Duchess County, in the Hudson Valley, as well as own apartments in New York and property in Miami. He and his wife, Margaret, raised their children upstate, and Tony raised, in addition, thoroughbred horses. The entrance to his property was flanked by two white, massive, imposing stone stallions. The weekends at his country home were sacrosanct to Tony. Monday to Thursday he lived in an apartment on 115th Street, close to the East River in Harlem, but come Thursday afternoon, he traveled back to his oasis in the country.
When in town, Tony could be found every morning at his base, the Palma Boys Social Club at 416 East 115th Street, or around the corner at his other club, on First Avenue.
The Palma Boys was basically a room 18 feet wide and 55 feet long, occupying the bottom floor of a four-story tenement building in the mostly desolate, but once thriving East Harlem Italian-American community. The building had a long history with the family; back in the 1930s it had served as the headquarters of “Trigger Mike” Copolla. Over continuous cups of espresso, the day’s business would be conducted. He claimed jokingly the Palma Boys was a pleasant place to be because all he had to do was sit there while people brought him money. And did they bring him money. He reputedly kept more than $1 million in small bills, packed in shoe boxes and stacked from floor to ceiling in a closet in his apartment.
In 1986, Fortune magazine rated him the country’s top gangster in terms of power, wealth and influence.
Tony’s forte was gambling, numbers and loan sharking. His numbers business alone brought in $50 million each year. Working with his three principal lieutenants, Louis”The Gimp” Avitabile, Salvatore Apuzzo and Louis Vigilante, Tony controlled all these activities in East Harlem and the South Bronx. All other operators had to pay Tony “key” money to operate within his jurisdiction. The Schitter brothers, Sam and Moishe, for example, kicked in a hefty commission to operate their $30 million a year numbers business in this area.
By the time he assumed the leadership of the family, Tony was an old man. Although his body appeared unwilling to defy the laws of gravity, he had beefy arms and shoulders, and still had some of the strength left that had served him well through his mob years. Delayed in court on one occasion for over two hours, in a rage he stormed into the offices of his attorney, Roy Cohen, and chased him out of the building, brandishing a 50-pound statue above his head.
He had sharp, dark piercing eyes, bushy John L. Lewis eyebrows, a bulbous nose and thinning grey hair. He was hardly ever seen without a fedora on his head or a cigar poking out of the left side of his mouth. His favourites were H. Upmanns and Partagas.
Although he only had a third grade education, he was a wizard with numbers and could carry out complicated numerical equations in his head, almost at computer speed. He read voraciously, especially the New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. He was a walking sports encyclopaedia, memorising not only batting averages and win-loss records, but knowing at any time which athletes were injured and unlikely to play, and how that would effect results. Although he apparently fixed numerous fights and some horse races,, his real strength lay in the secrets other people confided in him; mobsters from all over the country curried favours from him and were always happy to share their low-down on upcoming sports fixtures. At one time he had a part interest in boxer Sonny Liston.
Tony went to prison for six months in 1978 on charges of illegal gambling and tax evasion. It was his first time in jail in over 50 years of criminal activity. He was so cautious and circumspect following this that it was indeed ironic that the FBI was able to plant a “bug” at the Palma Boys and, as a result, gather enough information to ultimately “retire” him for the rest of his life to a Federal penitentiary. His comments recorded on one of these tapes, were ironic, to say the least. Talking to one of his soldiers, the conversation went:
“He had ‘em put a bug in Tony’s car?” asked an incredulous Salerno.
“In Avellino’s car”
“Avellino’s car?” repeated Salerno.
“They got 770 hours of tape.”
“They put a bug in Paul’s house,” Added Salerno.
“Unfucking believable.”
Tony was Tony “Ducks” Corallo, head of the Lucchese family, and Avellino was the driver of the black Jaguar that had been “bugged.” Paul was Paul Castellano, head of the powerful Gambino family whose mansion on Todt Hill, Staten Island, was also wired by the FBI.
In 1981, Salerno had a stroke and was hospitalised. He then retired to his farm for six month’s recuperation. On his return, it is now suspected, the family appointed Vincent “Chin” Gigante to the top, but he was happy to have Tony front as the titular head. Gigante was, as we shall see in due course, a most unusual man for a mob boss.
Just why Salerno at the age of seventy-one wanted the strife and hassle of the boss’s job is hard to understand. Perhaps, in some ways, he found himself in an elder statesman’s role as the keeper of the sacred flame of the Cosa Nostra. A strict disciplinarian and upholder of tradition and protocol, he wanted to keep things equitable, but above all he wanted to uphold his perception of what it meant to be a member of the institution he had served for so long.
The FBI microphone hidden in the ceiling of the Palma Boys Social Club picked up a conversation which revealed his thinking on this. He did not want the Bonanno Family represented on the Commission. They were some of the biggest drug traffickers within the mob and Salerno found this too distasteful for him.
“There’s a meeting Friday, over the union. Paul, Tony and another guy, uh, Gerry Lang. Just the four of us. For what?” complained Salerno. “About Rusty. Meet me at Strang Clinic. I won’t go there with Rusty if it was a million-dollar deal. I won’t go there for nothing. First of all, it’s a Friday. I’m never around here on a Friday. Second of all, what is this meeting that Paul is talking about? Tell them to take care of it themselves. Because I told Paul what to do. He kept telling me, ‘What are we going to do about Rusty? He’s so interested in the title, must be an angle someplace.’
“So I tell him, I said to Paul: ‘That’s the boss if the family wants him. But, as far as the Commission he can not be on it.’ Well now, what is he trying to prove? This Commission, them guys don’t want to deny that they aren’t switching. First they want to go before the Commission. The Commission tells them who’s gonna be the boss. Don’t you see? I don’t want to answer. They’re all junk men, all junk men.”
Tony was absolutely outraged that they should have tried to schedule a Commission meeting on a Friday afternoon. Didn’t they know he went upstate then. “On a Friday! I ain’t been in this town. I never was here for 30 years on a Friday. Meet with this guy on a Friday!”
Tony’s power, and through him, that of the family was absolute. The family controlled the waterfront on the East Side, the produce markets at Hunts Point, the Bronx Terminal Market and the Fulton Street Fish Market. They also had a grip on much of the organized crime in northeast New Jersey, Connecticut and many New York and New Jersey unions, particularly in the construction industry. The mob taxed a levy on just about everything -- labour unions, construction, the garment industry, garbage carting, gasoline, newspaper distribution and even fast food. Their infiltration of the meat industry added a penny to every hot dog sold at the Bronx Zoo.
They controlled directly numbers, loan sharking, betting, extortion and all other illegal criminal enterprises, but also indirectly, they exercised power over other mob families in northeast America. In April, 1988, Angelo Lonardo, former acting boss of the Cleveland La Cosa Nostra, gave evidence before a Permanent Subcommittee. He had become an informer and at the time was the highest-ranking member ever of Cosa Nostra to do a “Valachi.” Under questioning he stated:
“The Genovese represent us on the Commission. When I became underboss of the family I traveled to New York to introduce myself to Tony Salerno. I had known him since the 1940s and out of respect for him and the Genovese family, it was proper to let them know of my appointment. In 1977, Licavoli (the boss), and I travelled to New York City to see Salerno and requested permission to “make” 10 new members into the Cleveland family. Salerno granted our request and told us if we needed any more members, just to let him know. As I stated previously, the Genovese family looks out for the Eastern families -- aside from the other four New York City ones -- and Chicago takes care of the Western families.
“In the early 1980s, I knew Salerno to be the boss of the Genovese family and also knew Vincent Gigante (The Chin) was the consigliere and was being groomed to be the boss. I know that Salerno had a great deal of respect for Benny ‘Squint’ Lombardo and frequently sought his counsel on matters.”
Another outside opinion on the leadership of the family only helps to cloud the mystery of the management even more. Again, the ubiquitous “Benny Squint” hovers into view. With Salerno back from his sick leave, and apparently in charge, both Gigante and Lombardo were floating around the periphery of the family’s administrative boundaries. Whoever was the boss, one thing was clear: When the Feds came knocking on February 25,1985, looking for the boss of the Genovese family, the door they came in at belonged to one Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno.
His arrest resulted in an indictment representing the U.S.versus the Commission of the Cosa Nostra. After months of waiting, the alleged members of the Commission went on trial on September 8, 1986. Salerno was one of a number of top-ranking mobsters who were being judged, not on who they were, but on what they were: the hierarchy of organized crime. It was the first time ever that the ruling council of the mob was to be judged in a courtroom. The trial represented the culmination of a four-year assault on organized crime by federal, state and local authorities in the New York area.
The sheer size and scope of the trial raised many issues. There were 10 defendants, two of whom died before they could be brought to trial. Many lawyers argued that the use of RICO to prosecute numerous defendants in one case amounted to proving guilt by association. Many argued that, regardless of the outcome, there would be little permanent damage to organized crime. Judge Irving R. Kaufman, chairman of the President’s Commission on Organized Crime, stated “It seems to me, as I observe this over the years, that nothing really changes…You put an important mobster in jail for 20 or 40 years, but the business goes on.”
The business did go on. On November 20, Salerno and his peers were found guilty on every count in a 22-count indictment. Fat Tony was gifted 100 years in the slammer. The story goes that, after sentencing, Salerno and two of his peers, Carmine Persico (boss of the Colombo family) and Tony Corallo (head of the Lucchese mob), also convicted and sentenced to a century apiece, sat down for dinner at the Metropolitan Correction Centre, in New York. “Fat Tony,” the senior partner, raised his glass with the Sicilian toast that is as traditional as a shot in the head: “Cent Anni,” and means, roughly translated, “May you live a hundred years.” Carmine “The Snake” Persico is reported to have looked quizzically at his dinner partners and then said, “Cent Anni- I guess we’ll have to get some other toast.”
In July, 1992, Anthony Salerno died of a stroke in a federal medical centre in Springfield, Missouri. He was 81. He had many medical problems towards the end of his life, including diabetes and suspected prostrate cancer. He died alone, with no member of his family at his bedside.
In March of the same year he was convicted on the RICO charges, Salerno wrote a letter to a famous New York journalist who had written about his trial and sentence. In the letter Salerno wrote, “ I am familiar with the foibles of RICO It is a congressional enactment that is a prime example of the seldom use term ‘juxtaposition incongruity.’ It is a plaything for frustrated drama actors such as U.S. Attorney Giuliani and his stand-in Assistant Chertoff. For actors they are, the jury box, the audience for their courtroom histrionics.
“For what else can it be called when a 76-year-old man who has never been convicted of anything but a tax violation is portrayed as a murderer and worse and receives a 100-year term for RICO extortion.
“What is a 100 years sentence to a 76-year-old man? A death sentence, even though the Constitution of this country allegedly forbids such a sentence for a non-capital offence.
When this government has (under the guise of RICO) placed all the ‘bad guys of Italian extraction’ in prison, who will be next?
“History repeatedly shows us that a government that relies on unprincipled abuses of authority and dubious laws has a tendency to snowball into worse scenarios. The same jurors who most shamefully allowed these RICO convictions may one day find themselves at the defendant’s table for nothing more sinister than belonging to the Palma Boys Social Club or the White Plains Civic Ladies Sewing Club.
“Sincerely, Anthony Salerno.”
It’s hard not to feel some kind of grudging admiration for a man who could write that kind of letter, full of literacy and emotion, and easy to forget for perhaps a nano-second just who he really was.
