Falling Into the Mob, page 28
He took a long, you’re-boring-me look at his wristwatch.
“You’ve forgotten about the nuclear weapon.”
“Oh, sure, your nuclear weapon. Tell me about it briefly.”
I’d practiced this: “What I’m offering is detailed inside information implicating every boss of the five families, every underboss, every consigliere, every capo and street boss, many of the soldiers and so-called associates, connected people, judges, cops, politicians, out-of-town bosses and other bad actors, and gangs who deal with the Mafia. You name the badass, press the Search button, and I can give you useful and actionable information on him. I can provide details on probably every significant Mafia crime in the last thirteen years as well as ongoing crimes.”
He sat back down.
“I possess a document that I can put in your hands at anytime. The minute this document is in possession of the FBI, the New York Mafia is effectively sodomized.”
“Mr. Vail, do you think you’re the first person who’s come in here with big talk about giving me information on the Cosa Nostra? We’ve had top mobsters spilling their guts for years, intelligence windfalls better than anything you’ve got. We had John Gotti’s underboss, Sal Gravano, telling us about unsolved crimes, admitting to murders we didn’t even know about. Another underboss, Sal Vitale, flipped and gave us three decades worth of information. He had an encyclopedic memory. When these people come to us we require extensive interrogations over weeks or months. They don’t choose what to tell us. We get everything. We hold them upside down and shake them until all the coins fall out. If they hold anything back, the deal is off. Plus we have many other sources of intelligence. So if you think your stuff is so much better than what we have without you, you’re probably wrong.”
“But my stuff is better,” I said. “You’ve never had such comprehensive information. And Rob Portis will get the credit. Rob Portis will get books written about the day the mobster walked in and gave him the keys to the kingdom. Rob Portis will move to Washington and have an office the size of Texas.”
Rob Portis scoffed. He’d probably heard a ton of bullshit in his career but he wasn’t throwing me out, he was only playing hardball. I thought I could sense a physical response from him, maybe even a tingle telling him that a milestone in crime fighting just might be unfolding before his eyes.
“Describe the nature of your document.”
“Three loose-leaf notebooks totaling 1,563 pages, compiled on the orders of Jake Sforza. You think of Mr. Sforza as a member of the Mafia but in fact Mr. Sforza was a maverick who felt he had broken away from the Mafia and always believed the Mafia would be his ultimate enemy. He knew there would be a day when he needed an ace in the hole to survive. He assigned a very competent subordinate to take charge of this project. The subordinate made it his life’s work. It’s a masterpiece of longterm intelligence gathering. It doesn’t include the volume of government wiretapping that’s been done over the years, most of which is probably worthless goombah chitchat, but I’m confident the accretion of insider information gleaned in face-to-face conversations with unsuspecting Mafiosi in all five families makes it vastly superior to the totality of anything that you or any other agency has ever collected.”
I’d rehearsed that speech and thought it went well.
“When can I see it?”
“Not without a deal but you’re entitled to a taste. How about right now?”
“Now works for me.”
“Give me ten random numbers between one and 1,563.”
I took out a pen and index card while he thought about this.
He said, “Okay: 82, 107, 312, 574, 716, 802, 940, 1,005, 1,340.”
“That’s nine. One more.”
“Okay, 1,563.”
I’d copied them down. “The fax number on your business card is still operative?”
He nodded.
“Sorry to have to fax but these pages have not been scanned, for obvious reasons.”
I took out a “burner” (an untraceable cell phone taken from a drawerful of cheap disposable phones in the Sforza kitchen), punched in a speed-dial number, repeated the numbers Portis had given me, and hung up.
Bazzanella was waiting with the three notebooks on his lap in the lobby of a busy hotel in downtown Manhattan. He removed pages 82, 107, 312, 574, 716, 802, 940, 1,005, 1,340 and 1,563 and fed them into a fax machine in the hotel’s business center.
“Tell Peggy to stand at the fax machine,” I said.
Instead of telling Peggy he stood up and strode out of the office. I sat and looked at his wall-of-fame gallery, photos of himself with famous people. I stood up and looked out the window at a twenty-third-floor view of Lower Manhattan. Immediately below was a small plaza. Across the street were fast-food joints. The sidewalks were crowded with briskly moving pedestrians.
He returned clutching ten sheets of paper. He closed the office door, sat down behind his desk, put on reading glasses, and read the pages carefully as I waited.
At one point his face reddened and he mumbled, “Son of a bitch.”
“Good one, eh?” I said. He ignored me.
At last he looked up and said, “You’ve got 1,563 pages like this?”
“Want to see more?”
I would have given him a hundred more. The more pages he saw, the more he’d accept the pages as genuine and the better the odds he would find something mouthwatering.
I said, “Of course I’m not familiar with the particular pages you’ve just read but how many prosecutions could you initiate or at least stimulate based on that kind of information? How much unconfirmed information could you corroborate or supplement? I’m no expert but I bet you could make racketeering cases against every single mobster mentioned in that book. I don’t know if this gives you enough for convictions but it gets you started and meanwhile this information probably fills in most of the gaps in the Bureau’s knowledge of the mob, including some of what happened in Vavolizza’s basement. Are you aware of the activity in the basement?”
“The basement was his clubhouse. Had his capo meetings there.”
“Did you ever get a bug in there?”
“I wouldn’t tell you either way.”
“Did you ever read his notes on his computer or get into his e-mails? They’re on his wife’s account but I’m sure you knew that.”
Portis said nothing but I could see he was surprised. Maybe Nicky’s use of the computer was so stupid the FBI never thought of looking into it.
“Many of the people who took part in those meetings talked to the person who compiled my document. I’m confident you could piece it all together from what I can give you.”
“It’s impossible to verify and assess the value of a particular document after only a cursory glance at a few sample pages.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” I said. “How about this? I’ll get up and go to the men’s room and while I’m gone you can call the honchos in Washington and tell them what you got. I’ll be glad to send them another twenty pages just to make it interesting.”
I’d gotten through the simple part. Now it got trickier.
“But I have one requirement when you talk to them. And it’s something you will have to do very skillfully.”
“I’m listening.”
“You have to stress that this is not about getting a lot of incremental information that’ll help in individual prosecutions. It’s not about nailing Joey Gobbagooch for hijacking a truck five years ago. It’s about a comprehensive attack on the whole Mafia enterprise. I’m offering the document on that basis and that basis alone. If you do anything less with it, I will embarrass you publicly. I’m giving you this document to destroy the New York Mafia. I want that broad purpose acknowledged and I want the government’s explicit commitment to it as part of any deal.”
He stared at me. “I’ll tell them how you see it.”
I left his office, found the men’s room, and spent a few minutes washing my hands and standing around. Agents came in and out, eyeing me suspiciously. When I returned to his office he gave me twenty more page numbers and we did the faxing exercise again. I took another walk, this time to the lobby and back. When I returned to his office he was hanging up the phone.
“I’ve been asked to inquire whether the man who compiled these notebooks would be available for additional background and testimony?”
“That would expose him to considerable danger and the process might drag on for years. He’d probably require protective custody for the rest of his life.”
“There’s no deal without it.”
“Have we said there’s a deal with it?”
“Before agreeing to anything the Bureau will require concrete assurance that this evidence is authentic and reliable and will provide—”
“Rob, shut the fuck up—and I say that with the utmost respect. We’re talking about bringing down the entire New York Mafia. At the very least doing tremendous damage to it. So don’t be a dick. Let’s now move on to what I want in exchange for this.”
“Okay,” he said. “What do you want?”
“I HAVE a dream,” I said, attempting a Martin Luther King cadence. “I have a dream of glistening Adriatic waters and green canals. I have a dream of a family moving on to a new life far away, disappearing lock, stock, and barrel from the New York scene. A family that has—what’s the cliché?— tentacles into many activities but withdraws those tentacles and moves on to happy crime-free lives across the sea.”
“You want to go into witness protection?”
“No, I want to go to Venice. From what I hear the protection program entails being under your thumb for the rest of eternity.”
“The WITSEC program is run by the US Marshals Service so you wouldn’t be under my thumb.”
“I’d be under somebody’s thumb,” I said. “We don’t want to be in the program. We’ll handle our own security and our own costs. But we need your cooperation and facilitation.”
“Who’s ‘we’?”
“Me and everyone in the Sforza crew. Some will need passports. You’ll facilitate that along with whatever other diplomatic papers are necessary. Visas, work permits, I don’t have any idea what’s needed but you’ll provide it. All of these people will require across-the-board immunity from prosecution for anything they’ve ever done. I’ll expect you to guarantee our safety on the way out, and most important I want you to fix it with Italy.”
“You want the FBI to relocate you to Italy?”
“No, Rob. I want Venice and Italy to be hospitable to us. I don’t want them thinking New York is dumping a mob family on them. I want them to feel that they’re taking part in an unprecedented anti-Mafia process. We’ll do this quietly and peaceably but we need you backing up the deal. I want a high-ranking Italian official designated as a permanent liaison with us and I want a guarantee that we won’t be hassled by Italian cops or any agencies including their tax police. We intend to be model citizens, productive and law-abiding and employed, and we want to feel welcome.”
“You want jobs?”
“We’ll provide our own jobs. Legitimate jobs.”
“You’re out of your mind if you think the FBI will approve this and you’re even crazier if you think Venetian authorities will go along with this. And what happens when the Italian Mafia finds out where you are.”
“Not your problem. Let me worry about that.”
“Is that all?”
“No. One other thing: speed. Very bad shit is going to break loose if this moves slowly. It has to be record-breakingly fast.”
He gave me a little smile. “Speed is hard. Government wheels turn slowly, you know that. Lots of agencies would be involved in this—Justice, State, Homeland Security, the TSA, Interpol, New York State, New York City. Lots of turf and big egos, meetings, buy-ins and sign-offs, and so on. I can’t just make a call and get this done.”
“The challenge requires a mover and shaker. That’s why I brought it to you,” I said. “Find a way. I want this ultra fast-tracked. I don’t know what that entails and I don’t give a shit. I’ll give you a week, Rob. I’ll hand you the notebooks next Wednesday afternoon at Newark Airport. Then or never.”
“It’ll take a week just to—”
“Rob, let me put it this way: the Sforzas are now public enemy number one and the global media is all over this story. If you could make us disappear overnight and do this at no risk and no cost with no bloodshed and no embarrassment of any kind, would that be a good deal?”
“I can’t see my superiors accepting it.”
“Okay, let’s have a bloody mob war instead. Lots of collateral damage to innocent citizens.”
“I’ll get back to you,” he said.
HIRAM TACK, the Sforza IT guy, set up a secure line for a conference call to Italy: Viv and Paola on one end, Sylvia and I on the other.
Viv and Paola were spellbound as I filled them in on the fight with Vavolizza at Fiori, Bazzanella’s notebooks, and my session with Portis. I told the stories with a minimum of color. I did not want them distracted by all the juicy details. I wanted them following my thinking as I built a picture of what had to happen next.
“The reality,” I said, “is that the Sforza business in New York is on the verge of extinction. A war to preserve it will end disastrously. We’ve reached an unavoidable turning point. We have to move on to something else, and we have to act fast. So what I told Portis is that the only solution is for the Sforzas to leave.”
“To leave?” said one of them, or all three of them.
“To pack up and go,” I said.
“Where?”
There was a moment of dead silence until Viv figured it out and roared, “Venice!”
“Yes. Venice.”
“That’s a brilliant stroke. Allow me to repay my debt to you with permanent hospitality in my city.”
Sylvia said nothing. I felt I could see her processing the idea. Then the smile.
“Jesus,” she said. “Really?”
Paola laughed.
“Jake’s exit strategy had two parts,” I said. “The first was secret: the notebooks. The second part was in plain sight: building up a fallback existence in Venice for everyone in the family. That’s what Viv and Paola have been doing all these years.”
“Did you say everybody in the family’s going to Italy?” said Sylvia. “When? When is this going to happen?”
“Wednesday.”
“Wednesday? We’re moving to Italy on Wednesday? Are you nuts?”
But she loved it.
Later we gathered the family and explained the Venice plan. Everyone was shocked but when the shock subsided there was no real resistance. The impending danger was too great and the opportunity to throw off a lifetime as a pariah community was too appealing. Vera, to my surprise, stood up and in a clear and steady voice endorsed the plan. She had become a different person, her bimbo persona forgotten, and her words carried weight. “We’re at the end of it here,” she said. “We can’t go on with this nightmare.”
I made it clear that no one would be forced to go to Italy but almost everyone signed up. Sylvia would organize the move. Ron Taubman would close down the family’s New York businesses, conducting a “scorched earth” program to erase all traces of the family’s connections and to free most of its “clients” (i.e. victims) from depredations by the Vavolizzas. Their new boss, Carlo Noto, would arrive to take over but find nothing to take over.
CHAPTER 31
DeSens called early Friday morning. “I’m shooting hoops.”
I went out and met him on the basketball court.
“Bad news, Phil. Robert Portis has asked me to advise you that your proposition has met with impassioned resistance. It will not be approved, especially within your time frame. Portis wants you to know he supported you aggressively but to no avail.”
If DeSens had hurled the basketball at me and hit me square in the chest, the impact would not have been as deflating as this blow. Somehow I had counted my chickens; I felt I’d made my case so persuasively that it had to be accepted, wild as it was. I was so confident that I’d brought the whole family into the Venice plan. Now that rug was ripped out from under me.
“I don’t know details, Phil, but here’s one small fact that’ll interest you. In that first batch of pages you showed Portis there was an entry about the mob rigging a jury in a trial eight or nine years ago. That just happened to be a big case that Portis was closely involved with and a hung jury was a severe disappointment. It was obviously jury tampering but we had no proof. The notebook entry said the mob had intimidated and bribed two jurors. It gives their names, tells the whole story.”
“Can the case be retried?”
“It’s being looked into. But it’s what gave Portis a special appreciation of the notebooks. Unfortunately it didn’t convince everybody.”
“Do these assholes in Washington understand what the consequences will be?”
“They’ve been warned but it didn’t sink in. Portis thinks your proposal was too much to swallow in one gulp. He says they could understand a bunch of new prosecutions but they couldn’t visualize the totality of bringing down the entire New York Mafia. What they could visualize was the headlines blasting them for allowing a notorious crime family to leave the country with immunity, an escort to the airport, expedited passports, and a hands-off agreement from the Italian police.”
“I offer the destruction of the New York Mafia and they reject it because they can’t visualize it?”
“They just didn’t get it. They realize the notebooks are a gold mine and they want to work out a deal with you but that means a lot of negotiation. They’re more secure with a slow, careful process than a splashy overnight deal.”
“But there’s no time for that. The commission’s meeting Sunday night. That’ll be the green light for the war.”
“I didn’t know about Sunday night.”
“You thought they were going to wait six months while we work it out with Washington?”
We looked at each other helplessly. Then we shook hands and he hurried off.
