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We talked briefly in a bar, the old Joh
What he wanted first was to play Italians who were in the Mafia. The crime actors had been mostly Jewish: Edward G. Robinson, Alan King, Rod Steiger, Eli Wallach, Paul Muni, Jerry Orbach. De Niro and Pacino took it over.They were the stars of an American industry of writers, editors, cameramen, directors, gofers, lighting men, soundmen, location men, and casting agents who were all on the job and on the payroll because of the Mafia.
Now the whole Mafia industry is slipping on a large patch of black ice. Soon it will be totally gone.
"We had one wiseguy in the first season," Bill Clark, former executive producer of the now departed NYPD Blue, told me the other day. "That was all, because they just couldn't make it as characters for us.Their day was gone."
Both of us remember when it wasn't.There was a hot late afternoon in July 1979 when Carmine Galante, the boss of the Bona
The great A.M., secretary, took the call. She was a Catholic schoolgirl who was a true daughter of the Mafia in the Bronx.
"Tell Jimmy that Galante is down on Knickerbocker Avenue," Clark said. Then he hung up. Inspectors were barging in to grab the phone and have it for themselves the rest of the day. There was no such thing as a cell phone.
Secretary A.M. sat on the call for one hour.
"People shouldn't know about a thing like this," she said.
Today, aside from grieving showmen, the only ones rooting for the mobsters to survive-or at least for keeping some of them around-are FBI agents assigned to the squads that chase Mafia gangsters across the hard streets of the city. Each family has a squad assigned to it. The squads are numbered, such as C-16 for the Colombo squad. Each agent is assigned to watch three soldiers and one capo in the family. The work is surveillance and interviews. Agents will interview a cabdriver or a mobster's sister. It doesn't matter. Just do the interview.Then they get to their desk and fill out FD-302 forms that get piled up in the office.They must do it in order to keep the FBI way of life in New York.They earn seventy thousand dollars or so a year, live in white suburbs, and do no real heavy lifting on the job. After a five-hour day they go to a health club, then perhaps stop for a drink with other agents, and they always talk about what jobs they want when they retire. If, after interviewing, surveilling, and paying stool pigeons, they do not come in with some Mafia dimwit whose arrest makes the news, they face doing true work for their country: antiterror-ism detail in a wet alley in Amman, Jordan, or tent living in Afghanistan.
"What do you want?" Red Hot said. He is on First Avenue, in front of the great De Robertis espresso shop.
"We just want to talk to you" one of the two FBI agents said.
"You'll have to wait here until I get a lawyer to stop by," Red Hot said.
"We just wanted you to take a ride with us down to the office."
"The answer is no," Red Hot said.
"We just want to get fresh fingerprints. We haven't taken yours in a while."
"That's because I was in jail. And nothing happened to the prints you have.What are you trying to say, that they faded? They wore out?"
His friend Frankie "Biff" LoBritto cut in,"Red Hot, if you go with them, you won't come back. They'll make up a case in the car."
When the agents left, Red Hot said in a tired voice, "They'll be back. They're going to make up something and lock me up. Don't even worry about it."
Some nights later Red Hot was walking into De Robertis when he dropped dead on the sidewalk.
"He ruined the agents' schedules," Frankie Biff said. "They were going to put him away for sure without a case."
I will now take you into intensive care to observe the last of the Mafia.
The floor under them didn't even give a warning creak before opening up and causing everybody to tumble into the basement. This happened in March of this year when the United States Attorney in Brooklyn a
From out of the basement climbed Tony Cafe. Immediately the FBI visited him for the second time. It needed some help. If there were any shooters roaming around Brooklyn, Tony Cafe had to stop them. For if any bodies appeared on the streets or in the gutters of Brooklyn, perhaps the FBI agents, in absolutely desperate trouble for having Eppolito and Caracappa accused of shooting people practically in front of them, would be thrown like miscellaneous cargo onto transport planes bound for Kabul and Baghdad.
Politicians and the news media claimed the two detectives had committed the most treacherous and treasonous acts in the history of the police department.Would that it were true. Police officers serve wonderfully well and in these times do not even take a free cup of coffee. But there are isolated madmen who still pass the test and who have guns and could use money, and over the years the belief has been that many Mob shootings in Brooklyn have been done by cops.
Tony's favor to the FBI consisted of finding the only two Mob gunmen left in Brooklyn and ordering them to keep their fingers still.
There were other issues for the Mob. As ordered by the mandates of Christmas for Mafia captains, collections were taken up late in 2004 for traditional presents for the bosses of the five New York City Mafia families. The bosses now mainly were worried defendants and long-term prisoners. There was only one recognized boss, Joe Massino of the crime family named for the late big old mobster Joe Bona
The men in the Bona
Joe Massino sat at the defense table with a computer. He was good and overweight. He had a round, bland face and short white hair. The heritage of great suits ended at his plain blue suit and open-collar white shirt. Glasses were perched on his nose as his pudgy fingers touched the computer keyboard. I don't know what he was looking for.What he needed was an old movie of the battle of Dien Bien Phu, where he could identify closely with the French, who lost; the brother-in-law, Good-Looking Sal, would be shooting at him from the hillside.When Massino stopped typing, his hand went to the top of his head and, with thumb and forefinger, moved the glasses.This was the style of removing eyeglasses for all those in the underworld in Queens County.