Fear City: New York vs The Mafia

- -My fellow citizens,

I'd like to speak to you tonight about our future,

about a great historic effort

to give the words freedom, fairness, and hope

new meaning and power for every man and woman in America.

The early eighties was a golden era of our life, the Mob.

New York was the seat of power for that life all over America.

A special police task force has been assigned to investigate a long string

of shootings and murders in Manhattan and Queens.

- -We were always loan sharks.

We were always bookmakers. And we were always drug dealers.

But we diversified like you would in stock.

It's not just one industry.

You too can help us unlock the doors to a golden future.

You too can become leaders in this great new era of progress,

the age of the entrepreneur.

We prospered because we infiltrated every fabric of society,

from the guy on the street with the numbers business,

all the way up to unions.

Police in New Jersey say the death of two longshoreman officials

may also be Mob-related.

The problem with what the Mafia had done,

which no other organized crime group ever did before,

was instead of just being an organized crime group,

doing murder, doing extortion, doing loan-sharking, doing gambling,

doing prostitution,

they put their tentacles into legitimate society.

They controlled the fish market.

They controlled restaurants in New York City.

They controlled the transportation of our products.

They controlled the garment industry.

They had judges they put on the bench.

They had hospitals they controlled.

The docks, the ships... I can go on and on.

There is no instrument of hard work, savings, and job creation

as effective as the family.

The American dream belongs to you.

["Hard Times" by Baby Huey & the Baby Sitters plays]

- -

...this way they can get money and keep their jobs.

The intention was to develop a RICO case

against each of the Mafia families.

We decided that we would tap five family squads.

And all the information about that particular family

would only go to that one squad.

There was the Gambino squad,

the Genovese squad,

Colombo, Lucchese,

and the Bonanno squad.

The purpose of this was to collect the information

about each of those families,

either from wiretaps,

or from informants,

or from surveillance,

to go after the hierarchy of the family

and their involvement with the labor unions,

until you got enough evidence

that you could use that to bring the whole organization down.

Well, he said they...

they gave me... $200.

Two hundred dollars...

It was July of 1982.

I'm assigned to the Colombo Squad.

Gennaro Langella was acting boss of the Colombo family.

They were engaged in all the traditional organized crime activities:

loan-sharking,

illegal gambling,

theft from interstate shipment, hijacking.

- -

And, of course, murder when they had to.

But we needed evidence to put together prosecutable cases.

While we're surveilling Gennaro Langella,

we see that on Fridays, he would go to the Casa Storta restaurant.

It was an Italian restaurant in Brooklyn.

And it turned out to be a meeting place for the hierarchy of the Colombo family.

My supervisor says to me,

"John, I have an assignment for you.

You're gonna be charged with getting a bug in the Casa Storta restaurant."

The idea was to scope it out and to figure out where to put this bug.

I tried to be interested in the food,

the table, and my date.

But what I'm really looking around for was where they're seated.

Gennaro Langella and the Mob guys

are in the banquet room where they're playing cards.

I tried to act as normal as possible.

Typically, when you're in a restaurant, you've gotta go to bathroom.

The place is just swarming with Mob guys.

I didn't look them in the eye.

I didn't identify who was there, what they were doing.

I just wanted to see where they were sitting.

At that point, now you've got a good layout of the place.

You have a real good idea of where they're spending their time

and where to place the bug.

In Casa Storta, we had some new challenges.

We had a dog to deal with.

Her name was Nina.

She was about 150 pounds. She was an Italian bullmastiff.

And when you were having dinner, Nina was walking around the restaurant,

and if you didn't like the fact that Nina was joining you for dinner,

go eat some place else.

You have to think like a criminal.

And I saw that there was no alarm-related issue to deal with.

There was no back or side door

that I could, you know, put ajar.

There was nothing other than we had to go in through the front door.

First, we get the lock guys to work on the locks.

Nina is throwing herself up against the door, and she is a big dog.

We're ready to do the entry,

and instead of me being the first one in,

Arthur with his injectable is gonna in.

But he's having anxiety over how old Nina is.

He's not sure he should poke her,

'cause none of us wants to harm any animal.

Once the door opens, Nina backs up a little bit.

He sticks his leg in the door to sort of shoo her.

She grabs his boot,

backs up,

closing his leg in the door...

and he is stuck.

We have to protect ourselves. The worst case, you'd have to shoot a dog.

Backup-plan-Kenny,

he comes to the rescue with the CO2 fire extinguisher.

Nina lets go,

backs up,

walks into the coat room, and goes in her bed.

Just like that.

We get the job done,

installing a microphone above the table...

and we're out of there.

With a restaurant you have a lot of ambient noise.

Lots of people inside, all talking at the same time,

some of them talking very loudly...

[garbled, indistinct chatter over headphones]

...laughing, yelling.

You have dishes. You have glasses clattering.

Silverware being dropped.

So it presented a real challenge listening to those Mob guys.

But then we hear Gennaro Langella, the underboss.

At that point, two Mob guys enter the restaurant,

and we hear them being greeted.

And I hear one of them say, "That wire looks like it doesn't belong."

Next thing I know, everything goes dead.

They were on to us.

We realized that there was bugs everywhere.

There's FBI all around, watching.

The club's bugged.

The car is bugged.

Sometimes, one of the guys you're talking to has--

He's wearing a wire on his body.

I had fucking agents all around. They're looking for me.

Sure you know what you're doing?

They've wired up parking meters.

They wired up bushes.

They wired up homes.

Where've you been?

I got the mic on me.

And if you make the wrong move, and a lot of guys have,

they end up dead for it, and a lot of guys in jail for it.

He has dreams, this guy.

Wait a minute.

Do you realize you're talking to serious people?

...serious people...

You're the one that fucked everything up. I didn't do nothin'...

In 1981,

I was asked to investigate the Lucchese crime family's influence

in the garbage collection industry on Long Island.

At that point we knew

Tony "Ducks" Corallo was the boss of the Lucchese crime family.

Tony "Ducks" grew up on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

And he became a soldier many, many years before and rose in the ranks.

And he eventually took over the crime family and became the boss.

I was assigned to the unit

that did backgrounds and intelligence on organized crime.

So we knew Tony "Ducks" was a character.

His nickname was because he had this ability to duck subpoenas,

and when they were coming to arrest him on something,

he was never home.

He was ducking out.

He was cagey,

real old-school.

Not flashy. Didn't wear $2,000 suits,

low profile.

But... a boss.

Our investigators start making inroads

into the Lucchese crime family.

And we eventually worked our way up from informants, to wire taps,

to ultimately identifying Sal Avellino.

Sal Avellino was a soldier in the Lucchese crime family.

A Long Island guy.

He drove a black Jaguar, four-door.

We learned two things about Avellino.

One is that he was the industry specialist for garbage...

in the Lucchese crime family.

And the second thing was that he drove Tony "Ducks" Corallo in his Jaguar.