Fear City: New York vs the Mafia (2020) s01e03 Episode Script
Judgement Day
1
What a difference a decade makes.
Ten years ago,
New York was nearly flat broke
and very close to not being able to pay
its bills and loans.
Well, now the city is prospering.
[man 1]
The $42 million, 38-story Harley Hotel
is being built
by developer Harry Helmsley on 42nd.
[man 2] American Telephone and Telegraph
is putting up a skyscraper
at 55th and Madison.
Hyatt has broken ground for a hotel
on the side of the old Commodore.
[man 3] In the 1980s, there were buildings
going up all across Manhattan.
When all those projects are completed,
city officials glowing predict
that it'll mean an extra 20,000 jobs
here in Manhattan.
[man 4]
What's happened is phenomenal.
I've never seen anything
to the extent I have in New York.
Now, from a real estate standpoint,
it's probably become
the hottest city in the world.
[man 5] Every construction project
is worth millions and millions of dollars.
We were learning the Mob exploited that.
In the next year, three huge skyscrapers
will be completed on a single block.
Topping out ceremonies were held
at one of them today, the Trump Tower.
[man 5] If you're running
a construction company,
you've gotta deal with the Mob.
[man 5] It was a huge, huge racket,
terrifying people into doing
what the Mob wanted them to do.
[reporter]
A work foreman was beaten to death
and thrown out of a 56-floor window.
[interviewer] Make you nervous at all,
to know that one guy's dead,
-another's in the hospital from this job?
-It's all in a day's work.
The game is a tough one.
The stakes are high. The money is big.
And murder is not out of the question
for those who get in the way.
["Hard Times" by Baby Huey
& The Baby Sitters plays]
Cold, cold eyes upon me they stare ♪
People all around me
And they're all in fear ♪
So I play the part
I feel they want of me ♪
And I pull the shades
So I won't see them seein' me ♪
Havin' hard times in this crazy town ♪
Havin' hard times
There's no love to be found ♪
Havin' hard times in this crazy town ♪
Havin' hard times
There's no love to be found ♪
[song ends]
[static crackles]
You've never seen anything
Like this before ♪
[man] A new Chevrolet Corvette,
like never before.
Never before ♪
A Corvette superb and authentic
[Alite] In the '80s,
when all this is going on,
we started buying
apartments and property.
And I made all my guys
buy brand new Corvettes.
Then they started nicknaming me
"Johnny Vets."
[man] first computer-activated
manual transmission.
We were like a bunch of girls
going on a shopping spree.
We would go to David Nadler
and buy two dozen shirts at a time,
monogram shirts with our initials on it,
$2,000 suits,
shoes that were 1,000 a pop.
The money that we spent
was ridiculous, on champagne
We would drink Cristal.
We drank Perrier-Jouët
in magnums.
But the personal sacrifices,
while I'm drinking that champagne,
and after I put that glass down,
in two hours I'm gonna
put on a black outfit
and, uh go dig a grave somewhere
and kill somebody.
[man] Early this morning,
a man walking his dog
found a body lying in the tall grass
by the shore at Ferry Point Park.
That's in the Bronx.
Police figured it might have been
a gangland rub out.
[man 1]
He makes a deal with the guy in Brooklyn,
59th and 3rd.
[man 2] What the fuck do you wanna do?
Thirty-two thousand
[man 1] The job shows
a potential extra of $750,000.
[Joyce] We knew we were
onto something big with the Mob.
But we weren't getting clear evidence
of what this conspiracy was all about.
We just knew that we had a lot
of concrete companies
interacting with a lot of Mob families.
But we didn't know anything
about how it worked.
The whole idea was to figure out
if the Commission,
the bosses of all the families,
was a part of the conspiracy.
The Casa Storta restaurant
was a meeting place
for the hierarchy of the Colombo family.
We had the place bugged.
One of the things we noticed
is Ralph Scopo,
who's not a boss,
he's not a capo, he's not an underboss,
he's just a soldier.
He's at the table
when they're talking about
these controversial conversations
over construction.
I knew Ralph well. Ralph Scopo
was actually one of my father's guys.
I liked him.
Early on, I called him Uncle Ralph.
I grew up with him.
He was only a soldier,
but, you know, here's the thing.
If you had a soldier
that was making
a tremendous amount of money
and had a lot of influence,
he could be a powerful guy too,
because he had a lot of authority
in his own right,
because of what
he meant to the family.
Ralphie Scopo was that guy.
[Joyce] We discovered Ralph Scopo
was the President of the District Council
of the Cement and Concrete Workers Union.
It was clear to us, at that point,
that Ralph Scopo was a key player.
And our surveillance shifted
from the Casa Storta restaurant
to Ralph Scopo.
[Joyce] He would go into his office.
He'd be in there for about an hour.
And then, like clockwork,
he would go back to his car.
The contractor would drive up,
get out of his car,
jump in Ralphie's car,
and they would talk.
Clearly, he did not trust his office.
He was doing business in his car.
So we get the microphones installed
in Ralph's two cars.
[Joyce] You have to remember,
Ralph Scopo was the president
of the Concrete Workers Union.
So he controlled the laborers
at every construction project in New York.
[vehicle beeping]
[Joyce] Ralph made sure
he informed the contractors
what the consequences were
if they stepped out of line.
[Giuliani] I reviewed a lot of the tapes
the day after.
As we developed the Commission case,
we realized that by controlling
the construction units,
the Mafia controlled
the entire construction industry.
[reporter] The strike has halted
one and a half billion dollars
in construction projects in the city.
The walkout, which began yesterday,
continued today
The Mafia controlled unions
to make it impossible for you
to function and make a profit
by going on strike.
All of a sudden, you realize
it's better to pay these creeps off.
[Savarese]
Ralph Scopo terrified people
into doing what the Mob wanted them to do.
We had him on tape talking
to the construction company presidents,
and reminding them,
"You know that guy you read about
in the newspaper who was whacked?
You know, that was us."
And the message, not too subtle, was,
"If you don't do
what I'm telling you to do,
you could wind up like that guy
you just read about the paper."
[interviewer] You know that one guy
fell down the stairs here
and is in the hospital to this very day,
and another guy was
thrown out a window on the 56th floor.
That happened before my time.
[Savarese]
We had terrific tapes of Ralph Scopo,
but we needed proof that the Commission,
the ruling body of the Mob,
was at the heart of this extortion.
[Joyce] We had a squad working
each of the families.
We'd have a meeting of the key agents
on the squad,
-and we would compare notes.
-[tape deck clicks]
[indistinct chatter on tape]
The squad that was investigating
the Genovese family
was getting great information
about construction
at the Palma Boys Social Club,
where Fat Tony hung out.
[Joyce] The Gambino squad
was getting their information
from a bug they had on Paul Castellano.
[Joyce] Tony "Ducks" Corallo,
he's the boss of the Lucchese family.
His car's bugged.
All of those were little pieces,
little facets of the whole story.
And we started putting them together.
[click]
[whirring]
-What was that?
-[typewriter clacking]
[man] Speak now
or forever hold your peace
[Joyce] One day, one of the contractors
was in the car with Ralph,
and he was talking about
having a pretty decent sized job.
He says, "Look I've got this job.
It's gonna be about a $1.5 million job."
And Ralph says
[Joyce] The club was the key.
In a very short three minute conversation,
Ralph laid out the existence of the club.
He says, "There's eight companies
that participate in the club.
Each of those companies
is connected with a Mob family.
Anything over two million
was gonna be allocated
to those eight companies,
and no one else could bid."
It's fixed. It's fixed.
Everything is fixed from the beginning.
Everybody knows who's allocated what job.
Let's say its value
is really eight million.
They would put in their bid
for ten million,
and all the other companies will put in
a bid higher than the ten million,
thereby guaranteeing
that they would get
the job for ten million,
when it really only had a value
of about eight million.
So they were making a couple
of extra million dollars on a job.
And so with all these
extra millions of dollars,
it was going
into the pockets of Mob families
that represented that company.
But then we found out
another incredibly important
piece of evidence.
[tape whirs]
[Joyce] The contractors that interacted
with Ralph kicked back two percent
to the Mob families to be divided up
two percent a job.
And there's hundreds
of millions of dollars of construction
underway at any given time.
[Savarese] Stop, think about it.
There are buildings going up
all across Manhattan.
Many of these are buildings
that we all know. We all see.
They're still there.
And while they were being built,
the Mob had its hand in,
collecting its two percent.
[indistinct speech]
[distorted clanging]
[distorted speech overlaps
with sounds of machinery
[Savarese] Every concrete construction job
in Manhattan of over two million in value
would pay the Mob.
[Joyce] The concrete club showed up
in every conversation,
whether it was in Fat Tony's social club,
or Paul Castellano's wires,
or Tony "Ducks" Corallo's wires.
The Commission was always mentioned.
The Commission was centrally involved
in every big building
going up in Manhattan
for years and years and years.
[man] I told you, I ain't playing around.
[Joyce] We're literally talking
a billion-dollar operation.
[man] The deal was 400-plus.
You gotta put it behind you.
[overlapping distorted chatter]
[man] How does the Bronx zoo sound?
Aqueduct Racetrack, Belmont, the Coliseum?
[man 2] The first part of the job
is 4.8 million
The concrete club has to have been
one of the most audacious schemes
that the Mob ever pulled off.
But we can't just win this trial
by proving that there's something
called the "concrete club" alone.
To prove a RICO case,
we've gotta connect that Commission
to a series of other underlying crimes.
So, to show that they're
utterly terrifying people,
we thought that it would be great
if we could have something more violent,
more gripping,
more, you know, sort of really
grabbing your attention
and grabbing the jury's attention.
We were gonna prove a murder.
[Chertoff] The FBI were assigned
two agents to be the case agents.
The idea was they would be the main point
of contact between the prosecutorial team
and the FBI.
One was Pat Marshall
and one was Charlotte Lang.
[Lang] When I got there,
the FBI was very male-dominated.
I think it was 97 percent male.
The supervisor said to me,
"I didn't ask for you. I don't think women
can work organized crime."
He said, "You'll be the only woman
on the squad." And I was.
And I thought this must be,
"Hi, welcome to New York!"
But then the supervisor told me
that he was going to assign me
to work with Pat.
I would describe Pat Marshall as
the big brother that anybody
would want to have.
[Marshall] Charlotte was a former
school teacher, very well-organized.
She was my right-hand woman, my friend.
What I couldn't figure out, she could.
We work very, very well together.
It was our responsibility,
Charlotte's and mine,
to prove the Commission
had authorized murder.
So
how are we gonna prove it?
[Chertoff] There was a murder
we certainly had good reason to believe
was a Commission-ordered hit:
the famous murder of Carmine Galante.
[typewriter clacking]
Carmine Galante was rubbed out today
as he sat in a Brooklyn luncheonette,
a gangland execution
of a man believed to be
the most important organized crime
figure in the country.
Two other people in the luncheonette
died as well.
Brian Ross has the gory details.
[Ross] Galante was having lunch
in the courtyard
of an Italian restaurant in Brooklyn
when five men entered
with automatic rifles and shotguns
and opened fire.
Galante and two other men
at his table were killed.
[Chertoff]
Carmine Galante was a Sicilian mobster
who rose to ultimately control
what was the Bonanno family.
Now, there was a lot
of informant information
that to kill a boss, you needed
the permission of the Commission.
[Ross]
Galante was resented by other Mafia bosses
because he received so much
attention and publicity,
and because he had been too rough
in his efforts to become the top man
in the American Mafia.
[Lang] When Carmine Galante was murdered
at Joe and Mary's Restaurant
in '79 in Brooklyn,
the other four heads of the family
would've had to agree to that murder.
We had to prove that the Commission,
the other four Mob bosses,
okayed the killing of Galante.
[Lang] I spent an afternoon with
the medical examiner in New York then,
and he showed me the autopsy photos.
Carmine Galante had 84
exit and entrance wounds in his body.
Five people participated in that shooting.
[Chertoff]
There was a lot of informant information
that one of the shooters
was a guy named Anthony Indelicato.
The problem is you can't use
informant information in court.
So how do you prove the case?
[Childers] Bruno Indelicato,
real name Anthony Indelicato,
was a soldier in the Bonanno family,
who, shortly after the murder
of Carmine Galante,
was elevated to the rank of captain.
Bruno was a wild guy
known to be sort of a loose cannon,
someone you would
look to for violent crime.
When the car pulled away,
there was a woman across the street
in an apartment
who heard the shots,
saw the car, and wrote down
the license plate number.
She gave it to the police.
The police, within a day or so,
found the car abandoned,
and they took fingerprints
off the steering wheel,
where the driver was,
and also fingerprints off
the rear door handle in the back seat.
[Childers] Indelicato's fingerprints
were compared
against the latent print
on the door handle.
No match.
It was run against everyone who could be
thought of as a possible suspect.
There was no hits.
With no fingerprint hit,
there wasn't anywhere else to go.
[traffic sounds]
[Childers] Now, fast-forward to 1984,
we had the idea:
redo every piece
of the investigation, essentially.
I don't believe the car
was around anymore.
But that door handle,
that metal door handle,
had been removed from the car
and was still in police custody.
We went to the evidence vault
to check it out.
When you look at the door handle,
you realize,
it's not your fingers that would touch
where the print is,
but it's actually your palm.
And so that's when it was realized
that we need to start running
palm prints against these.
Indelicato's palm print
was not in police custody.
The fingerprint cards they had for him
didn't include his palm print.
[Lang] I had to look for Bruno.
We were able to identify,
I think through source information,
about this girlfriend.
And she was expected at this clinic
on a particular day.
We sat there all day waiting, hopefully,
for Bruno to show up with the girlfriend.
Of course, they do show up
like three minutes before it's gonna close
after sitting there all day.
So we arrest Bruno.
Instead of just doing the fingerprints,
we did the whole hand.
It's called a major case print.
We had an FBI agent
that was an expert and could determine
did his fingerprints, palm prints match?
[line rings]
[phone rings]
[Lang] I can still remember Pat--
We were sitting in the squad area
and his phone rang.
[ringing]
And he turned around and he said,
-"It's Bruno's palm print."
-Bingo.
One hundred percent match.
He was one of the shooters.
[Chertoff] That was
very, very good evidence
against Indelicato for murder.
Now we needed to connect that up,
to show the Commission had ordered it.
[Childers] It just so happened,
on the day of the murder,
there was video surveillance
being done on a social club
in Little Italy,
a place called the Ravenite Social Club.
What we had was somewhat unusual
on that tape.
Approximately half an hour
after the murder,
there is this incredible meeting.
Indelicato and a couple of other people
show up.
They are in a very energized state.
[Marshall] The surveillance tape
at the Ravenite Social Club
shows Indelicato wearing an open shirt,
and then everybody congratulates
one another, hugging and kissing.
[Lang] So here you have a Bonanno member,
on the day that the boss is killed,
going over and being congratulated
by the underboss of the Gambino family.
[Chertoff] Once you prove
that Indelicato was a shooter,
the fact that he goes to the boss
of another family to be congratulated
is very powerful evidence that in fact
the Commission did order the murder,
as the rules required them to do.
[Giuliani] This was tremendous evidence.
We were getting very close.
I knew what I would need
to indict Commission,
and I became obsessive-compulsive
about it.
I always felt like the pinnacle
of the case would be
proof of a Commission meeting.
That's what we needed.
Nobody had ever taken
surveillance photographs
of a Commission meeting before.
[ship's horn blows in distance]
[O'Brien] It was May 15, 1984.
I got a call in the morning
from my informant saying,
"There's gonna be a Commission meeting."
I didn't believe him. This was unheard of.
I said, "Yeah right."
He goes, "No, all of the bosses
are gonna be there.
They're gonna be talking about
this concrete club they had going."
I said, "Alright, if I make a fool
of myself, it's your ass."
The bosses of the crime families
couldn't afford to get caught
meeting together.
They would reconnoiter the area
looking for vehicles,
and if they did
they would detect the surveillance team.
They would call it off.
So the plan was, if the meeting
is gonna be at one o'clock,
we're gonna set up at two o'clock.
Don't have to get 'em going in.
We can get 'em coming out.
I was sitting in the passenger's side
of the van I had rented.
Andy was seated behind me.
He had a 300 millimeter lens,
which he had on my shoulder.
[barking]
We sat there, an hour
two hours.
Andy was starting to doubt they were
in there. I said, "They're in there."
And all of a sudden, we got 'em
[shutter snaps]
[O'Brien] Fat Tony Salerno,
head of the Genovese family.
Andy was using my shoulder like a tripod,
and I didn't even wanna breathe.
I'm hearing the click, click, click…
[click]
of Tony "Ducks" Corallo.
I was afraid to even move.
He might get a blurry photograph.
Gennaro Langella,
acting boss of the Colombo family,
and then Paul Castellano,
the boss of bosses.
They're coming out family by family.
This is historic.
This is a Commission meeting,
right in front of our eyes, unfolding.
They've got all these tapes,
but they don't have a meeting.
This is a meeting.
This was the final thing they needed,
these photographs.
[traffic sounds]
[thunder rumbles]
[Kossler] There came a point in time
where we had enough evidence
to prosecute all the bosses.
[phone line ringing]
[Kossler] The decision was made,
that we would make the arrest
the following morning.
[phone ringing]
I was sitting in my office.
We get a call.
It was NBC News.
NBC News said they know
that we are going to arrest
the bosses of all the Five Families
the next morning.
So they're gonna announce that
on the evening news.
[overlapping chatter]
So this was like six o'clock at night,
and the evening news
was gonna be coming on any minute now.
[woman] Ten seconds.
[Kossler]
And I knew that once that happened,
those folks that were to be arrested
would be in the wind.
So I told my bosses, I said,
"I think we gotta go right now!"
[woman] In seven, six, five
[man] Rollers.
[woman] Stand by, chyrons. Insert.
It was a very high honor
to be sent out to arrest the most
powerful mobster in America
on the most serious of charges.
Three, two, one
[announcer] This is NBC Nightly News.
Paul Castellano was having dinner.
His family was there.
[announcer]
This is NBC Nightly News in New York.
Told him we had a warrant
for his arrest on RICO charges.
Had to bring him in.
He said, "Can I get dressed first?"
"Sure."
When he was ready to go,
he put his hands out to be handcuffed.
I said, "Oh,
you don't have to handcuff him."
And, as we were driving in,
we had the radio on,
and then it came out on the radio.
Breaking news.
[radio squawks]
[man] There's a major roundup underway
of top leaders in organized crime
in our area. Top leaders.
First time ever, the reputed
[O'Brien]
And he leaned forward to hear it.
And then they said,
"Paul Castellano, the boss of bosses,
was also taken into custody,
from the information from the case
that was developed
from bugs in his house."
That's when he found out,
by listening to the radio,
that we had put a bug in his house.
So he goes, "You bugged my house!"
And it was kind of awkward.
I just kind of looked the other way,
you know.
I said, "Hey, you know,
that's the game we play."
[upbeat music playing]
[man] From WNBC-TV,
this is News 4 New York
with Chuck Scarborough and John Hambrick.
Good evening.
Tony Ducks, Big Paul,
Fat Tony, Gerry Lang, Rusty Rastelli.
A godfather roundup!
[DeVecchio] How often do you
send out agents to arrest every boss
in an organized crime family?
That was an exciting day in the office,
to see all these guys
get arrested and brought in.
Maybe once in a lifetime
you have that happen.
Authorities call this
the most important prosecution case
ever brought against organized crime.
[Franzese] It was sensational.
All the bosses,
carted away at the same time.
It was a day that I won't forget.
People wouldn't even dream about this,
you know, ten years before.
And here we were
in the middle of making history.
The Mafia leaders were rounded up
in an overnight sweep.
And today, US attorney Rudolph Giuliani
announced the indictments.
This is a great day for law enforcement,
but this is a bad day, probably the worst,
for the Mafia.
[Franzese] I felt terrible.
I knew Fat Tony, I liked him a lot.
[reporter] And tonight a man
identified as Ralph Scopo
[Franzese]
Ralphie Scopo, I knew Ralphie well.
I grew up with him.
[Giuliani] This case charges
more Mafia bosses,
in one indictment, than any ever before.
[overlapping chatter]
[Alite] When that RICO case
first got announced,
we were cursing out
Rudy Giuliani like crazy.
We don't even know
what they were talking about at the time,
'cause we didn't understand the law.
It was very technical.
There're a couple of Mob guys
who went to the hospital
thinking they were
gonna get indicted [laughs]
that we didn't name.
Everybody was worried.
All of a sudden, every gangster
that couldn't count to ten
started trying to understand
what RICO meant.
We realized this is a law
that enables the FBI
to gather multiple members
of the Mob together in a conspiracy case.
So anybody that was from the street
really understood what RICO meant to us,
and especially to our bosses
of the five families.
At least two of them, I know,
will be able to post bail immediately.
-[reporter] Is Castellano one of them?
-Castellano, yeah, and Fat Tony.
[man] I was
Fat Tony Salerno's defense lawyer.
At the time we met, I was 34.
I was a little bit intimidated
to meet with Mr. Salerno,
kind of afraid
to ask him certain questions,
because maybe the answers
were something that, uh
he didn't either want to tell me,
or maybe I shouldn't know.
Um And he once stopped me,
'cause he sensed that,
and he said, "Listen kid,
you can ask me any question you want,
and I will always,
always tell you the truth.
Some questions you're gonna ask me,
I won't be able to answer,
and I'll tell you I can't answer that.
You take it for whatever
it means at that point,
but don't ever be
afraid to ask me a question.
[reporter] I asked Fat Tony if he had
anything to say about all this.
You have something to say, Tony?
[reporter] Thank you.
[reporter] Excuse me.
[Cardinale]
Fat Tony was a very kind person
to me.
Here comes Marcy.
I want you to meet her.
[woman]
Introducing the new Cabbage Patch babies,
the littlest Cabbage Patch kids of all.
[Cardinale] My daughter was
about two years old at the time.
There was a doll that was very famous
called the Cabbage Patch doll,
and it was sold out everywhere,
and my daughter desperately wanted one.
Can't remember how he found that out,
but the next thing you know,
he sent a case
of Cabbage Patch dolls to my daughter.
[jingle playing]
[man] Cabbage Patch Kids babies,
with everything shown here.
Each sold separately from Coleco.
[man] Castellano left
the federal courthouse
in Lower Manhattan tonight
after posting
two million dollars bail money.
[Giuliani] Paul Castellano walked out,
and this reporter from 60 Minutes came up
to him, introduced himself and said,
"We'd like to put you on 60 Minutes,
Mr. Castellano.
People have to hear that Giuliani
isn't the only word on this."
And Castellano went
and reached in his pocket.
"I'll be glad to talk to you.
Here's my card. Talk to my lawyer."
He acted like a businessman.
Fat Tony walks out of court.
Fat Tony was fat
looked like a Mafia guy.
First thing he does when he gets out
of court is puts a cigar in his mouth.
[imitates match igniting]
The guy comes up to him,
says the same thing.
He says, "You're a reporter?
Then go F yourself.
Just go F yourself,
I don't talk to no reporters."
And he walks off. [chuckles]
It was a difference between two men.
One was totally pretentious,
and Fat Tony knew exactly who he was.
[Cardinale] One of the things
that came across in representing Fat Tony
was the notion that this group
was essentially its own government.
They did not play by the rules of the--
what the, say,
United States government rules were.
They had
their own law and order and justice.
And that's what they live by.
[reporter] It happened in the middle
of the evening rush hour
on a crowded Midtown street.
I was sitting in my office,
at the US Attorney's Office,
writing the government's response
to a variety of motions.
[reporter] Two men were apparently shot,
either getting into or leaving the car.
I happened to be playing
in a basketball game.
[reporter] One of the men appeared
to have been a driver.
The keys were only several inches
from his hand
All of a sudden,
our beepers were going off.
My secretary walks in and hands me a note.
[reporter] Both men appear
to have been shot in the head,
shot gangland execution-style
on the street.
I remember one of my colleagues
running down the hall saying,
"Big Paulie was just whacked!"
Shit.
[reporter] It is a historic event
in the history of the Mob.
You are looking
at the body of Paul Castellano.
[Kossler]
We got into cars and drove up there.
It was mayhem.
There were people everywhere,
all over the street.
The street was closed.
Castellano's body was laying
with his head in the gutter.
This was really significant in that he was
the boss of one
of the largest families in the Mafia.
[reporter] Witnesses said that Castellano
was sitting in his limousine
when three men in trench coats walked up,
started shooting, and they made a getaway.
The atmosphere was very tense.
I knew it was coming, for a while.
Castellano's rule is, like most bosses,
don't deal drugs.
If I find out about it,
you're gonna be killed for dealing drugs.
Angelo Ruggiero, John Gotti, and myself
were all moving drugs.
Angelo Ruggiero and John Gotti realized
that Angelo had been caught on hours
and dozens of wiretaps in his house,
discussing the drug business.
In our life, in the Mob world,
when you, uh break a rule,
your life is ended like that.
[static]
[Alite] Gotti and Ruggiero understand
that if Castellano
is in those tapes at the trial,
they're dead.
[tape deck clicks]
They had to hit him first.
Law enforcement officials
are wondering this morning
whether the murder of the country's
top Mob boss Monday
was the first salvo
in a new gangland war.
And they're looking
for this man, John Gotti.
[O'Brien] I felt bad
because the whole object of my case
was to put Castellano away.
There's a strange bond
that sometimes exists
between law enforcement officers
and criminals.
They both live
by codes of honor and respect
more stringent than most normal people.
And there's
a certain psychological connection there.
I heard him on the mic for 600 hours,
for a four, five-year period.
I felt like I knew him.
It wasn't supposed to end this way.
He's supposed to end up in federal prison.
[DeVecchio] It was frustrating
to learn he had been killed
just for the reason that
he was the boss of bosses.
I would much rather have seen
Castellano convicted,
rather than ending it that way.
Paul Castellano was
a very, very important defendant to us.
We had fantastic tapes
from his kitchen in Staten Island.
He was a reigning boss,
and we very much wanted him
to be a defendant at trial.
So it was both a shock,
and in some ways frustrating,
that we did not have a chance
to bring him to justice.
It certainly increased the pressure
on all of us as a trial team,
because the press and the whole country
were watching New York.
Tonight we begin
with an NBC News exclusive.
The godfathers of the New York Mafia
are in big trouble.
This was billed as probably
the biggest organized crime case ever.
The federal government
is trying to prove there are five men
who were the alleged bosses
of New York City's five crime families,
and they comprised a commission.
They are charged with a wide range
of strong-arm tactics,
including infiltration of New York City's
high-rise construction industry.
This case was a media circus,
no question about it.
Dare we hope that this is the beginning
of the end for the Mob?
Hopefully, with an organization
like the Mafia,
we will wear them down. I think this is
a perfect time to crush them.
Rudy did rather love
being in front of the cameras.
Some of your critics have accused you
of being a publicity hound.
Uh How do you plead to that charge?
I plead not guilty to the charge,
certainly with the way it's characterized.
[Savarese] Did we tease him a little bit?
Sure.
It was a running joke
among all the assistant US attorneys.
Being the the Mob buster
was a big part of his persona.
You can almost regard it
as a hidden tax.
[man] Giuliani and other officials
say the tax is exacted every time
[Cardinale] The government will do
whatever they can to win the case.
Including in that is to make sure
the publicity permeates the public
A major racketeering trial in New York.
[Cardinale] so that the jurors
are fully aware
of the most nefarious aspects
that Giuliani could put in the press.
It's outrageous that that kind of thing
happens in our society
[man] The public
must understand, they say,
that these men are gangsters and murderers
who steal from everyone.
[Childers] This clearly was
the biggest thing
I would ever do professionally.
[Giuliani] Young lady, let us through.
So there was a certain amount of pressure.
I had just turned 29.
John had also just turned 29.
And Mike was 30.
I'm sure in some quarters,
there were people questioning,
"Really? These three kids
are going to try this case?"
All my guys were incredibly young.
That's all you get. They don't pay
any money in the US Attorney's Office.
None of us had ever tried a case
of this magnitude before.
When you think about it,
it's a little crazy, right?
The United States is entrusting
essentially three novices
with this momentous case.
And all of a sudden,
we're up against
these terrifying, formidable Mob figures.
[reporter] Are you confident at all
about the charges?
[Savarese] Just before the trial began,
I proposed to my wife,
and she was nervous.
She kept asking me
about whether I was gonna come
into any kind of harm or danger.
Uh, fortunately, knock on wood,
I never did.
But others around me did.
[Giuliano] One day, US Marshal came
in my office and said,
"We have a documented threat
from the Mob,"
to kill my wife.
And they taught me and my chief assistant
how to use a gun.
[typewriter clacking]
[Chertoff]
Once the jury was finally seated,
my job in the opening statement
was to give them
a road map about what they're gonna hear
and explain it in context.
"Members of the jury,
Mafia families have
a single overriding purpose:
to make money
using corruption, fear, and violence.
The Cosa Nostra and Commission
are not words that are coined or made up
by the government.
These are words
these defendants used themselves.
And you are going to hear them
use those words on the tapes
with your very own ears."
For a criminal trial in the United States,
the US Constitution says the jury
has to be unanimous,
so you've gotta persuade all 12 jurors.
[Cardinale] If we could just convince
one or two of those jurors,
we would essentially win the case.
[Savarese] When the trial is underway,
you're watching the jury like a hawk.
You wanna see
what their body English is like.
Do they seem to be paying attention?
[Chertoff] Are they understanding
the evidence? What's interesting to them?
So you can calibrate your presentation.
[Lang] The forewoman of the jury
was a very elegant woman
who wore this gold cross.
And then this young, very attractive,
red-haired woman was in the front row.
And there was an elderly woman.
I said to Pat, "Wait till she starts
listening to some of these tapes."
Because it's difficult to understand
what was going on.
The judge directs
that the jury will listen.
They put on their headphones.
[indistinct speech]
[indistinct speech]
[Lang] It seemed like the elderly woman
was straining to understand
what was going on.
[indistinct speech]
[Savarese]
Get down to the bottom of the page.
[man] You look at it as a big corporation.
You're running a big corporation.
When we saw all 12 jurors turn the page
at exactly the right moment,
we just looked at each other like,
"Yes! They're following.
They're paying attention.
They're hearing what we've heard."
[man] For several weeks, a federal jury
has been sifting through tape recordings.
The vast majority of this case
is built on, uh, tapes of the defendants
talking about their criminal activities.
It's from those tapes
[Alite] Everybody followed
the Commission trial,
especially if you were a street guy.
When we were sitting around
the Bergin Hunt and Fish Club,
we were saying it's illegal,
it's this, like we were Harvard grads.
But in reality we understand
that we've got serious problems now.
[man grunting]
[Cardinale] The government did have
some pretty strong evidence.
The head of the Lucchese family,
Tony "Ducks" Corallo,
there was a bug placed in his car.
[Cardinale] There were conversations
about cement trade in New York.
[Cardinale] On one of the tapes,
Fat Tony remarked
that he had just seen a cement truck
drive down Second Avenue with--
The name on the truck
was something he didn't recognize,
and he wanted to know who had guts enough
to drive a truck through Manhattan
that was affiliated with a company
that he wasn't aware of or didn't control.
So it was that kind of tape
that was kind of difficult for us
to get around, if you will.
We knew we were in for a rough ride.
[typewriter clacking]
The strategy that I employed
was to do everything we could to
win the so-called sex-appeal parts
of the case
uh, the violence that they threw in
gratuitously, the Galante murder.
Anything that the government
can do to get an edge, they will do.
If anyone thinks this is fair
and they're trying to do right is wrong.
They're there to win the case.
It was very dramatic,
it was very violent,
and it was what was put in there
only to get the jury's attention.
[Chertoff] At the point in time
when we started putting evidence in
about the Galante homicide,
the world changed for Bruno Indelicato
inside that courtroom.
The reason Bruno Indelicato,
a lower-ranking member in the Mob,
was a defendant in the case
is because he was a gunman
in the murder of Carmine Galante,
and the Commission authorized that murder.
He was a person who took the orders
and carried out the Commission's bidding.
Now, all of a sudden, he's very agitated,
squirming in his chair,
understanding that no, this isn't
something he's going to skate on.
All of a sudden
it's real for him.
I guess it got to be too much for him.
Indelicato sprang to his feet
and yelled at me,
"What are you doing?
You're not playing fair.
I know who you are.
You can't do this crap."
That's the first time I ever had
a murderer actually threaten me.
The marshals immediately grabbed him,
put him back into the holding cell
in the back of the courtroom.
Lunch happens.
Indelicto comes back out,
comes over to me and says,
"Mr. Childers, I want to apologize.
I was out of line."
My best guess as to why
there was the change
of heart in Indelicato
is that he was back there
in the holding cell
with "Fat Tony" Salerno,
the boss of the Genovese family,
and Carmine Persico,
the boss of the Colombo family,
and they're on trial for their lives also.
And they outrank him.
And I would think
that they would've said,
"Hey, idiot, what the hell are you doing?
We don't need any more problems."
[Cardinale] Gil Childers was brought in
to present that case.
And he did it with great fanfare
and big blow-up pictures of Galante
with the cigar in his mouth and his eye
hanging out and bullet holes all over him.
But all of the violence
really had nothing to do with this case.
The government's theory was
there's a rule,
and the rule is you can't hurt your boss
unless all the other bosses agree.
The "Commission" has to agree.
My argument was that Fat Tony
was not the boss of the Genovese family
when Galante was murdered.
Somebody else was.
So Fat Tony
really had nothing to do with it.
If we could just convince
one or two of those jurors,
Fat Tony had nothing to do
with the Galante murder,
we could win the case.
[Savarese] Everyday, you're on edge.
You're in court.
Then at night,
you're preparing for the next day.
And then all weekend
you're preparing for the next week.
So you're exhausted.
So, by the end,
we felt good that we had made our case,
but you never know.
And then the jury goes off,
and they deliberate.
[typewriter clacking]
[ticking]
[Childers] You've done
everything you could do.
You now realize
that everything now rests
in the hands of 12 people
whose names you don't even know,
'cause it was an anonymous jury.
A defense attorney
only has to convince one person,
and, of course, prosecutors
have to convince 12.
[Savarese] The clock is kind of ticking
in your brain as each day goes by.
And you're wondering to yourself,
"What are they thinking?
Are they leaning our way? Are they not?
Who knows?"
[Giuliani] I was worried about someone
getting to the jury because
in the history of Mob cases,
they reached somebody.
[Savarese] The way the Mob can undermine
the jury process is by getting to a juror.
It's effectively corrupting a juror
to hold out and refuse
to vote in favor of conviction.
[Lang] What is going on here?
[man] No verdict yet
in the Commission trial.
Jury wrapped up four days of deliberating.
They go back to work tomorrow.
[Cardinale] The longer a jury stays out,
the better you feel that at least
there may not be a conviction.
This is not a runaway.
[Giuliani] I was 100% percent confident
when it started.
By the fifth day,
I was less sure of the verdict.
If we fail at this
ooh, it could set us back 30 years.
[ticking continues]
[Lang] I thought, "I can't believe
we've done all this work,
and this is gonna go down the tubes."
[Chertoff] My unit chief said to me,
"You should write
two statements for the press:
one if we convict
and one if there's an acquittal."
I said, "I can't do that.
I'm gonna jinx myself."
She said, "You have to do it."
So I gritted my teeth and I did it.
And then we got a call.
[Savarese]
The jury had reached a verdict.
It was like a circus in there.
Everybody showed up.
I mean, it was standing room only.
[Savarese]
We could barely get into the courtroom.
And I remember saying,
"Hey, we're the prosecutors.
We've gotta get in there."
[DeVecchio]
The culmination of years of hard work,
my whole squad, came down to this.
You don't want to screw this up.
You don't want to be the guy
who is known as the person
who let the Mob bosses off.
[Lang] The jury comes back.
You're looking at them all
because you're trying to read their faces,
like what the hell's going on here.
[Chertoff] You're sitting there,
literally with your heart in your mouth.
I had my hands on my lap
and I was saying, like, a prayer.
And Pat reached out,
and he squeezed my hand, and he goes,
"Here we go, pal."
Guilty.
-And it was guilty, guilty, guilty.
-Guilty, guilty.
Guilty, guilty, guilty, 150 times.
She looked over at us.
She smiled and she went
Just like that.
It's the way she nodded her head.
Good evening. A major blow
for the men who rule the Mafia.
Eight mobsters,
including three Mafia godfathers,
were found guilty of serving
as Commission members.
This verdict means the death
of the old school Mob leadership
in New York as we knew it.
I think it's gonna take a long time
to replace the kind of network
these men put together.
[Savarese] My God, we did it!
[chuckles] After all this work,
all those sleepless nights,
all those ruined weekends,
we were finally getting
what we had fought for.
These people
who were untouchables their entire lives
are now gonna be brought to justice.
It was, uh
It's an incredibly moving time.
Every single defendant
was convicted on every single count,
and I think this is a great day
for law enforcement
and for all those
who've been in pursuit of organized crime.
Some have lost their lives.
[man] The top bosses of the Mafia
were given 100 years in prison.
One hundred years
for Anthony "Fat Tony" Salerno
[Alite] For us, it was devastating.
When Giuliani brought this war into effect
against gangsters,
it was the plague.
Nothing worse than this
could ever come in existence
against street guys in the Mob world.
[man] The FBI now counts 500 Mafia
convictions in the last three years,
and it says more cases are coming.
[Franzese] This was the first time
in history anything like that was done.
And you know it really, really
put the icing on the cake for me.
I said, "When they can start doing that,
this life is in real trouble,
real trouble."
[Kossler] I was elated.
All the hard work that we put into this
and all the time away from home
and all the sweat and tears
and then it came to fruition.
[DeVecchio] This was the culmination of,
as far as I was concerned,
everything I had worked for.
Twenty some-odd years
of working organized crime in New York.
It was one of those thrills of a lifetime.
[Lang] I said, "Pat, it's like
being in a Broadway show,
and the show is over.
So now what are we gonna do?"
[chuckles]
[woman] We have come to know
the face of Rudolph Giuliani,
a steady presence in the morning papers
and evening news.
More than any other US attorney
for the Southern District of New York,
Giuliani has sewn himself
into the fabric of this city.
His most recent Mafia busts
resulting in death threats
[Giuliani] As an Italian-American,
I'm absolutely proud
to be the man who helped to destroy it
and who led the effort.
Rudolph Giuliani has officially
jumped into the race for mayor
at the place where two other Republicans
started their successful campaigns.
As we wrap up this series,
it's interesting to note
that for law enforcement officials,
the questions tonight are
who will the next generation of bosses be,
and what kind of shadowy crime game
will they play?
[sirens wailing]
[intense music playing]
What a difference a decade makes.
Ten years ago,
New York was nearly flat broke
and very close to not being able to pay
its bills and loans.
Well, now the city is prospering.
[man 1]
The $42 million, 38-story Harley Hotel
is being built
by developer Harry Helmsley on 42nd.
[man 2] American Telephone and Telegraph
is putting up a skyscraper
at 55th and Madison.
Hyatt has broken ground for a hotel
on the side of the old Commodore.
[man 3] In the 1980s, there were buildings
going up all across Manhattan.
When all those projects are completed,
city officials glowing predict
that it'll mean an extra 20,000 jobs
here in Manhattan.
[man 4]
What's happened is phenomenal.
I've never seen anything
to the extent I have in New York.
Now, from a real estate standpoint,
it's probably become
the hottest city in the world.
[man 5] Every construction project
is worth millions and millions of dollars.
We were learning the Mob exploited that.
In the next year, three huge skyscrapers
will be completed on a single block.
Topping out ceremonies were held
at one of them today, the Trump Tower.
[man 5] If you're running
a construction company,
you've gotta deal with the Mob.
[man 5] It was a huge, huge racket,
terrifying people into doing
what the Mob wanted them to do.
[reporter]
A work foreman was beaten to death
and thrown out of a 56-floor window.
[interviewer] Make you nervous at all,
to know that one guy's dead,
-another's in the hospital from this job?
-It's all in a day's work.
The game is a tough one.
The stakes are high. The money is big.
And murder is not out of the question
for those who get in the way.
["Hard Times" by Baby Huey
& The Baby Sitters plays]
Cold, cold eyes upon me they stare ♪
People all around me
And they're all in fear ♪
So I play the part
I feel they want of me ♪
And I pull the shades
So I won't see them seein' me ♪
Havin' hard times in this crazy town ♪
Havin' hard times
There's no love to be found ♪
Havin' hard times in this crazy town ♪
Havin' hard times
There's no love to be found ♪
[song ends]
[static crackles]
You've never seen anything
Like this before ♪
[man] A new Chevrolet Corvette,
like never before.
Never before ♪
A Corvette superb and authentic
[Alite] In the '80s,
when all this is going on,
we started buying
apartments and property.
And I made all my guys
buy brand new Corvettes.
Then they started nicknaming me
"Johnny Vets."
[man] first computer-activated
manual transmission.
We were like a bunch of girls
going on a shopping spree.
We would go to David Nadler
and buy two dozen shirts at a time,
monogram shirts with our initials on it,
$2,000 suits,
shoes that were 1,000 a pop.
The money that we spent
was ridiculous, on champagne
We would drink Cristal.
We drank Perrier-Jouët
in magnums.
But the personal sacrifices,
while I'm drinking that champagne,
and after I put that glass down,
in two hours I'm gonna
put on a black outfit
and, uh go dig a grave somewhere
and kill somebody.
[man] Early this morning,
a man walking his dog
found a body lying in the tall grass
by the shore at Ferry Point Park.
That's in the Bronx.
Police figured it might have been
a gangland rub out.
[man 1]
He makes a deal with the guy in Brooklyn,
59th and 3rd.
[man 2] What the fuck do you wanna do?
Thirty-two thousand
[man 1] The job shows
a potential extra of $750,000.
[Joyce] We knew we were
onto something big with the Mob.
But we weren't getting clear evidence
of what this conspiracy was all about.
We just knew that we had a lot
of concrete companies
interacting with a lot of Mob families.
But we didn't know anything
about how it worked.
The whole idea was to figure out
if the Commission,
the bosses of all the families,
was a part of the conspiracy.
The Casa Storta restaurant
was a meeting place
for the hierarchy of the Colombo family.
We had the place bugged.
One of the things we noticed
is Ralph Scopo,
who's not a boss,
he's not a capo, he's not an underboss,
he's just a soldier.
He's at the table
when they're talking about
these controversial conversations
over construction.
I knew Ralph well. Ralph Scopo
was actually one of my father's guys.
I liked him.
Early on, I called him Uncle Ralph.
I grew up with him.
He was only a soldier,
but, you know, here's the thing.
If you had a soldier
that was making
a tremendous amount of money
and had a lot of influence,
he could be a powerful guy too,
because he had a lot of authority
in his own right,
because of what
he meant to the family.
Ralphie Scopo was that guy.
[Joyce] We discovered Ralph Scopo
was the President of the District Council
of the Cement and Concrete Workers Union.
It was clear to us, at that point,
that Ralph Scopo was a key player.
And our surveillance shifted
from the Casa Storta restaurant
to Ralph Scopo.
[Joyce] He would go into his office.
He'd be in there for about an hour.
And then, like clockwork,
he would go back to his car.
The contractor would drive up,
get out of his car,
jump in Ralphie's car,
and they would talk.
Clearly, he did not trust his office.
He was doing business in his car.
So we get the microphones installed
in Ralph's two cars.
[Joyce] You have to remember,
Ralph Scopo was the president
of the Concrete Workers Union.
So he controlled the laborers
at every construction project in New York.
[vehicle beeping]
[Joyce] Ralph made sure
he informed the contractors
what the consequences were
if they stepped out of line.
[Giuliani] I reviewed a lot of the tapes
the day after.
As we developed the Commission case,
we realized that by controlling
the construction units,
the Mafia controlled
the entire construction industry.
[reporter] The strike has halted
one and a half billion dollars
in construction projects in the city.
The walkout, which began yesterday,
continued today
The Mafia controlled unions
to make it impossible for you
to function and make a profit
by going on strike.
All of a sudden, you realize
it's better to pay these creeps off.
[Savarese]
Ralph Scopo terrified people
into doing what the Mob wanted them to do.
We had him on tape talking
to the construction company presidents,
and reminding them,
"You know that guy you read about
in the newspaper who was whacked?
You know, that was us."
And the message, not too subtle, was,
"If you don't do
what I'm telling you to do,
you could wind up like that guy
you just read about the paper."
[interviewer] You know that one guy
fell down the stairs here
and is in the hospital to this very day,
and another guy was
thrown out a window on the 56th floor.
That happened before my time.
[Savarese]
We had terrific tapes of Ralph Scopo,
but we needed proof that the Commission,
the ruling body of the Mob,
was at the heart of this extortion.
[Joyce] We had a squad working
each of the families.
We'd have a meeting of the key agents
on the squad,
-and we would compare notes.
-[tape deck clicks]
[indistinct chatter on tape]
The squad that was investigating
the Genovese family
was getting great information
about construction
at the Palma Boys Social Club,
where Fat Tony hung out.
[Joyce] The Gambino squad
was getting their information
from a bug they had on Paul Castellano.
[Joyce] Tony "Ducks" Corallo,
he's the boss of the Lucchese family.
His car's bugged.
All of those were little pieces,
little facets of the whole story.
And we started putting them together.
[click]
[whirring]
-What was that?
-[typewriter clacking]
[man] Speak now
or forever hold your peace
[Joyce] One day, one of the contractors
was in the car with Ralph,
and he was talking about
having a pretty decent sized job.
He says, "Look I've got this job.
It's gonna be about a $1.5 million job."
And Ralph says
[Joyce] The club was the key.
In a very short three minute conversation,
Ralph laid out the existence of the club.
He says, "There's eight companies
that participate in the club.
Each of those companies
is connected with a Mob family.
Anything over two million
was gonna be allocated
to those eight companies,
and no one else could bid."
It's fixed. It's fixed.
Everything is fixed from the beginning.
Everybody knows who's allocated what job.
Let's say its value
is really eight million.
They would put in their bid
for ten million,
and all the other companies will put in
a bid higher than the ten million,
thereby guaranteeing
that they would get
the job for ten million,
when it really only had a value
of about eight million.
So they were making a couple
of extra million dollars on a job.
And so with all these
extra millions of dollars,
it was going
into the pockets of Mob families
that represented that company.
But then we found out
another incredibly important
piece of evidence.
[tape whirs]
[Joyce] The contractors that interacted
with Ralph kicked back two percent
to the Mob families to be divided up
two percent a job.
And there's hundreds
of millions of dollars of construction
underway at any given time.
[Savarese] Stop, think about it.
There are buildings going up
all across Manhattan.
Many of these are buildings
that we all know. We all see.
They're still there.
And while they were being built,
the Mob had its hand in,
collecting its two percent.
[indistinct speech]
[distorted clanging]
[distorted speech overlaps
with sounds of machinery
[Savarese] Every concrete construction job
in Manhattan of over two million in value
would pay the Mob.
[Joyce] The concrete club showed up
in every conversation,
whether it was in Fat Tony's social club,
or Paul Castellano's wires,
or Tony "Ducks" Corallo's wires.
The Commission was always mentioned.
The Commission was centrally involved
in every big building
going up in Manhattan
for years and years and years.
[man] I told you, I ain't playing around.
[Joyce] We're literally talking
a billion-dollar operation.
[man] The deal was 400-plus.
You gotta put it behind you.
[overlapping distorted chatter]
[man] How does the Bronx zoo sound?
Aqueduct Racetrack, Belmont, the Coliseum?
[man 2] The first part of the job
is 4.8 million
The concrete club has to have been
one of the most audacious schemes
that the Mob ever pulled off.
But we can't just win this trial
by proving that there's something
called the "concrete club" alone.
To prove a RICO case,
we've gotta connect that Commission
to a series of other underlying crimes.
So, to show that they're
utterly terrifying people,
we thought that it would be great
if we could have something more violent,
more gripping,
more, you know, sort of really
grabbing your attention
and grabbing the jury's attention.
We were gonna prove a murder.
[Chertoff] The FBI were assigned
two agents to be the case agents.
The idea was they would be the main point
of contact between the prosecutorial team
and the FBI.
One was Pat Marshall
and one was Charlotte Lang.
[Lang] When I got there,
the FBI was very male-dominated.
I think it was 97 percent male.
The supervisor said to me,
"I didn't ask for you. I don't think women
can work organized crime."
He said, "You'll be the only woman
on the squad." And I was.
And I thought this must be,
"Hi, welcome to New York!"
But then the supervisor told me
that he was going to assign me
to work with Pat.
I would describe Pat Marshall as
the big brother that anybody
would want to have.
[Marshall] Charlotte was a former
school teacher, very well-organized.
She was my right-hand woman, my friend.
What I couldn't figure out, she could.
We work very, very well together.
It was our responsibility,
Charlotte's and mine,
to prove the Commission
had authorized murder.
So
how are we gonna prove it?
[Chertoff] There was a murder
we certainly had good reason to believe
was a Commission-ordered hit:
the famous murder of Carmine Galante.
[typewriter clacking]
Carmine Galante was rubbed out today
as he sat in a Brooklyn luncheonette,
a gangland execution
of a man believed to be
the most important organized crime
figure in the country.
Two other people in the luncheonette
died as well.
Brian Ross has the gory details.
[Ross] Galante was having lunch
in the courtyard
of an Italian restaurant in Brooklyn
when five men entered
with automatic rifles and shotguns
and opened fire.
Galante and two other men
at his table were killed.
[Chertoff]
Carmine Galante was a Sicilian mobster
who rose to ultimately control
what was the Bonanno family.
Now, there was a lot
of informant information
that to kill a boss, you needed
the permission of the Commission.
[Ross]
Galante was resented by other Mafia bosses
because he received so much
attention and publicity,
and because he had been too rough
in his efforts to become the top man
in the American Mafia.
[Lang] When Carmine Galante was murdered
at Joe and Mary's Restaurant
in '79 in Brooklyn,
the other four heads of the family
would've had to agree to that murder.
We had to prove that the Commission,
the other four Mob bosses,
okayed the killing of Galante.
[Lang] I spent an afternoon with
the medical examiner in New York then,
and he showed me the autopsy photos.
Carmine Galante had 84
exit and entrance wounds in his body.
Five people participated in that shooting.
[Chertoff]
There was a lot of informant information
that one of the shooters
was a guy named Anthony Indelicato.
The problem is you can't use
informant information in court.
So how do you prove the case?
[Childers] Bruno Indelicato,
real name Anthony Indelicato,
was a soldier in the Bonanno family,
who, shortly after the murder
of Carmine Galante,
was elevated to the rank of captain.
Bruno was a wild guy
known to be sort of a loose cannon,
someone you would
look to for violent crime.
When the car pulled away,
there was a woman across the street
in an apartment
who heard the shots,
saw the car, and wrote down
the license plate number.
She gave it to the police.
The police, within a day or so,
found the car abandoned,
and they took fingerprints
off the steering wheel,
where the driver was,
and also fingerprints off
the rear door handle in the back seat.
[Childers] Indelicato's fingerprints
were compared
against the latent print
on the door handle.
No match.
It was run against everyone who could be
thought of as a possible suspect.
There was no hits.
With no fingerprint hit,
there wasn't anywhere else to go.
[traffic sounds]
[Childers] Now, fast-forward to 1984,
we had the idea:
redo every piece
of the investigation, essentially.
I don't believe the car
was around anymore.
But that door handle,
that metal door handle,
had been removed from the car
and was still in police custody.
We went to the evidence vault
to check it out.
When you look at the door handle,
you realize,
it's not your fingers that would touch
where the print is,
but it's actually your palm.
And so that's when it was realized
that we need to start running
palm prints against these.
Indelicato's palm print
was not in police custody.
The fingerprint cards they had for him
didn't include his palm print.
[Lang] I had to look for Bruno.
We were able to identify,
I think through source information,
about this girlfriend.
And she was expected at this clinic
on a particular day.
We sat there all day waiting, hopefully,
for Bruno to show up with the girlfriend.
Of course, they do show up
like three minutes before it's gonna close
after sitting there all day.
So we arrest Bruno.
Instead of just doing the fingerprints,
we did the whole hand.
It's called a major case print.
We had an FBI agent
that was an expert and could determine
did his fingerprints, palm prints match?
[line rings]
[phone rings]
[Lang] I can still remember Pat--
We were sitting in the squad area
and his phone rang.
[ringing]
And he turned around and he said,
-"It's Bruno's palm print."
-Bingo.
One hundred percent match.
He was one of the shooters.
[Chertoff] That was
very, very good evidence
against Indelicato for murder.
Now we needed to connect that up,
to show the Commission had ordered it.
[Childers] It just so happened,
on the day of the murder,
there was video surveillance
being done on a social club
in Little Italy,
a place called the Ravenite Social Club.
What we had was somewhat unusual
on that tape.
Approximately half an hour
after the murder,
there is this incredible meeting.
Indelicato and a couple of other people
show up.
They are in a very energized state.
[Marshall] The surveillance tape
at the Ravenite Social Club
shows Indelicato wearing an open shirt,
and then everybody congratulates
one another, hugging and kissing.
[Lang] So here you have a Bonanno member,
on the day that the boss is killed,
going over and being congratulated
by the underboss of the Gambino family.
[Chertoff] Once you prove
that Indelicato was a shooter,
the fact that he goes to the boss
of another family to be congratulated
is very powerful evidence that in fact
the Commission did order the murder,
as the rules required them to do.
[Giuliani] This was tremendous evidence.
We were getting very close.
I knew what I would need
to indict Commission,
and I became obsessive-compulsive
about it.
I always felt like the pinnacle
of the case would be
proof of a Commission meeting.
That's what we needed.
Nobody had ever taken
surveillance photographs
of a Commission meeting before.
[ship's horn blows in distance]
[O'Brien] It was May 15, 1984.
I got a call in the morning
from my informant saying,
"There's gonna be a Commission meeting."
I didn't believe him. This was unheard of.
I said, "Yeah right."
He goes, "No, all of the bosses
are gonna be there.
They're gonna be talking about
this concrete club they had going."
I said, "Alright, if I make a fool
of myself, it's your ass."
The bosses of the crime families
couldn't afford to get caught
meeting together.
They would reconnoiter the area
looking for vehicles,
and if they did
they would detect the surveillance team.
They would call it off.
So the plan was, if the meeting
is gonna be at one o'clock,
we're gonna set up at two o'clock.
Don't have to get 'em going in.
We can get 'em coming out.
I was sitting in the passenger's side
of the van I had rented.
Andy was seated behind me.
He had a 300 millimeter lens,
which he had on my shoulder.
[barking]
We sat there, an hour
two hours.
Andy was starting to doubt they were
in there. I said, "They're in there."
And all of a sudden, we got 'em
[shutter snaps]
[O'Brien] Fat Tony Salerno,
head of the Genovese family.
Andy was using my shoulder like a tripod,
and I didn't even wanna breathe.
I'm hearing the click, click, click…
[click]
of Tony "Ducks" Corallo.
I was afraid to even move.
He might get a blurry photograph.
Gennaro Langella,
acting boss of the Colombo family,
and then Paul Castellano,
the boss of bosses.
They're coming out family by family.
This is historic.
This is a Commission meeting,
right in front of our eyes, unfolding.
They've got all these tapes,
but they don't have a meeting.
This is a meeting.
This was the final thing they needed,
these photographs.
[traffic sounds]
[thunder rumbles]
[Kossler] There came a point in time
where we had enough evidence
to prosecute all the bosses.
[phone line ringing]
[Kossler] The decision was made,
that we would make the arrest
the following morning.
[phone ringing]
I was sitting in my office.
We get a call.
It was NBC News.
NBC News said they know
that we are going to arrest
the bosses of all the Five Families
the next morning.
So they're gonna announce that
on the evening news.
[overlapping chatter]
So this was like six o'clock at night,
and the evening news
was gonna be coming on any minute now.
[woman] Ten seconds.
[Kossler]
And I knew that once that happened,
those folks that were to be arrested
would be in the wind.
So I told my bosses, I said,
"I think we gotta go right now!"
[woman] In seven, six, five
[man] Rollers.
[woman] Stand by, chyrons. Insert.
It was a very high honor
to be sent out to arrest the most
powerful mobster in America
on the most serious of charges.
Three, two, one
[announcer] This is NBC Nightly News.
Paul Castellano was having dinner.
His family was there.
[announcer]
This is NBC Nightly News in New York.
Told him we had a warrant
for his arrest on RICO charges.
Had to bring him in.
He said, "Can I get dressed first?"
"Sure."
When he was ready to go,
he put his hands out to be handcuffed.
I said, "Oh,
you don't have to handcuff him."
And, as we were driving in,
we had the radio on,
and then it came out on the radio.
Breaking news.
[radio squawks]
[man] There's a major roundup underway
of top leaders in organized crime
in our area. Top leaders.
First time ever, the reputed
[O'Brien]
And he leaned forward to hear it.
And then they said,
"Paul Castellano, the boss of bosses,
was also taken into custody,
from the information from the case
that was developed
from bugs in his house."
That's when he found out,
by listening to the radio,
that we had put a bug in his house.
So he goes, "You bugged my house!"
And it was kind of awkward.
I just kind of looked the other way,
you know.
I said, "Hey, you know,
that's the game we play."
[upbeat music playing]
[man] From WNBC-TV,
this is News 4 New York
with Chuck Scarborough and John Hambrick.
Good evening.
Tony Ducks, Big Paul,
Fat Tony, Gerry Lang, Rusty Rastelli.
A godfather roundup!
[DeVecchio] How often do you
send out agents to arrest every boss
in an organized crime family?
That was an exciting day in the office,
to see all these guys
get arrested and brought in.
Maybe once in a lifetime
you have that happen.
Authorities call this
the most important prosecution case
ever brought against organized crime.
[Franzese] It was sensational.
All the bosses,
carted away at the same time.
It was a day that I won't forget.
People wouldn't even dream about this,
you know, ten years before.
And here we were
in the middle of making history.
The Mafia leaders were rounded up
in an overnight sweep.
And today, US attorney Rudolph Giuliani
announced the indictments.
This is a great day for law enforcement,
but this is a bad day, probably the worst,
for the Mafia.
[Franzese] I felt terrible.
I knew Fat Tony, I liked him a lot.
[reporter] And tonight a man
identified as Ralph Scopo
[Franzese]
Ralphie Scopo, I knew Ralphie well.
I grew up with him.
[Giuliani] This case charges
more Mafia bosses,
in one indictment, than any ever before.
[overlapping chatter]
[Alite] When that RICO case
first got announced,
we were cursing out
Rudy Giuliani like crazy.
We don't even know
what they were talking about at the time,
'cause we didn't understand the law.
It was very technical.
There're a couple of Mob guys
who went to the hospital
thinking they were
gonna get indicted [laughs]
that we didn't name.
Everybody was worried.
All of a sudden, every gangster
that couldn't count to ten
started trying to understand
what RICO meant.
We realized this is a law
that enables the FBI
to gather multiple members
of the Mob together in a conspiracy case.
So anybody that was from the street
really understood what RICO meant to us,
and especially to our bosses
of the five families.
At least two of them, I know,
will be able to post bail immediately.
-[reporter] Is Castellano one of them?
-Castellano, yeah, and Fat Tony.
[man] I was
Fat Tony Salerno's defense lawyer.
At the time we met, I was 34.
I was a little bit intimidated
to meet with Mr. Salerno,
kind of afraid
to ask him certain questions,
because maybe the answers
were something that, uh
he didn't either want to tell me,
or maybe I shouldn't know.
Um And he once stopped me,
'cause he sensed that,
and he said, "Listen kid,
you can ask me any question you want,
and I will always,
always tell you the truth.
Some questions you're gonna ask me,
I won't be able to answer,
and I'll tell you I can't answer that.
You take it for whatever
it means at that point,
but don't ever be
afraid to ask me a question.
[reporter] I asked Fat Tony if he had
anything to say about all this.
You have something to say, Tony?
[reporter] Thank you.
[reporter] Excuse me.
[Cardinale]
Fat Tony was a very kind person
to me.
Here comes Marcy.
I want you to meet her.
[woman]
Introducing the new Cabbage Patch babies,
the littlest Cabbage Patch kids of all.
[Cardinale] My daughter was
about two years old at the time.
There was a doll that was very famous
called the Cabbage Patch doll,
and it was sold out everywhere,
and my daughter desperately wanted one.
Can't remember how he found that out,
but the next thing you know,
he sent a case
of Cabbage Patch dolls to my daughter.
[jingle playing]
[man] Cabbage Patch Kids babies,
with everything shown here.
Each sold separately from Coleco.
[man] Castellano left
the federal courthouse
in Lower Manhattan tonight
after posting
two million dollars bail money.
[Giuliani] Paul Castellano walked out,
and this reporter from 60 Minutes came up
to him, introduced himself and said,
"We'd like to put you on 60 Minutes,
Mr. Castellano.
People have to hear that Giuliani
isn't the only word on this."
And Castellano went
and reached in his pocket.
"I'll be glad to talk to you.
Here's my card. Talk to my lawyer."
He acted like a businessman.
Fat Tony walks out of court.
Fat Tony was fat
looked like a Mafia guy.
First thing he does when he gets out
of court is puts a cigar in his mouth.
[imitates match igniting]
The guy comes up to him,
says the same thing.
He says, "You're a reporter?
Then go F yourself.
Just go F yourself,
I don't talk to no reporters."
And he walks off. [chuckles]
It was a difference between two men.
One was totally pretentious,
and Fat Tony knew exactly who he was.
[Cardinale] One of the things
that came across in representing Fat Tony
was the notion that this group
was essentially its own government.
They did not play by the rules of the--
what the, say,
United States government rules were.
They had
their own law and order and justice.
And that's what they live by.
[reporter] It happened in the middle
of the evening rush hour
on a crowded Midtown street.
I was sitting in my office,
at the US Attorney's Office,
writing the government's response
to a variety of motions.
[reporter] Two men were apparently shot,
either getting into or leaving the car.
I happened to be playing
in a basketball game.
[reporter] One of the men appeared
to have been a driver.
The keys were only several inches
from his hand
All of a sudden,
our beepers were going off.
My secretary walks in and hands me a note.
[reporter] Both men appear
to have been shot in the head,
shot gangland execution-style
on the street.
I remember one of my colleagues
running down the hall saying,
"Big Paulie was just whacked!"
Shit.
[reporter] It is a historic event
in the history of the Mob.
You are looking
at the body of Paul Castellano.
[Kossler]
We got into cars and drove up there.
It was mayhem.
There were people everywhere,
all over the street.
The street was closed.
Castellano's body was laying
with his head in the gutter.
This was really significant in that he was
the boss of one
of the largest families in the Mafia.
[reporter] Witnesses said that Castellano
was sitting in his limousine
when three men in trench coats walked up,
started shooting, and they made a getaway.
The atmosphere was very tense.
I knew it was coming, for a while.
Castellano's rule is, like most bosses,
don't deal drugs.
If I find out about it,
you're gonna be killed for dealing drugs.
Angelo Ruggiero, John Gotti, and myself
were all moving drugs.
Angelo Ruggiero and John Gotti realized
that Angelo had been caught on hours
and dozens of wiretaps in his house,
discussing the drug business.
In our life, in the Mob world,
when you, uh break a rule,
your life is ended like that.
[static]
[Alite] Gotti and Ruggiero understand
that if Castellano
is in those tapes at the trial,
they're dead.
[tape deck clicks]
They had to hit him first.
Law enforcement officials
are wondering this morning
whether the murder of the country's
top Mob boss Monday
was the first salvo
in a new gangland war.
And they're looking
for this man, John Gotti.
[O'Brien] I felt bad
because the whole object of my case
was to put Castellano away.
There's a strange bond
that sometimes exists
between law enforcement officers
and criminals.
They both live
by codes of honor and respect
more stringent than most normal people.
And there's
a certain psychological connection there.
I heard him on the mic for 600 hours,
for a four, five-year period.
I felt like I knew him.
It wasn't supposed to end this way.
He's supposed to end up in federal prison.
[DeVecchio] It was frustrating
to learn he had been killed
just for the reason that
he was the boss of bosses.
I would much rather have seen
Castellano convicted,
rather than ending it that way.
Paul Castellano was
a very, very important defendant to us.
We had fantastic tapes
from his kitchen in Staten Island.
He was a reigning boss,
and we very much wanted him
to be a defendant at trial.
So it was both a shock,
and in some ways frustrating,
that we did not have a chance
to bring him to justice.
It certainly increased the pressure
on all of us as a trial team,
because the press and the whole country
were watching New York.
Tonight we begin
with an NBC News exclusive.
The godfathers of the New York Mafia
are in big trouble.
This was billed as probably
the biggest organized crime case ever.
The federal government
is trying to prove there are five men
who were the alleged bosses
of New York City's five crime families,
and they comprised a commission.
They are charged with a wide range
of strong-arm tactics,
including infiltration of New York City's
high-rise construction industry.
This case was a media circus,
no question about it.
Dare we hope that this is the beginning
of the end for the Mob?
Hopefully, with an organization
like the Mafia,
we will wear them down. I think this is
a perfect time to crush them.
Rudy did rather love
being in front of the cameras.
Some of your critics have accused you
of being a publicity hound.
Uh How do you plead to that charge?
I plead not guilty to the charge,
certainly with the way it's characterized.
[Savarese] Did we tease him a little bit?
Sure.
It was a running joke
among all the assistant US attorneys.
Being the the Mob buster
was a big part of his persona.
You can almost regard it
as a hidden tax.
[man] Giuliani and other officials
say the tax is exacted every time
[Cardinale] The government will do
whatever they can to win the case.
Including in that is to make sure
the publicity permeates the public
A major racketeering trial in New York.
[Cardinale] so that the jurors
are fully aware
of the most nefarious aspects
that Giuliani could put in the press.
It's outrageous that that kind of thing
happens in our society
[man] The public
must understand, they say,
that these men are gangsters and murderers
who steal from everyone.
[Childers] This clearly was
the biggest thing
I would ever do professionally.
[Giuliani] Young lady, let us through.
So there was a certain amount of pressure.
I had just turned 29.
John had also just turned 29.
And Mike was 30.
I'm sure in some quarters,
there were people questioning,
"Really? These three kids
are going to try this case?"
All my guys were incredibly young.
That's all you get. They don't pay
any money in the US Attorney's Office.
None of us had ever tried a case
of this magnitude before.
When you think about it,
it's a little crazy, right?
The United States is entrusting
essentially three novices
with this momentous case.
And all of a sudden,
we're up against
these terrifying, formidable Mob figures.
[reporter] Are you confident at all
about the charges?
[Savarese] Just before the trial began,
I proposed to my wife,
and she was nervous.
She kept asking me
about whether I was gonna come
into any kind of harm or danger.
Uh, fortunately, knock on wood,
I never did.
But others around me did.
[Giuliano] One day, US Marshal came
in my office and said,
"We have a documented threat
from the Mob,"
to kill my wife.
And they taught me and my chief assistant
how to use a gun.
[typewriter clacking]
[Chertoff]
Once the jury was finally seated,
my job in the opening statement
was to give them
a road map about what they're gonna hear
and explain it in context.
"Members of the jury,
Mafia families have
a single overriding purpose:
to make money
using corruption, fear, and violence.
The Cosa Nostra and Commission
are not words that are coined or made up
by the government.
These are words
these defendants used themselves.
And you are going to hear them
use those words on the tapes
with your very own ears."
For a criminal trial in the United States,
the US Constitution says the jury
has to be unanimous,
so you've gotta persuade all 12 jurors.
[Cardinale] If we could just convince
one or two of those jurors,
we would essentially win the case.
[Savarese] When the trial is underway,
you're watching the jury like a hawk.
You wanna see
what their body English is like.
Do they seem to be paying attention?
[Chertoff] Are they understanding
the evidence? What's interesting to them?
So you can calibrate your presentation.
[Lang] The forewoman of the jury
was a very elegant woman
who wore this gold cross.
And then this young, very attractive,
red-haired woman was in the front row.
And there was an elderly woman.
I said to Pat, "Wait till she starts
listening to some of these tapes."
Because it's difficult to understand
what was going on.
The judge directs
that the jury will listen.
They put on their headphones.
[indistinct speech]
[indistinct speech]
[Lang] It seemed like the elderly woman
was straining to understand
what was going on.
[indistinct speech]
[Savarese]
Get down to the bottom of the page.
[man] You look at it as a big corporation.
You're running a big corporation.
When we saw all 12 jurors turn the page
at exactly the right moment,
we just looked at each other like,
"Yes! They're following.
They're paying attention.
They're hearing what we've heard."
[man] For several weeks, a federal jury
has been sifting through tape recordings.
The vast majority of this case
is built on, uh, tapes of the defendants
talking about their criminal activities.
It's from those tapes
[Alite] Everybody followed
the Commission trial,
especially if you were a street guy.
When we were sitting around
the Bergin Hunt and Fish Club,
we were saying it's illegal,
it's this, like we were Harvard grads.
But in reality we understand
that we've got serious problems now.
[man grunting]
[Cardinale] The government did have
some pretty strong evidence.
The head of the Lucchese family,
Tony "Ducks" Corallo,
there was a bug placed in his car.
[Cardinale] There were conversations
about cement trade in New York.
[Cardinale] On one of the tapes,
Fat Tony remarked
that he had just seen a cement truck
drive down Second Avenue with--
The name on the truck
was something he didn't recognize,
and he wanted to know who had guts enough
to drive a truck through Manhattan
that was affiliated with a company
that he wasn't aware of or didn't control.
So it was that kind of tape
that was kind of difficult for us
to get around, if you will.
We knew we were in for a rough ride.
[typewriter clacking]
The strategy that I employed
was to do everything we could to
win the so-called sex-appeal parts
of the case
uh, the violence that they threw in
gratuitously, the Galante murder.
Anything that the government
can do to get an edge, they will do.
If anyone thinks this is fair
and they're trying to do right is wrong.
They're there to win the case.
It was very dramatic,
it was very violent,
and it was what was put in there
only to get the jury's attention.
[Chertoff] At the point in time
when we started putting evidence in
about the Galante homicide,
the world changed for Bruno Indelicato
inside that courtroom.
The reason Bruno Indelicato,
a lower-ranking member in the Mob,
was a defendant in the case
is because he was a gunman
in the murder of Carmine Galante,
and the Commission authorized that murder.
He was a person who took the orders
and carried out the Commission's bidding.
Now, all of a sudden, he's very agitated,
squirming in his chair,
understanding that no, this isn't
something he's going to skate on.
All of a sudden
it's real for him.
I guess it got to be too much for him.
Indelicato sprang to his feet
and yelled at me,
"What are you doing?
You're not playing fair.
I know who you are.
You can't do this crap."
That's the first time I ever had
a murderer actually threaten me.
The marshals immediately grabbed him,
put him back into the holding cell
in the back of the courtroom.
Lunch happens.
Indelicto comes back out,
comes over to me and says,
"Mr. Childers, I want to apologize.
I was out of line."
My best guess as to why
there was the change
of heart in Indelicato
is that he was back there
in the holding cell
with "Fat Tony" Salerno,
the boss of the Genovese family,
and Carmine Persico,
the boss of the Colombo family,
and they're on trial for their lives also.
And they outrank him.
And I would think
that they would've said,
"Hey, idiot, what the hell are you doing?
We don't need any more problems."
[Cardinale] Gil Childers was brought in
to present that case.
And he did it with great fanfare
and big blow-up pictures of Galante
with the cigar in his mouth and his eye
hanging out and bullet holes all over him.
But all of the violence
really had nothing to do with this case.
The government's theory was
there's a rule,
and the rule is you can't hurt your boss
unless all the other bosses agree.
The "Commission" has to agree.
My argument was that Fat Tony
was not the boss of the Genovese family
when Galante was murdered.
Somebody else was.
So Fat Tony
really had nothing to do with it.
If we could just convince
one or two of those jurors,
Fat Tony had nothing to do
with the Galante murder,
we could win the case.
[Savarese] Everyday, you're on edge.
You're in court.
Then at night,
you're preparing for the next day.
And then all weekend
you're preparing for the next week.
So you're exhausted.
So, by the end,
we felt good that we had made our case,
but you never know.
And then the jury goes off,
and they deliberate.
[typewriter clacking]
[ticking]
[Childers] You've done
everything you could do.
You now realize
that everything now rests
in the hands of 12 people
whose names you don't even know,
'cause it was an anonymous jury.
A defense attorney
only has to convince one person,
and, of course, prosecutors
have to convince 12.
[Savarese] The clock is kind of ticking
in your brain as each day goes by.
And you're wondering to yourself,
"What are they thinking?
Are they leaning our way? Are they not?
Who knows?"
[Giuliani] I was worried about someone
getting to the jury because
in the history of Mob cases,
they reached somebody.
[Savarese] The way the Mob can undermine
the jury process is by getting to a juror.
It's effectively corrupting a juror
to hold out and refuse
to vote in favor of conviction.
[Lang] What is going on here?
[man] No verdict yet
in the Commission trial.
Jury wrapped up four days of deliberating.
They go back to work tomorrow.
[Cardinale] The longer a jury stays out,
the better you feel that at least
there may not be a conviction.
This is not a runaway.
[Giuliani] I was 100% percent confident
when it started.
By the fifth day,
I was less sure of the verdict.
If we fail at this
ooh, it could set us back 30 years.
[ticking continues]
[Lang] I thought, "I can't believe
we've done all this work,
and this is gonna go down the tubes."
[Chertoff] My unit chief said to me,
"You should write
two statements for the press:
one if we convict
and one if there's an acquittal."
I said, "I can't do that.
I'm gonna jinx myself."
She said, "You have to do it."
So I gritted my teeth and I did it.
And then we got a call.
[Savarese]
The jury had reached a verdict.
It was like a circus in there.
Everybody showed up.
I mean, it was standing room only.
[Savarese]
We could barely get into the courtroom.
And I remember saying,
"Hey, we're the prosecutors.
We've gotta get in there."
[DeVecchio]
The culmination of years of hard work,
my whole squad, came down to this.
You don't want to screw this up.
You don't want to be the guy
who is known as the person
who let the Mob bosses off.
[Lang] The jury comes back.
You're looking at them all
because you're trying to read their faces,
like what the hell's going on here.
[Chertoff] You're sitting there,
literally with your heart in your mouth.
I had my hands on my lap
and I was saying, like, a prayer.
And Pat reached out,
and he squeezed my hand, and he goes,
"Here we go, pal."
Guilty.
-And it was guilty, guilty, guilty.
-Guilty, guilty.
Guilty, guilty, guilty, 150 times.
She looked over at us.
She smiled and she went
Just like that.
It's the way she nodded her head.
Good evening. A major blow
for the men who rule the Mafia.
Eight mobsters,
including three Mafia godfathers,
were found guilty of serving
as Commission members.
This verdict means the death
of the old school Mob leadership
in New York as we knew it.
I think it's gonna take a long time
to replace the kind of network
these men put together.
[Savarese] My God, we did it!
[chuckles] After all this work,
all those sleepless nights,
all those ruined weekends,
we were finally getting
what we had fought for.
These people
who were untouchables their entire lives
are now gonna be brought to justice.
It was, uh
It's an incredibly moving time.
Every single defendant
was convicted on every single count,
and I think this is a great day
for law enforcement
and for all those
who've been in pursuit of organized crime.
Some have lost their lives.
[man] The top bosses of the Mafia
were given 100 years in prison.
One hundred years
for Anthony "Fat Tony" Salerno
[Alite] For us, it was devastating.
When Giuliani brought this war into effect
against gangsters,
it was the plague.
Nothing worse than this
could ever come in existence
against street guys in the Mob world.
[man] The FBI now counts 500 Mafia
convictions in the last three years,
and it says more cases are coming.
[Franzese] This was the first time
in history anything like that was done.
And you know it really, really
put the icing on the cake for me.
I said, "When they can start doing that,
this life is in real trouble,
real trouble."
[Kossler] I was elated.
All the hard work that we put into this
and all the time away from home
and all the sweat and tears
and then it came to fruition.
[DeVecchio] This was the culmination of,
as far as I was concerned,
everything I had worked for.
Twenty some-odd years
of working organized crime in New York.
It was one of those thrills of a lifetime.
[Lang] I said, "Pat, it's like
being in a Broadway show,
and the show is over.
So now what are we gonna do?"
[chuckles]
[woman] We have come to know
the face of Rudolph Giuliani,
a steady presence in the morning papers
and evening news.
More than any other US attorney
for the Southern District of New York,
Giuliani has sewn himself
into the fabric of this city.
His most recent Mafia busts
resulting in death threats
[Giuliani] As an Italian-American,
I'm absolutely proud
to be the man who helped to destroy it
and who led the effort.
Rudolph Giuliani has officially
jumped into the race for mayor
at the place where two other Republicans
started their successful campaigns.
As we wrap up this series,
it's interesting to note
that for law enforcement officials,
the questions tonight are
who will the next generation of bosses be,
and what kind of shadowy crime game
will they play?
[sirens wailing]
[intense music playing]