Speaker 1: You're listening to Law and Order Criminal Justice System, a
Speaker 1: production of Wolf Entertainment and iHeart podcasts.
Speaker 2: In the Criminal Justice System, landmark trials transcend the courtroom
Speaker 2: to reshape the law. The brave man and women who
Speaker 2: investigate and prosecute these cases are part of a select
Speaker 2: group that is defined American history. These are their stories.
Speaker 2: March nineteen eighty three, Salvator Avellino's Jaguar, New York City.
Speaker 1: Lu Casey Mobster's Salvator Avellino and Tony Dux Carala are
Speaker 1: inside Avellino's car discussing the new book written by former
Speaker 1: boss Joe Banana. Both men are incensed Banano has openly
Speaker 1: revealed the inner workings of his former crime family and
Speaker 1: in turn, the mob as a whole. They think he's
Speaker 1: fishing for a movie deal and some fast cash. I
Speaker 1: know that, But then they talk about something that troubles
Speaker 1: them even more. The book admits to the existence of
Speaker 1: the Commission, that there is a governing body overseeing all
Speaker 1: the families. No Mafia member has ever said this before publicly, Obedien.
Speaker 1: The two men also talk about another crime boss who's
Speaker 1: becoming a problem. They hint at their possible response, something drastic, something.
Speaker 3: Violent than some example other people like they talk a lot.
Speaker 4: That's why going to fall.
Speaker 1: What Avelino and Corlu didn't know was that their conversations
Speaker 1: were being recorded a hidden microphone had been secretly planted
Speaker 1: by law enforcement. The audio clips you just heard, though
Speaker 1: at times hard to decipher, capture their every word. You're
Speaker 1: not with the mob because you want to be.
Speaker 5: It's the gangster that decides whether you're his associated on.
Speaker 1: If you like your life, you will vote to acquit.
Speaker 1: I'm Anisee and Nicolazzi, my father should have been a
Speaker 1: dead man from Wolf Entertainment and iHeart Podcasts. This is
Speaker 1: Law and Order Criminal justice system. By the late seventies
Speaker 1: and early eighties, the FBI was deploying an array of
Speaker 1: resources to gain the upper hand against the mob. They
Speaker 1: created specialized task forces, targeted mafia leadership, and even bugged
Speaker 1: the homes of mob members, but it continued to be
Speaker 1: an uphill battle. The mafia's coat of silence protected the
Speaker 1: bosses who sat at the top calling the shots, and
Speaker 1: the heads of the families were more than willing to
Speaker 1: sacrifice a few pawns so long as their business kept booming.
Speaker 1: The Commission's priority keep the peace, keep the throne. But
Speaker 1: little did they know there was a new strategy brewing
Speaker 1: within law enforcement, and it had less to do with
Speaker 1: how to catch criminals and more to do with how
Speaker 1: to prosecute them. And by the dawn of the new decade,
Speaker 1: the tides were beginning to turn. As the FBI was
Speaker 1: secretly blitzing the families with bugs and wire caps. The
Speaker 1: State of New York was assembling it its own task
Speaker 1: force and it was led by a former prosecutor with
Speaker 1: a fresh plan to dismantle the.
Speaker 4: Mom formerly Ronald Goldstock, but Ron Goldstock for our purposes
Speaker 4: and I was the director of the New York State
Speaker 4: Organized Crime Task Force. Our jurisdiction was the investigation of
Speaker 4: multi county organized crime.
Speaker 1: Bad news for Kosa Nostra. They were about to be
Speaker 1: flanked from all sides FBI, NYPD and now New York State.
Speaker 4: We also had a fabulous tech unit to install taps
Speaker 4: and bugs, and it was a unit that was, as
Speaker 4: far as I know, better than anything else in the state.
Speaker 1: Even with less than one hundred employees on the payroll,
Speaker 1: Ron's team did have a notable advantage over the FBI.
Speaker 4: We were very nimble. If you went to the Organized
Speaker 4: Crime Task Force as a whole, so we need a
Speaker 4: wire tap, we would do it in a day. As
Speaker 4: a result, we became very popular. We were competitioned. To
Speaker 4: the FBI, the.
Speaker 1: Rules of economics applied. When more than one service is
Speaker 1: available in a given market, the quality of that service
Speaker 1: tends to improve.
Speaker 4: It is the competition that breeds innovation, that breeds change,
Speaker 4: that breeds experimentation. The assistant director of the FBI said,
Speaker 4: you are like a vanguard. You can move quickly where
Speaker 4: like a battleship. It takes us forever to turn the
Speaker 4: ship around, but once we get where we're going, we
Speaker 4: can knock out anybody in sight. And I think that
Speaker 4: was a pretty accurate description of both US and the Bureau.
Speaker 1: And he had his work cut out for him. As
Speaker 1: Ron put it, law enforcement hadn't been able to accomplish
Speaker 1: much against the mob.
Speaker 4: Organized crime was in its heyday. There were very few
Speaker 4: prosecutions that led to significant convictions of groups of individuals.
Speaker 4: At the time, you still had a mob that could
Speaker 4: replace people who had been taken out by prosecutions or
Speaker 4: through death.
Speaker 1: But what was now being captured on recordings started to
Speaker 1: change it all. You could sense that momentum was starting
Speaker 1: to shift in law enforcement's favor.
Speaker 4: The FBI began to use electronic surveillance to investigate the MOB,
Speaker 4: and they began to learn through the taps and bugs
Speaker 4: they had put in a great deal about the mob's structure.
Speaker 1: That deeper understanding of mob hierarchy and the web of
Speaker 1: loyalties and rivalries that ran through it would definitely come
Speaker 1: in handy, especially when it came time to prosecute. It
Speaker 1: was hard, dangerous work, but they were the best of
Speaker 1: the best. Here again is former Special Agent Joe Cantamasa,
Speaker 1: the FBI's undercover phone man.
Speaker 5: You had to be capable, confident, and dedicated to the mission.
Speaker 5: We had ninety nine percent success rate.
Speaker 1: However, being one of the most in demand black bag
Speaker 1: men came with a major pitfall, the toll on his
Speaker 1: personal life.
Speaker 5: There was just non stop work at the busy time.
Speaker 5: We could do three entries in one night. For the
Speaker 5: two years eighty two eighty three, I worked literally one
Speaker 5: hundred hours a week, so I was generally not around.
Speaker 5: I was divorced and my mother spent most of the
Speaker 5: time taking care of my daughter. When I was just
Speaker 5: not there.
Speaker 1: On top of all that was a frustration. He couldn't
Speaker 1: escape that for every low level soldier you put away,
Speaker 1: there was another to take his place. But here's the thing.
Speaker 1: As Ages placed the bugs and listened to hours upon
Speaker 1: hours of recordings, they had no idea the gold mine
Speaker 1: they had uncovered. These tapes, instead of being scattered across
Speaker 1: various case like before, were about to be woven together
Speaker 1: to form the backbone of the Commission case, a landmark
Speaker 1: moment in their investigation. Back in the late sixties, G
Speaker 1: Robert Blakey was a law professor at Notre Dame. He
Speaker 1: had been warning the government for years about the need
Speaker 1: to pivot how they went after organized crime. Here's Ron
Speaker 1: Goldstock on the man once described as the government's canary
Speaker 1: in a coal mine.
Speaker 4: Blakey had served in the organized crime section of the
Speaker 4: Department of Justice under Robert Kennedy, and he understood what
Speaker 4: was needed to deal with the problem of syndicated crime
Speaker 4: as opposed to individual crime or small conspiracies.
Speaker 1: And with this new understanding, Blakey got to work. He
Speaker 1: authored many of the electronic surveillance procedures, or title threes
Speaker 1: as they're called, that law enforcement used to this day.
Speaker 1: But Blakey's lasting legacy was his role in creating what
Speaker 1: is known as RICA.
Speaker 4: In nineteen seventy he did the Organized Crime Control Act,
Speaker 4: which provided for RICO, the Racketeer, Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act.
Speaker 4: RICO not only allowed you to use the term organized crime,
Speaker 4: but in effect required you to. The individual who was
Speaker 4: charged had to be part, either employed by, or associated with,
Speaker 4: an enterprise, and an enterprise in many organized crime cases
Speaker 4: was either the family or a crew from that family.
Speaker 1: RICO was passed and signed into law by then President
Speaker 1: Richard Nixon. All Blakie had to do next was convinced
Speaker 1: the justice system to adopt it.
Speaker 4: I met blake for the first time, probably around nineteen
Speaker 4: seventy three, and we became friends, and at some point
Speaker 4: he called me he had just gotten a grant to
Speaker 4: create an institute on organized Crime at Cornell to train
Speaker 4: state and local prosecutors on how to investigate and prosecute
Speaker 4: organized crime. And so I left the DA's office, went
Speaker 4: to Cornell, and the two of us put together this program.
Speaker 4: What we did think was it made sense to bring
Speaker 4: federal investigators to the summer sessions that we put on
Speaker 4: for a week at Cornell. It was a chance to
Speaker 4: keep them in on RICO. Jim Costler from the FBI
Speaker 4: came up. Blakey gave that seminal speech that everybody remembers
Speaker 4: on RICO not only as a prosecutive tool, but an
Speaker 4: investigative tool. That is, you think not of investigating individuals
Speaker 4: for the commission of an act, but you think more
Speaker 4: broadly of the enterprise. You think of the pattern of
Speaker 4: criminal activity rather than individual acts. And the other part
Speaker 4: is that the RICO Statute allows for civil and criminal forfeiture.
Speaker 1: Blaky harp on three important methods of investigation. One, don't
Speaker 1: waste time on the level gangsters, instead focus on leadership.
Speaker 1: Two attack them where it hurt the most, go after
Speaker 1: the money. And three more bugs, more wiretaps. It remained
Speaker 1: the single best way around the Mafiast code of silence, and.
Speaker 4: Blakie remains to this day the smartest person that I know.
Speaker 4: He just saw a different approach was needed and fundamentally
Speaker 4: changed the way the criminal justice system dealt with syndicated crime.
Speaker 4: And incidentally, it took good investigators like Costler to appreciate
Speaker 4: the brilliance of the statute and what it could do.
Speaker 1: After attending the conference and learning about the groundbreaking Rico Statute,
Speaker 1: Jim Costler headed back to New York to get his
Speaker 1: house in order and make Robert Blake's dream come true.
Speaker 6: The day we were leaving, he came up to the
Speaker 6: car or I was sitting in the car and he says,
Speaker 6: you know, he said, I dream of the day that
Speaker 6: you guys put all the busses of the families in
Speaker 6: jail in one place. And I said, good luck with that.
Speaker 6: But it actually happened.
Speaker 1: After decades of chasing thugs, setting up stings, and rounding
Speaker 1: up low level soldiers, it took a law professor to
Speaker 1: finally discover the answer. And could you have done it
Speaker 1: without the Rico Statute.
Speaker 6: No way. The Rico Statute brought in all the crimes
Speaker 6: that we didn't have jurisdiction over. It gave us all
Speaker 6: kinds of ability to use the wiretaps and microphones that
Speaker 6: we didn't have before.
Speaker 1: In nineteen eighty, as the new Organized Crime supervisor of
Speaker 1: New York, Jim quickly pinpointed the bureau's fundamental problem. Agents
Speaker 1: were working independently investigating single acts and single people, but
Speaker 1: they weren't connecting the parts to the whole.
Speaker 6: We were putting people in jail. We weren't solving the problem.
Speaker 6: So basically, when I became a supervisor, I threw out
Speaker 6: the code or the rule book on how agents that
Speaker 6: I worked for me worked together. They worked as a team,
Speaker 6: sometimes five or six working on a particular project, sometimes
Speaker 6: ten guys working on a particular project, with one agent
Speaker 6: in the lead and me watching over everybody.
Speaker 1: It was pure poetry. Jim would run his teams like
Speaker 1: a mafia captain ran his crew of soldiers.
Speaker 6: The problem in New York was that we had three
Speaker 6: different groups of agents working organized crime in three locations,
Speaker 6: and sometimes they would all be investigating the same people.
Speaker 6: It made no sense. So I basically said, this is
Speaker 6: what's going to be. These people up here. They'll have
Speaker 6: the Genoviees family, the people over here, the Lukes people
Speaker 6: over here, that cam Be and and so forth. So
Speaker 6: anything that came in for those particular families would go
Speaker 6: to that squad, and that way you would streamline the
Speaker 6: flow of information.
Speaker 1: Now he had separate squads to mirror the various families,
Speaker 1: and as the investigations progressed, he soon realized that each
Speaker 1: of his squads held important pieces to this interconnected puzzle.
Speaker 6: Sharing of the information was so important to our success.
Speaker 6: Sometimes I would get information to come to me from
Speaker 6: the Luksey squad and I had already seen something that
Speaker 6: came similar to that from the Genevies squad, and I'd say, hey, listen,
Speaker 6: you guys got to get together and share this information
Speaker 6: because both of you have it, but you don't know it.
Speaker 6: And I would have meetings every Thursday. Every Thursday morning,
Speaker 6: I had all the supervisors come in and bring their
Speaker 6: agents so that we all knew what each others was doing.
Speaker 6: And from that point on we were off and running.
Speaker 1: It was time to go full tilt with the bug.
Speaker 1: They knew just where to start. The Palma Boys Social
Speaker 1: Club was the East Harlem headquarters of Genevi's boss, Fat
Speaker 1: Tony Sealerno with his black bag expertise. Special agent Joe
Speaker 1: Cantamasa was once again the FBI's man on the inside.
Speaker 1: But infiltrating the club would be no easy task.
Speaker 5: It had two padlocks on it and the steel gate
Speaker 5: you couldn't move in an inch without screeching, and it
Speaker 5: was very loud and very noisy.
Speaker 1: But being a native New Yorker, Joe had some pretty
Speaker 1: good ideas how to avoid detection.
Speaker 5: The night we were going to do the entry, it
Speaker 5: was raining. We had already lined up the noisiest garbage
Speaker 5: truck in the New York Department of Sanitation's fleet, so
Speaker 5: we were ready to have noise cover. Everything is good
Speaker 5: to go. One of the issues with lots of places
Speaker 5: in Manhattan were street lights. Now I can remember sitting
Speaker 5: a couple of doors down waiting for the agent's name
Speaker 5: was Jim Curry to go over to the pedestal and
Speaker 5: turn off the street light.
Speaker 1: A pedestal is a metal box that houses breaker switches
Speaker 1: and controls for the street lights.
Speaker 5: I'm sitting there for an hour or more and all
Speaker 5: I'm watching on the street in front of the place
Speaker 5: is the rat show. Well, Jim shows up. He gets
Speaker 5: to the pedestal. It doesn't even have a door on
Speaker 5: it like it's supposed to, but there's rats all over
Speaker 5: the place, and he decides he's not reaching in there
Speaker 5: to do anything. He pulls the wires out with his
Speaker 5: flyers and just cuts something. And the next thing I
Speaker 5: see is sparks flying out of the pedestal. I'm thinking,
Speaker 5: oh jeez, but the light goes out. Next thing happens,
Speaker 5: we're ready to go. We quietly operate the locks. We're
Speaker 5: ready to do the roll up now, so we call
Speaker 5: for the garbage truck. It's white like New York City
Speaker 5: Sanitation was at the time, pulls down to the corner,
Speaker 5: starts operating the diesel at high rev starts operating the hydraulics.
Speaker 5: If we were standing six inches apart, you couldn't hear
Speaker 5: me speak. That's how noisy it was.
Speaker 1: And then the beauty of teamwork. Joe surveillance team had
Speaker 1: previously let them know that every time the last guy
Speaker 1: came out to close the gate for the night, he
Speaker 1: first looked down to the ground.
Speaker 5: The roll ups up, we call a time out. We
Speaker 5: looked down the bottom of the door to find out
Speaker 5: is there a lock down there that we couldn't see.
Speaker 5: And there's a piece of thread across the bottom of
Speaker 5: the door between the door and the door jam.
Speaker 1: A nearly undetectable piece of security that would have foiled
Speaker 1: the operation had it gone unnoticed.
Speaker 5: If you didn't put that thread back when you were done,
Speaker 5: you were in big trouble, which meant somebody had been
Speaker 5: in there other than you who locked it up the
Speaker 5: night before, so we see that, we know what it is.
Speaker 5: We save it. We get inside and there's a school
Speaker 5: of thread on the counter, so at least we didn't
Speaker 5: have to relock the old thread to put it back.
Speaker 5: When we left.
Speaker 1: Inside the club, they got to work installing a microphone
Speaker 1: and running the connection to a terminal in the club's basement.
Speaker 5: There's rats all over the place, but fortunately they are
Speaker 5: happy to leave when you shine lights on them and
Speaker 5: make noise. That microphone worked well.
Speaker 1: But not every operation went so smoothly.
Speaker 5: Probably the most difficult installation of my daytime scenarios happened
Speaker 5: to be the Castellano installation.
Speaker 1: As in Paul Castellano, head of the Gambino family. He
Speaker 1: was suspected of ordering a multitude of hits from his
Speaker 1: lavish mansion on Staten Island. It wasn't a stretch of
Speaker 1: the imagine nation to think he may have been one
Speaker 1: of the bosses involved in Carmen Galanti's murder. But overall,
Speaker 1: there was more than enough cause to get a listening
Speaker 1: device inside.
Speaker 5: Now we had a monitoring plant set up on a
Speaker 5: different block near the house.
Speaker 1: They learned that the notoriously careful and reclusive boss never
Speaker 1: talked business over the phone, so Joe would have to
Speaker 1: plant a bug inside the house. Their first attempt involved
Speaker 1: trying to get Castellanos made Gloria to.
Speaker 5: Help with the entry, and they decided early on to
Speaker 5: approach Gloria's family in Bogatah and offer them twenty thousand
Speaker 5: dollars if they could get Gloria to leave the door
Speaker 5: open when they went food shopping, and lo and behold,
Speaker 5: the next day they hear, quote, the FBI is trying
Speaker 5: to get into your house. Unquote. We were not going
Speaker 5: to get Gloria help, and she must have told Paul,
Speaker 5: and it came back to me that that wasn't going
Speaker 5: to work. And that's when I said, Okay, you know,
Speaker 5: I'll figure something else out.
Speaker 1: Plan B posing as a cable repairman to install a
Speaker 1: hidden microphone while Castellano's bodyguard shadowed his every move and
Speaker 1: that house was never empty, so Joe would need to
Speaker 1: install the microphone during the day while the Gambino boss
Speaker 1: and his associates were there, so he created a reason
Speaker 1: for a repairman to be called.
Speaker 5: Cable boxes were very new back then. That's the scenario
Speaker 5: that I used. I created a problem for them. That
Speaker 5: was coordinated and introduced by another agent on another pole
Speaker 5: down the block.
Speaker 1: Joe's agent scrambled the cable signal from the telephone pole
Speaker 1: and when they called for a repairman, they intercepted it, so.
Speaker 5: He was there when I got there, and then he's
Speaker 5: out of sight. And then Tommy Belotti and another older
Speaker 5: gentleman who I did not know, they're watching me and
Speaker 5: they're walking me through the house to see if I
Speaker 5: can identify the problem.
Speaker 1: Do you feel that suspicion?
Speaker 3: Oh?
Speaker 5: Absolutely, watching me.
Speaker 1: With Bollotti and another mobster keeping eyes on him. Joe
Speaker 1: identified the cable box, and with his agent's help from
Speaker 1: a block away, they replicated the problem that had gotten
Speaker 1: him into the house initially.
Speaker 5: And on my keywords, he would create the problem that
Speaker 5: they were having, and we got to associate the problem
Speaker 5: that they thought they had with the particular area of
Speaker 5: the house that I wanted to put the mic in.
Speaker 1: Connecting the microphone was going to be much harder than
Speaker 1: Joe initially thought.
Speaker 5: The reason that it was so difficult is in order
Speaker 5: to get this connection done, the wire that I needed
Speaker 5: to get connected to to replace the device that had
Speaker 5: the microphone in it was actually custom installed into a
Speaker 5: kitchen countertop and cabinet.
Speaker 1: Once again, time for Joe to use his magic get
Speaker 1: the targets to help seal their own fate.
Speaker 5: And so we had this adversarial exchange. I maintained my
Speaker 5: bad New York attitude to fit the occasion, and I said, listen,
Speaker 5: if we're going to do this, you've got to help
Speaker 5: me take this thing apart.
Speaker 1: And they did, and.
Speaker 5: We literally disassembled part of a kitchen counter cabinet in
Speaker 5: order to get access to the connector for me to
Speaker 5: replace this equipment. And part of my scenario for how
Speaker 5: I do this is I teach them along the way.
Speaker 5: I explain what I'm doing. I'm not doing this in silence.
Speaker 5: I'm helping them understand the approach.
Speaker 1: And you're actually planting a microphone at the same.
Speaker 5: Time, exactly Well, if you had the microphone in your hand,
Speaker 5: you wouldn't know you had a microphone in your hand.
Speaker 5: So we had pretty good concealment options back then.
Speaker 1: Needless to say, these were high risk, high reward situations,
Speaker 1: but you never know what might be the key to
Speaker 1: breaking a case. So they came up with more creative
Speaker 1: ways to gather intel, including one place mobsters least expected
Speaker 1: to be bugged their cars and over at the New
Speaker 1: York Organized Crime Task Force, Ron Goldstock was about to
Speaker 1: strike gold in the form of a glistening black nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty two Jaguar. It was owned by a captain in
Speaker 1: the Lucazy crime family, sal Avelino. Avelina was also the
Speaker 1: chauffeur to Lucasey boss Tony dux Carllo. Gold Stock suspected
Speaker 1: that sneaking a bug into the Jaguar would deliver priceless intel,
Speaker 1: but it wouldn't be easy.
Speaker 4: Our tech team, which as I said, was just exceptionally good,
Speaker 4: got a similar Jaguar and then practiced. They had to
Speaker 4: first figure out how to attach the bug to the
Speaker 4: battery without draining the battery. Then they had to locate
Speaker 4: where the bug was going to be so that there
Speaker 4: was an ambient noise that would interfere with the clarity
Speaker 4: of their recordings. And once they did that, they had
Speaker 4: to be able to do it very quickly, because they
Speaker 4: wanted to do it in the shortest time possible. Once
Speaker 4: they knew it, they took the car apart, put it
Speaker 4: back together again, and then began with a stopwatch. They
Speaker 4: still had to pull off the whole front part of
Speaker 4: the inside the dish and install it and prop it
Speaker 4: put it back together again. At the end they knew
Speaker 4: that it was the fastest they could do it.
Speaker 1: Then the team just had to watch and wait for
Speaker 1: the perfect moment to make their move.
Speaker 4: It was installed when Avelino was going to a location
Speaker 4: in Huntington.
Speaker 1: I believe it was the Huntington Townhouse because when I
Speaker 1: saw that reading, I was like, I think I had
Speaker 1: my senior prompt.
Speaker 4: Well, not sure. It may have been your senior problem.
Speaker 4: And he was invited, but in any events, he parked
Speaker 4: his car in the lot, and fortunately for us, he
Speaker 4: had gotten there late, so there was only parking away
Speaker 4: from the location. One problem was it started to rain,
Speaker 4: not very heavy, but enough so that we would concern
Speaker 4: that there would be water in the car. But the
Speaker 4: tech team was all set. They had tarps plastic to
Speaker 4: put over it. They saw him pull in, He went
Speaker 4: to the townhouse, They went to the car, they got in,
Speaker 4: picked the lock, they took out the tarps and the plastic.
Speaker 4: They entered the car, did their stop watch things, installed
Speaker 4: the bug, and then they were out.
Speaker 1: But the team's job was far from over because to
Speaker 1: record from the Jaguar bug you also had to follow it.
Speaker 4: This was not a recording device, this was a transmitter.
Speaker 4: If you had a car behind following, particularly a van,
Speaker 4: where you were recording the conversations, because you had to
Speaker 4: have the equipment, it would be seen. So we set
Speaker 4: up chase cars with repeaters. There were three or four
Speaker 4: chase cars, all different. One would follow for a while
Speaker 4: and the repeater would throw the signal back to the
Speaker 4: van out of sight of the Jaguar, which would then
Speaker 4: record the conversation. And then the chase car would drop
Speaker 4: off and another one would pick up and it would
Speaker 4: repeat the signal. And this went on day after day.
Speaker 4: In fact, the people in the van used to sing
Speaker 4: the song We're watching you. Wherever you go, whatever you do,
Speaker 4: we will be watching you. That became their theme song.
Speaker 1: With the chase cars in pursuit and the bug successfully
Speaker 1: transmitting Avelino and Carlo's exchanges were recorded and the results
Speaker 1: were instantaneous.
Speaker 4: Within a day. It's just what you want, Tony Ducks.
Speaker 4: Corlo was in the car with Avellino. Coralo was the
Speaker 4: grumpiest person, just constantly griping and grumping about everything that occurred,
Speaker 4: and yeah, these people are following me all the time. Now,
Speaker 4: he had no idea.
Speaker 6: That we were.
Speaker 4: So Avelino says, well, yeah, but you know you're the
Speaker 4: boss of the family, so of course they're going to
Speaker 4: be following you. And he says, yeah, I am the
Speaker 4: boss of the family.
Speaker 1: So I just picture of him sanway did he just
Speaker 1: actually say yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, That's why I said it was funny. Within
Speaker 4: the first day or two we had the mob structure.
Speaker 4: They would be talking about other people and we could
Speaker 4: map out the family. And somehow it got into the
Speaker 4: Daily News of the New York Post and they put
Speaker 4: in a little org chart of the Lukesy crime family
Speaker 4: and Avellino showed it to Corlo, and Corlo turned to him.
Speaker 4: He says, you know, for the first time, they got
Speaker 4: it right. If you have to prove the existence of
Speaker 4: an enterprise, it was done.
Speaker 1: Rumor and legend were turning into facts and evidence and
Speaker 1: evidence is how you built a winning case.
Speaker 4: Our bug was producing incredible conversations about the commission. When
Speaker 4: the meetings were where they were what was discussed.
Speaker 1: Were those conversations the first pieces of actual evidence of
Speaker 1: the Commission's existence.
Speaker 4: There was nothing before it. What we had was proof
Speaker 4: beyond the reasonable doubt of the existence of the commission.
Speaker 4: These were the seminal conversations in that regard.
Speaker 1: Investigators now had valuable information about the commission, given unintentionally
Speaker 1: by mobsters themselves. Then, to the FBI's amazement, one mafia
Speaker 1: boss was about to give even more, and this time
Speaker 1: they wouldn't need to bug him. He'd willingly share it
Speaker 1: on National TV.
Speaker 7: Joseph Banano, for three decades was one of the top
Speaker 7: mafia figures in the United States. For more than a
Speaker 7: quarter century, he headed the New York organized crime family
Speaker 7: that bore his name. Banano, now seventy eight and in
Speaker 7: failing health, wanted to tell us that all his life
Speaker 7: he has been misunderstood.
Speaker 1: Sometimes in life, patience and perseverance make all the difference,
Speaker 1: and law enforcement had shown plenty of both. And there
Speaker 1: are also times that you get a gift. It might
Speaker 1: come in the form of a recovered murder weapon, a
Speaker 1: cooperating witness, or in this case, a very public interview
Speaker 1: on sixty minutes.
Speaker 3: A man of honor, old man of honor, I was
Speaker 3: the most respected man in New York. In Alova, the country.
Speaker 1: In a now famous television interview, a recently retired Joe
Speaker 1: Banano decided to brazenly defy the Justice Department and the mob.
Speaker 3: Why you fight for sharvive to protect your life?
Speaker 6: Next?
Speaker 3: Sure that's you, society.
Speaker 1: Banano appeared to promote his self glorifying memoir, A Man
Speaker 1: of Honor.
Speaker 3: I want the more of a respectful way. I wanted
Speaker 3: to honorable way all my life. I've been misunderstood.
Speaker 1: But within the very pages of A Man of Honor
Speaker 1: was an unexpected bonus for law enforcement. Joe Banano had
Speaker 1: laid out a blueprint of the Commission, what it did,
Speaker 1: its purpose, its power, and how mob families were organized.
Speaker 1: It was a roadmap to an actual indictment of the
Speaker 1: Commission itself, utilizing all the evidence collected and amassed over
Speaker 1: the years. The only missing link to building the case
Speaker 1: was a hungry prosecutor willing to take on the challenge.
Speaker 1: In nineteen eighty three, a man was thumbing through Banano's book.
Speaker 1: When he finished, he turned to his assistant and said,
Speaker 1: if Banano can write about a commission, I can indict it.
Speaker 1: That man was a young US attorney named Rudy Giuliani.
Speaker 3: The question you here increasingly now is who's Rudolph Juliani
Speaker 3: and what does he want?
Speaker 6: Well, I'm the United States Attorney and what I want.
Speaker 7: Is to be as effective as I can be as
Speaker 7: a United States Attorney.
Speaker 4: What I say to my students is there's two kinds
Speaker 4: of lawyers and the dime a dozen lawyers are those
Speaker 4: that you go to you lay something out, and they
Speaker 4: can tell you what all the issues are. The good
Speaker 4: lawyers are the ones that have a can do personality.
Speaker 4: Let's figure out what we want to do and how
Speaker 4: we can legally do it and use the law to
Speaker 4: back us up rather than stop us. Julianni was that
Speaker 4: type of prosecutor. I trusted him. I should say he
Speaker 4: was a different person than that he is today. He
Speaker 4: was the right person at the right place, at the
Speaker 4: right time. I gave Rudy a call and sketched out
Speaker 4: for him how we could do the commission as an
Speaker 4: enterprise and indict the heads of the five families. He
Speaker 4: was ready to go.
Speaker 8: You go from Jaegar Hoover referencing that there was no
Speaker 8: mafia that was fictitious, It did not exist. Two decades later,
Speaker 8: a prominent prosecution not only saying that Klosinostra exists, but
Speaker 8: we are identifying and we are going to utilize this
Speaker 8: to dismantle organized crime by cutting off its head. I mean,
Speaker 8: it was a seismic event in terms of the war
Speaker 8: against the mafia. Just absolutely historic.
Speaker 1: The dominoes were falling, leading to a defining moment in
Speaker 1: American history. The Mafia Commission.
Speaker 2: Case next time on Law and Order Criminal Justice System.
Speaker 6: So the threat was, if you don't pay us what
Speaker 6: we want, we all shut your job down.
Speaker 1: We all knew that to kill a boss and a
Speaker 1: family you had to have commission approval.
Speaker 5: And his idea was we do a case involving the
Speaker 5: board of Directors of the American Mafia.
Speaker 9: It was an incredible feeling on several levels. Whose bright
Speaker 9: idea was that to entrust this case to guys of
Speaker 9: this experience level, no matter how confident you may or
Speaker 9: may not think they are.
Speaker 2: Law and Order Criminal Justice System is a production of
Speaker 2: Wolf Entertainment and iHeart podcasts. Our host is Anisega Nicolazi.
Speaker 2: This episode was written by Chandler Mays and Anisega Nicolazi.
Speaker 2: Executive produced by Dick Wolf, Elliott Wolf and Stephen Michael
Speaker 2: At Wolf Entertainment on behalf of iHeartRadio. Executive produced by
Speaker 2: Alex Williams and Matt Frederick, with supervising producers Trevor Young
Speaker 2: and Chandler Mays and producers Jesse Funk, Nooms Griffin, and
Speaker 2: Rima El Kali. This season is executive produced by Anna
Speaker 2: Sega Nicolazzi, story producer Walker Lamond. Our researchers are Carolyn
Speaker 2: Talmage and Luke Stents. Editing and sound designed by Jesse Funk,
Speaker 2: original music by John O'Hara, original theme by Mike Post,
Speaker 2: additional music by Steve Moore, and additional voice over by
Speaker 2: me Steve Zernkelton. Special thanks to Fox five in New York,
Speaker 2: ABC and CBS for providing archival material for the show.
Speaker 2: For more podcasts from iHeartRadio and Wolf Entertainment, visit the
Speaker 2: iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
Speaker 2: favorite shows. Thanks for listening.