Manhattan Mafia Guide (27 page)

238 Elizabeth Street today.
Courtesy of Sachiko Akama
.

57 East Fourth Street today.
Courtesy of Sachiko Akama
.

S
TAGE
B
AR

89 East Fourth Street, between Bowery Street and Second Avenue

This mid-century mob hangout was owned by Vincent Ciraulo, who was known as “Jimmy Second Avenue,” and attracted much of the same crowd as the Squeeze Inn a few doors away. Today, the address hosts a popular and affordable Italian restaurant.

S
UGAR
B
OWL

305 Broome Street, between Forsyth and Eldridge Streets

The sandwich shop that currently occupies the ground floor once hosted one of the many bars in which Frank Mari was said to hold interest by the 1960s.

T
HOMPSON
S
TREET
S
OCIAL
C
LUB

21 Prince Street, between Elizabeth and Mott Streets

This address hosted an important Genovese crime family members-only club for several decades in the late twentieth century. Today, a designer clothing store occupies the premises. According to one web reviewer, the store “had the one-day sale of all the leftover wardrobe from
Sex and the City
(I’m a HUGE
Sex and the City
fan!)” Welcome to twenty-first-century Little Italy—excuse me, “NoLita.”

T
ONY
P
ASTOR
’
S
C
LUB

130 West Third Street, between Sixth Avenue and MacDougal Street

This was another very popular mid-century nightspot operated by Joseph Cataldo and frequented by several Mafiosi. Tony Pastor is the name of the show business pioneer who helped popularize vaudeville in the 1880s. There is no word on whether this club’s name is a tribute to him. The space has hosted another popular live music venue named the Village Underground for about the last decade.

21 Prince Street today.
Courtesy of Sachiko Akama
.

T
RIANGLE
S
OCIAL
C
LUB

208 Sullivan Street, between Bleecker and West Third Streets

Officially named the Triangle Civic Improvement Association, this was the longtime headquarters of Vincent “Chin” Gigante, the Genovese boss who feigned mental illness for over three decades. Today, the building is occupied by a tea and spice retailer.

V
IVERE
L
OUNGE

199 Second Avenue, between East Twelfth and East Thirteenth Streets

Operated by Carli Di Pietro, the Vivere was at the center of the Galante-Ormento-Mirra narcotics operation. It was where Montreal Mafia representatives were allegedly introduced to Anthony Mirra while being wooed by the New York mob during the spring of 1958. Mirra, at that time, was working under John Ormento and was suspected of overseeing the ring’s Midtown East operations. On June 24, Canadian crime boss Giuseppe “Pepe” Cotroni himself made a trip to New York and visited the Vivere to meet with Di Pietro, according to court records.

The Vivere was said to be the first stop in one of five heroin-distribution routes that serviced the Greater New York area. On this route, couriers would allegedly deliver street-ready heroin in small travel bags or suitcases on an almost weekly basis to Di Pietro at this location, before stopping next at the Squeeze Inn on East Fourth Street and then heading into Brooklyn. A hair salon has occupied the premises for several years.

III

GANGLAND HITS

A
LFANO
, P
IETRO

East Side of Sixth Avenue between Eighth and Ninth Streets

On February 11, 1987, two men stepped out of a red Chevy near the corner of Sixth Avenue and West Ninth Street, where fifty-seven-year-old pizza shop owner Pietro Alfano was exiting the old Balducci’s market (424 Sixth Avenue) with his wife and bags of groceries in tow. The pair followed Alfano south for a few yards before one of them pulled out a .38-caliber revolver and fired three shots into his back. When Alfano dropped to the ground, the gunman opened fire on an innocent bystander before fleeing north on foot, back toward West Ninth Street. One assassin jumped in a yellow cab and the other in a blue van, disappearing into the busy downtown traffic.

When thirty-three-year-old Philip Ragosta and forty-one-year-old Frank Bavosa were arrested the the next day, they admitted to receiving $10,000 each for the hit, plus at least $10,000 in expenses, according to the FBI. It turned out that the pair had been following Alfano for months, waiting for the right opportunity to murder him.

A mob connection was quickly established by authorities. Alfano was no ordinary businessman. He was the nephew of Gaetano Badalamenti, a notorious Sicilian Mafia leader at the center of what was called the Pizza Connection case. The shooting victim was a defendant on trial in the infamous case, suspected of being the American point man for a $1.6 billion international heroin-trafficking ring that used pizza shops across the United States as distribution points.

This was the second such shooting related to the case. On December 3 of that year, the body of Gaetano Mazzara, another defendant in the trial, was found in a garbage bag in Brooklyn. However, both Alfano and bystander Ronald Price miraculously survived the nearly point-blank-range hit attempt; organized crime strike force prosecutor Robert Stewart chalked this up to “bad shooting.”
¹³¹

The attempt on his life may have been a bizarre blessing in disguise for Alfano, who faced life in prison without parole in the Pizza Connection trial. His case was declared a mistrial in July 1987 because he missed the last eighteen days of the seventeen-month trial due to his injuries. None of his eighteen U.S. codefendants fared so well, and all were sentenced to lengthy terms in March 1987.

Those connected to the Sicilian side of the case were not so lucky. Attorney for the U.S. Senate Permanent Investigations Subcommittee Harriet McFaul claimed that “twenty-two police chiefs, judges, politicians and Mafia hunters were murdered before the trial on the so-called Italian end of the Pizza Connection case.”
¹³²

A
NASTASIA
, A
LBERT

870 Seventh Avenue, Park Sheraton Hotel

At about 10:20 a.m. on the morning of October 25, 1957, Anastasia was relaxing in a barber chair at this address (now the Park Central Hotel) when two men slipped in the front door, quietly pushed the barber aside and fired several shots at the veteran mobster. Their target, disoriented, stood up and returned fire at his own reflection in the mirror before collapsing on the floor and dying of his wounds. One of the gunmen dropped his .38-caliber Colt revolver, with five spent shots, in the hotel lobby while fleeing. Another revolver was found four hours later in the subway station beneath the hotel; this weapon had only been fired once. Despite the efforts of over one hundred law enforcement officials originally assigned to the case, this assassination remains officially unsolved. However, gangland chatter pointed to “Crazy” Joey Gallo and his brother.

Anastasia had fallen out of favor with the mob and was marked for death by the early 1950s, but the powers that be offered the powerful gangster a chance to live if he retired and relocated from the city. Spending most of the 1950s underground in his Fort Lee, New Jersey home, Anastasia began pushing his luck by frequenting New York City more and more in the months before his death.

Coincidentally, this is the same address where gambler and racketeer Arnold Rothstein was shot on November 4, 1928, in room 349, dying hours later. That murder is also unsolved.

B
ARETTO
, G
REGARIO

636 East Thirteenth Street

On July 6, 1971, twenty-nine-year-old Gregario Baretto was shot in the chest by an unknown gunman on the sidewalk at this location near Avenue D. Authorities believed the shooting was part of a brewing war for control of the Colombo family, though Baretto, in critical condition, refused to identify his attacker or cooperate with a police investigation.

B
ILOTTI
, T
HOMAS

210 East Forty-sixth Street, Sparks Steak House

As bodyguard to Paul Castellano, Thomas Bilotti (March 23, 1940–December 16, 1985) became an unfortunate casualty in John Gotti’s drive to become boss of the Gambino crime family. (See Castellano, Paul, below.)

B
ONANNO
, J
OSEPH

Park Avenue at East Thirty-fifth Street

At close to midnight on October 20, 1964, mob boss Joe Bonanno (January 18, 1905–May 11, 2002) was getting out of a car in front of his lawyer’s apartment building at this location when two men forced him into the backseat of a waiting vehicle. Bonanno was held captive in an upstate farmhouse for six weeks before being driven to Texas and released unharmed. The veteran mobster then spent over a year hiding out in the Southwest, disguised in a beard.

At least, that is the story according to Joe Bonanno. Most law enforcement officials and Mafia insiders seriously doubt the kidnapping ever took place. Conveniently for Bonanno, due to the “abduction,” he missed having to testify before a grand jury on October 21 or face incarceration for contempt of court.

Prison time was the least of Bonanno’s troubles. He made a lot of enemies when an alleged plot to murder fellow family bosses Carlo Gambino and Gaetano Lucchese was uncovered. Many theorize that Bonanno fled the city in order to figure out a way to make peace with the Mafia Commission, which was furious over Bonanno’s unsanctioned plan.

Joe Bonanno inherited the family in 1931 and ran it for three decades in relative peace until the early 1960s. His troubles are said to have begun when a popular longtime capo named Gaspar DiGregorio was passed over for a consigliere position in favor of Bonanno’s own son, Salvatore “Bill” Bonanno, causing a rift in the family.

When Joe Bonanno disappeared in 1964, the commission stepped in and appointed DiGregorio acting boss by 1965, infuriating supposed successor Bill Bonanno and his supporters. The resulting “Bonanno War” turned violent as loyalists to both men chose sides and fought for control of the family.

Most of the hostilities ended by 1968, when Joe Bonanno suffered a heart attack and officially retired his throne. Battling factions had united by the end of the decade under the leadership of Natale Evola, who also helped mend the family’s relationship with the Gambinos and Luccheses.

B
RIGUGLIO
, S
ALVATORE

163 Mulberry Street

At about 11:15 p.m. on June 26, 1978, two unidentified men approached forty-eight-year-old Genovese crime family soldier “Sally Bugs” Briguglio on the sidewalk outside the Benito’s II restaurant at this address and knocked him to the ground before firing five bullets into his head and one into his chest.

Briguglio was a business agent for the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, Local 560, based out of Union City, New Jersey. At the time of his murder, prosecutors were building a case against Briguglio and Genovese capo Anthony “Tony Pro” Provenzano, implicating the mobsters in the 1961 slaying of rival teamster Anthony Castellito (whose body was never found and was said to have been put through a wood chipper).

The relationship between labor unions and the mob date back to the early twentieth century and perhaps peaked by the late 1950s, when the McClellan Committee began its investigations into organized crime. By 1960, newly appointed attorney general Robert Kennedy had targeted the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, Chauffeurs, Warehousemen and Helpers of America and its president, James Riddle Hoffa. When the organization’s books were opened, investigators found several known Mafia members on the payroll, including Briguglio.