Nothing But Money (14 page)
Authors: Greg B. Smith
“Not a problem,” Jeffrey assured him. “I’m with a guy named Robert Lino. Everybody calls him Robert from Avenue U.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
January 2, 1990
No studies have been presented to learned colleagues in vaunted journals about the amount of time the average gangster spends sitting in restaurants, but it’s fair to assume it’s about 50 percent of his waking hours. The gangster, of course, has no office. There’s no conference room from which to transact teleconference calls with clients. There’s just the corner banquette at the local diner. The day after New Year’s Day on the second day of the new decade, Frank Lino and two gangster friends sat in a Middle Eastern restaurant on McDonald Avenue and Avenue N way out there in Brooklyn, waiting. It was a nasty cold night, and all the holidays were officially over. People were taking down Christmas trees and dumping the dried out skeletons on the sidewalk, the silver tinsel shivering in the wind. This was the bleak stretch of winter. The fun was over. The weeks of January and February stretched out ahead like so many miles of arctic tundra.
Frank and his pals sat in the restaurant waiting for his cousin, Robert Lino, who was always on time. Tonight Robert from Avenue U was late.
For Frank Lino, the twentieth century—the gangster’s century—hadn’t been so bad. Here he was at age fifty-two, a Lafayette High School dropout by tenth grade, married at age nineteen to a girl not yet sixteen, five kids and a divorce behind him. He’d tried legitimate work, but it didn’t really suit him. He was handling dice games and running sports book by the time he was a teenager, and he never looked back or thought twice about where he was headed. He did have some doubts along the way. For a time, he insisted he wouldn’t carry a gun when they hijacked trucks out near Kennedy Airport. Often he thought everyone was out to get him and that the next sit-down would be his last. But he was still around. He’d been inducted into the Bonanno group in 1977 on his fortieth birthday and elevated to captain in 1983. By the second day of the last decade of the twentieth century, he was a veteran. He made a fortune from a thriving gambling operation. He dabbled in drugs and did quite well. He’d bought up pornographic videos in the 1970s when they were still called “French films” and resold them in Las Vegas for hefty profits. Now people paid him money just to use his name. As in “I’m with Frank.” Everybody was happy with Frank Lino. He made money for himself and the bosses, who did not understand the concept of enough, and in this life—the life of the made man—he’d done almost no time. This had truly been the gangster’s century. From a street gang in the alleyways of Lower Manhattan, an unwanted import from Sicily, the schemes had grown and grown, the power extended to the highest reaches of business. And Frank Lino was a part of all that.
Of course, Frank still had to sit in restaurants in the middle of the night waiting for things to happen that would never ever happen on time.
Usually Robert was pretty good about these things. He was Frank’s star pupil. Like Frank, he’d dropped out of high school, which was good. Some of these guys who went on to college were a pain in the ass. Robert had embraced the life. He was disinclined to get a real job under any circumstances. The bosses had put him with Frank, and he was happy to be there. He was obeying his father’s wishes. And he did whatever Frank wanted. He helped him track his bookmaking, collect on his shylock loans, enforce protection collection. He took messages to people. He watched Frank’s back. He was an apprentice, learning the players and all their tricks. In a way, now that Bobby Senior was gone, Frank was Robert’s new father.
Frank was old-school gangster. He’d survived a nasty bit of business in 1981 when he and three captains were invited to a meeting at a social club in Brooklyn and walked into a shotgun attack. The three captains were blown to pieces, and Frank—for reasons he had never quite figured out—had been allowed to leave alive and breathing. Subsequently he’d been welcomed back into the newly aligned Bonannos’ loving embrace. He immediately set to ingratiating himself with the bosses by handling another nasty piece of work, the unfortunate and untimely death of Sonny Black. By 1990 Frank Lino was an established player in the family, and Robert Lino was at his side. And late.
As it happened, Frank had to cut Robert some slack. By 1990, after thirteen years as a gangster, Frank was immersed in middle age. Not retirement age, just slowing-down age. Robert was a young man. Frank was tired of tracking money he put on the street, so he put Robert in charge of that. Frank was less interested in day-to-day occurrences within his crew, so Robert helped out, letting Frank know about internal disputes petty and otherwise. Robert quietly made it his business to know everything. As 1990 arrived, Frank knew that Robert Lino was on his way to becoming a made man at a time when the Bonanno crime family was on the rise. There was, however, a bit of a speed bump. It was the reason Frank was sitting in the restaurant on McDonald Avenue.
The problem at hand was Louis Tuzzio, a low-level wannabe who someone with not very much sense had assigned the task of killing a guy named Gus Farace. Farace was a lowlife drug dealer who happened to have some Mafia friends. He was heavily involved in selling as much dope as he could and using as much as he could handle, too. He was essentially out of control, and in his drug-addled state he had made a major-league mistake. Perhaps the biggest mistake you can make. During a drug sale in Brooklyn he decided he didn’t like the guy doing the buying, so he shot him to death. How could he have known that the buyer was really a Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) undercover agent and family man? The federal government was furious. They rousted mob social clubs, letting everybody in every family know that until the shooter came forward, life would be hell for
la cosa nostra
in New York City. Gus Farace thus became marked as a dead man in every way.
la cosa nostra
in New York City. Gus Farace thus became marked as a dead man in every way.
The job of finding and shooting Gus Farace right away fell to the Bonanno crime group, mostly because Gus Farace was dating the daughter of a Bonanno family soldier. She was seen as the way to get to Gus. As it was told to Frank Lino, Louis Tuzzio got the job because Tuzzio knew Farace and was as close to a friend as a guy like Farace could expect. Tuzzio had set up a meeting, and Farace was supposed to show up solo. Tuzzio pulled up in a van with three other guys, to a spot in the middle of nowhere Brooklyn, and—naturally—Farace was not alone. He was with a guy named Sclafani who happened to be the son of a Gambino soldier. Louis Tuzzio decided on the spot not to call off the job. Instead, he got in a shoot-out with Gus Farace, and Farace wound up dead. Unfortunately for Louis Tuzzio, Sclafani, the son of the Gambino soldier, also ended up shot and badly wounded.
Which was why a few months later Frank Lino received word that John Gotti, imperious boss of the Gambino crime group and a guy who truly believed he was the boss of everyone, had let it be known that he was apoplectic. He wanted everybody involved in the shooting of the Sclafani kid dead. Everybody. This was his way. He frequently wanted everybody guilty of one or another perceived slight dead. Now the Bonanno group had a big John Gotti headache, and Frank Lino wound up as the guy chosen to administer the medicine. At the time, Frank was feeling somewhat vulnerable. In fact, he was constantly worrying about becoming a victim himself. He felt sure that at any time he would go to a meeting and never come back. This was due in part to his experience inside the social club when his three friends had been shotgunned to death in front of him and he’d been allowed to leave. This event cast a certain shadow over Frank’s life. He needed to make things right, and the way to do that would be to resolve the big John Gotti headache. It was natural that Frank Lino would turn to his cousin Robert for help.
Gotti had demanded the deaths of the three non-made members in the van when Sclafani was shot. Members of the Bonanno family—including Frank Lino—were extremely upset about this. They felt this was unfair, given that Sclafani was only one guy and he’d survived and Gotti was saying three guys had to go. This was bad math. This was, at best, three for the price of one. The Bonanno group and Gotti came up with the usual compromise—one guy for one guy. Maybe that was what Gotti had wanted in the first place. Regardless, Louis Tuzzio, more or less by default, became the one guy.
As Frank sat in the restaurant on McDonald Avenue, the plan—his plan—was already unfolding. A Bonanno associate named Dirty Danny was childhood friends with Tuzzio. Dirty Danny was also childhood friends with Robert Lino, so the two were assigned the job of luring Tuzzio to a meeting, where he would be shot in the head adequately to kill him. Everyone involved knew this would not be a simple task. Tuzzio was in a high state of paranoia. Recently another crew tried to convince Tuzzio to show up at a lonely garage in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, owned by a guy named Patty Muscles. On the appointed day, the assigned hit man had a heart attack, so that didn’t work out. Next they tried luring Tuzzio to a meeting in a residential area of Bay Ridge, but he showed up with another Bonanno soldier who was not clued in on the matter. Now here it was, the day after New Year’s, and Frank Lino and two gangster friends sat in the Middle Eastern restaurant on McDonald Avenue waiting for Robert Lino, Dirty Danny and Louis Tuzzio to pull up in a Camaro.
The story they’d thought up to get Tuzzio to go along was this: Frank was going to reassure Tuzzio that the business with Gus Farace was, in fact, understandable given Gus Farace’s many problems. Frank would tell Louis that he was about to get his button, to become a made member of the Bonanno crime family. This would be a great honor for Louis. In fact, it would be the biggest day of his life, the thing he’d always wanted, the dream come true. That was the story they figured would work to get a paranoid guy like Louis Tuzzio to show up for his own assassination.
And then here they were. The Camaro pulled up with Tuzzio at the wheel. Frank watched Tuzzio get out of the car, apparently relaxed, still believing he might live to collect Social Security. Tuzzio strolled into the restaurant with his childhood friend, Dirty Danny, Robert Lino, and—a surprise for Frank—another guy not on the guest list. The guy was Frank Ambrosino, a friend of Robert’s since childhood. They all entered the restaurant and Tuzzio sat down with Frank. Everybody else went to a separate table.
Frank went to work with his avuncular act. He understood why Tuzzio might think that all this talk about him becoming a made guy was not real, what with the other guy with the Gambinos getting shot and all that. But Louis had to know the context. Frank reassured him that the bosses all considered Louis to be a capable guy for his work on Gus
Farace. Sure there had been a bit of mess to clean up, but it had all worked out. Law enforcement seemed far more enthusiastic about finding Farace than about finding Farace’s killers, and—sure enough—after Farace was clipped, the feds backed off. Frank began instructing Tuzzio on what to expect at the induction ceremony, how it was important to pretend you didn’t know what was what when they asked if you knew why you were there. He went through the list of rules that everybody knew and everybody broke on a regular basis and gave the kid Tuzzio a gentle slap to the cheek. Frank Lino told the kid everything would be fine.
“Relax,” he said. “This time next week you’re a man of respect.”
Sure it was late and it was dark and freezing outside, but couldn’t Tuzzio see he was with his best friend, Dirty Danny? His whole life was about to change. What good was fear misplaced? Frank told Tuzzio to sit with Dirty Danny and send his cousin Robert over. When Robert sat down, Frank asked quietly about the guy Robert had brought along, Ambrosino. Frank needed to know about this guy. Robert made it clear he wanted Ambrosino with him in the backup car. Robert made it plain that he’d known Ambrosino forever and trusted him like a brother. He said he and Ambrosino would carry weapons and follow the car Tuzzio was in. After the shooting they would be responsible for getting rid of the murder weapon.
Everything was ready. Events were set in motion. There was no turning back, no backing away. Soon Tuzzio would no longer be a problem for the Bonanno crime group’s bosses and Robert Lino would have participated in a piece of work. That would make him eligible to be made himself, which was what Robert’s father, Bobby, had wanted all along. Frank was just doing a dying man a favor here. Robert Lino Sr. would surely understand. Louis Tuzzio surely would not.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
1981
Warrington sat in a movie theater in midtown Manhattan, waiting for the show to begin. All his friends from school were there, waiting with him. Actually they weren’t there to see a movie. They were there to see Warrington—in a movie.
Warrington hadn’t really made it at Villanova. He’d tried his best to pretend he actually liked economics, but they didn’t call it the dry science for nothing. It was brutal. It was like learning a second language and math at the same time. He loathed every minute of it. He also had loathed the bucolic campus in middle-of-nowhere Pennsylvania. It was what his mother wanted, but not what he wanted. He had so much more to offer. He was a creative guy. In the summer after sophomore year, he’d made a decision—he was going to quit and move to New York to become what he was always meant to be—an actor.
It all made more sense than the Laffer curve and John Maynard Keynes. He had an outgoing personality, could ingratiate himself with people in power (teachers, coaches, bouncers), and was growing into his father’s good looks. Hollywood beckoned, but first he had to actually learn how to act. New York City and the Strasberg Institute was the place for that.
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