Surviving the Mob (18 page)

“He was pretty nervous and wanted to get on my good side. He said he was doing business with these two guys from an air-conditioning and refrigeration company on Utica Avenue in Brooklyn—my old stomping grounds. Maybe if I met them, we could do some things together. I said sure.

“My brother-in-law introduced me to his friends and we got along right from the start. The best thing about it was that the brother of one of them in San Diego was one of the biggest marijuana suppliers in the United States at the time. And the brother was sending marijuana to the air-conditioner place through UPS.

“Robert Arena and me made a deal for twenty pounds at a time. We wanted more, but that’s all they let us have at one time until they saw how things worked out. So we got our deliveries of twenty pounds every ten days or so. Robert and I had our own distributors, including a guy who lived in a college town upstate. We funneled five pounds of weed to him out of every delivery. It was a nice marriage and we did really good with that. Our supply allotment went up to fifty pounds at a time and we were earning big time.”

Andrew knew it was likely Nicky Corozzo would learn of his marijuana operation at some point. To protect himself, he slipped Corozzo some money from time to time. But he didn’t pay what he should have. He held back for two reasons. One was that it galled him to pay his boss anything at all. The other was that a larger tribute would indicate the amount of money he was making. And if a guy like Corozzo knew the true amount involved, he might try to take over the operation.

His California connection was a reliable supplier for almost the entire year. However, the operation came to a halt when the guy overdosed and lapsed into a coma. As far as Andrew knows, he never regained consciousness.

In addition, his new business associates at the air-conditioning company provided him with yet another illegal earning opportunity. One of the guys had a girlfriend who worked in the main business office of Marriott Hotels. Her position there gave her access to blank checks. When Andrew heard that, he got a brainstorm. Why not get some of those checks and use them to pay Andrew’s Clean Machine for cleaning carpets at the Marriott?

“The girlfriend stole an initial supply of about fifteen blank checks. Marriott’s procedure was that each check had to be signed by three of its people. So each week I’d fill in one of the blank checks for ninety-five hundred dollars. We figured by keeping the amount under ten thousand, there
would be less chance of the transaction getting flagged. My brother-in-law and the air-conditioner guys each forged one of the authorizing signatures. And then I deposited the check in my carpet-cleaning business account. After a couple of days, the money was available in my account and we split it equally. This was a great thing and we rode it until the wheels fell off.

“I remember that after several weeks, I got a call from a lady at my bank telling me that fraudulent activity had been detected involving my account. The last Marriott check hadn’t cleared. She said she wasn’t sure of the details, but I was a valued customer and the bank would work with me any way possible to resolve the problem.

“I went to the bank and played the part of the injured party. I said that while the situation was being looked at, I still had my workers to pay. They were counting on their paychecks from me to keep their own bills paid and put food on their tables. What was I supposed to tell them?

“The banker said not to worry about it. She gave me ninety-five hundred in cash to take care of my employees while things were being ironed out. She also told me that I should go to the local police precinct and file a complaint about what had happened to my bank account.

“Taking her advice, I went to the precinct in Bensonhurst to make my report. Most of the guys there knew who I was. It didn’t matter, though. I had to do it to cover my tail. They took my complaint, then pretty much laughed me out of the station.”

After the scam came to an end, Andrew received regular phone calls from the bank asking him to come in to discuss his account. He never went. One day in late September, he was in a beauty parlor operated by a girl Robert Arena was dating. As he talked with Robert in the rear of the shop, he noticed a familiar figure in one of the chairs getting her hair done. It was none other than the female bank manager who
had given him the $9,500 to pay his alleged employees when the Marriott denied payment on the forged check. Their eyes locked. The woman rose from her chair and started toward him. The salon was suddenly a place where Andrew didn’t want to be.

“I told Robert that he had to throw a body block on her or do something to stall her until I could make my escape,” Andrew laughs as he remembers the meeting. “He intercepted her when she was about halfway to me. He stood in front of her and said how she looked very familiar and wondered where he knew her from. She tried to get around him. But when she stepped to the side, he stepped with her, blocking her path. While they were doing that little dance, I beat it out the back door. I never bumped into her or anyone else from the bank again.”

Andrew had made a lot of money from the check scheme and was doing well with his marijuana business. Even though he could have paid Wild Bill Cutolo at least the fifteen thousand dollars back, he refused to give him a dime. To Andrew, it was a matter of principle. He wasn’t going to pay money he didn’t owe. His relationship with Wild Bill continued to deteriorate. It reached the point that Andrew couldn’t attend Billy Cutolo’s wedding. That decision opened up yet another issue that Wild Bill would later use against him.

For his problems with the elder Cutolo, Andrew blamed Mike Bolino, who’d defaulted on his loan. And although he liked the guy, he felt he’d been taken advantage of. When the opportunity arose, Andrew decided to repay Bolino in kind.

Mike Bolino approached Robert Arena and Andrew and said he had several hundred pounds of marijuana he wanted to move, and asked if they were interested in helping him unload it. They were. A meeting was set up with one of Mike’s
partners, who said he’d get the pot to them in a couple of days. A few days later, they met at a diner on 4
^th
Avenue in Bay Ridge, where Andrew gave his car keys to another one of Mike’s guys. He drove it away. About twenty minutes later he came back, parked the car in the parking lot, left the keys under the floor mat, and took off.

Andrew and Robert Arena went out to the car. They found two big bales of marijuana in the back seat and the trunk filled with three more, for a total of five hundred pounds. They took off with a friend following in a car behind them. If the cops tried to pull them over, he’d be the crash car, blocking the cops, even if it meant crashing into their vehicle.

“We drove away and within a couple of minutes, two cop cars were running up on us from behind with their sirens blaring. There we were, two organized-crime parolees in possession of a quarter ton of marijuana. That pinch would have been a parole-officer’s dream. We didn’t know what in the hell to do. Just as the cops got on the bumper of our crash car, they pulled to the right and went on past. I don’t know where they were going or who they were after, but it wasn’t us. When we came to the next intersection, our buddy pulled side of us. We looked at each other and broke out laughing. The tension was broken and we went on about our business.”

Over the next several days, they got rid of all the weed—a hundred pounds here, fifty pounds there. They made about two hundred thousand on the deal.

A few days later, Mike Bolino called asking about payment. That’s when Robert and Andrew got back at him for stiffing Andrew on his loan, playing him for a sucker and putting him in a jackpot with Wild Bill. They made up a story that they’d given the stuff to a guy in New Jersey and he’d never gotten back to them. They didn’t know what was going on. Basically, they robbed him.

Mike and his guys weren’t happy, but they weren’t sure where to go with their complaint. It took them a little time
to put together a game plan. They went to Nicky Corozzo and Robert’s boss, Danny Cutaia. Robert and Andrew both had the green light to rob drug dealers. And they had the approval from their families to work together. They didn’t think very much more about it. The money was made and Mike wasn’t going to get a penny of it. As far as they were concerned, it was a done deal.

To Andrew and Robert, the bilking of Mike Bolino was a matter of the way business was done on the streets. Bolino had done his friend Andrew wrong and now he’d gotten his payback. That’s the way these things worked. However, Andrew and Robert would soon find out that in this particular case, they couldn’t have been more wrong.

As Andrew’s first full calendar year on parole came to a close, his financial picture was bright. But his organized-crime and personal relationships were another story. Wild Bill Cutolo could be a dangerous enemy and the chasm between him and Nicky Corozzo was widening steadily. He’d also suffered the loss of another one of his crewmates over the summer when Tony “Tough Tony” Placido was gunned down.

On top of those issues, Andrew had begun dating the cousin of his ex-wife Dina. He could almost cut the tension with a knife when he picked up his son for visitation.

But a few weeks into the new year, Andrew would look back at those problems and wish they were all he had to worry about.

16

The year 1996 was the most stressful of Andrew DiDonato’s life. The pressure cooker he would live in for the next several months started gaining steam in late January with the murder of his best friend, Robert Arena. According to Andrew, the roots of that killing went back to the previous year’s marijuana theft from Mike Bolino and the murder of Tony Placido.

Tony Placido was part of Nicky’s crew. He and Andrew worked in the horse rooms together and went out looking for guys once in a while when there was work to do. According to Andrew, he was a tough kid—real tough. While Andrew was in Hudson, Tony did time with Robert Arena in Elmira and they’d become friends. The three of them used to write one another while we were all locked up. Andrew really liked Tony, but they weren’t as close as he and Robert. And Tony had a drug problem. When he was high, he had a hair trigger. Sometimes he went out to dinner with friends and by the time the meal was over, he wanted to kill the people he was with.

That summer, around August, Andrew heard Tony had been shot dead in the street. Nobody seemed to know who did it or why. Andrew felt bad and figured that eventually Nicky would find out what happened. And then if something
needed to be done, it would be done. He didn’t give it too much more thought.

But as time went by, more information started coming out. The night Tony was killed, he’d been seen out in Bay Ridge having dinner with Robert Arena. There were a lot of witnesses to that. Then Andrew remembered that he’d gone to Robert’s house the morning before Tony’s death. He didn’t see Robert’s car there and asked him about it. He said the car had been stolen sometime overnight. Andrew thought that was strange: Everyone knew who they were and what they did and nobody stole their cars.

“After I left Robert’s, I happened to look at a newspaper and read about Tony,” Andrew picks up the story. “I didn’t connect Robert’s car and Tony’s murder then. But when it came out that Robert had been the last one seen with Tony, I put two and two together. Robert had killed Tony himself or at least been involved in the murder. He had to ditch his car, which had blood or other evidence in it. As this information came to light, I wasn’t the only one to come to that conclusion about Robert. Nicky and the crew did too.

“That could have ended my association with Robert, but it didn’t. Our friendship was too strong for that. And I was sure that whatever the reason Tony was killed, it had nothing to do with business. Tony had probably got into the drugs, turned on Robert, and Robert did what he had to do. I wasn’t happy about it, but I understood it. I never told Robert what I thought and he never mentioned it either.”

Meanwhile, the marijuana deal with Mike Bolino was causing some serious problems as well. The heat on Robert and Andrew from Danny Cutaia and Nicky was intense. Danny had dealers coming to his home, asking for help in getting the marijuana back or getting paid for it. Danny also considered Andrew a threat, perhaps linking his crew to the murder of Tony Placido. Danny wanted Andrew dead and Robert filled him in on the whole plot.