Surviving the Mob (5 page)

Gaspipe Casso didn’t get Andrew. But the law eventually got Gaspipe and Vic Amuso. Both are currently in federal prison serving sentences of life without parole for racketeering.

That same year, Andrew suffered the loss of two people he was very close to in a two-month period. The first came in June when his paternal grandmother Amelia Macchiarole DiDonato passed away. Her death hit Andrew particularly hard.

“My sisters, my mother, and I lived with her while my father was incarcerated. She was the best there was. She took care of all the kids. She had seventeen grandchildren, but we were the only three grandkids that lived with her. She was the glue that held the family together. There were always a lot of people at her house and she fed everybody. She was very generous. When she died, it affected everybody.”

Andrew was still grieving over the loss of his grandmother when the second shoe dropped in August. This time it wasn’t a blood relative, but the death was equally devastating. His close personal friend and crewmate Albert Lattanzi, one of the neighborhood guys Andrew first stole cars with, was murdered.

“Because of the trouble we’d had with Gaspipe’s guys, Nicky told us to lay low until he could make sure everything was taken care of. He wanted to calm us down, so to speak. Mike Yannotti, Anthony Gerbino, Richie, Albert, and me were moving around a lot, staying in various places and with different friends around Brooklyn.

“One night Albert said he wanted to go out. I told him to
hang around the house we were at. I said we were going to order some Chinese food and rent a couple of movies. He said the rest of us were having girlfriends over and he just needed to get out. He planned to go out on Long Island where he wasn’t likely to run into anybody that knew him. I couldn’t force him to stay at the apartment, so he went. He usually carried a gun, but on that night he went unarmed.”

Albert hooked up with a guy from their crew named Mario and a Lucchese associate named Bobby. Bobby wasn’t with the Gaspipe crew and he was friendly with Andrew’s crew. But instead of going to Long Island, they went to a new dance club on Coney Island Avenue in Brooklyn.

At the club, Albert met up with a girl; she was Mike Yannotti’s cousin. They talked for a while and she said she needed a ride home when the club closed. Albert told her he’d make sure she got home okay. She then left Albert to socialize.

Later on, she started dancing with a guy named Evan, a drug dealer for the Lucchese family. They’d muscle him into working for them the same way Andrew did with dealers in his neighborhood. She and Evan hit it off.

When it was time to go, Albert and Evan got into an argument over who’d drive the girl home. That deteriorated into a fistfight. As they rolled around on the ground, Todd Alvino, one of the Lucchese guys Evan was dealing for, walked up, drew his gun, and shot Albert dead. Alvino had a bad cocaine problem and it’s likely he was hopped up at the time.

Andrew picks up the story. “After Alvino shot Albert, he turned the gun on Mario. The gun either jammed or was out of rounds and didn’t fire. Mario was a legitimate tough guy and he was armed. For some reason he froze. He never pulled his gun to avenge Albert or defend himself. He was damn lucky to get out of the place alive. Alvino commandeered a car and got away.

“When we got the call that Albert had been murdered, we wanted Alvino bad. Mike, Anthony, Richie, and me geared
up [armed themselves]. We stole a car from a neighbor and headed out looking for revenge. We knew Alvino’s father ran a newsstand in the neighborhood and that he’d be there in the morning to open up. We decided to kill him for starters. But as we calmed down and began thinking more clearly, we discarded that idea. We all had fathers. They were civilians and Alvino’s old man didn’t have anything to do with Albert’s death. We went out looking for his son, though, but couldn’t find him. Alvino surrendered to the cops a few days later, then got out on bail.

“From that point forward, the hunt was on. We literally worked in shifts and stalked him night and day. We went to known Lucchese hangouts, bars, social clubs, and after-hours joints. We kept an eye on his house on Ralph Avenue. We came close a couple of times, but couldn’t catch up with him.

“Alvino and the Luccheses knew we were looking for him, of course. Nicky was onboard with what we were doing, but in order to prevent the Lucchese bosses from requesting a sit-down that would have stopped the hunt, Nicky had to deny that Albert had been part of his crew. That way he could say the whole thing was none of his business.

“Even though we were after Alvino around the clock, he dodged us month after month. Nicky mentioned the amount of time it was taking. He said, ‘If this happened to a friend of Lenny and me, the guy that did it would be dead already.’

“Another time I was talking with Nicky in a small social club we hung out at on East Ninety-Third Street at Avenue L in Canarsie. The Luccheses had a club in the back of a laundromat right across the street. Nicky pointed to a car parked out in front and said, ‘What if I told you I know that by the end of the day, the guy you’re looking for is going to get into that car?’

“I said that I’d stay right there and shoot him when he showed up. Nicky said, ‘No you won’t. But I’ll tell you what you will do. You’ll take him down the block and shoot him.
But you won’t shoot him in front of our club.’ I waited around, but Alvino never came.”

In spite of the best efforts of Andrew and his friends, the elusive Todd Alvino remained alive.

In the world of organized crime, problems can arise from inside the family as well as from outside. Later in the year, Andrew made an honest mistake that could have had serious consequences.

One Friday night, Nicky called a meeting at the Seaview Diner on Rockaway Parkway in Canarsie. Anthony Gerbino, Mike Yannotti, Richie, and Andrew drove out there in their work car, which was registered and insured in the name of a dead woman. When they pulled into the parking lot, they noticed a guy talking on the pay phone on the street and a Mercedes convertible at the curb next to him, engine running.

They went inside the restaurant. Nicky wasn’t there yet, so they hung around, talking with some of the other guys. Pretty soon, a made man with the Gambinos they knew came in and asked if they were still in the car business. He mentioned the Mercedes and figured they’d be interested in it.

“The four of us went back outside. Mike would grab the car. I’d get between the car and the guy on the phone. Richie and Anthony went to the work car. As soon as Mike got away, I’d hop in with them and we’d follow Mike back to my place.

“Mike had just gotten in the car when ‘Pay Phone’ spotted him. He made a dash for the car and I gave him a hip check that sent him rolling into the street. He got up and made a grab for the passenger-door handle, but Mike pulled away before he could reach it. I got in the work car and we took off.

“We got to my house and barely got inside when the phone rang. It was Nicky. He said, ‘Have you guys still got that thing you took from the diner?’ I told him yeah, we’ve
got it. He said, ‘We’ve got a little problem. Just stay there and don’t do anything. I’ll get back to you in a few minutes.’

“As soon as I hung up the phone, we went through the car. We found a wallet in the glove compartment and a satchel in the trunk and took them inside. Inside the satchel were a bunch of white envelopes and a ledger book with a thirty-eight revolver on top of them. I opened the first envelope and there was fifteen hundred in cash in it. We opened the rest and the total came to eighty-seven thousand dollars. It was obvious that the Mercedes didn’t belong to some ordinary citizen. There was a clue on the envelopes; the logo on them said Meats Supreme. That was one of Paul Castellano’s legitimate businesses. But in our excitement over all that money, we didn’t pay any attention.

“About then Nicky called back. He said, ‘There’s a bag in the trunk of that car. Whatever you do, don’t open that bag.’ I hung up the phone and when we got done laughing, Nicky called for the third time. He said, ‘I found out there’s a book in that bag too. That book’s gotta be kept safe, understand? Don’t look in it and don’t let anything happen to it.’

“You know what we did next, right? The book was full of names and dollar amounts and phone numbers. It was becoming clear that we’d taken a car used to collect payoffs and had something to do with Paul Castellano. But what?

“We checked the license plate and looked through the wallet from the glove compartment. The Mercedes belonged to a relative of Paul’s and no doubt some or all of the money was intended for Paul. As much as it hurt, there was no doubt we’d have to give back the car and the cash. The question was would the Castellanos let it go at that or would they want to teach us a lesson.

“We met up with Nicky late that night at Sally the Lip’s house. Nicky told us, ‘I’d never ask you to give back something you stole. But this is the one time I’m going to. Everything’s gotta be returned.’ He said he’d set up a meet for the
next morning at a luncheonette at East Ninety-Third Street and Avenue L across from our social club.

“We didn’t know how pissed the Castellanos were and we weren’t about to take any chances. We went to the meet armed to the teeth in case we had to shoot our way out. Mike Yannotti and I went first with the money, the book, and the wallet. We emptied the bullets out of the gun and took that too. Anthony Gerbino brought the Mercedes over a few minutes later.

“Nicky was there and so was Paul’s relative Pay Phone. He had a couple of guys with him, but they were okay. Pay Phone hugged Nicky and thanked him and us for doing the right thing. There was even one thing that got a chuckle from everybody. That was when we told Pay Phone the cash was ten dollars short. He was running the Mercedes on empty when we took it and we had to put gas in it to get it back to him. We figured that was his expense and not ours.

“Mike, Anthony, and I were a little pissed that all we got was a thank you. The next day we had our Saturday meeting at the club. Nicky said he’d gotten a phone call. Paul Castellano told him we’d earned a feather in our cap for doing the honorable thing, and we had personal favors coming if we ever needed them.

“I said to Nicky as a joke, ‘Favors don’t pay the bills. Maybe he can give us that eighty-seven thousand back.’ A couple of days later a fruit basket was delivered to my house. The card said, ‘You did a very honorable thing. Your friend Paul.’

“Although I would have preferred the money, there were a few times over the next several months that having that connection with Castellano came in handy.”

As the year passed, the intense focus by Andrew and his crewmates to find and kill Todd Alvino eventually hurt them in the wallet.

“When you’re not out there stealing, you’re not earning,” Andrew explained. “We were spending more time looking for Alvino than we were working. It came to a point that the lack of income was noticeable.”

In order to compensate, they changed how they shook down the pot dealers. Rather than handing over $500 a week, the dealers now gave them two pounds of marijuana. A friend of Andrew’s stood in Utica Park at Utica Avenue and Avenue N, selling dime bags of marijuana. Pretty soon he was making $500-$600 a day. His cut was three bags out of every 20 he sold, $30 out of the $200. Andrew also got permission to have another friend deal in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn.

“I was making four or five thousand a week. But I shared that with Mike, Anthony, and Richie, and I had to send Nicky an envelope every week. The four of us ended up with about eight hundred a week each. But we were still extorting money from some of the big drug dealers. We kept that as kind of a slush fund, in case we needed bail money or something. Nicky got a piece of that too, only it was on a monthly basis.”

As 1984 drew to a close, Andrew, not yet 20 years old, was keeping his head above water financially. But the frustration over not being able to locate Todd Alvino was growing by the day.

6

As a rule, criminals aren’t overly fond of being stopped and questioned by the police, especially if they happen to be in possession of items that are illegal or difficult to explain away. Andrew was confronted with that exact situation in January.

Anthony Gerbino, Mike Yannotti, and Andrew were driving to a friend’s nightclub in Mike’s 1983 Fleetwood when a squad car pulled them over. Andrew was carrying two illegal guns and Mike had one. It was Super Bowl weekend and Andrew was also carrying about twenty thousand dollars in bets. As the officer was approaching the car, they decided they couldn’t afford a search. Mike handed him the registration and insurance card, then sped off. The chase was on. They had enough of a head start that they were able to ditch the guns. Andrew hid the money.

By that time, several more police cars had joined the pursuit and it turned into a regular demolition derby, the Cadillac against New York’s finest. They ran a couple of cruisers off the road and smashed fenders with another one. When they got behind a car stopped at a red light, they went right through, pushing it in front of them. It ended when a police car T-boned the caddy on Flatbush Avenue.

Fifteen or so very pissed off officers took turns beating
up the three occupants. If a few citizens hadn’t stopped to see what was going on, it could have been more serious, maybe even deadly. All three ended up bruised and needing stitches.

The charges included possession of weapons, for a blackjack and ball bats in the trunk. The police also found the money Andrew had hidden. They couldn’t charge him with anything for that, but they did report it to the Organized Crime Task Force to put them all on their radar.

“When we went for arraignment the next morning,” Andrew explained, “the judge knew the cops had beaten us during the arrest. We refused to press charges against them, though. The judge made us a deal: If we pled guilty, we’d only have to pay a fine and not do any time. We took it.

“Afterward, we saw some of those same police officers from time to time and there was a mutual respect. That’s the way it was back then.”