Uncle John’s True Crime (14 page)

WHAT HAPPENED:
The Justice Department feared the payments made the program look “like a pension fund for aging mobsters,” so he was thrown out of the program in 1987. But by that time, Fratianno had
already soaked U.S. taxpayers for an estimated $951,326. “He was an expert at manipulating the system,” McPherson said. Fratianno died in 1993.

Charles Manson, Merle Haggard, and Black Bart served time at San Quentin
.

WISEGUY:
James Cardinali, a five-time murderer who testified against Gambino crime boss John Gotti at his 1987 murder trial. Gotti, nicknamed the “Teflon Don,” beat the rap, but Cardinali still got to enter the Witness Protection Program after serving a reduced sentence for his own crimes. After his release, federal marshals gave him a new identity and relocated him to Oklahoma.

IN THE PROGRAM:
Witnesses who get new identities aren’t supposed to tell anyone who they really are, and when Cardinali slipped up and told his girlfriend in 1989, the program put him on a bus to Albuquerque, New Mexico, and told him to get lost.

But Cardinali wouldn’t leave quietly. When he got to Albuquerque, he made signs that read “Mob Star Witness” and “Marked to Die by the Justice Department.” Then, wearing the signs as a sandwich board, he marched back and forth in front of the federal courthouse, telling reporters he would continue his protest until he was let back into the program or murdered by mobsters, whichever came first. “If I get killed,” Cardinali told reporters. “I want everybody to see what they do to you.”

WHAT HAPPENED:
Cardinali flew to Washington D.C. to appear on CNN’s
Larry King Live
. But leaving the state violated his parole, so when he got back to New Mexico he was arrested, taken to jail...and released into the custody of the U.S. Marshals Service. Then he vanished. Did he embarrass the Witness Protection Program into letting him back in? The Marshals Service “will neither confirm nor deny” that he did.

WISEGUY:
John Patrick Tully, convicted murderer and member of the Campisi crime family of Newark, New Jersey

IN THE PROGRAM:
Tully served a reduced sentence for murder and entered the Witness Protection Program in the mid-1970s. By the early 1980s, he was living in Austin, Texas, where, as “Jack Johnson,” he worked as a hot dog and fajita vendor. (It was a “nostalgic” choice—years earlier, he’d robbed a bank and used the money to buy a hot dog cart.)

Tully’s business thrived, but he had repeated run-ins with the police and was arrested numerous times for public intoxication and drunk driving. At
some point the police figured out who “Mr. Johnson” really was and then, Tully alleges, they started harassing him.

Australian outlaw Ned Kelly wore a homemade suit of armor
.

WHAT HAPPENED:
Tully fought back by publicly revealing his true identity. He wrapped himself—literally—in the American flag, and, standing on the steps of city hall with his seven-page rap sheet in one hand and a beer in the other, announced his entry in the 1991 race for mayor. His reasons for running: 1) As a reformed criminal he was a better candidate than typical politicians who “get into office and
then
start crooking,” and 2) “If the police are going to hit me, they’re going to have to hit me in the limelight.”

Tully actually won 496 votes...but lost the race.

WISEGUY:
Joseph “Joe Dogs” Iannuzzi, bookie, loan shark, and member of New York’s Gambino crime family from 1974 to 1982

IN THE PROGRAM:
Joe Dogs had a reputation for being an excellent cook—even in the mob. After turning State’s evidence in 1982, he supported himself by opening a bagel shop in Florida.

Then in 1993 he wrote
The Mafia Cookbook
. How can someone in the Program promote a book? They can’t—witnesses are forbidden from contact with the media, and Joe Dogs had to pass on several offers to appear on TV. But he was a huge fan of David Letterman, so when he was asked to appear on
The Late Show
, he agreed, even though he risked being thrown out of the program. Why would he take the chance? “Dave was my idol,” Iannuzzi explained.

WHAT HAPPENED:
It finally dawned on somebody at
The Late Show
that bringing a man marked for death by the mob into New York City and putting him on TV with Dave in front of a live studio audience might not be such a good idea. At the last minute, just as Joe Dogs was getting ready to cook Veal Marsala, show staffers told him his segment had been canceled.

Iannuzzi was furious—according to some accounts he even threatened to “whack” Letterman. And although he never actually went on the show, the U.S. Marshals Service kicked him out of the Witness Protection Program anyway.

“What am I going to do now? Well,” he told reporters, “I can always cook.”

What are the “Ball and Chain,” “Oregon Boot,” and “Susie’s Corset”? Prison restraint devices
.

Here’s a real-life crime story that reads like something out of a cartoon. Warning: It’s pretty gruesome ...but it’s also pretty fascinating
.

T
HE NEFARIOUS SCHEME

During the waning days of Prohibition, Tony Marino’s speakeasy served illegal liquor in the Bronx, New York. Marino and his bartender, Joe “Red” Murphy, did some additional business on the side: They’d take out insurance policies in the names of vagrants and then feed them so much booze that they’d die. By December 1932, after having pulled off the scheme successfully a couple of times, Marino and Murphy set their sights on one of their regular customers, a 60-year-old Irish immigrant named Michael Malloy. A firefighter in his younger days, Malloy was now just another old drunk with no money, no home, and no family.

With three insurance policies secretly taken out in Malloy’s name, the two conspirators offered him an open tab and a cot in the back in exchange for sweeping out the bar each morning. The men stood to collect $3,500 (nearly $60,000 in today’s money), but only if Malloy’s death was accidental. But no matter how much hooch he put down (reportedly more than enough to kill any other man), he’d just sleep it off and then ask for more. Not only that, but Malloy’s health was actually
improving
—forcing Marino and Murphy to take their plan to the next level.

A TOUGH CONSTITUTION

• Murphy, a former chemist, mixed antifreeze with whiskey and told Malloy it was “new stuff.” After drinking it down, Malloy said, “That was smooth!” Then he fell unconscious to the floor. The men dragged him into the back room and left him to die. But he didn’t.

• The next morning, they found Malloy cheerfully sweeping the bar. So over the next few days, Malloy’s drinks were spiked with more antifreeze—as well as turpentine, horse liniment, and rat poison. He didn’t die.

The CIA once used pigeons to take aerial spy photos
.

• Murphy gave Malloy a potentially lethal sandwich. The ingredients: sardines that had been left to spoil in an open tin for a week, along with some metal shavings and carpet tacks. Malloy happily ate the sandwich. He didn’t die.

• Then they gave Malloy another rotten sandwich, this one containing oysters that had been soaked in a batch of whiskey and wood alcohol—a poison that‚ if it didn’t kill you, would blind you. Malloy didn’t go blind. And he didn’t die.

• January brought a cold snap. One night, when the temperature was –14°F, the men fed Malloy so much hooch that he passed out. They then took him to a park, stripped off his shirt, and threw him onto a snow-bank. Then they poured a few gallons of cold water over him for good measure. He didn’t die.

• Then the men paid a cab driver named Hershey Green $50 to run over Malloy. Another accomplice, “Tough Tony” Bastone, held up Malloy’s unconscious body in the road. Just before the cab hit Malloy at 45 mph, Bastone jumped out of the way. They left Malloy’s mangled body in the road, believing he was finally dead.

HE LIVES!

Over the next few days, the gang scanned the obituaries and police reports for news of Malloy’s death. It didn’t come. And then, three weeks later, Malloy walked back into Marino’s speakeasy, ordered a shot of rotgut, and explained to the astonished men, “I must have really tied one on, because I woke up in the hospital with a cracked skull and a busted shoulder!”

The men were at their wits’ end. Bastone, a part-time hit man, offered to “fill the bum full of lead” for $500. Marino refused. He had another plan: He hired a fruit dealer named Daniel Kriesberg to rent a room, take Malloy there, and give him all the gin (mixed with wood alcohol) that he could drink. After Malloy passed out, Murphy brought in a length of rubber hose. He put one end in Malloy’s mouth and the other into a gas jet, and then he turned it on. On February 22, 1933, Michael Malloy was finally dead.

That night, Marino paid a crooked doctor $50 to sign a death certificate listing Malloy’s cause of death as “lobar pneumonia, with alcoholism as a contributing cause.” Then another member of the gang, an undertaker
named Frank Pasqua, buried Malloy in a $12 coffin without even embalming him. The next day, Murphy, posing as the deceased’s brother, collected $800 from Metropolitan Life. One policy down, two to go.

Capone’s nickname Scarface came from 3 knife slashes he suffered in a fight over a woman
.

CAUGHT!

But then the scheme began to unravel as the conspirators squabbled over who should get a bigger cut. Bastone even threatened to go public. The next day, two Prudential agents came to the speakeasy looking for Murphy but were told he was down at the police station being questioned about Bastone...who had mysteriously turned up dead the night before. The agents became suspicious and told the cops that it looked like a case of insurance fraud. Police exhumed Malloy’s body and concluded that he was indeed gassed to death.

In a headline-grabbing trial, the Bronx’s “Murder Trust” captured the attention of the public. In his opening statement, Bronx District Attorney Samuel J. Foley referred to the scheme as “the most grotesque chain of events in New York criminal history.” While on the witness stand, each gang member tried to pin the whole thing on Bastone, testifying that he had forced them to kill Malloy. The jury didn’t buy it. The verdict: Guilty. Green, the cab driver, turned state’s evidence and was given a lesser sentence—life in prison. Marino, Murphy, Pasqua, and Kriesberg were each put to death in the electric chair at Sing Sing Prison in the summer of 1934.

And to this day, doctors still have no idea how Malloy could have possibly survived all of those murder attempts.

*
*
*

In April 2005, 18-year-old Nicholas Buckalew of Morrisville, Vermont, decided that he wanted to make a creative and unusual “bong” (large marijuana pipe). Late one night, Buckalew went to a cemetery, broke into an above-ground tomb, and took the skull from an interred body, along with the eyeglasses and bow tie that were with it. Police said he told friends he was going to bleach the skull and make a pipe out of it. In 2006 Buckalew pleaded guilty to “intentionally removing a tombstone and intentionally carrying away the remains of a human body.” He was sentenced to one to seven years in prison.

There are about 45,000 private detectives in the US. Average inclome: $42,000
.

If the Americans hadn’t disrespected Canadian borders, we might not have the Mounties
.

L
AWLESSNESS IN THE WEST

In 1869, with Canada about to take control of its interior from the Hudson’s Bay Company, Prime Minister John A. Macdonald outlined his plan for a paramilitary police force to patrol the region. The idea didn’t really get going, though, until 1873, after the Cypress Hills Massacre. That year, American wolf trappers in Montana lost a lot of horses to thieves who appeared to be headed for the Canadian border. The trappers followed and lost the trail, but stumbled on a camp of 300 Nakota natives. In a tense standoff full of accusations and alcohol on both sides, the wolf trappers opened fire on the Nakota camp, killing at least 20 people.

The massacre outraged Canadians for a number of reasons, including the fact that Americans were invading their territory with impunity. And it wasn’t the first time either. Just a few weeks earlier, whiskey traders had started illegally selling alcohol at Fort Hamilton (nicknamed “Fort Whoop-Up” because of the whiskey trade) near what is now Lethbridge, Alberta, and rumors swirled that the traders had flown the American flag over the fort. They didn’t really, but the incident was enough to speed up the formation of Macdonald’s police force, which he named the North-West Mounted Police (NWMP), or Mounties. They got guns, horses, and red uniforms, in part to differentiate them from the blue of the American cavalry...just in case the recurring border incursions turned into a full-scale war.

ON THE MARCH...WITH A TRANSFER IN CHICAGO

The first squad of 309 Mounties was assembled in 1874. Scoring an early point for multiculturalism, if not for sensitive language, Macdonald had specified that the new force should be a “mixed one of pure white, and
British and French half-breeds.” Pay was 75¢ a day, and recruits had to be between 18 and 40 years old, physically active and able, and literate in either English or French.

Sit quietly: New York’s Attica prison has a teargas system installed in the cafeteria
.

On June 6, the Mounties got their first orders to move out. They were headed for the wilds of Manitoba and were to be accompanied by Henri Julien, an illustrator/reporter from the
Canadian Illustrated News
. (Julien had been given an all-expenses-paid invitation to make sure the Mounties’ heroic march west received adequate public attention.) The police, dressed in their scarlet best, mounted their horses and prepared for a journey...to the downtown train station. There, they loaded their horses onto train cars—an effort that Julien called “long, tedious, and amusing” in its disorder. At 3:30 p.m., the train whistle blew, and “amid the cheers of a vast crowd, we glided out of Toronto.”