- 26/07/2025
Documentary, Inside the American Mob S01E06 End Game
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LearningTranscript
00:00I'm from Brooklyn, New York, Bensonhurst.
00:11The neighborhood is run by the Italian Mafia.
00:15One day, April 4th, my friend John Polio was murdered.
00:19The kid Michael Hamster was taking credit for his murder.
00:23Goes around the neighbor that this kid's bragging that he killed John Polio.
00:26You know, so I wanted some, uh, payback.
00:30I go to Joey Calco and Pauli Galeno and, uh, Pauli G gave us a 380, me and Joey.
00:37And, uh, we go hunt for Michael Hamster.
00:40We see him get into Bobby DiCicco's car. We follow him.
00:44He stops at a red light on 17th Avenue and Benson.
00:48He rolls down the window because he thinks he's a tough guy.
00:51And all of a sudden, Joey pulls out the pistol and he starts unloading on him.
00:54Pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop.
00:56The kid Michael Hamster is, uh, jumping one leg across the street, like hopping.
01:04The kid Joey Calco with the shotgun, boom, hits him and he falls.
01:09Joey hands me the gun. I put it down my pants.
01:11Joey takes off.
01:15As we're driving, there's a cop car.
01:18This is a true story.
01:20He pulls us over.
01:22We're a little nervous.
01:23You know, I got a gun down my pants.
01:25You know, we just shot this kid five times.
01:28And, uh, all of a sudden on the cop's radio, we hear man shot, 17th Benson.
01:34The cop goes like this.
01:36Today's your lucky day.
01:39And he just takes off.
01:41He had us right there.
01:50It's 1992 and most of the old bosses of the five families of Cosa Nostra are in prison.
02:00Fearing life sentences and payback from their own side,
02:03gangsters everywhere start cooperating with the United States government.
02:07As part of my cooperation, I told the government about my life of crimes,
02:12including the fact that I participated in 19 murders.
02:15Which leads to the takedown of the most famous boss of modern times, John Gotti.
02:21But the remnants of the five families remain loose on the streets, trying to rebuild on the ashes.
02:27And none is more determined and dangerous than the Bonanno family,
02:30which begins their ascent below law enforcement's radar.
02:35These people are witnesses to that secret history,
02:38stepping out of the shadows to tell their story firsthand.
02:41A few remain concealed for personal safety, fearful of an organization that even in the 1990s
02:48is fully capable of resurrecting itself, like the Bonannos.
02:53I think it's fair to say that two events brought the Bonanno family to the edge of extinction.
02:58First, obviously, its boss was murdered, Carmine Galante.
03:01Famous image of him lying dead with a cigar still in his mouth.
03:05But at the same time, there was the Donnie Brasco infiltration and subsequent prosecution.
03:10This operation really kicked the Bonannos in the arse.
03:14I mean, we kind of really decimated them.
03:16That was a huge blight on the Bonanno organized crime family.
03:20As a result, they were kicked off the commission.
03:23It was a major embarrassment.
03:25The commission is the board of executives that oversees the five families of the mob.
03:30Gambino, Colombo, Lucchese, Genovese, and Bonanno.
03:36They call the shots, determining who lives and who dies.
03:40Ironically, the Bonanno family's expulsion from the commission turns out to be their big break.
03:45The FBI and other law enforcement agencies moved on to other cases.
03:50So they didn't really keep a clamp on the guys that were left in the family.
03:54Their headlines were about the Gambinos, and about the Lucchese's,
03:58and about the Genovese family, and the internal war in the Colombo family.
04:03You know, Gotti's gone. Castellano's gone.
04:06In the Colombo family, they're having a Colombo family war.
04:08The Genovese family, Fat Tony is gone. He's been convicted.
04:11The Lucchese family is in total disarray. Chin Gigante is on the run.
04:15He's been indicted or about to be indicted.
04:19These different problems within these families allow the Bonannos to continue to exist,
04:24to keep a lot of its turf, and for a period of time to fly low on the radar,
04:31to give it a chance to rebuild its infrastructure. And that's exactly what they did.
04:37While Bonanno boss Joe Massino was in prison serving six years for racketeering,
04:41his subordinate, old-school gangster Anthony Spiro takes over daily operations. Spiro is one of the
04:48last major mob figures still on the street, and a believer in traditional mafia values of secrecy,
04:54respect, and murder. He had strong connections with the other families, and he had the respect of
05:01lower-level members. He was a gentleman to law enforcement, and he was very well respected,
05:07you know, in the neighborhood. He was known to host an extravagant firework show every year for members
05:15of the community. But he was a lethal guy, and he would kill you. He was a bit of an eccentric guy though.
05:22Come on baby, come on. He was very big into pigeon races, and pigeon coops, and whatever you do with pigeons.
05:38They would fly in a big sweeping flock around the neighborhood, and ultimately come
05:45right back home. He's going like this. And all the pigeons are following, and you see them flying.
05:52And if you think about it, it's almost just a metaphor for Spiro's criminal organization,
05:57where he's releasing not pigeons, but villains, murderers, thugs out on the streets,
06:04all for them to make money and to bring it back to him.
06:12Spiro excels at taking children off the streets of his neighborhood
06:16and grooming them for a life of crime and violence. Kids like Jimmy Calandra,
06:21who grows up in the Bensonhurst neighborhood of Brooklyn in the 1980s,
06:25at a time when the mafia is fighting for its life against law enforcement,
06:28but still has the power and glamour to make a big impression on little boys.
06:34Calandra and his best friends are nothing but kids when they start their journey into the underworld.
06:38The core group friends was Paul Egalino, Tommy Reynolds, Joey Calico, me, and Fabrizio DiFrancinski.
06:46I mean, we were troubled kids in the neighborhood. We were bare kids. You know, we decided to form a crew.
06:52They got tattoos on their ankles to label themselves number one through number seven.
06:58We were making a pack with each other. You know, we're all in the same crew together. You know, one for all for one.
07:09The boys of Bath Avenue have each other's backs in a Brooklyn neighborhood steeped in the code of Cosa Nostra.
07:15All five families have a foothold here.
07:18Bad Avenue was a known avenue for mob-related activity.
07:22Bad Avenue were filled with social clubs. There was three on a block.
07:27You knew who were the guys that were connected, who were the guys that were up and coming.
07:32You know, I was a young kid growing up around wise guys.
07:38The guys making the money. You know, every time they see us, you know, here, here's 20.
07:42You know, as soon as I leave my house, I got $20. I go to the corner, I hang out.
07:46You know, what do I work for?
07:48We had Nick's Candy Store right around the corner from my apartment. That's where we would all come together.
07:53You know, there was a group of guys on every other block. No matter what time, day and night,
07:59there was always somebody there. That corner was home base.
08:02And we'd do everything for them. They would give us a couple of hours here.
08:06Uh, go up the block and get me, uh, two french bread.
08:09Say they need someone's window broke, you know, phone us the keys, yeah, go wash my car,
08:14whatever the case may be. You know, you know they control the neighborhood, you know,
08:18with their walk-in talks in the neighborhood. You know who was who.
08:21You know, these were the guys that, uh, I looked up to.
08:24Imagine that you are an eight-year-old boy in a working-class neighborhood in Brooklyn.
08:34Most of the men and women that you know are struggling to make ends meet.
08:39Uh, they're working their fingers to the bone. But what you see down the street at the social club
08:45are Cadillacs pulling up and men dressed in $500 suits getting in and out of the Cadillacs.
08:52These men were my father figures. You know, if I need anything, they just helped me.
08:57If we had a problem, we knew where to go.
09:00These kids really did start as kids.
09:04Some of them were eight or nine years old when they first started running numbers at the social clubs.
09:10Social clubs were really big. Gambling parlors, you know, were really big.
09:16They were bookmakers. And if you tried to use the pay phone on a Sunday, they'd cut your hands off.
09:21We do, uh, straight bets. We do parlays. We were gambling every football game, Sundays, everything.
09:28I was loaning out money. I was a little kid. I was maybe 13 years old. We thought we were somebody.
09:34You know, we were looking up to these guys and we actually thought we were doing something.
09:37Eight or nine, they're running numbers. 12, 13, 14, they're parking cars and hiding weapons and moving
09:44money. And they move up the ranks to do more violent and more profitable things.
09:50As the Bath Avenue boys grow up, what starts with trips to the bakery ends in crime and violence.
09:56As we get older, we just got more dangerous. And so instead of boys, now we're just a crew.
10:04It's now the 80s, the era of crack cocaine, a drug that ignites rampant street violence in New York City.
10:11And the Bath Avenue crew fits right in.
10:13The Bath Avenue crew, you know, they would smoke drugs, uh, rob drug dealers.
10:18Then they got into the drug business, started extorting drug dealers.
10:22We were doing bookmaking. We had the cocaine business on beepers. We had the pop business.
10:28We were stealing cars.
10:32I was doing banks. I was doing burglaries.
10:35They're out there earning because being a good earner is a way to getting good graces,
10:40you know, by sending money up the ladder, getting some respect from some of the wise guys.
10:45So the Bath Avenue crew was embraced by the Modano family as associates because they were good at their jobs.
10:54And the job of an associate is to earn money and to engage in violent acts when they're needed.
11:01And this group really excelled at both. They were a gruesome bunch of guys.
11:07Fabrizio Di Francisi, one of the most ruthless enforcers the group had.
11:15He took a blow torch and literally tortured one crack dealer who was, uh, using product on the street.
11:23Tommy Reynolds, out of anger, picked up a fork and jabbed it in someone's eye.
11:28That's how violent these guys were.
11:30They killed a lot of innocent people. They committed a double homicide for, I think, uh, an eight ball of cocaine.
11:37They were doing exactly what associates had been doing, maybe more violently, uh, but doing for many, many years.
11:44We're Sparrow's muscle. I mean, if Sparrow needs something done, we are at his disposal.
11:52The acting boss of the Bonanno family soon puts them to work.
11:56Sparrow had a daughter, uh, in the neighborhood.
11:59One day, there was a drug addict named Vincent Bickleman. He broke into her house and stole a necklace.
12:10After he stole it, he went to somewhere on 86th Street to sell it.
12:14It had Jill's name on the necklace. It said Jill. And it got back to Sparrow.
12:19He broke into a Bonanno boss's daughter's house.
12:24Sparrow went to Galeno, uh, to pass the order to kill Bickleman.
12:29And, of course, Galeno saw this as his opportunity to get inducted into the Bonanno family.
12:37Paulie Galeno was the leader of that group.
12:41Vicious guy.
12:42He didn't give a , wasn't afraid of nobody. He was a ballsy kid. He was a tough kid.
12:46A lot of white guys were afraid of him.
12:49That, uh, hit was given to us. Paulie just gave word to all of us.
12:53If you see this kid, this is what he looks like.
12:55If you see what I mean, leave him where he is. It was a big opportunity for us.
13:03In the 1990s, the five families of the American mob are a headless snake,
13:07struggling to recover from repeated assaults by law enforcement.
13:12But in the streets of Brooklyn, wild gangs like the Bath Avenue crew
13:15unleash a reckless new wave of violence. Violence that grabs the Bonanno family's attention.
13:21So when a thief inadvertently robs the daughter of Bonanno family crime boss,
13:25Anthony Spiro, the Bath Avenue boys get the call.
13:29It was a big opportunity for us.
13:31This was a very, very important piece of work to do for Anthony Spiro because
13:38this was gonna get Paulie Galeno recognized and hopefully become a made member in the family.
13:44You know there are certain rules to become, uh, a made guy.
13:49And one of them is you have to, to earn your button, you have to kill somebody.
13:55One day Paulie Galeno was driving around. He saw the kid and he runs up on the kid,
14:00Vincent Pickleman, right around the corner from the police station, right off the corner.
14:04He jumped out.
14:08And he just shot the kid five times.
14:14That's it. Drop.
14:15We all went to the bar.
14:17Paulie told all of us what happened.
14:19We celebrated. We were drinking.
14:20We had a great time.
14:22The Bickleman murder cements the Bath Avenue crew's reputation.
14:27It tells everyone on the street there's a new gang in town.
14:30Guys who are on their way to becoming made men in the Bonanno family.
14:33They want people to know that they just killed this guy because you're recognized now by, uh,
14:45made guys, by captains that you're capable of doing things like that.
14:49We ain't kids no more.
14:50You know, we're looking to, you know, move up to the next level.
14:53The members of the Bath Avenue crew want to join the Bonanno family at a crucial moment.
14:58Just as Joe Messino, the family boss, gets released from prison after serving six years for racketeering.
15:05So Joe Messino gets out of prison and all the other bosses have been convicted.
15:10They're replaced by underlings, people who are not that significant.
15:14So Joe comes out and he is someone who is revered.
15:18He is like the last Don, the one well-respected boss.
15:22Unlike a lot of organized crime members, Messino was very friendly, very affable.
15:28Very jovial, beloved by members of his family.
15:31He worked with John Gotti. They were close friends, um, and close confidants in truck hijacking.
15:39He's also one more made guy with a violent past,
15:42routinely ordering associates like Sal Polizzi to use their muscle.
15:45The Bonanno family had a case running and Joe Messino, who later became the boss, called Foxy and I
15:51said, look, you gotta do us a favor. There's a witness. You gotta go, you gotta go beat this guy up.
15:56I want you to break his arms and legs and to give a message, to give him a beating that
16:00he wouldn't testify. So we beat this guy up with bats, broke his arms and legs only to find out
16:07he was the wrong guy. He was the father. And then when Messino called us in for a meeting,
16:11he said, look, you beat up the wrong guy, but it's okay. The witness disappeared anyway.
16:17But Messino doesn't just subcontract his killing. He's done it himself. His claim to fame is as one
16:24of the shooters in the Three Capos murder, an infamous gangline massacre from the early 1980s.
16:29The three captains wanted to take over the family. Sonny Red and Delicato,
16:33Phil Lucky Giacone and Dominic Trinchera. Messino goes to the commission. He then gets permission to go
16:39ahead and kill the three captains. But when Messino gets out of prison in 1992, after six years,
16:49he's faced with a new reality. He needs to keep a low profile. He recognizes the mistakes of other
16:55bosses like John Gotti and Joe Colombo, who spend too much time in public or got caught on tape by
17:01electronic listening devices. So Messino reforms the Bonanno family, starting with his own extreme
17:07variation on that tried and true code of silence. No one is allowed to say his name. Instead, he says
17:15anyone who wants to refer to the boss must just use the visual hand to the ear. Just like Chin Gigantic
17:23in the Genevieve family, you had to touch your chin. Well, Joey was going to be called the ear. Also,
17:28he did not go to weddings and funerals where people would be photographed. He doesn't use a cell phone.
17:35He doesn't use a pager. He doesn't use his home phone. He also takes the extreme measure of ending
17:41a decades-old tradition, closing down the places that were once the hub of all mob activity, social
17:47clubs. For many, many years, I'm sure they thought they were invincible at social clubs. But we managed
17:54to bug a number of social clubs and overheard a lot of incriminating information. Joe Messino learned
18:01what he should and should not do. At the same time, he encourages a major new front in the way the mob
18:08earns money, Wall Street. The 90s brought a tremendous bull market, enormous amounts of money,
18:18and some loose regulations. Everybody wanted to be in the market. Everybody was making money who was in
18:24the market. So it was really perfect and fertile ground for organized crime. In the bull market of
18:30the 1990s, the last dawn of the American mob, Joe Messino, is about to make a killing.
18:40By 1993, Bonanno family boss Joe Messino is the last of his kind, an old-school godfather who believes in
18:46the code of silence and secrecy, characterizing the golden age of the American mob. But he's also an
18:53innovator when it comes to earning, seizing new opportunities not in Bensonhurst, but on Wall
18:58Street. By the time Joe got out of prison, the heady days of labor racketeering were pretty much
19:03coming to an end. So the big, big money that the mafia was making through the labor racketeering was
19:09really just not available anymore. And they began to move towards Wall Street.
19:16In the 90s, it was certainly a bull market. There were tons of new companies. The internet was sort of
19:22new and burgeoning at the time. And certainly where there's a lot of easy money to be made,
19:26you can rest assured that the mob's going to be there to make it.
19:31Legitimate stockbrokers must follow the rules of the Securities and Exchange Commission,
19:35but not Joe Messino and the Bonanno family. Fraud is the key to their success.
19:41The underbelly of Wall Street is where the mob operates. That's where the boiler rooms come in.
19:45These boiler rooms are filled with very young kids, unsophisticated kids, who have one task,
19:53and that is to sell stock, and to say whatever they need to say, and follow whatever script they
19:57have in front of them to make sure they accomplish that task. Most of the boiler rooms look like New
20:03Year's Eve party had been thrown the night before. Often scantily clad women walking around, stacks of
20:09papers, cigarettes, alcohol. Looks nothing like you'd imagine that a brokerage house looks like.
20:18The game is called pump and dump, and it works like this. Mobbed up traders acquire large blocks
20:24of stocks worth five dollars or less. By controlling supply, they increase demand, artificially inflating
20:30the stock's price. Then they sell those stocks to unsuspecting investors for much more than the
20:35original value, in turn earning an enormous profit. The mob makes sure that things stay in order,
20:42and if they don't successfully do their job, they're going to get a beating. Violence, threats, extortion,
20:49blackmail. The mob is a master at bullying. The fear of the violence is what keeps everybody in line.
20:56They make sure that those boiler room kids keep that stock put away. They sell it, and they don't let it
21:01get sold back to the market. It's paid in cash, and it's undisclosed. There's no paper portrayal.
21:06Nobody knows about it. You get a bag of cash on Friday. The cash is divvied up, some going to the
21:13broker's pocket, the rest going to the bosses. Raking in the cash for Joe Massino of the Bonanno family
21:20is this guy, Robert Lino. Lino was the muscle at the higher level. He was the capo. He was the one
21:26who represented him in sit-downs. He was the one who essentially ran an investment firm in lower
21:32Manhattan called DMN Capital, which was under the auspices of the Bonanno family. To route out the
21:38Bonanno family's corruption on Wall Street, agent Kevin Barrows needs to get inside DMN Capital.
21:44It was too risky in this day and age to have an agent try to go undercover. You had to know somebody.
21:49It wasn't the days of, you know, Joe Pistone where it was somewhat easier to infiltrate. My partner
21:55and I began to really develop a lot of cooperating witnesses. But not just any cooperating witness.
22:03His informant works as a mole inside the mob's boiler rooms. With his help, Operation Uptick is born.
22:10The goal of an informant is always to get the next person up in the chain. As we always say,
22:16you've got to eat our way up the chain and get to the top. The feds want Bonanno boss Joe Massino.
22:23But before they can reach the top of that food chain, FBI agents must snare a smaller fish
22:28and catch Bonanno capo Robert Lino on tape first. So they send their DMN informant to work wearing a wire.
22:35And the stakes couldn't be higher. If discovered, they'll almost certainly be killed.
22:41You better get my . And Louie, I better have it soon. I am going to put the word out with everybody I know,
22:48and everybody you know. You're done. You understand me? You .
22:52There were times when we had them wired up and ready to go and found out somebody was coming. We'd take the wire off seconds before we walked in.
22:58Simply because Robert Lino was a very tough, very violent guy. But my partner and I were extraordinarily
23:07successful at getting people to cooperate. And we just kept getting more and more cooperators who gave
23:12us more and more information about more and more people, which led to more and more indictments.
23:18Operation Uptick grows, putting increasing numbers of mobsters in the FBI's crosshairs,
23:23including Robert Lino.
23:26In the largest federal arrest operation ever in the New York City metropolitan area,
23:32more than 600 FBI agents began arresting 120 defendants as a result of a 10-month investigation code
23:41named Uptick. It really awakened the public and it awakened regulators.
23:48But Joe Messino knows how to play the system like an old-school boss,
23:52and his anti-surveillance techniques pay off. He's never caught on tape and gets away clean in
23:57Operation Uptick. While the Bonanno family tries its hand at white-collar crime in Manhattan,
24:04back in Brooklyn, the old friendships on Bath Avenue are about to disintegrate,
24:08starting with this guy, Tommy Reynolds. Well, Tommy Reynolds, he's a cracked-out maniac.
24:16You know, smoking crack, kill you for a $100 piece of crack.
24:19Reynolds and fellow Bath Avenue member Jimmy Calandra joined a third guy,
24:24a street thug named Chris Ludwigson, on a heist that's supposed to be an easy score.
24:28He notified me, he says, Jimmy, I got this score with this guy. Big money in his house,
24:33he has a safe in his house in his basement. The money Chris was talking about, you know,
24:37he said it was close to a million dollars. There's just going to be a guy at home.
24:42It's an easy score. They said, okay, sounds good. So they brought Reynolds with me,
24:47because Reynolds was always my guy to do scores with. And at the time,
24:51Tommy Reynolds was one of the key people who was organizing the crack distribution ring,
24:57and he started using some of the product himself.
24:59He said, no one else was supposed to be in this house. Only this guy was supposed to be there.
25:07So we all get our crisp weights in the car.
25:09I knock on the door.
25:27All of a sudden,
25:28I see this woman.
25:34I hear it, boom.
25:37Lady goes flying across the room.
25:41Reynolds, in his crack stupor, accidentally pulled the trigger to the gun
25:46and shot her in the head in front of her then nine-year-old daughter.
25:49I went there to go rob a safe, and Tommy Reynolds ends up shooting the lady by accident.
26:01I was like, what the **** did I just get myself involved in?
26:07I was so ashamed of it. I mean, it's one thing, you know, killing someone from the street,
26:11but then you're killing an innocent woman. It was like so **** hard for me to live with.
26:16Jimmy lived with that. I know, I know that still affects him to this, to this day.
26:22As it turned out, uh, there was no safe in the house at all, and they had just gotten bad information.
26:30The violence is starting to get out of hand, even for a rough crew like Bath Avenue.
26:36A bloody battle over turf and bragging rights is about to start, and no one can imagine where it will end.
26:47In the 1990s, the Bensonhurst neighborhood of Brooklyn is the Wild West,
26:51with crews of young mobster wannabes trying to impress an older generation of gangsters.
26:56Guys like the Bath Avenue crew, who work for Bonanno family boss Anthony Spiro.
27:01But there's another crew on the rise, and they're connected to the Colombo crime family.
27:05The Bath Avenue crew, given the violence of its members, had more pride,
27:09ego, uh, than just about anyone else. But there was a rival in the area. A group on 20th Avenue
27:16was, uh, extraordinarily violent as well. Turf is an issue, and pride is an issue.
27:22They had a little crew that, uh, that grew up just like us. They lost some of their friends,
27:28they retaliated at the guys who killed their friends, so they were, like, tough like us.
27:33There were a number of extraordinarily violent shootouts.
27:36With the 20th Avenue kids, uh, you know, everybody was always on high alert. I never left my house
27:41without a pistol. I had a bulletproof vest with the plate in the front, plate in the back. Plus,
27:47I also had the strap on where you got a pistol over here, you got a pistol over here.
27:52You know, you got two pistols like this. You know, we were ready to go to war.
27:57You know, we didn't trust anybody. My friends were getting killed left and right. We were shooting
28:00people left and right. When I think back how much craziness was going on up there,
28:05it really was. It was like a shooting gallery up there.
28:09Violence gets so extreme that Spiro steps in.
28:15There was a sit down with their people, and, uh, Spiro told me, like, yeah, you know what,
28:19we're gonna straighten this out. Uh, we're gonna put this underneath the table. Let's go forward,
28:23stuff like that. But, uh, Pauli Galeno didn't want that.
28:27Galeno, the hothead of the Bath Avenue crew, wants more respect.
28:33Galeno was very upset about the lack of support that he was getting,
28:37and he obviously felt as the person that carried out the Bickleman murder,
28:42that his place should be more important.
28:46So Galeno does the unthinkable for a small-time mob associate.
28:50He challenges Spiro, one of the most respected men in the Bonanno crime family,
28:54and a seriously dangerous individual. Pauli G. wanted his full support. You know,
29:01I'm with you, you're supposed to defend me, them. He wanted to kill Spiro.
29:07Everyone knows that Anthony Spiro is, you know, one of the kings, one of the few bosses that still
29:14lives in the area. And in the middle of this heated confrontation on the public street,
29:22Galeno pushes Spiro, puts his hands on him.
29:30He gave himself a death sentence. There are some rules that you cannot break.
29:34I mean, you can't stay in a neighborhood after you hit a maiden member in a crime family,
29:41because your own friends are going to be the one to take you out.
29:44Spiro essentially turned around and walked away, turned his back on Galeno.
29:49That was the day that Paul Galeno became a marked man.
29:53Spiro gave the order to kill Pauli. And, uh, you know, who's going to kill Pauli? You know,
30:00Pauli's a hard person to kill. The only people that could kill Pauli were his friends.
30:08He was holed up in his apartment. He doesn't know when the day of reckoning is going to come,
30:15and so he can trust almost no one. But he does trust Joey Calco and Tommy Reynolds. It's those two,
30:24that were in the short list of people whose knock, uh, Galeno would have responded to with an open door.
30:35Tommy and Joey went to Pauli Galeno's house on a Sunday.
30:39They asked him for something to drink. He opened the refrigerator door.
30:42As he opened the refrigerator door, Joey, uh, put a couple bullets in back of, uh, Pauli's head.
30:51Galeno fell to the floor dead.
30:57You know, you can go from being on top of the list to, uh, you know, they get a nod and two friends blow your brains out.
31:05Uh, Galeno, Reynolds, Calco. They've been friends for their whole lives. Uh, they grew up together.
31:16They marked their ankles together. And yet, at that critical moment, it was the two best friends
31:23that snuffed out Pauli Galeno's life because they were to, but more importantly, because they wanted to,
31:30because they knew it would be a path to their own rise within the Bonanno family.
31:35They left like, uh, nothing happened. That's it.
31:40But Pauli Galeno's murder will change everything for the Bath Avenue crew.
31:44After Pauli Galeno publicly shoves Anthony Spiro, a leading figure in the Bonanno crime family,
31:56he's marked for death. Spiro orders Galeno's own friends in the Bath Avenue crew to kill him.
32:01And they do. A time-honored tradition in the mob.
32:06At the time of the killing, Jimmy Calandra, one of the original members in the Bath Avenue crew,
32:10was in jail where he hears about the hit. I called Tommy Reynolds that night from federal prison.
32:19I said, was it you? Was that, was it you? And he was crying. He said, no, no. He said, no.
32:28But I knew it was my friends. Jimmy saw a lot of deceit and treachery and saw his best friend get killed.
32:38I felt sick. I wanted to throw up. I was like a baby crying to myself, seriously.
32:43Pauli was a really good friend of mine, a dear friend, a childhood friend, and just, you know,
32:49I was never the type to kill my own friends.
32:54That wasn't me. You know, Spiro would have gave me the hit. In all honesty, I probably would have told Pauli.
33:00I stopped and I looked and I said, you know what, we're not friends no more over here.
33:06You know what we are? We became gangsters.
33:09Law enforcement round up the remaining members of the crew while Calandra is still in prison.
33:14But when he gets out, his past catches up to him again.
33:18He's under investigation for an old murder in Staten Island.
33:22The unsolved killing of a woman with no connection to organized crime.
33:26New York police detective Tommy Dades has been piecing together the details and is getting close to an arrest.
33:32I was investigating him to lock him up. He did some jail time.
33:38He got out and he knew that we had just locked everybody else up.
33:43And he knew that the ax was going to fall on him sooner or later.
33:49The feds knocked on my door and told me, your past came back to haunt you.
33:53When I got home, I didn't say a word about nothing. Then all of a sudden, people were flipping on me again.
33:59You know, I said, I said, what life is this? I keep my mouth shut.
34:04And then I come home, I tell on me.
34:07It's no I might as well flip too.
34:10What do you do, be a sucker?
34:13By the 1990s, dozens of guys are flipping.
34:18The old code of silence, what used to be called Omerta, no longer holds.
34:22Faced with the threat of life sentences in prison or getting whacked by their own side,
34:26gangsters up and down the ladder reconsider their options.
34:30After my friend Paulie was murdered, I was at the point in my life, you know, I had enough.
34:34I wanted away from this life.
34:36You know, I sat down with a prosecutor, I made an agreement with him,
34:39and I testified against Anthony Sparrow.
34:41Sparrow, the one-time acting boss of the Bonanno family.
34:46You know, it was hard. It wasn't easy. It's not an easy thing to do.
34:52Sparrow was someone I knew for a very long time since I was a little boy.
34:56That told me never tattletale on anybody.
35:00You know, because at one time, I really liked this guy.
35:02You know, I had respect for him.
35:04But, uh, when I sat down on the stand, all I thought about was how Anthony Sparrow used to send us out
35:11on missions for him. He might put on the nice guy appearance, you know, that gentle way about him.
35:20But I know deep inside, I know that he was a gangster, and if he could, he would have me killed right there and then, if he could get away with it.
35:28So Anthony Sparrow was sentenced to life in prison, and he went to prison, and he died in prison.
35:36He did not cooperate, even though we very much wanted him to cooperate to build a case against Massino
35:41and the other members of the Bonanno family that were on the rise.
35:44So Bonanno boss Joe Massino remains insulated from the problems created by the Bath Avenue crew
35:53and continues running his increasingly profitable empire.
35:57Joe Massino was able to come home from prison and, and, and run it a wall grease machine, and they made a lot of money.
36:04Joe Massino is running the Bonanno crime family in an effective way, but what they were doing was they were leaving a lot of paper trails.
36:11You have agents in the Bonanno organized crime squad who are trying to figure out how can we get to this family,
36:19and they thought maybe the way to this is let's follow the money because a lot of these captains
36:27are now very wealthy living the good life.
36:33One of them is Sal Vitale, Joe Massino's brother-in-law.
36:37Joe Massino taught Sal Vitale how to swim when they were little kids.
36:41I mean, they were just very, very close.
36:45Once Massino gets out of prison,
36:48their relationship becomes a little bit strained.
36:53Other members of the Bonanno organized crime family
36:57perhaps were jealous of Vitale or did not like his style of running the show,
37:02and so they're starting to whisper in Massino's ears about Vitale.
37:08Then Vitale makes a bombshell discovery.
37:11He learns that his own brother-in-law wants him whacked.
37:16After mob boss Joe Massino is released from prison in 1992,
37:20he makes a series of sweeping reforms that turns the Bonanno family into a well-greased machine.
37:26But the family's foundation trembles when Massino's underboss Sal Vitale believes a rumor that the boss wants him whacked.
37:33This is the ultimate betrayal for Sal Vitale.
37:36Here's the man who he loved more than anyone else, who he believes he served faithfully,
37:43and the fact that he may have wanted to kill him just switches something in Sal Vitale.
37:49The underboss deciding to cooperate against his brother-in-law was the last nail in the coffin for Massino.
38:00Federal prosecutors are claiming victory tonight after reputed mob boss Joseph Big Joey Massino
38:05was convicted on all counts of murder, extortion, and racketeering.
38:11He's charged with eight murders.
38:14One of the murders, Joe was facing a death penalty on that case.
38:17So he reaches out to the trial judge and says that he wants to cooperate.
38:21Joey Massino finds out he's going to get the death penalty.
38:25The first thing he does is he cooperates.
38:27He had that fear that he was going to die in the chair, and he cracked.
38:36And that was the first time that an official boss of an organized crime family
38:41had decided to become a turncoat.
38:43So, imagine, the head of the group.
38:47He knew how to play the system, but when the hit the fan, the hit the fan.
38:52Gosh, I mean, that's the ultimate betrayal, in my view, for a boss.
38:58Somebody that is supposed to be so entrenched in this life, so entrenched in the ideology of this life,
39:04a leader. The fact that a boss could do that is devastating.
39:11By 2003, the sun's finally setting on the American mob.
39:15After 70 years as the most powerful organized crime force in the United States, Cousinostra is decimated.
39:21The mob first stumbles in 1970, when mafia boss Joe Colombo steps out of the shadows and into the public eye,
39:29and is gunned down shortly thereafter by a mob-hired hitman.
39:33It continues with the landmark infiltration of the Bonanno family by FBI agent Joe Pistone,
39:38and the prosecution of the leaders of the five families in the commission case by U.S. attorney
39:43Rudolph Giuliani in the 1980s.
39:46We have now proven in a court of law, beyond a reasonable doubt, not only that there's a mafia,
39:50but that there's a commission, that it runs the mafia.
39:52Publicity-hungry Don John Gotti turns out to be another nail in the coffin in the 90s.
39:58But it all culminates with the betrayal by the last Don Joe Messino, when he becomes the first boss of a
40:04family to cooperate with the federal government. Joe Messino's conviction really was the end of an
40:10era for the five families in New York. That's sort of the real deterioration of all their values,
40:17all their principles. The underworld as I knew it has been pulverized, pummeled. What there was then,
40:26certainly I don't see now. They're on the run because the Justice Department and local law enforcement
40:32in those regions have gone after the mafia with a vengeance. Too much technology, too many people
40:38talking, too much law enforcement, too many cameras, you know, too many people taking pictures.
40:47Organized crime still exists, but it's not the same. There's still thugs that hijack and sell dope and
40:55run prostitution and gambling rackets, but it's nothing like it was. Is there a handful of real tough
41:02guys out there? Is there a handful of guys out there that got good schemes going on? Yeah. To compare
41:08it to anything of like it used to be, those days are over forever. The mob's downfall is the culmination
41:17of a determined decades-long campaign by law enforcement. The goal that the government had
41:24was to denude the Cazinostra of all its ornaments. They have succeeded. We took a lot of their assets and
41:34their money-making opportunities away from them. We took them from being the top organized crime
41:40group in the country to just another organized crime group. We really kicked the out of the mob.
41:47One key victory, the breaking of the code of secrecy known as Omerta, practiced on pain of death for
41:55decades, now in ruins. What separated us is that we had that structure, we had that respect, we had that
42:03honor, and we had to abide by it or there were serious consequences. There was greed, there was
42:07jealousy, and all of a sudden the principles and the honor was out the window. Look, Cazinostra,
42:13you know, I believed in it at one time. It's like, like when I was a kid, I believed in Santa Claus.
42:18As I got older, I didn't believe in Santa Claus anymore. And it's the same way with La Cazinostra.
42:24They had these delusions of grandeur. I think by the time you get to 2003, all the delusions of
42:29grandeur are gone and they're just a bunch of, a bunch of creeps. My father, from the time I was
42:34young, would describe them as bullies. If you need two or three men to fight your battles, you're not a
42:39real man, my father. A real man can fight his own battles. But almost no one believes the mob is gone
42:47for good. The mob has taken a lot of hits. They're wounded, gravely, but not mortally. This thing is
42:55cyclical. Organized crime, boom, they pound on everybody, they pound on everybody for a period of
43:00time, and then something else becomes important. Terrorism becomes important. So they take the agents
43:05off, they focus on that, and the guys on the street, they build up again.
43:10It's what some people call the cockroach theory. When the lights are out, the cockroaches roam freely.
43:18If you turn the spotlight on them, they have to scurry. I remember talking to Sandy the Bull
43:23Gravano about this, and he said, one theory, if everybody lay low for 10 years,
43:29the government will go away, we'll come back, we'll be stronger than ever.
43:31It's going to grow again. There's going to be a spike. And this time, when it spikes,
43:36it's going to spike bad. There's a fresh crew coming out after serving 20 years. They're coming
43:41out in the next year, the next two years, coming back to Brooklyn. They know nothing but to commit
43:46crimes. They're going to come back old, tired, and hungry. God knows what's only going to happen
43:52when they hit them streets.
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