Longtime Colombo family boss Carmine "The Snake" Persico dead at 85
Carmine
J. Persico, who emerged from gangland Brooklyn to become the
unpredictable boss of one of the nation’s most powerful Mafia
organizations in an era when the mob in New York was at the peak of its
prosperity, died a prisoner on Thursday in North Carolina, where he was
serving a 139-year sentence. He was 85.
His
lawyer, Benson Weintraub, confirmed the death, at Duke University
Medical Center in Durham. He said he did not know the cause. Mr. Persico
had been incarcerated nearby at a federal prison in Butner, N.C.
Mr.
Persico spent most of his adult life under indictment or in prison, and
yet, even from behind bars, he managed to retain his status as the
leader of a vast and violent criminal enterprise known as the Colombo
family. Law-enforcement authorities believe that he had a strong hand in
the assassinations of the mob bosses Albert Anastasia and Joey Gallo.
The
son of a middle-class law firm stenographer, he began his criminal
career as a teenage enforcer and hit man in South Brooklyn. His first
arrest, at age 17, was for murder. But employing a keen intelligence,
street-bred guile, an appetite for violence and a willingness to betray
others, he quickly climbed the ladder to the top of the Colombo
organization.
“He
was the most fascinating figure I encountered in the world of organized
crime,” said Edward A. McDonald, a former federal prosecutor who was in
charge of a Justice Department unit that investigated the Mafia in the
1970s and ’80s. “Because of his reputation for intelligence and
toughness, he was a legend by the age of 17, and later as a mob boss he
became a folk hero in certain areas of Brooklyn.”
Mr.
Persico’s penchant for double-crossing his mob allies earned him an
underworld nickname that he detested, the Snake. It was a name that none
of his confederates dared utter in his presence; they always addressed
him by the more pleasant sounding but misleading appellation “Junior.”
Law-enforcement
officials maintain that even when he was serving prison terms from the
1960s into the late ’90s, he remained a potent force in two bloody mob
wars and in the running of the Colombo family’s network of criminal
operations. During his tenure, his gang reaped millions of dollars a
year in illegal payoffs from labor racketeering, gambling, loan-sharking
and drug trafficking, mainly in the New York region.
Detectives,
lawyers and underworld associates described Mr. Persico as a moody man
who could be alternately charming and vicious. Lawyers remembered his
ability to grasp complicated criminal law procedures and make acute
strategy suggestions at his trials. In tranquil moments he delighted in
tending to his garden and in preparing his favorite dish — pasta with a
delicate mixture of olive oil and garlic — for friends and relatives.
But
Mafia defectors and investigators, who listened to his conversations on
electronic bugs and telephone taps, said he would become enraged over
the slightest suspicion that other mobsters were cheating him. An
informer who shared a prison cell with him testified that he had tried
to hatch plots to murder prosecutors, including Rudolph W. Giuliani, and
F.B.I. agents, all of whom he held responsible for his long prison
sentences.
Mob
turncoats said Mr. Persico had boasted that he had a hand in more than
20 murders, either as the actual killer or in ordering the slayings. He
was once stopped from garroting Larry Gallo, an old underworld
confederate turned foe, when a police officer happened to walk into a
bar and found Mr. Gallo, unconscious, with a rope twisted around his
neck.
Mean Streets and 59 Acres
At
the height of his power, from the early 1960s to the mid-’80s, Mr.
Persico, neatly attired in a suit and tie, roamed Brooklyn, particularly
the Carroll Gardens, Red Hook, Park Slope and Bensonhurst sections.
Slightly built at 5 feet 6 inches tall and weighing about 150 pounds, he
was usually accompanied by his favorite sidekick and bodyguard, Hugh
McIntosh, a 6-foot-4 mobster with a frame like a tree trunk.
When
he was not in Brooklyn, Mr. Persico could usually be found on the Blue
Mountain Manor Horse Farm, his 59-acre spread with a nine-bedroom house
in Saugerties, N.Y., about 100 miles north of New York City. A police
raid at the farm in 1972 uncovered a stockpile of about 50 rifles and
shotguns and 40 bombs."
The
extent of Mr. Persico’s influence and authority in the Mafia was
exposed at a watershed federal trial in 1986 in Manhattan. He and the
reputed bosses of the Genovese and Lucchese crime families were
convicted of being members of the Commission, the select body that
resolved major disputes and set policies for the five New York crime
families: the Bonanno, Colombo, Gambino, Genovese and Lucchese factions.
At
the trial, Mr. Persico, a high school dropout, decided to represent
himself, and he won the praises of lawyers and judges for his acumen in
questioning witnesses, writing legal briefs and raising points of law.
His
unorthodox trial tactics failed, however, and he was convicted, along
with Anthony Corallo, the accused boss of the Lucchese family, and
Anthony Salerno, a high-ranking member of the Genovese family. Each man
was sentenced to 100 years in prison without the possibility of parole
after being found guilty of conspiracy to commit murders, racketeering
and leading a criminal enterprise, the Commission.
The
trial, which was known as the Commission case, disrupted the
hierarchies of three crime families and weakened the Mafia’s ability to
control New York’s construction industry through threats, extortion and
rigged contracts. The case boosted the political career of Mr. Giuliani,
who was then the United States attorney in Manhattan. His role in
uprooting three entrenched mob emperors brought him national attention
and helped him become mayor of New York in 1994.
Carmine
John Persico was born on Aug. 8, 1933, and grew up in Park Slope and
Red Hook, which were then heavily Italian-American and Irish-American
blue-collar neighborhoods. Gangsters of his day typically came from
impoverished backgrounds, but Mr. Persico’s upbringing was solidly
middle class. His father, Carmine Sr., was a legal stenographer for
Manhattan law firms, and his mother, Susan (Plantamura) Persico, was a
strong-willed woman who tried to keep a tight rein on young Carmine; his
older brother, Alphonse; his younger brother, Theodore; and a sister,
Dolores.
But she was contending with a
South Brooklyn of the 1940s that had become a bastion for organized
crime. Neighborhood youths were attracted to the flashy, tough-talking
gangsters with big bankrolls who hung out at the storefront clubs that
they used as meeting places. The Persico brothers were no exception.
Alphonse and Theodore enlisted in the Mafia’s ranks at early ages,
according to court records.
Carmine
dropped out of high school at 16 and became known to the police as the
leader of the Garfield Boys, a street gang that brandished knives, clubs
and zip guns — primitive single-round weapons often secretly
constructed in high school shops — in battles with rival gangs and in
extorting money from teenagers.
In
March 1951, when Carmine was 17, he was arrested for the fatal beating
of another youth during a brawl in Prospect Park. It was his first
serious encounter with the law, and when the charges against him were
dropped, his reputation for boldness and cunning was enhanced.
“He
was only a teenager and small in size, but people took notice of him
and began to fear him,” Mr. McDonald, the former prosecutor, said.
‘Made’ at Just 21
At
18, Mr. Persico was working for Frank "Frankie Shots" Abbatemarco, the
head of a crew in a Mafia group then known as the Profaci family. Joseph
Profaci was the boss, or godfather, of the organization, which evolved
into the Colombo family and became one of the original five New York mob
families established by the Mafia in 1931.
The
Abbatemarco crew specialized in illegal sports and numbers gambling,
loan-sharking, burglaries and truck cargo hijackings. According to
police intelligence reports, Mr. Persico advanced swiftly as a trusted,
hardened member of the crew. He was “made,” or formally inducted as a
soldier into the Mafia, at 21 — an unusually early age to be recognized
by mob leaders.
In
the mid-1950s, police intelligence reports asserted that Mr. Persico
was involved in gambling and hijacking enterprises with Joseph "Crazy
Joey" Gallo and his brothers Larry and Albert, all members of the
Profaci family.
Mr. Persico, who
ultimately would be indicted in 25 separate cases, compiled more than a
dozen arrests in the 1950s and early ′’60s. The accusations included
involvement in numbers betting, running dice games, loan-sharking,
assault, burglary, attempted rape, hijacking, possession of an
unregistered gun and harassing a police officer.
Most
of the felony charges were dropped or reduced to misdemeanors when the
complainants and witnesses refused to testify or disappeared. As a
result, Mr. Persico never spent more than a day or two in jail in those
years; most cases ended with his paying insignificant fines.
His
reputation for violent audacity increased after the murder on Oct. 25,
1957, of Albert Anastasia, the feared boss of the mob organization that
was later called the Gambino family. Federal and city investigators
suspected that Mr. Persico and the Gallo brothers were members of the
assassination team later called “the Barbershop Quintet,” so named
because Mr. Anastasia was shot dead while he was being shaved in a
hotel’s barber shop in Midtown Manhattan.
According
to underworld informers, the murder was initiated by Carlo Gambino, who
was Mr. Anastasia’s underboss, and sanctioned by Mr. Profaci and other
Mafia bosses who feared that Mr. Anastasia was trying to become the
nation’s dominant mob leader. No arrests for the murder were ever made,
but in a sentencing memorandum about Mr. Persico in 1986, federal
prosecutors said he had admitted to a relative, “I killed Anastasia.”
War
A
turning point in Mr. Persico’s career came in 1959, after Frank
Abbatemarco, the head of his crew, was murdered. Mr. Persico and the
Gallo brothers expected that Mr. Profaci would hand over Mr.
Abbatemarco’s illegal enterprises to them. Instead, Mr. Profaci planned
to give the rackets to an older mobster. Before he could, an infuriated
Mr. Persico, who was also heard to complain that Mr. Profaci had
extracted too large a share of his loot, decided to act.
In
retaliation, organized-crime investigators said, Mr. Persico and the
Gallo brothers kidnapped six of Mr. Profaci’s lieutenants and demanded a
larger slice of the family’s profits. Mr. Profaci agreed to the terms,
and the hostages were released. But Mr. Profaci reneged on the deal
after persuading Mr. Persico to rejoin him, promising him more power and
money if he eliminated the Gallo brothers.
Full-fledged
war erupted in 1960 between the Profaci and Gallo factions and led to
12 murders and the wounding of 15 gangsters, including Mr. Persico.
On
Aug. 20, 1961, a police sergeant walked into the Sahara Club, a bar in
Brooklyn, and interrupted two men in the act of strangling Larry Gallo
with a rope. The attackers rushed outside and fled. Police informers
reported that Mr. Persico had lured Mr. Gallo to the bar on the pretext
that he intended to switch sides once again and rejoin the Gallos.
Mr.
Persico was identified by police officers as one of the assailants, but
Mr. Gallo refused to testify, and the assault charges were dismissed.
On
May 19, 1963, Mr. Persico was driving in South Brooklyn when he became
the target of gunfire from a passing truck. He was struck in his left
hand and arm and never regained the full use of that hand.
The
war between the Profacis and the Gallos ended in late 1963 after the
death, from natural causes, of Joseph Profaci. Carlo Gambino and other
Mafia leaders imposed an uneasy truce between the factions and installed
Joseph A. Colombo Sr. as the boss of the old Profaci family.
Mr.
Persico became enmeshed in criminal trials in the 1960s. He was
indicted in Brooklyn on federal charges of being the ringleader in the
1959 hijacking of a $50,000 cargo of linen from a truck. Four trials
ended in two mistrials and the overturning of two convictions on appeal.
At
a fifth trial, in 1969, Mr. Persico was again convicted. Free on bail
pending an appeal in the federal courts, he was back in court in
Manhattan in 1971 on a separate state indictment that accused him of
being the head of a multimillion-dollar loan-sharking operation.
Mr.
Persico was acquitted on the loan-sharking charges in a trial that was
closed to the press and public by the presiding judge, State Supreme
Court Justice George Postel. The judge ruled that newspaper articles
about Mr. Persico’s Mafia links could unfairly influence the jury and
granted a defense motion to exclude reporters from the courtroom.
Justice Postel was later admonished by an appeals court for violating
news organizations’ constitutional rights to report on the trial.
A Killing in Columbus Circle
On
June 28, 1971, in a spasm of violence that shocked New York, Joseph
Colombo, the boss of Mr. Persico’s crime family, was shot in the head
and paralyzed during an Italian-American civil-rights rally that he had
organized in Columbus Circle in Manhattan. The shooting in front of
thousands of spectators left Mr. Colombo unable to speak or communicate;
he died in 1978. The man who shot him was himself gunned down almost
immediately and died before he could be questioned.
After
Mr. Colombo was incapacitated, Mr. Persico took control of the Colombo
family even though his appeals on his conviction in the hijacking case
had been rejected. On April 7, 1972, shortly before Mr. Persico’s
imprisonment began, his archrival Joey Gallo was shot down while
celebrating his birthday at a late-night meal at Umberto’s Clam House in
Little Italy.
Mr. Gallo, like Mr.
Colombo, was a flamboyant figure around New York, and his murder stunned
the city. No arrests were made, but prosecutors, in their sentencing
reports concerning Mr. Persico in 1986, said he had engineered Mr.
Gallo’s murder after concluding that Mr. Gallo had orchestrated the
shooting of Mr. Colombo.
While
serving his first prison sentence, Mr. Persico maintained his status as a
boss, relaying his orders through relatives and trusted confederates
who visited him. He was released in 1979, but in 1981 he was returned to
prison for three more years for parole violations and for conspiracy to
bribe an Internal Revenue Service agent for confidential information
about organized-crime investigations.
Again,
despite being a prison inmate hundreds of miles from New York, he
continued to rule the Colombo gang, relaying vital decisions through
surrogates. Released from prison in March 1984, he went into hiding
after learning through a law-enforcement informant that the federal
authorities intended to indict him anew for murder and racketeering.
Mr.
Persico was placed on the F.B.I.’s 10 Most Wanted list, and after being
a fugitive for three months, he was arrested in February 1985 at the
home of a cousin in Wantagh, on Long Island. The cousin’s husband, Fred
DeChristopher, collected a $50,000 reward for telling the F.B.I. where
Mr. Persico was hiding out.
In
June 1986, Mr. Persico was found guilty in Manhattan on charges that he
was the leader of the Colombo family, which controlled union locals
representing restaurant, concrete and cement workers, and that he had
extorted millions of dollars from unions and construction companies in
New York City.
‘You Are a Tragedy’
Aaron
R. Marcu, a former federal prosecutor, remembered that Mr. Persico’s
command of the courtroom was made evident by the frequent times that
defense lawyers looked at him for approval before making decisions on
such matters as scheduling sessions or whether to challenge the
introduction of prosecution evidence.
“Mr.
Persico, you are a tragedy,” John F. Keenan, a Federal District Court
judge, said in sentencing him to 39 years in prison. “You are one of the
most intelligent people I have ever seen in my life.”
Eight
other defendants, including Mr. Persico’s son Alphonse, whom
prosecutors identified as a member of the top echelon of the Colombo
gang, were also convicted on racketeering charges.
Three
months later, Carmine Persico went on trial in Manhattan on new federal
racketeering charges that he was a prominent member of the Commission,
the Mafia’s version of an underworld board of directors. This time he
decided to be his own defense lawyer.
Lawyers
and prosecutors speculated that Mr. Persico’s strategy was to charm the
jury. The prosecution’s case hinged on tapes, surveillance and the
testimony of self-described “made” Mafia soldiers and associates. In his
opening and closing statements and in his cross-examining of witnesses,
Mr. Persico questioned the validity of the government’s evidence
without having to testify himself, which would have subjected him to
cross-examination.
Instead
of appearing as an eloquent lawyer, Mr. Persico sounded more like an
ordinary man appealing for sympathy. His performance was Runyonesque as
he tried to make legal points in a Brooklyn accent, using phrases like
“I sez” and “you seen” and “dem kids.”
Unswayed
by Mr. Persico’s tactics, the jury found him guilty along with the two
other mob bosses. He was sentenced to 100 years in prison, raising his
combined sentences for the Commission and Colombo family convictions to
139 years.
In 1998, Michael Lloyd, a
convicted bank robber who was a government informer, testified that Mr.
Persico had told him while they were together in prison that he had
authorized “contracts” to kill two F.B.I. agents as well as Mr. Giuliani
and Mr. Marcu, blaming them for his prison terms. Mr. Lloyd’s statement
was made at a parole hearing in which prosecutors confirmed that he had
been an undercover informer in the late 1980s and early ’90s.
Federal
law-enforcement officials said they had decided not to bring murder
conspiracy charges against Mr. Persico because he was already serving a
life term; they had also wanted to protect Mr. Lloyd from exposure while
Mr. Persico unwittingly provided him with valuable information about
the Colombo family, the officials said.
Clinging to Power
Although
the two convictions left Mr. Persico with no hope of release, he
refused to step down as the Colombo boss. Under Mafia tradition, a boss
can be removed only by death or abdication. Organized-crime experts said
that Mr. Persico wanted to retain his title and power until he could
hand over the leadership to his son Alphonse, known as Little Allie Boy.
Alphonse Persico was imprisoned from 1986 to 1993 after his conviction
in the Colombo family racketeering case.
To
safeguard his son’s succession, Carmine Persico appointed Victor J.
Orena, a Colombo capo, or captain, as acting boss. But Mr. Persico
apparently misjudged Mr. Orena’s willingness to obey him.
In
1991, Mr. Orena tried to assume permanent control of the Colombo family
as its new boss. Investigators said that Mr. Persico, confined at the
Federal Penitentiary in Lompoc, Calif., directed his loyalists to
eliminate Mr. Orena and his supporters.
Mr.
Persico’s decision ignited another mob war in New York, this one
between the Persico and Orena partisans. Before the guns were lowered in
1993, at least 10 gangsters and a bystander had been killed. The war
led to a spate of defections by Colombo soldiers and associates and to
the convictions of a dozen Colombo gangsters, among them Mr. Orena. He
was convicted in 1992 of murder and racketeering and sentenced to life
in prison.
An
armistice was arranged in the mid-’90s with a Persico loyalist, Joseph "Jo-Jo" Russo, who was also Mr. Persico’s cousin, installed as acting
boss. But by that time the Colombo crime family was considerably weaker.
Its ranks of active soldiers and capos had been thinned by convictions
and defections, and the organization was damaged by the ability of the
government to blunt its gambling and loan-sharking operations and loosen
its hold on construction and restaurant workers’ unions.
There
was satisfaction among law-enforcement officials at the fact that the
Snake’s gang had been further enfeebled by the willingness of members
and associates to inform on their comrades.
Mr.
Persico’s son Alphonse pleaded guilty in 2000 to gun possession charges
in Florida and was sentenced to 18 months in federal prison. He was
convicted in 2009 of engineering a murder and is currently serving a
sentence of life without parole.
In
addition to Alphonse, Mr. Persico and his wife, Joyce "Smoldone"Persico, had two other sons, Michael and Lawrence, and a daughter,
Barbara Persico Piazza. His lawyer, Mr. Weintraub, said Mr. Persico was
survived by his wife, two children and 15 grandchildren. He would not
identify the children. Mr. Persico’s brother Alphonse died of cancer in 1989 while serving a prison term.
At
his last trial in the Commission case, Mr. Persico tried to explain his
life and principles in a summation to the jury. Acknowledging that he
had served time in prison and that he had gone into hiding to evade a
trial, he said, “Maybe I was tired of going back and forth to jail,
tired of being pulled into courtrooms and tried on my name and
reputation.”
Insisting that he had
been persecuted and unjustly prosecuted as a Mafia kingpin, he added
plaintively, “When does it end, when does it stop, when do they leave
you alone?”
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