Best American Crime Writing 2006 - Mark Bowden [19]
“Joe is a rat. I don’t give my money to rats,” he said. “I want my money back.”
“How are you going to get it from him? He’s in jail,” he was told.
“From his wife,” he said.
“You go ask his wife.”
When mobsters are reduced to fighting under the mistletoe, there is no reason for them to exist.
And now, in this court building at the same time, you saw the reason the Mafia must die. Four members of Local 15 of the Operating Engineers Union were in court to plead guilty to selling out workingmen. They work cranes, backhoes, bulldozers, and hoists. They are proud and physical and, along with Local 40 of the Iron Workers, were about the first to walk up to the fiery mountains of the old World Trade Center, fierce, powerful, unafraid, and did all the gruesome heavy lifting for the next year. They were Irish, and their union heads admitted to being controlled by Mafia gangsters. Tom Robbins of the Village Voice, who seems to be the only reporter in the city who thinks labor is important, called the union the Mob’s Engineers.
The government indicted twenty-four Mob guys in Brooklyn, including one Jackie DeRoss, who was listed as a union member but was recognized on the street as an underboss in the shrinking Colombo family. His sons, John and Jamie, had union books and were placed on jobs where attendance might have been taken. In Manhattan another eighteen mobsters in the union were indicted; one was Ernie Muscarella, a reputed boss in the Mob.
The one that bothered the most was Tom McGuire Jr., the business agent for the local. Everybody in labor knew his father, who had been business agent before him. Junior, out of Manhattan College, was unable to wail that he had to steal in order to make it in life. He was in the son game, as in “son of….” If America is weaker at this time, blame the son game, the nepotism, as much as, in this case, the Mafia.
As Massino told agents stories that would end the Mafia, McGuire was in the same court building pleading guilty to a charge of selling union books. There were many other charges, including extorting fifty thousand dollars a year from a paving company and then giving an eighty-thousand-dollar bribe to the president of the International Union of Operating Engineers in order to become a vice president of the international. But selling the union books was the hideous crime. People beg, plead, and implore for a union book. If your son can get a book, you can sleep all through the night; union jobs pay up to forty-five dollars an hour, and your son has a fine living for life. Tom McGuire Jr., now sixty, pudgy, and arrogant, sold union books for twelve thousand dollars. He had a man running things for him, purportedly a Local 15 member, Anthony Polito. He took care of anything to do with organized crime. There were no-show jobs to be given to wiseguys or allowing work rules for health and safety to be ignored on any job where contractors had come up with money. Polito is in prison.
Reading through the government’s indictment, I found that one of its legal standards for introducing evidence was based on United States v. Brennan, the defendant being “a former New York State Supreme Court justice who was charged with fixing four criminal cases,” the indictment reads. “The government’s witness, Anthony Bruno, served as a middleman.”
I used to see Justice Brennan on Queens Boulevard, and we’d have a beer once in a while. He would walk across the street to the courthouse and fix narcotics cases and, I believe, a homicide for the Mafia. He was another one of those who come without a shred of shame. His was a complete character collapse that turned him into a cheap errand boy. Reading on, I found a page of testimony about the labor men pleading guilty in Brooklyn federal court to robbing their own.
Simultaneously Joe Massino sat in the jailhouse and bargained for his life, his ten million dollars in plunder, and his two houses, one for his mother