Surviving the Mob - Dennis Griffin [12]
“We followed them until they rolled up to a stop sign. We pulled alongside the truck. Anthony was driving and Richie was in the front seat with him. Albert was in the back seat driver side and I was on the passenger side.
“Richie opened fire first with a shotgun. He shot out the front tire and the engine. The truck was stopped dead in its tracks. I fired next, throwing a couple of rounds into the back of the truck. I was far enough back that I couldn’t get a good shot at the guys in the cab. I leaned out the window as far as I could and let a couple of rounds go at them anyway. After I emptied my clip, Albert sat on the driver-side rear window sill and fired at the truck across the roof of our car. We then drove away to where we had left the getaway car.
“During the drive, Richie went into a panic. He started whining, saying things like, ‘Andrew, what did you do? We’re gonna go away for murder.’
“I told him, ‘What the fuck did you think we came here for tonight? You threw the first shot.’ After a while he calmed down.
“We made it to the second car and drove that back to our hangout. Mike Yannotti was waiting there and we told him what went down. He then torched both of the cars we’d used to destroy any evidence.
“At that time I assumed we’d killed one or more people. And then we got word that nobody was dead. Our main target was injured, but he’d survive. It was disappointing at the time. But looking back at it now, I thank God it turned out that way.”
Following that incident, Gaspipe Casso made his displeasure with Andrew known to Nicky Corozzo. He wanted Andrew dead and expected Nicky to agree that his young crewman deserved to be executed. When the two bosses got together to discuss the matter, Nicky played his trump card.
“Mob protocol says that you can’t kill a made man without getting permission for the hit,” Andrew explains. “Up until that meeting, Gaspipe wasn’t aware that Nicky had been sitting in the car that night and a bullet had struck the windshield right in front of him. When Gaspipe said he wanted me for the torch job on the house Amuso’s nephew was at and the U-Haul thing, Nicky said, ‘You want this kid for that? Let me tell you something. I was sitting in the goddamn car the night your guy started shooting. One of the bullets hit the windshield right in front of my fuckin’ head. I was lucky not to be killed. What about that?’
“That was the end of the conversation. Nicky had made his point. And under the circumstances, Gaspipe had nowhere else to go with his beef. That should have been the end of it. With a guy like Gaspipe, though, you always had to wonder if it would be.”
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.
THE MURDER OF ALBERT LATTANZI
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