Surviving the Mob - Dennis Griffin [59]
Mike and his guys weren’t happy, but they weren’t sure where to go with their complaint. It took them a little time to put together a game plan. They went to Nicky Corozzo and Robert’s boss, Danny Cutaia. Robert and Andrew both had the green light to rob drug dealers. And they had the approval from their families to work together. They didn’t think very much more about it. The money was made and Mike wasn’t going to get a penny of it. As far as they were concerned, it was a done deal.
To Andrew and Robert, the bilking of Mike Bolino was a matter of the way business was done on the streets. Bolino had done his friend Andrew wrong and now he’d gotten his payback. That’s the way these things worked. However, Andrew and Robert would soon find out that in this particular case, they couldn’t have been more wrong.
As Andrew’s first full calendar year on parole came to a close, his financial picture was bright. But his organized-crime and personal relationships were another story. Wild Bill Cutolo could be a dangerous enemy and the chasm between him and Nicky Corozzo was widening steadily. He’d also suffered the loss of another one of his crewmates over the summer when Tony “Tough Tony” Placido was gunned down.
On top of those issues, Andrew had begun dating the cousin of his ex-wife Dina. He could almost cut the tension with a knife when he picked up his son for visitation.
But a few weeks into the new year, Andrew would look back at those problems and wish they were all he had to worry about.
16
Beginning of the End
The year 1996 was the most stressful of Andrew DiDonato’s life. The pressure cooker he would live in for the next several months started gaining steam in late January with the murder of his best friend, Robert Arena. According to Andrew, the roots of that killing went back to the previous year’s marijuana theft from Mike Bolino and the murder of Tony Placido.
Tony Placido was part of Nicky’s crew. He and Andrew worked in the horse rooms together and went out looking for guys once in a while when there was work to do. According to Andrew, he was a tough kid—real tough. While Andrew was in Hudson, Tony did time with Robert Arena in Elmira and they’d become friends. The three of them used to write one another while we were all locked up. Andrew really liked Tony, but they weren’t as close as he and Robert. And Tony had a drug problem. When he was high, he had a hair trigger. Sometimes he went out to dinner with friends and by the time the meal was over, he wanted to kill the people he was with.
That summer, around August, Andrew heard Tony had been shot dead in the street. Nobody seemed to know who did it or why. Andrew felt bad and figured that eventually Nicky would find out what happened. And then if something needed to be done, it would be done. He didn’t give it too much more thought.
But as time went by, more information started coming out. The night Tony was killed, he’d been seen out in Bay Ridge having dinner with Robert Arena. There were a lot of witnesses to that. Then Andrew remembered that he’d gone to Robert’s house the morning before Tony’s death. He didn’t see Robert’s car there and asked him about it. He said the car had been stolen sometime overnight. Andrew thought that was strange: Everyone knew who they were and what they did and nobody stole their cars.
“After I left Robert’s, I happened to look at a newspaper and read about Tony,” Andrew picks up the story. “I didn’t connect Robert’s car and Tony’s murder then. But when it came out that Robert had been the last one seen with Tony, I put two and two together. Robert had killed Tony himself or at least been involved in the murder. He had to ditch his car, which had blood or other evidence in it. As this information came to light,