Surviving the Mob - Dennis Griffin [90]
“Today I’m the boss of a family. It’s a family that consists of my wife and children. And they don’t call me capo or the don. In my family, they call me Dad.”
Another of Andrew’s former associates was involved in some action in 1999. That December, electronics expert and bank robber Sal “Fat Sal” Mangiavillano paid a visit to Phoenix, Arizona. His mission: Kill super-rat Sammy “the Bull” Gravano, John Gotti Senior’s former lieutenant.
The story came to light in June 2002, when Sal was still locked up on a 2001 arrest for bank-burglary charges. He contacted the FBI and told them that he had information that could implicate Peter Gotti, John Gotti Senior’s brother and the current Gambino family boss, in a murder plot. Were the feds interested in talking deal?
They were. And what Sal had to say hadn’t been heard by government ears before: that Peter Gotti had sanctioned a hit on the despised gangster-turned-snitch Sammy Gravano, the man who put Gotti Senior behind bars.
Mangiavillano told agents that on Peter Gotti’s orders, he and former Gravano crew member Thomas “Huck” Carbonaro headed for Phoenix in December 1999 to kill the traitorous Gravano. Driving Sal’s 1992 Mercury Grand Marquis, the pair made it to Amarillo, Texas, before a severe snowstorm forced them to spend three nights in the basement of a church. When the weather finally cleared, they went on to Phoenix.
Fat Sal may have been a rather odd choice to be asked along on a hit. His reputation was as a bank burglar and a master of electronic gadgetry. That made him valuable to the family as an earner, but he wasn’t known as a killer.
However, he had a proven track record for being extremely resourceful. Sal had committed more than 30 bank burglaries from Brooklyn to South Carolina, usually by angling a homemade gaff and three-pronged spears into night-deposit boxes to pluck out the loot. For one Brooklyn heist, he rigged a remote-control drill to cut through concrete and steel. His organized-crime pals dubbed his capers “Fat Sallie Productions.”
After an 18-month prison stretch in the mid-1990s for burglary, Mangiavillano was deported to Argentina, where he had original citizenship, but slipped across the Canadian border by negotiating his nearly 400-pound frame onto a Jet Ski for a ride across the Niagara River.
Back in Brooklyn in late 1999, while reuniting with his wife and three children, Sal got a call from Carbonaro, who pitched the idea of killing Gravano. Never much of an earner, Carbonaro had taken over Gravano’s loansharking book, estimated to be worth more than $2 million, after Gravano flipped. But after a while, most refused to pay back a “rat’s money” and the cash flow dried up.
However, according to prosecutors, what Carbonaro was good at was killing. During their cross-country trip, Carbonaro confided to Mangiavillano that the only person he regretted killing was his good friend Nicholas “Nicky Cowboy” Mormando, whom he murdered on Gravano’s orders.
Carbonaro went to his bosses in 1999 to ask permission to kill Gravano, who, after leaving Witness Protection, suggested in a newspaper article that anyone foolish enough to come after him would be going home in a body bag.
“He [Gravano] was an embarrassment to them,” Mangiavillano explained. “He was slapping them in the face.”
If the hit was successful, Carbonaro would have been promoted to captain and Mangiavillano would have become a made man—a prospect that was not so enticing to Mangiavillano. As a made man, he’d be required to kick up money from his bank heists. Still, Sal felt he had little choice. If he refused, he probably would have been killed. “I couldn’t tell him no,” Mangiavillano said. “Once he asked me to go with him, I had to go with him.”
After arriving in Phoenix, Carbonaro grew a beard and put hoop earrings in each ear. He took the name Henry Payne, which he thought sounded American. Mangiavillano chose Paul Milano.
They staked