The President Street Boys: Growing Up Mafia

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INTRODUCTION

A DIFFERENT BREED OF GANGSTER

I

T WAS

B

ROOKLYN

during the 1960s and my father was Richard Ricky Dimatteo, bodyguard for crime boss Larry Gallo. In one of the ballsiest moves in gangland history, the Gallo brothers, led by Crazy Joey Gallo, became what you might call independents. They didn’t answer to any of the five families that ran New York back then. They didn’t answer to anybody.

Larry and his brothers, Crazy Joe and Albert Kid Blast Gallo, were defiant gangsters who ran their own crew, had their own group of urban outlaws. By defiant, I mean they defied the Mob’s Commission. That’s a dangerous practice, but they didn’t give a fuck. The Gallos were a different breed of gangster. They had their own style, their own way of operating, and they challenged the status quo of La Cosa Nostra—and that quo wasn’t used to being defied. The old-school Dons didn’t like the way the brothers were doing business.

Though they were originally part of the Profaci (later Colombo) Mafia family, the Gallo brothers went to war against the Profacis in 1961, and the streets of Brooklyn were littered with dead bodies.

Crazy Joe and his crew seemed to have a second set of balls. It didn’t take long before the brothers, and their small but dangerous crew, were waging an all-out war with an established mob that had more men, more money, and more turf.

That was the beginning of the end.

Joe Gallo and his brothers and his crew ran their operation out of a storefront at the end of President Street near the Brooklyn waterfront (now called Red Hook; when I was a kid, it was known as South Brooklyn until the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway was built and cut it off from the rest of the world). The Gallo crew was among the most feared and ruthless gangs in the history of the American Mafia.

And that was the world I was born into.

* * *

This book tells an insider’s story of the President Street crew. Unlike a lot of other Mafia books, this one’s written by someone who knows what the fuck he’s talking about. I was there.

It will explore the cause of, and the bloody battles of, the Gallo-Profaci War, fought for the most part on the streets of Brooklyn. The results were extensive, shaping the other New York crime families to this very day.

Here are detailed firsthand accounts of legendary Mafia meetings, harrowing crimes, violent confrontations, and inside dope on a mob murder or two that have remained a mystery until now.

The President Street Boys: Growing Up Mafia is a who’s who of the American Mafia during the second half of the twentieth century: bosses, capos, street soldiers, as well as shady businessmen and even some celebrities. The sleazy world of pornography—long before the Internet—was also a huge moneymaker for the mob. I was a part of that world, too (though I never had to take my clothes off or anything).

I was reared on the knee of the Mafia, you might say. It’s the only life I ever knew. It took me years before I realized that I didn’t have a choice. For me, being in the Life was the only life I knew.

I knew the rules of the street better than I knew my ABCs. I knew that it was a harsh world and you had to be tough to survive. I also knew, at the time anyway, that those affiliated with the Gallos respected honor, while their asshole Mafia enemies did not.

I knew all the mobbed-up wiseguys and they all knew me, from the time I was born. Thanks in large part to movies like The Godfather and Goodfellas, and later, the TV show The Sopranos, the mob guys have been glorified, like they were America’s modern-day equivalent to England’s Arthurian legends, Robin Hood and his band of merry men. (And believe me, Robin Hood and his pals were bigger crooks than we ever were.)

The Mafia has been portrayed as evil, ruthless killers, heartless criminals loyal to no one and nothing except the almighty dollar. Nothing but a bunch of tax-evading, dope-smoking, coke-sniffing, money-laundering, weenie-wagging, wife-cheating, womanizing, lip-biting, lying, despicable, self-centered, self-serving, horns-waggling, double-dealing, power-hungry, money-grubbing thieves.

To me, a young kid from Brooklyn, where everyone in the neighborhood was mobbed up in one way or another, these criminals were also my family members, my neighbors, and my friends.

I’m not denying that some of the stuff in those movies is sure-as-hell true. But like the mob lawyer says in that great old gangster movie The Asphalt Jungle, Crime is merely a left-handed form of human endeavor.

Me, I’m actually right-handed. But you get the idea.

THIS IS NOT A HISTORY LESSON

There are times when I’ve used published sources—books, newspapers, etc.—to better tell a story, to keep things in chronological order, and to give a little outside perspective.

But that doesn’t mean this is a history lesson. This book is comprised in essence of memories that have history running through them on account of I happened to be where the action was.

This is not a tell-all—some things a guy has to protect. I’ll promise this, though: This book contains everything that I’ve seen.

I knew and worked with some of the all-time most notorious and feared gangsters in mobdom, and I became an unwitting witness to some of gangland history’s most infamous moments.

And for that, I have to thank my father.

As is true of a lot of guys, my dad was my idol. His name was Richard (Riccardo on his birth certificate), but everybody in the neighborhood called him Ricky. I wanted to be just like him when I grew up.

Who wouldn’t?

He was good-looking, well-dressed, well-respected, made lots of money, drove fancy cars, and seemed to have the world by the balls. I didn’t know back then in my youth that I was only seeing one part of the picture—the part my father wanted me to see.

You believe in Santa Claus because your folks tell you the fat fuck is real. In the same way, parents create a mythology around themselves and the rest of the world that ultimately becomes reality for a kid.

As adults, we again create false realities, put on the rose-tinted glasses, use denial. People who refuse to face facts have nothing to worry about. They are also notoriously lousy at balancing risk and reward.

I was that guy, looking at the world around me as if it were normal, and we all lived together in a glass-half-full world. To me, Ricky and the guys who hung out on President Street were gods in a world of devils.

I believed in the legendary version of the Mafia, the one that kept the people safe and happy (for a price) in a world in which government, law enforcement, and other gangs were all corrupt and needed to be defied.

It was okay if sometimes life in my neighborhood seemed to mimic an old Western movie, or a shoot-’em-up gangster picture taking place during Prohibition. It was okay because we were the good guys.

COLORFUL NICKNAMES

One thing Hollywood got right about the Mafia is the colorful nicknames. I remember the President Street Boys mostly by their nicknames: Little Angelo, Cockeyed Butchie, Ralphie Goodness, Stanley the Hat, Mooney, Smokey, Punchy, and Roy Roy.

And in charge were the Gallo brothers: Larry, Albert (aka Kid Blast), and Joey. When I was a little boy, the Gallos would pinch my cheeks so hard that there’d be tears in my eyes. I tried with all of my might to hide my pain from them, but they kept bearing down until they made me cry a little bit. They thought it was funny, and it was their way of showing affection. Eventually, I learned to tough it out, without my eyes watering. When you are around guys like that, you learn early on the value of being tough. So I got over the hard pinches of the cheek.

Pain, I was to learn, was a regular part of the business.

* * *

Dad’s start in the Life came in 1958, just after he was discharged from the army. Ricky was a high school graduate from a poor Italian family, and he bounced around for a while, worked maintenance for American Airlines, discovered that he liked to box. It was something that many poverty-stricken kids turned to.

At that time, one of the best boxing venues in New York was the Sunnyside Gardens. It wasn’t a big place (they tore it down in the late 1970s and put up a Wendy’s in its place), but it was famous because during the late ’40s and early ’50s, it was from there that the old DuMont Television Network broadcast boxing matches on their weekly show. It was the sort of place where guys on their way up fought guys on their way down, with the newcomers being showcased on TV for bigger shows at Madison Square Garden.

Ricky fought in the preliminaries as a middleweight—but he was not a pugilist with top-ten level skills—and he was smart enough to cut his boxing career short while he still had his marbles.

After that he hooked up with Anthony Little Augie Pisano Carfano and Anthony Tony Bender Strollo, who were ca-poregimes in the Genovese Crime Family. Carfano and Strollo ran nightclubs in the city (that means Manhattan), and they were looking for a bouncer.

Little Augie was the key factor there. He was a man with a history and a lot of enemies. He was a mob killer, killed for Vito Genovese—and, unfortunately for Augie, sometimes he also shot people for Lucky Luciano and Frank Costello.

Six times Augie had been arrested for murder, but each time they’d had to cut him loose. Augie was in charge of collecting the Genoveses’ cut from New York’s garment district. Because of his garment district status, Augie also controlled labor unions there, and may have used his muscle to rig a few city elections.

He was a Genovese lieutenant, although he and the boss weren’t chummy-chummy. Augie’s allegiance was in question. In 1959, Vito had called for a meeting of his lieutenants because he was worried about family solidarity. Everybody showed up except Augie. He was discussed in his absence. Little Augie was about fifty, but he still enjoyed women as much as ever. He’d had a couple of wives. One was a cop’s sister. A dapper dresser, he was known for his white felt fedora with black silk band, his finely tailored suits, and his shiny shoes.

Tony Bender was the guy who saw Ricky in one of his Sunnyside Garden fights, saw that he was tough as nails, and offered him a job interview. Quizzed and tested, Ricky demonstrated that he was good at handling himself and others, so he was hired.

He worked at two clubs in Manhattan: The Wagon Wheel and The Gold Key. One night he got into a fight with a black man who’d been spending too much time talking to a white woman, a no-no back then. Ricky floored him twice and threw him out of the club—and only later learned that the guy was Emile Griffith, who, in 1958, was just then starting his career as a pro boxer. Griffith went on to win belts as both a welter- and middleweight, but he is perhaps most frequently remembered as the boxer who killed a man in the ring on national TV. The fight, against the Cuban fighter Benny Kid Paret, was held at Madison Square Garden on March 24, 1962. At the weigh-in, Paret touched Griffith’s buttocks and called him gay, which angered Griffith—and also turned out to be true. Griffith took out his anger in the ring and gave Paret a brutal, and fatal, beating. But on the night he encountered Ricky Dimatteo in a New York nightclub, he came out second best.

It was while working as a bouncer for the Genovese guys that Ricky got to know the Gallo brothers, especially Larry and Joey, who were at that time members of the Profaci Family of Brooklyn. They were friends of Carfano and Strollo and came into his clubs all the time. Ricky and Larry hit it off big, and became best buddies.

On September 25, 1959, Augie was shot in the back of his head while sitting at the wheel of his Cadillac. Augie’s last date was with a married beauty queen named Janice Drake. She was married to comedian Alan Drake. The Drakes were swingers. One was just as apt to step out as the other. There was no jealous-husband angle.

For syndicate guys, a kiss from Janice Drake was like the kiss of death. She made a habit of getting next to hoods just before they were shuffled off the mortal coil. Janice was Albert Anastasia’s dinner date the night before his date with destiny in the Park Sheraton barbershop. (More about that later.) She was also the date of garment district powerbroker Nat Nelson on the night he was ventilated.

Augie and Janice went out to dinner that night. After dinner they drove around in Augie’s Cadillac. They were ambushed as they drove down a dark street in the borough of Queens, not far from the airport that was, at the time, known as LaGuardia Field. The car had continued on after the shooting and crashed into the curb. The hit became famous because a New York Daily News photographer was on the scene immediately. Photos showed Drake, slumped to one side but eyes open, staring at the windshield, with a bullet hole in the center of her forehead. Augie had fallen over to his right, so that his head now rested in Janice’s lap.

The hit looked like the start of a war, so Larry Gallo needed a bodyguard. Larry came to the Peppermint Lounge in New York and asked Ricky to come over to Brooklyn with him. Ricky did, and from then on my dad was a fixture on President Street. He got a job in a bar, where he met my mom.

As a boy, I would go to the bar to make a few dollars. I’d clean up the place. Plus, I brought my shoe-shine box. When the guys came in, they laughed at me. They could see I was setting them up. They liked a kid who knew how to make money, and they’d give huge tips, ten dollars or more depending. The bigger the gangster, the bigger the tip. I made a good chunk of change. I could bring in $150 on a good Saturday afternoon. Not bad for a kid in the 1960s.

That was my world, as a kid, safe on a Saturday afternoon. At night there were bullets flying around. The hit on Augie had, as expected, precipitated a war between the Gallo and Profaci contingents.

The Gallos had tried to overpower then-boss Joe Profaci and seize control of the family. They had a laundry list of reasons why Profaci had to go, including the fact that he was greedy, imposing unnecessary financial tribute fees from all family members.

The coup didn’t work, so the Gallos splintered off from Profaci and a civil war broke out. That meant the boys had to hide out, hit the mattresses on President Street, where they had their clubs and hangouts. They hid in safe places to be secure from attack and be able to plot their own offensives. The phrase hitting the mattresses was later made famous in The Godfather movies, where they slept on mattresses on the floor while hiding out. And that part was true. Guys did literally hit the mattresses, because there weren’t enough beds at the safe houses on President Street for all the crew that was hiding out.

JOEY’S PET LION

Roy Roy had a club there, and that’s where a lot of the hiding was done. And so did Armando, a dwarf gangster who worked for Joey Gallo. Along with hosting a safe house, Armando’s job was to walk Joey’s pet lion. The lion was used as a demonstration tool only, to put the hurry-up in those too slow in paying their debts. The lion lent inspiration to a wide variety of enemies and other various victims. The lion never had to attack.

Everyone taken down those basement stairs got the idea: See the lion, the lion is hungry, pay the vig. The lion was exceptionally motivational, and debts were paid promptly.

Some of the crew hid out at Gargiulo’s Flower Shop and Lefty Big Ears’s joint. They had the street locked down. President Street was a sanctuary from the bullets of war. It was fairly secure geographically, sealed in at the east by the big trench dug to accommodate the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, and on the west by the water. The street came to a T on both ends. Further protection was offered from the south by the entrance to and the mouth of the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel.

At the time of the war, Ricky was so new with the Gallo crew that he wasn’t widely recognized by the Profaci side. He could move around fairly easily and remained unharmed. For this reason, he was chosen to be one of the shooters on the Carmine The Snake Persico hit.

Persico is a big name in the history of La Cosa Nostra, a future godfather of the Profaci Family. He was a Red Hook boy, a member of the Garfield Boys who once killed a rival with his bare hands during a rumble. His first claim to fame was being in on the barbershop killing of Albert The Mad Hatter Anastasia, and he was on the list of those who needed to be taken out to defeat the Profaci gang. Persico had been his own entity and an ally of the Gallos for a time, but Profaci offered Persico lucrative rackets in exchange for allegiance. Persico accepted. To demonstrate his allegiance, Persico executed a failed murder attempt on Larry Gallo, and thus ended up on the Gallo hit list. In retaliation for the botched execution, a group of gunmen, including my father, ambushed Persico in the dingy Gowanus section of Brooklyn, where a polluted canal slices through a charred brick cluster of warehouses and factories. A panel truck pulled alongside Persico’s car one night and he was shot in the face, head, and shoulder. Persico lived, and my dad’s job as bodyguard was more important than ever, which was easy for him because he and Larry Gallo had a strong and loyal friendship.

* * *

So there you have a taste. My father’s life in the mob. My own life in the mob. Two generations. Four decades. An inside story like never before, a first-person eyewitness account of what it’s like to grow up in the underworld. Revealed in brutal and inglorious detail, the men behind the headlines, in their raw day-to-day business affairs, the seduction, the inner workings. Details based on eyewitness reports and deathbed confessions about some of the Mafia’s most notorious murders. It’s quite a ride.

This book is fifty-eight years in the making. The result is the most personal and accurate testament to the Life that you’ll ever read. Some myths will be dispelled, others enforced, but the record will be set straight regarding many of the infamous events of mob history.

I would like to thank my family: Richard Dimatteo, Amelia Dimatteo, Emily Dimatteo, Kristina Dimatteo, Frank Dimatteo, Matthew Dimatteo, Chris Chairamonte, Valory Dimatteo, Louis and Josephine Floridia, Tony Crispe, my three grandkids—Salvatore, Frank III, and Luciano—and Carrol Torres. On the pro side, thanks to Michael Benson (author of The Devil at Genesee Junction) and to Gary Goldstein at Kensington Books for their expert support.

* * *

This book is dedicated to Richard Silver Fox Dimatteo. We all have parents, some good, some bad, some indifferent. I had Ricky and Dee. I was born into a crazy world of blood, guns, scores, and violence.

I had no say in the matter. But I learned from what I saw, things most kids don’t ever see, plus I got to live a life most people are denied. I am not glorifying the life that Ricky led. It was his life to live the way he wanted to.

The family I lived with was comprised of the people I loved, and I have no regrets. I stand proud to have Ricky and Dee as parents. That statement has gone through a process over the years. There were a number of things I had to clarify in my mind before I could declare pride in my parents. I had to come to grips with the fact that the Life was a bad life, that those in it miss out on so much, and that it was my life, too—and that I, too, had missed out on a lot.

Ricky has passed on, may he rest in peace, and so has Bobby Darrow, Punchy, Uncle Joe Shep, and Roy Roy. Now I am left alone with only memories of the life we led, a life I share here in this book with you.

CHAPTER 1

WE CALLED IT SOUTH BROOKLYN

T

O UNDERSTAND WHY

the people in these stories act the way we do, you’ve got to understand where we came from: South Brooklyn—with a focal point on a protruberance of land jutting into New York Harbor called Red Hook.

Red Hook was a part of the Town of Brooklyn right from the beginning, in the 1600s when the place was called Breuckelen on the East River, and Kings Highway (still a major thoroughfare wandering through the modern Brooklyn grid circumventing long-forgotten obstacles) was trafficked by the Dutch. Three hundred years later it was a big city, consolidated in 1898 as a borough of New York City. When they built the Brooklyn Bridge, Brooklyn grew fast, wrapping around the Narrows, through Coney Island, all the way past Sheepshead Bay to Canarsie, which were villages that were swallowed up.

It’s not hard to figure out how Red Hook—originally Roode Hoek—got its name. It sticks out into the Upper Bay in a hook shape, curling across Buttermilk Channel