I took down the Mafia in New York. This was the secret

It was one of the most dramatic and significant court cases in history. After decades of extortion and murder, the real-life godfathers of the New York Mafia – La Cosa Nostra – were finally being put on trial in Manhattan. The bosses of the infamous Five Families believed they could corrupt and terrorise the city with virtual impunity thanks to the “omertà” code of silence, enforced by hitmen. The leaders ran criminal operations together through a ruling council known as the Commission and thought they were untouchable. Yet 40 years ago this month, “Fat Tony” Salerno of the Genovese gang, Carmine “Junior” Persico of the Colombo group and “Tony Ducks” Corallo of the Lucchese clan found themselves hauled in front of a jury, together with five senior underlings. The prosecution didn’t just have to prove who carried out the ruthless crimes, but who ordered and endorsed them. This was incredibly tough. Such was the mob’s success in covering up how the families jointly coordinated their actions, they even ensured the 1972 film adaptation of The Godfather didn’t include a single mention of the word “Mafia” – claiming it was an anti-Italian conspiracy theory. It was therefore a landmark moment when the jury returned to deliver their verdicts: guilty on all counts. Now, the senior detective who led the investigation, Frank Storey, is going public to tell the inside story of the the downfall on the dons. “I was personally directing all these investigations and developing the strategy,” says the 84-year-old veteran, in a phonecall from the US. “I’ve been wanting to tell the story for quite a while.” There has been “so much misrepresentation” of mobsters in films and TV, Storey explains, but his new book – The FBI’s War Against the Mafia – is the definitive “true account”. He wants to get across “how difficult it was to accomplish this task”. It involved recruiting servants as sources, undercover agents posing as young lovers and TV repairmen, and placing bugs in the gangsters’ homes. With his northeast American accent, straightforward choice of words and matter-of-fact tone – describing events worthy of movie scenes – sometimes it sounds like Robert DeNiro is on the other end of the phoneline during our hour-long interview. But Storey is no actor. His tale is deadly real. Frank Storey during his FBI career, left, and now aged 84, right (Photos: Frank Storey) ‘My car was firebombed’: tackling the mobsters When President John F Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, Storey was a student with a part-time admin job at his local FBI office in Philadelphia. That evening, he was inspired to see the detectives in action, responding to leads about gunman Lee Harvey Oswald. “That event convinced me to be an FBI agent,” he says. After receiving his badge two years later, he was soon exposed to Mafia cases while assigned to a team in Indiana. There, he began to learn his craft by tackling kidnappers and loan sharks. He was also confronted by the big problem facing the FBI. As soon as they arrested a mobster – be they a low-ranking soldier, a mid-ranking captain or a boss at the very top – they were instantly replaced by another crook. They didn’t have a way of tackling whole groups to end their crimes. During a posting in New Orleans, Storey helped to uncover the city’s largest illegal gambling business by tapping phonelines, but the dangers of the job also became apparent. “My car was firebombed,” he recalls. “That was about 1 o’clock in the morning… My superior told me: ‘Frank, you have to be careful, this could be payback.'” “Tony Ducks” Corallo, left, and “Fat Tony” Salerno, right, were among the bosses put on trial (Photos: Getty) There was another worrying incident in Philadelphia. “I was living alone at the time, going through a divorce. I was in my apartment one night and I got a call from a woman. She said, ‘We know who you are, we know where you live, you better be careful,’ and hung up.” He was so worried that he slept with his pistol under his pillow. Storey was struck by how Mafia bosses across the US were able to build loyalty among law-abiding neighbours, helping to shield them from police. Even the Philadelphia crime family’s leader, Philip “The Chicken Man” Testa, was widely liked prior to his assassination in 1981. Testa, whose nickname stemmed from his work in the poultry trade, was killed by a nail bomb placed under his porch. His violent end was memorialised by the opening lyric of Bruce Springsteen‘s song “Atlantic City”: “They blew up ‘The Chicken Man‘ in Philly last night.” Storey attended the scene. “There were two elderly ladies that lived next door who were blown out of their beds. I felt sorry for them, so I went and spoke to them, just to calm them down – and one lady mentioned: ‘I don’t understand. He was such a nice man.’ “He was admired by all his neighbours. He had a wife and children, he went to Catholic church every Sunday… That’s how the Mafia existed: they didn’t seem harmful to the average person, as long as they didn’t interfere with their business.” In truth, of course, these were the most dangerous men in the country. Testa had been murdered by members of his own group, who were frustrated he wouldn’t let them get involved with drug trafficking. But exactly one year later, the gangster who killed him, Rocco Marinucci, was also found dead. He had been shot – and his mouth was stuffed with firecrackers. The hit on Testa had not been approved by the Commission; this was their revenge. It was a warning that lower-ranking gangsters must be loyal to bosses. It also reminded Storey that the leaders in New York had to be taken down if this violence was to ever stop. Carmine “Junior” Persico was another of the bosses who was prosecuted (Photo: Yvonne Hemsey/Getty) ‘They thought I was crazy’: taking on the Five Families Later that year, Storey was promoted and sent to New York to lead the organised-crime programme. He moved there with big ambitions and a plan. “I called all the supervisors together and I wrote on a blackboard: ‘Rico.’ They looked at it and were like: ‘What’s this all about?'” While working at FBI headquarters years earlier, Storey had studied the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organisations Act of 1970, known as Rico. “No one understood it,” he says – but he realised it provided agents with the power to prosecute Mafia leaders if patterns of serious crimes could be linked to their enterprises. He used it in a landmark case in Miami known as Unirac – short for union racketeering – to stop a Mafia operation that had taken over a dockworkers’ union, forcing workers to give cuts from their paychecks or lose their jobs. Storey believed Rico could be used in New York, too. He established five squads, each dedicated to a different family, more than 140 agents in total. Rudolph Giuliani, right, was the US Attorney who worked with Frank Storey to prosecute the Mafia bosses, before his career as New York Mayor (Photo: Alan Raia/Newsday RM via Getty) “I told them: ‘I want New York lit up like a Christmas tree with wiretaps and microphones. We’re going to take down the five bosses.’ They looked at me like I was crazy,” he says. “The old timers that were near retirement age, they weren’t on my squads. I had all young people, they were the game changers. I wanted guys to go out and kick doors down.” They benefitted from information gathered by perhaps the bravest agent in FBI history, Joe Pistone. He had infiltrated the Bonanno family and served undercover for five years, only being pulled out in 1981 when he was ordered to kill someone to prove his loyalty. Pistone was later made famous by a film starring Al Pacino and Johnny Depp which used his alias as its title: Donnie Brasco. Storey met with Pistone several times. “He furnished us with a tremendous amount of information concerning how they thought, how they acted, where they socialised, the structures of the families and who was in charge.” The pair remain in touch and Pistone has written the foreword to Storey’s book. The challenge now was to get bugs into the places where mob bosses felt comfortable enough to speak frankly about their crimes. Detectives linked the killing of Bonanno boss Carmine Galante to the Commission (Photo: Bettmann Archive/Getty) Downfall of the dons: how bosses were caught To catch the leaders of the Colombo family, two agents posing as a couple started dining at the Casa Storta restaurant in Brooklyn, frequented by underboss Gennaro Langella. Having established Langella was holding meetings in the back room, an agent was sent there overnight to install a microphone inside a lamp, but this was a “dangerous assignment,” Storey explains. Not only did he have to spray a German shepherd to temporarily neutralise the guard dog, he also had to avoid being spotted by local cops who were on the Mafia payroll. Recordings from the restaurant proved the mob was controlling the construction workers’ union. This meant they could decide which firms were contracted to build skyscrapers, allowing them to inflate prices and take big cuts. Another of Storey’s teams managed to place a bug in the home of Gambino chief Paul Castellano, the boss of bosses, known as “Big Paulie”. “We contacted the maid, who was an immigrant. She was illegal… We told her: in order to stay in this country, you have to help us.” The woman told them where Castellano met with his trusted associates, but how would they get inside? The squad decided to disrupt Castellano’s television signal, then send an agent to his home disguised as a technician, saying there had been problems in the neighbourhood and he could fix the issue. When the agent knocked on the door, the ruse worked. They were allowed in, and while nobody was looking, they fitted a bug in Big Paulie’s dining room. After more than three years of work, they could prove who was in control. Crucially, Storey’s team also linked the Commission to the murder of Bonanno leader Carmine Galante in 1979 – having reviewed old files to identify the killer using a hand print, and found photographs of other dons congratulating him. Paul Castellano of the Gambino family was shot dead before he could go on trial (Photo: Ken Sawchuk/Newsday RM via Getty) On 25 February, 1985, the FBI was preparing to arrest the bosses and key associates the next morning, when they learnt the media knew what was happening. “I said: ‘Oh f**k!’ Those were my exact words,” Storey recalls. They had to pounce straight away, before the men could flee or destroy evidence. Most were detained without any issues, but “Fat Tony” Salerno was different. “What a character he was,” says Storey. “He was a shabbily dressed man. He wore a hat tilted to the side, always smoked a cigar. He looked like he didn’t have any money but he was the head of the Genovese family.” He was found at his headquarters, a club in Harlem, and was locked in handcuffs. But Storey says: “He got in the car and started saying: ‘My heart, my heart!'” Instead of going straight to the cells, Salerno was driven to a hospital. “They wheeled him in and checked him out. He was fine! They put him back in the car and took him to jail,” the veteran says with a chuckle. “He faked a heart attack – a big tough guy, right? He didn’t have a cigar in his mouth that night.” It took 18 months for the Commission trial to get underway. During that time, one of the 10 indicted men died of cancer, while Castellano was shot dead outside a steak restaurant while out on bail. Watching across the road that night was John Gotti, a fellow member fof the Gambino family. Castellano had banned him from entering the drugs trade, but Gotti felt his boss was too weak, ordered his death, and assumed control of the group. John Gotti’s mugshot after his arrest in 1990 (Photo: Donaldson Collection/Getty) “Gotti was the most ruthless Mafia member I ever investigated,” says Storey. “He was a homicidal maniac.” He became known as “the Teflon don” by avoiding jail for many years through witness intimidation and jury tampering, but was eventually convicted by anonymised jurors in 1992. When the bosses eventually went on trial in September 1986, the eight remaining defendants listened as more than 100 covert recordings were played one by one. After 10 weeks, the jury convicted every man on all counts, confirming the Commission was real in the process. Meanwhile, hundreds of lower-ranking mobsters were also jailed. “The agents were elated,” says Storey. “They changed the way the FBI conducted organised-crime investigations – we changed it forever.” There have been concerns the mob could be making a comeback after an illegal basketball gambling operation was uncovered last year, but Storey firmly believes “the Mafia will never resurrect itself”. “The media may may brand them as members of the Mafia,” he says, “but they don’t control the unions anymore. That was their power. It’s all gone.” ‘The FBI’s War Against the Mafia‘ is on sale now (£25.99, Citadel)