Gangland:9/1/16

[Dellacroce]

September 1, 2016 This Week in Gang Land
By Jerry Capeci

Gambino Wiseguy Joe The Cat Cashes In His Chips, At Age 99

Gang Land Exclusive!Joseph LaForteJoseph (Joe The Cat) LaForte, a longtime Gambino crime family soldier who amassed a small fortune in real estate and who for many years owned the Little Italy building where the late Mafia boss John Gotti held court at the Ravenite Social Club on Mulberry Street during his heyday, cashed in his chips last week at the ripe old age of 99.

LaForte hailed from Little Italy but moved decades ago to Staten Island where he ran the crime family's lucrative bookmaking operations. He died in his sleep in the early morning of August 23 in the home where he lived alone on Scheffelin Avenue in the exclusive, historic Lighthouse Hill section of the island that was settled by Dutch, French and English farmers in the late 1600s.

"They don't make 'em like that anymore," said one local denizen who knew LaForte, his background, and his family members for many years. "He was a low key, low-level soldier who made a lot of money and didn't piss it away. He bought property in SoHo and Little Italy when you could get it for a song and he lived off it for the rest of his life."

Ravenite Social ClubHe also owned much property on Staten Island, and until recently, LaForte could often be seen in New Dorp, on the main drag on New Dorp Lane and on New Dorp Plaza, where he still owns some stores, according to several Staten Islanders who asked that their names not be used.

"He was pretty healthy for an old guy," said one, adding that a driver would regularly pick him at his home and "take him almost every day to where he owned stores on New Dorp Plaza."

But last week was not a good one for LaForte, or his family. A day after the Grim Reaper came for Joe The Cat, he returned to collect Laforte's 72-year-old son Edward. The younger Laforte died in Columbia Presbyterian Hospital after a long illness, and was cremated Tuesday, according to Scarpaci Funeral Home in Staten Island.

LaForte's role as a real estate entrepreneur sometimes put Joe the Cat into jams, even ones he had nothing to do with. In 1987, cops responded to a report of a burglary at Paul's Sweet Shoppe, a store run by two of Joe's other sons, James and Joe Jr., that was located in a building their dad owned at 44 New Dorp Plaza. When police entered at 4:30 AM, they found a self-employed carpenter tied up and shot to death in a body bag in the basement.

James LaForteAccording to court records, the victim met his fate after Gotti crew members apprehended him outside the Bergin Hunt and Fish Club when they mistakenly thought he had pegged a shot at Gotti. The prevailing wisdom today is that a truck backfire sounded like a shot to the wary Gotti crew, which was fearing additional retaliation for Castellano's murder.

The hapless carpenter was thrown into the trunk of a car, and taken to Staten Island where Gambino mob associate Joseph Watts was given the task of interrogating him. On Gotti's orders, according to testimony, the carpenter was tortured and killed in the basement of Paul's Sweet Shoppe. Watts was acquitted at trial.

Not that Joe The Cat didn't have his own run-ins with the law. He had state court convictions for policy, gambling, and obstruction of justice for which he served virtually no time in prison. He did serve two short federal prison stretches for tax evasion and perjury. In more than 50 years as a wiseguy, though, going back to the era of family patriarch Carlo Gambino, LaForte managed to evade all the major racketeering probes by the FBI, which tabbed him as a "made man" in 1963.

"He was a tight, cheap old bastard who everybody hated," said one law enforcement source. "But they all loved the money he brought in, so he rarely had a problem with his bosses, and never had one he couldn't solve."

Aniello DellacroceIt didn't hurt that LaForte was a close pal of Gambino's longtime underboss, Aniello (Neil) Dellacroce, the leader of the blue collar wing of the crime family, and Gotti's mentor. LaForte was also Dellacroce's landlord. He owned the Mulberry Street building where Neil lived, before he too opted for the wide open spaces of Staten Island after the Verrazano Bridge opened in 1964. (LaForte got his nickname as a young thief growing up in Little Italy because he could jump from rooftop to rooftop, "like a cat" to get away from the cops.)

"When Neil died (in December, 1985), Gotti was irate that (Paul) Castellano put him with Tommy Bilotti," said one law enforcement source. "He was bringing a lot of money to Neil and John figured that belonged to him once Neil died. That was one of the reasons they killed Paul," the source added.

In a tape-recording played at Gotti's 1992 trial, the Dapper Don was heard complaining that while Castellano was alive, he had stated that "Joe The Cat, he's gotta give me two million," and that Paul was "breaking up" Gotti's crew and putting LaForte and others under Bilotti.

John GottiThe Dapper Don loved the money that Joe The Cat sent up to his new boss, but during one FBI tape recorded discussion that was never played in court, Gotti excoriated LaForte "maybe a dozen times" repeating the same seven words, each time, accentuating a different syllable or word, said a former federal official.

"Joe The Cat? He's a heartless mother-fucker," Gotti said over and over again, said the source. "One time he'd drag out the word heartless, then he'd drag out mother, then he'd drag out fucker. I remember thinking at the time, LaForte's lucky we took John off the streets, but in hindsight, he was probably just playing to his audience and blowing off steam."

A few years earlier, in March of 1986, Gotti blew his stack at LaForte when he apologized for not attending a victory celebration in Queens that Gotti's crew threw when he beat assault charges against a forgetful refrigerator mechanic in a case that the New York Post announced with a screaming "I FORGOTTI" headline. Joe The Cat had claimed that pressing business had kept him away.

Joe The Cat LaForteThe conversation was picked up by a state Organized Crime Task Force bug in the Bergin Hunt And Fish Club in Queens, as Gene Mustain and I wrote in Mob Star: The Story of John Gotti.

"You know I'm not selfish John," said LaForte. "You know I'm not selfish. You know it."

Gotti replied in his usual hyperbolic way. "Hey Joe, you're trying to tell me then that everybody else, Angelo, Frankie, his uncle Joey, Joe Gallo, all of eighty-sixth street (in Bensonhurst,) all our people there, Jersey people, all these guys are not as important as you. They run cities, they run towns, countries! You pick up the fuckin' Post to find out how your fuckin' friend made out in court."

Joe The Cat survived that tirade, and the Dapper Don's "heartless mother-fucker" rant too. His last scrape with the law ended on December 19, 1990, when he was released from federal custody, following a short stretch behind bars for his perjury conviction earlier that year.

Paul Castellano HitEight days before that, the Dapper Don took his last breath as a free man, when FBI agents arrested him on racketeering and murder charges that would keep him behind bars for the rest of his life.

Their paths never crossed again, but Gotti's 1992 conviction did give Joe The Cat some final, but relatively minor — for him — aggravation a few years later.

That began in January of 1993, when the feds moved to seize the building at 247 Mulberry Street because it was the hub of racketeering activity during Gotti's reign as the Gambino family boss. At first, LaForte said he would contest the seizure, but he never did. And on October 15, 1997, deputy U.S. Marshals evicted the occupants of the Ravenite Social Club and informed the other residents of the five story building that they should begin paying their rent to Uncle Sam.

A year later, the building was sold for a cool $1.03 million, but Joe The Cat never looked back.

An old friend of the LaForte family told Gang Land that earlier this month, Joe the Cat was hospitalized after breaking a leg. "Joe came home from the hospital, and he died in his sleep a few days later," the friend said.

Frank DeCicco Murder SiteHe was waked at Seneca Chapels in Ridgewood, Queens last Wednesday and Thursday and buried Friday at Moravian Cemetery in Staten Island. He's in good wiseguy company there: It's the same final resting place for more than a few high-ranked Gambino family members who lived on Staten Island. But only one of them, capo James (Jimmy Brown) Failla, died of natural causes like Joe The Cat.

The others are reminders of the 1980s, a much more violent era for the Gambino crime family. Castellano and his key aide Bilotti, were shot to death on the East Side of Manhattan; Frank DeCicco, Gotti's first underboss, was blown up on 86th Street in Brooklyn.

LaForte is survived by his son James, his daughters Linda and Josephine, and more than 20 grand children, and 25 great-grandchildren.

Editor's Note: Newsman Will Jones focused on Genovese capo Patsy Parrello in a discussion last week with Gang Land about the indictment of 46 mob connected defendants with five crime families on Channel 13, the PBS station in New York, while reporter Dave Schratwieser of Fox 29 in Philadelphia chatted up the arrest of Philadelphia mob boss Joey Merlino in his chat with Gang Land about the same case.

Tough Love: Dad Wanted To Smash His Mobster Son In The Face With A Baseball Bat

Joseph LaForte Jr.Joe The Cat LaForte loved his late son, Joseph Jr., a wiseguy known as Buddy The Cat, whom he set up in business at Paul's Sweet Shoppe. But in the spring of 1985, LaForte was so angry at his mobster son that he told his old pal, Gambino underboss Aniello (Neil) Dellacroce that he wanted to smash him in the face with a baseball bat.

The Cat's ire stemmed from a bid by son Buddy to leapfrog over his old man and become a capo, a job that would make him his dad's mob supervisor. Buddy was so eager to land the post, he tried to buy the job for $20,000 from capo Michael (Mike The Baker) Caiazzo who was stepping down. (Apparently everything was for sale in the Gambino family).

As then-capo John Gotti and mobster pal Angelo Ruggiero listened during a get-together in the living room of the ailing Dellacroce's Staten Island home, the elder LaForte explained his anger to his longtime mob pal this way, according to a transcript of a conversation that was secretly recorded by the FBI.

"The bat was right there," said Joe The Cat. "I don't know how I didn't grab the bat. But it was in the back of my mind that he's Amica Nostra, or I would have took all his teeth out of his mouth," said LaForte, evoking mob rules that prohibit striking a fellow made man.

Joseph Laforte, Gene Gotti, et alThis sounded a bit too violent a reaction even to Dellacroce, who had banished Caiazza for his actions in accepting Buddy's offer. But he was also a father, and he questioned LaForte's reluctance to use a baseball bat on his son solely because it was against mob protocol.

"What else could you be fucking thinking?" Dellacroce asked and answered very quickly: "If you hit him with a fucking bat he'd get hurt. He's your son."

LaForte had a quick and ready response, one that the Dapper Don may have recalled years later when he called Joe The Cat a "heartless mother-fucker" a dozen times in another tape recorded talk.

"Boy if I hit him with that bat, he's hurt, 'cause I'd knock all his front teeth out" said LaForte. "I mean, I'd smash his nose. I'd really hit. Because I was mad that day. My son Jimmy stole some money off of me. I knocked all his teeth out. I broke his nose. Smashed his whole face with a bat. This guy, he does ten times worse — I wasn't willing to stop with him at all."

By Andy Petepiece

Ask Andy: Mobsters Love To Tip The Scales Of Justice

Most Gang Land readers know the jury was fixed in the 1987 trial in which John Gotti was acquitted of racketeering charges — even though it's unlikely the Life and Death of John Gotti movie starring John Travolta and his family that they just made in Cincinnati will mention that — but a few folks have asked if other mobsters ever tried to tip the scales of justice in their favor. That is like asking if the sun is hot. Here are a couple of instances from the early 1970s.

In 1970, Sam Pieri, who briefly served as underboss in the early 1950s for Stefano Magaddino, the longtime Buffalo family boss who was a charter member of the Mafia Commission, was serving as the crime family's boss when he was arrested on federal charges of transporting stolen jewelry across state lines.

Pieri, who was the family underboss when he was convicted of drug dealing in 1954 and sentenced to 10 years in the slammer, didn't want to go back to prison. He had been lucky in his confrontation with the law in the late 1960s when he was charged with a bank robbery conspiracy and was acquitted at trial.

But he didn't want to take any chances. His stretch behind bars for heroin trafficking had cost him his spot in the family hierarchy, and he didn't want to take a chance at losing it again. As it was, the Mafia Commission had not formally accepted Pieri as the rightful Buffalo boss, even though he was acting as if it had.

Sam PieriAccordingly he found and approached a willing juror who brought two other jurors into a plot to fix the case. Unfortunately for Pieri, the FBI was on to him and watched as he spoke to the juror. It was game over again. This one cost him a five year prison term for jury tampering. Ironically, the original stolen jewelry charge was dropped.

In 1972, in Chicago there was a much more serious bribery attempt. It was successful, and prevented a notorious hitman from being convicted of murder.

Notorious Chicago hood Harry Aleman gunned down a rival hoodlum named William Logan in what later appeared to be a personal matter. Although Aleman was not a made member of the Chicago Outfit, he was a veteran gangster and very valued associate. For the next four years the case stymied the cops.

Things changed when an Aleman accomplice was implicated in another matter and rolled on the Logan murder case. Aleman was arrested but infamous Chicago Outfit bagman Pat D'Arcy quickly went to work. With Aleman's agreement, of course, D'Arcy paid off a crooked lawyer who bribed the presiding judge in a non-jury murder trial. The jurist found Aleman not guilty. Bribery had worked.

Harry AlemanThings went south for Aleman 20 years later, however. The crooked lawyer, Bob Cooley, got jammed up and rolled over. Eventually, the state won the right to retry Aleman and succeeded in convicting the hitman in 1997. He ended up dying behind bars.

Messing with the justice system is a tried and true tactic used by Cosa Nostra — whenever it can. That's why federal prosecutors often seek to seat anonymous jurors in organized crime cases — to make it that much harder for mobsters to identify jurors to bribe. But that is not a fail-safe tactic.

The jury in the 1987 Gotti case was anonymous. Unfortunately, for the government, juror George Pape reached out to the mob through a gangster he knew, and earned a $60,000 payoff to throw the case.

[Snakes]

The "Pat D'Arcy" mentioned in the Ask Andy segment is probably a mix up between Pat Marcy and John D'Arco, the Outfit's two connections in the 1st Ward that fixed cases.

[Hailbritain]

Thanks delly , much appreciated pal

[moneyman]

Interesteing to hear that the LaForte/Castellano relationship was a big reason for killing Paul... interesting to hear the specific reasons instead of the repeated blue collar vs white collar story

[B.]

I enjoy these "mob eulogies" Gangland gives when the old timers die. Of course there is a strong Gotti connection to this one so it's right up Capeci's alley, but he's done it for a number of others as well.

From some of the text it looks like there may be photos -- can anyone post those?

[Cheech]

here you go

[Cheech]

one more

[B.]

Thanks man!

[Mikeymike12]

Wow they filmed the Gotti movie in Cincinnati . Already -1. I'm surprised junior let that happen , would think he would want it to be "genuine and accurate. Should be at least 75% in Queens . Wonder what the other side of the family (Uncles) feels about this film.

[phatmatress777]

It's very cheap to film in Cincinnati hopefully they were able to recreate some places and then I'm sure with computer technology in films nowadays it will look good. The things they did in transformers with the old betheleham steel factory was Amazing


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[Pogo The Clown]

It's very cheap to film in Cincinnati

You nailed it. It costs a small fortune to film in NYC. Plus you have the hassle of all the red tap, beauracracy, permits, etc. It is why more and more movies are being filmed in Canada.


Pogo

[Mikeymike12]

Very true Phat , but still not the same. (Imo) for example on these boards guys are still talking about the Soprano locations, cause they were genuine locations . I think that real areas are a major part. I don't think Scorsese would film this film in Ohio if he was involved. Makes me think of that awful movie 10th and wolf for some reason maybe cause it was filmed in Pittsburgh.

Wonder if Gene will get alittle kick up from the film if so maybe the other Uncles too, but who knows isn't Jr on the outs With his uncles./uncle

[phatmatress777]

That movie sucked period lol


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[FriendofHenry]

Pittsburgh/Three rivers - What a beautiful view Phat

[phatmatress777]

Pittsburgh/Three rivers - What a beautiful view Phat

Thank you pgh has a beautiful view and sky line it's amazing to go to mt Washington and look down over the city or ride the inclines not many cities have inclines... Johnstown has some but who wants to see that shit hole lol


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