© Society of Former Special Agents of the FBI, Inc. 2007
Interview with Former Special Agent of the FBI
Arthur Ruffels (1970-1990)
on February 22, 2007
By Brian Hollstein
Edited for repetitions, spelling by Sandra Robinette on May 5, 2007. Final edit from Mr.
Ruffels’s corrections by Sandra Robinette on July 9, 2007.
Brian R. Hollstein/
H:
Okay. Today’s date is the 22nd of February, 2007. My name is Brian R.
Hollstein. I’m with Arthur Ruffels, also known as Boats, and who is a former
Agent. We have signed the Copyright Release and Background Form. Let’s start
into, with the interview.
Art, I like to always ask, how do people get into the FBI? How did you happen to
become involved with it?
Arthur Ruffels/
R:
I was a teacher in Monroe, Connecticut, at Masuk High School. One day, around
noon time, I had a free period and walked up to the office to check my mailbox
and have lunch. I went into the office there was a gentleman standing in the
lobby, all dressed up, much more dressed than teachers are.
This was, remember the ’60s and we had kids throwing rocks through the front
windows and, school authorities telling us that they were expressing themselves.
At that point, I knew I was on the wrong side. I had already told my wife that I’m
leaving teaching because I’m in the enemy camp as far as I’m concerned.
This gentleman was standing there with his briefcase in hand, and I said, “Can I
help you?” And he said, “I’m here to give a speech at one o’clock. I’m speaking
to the senior class.” I asked, “What are you speaking about?” He said, “This is
Law Day and I’m Assistant Special Agent in Charge of the New Haven FBI
Office, and I’m going to speak about Law Day and the Federal Government and
the FBI.” I said, “Wow, that sounds great.”
I asked, “How about a cup of coffee?” He said, “I’d love one.” So we went down
to the teachers’ room and proceeded to sit for forty-five minutes together, talking
about things I had done and a little bit about the FBI. I was the JV basketball
coach and he liked that, and, said, “That’s pretty cool.” So he said, “You know, I
think you ought to make application for the Bureau. Did you ever think about
coming in?” I said, “No, I love the FBI, just never thought that I would qualify.”
As we know, we all thought you had to be an attorney or an accountant.
Arthur Ruffels
February 22, 2007
Page 2
R:
And there’s no third category that would qualify as a high school teacher.
“You’re definitely qualified,” he said, “Can I send you an application?” I said,
“Absolutely.”
H:
Now you, prior to that you’d been in the navy for a long --.
R:
I spent four years in the Navy after high school.
H:
And then where did you go to school?
R:
I then attended and graduated from Southern Connecticut State University.
H:
With a BA?
R:
Yes. I have since earned two master’s degrees.
H:
Good. So, you went through the interview process and was accepted and sent to
Quantico. What was Quantico like after military service?
R:
When I entered the FBI, I was disappointed when I got to Quantico. The old
Quantico, before the New Academy, where we were in the barracks. And I
thought that all the physical things that they asked us to do were too easy. It
should have been harder.
H:
That’s what I ran into. I’d been in the army and the last two years I was in a desk
job in intelligence in Fort Holabird. And I thought, “Boy, I’d better get myself
into shape.” Here’s a lot of marines showing up for training and what have you.
R:
I think they hold the new agents a lot more responsible now. I think they do a lot
more running. And, I’m glad they do. I think it’s important.
H:
Okay. You got through Quantico and the Bureau training and the next move was
your first office.
R:
Upon completion of Agent’s training, I was assigned to Minneapolis for my first
office. I’m an East Coast boy from here in Connecticut. I’m one of those guys
who thought the world ended at the Hudson. Even when I was in the navy my
home port was Norfolk, Virginia, so I stayed on the east coast.
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Arthur Ruffels
February 22, 2007
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R:
When I arrived in Minneapolis, I thought like the world had ended. I went out
without my family so I was by myself for a year. So you take the car and go out
for a ride. The only question is “do you want to look at the cornfields to the north
or the cornfields to the south, or the cornfields to the east or the west.” Unlike
being out here in the metropolitan area where you can be in Philadelphia in two
hours, for example.
H:
Right.
R:
So, it was quite a shock, but it was a great experience. And, in those days you
were assigned about sixty cases, Selective Service violators being about half of
them. I had some very interesting criminal cases. I even had a national security
case. Minneapolis has the largest territory in the FBI because they cover all of
Minnesota, North and South Dakota. So it’s a huge territory. And after I was
there for about seven or eight months, they sent me to Minot, North Dakota, for a
month. And, then I really thought the world ended.
There was just nothing out there except silos, missile silos. And Minot Air Force
Base, at that time, was a SAC base. Strategic Air Command. And they were
rotating B-52 squadrons back there to be renovated and worked on. I got a case
involving some people at Minot AFB with a subversive plot. It was a very
interesting case, which I solved, but I never heard another word after I wrote my
report.
I requested coming back to New York and you would think that you would get it
automatically, but there were two other guys in Minneapolis from the New York
area, that wanted to come back, and requested it. I requested it and I got it, but
two guys didn’t.
My SAC in Minneapolis, Dick Held, and I developed a pretty good relationship.
Because other guys had their families there, I had volunteered to work nights and
weekends. So I was pretty good friends with the SAC. He called me in one day
and he said, “Ruffels, any dumb son-of-a-gun that wants to be in New York ought
to be there.” He said that. I laughed and said, “That must mean I got orders.”
And he then said, “Here’s some orders for you.”
H:
The work was wonderful as I know we’re going to get into right now. So you
arrived in New York, roughly when was that then? 1971, maybe?
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Arthur Ruffels
February 22, 2007
Page 4
R:
I arrived in New York, Christmas 1971 and was assigned to the Organized Crime
Division, the Colombo Squad. The New York Office was located at 201 E. 69th
Street in an office building, which has since been converted to condominiums.
But when I got there the office was located on the sixth floor, and went about six
stories up to the twelfth floor.
H:
Yes.
R:
The Bureau was really getting serious about Organized Crime on the heels of
Bobby Kennedy and the Omnibus Crime Act of 1968 and RICO which came out
just then. We finally had something to work with, we had something like two
hundred and fifty Agents assigned to Organized Crime at that time.
One day we had an all-Agents organized crime conference and we all were just
herded into our side of the office. The speaker was the gentleman who had
written the RICO statute who was Professor Blakey, from Notre Dame. RICO Racketeering Influence in Corrupt Organizations. RICO.
H:
Good.
R:
And Professor Blakey is the man who had written the statute and up until then we
couldn’t lay a glove on a wise guy. I mean we used to work gambling cases and
occasionally if we got lucky, which I happen to have worked two of them,
extortion cases. I was fortunate enough to convict the two guys for extortion and
I think they got the largest sentence for shylocking that I know of. I think they
got twelve years each.
H:
Not bad.
R:
In fact, it’s a funny story. When we went out and arrested the accomplice, not the
main guy, but his accomplice in Staten Island. We went in early morning. You
know, the usual 6 am arrival. And when we told him who we were and that we
had a warrant for his arrest, and he said, “Well, what am I charged with?” We
said, “Extortion.” And whatever the statutes were with that, usury, and so on. He
said, “Oh, boy, I’m glad that’s all I’m charged with. I thought you were here to
get me on untaxed cigarettes.”
H:
Not the brightest.
R:
No, this guy was not the sharpest guy in the ball park.
H:
(chuckle) Okay. So you had your RICO meeting. Then that was somewhat of a
kickoff?
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Arthur Ruffels
February 22, 2007
Page 5
R:
I was on the Colombo Squad with supervisor Ray Tallia. Really, bright guy in
Organized Crime. Ray had more ideas on how to get these guys without RICO
than anybody else. And I called him the Leonardo Da Vinci of Organized Crime.
He could invent things that we didn’t even think of.
When Professor Blakey was talking and describing what we can do with the
statute, we can combine several crimes, like arson and extortion, and charge
RICO.
H:
Uh, huh.
R:
That’s a twenty-year count. And we’re sitting there saying, “Can’t be, this guy is
crazy.” And to be honest, the US Attorney’s Office wasn’t any further ahead than
we were. And so the US Attorney’s Office -- took another two years for the US
Attorney’s Office and the FBI to actually start putting RICO together and
prosecuting, and investigating cases under RICO. Of course today, we don’t
investigate anything except RICO.
H:
Tell me a little bit about how these investigations were conducted, just in general.
How did you get started with something like this? Was there a lot of information
available concerning the La Cosa Nostra (LCN) at the time?
R:
We began working RICO cases based on informant information. Based on the
things that they told us, we would create a kind of profile, particularly on each
family, like the Colombo family. We were kind of fortunate in that we had the
highest ranking member of the LCN on our family.
We had Anthony Valano, an Agent on our squad, who operated that source. He
was a capo in the Colombo family and he would provide a lot of information to
us. And based on that, we could create a profile of the family. We knew the boss
and the underboss, the consigliere, the capos, and the crews.
Prior to RICO, we would get the opportunity to investigate a gambling operation
if we discovered one. And we sometimes would get lucky to have a victim, a
shylock victim which usually arose from gambling, where guys would bet over
their heads and start borrowing money and then get into a jackpot with the wise
guys.
H:
Did you get much help from other agencies, like New York PD, or IRS?
R:
Generally speaking, we didn’t work closely with the PD or the other federal
agencies. I started a gambling case on another family, and I had to get special
permission from the SAC after my informant gave me the information about this
gambling operation, which was the Lucchese family.
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Arthur Ruffels
February 22, 2007
Page 6
R:
Now I was on the Colombo squad, but at the time they were anxious to get any
cases going that they could. “Yeah, you have the informant. Go ahead, you work
the case.” We spoke to the Lucchese family supervisor and he said, “I don’t have
any problem with them working that case.” So that was on Paul Vario, capo.
After that case they made the movie, Goodfellows, with Henry Hill. He used to
hang out in Gefkin’s Bar on Flatlands Avenue in Canarsie, which is right next to
where my biggest case was based, on the DeMeo crew.
When I started that case, the gambling case, my informant had given me two
telephone numbers that they were using for people to call in to the wire room. I
wanted to get telephone records, so I made a request for telephone, or toll records,
for those two telephone numbers to the New York telephone company. They
already were providing toll records to the Brooklyn DA’s Office who had a yearlong investigation that they had put thousands and thousands of dollars into. The
only thing I had really done, was written requests for the toll records. Oh, and
Marty Boland and I had gone out and conducted a couple of surveillances at the
location, which was a candy store. We’re pretty satisfied we had the right
location and so on.
But that’s all we had done. About a couple of days after I requested my toll
records, our office got a phone call from a DA in Brooklyn.
H:
Right.
R:
At that time Eugene Gold was the DA in Brooklyn. But this guy was the chief of
the Racket’s Bureau and had called our office and asked if they could meet with
Agent Ruffels to discuss an investigation. Our office said, “Sure.” So Marty
Boland, myself, and Warren Donovan, who was the liaison guy for us, went. The
three of us went over to the Brooklyn DA’s office one afternoon and went into his
office. And I’d never been there before. We thought it was corrupt, that’s what I
had been told in our office. “Don’t go near the Brooklyn DA’s office because we
think that’s a bad place.”
We went into this room and it had the hierarchy of the New York Police
Department. I mean, there were more chiefs and deputy chiefs and more stars and
gold braid than I had ever seen. I mean, I thought I was back in the military.
And, besides, they’re all sitting in there and that’s when I first met Inspector
Nevins who was in charge of the District Attorney’s squad, the Brooklyn DA’s
squad. He had about sixty detectives assigned to him over there. And it was a
great, a great outfit. But because we hadn’t worked with them, we didn’t know
anything about them.
H:
Sure;
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Arthur Ruffels
February 22, 2007
Page 7
R:
And, so we sat there and we fished around for about thirty minutes, like feeling
each other out. The guy running the meeting. “What are you guys doing with so
and so?” But nothing to do with the issue. Finally after about thirty minutes, and
I’m saying to myself, “Why are all these guys here? I can’t figure out why these
guys are here.
H:
It’s overkill, overkill, huh.
R:
And, so he says, “Look, let’s quit fooling around. We’re going to put our cards
on the table and what we’re going to do is ask you one of two things. Discontinue
your investigation --.” They didn’t know how long we had been doing it. They
didn’t know where we were in the case. “Discontinue your investigation or join
us with our investigation.” And then he went on and described they had been
working it for a year. They had undercover cops involved. They had made buys.
They had done a lot of things. And it was clear to us that we had nothing to lose
in this.
They seemed on the up-and-up. They seemed, you know, they were not --. They
didn’t run and tell the wise guys, for example, that we had requested phone
records and that kind of thing.
So we, we said we’d have to go back to our office and get permission from the
office. And, I forget who the SAC was at that time. Oh, the guy from Atlanta.
Frank, Frank, something. Or maybe it was his successor. I don’t know, but
anyway, I forget who. But he said, “Let’s drop our case. We don’t want to be, we
don’t want to join. We don’t want to be co-investigators in the case. But you go
ahead and provide any Bureau assistance that you can to their investigation and
we’ll go along with that.”
H:
Uh, huh.
R:
As a result, I used to go, probably three times a week, over to the DA’s office. I
used to deal directly with Inspector Nevins and Kenny McCabe. Kenny McCabe
was Inspector Nevins’ right-hand man. He wasn’t the senior investigator, but he
was the, just like he went on to be with us later at the US Attorney’s office, he
was the, without a doubt, the most knowledgeable individual in organized crime
in New York. There was no one close to him. The Bureau didn’t have anyone.
Neither did anyone else. And that’s how I met Kenny.
I went on to my major case, the biggest case that I ever worked. Well, there were
two of them, but the biggest one was the DeMeo crew from out of the Gambino
family. And I teamed up with Kenny McCabe on that case.
H:
Uh, huh.
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Arthur Ruffels
February 22, 2007
Page 8
R:
We’d already gotten him hired as a special investigator at the US Attorney’s
Office. We needed to get special letters from the Justice Department and we
needed to get special letters from the FBI authorizing them to increase their level
by two for special investigators, which they did and McCabe was hired by the
Southern District of New York, under Rudy Giuliani.
H:
Well, was that Southern District or Eastern District?
R:
Yeah, Southern District.
R:
When we started the DeMeo case, Kenny was still working in the police
department. And I brought him in as the Organized Crime expert which Walter
Mack, the US Attorney who was handling it, clearly discovered and became a fan
of Kenny’s.
H:
Okay. Now, you said that there’s a book. It’s called The Murder Machine,
written by Gene Mustain and Jerry Capeci. And you were mentioning that they
did a particularly good job of getting things started with the preface. Why don’t
you read that to us and then we’ll talk off of that and see where things end.
R:
Okay. Well Jerry Capeci and Gene Mustain were both reporters for The Daily
News. Jerry wrote a column called Gangland. Everybody read Gangland. It was
like required reading by everybody because it would be something very current.
H:
Oh, yeah. When was the book published and, and who’s the publisher if you
know?
R:
The Dutton and Penguin Books and it was published in 1992. When they
published the book, it was ’92. But I was still there. I retired in 1990 and this
interview was done while I was an Agent. And this interview was done in the
ADIC’s conference room at the New York Office. The ADIC was Jimmy Fox
and he was there. Jules Bonavolonta, who was in charge of Organized Crime.
And several Bureau people.
So, this is a prologue about the DeMeo crew. Just one incident, but this is how
they operated.
“It was about 6 pm, already pitch black out, in one of those wet, stingy snows was
coming down hard. Mr. Tadaro parked his car in the street in front of the crew’s
clubhouse. He was an older gentleman, sixty, I think. What was about to happen
to him was, well to me, it was something out of Auschwitz. Roy had ordered
Freddie, who was like Roy’s servant, to lure Mr. Tadaro to the clubhouse by
making him think Roy had a used car to sell. But actually, Roy was going to kill
him so that the man’s nephew, a friend of Roy’s, could take over Mr. Tadaro’s
film production business which, by the way, was pornography.
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Arthur Ruffels
February 22, 2007
Page 9
“Roy was always available for this kind of work. After the first few, I think he
started enjoying it. Anyway, it’s dark and it’s snowing and, as expected, Mr.
Tadaro sees Roy’s guy, Freddie, waiting outside and says, “Hello.” They start
walking toward the clubhouse. Now there was a picture window with the
Venetian blinds next to the doorway. And as Freddie’s walking, he sees someone
inside the clubhouse pinch the blinds and look out. All he sees is the person’s
eyeballs. It’s eerie and he begins to quiver. He knows Mr. Tadaro is about to
die, but he’s never seen Roy DeMeo murder before.
“Mr. Tadaro goes in first. There is a living room off the hallway that leads to the
kitchen. As soon as Mr. Tadaro is past the opening to the living room, Freddie is
startled to see someone he knows, Chris, leaping out into the hallway with a
butcher knife in his hand. It was an almost balletic move. Chris, by the way, was
the first kid to join Roy’s crew. At the moment, he doesn’t have any clothes on
except for his jockey shorts. He always worked in his underwear because he
didn’t want to bloody his clothes.
“Freddie starts to wet his pants. He believes Chris is going to stab him. But no,
Chris just grabs him by the arm and wings him out of the way. “You, over here,”
he says. Freddie then sees Roy DeMeo coming out of the dark from the other end
of the hall, just gliding along. And he’s got a gun in one hand and a white towel
in the other. He just glides up and shoots dumbfounded Mr. Tadaro in the head,
and before the man even hits the floor, Roy is wrapping a towel around his head
to prevent the blood from squirting all over. Then Chris comes over and stabs
Mr. Tadaro in the heart many times. ‘That stops it from pumping blood,’ Roy
tells Freddie, who’s still shaking.
“The murder only takes a few seconds, but, of course, they’re not done yet.
They’re going to make Mr. Tadaro disappear. Some other kids in Roy’s crew
appear from somewhere and they all drag Mr. Tadaro’s body across the kitchen
and into the bathroom where they put him in a tub. Now before they begin cutting
Mr. Tadaro up, they have to wait forty-five minutes or so until the blood congeals.
‘Dismemberment isn’t so messy that way,’ Roy tells Freddie, like Freddie was a
medical student.
“So they waited, maybe even ordered pizza. I don’t know, but we do know they
did that once while waiting. One of the men waiting actually lived in the
clubhouse. The others called him Dracula, and not just because he had silver
hair and a deep voice.
“As I indicated Mr. Tadaro was one of those free-lance jobs that Roy and the
crew did. There were a lot of those but normally they were out making money for
a gangster named Nino. You knew Nino was a gangster as soon as he walked into
a room. He was a murderer, too, but he did not do as much killing and, so far as
we know, was not present for any of the dismemberments at the clubhouse.
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Arthur Ruffels
February 22, 2007
Page 10
Neither was Dominic who was the guy Nino used to collect his cash and keep an
eye on the DeMeo crew. When Dominic was a little boy, Nino practically stole
him from his father. Dominic went on to be a Green Beret war hero in Nam and
was a tough guy, but he did not have a killer’s eyes. Roy and his crew, they all
did.
“Eventually Mr. Tadaro’s body was taken out of the bathtub and placed on either
a tarpaulin or one of those swimming pool liners they sometimes used. Then Roy
and his crew sawed the man apart. Put him in garbage bags and took him to the
biggest dump in Brooklyn.
“It was like a disassembly line. None of Mr. Tadaro was ever seen again. This
butchery went on all the time. It was systematic. The system was, you know,
almost ceremonious, and they used to talk about the kick they got from it, the
high, the power. They used to say killing made them feel like God.
“Of all the horrifying stories about Roy DeMeo and his crew, the murder of Mr.
Tadaro is the one that stays in the mind of FBI Special Agent Arthur Ruffels.
While telling it in the main conference room of FBI Headquarters in New York
City, Ruffels, a former high school teacher rose to his feet to mimic the killer’s
movements. His audience, other Agents, their boss and the authors of this book,
were spellbound. The room felt colder than before. Ruffels had transported us to
a charnal house. ‘They were the scariest people we’ve ever seen’ he continued,
sitting down. ‘Just in Roy’s crew, there were five people you’d have to call serial
killers.’
That gives you a flavor of what these guys were all about.
H:
Certainly does. How did you get this as a case and, then, how did you get this
kind of information?
R:
That story came from the guy Freddie in the story. Freddie was Roy’s driver. But
he wasn’t a killer. And he eventually cooperated. Kenny McCabe and I worked
on him a long time. And he, at first, wouldn’t cooperate, but his own crew, the
DeMeo crew, killed Roy DeMeo because they knew he was a weak link. They
felt that he was a guy that we would be able to flip. So they killed him. We
found his body in the trunk of his car at Sheepshead Bay. Freddie was in prison at
the time. We used to go once a month and visit him. And we told him the next
time we were up, because we were getting more informant information, that he
was next. They had killed Roy.
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Arthur Ruffels
February 22, 2007
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R:
They knew that Freddie was devoted to Roy even though he was in prison and
they were afraid that Freddie was going to go out there with us. And he was in
prison and that’s our pitch to Freddie was, “Freddie, you know and we know,
you’re the easiest guy for them to get.” It took us a couple more months, but we,
we got him to cooperate.
H:
Let’s start back with how you got onto the case and did it have a name for it? Was
this early in your time in New York?
R:
I’d been in the Bureau about ten years when I first was assigned to this. At this
time I was on the Gambino squad and Bruce Mouw was my supervisor. And our
squad had wires on Angelo Ruggiero’s home phone, phones, and we had a bug in
his basement, his rec room, where he used to do business. So our whole squad
was monitoring those phones and the bug. Myself, and, I think, two other Agents,
were assigned to conducting surveillances whenever they came up on, with
anything on the bug especially or the phone that someone was going to go do.
Then we would conduct the surveillance of that activity.
One day, Bruce called me in. We’d been working on this case for --. By the way,
Angelo Ruggiero was John Gotti’s closest friend. And so we were mostly getting
information about John Gotti, but John used to go up to meetings at Paul
Castellano’s house. At that time, Paul was the boss and had succeeded Carlo
Gambino. And so Paul was essentially the boss of bosses, and we were getting
most of the information through John Gotti talking to Angelo and to John’s
brother, Genie who was Angelo’s best friend.
H:
Uh, huh.
R:
So, one day Bruce called me in and said, “Hey, Art, I’d like you to go over and
meet with an Assistant US Attorney in Manhattan, named Walter Mack. And
he’s starting an investigation on ...” We didn’t know very much about Roy
DeMeo. “He’s starting an investigation on Roy DeMeo who’s a soldier in the
Gambino family and he’s requested six Agents to work on a task force.”
Walter Mack did not get the information from the FBI. He got the information
from the New York City Auto Crime Squad. That’s where it started out. Stolen
cars. But that was just one of their activities. They had a major-league stolen car
operation. They were sending cars to Kuwait, to Puerto Rico. They stole cars by
the hundreds.
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R:
And they were good at it. And as a result of that information, Walter Mack had
received four --. I believe he had four detectives from the Auto Crime Unit and
because informants now were telling us, telling them, that there were a lot of
murders being done by this crew, he had four homicide detectives assigned to the
squad. To the investigation. To the task force. And then he had two postal
inspectors and one ATF agent that we never saw. We saw him if there was a
party; he would come. There were task forces going on I would say quite often.
H:
Uh, huh.
R:
Louis Freeh’s investigation involved detectives, working with them. And, well,
detectives from Italy, you know, they had guys working from the Italian police
and so forth. See, they were in the office next to us and we used to, you know,
shoot the breeze with them.
H:
That was a huge change in terms of thinking.
R:
Yes, you remember prior to --. I’d say RICO is what caused this. Because now
we had to reach out into areas that we never, we never did before. For example,
I’m, I was an Organized Crime Agent, and I’m assigned to this task force. When
I first went over, Walter Mack had requested six FBI Agents to be on the task
force. And Bruce told him, “Walter, I don’t have six Agents to assign. I’m going
to send you my best Agent.” Those were Bruce’s words. “I’m sending you my
best Agent and he’s assigned on a part-time basis to assist you in whatever way he
can. Whatever the Bureau can do, he’ll facilitate. And that’s the way we’re going
to have to work it because the rest of my squad is involved in a wire.”
Okay, so I went over and met with Walter Mack and he told me about the
investigation because we really knew nothing about it. We didn’t know what they
were doing. What the investigation was even about. He filled me in. Told me. I
took notes so that I could go back and write a memo to the file to open a case. We
didn’t even have a case open.
And I started out on a part-time basis for about a month where I would go, maybe
three days a week for two hours. Every time I’d go in I’d have a list of “Can you
check these names, and these names, and this incident and that incident, and by
the way we need money for this and we have to do this.” And, like I’m
overwhelmed because I’m full-time on surveillance plus on the weekends, on
Sundays, Bruce Mouw and I were conducting surveillances at Paul Castellano’s
house. This was before we put a bug up in Paul’s.
So, from the Ruggiero wire, we were getting probable cause to go to Paul’s house.
H:
How big was the squad?
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Arthur Ruffels
February 22, 2007
Page 13
R:
Our FBI Squad was composed of about twenty men and two women Agents. But
everyone was thrown in to that wire. And Bruce and I on Sundays were running
surveillances up at the hill because Paul used to hold all his meetings on Sunday
mornings at his house because they, our informants told us they know the FBI
doesn’t work on Sundays.
And so Bruce said, “Look, all right, you’re the only guy I can send over there and,
you know, and you’re it. So whatever you can do.”
Well, as this thing went along, it just steamrolled and then it became obvious I
had to be there full-time on the case and Bruce agreed. And I did that for
probably about maybe eighteen months. I was the only Agent. And finally I
asked for more help. Because it was getting so big and we had so many murders
and we had so many witnesses, that I asked for help and Bruce said, “Well, you
know, I can assign Marilyn Lucht to you because she won’t do anything I tell her.
She’s a hard worker, but she only does the things she wants to do. But if you
think you can get her to work with you, then she can go.”
So, I called her and told her and I knew --. She had told me --. I didn’t know
Marilyn very well, but the few times I had, she was a lawyer and she always
wanted to work over at the US Attorney’s Office and be around the prosecutors.
And so when I asked her if she wanted to come. “Oh, my God, yes.” And I just
told her, “Look, there’s one thing we have to understand. There’s one boss, me.
You and I can fight till the cows come home about what we’re going to do”cause I know Marilyn doesn’t go along with too many things. I said, “But in front
of the cops, in front of the US Attorney, there’s only one opinion, and it’s mine –
and if you cross that, you’re out because I’m going to get somebody else.”
H:
Did she stay on for a full career then?
R:
She was quite young, I mean, at the time and like even now, I don’t know how old
she’d --. Probably fifty-five or something like that. So she’s had like thirty-year
career. As a great Agent, a great Agent.
As a result of working with us at the US Attorney’s office, she worked a lot on
tapes cause one of the phases of the DeMeo case was the Westchester Premier
Theatre case which involved Greg Di Palma, who was in the process of being a
‘made man,’ soldier in Nino’s crew. Nino was Anthony Gaggi, a capo in the
Gambino family.
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Arthur Ruffels
February 22, 2007
Page 14
R:
On those wires, because we had to listen to the tapes because we were going to
introduce them in our case. He used to talk with Frank Sinatra’s best friend out in
California. He lived right next door. I forget this guy’s name. But this guy from
California used to call him at Westchester all the time and ask him if he was made
yet. And he would always refer to it. We have it on the phone. “Did you get the
jack-et yet?” The “jacket.” Had to use codes, you know. “Oh, did you get the
jack-et yet?” “Oh, no, no, but I got to go see Nino tomorrow night. I think we’re
getting close.” If this ever came out, Castellano would have had him killed on the
spot.
H:
Sure, sure.
R:
And, you know, you can see how shrewd Nino was as the boss of this group. He’s
never wanted to talk to him on the phone when this guy would call his house.
Dominic, who was Nino’s nephew, used to have to do all the phone calls, used to
have to go up and deal with him. He used to collect the money from up at
Westchester and all that stuff.
And so we had those tapes and Marilyn was, she was really a pro on listening to -I couldn’t hear the tapes. And my hearing, you know, from the navy and I was on
some big guns and things, I couldn’t hear those things. And Marilyn could hear
every word and everything that was on them and she was an expert at working on
them. Plus she was a forfeiture expert because she was an attorney and she got
very knowledgeable in forfeiture. And that was one of the phases of our cases
that we would always begin tying in what assets can we take. So Marilyn became
an expert in this, so it really worked to her advantage. She became this expert and
they cross-designated her at one point, as a Special Assistant US Attorney. So she
was cross-designated as a Special Assistant US Attorney and an FBI Agent.
That’s how we got rolling on the case.
H:
Uh, huh.
R:
Oh, oh, oh, by the way, Brian, what I want to do is explain the difference here.
I’m the case Agent now. I’m regarded as “the” case Agent and it’s an FBI case.
Even though it’s a task force, it’s carried as an FBI case. XXXXXX was the file
number. And all, if you see all the photographs, mug shots, and everything,
they’re all shot under that XXXXXXX which is my file number.
H:
Uh, huh.
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Arthur Ruffels
February 22, 2007
Page 15
R:
And the big thing was that as the case Agent, and I’m working with let’s say a
dozen people at any one time, and each time I would come in the office, each
group operated independently. The Auto Crime detectives were working on the
car aspect of the case. And the homicide guys were working on the homicides.
And the postal inspectors were working on the mail fraud aspects and all that.
And, you know, people would, in addition, would come in and out of the case.
My job was to coordinate all the activities going on. All of the things. And the
biggest thing that I had to do was --. The funding came from the FBI. All the
funding came from the FBI. So when Walter talked about, “Artie, you know, one
day we’re going to have to dig up that gas station.” We knew about it for about
three years. “We’re going to have to dig up that gas station.” I used to laugh.
H:
We looked at some pictures but I don’t think we mentioned it. There was
information that there was …
R:
A Mobile gas station on 86th Street, Brooklyn, which is the Broadway of wise
guys. 86th Street, Brooklyn, as you know in Bay Ridge, is, you know, wise guy
heaven. And allegedly two bodies were buried there by the DeMeo crew when
the gas station was having new tanks put in. And they were put under the two
new tanks and then concrete poured over them.
And finally after about two or three years, Walter said, “Art, we have to dig those
tanks up. That’s all there is to it.” So I had to go back to the office and have a
meeting with Jules Bonavolonta and Bruce and probably somebody else. “Well,
we have to dig this up and it’s going to cost a lot of money.” And so, I had
already had meetings with Mobile Oil who assigned an engineer to work with us
on that project and they were very cooperative. And we eventually did dig it up.
H:
Did you find …?
R:
And did not find anybody.
H:
It’s interesting though because once again, you know, the Bureau’s had an image
of “we do our own stuff” and here they’re actually funding other Federal agencies
as well as local agencies in an investigation.
R:
Positively.
H:
This is back in the what, late 1980s, mid ’80s?
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Arthur Ruffels
February 22, 2007
Page 16
R:
Yeah. I just read a book. I don’t know if it’s still here. But I just read a book and
it’s written by a guy who went on to become a writer. And his name is Eddie
Dee, a lieutenant. Eddie Dee, from New York City Auto Crime Squad. He was
the first commander of the Auto Crime team that came to this investigation. And
I knew Eddie there. And, in fact, when he retired from the PD, he went out on a
75 percent disability because he injured himself on a raid that we conducted out
on Long Island at a house. And I was in charge of the raid and several detectives
came with me. And we did this investigation out there and he fell from a ladder
out in the garage and hurt his back and went out. That’s when he retired.
I always had a great relationship with Eddie Dee. He was a very nice guy. And
now he went on. I read a couple of books of his. I just finished one though
within the last three months. (chuckle) It’s about Brooklyn and it’s about the
Jewish Mafia, the Russians.
H:
Uh, huh.
R:
And the whole book, all he does is slam the FBI. “Ah, and then the FBI is
involved. Ah, and they think they know everything. And they don’t know
anything. And they don’t think --.” You know, it’s as if he hated me. Not me,
but the FBI. It seems to be that it’s a prerequisite for any police officer writing a
book “must” use the FBI as a whipping boy. And that we really don’t know
anything except that it’s always our informants that lead to the solving of these
crimes.
And to the starting an investigation or getting it wired. I can’t tell you when I had
liaison with the Brooklyn DA’s office how many wires our office gave to the
Brooklyn DA and the New York Police Department that, for whatever, for one
reason or other, we didn’t have the manpower or we didn’t want to conduct -But we gave it. Then we would give them the information and we would have
our informant write an affidavit and we would get the wire for them. Assist them
in getting a wire.
Here’s my policy about working with the PD, and I found this to be a pretty good
rule, that I always went into any meeting with the Police Department as if I don’t
trust anybody. And until I can feel confident that these guys are straight and not
crooks. And then that all of a sudden you mention something and all of a sudden
there isn’t some activity that takes place that you kind of know that came from
something you said.
H:
Well, this was life, this was life and death for your informants certainly.
R:
Right.
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Arthur Ruffels
February 22, 2007
Page 17
H:
We shared one that ended up getting --.
R:
My God, that’s right. Were, were you the one who signed that guy to me?
H:
Yeah.
R:
And I operated him and he, yeah, and he ended up getting whacked out. He did
have information.
H:
It was different story though. Yeah, it was a different story though. He was just
not careful.
R:
That’s right.
H:
He would never listen to me.
R:
He was a wild man.
H:
Well, he knew everything and he knew it all. And, you know, he ended up getting
nailed. But it was for real though. This was not, not kidding around. It wasn’t,
wasn’t fiction. This was a dead guy.
R:
I had completely forgot that you had assigned that informant. Because I had gone
with you. You had come with --. You had asked me to help you at the DA’s
office with liaison.
H:
Right.
R:
And everyone in the office knew that. And I used to get guys every … I won’t
say every day, but once a week at least.
H:
Sure.
R:
For example, the one that I got called on was --. John Good one day called me.
He was supervisor of the Hijack Squad, or something like that. I don’t know, but
he was in the Criminal Division. He wasn’t in the OC Division. And he called
me one day and said, “Art, I have a guy just got locked up yesterday by the New
York PD and it’s in the Brooklyn’s DA’s office. Can you go talk to my guy and
see if we can work out an arrangement? He’s one of my guys.” And I said,
“Well, I’ll call him and see what the deal is.” Said, “I’d like to talk to you about
this individual.” And he says, “Sure.” He says, “But, you know, have the Agent
come with you because I’d want to know more information.”
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Arthur Ruffels
February 22, 2007
Page 18
R:
So John and I went over to his office. We sat down. Inspector Nevins sat in with
us. I mean, we trusted Inspector Nevins and Kenny McCabe. Implicitly. And,
well, it turns out that the guy that we made the deal for was Mel Weinberg. The
guy who did the Senate case. Where we took down, took down all the politicians.
ABSCAM.
H:
Okay.
R:
In return for getting him out of the jackpot with the PD, he had been arrested on
some kind of a scam or something. He was a con man, and he was a con man in
ABSCAM too. He had had several arrests and was going to be prosecuted. And
that was just when Mel Weinberg just starting to tell John Good about ABSCAM
and the Congressman.
Now John couldn’t mention any of that, but he said, “He’s really providing some
very heavy duty information to us that we are starting a case on. But, can we
work something out with you?” And so he says, “Sure. Look, if he has that much
information, what we want is a case that is at least as good as the case we have on
him or better.” And, John said, “Well, I can easily bring a better case than you
have on him.” And he says, “Deal’s done.” So, Mel walked and we got
ABSCAM.
H:
Yep. Not bad, not bad at all. Good trade.
Let’s get back to the Gambino crime family. And Art was telling me some more
about dealing with New York PD and some of their internal workings. Why don’t
you keep up with that?
R:
Right. Well, I was just talking about a police officer, the detective that I worked
with, who told me how he wouldn’t discuss any of our investigation with other
members of the police department unless he knew the guy very closely and
trusted him and that the guy had a reason to know.
And the same thing is true in the FBI. I always had the belief and I think that
most Agents who worked Organized Crime, more so than other areas, believe that
you don’t discuss any of your case. Remember, Organized Crime reaches out so
far and you don’t know who knows who and where the connections really go and
what Organized Crime will, how far they will reach to get information. So as a
rule you never discuss any of the details of your cases unless a person has a
reason to know.
H:
Uh, huh.
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Arthur Ruffels
February 22, 2007
Page 19
R:
One day while I was working on the DeMeo crew, which we involved with
hundreds of murders, our secretary, squad secretary, told me that an Agent from
another squad had come over and asked to take a look at my file. Something you
don’t do. She said, “Well, you’ll have to wait for Art to get back.” So when I
came back in the office she told me what had happened and it was a young Agent.
He was on a criminal squad. He wasn’t on an OC squad.
He had a name that he wanted to check and so on, and he wanted to see if there
was anything in my file. Of course, I had volumes by that time. The thing ran
maybe ten volumes.
H:
A volume is about how thick?
R:
Two inches, two inches thick. She told me his name. Mike Flannigan was the
ASAC in charge of the Queens Office. Our squad, the Gambino squad, was in
Queens. I went and saw Mike first and told him, “Mike, I don’t know why this
kid, I don’t know the kid, but I don’t know why he came and wanted to look in
my file, but I regard that as a serious violation.” Mike agreed and he said, “I
don’t know why he did either, I’ll get him and we’ll find out together. I want to
know why he wants to look at your file without you there.”
Mike called the kid in and it was a very logical explanation. This was his second
office coming to New York and he had only been here maybe six months or
something like that. I just remember, his first name was Jimmy and he lived in
Long Island. His first office has been in Philadelphia. And he covered a prison
down there. Lewisburg, Federal prison.
While he was assigned to that office he covered Lewisburg Prison and he
developed a relationship with an inmate somehow who was providing
information. And I had never heard of this kid. Well, now he’s telling us about
this and he’s giving us --. He gave me the kid’s name, the informant’s name.
And, he said, “I was checking to see if there was any reference in your file
because he says that he knows Roy DeMeo.” So, he gives me the name. I said,
“Okay, but, you know, I would appreciate it for you’d come to me. I don’t want
someone reading, looking in my files.” He said, “Well, I didn’t know that.”
See in the criminal area, a lot of times they’ll go over and check the file.
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Arthur Ruffels
February 22, 2007
Page 20
R:
A bank robber. Or something like that. So, he said, “I didn’t know that, or I
wouldn’t have done that.” So I said, “Well, no problem.” So I said, “Well, give
me this guy’s name and tell me what his status is.” “Well, he’s still in prison, but
what he wants is, he’s asking me, because I’ve maintained contact with him. He
actually communicates, calls me from time to time. And he’s been transferred in
the prison system from Lewisburg, he’s been transferred to California. And he’s
in Lompoc Federal Prison which is halfway between LA and San Francisco. It’s
about an hour north of Santa Barbara.
“He’s out there now. He’s been out there for about six months. And his wife is
back in Brooklyn. He’d like to be moved in the system back, you know, closer to
New York where his wife can see him. And, he’s willing to provide whatever he
has to do that.” So I said, “Well, it sounds good to me. But, I need to find out
who this guy is.” So I said, “Give me a day and I’ll get back to you about this.”
So, of course, I go over to the US Attorney’s office. Kenny McCabe now has
been working over with us. He’s a regular investigator there. I go and I see
Kenny. I said, “Kenny, what do you know about his guy?” So, he looks at me,
says, “This kid’s in line to get made when he gets out. This kid knows everything
and he’s a young guy, he’s a young Turk.” And I said, “Holy Moley.”
H:
(chuckle)
R:
So Kenny says, “Why, what do you care about?” So I told him the story. I mean,
Kenny and I worked together my whole career. I mean, we used to travel together
all around the country. Kenny said, “Oh my God, this guy is worth a fortune to
the government. This guy is worth anything, whatever you guys can do, you have
to do it. Help that kid to keep the line with him.”
So I went back and met with Flannigan and told him, I said, “This kid’s legit.
This is real. And this guy, we should be helping this kid to talk to this guy and
get him back to commuting distance from New York.”
So Flannigan says, “Art, I’ll go along with that.” You know who his supervisor
is? Margo. Margo really didn’t care too much about Organized Crime. She was
a general crime supervisor. You know, just didn’t have any deep interest in
Organized Crime. So she was discouraging this kid, the Agent, from going. The
kid wanted to meet with him in California. She wouldn’t let him go.
H:
That was a big deal at the time, wasn’t it? Traveling?
R:
It used to be. It wasn’t any more. I traveled all the time. I was traveling two or
three times a week. California, Texas, everywhere.
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Arthur Ruffels
February 22, 2007
Page 21
H:
Yeah. See, when I was around it was a big production. When Sean Rafferty and I
went down to San Juan to talk to informants on a, on the Puerto Rican bombing
case --
R:
FALN.
H:
Yeah, and to look at their, look at their files and talk to the guys who are handling
these people. And, man, that was a big production.
R:
Well, it, it wasn’t any more. And so I went in and saw Flannigan and I told him,
you know, who this guy really is. And how valuable he is. And Mike says, “Art,
I’m going to talk to Margo, but I’m going to tell her I want him to go out to
California and have a meeting with this kid and that we’re going to assist in
getting him, if he still wants to be moved, that we’re going to make sure that he
gets moved out here.” Which he did.
Mike met with Margo and told her that this is very important to the Organized
Crime Program, that we can’t sit back and allow an opportunity like this to go by.
But Mike says, “There’s only one condition. You have to go with him. Art, I
don’t know the young guy. I don’t know what he does, but I want an experienced
Agent with informants to go with him.”
And as it turns out, we went out. You know, we were only gone like two days and
had the meeting and I told the kid, “Look, you’re going to meet him in an
interview room at the prison.” And I told him, “If the guy wants to, I’ll come in.
You go in first, one-on-one,” (I was at the warden’s office), “if he wants to have
me come in, because I’m experienced in OC and you’re not, and I’m the one who
can probably tell him how we can proceed.”
He came back out after a few minutes and he said, “He doesn’t want to meet
anybody else.” I said, “That’s fine. Most guys don’t want to do that.” I said,
“Just so he’s on the team, that he wants to help us, we’re going to do everything
we can to get it done.”
And we did. Afterwards, I was up to my eyeballs in the DeMeo case. I didn’t
have time to do this, but I couldn’t let it go, it was too important.
H:
Sure, oh yeah.
R:
It was just that important. I mean, when I heard who he was, it was like out of the
blue like that with a young Agent who was trying to develop this informant,
didn’t know how to go about it.
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Arthur Ruffels
February 22, 2007
Page 22
H:
Yeah. Okay, so we’re getting back to Roy DeMeo and Ruggiero and the rest of
them. So you got started with this, with this case and the task force took it on.
R:
Right.
H:
Did you have wires or bugs that were working on this specifically?
R:
No, we didn’t, we did not use any wires. We were relying --. In most of these
cases, this type of case, it’s more based on history. It’s what we already have.
And putting it together. And then finding witnesses. The biggest thing in these
cases, in that case, especially this murder, multi, multi-murders, is getting people.
They’re all petrified.
H:
Sure.
R:
So what we would do, we would issue grand jury subpoenas. People come in and
say, “I’m not going to talk to you.” You know, regular people who just happen to
be there and see something happen. But they know who these guys are, you
know, and “I’m not going to talk to you.” And so we would then work on them
and get them to come on board.
I mean, in this case, I put twenty-two witnesses in the Witness Security Program.
I think I had the record for the most witnesses. I know I did in terms of the
Marshal Service, because I used to have more arguments with the Marshal
Service about having my witnesses brought in.
H:
Going back, just, not to get into the technology of it but into the administration of
it. An Agent wants to, thinks he can, he can develop a case through a wire tap or
a bug.
R:
Uh, huh.
H:
How did that generally work?
R:
It starts with an informant. And what we have to do is get an informant that’s
very knowledgeable and close to the person or the room, the activity, that we are
interested in monitoring and have him give us information for an affidavit.
H:
Uh, huh.
R:
And we then have to apply his information. He basically has to guarantee what’s
going to happen before it happens.
H:
Uh, huh.
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Arthur Ruffels
February 22, 2007
Page 23
R:
In other words, “Wednesday afternoons between two and three, John Gotti visits
with Angelo Ruggiero. They talk about their narcotics business.”
H:
Right.
R:
And, that’s how it goes. We, we have to write out --.
H:
And you have actually surveilled probably and --
R:
Oh, yeah.
H:
-- have something to verify what these --.
R:
Corroborate. We corroborate what he’s telling us in advance. He says, “On
Wednesday afternoons that John Gotti visits this guy.” Okay, we’re there, we
watch. “Hey, there’s John.”
H:
Uh, huh.
R:
Okay, now we can assume that he’s right about that. He must be telling us the
truth about what the conversation is.
H:
And then you would mix in --. You might have sources from other, information
from other sources.
R:
We look to find other, any corroborating other source that can help us. We also
probably would do, pull toll records if it’s telephone conversations that every
Wednesday afternoon that there’s a call that takes place. So that corroborates part
of it also. So, and you use whatever means, another informant, telephone records,
that type of information.
H:
You write that up as a case Agent?
R:
Right.
H:
Now it’s then reviewed by the Bureau?
R:
It’s done by the --. No --.
H:
Coordinator there at the New York Office?
R:
No, we write it up --. No, we usually do the affidavit with the US Attorney. The
Assistant US Attorney. And he will write the affidavit.
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Arthur Ruffels
February 22, 2007
Page 24
R:
I’m trying to think of which way we go. But then we submit it to the FBI. The
FBI reviews it to see if there’s anything that we’ve done, maybe exposed the
source that we shouldn’t be.
H:
Sure.
R:
And the Bureau’s always concerned about that. And then it goes to the Justice
Department and they make the final decision whether this wire, whether that order
is going to be issued.
H:
Uh, huh.
R:
And then it’s taken to a judge in our district and the judge rules on it. And
generally the judge doesn’t even question it.
H:
Once, it’s been through all the --.
R:
Once it’s been through the process, the judge authorizes it.
H:
Generally speaking it doesn’t go through the first time in terms of writing it.
R:
No, that’s right.
H:
… a lot of rewriting, yeah.
R:
As we know, sometimes your third and fourth draft, someone will say that these
toll records don’t look very revealing. They’re not necessarily backing up what
you’re telling us.
H:
Or, they just want more --. I just remember it being a --. It was always a big deal.
R:
It is a big deal.
H:
It wasn’t a casual thing.
R:
No, no. No. (chuckle)
H:
I’d like to hear what that guy’s saying and, and then they went through --.
Always a lot of work.
R:
Right.
H:
And let’s just explore the Witness Protection just for a little bit too. You’ve got
to be the all-time champ in terms of --.
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Arthur Ruffels
February 22, 2007
Page 25
R:
To my knowledge I am.
H:
(chuckle) How did all of that stuff work?
R:
Started with the DeMeo case. All of a sudden I’ve got people coming out of the
woodwork. They’re going in the Witness Program. They’re cooperating on the
condition that they are going to be moved.
H:
Uh, huh.
R:
That they’re going in the Witness Program.
H:
That was fairly new.
R:
No, it was --.
H:
It was the early ’70s?
R:
Yeah, early ’70s. I remember that one guy, the first one that I had known of, but
didn’t work on it. I had heard about them working on it, was Tom Vincent. He
was a marine. He’s up in Rockland County, with Chris Munger and around there.
H:
Not Tom Vinton?
R:
Right. Tommy Vinton.
H:
Big, husky guy? Athletic looking kind of --.
R:
Seemed to work out I guess. Tommy and another Agent had a guy they had put in
the program. And, then a guy on my squad did one and I helped, I did work on an
early one. It was with Bill Fleisher who was on our squad and he transferred over
to Customs, US Customs, and became one of the bosses in Customs.
And Bill and I used to work together. He put a guy who was giving him a lot of
information in the Witness Program.
H:
Uh, huh. But normally speaking, those are people who should have been in jail or
could have been in jail just as well as –
R:
Almost all of them are. Almost all of them have been in and/or are in prison. I
mean, in the Westies case, we started the whole investigation, the whole case on a
phone call from Mickey Featherstone who was at Rikers Island.
H:
Uh, huh.
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Arthur Ruffels
February 22, 2007
Page 26
R:
Mickey Featherstone was the most feared white man in New York City. A former
Green Beret. I told Jules Bonavolonta at the time I already had Dominic from the
DeMeo case. It was well into this case and Jules was an officer in the Green
Beret.
H:
Uh, huh.
R:
Special Forces in Nam. And I told Jules one day, “I’m forming my own A-Team,
Jules. I got my second Green Beret.”
H:
(chuckle)
R:
“I’m looking for a third.”
H:
(chuckle)
R:
And so, it was Mickey Featherstone. And Mickey called the US Attorney. He
called another --. A US Attorney. This was very good. From Ricker’s. And he
called a guy who had been an Assistant US Attorney but went into private
practice. But this US Attorney had put Mickey in prison on a counterfeit money
case. Him and Jimmy Coonan, the boss of the Westies.
And so Mickey had done five years from the US Attorney who had convicted
him. But Mickey trusted him. Mickey knew he was reaching out and he was at
Rikers and had been convicted of a murder he didn’t do. He called this guy and
said, “I want to talk to the FBI or your office because I’m doing time for
something I didn’t do and I’ve been convicted. I’m getting twenty-five years.”
I forget the US Attorney’s name who was in private practice by then, but [he] did
the right thing. He called the US Attorney’s Office and said, “Hey, we’ve got a
guy here that wants to talk to you guys in the Bureau and he wants to try to make
a deal with you.”
H:
What was the mechanism, just very briefly in general, how, how did that work?
R:
Okay. Here’s what we did with Mickey. We did this with a lot of guys. But this
was the procedure. Mickey was at Rikers Island. He was in central monitoring.
He was a guy couldn’t be moved without ankle bracelets, cuffs, chain around the
waist, chain down the front. He was the most dangerous guy in that group in New
York.
And we had to set up a way of talking to him and couldn’t do it at Rikers Island.
So what we did was we get a writ to take him out of Rikers “on a voose” that he
was being brought over to the US Attorney’s Office for handwriting samples.
26
Arthur Ruffels
February 22, 2007
Page 27
R:
And so we took him out, but instead of going to the US Attorney’s Office, we
took him over to the Whitestone, to New Rochelle, to the Sheraton Hotel that was
in our office [building].
H:
Right.
R:
Sheraton. And our office happened to be in there.
H:
Right.
R:
But we didn’t use the FBI office at all. We went into the hotel and we brought
Mickey -- Marilyn and I brought Mickey from his prison, Rikers. His wife, lived
over in Jersey, and she met us. Told her where to meet us. She came to the hotel.
She wasn’t incarcerated and she came over and was there. Then Mary Lee
Warren was the lead US Attorney on it and she was there and I think there was
another Assistant US Attorney. I think the first time it was just me. Then I think
we had a couple of cops with us. Detectives. And we met with Mickey and the
purpose was to set up the guidelines. “What can we do for you if you cooperate
with us?” And that was basically the US Attorney explains what we’re going to
do.
And then what Mickey said … He had been in prison for three and a half years at
Rikers. You’re only supposed to be there for year.
H:
Yeah, that’s a bad place.
R:
But he was there for three and a half years because of the trial. Anyway after we
got through this stuff he said to me, “Mr. Ruffels, here’s what I’m asking the FBI
to do. This is why I made a call. I’ve been framed by my friends in the Westies
for a murder that I didn’t do. But I know who the killer is and I know who helped
him. Who the driver was.”
H:
Uh, huh.
R:
“I’d like the FBI to investigate the murder and my wife, Sissy, will help you to
prove my innocence.” And then he said, “I’m not telling you I didn’t kill
anybody. I have killed people and I’m going to tell you the people I killed, but I
just, I want to see good faith by the FBI. I want to see if what we hear you do is
real and then we’ll make the final deal.”
H:
Uh, huh.
27
Arthur Ruffels
February 22, 2007
Page 28
R:
I said, “That’s a fair shake. We’ll do it.” And we did. We recorded, Marilyn and
I went out, wired Sissy up. She was a very bold gal, attractive blond from the
west side. She grabbed hold of another Westie, who was the shooter. She
grabbed him at the Ninth Avenue festival in June. It was about a hundred degrees
out on a Saturday and we wired Sissy up. Sissy goes over to the guy, the killer, a
guy named Billy Bocam. She grabs him, because they were all petrified. These
guys were all petrified of Mickey.
Marilyn and I were following her because we also had a mic on Sissy, so we were
following her. There were thousands of people. I mean, she’s in the middle of
thousands of people.
H:
Uh, huh.
R:
But we were following her for safety. I mean, we’re covering Sissy who is wired
and you got the Westies hanging around. So, Sissy grabs hold of Billy because
they were giving money to her, to help with expenses.
So, sometimes Billy would be one of the guys that came to the house and Sissy
used to always say to them, “I thought you were going to go confess. Mickey’s
taking a hit for you.” And he says, “Sissy, I am. I’m going to confess. I’m going
to tell them I’m coming in. I’m telling them I did it.” And he was never going to
do that.
So Sissy gets hold of him. She grabs him by the shirt and says, “Billy, come here.
I want to talk to you.” And she drags him. He was short. He was a short stocky
guy. They’re really young guys. And she drags him down the side --. We told
her, “You got to get off the main avenue. You got to get on a side street where
we can drown out, get rid of the noise.”
H:
Sure, it’s quieter, sure.
R:
So she gets him down, half-way down the block. She pushes him onto a car, the
hood of a car. “Sit right here.” She’s got her pocketbook with a long strap over
her shoulder with a big flower on the front. Of course, the wire, the mic is in
here. And, she says, “Now Billy, tell me how this went again. How did you do
that thing?”
And he tells her again. He tells her the whole story. “And Kenny Shannon drove
the car.” “Yep, okay.” And, so we clipped him right out front there, right at
noontime. You know, the whole thing. And they dressed up to look like Mickey.
That was the whole thing. Blond. They had blond hair. Like they had blond hair
because Mickey had blond hair.
28
Arthur Ruffels
February 22, 2007
Page 29
R:
I mean, it looked to him like they set him up.
H:
Amazing.
R:
So from there, we took that and we had another meeting with Mickey and Sissy
and we played the tape. We told them, “We have the evidence. We’re going to
present it to the Manhattan DA’s Office, Morgenthau’s office and we want the
charges dismissed against you. Is that agreeable with you?” And he says,
“Yeah.”
So we said, “Okay, based on that, we don’t think it’s safe for Sissy to be on the
street any more.” And they had four kids. “So we think you should be going into
the Witness Security Program.” And he agreed.
H:
Uh, huh.
R:
And she agreed. So Marilyn and I made arrangements to move her and we rented
--. We had done this so much, I mean, we were pros. We were the best at this. I
had other US Attorneys call me for advice “How do we get places and do this
right?”
H:
How do you do it, right?
R:
Because everyone knew in the US Attorney’s Office that I was the expert. So we
rented a house. Oh, the first thing I had to do was find a jail that I could put
Mickey in when we took him out of Rikers Island. He was in my custody now.
H:
Uh, huh.
R:
He’s my personal prisoner.
H:
So, the US Marshals don’t take over right away then?
R:
No. It takes about twelve weeks for the Marshals to take them. So they’re in my
custody during that time.
So I was looking for a military prison to put Mickey in. Well, Bruce Mouw was
with me and Bruce gets nervous about these things. I said, “Bruce, we
need a navy prison. You know, there’s a navy prison in, well, there was one up in
New Hampshire.”
H:
Right. Portsmouth?
R:
Portsmouth.
29
Arthur Ruffels
February 22, 2007
Page 30
H:
Yeah.
R:
I said, “But I think there’s maybe one in Philadelphia, and I know there’s one at
New London.” So I said, “You know, let’s go ahead. What I’m going to do is
call the Chief of Naval Operations which is in Washington, in Norfolk, Virginia,
for the Atlantic Fleet.” And we did. I remember, Bruce was sitting there. “I have
a call in and I want to talk to the Chief of Naval Operations.” Bruce was a Naval
Academy grad --
H:
Oh, is that right?
R:
-- and he was a navigator on a nuclear sub and all that stuff, so when you start
talking Chief of Naval Operations, he’s like, “Oh, my God --.”
H:
He knows what you’re talking about though, yeah.
R:
So I call and the guy says, whoever I got on the phone, they said, “Well, the
Chief, the CNO is not available. I’m his adjutant,” or whatever his assistant’s
name is, “What, who is this?” “Special Agent Ruffels, FBI.”
And I told him, “This is what we’re looking for. We’re looking for a military
prison. Really we want a navy prison to put him in. We have a witness. We’d
like to put him in for safekeeping in a military prison.” And so he said, “Well,”
I’m going to hand you off to one of my people here. He’ll give you the
information you need. But we’ll work with you on it.”
So he said “We used to have one in Philadelphia. It’s open but it’s now reduced
so small that we can’t call it really a place that we could recommend.”
He says, “The best one is New London. Submarine base has a brig, active brig. It
would be good.” I said, “Okay.” And he said, “When you go there, if you’re
going to try to make, you have to go up there and deal with them. But tell them
that we’ve authorized this arrangement. That we’re behind whatever you’re
doing. You have to pay for any expenses incurred, --
H:
Sure.
R:
-- the government, you know, the FBI’s going to have to pay.” We understand
that.
So we went up and met with the chief in charge of the brig and told him we had a
guy. Couldn’t tell him who he was. We couldn’t give him any background or
couldn’t give him any real names. He said, “Fine, we can work with you. We’ll
be glad to do it.” And we did.
30
Arthur Ruffels
February 22, 2007
Page 31
R:
And, we had the brig all lined up for Mickey and what we would do is take him
out during the day and bring him back at night.
H:
Uh, huh.
R:
And then we still were taking him down to New York to talk, testify in the
Federal Grand Jury. So we were having to move him around quite a bit. And in
those cases I would then have to make other arrangements. Local. The Stamford
Police Department here was wonderful. They housed him for me. New Canaan
Police Department housed him for me several times, several nights. They were
very good.
H:
So you were debriefing him also for Bureau debriefing.
R:
We would be working with him all the time.
H:
And then also the testimony --
R:
All the time.
H:
-- he would be giving.
R:
Positively. We would constantly be debriefing him. See, he would always be
remembering things. These were things that he wasn’t giving any thought to
when he was doing them.
H:
Sure.
R:
All of a sudden things are coming back to him and that’s what we’re working on.
To corroborate everything he can --.
H:
So by the time he actually disappears and he goes off to some town here in the
country, he and his wife and kids and he has a new life, you’re done with him.
You’ve, you’ve drained him pretty much --.
R:
No, no, he had to come back and testify.
H:
Oh, for testifying, yeah, yeah.
R:
Yeah, he had to come back and testify.
H:
Okay.
31
Arthur Ruffels
February 22, 2007
Page 32
R:
And that’s why I did so much traveling around the country. I and the US
Attorney and Kenny McCabe and my homicide friend Frank Pergola, we used to
go out and meet these guys. The Marshals would bring them to a neutral city. So
if the guy lived in Phoenix, Arizona, and we’re coming from New York, they
would say, “Well, we’ll produce him in Minneapolis, next Thursday at a hotel.
So you just go to that hotel.” We’re not supposed to know where he is. Of
course, we know.
H:
Things, you know, things happen.
R:
But, that’s how it works.
H:
Uh, huh.
R:
And so what we did with Mickey … remember he was such a high profile guy.
H:
Uh, huh.
R:
So what we did was, Sunday, it was a Sunday, and we were going to move Sissy
and the kids Monday morning at 6 am up to New London. Oh, before we did that,
we made arrangements at the brig for Mickey. He’s still at Rikers, but this was
when we’re ready, we’re moving him to the brig. We went to a real estate agent
and we rented a house in New London for Sissy and the kids --
H:
Uh, huh.
R:
-- because we know they’re going to be with us for at least twelve weeks. Well,
it’s a lot cheaper to rent a house than to pay a hotel.
H:
Oh, sure.
R:
It’s safer, too.
H:
Oh, yeah.
R:
You can’t be in a hotel more than three or four days before the hotel people want
to know what’s going on. Who are these guys walking all around and guys sitting
near the doors and guys in the room with a family. You know, you get a lot of
attention in hotels.
H:
Oh, yeah.
R:
So, we learned all these things as we went along. So the main thing, especially
with a family, was to rent a house.
32
Arthur Ruffels
February 22, 2007
Page 33
H:
Uh, huh.
R:
Which we did. We rented a nice house up there. And, so we moved Sissy. We
had her all set to move her on Monday morning at 6 am. We had a van, Bureau
van. You can only take the things you can pack into a bag. You can’t take very
much. And then we send movers back to pick up the things that will ultimately be
delivered to you, but can’t have any serial numbers on it. It can’t be identifiable
in any way. And that would be done later. So basically all we do is take them in
a car, in a van, and off we go.
But Marilyn and I, because this was so sensitive, we went there Sunday morning
at like 10 am and we surveilled her house all day and all that night. And we took
turns sleeping in the van. And, then first thing Monday morning, we moved
Sissy. We came to the house, very quickly got everything in the van and off we
go. Sissy’s gone. The next morning. We get her up to the place.
The next morning, I have a writ for Mickey. We go to Rikers at 5 am. Show
them the writ. “We’re taking Featherstone out. US Attorney’s Office” and so on.
“Okay.” Mickey goes with us. Well, we don’t go to the US Attorney’s Office.
He spent the first night on my couch. I had arrangements with the Mount Vernon
PD to lodge him. And when we got there at 11 pm that night, they said, “We
don’t know anything about it. We can’t put him in here.” The first night out of
Rikers, I said, “Holy Mackerel.” I said, “Mick, how do you like my couch?”
“Can’t believe you’re going to trust me in your house.” I said, “Mick, I don’t
have any other way.” Anyway, that was one of those things.
H:
Yeah, things like that happen.
R:
But we did take him to New London the next night. But when he wasn’t brought
back to Rikers Island by that afternoon, NBC News, after the 6 o’clock NBC
News, did a fifteen-minute special about Mickey Featherstone going with the
government. And they filmed his house over in New Jersey. And see the kids’
toys all laying around in the yard and all that.
H:
Everybody’s disappeared.
R:
Every indication is his wife is gone. He hasn’t been returned to --
H:
Rikers.
R:
-- Rikers. “It seems that we think he’s been taken, the FBI has taken him. He’s
probably gone in the Witness Program. So he’s going to be testifying against the
Westies.”
33
Arthur Ruffels
February 22, 2007
Page 34
H:
Uh, huh. Interesting. Doesn’t take long with all their connections.
R:
But that’s how the program works.
H:
Another thing that comes up often is success of the people that are, that disappear
in the Witness Program. In your experience, have they been reasonably
successful? Were they able to settle down and actually live like normal human
beings or do they?
R:
Almost all the ones that I did have. Out of the ones I was closest with, say the
twenty-two, twenty-five out of the Westies and the DeMeo group, out of them
we’ve had people leave. See, the Witness Security Program is a voluntary
program. You don’t have to go in it. And the people who go in it, many of them
after a year’s time or so, get homesick and they will just go back home. Or they’ll
go some place where they can be close to their families. Because when you get
moved, you get moved well away.
H:
Where you wouldn’t know anybody.
R:
And the only one that really --. Well, he got killed, but not by the wise guys. The
gay hit man, Vito Arena.
H:
Uh, huh.
R:
He had been in prison for seven years. When we arrested him we had him locked
up. And when he was due to be released from prison, we tried to put him in the
Witness Security Program. We proposed him to the program. And the Marshals
turned him down because he was too dangerous according to the psychologists for
the Marshal Service to vouch for the community’s safety that they would put him
in. And that’s, they have to do that with every witness.
H:
Yeah, I’m sure.
R:
And I have to do a lot of writing on every one of these. I have to do a threat
assessment. I have to say why we’re moving him. Who would kill him. How
would it be done. All of that kind of stuff. And so that’s the case Agent’s
responsibility as well. And Vito, they rejected him. They wouldn’t take him into
the program, so we just said, “Okay, Vito, you’re going to be on your own when
you go because they won’t take you in. That means you get no funding, you get
nothing.”
Well, he still was happy to be getting out. And he called me a couple of times
actually after he was out. He was out for about a year. And, at first it was out in
Los Angeles and he was living on a boat in the marina out there.
34
Arthur Ruffels
February 22, 2007
Page 35
R:
And then he moved to Texas. And he called me once and said he was in Texas.
And that was all. You know, that was it. And then, I’ll never forget, I still had my
business going. It was maybe a couple of years after I’d gotten out of the Bureau
and I had my business. So I had my answering machine on. Came in one time
and I put the machine on and it was the secretary from the US Attorney’s Office,
Mary Ellen Luthy. She’s a paralegal I think. She’s married to Jim Esposito. Do
you know Jim Esposito?
H:
No.
R:
Big, tall guy. He was the Deputy Assistant Director in New York.
H:
Yeah.
R:
But Jim and I were very good friends and Mary Ellen as well. Anyway, Mary
Ellen called and said, “Art, I just thought I’d call to give you some information.
Vito was killed this morning in Houston, Texas, during a stick-up. Obviously, he
was the stick-upee.”
H:
(chuckle)
R:
She said, “I’ll give you the details.” So I called her and she said, “Well, the PD
said that what happened was he came into --.” This was his MO. That’s how we
actually caught him. He was trying to hide from us even then when we got him
the first time. And he was ripping off dentists at the time. Cause he had a gay
lover. He had a young kid that was his lover as well. He was taking the kid to the
dentists’ office to get his teeth straightened. And after the doctor would do some
work, then Vito would say, “Okay, now give me all the money you have and any
gold you have around here.”
H:
It’s just a plain old stick-up then?
R:
The DeMeo crew were looking for him as well. They didn’t trust him either.
They’d whack him if they got him. We were looking for him for two years. He
was wanted by everybody but he was eluding everyone.
Anyway in this case the police said he walked into a music store in Houston and
stuck it up. There was nobody else in the store. And the owner says, “Okay, no
problem.” He gives him the money out of the register. Then Vito, he’s very
flamboyant. He was like an actor. He enjoyed like playing a role.
H:
Yeah.
35
Arthur Ruffels
February 22, 2007
Page 36
R:
And, he says, “You know, you’ve got some good music in here.” So he decides
to walk around and start picking up CDs that he likes. So he picking out and he’s
looking for things. While he’s picking out CDs, the store owner is reaching under
the counter for a .357 and pulls it out and blasts him and killed him and that was
the end of Vito.
H:
That’s Texas for you, right?
R:
But he’s the only one.
H:
Uh, huh.
R:
I mean I had lots of them leave. Most of them leave the Witness Program. The
people that are still -- Mickey Featherstone is still in the program.
H:
Uh, huh.
R:
Has been in it for fifteen years.
H:
That’s great. Who was a hit man also that was, went out to Phoenix and ended up
getting, it’s not too long ago, ended up getting arrested out there. He was running
a --
R:
Sammy, Sammy the Bull.
H:
Oh, Sammy Gravano. Yeah. So they’re not all successful?
R:
No, but Sammy was a --
H:
Well, some of them just can’t stand the fact that they’re no longer heavy duty
guys.
R:
Well, that’s a major problem with putting any of these guys out in these programs.
We have to be pretty, we have to be pretty convinced that the guy that we’re
putting in there when we recommend them to go into the program first that he’s
going to actually make it. We have to feel, we have to feel confident that the
guy’s going to make it. And it depends on our relationship. One-on-one
relationship.
H:
Uh, huh.
36
Arthur Ruffels
February 22, 2007
Page 37
R:
And I have to know --. I have to feel that based on everything he’s done --.
Remember, he’s handed up everyone he’s ever known, you know, when he, they
make an agreement with the government. They tell us every crime they’ve ever
committed and all that. And knowing that, you have to say, “Well, then this guy’s
a good bet, but he may be a problem.”
H:
Uh, huh.
R:
“We may have one or two incidents. We don’t know.”
H:
Yeah.
R:
So, and you do. You do have some incidents.
H:
But it in general, it works.
R:
But in general, Vito’s the only guy that we had a major problem with. He just
stuck a place up and got killed. But he wasn’t even in the program. He was not
in the program.
H:
Yeah, but you weren’t responsible for him.
R:
That’s right.
H:
He’d been turned down.
R:
He wasn’t even in the program, right.
H:
Let’s take a stop here for the day, I think.
37
Arthur Ruffels
February 22 & 28, 2007
Page 38
Interview with Former Special Agent of the FBI
Arthur Ruffels (1970-1990)
on February 28, 2007
By Brian Hollstein
Edited for spelling, repetitions, etc. by Sandra Robinette on May 12, 2007. Final edit with Mr.
Ruffles’ corrections by Sandra Robinette on July 9, 2007.
Brian Hollstein/
H:
This is the second session with Art Ruffels in Stamford, Connecticut. My name is
Brian Hollstein. The date today is the 28th of February, 2007, and we’ve been
talking about organized crime activities in New York and FBI investigations.
We were talking about Roy DeMeo, Angelo Ruggiero, John Gotti, Paul
Castellano, Ray DeMeo -Arthur Ruffels/
R:
Roy, Roy DeMeo.
H:
Roy DeMeo, I already said him. And we talked about witness protection
problems and, and some of the technology, I guess, of dealing with them. We
want to follow on that a little bit farther?
R:
Sure. Well, with witness protection, one of the things I didn’t tell you was,
because I had so many witnesses, one of the things you have to do with your
witnesses. They will not be taken or admitted into the WSP, Witness Security
Program, unless all of their legal problems are resolved. And the biggest one that
they all have is traffic tickets.
H:
(chuckle)
R:
Every witness that I ever dealt with which is, well, something like thirty in these
two cases and then forty-six witnesses all together, they all had awful driving
records.
H:
These are tough guys that are extorting money, kidnapping, murdering --
R:
Yep.
H:
-- stealing, what have you, but their major complaint is that they’ve got traffic
tickets.
R:
Yeah, that’s the Marshal’s program.
Arthur Ruffels
February 28, 2007
Page 39
H:
Yeah.
R:
So, in trying to resolve these problems I began going to the head traffic judge, in
New York City. I was there so often that I got to be a very good friends. His
name was Leo Shulgasser and just a terrific guy, especially for law enforcement.
And it got to where I would walk in and the secretary would know, “Oh, Mr.
Ruffels.” He would be in the other room and she’d say, “Just a minute.” He’d be,
there’d be a couple of people in there and he’d come right out and, “Hi Art, how
you doing? I’m going to ask these people to wait a few minutes, I know you’re
too busy to wait. Come on in.” He had a traffic computer sitting there with all
the records.
He’d type in the guy’s name and say, “Now, on this charge here --.” And I would
have my printout. He’d say, “We’ll get rid of all the ones that don’t involve
moving violations.” Like driving through a stop sign, through a red light. That
type of stuff.
H:
Speeding, I guess.
R:
Speeding. Yeah, that stuff. But all the others which most of them were illegal
parking and he’d give me a red pen, “Just cross these off.” And he’d just go
down the list. “Cross this off.”
So we’d end up, we’d reduce this sheet which sometimes would be four pages and
it would get down to about four items. But he’d say, “Now these, I can’t do
anything about these moving violations, and the penalties are whatever it says
they are. You’re going to have to pay for these. The Bureau’s going to have to
pay for those. Whoever is paying, but somebody has to pay for these. I can’t do
anything about them.” I said, “We’ll take care of them.” So we worked it out.
The Marshals didn’t have any such contact.
H:
Uh, huh.
R:
So one day I was at the Office of the head Marshal, who by the way I got his job
for him. When the position opened up he came to me because I was down there
so much with him. “Could you get a letter from the New York Office, from the
ADIC, recommending me for the job as Head Marshal?”
H:
Yeah, that was all, a political appointment.
R:
Big political thing, right.
39
Arthur Ruffels
February 28, 2007
Page 40
H:
Yeah.
R:
So I said, “Sure.” So we wrote a letter to him and, of course, he got the job. Of
course, then he proceeded to try to spit in my face over dealing with my witnesses
and everything. One day when I was down there, he comes and says, “Hey, I hear
you have a contact in parking violations?” I says, “Yeah.” He says, “Could you
do me a favor and see if you can do something with this?” And then all of a
sudden they’re starting to ask me for all the other, other witnesses. “Come and do
this.” I said, “Hey, I don’t have time to do this.”
So I said, “Look, give me a Marshal. I’ll bring him over and introduce him to the
judge. And then you guys take it from there and do your own thing because I’m
not going to be doing this for the Marshals.” Anyway we ended up doing that.
But I mean, that’s just one of the problems you run into with the marshals.
The other day I was going to tell you talking about when people are asking me
was I going to write to book and do all these things. I actually met with the
number one outfit that sets you up for books, publishers. Well, they did this book.
Just a minute. The Boss of Bosses, Andy Kurins and Joe, Joe O’Brien. I don’t
know if you’re familiar with it.
H:
I’ve seen it, yeah.
R:
Well, it was number one on the best seller list, New York Times, Best Sellers List
for about twelve weeks. And then it stayed on the list for a long time after.
H:
That’s a while ago, right?
R:
Yeah. That was around 19--. Early ’90s. And this whole thing took place, Boss
of Bosses. My name is not in this book, even though I was on the squad with both
of these guys.
And when Joe O’Brien, who was the lead Agent on it, started going out to
Castellano’s residence on Staten Island, before he even started doing that, Bruce
Mouw and I were going out there and running surveillances on Sunday mornings
because Paul was holding meetings on Sunday mornings because the FBI never
works on Sundays.
H:
FBI never works on Sundays, right.
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And we saw everybody up there. Jimmy Brown, John Gotti, all of the capos
would come up there. There’d be ten or twelve guys there. Every Sunday
morning. And I went with Joe O’Brien one of the first times that Joe tried to
make the pitch to the girl who became the main, one of the main informants in it.
Paul’s maid, and she was a Colombian girl. I think she was from Colombia.
Gloria.
And I went with Joe again because there was nobody else on the squad who had
any freedom to go anywhere because they were all, had taken shifts on the wires.
Joe asked me if I’d go with him. And we went out and he knew that her day off
was like Wednesday, or Thursdays, and we tried to get her at the bus stop. She
walked out of the house and down the street. Waiting at the bus stop --.
H:
This is still at the recruiting, you were recruiting her?
R:
Yeah, we were going to make the pitch for her to cooperate and we were all set to
pull up and Joe was going to introduce himself. I was just going to wait in the
car. And somebody walked up to the bus stop. As we were coming up, another
person came up. That was the only time that I was with him.
But I was involved, not only was I involved, but the “Boss of Bosses” was Paul
Castellano. In their whole case, they had the wire at the house and all that and
Paul was the target. But our case, at the same time they’re doing that, all of our
information keeps going up to Paul.
And so when we bring down our indictments in 1984, we brought down twentyfour indictments, and Paul was one of those indictments. So they were very
unhappy, you know. Joe O’Brien and Andy. Andy used to race with me. When
he was writing his book, he used to race with me every Tuesday night on my boat
in the summer. We were very close. But, anyway, there was a lot of jealousy
because we got Paul, indicted him before they did. So, that kind of stuff went on.
H:
Hopefully, it’s friendly rivalry.
R:
It’s healthy, other than in this book that they wrote, described our case, my case as
a “frivolous case that would never get a conviction, and that all we did was we
were doing headlines.” Except that we convicted everybody.
H:
Yeah. (chuckle)
R:
Or, six of them either died or got killed in the middle, Paul being one of them.
H:
Yeah, yeah.
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R:
And, and Roy DeMeo who was the original target, his own crew killed him. Nino
Gaggi, the capo, died at the Metropolitan Correction Center of a broken heart. He
missed his wife. And Nino was the only guy that I knew, that I’d ever known in
the mob, who didn’t have a gamata on the side. He was a real, real staunch family
man. He was a killer, but he was devoted. A devoted family man. No fooling
around. His wife, Rose, was Irish, but he trusted her with everything. And I
ended up, I spent three days with Nino taking him through, when we arrested him
and getting him through the preliminary process, arraignment.
H:
All the processing, yeah.
R:
When we arrested him, he wouldn’t answer. He wouldn’t talk to us in any form.
And we got him into the office --. This is kind of a cute story about Kenny
McCabe. You don’t know Kenny?
H:
No.
R:
He was the number one Organized Crime expert in New York City.
H:
In the New York PD.
R:
Not only that, but he would, because he lived in Brooklyn, stop by, go by all the
social clubs and check them out. And he knew everybody because he had a
photographic memory. And he could remember their license tags. He knew their
faces. He knew everything about them.
And Kenny was one of the guys, when we made the arrest of Nino Gaggi, the
capo out in Brooklyn. We did it on a Saturday. Because we wanted him to spend
some time before he gets out. Soon as we finish the arraignment, he’s out.
H:
Sure, sure.
R:
So we wanted to at least get a little time in the joint --
H:
(chuckle)
R:
We arrested him in the afternoon like two o’clock on 86th Street and it was
McCabe, Pergola, another detective Ronnie Cadeaux, and myself. And we drive
back to the SDNY and he wouldn’t talk to us. We asked if he needed medication
or anything. He wouldn’t say one word to us.
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R:
When we got into Walter Mack’s office, the US Attorney, Walter’s going through
his list of things he wants to ask him. The guy’s just not answering a thing.
Walter, finally after about an hour and a half says, “Well, why don’t you guys go
ahead and take him over to the FBI office and fingerprint him and photograph him
and do all that and then bring him back here.” We did that. Still wouldn’t talk to
us.
We all came back. Now it’s like five-thirty or six o’clock in the afternoon and we
now had, probably had maybe six Agents. No, I think there’s just the four of us
that did the arresting. The four of us, but then we had two US Attorneys.
So we were in the conference room at the Southern District and we’re all sitting
around, and Kenny had told me that he’s taking his wife out that night for dinner.
Kathy. So he says, “I’m going to try to leave, as quick as I can.” So it’s like six
o’clock, the phone rings and we’re all at the conference table including Nino,
sitting around. And, of course, Nino is not saying anything to anybody. And it’s
for Kenny. Whoever answered it, “Kenny, it’s your wife.”
So Kenny’s on the phone and says, “Kathy, something’s come up and I don’t
think we can, I don’t think I can make it tonight. We’ll have to put it off for some
day next week.” So, Nino’s sitting around the table. All of a sudden, Nino says
his first word. “For Christ’s sake, McCabe --.” They all knew McCabe. “For
Christ’s sake, McCabe, will you go home and take your wife out to dinner. I’ll
give you a note.”
You know, we roared. I mean, the whole place just cracked up. And, from there
on, he just started talking to us. And, it was just a fun thing. And from there on,
Nino and I became friends. His son was an optometrist and it’s when the lightweight glasses first came out, the plastic glasses. And I was wearing glasses
which were heavy. And when Nino and I were sitting together during the
arraignment process, I had said to him, every photograph we had of Nino, ever
had of Nino, he was always wearing sunglasses. So I asked him, “Nino, let me
ask you a question. Every photograph we have of you is sunglasses. Middle of
the day or night, you have sunglasses on. Do you just wear those to play the role,
or do you really need sunglasses?” He says, “I really need sunglasses. Light kills
my eyes.” He says, “I wear sunglasses all the time. I don’t wear regular glasses. I
always wear sunglasses. That is the truth.”
So he says, “What kind of glasses are those that you’re wearing?” So I said,
“Glasses.” So he says, “Well here, try mine on and I’ll try yours on.” So we
switch glasses. And, of course, they’re light as a feather.
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“Holy mackerel, these are unbelievable. What kind of glasses are these?” So he
says, “How can you wear these other glasses? They’re so heavy.” Then he says,
“Do you want a couple pair?”
H:
(chuckle)
R:
And I said, “No.”
H:
He’ll buy you a hat, right.
R:
Yeah, well, his son is an optometrist. I said, “No, I don’t think so, Nino, but I’ll
tell you one thing. I’m going to my optometrist and get a pair of these glasses.”
Which I did. So that was one of our things.
H:
Well, that’s good. This brings us to --.
R:
Well, the human part.
H:
We’ve gone through the investigative side of the case and all the difficulties that
went into that. And now we’ve made the arrest and you’re processing getting,
going towards the trial. Now the trial had to be a circus with that number.
How many defendants?
R:
Well, because we had eighteen defendants. And eighteen attorneys. And some of
them had two guys. They had their assistants with them. So they all have their
staff. And our trial was held in the Ceremonial Courtroom at the Southern
District which is the big one. Seats three hundred.
It’s the biggest one. The bench goes all the way across the courtroom. Like the
bridge of a ship. The judge can walk from one side of the court to the other and,
which they did. The witness chair would be down in front, below it because it’s
raised.
And we held both trials. The Westie trial was held in that courtroom which came
after, and both DeMeo trials. Because we had Judge Kevin Duffy, Judge Duffy
split [the cases.] “The case is too unwieldy that I don’t think the government can
prove this case whatsoever.” And, our attorneys and the US Attorneys, all had
met and talked about it and said, “Well, we think we can.”
So Kevin Duffy decided to split the case. We’re going to do stolen cars first,
because their big business was stolen cars, and then murder, narcotics et al next.
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R:
We sent Auto Crime guys to Kuwait for two weeks to identify stolen cars, stolen
VIN numbers and everything. We located lots of them. And, the Kuwait
government cooperated, but, of course, they wouldn’t release anything to us.
They’d let us find the car and say it’s there. That’s it. Nothing else.
H:
Take back?
R:
They weren’t going to let us take any cars back. And, in Puerto Rico, we had a
big stolen car thing going down there with the same group. Anyway, he divided
it. I think our first trial had nine defendants. And that lasted eight months. There
was so much to introduce on cars, and VINs.
H:
And all that technical stuff.
R:
-- witnesses, because in the process we did a couple of murder cases that were
connected with the cars. They killed a couple of guys that were involved in cars,
so we could introduce those murders to help the case.
H:
Well, they weren’t being tried on murder, they were being tried --.
R:
The judge allowed us to bring in the murders that were directly connected with
the cars. Not with the Murder Incorporated, part of the crew which was the big
thing for them. They were just killed because of the cars. There were two guys
out in Long Island. Car guys. Used car dealers. And they ended up buying some
cars from these guys, not knowing that they were stolen, but then started to find
out when the police would come around and take them. And finally one day these
guys realized that these guys were selling them stolen cars.
And so they made the mistake of telling Roy DeMeo that “We’re going to the
Nassau County District Attorney.” Of course, they never made it.
H:
That’s not very smart.
R:
So we were able to do that. We convicted everybody. Eight or nine guys. We
convicted everybody. And, then, we got ready for the main trial, the main RICO
trial.
H:
And that was how many defendants in that one? Eighteen?
R:
Well, it was, under RICO, I think eighteen defendants because Paul got killed in
the middle of that trial. By Gotti, in front of Sparks Steakhouse.
Nino died in prison before the trial started. Nino was convicted in our first trial,
the car case.
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H:
Uh, huh. The car case.
R:
Roy DeMeo had been killed. Of the twenty-four people we indicted, there was
probably a year from the time they were indicted until the trial and during that
year they killed Roy. Nino died between the two, before the second trial, in
prison.
H:
Is he an older guy? Nino?
R:
No, he wasn’t that old. Nino, I can show you a picture of him if you want. Up in
the book. I’m trying to think.
But anyway, they killed five of their own guys. One of them was the brother of
Freddie DiNome. Freddie DiNome was the guy I told you about. That story in the
beginning of the book.
H:
Right.
R:
Freddie was the one who told me the story. He was our witness and he was Roy’s
driver. And his brother, Richie DiNome, and one of his friends were killed right
after Roy was killed. That’s when we got word from informants that they were
going to kill Freddie in prison. And that’s when Freddie agreed to cooperate with
us and we took him out.
H:
This was real desperation on their part. I mean to be murdering right in the
middle of a Federal trial.
R:
Didn’t bother them at all. Their philosophy was “kill anybody who could testify.”
H:
Yeah.
R:
“Kill anybody.” Also, I told you they had that saying “We make bodies
disappear.” They didn’t just kill you, but they cut them up and take them to the
dump. Once you drop a body, parts of a body, in the Fountain Avenue dump
which is on the Belt Parkway in Brooklyn, right along those big hills that you see
along the water, that’s the Fountain Avenue dump. That’s only about two miles
away from their clubhouse. And one of the crew, Anthony Center’s uncle owned
a truck, a carting company. So he would go when they had the body. Anthony
would go and he would borrow a garbage truck. And he’d come back to the club
and they’d have everything wrapped in plastic and in little boxes. And he would
bring it all out to the truck, go to the dump and dump it. “Once it got into that
dump” and all the trucks that were dumping there it would be impossible to find
the body,” which is true.
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R:
So that was their whole thing. The other part of that theory was “no body, no
crime.” And under state law, that’s true. But, under Federal law, we could charge
murder without the bodies if we had corroborating evidence and witnesses. And
so, that’s why we had so many witnesses.
H:
But Castellano, himself, was killed on the street, right?
R:
Yep, in front of Sparks Steakhouse. December 16, 1986, I think.
H:
Uh, huh.
R:
Yeah, but that was their whole philosophy. So when we started --. They began
realizing that all these witnesses --. They were keeping track of people going to
the Grand Jury and things. They would talk to people. Where people made big
mistakes, witnesses, was, they were so afraid of Roy and the crew, that when we
would serve a Grand Jury subpoena to anybody, they would go over and tell Roy
or one of the guys, “I got a Grand Jury subpoena. What am I supposed to do?”
And of course, they’d tell him, “You don’t say anything.”
H:
Right.
R:
“You just don’t say anything.” But in the meantime they’re assessing “Will this
witness really stand up?”
H:
Sure. And put him on the hit list.
R:
And if for any reason they thought you couldn’t stand up, they were going to
whack you. And they would whack just about anybody. If they had a crack at
any of them, they would whack them. The witnesses started to get that feeling
just when they went and talked to these guys. The way they talked to them. They
kind of intimidated them. You know, “It’s good. You can’t do the right thing.”
And knowing who they were. These people all had information, first-hand
information about one or maybe several murders. So, it was pretty scary.
H:
Enough to make you very nervous if you were a witness, I’m sure.
R:
You said it.
H:
Have we pretty much mined this one? Should we go on to the Westies? Now the
other things will come up as we talk about the Westies too. Who were the
Westies and why were we interested in them?
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R:
Well, first of all, I’ll tell you how I became the case Agent on the Westies. It was
a complete shock to me when I got the call on it. And I think I told you the other
day how Mickey Featherstone was the number two Westie.
H:
Right.
R:
But he felt that the Westies themselves had framed him for a murder that he didn’t
do. And we have that, I think, that story on tape. And Mickey reached out to a
former Assistant United States Attorney. I can’t think of the guy’s name offhand,
but got the attorney who was the guy who had convicted Mickey previously. He
did five years on a counterfeit thing. But he felt that the guy was an honest guy
and that he could trust him. The big thing is they liked the Federal government.
If they want to make a deal, they’re not confident with the police department or
DA’s offices for the most part. And they like to --. I mean, they just simply feel
safer going to the Feds.
Mickey contacted us and we went and had the meetings with his wife. We moved
him up to New London. And, Mickey was the number two man and the boss was
Jimmy Coonan. Jimmy was really a much bigger killer than Mickey. He would
kill people. And he was a good friend of Roy DeMeo.
H:
Oh, what that right? So there was some cross-over.
R:
He knew a couple of the guys in Roy DeMeo’s crew and I think he had known
them, met them in prison one time. After he got out of prison, they would meet
each other and talk about activities they were doing.
But finally what happened with the Westies was they came up with a pretty good
idea, a good plan that they could kidnap wise guys and hold them for ransom,
which they did. And they would have the guy over in some warehouse over on the
West Side and they would just tell him, “Well, here’s the phone. Call whoever
you have to call. We want a hundred grand.” And, of course, how could he, how
could a wise guy argue. He can’t call the cops.
H:
That’s right, yeah.
R:
And, he can’t tell the rest of the gang. He can’t go back and tell the other wise
guys that he had been kidnapped and that they held him ransom. And so, they
would get the money and let the guy go.
Well, it became so common, it scared the wise guys to death. And so they went to
Paul Castellano, the boss of bosses, and complained. “Hey, it’s the Westies that
are doing these things. And these guys are crazy. They’re a bunch of kids and
they’re wild guys. Cowboys.”
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H:
This was coming from people like Roy DeMeo?
R:
Yeah, yeah, and it was coming down to that no self-respecting wise guy was safe
any more. Now, you know how many wise guys, made guys there were on New
York City. Maybe three thousand. Twenty-five hundred, two thousand.
There were twelve Westies, that’s it.
H:
That’s it? Never more than that?
R:
There was no initiation ceremony. There was no anything. You were just one of
the gang and that was it, other than Jimmy Coonan was the boss, but that’s all.
H:
And were they all Irish?
R:
Yeah. As a result of the wise guys, the other four families coming and saying,
“Something has to be done about the Westies.”
Oh, the other thing they did and this was a big thing. One of the guys that they
grabbed was Ruby Stein. Ruby Stein was the biggest shylock in New York City.
Ruby Stein, a Jewish guy, Ruby was a very nice guy. He wasn’t a tough guy or
anything. He had guys who worked for him, but, Ruby, himself, was not a tough
guy. But he had a lot of money on the street. And the Westies all used to borrow
money from him, to shylock. And Ruby would give them at a discounted rate to
put on the street as a kind of a service to the Westies.
So one day Jimmy Coonan decided “We’re going to, we’re going to take over
Ruby’s business.” And so he told the Westies, “Everybody take as much money
as you can take on loan from Ruby so that we get that before we whack him. Get
as much money from him as you can.” Which they did.
I’ll tell you a funny story about one of my witnesses. In fact, I’m going to --.
Inger and I are going to his son’s wedding. One of his son’s wedding in June.
So Coonan tells them, “Get the money.” And after they have the money, Jimmy
gets them all together, the Westies, and says, “Okay, what we’re going to do now.
We’re going to get Ruby down here.” I think it was to the 596 Club. That’s was
the club that they had. It was a bar.
H:
Uh, huh.
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R:
On Ninth Avenue. We’re going to get him in here during the day. Then he
assigned jobs to all the guys there, like nine guys. And my witness, Billy Beatty,
he was a bartender in there. And his job was as soon as Ruby came in to the
place, he was to lock the door behind him so that nobody could come in. And
then, Grillo. This is one of Roy’s guys who was there too. And he comes up with
a gun with Jimmy and I think Grillo, Danny Grillo, and he kills Ruby.
And then they take the gun, Jimmy takes the gun and he fires into Ruby. They
hand the gun around and all the guys that were present had to shoot Ruby at least
once. And it was like a ceremony. And what it got down to --. No one missed
Ruby. Didn’t care too much about --. I’m talking about the wise guys.
But what they cared --. Ruby was aligned with the Genovese Family. If he was
aligned with anyone, he was aligned with the Genovese Family, not the
Gambinos. And so now, the Westies have a lot of money that belonged to Ruby.
But the big thing, what really got, set off the wise guys. Then Jimmy took Ruby’s
book of, of victims. All the people that he had his money out with because they
knew he had that book. So they took the book. Now they could go around and
make the collections on all the other victims. All of Ruby’s money. And, of
course, that infuriated the Genovese gang.
H:
But it was a Gambino that was with them though?
R:
Yeah. Danny Grillo was one of Roy’s --.
H:
Grillo is a Gambino, right.
R:
Actually Roy and the gang killed Danny Grillo over something.
H:
It wasn’t really straight, straight along ethnic lines then in terms of the Italians
were all LCN but they would be, they’d be happy to be work with the Westies
from time to time?
R:
And, and Jewish guys. Money makers.
H:
I mean particularly the Westies.
R:
Here’s how the Westies got into it and this is how I got the case. As a result of
the meeting, LCN meeting with Paul Castellano and the other four families, it was
decided, “We have to get control of the Westies. We have to lay the law down.
They’re cowboys. We have to stop them from running wild and we have to make
sure that from now on they’re going to have to go by the same rules as we go by.
And if they’re going to clip somebody, they have to get permission from Paul.”
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R:
So they start looking around and say, “Well, now, who knows the Westies? Who
knows them enough to talk to them?” Danny Grillo knew Jimmy Coonan.
H:
Uh, huh.
R:
And Danny is in Roy DeMeo’s crew. So Roy and Danny go over and see Jimmy
Coonan. They go over and they see Coonan and tell him, “Paul wants you to
come over to a sit-down this coming week.” Like a Thursday night. And that
means come over to 86th Street, Brooklyn, and Tomaso’s. I don’t know if you
remember Tomaso’s Restaurant. It’s on 86th. Right near the Veterans and
Friends Social Club. The big American flag in the window and all that. That club
was named for my other witness. One of my other witnesses. Nino’s nephew,
Dominic, who had been a Green Beret that Nino had raised in his own house
when he was a little kid. And we’ve got little movie films and everything of him.
Dominic with Nino and playing as a kid. And, then as Dominic grew up.
:
When Dominic came home from Vietnam, they made that club, the Veterans and
Friends Social Club, and it was because of Dominic. That’s what they called it. I
mean, they had the club. They were making the club. Nino said, "We’ll call it the
Veterans and Friends Social Club.” And it’s right next door to Tomaso’s
Restaurant. Tomaso’s was the Gambino’s number one place to hold meetings.
Like dinner meetings. Important meetings were held with the capos and stuff at
Tomaso’s.
H:
When we had the Manny Gambino case, a kidnap, I think he’s a cousin of Carlo’s
–
R:
Yeah.
H:
-- the mother complained to the FBI and we opened a case, --
R:
I remember that.
H:
-- kidnap case on the thing. And we went over, we were interviewing all the
members, everybody we could, we could --
R:
Yeah.
H:
-- find, and I remember going to, I believe we went to this particular restaurant in
fact, and sat down with this guy and --
R:
Tomaso.
H:
-- had a cup of coffee, yeah, yeah.
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R:
He owned it.
So they ordered him over there and to bring Mickey with him. See, what Jimmy
Coonan had done, while the Westies are terrorizing the place, is he kept building
up Mickey Featherstone. Remember, Mickey had been a Green Beret in Vietnam
also. And he was on a one hundred percent mental disability from Vietnam. And
so Jimmy tried to create the image that Mickey was an out-of-control killer.
And that he would kill anybody at any minute. And everybody believed it. And,
if someone were killed and it had nothing to do with the Westies but it was near
the West Side, Coonan would say, “Uh, Mickey did it.” And so, you know,
whoever got killed, “Mickey did it.” So people pictured Mickey killing hundreds
of people. He killed four. He confessed to four.
H:
This is, he’s the same wild man like Roy.
R:
Yeah, but very different. I mean, they operate so differently.
H:
This guy’s a real, a head case though isn’t --?
R:
He was a legit psycho. Jimmy Coonan says, “Okay, we’ll be there.” I think they
were supposed to be at Tomaso’s at nine o’clock. Eight o’clock. Supposed to be
there at eight o’clock. And that was going to be Jimmy and Mickey. And they
were going to meet with Paul Castellano, all the capos in the Gambino Family. I
think they had representatives from the other families there. And Nino was there
of course because he’s going to be the capo that these guys are reporting to. The
Westies were put under. And Roy was there because he was the soldier that
Coonan was going to, actually that was his contact, was Roy DeMeo.
Now when we had the witnesses, we had the DeMeo case going for over a year
and knew nothing about the Westies. And when we finally got hold of Dominic
as a witness, and then we got Freddie DiNome who was Roy’s driver, and they
began telling us that the “Westies, yeah, the Westies are under Roy and Nino.”
And we’re going, “Wait a minute.” We couldn’t believe it.
We were sitting there. Here’s the DeMeo crew, Murder Incorporated, and the
next crazy bunch of killers are the Westies.
H:
(chuckle)
R:
And the Westies are under the --. They’re Irish and they’re in, they’re under the
DeMeo crew and the Gambinos?
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R:
So that’s when Mickey made the call to that guy in the US Attorney’s Office.
The office ran something and checked out and found out that Mickey had
mentioned to that US Attorney, Roy DeMeo and Nino Gaggi and Paul Castellano.
So I had the case on that in the indices and “Oh, Ruffels is the guy, yeah, you got
to go to.”
Roy DeMeo was murdered. We popped the trunk. He was missing for two
weeks. He was frozen. It was the two coldest weeks of the year, February, 1984.
H:
So he was pretty well preserved then.
R:
We found the body down in Sheepshead Bay. Had been parked there for two
weeks. He was in the trunk. And we had the car towed over to Highway 2
Garage along the golf course out on Flatbush Avenue right near the parkway.
We had, of course, a “Who’s Who” of the New York Police Department down
there. And, I was the only Bureau guy. So I was standing with them, with the
Auto Crime guys when they popped the trunk. We had to get permission from his
wife to pop the trunk of the car which she finally gave permission to do.
And when we popped the trunk --. This was a Cadillac Coupe de Ville, brand
new. And when we popped the trunk, the first thing we saw was a big lamp
shade, like a chandelier sitting on top of something. And so we had to take the
chandelier out and then here’s Roy lying in there and he was in a position like
this. And he had put his hands up to block the bullets went through his hands into
his head. And it was done by his own crew. On orders from Paul. And, because,
they felt that he, Roy, couldn’t take the heat and that he would definitely fold.
(Showing pictures from the Murder Machine) Well, here we are. Here’s me
arresting him, Anthony Center. This is the guy whose uncle had the carting
service and he was the driver. He was one of the psycho killers.
And here we are. That’s Kenny McCabe that I told you about.
H:
Okay. That face looks familiar.
R:
You had to know Kenny.
H:
Yeah, yeah.
R:
I mean, you didn’t work Organized Crime but you would know Kenny. He was
the man.
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R:
That’s Nino and his wife, Rose. Joey Testa. He was the number two guy. He
wasn’t a made guy. But he was the number two guy in the gang in Roy’s crew.
Roy was a made guy. He was a soldier. And then Joey Testa who later, we were
told, was made a member after our case. Was made a member in the Lucchese
Family
H:
Huh. Switched, switched crews. Just for the record, we’re, we’re looking at a
book called Murder Machine by Gene Mustain and Jerry Capeci.
R:
Right. And here’s Marilyn, my partner, when we arrested Paul. And I’m back
there behind Joe Coffey. That’s Joe Coffey.
H:
Coffey, I recognize right away.
R:
Yeah, he was assigned to our case. Joe worked with us during that.
H:
See, I was out in ’77, so it was well before all of this happened.
R:
Oh, yeah. I’ll tell you how you know Joe Coffey. He used to spend a lot of time
up in our office on 69th Street.
H:
Right.
R:
Because the guy who had the case, the Agent was over on Bruce Mouw’s squad,
on the number one man’s squad, Sweeney’s squad. The Agent, he became the
SRA in Newport, Rhode Island. Big guy. I know him. I used to see him when
we would be in Newport. Dick Tammaro. Big guy. Notre Dame grad. Okay,
you’d know him if you saw him.
H:
Yeah, yeah.
R:
Well, Tammaro had a big case and it was a paper case. It was all chasing
international money around. And Tammaro was doing a great job on it. And then
Coffey somehow got involved in it. And, I mean, Joe is a likeable guy but he’s a
funny guy. He doesn’t, Joe doesn’t really work. You know, like, he floats
around. And he sees everybody. And, that was Joe’s “M.O.” But he used to
come up and spend a lot of time with Dick, and that’s how I first met Joe Coffey.
But, I’ve become good friends with Joe. Yeah, I like Joe. He’s a good guy.
This is one of the photos of a barrel that they buried a body --. They put a body in
this barrel after they killed him and this is the guy that the gay hit man killed.
And he’s in this barrel and we’re just dredging him up and pulling him out and
then we had Nassau County, Suffolk County Crime Scene Unit. They had to use
these big electric saws, chain saws, to break through there.
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R:
Yeah. That’s Dominic, my witness that I spent so much time with. We’ve done a
lot of TV shows together. Just show you that for the heck of it. This is Freddie
DiNome. And this is the guy that tried to kill McCabe and I down in Texas and
then he later committed suicide that night.
H:
Huh. That’s Richard?
R:
No. That’s Freddie DiNome.
H:
And that’s his brother next to him.
R:
Well, here’s the gay hit man, Vito Arena. You can see why he’s not exactly what
you have in mind when you think of a gay guy.
H:
No, no, not at all.
R:
Right. And this was Peter Lafrosia. Now here they are. Here’s Roy and they’re
at somebody’s funeral. Oh, Francese, Tina Francese was at this funeral. Sonny
Francese’s wife. Sonny was doing twenty-five years down in Petersburg, but Tina
was there and Bernie and I covered it. Covered this funeral, and we got all these
great photos. We didn’t take them. We had other guys who were taking the
pictures. But, there was Roy and these are guys in his crew.
This was the club. Gemini Lounge was the bar on the corner --
H:
Uh, huh.
R:
-- and then right down here next door was the club. And that’s where the front
window and the blinds were.
H:
This is the Veterans --?
R:
No, no, no. This is over in Carnarsie. When I say “club,” I’m talking about the
DeMeo club. The Veterans and Friends was a Gambino Club where capos took
turns. They had a night, one night a week that they would hold their crew
meetings and things. That’s how that was run. That was a family thing. But this
was strictly the DeMeo crew.
H:
Oh, I see. Okay.
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R:
That was the club where they cut up bodies and they did all that stuff. When we
went in there, we executed a search warrant and we hit the place to search and all
that. And we had the crime scene done and everything for blood. But they hadn’t
killed anyone when we did this for a year because it was after we had been in the
works. And Roy had already been killed.
We got hold of a plumber and I had the plumber come over and he took out all the
plumbing underneath the shower and the pipes and I shipped it all down to the lab
for blood work. But they really didn’t come up with it. They couldn’t come up
with anything by then.
H:
Huh. Getting back to the Westies here.
R:
Yeah, I was going to see if I have any pictures of the Westies here, but I don’t.
Okay.
H
So it was around this time then is when Featherstone went away?
R:
Well, he had already been in Rikers for three years. A guy is only supposed to
spend not more than a year at Rikers and then otherwise he’s shipped upstate to
one of the regular prisons. But because of his trial and then appeals and all the
stuff that went on, he was there for three years.
H:
Uh, huh.
R:
So, that is how we got, I and the DeMeo crew, got involved with the Westies. So
from there on, we opened the case and I had the case assigned to Marilyn who had
been my partner on the DeMeo crew.
H:
Help, help me out now. So Coonan and Featherstone --
R:
Westies.
H:
-- are invited to go to a meeting?
R:
Right.
H:
They had a sit-down --
R:
Okay.
H:
-- and then they were assigned to a particular --
R:
DeMeo.
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H:
-- DeMeo.
R:
Right.
H:
So, this was before, obviously Featherstone was in jail.
R:
No, they were on the street. Yeah, before they went to prison.
H:
Right.
R:
Mickey was in and out of prison all the time. He was in and out all the time.
H:
Oh, oh.
R:
He’d be on the street two or three years. Then he’d be in prison for two or three
years. And then he’d be back out again.
H:
Uh, huh.
R
And Coonan would be the same.
H:
Well, it must have been for relatively minor offenses though. They didn’t go in
for murder.
R:
They didn’t. They were not convicted of murder before, right. They did five
years on the counterfeit money case. Well, that’s really the one that they did
together. They both got convicted in the counterfeit case. But then they got
picked up on other charges, separately, and things like that.
H:
And the police would be on the lookout for them I’m sure.
R:
The police monitored the Westies all the time. Mickey Featherstone was the
number one guy that they wanted to get. The New York Police Department
wanted Mickey Featherstone more than anybody in New York City. He was
supposed to be wildest, craziest man in New York City. And he was their target.
And when Tom English wrote this book, The Westies, when you read the book it
sounds like this was strictly the New York Police Department case. Everything in
it is “Detective So-and-So told us this. And Detective So-and-So told us that.
And the New York Police did this and they did that,” when, in fact, it was an FBI
case. And it was Marilyn and I, and we did everything.
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R:
We got assistance, like Frank Pergola, my good friend, the homicide detective,
that worked with us just about the whole time. He worked the whole time that we
were doing the DeMeo group. And Pergola, we asked him to give us a hand in
the Westies case because he was assigned to the US Attorney’s Office. So he just
began working with us. The prosecutor on the Westies was Mary Lee Warren
who’s now in Washington. Right after the Westies case she went to Washington.
As far as I understand it, she’s in charge of all narcotics prosecutions in the
United States. Federal narcotics prosecutions in the United States.
H:
Big job.
R:
Yep. And that’s what her thing is. And to my knowledge she still does it.
H:
Huh.
R:
Oh, I have to tell you an interesting story about the sit-down. The Westies are
very colorful. Because the Westies, Jimmy and Mickey knew that they were
going on Thursday night to this meeting with the bosses, with the Mafia, Jimmy
told everybody. Told Mickey and then the guys “to be at Mickey’s apartment at
seven o’clock Thursday night before they went over for their meeting. And to
bring all the guns, all the grenades, and anything you have, and ammo, bring them
to Mickey’s house.”
And they had like gym bags and they had duffel bags with machine guns in them
and stuff. They had them all up in Mickey’s house, his apartment on the West
Side. And Sissy’s there. All the girls are there.
And here’s the difference between the Italians and the Irish mob. The Italian mob,
the women are not involved. At least they’re not aware of, I mean they may be
involved when the husband’s in trouble or they may do something. Otherwise,
they know nothing about what the business, what the guy is doing, nothing. They
are completely out of the loop.
With the Westies, the wives, girlfriends are up to their eyeballs in every activity.
Murder, everything, they’re in it. Drugs, they’re in there filling the tubes, making
the envelopes, all that. They’re involved to their eyeballs. And that’s how they
are. Well, they’re all up in Mickey’s apartment. I think they were supposed to be
there at six o’clock and they all had their stuff in the living room. It was piled on
the floor. And Jimmy told them, “Mickey and I are going over to this meeting at
Tomaso’s.” And then they told them where it is and they knew where it was. I
mean, they had maps out and everything in case they got mixed up. And, the plan
was, Coonan wasn’t sure that he and Mickey were going to come out alive. They
felt it was a fifty-fifty chance they might be killed there because it’s all about
Ruby Stein.
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R:
They want to know where that book is. That was one of the big things that they
wanted to talk to them about. So, Coonan said, “Because of that, Mickey and I,
we’re going to bring guns. We’re not supposed to, but if they’re going to kill us,
we’re going to kill some of them.” And Mickey told us he had, he had a gun,
small, you know, a PPK or something. I don’t know what they were. He didn’t
say. But he had one strapped on each arm because he didn’t think they would
search his arm. They would search under but he had them taped on his arm up
where they didn’t search. And, that where his guns were. I don’t know where
Coonan’s were. But they both had guns.
And they went into the meeting in the back room at Tomaso’s. The instructions
to the Westies left back at the place which was probably eight of them, seven or
eight Westies back there. And the plan was that they were having a meeting at
eight o’clock. They had to be at the club, at Tomaso’s at eight o’clock that night
for a sit-down. And it was a dinner actually. And with all the hierarchy of the
wise guys.
And if they didn’t get a phone call by nine o’clock from Coonan back to the
apartment, the Westie apartment, Mickey’s apartment, that they were to get in
their cars, with the weapons, come out to 86th Street by Tomaso’s and the
Veterans and Friends Social Club and begin just driving up and down the street
shooting up everything on the street there in that block. Just shoot, just shoot, kill
anybody on the street there. And throw grenades, whatever you have, just use it
all. They considered it was a war against the Mafia. And that was the plan.
In addition to the plan, they had two people go over to have dinner. Young
people who were not in the group but associates of the group. A young girl who
was only seventeen, Alberta Sachs, who we later located down in Texas by the
way. Got her and got her up. And the greatest witness I’ve ever seen on the stand
was Alberta Sachs. I’ve never ever seen a witness that good. I can tell you about
her later.
She was the girl who went and she borrowed Sissy’s high heels because she was
short and she had Sissy’s high heels on. She had never worn heels before. She
didn’t know how to walk in them. And she got all dressed up and one of the guys
was, some guy who we didn’t, you know, we never did anything with this guy.
He just went there. They were just going there and their job was to sit, at eight
o’clock go in and have dinner and just, like, keep your eye on the back room. See
what’s going on. And whatever you could tell, then if something happens, get to a
phone and call us.
But nothing really happened. And, they were there. So that was the plan. If the
call didn’t come in by nine, the gang was to come out and get started blowing the
place up.
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R:
Now you talk to the other guys who were back in the apartment. That’s Billy
Beatty, my other good guy, who was a Westie. He tells us that when they were
back in that apartment. First of all, they were all using drugs. They were using
coke and they were smoking grass, you know, all of that stuff. Pop pills. And he,
“We ended up, we’re sitting there and we’re waiting around. What do you think
we’re going to do, hanging around for a couple of hours?” you know. He says,
“But we were all smoking, grass. We were looped.” He said, “The whole place,
was stoned.” And he says, “We forgot about the nine o’clock thing and Coonan
forgot about it.” And so, no phone call was ever made, but they didn’t go out, and
even if they had, he says, “We wouldn’t be able to see the street.” But the plan
was that they were going to go out and blow the place up.
H:
What a reliable crowd.
R:
Yeah.
H:
Wow.
R:
But that was the Westie approach to it.
H:
Right.
R:
This is, you know, that was their take on it.
H:
(chuckle) That’s incredible.
R:
Yep.
H:
What a crowd. So out of this then, Featherstone and Coonan ended up as part of?
R:
Under the DeMeo crew.
H:
-- under DeMeo.
R:
And they were supposed to get permission anytime they killed anybody and they
were supposed to --. Oh, and then they were supposed to turn in part of their
gambling operation and their shylocking money, drugs. The same rules as the
wise guys.
H:
Yeah.
R:
But they were supposed to start turning in. They never turned in. Ever.
H:
So they just said, “Yes, yes, yes.”
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R:
Never turned any money in.
H:
They’re going along with it.
R:
Yeah. Now the wise guys felt better and the Westies did stop kidnapping wise
guys. So they did make one concession. Which the wise guys were quite happy
about.
H:
I’m sure, I’m sure. Well, now, at some point or another, I gather, after this
Featherstone was framed for murder by some of his own crew?
R:
Here’s the reason that he was. He went away and did time again, when he was
doing the five years on the counterfeit, they shipped him out to a prison in
Wisconsin. Mickey had two choices when he went to jail, he could elect to stay
in the prison or he could elect to go to a site, a psychological facility.
H:
A mental, a mental --.
R:
A mental institution. And he spent more time in the mental institutions because
he said he could, he could operate easier in the mental institutions than he could in
the prison. So, mostly he would go to mental institutions.
He went to one out in Wisconsin. It happened to be a very good one. And one of
the counselors started counseling Mickey and telling him that he could change
himself, his life. That as far as this guy, this counselor, could see that Mickey
when he got a chance to sit down and just talk to him, was normal. “You’re not
crazy. You’re pretty normal, I mean, you know, the feelings you have other
people have. You get mad at people. Other people do.”
And Mickey saw the light. Mickey, while he was there two years, and that was
just before he was released. And he saw the light and said, “You know, Coonan’s
been using me this whole time. And I don’t have anything to show for it. I don’t
have any money. I don’t have anything. And meanwhile, he’s rich. He’s got a
beautiful home down in South Jersey, and all that.”
So Mickey said, “I want to get out of the mob. I don’t want to be in the gang, in
the Westies any more. And I want to go straight.” He was trying. He knew he
couldn’t just walk away from them because that would be impossible. But he was
trying to keep his distance, particularly from Coonan, then even from the crew.
And they were picking up on it, that he wasn’t the same guy any more. And that
bothered them, that bothered the crew.
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R:
And it bothered Coonan. And finally Coonan kind of indicated that “Maybe we
have to do something about Mickey.” And Mickey, definitely, can sit and tell you
that there’s no way that the kid who did the killing that Mickey was supposed to
have done, that was convicted on, did he look anything like this. I mean, he
didn’t have blond hair. This kid was all dressed up to look like Mickey. He
didn’t have a mustache, but he wore a mustache that day. And he had a blond wig
on, and he’s Mickey’s height.
And the cops, and people on the streets, “He’s a blond-headed guy about fivefoot, eight.” And the cops just -- Featherstone.
H:
Huh.
R:
Mickey, he has been trying to get away from them and they framed --. He feels
they framed him.
H:
So Featherstone, then decided he was going to work with you.
R:
Oh, well, then, he did. Then he totally cooperated with us. Yeah, yeah.
H:
And he testified and --.
R:
Testified.
H:
The Westies, and everybody. Who went away?
R:
All the Westies. I guess we had nine guys on trial. Everyone was convicted. No,
one guy was acquitted. Why was that? I forget why that guy was acquitted, but
he wasn’t really a Westie, he was an associate of theirs but we didn’t have really
good evidence on him. We put him in because we thought we might get him, we
might include him. But, the jury didn’t find him guilty, so they acquitted him. So
I think we had nine on trial, and eight were convicted including Coonan and the
rest. Coonan’s wife got fifteen years. She was on trial too.
H:
-- she was on trial too, yeah.
R:
And then Tommy Collins was convicted. And his wife was convicted.
H:
So they’re still away now as far as is known?
R:
Well, Jimmy is. Jimmy got, I don’t know, sixty years or something like that. Just
about everybody’s still away. Tommy Collins I think got out. He was on
narcotics charges, so we had him on narcotics.
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H:
Uh, huh. So, what’s happened to Featherstone then? End of the story?
R:
Well, each witness, all our witnesses, I mean if they’re in the crew, if they’re part
of the conspiracy, they’d each have to plead to one count of RICO which is
twenty years. And each one of them has to plead, take a plea as part of their
agreement. And if they violate the terms of the agreement, they’re just charged
twenty years. And they know it.
H:
Uh, huh. So he’s disappeared somewhere?
R:
Mickey?
H:
Yeah.
R:
Yeah.
H:
And, so far so good. No, no word that he’s?
R:
Oh, I’m sure he’s great. His wife is the sharpest thing on two feet. She was, after
they moved and were relocated in the hinterland, she’s become very successful in
business.
H:
Uh, huh. Good. So that’s the end of the Westies then as we know them?
R:
Uh, well, yeah it is. I mean, there’s all sorts of things that you could go on about
their activities, but essentially, yeah.
H:
Yeah, they’re, they’re legendary and --
R:
Yep.
H:
-- there’s, there’s plenty of, plenty of stories.
R:
We had one guy --. Just to give you an idea how scary the Westies were though, I
mean, we’re joking and kidding like about how they’re kind of nice guys.
They’re not, they weren’t nice guys. I mean, they’d kill people and they, Billy,
this friend of mine now, witness, when we arrested him, he said immediately he
knew we were coming. He saw that program. I told you when Mickey, the day
we took Mickey out of Rikers and Sissy and the kids were already gone the day
before, and that night NBC News had a fifteen-minute special after the six o’clock
news about Mickey Featherstone. And that he’s with the government.
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R:
And, well, Billy, who was still on the street, saw that and here’s what he did. He
was living in Jersey. Hazlet? Well, it’s right next to Hazlet. Coonan lived in
Hazlet, New Jersey, and Billy lived in the town next to it. I forget the name of it.
Billy was living there and he had his wife and five kids. And they were all sitting
at home because he used to tell his kids, he wanted them to not be bad guys. He
was trying to teach them to be good kids. They had no idea that he was involved
with anybody like that. Just couldn’t imagine it. I’m talking about his family.
And his wife knew. Angela was involved with everything on the street. She’s
Puerto Rican.
H:
Uh, huh.
R:
And she’s a hot ticket.
H:
What’s Billy’s last name? I’m sorry.
R:
Beatty. B-e-a-t-t-y. And they were sitting that night waiting for Jeopardy to
come on TV. Billy used to make the kids all sit there and watch Jeopardy
because he felt they could learn a lot from that program. And they used to sit
every night and, if he was there, they would, which was most nights. He wasn’t
out carousing or anything.
When that came on and Mickey came on, Billy saw it come on, and they knew, of
course, Mickey Featherstone. Picture of Mickey, and all that stuff. “He’s been
taken by the FBI.” And Billy says, “Kids, come here. You see that guy on
television? You see this program right now? Everybody sit down. That guy’s a
friend of mine. And I did some things with him. And I know that the police or the
FBI will be coming here for me. So I just want you to know what’s going to
happen.” And they all sat there and watched it and he just said, “Sorry to say, but
that’s what I was involved in.”
H:
Huh.
R:
After they killed Ruby Stein and they had money, all the Westies had … Billy
held a hundred and fifty thousand of Ruby’s money. And he had it on the street.
And then each week, he had it out for a long time. And, and then he’d go around
and make the collections. Well, not long after Ruby was killed and the big sitdown with the crew, for some reason, Coonan didn’t trust Billy. So he allegedly
put a contract out on Billy to have him killed by the Westies.
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R:
But instead of killing him, they told him. Somebody called him and said, “Billy,
Jimmy wants us to clip you. We’re just telling you so you can get away or
whatever you want to do because we don’t want to kill you.” And he’s a terrific
guy. So he says, “Okay.” He went up to the mountains, he lived in the mountains,
in the Adirondacks for three years, hiding out from them. And, out in the woods.
But before he left, he went around and saw the people he could see, that he
bumped into. These are people who owned stores and things. He would go and
he told them, “You know that ten grand that you owe me, forget about it.” He
goes down the street, “You know that five grand you owe me, forget about it. If
they come around, tell them you paid me.” And then he called up the others on
the phone and he says, “The money you owe me, forget about it, and if they come
around and ask anything about it, just tell them you gave it to me.” So he erased
all the debts and then he took off.
H:
(chuckle)
R:
(chuckle) So if they weren’t, weren’t sure they wanted to kill him, --
H:
(chuckle) They were sure.
R:
-- they were sure now. So it was funny.
H:
How did you get back into, into action though? He disappeared for a while.
R:
Well, after three years, he just felt that it was, everything had cooled off from
whatever happened with Ruby and he just went back to Jersey and --
H:
Went on about his business.
R:
-- started living back down there again and that was, as far as he knew, no one
was out trying to get him, so he was okay.
H:
What a crowd, what a crowd. Did you have one more? You had mentioned
another, another case.
R:
Uh, Well, in the middle of this, we did a second case. And that was Marilyn’s
case, but I helped her on that.
H:
Uh, huh.
R:
On a corruptions case. Police corruption.
H:
What’s Marilyn’s full name?
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R:
Oh, Lucht, L-u-c-h-t.
H:
And she’s retired now?
R:
I have to call her up. I don’t know. She was going to retire at the end of the year,
but Inger keeps saying, “Here, will you call and find out if she retired, what she’s
doing.”
66