Matt Birkbeck - The Quiet Don: The Untold Story of Mafia Kingpin Russell Bufalino

Praise for

D ECONSTRUCTING S AMMY

Birkbeck has killer leads, gripping kickers, and sensational descriptions. This cinematic book reads more like a detective story than a traditional life of.

New York Times Book Review

Tremendous... Birkbeck tells the epic of Sammy Davis, Jr.... from his Harlem boyhood to his wrenching deathbed (he died of cancer in 1990) in his Beverly Hills mansion, where various hangers-on, seeing the circling vultures, stripped his corpse even before it was a corpse.

Los Angeles Times Book Review

A B EAUTIFUL C HILD

Matt Birkbeck created a beautiful masterpiece.

True Crime Book Reviews

A D EADLY S ECRET

Mr. Birkbeck presents a startling inside look at the politics of police work that can place roadblocks in the place of justice.

Westchester County Times

THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Group (USA)

375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

USA | Canada | UK | Ireland | Australia | New Zealand | India | South Africa | China

Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

For more information about the Penguin Group, visit penguin.com.

THE QUIET DON

A Berkley Book / published by arrangement with the author

Copyright 2013 by Matt Birkbeck.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the authors rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

Berkley Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group.

BERKLEY is a registered trademark of Penguin Group (USA).

The B design is a trademark of Penguin Group (USA).

For information, address: The Berkley Publishing Group,

a division of Penguin Group (USA),

375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

eBook ISBN: 978-1-101-61826-4

PUBLISHING HISTORY

Berkley premium edition / October 2013

Cover photo by AP Photos / Bufalino.

Cover design by George Long.

The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

Most Berkley Books are available at special quantity discounts for bulk purchases for sales, promotions, premiums, fund-raising, or educational use. Special books, or book excerpts, can also be created to fit specific needs. For details, write: Special.Markets@us.penguingroup.com.

For Donna, Matthew and Christopher, the loves of my life.

A CKNOWLEDGMENTS

A number of people helped make this book a reality, and special thanks go to my friend and former boss Peter Leffler, of the AllentownMorning Call, whose support and encouragement allowed me to follow this story; Nathanial Akerman, former assistant U.S. attorney in New York; Ralph Rick Periandi, deputy commissioner of the Pennsylvania State Police (retired); my attorney, Jay Kenoff, of Kenoff and Machtinger in Los Angeles, California, for his constructive counsel and continued support; and my editor, Natalee Rosenstein, who published my first two books and welcomed me back for a third go-round.

P ROLOGUE

T he old man with the droopy right eye sat slumped on the witness chair pretending to be a nobody.

At five feet ten inches and nearing eighty years of age, he sure didnt look like anyone important, not with his ruffled suit and tired features. So it was hard to believe for anyone looking at him in the courtroom at the federal district courthouse in Manhattan in October 1981 that he could be a threat to anyone, much less be the man responsible for the murder of Jimmy Hoffa.

But federal prosecutors had circled around the old man following one of the most intense and thorough investigations in the history of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. More than two hundred FBI agents were assigned to the Hoffa case within hours after the former head of the Teamsters union had vanished into thin air on July 30, 1975. Over the next three years, agents conducted hundreds of interviews and reviewed countless documents, and prosecutors convened several grand juries. In addition, there were two congressional hearings and a separate Senate committee investigation. But all were frustrated and doomed to failure by the lack of evidence and the inability to get any one of the alleged conspirators to talk, chief among them the elderly man now sitting on the witness stand, who preferred to discuss the joys of dipping fresh, crisp loaves of Italian bread into a well-made tomato sauce.

So, instead, the government agents took a different tack and harassed their suspects, a small group of men long affiliated with organized crime, charging them with anything they could in the hope of pressuring them to tell the truth but otherwise feeling content that getting them off the street and inside a prison cell was an acceptable alternative.

Rosario Russell Bufalino was no exception.

Jack Napoli ran to the FBI seeking their protection in 1976 after Bufalino threatened to personally strangle him with his bare hands. Napoli unwisely used Bufalinos name to buy $25,000 worth of diamonds, and then bounced the check on the merchant, who subsequently sent word to Bufalino. Napoli was summoned to the Vesuvio restaurant, in midtown Manhattan, to explain himself. But it was Bufalino who did most of the talking, and everything he said, including the promise of what he would do to the six-foot-six, two-hundred-forty pound Napoli if he didnt return the diamonds, was captured on a recording device Napoli wore, courtesy of the FBI.

Im going to kill you, cocksucker, Bufalino roared, and Im going to do it myself and Im going to jail just for you.

Bufalinos threat was somewhat prophetic. He was indicted on federal extortion charges, found guilty and served four years in prison, where he stewed over Napoli and remained so transfixed with the informant that he enlisted a cell mate to kill him. But the FBI found out about that plan too and charged Bufalino again, this time with attempted murder as he exited the prison.

The new charges didnt bring any headlines. The media barely acknowledged Bufalino, who may have had business interests in New York, but he was, after all, from Pennsylvania of all places, which didnt warrant the often rabid media attention heaped on other organized crime figures who hailed from Manhattan, Brooklyn, Staten Island and New Jersey, such as Crazy Joe Gallo, Carmine Galante, Vito Genovese, Carlo Gambino and his successor, Paul Castellano.

But there were a select few who knew about the old man, and among them was Nathanial Akerman, a young assistant U.S. attorney who had been prosecuting organized crime cases for several years and had access to the sensitive files detailing Bufalinos history.

He first appeared on the FBIs radar in 1953, when his name was mentioned in a secret report filed by the Philadelphia bureau as part of the FBIs new Top Hoodlum Program. Over the next quarter century, Bufalinos name continually resurfaced in the FBI reports, detailing his hold over the garment industry in Pennsylvania and New York; his control over Jimmy Hoffa and the Teamsters union, especially its rich pension fund; and Bufalinos role in organizing the infamous meeting of organized crime chieftains held in Apalachin, New York, in 1957, the very meeting that finally introduced the Mafia,