Interview with Former Special Agent of the FBI Arthur Ruffels ( ) on February 22, 2007 By Brian Hollstein

Transcription

1 Society of Former Special Agents of the FBI, Inc Interview with Former Special Agent of the FBI Arthur Ruffels ( ) on By Brian Hollstein Edited for repetitions, spelling by Sandra Robinette on May 5, Final edit from Mr. Ruffels s corrections by Sandra Robinette on July 9, Brian R. Hollstein/ H: Okay. Today s date is the 22nd of February, 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.

2 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. 2

3 Page 3 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? 3

4 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. 69 th 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. H: Good. 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. 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? 4

5 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. 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. 5

6 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. H: Right. 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. 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. H: Sure; 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. 6

7 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. 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. 7

8 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 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. 8

9 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. 9

10 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. 10

11 Page 11 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. 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. 11

12 Page 12 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. 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? 12

13 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. 13

14 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. 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. 14

15 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 86 th Street, Brooklyn, which is the Broadway of wise guys. 86 th 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? 15

16 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. 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. 16

17 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. 17

18 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. 18

19 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. 19

20 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. 20

21 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. 21

22 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. R: And we then have to apply his information. He basically has to guarantee what s going to happen before it happens. 22

23 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. 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. 23