Sam: "Jack, what happened to Pickles two weeks after he broke away from me?"
Jack: "He got killed."
Marty: "The guy in Elizabeth, huh?"
Sam: "Yeah, he was away two weeks. I told him that was what was going to happen to him. So when people don't want to listen . . ."
Marty: "He tried to be a big man?"
The dialogue sounds like a Grade-B gangster movie on late-night television, but the script is from life. It is a chillingly real conversation that took place among three Mafia hoodlums in their hangout. The subject of the session: methods of dispatching associates to a better world. This and other candid peeps at organized crime became available last week when a 2,000-page transcript of FBI tape recordings was filed in Federal District Court in Newark, N.J. The tapes were presented by the district attorney in connection with extortion-conspiracy charges against Simone Rizzo ("Sam the Plumber") De-Cavalcante, a New Jersey Mafia leader. The FBI had bugged four mob hangouts in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, including the office of DeCavalcante's Kenilworth, N.J., plumbing-supply firm.
The transcript referred to eight murders. These facts, however, cannot be used to prosecute anyone because such bugging and wiretapping was illegal at the time. Subsequent legislation legalizing eavesdropping under certain circumstances is not retroactive.
Protecting People. Much of the recorded conversation centered on the fine points of murder, and it was clear that, in the underworld, neatness counts. The 1951 gunning down of Willie Moretti in a Cliffside Park, N.J., restaurant was distasteful to Angelo DeCarlo, who had a better idea: "Now like you got four or five guys in the room. You know they're going to kill you. They say, 'Tony Boy wants to shoot you in the head and leave you in the street, or would you rather take this [a fatal drug], we put you behind your wheel, we don't have to embarrass your family.' That's what they should have done to Willie. Sure, that man never should have been disgraced like that." Added DeCavalcante: "It leaves a bad taste. We're out to protect people." At times, the mob seems to have a conscience.
Mobsters were overheard deploring the 1962 hand-grenade slaying of "Cadillac Charlie" Cavallaro in Youngstown, Ohio, because the blast also killed the victim's eleven-year-old son.
Another time, DeCarlo told of the stylish dispatching of a cooperative victim named Itchie: "I said, 'You gotta go, why not let me hit you right in the heart and you won't feel a thing?' He said, Tm innocent, Ray, but if you've got to do it . . .' So I hit him in the heart and it went right through him." Some victims were less cooperative, such as the one many years ago described by Anthony Boiardo, son of Ruggiero ("the Boot") Boiardo: "The Boot hit him with a hammer. The guy goes down and he comes up. So I got a crowbar this big, Ray. Eight shots in the head. What do you think he finally did to me? He spit at me."