"With the unions behind us, we could shut down the city, or the country for that matter, if we needed to, to get our way."
-- Genovese soldier Vincent (Fish) Cafaro, in 1988 Senate testimony
Peter (Blackheart) Savino, an associate of the Genovese crime family, was a man with a mission and a machine gun. As he drove down Scott Avenue in Brooklyn, N.Y., he was furious with PECO Corp., a window manufacturer. The company, which had ties to the Genovese family, had started to succumb to overtures by the smaller Lucchese clan. This was cutting Savino out of his kickbacks. So with the blessing of family higher-ups, Savino and a fellow gangster stormed the company's storage yard, pulled out their machine guns and blew to bits more than 200 windows that were sitting on an open truck. For PECO's owners, happy to still be breathing, it was a pointed lesson that so many businessmen have come to learn: you don't mess with the Genovese gang.
That episode, which took place in November 1983, came to light because Savino later became a rare traitor in the Genovese ranks. In 1987 he wore a concealed microphone to help prosecutors build evidence for an indictment last May of Genovese boss Vincent (Chin) Gigante and other leading mobsters. The charge: controlling a labor union and rigging $143 million worth of contracts for windows in public housing since 1978. The Mob is not taking this act of betrayal lying down, but Savino may. Two weeks ago, a gasoline bomb was found on the seat of his wife's Pontiac Grand Prix in their Brooklyn driveway.
These are difficult times for the 25 families, or "brugads," that make up America's Cosa Nostra (rough translation: our thing). During the 1980s, some 1,200 Mafia operatives were convicted, including the leaderships of New York City's five brugads and 11 smaller Italian gangs in cities ranging from Denver to Kansas City to New Orleans. The bloodletting has decimated two major New York City families (Colombo and Bonanno) and enabled Gambino family boss John Gotti, a flamboyant newcomer, to rise up overnight as America's leading media mobstar.
Yet the underworld's most powerful force is the quieter and more sophisticated Genovese clan, with its entrenched army of more than 1,500 "made" members and associated underworld entrepreneurs. "You keep hearing all this crap about Gotti being the boss of the bosses," says Richard Ross, one of the FBI's leading Mafia experts, "but Genovese has always been the country's most powerful family." Says Joseph Coffey, a top investigator at the New York State Organized Crime Task Force: "The Genovese gang more or less invented labor racketeering. I consider them the Ivy League of the underworld."
Organized crime is an estimated $100 billion-a-year untaxed business operated by groups ranging from motorcycle gangs to Asian drug triads. But the Italian Mafia is still the only group that has infiltrated hundreds of legitimate U.S. industries and labor unions. Despite the wave of new prosecutions, the Cosa Nostra -- and particularly the Genovese branch -- is showing few signs of abandoning these businesses, which today are far more lucrative than such traditional vices as gambling and loan-sharking. "In terms of the Genovese family, I'm afraid we haven't even made a dent," concedes investigator Coffey.