Jimmy Calandra: I'm from Brooklyn, New York,
Bensonhurst.
The neighborhood is run by the Italian mafia.
One day, April 4th,
my friend John Polio was murdered.
The kid Michael Hamster
was taking credit for his murder.
It goes around in the neighborhood,
this kid's bragging that he killed John Polio,
you know, so I wanted some payback.
I go to Joey Calco and Pauly Gulino.
And Pauly G. gave us a 380,
me and Joey, and we go hunt
for Michael Hamster.
We see him get into Bobby DeCicco's car.
We follow him.
He stops at a red light on 17th Avenue and Benson.
He rolls down the window 'cause he thinks
he's a tough guy and all of a sudden Joey
puts out the pistol,
and he starts unloading on him,
pop-pop-pop-pop-pop-pop.
The kid, Michael Hamster,
is jumping one leg across the street like hopping.
The kid Joey Calco with the shotgun boom
hits him and he falls.
Joey hands me the gun.
I put it down my pants.
Joey takes off.
As we're driving, there's a cop car.
This is a true story.
Therefore, he pulls us over.
Now, we're a little nervous.
I got a gun down my pants, you know,
we just shot this kid 5 times and
all of a sudden on the cop's radio we hear,
"Man shot, 17th and Benson."
Police Radio: All units report.
Jimmy Calandra: The cop goes like this,
"Today's your lucky day."
And he just takes off.
Phew.
He had us right there.
Narrator: It is 1992 and most of the old bosses of
the five families of Cosa Nostra are in prison.
Fearing life sentences and payback from their own side,
gangsters everywhere start cooperating with
the United States government.
Sammy Gravano: As part of my cooperation,
I told the government about my life of crimes,
including the fact that I participated in 19 murders.
Narrator: Which leads to the take down of the
most famous boss of modern times, John Gotti.
But the remnants of the five families remain
loose on the streets,
trying to rebuild on the ashes,
and none is more determined and dangerous
than the Bonanno family,
which begins their ascent below law enforcement's radar.
These people are witnesses to that secret history,
stepping out of the shadows to tell
their story first-hand.
A few remain concealed for personal safety,
fearful of an organization that even in
the 1990s is fully capable of resurrecting itself,
like the Bonanno's.
Jim Walden: I think it's fair to say that 2 events
brought the Bonanno family to the edge of extinction.
First obviously its boss was murdered,
Carmine Galante, famous image of him lying dead
with a cigar still in his mouth.
But at the same time there was the Donnie Brasco
infiltration and subsequent prosecution.
Agent Pistone: This operation really kicked
the Bonanno's in the arse.
We kind of really decimated them.
Mitra Hormozi: That was a huge blight on the Bonanno
organized crime family.
As a result they were kicked off the commission.
It was a major embarrassment.
Narrator: The commission is the board of executives
that oversees the five families of the mob:
Gambino, Colombo, Lucchese, Genovese and Bonanno.
They call the shots determining who lives
and who dies.
Ironically, the Bonanno family's expulsion from
the commission turns out to be their big break.
Agent Pistone: The FBI and other law enforcement
agencies moved on to other cases so they didn't really
keep a clamp on the guys that were
left in the family.
Jim Walden: Their headlines were about the Gambino's and
about the Lucchese's, and about the Genovese family,
and the internal war in Colombo family.
Edward McDonald: You know, Gotti's gone,
Castellano's gone.
And the Colombo family,
they're having a Colombo family war.
The Genovese family: Fat Tony is gone,
he's been convicted.
The Lucchese family is in total disarray.
Chin Gigante is on the run, he's been indicted
or about to be indicted.
Jim Walden: These different problems within
these families allowed the Bonanno's to
continue to exist to keep a lot of its turf,
and for a period of time to fly low on the radar
to give it a chance to rebuild its infrastructure,
and that's exactly what they did.
Narrator: While Bonanno boss Joe Massino
is in prison serving 6 years for racketeering,
his subordinate, old school gangster Anthony Spero,
takes over daily operations.
Spero is one of the last major mob figures still on
the street, and a believer in traditional
mafia values of secrecy, respect and murder.
Jim Walden: He had strong connections with
the other families, and he had the respect
of lower level members.
Detective Dades: He was a gentleman to
law enforcement, and he was very well respected,
you know, in the neighborhood.
Jim Walden: He was known to host an extravagant
fireworks show every year for members
of the community.
Detective Dades: But he was a lethal guy
and he would kill you.
Jim Walden: He was a bit of an eccentric guy though.
Anthony Spero: Come on baby, come on.
Detective Dades: He was very big into pigeon races
and pigeon coops and whatever you do with pigeons.
Jim Walden: They would fly in a big sweeping flock
around the neighborhood and ultimately
come right back home.
Jimmy Calandra: He was going like this, voof,
and all the pigeons are following him,
you see them flying.
Jim Walden: And if you think about it,
it's almost a metaphor for Spero's criminal
organization, where he's releasing not pigeons
but villains, murderers, thugs, out on the streets,
all for them to make money and to bring it back to him.
Narrator: Spero excels at taking children
off the streets of his neighborhood
and grooming them for a life of crime and violence.
Kids like Jimmy Calandra,
who grows up in the Bensonhurst neighborhood
of Brooklyn in the 1980s at a time
when the mafia is fighting for its life
against law enforcement but still has the power
and glamour to make a big impression on little boys.
Calandra and his best friends are nothing
but kids when they start their journey
into the underworld.
Jimmy Calandra: The core group of my friends
was Pauly Gulino, Tommy Reynolds, Joey Calco, me,
and Fabrizio DeFrancisci.
We were troubled kids in the neighborhood,
we were bad kids.
You know, we decided to form a crew.
Jim Walden: They got tattoos on their ankles
to label themselves number 1 through number 7.
Jimmy Calandra: We were making a pact
with each other.
You know, we were all in the same crew together,
you know.
One for all, all for one.
Narrator: The boys of Bath Avenue have each other's
backs in a Brooklyn neighborhood steeped
in the code of Cosa Nostra.
All five families have a foothold here.
Jimmy Calandra: Bath Avenue was a known avenue for
mob-related activity.
Detective Dades: Bath Avenue was filled
with social clubs, you know.
There was three on the block.
You knew who were the guys that were connected,
who were the guys that were up and coming.
Jimmy Calandra: You know, I was a young kid
growing up around wise guys.
The guys making the money, you know every time
they see us, here, here's 20, you know.
As soon as I leave my house, I got 20 dollars.
I go to the corner, I hang out, you know?
What do I got to work for?
We had Nick's Candy Store right around
the corner from my apartment.
That's where we would all come together.
Detective Dades: You know, there was a group of guys
on every other block, no matter what time,
day and night, there was always somebody there.
That corner was home base.
Jimmy Calandra: And we would do errands for them.
They would give us a couple dollars,
"Here, go up the block and get me two French bread."
Say they need someone's window broke,
thrown us the keys, "Go wash my car,"
whatever the case may be.
You knew they controlled the neighborhood,
you know, with their walk and talks.
In the neighborhood, you know who was who.
You know, these were the guys that I looked up to.
Jim Walden: Imagine that you are an eight-year-old boy
in a working class neighborhood in Brooklyn.
Most of the men and women that you know are struggling
to make ends meet, they're working their fingers to the
bone but what you see down the street at the
social club are Cadillac's pulling up and
men dressed in $500 suits getting in and out
of the Cadillac's.
Jimmy Calandra: These men were my father figures.
You know, if I needed anything
they just helped me.
If we had a problem, we knew where to go.
Jim Walden: These kids really did start as kids.
Some of them were 8 or 9 years old when they first
started running numbers at the social clubs.
Detective Dades: Social clubs were really big.
Gambling parlors, you know, were really big.
They were bookmakers and if you tried to use
the payphone on a Sunday they'd cut your hands off.
Jimmy Calandra: We'd do straight bets,
we'd do parlays;
we were gambling every football game,
Sundays, everything.
I was loaning out money.
I was a little kid.
I was maybe 13 years old.
We thought we were somebody, you know,
and we were looking up to these guys and
we actually thought we were doing something.
Jim Walden: 8 or 9 they're running numbers,
12, 13, 14 they're parking cars and
hiding weapons and moving money,
and they move up the ranks to do more violent
and more profitable things.
Narrator: As the Bath Avenue boys grow up
what starts with trips to the bakery ends
in crime and violence.
Jimmy Calandra: As we got older,
we just got more dangerous.
You know, so instead of boys, now we're just a crew.
Narrator: It's now the 80s, the era of crack cocaine,
a drug that ignites rampant street violence in
New York City and the Bath Avenue Crew fits right in.
Fat Sal: The Bath Avenue Crew,
they would smoke drugs, rob drug dealers,
and then they got into the drug business,
started extorting drug dealers.
Jimmy Calandra: We were doing bookmaking,
we had the cocaine business on beepers,
we had the pot business.
We were stealing cars.
I was doing banks, I was doing burglaries.
Detective Dades: They're out there earning because
being a good earner is a way to get in good graces,
you know, by sending money up the ladder,
getting some respect from some of the wise guys.
Jim Walden: So the Bath Avenue Crew was
embraced by the Bonanno family as associates because
they were good at their jobs.
And the job of an associate is to earn money
and to engage in violent acts when they're needed,
and this group really excelled at both.
Detective Dades: They were a gruesome bunch of guys.
Jim Walden: Fabrizio Defrancisci,
one of the most ruthless enforcers the group had.
He took a blowtorch and literally tortured one
crack dealer who was using product on the street.
Tommy Reynolds, out of anger,
picked up a fork and jabbed it in someone's eye.
That's how violent these guys were.
Fat Sal: They killed a lot of innocent people;
they committed a double homicide for I think an
eight ball of cocaine.
Jim Walden: They were doing exactly what associates
had been doing, maybe more violently,
but doing for many, many years.
Jimmy Calandra: We're Spero's muscle.
And when Spero needs something done,
we are at his disposal.
Narrator: The acting boss of the Bonanno family
soon puts them to work.
Jim Walden: Spero had a daughter
in the neighborhood.
One day there was a drug addict
named Vincent Bickelman.
He broke into her house and stole a necklace.
Jimmy Calandra: After he stole it,
he went to somewhere on 86th street to sell it.
It had Jill's name on the necklace, it said,
"Jill," and it got back to Spero.
He broke into a Bonanno boss's daughter's house.
Jim Walden: Spero went to Gulino to pass the
order to kill Bickelman and of course,
Gulino saw this as his opportunity to get
inducted into the Bonanno family.
Detective Dades: Pauly Gulino was
the leader of that group.
Vicious guy.
Jimmy Calandra: He didn't give a (bleep).
He wasn't afraid of nobody,
he was a ballsy kid he was a tough kid,
and a lot of wise guys were afraid of him.
So when a thief inadvertently robs the
daughter of Bonanno family crime boss,
Anthony Spero, the Bath Avenue boys get the call.
Jimmy Calandra: It was a big opportunity for us.
This was a very, very important piece of work to
do for Anthony Spero because this was gonna get
Pauly Gulino recognized and hopefully become a made
member in the family.
Agent Pistone: You know, there are certain rules to
become a made guy and one of them is you have to earn
your button, you have to kill somebody.
Jimmy Calandra: One day Pauly Gulino's driving
around, he saw the kid and he runs up on the kid,
Vincent Bickelman, right around the corner
from the police station, right off the corner,
he jumped out and he just shot the kid 5 times.
That's it, drop.
We all went to the bar,
Pauly told all of us what happened,
we celebrated, we were drinking,
are you kidding we had a great (bleep) time.
Narrator: The Bickelman murder cements
the Bath Avenue Crew's reputation.
It tells everyone on the street there's a new
gang in town, guys who are on their
way to becoming made men in the Bonanno family.
Detective Dades: They want people to know that
they just killed this guy because you're recognized
now by made guys, by captains, that you're
capable of doing things like that.
Jimmy Calandra: We ain't kids no more.
You know, we're looking to you know
move up to the next level.
Narrator: The members of the Bath Avenue Crew want
to join the Bonanno family at a crucial moment:
just as Joe Massino,
the family boss, gets released from prison
after serving six years for racketeering.
Edward McDonald: So Joe Massino gets out of
prison and all the other bosses have been convicted.
They're replaced by underlings,
people who were not that significant.
So Joe comes out and he is someone who is revered.
He is like the last don, the one well-respected boss.
Agent Devecchio: Unlike a lot of organized
crime members, Massino was very friendly.
Very affable.
Mitra Hormozi: Very jovial,
beloved by members of his family.
Agent Sallet: He worked with John Gotti,
they were close friends and close
confidants in truck hijacking.
Narrator: He's also one more made guy with
a violent past, routinely ordering associates
like Sal Polisi to use their muscle.
Sal Polisi: The Bonanno family had a case running,
and Joe Massino who later became the boss,
called Foxy and I said,
"Look, you gotta do us a favor.
There's a witness you gotta go,
you gotta go beat this guy up.
I want you to break his arms and legs to give
a message, give a beating so that he wouldn't testify."
So we beat this guy up with bats,
broke his arms and legs, only to find out
he was the wrong guy, he was the father.
And then when Massino called us in for a meeting he said,
"Look, you beat up the wrong guy, but it's okay.
The witness disappeared anyway."
Narrator: But Massino doesn't
just subcontract his killing,
he's done it himself.
His claim to fame is as one of the shooters in
the Three Capos Murder, an infamous gangland massacre
from the early 1980's.
Agent Pistone: Three captains wanted to take
over the family: Sonny Red Indelicato,
Phil Lucky Giaccone, and Dominick Trinchera.
Mitra Hormozi: Massino goes to the commission,
he then gets permission to go ahead
and kill the three captains.
Narrator: But when Massino gets out of prison in
1992 after six years, he's faced with a new reality.
He needs to keep a low profile.
He recognizes the mistakes of other bosses like
John Gotti and Joe Colombo who spent
too much time in public or got caught on tape
by electronic listening devices.
So Massino reforms the Bonanno family starting with
his own extreme variation on that tried
and true code of silence.
Mitra Hormozi: No one is allowed to say his name.
Instead, he says anyone who wants to refer
to the boss must just use the visual hand to the ear.
Edward McDonald: Just like Chin Gigante in the
Genovese family, you had to touch your chin,
well Joey was gonna be called the ear.
Mitra Hormozi: Also, he did not go to weddings
and funerals where people would be photographed.
Agent Sallet: He doesn't use a cell phone,
he doesn't use a pager, he doesn't use his home phone.
Narrator: He also takes the extreme measure
of ending a decades old tradition,
closing down the places that were once the
hub of all mob activity: social clubs.
Agent Devecchio: For many, many years I'm sure they
thought they were invincible in social clubs,
but we managed to bug a number of social clubs
and overheard a lot of incriminating information.
Agent Sallet: Joe Massino learned
what he should and should not do.
Narrator: At the same time,
he encourages a major new front in the
way the mob earns money:
Wall Street.
Agent Barrows: 90s brought a tremendous bull market,
enormous amounts of money and some loose regulations.
Everybody wanted to be in the market,
everybody was making money who was in the market.
So it was really a perfect and fertile ground
for organized crime.
Narrator: By 1993, Bonanno family boss,
Joe Massino,
is the last of his kind, an old school Godfather
who believes in the code of silence and secrecy
characterizing the Golden Age of the American mob.
But he's also an innovator when it comes to earning,
seizing new opportunities not in
Bensonhurst but on Wall Street.
Edward McDonald: By the time Joe got out of
prison the heady days of labor racketeering were
pretty much coming to an end.
So the big, big money that the mafia was making
through labor racketeering was really just not available
anymore and they began to move towards Wall Street.
Agent Barrows: In the 90s, it was
certainly a bull market.
There were tons of new companies,
the internet was sort of new and burgeoning
at the time and certainly where there's a lot of
easy money to be made you can be rest assured
that the mob's gonna be there to make it.
Narrator: Legitimate stockbrokers must follow
the rules of the Securities and Exchange Commission,
but not Joe Massino and the Bonanno family.
Fraud is the key to their success.
Agent Barrows: The underbelly of Wall Street
is where the mob operates.
That's where the boiler rooms come in.
These boiler rooms are filled with very young kids,
unsophisticated kids, who have one task and that
is to sell stock and to say whatever it is they
need to say, follow whatever script they have
in front of them to make sure they accomplish that task.
Most of the boiler rooms look like New Year's Eve
party had been thrown the night before,
often scantily clad women walking around,
stacks of papers, cigarettes, alcohol.
Looks nothing like you'd imagine
that a brokerage house looks like.
Narrator: The game is called "Pump and Dump,"
and it works like this: mobbed up traders acquire
large blocks of stocks worth 5 dollars or less.
By controlling supply, they increase demand,
artificially inflating the stock's price.
Then they sell those stocks to unsuspecting
investors for much more than the original value,
in turn earning an enormous profit.
Agent Barrows: The mob makes sure things stay
in order and if they don't successfully do their job,
they're going to get a beating.
Sal Polisi: Violence, threats,
extortion, blackmail;
the mob was a master at bullying.
Salmieri: The fear of the violence is
what keeps everybody in line.
Agent Barrows: They make sure those boiler room kids
keep that stock put away.
They sell it and they don't let it get sold
back to the market.
Agent Barrows: It's paid in cash and it's undisclosed.
There's no paper trail, nobody knows about it.
Get a bag of cash on Friday.
Narrator: The cash is divvied up,
some going into the brokers pocket,
the rest going to the bosses.
Raking in the cash for Joe Massino of the
Bonanno family is this guy, Robert Lino.
Agent Barrows: Lino was the muscle at the higher level.
He was the Capo.
He was the one who represented
them in sit-downs.
He was the one who essentially ran a
investment firm in lower Manhattan
called DMN Capital,
which was under the auspices of the Bonanno family.
Narrator: To rat out the Bonanno family's corruption
on Wall Street, Agent Kevin Barrows
needs to get inside DMN Capital.
Agent Barrows: It was too risky in this day and
age to have an agent try to go undercover,
because you had to know somebody.
It wasn't the days of, you know, Joe Pistone,
where it was somewhat easier to infiltrate.
My partner and I began to really develop a lot
of co-operating witnesses.
Narrator: But not just any cooperating witness.
His informant works as a mole inside
the mob's boiler rooms.
With his help, Operation Uptick is born.
Agent Barrows: The goal of an informant
is always to get the next person up in the chain.
As we always say, "We gotta eat our way up
the chain and get to the top."
Narrator: The Feds want Bonanno Boss Joe Massino,
but before they can reach the top of that food chain,
FBI agents must snare a smaller fish and
catch Bonanno Capo Robert Lino on tape first.
So they send their DMN informant to work wearing
a wire and the stakes couldn't be higher.
If discovered, they'll almost certainly be killed.
Robert Lino: [on tape] You better get my (bleep)
money and Louis, I better have it soon.
I am going to put the word out with everybody
I know, everybody, you are done.
You understand me, you rotten (bleep)!
Agent Barrows: There were times when we had him wired
up and ready to go and found out somebody was coming,
and we'd take the wire off seconds before he walked in.
Simply because Robert Lino was a very tough,
very violent guy.
But my partner and I were extraordinarily successful
at getting people to cooperate and we just kept
getting more and more cooperators who gave us more
and more information about more and more people,
who, which led to more and more indictments.
Narrator: Operation Uptick grows,
putting increasing numbers of mobsters in
the FBI's crosshairs, including Robert Lino.
Man: In the largest federal arrest operation
ever in the New York City metropolitan area,
more than 600 FBI agents began arresting
120 defendants as a result of a 10-month
investigation code-named: Uptick.
Agent Barrows: It really awakened the public
and it awakened regulators.
Narrator: But Joe Massino knows how to play the system
like an old school boss, and his anti-surveillance
techniques pay off.
He's never caught on tape and gets away
clean in Operation Uptick.
While the Bonanno family tries its hand
at white-collar crime in Manhattan,
back in Brooklyn the old friendships on Bath Avenue
are about to disintegrate,
starting with this guy, Tommy Reynolds.
Fat Sal: With Tommy Reynolds,
he's a cracked-out maniac.
Smoking crack, kill you for a $100 piece of crack.
Narrator: Reynolds and fellow Bath Avenue member,
Jimmy Calandra, join a third guy,
a street thug named Chris Ludwigsen,
on a heist that is supposed to be an easy score.
Jimmy Calandra: He notified me, he says,
"Jimmy, I got this score with this guy,
big money in his house,
safe in his house in his basement."
The money Chris was talking about, you know,
he said it was close to a million dollars.
Detective Dades: There's just gonna be a
guy at home, it's an easy score.
Jimmy Calandra: I said, "Okay, sounds good."
So I brought Reynolds with me because
Reynolds was always my guy to do scores with.
Jim Walden: And at the time,
Tommy Reynolds was one of the key
people who was organizing the crack
distribution ring and he started using
some of the product himself.
Jimmy Calandra: No one else was supposed
to be in this house.
Only this guy was supposed to be there.
So we all get out, Chris waits in the car.
I knock on the door.
All of a sudden, I see this woman.
I hear "boom."
The lady goes flying across the room.
Jim Walden: Reynolds in his crack stupor accidentally
pulled the trigger to the gun and shot her in the head
in front of her then 9-year-old daughter.
Jimmy Calandra: I went there to go rob a safe and
Tommy Reynolds ends up shooting the lady by accident.
I said, "What the (bleep) did I
just get myself involved in?"
I was so ashamed of it.
I mean it's one thing, you know,
killing someone from the street but you're
killing an innocent woman.
It was like so (bleep) hard for me to live with.
Detective Dades: Jimmy lived with that,
I know, I know that still affects him to this,
to this day.
Jim Walden: As it turned out,
there was no safe in the house at all,
and they had just gotten bad information.
Narrator: The violence is starting to get out of hand
even for a rough crew like Bath Avenue.
A bloody battle over turf and bragging rights
is about to start and no one can imagine
where it will end.
Jim Walden: The Bath Avenue Crew,
given the violence of its members,
had more pride, ego, than just about anyone else.
But there was a rival in the area.
A group on 20th Avenue was
extraordinarily violent as well.
Turf is an issue and pride is an issue.
Jimmy Calandra: They had a little crew that
grew up just like us.
They lost some of their friends;
they retaliated at the guys who killed their friends,
so they were like tough like us.
Jim Walden: There were a number of extraordinarily
violent shoot-outs.
Jimmy Calandra: With the 20th Avenue kids,
everybody was always on high alert.
I never left my house without a pistol.
I had a bulletproof vest, with a plate in the front,
plate in the back.
Plus I also had the strap-on where you got a
pistol over here and you got a pistol over here,
you know, you got 2 pistols like this.
We were ready to go to war.
We didn't trust anybody.
My friends were being killed left and right.
We were shooting people left and right.
Detective Dades: When I think back how much
craziness was going on up there it really was,
it was like a shooting gallery up there.
Narrator: Violence gets so extreme that Spero steps in.
Jimmy Calandra: There was a sit down with their people,
and Spero told them, you know what we're gonna
straighten this out, we're gonna put this
underneath the table;
let's go forward, stuff like that.
But Pauly Gulino didn't want that.
Narrator: Gulino, the hothead of the
Bath Avenue Crew, wants more respect.
Jim Walden: Gulino was very upset about the lack
of support he was getting and he obviously felt,
as the person that carried out the Bickelman murder,
that his place should be more important.
Narrator: So Gulino does the unthinkable for
a small time mob associate,
he challenges Spero,
one of the most respected men in the Bonanno crime
family and a seriously dangerous individual.
Jimmy Calandra: Pauly G. wanted his full support.
You know, I'm with you, you're supposed to
defend me, (bleep) them.
Detective Dades: He wanted to kill Spero.
Jim Walden: Everyone knows that Anthony Spero
is, you know, one of the kings, one of the
few bosses that still lives in the area.
And in the middle of this heated confrontation
on the public street, Gulino pushes Spero,
puts his hands on him.
Jimmy Calandra: He gave himself a death sentence.
Jim: Walden: There are some rules you cannot break.
I mean you can't stay in the neighborhood after
you hit a made member in a crime family,
because your own friends are gonna be the
one to take you out.
Spero essentially turned around and walked away,
turned his back on Gulino.
That was the day that Paul Gulino became a marked man.
Jimmy Calandra: Spero gave the order to kill Pauly,
and you know, who's gonna kill Pauly?
Pauly's a hard person to kill.
The only people that could kill Pauly were his friends.
Jim Walden: He was holed up in his apartment.
He doesn't know when the day of reckoning is
going to come and so he can trust almost no one.
But he does trust Joey Calco and Tommy Reynolds.
It's those two that were in the short list of people
whose knock Gulino would have responded
to with an open door.
Jimmy Calandra: Tommy and Joey went to Pauly Gulino's
house on a Sunday.
They asked him for something to drink,
he opened the refrigerator door.
As he opened the refrigerator door,
Joey put a couple bullets in the back of Pauly's head.
Jim Walden: Gulino fell to the floor dead.
Detective Dades: You know, you can go from being on top
of the list to, you know, to get a nod,
and two friends blow your brains out.
Jim Walden: Gulino, Reynolds, Calco,
they've been friends for their whole lives.
They grew up together, they marked their ankles
together, and yet, at that critical moment,
it was the two best friends that snuffed out
Paul Gulino's life because they were ordered to,
but more importantly, because they wanted to,
because they knew that it would be a path to
their own rise within the Bonanno family.
Jimmy Calandra: They left like nothing happened.
That's it.
Narrator: But Pauly Gulino's murder will
change everything for the Bath Avenue Crew.
At the time of the killing, Jimmy Calandra,
one of the original members in the Bath Avenue Crew
is in jail where he hears about the hit.
Jimmy Calandra: I call Tommy Reynolds that night
from federal prison.
I said, "Was it you?
Was that, was it you?"
And he was crying.
He said, "No," he said, "No."
But I knew it was my friends.
Detective Dades: Jimmy saw a lot of deceit and
treachery and saw his best friend get killed.
Jimmy Calandra: I felt sick.
I wanted to throw up.
I was sad.
I was like a baby crying in my cell, seriously.
Pauly was a really good friend of mine,
a dear friend, a childhood friend and just you know,
I was never the type to kill my own friends.
That wasn't me.
You know, if Spero would've gave me the hit,
in all honesty, I probably would've told Pauly.
I stopped and I looked, said, "You know what;
we're not friends no more over here.
You know what we are?
We became gangsters."
Narrator: Law enforcement round up the remaining
members of the crew while Calandra is still in prison.
But when he gets out, his past catches up
to him again.
He's under investigation for an old murder in
Staten Island, the unsolved killing of a
woman with no connection to organized crime.
New York Police Detective Tommy Dades
has been piecing together the details
and is getting close to an arrest.
Detective Dades: I was investigating him
to lock him up.
He did some jail time, he got out and he knew
that we had just locked everybody else up and
he knew that the axe was gonna fall
on him sooner or later.
Jimmy Calandra: The feds knocked on my door
and told me your past came back to haunt you.
When I got home, I didn't say a word about nothing.
Then all of a sudden,
people are flipping on me again.
You know?
I said, "(Bleep) this."
I said, "What the (bleep) kind of life is this?
I keep my mouth shut and then I come home
(bleep) want to tell on me?
There's no (bleep) loyalty,
I might as well flip too.
What am I gonna do, be a sucker?"
Narrator: By the 1990s, dozens of guys are flipping.
The old code of silence, what used to be called
"omerta", no longer holds.
Faced with the threat of life sentences in prison,
or getting whacked by their own side,
gangsters up and down the
ladder reconsider their options.
Jimmy Calandra: After my friend Pauly was murdered,
I was at the point of my life you know,
where I had enough.
I wanted away from this life.
I sat down with a prosecutor,
I made an agreement with him
and I testified against Anthony Spero.
Narrator: Spero, the onetime acting boss
of the Bonanno family.
Jimmy Calandra: You know, it was hard.
It wasn't easy;
it's not an easy thing to do.
Spero was someone I knew for a very long time
since I was a little boy that told
me never tattletale on anybody,
you know, because at one time
I really liked this guy.
You know, I had respect for him.
But when I sat down on the stand all I
thought about was how Anthony Spero used to send
us out on missions for him.
He might put on the nice guy appearance, you know,
that gentle way about him, but I know deep inside,
I know that he was a gangster and if he could,
he would have me killed right there and then.
If he could get away with it.
Jim Walden: So Anthony Spero was
sentenced to life in prison and he went to prison
and he died in prison.
He did not cooperate, even though we very much
wanted him to cooperate to build a case against
Massino and the other members of the Bonanno family
that were on the rise.
Narrator: So Bonanno Boss Joe Massino remains
insulated from the problems created by the
Bath Avenue Crew and continues running his
increasingly profitable empire.
Fat Sal: Joe Massino was able to come home from
prison and run a well-greased machine,
and they made a lot of money.
Edward McDonald: Joe Massino was running
the Bonanno crime family in an effective way,
but what they were doing was they were leaving
a lot of paper trails.
Mitra Hormozi: You have agents in the
Bonanno Organized Crime Squad who are
trying to figure out,
how can we get to this family?
And they thought maybe the way to this is,
"Let's follow the money,"
because a lot of these captains are now very wealthy,
living the good life.
Narrator: One of them is Sal Vitale,
Joe Massino's brother in law.
Mitra Hormozi: Joe Massino taught Sal Vitale
how to swim when they were little kids.
I mean, they were just very, very close.
Once Massino gets out of prison,
their relationship becomes a little bit strained.
Other members of the Bonanno organized crime family
perhaps were jealous of Vitale,
or did not like his style of running the show,
and so they're starting to whisper in Massino's
ears about Vitale.
Narrator: After Mob Boss Joe Massino is released from
prison in 1992, he makes a series of sweeping reforms
that turns the Bonanno family into a
well-greased machine.
But the family's foundation trembles when
Massino's Underboss, Sal Vitale,
believes a rumor that the boss wants him whacked.
Mitra Hormozi: This is the ultimate betrayal
for Sal Vitale.
Here's the man who he loved more than anyone else,
who he believes he served faithfully,
and the fact he may have wanted to kill
him just switches something in Sal Vitale.
Jim Walden: The underboss deciding to cooperate
against his brother-in-law was
the last nail in the coffin for Massino.
Sue Simmons: Federal prosecutors are
claiming victory tonight after reputed mob boss
Joseph "Big Joey" Massino was convicted
on all counts of murder, extortion and racketeering.
Edward McDonald: He's charged with 8 murders.
One of the murders, Joe was facing the
death penalty on that case.
So he reaches out to the trial judge and
he says that he wants to cooperate.
Agent Pistone: Joey Massino finds out
he's gonna get the death penalty,
the first thing he does is he cooperates.
He had that fear that he was gonna die in the chair,
and he cracked.
Mitra Hormozi: And that was the first time
that an official boss of an organized crime family
had decided to become a turncoat.
Bruce Cutler: Imagine!
The head of the group!
Fat Sal: He knew how to play the system.
But when the (bleep) hit the fan,
the (bleep) hit the fan!
Michael Franzese: Gosh.
I mean that's the ultimate betrayal in my view,
for a boss, somebody that is supposed to
be so entrenched in this life,
so entrenched in the ideology of this life,
a leader.
The fact that a boss could do that is,
is devastating.
Narrator: By 2003, the sun's finally setting
on the American Mob.
After 70 years as the most powerful organized
crime force in the United States,
Cosa Nostra is decimated.
The mob first stumbles in 1970,
when Mafia Boss Joe Colombo steps out of
the shadows and into the public eye
and is gunned down shortly
thereafter by a mob hired hit man.
It continues with the landmark infiltration of
the Bonanno family by FBI Agent Joe Pistone,
and the prosecution of the leaders of the
five families in the commission case by U.S.
Attorney Rudolph Giuliani in the 1980s.
Rudolph Giuliani: We have now proven in a court of law
beyond a reasonable doubt not only that there's a
mafia, but that there's a commission
that it runs the mafia.
Narrator: Publicity hungry don John Gotti
turns out to be another nail in the coffin in the 90s.
But it all culminates with the betrayal by the
last don, Joe Massino when he becomes the
first boss of a family to cooperate with
the federal government.
Mitra Hormozi: Joe Massino's conviction
really was the end of an era for
the five families in New York.
Rudolph Giuliani: That's sort of the real
deterioration of all their values,
all their principles.
Bruce Cutler: The underworld as I knew it
has been pulverized!
Pummeled!
What there was then certainly, I don't see now.
Edward McDonald: They're on the run because the
Justice Department and local law enforcement
in those regions have gone after the
mafia with a vengeance.
Jimmy Calandra: Too much technology.
Too many people talking.
Too much law enforcement.
Too many cameras.
You know?
Too many people taking pictures.
[makes clicking sound]
Narrator: Organized crime still exists,
but it's not the same.
Agent Kallstrom: There's still thugs that hijack
and sell dope and run prostitution
and gambling rackets, but it's nothing like it was.
Detective Dades: Is there a handful of real
tough guys out there?
Is there a handful of guys out there
that got good schemes going on?
Yeah.
To compare it to anything of like it used to be?
Those days are over forever.
Narrator: The mob's downfall is the culmination
of a determined decades-long campaign
by law enforcement.
Bruce Cutler: The goal that the government had
was to denude La Cosa Nostra
of all its armaments.
They have succeeded.
Agent Devecchio: We took a lot of their assets
and their moneymaking opportunities
away from them.
Agent Pistone: We took 'em from being the
top organized crime group in the country
to just another organized crime group.
We really kicked the (bleep) out of the mob.
Narrator: One key victory:
the breaking of the code of secrecy
known as Omerta, practiced on pain
of death for decades, now in ruins.
Michael Franzese: What separated us is that we had
that structure, we had that respect,
we had that honor,
and we had to abide by it or
there were serious consequences.
Salvatore Polisi: There was greed,
there was jealousy,
and all of the sudden the principles
and the honor was out the window.
Philip Leonetti: La Cosa Nostra,
you know, I believed in it one time.
It's like when I was a kid I believed in Santa Claus.
As I got older,
I didn't believe in Santa Claus anymore
and it's the same way with La Cosa Nostra.
Rudolph Giuliani: They had these delusions of grandeur.
I think by the time you get to 2003,
all the delusions of grandeur are gone and
they're just a bunch of, a bunch of creeps.
My father, from the time I was young,
would describe them as bullies.
"If you need 2 or 3 men to fight your battles,
you're not a real man," my father would say,
"a real man can fight his own battles."
Narrator: But almost no one believes the mob
is gone for good.
Selwyn Raab: The mob has taken a lot of hits.
They're wounded, gravely.
But not mortally.
Michael Franzese: This thing is cyclical.
Organized crime, boom.
They pound on everybody, they pound on everybody
for a period of time and then
something else becomes important.
Terrorism becomes important.
So they take the agents off, they focus on that,
and the guys on the street they build up again.
Selwyn Raab: It's what some people call
"the cockroach theory":
when the lights are out the
cockroaches roam freely.
If you turn the spotlight on them they have to scurry.
Agent Mouw: I remember talking to
Sammy "the Bull" Gravano about this.
And he said, "One theory is everybody
lay low for 10 years,
the government will go away, we'll come back,
we'll be stronger than ever."
Fat Sal: It's gonna grow again.
There's gonna be a spike.
And this time when it spikes,
it's gonna spike bad.
There's a fresh crew coming out after serving 20 years,
they're coming out in the next year,
the next two years,
they're coming back to Brooklyn.
They know nothing but to commit crimes.
They're gonna come back old, tight and hungry.
God knows what's only gonna happen when
they hit them streets.