The death of the mob

In fact, the whole picture takes some getting used to. No doubt against our better judgment, many of us, thanks to the books of Mario Puzo and the rasping growls of Al Pacino or Marlon Brando, have grown attached to the shadowy world of the godfathers, with their close-knit family ties, their vicious but essentially honourable rivalries, and their crude, Old Testament justice.

Of course, the real-life Cosa Nostra never had much in common with the Hollywood variety; for a start, the average mafioso bears as much resemblance to Al Pacino as Rome, Oregon, does to Rome, Italy. In the event, the greatest difference between the real-life Mob and the Puzo variety is that real mobsters are nowhere near as smart as we, or they, like to think. If that's true, you might ask, why did it take so long to crack them? The answer to that question is worth pausing to consider for a moment. It shows what can be done in law enforcement once the police, the government and their lawyers put a mind to it. It shows that the right laws, the right personnel (in the police in particular) and the right attitude can work wonders. But you need imagination.

Depending on who you talk to, the credit for sinking the five families goes to either Jules Bonavolonta, a Vietnam War hero who came home to head the FBI's special C-16 team targeting the Gambino crime family; to Bruce Mouw, who ran Sammy 'The Bull' Gravano, the greatest informer against the Mob that there has ever been; or to Joe Pistone, better known now as Donnie Brasco, the slim punk who infiltrated the Bonanno family as a long-term undercover agent (played by Johnny Depp in the film Donnie Brasco).

In truth, all are wrong. The man who sparked the whole 15-year operation had very little to do with the FBI, formally speaking, wasn't a law enforcement officer, and didn't even live in Manhattan. G. Robert Blakey is an academic with a taste for three-piece suits, otherwise an unassuming, balding, professor of law at Cornell University in Ithaca, up-state New York. Since as long ago as the mid-Sixties, Blakey had been arguing that the traditional FBI attitude to the Mob, courtesy of J. Edgar Hoover, was hopelessly inadequate and outdated; that though they might win the occasional trial against the Cosa Nostra, they could never hope to put them out of business.

The key point, he argued, was that the Mob was business and had to be attacked as such. For him that meant two things. First, the FBI should not bring individual cases against this or that illegal deal in which the Mob was engaged. Instead, they should watch and wait, tapping phones, keeping people under surveillance, obtaining documentation or informants where they could, building a picture of a corrupt business, operating over time with widespread links in a number of places. Only after the entire business was understood, and after enough evidence to show this wider picture had been collected, should prosecution proceed.

Second, changes in the law were needed. In the first place, Blakey argued, life should mean life. The Mob was successful because it was prepared to use violence - even murder - to enforce its aims. If young mobsters who had killed faced the prospect of dying in jail if convicted, they might well choose the alternative: turning state's witness and shopping their colleagues. Blakey was not at all impressed by the fabled code of omerta, silence. Give the mobsters something to really fear, he said, such as the prospect of dying in jail, and they would crack as surely as their victims cracked, knowing the Mob was prepared to kill.

Blakey also argued that a new type of law was needed, one that recognised the reality of Mafia businesses, that racketeering, as it is called in the US, is a systematic, long-term affair. The professor's first success came in this area. Being a lawyer himself, he found it easier to convince other lawyers that he was right - Congress passed the Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) in 1970, which enabled the police in effect to join up the dots in a series of wrongdoings and bring actions against entire Mob families.

It was, in theory, a landmark in US law, giving the police unprecedented powers. There was only one problem: it was never used. No one quite knows why, now. Some suggested that the Mob might have bought off a few bad apples in the FBI; others put it down to the fact that, in J. Edgar Hoover's day, the FBI was reluctant to change its ways, and that meant bringing one-off cases against individuals as soon as there was enough evidence.

Nothing happened for a whole decade, until January 1980 when Jules Bonavolonta and Jim Kossler attended a seminar at Cornell University. Bonavolonta, one-time special forces agent in Vietnam, was the agent in charge (a 'bishop' in FBI-speak) of the Organised Crime Field Office in New York and Kossler, a big red-headed former American footballer, was his assistant. Neither had been in the job long and neither much liked the way New York was run. At one stage the local Feds were so disorganised that there were six separate investigations being mounted against one of the capos of the Genovese family, a certain Matthew 'Matty the Horse' Ianniello.

In 1980, the five Mob families in New York were at the peak of their power. All had their Shylocks on the streets, lending money at double-digit interest per week. But they were also running much bigger businesses. The Gambinos and the Genoveses were the leaders - the Gambinos had the meat and construction industries ('farms' in Mob-speak), the Genoveses had the docks and the Fulton Fish Market. The Lucchese had JFK Airport sewn up, while the Colombos had the cement industry. The Bonannos were regarded as the smallest and least stable - drawing money mainly from heroin trafficking.

It says something for the FBI organisation that when Bonavolonta and Kossler attended Blakey's seminar that winter's day and listened to him outline the provisions of the RICO Act, neither of them had so much as heard of it. Bonavolonta was later to describe the lecture as an epiphany. He and Kossler stayed talking to Blakey long after the seminar was over and they didn't return to Manhattan until very late.

The point of RICO was that it allowed the Feds to put together, say, an illegal drug deal, some loan-sharking, a murder and extortion, to show a pattern of organised crime. It sounds simple but one can see why it took so long to catch on. While you have a possible murder case and you are waiting for a pattern of crimes to develop before making an arrest, there might be another murder. Then how would it look? So it wasn't easy for Bonavolonta and Kossler to convince the other bishops, and the archbishops above them, to change lanes. But then they had two strokes of luck. Bonavolonta had an agent under cover inside one of the Mob families - the Bonannos. He wasn't very far in but as luck would have it he had befriended a mobster known as Benjamin 'Lefty Guns' Ruggiero. (One of the ways in which Puzo novels are like the real Mob is in the ridiculous nicknames they all have.) A key to Lefty Guns was his IQ, or rather the lack of it (this 'wiseguy' once confused Lake Superior with the Atlantic Ocean). For all his stupidity, Lefty Guns was in charge of the Bonannos' bookmaking business and numbers were not exactly his strong point. Here, Bonavolonta's undercover agent was able to help out. And so, for a period of time, the FBI actually ran one of the Cosa Nostra's illegal bookmaking businesses. Then they had a second piece of luck.

The Bonannos were the biggest players in the heroin trade, but their boss, Carmine Galante, had already made a few enemies in his attempts to become Boss of Bosses - the FBI claimed he had had a hand in more than 80 murders. On a hot July afternoon in 1978, as he ate fish and salad at the Joe & Mary Italian-American Restaurant on Knickerbocker Avenue in Brooklyn, he was shot through the eye.

But the good news for the Feds did not stop there. In the wake of the killing, one Sonny Black Napolitano was made acting boss of the Bonannos. He appointed as his right-hand man none other than Lefty Guns, which meant that the FBI now had its man - Joe Pistone, aka Donnie Brasco - only one remove from the top spot in one of the five families.

As if that wasn't enough, the FBI were approached by a certain Vinnie DePenta. Vinnie wasn't a real mafioso. He had got himself into a fix with the Bonanno family, borrowing money and then trying to Shylock himself - loaning money at exorbitant rates on the street. His problem was that he wasn't bright enough to choose the right people to lend to, or tough enough to collect when the time came. Result: he owed a fortune to the Bonannos of all families. To get himself off the hook, he now offered to become an informant for money.

The FBI had other plans, however, and here the new brand of officer showed its mettle. Like Bonavolonta, several of the new bishops had been in Vietnam, in the special forces. Without romanticising them too much, they were a cut above the normal Fed agent, not just in terms of intelligence, which was important, but also adventurousness, which was even more valuable. Instead of becoming an ordinary informant, Vinnie was given his own 'business', an import-export office that they called D&M and which had one important difference from regular import-export offices: it was saturated with hidden microphones and cameras.

So they now had two major ways into the Bonanno family: Pistone/Brasco and Vinnie DePenta's D&M. The question was, could they let these listening posts run long enough to advance to a more widespread RICO charge?

At D&M, various mobsters took the bait and serious intelligence about the five families began to build up. Not only that: as Blakey had always predicted, the intelligence showed the bishops where to plant more bugs, to gain more information. But there was a slight setback, to put it mildly, when Pistone/Brasco found he had become so well accepted by the new management at the Bonannos that he was instructed to murder a mobster from a rival family. For the FBI, a murdered mobster was not exactly unwelcome - it would mean, too, that Pistone would become a fully 'made' member of the Bonannos, privy to all their closest secrets. It was neat, but Bonavolonta knew it was wrong, and so he set about pulling Pistone out of the family. It was the only way he would be safe.

Even this was turned to advantage. When Pistone broke the news to Lefty Guns that he was an FBI undercover agent (over the phone, naturally), Lefty wouldn't believe it at first. But eventually he had to - and then he started phoning; phoning everyone he could think of to give them the bad news. Of course, Lefty wasn't thinking: Pistone had tapped his phone a long time before. Yet more detail about the way the Mob was organised came the FBI's way.

They had still more luck when D&M proved so successful that not only the Bonannos, but the Colombos too wanted a cut of the action; a little inter-family fight over their very own set-up was almost too good to be true. By now Bonavolonta and the other bishops judged they had enough for their first prosecution under RICO. Case Number 81-CR.803, The United States of America v. Napolitano et al (ie. the Bonannos) began in July 1982 and Pistone testified for nine days. The jury took three days to deliberate. There could be no doubt about the evidence, so they must have been worried about retaliation if they were to return a guilty verdict. In the end, they did find four of the five defendants guilty and between them they got 76 years, nearly 20 apiece. RICO worked.

It was a watershed. At last, everyone inside the FBI and the New York Police Department (which had its own organised crime outfit) could see that Blakey's approach was the right one. So now they began to work together. They hadn't yet completely closed down the Bonannos, but they had hurt them harder than they had ever been hurt before. It suddenly seemed that, given time, the impossible could happen. All the families could be closed down.

Having started with the smallest family, the Bonannos, the FBI now targeted the biggest, the Gambinos. From their earlier wire-taps, they knew exactly where Paul Castellano, the godfather of the Gambinos, lived: a small estate called The White House, on a hill in Staten Island, south-west of Manhattan. Their only problem was how to get in to wire the place. Surveillance showed that the house was never empty; they couldn't break in even if a judge gave them permission to do so.

The next bit, how they did get in, the Feds won't disclose, because they still use the same method, but it had something to do with causing interference in the television sets in Castellano's house and 'interrupting' his calls to the repair firm, so that the two men in overalls who turned up to 'repair' the televisions were in fact FBI special agents.

At the same time, the FBI also had a bug hidden underneath table one at the Casa Storta restaurant over on 21st Avenue in Brooklyn. From earlier surveillance, they knew that members of the Genovese and Colombo families gathered there. What Bonavolonta, Kossler and the others never expected was that they would begin to get the same information from both wire-taps. This was because the three families - the Genoveses, the Colombos and the Gambinos - were sharing business. It later became clear that four of the families were dividing up the construction business in New York, with only the Bonannos left out.

Unpublished FBI documents made available to The Telegraph show just how immense the sums involved were. To put it at its most basic, construction costs in New York were 35.2 per cent above the national average, 15 per cent of which was due to the higher cost of living, but a massive 20 per cent of which was the Cosa Nostra's cut. The construction business in New York is worth $7 billion a year; 20 per cent of that is $1.2 billion, or $350 million a family.

The four Mob families that controlled concrete were part of a shady organisation known as 'the Concrete Club' and, for any concrete work costing more than $2 million, only six firms, also members of the club, were permitted to bid. 'For the privilege of bidding,' says the document, 'the winning firm had to kick back two per cent of the value to Ralph Scopo (president of the New York District Council of Cement and Concrete Workers), who would share it with the four La Cosa Nostra families.' On contract work worth less than $2 million, the Gambinos took all. In the painting industry it was standard for firms to pay a 10 per cent kickback to Mob families on every contract.

The more the FBI looked at the construction industry, the more they saw that two factors outweighed all others - cement and labour. And from the taps already in place it was clear that the Mob leader who controlled the labour unions was the boss of the Genovese family, 'Fat Tony' Salerno. It was known that he used a club called the Palma Boys Social Club in Italian Harlem. In an astounding piece of daring, Bonavolonta's assistants broke into the outfit one night and installed seven hidden microphones and wiretaps. This was achieved by borrowing Sanitation Department trucks to park outside the club, to act as a 'front' for the break-in; to mask the sound of the drilling necessary to bury the bugs in the ceilings and walls, two additional garbage trucks passed by at the appropriate time (3am) and made as much noise as possible.

Gradually the FBI and NYPD were, with various judges' permission, breaking into known Cosa Nostra strongholds all over New York and hiding powerful bugs. Two things emerged first from the surveillance of The White House and the Palma Boys. One, that Fat Tony had enough clout to actually choose the president of the Teamsters, America's biggest union; and two, that a meeting of the legendary Cosa Nostra Commission, when all the godfathers would attend in one place, was being prepared. So when the meeting took place in May 1984, at a house on Staten Island, it was captured on film. The quality of the intelligence now being collected by the Feds was unprecedented. The only questions were: when should they convert it into a prosecution; and who should be accused?

It came down to two prosecutions: one to expose the construction industry; the other to expose the Commission and to reveal the whole interconnecting matrix that made up organised crime.

The construction trial came first, in 1986. Seven defendants, including Carmine 'The Snake' Persico (boss of the Colombo family), were found guilty and given a combined 202 years in jail (Persico got 39 years).

The Commission trial followed in the same year. Among the defendants this time were Carmine Persico, again; Fat Tony Salerno, the Genovese family boss; Tony 'Ducks' Corallo, the Lucchese family boss; and Bruno Indelicato, a capo in the Bonanno family. The only family not represented was the Gambinos, on account of its boss, Paul Castellano, having been recently murdered in a Mob shoot-out.

The Commission trial lasted more than two months; weeks and weeks of tape transcripts, with the defendants sitting there, listening to themselves incriminate one another. Fat Tony ate Mars bars most of the time but they didn't help his mood. At one point he was heard to growl, 'I'm going to die in the can.' The jury deliberated five days before finding all the defendants guilty of everything they were charged with. The three godfathers got 100 years each and Indelicato got 40 years (Philip 'Rusty' Rastelli, the Bonanno godfather, was already in jail). More than enough.

The FBI was riding high. Too high as it turned out. The next case was against John Gotti. Gotti began his criminal life hijacking trucks but soon proved himself to be tougher than average, even for a mobster, and worked his way up the Gambino family. The Gambinos were not only at war with most of the other families but they were also divided among themselves. One side wanted Neil Dellacroce, Castellano's underboss, as the next godfather. But he was old and ill, and a young Turks faction, led by Gotti, wanted to bypass him. When Dellacroce became terminally ill with cancer, Gotti's people killed Castellano to show where the power now lay. Although the FBI did not yet have enough evidence to try Gotti for this murder, they took him to court charged with attempted murder of another mobster. A guilty verdict in this trial would render all Mob families in New York headless.

But this time they failed: Gotti and the other defendants were acquitted on every count. It was a disaster, for with such a high-profile case Gotti was now the undisputed head of the Gambino family, pushing hard for the title of Boss of Bosses. He was good-looking (for a mobster) and, because he dressed well (for a mobster), he had earned his nickname as the Dapper Don.

All that only made the FBI more eager than ever to get Gotti (that became their phrase: 'Get Gotti'). The wire-taps and bugs at D&M told them that he, too, used a social club, the Ravenite, on Mulberry Street in Little Italy, and so the plan was to install a bug. With great difficulty this was done, by having a male and female officer pose as a courting couple in a nearby doorway late at night and occasionally take moulds from the keyhole so that the wire-tappers could get into the building.

It didn't work. Gotti could read the newspaper court reports like anyone else and knew that the Feds had been wiring all over town. Any time he wanted to discuss something sensitive, he took a walk. In their frustration, the Feds brought another hurried charge against him and again he got off. Suddenly he was no longer the Dapper Don of newspaper headlines but the Teflon Don. All the ground the FBI had made through the Eighties looked like being lost.

Then their luck returned, or appeared to. From an informant it turned out that when Gotti left the Ravenite and went on his walks, he didn't go far - just to the apartment block next door. There, he always chose the same top-floor room to discuss important business. Another courting couple, another key, another bug installed and another charge. But again Gotti got off. The Teflon Don was now a celebrity, much to the embarrassment of the Feds. When he attended a boxing match at Madison Square Garden he was applauded more than the fighters.

By now the Mob families were only too aware that they were being targeted by special squads, and they knew that the chief evidence against them was always the same - tapes taken from cleverly hidden bugs. By rights, they ought to have adjusted. If any serious mobster had followed the obvious path and made sure he kept changing his meeting place, or only met others outside, no such taping could ever have worked. It didn't happen like that. Meeting outside, it seems, was not in the Cosa Nostra nature. Two reasons, it would seem, account for this. One is that Mob bosses like being Mob bosses. They like the 'respect' they get and they get more respect in places they own; no less important, if you live by the gun you are apt to die by it, and their old haunts are more secure from trigger-happy rivals from other families. Also, there is the so-called code of omerta. In your own club, no one betrays you. Or so the theory goes. Most of the time, Gotti could not bring himself to believe that anyone would betray him; they were all too frightened.

And so, one more time, amazing as it may seem now, the FBI were able to insert a bug into a place where Gotti liked to relax, do his drinking and do his talking. This time it was a place called Nettie's, two floors above the Ravenite. And, despite all that had gone before, despite the luck he had had with his previous three court appearances (and maybe because he really did think he was the Teflon Don), Gotti loosened his tie, took off his shoes and opened up.

On tape, clear as air-traffic control, he described in detail how he had personally ordered five murders and discussed with his underboss another three that Sammy 'The Bull' Gravano had masterminded. He discussed specific loansharking cases and an illegal gambling game he ran; he described how he had attempted to fix the jury in the earlier case he had been acquitted of, and a succession of bribes that had helped him gain lucrative contracts in the garment business and in construction.

It took some nerve for the Feds to bring a fourth case against Gotti in five years. Should they fail again, they would surely have to lay off him for a long time, leaving him as the most powerful Mob boss in New York and a figure who, if not loved by the press, at least provided wonderful copy.
Still, they went ahead. In 1991, Gotti, Gravano and several others were arrested and indicted. Their trial was set for February 1992. What the FBI didn't know - and this is a nice irony - is that they had, almost by mistake, arrested the one intelligent mafioso in New York.

Sammy 'The Bull' Gravano didn't mind his nickname. In a sense it was earned: he was small with a thick neck and he had lost count of the number of people he had killed - 18 or 19 at least. But names and appearances can be deceptive. For a bull, Gravano was very careful. He kept out of the limelight; he never spoke his mind; he was a faithful and reliable colleague (in Mob terms); and he didn't shoot off at the mouth. Despite his reputation, he had only ever appeared in court once, had chosen the best lawyer he could afford, and had been acquitted.

So the Feds did not know, could never have known, that Gravano was furious with Gotti, his boss, for speaking so freely on tape. Sammy himself would never have boasted. He had nothing to prove. Awaiting trial, Gotti and he were held in the same prison. They were kept separate but, as they were to be tried together, there was a lot of toing and froing. Gotti was a bigger celebrity than ever, trading jokes and wisecracks with the press. Everything rubbed in the fact that Gravano was behind bars because of Gotti's mouth. It set Sammy thinking.
Gotti had just turned 50. Gravano was 46. In the normal course of events, he could expect to live for another 30 to 40 years. He had a wife and young children, and he was looking forward to seeing them grow up. He decided to turn state's witness.

But what about the Mob code of silence? Gravano didn't think twice. To repeat: there never has been a code of silence, other than that brought about by sheer fear. Every bug hidden by the Feds in a Mob restaurant or social club had been the result of someone squealing, squealing to buy a favour from law enforcement. Omerta suits the press - it adds to the colour - and it suits the Mob itself. But it doesn't exist.

There were very real problems for Gravano to make the turn without Gotti - just down the corridor - finding out. And at first the Feds didn't believe him. But eventually he convinced them, and they convinced him that they could keep him alive both before and after the trial.

Gotti found out, of course, when Gravano's name was taken off the indictment. He was, shall we say, less than amused. As well as mounting a legal defence, he mounted a major PR offensive. He was, by now, well known in America, New York in particular, and there were even people who thought he was genuinely innocent of the charges he had been acquitted on. They were out in force as the trial started, with their 'Free Gotti' banners. Then there were the film stars - Mickey Rourke among others - who turned up in court to offer moral (forgive the irony) support.

When Gravano appeared on the stand to give evidence, the hatred between witness and defendant was almost tangible. Part of the FBI's worry, when considering if they should accept Sammy's offer, was whether he would make a good witness. He was tough, strong and convincing - no problems there. But if there should be an enormous show of G-force between Gotti and Gravano, would that so terrify the jury that they would be too frightened to convict? It didn't help that part of Gravano's evidence concerned Gotti's attempts to interfere with the jury in an earlier trial.
He was on the stand for eight days. Some days he and Gotti just stared at each other. Other days their eyes never met. The public gallery was never less than overflowing. As days went by, Gotti's mood deteriorated. Gravano unloaded everything.

And so, in the end, 18 years after Bonavolonta, Kossler and Blakey drank coffee in Ithaca, the plan finally paid off. Gotti, who was this time found guilty on all the charges against him, was given five life sentences, and for him life means life. He is now in America's toughest jail at Marion, Illinois, locked in solitary confinement, allowed one hour's exercise a day, the rest of the time cooped up in a six-by-eight-foot cell, including space for a lavatory and a 12in black-and-white television. He is allowed visitors seven days a month.
And that means the heads of all five families were safely put away. John Gotti Jr, the Dapper Don's son, now in his early 30s, will be tried this year, too, on another RICO charge and the word in New York is that so many top-echelon family people have been put behind bars, for so long, that the Cosa Nostra will take years to recover, if ever. The Russian mob is moving in. The Koreans have already done so.

Sammy Gravano didn't get things all his own way. He is now in a government witness protection programme, with a new identity, a new home, and, quite possibly (they keep these things secret), a new face. But his wife didn't go with him. She prefers the life she knows, as do the children. Also, the truth is she didn't fully approve of what he did. Perhaps it's only fair that no one - least of all a multi-murderer - should come out of this clean.

A satisfactory ending? Maybe. At a trial I attended in Brooklyn earlier this year, when a well-known mobster was accused of jury-tampering, juror number nine, a small black woman, thought she recognised someone in the public gallery, an Italian-type in a black leather waistcoat. She had seen that person exchange greetings with the defendant. Trembling like a leaf, she asked to be excused. The judge granted her request. So far as juror number nine was concerned, the Mob is a long way from being dead.

o try. Third, if you build an office skyscraper or a block of flats in New York now, you no longer have to pay $2 to organised crime for every window you put in: the Mob window tax is a thing of the past. Finally, the most surprising, and telling, fact of all: the godfathers of all five New York families - the Bonannos, the Colombos, the Gambinos, the Genoveses and the Luccheses - are in jail and will remain there for a very long time.
In fact, the whole picture takes some getting used to. No doubt against our better judgment, many of us, thanks to the books of Mario Puzo and the rasping growls of Al Pacino or Marlon Brando, have grown attached to the shadowy world of the godfathers, with their close-knit family ties, their vicious but essentially honourable rivalries, and their crude, Old Testament justice.

Of course, the real-life Cosa Nostra never had much in common with the Hollywood variety; for a start, the average mafioso bears as much resemblance to Al Pacino as Rome, Oregon, does to Rome, Italy. In the event, the greatest difference between the real-life Mob and the Puzo variety is that real mobsters are nowhere near as smart as we, or they, like to think. If that's true, you might ask, why did it take so long to crack them? The answer to that question is worth pausing to consider for a moment. It shows what can be done in law enforcement once the police, the government and their lawyers put a mind to it. It shows that the right laws, the right personnel (in the police in particular) and the right attitude can work wonders. But you need imagination.

Depending on who you talk to, the credit for sinking the five families goes to either Jules Bonavolonta, a Vietnam War hero who came home to head the FBI's special C-16 team targeting the Gambino crime family; to Bruce Mouw, who ran Sammy 'The Bull' Gravano, the greatest informer against the Mob that there has ever been; or to Joe Pistone, better known now as Donnie Brasco, the slim punk who infiltrated the Bonanno family as a long-term undercover agent (played by Johnny Depp in the film Donnie Brasco).
In truth, all are wrong. The man who sparked the whole 15-year operation had very little to do with the FBI, formally speaking, wasn't a law enforcement officer, and didn't even live in Manhattan. G. Robert Blakey is an academic with a taste for three-piece suits, otherwise an unassuming, balding, professor of law at Cornell University in Ithaca, up-state New York. Since as long ago as the mid-Sixties, Blakey had been arguing that the traditional FBI attitude to the Mob, courtesy of J. Edgar Hoover, was hopelessly inadequate and outdated; that though they might win the occasional trial against the Cosa Nostra, they could never hope to put them out of business.

The key point, he argued, was that the Mob was business and had to be attacked as such. For him that meant two things. First, the FBI should not bring individual cases against this or that illegal deal in which the Mob was engaged. Instead, they should watch and wait, tapping phones, keeping people under surveillance, obtaining documentation or informants where they could, building a picture of a corrupt business, operating over time with widespread links in a number of places. Only after the entire business was understood, and after enough evidence to show this wider picture had been collected, should prosecution proceed.

Second, changes in the law were needed. In the first place, Blakey argued, life should mean life. The Mob was successful because it was prepared to use violence - even murder - to enforce its aims. If young mobsters who had killed faced the prospect of dying in jail if convicted, they might well choose the alternative: turning state's witness and shopping their colleagues. Blakey was not at all impressed by the fabled code of omerta, silence. Give the mobsters something to really fear, he said, such as the prospect of dying in jail, and they would crack as surely as their victims cracked, knowing the Mob was prepared to kill.

Blakey also argued that a new type of law was needed, one that recognised the reality of Mafia businesses, that racketeering, as it is called in the US, is a systematic, long-term affair. The professor's first success came in this area. Being a lawyer himself, he found it easier to convince other lawyers that he was right - Congress passed the Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) in 1970, which enabled the police in effect to join up the dots in a series of wrongdoings and bring actions against entire Mob families.
It was, in theory, a landmark in US law, giving the police unprecedented powers. There was only one problem: it was never used. No one quite knows why, now. Some suggested that the Mob might have bought off a few bad apples in the FBI; others put it down to the fact that, in J. Edgar Hoover's day, the FBI was reluctant to change its ways, and that meant bringing one-off cases against individuals as soon as there was enough evidence.

Nothing happened for a whole decade, until January 1980 when Jules Bonavolonta and Jim Kossler attended a seminar at Cornell University. Bonavolonta, one-time special forces agent in Vietnam, was the agent in charge (a 'bishop' in FBI-speak) of the Organised Crime Field Office in New York and Kossler, a big red-headed former American footballer, was his assistant. Neither had been in the job long and neither much liked the way New York was run. At one stage the local Feds were so disorganised that there were six separate investigations being mounted against one of the capos of the Genovese family, a certain Matthew 'Matty the Horse' Ianniello.

In 1980, the five Mob families in New York were at the peak of their power. All had their Shylocks on the streets, lending money at double-digit interest per week. But they were also running much bigger businesses. The Gambinos and the Genoveses were the leaders - the Gambinos had the meat and construction industries ('farms' in Mob-speak), the Genoveses had the docks and the Fulton Fish Market. The Lucchese had JFK Airport sewn up, while the Colombos had the cement industry. The Bonannos were regarded as the smallest and least stable - drawing money mainly from heroin trafficking.

It says something for the FBI organisation that when Bonavolonta and Kossler attended Blakey's seminar that winter's day and listened to him outline the provisions of the RICO Act, neither of them had so much as heard of it. Bonavolonta was later to describe the lecture as an epiphany. He and Kossler stayed talking to Blakey long after the seminar was over and they didn't return to Manhattan until very late.

The point of RICO was that it allowed the Feds to put together, say, an illegal drug deal, some loan-sharking, a murder and extortion, to show a pattern of organised crime. It sounds simple but one can see why it took so long to catch on. While you have a possible murder case and you are waiting for a pattern of crimes to develop before making an arrest, there might be another murder. Then how would it look? So it wasn't easy for Bonavolonta and Kossler to convince the other bishops, and the archbishops above them, to change lanes. But then they had two strokes of luck. Bonavolonta had an agent under cover inside one of the Mob families - the Bonannos. He wasn't very far in but as luck would have it he had befriended a mobster known as Benjamin 'Lefty Guns' Ruggiero. (One of the ways in which Puzo novels are like the real Mob is in the ridiculous nicknames they all have.) A key to Lefty Guns was his IQ, or rather the lack of it (this 'wiseguy' once confused Lake Superior with the Atlantic Ocean). For all his stupidity, Lefty Guns was in charge of the Bonannos' bookmaking business and numbers were not exactly his strong point. Here, Bonavolonta's undercover agent was able to help out. And so, for a period of time, the FBI actually ran one of the Cosa Nostra's illegal bookmaking businesses. Then they had a second piece of luck.

The Bonannos were the biggest players in the heroin trade, but their boss, Carmine Galante, had already made a few enemies in his attempts to become Boss of Bosses - the FBI claimed he had had a hand in more than 80 murders. On a hot July afternoon in 1978, as he ate fish and salad at the Joe & Mary Italian-American Restaurant on Knickerbocker Avenue in Brooklyn, he was shot through the eye.

But the good news for the Feds did not stop there. In the wake of the killing, one Sonny Black Napolitano was made acting boss of the Bonannos. He appointed as his right-hand man none other than Lefty Guns, which meant that the FBI now had its man - Joe Pistone, aka Donnie Brasco - only one remove from the top spot in one of the five families.

As if that wasn't enough, the FBI were approached by a certain Vinnie DePenta. Vinnie wasn't a real mafioso. He had got himself into a fix with the Bonanno family, borrowing money and then trying to Shylock himself - loaning money at exorbitant rates on the street. His problem was that he wasn't bright enough to choose the right people to lend to, or tough enough to collect when the time came. Result: he owed a fortune to the Bonannos of all families. To get himself off the hook, he now offered to become an informant for money.

The FBI had other plans, however, and here the new brand of officer showed its mettle. Like Bonavolonta, several of the new bishops had been in Vietnam, in the special forces. Without romanticising them too much, they were a cut above the normal Fed agent, not just in terms of intelligence, which was important, but also adventurousness, which was even more valuable. Instead of becoming an ordinary informant, Vinnie was given his own 'business', an import-export office that they called D&M and which had one important difference from regular import-export offices: it was saturated with hidden microphones and cameras.

So they now had two major ways into the Bonanno family: Pistone/Brasco and Vinnie DePenta's D&M. The question was, could they let these listening posts run long enough to advance to a more widespread RICO charge?

At D&M, various mobsters took the bait and serious intelligence about the five families began to build up. Not only that: as Blakey had always predicted, the intelligence showed the bishops where to plant more bugs, to gain more information. But there was a slight setback, to put it mildly, when Pistone/Brasco found he had become so well accepted by the new management at the Bonannos that he was instructed to murder a mobster from a rival family. For the FBI, a murdered mobster was not exactly unwelcome - it would mean, too, that Pistone would become a fully 'made' member of the Bonannos, privy to all their closest secrets. It was neat, but Bonavolonta knew it was wrong, and so he set about pulling Pistone out of the family. It was the only way he would be safe.

Even this was turned to advantage. When Pistone broke the news to Lefty Guns that he was an FBI undercover agent (over the phone, naturally), Lefty wouldn't believe it at first. But eventually he had to - and then he started phoning; phoning everyone he could think of to give them the bad news. Of course, Lefty wasn't thinking: Pistone had tapped his phone a long time before. Yet more detail about the way the Mob was organised came the FBI's way.

They had still more luck when D&M proved so successful that not only the Bonannos, but the Colombos too wanted a cut of the action; a little inter-family fight over their very own set-up was almost too good to be true. By now Bonavolonta and the other bishops judged they had enough for their first prosecution under RICO. Case Number 81-CR.803, The United States of America v. Napolitano et al (ie. the Bonannos) began in July 1982 and Pistone testified for nine days. The jury took three days to deliberate. There could be no doubt about the evidence, so they must have been worried about retaliation if they were to return a guilty verdict. In the end, they did find four of the five defendants guilty and between them they got 76 years, nearly 20 apiece. RICO worked.

It was a watershed. At last, everyone inside the FBI and the New York Police Department (which had its own organised crime outfit) could see that Blakey's approach was the right one. So now they began to work together. They hadn't yet completely closed down the Bonannos, but they had hurt them harder than they had ever been hurt before. It suddenly seemed that, given time, the impossible could happen. All the families could be closed down.

Having started with the smallest family, the Bonannos, the FBI now targeted the biggest, the Gambinos. From their earlier wire-taps, they knew exactly where Paul Castellano, the godfather of the Gambinos, lived: a small estate called The White House, on a hill in Staten Island, south-west of Manhattan. Their only problem was how to get in to wire the place. Surveillance showed that the house was never empty; they couldn't break in even if a judge gave them permission to do so.

The next bit, how they did get in, the Feds won't disclose, because they still use the same method, but it had something to do with causing interference in the television sets in Castellano's house and 'interrupting' his calls to the repair firm, so that the two men in overalls who turned up to 'repair' the televisions were in fact FBI special agents.

At the same time, the FBI also had a bug hidden underneath table one at the Casa Storta restaurant over on 21st Avenue in Brooklyn. From earlier surveillance, they knew that members of the Genovese and Colombo families gathered there. What Bonavolonta, Kossler and the others never expected was that they would begin to get the same information from both wire-taps. This was because the three families - the Genoveses, the Colombos and the Gambinos - were sharing business. It later became clear that four of the families were dividing up the construction business in New York, with only the Bonannos left out.

Unpublished FBI documents made available to The Telegraph show just how immense the sums involved were. To put it at its most basic, construction costs in New York were 35.2 per cent above the national average, 15 per cent of which was due to the higher cost of living, but a massive 20 per cent of which was the Cosa Nostra's cut. The construction business in New York is worth $7 billion a year; 20 per cent of that is $1.2 billion, or $350 million a family.

The four Mob families that controlled concrete were part of a shady organisation known as 'the Concrete Club' and, for any concrete work costing more than $2 million, only six firms, also members of the club, were permitted to bid. 'For the privilege of bidding,' says the document, 'the winning firm had to kick back two per cent of the value to Ralph Scopo (president of the New York District Council of Cement and Concrete Workers), who would share it with the four La Cosa Nostra families.' On contract work worth less than $2 million, the Gambinos took all. In the painting industry it was standard for firms to pay a 10 per cent kickback to Mob families on every contract.

The more the FBI looked at the construction industry, the more they saw that two factors outweighed all others - cement and labour. And from the taps already in place it was clear that the Mob leader who controlled the labour unions was the boss of the Genovese family, 'Fat Tony' Salerno. It was known that he used a club called the Palma Boys Social Club in Italian Harlem. In an astounding piece of daring, Bonavolonta's assistants broke into the outfit one night and installed seven hidden microphones and wiretaps. This was achieved by borrowing Sanitation Department trucks to park outside the club, to act as a 'front' for the break-in; to mask the sound of the drilling necessary to bury the bugs in the ceilings and walls, two additional garbage trucks passed by at the appropriate time (3am) and made as much noise as possible.

Gradually the FBI and NYPD were, with various judges' permission, breaking into known Cosa Nostra strongholds all over New York and hiding powerful bugs. Two things emerged first from the surveillance of The White House and the Palma Boys. One, that Fat Tony had enough clout to actually choose the president of the Teamsters, America's biggest union; and two, that a meeting of the legendary Cosa Nostra Commission, when all the godfathers would attend in one place, was being prepared. So when the meeting took place in May 1984, at a house on Staten Island, it was captured on film. The quality of the intelligence now being collected by the Feds was unprecedented. The only questions were: when should they convert it into a prosecution; and who should be accused?

It came down to two prosecutions: one to expose the construction industry; the other to expose the Commission and to reveal the whole interconnecting matrix that made up organised crime.

The construction trial came first, in 1986. Seven defendants, including Carmine 'The Snake' Persico (boss of the Colombo family), were found guilty and given a combined 202 years in jail (Persico got 39 years).

The Commission trial followed in the same year. Among the defendants this time were Carmine Persico, again; Fat Tony Salerno, the Genovese family boss; Tony 'Ducks' Corallo, the Lucchese family boss; and Bruno Indelicato, a capo in the Bonanno family. The only family not represented was the Gambinos, on account of its boss, Paul Castellano, having been recently murdered in a Mob shoot-out.

The Commission trial lasted more than two months; weeks and weeks of tape transcripts, with the defendants sitting there, listening to themselves incriminate one another. Fat Tony ate Mars bars most of the time but they didn't help his mood. At one point he was heard to growl, 'I'm going to die in the can.' The jury deliberated five days before finding all the defendants guilty of everything they were charged with. The three godfathers got 100 years each and Indelicato got 40 years (Philip 'Rusty' Rastelli, the Bonanno godfather, was already in jail). More than enough.

The FBI was riding high. Too high as it turned out. The next case was against John Gotti. Gotti began his criminal life hijacking trucks but soon proved himself to be tougher than average, even for a mobster, and worked his way up the Gambino family. The Gambinos were not only at war with most of the other families but they were also divided among themselves. One side wanted Neil Dellacroce, Castellano's underboss, as the next godfather. But he was old and ill, and a young Turks faction, led by Gotti, wanted to bypass him. When Dellacroce became terminally ill with cancer, Gotti's people killed Castellano to show where the power now lay. Although the FBI did not yet have enough evidence to try Gotti for this murder, they took him to court charged with attempted murder of another mobster. A guilty verdict in this trial would render all Mob families in New York headless.

But this time they failed: Gotti and the other defendants were acquitted on every count. It was a disaster, for with such a high-profile case Gotti was now the undisputed head of the Gambino family, pushing hard for the title of Boss of Bosses. He was good-looking (for a mobster) and, because he dressed well (for a mobster), he had earned his nickname as the Dapper Don.

All that only made the FBI more eager than ever to get Gotti (that became their phrase: 'Get Gotti'). The wire-taps and bugs at D&M told them that he, too, used a social club, the Ravenite, on Mulberry Street in Little Italy, and so the plan was to install a bug. With great difficulty this was done, by having a male and female officer pose as a courting couple in a nearby doorway late at night and occasionally take moulds from the keyhole so that the wire-tappers could get into the building.

It didn't work. Gotti could read the newspaper court reports like anyone else and knew that the Feds had been wiring all over town. Any time he wanted to discuss something sensitive, he took a walk. In their frustration, the Feds brought another hurried charge against him and again he got off. Suddenly he was no longer the Dapper Don of newspaper headlines but the Teflon Don. All the ground the FBI had made through the Eighties looked like being lost.

Then their luck returned, or appeared to. From an informant it turned out that when Gotti left the Ravenite and went on his walks, he didn't go far - just to the apartment block next door. There, he always chose the same top-floor room to discuss important business. Another courting couple, another key, another bug installed and another charge. But again Gotti got off. The Teflon Don was now a celebrity, much to the embarrassment of the Feds. When he attended a boxing match at Madison Square Garden he was applauded more than the fighters.

By now the Mob families were only too aware that they were being targeted by special squads, and they knew that the chief evidence against them was always the same - tapes taken from cleverly hidden bugs. By rights, they ought to have adjusted. If any serious mobster had followed the obvious path and made sure he kept changing his meeting place, or only met others outside, no such taping could ever have worked. It didn't happen like that. Meeting outside, it seems, was not in the Cosa Nostra nature. Two reasons, it would seem, account for this. One is that Mob bosses like being Mob bosses. They like the 'respect' they get and they get more respect in places they own; no less important, if you live by the gun you are apt to die by it, and their old haunts are more secure from trigger-happy rivals from other families. Also, there is the so-called code of omerta. In your own club, no one betrays you. Or so the theory goes. Most of the time, Gotti could not bring himself to believe that anyone would betray him; they were all too frightened.

And so, one more time, amazing as it may seem now, the FBI were able to insert a bug into a place where Gotti liked to relax, do his drinking and do his talking. This time it was a place called Nettie's, two floors above the Ravenite. And, despite all that had gone before, despite the luck he had had with his previous three court appearances (and maybe because he really did think he was the Teflon Don), Gotti loosened his tie, took off his shoes and opened up.

On tape, clear as air-traffic control, he described in detail how he had personally ordered five murders and discussed with his underboss another three that Sammy 'The Bull' Gravano had masterminded. He discussed specific loansharking cases and an illegal gambling game he ran; he described how he had attempted to fix the jury in the earlier case he had been acquitted of, and a succession of bribes that had helped him gain lucrative contracts in the garment business and in construction.

It took some nerve for the Feds to bring a fourth case against Gotti in five years. Should they fail again, they would surely have to lay off him for a long time, leaving him as the most powerful Mob boss in New York and a figure who, if not loved by the press, at least provided wonderful copy.
Still, they went ahead. In 1991, Gotti, Gravano and several others were arrested and indicted. Their trial was set for February 1992. What the FBI didn't know - and this is a nice irony - is that they had, almost by mistake, arrested the one intelligent mafioso in New York.

Sammy 'The Bull' Gravano didn't mind his nickname. In a sense it was earned: he was small with a thick neck and he had lost count of the number of people he had killed - 18 or 19 at least. But names and appearances can be deceptive. For a bull, Gravano was very careful. He kept out of the limelight; he never spoke his mind; he was a faithful and reliable colleague (in Mob terms); and he didn't shoot off at the mouth. Despite his reputation, he had only ever appeared in court once, had chosen the best lawyer he could afford, and had been acquitted.

So the Feds did not know, could never have known, that Gravano was furious with Gotti, his boss, for speaking so freely on tape. Sammy himself would never have boasted. He had nothing to prove. Awaiting trial, Gotti and he were held in the same prison. They were kept separate but, as they were to be tried together, there was a lot of toing and froing. Gotti was a bigger celebrity than ever, trading jokes and wisecracks with the press. Everything rubbed in the fact that Gravano was behind bars because of Gotti's mouth. It set Sammy thinking.

Gotti had just turned 50. Gravano was 46. In the normal course of events, he could expect to live for another 30 to 40 years. He had a wife and young children, and he was looking forward to seeing them grow up. He decided to turn state's witness.

But what about the Mob code of silence? Gravano didn't think twice. To repeat: there never has been a code of silence, other than that brought about by sheer fear. Every bug hidden by the Feds in a Mob restaurant or social club had been the result of someone squealing, squealing to buy a favour from law enforcement. Omerta suits the press - it adds to the colour - and it suits the Mob itself. But it doesn't exist.

There were very real problems for Gravano to make the turn without Gotti - just down the corridor - finding out. And at first the Feds didn't believe him. But eventually he convinced them, and they convinced him that they could keep him alive both before and after the trial.

Gotti found out, of course, when Gravano's name was taken off the indictment. He was, shall we say, less than amused. As well as mounting a legal defence, he mounted a major PR offensive. He was, by now, well known in America, New York in particular, and there were even people who thought he was genuinely innocent of the charges he had been acquitted on. They were out in force as the trial started, with their 'Free Gotti' banners. Then there were the film stars - Mickey Rourke among others - who turned up in court to offer moral (forgive the irony) support.

When Gravano appeared on the stand to give evidence, the hatred between witness and defendant was almost tangible. Part of the FBI's worry, when considering if they should accept Sammy's offer, was whether he would make a good witness. He was tough, strong and convincing - no problems there. But if there should be an enormous show of G-force between Gotti and Gravano, would that so terrify the jury that they would be too frightened to convict? It didn't help that part of Gravano's evidence concerned Gotti's attempts to interfere with the jury in an earlier trial.

He was on the stand for eight days. Some days he and Gotti just stared at each other. Other days their eyes never met. The public gallery was never less than overflowing. As days went by, Gotti's mood deteriorated. Gravano unloaded everything.

And so, in the end, 18 years after Bonavolonta, Kossler and Blakey drank coffee in Ithaca, the plan finally paid off. Gotti, who was this time found guilty on all the charges against him, was given five life sentences, and for him life means life. He is now in America's toughest jail at Marion, Illinois, locked in solitary confinement, allowed one hour's exercise a day, the rest of the time cooped up in a six-by-eight-foot cell, including space for a lavatory and a 12in black-and-white television. He is allowed visitors seven days a month.

And that means the heads of all five families were safely put away. John Gotti Jr, the Dapper Don's son, now in his early 30s, will be tried this year, too, on another RICO charge and the word in New York is that so many top-echelon family people have been put behind bars, for so long, that the Cosa Nostra will take years to recover, if ever. The Russian mob is moving in. The Koreans have already done so.

Sammy Gravano didn't get things all his own way. He is now in a government witness protection programme, with a new identity, a new home, and, quite possibly (they keep these things secret), a new face. But his wife didn't go with him. She prefers the life she knows, as do the children. Also, the truth is she didn't fully approve of what he did. Perhaps it's only fair that no one - least of all a multi-murderer - should come out of this clean.

A satisfactory ending? Maybe. At a trial I attended in Brooklyn earlier this year, when a well-known mobster was accused of jury-tampering, juror number nine, a small black woman, thought she recognised someone in the public gallery, an Italian-type in a black leather waistcoat. She had seen that person exchange greetings with the defendant. Trembling like a leaf, she asked to be excused. The judge granted her request. So far as juror number nine was concerned, the Mob is a long way from being dead.