Tom Robbins
Village Voice
November 1st
posted: November 1, 2007 3:42 EST
By Michael Clancy, Village Voice
It wasn't much of shock this morning when prosecutors dropped the case against Lindley DeVecchio, the former FBI agent accused of collaborating with mobsters on four murders.
The case was teetering on collapse Tuesday afternoon after the Voice published Tom Robbins' "Tall Tales of a Mafia Mistress", sending both the defense and prosecutors scrambling. The story revealed that the prosecution's star witness, Linda Schiro, contradicted her sworn testimony at the trial in interviews she had in 1997 with Robbins and another reporter, Jerry Capeci. On the stand, she said DeVecchio had a hand in four rubouts. In those interviews, she said DeVecchio only helped ice Patrick Porco.
The Daily News noted that Robbins, whose stories put ex-Giuliani administration official Russell Harding in the clink, has the distinction of writing stories that got one man locked up and helped another guy get out.
• • •
Listen to "The Schiro Tapes."
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posted: November 1, 2007 3:40 EST
A witness for the prosecution of an ex-FBI agent once told a different story
By Tom Robbins, Village Voice
Linda Schiro, the key prosecution witness in the startling murder trial of former FBI agent R. Lindley DeVecchio, took the stand Monday, and it was hard not to find her deadly story convincing.
In a soft voice and a strong South Brooklyn accent, Schiro, 62, nervously but soberly laid out how Lin DeVecchio had regularly visited the homes she shared in Bensonhurst with the love of her life, a swaggering Mafia soldier and secret government informant named Greg Scarpa Sr. On four of those visits, Schiro said, DeVecchio had provided Scarpa with the lethal information that her gangster lover then used to murder four people.
To hear Schiro tell it, there wasn’t much difference between the gangster and the FBI agent. “You know, you have to take care of this, she’s going to be a problem,” she quoted DeVecchio as saying prior to the 1984 murder of a beautiful girlfriend of a high-level member of Scarpa’s Colombo crime family who was allegedly talking to law enforcement.
She had the agent, a smirk on his face, talking the same way in 1987 about a drug-addled member of Scarpa’s crew. “You know,” Schiro said DeVecchio told Scarpa, “we gotta take care of this guy before he starts talking.” The crew member was soon dead as well.
When Supreme Court Justice Gustin Reichbach called the first break of the day, reporters polled one another as to whether this crucial witness was believable.
“If I was him,” said one old hand, pointing at the defendant, “I’d be getting on the A train right now, headed for JFK and a plane someplace far away. He’s dead.” A veteran reporter sitting next to him nodded in agreement.
The first time I heard Linda Schiro, she also sounded convincing.
That was 10 years ago, when Schiro sat down to talk with me and Jerry Capeci, then and now the city’s most knowledgeable organized-crime reporter. But the story she told us then is dramatically different from the one she has now sworn to as the truth.
read on . . .
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September 24th
posted: September 24, 2007 1:57 EST
Crime-fighter Giuliani somehow skipped the mobsters infesting your kids' school buses.
By Tom Robbins, Village Voice
One sure sign that Rudy Giuliani is feeling pretty comfy as a presidential frontrunner is that he's still doing his Marlon Brando Godfather shtick.
This is the one where he hunches his shoulders, juts out his jaw, and does Don Corleone's strangled mumble. "Thank youse all for invitin' me here tuh-day to this meeting of the families," he growled at a California audience recently. This is played for big laughs, and the ex-mayor has been doing it for years. In 2001, he did a song-and-dance number for the annual Inner Circle roast dressed as a Rockette in Godfather getup. Photos from the event show him roaring at his own gag.
Not everyone chuckles. "It's not funny," says Rosario Iaconis of the Italic Institute of America. "It's like a mantra with him. Whenever Italian-Americans voice complaints, he says, 'Don't go looking for an insult.' "
What is supposed to make this tasteless little routine acceptable are Giuliani's allegedly impeccable mob-busting credentials. As a federal prosecutor, he famously sent major Mafiosi to prison. As mayor, he targeted mobsters who preyed on the city, creating a new public-integrity commission to screen out wiseguys from the old Fulton fish market, the private carting business, and the city's public markets. Those with past scrapes with the law and too many visits to known wiseguy locations were out of luck.
But Giuliani's watchdogs can't explain how he skipped over one of the most notorious nests of Mafia corruption, and one that's a bit nearer and dearer to the public heart than putrescible waste: the city's huge school-bus industry. Like waste carters and fishmongers, the bus operators include many honest, hard-working entrepreneurs. But there have been an awful lot of wrong numbers as well.
There was a major operator in Queens who enjoyed the company of John Gotti's heroin-dealing brother. There was the big school-bus firm in the Bronx that had a captain in the Colombo crime family handling its employee grievances. There was the Brooklyn bus outfit whose proprietors were a father-and-son team with dual membership in the Bonanno crime family.
Then there was an ex–transit cop who owned a couple of school-bus companies and began singing to the government after his conviction on a murder rap. His song's refrain was about kickbacks to a crooked union official named Julius "Spike" Bernstein. The financial secretary of Local 1181 of the Amalgamated Transit Union, Bernstein made sure some shops never got organized. For others, he made sure the contract wasn't enforced.
Bernstein, whose rap sheet included an offer to put a debtor's head through a cigarette machine, was usually seen with Matthew "Matty the Horse" Ianniello, a lumbering Genovese captain who ruled an empire of bars and porn palaces. His sideline was school buses.
None of this was exactly a secret. A lengthy exposé on the bus industry's cozy mob ties appeared as early as 1978 in New York magazine. In 1995, during Giuliani's first term as mayor, Newsday and The New York Times ran their own detailed reports. These were the kind of publicly available records that Giuliani's integrity commission would hold up in front of an applicant for a carting license who insisted he never knew his partner Frankie No-Nose was in the Mafia. "Don't you read the papers?" the commission's people would ask. Then they'd stamp "rejected" on the application.
But while this test was applied to those who sold fish, picked up trash, and ran market stalls, those in charge of delivering the city's children to school every day—and who received millions in city payments—continued with business as usual.
Veterans of the Giuliani administration are at a loss to explain why the mob detectors were never loosed on the school-bus crowd. "I don't remember that it ever came up," said one. "That would have been someone else's department," said another. A call to Randy Mastro, the former deputy mayor who served as Giuliani's top gun on his mob cleanups, was returned by a sprightly spokeswoman for Giuliani's campaign. "Alrighty, I'll get back to you," she said. The wait continues.
read on . . .
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August 30th
posted: August 30, 2007 5:26 EST
An admitted 'hope-monger' brings down the house in Brooklyn.
By Tom Robbins, Village Voice
Before last week's big Barack Obama rally brought life and light back to the place, the last political event of any size at the Marriott hotel in downtown Brooklyn was a dismal affair, a fundraiser for the Kings County Democratic organization. It was overseen by Clarence Norman, then the party's chairman and an assemblyman from Bedford-Stuyvesant. That night in 2003, he wore a dark double-breasted suit, a bright red pocket hankie, and a dour look.
It grew more dour when he was asked about the scheming judges his party had put on the bench. One had just pled guilty, another had been booted from office. Several others were under investigation. This gave Brooklyn's judiciary a higher crime rate than Norman's district. Norman explained that the judges hadn't yet committed their crimes when the party supported them. Then he walked into the ballroom filled with favor-seekers who had paid $500 each to gain his attention.
That gloomy evening was one more marker along the road toward the end of hope for politics. It was also the beginning of the end for Norman, who was soon convicted of corruption. He now wears number 07A3169 and resides in the Oneida Correctional Facility upstate.
Then last Wednesday, there was a purge of those old ghosts. Streaming in the doors of the same ballroom where Norman and his clique had gathered came a surge of excited people. They poured into the room, blacks and whites, a few Hispanics. Most of them were young, and all were there to get a look at this presidential candidate who has been in the U.S. Senate for only three years and, at 46, is the youngest one running. The rap against him is that he is too young, too dark, and too inexperienced to win. But he is still three years older than John F. Kennedy was upon his election in 1960. And like they did for Kennedy and his brother Robert, the crowds gather around Obama, who generates the kind of electricity political consultants pray for.
Those attending the Brooklyn event paid $25 a head; the student rate was $15. This kind of retail politics is not supposed to be terribly effective for raising the millions needed to run a big national campaign. Last quarter, however, Obama raised $31 million for the primary, $10 million more than Hillary Clinton, the New York senator who leads almost every poll. Obama's average donor gave $202. The maximum allowed is $2,300. Although it is supposed to be Clinton country, Brooklyn represents potentially ripe pickings for the candidate. With 2.5 million people, a third of them black, the borough would be the nation's fourth-largest city if it stood on its own.
read on . . .
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August 23rd
posted: August 23, 2007 5:23 EST
Candidate whisperer: The ex-bartender who's got Giuliani's ear.
By Tom Robbins, Village Voice
The most enduring lesson that Karl Rove taught the American people during his term as George W. Bush's top adviser was to always find out who the candidate's brain is before you elect him or her. For instance, if voters had fully understood that the swaggering, brush-cutting cowboy they elected was under the total sway of a dumpy balding guy with glasses who dropped out of college and believed William McKinley was America's greatest president, they might have thought twice.
Had voters been more attentive, they'd have noticed that this pudgy little man was always at Bush's side, whispering in his ear the same way Nancy Reagan used to do for husband Ronald ("We're doing everything we can!").
Rightfully, this kind of political cheating should be barred under Federal Election Commission rules. OK, that may be too severe. Outlawing such advisers might unrealistically narrow the field, leaving us with the zany likes of Colorado congressman Tom Tancredo, who clearly gets no advice from anyone. But what's needed is some pre-election disclosure of influence peddlers.
Right now, with the race for the White House well underway and a score of candidates vying for nomination, we have an opportunity to take a careful look at those who are positioned beside the candidates' ears. The tutorial begins with a look at Republican frontrunner Rudy Giuliani's chief whisperer, a man named Anthony V. Carbonetti.
You ask: "Who?" And that is exactly the point. The essence of a good candidate whisperer is to stay in the background, at least until after an election. Carbonetti, 38, is the guy with the beefy build, dark hair, usually wearing a gray suit, standing slightly to the right of America's mayor.
Giuliani observers will argue that he needs no one else's brain because his own is so well-developed. But even Rudy's admirers will admit that Carbonetti, whose greatest passions are aroused at a casino blackjack table, is a major influence on the man who may someday soon be deciding whether to take out Tehran with a tactical strike. We thus ignore him at our peril.
read on . . .
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July 5th
posted: July 5, 2007 4:22 EST
But while a Republican, the New York mayor made quite a contribution to the party.
By Tom Robbins, Village Voice
Veteran of golf war: Bloomberg
It is never good to live with lies, even half-lies, and it is a great cleanser of the spirit to finally speak the truth. So it was helpful for the mayor and for us last week to finally learn Michael Bloomberg's real feelings about political parties. He has been in two of them, so he knows something about the subject. "I don't think either national party stands for anything. Individuals stand for things. There isn't any philosophy for any party," he told the crowd at Crain's Wednesday breakfast forum in midtown. Party platforms? "C'mon, get serious," he said, that little smile tugging at a corner of his mouth. "That's just something to give you to write about during a boring convention."
We know Bloomberg is speaking from the heart, because state campaign records show that he has not written huge checks to the state's Republican Party apparatus since. . . January. That was when he sat down and wrote one for $75,000 to the New York Republican State Committee. For good measure, he sent another $75,000 to the New York State Senate Republicans.
This is true noblesse oblige. When Bloomberg dropped his Democratic Party registration back in 2000 to become a Republican and run for mayor, he took on the responsibility of supporting the state GOP. It was a billionaire's burden. How could he ask for support and not give it himself? He opened his checkbook and started writing to the party that believes in nothing: State Republicans got some $466,000 between 2000 and 2003; the Republican National Committee received $250,000 in 2002.
By rights, he should have been quit of this noxious obligation when he easily won re-election in November 2005. It was the biggest win ever, and it was due to his own triumphant record of governing; his party affiliation was, if anything, more hindrance than help. Term-limited as mayor, what more could he expect the Republicans to do for him? But Bloomberg is not the kind of guy to walk away from a friend: In a true generosity of spirit, he kept giving to the Nothing Party. In October 2006, almost a full year after his own re-election, he gave a whopping $500,000 to the Republican Senate Campaign Committee so that it could hold onto its majority against the Spitzer juggernaut then in full throttle.
Altogether, since he entered politics, Michael Bloomberg has given $1.5 million to a party he knew to be engaged in existential nothingness.
read on . . .
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May 2nd
posted: May 2, 2007 3:36 EST
By Tom Robbins, Village Voice
Julia Green
You couldn't give an opponent much more of a beating than the one Eliot Spitzer handed John Faso last fall. Any worse and you're talking possible fraud or felony assault charges. When the official tally for the New York gubernatorial race was posted in January by the state Board of Elections, it showed Democrat Spitzer with just shy of 70 percent of the valid votes cast, thrashing the hapless Long Island Republican by more than 1.8 million ballots.
Pow! Bam! That's a mandate, no questions asked. New Yorkers gave the former attorney general a bright green light for the mission he promised during his campaign, the one where he pledged, on "Day One everything changes." By "everything," Spitzer made clear on the stump, he meant Albany's stalled government, its fractured ethics, and the anything-goes approach of the previous 12 years that showered perks and deals on the well-connected.
Which is why many political watchers did a sharp double take when Spitzer's first big economic-development announcement delivered a potential windfall to a passel of business-as-usual Republican operatives, a crew consisting of some of former GOP governor George Pataki's closest cronies, who have aligned themselves with a company desperately trying to shed the taint of past corruption by former officers.
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