American Gangsters Read online

  The other part of Mad Dog’s code has to do with being the best at what you do.

  At one point in our conversation, I ask Sully to describe his cleanest and most professional hit. He described the planning and execution of a particularly perilous assignment with matter-of-fact satisfaction, how he stalked his victim—a notorious underworld figure—until he knew the man’s daily routine. Sully described how he created a disguise and chose a particular caliber weapon best suited to the unique conditions of the shooting. One night, he penetrated the victim’s inner sanctum—his favorite saloon. Joe got right up next to the guy, chatted with him at the bar for twenty minutes before shooting him once in the head, then walking—not running, walking—right out of the bar. His disguise was so seamless, and the act so sudden and unexpected, that witnesses gave three entirely different descriptions of the shooting, and a description of the shooter that guaranteed that Joe Sullivan, without the disguise, would never be identified as a suspect.

  Sullivan’s appreciation of a job well done extends to my own undertakings as a writer. Since he’s been in prison so long, Sully has lots of time on his hands, and he’s become a voracious reader. He is fascinated by the process of gathering information and getting it down on the page. He asks me if I use a tape recorder or take notes when I’m doing interviews. “How do you get people to talk to you?” he asks. He wants to know how I’m able to put so much into my writing and still keep everything organized. He’s curious about how I’m able to remain mostly objective when writing about people that many would dismiss as “scumbags.”

  I answer Joe’s questions, and he listens attentively to my answers.

  I am fascinated by his life’s work, and he is fascinated by mine.

  Over a couple of visits to the prison visiting room, we continue our conversation. Often, Mad Dog and I become so engrossed that it’s easy to forget where we are. The hours pass, the day drags on. We are merely two craftsmen—the assassin and the journalist—discussing the tricks of our respective trades.

  The sixteen stories in this collection are republished here in their original form. With articles written fifteen and twenty years ago, it is tempting to go back and edit or rewrite from a revisionist perspective, to bend the information to a contemporary point of view. Fortunately, I am not the kind of writer who is obligated to make prognostications or provide “expert opinion” on the likely outcome of elections or sporting events. These articles represent the time in which they were written, snapshots from America’s ongoing crime narrative.

  The books I have written are sometimes from a historical perspective, but my journalism, as represented by these pieces, chronicles America’s crime history in real time. To be judged fairly, they must be taken as investigations into an evolving phenomenon, though with the benefit of hindsight they can also—for better or for worse—be evaluated for their accuracy as harbingers of things to come.

  The title of this collection—Whitey’s Payback—is drawn from the most recent collection of articles dealing with the prosecution of Boston mobster James “Whitey” Bulger. The story of Bulger’s capture and prosecution has many of the characteristics I most relish in a good story, namely, deeply rooted historical underpinnings that help explain a contemporary situation.

  Having Mad Dog Sullivan and Whitey Bulger open and close this book has a certain symmetry: Taken together, they represent the last of a kind of old-school gangsterism that most people would rather deny ever played such a monumental role in American urban life.

  Over the years, one fact has not changed: In the United States, the narrative remains open-ended. Being a crime journalist is the gift that keeps on giving. When gangsters, con artists, porn kingpins, and corrupt lawmen stop using the American Dream as their license to commit crime, I will stop writing about it. Short of that happening, I hope to see you again in another twenty-two years, with another collection of stories.

  I.

  BULLET IN THE ASS

  Not long after I published my first book, in late 1990, I received a call from an editor at Playboy. The editor wanted me to write a feature article for the magazine. No major publication of this stature had ever before called me, out of the blue, with the offer of an assignment. It was a big step in my career as a journalist. The editor told me what they had in mind, though, frankly, I was hardly listening. I accepted the assignment immediately because it felt like an important opportunity. It was only later, after I’d hung up the phone, that it dawned on me what I was being asked to do: The story was to be an exposé on the Witness Protection Program.

  Can that even be done? I asked myself.

  It was a good question, one I should have asked myself before I accepted the assignment.

  The Witness Protection Program was, and remains, a highly covert federal program. It was designed to be secretive, a program that you could not trace or expose.

  And so began a pattern for me of taking on certain reporting assignments with considerable fear and trepidation about whether or not that particular undertaking could be accomplished.

  The article about the Witness Protection Program took six months of research and went down many blind and frustrating alleyways before appearing in the April 1991 issue of the magazine. The editors at Playboy were pleased with the result and quickly came back to me with another assignment. They wanted me to write an article that charted the decline and fall of the Mafia in the United States.

  I had little interest in writing about the Mafia. In the early 1990s, I sensed there were many great stories to write about organized crime in America, but the story of the Mafia was old news. Even a story about the decline of the Mafia felt like old news. To me, magazine and newspaper editors were missing out on the most interesting crime phenomenon of our time: the emergence of newer ethnic crime groups that were using gangsterism and organized crime as a process of assimilation much like previous generations of Italians, Irish, and Jews had used crime as a way to carve out their own slice of the American Dream.

  I told the editor at Playboy that this was what I really wanted to write about. And so we came up with a compromise. I would do a series of three articles that would chronicle this transformation that was taking place in the American underworld. Two of the articles would be about the emergence of a new group, and the last article would be about the decline of the Mafia. The series was entitled “The New Mob” and it ran in the magazine over a nine-month period, from October 1991 to September 1992.

  Logistically and as a research assignment, the series was a challenge. It established a method for me that I have tried to continue throughout my career, which is to approach a subject with a wide lens and then zoom in on a particular storyline, to reveal the big picture and then focus on details within the big picture.

  To write each of these articles required absorbing a tremendous amount of information, not just about the criminal activity of the subject I was writing about, but also the cultural and political factors that helped shape a particular criminal phenomenon or gang, both in the United States and the country of origin.

  There was another proclivity that I established with this series that I have tried to replicate whenever possible, that of traveling, when it is called for, to complicated, challenging locales (in this case, Kingston and Hong Kong) on high-intensity information-gathering assignments.

  I am not a gratuitous thrill seeker. I do not bungee-jump or skydive on the weekends. And I do not, per se, take these assignments out of a Hemingwayesque sense of adventure. But I do relish the challenge of going into an environment that is new, a situation that requires street smarts and urban survival skills. I take pride in doing my homework and navigating these environments in a way that minimizes the opportunity for disaster. A successful research trip is one where you penetrate as deeply as possible, get the information you need—maybe even more than you hoped for—and then come home all in one piece, older and wiser and with experiences you remember for the rest of your life.

  I have learned that
these trips are often filled with fascinating moments that sometimes never make it into the article I am working on.

  For instance, on my very first research trip for the Playboy series, I found myself in central Kingston, a place I had never been before. If you are not from Kingston, and have never been exposed to extreme Third World poverty, the conditions in the shantytowns and tenement yards are shocking. In 1991, when I was first there, many of the neighborhoods were cordoned off by makeshift barricades. For fifteen years or so, the island had been in the throes of a wave of gang violence touched off primarily by the partisan wars between Jamaica’s two main political parties. Each ghetto neighborhood was aligned with one of the two parties, and the gunplay and general violence, especially around election time, was horrifying.

  Over time, I established important contacts with a human rights organization based out of an office in downtown Kingston that was dealing primarily with the issue of police brutality in the city’s poorest areas. They assigned me a guide, a kid who appeared to be about fifteen years old. One hot, tropical morning I set out with my guide on what would be an all-day journey around Denham Town, an especially rough shantytown right in the center of the action. The kid took me around and introduced me to wise neighborhood elders, shop owners, people at a bicycle repairman’s shop, average denizens of this unremittingly poor but vibrant neighborhood. My guide introduced me as a journalist from the United States who wanted to know about life in Kingston during this time of strife and violence, and then I was more or less on my own. Some people did not want to talk to me; some did. All were startled to see something they rarely saw—an outsider from another country who was interested in hearing about the reality of their daily lives.

  At one point in the afternoon, my guide led me into a sprawling tenement yard. He warned me that the physical terrain was ragged (no paved streets or sidewalks) and that sudden and explosive violence was always a possibility. The homes, such as they were, were wood shacks with roofs made of corrugated tin. We made our way around shacks and through the yards of what seemed like one huge collective living space. People gaped at me like I was a visitor from another planet, some smiled, some scowled. The entire environment was dominated by the sound of reggae music coming from distant radios or cassette players, and the pungent aroma of ganja.

  Eventually, my guide led me into a yard where a group of four or five dreadlocked Rastas were sitting around a homemade grill roasting salt fish, listening to reggae and smoking from a huge chillum pipe. The look on their faces as I was brought into their lair on a leisurely afternoon was one of astonishment. They all looked at me, then looked at my guide, with an expression that said, “Junior, you better have a good reason for bringing this stranger into our yard in the middle of the afternoon while we be chillin’ in our private space.”

  The kid explained, as best he could. The response was not enthusiastic. Two of the Rastas simply up and left. The other three stayed put mostly out of curiosity.

  I attempted to explain what I was up to. The lead Rastaman—the one who controlled the chillum pipe—took it upon himself to scold me about exploitation and colonialism, explaining how absurd it was that they had to speak to me in a different language—American English—as opposed to their own Jamaican patois, so that I could understand them. Referring to our interview, he said, “Dis a colonial relationship.” The others chimed in: “Ras clot.”

  I was sweating from the sweltering afternoon sun and the heat off the grill. The Rastaman had a valid point. I was there representing a big corporate American enterprise—Playboy—and I was asking them to share their experiences with me without them having any guarantee that what I might write would be accurate or informed. All I could do was try to assure them that my motives were sincere, that I was not ignorant of their plight, and that I was capable of seeing beyond a colonial or imperialist point of view.

  As I spoke, they passed the pipe around.

  “Let me ask you this,” I said. “How many times have you had a journalist here in Denham Town, a white journalist from New York, here in your yard by himself asking to hear your perspective, your point of view, from your mouth? How many times?”

  They were all quiet for a few seconds. The lead Rastaman said, “Nevah.”

  “Okay,” I said, “Come on, then. At least you have to give me that.”

  One of the Rastas chuckled. The others hit the pipe, blew smoke in the air, and pondered what I had said. I sensed some of the tension drifting away with the ganja smoke. Now, as neighborhood people came and went, each of them looking at me as if I were a ghostly apparition, it was the lead Rastaman who took it upon himself to explain, “Him a journalist from Babylon, from New Yawk, him inna Kingston to get a bird’s eye view of de politricks an’ di violence.”

  I laughed when he said “bird’s eye view.” That was a fair description of what I was doing.

  Eventually, the moment of reckoning arrived. The lead Rastaman handed me the chillum pipe. Everyone watched to see how I was going to react.

  A number of equations ran through my head. First of all, my young guide had disappeared, so I was in the middle of a Kingston ghetto, sitting with a bunch of strangers, with no real idea of how to get back to where I came from. It was the kind of situation in which you would normally want to have your wits about you. Second, I knew from experience that Jamaican weed was about ten times stronger that what I was familiar with in the United States. All of this was weighed against the simple fact that if I expected to sit there in that environment, to come into those folks lives for an afternoon and ask questions, to not be judgmental, to show them that I could—to the extent possible in this transitory moment and on this transitory day—be one of them, I would need to take a hit off the pipe.

  And so I did. With hardly a hesitation. And that changed everything. I was still an outsider in their midst, but we’d had a ceremonial exchange, a sharing of the pipe, and it meant a lot.

  I recount this incident now because it has become, for me, a kind of metaphor—a parable—about having to make split-second decisions, trusting your instincts in a way that will determine whether you are able to absorb and understand the story you hope to write about. In a way, the lesson can be condensed into that hoary cliché, one of my favorites, that has become my guiding principle as a journalist.

  If you can’t stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen.

  1.

  The Wiseguy Next Door

  Playboy, April 1991

  The Witness Protection Program has a remarkable purpose: To hide hardened criminals among the general public. What could possibly go wrong?

  It was nearly twenty-one years ago that Michael Raymond, a beefy, Brooklyn-bred con man and stock swindler, got into a tight spot with the law. After a lengthy trial in Illinois state court, he received a four-year prison term for trying to use stolen Treasury notes to buy two small midwestern banks. A silver-tongued grifter with a robust appetite for the good life, Raymond had no intention of serving his sentence. Instead, he cut a deal with the feds.

  What Raymond received, however, was far from your average, run-of-the-mill government deal. In exchange for testifying before a Senate subcommittee on stolen securities and the Mob, he was placed in what was then a new, top-secret federal program called WITSEC, short for Witness Security Program, now commonly referred to as the Witness Protection Program.

  At the time, fewer than a hundred people had entered this experimental program, thought to be the government’s most potent new tool against organized crime. Despite its controversial nature, the program had never actually been debated, or even proposed, on Capitol Hill. The U.S. Justice Department simply requested funds for “witness relocation” and the various appropriations committees gave it the rubber stamp. Over the next twenty-one years, the program would attract a vast following, not the least of which were more than 13,000 criminals and their family members coerced into its ranks. Back in 1970, though, WITSEC was a theory to be tested. And like any new theory, it h
ad bugs to be worked out—bugs like Michael Raymond.

  As part of this agreement with the overseers of WITSEC, Raymond was given a new identity and relocated to sunny Southern Florida. The government also immediately began paying him $1,500 a month, plus $50,000 for “job assistance.” Over the next several years, Michael “Burnett,” as Raymond officially became known, would learn to use WITSEC to underwrite one scam after another. During one deadly three-year period, three business associates of his disappeared under nefarious circumstances. One of them was a sixty-seven-year-old socialite and widow whom Raymond had been romancing. The woman was last seen getting into a car with him just hours after she cleared out her bank accounts. Raymond later became a prime suspect in her disappearance when an informant told local cops that he had bragged of killing her. “They’re never going to find the stone she’s under,” he reportedly told the informant.

  When Florida authorities began looking into the past of Michael Burnett, they were amazed to find that he had no personal history whatsoever. His life of crime as Michael Raymond had been effectively expunged, courtesy of WITSEC. Furthermore, the federal government helped Raymond disappear while the investigation was under way. He had intentionally violated his security, so the Justice Department—unaware that its prize witness was also a primary suspect—relocated him to another region of the country and covered his tracks after he left.

  In the years that followed, Raymond often caught the attention of federal crime fighters. Although the U.S. Marshals Service—the branch of the Justice Department that administers the Witness Security Program—believed that his life was in danger, he moved around like a man without worries. He drove Cadillacs and wore mink coats, and his fingers sparkled with diamond rings. A gourmet chef with a taste for fine wines, he allowed his waist to grow in proportion to his criminal deeds, until he topped the scales near 300 pounds.