Original subtitles

What a difference a decade makes.

Ten years ago, New York was nearly flat broke

and very close to not being able to pay its bills and loans.

Well, now the city is prospering.

The $42 million, 38-story Harley Hotel

is being built by developer Harry Helmsley on 42nd.

American Telephone and Telegraph is putting up a skyscraper

at 55th and Madison.

Hyatt has broken ground for a hotel on the side of the old Commodore.

In the 1980s, there were buildings going up all across Manhattan.

When all those projects are completed, city officials glowing predict

that it'll mean an extra 20,000 jobs here in Manhattan.

What's happened is phenomenal.

I've never seen anything to the extent I have in New York.

Now, from a real estate standpoint,

it's probably become the hottest city in the world.

Every construction project is worth millions and millions of dollars.

We were learning the Mob exploited that.

In the next year, three huge skyscrapers will be completed on a single block.

Topping out ceremonies were held at one of them today, the Trump Tower.

If you're running a construction company,

you've gotta deal with the Mob.

It was a huge, huge racket,

terrifying people into doing what the Mob wanted them to do.

A work foreman was beaten to death

and thrown out of a 56-floor window.

Make you nervous at all, to know that one guy's dead,

- another's in the hospital from this job? - It's all in a day's work.

The game is a tough one.

The stakes are high. The money is big.

And murder is not out of the question for those who get in the way.

A new Chevrolet Corvette, like never before.

A Corvette superb and authentic...

In the '80s, when all this is going on,

we started buying apartments and property.

And I made all my guys buy brand new Corvettes.

Then they started nicknaming me "Johnny Vets."

First computer-activated manual transmission.

We were like a bunch of girls going on a shopping spree.

We would go to David Nadler and buy two dozen shirts at a time,

monogram shirts with our initials on it,

$2,000 suits,

shoes that were 1,000 a pop.

The money that we spent was ridiculous, on champagne...

We would drink Cristal. We drank Perrier-Jouët...

in magnums.

But the personal sacrifices, while I'm drinking that champagne,

and after I put that glass down,

in two hours I'm gonna put on a black outfit

and, uh... go dig a grave somewhere and kill somebody.

Early this morning,

a man walking his dog found a body lying in the tall grass

by the shore at Ferry Point Park. That's in the Bronx.

Police figured it might have been a gangland rub out.

He makes a deal with the guy in Brooklyn,

59th and 3rd.

What the fuck do you wanna do? Thirty-two thousand...

The job shows

a potential extra of $750,000.

We knew we were onto something big with the Mob.

But we weren't getting clear evidence of what this conspiracy was all about.

We just knew that we had a lot of concrete companies

interacting with a lot of Mob families.

But we didn't know anything about how it worked.

The whole idea was to figure out if the Commission,

the bosses of all the families,

was a part of the conspiracy.

The Casa Storta restaurant was a meeting place

for the hierarchy of the Colombo family.

We had the place bugged.

One of the things we noticed is Ralph Scopo,

who's not a boss, he's not a capo, he's not an underboss,

he's just a soldier.

He's at the table when they're talking about

these controversial conversations over construction.

I knew Ralph well. Ralph Scopo was actually one of my father's guys.

I liked him. Early on, I called him Uncle Ralph.

I grew up with him.

He was only a soldier,

but, you know, here's the thing.

If you had a soldier

that was making a tremendous amount of money

and had a lot of influence, he could be a powerful guy too,

because he had a lot of authority in his own right,

because of what he meant to the family.

Ralphie Scopo was that guy.

We discovered Ralph Scopo

was the President of the District Council of the Cement and Concrete Workers Union.

It was clear to us, at that point,

that Ralph Scopo was a key player.

And our surveillance shifted

from the Casa Storta restaurant to Ralph Scopo.

He would go into his office. He'd be in there for about an hour.

And then, like clockwork, he would go back to his car.

The contractor would drive up, get out of his car,

jump in Ralphie's car, and they would talk.

Clearly, he did not trust his office.

He was doing business in his car.

So we get the microphones installed in Ralph's two cars.

You have to remember, Ralph Scopo was the president

of the Concrete Workers Union.

So he controlled the laborers

at every construction project in New York.

Ralph made sure he informed the contractors

what the consequences were if they stepped out of line.

I reviewed a lot of the tapes the day after.

As we developed the Commission case,

we realized that by controlling the construction units,

the Mafia controlled the entire construction industry.

The strike has halted one and a half billion dollars

in construction projects in the city.

The walkout, which began yesterday, continued today...

The Mafia controlled unions to make it impossible for you

to function and make a profit by going on strike.

All of a sudden, you realize it's better to pay these creeps off.

Ralph Scopo terrified people

into doing what the Mob wanted them to do.

We had him on tape talking to the construction company presidents,

and reminding them,

"You know that guy you read about in the newspaper who was whacked?

You know, that was us."

And the message, not too subtle, was,

"If you don't do what I'm telling you to do,

you could wind up like that guy you just read about the paper."

You know that one guy fell down the stairs here

and is in the hospital to this very day,

and another guy was thrown out a window on the 56th floor.

That happened before my time.

We had terrific tapes of Ralph Scopo,

but we needed proof that the Commission,

the ruling body of the Mob,

was at the heart of this extortion.

We had a squad working each of the families.

We'd have a meeting of the key agents on the squad,

and we would compare notes.

The squad that was investigating the Genovese family

was getting great information about construction

at the Palma Boys Social Club, where Fat Tony hung out.

The Gambino squad was getting their information

from a bug they had on Paul Castellano.

Tony "Ducks" Corallo, he's the boss of the Lucchese family.

His car's bugged.

All of those were little pieces,

little facets of the whole story. And we started putting them together.

What was that?

Speak now or forever hold your peace...

One day, one of the contractors was in the car with Ralph,

and he was talking about having a pretty decent sized job.

He says, "Look I've got this job. It's gonna be about a $1.5 million job."

And Ralph says...

The club was the key.

In a very short three minute conversation,

Ralph laid out the existence of the club.

He says, "There's eight... companies that participate in the club."

Each of those companies is connected with a Mob family.

Anything over two million

was gonna be allocated to those eight companies,

"and no one else could bid."

It's fixed. It's fixed. Everything is fixed from the beginning.

Everybody knows who's allocated what job.

Let's say its value is really eight million.

They would put in their bid for ten million,

and all the other companies will put in a bid higher than the ten million,

thereby guaranteeing

that they would get the job for ten million,

when it really only had a value of about eight million.

So they were making a couple of extra million dollars on a job.

And so with all these extra millions of dollars,

it was going into the pockets of Mob families

that represented that company.

But then we found out

another incredibly important piece of evidence.

The contractors that interacted with Ralph kicked back two percent

to the Mob families to be divided up...

two percent a job.

And there's hundreds of millions of dollars of construction

underway at any given time.

Stop, think about it.

There are buildings going up all across Manhattan.

Many of these are buildings that we all know. We all see.

They're still there.

And while they were being built,

the Mob had its hand in, collecting its two percent.

[distorted speech overlaps with sounds of machinery.

Every concrete construction job in Manhattan of over two million in value

would pay the Mob.

The concrete club showed up in every conversation,

whether it was in Fat Tony's social club,

or Paul Castellano's wires,

or Tony "Ducks" Corallo's wires.

The Commission was always mentioned.

The Commission was centrally involved

in every big building going up in Manhattan

for years and years and years.

I told you, I ain't playing around.

We're literally talking a billion-dollar operation.

The deal was 400-plus. You gotta put it behind you.

How does the Bronx zoo sound? Aqueduct Racetrack, Belmont, the Coliseum?

The first part of the job is 4.8 million...

The concrete club has to have been one of the most audacious schemes

that the Mob ever pulled off.

But we can't just win this trial

by proving that there's something called the "concrete club" alone.

To prove a RICO case,

we've gotta connect that Commission to a series of other underlying crimes.

So, to show that they're utterly terrifying people,

we thought that it would be great if we could have something more violent,

more gripping,

more, you know, sort of really grabbing your attention

and grabbing the jury's attention.

We were gonna prove a murder.

The FBI were assigned two agents to be the case agents.

The idea was they would be the main point of contact between the prosecutorial team

and the FBI.

One was Pat Marshall and one was Charlotte Lang.

When I got there, the FBI was very male-dominated.

I think it was 97 percent male.

The supervisor said to me,

"I didn't ask for you. I don't think women

can work organized crime."

He said, "You'll be the only woman on the squad." And I was.

And I thought this must be, "Hi, welcome to New York!"

But then the supervisor told me

that he was going to assign me to work with Pat.

I would describe Pat Marshall as...

the big brother that anybody would want to have.

Charlotte was a former school teacher, very well-organized.

She was my right-hand woman, my friend.

What I couldn't figure out, she could.

We work very, very well together.

It was our responsibility,

Charlotte's and mine,

to prove the Commission had authorized murder.

So...

how are we gonna prove it?

There was a murder we certainly had good reason to believe

was a Commission-ordered hit:

The famous murder of Carmine Galante.

Carmine Galante was rubbed out today as he sat in a Brooklyn luncheonette,

a gangland execution of a man believed to be

the most important organized crime figure in the country.

Two other people in the luncheonette died as well.

Brian Ross has the gory details.

Galante was having lunch in the courtyard

of an Italian restaurant in Brooklyn

when five men entered with automatic rifles and shotguns

and opened fire.

Galante and two other men at his table were killed.

Carmine Galante was a Sicilian mobster

who rose to ultimately control what was the Bonanno family.

Now, there was a lot of informant information

that to kill a boss, you needed the permission of the Commission.

Galante was resented by other Mafia bosses

because he received so much attention and publicity,

and because he had been too rough

in his efforts to become the top man in the American Mafia.

When Carmine Galante was murdered

at Joe and Mary's Restaurant in '79 in Brooklyn,

the other four heads of the family

would've had to agree to that murder.

We had to prove that the Commission,

the other four Mob bosses,

okayed the killing of Galante.

I spent an afternoon with the medical examiner in New York then,

and he showed me the autopsy photos.

Carmine Galante had 84 exit and entrance wounds in his body.

Five people participated in that shooting.

There was a lot of informant information

that one of the shooters was a guy named Anthony Indelicato.

The problem is you can't use informant information in court.

So how do you prove the case?

Bruno Indelicato, real name Anthony Indelicato,

was a soldier in the Bonanno family,

who, shortly after the murder of Carmine Galante,

was elevated to the rank of captain.

Bruno was a wild guy known to be sort of a loose cannon,

someone you would look to for violent crime.

When the car pulled away,

there was a woman across the street in an apartment

who heard the shots,

saw the car, and wrote down the license plate number.

She gave it to the police.

The police, within a day or so, found the car abandoned,

and they took fingerprints off the steering wheel,

where the driver was,

and also fingerprints off the rear door handle in the back seat.

Indelicato's fingerprints were compared

against the latent print on the door handle.

No match.

It was run against everyone who could be thought of as a possible suspect.

There was no hits.

With no fingerprint hit, there wasn't anywhere else to go.

Now, fast-forward to 1984, we had the idea:

Redo every piece of the investigation, essentially.

I don't believe the car was around anymore.

But that door handle,

that metal door handle, had been removed from the car

and was still in police custody.

We went to the evidence vault to check it out.

When you look at the door handle, you realize,

it's not your fingers that would touch where the print is,

but it's actually your palm.

And so... that's when... it was realized

that we need to start running palm prints against these.

Indelicato's palm print was not in police custody.

The fingerprint cards they had for him didn't include his palm print.

I had to look for Bruno.

We were able to identify,

I think through source information, about this girlfriend.

And she was expected at this clinic on a particular day.

We sat there all day waiting, hopefully, for Bruno to show up with the girlfriend.

Of course, they do show up like three minutes before it's gonna close

after sitting there all day.

So we arrest Bruno.

Instead of... just doing the fingerprints, we did the whole hand.

It's called a major case print.

We had an FBI agent that was an expert and could determine...

did his fingerprints, palm prints match?

I can still remember Pat... We were sitting in the squad area

and his phone rang.

And he turned around and he said,

- "It's Bruno's palm print." - Bingo.

One hundred percent match.

He was one of the shooters.

That was very, very good evidence

against Indelicato for murder.

Now we needed to connect that up,

to show the Commission had ordered it.

It just so happened, on the day of the murder,

there was video surveillance being done on a social club...

in Little Italy, a place called the Ravenite Social Club.

What we had was somewhat unusual on that tape.

Approximately half an hour after the murder,

there is this incredible meeting.

Indelicato and a couple of other people show up.

They are in a very energized state.

The surveillance tape at the Ravenite Social Club

shows Indelicato wearing an open shirt,

and then everybody congratulates one another, hugging and kissing.

So here you have a Bonanno member, on the day that the boss is killed,

going over and being congratulated by the underboss of the Gambino family.

Once you prove that Indelicato was a shooter,

the fact that he goes to the boss of another family to be congratulated

is very powerful evidence that in fact the Commission did order the murder,

as the rules required them to do.

This was tremendous evidence. We were getting very close.

I knew what I would need to indict Commission,

and I became obsessive-compulsive about it.

I always felt like the pinnacle of the case would be

proof of a Commission meeting.

That's what we needed.

Nobody had ever taken surveillance photographs

of a Commission meeting before.

It was May 15, 1984.

I got a call in the morning from my informant saying,

"There's gonna be a Commission meeting." I didn't believe him. This was unheard of.

I said, "Yeah right."

He goes, "No, all of the bosses are gonna be there.

They're gonna be talking about this concrete club they had going."

I said, "Alright, if I make a fool of myself, it's your ass."

The bosses of the crime families

couldn't afford to get caught meeting together.

They would reconnoiter the area looking for vehicles,

and if they did...

they would detect the surveillance team. They would call it off.

So the plan was, if the meeting is gonna be at one o'clock,

we're gonna set up at two o'clock.

Don't have to get 'em going in. We can get 'em coming out.

I was sitting in the passenger's side of the van I had rented.

Andy was seated behind me.

He had a 300 millimeter lens, which he had on my shoulder.

We sat there, an hour...

two hours.

Andy was starting to doubt they were in there. I said, "They're in there."

And all of a sudden, we got 'em...

Fat Tony Salerno,

head of the Genovese family.

Andy was using my shoulder like a tripod,

and I didn't even wanna breathe.

I'm hearing the click, click, click…

Of Tony "Ducks" Corallo.

I was afraid to even move.

He might get a blurry photograph.

Gennaro Langella,

acting boss of the Colombo family,

and then Paul Castellano, the boss of bosses.

They're coming out family by family.

This is historic.

This is a Commission meeting, right in front of our eyes, unfolding.

They've got all these tapes, but they don't have a meeting.

This is a meeting.

This was the final thing they needed, these photographs.

There came a point in time where we had enough evidence

to prosecute all the bosses.

The decision was made,

that we would make the arrest the following morning.

I was sitting in my office.

We get a call.

It was NBC News.

NBC News said they know

that we are going to arrest

the bosses of all the Five Families the next morning.

So they're gonna announce that on the evening news.

So this was like six o'clock at night,

and the evening news was gonna be coming on any minute now.

Ten seconds.

And I knew that once that happened,

those folks that were to be arrested

would be in the wind.

So I told my bosses, I said, "I think we gotta go right now!"

In seven, six, five...

Rollers.

Stand by, chyrons. Insert.

It was a very high honor to be sent out to arrest the most...

powerful mobster in America on the most serious of charges.

Three, two, one...

This is NBC Nightly News.

Paul Castellano was having dinner. His family was there.

This is NBC Nightly News in New York.

Told him we had a warrant for his arrest on RICO charges.

Had to bring him in.

He said, "Can I get dressed first?"

"Sure."

When he was ready to go, he put his hands out to be handcuffed.

I said, "Oh, you don't have to handcuff him."

And, as we were driving in, we had the radio on,

and then it came out on the radio. Breaking news.

There's a major roundup underway

of top leaders in organized crime in our area. Top leaders.

First time ever, the reputed...

And he leaned forward to hear it.

And then they said,

"Paul Castellano, the boss of bosses,

was also taken into custody,

from the information from the case

that was developed from bugs in his house."

That's when he found out,

by listening to the radio,

that we had put a bug in his house.

So he goes, "You bugged my house!"

And it was kind of awkward.

I just kind of looked the other way, you know.

I said, "Hey, you know, that's the game we play."

From WNBC-TV,

this is News 4 New York with Chuck Scarborough and John Hambrick.

Good evening.

Tony Ducks, Big Paul, Fat Tony, Gerry Lang, Rusty Rastelli.

A godfather roundup!

How often do you send out agents to arrest every boss

in an organized crime family? That was an exciting day in the office,

to see all these guys get arrested and brought in.

Maybe once in a lifetime you have that happen.

Authorities call this

the most important prosecution case ever brought against organized crime.

It was sensational.

All the bosses, carted away at the same time.

It was a day that I won't forget.

People wouldn't even dream about this, you know, ten years before.

And here we were in the middle of making history.

The Mafia leaders were rounded up in an overnight sweep.

And today, US attorney Rudolph Giuliani announced the indictments.

This is a great day for law enforcement, but this is a bad day, probably the worst,

for the Mafia.

I felt terrible. I knew Fat Tony, I liked him a lot.

And tonight a man identified as Ralph Scopo...

Ralphie Scopo, I knew Ralphie well.

I grew up with him.

This case charges more Mafia bosses,

in one indictment, than any ever before.

When that RICO case first got announced,

we were cursing out Rudy Giuliani like crazy.

We don't even know what they were talking about at the time,

'cause we didn't understand the law. It was very technical.

There're a couple of Mob guys who went to the hospital

thinking they were gonna get indicted...

that we didn't name.

Everybody was worried.

All of a sudden, every gangster that couldn't count to ten

started trying to understand what RICO meant.

We realized this is a law that enables the FBI

to gather multiple members of the Mob together in a conspiracy case.

So anybody that was from the street

really understood what RICO meant to us,

and especially to our bosses of the five families.

At least two of them, I know, will be able to post bail immediately.

- Is Castellano one of them? - Castellano, yeah, and Fat Tony.

I was Fat Tony Salerno's defense lawyer.

At the time we met, I was 34.

I was a little bit intimidated to meet with Mr. Salerno,

kind of afraid to ask him certain questions,

because maybe the answers were something that, uh...

he didn't either want to tell me, or maybe I shouldn't know.

Um... And... he once stopped me,

'cause he sensed that,

and he said, "Listen kid, you can ask me any question you want",

and I will always, always tell you the truth.

Some questions you're gonna ask me,

I won't be able to answer, and I'll tell you I can't answer that.

You take it for whatever it means at that point,

but don't ever be afraid to ask me a question.

I asked Fat Tony if he had anything to say about all this.

You have something to say, Tony?

Thank you.

Excuse me.

Fat Tony was a very kind person...

to me.

Here comes Marcy. I want you to meet her.

Introducing the new Cabbage Patch babies,

the littlest Cabbage Patch kids of all.

My daughter was about two years old at the time.

There was a doll that was very famous called the Cabbage Patch doll,

and it was sold out everywhere,

and my daughter desperately wanted one.

Can't remember how he found that out,

but the next thing you know, he sent a case...

of Cabbage Patch dolls to my daughter.

Cabbage Patch Kids babies, with everything shown here.

Each sold separately from Coleco.

Castellano left the federal courthouse

in Lower Manhattan tonight

after posting two million dollars bail money.

Paul Castellano walked out,

and this reporter from 60 Minutes came up to him, introduced himself and said,

"We'd like to put you on 60 Minutes, Mr. Castellano.

People have to hear that Giuliani isn't the only word on this."

And Castellano went and reached in his pocket.

"I'll be glad to talk to you. Here's my card. Talk to my lawyer."

He acted like a businessman.

Fat Tony walks out of court.

Fat Tony was fat... looked like a Mafia guy.

First thing he does when he gets out of court is... puts a cigar in his mouth.

The guy comes up to him, says the same thing.

He says, "You're a reporter?"

Then go F yourself.

"Just go F yourself, I don't talk to no reporters."

And he walks off. It was a difference between two men.

One was totally pretentious, and Fat Tony knew exactly who he was.

One of the things that came across in representing Fat Tony

was the notion that this group was essentially its own government.

They did not play by the rules of the...

What the, say, United States government rules were.

They had their own law and order and justice.

And that's what they live by.

It happened in the middle of the evening rush hour

on a crowded Midtown street.

I was sitting in my office,

at the US Attorney's Office,

writing the government's response to a variety of motions.

Two men were apparently shot, either getting into or leaving the car.

I happened to be playing in a basketball game.

One of the men appeared to have been a driver.

The keys were only several inches from his hand.

All of a sudden, our beepers were going off.

My secretary walks in and hands me a note.

Both men appear to have been shot in the head,

shot gangland execution-style on the street.

I remember one of my colleagues running down the hall saying,

"Big Paulie was just whacked!"

Shit.

It is a historic event in the history of the Mob.

You are looking at the body of Paul Castellano.

We got into cars and drove up there.

It was mayhem.

There were people everywhere, all over the street.

The street was closed.

Castellano's body was laying with his head in the gutter.

This was really significant in that he was

the boss of one of the largest families in the Mafia.

Witnesses said that Castellano was sitting in his limousine

when three men in trench coats walked up, started shooting, and they made a getaway.

The atmosphere was very tense.

I knew it was coming, for a while.

Castellano's rule is, like most bosses,

don't deal drugs.

If I find out about it,

you're gonna be killed for dealing drugs.

Angelo Ruggiero, John Gotti, and myself

were all moving drugs.

Angelo Ruggiero and John Gotti realized

that Angelo had been caught on hours

and dozens of wiretaps in his house,

discussing the drug business.

In our life, in the Mob world,

when you, uh... break a rule, your life is ended like that.

Gotti and Ruggiero understand

that if Castellano is in those tapes at the trial,

they're dead.

They had to hit him first.

Law enforcement officials are wondering this morning

whether the murder of the country's top Mob boss Monday

was the first salvo in a new gangland war.

And they're looking for this man, John Gotti.

I felt bad because the whole object of my case

was to put Castellano away.

There's a strange bond that sometimes exists

between law enforcement officers and criminals.

They both live by codes of honor and respect

more stringent than most normal people.

And there's a certain psychological connection there.

I heard him on the mic for 600 hours,

for a four, five-year period.

I felt like I knew him.

It wasn't supposed to end this way. He's supposed to end up in federal prison.

It was frustrating to learn he had been killed

just for the reason that... he was the boss of bosses.

I would much rather have seen Castellano convicted,

rather than ending it that way.

Paul Castellano was a very, very important defendant to us.

We had fantastic tapes from his kitchen in Staten Island.

He was a reigning boss,

and we very much wanted him to be a defendant at trial.

So it was both a shock,

and in some ways frustrating,

that we did not have a chance to bring him to justice.

It certainly increased the pressure on all of us as a trial team,

because the press and the whole country were watching New York.

Tonight we begin with an NBC News exclusive.

The godfathers of the New York Mafia are in big trouble.

This was billed as probably the biggest organized crime case ever.

The federal government is trying to prove there are five men

who were the alleged bosses of New York City's five crime families,

and they comprised a commission.

They are charged with a wide range of strong-arm tactics,

including infiltration of New York City's high-rise construction industry.

This case was a media circus, no question about it.

Dare we hope that this is the beginning of the end for the Mob?

Hopefully, with an organization like the Mafia,

we will wear them down. I think this is a perfect time to crush them.

Rudy did rather love being in front of the cameras.

Some of your critics have accused you of being a publicity hound.

Uh... How do you plead to that charge?

I plead not guilty to the charge, certainly with the way it's characterized.

Did we tease him a little bit?

Sure.

It was a running joke

among all the assistant US attorneys.

Being the the Mob buster was a big part of his persona.

You can almost regard it as a hidden tax.

Giuliani and other officials say the tax is exacted every time...

The government will do whatever they can to win the case.

Including in that is to make sure the publicity permeates the public...

A major racketeering trial in New York.

So that the jurors are fully aware

of the most nefarious aspects

that Giuliani could put in the press.

It's outrageous that that kind of thing happens in our society.

The public must understand, they say,

that these men are gangsters and murderers who steal from everyone.

This clearly was the biggest thing

I would ever do professionally.

Young lady, let us through.

So there was a certain amount of pressure.

I had just turned 29.

John had also just turned 29.

And Mike was 30.

I'm sure in some quarters, there were people questioning,

"Really? These three kids are going to try this case?"

All my guys were incredibly young.

That's all you get. They don't pay any money in the US Attorney's Office.

None of us had ever tried a case of this magnitude before.

When you think about it, it's a little crazy, right?

The United States is entrusting

essentially three novices with this momentous case.

And all of a sudden,

we're up against these terrifying, formidable Mob figures.

Are you confident at all about the charges?

Just before the trial began, I proposed to my wife,

and she was nervous.

She kept asking me

about whether I was gonna come into any kind of harm or danger.

Uh, fortunately, knock on wood, I never did.

But others around me did.

One day, US Marshal came in my office and said,

"We have a documented threat from the Mob,"

to kill... my wife.

And they taught me and my chief assistant how to use a gun.

Once the jury was finally seated,

my job in the opening statement was to give them

a road map about what they're gonna hear and explain it in context.

"Members of the jury,

Mafia families have a single overriding purpose:

To make money using corruption, fear, and violence.

The Cosa Nostra and Commission

are not words that are coined or made up by the government.

These are words these defendants used themselves.

And you are going to hear them use those words on the tapes

"with your very own ears."

For a criminal trial in the United States,

the US Constitution says the jury has to be unanimous,

so you've gotta persuade all 12 jurors.

If we could just convince one or two of those jurors,

we would essentially win the case.

When the trial is underway, you're watching the jury like a hawk.

You wanna see what their body English is like.

Do they seem to be paying attention?

Are they understanding the evidence? What's interesting to them?

So you can calibrate your presentation.

The forewoman of the jury

was a very elegant woman who wore this gold cross.

And then this young, very attractive, red-haired woman was in the front row.

And there was an elderly woman.

I said to Pat, "Wait till she starts listening to some of these tapes."

Because it's difficult to understand what was going on.

The judge directs that the jury will listen.

They put on their headphones.

It seemed like the elderly woman

was straining to understand what was going on.

Get down to the bottom of the page.

You look at it as a big corporation. You're running a big corporation.

When we saw all 12 jurors turn the page at exactly the right moment,

we just looked at each other like,

"Yes! They're following. They're paying attention.

They're hearing what we've heard."

For several weeks, a federal jury has been sifting through tape recordings.

The vast majority of this case is built on, uh, tapes of the defendants

talking about their criminal activities. It's from those tapes...

Everybody followed the Commission trial,

especially if you were a street guy.

When we were sitting around the Bergin Hunt and Fish Club,

we were saying it's illegal, it's this, like we were Harvard grads.

But in reality we understand that we've got serious problems now.

The government did have some pretty strong evidence.

The head of the Lucchese family,

Tony "Ducks" Corallo, there was a bug placed in his car.

There were conversations about cement trade in New York.

On one of the tapes, Fat Tony remarked

that he had just seen a cement truck drive down Second Avenue with...

The name on the truck was something he didn't recognize,

and he wanted to know who had guts enough to drive a truck through Manhattan

that was affiliated with a company that he wasn't aware of or didn't control.

So it was that kind of tape

that was kind of difficult for us to get around, if you will.

We knew we were in for a rough ride.

The strategy that I employed was to do everything we could to...

win the so-called sex-appeal parts of the case...

uh, the violence that they threw in gratuitously, the Galante murder.

Anything that the government can do to get an edge, they will do.

If anyone thinks this is fair and they're trying to do right is wrong.

They're there to win the case.

It was very dramatic,

it was very violent,

and it was what was put in there only to get the jury's attention.

At the point in time

when we started putting evidence in about the Galante homicide,

the world changed for Bruno Indelicato inside that courtroom.

The reason Bruno Indelicato, a lower-ranking member in the Mob,

was a defendant in the case is because he was a gunman

in the murder of Carmine Galante, and the Commission authorized that murder.

He was a person who took the orders and carried out the Commission's bidding.

Now, all of a sudden, he's very agitated, squirming in his chair,

understanding that no, this isn't something he's going to skate on.

All of a sudden...

it's real for him.

I guess it got to be too much for him.

Indelicato sprang to his feet

and yelled at me,

"What are you doing? You're not playing fair.

I know who you are.

You can't do this crap."

That's the first time I ever had a murderer actually threaten me.

The marshals immediately grabbed him, put him back into the holding cell

in the back of the courtroom.

Lunch happens.

Indelicto comes back out, comes over to me and says,

"Mr. Childers, I want to apologize. I was out of line."

My best guess as to why

there was the change of heart in Indelicato

is that he was back there in the holding cell

with "Fat Tony" Salerno, the boss of the Genovese family,

and Carmine Persico, the boss of the Colombo family,

and they're on trial for their lives also.

And they outrank him.

And I would think that they would've said,

"Hey, idiot, what the hell are you doing?

We don't need any more problems."

Gil Childers was brought in to present that case.

And he did it with great fanfare and big blow-up pictures of Galante

with the cigar in his mouth and his eye hanging out and bullet holes all over him.

But all of the violence really had nothing to do with this case.

The government's theory was there's a rule,

and the rule is you can't hurt your boss unless all the other bosses agree.

The "Commission" has to agree.

My argument was that Fat Tony was not the boss of the Genovese family

when Galante was murdered. Somebody else was.

So Fat Tony really had nothing to do with it.

If we could just convince one or two of those jurors,

Fat Tony had nothing to do with the Galante murder,

we could win the case.

Everyday, you're on edge. You're in court.

Then at night, you're preparing for the next day.

And then all weekend you're preparing for the next week.

So you're exhausted.

So, by the end, we felt good that we had made our case,

but you never know.

And then the jury goes off, and they deliberate.

You've done everything you could do.

You now realize

that everything now rests in the hands of 12 people

whose names you don't even know, 'cause it was an anonymous jury.

A defense attorney only has to convince one person,

and, of course, prosecutors have to convince 12.

The clock is kind of ticking in your brain as each day goes by.

And you're wondering to yourself, "What are they thinking?

Are they leaning our way? Are they not?

Who knows?"

I was worried about someone getting to the jury because...

in the history of Mob cases, they reached somebody.

The way the Mob can undermine the jury process is by getting to a juror.

It's effectively corrupting a juror

to hold out and refuse to vote in favor of conviction.

What is going on here?

No verdict yet in the Commission trial.

Jury wrapped up four days of deliberating. They go back to work tomorrow.

The longer a jury stays out,

the better you feel that at least there may not be a conviction.

This is not a runaway.

I was 100% percent confident when it started.

By the fifth day, I was less sure of the verdict.

If we fail at this...

ooh, it could set us back 30 years.

I thought, "I can't believe we've done all this work,

and this is gonna go down the tubes."

My unit chief said to me,

"You should write two statements for the press:

One if we convict and one if there's an acquittal."

I said, "I can't do that. I'm gonna jinx myself."

She said, "You have to do it." So I gritted my teeth and I did it.

And then we got a call.

The jury had reached a verdict.

It was like a circus in there.

Everybody showed up. I mean, it was standing room only.

We could barely get into the courtroom.

And I remember saying, "Hey, we're the prosecutors.

We've gotta get in there."

The culmination of years of hard work,

my whole squad, came down to this.

You don't want to screw this up.

You don't want to be the guy

who is known as the person who let the Mob bosses off.

The jury comes back.

You're looking at them all because you're trying to read their faces,

like what the hell's going on here.

You're sitting there, literally with your heart in your mouth.

I had my hands on my lap

and I was saying, like, a prayer.

And Pat reached out,

and he squeezed my hand, and he goes,

"Here we go, pal."

Guilty.

- And it was guilty, guilty, guilty. - Guilty, guilty.

Guilty, guilty, guilty, 150 times.

She looked over at us.

She smiled and she went... Just like that.

It's the way she nodded her head.

Good evening. A major blow for the men who rule the Mafia.

Eight mobsters, including three Mafia godfathers,

were found guilty of serving as Commission members.

This verdict means the death of the old school Mob leadership

in New York as we knew it.

I think it's gonna take a long time to replace the kind of network

these men put together.

My God, we did it!

After all this work, all those sleepless nights,

all those ruined weekends,

we were finally getting what we had fought for.

These people who were untouchables their entire lives

are now gonna be brought to justice.

It was, uh... It's an incredibly moving time.

Every single defendant was convicted on every single count,

and I think this is a great day for law enforcement

and for all those who've been in pursuit of organized crime.

Some have lost their lives.

The top bosses of the Mafia were given 100 years in prison.

One hundred years for Anthony "Fat Tony" Salerno...

For us, it was devastating.

When Giuliani brought this war into effect against gangsters,

it was the plague.

Nothing worse than this could ever come in existence

against street guys in the Mob world.

The FBI now counts 500 Mafia convictions in the last three years,

and it says more cases are coming.

This was the first time in history anything like that was done.

And you know it really, really put the icing on the cake for me.

I said, "When they can start doing that,

this life is in real trouble, real trouble."

I was elated.

All the hard work that we put into this and all the time away from home

and all the sweat and tears and then it came to fruition.

This was the culmination of, as far as I was concerned,

everything I had worked for.

Twenty some-odd years of working organized crime in New York.

It was one of those thrills of a lifetime.

I said, "Pat, it's like being in a Broadway show",

and the show is over.

"So now what are we gonna do?"

We have come to know the face of Rudolph Giuliani,

a steady presence in the morning papers and evening news.

More than any other US attorney for the Southern District of New York,

Giuliani has sewn himself into the fabric of this city.

His most recent Mafia busts resulting in death threats...

As an Italian-American, I'm absolutely proud

to be the man who helped to destroy it and who led the effort.

Rudolph Giuliani has officially jumped into the race for mayor

at the place where two other Republicans started their successful campaigns.

As we wrap up this series, it's interesting to note

that for law enforcement officials,

the questions tonight are who will the next generation of bosses be,

and what kind of shadowy crime game will they play?