We all know how the mafia works, right? The cinema
screen and the cathode ray have educated us in mob etiquette and protocol.
Anybody who’s ever thrilled to The Godfather, Goodfellas or The Sopranos
understands the mafia is a finely nuanced world of respect, fanatical honour
amongst thieves and evangelical familial loyalties...
“That’s bullshit!” observes Dominick Montiglio,
slamming a heavy fist onto the table of a New York pizzeria. “There is no loyalty in the mafia and there is no honour.
Forget that crap in The Godfather - if you’re in the mob, you can’t trust
nobody. The bottom line of the mafia is money and killing.”
In all fairness, Montiglio is a man who knows a
little about money and killing. As a key figure in New York’s Gambino family in
the 1970, he pulled in $250,000 per week in drug and extortion money and
supervised the nefarious DeMeo crew, the most notorious contract killers in
mafia history. In 1983 Montiglio was arrested, turned state evidence and sent
56 mobsters to jail before vanishing into the witness protection programme.
Twenty-two years later, Montiglio has emerged from
anonymity to be the linchpin of a new four-part TV series tracing the history
of the mob from its Sicilian origins to the current day. A stocky figure now
nearing 60, he’s phlegmatic about the dangers that could face him on today’s
rare return to New York: “Plenty of people still want me dead, but what can I
do? The trick is not to be scared.”
Montiglio’s life story is a fascinating microcosm of
mob life at the peak of the mafia’s 1970s powers. Aged
five he was removed from the care of his alcoholic father by his uncle, Nino
Gaggi, a Gambino family capo: “My father used to walk down the street and totally ignore
me. My uncle had told him, if he talked to me, he would kill him.”
After killing 93 enemy troops as a sniper in Vietnam,
Montiglio began to utilise his new transferable skills back in New York.
Initially reticent to join the family business, he was soon seduced by the
glamour of the wiseguy lifestyle. In 1976 he sealed his place in the Gambino
inner circle by shooting dead Vincent Governara, a man whose sole crime had
been to break Nino Gaggi’s nose a full 12 years earlier. Montiglio left his
wife’s birthday party to whack Governara, returning an hour later to hand over presents and eat
cake as if nothing had happened.
Montiglio is remarkably blasé today about Governara’s
fate (“I guess he was unlucky,” he shrugs), but this initiation murder soon
paled into insignificance when he was made the de facto head of the psychotic
DeMeo crew. Operating out of a Brooklyn bar called the Gemini Lounge, this gang
of Gambino-affiliated car thieves and drug dealers embarked on a killing spree
that Montiglio claims he was powerless to control.
“The FBI reckon the DeMeo crew killed 200 people,” he
says. “I reckon that’s a low-end figure. They would entice people there, stab
them, wrap them in towels and shoot them through the heart. Then they’d cut
their throats, hang them in the shower and eat pizza while they waited for the
bodies to bleed dry so they could hack them into pieces. It was basically a
crew of nine serial killers.”
Brando’s Don Corleone would struggle to recognise the
DeMeo crew’s ethics. When they arrived at one hapless victim’s house to find
him hosting a Sunday morning brunch for his neighbours, they machine-gunned the
entire breakfast table. Seldom present at killings and inured to slaughter by
Vietnam, Montiglio kept an amoral distance: “I saw the DeMeos as cartoon
characters, and the people they killed were cartoons too. That was just how
things were.”
National Geographic’s TV series takes a censorious
tone on the mob’s activities. In interview, Montiglio cuts a far more
ambivalent figure. Uneasy - but far from contrite - when forced to discuss the
Gambino family’s violent atrocities, the retired gangster becomes positively
nostalgic when invited to recall the good times when the mafia, by his own
boast, “ran not just New York, but the whole country”.
“Our chief, Paul Castellano, sent me to see a congressman,” he says. “I had a request in an envelope; I have no idea what
it was. The congressman called me a couple of days later and said, ‘Tell
Castellano it can’t be done.’ Castellano sent a message back via me: ‘If it’s
not done, I will make sure every single truck and ship in this country stops
working.’“ He claims the congressman rang back the next day and told him the
White House would take care of it. “That’s when I realised - this thing goes
right to the top.”
As the mafia-dominated 1970s closed, Montiglio’s
lifestyle made that of Joe Pesci’s Tommy DeVito in Goodfellas look positively
frugal. As his narcotics and extortion network pulled in hundreds of thousands
of dollars per month, he dutifully acquired the archetypal wiseguy accessories
of guns, girls and cars. The Gambino men took their wives out every Saturday
night. The rest of the week was playtime.
“There were so many gangster groupies,” he recalls wistfully.
“I took one girl back to my penthouse on Central Park. The next morning she was
going to get a train home, and I said, ‘Don’t do that.’ I walked her to the
Cadillac dealer, bought her a new $22,000 automobile with the cash in my
pocket, and she drove off in it. I had absolutely no idea what her name was.”
Any good mafia story requires a fall from grace, and
Montiglio’s playhouse came tumbling down in 1983 when he was jailed for
racketeering. Fearful that he would talk, the Gambinos took out a $1m contract
on his life. Montiglio took a decision that was “harder than doing three more
terms in Vietnam”: he shopped Castellano, the DeMeo crew and the entire family.
Locked into the witness protection programme for the
next decade, Montiglio’s family fell apart as his wife and children proved
unable to cope with constant moves to cowboy hicktowns in Wyoming, Alabama and
Colorado. Poverty-stricken and alone, he quit the programme in 1993: “I felt
the risk had diminished, but the point was that it was a miserable life and I
just couldn’t live like that any longer.”
Still living under a secret identity, Montiglio now
makes a living painting lurid and disturbingly primal artworks (“It’s great
therapy”). The recent discovery of Agent Orange around his lungs, an unwanted
souvenir of Vietnam, has also made him more fatalistic about breaking cover for
media appearances such as this. So what of the US mafia today? Has their peak
inevitably passed?
“The Italian mob as I knew them are still around, but
they’re more underground and doing more legit business,” he says. “Nowadays the
Russian mob are moving in everywhere, and they will shoot anybody as soon as
look at them.” There’s a pause, and a sigh. “You know the problem? They have no
class.”
It’s a family thing:
Dominick Montiglio runs a wiseguy’s eye over screen
mobs.
The Godfather
“It’s so romantic but no mob family is like that.
That’s how we’d all love the mafia to be - it makes us the good guys.”
Goodfellas
“It’s good, but I get pissed
off with the Henry Hill character. Henry never did nothing in real life. He was
our coffee boy, our gofer.” [That’s the point.]
Donnie Brasco
“The most realistic mafia movie of all. I gotta say,
respect to Joe Pistone - he had some nerve to be undercover in the mob for as
long as he was.”
The Sopranos
“The Sopranos is a joke. A mafia boss seeing a
psychiatrist - are you kidding me? He’d get whacked as he walked out the door!”
Growing Up Gotti [US reality show following
the fortunes of late don John Gotti’s law-abiding but spoiled offspring]
“Jesus Christ! I knew John Gotti’s kids when they
were little. Now they’re whining about not having enough diamonds? I want to
smack the lot of them.”
The Mafia, starts Sunday, 9pm, National Geographic
channel
No comments:
Post a Comment