On the afternoon of February 15, 1985, at about 4:45, twenty-five FBI agents and New York City police officers from the Organized Crime Task Force quietly surrounded a house on a residential street in Wantagh, Long Island. Instead of breaking down the door, one of them made a phone call. A man inside answered. Minutes later, the most wanted mafia boss in America walked out the front door with his hands on his head.
The FBI had been hunting Carmine Persico since October, when he vanished rather than face a 51-count racketeering indictment. Now, at 51 years old, the boss of the Colombo family emerged from hiding, followed by one of his captains, Dominic Montemarano, known as Donnie Shanks. Agents also arrested Joseph Russo and Fred DeChristopher, the man who had taken Persico in, charging both that night with harboring a fugitive. Kenneth Walton, deputy assistant director of the FBI’s New York field office, told reporters that Persico looked surprised when the phone rang.
He added only that Persico’s associates had been under surveillance and that the bureau had known he was there that afternoon. He did not say who told them, or when, or why a team that size had not simply taken the door off its hinges. The next day, Persico and Montemarano were arraigned in federal court in Manhattan on the same 51 counts they had fled in October. For the government, getting him into that chair was only the first step.
The case against Persico had been building for years. In the fall of 1984, a federal grand jury returned the 51-count indictment against 11 leaders of the Colombo family, with Persico’s name at the top. The indictment closed out an FBI investigation that had run for more than three years under the code name Starquest. Agents chose the name because they regarded all 11 men as the stars of the family.
To get close enough to record men this careful, the bureau staged elaborate operations. Off Staten Island, agents wired a luxury yacht for sound and put an undercover agent aboard, posing as a big-spending buyer of stolen goods. Suspected mobsters came aboard as his guests. In Little Italy, agents ran a pasta importing business that existed to be visited, with hidden cameras recording the Colombo men who came through its door.
More than two dozen extortion victims were persuaded to cooperate. The indictment alleged that the family controlled seven union locals in the city’s construction and restaurant industries and used them to squeeze contractors and restaurant owners for money. Three of the 11 defendants held union office themselves. Walton described the family’s influence on the day the indictment was announced, saying its finely manicured hands were at every construction site in New York City.
Attorney General William French Smith went further, declaring that the mob was no longer untouchable. Rudolph Giuliani, the US attorney for the Southern District, was more careful. He said there was a lot more to do. On that day, Giuliani was the one who was right.
Seven of the 11 defendants were in custody or accounted for, including the underboss Gennaro Langella and the union official Ralph Scopo. Four were gone: Persico, Montemarano, and two more captains, John D. Russo and Frank Melly. The FBI issued all-points bulletins and launched a nationwide manhunt.
On January 31, 1985, FBI director William Webster added Persico to the Ten Most Wanted list as fugitive number 390. The poster described a Brooklyn native, five foot seven, 150 pounds, brown hair and brown eyes, with a scar on his right wrist and partial use of his right arm from an old stroke. That same day, the news noted that the bureau was also looking for Persico’s older brother, Alphonse, known as Allie Boy, who had defaulted on his bond after a loan sharking conviction. As far as the public knew, the government had no idea where either brother was.
Persico spent two weeks on that list before walking out of the house in Wantagh with his hands up. The answer to how agents found him was sitting inside the house the whole time. Fred DeChristopher was married to Persico’s cousin. When Persico needed somewhere to disappear, he did not go to a crew hangout in Brooklyn where every agent in the city would look first.
He went to family, to a quiet street on the south shore of Long Island near the beach. While Persico was living under that roof, DeChristopher was secretly working with a federal agent. His motive, according to the Mob Museum’s history of the case, was plainly the reward: $50,000. The government’s price on a mob boss turned out to be enough for a man Persico trusted with his life.
The address the whole country was supposedly hunting for had been reaching the bureau from inside the hideout. That was why agents could phone, why a quiet surrender worked, and why the FBI walked away with both the fugitive and the source. Jump ahead 20 months to early October 1986, a federal courtroom in Manhattan. Persico was on his feet at the defense table with no lawyer doing the questioning for him.
The witness he was about to question was Fred DeChristopher. How the case got from that front lawn to that witness stand is the part that actually convicted him. If the Colombo indictment had been the only problem, Persico might have had years to fight it out, one appeal at a time. But with Persico already in custody, agents arrested the men named in a second indictment out of Giuliani’s office.
This one went after the Commission itself, the council of bosses that sat over the New York families. It named Anthony Salerno of the Genovese family, Anthony Corallo of the Lucchese family, and Persico’s own underboss, Langella. By that summer, the government had added Persico himself, and he had gone from fugitive to defendant in two federal racketeering cases at the same time. The Colombo case went to trial first.
Jury selection started at the end of September 1985 in Manhattan before Judge John Keenan, and the trial ran eight months. The government presented about 200 tapes, about 100 witnesses, and 800 documents. The record ran to more than 15,000 pages. Then the witnesses started coming.
Jimmy Fratianno, the 72-year-old admitted killer turned government witness, took the stand. Then Fred DeChristopher came forward in open court and told the jury about hiding the boss while he was on the run. The man whose front door Persico trusted was now on the government’s witness list. In June 1986, after 12 days of deliberation, a jury of seven women and five men convicted Persico and eight others on racketeering charges, a list of 28 counts running from bribery to extortion to loan sharking.
His underboss, Langella, went down with him, and so did his own son, Alphonse. But Persico was not done yet. By September 1986, the Commission trial was underway in Manhattan federal court before Judge Richard Owen, and Persico had decided to be his own lawyer. His longtime attorney, Frank Lopez, remained at the table only as a legal adviser.
Persico’s explanation to reporters was short: he had a good attorney, but he felt the attorney was getting tired after all these years. His whole plan rested on one idea. All he needed was one juror who did not buy the prosecution’s case, because one holdout was enough to set all eight defendants free. Persico played to the one.
Over roughly 10 weeks, the government put about 80 file witnesses and something like 150 tape recordings before the jury. The defense lawyers settled on a strategy of admitting the mafia existed and arguing that being a member was not a crime. The defendants went along only if none of them had to say it personally. Persico, the one defendant acting as his own lawyer, never said it himself.
Where the bet went wrong was the witness list, because one of the people he was charming the jury in front of was the relative who turned him in. In early October, the government called Fred DeChristopher, and Persico got up to question him. DeChristopher admitted he never once heard Persico mention the Commission or the concrete club. But he told the jury the two of them had talked about criminal matters, and that Persico was careful about it, often opening with something like, I shouldn’t be talking like this, Freddy.
Persico’s questions kept circling back to the betrayal. He asked DeChristopher whether DeChristopher had helped him when he came to his house, and the courtroom laughed. At one point DeChristopher asked him whether he would like to see him down the sewer. Persico’s answer was dry enough to get its own laugh: I don’t think the judge would permit me to answer that question.
Then he said it plainly: You were my family. The cross-examination proved to the jury how close the two men really were, which happened to be the government’s point. What the government wanted from DeChristopher was a witness who could put Persico in a room talking about criminal business, and he had just done it with the defendant asking the questions. Closing arguments ended on Friday, November 14, 1986.
Judge Owen spent close to three hours instructing the jury and told them plainly that membership in the mafia alone was not enough to convict any of these defendants. Then the jury went out. On Monday, November 17, with that jury still deliberating, Persico stood before Judge Keenan for sentencing in the Colombo case. Keenan gave him 39 years.
Langella got 65, and Persico’s son, Alphonse, got 12. Keenan also handed Persico a line that stayed with him: Mr. Persico, you are a tragedy. You are one of the most intelligent people I have ever seen.
On Wednesday, November 19, the Commission jury came back and convicted all eight defendants. Persico was found guilty on every count. The one-juror bet never found its juror. On January 13, 1987, Judge Owen sentenced him to 100 years in prison and a fine of $240,000, on top of Keenan’s 39, 139 years in all.
Persico was 53 years old, and the government had just made sure the rest of his life belonged to the Bureau of Prisons. Walton never did explain that February night on Long Island how agents knew which door to call. The answer came out under oath twice, and the second time Persico himself was the one asking the questions. The case against him ran on a yacht off Staten Island, cameras in a pasta shop, 200 tapes, and a union boss talking about two percent.
The arrest ran on something older than any of that. A relative took him in, and the relative talked to the FBI. Carmine Persico died on March 7, 2019, at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina, 85 years old and still in federal custody, 32 years into a sentence built to outlast him. Fred DeChristopher, by the Mob Museum’s account, took his $50,000 and bought himself a nice home.
The boss who told that witness, You were my family, had it exactly right. Family is exactly how the government got to him.