Undercover Cop: How I Brought Down the Real-Life Sopranos - Hardcover

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Fitting In
March 1982
I was in King’s Court, a mob hangout on the west side of Newark, New Jersey, with two wiseguys. We were doing what wiseguys do: talking about pussy and money, not necessarily in that order.
The club was in a commercial area, which for Newark at that time meant more vacant storefronts than viable businesses. The Court was what passed for a health club back then: four racquetball courts and a weight room the size of a closet. The main attraction was the disco, a club within a club, located in the center of that mecca to healthy living. Play a few games of racquetball to get the cardio up and the hamstrings loose, then repair to the bar to drink yourself silly, dabble in some coke, maybe get laid.
It was the eighties; disco was still in bloom, but waning, slowly being replaced by hip-hop and rap. In this primarily Italian and Irish neighborhood, disco wasn’t going down without a fight.
That night the disco was packed with a diversity of types. Mobsters mixed with college students, off-duty firefighters and cops, with a smattering of junkies and underage girls looking to trade some free tight snatch for drugs. There was no shortage of takers. The racquetball courts were deserted.
Despite the variety of the clientele and the size of the crowd, peace was usually maintained in the disco. The owners, made guys from the Lucchese crime family, saw to it, as did the small army of bouncers who were as big as Buicks. The Lucchese family ran this section of Newark and had a mostly peaceful yet contentious relationship with the Gambino and Genovese families, who whacked up the rest of the city.
Anthony Acceturo was the capo who ran the Lucchese crew. Acceturo—or Tumac as he was known on the street—was a heroin addict and all-around scumbag. Born and raised in Newark, his claim to fame was killing some black bookmakers back in the sixties to make his bones with the Luccheses.
Like-minded groups gathered at the bar and in corners, shrouded by smoke and trying to maintain private conversations under the din of blasting music. As an homage to the old days, the joint also boasted a live singer a few days a week who focused on the old standards, giving people with taste a respite from the noise. The current Sinatra wannabe was Frank Vincent, who had a pretty good voice and would later go on to appear in the HBO series The Sopranos and numerous other TV shows and movies, always typecast as a gangster. He’s best known for telling Joe Pesci to get his “fucking shine box” in the movie GoodFellas, and exiting the scene via bullets, stab wounds, and numerous kicks to the head.
Tonight, those patrons who weren’t sweating on the dance floor to the rhythmic beat of Gloria Gaynor made frequent trips to the bathrooms to partake in as much cocaine as they could shovel up their noses. Coke isn’t a mellow drug, it causes users to seek action. The resurgence of coke in the eighties fueled the success of clubs everywhere. These were the days before random drug tests, and it was in the best interest of partygoers to keep the peace and blow their brains out with impunity. This included cops, bad guys, doctors, lawyers, politicians, and everyone else. It was party time.
An eclectic crowd if there ever was one.
With me were Joey Ricardi and Rory DeLuca, two Lucchese associates, young guys looking to get made and maybe someday get rich as bosses of their own crews. Or maybe wind up in the trunk of a Cadillac in the long-term-parking lot at Newark Airport, whichever came first.
My name’s Mike Russell and I was a New Jersey state trooper working undercover, playing the role of an up-and-coming mobster looking to work with a crew and make a ton of money. My cover was that I was once a cop but was fired for being excessively violent and had been accused of criminality by my cop bosses, charges that had never been substantiated. I had been given the nickname Mikey Ga-Ga by my new best friends in the Court, a street name that truly meant nothing. A drunken capo had coined it one night and it stuck.
I was thirty-two years old, from the Newark area, had spent my life on the street, and had the well-deserved reputation of being a tough guy. The local Mafia contingent believed my bullshit story, but it was still taking a while for me to work my way into the confidence of Acceturo. I had plenty of time. Cops are nothing if not patient. While patience might be a virtue, trying to work your way into a Mafia family made it a necessity.
It can sometimes take many months or even years to convince normally suspicious gangsters that you are one of them. My object was to build a good criminal case, one that would stick in court and send the bad guys to jail for a long time. To what extent my supervisors would have me go to get convictions would soon become evident, but for now I was simply biding my time by tending bar, managing the health-club portion of the Court, and talking up a good background for myself.
It was a typically brisk winter evening, cold and dank. I’m convinced God gave Newark what seemed like a permanent overcast to fit in with the palpable feeling of despair and defeat that hung in that economic DMZ. The race riots after the Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King assassinations of the 1960s had permanently labeled Newark as a slum that needed to either be bombed off the map or rehabilitated with massive amounts of federal funds, depending on your political point of view.
We occupied a table in the back near the office, surveying the throng of guys bellying up to the bar or to the butts of the women they were trying to score.
“Lotta off-duty cops,” Joey observed.
“Yeah,” Rory agreed.
Joey Ricardi was in his twenties, like Rory, and dressed like a typical mob associate: tight jeans, black silk shirt, black leather jacket, and slicked-back hair, what I referred to as a ninety-mile-an-hour hairstyle. He was dark and couldn’t be mistaken for anything but Italian. Rory DeLuca looked like Joey, except for the black silk shirt. His was red. Both had enduring sneers and were adorned with enough gold chains to anchor a battleship. If and when they got inducted into the Brotherhood as made guys, the thug look would get replaced with $2,000 suits. They’d still look like hoodlums, only better dressed.
I looked as if I was trying to fit in, dressing the dress and walking the walk, but while these guys were dark and swarthy, I was more Newark-noir, fair skinned and brooding.
These guys could spot an off-duty cop with a paper bag over his head. I knew what was coming next: We were going to boost cars for guns. This was the practice of looking for the cars that belonged to the off-duty cops, who would invariably stash their pieces in their rides before entering the club. Nothing turned off a nubile, young thing like grabbing a guy around the waist and coming up with a fistful of iron.
With almost a hundred cars parked in the vicinity, how could we pick out a cop’s car? For me it was easy: I was a cop. For Joey and Rory it was a matter of survival; if they couldn’t spot a cop at fifty yards, they were destined to be handcuffed by a lot of them.
It didn’t take a clairvoyant; most cops parked as close to their destinations as possible, traffic laws be damned. Their cars could be identified to other cops by placing a police-union card on the dashboard. Subtle. This was the eighties, before the term politically correct was hammered into the American lexicon. Cops could park by fire hydrants, in crosswalks, on sidewalks, in driveways. If there were a way to pull their cars into someone’s living room, they’d do it.
So, with little difficulty, we went hunting for cops’ private cars. The object was to smash and grab: break a window, rifle the car as quickly as possible for a gun or other valuables, and move on to the next vehicle. Brain surgery it wasn’t.
I didn’t want to be the window breaker, seeing as how I was the law. I had planned on being the lookout, but that was soon to change. Undercovers were not supposed to break the law. At least that’s what the book said. The street dictated a different set of rules. To seem real and, better yet, not get made as a cop, I occasionally committed the random felony. Tonight would be one of those times.
I scored almost immediately. In the club’s parking lot I spotted a brand-new, shiny, black Mercedes-Benz with the doors unlocked and a leather briefcase in the backseat. While the vehicle certainly didn’t belong to a cop, it was easy pickings.
Joey and Rory were otherwise occupied, peering into the windows of cars adorned with PBA stickers. I decided to give them a heads-up.
“Hey,” I called out. “Got an open car here. Briefcase in it.”
Joey’s head bobbed up. “No gun?”
I shrugged. “Doubt it. Looks like it belongs to a citizen.”
“Fuck it then,” Joey said, and went back to the hunt.
Rory had wandered down the street and didn’t notice the exchange.
I removed the briefcase, glanced quickly inside, and saw a wad of cash and a lot of paper. I walked to my own car and tossed the briefcase in the trunk, a decision I made on the spur of the moment. The briefcase, the expensive car, that it was left unlocked, spelled M-O-B. Wiseguys didn’t lock their cars when parked in friendly territory, figuring no one would have the balls to take off a car obviously belonging to a connected guy. A show of bravado, if you will. I’m a wiseguy, fuck with my car at your own peril. Or maybe the Benz belonged to Joe Citizen and he was too drunk to remember to lock it. My cop instinct, however, told me it was the former.
Joey and Rory didn’t score any guns, but came up with some loose change, a flashlight, a bottle of Scotch, a box of condoms, and a banana. They stole everything but the fruit. Big-time gangsters.
We wound up back in the club, where we spent the...