Being Oscar (24 page)

Goodman Dynasty: Oscar and Carolyn surrounded by their children, their children’s spouses, and their grandchildren. (Photo by Carol Cali of The Meadows School)

T
hey say you can’t go home again, but in the mid-1980s I got a chance to spend quite a bit of time in Philadelphia. The FBI had a major investigation into the crime family there, targeting mob boss Nicodemo “Little Nicky” Scarfo and most of his top associates.

Bobby Simone, Scarfo’s lawyer, had recommended me to Leland Beloff, a city councilman who had gotten caught up in one of the many cases the feds had pending against the Scarfo organization. Beloff called me and I flew out to meet him. Once again, informants were the key. The mob rat I had mentioned earlier, Nicholas “Nicky the Crow” Caramandi, was the chief witness.

It was interesting to return to the city where I grew up and where my Dad had built his reputation as a lawyer. Some people still remembered him, and those who did always had nice things to say about him.

What they were saying about my client was another matter. Philadelphia had long had a reputation for political corruption. “Corrupt and contented” was a phrase coined back in 1904 by one of the muckraking journalists of the day, a man named Lincoln Steffens. He wrote an article for
McClure’s Magazine
in which he said Philadelphia was one of the most corrupt, if not
the
most corrupt, city in the country.

Many were saying that still applied, although Steffens was writing about a Republican political machine. As a city councilman
Beloff was part of the Democratic machine that controlled the city in the 1980s, and still does today.

Beloff was a millionaire. He had inherited a nursing home business that his father, a former Philadelphia judge, had founded. He was a handsome, well-spoken councilman whose district included part of South Philadelphia, which was the mob’s nesting place, and an area along the Delaware River that had been targeted for redevelopment. For years the city had talked about Penns Landing, a location along the river that supposedly was the place where William Penn had landed when he came to Philadelphia.

Urban planners saw the riverfront as a natural location for a commercial, residential, and community development, something like the Inner Harbor in Baltimore or the South Street Seaport in New York. The city had finally gotten its act together and had tapped Willard Rouse, a nationally known developer, to spearhead the project.

According to a federal indictment, the mob jumped into the middle of the project through Beloff. A couple of city ordinances needed to be passed before the Penns Landing project could qualify for some federal aid programs. Several million dollars were at stake in terms of the federal funding, and many more millions when you considered the entire development plan. Beloff, as the councilman in whose district the project was located, could either hold up those ordinances or shepherd them through.

The feds said he cut a deal with the mob. Caramandi, a con artist, degenerate gambler, and overall low-life gangster, became the point man. He went to the Rouse people and told them he could hold up the ordinances or have them passed. What he wanted in exchange was $1 million.

It was a not-so-subtle mob shakedown. What Caramandi and his mob associates didn’t figure on was Rouse. They were apparently used to dealing with corrupt politicians and corrupt
businessmen. But Rouse, who wasn’t from Philadelphia, went to the FBI. The feds got an undercover agent into the negotiations, posing as a Rouse project manager. He met with Caramandi, who repeated the demand, claiming that he had Beloff in his back pocket.

Scarfo, Caramandi, Beloff, and Bobby Rego, one of his council aides, were indicted. A short time later, Caramandi flipped and began cooperating, claiming he was convinced that Scarfo was going to have him killed for screwing up the shakedown. At around the same time, another member of the Scarfo organization, Thomas “Tommy Del” DelGiorno, cut a deal with the New Jersey State Police. Eventually DelGiorno was turned over to the feds.

These guys were murderers and had been targets of federal and state investigations, but now they were welcomed into the federal fold with open arms. Both were treated with kid gloves by their law enforcement handlers and by the judges who eventually sentenced them. They didn’t spend time in prison, but rather in safe houses.

At one point, Caramandi was spotted by the mother of one of the defendants in the mob case. He was living in a condo in Ocean City, Maryland, a comfortable summer resort town, surrounded by a detail of FBI agents who rotated “duty shifts” at the seashore.

DelGiorno had an even better deal. Traditionally, the government rents a house in a safe location before relocating a witness and his family to that spot. DelGiorno got the okay to purchase a house in Virginia, where he and his family were moved while he was cooperating. The government then agreed to “rent” the house from him. He became both the proprietor who was renting to Uncle Sam, and the witness who was living in a safe house. All his family’s needs were taken care of on taxpayer dollars, plus he was collecting rent from Uncle Sam.

In exchange, Caramandi and DelGiorno were “confessing” to all sorts of crimes—murders, assaults, and extortions—that stretched back for years in Philadelphia, Atlantic City, and Southern New Jersey.

That was the legal minefield I walked into when I was hired to represent Beloff. He was somewhat volatile, but was treated with a great deal of respect in the city. His constituents loved him. His aide, Bobby Rego, was a charming guy who lived in South Philadelphia and had grown up with some of the mobsters. And Lee’s wife, Diane, was very nice. She was the better part of that duo.

We met for dinner one night at Bookbinders, a famous (now shuttered) Philadelphia landmark restaurant in the historic part of town. I was joined by Bobby Simone, who was representing Scarfo in the case, and Beloff and his wife. Beloff was under a lot of pressure at the time, and was a little paranoid. Plus we had a few drinks before and during dinner. All the while he kept looking across the room at another table where two men in suits were having a meal. They were dressed in conservative suits with white shirts and rep ties. As the night wore on, Beloff became convinced they were FBI agents who were there to keep tabs on him.

Bookbinder’s was a great restaurant, and I was enjoying my meal and going over some preliminary details. All the while, Beloff kept looking at the two guys. Finally, as we were leaving, he flipped out, picked up a butter knife, and ran at them, screaming, “FBI motherfuckers!”

I don’t know what he intended to do. We grabbed him, and the two guys in the business suits were shaking. After they got over their shock, they said, “We’re not FBI. We’re IBM.”

That was my introduction to Leland Beloff and Philadelphia politics, circa 1987. We had a decent defense in the case and were able to beat up Caramandi pretty good on the witness
stand. He looked like something out of central casting, wearing a leather jacket, a two-day beard, and had a gruff, heavily Philadelphia-accented voice. He also had a criminal record that went back decades. He was a scam artist with a conviction for passing counterfeit bills, and he was now admitting to being a hit man for the mob.

Another witness was a woman who was described as Beloff’s girlfriend. That’s always a ticklish situation, and as I said, I thought his wife Diane was a very nice lady. In another alleged extortion charge, the feds said Beloff had gotten his girlfriend a rent-free apartment in a building owned by a developer who needed city council approvals for another project.

The jury had only been out a couple of days when they sent a note saying they were deadlocked. The judge, John P. Fullam, a very dour man, immediately declared a mistrial. I think he knew the prosecution’s case had gone badly, and in effect, he gave them a second chance. It was as if he was on a mission. I thought he was totally out of line, and I think if he had let the jury deliberate longer, we might have gotten acquittals.

Fullam either had a bug in the jury room or was listening through the wall, because I’ve never seen a mistrial declared without an instruction—they call it an Allen charge—asking the jury to go back and try again.

We tried the case a second time, but retrials are always bad for the defense. I like the spontaneity of a trial, but you tend to lose that the second time around. The prosecution knows what your game is and can bolster its case accordingly.

For example, in the second trial, Caramandi came in cleanshaven and wearing a jacket and tie, which de-emphasized his wiseguy look. The government also changed prosecutors. Edward S. G. Dennis, Jr., who was the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, handled the prosecution. This was highly unusual because Dennis was the boss. He had
about 150 deputy and assistant U.S. attorneys who normally tried cases. But this time, Dennis brought the prestige of his position into the courtroom. This was the top law enforcement official in the city, and it had to have an impact on the jury.

Dennis did a very extraordinary thing that I had never seen before or since. He read his closing argument to the jury, and while he was reading it, he had it flashed on a screen on the wall, like a PowerPoint. I thought this gave added weight to what he was saying, and obviously the jury thought so, too.

Scarfo, Beloff, and Rego were convicted. Beloff got ten years, Rego got eight, and Scarfo got fourteen.

And that was just the start of Nicky Scarfo’s problems.

We were constantly in court fighting pretrial battles and picking juries.

Jury selection is another interesting process. I know a lot of attorneys like to depend on “experts” who help analyze the questionnaires that potential jurors fill out and who try to develop insights into a juror’s character based on how he or she answers questions posed during the selection process, which is called the
voir dire
, Latin for “to see and to say.” I usually went with my own instincts.

It used to be that I would pick anyone who said they had a tattoo. That used to signify, at least in my mind, that the person was an individualist and a non-conformist. Today that’s no longer the case. Tattoos are like fashion statements, and they don’t tell us much about a person anymore.

I’m a Leo, born on July 26, and I would try to slip that fact into the question-and-answer sessions with possible jurors because I believe that you can sometimes make a connection that way; that a fellow Leo might be more sympathetic to the arguments
of a lawyer who had the same birth sign. I would always try to keep naturalized citizens off the jury panel. I worried that they might be too gung-ho and rah-rah, and would accept anything the prosecution—the embodiment of the United States of America—might say. Another thing I tried to ask about was bumper stickers. You can sometimes get an idea of who a person is by the bumper sticker he or she has on the back of the car.

At the end of the day, jury selection is really a legal crapshoot. We had a lot of that when I was back in Philadelphia for those mob trials. Unfortunately, we didn’t roll many sevens.