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Retired Intelligence Detective Gary Jenkins brings you the best in mob history with his unique perception of the mafia. In this episode of the Gangland Wire podcast, Michael Vecchione, a former Brooklyn prosecutor and author, discusses his novels inspired by real-life experiences in the criminal underworld. Gary Jenkins and Michael Vecchione focus on Lucchese mobster Anthony Gaspipe Casso. These two veterans of the fight against the Mafia delve into themes of loyalty, betrayal, and the gritty realities of organized crime in New York City. Former porsecutor Michael Vecchione interviews Gaspipe Casso about his involvement in criminal activities, intricate alliances, and obstacles law enforcement faces in solving cases, which are highlighted, offering a glimpse into the dark world of organized crime. The discussion underscores the challenges of investigating organized crime and emphasizes the importance of ongoing efforts to combat the La Cosa Nostra.
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Transcript
[0:00]
Introduction to Gangland Wire
[0:00]Hey, welcome all you wiretappers out there. It’s good to be back here in the studio of Gangland Wire. This is Gary Jenkins. You know, I’m a retired Kansas City Police Intelligence Unit detective turned podcaster. And this has been fun, guys. This is so much fun. And I’ve gotten to know some great people doing this over the last several years. And one of them is Michael Vecchione. Welcome, Michael.
[0:22]Thank you very much, Gary. I appreciate you having me back on. I love talking to you and talking to your audience. You know, it’s interesting, like Michael and I kind of speak the same language in many ways, because he was a prosecutor in the Brooklyn. He was a, you were the chief of the Brooklyn Rackets division, correct? That’s, that’s correct. Yeah. I had before that I was chief of the Homicide Bureau as well. And so I kind of had my hand in, in almost everything that went on in the DA’s office when I was, when I was there. So it was a very interesting experience. I got to tell I can imagine, you know, Michael knows where all the bodies are buried in Brooklyn, political and really, you know, it’s interesting you say that because the guy we’re going to talk about the gas pipe castle, when I spoke to him, gave me some locations for bodies. And, but we’ll get into that when we, when I tell you the story. Really? Let’s talk just a little bit about Michael and his books. First of all, guys, we’ve got a self-talk Mary, you know, and, and you’ll be interested in these books. He was on here before with Luigi the Zip, Homicide is My Business, and that was a big seller, at least for me, and I think it was for Michael, too. And he interviewed this guy who was a Sicilian who did a bunch of hits here who just liked Michael, if I remember right. That was a great show, Michael. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, it was. Luigi was a character that I will never forget, I have to tell you.
[1:49]Uh, I’ll have links to all these and to Amazon and the show notes guys at, we had crooked Brooklyn. We talked, I think we talked about that one and we had, uh, did we do murder on the bridge? I can’t remember what was, we did the one about, uh, people were getting killed in a hospital.
[2:07]Oh, that was Behind the Murder Curtain. Oh, okay. Behind the Murder Curtain. Behind the Murder Curtain. Yeah. And Murder on the Bridge, it was a case that I did. And it’s actually part of the novel series that I’m now working on. I made it into a, I fictionalized it. But it started out as, it was a young woman who was walking the Williamsburg Bridge between Manhattan and Brooklyn for exercise. And she was set upon one Sunday morning by a junkie who wound up killing her after she She didn’t have any money that he wanted money and she didn’t have any. He killed her and made it seem as if it was a sex crime and then went back later that night and burnt her body to beyond recognition.
[2:47]So it was a very, very important case to the district attorney when I got it because it involved a community that had a lot of votes in it. You know, the Hasidic Jewish community in Brooklyn is huge. Huge and this young lady was the victim of this guy that that i called and if you don’t mind i could just tell you a little a little bit when i tried the case and i summed up the case was so horrific and what he did to this young woman that all was left on the on the bridge where she was found was a shoe and her bra clasp and and the only way that we identified her was through dental records. It was just horrific.
[3:28]And when I summed up, I essentially told the jury that it was as if the devil
[3:36]
Fallen Angel Novel Series
[3:33]had come to Brooklyn and committed this crime. And that gave me an idea, but later on in my life, and I’m in the midst of it now, of a crime novel series, which I call Fallen Angel. And the premise is that the devil does come to Brooklyn and he is behind and instigating horrific crimes that need to be taken to, the perpetrators need to be brought to justice. And the government forms this committee, this group, to concentrate on bringing the devil and his minions to justice. And they hire a prosecutor. And the prosecutor happens to be the retired district attorney, the head of the rackets division in the DA’s office. So the books of Fallen Angel, book one and two are now on Amazon.
[4:25]And I’ve just turned in book three. It’ll be out in the fall. So I think that your listeners and your viewers will really like it, will really enjoy it. Because all of the cases, all of the crimes in the book that is part of a novel, but all of them actually happened. And I handled every single one of them when I was in a DA’s office. So that’s the spin. And it’s been very, very well received. I sold book one to Hollywood. And I’m hanging on now waiting to hear. year. We have a pilot written. And so anyway, that’s a little bit about what I’m doing at the moment and now talking to you. All right. And what we’re going to talk about is your other book that you did with a retired New York City detective, Tommy Dades, called Friends of the Family. Right, right. We’re going to not so much talk about the two, what we call mafia cops, I believe, Coppa and what was the other guy’s name? Eppolito. Eppolito, yeah. He was the one that was in and Goodfellas, I believe. Those were a couple of characters to us for sure. But we’re going to talk about Gaspipe Casso, who was their kind of control, would you say?
[5:31]Well, yeah, he controlled them. He actually called them his crystal ball because when he needed information about informants or needed something taken care of by them going into the police computer and getting information, he had an intermediary who he would go to and that intermediary would go to the mafia cops and they would provide the information they’d give them the information about who was who the rats were who the informants were and and then on at least one occasion they actually did a murder on his behalf so so those two guys were were quite a quite a pair i mean it was and they’re both by by the way, now deceased. So we can talk about them.
[6:15]Well, they were both in jail when they did get deceased, weren’t they? Yep. Yep. They did life. They got life in prison. They both died in jail. And it was, as my boss, the district attorney called it when we had our press conference, it was the most horrific case of corruption in the history of the New York City Police Department. And it was, it was. I would say in the history of the United States, it was It was the most horrific case of corruption by law enforcement, for sure. I don’t know any worse. Gas pipe was right in the center. But, you know, Gary, I got to tell you, before they went to work for gas pipe, they were working for someone in the Gambino family. Oh, really? And there was a falling out. The Gambinos did something to, I think it was the cousin of Eppolito. And when that happened, he said that he’s not going to do anything for them anymore. And gas pipe was looking for someone like them, somebody he could turn, someone he could lean on. And the intermediary that he went to was a guy named Bert Kaplan, who had been the intermediary between the mafia cops and the Gambinos.
[7:21]And, and, and he talked gas pipe into getting these guys on board. And, and it was a marriage made in hell, not in heaven, in hell. So really, yeah. And, and which brings us to Anthony gas pipe, Casso, a, a bad, bad dude. It started out in the Lucchese family, spent his entire career in the Lucchese family. I can’t remember. I was, he, how high did he get? Of course he had his own. He was the under boss. Okay. He was a concierge. He was all the under boss. And, and at the time that he and his, and the boss guy by the name of Al D’Arco went out on the land because they got word through the mafia cops and through their network that, that gas pipe was, and, and D’Arco were on a list to be arrested. They took off. So, yeah, he was an underboss, but he was a vicious, vicious guy, so bad that the federal prosecutors, when they arrested him and turned him and he became a witness, they called him Lucifer. That’s how bad a guy he was. That was their nickname for him. Really? Yeah. The feds, of course, turn him because they’ve always got the big stick, but he reached out to you or you reached out to him. I’m not sure. Tell us about that. You ended up talking to him after he went, after he turned.
[8:39]
Need for Inside Information
[8:39]So in the midst of the mafia cops, I knew we needed someone on the inside. We had some information, tangential information. Things were going along very well in the investigation. But I knew that if I was going to take the case to trial, and what we were concentrating on, Gary, was one murder that they were involved in. And I have to give you a little bit of the background as to why this particular guy was a target of gas pipes.
[9:11]Back when Paul Castellano was the head of the Gambino family, Castellano replaced Carlo Gambino as the boss of the family. And as you probably know, because you know the history of these guys as well as I do and probably better, Castellano was assassinated on the street in front of a steak restaurant in Manhattan, orchestrated by John Gotti and Sammy Gravano. The whole point of the plot was for Gotti to take over and become the boss of the Gambino family.
[9:49]So they did that. They set up the hit and Castellano was killed along with his driver, but it was an unsanctioned hit. It was not sanctioned by the other family bosses. And that kind of set off both Gas Pipe and Vincent the Chin Gigante, who was the head of the Genovese family.
[10:14]
Assassination Attempt on John Gotti
[10:09]And they decided that John Gotti had to be killed because of what he did. So gas pipe recruits gas pipe knew that every sunday god he would go to a particular social club in brooklyn for whatever i guess to collect money to meet with people in the family that kind of thing and so he recruited a believe it or not a musician a musician a munitions expert a bomb expert that he knew who was in the army and was a bomb maker. And he was also a wise guy.
[10:47]So the plan was for this bomb maker to make a bomb, sort of like an IED, a flat kind of bomb. And the plan was for the bomb maker to meet in this spot in Brooklyn on a Sunday morning. and he gas pipe was going to walk and did walk past the car.
[11:10]That was going to be the car that they were going to blow up because Gotti arrived and left in a car. So he tells me the story about how he was walking down the street, paper bag with what looked to be groceries and Italian bread sticking out and things of that nature. Like, you know, Sunday morning and I’m shopping and that kind of thing. And as he gets to the car, he bends down and he puts the IED under the car. So now it’s all set. He takes off, goes around the corner and waits. The bomb maker who was going to set the bomb off is across a double side a double it was a two-way street so it was a long distance between where he was and where the car was so instead and he was going to set the bomb off with a um with a remote device so instead of doing it from across the street where his car was this moron takes his car makes a u-turn and pulls up next to the car where these two guys get in and one of them he believes is Gotti and the other is his driver, Frankie DiCicco. And he gets, pulls up next to the car, sets it off and blows the car up. Now the idiot was right next to it and his car was badly damaged. He takes off and as it turns out, Gotti was not in the car. Gotti did not go that day. It was someone else.
[12:33]That sets off a chain of events. Gotti now finds out that Gas Pipe and Vincent de Chin, Giganti, were behind this plot to kill him.
[12:45]And since Giganti was a little bit more protected than I guess he felt Gas Pipe was, his plot was to kill Gas Pipe in revenge for attempting to kill him. And the gas pipe one day is driving his car in Brooklyn, of course, stops at a light and a car pulls up next to him. Four guys are in the car. He looks over, doesn’t think anything of it, and all four of them open fire and shoot gas pipe and then take off.
[13:16]Gas pipe doesn’t die. He’s injured. He’s injured very badly. He makes his way out of his car, crawls on the street to a Chinese restaurant that was right near the area, goes down to the basement of the Chinese restaurant and waits and calls someone to come and get him. And they get him, bring him to some doctor, and he gets taken care of. Now, gas pipe now makes it his life’s work to find out who those four guys were in that car and who was behind the assassination attempt. And he finds out. He finds out. How does he find out? Well, the mafia cops help him find out who it was who was in the car.
[14:01]
Mistaken Identity Hit
[14:01]Now, one of the names was a guy named nicky guido in that car one of the people in the car gas pipe goes to the mafia cops they now he wants to find out where nicky guido lives because he’s not he doesn’t recognize the name doesn’t know it and epilito i’m sorry caracapa who was still who was working in i guess the organized crime section of major case squad in the nypd had access to all of this these records and he puts it the name nikki guido gives a kind of a description and an area where he thinks he came from and he comes up with a name comes up with an address and it’s in south brooklyn which would be where they thought that this guy lived and they tell gas pipe gas pipe arranges for this guy Nicky Guido to be hit and it’s Christmas morning and, Nicky Guido is out on the street in front of his house with his uncle showing off.
[15:09]To his uncle his brand new car and a car comes up the block and stops while guido is in the car with his uncle and guido recognizes or sees that they have taken guns at it and now aiming to the car and he jumps on to his uncle to protect them they open fire and nikki guido is is killed saved his uncle. They take off. Turns out it was the wrong Nicky Guido. It wasn’t the guy who was in the car who shot at gas pipe. When the real Nicky Guido finds out what happened, he takes off and goes to California. He’s later found in California. So gas pipe, so that’s one mess. That was a miss. He still didn’t gab the names of all the others, although he ultimately gets That’s the mall. And he fought. One of the names is a guy by the name of Jimmy Heidel. Heidel was kind of a hanger on a guy that was a, an associate of the, of the Gambino family lived of course, and he lived in Staten Island, but he hung out in Brooklyn and gas pipe.
[16:19]It was the order to the mafia cops, find this kid and find out what he knows, and ultimately, we’re going to kill him. So they find out where they go to his home, where he lived with his mother in Staten Island, the mafia cops. And they ring the bell, but before they get to the door, they see a guy who looks like Jimmy Heidel. It turns out it was his brother, Frankie Heidel. They accost them on the street.
[16:52]And they say to Frankie, you’re coming with us, Frankie. He says, no, no, you’re looking for my brother. I’m not Jimmy, I’m Frankie. They say, okay, and they leave. They go to the mother now. I’m sorry, Frankie goes into his home and tells his mother what just happened. She goes out onto the street and they’re still sitting there. And she goes up to the car and confronts them. What are you doing what do you want with my kids that kind of thing and she sees both and they say it’s police business ma’am you know stay out of it we’re looking for so frankie had told him had told the the mafia cops where he thought his brother might be over in brooklyn and and they had a connection over there and they found out that he was in i think it was either a pool hall or bowling alley i forgot now what’s important about that is that years later mrs heidel first of all, she reports all of this stuff to the FBI, to the police, etc.
[17:55]
Hunt for Jimmy Heidel
[17:50]Nothing happens after her son disappears, Jimmy. And what happened is Jimmy is in Brooklyn and they find out where he is. And I think, as I said before, I think it was a bowling alley. And he comes out of the bowling alley and they grab him, the two cops, and they tell him, come with us.
[18:11]He doesn’t know what the hell is up. He just thinks that, you know, he’s being arrested. It’s another bullshit arrest on his part and gets in the car. They don’t drive to any precinct. They drive to a location in Brooklyn to a parking lot behind what used to be a Toys R Us, big Toys R Us store.
[18:29]And there in that parking lot, they transfer him from there to gas pipes guys. And the gas pipes guys drive him to a house not that far away, down to the basement. Where gas pipe is waiting for him and gas pipe tortures tortures the the hell out of him, he gives up all of the names in the car who were in the car and then gas pipe kills him that’s what happens now i mrs heidel by the way never found out until later on where what happened to to jimmy And Frankie Heidel, her other son, was also murdered by a different group for a different reason.
[19:18]And Tommy Dage, the detective who worked on the mafia cops case with me, was assigned to that homicide. And he got to know Mrs. Heidel. And the case broke for us when she decided, finally decided to tell Tommy about the visit in Staten Island by the mafia cops looking for her son. And so we were going to investigate, and we had enough, I believe, to at least open an investigation into the death of Jimmy Heidel. And that’s how we were going to go after the mafia cops, going after this murder case, which carried 25 to life, by the way, Gary, if I convicted him. So the investigation goes on, our investigation goes on, and I get to the point where I say to Tommy, we need somebody else. We need someone on the inside.
[20:11]We knew Kaplan was involved, but Kaplan at that point wasn’t talking. He had turned down helping the feds, even though they offered him a deal. He was in jail, by the way, for narcotics violations. So I said, where are we going to go? So it dawned on me one day, I said, let me give it a shot. Maybe gas pipe will talk to me. So I reach out to his lawyer. And I find out the gas pipe is in Brooklyn of all places now in jail. He’s waiting to testify in a federal case, not for the prosecution, but for the defense. So I call the U S attorney’s office. And I speak to a U S attorney and say, listen, you guys have him here. You produce them in case he’s needed as a witness. I want to go talk to him, but the federal jail Dale won’t let a local prosecutor in. I need your okay to go in and do it.
[21:06]I thought that this was a ground ball. Know what they told me? No, we’re not helping you. We’re not helping you. So I say, come on. And I’m working on him. And I’m working on him. In the meantime, I’m speaking to the lawyer. Because I’m thinking that ultimately I’m going to convince the feds to let me go in to see him. And I do convince the feds at some point to let me go in. So now I’m waiting for the lawyer to give me an answer. Is your guy going to talk to me? I told him I would give him a letter that he cooperated for whatever that was worth. The guy was doing 17 life sentences.
[21:41]So the lawyer finally gets back to me and he says, my guy, I’ll let you talk
[21:48]
Immunity Request for Gaspipe
[21:47]to my guy, but here’s what I want. I want immunity for the Jimmy Heidel murder. I said, well, it’s a state case. You’ve got the immunity. The guy’s doing 17 life sentences. I’m not going to go after him for Jimmy Heidel. I said, no problem. problem he goes well that’s not it not all i want the feds to give me immunity because they could fashion some kind of as he said bullshit charge for the jimmy i delving i said okay i’ll call the feds now i haven’t spoken to them about this yet uh you know about the immunity stuff yet until but they did say that they would have somebody go with me to the jail when i talked to him but of course gas pipe wouldn’t talk to me unless they gave him immunity once again gary they said to me No, we’re not giving him immunity. I said, are you going to really prosecute this guy? You’ve already got him for 17 lives. How much more time can the guy get? Gary, it was not that. That was not the reason. You know why they wouldn’t allow me to go in to talk to him or why they wouldn’t give me the deal?
[22:51]Because he had written a letter after they convicted John Gotti. Gas Pipe had written a letter saying that Sammy Gravano, who was the main witness in the case, was a liar. Lied about this, lied about that. They were concerned that if they gave Gas Pipe a deal, that somehow his claims about Gravano lying in the Gotti case would be used by an attorney to try to overturn the Gotti conviction. Because they had convicted Gotti by that point. They said, no, they’re not giving me. And they didn’t. They were very hard and fast. So I go back to the lawyer and I tell him, I can give you the immunity in state court, but I can’t do what I can’t do. You know, I can’t give you a federal immunity because they are not willing to give it to us. Let me talk to him. You got nothing to lose. The answer was no.
[23:47]So I never got to talk to gas pipe. Gas pipe would have been my witness with all the rest of the things I had in the Heidel case.
[23:57]Anyway, to make a very, very long story short, the feds steal the case from
[24:03]
Frustrations with Federal Handling
[24:01]us. They make a RICO case out of the whole thing. And it still sits. Every time I talk about it, my stomach starts to churn because the feds really, to use a Brooklyn term, really fucked me, Gary. They had no interest in allowing us to do this, to do this case, particularly when we made it and started it. After that, after the case sat for 10 years, the boxes with this case and it sat for 10 years in a federal courthouse or the U.S. attorney’s office never touched it. They never had any interest in doing it. In fact, when we started the case, they said to me, go ahead, knock yourself out. We don’t give a shit. It’s an old case. You know, you’re never going to make this. And then when we made it, when we started to make it, now suddenly, oh boy, now we can get this mafia cops business. And believe it or not, they took all the credit in the world for the case. Wound up convicting them.
[24:57]The first time the case was set aside, by the way, because it was a bogus kind of theory that they used that was then reversed on appeal and the conviction stood. So Pointwood gas pipe was something that always bothered me. I didn’t understand why this guy who was so willing to talk to the feds when they turned them wouldn’t talk to me, wouldn’t even have me visit. He didn’t have to commit to anything. Let me just talk to you and see if I can convince you. I couldn’t figure that out. I do get the answer and I get the answer from gas pipe and I’ll get to that.
[25:36]
FBI Agent on Colombo Payroll
[25:33]So I go on, the feds steal the case, they go on, do it. And I begin a case involving an FBI agent, a retired FBI agent who was on the Colombo family payroll, who was providing information to the Colombos through a capo named Scarpa, Greg Scarpa. And Scarpa was providing the FBI agent with information about his fellow mafiosi. And it was a again a marriage made in hell quite frankly and so i’m involved in this investigation.
[26:10]And part of the investigation involves i’m sorry a major part of the investigation involves greg scarpa who’s now dead at that time but his son gregory scarpa was alive and in, ad max in colorado he was doing life in not life he was doing something less than life but he was doing it in Colorado, the Ad Max in Florence, Colorado, the most secure prison in the United States. And I send word through his lawyer that we want to talk to him, tell him that I will give whatever letter they want in terms of cooperation. And his lawyer was very cooperative, a woman, a female lawyer, forgot her name. And I get a takeout order from the feds to take out Scarpa and Gregory Scarpa, bring him to New York and have him sit with us as we go through this investigation against this FBI agent, because he was intimately involved with everything his father did, everything. He knew the FBI agent, knew exactly what he had been doing, everything that we needed to make a case. So I brought him in and literally when he walked into my conference room, the first day the detectives had him and brought him in to me.
[27:25]He said, I introduced myself and he says, he says, ah, hi, you’re Mike Vecchione. I said, yep. He said, before I forget, gas pipe wants you to go see him. He said, gas pipe? What’s going on? He said, gas pipe is my neighbor down in, he had to sell next to Gregory Scarpa in Ad Max. I said, really? What’s he want to talk to me about? He said, I don’t know. He just knew I was coming to see you. And he told me that when you’re done with me, he wants to see, he wants to see you. I said, okay. So I go, we, we do our case. We do the case involving the FBI agent and it’s over. and I make an appointment to go down to visit Gas Pipe. He gave me permission. His lawyer gave me permission. Very strange that the
[28:23]
Visiting Gas Pipe in Butner, North Carolina
[28:19]lawyer would allow me at this point to go see him, but he did. He was in Butner, North Carolina in a prison hospital.
[28:29]So two detectives and myself took a trip down to North Carolina. Minor, we go into the prison and the prison authorities had arranged for us to have a room alone. And the detective and myself and one of the correction officers were standing in the room and we’re waiting for another correction officer to bring gas pipe to the room. And then suddenly there he is. He walks in. Guys introduced themselves. And then I introduced myself and he goes, you don’t have to, I know who you are. He says to me, A lot of guys in here have your picture on dart boards that they’re throwing darts at because of what you’ve done. I said, what have I done? Done what? My job. He started to chuckle. You know, that’s. So I said to him, did you read the book? Meeting friends and family. He said, yeah, I did. I said, so? He goes, about 95, 96% accurate. He said, I’ll take it. So we bring him in and and i say okay so here we are what do you want to talk to me about.
[29:35]So what he was interested in, Gary, was he was looking to find some way for us to go to the federal judge, a federal judge, and tell him how cooperative he was in solving old, unsolved homicides that he and the Lucchese’s were involved in. He was hoping that um you know that that somehow by miracle by miracle i said.
[30:07]Anthony you’re doing 17 life sentences what is what am i going to do for you he goes you never know i i really would appreciate you doing it plus he says you know i’m i’ve been in here i i’m i’m having it was like he was trying to tell me that he had some kind of an epiphany you know His whole life has now changed and he wanted to help us. And I said, okay, well, I’ll hear what you have to say. I said, but first of all, you’re going to tell me about the mafia cops case. So we talk and he tells me about how he hooked up with them through Burt Kaplan, why he wanted them on his payroll, what they did for him. Everything that i knew gary he corroborated and told me was you know gave me the imprimatur so to speak the mafia imprimatur yeah that was that was that’s what happened so i asked him i said listen why is it that you didn’t tell me this when i wanted to talk to you years ago when we We were doing the case. He said, Mike, the way I found out that you wanted to talk to me was I read it in your book.
[31:21]My lawyer never told me that you were looking to have me come in and talk to you in the DA’s office. He said, if I had known that, I would have been there. I would have gone. I would have come in and talked to you. It was like, I couldn’t go back. You know, the lawyer unfortunately has passed away and I couldn’t, I really couldn’t do anything to scream at the guy like, you son of a bitch. You know, how did you, how could you do that to me? And, but he said, yep. So I told, so he tells me the whole story and you know, Gary, I got to say that he was, we were pretty accurate. We were pretty, we were very accurate. He admitted to the screw up with, with Nikki Guido and, and told me all about Burt Kaplan, the guy that was his intermediary. He gave me the whole story and told me all about his life growing up and how he started with on the street, little street gang, and then ultimately wound up becoming, he wasn’t a Lucchese to begin with. I think he was in a Gambino family first. And then there was a swap, sort of like a baseball swap between him and someone else. There was a problem and wanted a Gambino’s with him. And so he moved over to the Lucchese family. And the one thing that I did find out is he mentioned how he was really upset.
[32:43]By people calling him gas pipe. He hated that name. He hated it. And I found out. I said, well, how did you get it? Where did it come from?
[32:54]He said, people tell me that my father, his father was a wise guy as well, was a collector, a guy who would go around collecting money that was owed to the wise guys. And he broke off one day, a guy was giving him a hard time, and he broke off the tailpipe of a car. And he beat the hell out of the guy with the tailpipe of the car. And his father was not called gas pipe. But when Anthony, his son, started to come up in the mafia world, they attributed, they He said, that’s so-and-so’s son, and they started to call him gas pipe. But he told me he hated it because I think that at some point, I was going to toss, call him that, gas or something of that nature. And it was like, no, you don’t call me that. My name is Anthony. And the other thing is that a lot of people call him Queso. They were always calling him Anthony Queso, cops in particular. He said, my name is Queso. so. So please call me by my correct name. And that’s what we did. So we spent, the first time we were there, we spent about two hours or more talking to him. And he gave me, he started out, told me what he wanted. He wanted my help. He wanted me to write a letter to the federal.
[34:19]I don’t know, parole authority, federal judge, to somehow keep it on record that he had helped. And I said, okay, I have no problem doing that, but you got to tell me what you’re going to give me. I need something. I can’t just write a letter if you don’t give me anything. So he starts out by telling me about a particular murder that occurred, and he was the one who actually did it. And he gave me this information about what it was. And I got to tell you, Gary, Larry, I don’t remember exactly the facts of the case and it’s not important because what he, what he said, I said, okay, so where, first of all, it’s only you telling me this. I can’t put you on the stand and expect the jury to buy just you, what your background. I said, you got to give me something more. For instance, where’s the gun? What’d you do with the gun? He said, I’ll tell you. I dropped it into Sheepshead Bay.
[35:09]
Searching for the Gun in Sheepshead Bay
[35:10]So are you familiar with what Sheepshead Bay is? Sheepshead Bay is a body of water that’s off the Atlantic Ocean in Southern Brooklyn. And it feeds, it’s a bay, a big one, and it has boats on it, pleasure boats, et cetera. And it feeds into the Atlantic. He said, I drove to Sheepshead Bay. He gave me the street. He gave me the spot. He said, I dropped the gun into Sheepshead Bay right there. I said, well, that will help. He said, if you get that gun, you can compare it to the bullets, et cetera, et cetera. I said, okay, I’ll do that. i said that’s one what’s what else you got so now he tells me about another hit that he does and i said so what’d you do with the body this time he says well we went down to carol gardens which is an area where i actually i was living at the time and and on this particular street he gave me the name of the street there was a sort of a little storefront kind of warehouse kind of thing and we dug up the floor, buried the body in the floor or in the wall. I don’t remember exactly. And then covered it up and that’s where the body is. I said, you think it’s still there? He says, yeah, nobody went to get it. Nobody even knows this, except I’m telling you. But that’s where I put the body. I said, okay. I said, you got other information? He gives me other information. Who else was involved? Where it happened? You know, that kind of stuff.
[36:32]So anyway, I’m going to skip ahead. So we, when we went home, I took two detectives, it was very right near the office where this location was. And we go down to this spot onto the street and I look and I say, oh no, I said, this now was the storeroom for one of the best Italian restaurants on Court Street was the name of the street. It’s a very, very, very well-attended, well-liked, delicious food. In the back was their storeroom for where they would keep their supplies.
[37:10]Mozzarella and tomato sauce and all this other stuff. We go in and we find the spot. We knew because he gave us that kind of details, the way the body was. It was completely renovated, completely bricked over. over everything. I said to the detective, we can’t take this apart. George, George Taro was his name. I said, George, what are we going to do? We’re going to go in this guy and ask the guy in the restaurant to allow us to, and you know how much it’s going to cost us to try to find this body? We’re never going to be able to find it. So we abandoned it. So what we did was we went to the NYPD and asked them if they would allow us to use the scuba team to go to Sheepshead Bay to search for the gun. At least maybe we can make a case with, make that case. Gary, three days of diving into Sheepshead Bay by the scuba team.
[38:08]I mean, it was years, 10, 15 years. You know where that gun probably is down now in the middle of the earth, you know, it sinks in, they never, never found it. So I can tell you one other, one thing that kind of jogged my memory about breaking up the back of the restaurant, when they killed Jimmy Heidel, they killed him after gas pipe tortured him. He killed him in the basement of a home that was owned by one of the Lucchese soldiers. So we knew exactly where or what the home was. We knew exactly where they had done it in the basement. We found all of this information out.
[38:57]
Searching for Evidence in the Lucchese Soldier’s Home
[38:49]And we sent, we said, I sent guys to the home now to see, we’re going to do this case. If we can find even remnants of blood down there, then it corroborates the story that we were getting from our, our informants, the witnesses that we had who were going to tell us all about this. So we get a search warrant for the house. Okay. Go down there, and we serve the search warrant on the owner. The owner now is no longer the Luke Hazy guy. It’s some family that owns the place now, but they said, sure, you can go down and look. It’s no problem, and if you need to, you can search around to do whatever you have to do. So I get a call.
[39:36]Detective calls me and said, actually, it was Tommy Dates. Tommy says, Mike, this place is entirely mirrored. Whoever bought the house after or maybe before put mirrors up all around the walls of the house. The floor was all covered with brand new flooring. He said, we never are going to be able to find any blood here. But we took some samples of some things that looked like blood from the floor and from the wall. And the medical examiner took it. Never turned out to be enough to find out what we did. And then finally, at the end, when I spoke to Gaspar, at the end of the interview, I said to him, listen, before I leave, you’re going to tell me what you did with Jimmy Heidel’s body because Mrs. Heidel deserves to know. He says, yeah, no problem. She says, I’m cooperating. I’m cooperating. I’m no problem. So he tells me that after they killed Heidel, they needed to dump the body. In an area of South Brooklyn, it’s now called Georgetown, believe it or not, they were building this entire new development of homes, blocks and blocks of homes. And they were digging up the earth to get ready to lay down the foundation.
[41:06]And they knew one of the bulldozer operators. Gas pipe tells me, yeah, we knew the guy. And we asked them, we bring the body. We asked them if he would allow us to bring it in there because he was going to, because suddenly he could bury it with the bulldozers. And then the next day, he said, the next day they were going to cement and build the foundation. So the body was dumped. Bulldozer dumped the dirt. Next day, this enormous housing development began to be built with the concrete, and that’s where Jimmy Heidel’s body is. Now, I told, we went home, and I told Mrs. Heidel, she was at least grateful for finding out where her son was. She’d never be able to find his body, but that’s where it was. And that was as a result of gas pipe telling me, you know, telling me what he did.
[41:57]So we we did the investigation to the best we could and we we didn’t come up with anything with gas for gas pipe but we went back down to talk to him again and said told him what the result was and he started giving us other information it was another case involving a an informant and and it was he he it was very difficult gary to to to make cases based on just Just the shreds of information that he was giving us, you know, better than I do. You can’t make cases unless you start to get some concrete information. I remember this happened here and it was this guy. And we’re talking about cases that are 15, 16, 20 years old. There was no way that we were able to do it. So I told him, I promised him, I said, listen, I will, I will, if you want me to, I will send a letter to tell a judge and give it to your lawyer that you did cooperate. You did attempt to help us solve these unsolved cases, as many as we had. I forgot how many he ultimately gave us.
[43:01]But I can’t promise you anything. I can’t go to the feds and say, you need to do something to help this guy. And I can’t make a case. Anthony, I just can’t make a case. So believe it or not, He kind of understood he was upset, but not to the point of, you know, giving me a hard time. He just said, I tried, you know, I tried. And, you know, it wasn’t that long after that.
[43:27]A few years after that, that he ultimately passed away from, he, from, he had, he had prostate cancer and that’s what he ultimately passed away. But, um, it was a, it was two, there were two meetings chock full of information. I mean, getting the whole, uh, attempt on Gotti’s life, the whole story, um, about that. We actually sent detectives to the garage where the, the bomb maker had driven his car after he, after he did the bomb. There was gas pipe said, you know, that car was never moved. It might be still there. He couldn’t pinpoint the actual garage that they drew, drove it to, but we were, you know, at least I would have loved to have at least tried to make a case against the bomb maker because he was still alive and he, he just died now too. But at the time he was alive and I could have, I could have made a case against her and he, you know, it, it, but I never, we could never find the car. The problem was that his information was old and difficult to track down. But he opened up like a, you know, he sang like a canary.
[44:38]
Analyzing Gas Pipe’s Demeanor
[44:39]I have to ask, Michael, about his demeanor. What was your impression, just your kind of gut impression of him, his aura, if you will? Yeah, he was very calm.
[44:52]Very collected, very polite talk, you know, with the, with the very heavy Dick Brooklyn accent, but, but not a madman, not the madman that the feds used to call the, you know, the call Lucifer. Yeah. He was a guy that, you know, he had a story to tell and things to say, and he, you know, and he did. And his, his demeanor was, was very calm. And quite frankly, if you didn’t know what he was and who he was, you would say, yeah, Very polite, nice guy, you know, and with 30 plus, 35 murders under his belt, but maybe more. So, but that was it. That was, there was nothing overt about the guy as far as, you know, giving you a hint that who, of who he was. He seemed to settle in. He was settled into prison life and, and, and actually, I think he probably enjoyed the two hours that we were together, got him out of whatever he was. And, you know, it was, it was interesting, an interesting kind of a situation. So, yeah, they say guys will, will try to do anything when he’s out there in Ad Max in Florence, Colorado, which is bad. It’s a, it’s a lonely existence in order to get out and, you know, mingling around with other prisoners as you’re then transferred and then take his handcuffs off and go into a room and get a cup of coffee with people that are, you know, not, you know, just have a certain amount of freedom.
[46:15]
Communicating Through the Sink: Scarpa and Gas Pipe’s Connection
[46:15]Absolutely. there’s one none i mean it’s an hour out it’s some other cell where you get to walk around you know yeah let me tell you one other thing and it’s interesting he was when he was a neighbor to to scarpa i asked both of them and i corroborate i asked scarpa and i corroborated it with with with gas pipe i said to scarpa how did you hey how did he tell you you know well do you are you because they don’t mingle they’re not because they’re both in segregation he goes you got to to understand he was next to me in the cell next to me and what we used to do was we would take a toilet paper roll when it was finished the paper was and you put it to the in the sink that is all the sinks are all connected and you blow out whatever water is in there and if you talk into the toilet paper roll and the other guy has his toilet paper roll and he has his ear to to his, he can understand what we’re, what we’re saying. He can, he can hear me. And I asked later on, I asked Casso the same thing. And he told me exactly the same story. He said, yeah, we talked through the sink. And, um, and that was, you know, that was, that was it. That’s how we, that’s how they would get messages to, to each other and discuss what’s going on and how things are. And that’s how we told him you’re going to see Vecchione. You got to tell him that he’s got to come back. So that’s my, that’s, that’s my, my, my adventures with, with gas pipe.
[47:41]
The Kansas City True Crime Writer Connection
[47:41]You just never know what’s going to happen. I have a guy actually, he’s a true crime writer in Kansas city. He’s mainly, he’s, he’s got a full-time job as a park ranger out West, but he’s originally from Kansas city and wrote a book about Kansas city. And he was checking on some people who are camping illegally at one of the national
[48:01]
Gas Pipe’s Surprisingly Calm and Polite Demeanor
[48:00]forest where he was working. And it was greg scarpa jr’s granddaughter i believe okay yeah yeah he’s got he has he has a bunch of granddaughters a bunch of grandkids i don’t know how many granddaughters he has yeah frank asker you know i said are you any kin to him because he’s he’s on my podcast group and listens to me and everything and yeah he stays up on this he said oh yeah that was my grandfather father i mean my my year with uh yeah i had scarpa with me for a year during the time that i needed him and what was working with him that was another whole interesting situation about him and and what is how his father treated him and things of that nature another for another podcast okay all right we’ll do that that would be it would be good you spent a lot of personal time with him oh yeah oh yeah that’s hard to find that kind of uh firsthand that’s why i ask you the aura of gas pipe castle So, because you look at his picture, his mugshot and he does look a little bit like the devil and that’s his tough guy.
[49:01]No, make no bone. I make no, you know, I don’t say that he wasn’t, he was, he gave off the idea that he was polite, but you knew that you shouldn’t mess with him. That would be, that would be the way I would characterize it. Interesting. Yeah. It’s always interesting that these guys talk as if you and I are talking about golf or something and talking about killing people or hiding bodies and doing something with the body. It’s just like they’re, they’re distance personally, they’re distanced from that a little bit. They don’t really affect them.
[49:30]Absolutely. Crazy. All right. Well, Michael, that’s your own. I really appreciate you coming on and telling this story and guys, don’t forget to look down in the show notes for links to his books. He’s got several of them and they’re good books. And if you didn’t read Luigi, the zip, that’s a, that’s a really interesting story. Unknown mob story of New York city. I think, you know, everything about New York city mafia, read that one. You’re going to find out a lot more and their relationship. To Sicilians already. Also, that’s another interesting thing is that relationship to Sicilians. I interviewed a guy from Sicily that was connected to the Bonanno family for a while. And he, it was right to me. It was interesting because he talked, he told the story of somebody that nobody knew anything about. He wasn’t really even that much of a criminal. He was a bookie and did a lot of things with them. And it’s just, you get this different idea about what, what that life inside that family is like day to day. And Luigi the Zip, he did that. Luigi was in it, boy. That’s for sure.
[50:35]All right. Thank you, Gary. I really appreciate the time and thank you for the, for the ads, for my books. I really hope that your listeners and readers, I’m sorry. And your, your viewers will, will go to them. I think that they’ll, they’ll enjoy them. All right. Thank you, Michael.
[50:54]
Reflections on Michael Vecchione’s Contribution to Fighting Organized Crime
[50:51]Have a good one. All right. Talk to you later. Well, guys, that was great. Great. I really like Michael Baccione. I really hope we’ll do some more with him and I hope he continues to do more and he has greatest success because he spent his time in the trenches in the Brooklyn Rackets Division. You know, you can imagine what that life was like. And he had some long, hard days as anybody that gets into this fight knows, because it’s 24 hours a day, seven days a week. If you’re going to do anything to help prosecute or to prosecute organized crime or the mob because they’re out there 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Don’t forget. I like to ride motorcycles.
[51:27]I don’t investigate organized crime anymore. I just research it. If you have a problem with PTSD and you’ve been in the service, be sure and go to that VA website. I’ve got, if you’re on YouTube, I’ve got the screen grab of the website on the screen. If you have a problem with drugs or alcohol, which goes hand in hand with PTSD, be sure and check out Anthony Ruggiano. He has his own website. He’s got a hotline number on that. And he’s a drug and alcohol counselor down in Florida. So that would be cool. Have him be your drug and alcohol counselor. Don’t forget to like and subscribe, you know, punch that button down below. And if you’re on YouTube, so you’ll subscribe and you can subscribe on the Apple podcast app. Also give me a review. If you think about it, it’s hard to figure out how to do. I know that I love your comments on my YouTube channel, particularly. I really love your comments on that. I interact with a lot of people on that. Plus my gangland wire podcast, Facebook group, and it’s a private group. Now it’s got 60,000 people on it and we get a lot of great stuff on there a lot of great pictures a lot of good conversation from people who are in the know live the life or live in the neighborhoods of the life and if you can’t figure out how to get to it through facebook get hold of me and we’ll get you invited to it for sure you just got to be on facebook and like and subscribe like i said and don’t forget keep coming back i got a new podcast every week and quite often i’ll have a bonus episode in between. So thanks a lot guys.