Free Made Men by Greg B. Smith Page A

that time, “Wiggles” had built up a loyal customer base of leering drunken men with fistfuls of sweaty dollar bills. And many of those sweaty dollar bills were secretly finding their way into Vinny Ocean’s pocket.
Plus there were many other deals. There was the $1,300 a week Vinny pocketed from his take of a gambling operation that took bets from across metro New York. There was the untold thousands in loan-shark interest Vinny picked up by buying his money at a point and a half weekly interest from a Gambino capo and putting it on the street at two points. Then there were the secret partnerships. He had designated himself a “partner” of T&M Construction, which then went and won a big contract to renovate the New Yorker hotel in midtown Manhattan. He was looking into becoming a secret partner in a new gambling boat operating out of Freeport, Long Island. None of this money showed up on his tax forms. All of it was collected in bundles of cash.
Still, Vinny Ocean wanted more. Much of his income in 1998 came from the usual Mafia sources—preying on degenerate gamblers, lightening the wallets of loan-sharking victims, shaking down local unions. Thirty years after Joe Valachi first went on national television and revealed the inner secrets of the Mafia, these three activities remained the mainstays of the mob. In business terms, this refusal to evolve was not a good thing. This was like the automobile industry failing to predict the ascendancy during the 1970s of small, affordable Japanese cars that didn’t consume massive quantities of gasoline. Except in this case, Toyota was the FBI, and the FBI had long ago figured out how to investigate the mob when it was involved in gambling, loan sharking, and extortion. What the mob needed in the late 1990s was to figure out new ways to make money. And by 1998, some of the more clued in were doing their all-American best. Vinny Ocean was definitely one of the more clued in.
Like most Americans who did not live in dark spaces beneath the ground, he was vaguely aware of the unusually strong boom in the stock market that was making some amateur investors a lot of money. Therefore, Vinny invested. He talked about puts and buys. He consulted with a DeCavalcante captain named Phil Abramo who thought of himself as the Michael Milken of La Cosa Nostra. He discussed “this new thing, this Viagra.”
“Somebody’s going to make a lot of money on that one,” he said.
But the stock market was still a risky place, and some of what Abramo was doing—secretly paying off brokers to pump up the worth of worthless stock and then dumping the stock when it peaked—was not exactly legal. Vinny Ocean was clearly looking for ways to go legit.
Consistently he sought out business deals that might be considered forward-thinking. In January 1998, for instance, he was talking about investing in a cell-phone distributorship through the German communications giant Siemens. He had a partner. To the Germans they did business with, the partner’s name was William Cutolo, a businessman in a suit. Cutolo was like Vinny Ocean—a good-looking, fifty-something New York guy with silver sideburns that implied distinguished banker at work. Prudence was the message. Of course, on the streets of Brooklyn, Cutolo was known as Wild Bill. This was because Wild Bill had once beaten a man bloody with a baseball bat in front of a group of stunned Teamsters. This was the Wild Bill who was heavily involved in the Colombo crime family wars of the early 1990s, when ten gangsters and two innocent bystanders were shot down in the streets of Brooklyn because of a dispute over who would run the family. At that time one side of the family had decided it was better than the other side. In one episode of this twoyear saga, Cutolo lured to a suburban home in Staten Island a rival from the other side who many felt held too high an opinion of himself. When the rival showed up, he was pointed toward the stairs leading to the second