'Fixers,' Mob Guys Profited: Ameruso Let DOT Go Corrupt

'Fixers,' Mob Guys Profited
Ameruso Let DOT Go Corrupt

By JIM CALLAGHAN

The death of former Transportation Commissioner Anthony Ameruso in April resulted in some former and current public officials serving up sugar coated memories of a convicted felon, one of the many Koch administration officials who were disgraced or went to jail.

Fire Commissioner Nicholas Scoppetta, who served as Ameruso's attorney when he was investigated for his ties to a parking lot company in 1986, told the New York Times on May 12 that Ameruso was a "warm guy" who would come to work and share his lasagna sauce recipe with you.

A Careful Evasion

Ed Koch, choosing his words carefully, as he always does when discussing the corruption at the top levels of his administration, was quoted in the Times obit: "It's terrible that he committed a lie, and it's terrible that he violated his oath, but to tie him to the Parking Violations Bureau (PVB) scandal would be simply outrageous."

Koch the lawyer was careful to specify the PVB, not other scandals that engulfed his City Hall tenure.

Left out of the obits were a few salient facts: Ameruso's penalty for violating his oath was that Koch allowed him to resign. "If he hadn't resigned," Koch told the Times on Feb. 20, 1986, "I would have fired him." But he didn't fire him, sending a signal - just weeks after Queens Borough President Donald Manes tried to kill himself and concocted a story for the cops that he had been kidnapped - that there was no penalty for "committing a lie" or "violating an oath." The cover-up had begun. In 1986, Scoppetta was even more effusive about his client. "There were no conflicts of interest, there was no impropriety, there was no violation of the spirit of the law," he said. The key word for Scoppetta was apparently "spirit."

CLUBHOUSE LEANINGS: Although former Mayor Ed Koch (left) denied that he appointed Anthony Ameruso as his Transportation Commissioner - overruling his own search committee - as a favor to Brooklyn Democratic boss Meade Esposito, the late Mr. Esposito has claimed otherwise. While heading the Department of Transportation, Mr. Ameruso filled top posts with people tied to the Democratic clubhouses in four boroughs, until a Parking Violations Bureau scandal engineered by a corrupt official on behalf of the Democratic leaders of Queens and The Bronx erupted. Mr. Ameruso was never implicated in that scandal, but he was forced from office for lying about DOT ferry leases involving a firm in which he held a secret interest.

Took Fall for Lying

A Federal grand jury didn't exactly agree. Ameruso was indicted and convicted of perjury and served 16 weekends in jail. He had lied about his secret involvement with the company, which had leases from his agency to operate a ferry. He made a $100,000 profit in four years. After his jail term, Ameruso went to work for a mob-tied concrete company.

None of the obits accurately described the Anthony Ameruso I remember when I covered him as a reporter and editor in the 1980s. None of the coverage mentioned his turning over the operations of the Staten Island ferry to the mob, Roy Cohn and his mob clients, and former Brooklyn Democratic chairman Meade Esposito and his mob clients.

Ameruso allowed these bottom-feeders, with the full knowledge of the Mayor, to run an entire city agency as a private preserve. The Transportation Department under Ameruso didn't exactly live up to Koch's 1977 campaign slogan: "After eight years of charisma (Lindsay), and four years of the clubhouse (Beame), why not try competence?"

In fact, it was Ameruso's personal choices for deputies that led to the most explosive corruption case of the Koch era. Ameruso hired two Manes cronies, Lester Shafran and Geoffrey Lindenauer, who perfected a bribery scheme that would tarnish Koch's tall tales of "good government" forever.

Dated Back to Beame

GETTING CARDED: A series of trading cards from the 'Rotten to the Core' series were issued in the late 1980s memorializing some of the key figures in questionable Department of Transportation transactions of the previous decade. In addition to ex-DOT Commissioner Anthony Ameruso, among those given this 'honor' were two political fixers with mob ties, Brooklyn Democratic leader Meade Esposito and attorney Roy Cohn.

The corruption, nepotism and malfeasance were rampant, starting with the Beame years when Commissioner of Marine and Aviation Vito Fossella Sr., the father of the Staten Island Congressman, gave agency concessions to more than a few unsavory characters who didn't pay the rent. Through the administrations of Beame, Koch, Dinkins, Giuliani and Bloomberg, the corruption was allowed to fester. The denouement came in October 2004, when a ferry rammed a dock on a bright, clear day, killing 11 people and injuring 70 others, one of whom had his legs sliced off.

An hour after the crash, before any investigation had started, Mayor Bloomberg blamed the wind. It turned out that the Assistant Captain steering the vessel had overdosed on medication and the Captain was not in the pilothouse - a rule that had been ignored for 30 years because Commissioners had no interest in pulling the plug on the clubhouse.

Earlier Ferry Crash

Koch had his first inkling of something amiss in November 1978 - just 11 months after taking office, when a ferry rammed a pier in Manhattan. One Captain said the strobe lights at the end of the pier weren't working. Another Captain said they were. Witnesses said the lights were working, as were foghorns and warning bells. Two hundred people were injured. It was the worst ferry crash in 25 years, but the boodle boys at the ferry agency marched on.

Also not mentioned in the obits was the fact that Ameruso permitted the hiring of Deckhands who were not qualified and who were given jobs by presenting phony sea papers, forged by employees of New York shipping companies. (The law is you must have two years of sea experience to become a Deckhand.) Circumventing civil service rules, Ameruso was part of the clubhouse system by which Deckhands were interviewed in the offices of the Staten Island Democratic Party chairman, City Councilman Nick La Porte, whose son was Deputy Personnel Director, appointed by Koch.

Looked the Other Way

No one, not even the Coast Guard, checked the papers. The union looked the other way because union officials were getting their relatives jobs and promotions. One of them wound up getting indicted in the ferry crash probe. Everyone on the boats and in local politics knew about the scam (I wrote about it more than once). No one wanted to ruin a good thing. Most of the Deckhand jobs, which pay $42,000 for a 32-hour week, have been held by white men. There are no women Deckhands.

Ameruso even set up a Marine and Aviation police force - Deckhands with guns. The first job was given to a cousin of the Staten Island Deputy Borough President, Ralph Lamberti.

Small Salary, Big Bankroll

Rick Mazzeo was not in any of the obits. He was the Director of Leasing under Fossella and later Ameruso. He shared his payoffs with Cohn, whose firm represented him when he later got into trouble with the Feds. He amassed over $500,000 on a salary of $15,000 a year, operated a private food brokerage company with a phone in his city office and drove a car with the vanity license plate "Gatsby." He rented a $20,000-a-year home in fashionable Sands Point and had a cocaine habit that was costing him hundreds of dollars a day.

After serving six months on a Federal tax rap, he came out of jail and threatened to become a canary for the Feds. He tried to shake down Cohn and Esposito in return for his silence. And Cohn had a lot to worry about. I had a tipster who knew Cohn - and hated him. He would call me with a new story; they always checked out. I printed them.

A Cohn bag man, George Dowling, testified that he skimmed $5,000 a week from a ferry parking lot lease awarded by Ameruso. It checked out. The previous owner's lease was broken after his legs were broken. It checked out. Another lease was awarded to a company - represented by Cohn - that had bribed an Amtrak official. It checked out. Writing in the April 26, 1983 edition of the Village Voice, Jack Newfield and Wayne Barrett said that several years earlier, Koch's top political adviser, John LoCicero, tried to get Mazzeo a property management job with another city agency. They quoted Susan Heilbron, Koch's Commissioner of Ports and Terminals, who said LoCicero called her. LoCicero denied it. Mazzeo stayed on the city payroll for four years after Koch became mayor.

A Grizzly Send-Off

In December 1983, Mazzeo's body was found in the trunk of a car in Brooklyn. He had been shot four times. "He went out shopping," his mother told me at the time.

Since then, a mobster and former New York Post deliveryman has confessed to the Mazzeo hit, claiming he had bribed Mazzeo to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars and "wanted him dead." When Mazzeo ran the ferry leasing, Richard "Shellackhead" Cantarella had all sorts of scams going, including a newsstand where he sold stolen copies of the Post outside the ferry terminal.

It is difficult to believe that Cantarella acted on his own with his friends in killing Mazzeo. As Federal informant Harold Kaufman testified in 1985, "I am sure Meade slept better knowing Mazzeo was dead." Kaufman said he was with Mazzeo and Esposito when Mazzeo took cash from a ferry concessionaire - an Esposito insurance client - who later went to jail for bribing the mayor of a New Jersey town.

A Warning Shot

Cantarella's confession does clear up another crime, at least in my opinion. In July 1982, I spent an entire day reviewing leases at the Ferry Commissioner's office. The next morning, at 5 a.m., my car was firebombed outside my house. The crime was never solved. In retrospect, if a guy confesses to whacking a former city official, what's a little firebomb in a car?

Mazzeo was a thief, but the Feds didn't believe he kept all the cash himself; nor did they believe he could have put more than 15 mob-run companies into leases at the ferry terminals without higher-ups knowing. Vito Fossella Sr. testified that he routinely kept rent checks from concessionaires in his desk drawer, "forgetting" to cash them - every New Yorker's dream landlord. One check was for $150,000 from a tenant represented by Queens State Sen. Emanuel Gold.

I was often asked: how could the Mayor and his Commissioner not know? In fact, Koch and Ameruso did know.

Warned About 'Sewer'

City Comptroller Jay Goldin told Barrett and Newfield that he had lunch with Koch just before the Mayor-elect took office in January 1978 and told him about the "sewer" at the ferry bureau. In fact, Goldin's audits were turning up one sleazy deal after the other. Koch promised action, but did nothing. He did, however, give ferry boss Fossella a plum: Chair of the Board of Standards and Appeals, where he would continue to serve the county leaders and the builders who financed their machines.

City Councilwoman Mary Codd confronted Koch about the crooked Ameruso-approved leases on a live TV show in 1983. He feigned shock, much as he did later in 1986 when Ameruso was indicted ("I believed him to be an honest man," Koch said.)

I told them in 1982.

Neither man wanted to hear it. Koch shouted me down at a gubernatorial campaign stop in 1982 and told his Deputy Press Secretary Dick Riley - a former editor of the Staten Island Register - to parrot the official City Hall line: "no comment, no comment and no comment."

When I asked Koch about the ferry corruption, he gave his standard answer: "If you have evidence of wrong-doing, go to the District Attorney." This was the same answer he gave to Jim Smith, the publisher of a newspaper called "Talking Turkey," when Smith challenged Koch in 1984 on the hand-held computer deal that was being promoted by Stanley Friedman. The Register headlines were there week after week in 1982 and 1983: how Ameruso hid the agency's files, refusing access to reporters; how he gave month-to-month leases to mob firms; how he ignored the high bids for rentals, how he allowed mob firms to run up huge bills - over $2 million - while Koch was crying poverty and threatening to end night-time service on the ferry, raise the fare and cut service (which he did).

Ameruso, appearing at a 1983 Borough Board meeting in Staten Island, was guarded by Borough President Tony Gaeta and his staff as someone brought out a cake to celebrate Lamberti's birthday.

Lying and Ducking

When I told Ameruso that night about the Cohn leases and the mob no-bid lease awards, he prevaricated and had sudden memory lapses, pleaded ignorance, and generally avoided answering. Finally, as I, along with Staten Island Advance reporter Dan Janison (now an editor for Newsday), kept at him, he smiled and walked into another room and said: "I'm going to celebrate Ralph's birthday." Lamberti closed the door and hustled Ameruso out a side exit, clear from nagging reporters asking impertinent questions.

A staffer for Councilwoman Codd uttered the most prescient comment I have ever heard about a city official: "If he is ever under oath, he will be indicted for perjury."

Ameruso wasn't smiling when I showed up at his house in Roslyn, Long Island in 1983. (As a Commissioner, he was required to live in one of the five boroughs.) One of his staffers had tipped me off that his city chauffeur was taking him to Roslyn every night and picking him up the next morning.

When I approached him, Ameruso said I should get off his property before something happened to me. (I didn't think he was referring to calling the police). "I will kick your ass back to Manhattan," he bellowed. He denied living outside the city, and said he was merely visiting his wife.

A few days later, I received a copy of the driver's logs from a city employee - he was indeed being picked up every morning in Roslyn.

Teflon Tony

Ameruso was Koch's Teflon Commissioner. Nothing could get him fired because Koch had made his Faustian bargain with the Democratic county chieftains (four of whom gave him crucial support during the 1977 Democratic mayoral runoff, and again when he ran for Governor in 1982). After his death, Koch invented a story for hiring Ameruso. The man who would go ballistic when questioned about "quotas" for blacks or women told the Times he appointed Ameruso because he wanted an Italian in his cabinet, even though his own hand-picked screening panel, led by civic activist Sally Goodgold, said that Ameruso was not qualified.

Koch's recent revisionism is exposed by reading his book "Politics," where he wrote that none of his appointments were based on ethnicity, race or religion - or on recommendations from the clubhouse. For their 1987 book "City for Sale," Newfield and Barrett interviewed Esposito, who told the real story. Ameruso's name was on a list presented to Koch when he came courting Esposito during the 1977 mayoral runoff against Mario Cuomo. Koch accepted the list and kept his promise.

Koch's Blind Eye

Koch ignored one fixed lease after the other, all approved by Ameruso. He even gave an important job ferry bureau real estate job to Felice Saccone, a protege of Carmine DeSapio, the man he defeated for district leader in the early '60s on an anti-boss platform.

Ameruso was a disaster as Commissioner and Koch knew it, lasagna sauce or no lasagna sauce. Ameruso does, however, have one lasting claim to fame. He, along with two dozen others, including Fossella Sr., Koch, Bess Myerson, Mazzeo, Esposito and Cohn, are featured in "Rotten to the Core" trading cards. Nassau County, where Ameruso lived, passed a law in 1989 outlawing the cards because they portrayed "heinous crimes." The publishing company won on appeal.

Jim Callaghan covered the Koch administration from 1978 to 1987 as the editor of the Staten Island Register and the Staten Island Eagle, and as a contributor to The Village Voice. In 1983, he and his staff were given the First Place Award for in-depth Reporting by the New York Press Association for a series of articles on ferry corruption.