The Strength of the Wolf by Douglas Valentine

Author:Douglas Valentine
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 2013-10-01T04:00:00+00:00

THE ISOLATION OF FRANK SELVAGGI

As mentioned earlier, Charlie Siragusa had chewed out John Dolce for sending Frank Selvaggi alone into Harlem. For that reason, and because he was Siragusa’s in-law, one of the Group Three agents christened Frank with the nickname, “Selagusa.” That didn’t bother him, as it was part of the ribbing that went back and forth in the New York office. What troubled him was that the Group Three clique was starting to interfere in his cases.

“Sal Rinaldo had two other connections,” Selvaggi explains, “a guy named Shears, whom we hadn’t heard about before, and a super-connection named Mickey Blair. You couldn’t go to Blair [real name Dominick Castiglia] for less than five kilos. He’d been in the Army during the war, and when he was arrested in the Borelli case, he said that General Mark Clark would vouch for him.” Selvaggi arches his eyebrows.

“Anyway, Brady found out that Shears was Sal Maneri, the contact-man between the Italians and the French. So we arrested Maneri one night on the street, and during the arrest I treated his wife with respect – which is why Maneri called me when he got out on bail. Like everyone else in the Rinaldo case, he was on Eboli’s hit list and wanted help. So we started meeting in Times Square on Sunday afternoons. Maneri tells me things. He says he’ll give me ‘a house,’ meaning a plant, if I can help him. ‘They’ll make you a general,’ he says.

“Well, Dolce is my group leader, and he knew I was meeting with Maneri. He also knew that Maneri was running a crap game down on the Lower East Side with a Czechoslovakian guy, Jan Simack. The next thing I know, Dolce decides he’s going to hit Maneri’s crap game. Everyone in the group gets an envelope. The way it works, you open the envelope at a prearranged time, and inside is a piece of paper telling you where to meet everyone. But there’s no envelope for me.” Frank pauses reflectively.5

“Later on I heard what happened. They’re outside Maneri’s crap game and they see him handing something to someone on the street. They think it’s a pass, so they hit them right then and there. But it’s cash, not drugs. Maneri hands ten grand to Simack. Not long after that, Maneri flees the country with Mauro and Caruso.”

Selvaggi lights a cigarette. “After that I requested a transfer to the Court House Squad. An agent could avoid trouble by joining the Court House Squad,” he explains. “Same with the International Group. Those groups could subpoena their suspects under the Thirty-Five Hundred Rule. They didn’t need dope on the table, and they didn’t have to testify in court.” And testifying in court was risky business, because slick criminal defense attorneys invariably claimed that the arresting agent had stolen money from, or planted evidence on, the defendant. But even at the Court House Squad, Selvaggi was on the frontlines, eyeball to eyeball with hoods, even if he wasn’t turning them into informants anymore.

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