Gaming the Game Read online

  Mobster Caramandi later explained that he was actually trying to extort Mastronardo, but failed, noting that a “partner” of his named John Pastorella knew Mastronardo and started betting with him “fifty thousand, sixty thousand on ten or fifteen games each weekend. But I was also trying to smoke [Mastronardo] out, because I wanted tribute money off of him, shake money, because we’d heard this guy did real well, taking one hundred, two hundred thousand a game. I figured once we lose I’ll meet this guy and read him his rights, that he has to pay.” Caramandi’s plan worked like a charm to start, as he said, “Well, the first week we win, like, fifteen thousand . . . But the second week we lose fifty-two thousand. And Mastronardo’s on the phone looking for his money. So now I switch everything around and I tell him that he owes me fifty thousand. I tell him Pastorella made a mistake betting the games. I say Pastorella was betting with my money and that Mastronardo’s responsible and I wanna meet him. He says, ‘I don’t wanna get involved with no gangsters.’ ” As was the case in the very near future with Battista and his gambling pals, Mastronardo carefully avoided the harm that awaited him if he was ever to cross paths with Philly wiseguys. “And he would never meet me,” added Caramandi. “He musta gone underground or something, ’cause we could never find him. And so eventually we boxed a draw there and forgot about it.”

  Authorities estimated that Mastronardo’s operation at the time grossed approximately fifty million dollars annually. The Mastronardos were the targets of a high-profile 1987 federal prosecution which also involved a stockbroker at Shearson Lehman Brothers who, according to the PCC, “played a significant role by converting profits of the operation into bonds and securities. Thus, illegal money was converted into legal assets and income taxes were avoided . . . Initially the profits were converted to treasury or cashier checks and money orders in amounts under ten thousand dollars to circumvent the requirement of filing an IRS Currency Transaction Report.” The checks and money orders were then used to buy bonds and securities using nominee accounts at Shearson Lehman. Each of the Mastronardos was convicted in February 1987, with Joe Vito being sentenced to two years in prison and receiving a fine of two hundred and fifty thousand dollars.3 As a sign of things to come, the Mastronardos continued to operate even during their federal trial, and the next couple of years would yield millions of confiscated dollars on repeated occasions relating to their massive sports bookmaking and betting enterprise. Law enforcement intelligence disclosed Joe Vito’s national prominence emanating from the Philly suburbs, and locales from Los Angeles to New York were found to be part of the grand Mastronardo enterprise.

  Battista and The Animals had much to learn from the legendary Joe Vito, including how to avoid the numerous pitfalls awaiting pro gamblers—especially those operating in the Philadelphia area.

  * * *

  One of the most consequential events in The Sheep’s betting career took place toward the end of 1993. Battista, consumed with his work for Mike Rinnier, was always on the lookout for law enforcement and, more importantly, for Philly mobsters who were not pleased with the lack of respect shown by Rinnier’s operation. At the time, Philly’s underworld was in turmoil. Infamous, hot-headed mob boss Nicodemo “Little Nicky” Scarfo was convicted of racketeering in 1988 and sentenced to life in prison. Following Scarfo’s precipitous downfall, the predictable struggle for power ensued with flashy up-and-comer Joseph “Skinny Joey” Merlino and the more seasoned and staid John Stanfa leading rival factions in the early 1990s. The streets of South Philly weathered the internecine warfare, while the area’s bookies wound up with their own related problems. Rather than paying one entity—the Scarfo mob, area gamblers now had two groups demanding protection money. Rinnier’s crowd and some of their suburban betting pals were already on bad terms with the “boys from downtown” either because they hadn’t been paying enough tax or because they were crushing some of the mob’s bookies with their betting, and now there was the added underworld bravado and hysteria emanating from the Merlino-Stanfa battle. If Mike Rinnier was paying a street tax to the mob, word was that his offering was insufficient and that he or one of his surrogates should expect a visit to address the matter. In fact, this was the case with many suburban bookies throughout the fall of 1993, and one in particular experienced considerable problems.

  Jimmy Pirollo was a short, balding, gray-haired figure in his fifties who was known for his easygoing disposition and his professional manner. “One of our local bookmakers and a good friend of ours was a guy named Jimmy Pirollo,” Jimmy Battista says. “Everyone loved him because he was one of the most generous guys I ever met in my life.” Louie the Lump was among those who benefitted from Pirollo’s generosity. “One day,” he says, “I was walking around with a puss on my face, and Jimmy asked what was wrong. I told him I was broke. He came back the next day with two brown bags with thirty thousand dollars in cash and said, ‘Pay me back when you can.’ He was a good guy, Jimmy Pirollo.”

  Good guy or not, Pirollo was apparently not paying a cent to either Philly mob faction, and received the attention of an extortion crew sent on behalf of John Stanfa. Jack Manfredi, a pest exterminator who also happened to be a mob shakedown artist, visited Pirollo in September of 1993, and told him, “Stanfa sent me up here . . . [and] wants money from every bookmaker in the city and he wants anybody that’s doing business in the city to turn it into him, or give him a piece because, you see, the difference between him and the other guys [is that] when he says something he backs it up and he does something.” The thirty-five year-old Manfredi also told Pirollo, “I work for somebody just like you do. This business is our business, okay? You’re part of that business, you gotta do the right thing. We’re not out to hurt you. Everybody’s gotta do the right thing.” Manfredi, who was also trying to muscle money out of a few other local bookies and the owner of a popular high-end strip club called Delilah’s Den at the time, said he wanted three hundred dollars per week from Pirollo. If Pirollo was petrified of Manfredi, it was with good reason. Not long after these exchanges took place, Manfredi was arrested by police investigating another sports bookmaking operation. As police approached Manfredi, he tossed an unregistered gun under a parked car, and later surrendered two other guns. He also had a set of throwing knives on him.

  What Jack Manfredi and his mob associates didn’t know when they visited Jimmy Pirollo was that the diminutive bookie was wired for sound by the FBI. That criminal case, however, wouldn’t be sufficiently developed until the spring of 1994, and not even Mike Rinnier and his colleagues knew of the federal investigation, much less of Pirollo’s role.4 As such, the mob shakedowns continued throughout the fall, and the area’s gamblers operated with trepidation. In any illicit business, paranoia is common, as are numerous myths and conspiracy legends, in large part because there is no means to validate most of what is rumored. Whispers of threats, real or imagined, alter all sorts of activities even when there is, in fact, nothing to fear. The numbers of underworld actors who have volunteered information to authorities out of irrational concerns are considerable, and what occurred next in the careers of Rinnier and his crew is a routine exercise among illicit entrepreneurs.

  “Jimmy Pirollo was affiliated with Mike Rinnier booking and betting, more booking.” Battista says. “He was a close friend of ours, and we all worked together. He lived in Glenolden and owned a mom-and-pop bar supply company, and sold things like coasters, napkins, straws, little treats, pretzel sticks, munchies and candies people would put on top of a bar. Stuff like that. That’s how he got the nickname The Candyman, because he always had sweets on his truck. But his main thing was booking. He was the only person in Glenolden living in a row home that was driving a brand-new fucking Mercedes. Jimmy P was the greatest!

  “He booked anybody and everybody; he didn’t care. ‘Just give me a yellow pad and a pencil’ was his philosophy because he knew back then, before we all got so sophisticated, that no one could win in the long run. Well, Mike Rinnier and Tiger started bettin
g him and beat his brains in, and that’s how they became partners.” “When I went partners with Mike in the early 90s,” Tiger says, “we were betting and booking, and we would bury the bookmakers; we would bet them and bury them. They’d owe us so much money that they’d have to come work for us. So, we’d run their books. We would call them and give them what lines to use. We were using these bookmakers to actually get down on the right sides. We manipulated the lines in the market to try and control the way people bet so we would be on the right sides. Jimmy Pirollo was one of those bookmakers that we used.”

  By the fall of 1993, Pirollo’s involvement with Mike Rinnier was a subject of interest for Philly’s mobsters. “Jimmy wasn’t paying anything to the guys downtown,” Battista says, “and they knew Jimmy and Mike were now partners. They came into Jimmy’s house and robbed him twice that I know of. One time, they dressed up like cable company guys, came in, duct-taped him up, bitch slapped him, pistol-whipped him, and said, ‘You’re gonna fucking pay.’ They wanted like a fifty dime payment or something, but he just told them he’d take care of it, and they left. He was lucky, because he used to hide bricks of money up in his basement ceiling.” With mob events such as these swirling in the air, an otherwise irrelevant local bettor sent everyone hiding for cover on a Saturday morning that December.

  Jimmy Pirollo’s son, Jay, was a small-time bookmaker whose betting clientele was a far cry from his father’s substantial book, and which included a man named Charles “Chuck” Giordano who owed him seventy-five hundred dollars. Giordano had made several appointments to meet with Jay to pay off the debt, but never showed up. Finally, Giordano promised to appear at Pirollo’s father’s home on December 18th to settle the matter. Unfortunately for Giordano, he also owed another group of bettors around thirty-five hundred dollars and—unlike Jimmy Pirollo—they had the muscle and the apparent motivation to use it to get their money. Three hulking men visited Giordano at midnight on December 17th to make their displeasure regarding the outstanding debt known.

  Jimmy Pirollo had another Saturday of booking football action ahead of him on December 18th, but his first stop was Philadelphia International Airport. Jay was heading to the islands for a scheduled vacation and Jimmy was dropping him off. When Jay hugged and kissed his father goodbye, he likely could not have imagined what the day would hold for the admired Glenolden bookmaker. At approximately quarter after eleven that morning, Dave Segich, a friend and colleague of Jimmy Pirollo’s, showed up at Pirollo’s house to handle that day’s bets. Segich, who earned a hundred bucks a day for the task, started setting up a table in the basement betting office when a knock on the door came. Chuck Giordano had finally honored his promise to appear at Pirollo’s home. When Jimmy Pirollo opened the door to his home, he didn’t recognize Giordano at first. Only when Giordano identified himself as “Chuck” did Pirollo acknowledge him and bring him inside the home, suggesting he was expecting him for a meeting.

  As the men entered the basement, they chatted about Christmas while Pirollo sat behind his desk. Just as Dave Segich reached down into his briefcase for a pen, he heard Pirollo scream “Oh my God!” Giordano had pulled out a nine-millimeter gun and, as Pirollo screamed, shot The Candyman in the face, killing him. Segich was shot next, with the bullet tearing into his face below the nostril and exiting behind an ear. Segich was nevertheless able to use a chair as a shield to get up the stairs and out of the basement and out of the home. He ran through the front yards and bushes of neighbors, bleeding profusely from his face all the while. Segich finally collapsed next to a neighbor’s steps and watched anxiously as Giordano fled Pirollo’s home, speeding down the street in his Ford Bronco. Concerned neighbors rushed to Segich’s side, covering him in a blanket and trying to stem the bleeding.5 Roughly half an hour after fleeing the Pirollo scene, Giordano paid off the thirty-five-hundred-dollar debt that had been owed to a betting group for several months. It was determined that four thousand dollars was missing from Pirollo’s basement following the shooting.

  Of course, this level of detail wouldn’t be known fact for some time, and for now Jimmy Pirollo’s colleagues were about to receive the dire—and chilling—news. “It was late on a Saturday morning and we were in the gambling office betting,” Battista says. “The phone rang and someone in the office said that Jimmy Pirollo, The Candyman, got killed. A Pennsylvania state trooper who had arrested us before called Mike from Jimmy’s house, and I remember the look on Mike’s face when he heard Jimmy got killed. He was really scared. We already knew about the war Merlino and Stanfa and all those guys were having. Well, they were also trying to shakedown all the bookmakers from Delaware County. We immediately thought it was the mob that did it. Mike was panicking because he thought they would be coming after him next. They had already warned Mike about not paying the protection tax, and they sort of knew we were destroying their books.

  “I was in the middle of getting a rundown, and Mike said, ‘Sheep, come here. I need you to go over to Candy’s house. He got shot and was killed.’ He sent me over to Jimmy’s house to get a feel for things. I wanted to go because I felt so bad; he was a good friend of mine. I knew him for about five years and we did a lot of stuff together. I saw all the police there, and them taking the body out. It was a sin. We were trying to find out the basics of what it was.” It wasn’t long before Battista and Rinnier were hearing more about the recent extortion threats. “We all thought, ‘Oh my God, it’s the mob. They went in and fucking killed him.’ They were there just a few weeks before shaking him down.” To make the organized crime paranoia more gripping, the alleged shooter was named Chuck Giordano. When Rinnier’s crowd heard the killer’s name ended in a vowel, it confirmed for them their worst fears of a mob hit. “It freaked us all out,” Tiger says. “ Giordano ?! We were thinking, ‘Alright, we’re all gonna get killed.’ ”

  “Because Mike thought the boys from downtown were after him, he asked me to move in with him and protect his family,” Battista says. “At the time, I didn’t have a gun or a permit, but I started carrying guns to protect Mike and his family.” “When Jimmy Pirollo got murdered,” Tiger says, “they thought it was a mob hit and the next thing you know Baba was walking around with a shotgun under a trench coat! Baba was Mike’s right-hand man at the time, and was in Mike’s house with another guy, just sitting in his living room with shotguns because we thought it was the mob. Baba was with him everywhere he went. When Mike would go down the casinos, he would rent, like, five limos and it was like a caravan so no one would know which one Mike was in. It was like a shell game going down the Atlantic City Expressway because there were rumors Mike was going to get kidnapped and stuff like that. At the time, which we later realized was just a coincidence, the dagos from downtown were shaking Mike Rinnier and Jimmy Pirollo and all those guys down. I didn’t even know because I wasn’t in that part of the organization. I was just the gambling part, and we were betting our asses off. We were pretty secluded from the outside world. We didn’t even know how bad they were getting shaken down. Well, they were getting shaken down pretty fucking bad.”

  Sheep and Tiger were immersed in a subculture that included many undesirable characters. The relatively hum-drum, straight-shooting pro gamblers and their crowd thus had immense appreciation and respect for a class act like The Candyman. Indeed, Tiger still pauses when he thinks about Jimmy Pirollo, and says, “He was a really good guy. God, what a great fucking guy. The first time I met Jimmy, he was driving a red Corvette. He lived in the nicest row home on the fucking planet. The neighborhood wasn’t the greatest but the place was real nice inside. The basement was the betting office. The only thing noteworthy about his betting office was that he took bets out of a desk and he had a drawer with a pile of hundreds in it. He would be like, “Oh, I owe you ten grand. Hold on a minute. He’d take out like sixty grand, and pull ten out and put the fifty back in the drawer. That was stupid, and that’s what got him killed. Somebody saw that and wanted that money.”

  As someo
ne with particularly keen insight, Battista offers his reflections on Pirollo’s slaying. “Jimmy’s son had a reputation for being a degenerate gambler who was booking people on his own,” Battista says. “He had some kid who owed him money, and he was supposedly threatening to sic some guys on him if the kid didn’t pay up. We heard that Jimmy’s kid was saying, ‘My dad is going to come after you. You don’t know who my father is, blah, blah, blah,” shooting off his mouth, where his father was actually the nicest guy in the world. Jimmy Pirollo wouldn’t shake down anyone. He’d say, ‘When you get the money, you pay me.’ But, his kid was apparently trying to make a name for himself being a tough guy. Well, that, in essence, got his father killed. The kid who owed the money went over Jimmy’s house, and instead of paying him went over and shot him. Among our crowd, Jimmy’s kid was just a fucking asshole, and most of us looked at it like he got his father killed.” The area’s gamblers were none too fond of Pirollo’s son, even before the slaying.6 “I didn’t like Jimmy’s kid that much,” one says. “He took advantage of Jimmy, I thought.” Never one to hold back, Louie the Lump is a bit more emphatic and cutting when he says, “Jimmy’s kid wouldn’t make a pimple on his father’s ass. He was a jerkoff. Jimmy didn’t deserve him.”

  * * *

  The Pirollo slaying only aggravated the preexisting and omnipresent fear suburban gamblers had of the Philly mob, and until things calmed down Mike Rinnier employed a host of tactics to ensure his safety—and the viability of his organization. According to those close to him, this meant somehow ingratiating himself with law enforcement authorities and local political figures. It is unclear what, if any, political protection Rinnier enjoyed and how he benefitted from this or from his supposed role as an informer.