By ROGER FRANKLIN
NEW YORK - It can't have been easy for Tony Spero. Sure, if you take the word of New York prosecutors, he is the effective head of the Bonanno crime family, which makes him an important figure in the commercial and community life of both his Brooklyn neighbourhood and the Big Apple as a whole.
And true, all the wiseguy wannabes accorded him the deference which every button guy who becomes "da boss" is entitled to expect. But, all the same, he must have spent the past decade or so hearing sniggers from behind his back. This was the hood who did everything right and still could not get any respect.
Sometime rival Gambino boss John Gotti was hailed for his $US2000 ($4620) suits and what seemed to be, at least for a while, a near miraculous ability to convince juries that he really was nothing more than a simple plumbing-supply salesman from Queens.
Even Vinnie "The Chin" Gigante was more revered, despite the fact that he wandered Greenwich Village in his dressing gown, talking to lamp-posts and barking at dogs as he feigned the madness that kept him safe from prosecution for the best part of three decades.
As for Carmine "The Snake" Persico, he was so sharp even the cops who eventually sent him away for life admitted that the Columbo chieftain could have been a Supreme Court justice if only his early life had taken a different turn or two.
But Spero? Well, the shuffling figure feeding his beloved pigeons was such a low-profile presence in the world of organised crime that even his own soldiers never bothered to annoint him with a bona fide mob nickname. No colourful handles for this guy who, as a prosecutor recently noted, "is a grey old man in a cheap cardigan."
And now, just when Spero is finally ready for prime-time as the defendant in what may well be the last major prosecution of an old-school New York mafiosi, comes the biggest insult of the them all: he is being upstaged by Tony Soprano, the central character in the hit TV series.
With the show's third season about to begin in a week or so, it is the celluloid gangster and his fictional New Jersey crew who are getting all the ink.
It's a pity, and not just for what the lack of attention must be doing to the 72-year-old Spero's ego.
Though the press coverage he garnered throughout his career was always minimal, students of Mobland regard him as a standout operator, a man whose best efforts and inspired innovations kept the feds off his case for more than a decade - but still could not postpone the final, inevitable stage of the Mafia's irreversible decline.
Ironically, it was Spero's own "family" that began the downward spiral back in the early 1980s when it embraced a big-talking jewel thief called Donnie Brasco.
As history and a hit Hollywood movie both recall, the ice man was really undercover cop Joe Pistone, whose inside information led to the conviction of more than 100 Bonanno mobsters and reduced the clan to the smallest of New York's infamous Five Families.
The next stage came a few years later, when federal prosecutors effectively decapitated the organisational heads of all the families by using wire-taps and the evidence of turncoats such as Sammy "The Bull" Gravano, who broke their omerta vows of silence in return for new lives in the witness protection programme.
The vacuum in the Bonanno top ranks drew Spero ever upward, giving him a chance to change the family's direction.
According to prosecutors, who spent most of this week selecting jurors for the upcoming trial, Spero ruthlessly removed any associates he regarded as a potential security risks, a move that shrank the family's ruling elite to a relative handful of very hard cases.
Once he had achieved that first goal, Spero farmed out much of the loan sharking, prostitution and gambling operations to subcontractors, who paid the Bonannos a franchise fee for managing their old rackets.
The next step in Spero's survival strategy could have been dictated by Harvard Business School: he developed under-performing subsidiaries.
Take garbage, for example, which New York's businesses produce in such vast quantities that it must be carted away by contractors, most of whom Spero and his associates controlled.
The profits were immense. At one commercial building in TriBeCa, the managing agents were paying $US120,000 a month to have their trash removed - a job currently performed for less than $US12,000 now that the Bonanno strangehold has been broken.
In the Garment District, it was more of the same. The rag traders, whose livelihoods depend on getting clothes from sweatshop to showroom before they go out of style, were being squeezed for as much as $US4 a hanger to have a truckload of duds a few city blocks.
Today, with the Bonannos banished and independent operators free to offer their services without risking their knees, the going rate is around 40c and falling.
Finally, there was Wall St, where Spero's ambitions found their greatest reward. By filling boiler-room stock brokerages with mob associates, his crime family was in a position to bilk suckers from coast to coast.
"They would 'pump and dump' microcaps [penny stocks] all the time," said Bradley Skolnick, president of the North American Securities Administrators Association. "Take a worthless stock, use mob money to push up the price, and then have their operatives call unsophisticated investors and urge them to get on board.
"When the price soared, the mob would sell everything, the price would collapse and innocent people would be ruined. Microcap fraud has cost Americans hundreds of millions of dollars, perhaps billions.
"Unlike The Godfather or Sopranos, there is nothing entertaining about the mob on Wall St."
It probably seemed to Spero that he had transformed his family into an almost-legitimate business, one that was immune to the blitz of indictments that eventually humbled even Gotti.
Old ways die hard, however, and even the canny Spero could not entirely change his style. When his daughter's apartment was robbed, the doting father reverted to form and ordered that the burglar be executed forthwith.
When a neighbourhood junkie was foolish enough to threaten him on the street, prosecutors say, Spero had him killed, too.
And as for those pigeons he was always cooing over, the feds say he used them to send messages to his hit men - the only way he could communicate without being either bugged or tailed.
Spero's trial starts in earnest next week and is destined to command its share of column inches in the New York press. But the real spotlight will belong to Tony Soprano and the series' season debut.
Unlike his real-life counterpart, the fictional boss with the dysfunctional family has a unique advantage: a scriptwriter who has so far kept him out of the slammer.
Tough life when fiction outshines fact
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