Copyright 1991 CanWest Interactive, a division of
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The Ottawa Citizen
July 5, 1991, Friday, FINAL EDITION
SECTION: NEWS; Pg. A2

LENGTH: 1433 words

HEADLINE: FBI tapes reveal secrets of Mafia initiation rites

BYLINE: Edmund Mahony

DATELINE: HARTFORD, Conn.

BODY:
HARTFORD, Conn. _ "Richie," the raspy, nasal voice of mob consiglieri Joseph "J.R." Russo inquired. "Do you got any brothers?"

"Yes," Richard Floramo answered.

"Do you have sons?"

"Yes."

"If I told you one of them was an informer," Russo continued, "a police informer, gonna put somebody in prison, and I told you, you must kill them, would you do that for me without hesitation?"

"He has to go," Floramo replied.

Russo's cocksure voice and Floramo's, at times nervous and hesitating, boomed over a loudspeaker in U.S. Ditrict Court here Wednesday. It was the first time that a tape recording of the Mafia's centuries old, quasi-religious initiation rite had been played in public.

The courtroom was silent except for the recorded voices. Jurors listened over headphones and followed the conversations intently from a typed transcript. The eight reputed Patriarca crime family members and associates being tried on racketeering charges did the same. About two dozen reporters and the packed gallery also strained to hear.

Propped against an evidence table was a chart with 19 color photographs taken on a quiet Sunday morning in the Boston suburbs. They depicted a tidy home at 34 Guild St. in Medford. The trees in the yard carried the last bits of autumn's color.

Scattered around the neighborhood, FBI agents and detectives hid nervously. Down the street, in a hastily assembled command post, another agent worried over a tape recorder, listening to the goings on within 34 Guild St. being provided by at least one secretly installed transmitter.

As noon approached, a big Lincoln stopped repeatedly in front of the home. It deposited groups of mostly middle-aged men. All but one were wearing business suits or sports jackets and ties.

The eavesdropping agent heard the coughing and small talk of 17 sworn Patriarca family members and the scraping sound of furniture being moved before Russo took the floor. He initiated four new members into New England's dominant criminal organization. Floramo was the fourth.

"We have to ask, say once more," Russo continued, questioning Floramo. "This thing you're in, it's gonna be the life of heaven. It's a wonderful thing, the greatest thing in the world. If you feel that way, want to be part of it, as long as you live."

"Yes," Floramo said. "I do."

(Begin optional trim)

There was one difficulty Floramo was compelled to mention. He had an uncle on the Boston police force.

"But I don't think he ever made a pinch in his life," he said.

"That's all right," Russo said.

(End optional trim)

Then, the voice of Biagio DiGiacomo, with a thick Italian accent, filled the courtroom.

"Good luck, Richie," DiGiacomo said.

Then, as he had for those inducted before Floramo _ Robert DeLuca, Vincent Federico and Carmen Tortora _ DiGiacomo administered the Mafia's blood oath in Italian:

"Io, Richie, voglio entrare in questa organizzazione per proteggere la mia famiglia e per proteggere I miei amici. (I, Richie, want to enter into this organization to protect my family and to protect all my friends)."

Floramo repeated the oath as it was administered by DiGiacomo. He swore never to betray the Mafia's secrets and to obey with love and omerta, the Sicilian code of silence.

"Which finger do you use to pull the trigger?" DiGiacomo then asked.

Floramo showed him and _ the FBI says _ the finger was cut to draw blood. Then, in an elaborate numerical ritual, similar to a game children play when choosing sides for ball games, the mob selected a compare, or buddy, for Floramo, someone to stand beside him during the next phase of the ritual.

As a paper card bearing the image of the Patriarca family's patron saint was burned in Floramo's cupped hands, he swore, in Italian, "As burns this saint, so will burn my soul. I enter alive and I will have to get out dead."

"Come in alive and go out dead," one of the mobsters assembled around Floramo interjected.

The FBI considers the recording one of the most important pieces of evidence ever collected in its decades-long fight against the nation's organized crime families. For years, reputed Mafiosi have said the Mafia exists only in the fevered imaginations of government agents.

Agents and government prosecutors say that the recording is the best possible proof that the Mafia is a continuing enterprise designed to further its interests by breaking the law. The government's principal weapon against organized crime, federal anti-racketeering laws, requires that the existence of a criminal enterprise be proven.

Prosecutors hope jurors hearing the case in Hartford, as well as those who will hear testimony in a related trial in Boston later this year and others elsewhere in the United States, will consider the recording just that proof.

(Begin optional trim)

The recording did not end with the conclusion of the fourth initiation Oct. 29, 1989. Russo, DiGiacomo, one of five mob capos at the ceremony, and other high-ranking gangsters instructed the freshly initiated Mafia soldiers in the rules of La Cosa Nostra.

"All the friends of ours, this family, we help each other because you people became outlaws, you know," the initiates were told.

The phrase "friend of ours" _ amico nostro in Italian _ is an important aspect of communication in the Mafia, the four new soldiers were told. They were ordered never to introduce themselves as Mafia soldiers _ except to another soldier, and then only when the introduction was arranged by a third Mafioso friends with both parties.

Non-Mafia members should be introduced as "a friend of mine," DiGiacomo said. Then, DiGiacomo, in a kind of charade, mimicked how the introduction of a mob capo, or captain, should go.

"Then he's a captain and I say, 'Vinnie, he's a friend of ours. Also he's a captain,"' DiGiacomo said. "Then you shake hands. You don't kiss him. Years ago, we used to kiss each other."

The practice of men kissing one another attracts too much attention, particularly from FBI agents, he explained.

"Right away, they're going to make it," DiGiacomo said. "They say it's a wop, they do something with this guy."

Each new inductee was also introduced to men at the ceremony identified as the five Patriarca family capos. They were Robert Carrozza, Vincent Ferrara, Charles Quintina and DiGiacomo of the Boston area and Matthew Guglielmetti of the Providence, R.I., area. Guglielmetti has been identified by the FBI as the leader of the family's Connecticut crew.

He was originally among those on trial for racketeering in Hartford but pleaded guilty and is scheduled to be sentenced next week.

The four new members were instructed in other rules.

"Another thing," Russo told them. "We're very protective of our women. You have a sister? Unless our intentions are super honorable, marriage, of course, that's all."

The same applies to wives and girlfriends, he said.

"A woman is sacred," Russo said, adding, "the only way to get out of that, you die. You die."

Raymond A. "Junior" Patriarca, who was then the mob's boss, warned the new members not to get carried away with their new-found prestige.

"Stay the way youse are," he warned. "Don't let it go to your head."

(End optional trim)

The Mafia is an international organization, the new members were told. Members can obtain assistance anywhere or anytime. There are families in cities all over the country.

"All families are related, all over America," Russo said.

"Throughout the world," Patriarca said.

But once a member joins, there is no way out, DiGiacomo said. Particularly if he betrays the secret.

"It's no hope, no Jesus, no Madonna," he said. "Nobody can help us if we ever give up this secret to anybody, any kinds of friends of mine, let's say."

(Begin optional trim)

"This goes back about 300 years," an unidentified speaker said. "Right, Biagio?"

"More," he answered.

"Around the 12th century, wasn't it?" Quintina said. "Ah, the Sicilian vespers."

Explaining the background of the Mafia, DiGiacomo said that it started in Sicily "because there was a lot abuse to the family, to the wife, to the children."

"Until some people, nice people, they got together, and they said, 'Let's make an organization over here, but let's start to do the right thing. Who makes a mistake, he's gotta pay.' "

The induction ceremony ended a little after noon.

(End optional trim)

"Only the (expletive) ghost knows what really took place over here today, by God," Ferrara told his pal as they left.