Salemme and DeLuca took their assignment seriously. Behind the hard green steel doors of their cells, seated on the thin mattresses of their metal bunk beds or at the tiny metal desks attached to their walls, the men played the tapes. There were hundreds of tapes, and the work was mind-numbing, as they played and replayed the conversations, straining to hear the dialogue.
Bobby DeLuca especially took to the task at hand, and one day, while concentrating on the Hilton-Logan tape, he detected something in the background. He stopped, replayed the passage, and the more he listened the more he became convinced he could hear other voices besides the two targeted wiseguys. DeLuca summoned Salemme, who listened to the tape. Salemme heard the extra voices too. DeLuca wasn’t crazy. Two voices in the background were whispering. It had to be the FBI agents overseeing the taping. Somehow the roving bug they were using from the next hotel room had also captured their voices, and one agent was whispering to the other agent that they should have gotten “the Saint” to give one of the wiseguys “a list of questions.”
Eureka.
DeLuca and Salemme stopped the tape and eagerly placed a telephone call to Cardinale in Boston.
THE MAFIA had been calling on Tony Cardinale for years, and at forty-five, he possessed the seasoning, ego, and stamina to go deep into any contest with the government. By the time of the 1995 indictment of Salemme, Bulger, Flemmi, and the others, he was Boston’s leading mob lawyer. Fond of Hermes silk ties, fine cigars, and scotch, Cardinale relished the combat of the courtroom. He was a lawyer who was best on his feet, seemingly restless behind a desk. It had always been this way for the litigator who’d grown up in Hell’s Kitchen in New York City, the son of a boxer and restaurateur. Cardinale’s father and four uncles ran Delsomma’s Restaurant on Forty-seventh Street between Eighth Avenue and Broadway, popular with the theater crowd, the old Madison Square Garden folks, and the wiseguys from the West Side. His father also trained boxers, and Tony Cardinale grew up under his father’s careful eye, taught to bob and weave, jab-jab, a right, bam! a left hook, bam! Boxing dominated the talk at the restaurant and at home, a railroad-style flat on the third floor of a tenement on Forty-sixth Street, right next to a fish market. Two uncles and their families lived across the street; his grandmother and another uncle lived around the corner. Tony Cardinale ran with the Forty-sixth Street Guys, a gritty, true-life version of the street gangs glamorized in the musical West Side Story. The teen Cardinale wore the late 1950s getup of blue jeans, white T-shirt, sneakers, and garrison belt, a thick, big-buckled belt that could double as a weapon.
Young Tony Cardinale grew up watching the city pass through the doors of his family’s restaurant—fighters, gangsters, high rollers, businessmen—and this was the spot where he first picked up the notion of someday becoming a lawyer. “If my dad met a guy at the door who was a lawyer or a doctor, he would be really impressed,” said Cardinale. “He would be very solicitous, very respectful.
“Something happened, something special about seeing that, because I’d think, as I saw how my father treated people who were lawyers, I’d say, ‘You know, that’s what I want to be, Dad,’ and he’d say, ‘God, if you ever do that, that would be great, that would be wonderful.’”
On a football scholarship, Cardinale attended Wilkes College in Pennsylvania. He wanted to go to law school in New York City, but NYU, Columbia, and Fordham all rejected him, so Cardinale traveled to Boston, newly married, to attend the only school that would take him, Suffolk Law School. He never left the city. Indefatigable, he made law review. In his second year he and classmate Kenneth J. Fishman began working for famed defense lawyer F. Lee Bailey. Cardinale and Fishman became lifelong friends. Bailey called the two “the Gold Dust twins” because they came into the office at the same time and were attending law school together. The mentor thought of Fishman as “the law guy” for his acumen in legal analysis and Cardinale as “the fact guy” for his ability to investigate a case and track down flaws in the opponent’s reasoning. “He had a good measure of self-confidence,” Bailey said later, remembering a young Cardinale. “He’s got good-sized balls.”
Cardinale stayed with Bailey for five years, then struck out on his own in the early 1980s, working the trenches, building on the fast start he’d gotten with Bailey by piling up courtroom experience. Then in late 1983 he took on his first Mafia client—Gennaro Angiulo, of all people. The underboss’s original attorney, in line for a judgeship, had dropped out of the case, and Cardinale got the call one night after Christmas: “How would you like to represent Jerry Angiulo?” It was the big break, and Cardinale was eager. “This was a major league, major league case,” he said. “I want to get in the game, you know. That’s the athlete part of me coming out—if this is the biggest game in town, then I want to be in it.” Just thirty-three years old, Cardinale was the lead attorney in the biggest organized crime case in Boston’s history.
Cardinale went to war. He relentlessly attacked the devastating 98 Prince Street tapes, their quality, their accuracy, all in an attempt to knock them out of court. The trial lasted nine grueling months, and each day Cardinale was on his feet trading blows with the government team led by Jeremiah T. O’Sullivan.
In the end the House of Angiulo had fallen, but Cardinale had made it, even if his hair turned gray during the trial. Just like that he had become the up-and-coming practitioner for the mob. During the 1980s he represented other Angiulos and Vinnie Ferrara, and he commuted to New York to represent “Fat Tony” Salerno. In the early 1990s he joined the defense team of John Gotti, representing Gotti sidekick Frank “Frankie Locs” Locascio. In the 1995 indictment of Cadillac Frank Salemme, Tony Cardinale was again the Mafia’s go-to guy. Flemmi, meanwhile, tapped another leading defense attorney, Cardinale’s law school friend Ken Fishman.
Cardinale was ecstatic to hear from Salemme about their cellblock discovery. He had turned his own office into a quasi-electronics center, with high-quality tape recorders and enhancers, and when he listened to the tape himself, he too heard the whispering that Salemme and DeLuca had detected. Each time he replayed the passage, he felt more certain that he now had a legal smoking gun, something he could use to land a counter-punch against the government. He had technicians enhance the tape, and the background FBI voices were less faint. The two agents operating the roving bug were complaining about the rambling, unfocused conversation under way in the next room between a local wiseguy named Kenny Guarino and a visiting mobster from Las Vegas named Natale Richichi. One agent seemed to tell the other that beforehand they should have had “the Saint” make up “a list of questions of shit... for Kenny to ask him . . . we could, you know, narrow the different categories.”