Subject file
Anthony "Tony Ducks" Corallo
Known as Tony Ducks
The nickname was a courthouse joke about how often he ducked convictions. It stopped being funny in 1986, when he was sentenced to a hundred years.
Corallo took the Lucchese family in the early 1970s and ran it in the tradition Lucchese had established: labour racketeering, construction, freight, and as little noise as the work allowed.
The car
The government's case against the Commission was built substantially on a microphone in the dashboard of Corallo's Jaguar.
His driver, Salvatore Avellino, took him to meetings. What the FBI recorded over two years was not boasting but administration — the allocation of construction contracts, the arrangements governing a carting cartel on Long Island, and the business of the Commission itself, discussed by a man who had no idea he was providing the evidence that the Commission existed.
A boss of Corallo's generation assumed the house was wired, assumed the club was wired, and conducted anything sensitive while walking outdoors or driving.
The car was the last place he believed was his. It is the reason the Commission case has the quality it does: hours of a boss speaking freely because he had taken what he thought were the necessary precautions.
1986
Corallo was tried with Anthony Salerno and Carmine Persico in the case that prosecuted the Commission itself as a criminal enterprise. All eight defendants were convicted on 19 November 1986. He received a hundred years and died in federal custody on 23 August 2000.
He was seventy-three at sentencing. The term was not intended to be survived, and the government said as much.
Sources
- Selwyn Raab — Five Families (2005)
- United States v. Salerno and others
- Southern District of New York (1986)
- President's Commission on Organized Crime report (1986)