Angelo (Little Angie) Tuminaro: The French Connection Mastermind

Angelo ( Little Angie) Tuminaro was the criminal mastermind behind the infamous French Connection - the largest drug seizure case in U.S. history.

Angelo (Little Angie) Tuminaro was born on February 22, 1910, and raised in Manhattan. He resided and operated on the Lower East Side for nearly his entire life.

For many years, he lived at 24 Rutgers Street and frequented the area around the Pike Street docks and Madison Street area in the old “4th Ward” section, an area that produced many a mafiosi in its day.

Angelo (Little Angie) Tuminaro

Over the years, he also listed 60 East 17th Street as his address.

He used many aliases; Anthony Tumensio, Angelo Tuminaio, Ancelo Tuminaro, and Anthony LaRosa among them.

NYCPD # B-80192, FBI # 270010, BNDD # 6519, Elmira Reformatory # 37086, Dannamora Prison # 25872

He was a notorious hoodlum and gunman with a lengthy criminal record dating to 1929 that included:

1929 - grand larceny (auto)

1930 - robbery

1930 - grand larceny (auto)

1930 - assault and robbery (15 years at Elmira Reformatory)

1933 - parole violation

1933 - vagrancy

1934 - vagrancy

1934 - robbery

1935 - vagrancy

1936 - assault and robbery

1937 - deadly weapon (3-1/2 to 7 years in Sing Sing)

1938 - robbery (15 years in Dannemora State Penitentiary)

1947 - selling narcotics

1960 - federal narcotics violations and conspiracy to sell heroin

1960 - jumped bond, fugitive from justice

1962 - arrested on a fugitive warrant

With the appropriate nickname of Little Angie, Tuminaro stood a tiny 5-feet 2-inches tall, and weighed in at a mere 130 pounds. But this jockey-sized mafioso had a giant reputation for deadly ferocity and a wanton viciousness that belied his appearance.

With dark brown hair and eyes that had a cut scar across his left one, he was a Gung-Ho type street hood just itching for action.

He got married at the age of 43 years old in 1953 to a Jewish girl named Bella Stein, whose father was also a hood in their area.

In later years, Little Angie became the paramour of Lower East Side hoodlum Danny Motto’s daughter, with Danny’s blessings of course.

He had a brother Frank Tuminaro who was also connected with the mob. They were close and operated together for years until Frank was later murdered.

Side Note: Daniel Motto was a former pro-boxer, who later became president of the Bakery and Confectionery Workers Union (AFL-CIO), and a was a major labor leader in the New York area. He also doubled as a shylock and a Lucchese associate serving directly under capo “Tony Ducks” Corallo.

Little Angie held a partnership interest in the Apollo Barber Shop at 144 Clinton Street that doubled as his unofficial headquarters.

From there he operated with his boyhood partner Anthony (Bootsie) DePasqua in shylocking, numbers, and a major wholesale narcotics trade that supplied several top Jewish traffickers through his father-in-law.

Tuminaro had a variety of narcotics sources but chief among his main suppliers were the Cotroni brothers regime up in Montreal, Canada, and later Vito Genovese’s European narcotics pipeline.

He was suspected of first dabbling in the narcotics trade by the mid-1940s, coinciding with the end of WWII, and his release from a stint in state prison. Angie was broke and needed quick bucks, hence he dove headfirst into the powder trade.

Tuminaro was also highly suspected of performing many contract killings over the years for the mafia, and for his own personal reasons.

In fact, the NYPD actively investigated him for years in several unsolved gangland murders he was suspected of having committed.

In 1958, several informants in Lower Manhattan told their FBI handlers that Tuminaro and his partner “Bootsie” DePasqua had put their drug profits to work by going into the shylock business. They allegedly also provided at least $10,000 to fellow soldier Joseph (Joe Bumphy) Fernandes to augment Fernandes’ loan shark business. They became limited partners in that operation.

Among his closer associates were Rosario (Saro) Mogavero, Alfred (Al Walker) Embarrato, Anthony (Tony) Mirra, Frank (Frankie T) Mari, Cosmo (Carlie) DiPietro, Nathan (Nate) Behrman, Giuseppe (Pepe) Cotroni, Frank (Cheech) Cotroni, Frank Gangi, and Pasquale (Patsy) Fuca.

Tuminaro typically hung out with so many members of the Bonanno and Genovese crews that law enforcement often misidentified him as a member of those Families.

But both the NYPD Organized Crime Intelligence Task Force, as well as the FBI later list him as a made member of the Gaetano Lucchese Family based in East Harlem.

Side Note: Although listed on a Lucchese membership chart as belonging to that particular Family, I’m not so sure. There has been little additional confirmation of Tuminaro being “with” them. He may have been, but I also suspect that he could have been a Genovese Family member just as well. Most of his close associates and criminal confederates have always been either Bonanno or Genovese members...so I’m just not sure of him.

Besides narcotics and shylocking, Tuminaro was also known to be active in burglaries, truck hijackings, fencing stolen goods, and strong-arm extortion.

A good example of this criminal diversity was the October 1955 burglary of the popular Eversharp Pen Company warehouse in Chicago, Illinois. They were robbed of a shipment of pens valued at $300,000. Within a month FBI informants in New York City advised their FBI handlers that a substantial portion of the stolen merchandise was being “fenced” in the Big Apple.

The informant named Tuminaro and a partner Tommy Oddo as the two key distributors. He named Little Angie having sole control over the entire New York portion of the load, said to number some 120,000 pens.

The informant later learned that Tuminaro and Oddo went to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in March of 1956, where Angie arranged to sell a part, or all of the stolen load to a well-known hoodlum and labor racketeer named Samuel (Shorty) Feldman.

Aside from his other endeavors, Tuminaro allegedly also controlled a lucrative Greek Rummy game downtown Manhattan along 2nd Avenue and 12th Street. This card game was actually operated by another Italian hoodlum partner of his named Buster, who ran the weekly game from a downstairs apartment in the building.

This Buster (not further identified), was said to be a vicious killer who was very close to Tuminaro.

From at least the early 1950s forward, the (FBN) Federal Bureau of Narcotics knew that Tuminaro and his close associates were people to be watched carefully, confident that they were knee-deep into the heroin trade.

But it was not until 1962 that they successfully cracked his network. A combined team of 50 federal agents and city police staged lightning quick raids against his entire network. This is the case that infamously became known as “The French Connection.”

The arrests made front-page newspaper headlines across the country and Europe.

His two nephews, luncheonette owner and ex-convict Pasquale (Patsy) Fuca (31y), and his longshoreman brother Anthony (Tony) Fuca (30y) were nabbed as key players in a massive heroin importation and trafficking conspiracy.

The Fuca’s elderly father Joseph (60y) and Patsy’s wife Barbara (20y) was also nabbed in the raid on Joe Fuca’s home at 245 Seventh Avenue, Brooklyn.

A fifth suspect present in the home, longshoreman Nicholas Trovato (24y) was also arrested after the junk agents found two packages of heroin in his jacket pocket. A personal friend of Anthony, he was thought to be part of their distribution network. Secreted inside a fresh, newly plastered ceiling in the basement of the home agents found 22 one-pound packages of heroin, prepped and ready for distribution.

Side Note: The key Frenchman entrusted by the Corsican mob in Marseille to initially smuggle the drug shipment in from France was Jacques Angelvin, a popular television personality back in Paris.

He figured very prominently in this international conspiracy. It was his automobile in which the load of narcotics was secreted within the door frames and chassis, then placed on a luxury liner bound for the United States.

Once the ship arrived and docked at New York’s westside piers, the automobile was then retrieved and driven off by Angelvin during normal disembarkment. All the while the drug agents were monitoring the car's movements, as well as the Frenchman, the Fucas, and several other suspects later identified as top members of the French underworld until the moment was right to move in and make the arrests.

When arrested, Angelvin tried playing innocent but was held on $100,000 bail.

One member of the Marseille underworld, a Paris bistro owner and top racketeer named Francois Scaglia, alias “Barbier”, was also nabbed by the junk agents while he was still in Manhattan and charged with narcotics conspiracy and possession of heroin. He figured into several key meetings during the negotiation of prices and the logistics for moving the massive narcotic shipment.

Simultaneously, to execute the arrest warrants, agents were also authorized to search several other premises which included Patsy and Barbara Fuca’s Bensonhurst, Brooklyn apartment, located at 1224 67th Street, and the luncheonette they ran in Downtown Manhattan along Pike Slip.

But it wasn’t until a day later after narcotics bureau agents raided Anthony Fuca’s Bronx apartment at 1771 Bryant Avenue and searched it, that they really hit pay dirt.

Armed with a federal search warrant, the junk agents discovered a huge stash of 88 pounds of pure high-grade white heroin, said to be valued at $25,000,000 dollars.

The various raids also uncovered scales, glassine bags and packaging equipment, several pistols, rifles, shotguns, and a Japanese submachine gun with full clips.

Side Note: Years later Barbara Fuca admitted that almost immediately after her arrest that fateful night, during questioning, the twenty-year-old told agents where they could find a second large stash of heroin. That was when they raided the Bronx apartment and discovered the other 88 pounds.

After a high-profile criminal trial, Patsy Fuca and company were all convicted and sentenced to long prison terms. But Patsy stood up like a man, took the full weight, and never opened his yap on anybody, including his dear uncle Angie.

Tuminaro himself figured into an earlier related narcotics case in 1960, when he was indicted in May of that year in New York along with 13 other top hoods on heroin trafficking and conspiracy charges.

Released on a bail package of $35,000, prosecutors and the case judge quickly set a trial date for that November in United States District Court. Just as quickly Little Angie jumped his bail, and disappeared into thin air. He was “on the lam” for over two years until his capture down in Miami, Florida, on November 6, 1962.

This was an intensive combined manhunt by the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, the FBI, Federal Marshal’s Service, and local law enforcement, with authorities also utilizing many informant tips to track their man as well.

Knowing Tuminaro was an avid gambler, he was finally nabbed at a local dog track one night in Miami by local detectives and federal narcotics agents. He was held on a whopping $300,000 bail before a federal magistrate, and after waiving extradition before the Florida court, Little Angie was transported back up to Manhattan to face the federal music.

He was supposed to have stood trial with the notorious Lucchese capo John (Big John) Ormento, and twelve others for a multimillion-dollar heroin smuggling network that they had all been convicted of months earlier in June. Ormento, as the acknowledged leader of the drug ring, received a 40-year jail term.

This case was interrelated with several other cases that also snagged Vito Genovese, Carmine Galante, and other top mafiosi. Tuminaro had been one of many recognized as top cogs in these drug operations.

Despite all Little Angie’s trouble with the feds, he and his brother, and their friends continued trafficking almost unimpeded.

A few years later in 1968, Little Angie’s brother Frank Tuminaro and his partner Frank J. Gangi were found shot to death and wrapped in bags along the side of a desolate road in the town of Bloomingburg, in Upstate New York.

Shortly thereafter in 1968, veteran Genovese member Charles (Chalutz) Gagliodotto’s corpse was found on a Queens Street. The medical examiner initially ruled his death from a heart attack. But soon, investigators got word from their informants that Gagliadotto had been suffocated by a plastic bag that had been placed over his head.

His death was immediately ruled a homicide. It seems that crazy old Chalutz had plotted the double-murder of Tuminaro and Gangi over a narcotics deal gone sour. He was suspected of having committed these gangland murders without the sanction of higher-ups, thereby incurring the rathe of the mafia hierarchy.

Side Note: Charles Gagliodotto had indeed been a bit of a screwball and loose cannon, and everybody in the New York mob knew it. In his day he had been a stone killer, an actual contract killer who was known to have traveled around the country committing hits for the hierarchy with his partner David (Little Davy) Betillo, another half a nut job.

The two of them were also known to “bang the gong” occasionally. That’s an old-time mob phrase for smoking opium.

Underworld legend has it that they would team up, dressed in drag as women, disguised in order to get close enough to their future murder victim in order to kill him.

Little Angie demanded Gagliodotto’s head for killing his brother Frank. And he got it...after the FBI exhumed the body, the M.E. determined that, in fact, Gagliadotto had died from manual strangulation.

These types of murders and the resultant vendetta killing was sensitive stuff in the mafia. It involved the Genovese and Lucchese Families, and could have ended up with a gang war had the Genovese mob not given “satisfaction” to their Lucchese friends by killing one of their own to satisfy the “debt”.

Never one to learn his lesson or be rehabilitated, by the 1970s Little Angie was back at it again. In a complete replay of an earlier time, he had been indicted again for narcotics dealing. And once again took it “on the hop”, disappearing into the night to avoid prosecution.

He was once again a fugitive from justice. He went “on the lam” and the feds were going crazy searching for him with wanted bulletins splashed across the country.

By 1978, a key informant was being developed on Long Island by the name of Michael Orlando.

He had been a former school teacher who was now deeply involved in Italian organized crime. A very unlikely top mob informant, but federal authorities had proven his worth by the precise and accurate information he provided them in regard to several important investigations including the case of Labor Secretary Raymond Donovan and Bronx based Genovese mobsters, several truck hijackings, the planned murder of Carmine Galante, and efforts to restart the French Connection heroin network.

Incredulous but true!

In mid-1978, he told his newly assigned federal handler Ronald Levinson of a planned meeting down in Coral Springs, Florida, by top mobsters looking to jump start the infamous French Connection again.

Already deep into an investigation the feds named TUMCON, for “Tuminaro Conspiracy”, Orlando and Genovese soldier “Billy the Butcher” Masselli had been directed by fellow mobsters to go to the parking lot of an area church for the meeting.

While they waited in their auto, the figure of a small, gnarled old lady dressed in black walked out of the church and approached their car. It was actually Tuminaro in disguise.

Authorities said that even though they were aware of the two meetings with Tuminaro, a fugitive they eagerly sought, they chose not to make any move to close in on them, sacrificing Tuminaro’s arrest in order to protect Orlando’s informant status.

Little Angie was allowed to evaporate into thin air once more. And to my knowledge, this was the last time he was ever seen again...the year was 1978. He was 77 years old at the time of those meetings, and still trying his best to rock and roll on the streets.

How much longer he operated, or even lived after that is anybody’s guess. I, for one, don’t know.

But what I do know is that the name of Angelo Tuminaro is not one that gangland will soon forget.

He was a dyed in the wool hoodlum through and through. He lived and breathed to commit crimes and the game of cat and mouse with the authorities. And from what can be ascertained, he enjoyed every single minute of it!

Until the next time...”The Other Guy!”

Angelo (Little Angie) Tuminaro: The French Connection Mastermind

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Angelo (Little Angie) Tuminaro: The French Connection Mastermind

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