Mafioso Tony Caruso: A Wily Fox or a Rat?

Tony Caruso was a New York-based soldier in the DeCavalcante Family primarily engaged in bootlegging rackets. But Tony had a secret (or maybe not). During one court case, prosecutors described him as "very helpful" to the authorities in their investigation into the bribery of local public officials.

So was Tony Caruso a wily fox? Or a rat?

Antonio (Tony the Fox) Caruso -- aka Tony Caruso, Tony Russo, Anthony Caruso, Thomas Costa, and Anthony William Caruso -- was born on August 19, 1898, in Downtown Manhattan in New York’s old “Fourth Ward” neighborhood.

Tony was one of six children of Italian immigrant parents Angelo Caruso and Margherita “Mary” (nee’ DiSanta) Caruso.

The oldest of the Caruso family’s brood, Tony's younger siblings included one sister, Maria, who is five years younger than him, and four much younger brothers, John, Nicholas, Joseph, and Peter.

Tony Caruso

The Caruso family lived at 385 Water Street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. This is the neighborhood where Tony and his siblings were believed to have attended school and grown up. It’s also where Tony would live and operate for the rest of his life.

As the First World War raged on in Europe, on June 2, 1919, Caruso, then only 19 years old, drove over the bridge into Newark, New Jersey, and registered at the draft board for military duty overseas.

He joined the U.S. Navy and enlisted as a Seaman 2nd Class. After his initial training, Caruso was shipped to the U.S. Naval Base at Norfolk, Virginia, where he received additional classes in “listening school.” He later graduated to become a Quartermaster 2nd Class.

He and his fleet were then shipped overseas to New Zealand, a unique location, where he was stationed at a U.S. Naval Base in Queenstown.

Back to the Neighborhood

When he returned home from the war, Tony soon met and married Mary Marcello, a local neighborhood girl who was the same age as his sister Maria and was her girlfriend.

Initially, the young couple rented an apartment nearby in the same hardscrabble neighborhood. They soon started a family that would eventually grow to include three children: two sons they named Angelo (after Tony’s father) and Joseph, and a daughter, Margaret, who was named after Tony’s mother.

FBI #1065429, NYCPD #B-143340

Caruso was described in military files and later, subsequently, in law enforcement records as 5 feet 6 inches tall and stockily built at 170 pounds. He had a dark Mediterranean-olive complexion, very dark brown eyes (said to be almost black), and a full head of jet-black hair that had already turned prematurely grey by the time Tony reached his early thirties. Police records state that he also sported a scar over his right eyelid.

By underworld standards, Caruso’s criminal record seems to have started very late. New York Police Department files log his first arrest in 1935 for violating state liquor laws when Tony was already 37 years old. Two years later, in 1937, he was nabbed once again on bootlegging charges related to the illegal manufacturing and sale of untaxed liquor. But this time around, he was nailed by agents of the U.S. Treasury Department.

On review, it appears that all of Caruso’s more significant arrests involved alcohol bootlegging and its distribution and the evasion of state and federal taxes due to good ole’ Uncle Sam from those sales.

This particular racket seems to have been Caruso’s primary criminal endeavor and forte. In fact, the FBI and FBN state in their internal files on Anthony Caruso, “Anthony Caruso directs Mafia bootlegging operations in the NYC area.”

Aside from bootlegging, local law enforcement authorities noted in the 1950s that he was actively engaged in rackets as a bookmaker and policy gambler in Lower Manhattan.

Downtown New York

A lifelong resident and habituate of Manhattan’s Lower East Side 4th and 6th Ward neighborhoods, he and Mary and their kids resided in several apartments around Downtown Manhattan over the years.

By 1950, the 51-year-old Caruso, his wife, and their children had relocated to nearby Clinton Street, and Tony was then managing a commercial parking garage.

Several years later, by the late 1950s, the Carusos had relocated nearby and were now living at 239 Park Street. At this time, he was also listing his employment as a mechanic at a garage in the same area, located at 11 Fulton Street, in Lower Manhattan.

Later, during several subsequent law enforcement investigations into his background, criminal associates, and activities, it was discovered that Caruso was actually a corporate officer of the Full Front Garage, the business operating at this location. In fact, he was registered on the NYS incorporation papers as the company’s Secretary and Treasurer.

A Big Bootlegging Ring

Back in 1937, Caruso was among 32 suspects federally indicted in a massive case brought by the United States Alcohol Tax Bureau for illegally operating a string of alcohol stills in three towns located in Nassau and Suffolk Counties out on Long Island.

In the particulars of the indictment handed down, prosecutors specifically charged the suspects with operating an alcohol still with a 750-gallon capacity in Bellport and an even larger 1,000-gallon still in East Patchogue. The third still, based in Baldwin in Western Nassau, said to have a capacity of 1000 gallons, was also being operated.

The suspects were each charged with assorted counts of conspiracy to manufacture and the transportation and sale of untaxed alcohol. They were each released on various bail packages.

Besides Caruso, among the many other defendants named were Gambino Family soldier Michael (Skinny Mike) Pecoraro, a notorious mafioso and racketeer who operated on both coasts. Others included Michael (Mikey D) D’Amore, Joseph (Joe Cass) Casillo, Samuel Gross, Benjamin Gottlieb, Charles Buchin, Benjamin (Benny Gross) Grossman, Louis Hoffman, Nettie Hoffman, Alfred Liquori, Emanuel (Manny) Lavanter, Angelo Mannino, and Anthony Vergone Jr.

Michael Pecoraro

On February 1, 1940, the jury foreman reported that a partial verdict had been returned: three of the nineteen defendants were convicted, five were acquitted, and another eleven defendants were still awaiting the jury to deliberate their fate.

But by midnight that evening when no further verdicts had been returned, Judge Moscowitz ordered the jurors locked up in a nearby hotel so that they could resume deliberations the following day.

Over the following year, 13 defendants' cases were disposed of through plea bargains, guilty pleas, or dismissals.

Through various court delays and legal strategies, defense lawyers were able to delay the criminal case from coming to trial for several years. But by January 1940, the trial for the remaining defendants finally began in Brooklyn Federal Court before Court Judge Grover M. Moscowitz.

Several weeks Later, on February 21 that month, all 27 defendants in the dock were convicted after a jury trial.

Three defendants, along with Caruso, were initially convicted at trial. They were Pecoraro, D’Amore, and Gross. Five others were acquitted: Joseph Annicelli, Michael Carini, Julius (Julie) Slominsky, James DeSimone, and his wife, Josephine.

Was He a Fox? Or a Rat?

But by the time Caruso stood before the judge for sentencing on April 14, 1940, most of his codefendants had already been sentenced. It was now Tony Caruso’s turn to finally hear his fate.

But it seems that a funny thing happened on the way to the penitentiary.

Caruso was later convicted -- or had pled guilty -- to the charges. When he stood before Federal Judge Grover M. Moscovitz, who had presided over the case, he received a two-year prison term - which the judge then immediately suspended -- and then placed Caruso on two years criminal probation instead.

Caruso and each of the 27 codefendants either pleaded guilty or were convicted at trial. Tony was the only defendant known to have received probation. All the other ring members were sentenced to serve prison terms ranging from a mere two months to twenty-two months.

Apparently, at the time of his sentencing, the Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District, James G. Scileppi, informed the jurist that Caruso had been very helpful to the authorities in their investigation into the bribery of local public officials during their investigation into the bootlegging case.

U.S. Attorney Scileppi advised the court that Caruso was “A source of vital information that led to the investigation and indictment of several defendants on a bribery charge” in Manhattan.

“It’s the duty,” Schileppi added, “of the Government to assist those persons who prove themselves to be of help to the United States Government.”

Presumably persuaded by those statements, Judge Moscowitz subsequently cut Caruso a break and sentenced him to probation instead of incarceration.

More Here Than Meets the Eye?

His “alleged” police cooperation was a very public thing. It was written up in all the local newspapers. Yet, throughout the next three decades, “Tony the Fox” continued to operate with seeming impunity from reprisals by his fellow mafiosi and hoodlums in the very heart of Cosa Nostra’s Little Italy territory -- the absolute ”ground zero” for the Mafia in this country, if you will.

He and Mary continued living downtown in the exact same apartment in the same mafiosi-laden neighborhood as they always had. Tony also maintained his employment as a principal corporate officer at a well-known parking garage.

Local and federal law enforcement sources continued carrying him in their investigative files as an active racketeer in good stead with his underworld associates.

How could have been? How was it even possible? How could a known rat could walk around in the wide open without getting slaughtered?

How did “Tony the Fox” even survive, let alone seemingly thrive, in such a toxic and dangerous daily environment?

Remember, too, that this was during an era -- at the very pinnacle of the Mafia’s power -- where upon discovery, or even mere suspicion, rats were being killed left and right on an almost weekly basis on the streets of New York City….and all across the country for that matter.

Why wasn’t Caruso hit in the head and left bleeding in the gutter as an example to all potential future police informers about what would happen to them if they opened their mouths?

It just doesn’t make any sense and makes me think that more must have been at play here -- behind closed doors -- concerning the circumstances surrounding Caruso’s “alleged” cooperation with law enforcement authorities.

Did Tony Get the OK?

Could it be that he was actually given the nod and the “ok” by his Mafia superiors to expose a few corrupt policemen, using them as “sacrificial lambs,” so to speak, for the ultimate benefit of himself and the mob?

How else can you explain his continued close associations and involvement with his fellow mafiosi? Because that appears to be exactly what happened.

In fact, many years later -- in 1983 -- the FBI submitted extensive background data to a United States Senate Investigations Committee then conducting hearings into organized crime in America which still listed Anthony “The Fox” Caruso as being an active New York-based mafioso. They identified him as being a formally inducted “soldier” of New Jersey’s Simone “Sam the Plumber” DeCavalcante Family.

Of course, as it was, his name appearing before the committee turned out to be a slight faux pax. This is because by that point in time Caruso had already passed on into the next world more than a decade earlier.

Nonetheless, at the time, the FBI described Caruso to the U.S. Senators sitting on that investigative panel as still being actively engaged in New York City-based gambling operations. Some fifty years after his publicly stated “cooperation,” no less.

The Lower East Side Crew

Tony had many criminal associates over the years. But, among others, his police file named various Manhattan and Brooklyn-based hoodlums like John Brocco, Calogero “Charlie” DeSalvo, Arthur Esposito, Anthony Gallo, and Anthony Barracata.

And aside from Skinny Mike Pecoraro, with whom he was arrested back in 1937 for liquor bootlegging, the FBI also documented his close association with another old-time Gambino Family soldier, Eduardo “Eddie” Aronica. Born in Sicily in 1890, Aronica was also a low-key but well-known New York City mafioso.

Eduardo Aronica

Not far apart in age, Tony and Eddie lived in the same area and operated on the same stomping grounds. Aronica and Caruso seem to have been contemporaries of sorts.

A Quiet Ending

Antonio (Tony the Fox) Caruso passed away quietly on April 2, 1968. He was buried right over the Williamsburg Bridge in Calvary Cemetery in the Woodside section of Queens County. The Fox was only 69 years old.

His wife Mary outlived him by 14 years, dying in 1982.

Until next time…”The Other Guy”

Mafioso Tony Caruso: A Wily Fox or a Rat?

You May Also Enjoy

Rudolph (Rudy) Farone

DeCavalcante Capo Frank (Big Frankie) Cocchiaro

Joseph (Uncle Joe) Giacobbe: DeCavalcante Family Capo

Welcome Back!

Retrieve your password

Are you sure want to unlock this post?

Are you sure want to cancel subscription?

Mafioso Tony Caruso: A Wily Fox or a Rat?

Unlock The Door to the Underworld

Purchase Subscription

You May Also Enjoy

Rudolph (Rudy) Farone

DeCavalcante Capo Frank (Big Frankie) Cocchiaro

Joseph (Uncle Joe) Giacobbe: DeCavalcante Family Capo

Welcome Back!

Retrieve your password

Are you sure want to unlock this post?

Are you sure want to cancel subscription?