Cityside

MoMA and the Mob

Siegel made vigorous attempts to counter this by rehashing such alleged incidents in Carrara’s misspent youth as putting C4 explosive—actually, a Claymore mine—beneath somebody’s car. The bomb blew prematurely, almost costing Carrara his eyes and ears, a matter to which he frequently returns in the tapes. “He explains in general that he has blown out his eyes and ears for the mob,” Siegel says. That was in the seventies. So, too, apparently, was the incident when Carrara claimed he blew up the store of a contractor who had insulted his wife. “Mr. Carrara also engaged in an explicit discussion of a robbery he engaged in,” Siegel says. “He shot the person in the chest . . . the victim was pulling at his vest and saying, ‘I think I’m having a heart attack.’ Mr. Carrara jokingly says on the tape, ‘I told him, “Don’t worry about it, buddy. I don’t think you’re going to make it.” ’ ”

Carrara’s humor deserted him, though, when he wanted to confront the representative of AMEC with whom he dealt most frequently on the MoMA project. “I got to know what’s going on with the fucking job,” he said. “I don’t give a fuck. I’m ready to throw punches. I don’t give a fuck. I’ll leave him in the fucking street over there. He thinks I won’t. I’ll leave him right on the fucking ground there.”

Carl Carrara and the Genoveses duly became aware that there was an investigation under way, and this too became grist for the Shed Tapes. People would “go to the trailer and explain to Mr. Carrara that they had received a subpoena or that an FBI agent came to their house.” His advice was “Don’t tell the government anything.” Also, “Mr. Carrara states repeatedly to others in the trailer that he is going to make sure that Mr. Diminno doesn’t cooperate with the government, that he’s going to do whatever he has to do to make sure Mr. Diminno does the right thing.”

Carrara’s instincts were sound but his confidence unfounded. Morris (a.k.a. “Fatso” or “Mickey”) Diminno pleaded guilty. As did the Genovese capo of the crew, Ernest “Ernie” Muscarella. They have been sentenced. Diminno got 63 months, Muscarella 60. Slaps on the wrist, so they have doubtless been talkative. This is the post-Sopranos mob ethic. The boss rats out his juniors, and the non–“made man,” Carl Carrara, lands at the center of the case. He has been indicted on 56 of the 61 counts.

“It is relatively rare that people who are charged with as many crimes as he’s been charged with actually get acquitted on all of them,” says Judge Naomi Buchwald. She agreed to bail, nonetheless. “I am assuming it is awful,” she said of a tape she had been given. “I am assuming he is a person who leaves much to be desired on the law-abiding and morality continuum of the world. But the issue is still with the age of the things the government is relying on and the fact that apparently he has a huge mouth, a dirty mouth. If we were in some other world, I guess soap in his mouth would be, you know, an appropriate condition of bail, but it’s not the world we are in.” Carl Carrara was given bail on a million-dollar bond, his conditions in the world that we are in being that he is electronically monitored and he is house-bound.

On May 6, the morning after Sotheby’s knocked down Picasso’s Boy With a Pipe for $104 million, a small group of journalists was taken around the MoMA site by the director of the museum, Glenn Lowry. We walked around heavy equipment colored hazard yellow, sky-blue, and orange, watched by quizzical hardhats, and occasionally crossing paths with an equally small, rather more nattily dressed group of trustees. A few Matisse posters were stuck to the walls of one space, and Lowry spoke of the Bauhaus, and of Brancusi, and of the way that “Yoshio has brought the street very dramatically into the museum’s visual landscape.” It seemed very much a tale of two cities. On the ground floor, the word AMEC was painted on a square of plywood. The construction shed, which is also made of plywood, is far smaller than I imagined from the orchestra of voices on the tapes. Perhaps it should be part of the permanent collection.