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Here's What We Heard on the Wire Recordings Played at the 'Goodfellas' Trial Today

For nearly five hours on Wednesday, a jury in Brooklyn listened in to what life is like in the modern American Mafia.
In this courtroom sketch, Vincent Asaro, 80, third from left, sits flanked by his defense attorneys during opening arguments in federal court. Photo by Elizabeth Williams via AP

"I mean, we're wise guys," Gaspare Valenti tells his cousin, Carmine Muscarella, on the wire recording, the sound of a Queens construction workshop in the background. "We don't take bullshit… I'm not an asshole."

Muscarella had recently sold his father's house in Brooklyn, a property that belonged to "the family." Valenti and his cousin, Vincent Asaro, were that family, and also members of another one: the Bonanno crime clan. But Muscarella had never paid the two the dues—some $7,500 or so—they said they were owed from the sale.

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Thus the shakedown in broad daylight. It was like a scene right out of Goodfellas, but played via audio recording to a Brooklyn federal courtroom.

Read our previous coverage of the Lufthansa heist trial

In 2008, broke and desperate after a severe gambling addiction, Valenti reached out to the FBI with information culled from his 40-plus-year career in the Mafia. He was finished with the so-called "life."

"I was tired," he told the court on Wednesday. "[I had] a lot of remorse, a lot of nightmares about the situations I was involved in."

So a few years later, Valenti pleaded guilty to racketeering conspiracy without being charged, and, in exchange, put on a recording device and coaxed details from his cousin, Vincent Asaro, about his alleged involvement in the 1978 Lufthansa heist of Goodfellas fame—the $6 million cash theft at John F. Kennedy International Airport that Valenti says they both played a key part in.

Whether the recordings make the case against Asaro remains to be seen, but for nearly five hours on Wednesday, the jury listened in to what life is like in the modern American Mafia.

Before meeting in 2010, Valenti said he and Asaro hadn't spoken for two years due to a dispute over money—both were known gambling addicts, and prosecutors claiming Asaro blew his Lufthansa cut at the racetracks. So it makes sense that the first exchange the cousins had in quite a while involved green. On the tape, Asaro doesn't waste time telling Valenti to get the cash they're both "owed" from their cousin, Carmine. He doesn't hold back from suggesting violence either.

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"If you have to do it, do it," Asaro can be heard saying.

The next recording played for the court Wednesday was Valenti's encounter with Muscarella at his workshop in Queens, where his cousin denies ever agreeing to pay them a dividend of the house sale. The aforementioned exchange follows, and Valenti threatens to call Asaro up. "You know Vinny, right?" he asks Muscarella, implying that his cousin—who is also charged with strangling suspected snitch Paul Katz with a dog chain in 1969—won't take no for an answer.

The phone call is made, and, within seconds of talking to Asaro, Muscarella agrees to pay them three grand. What Asaro actually said to Muscarella on the phone was inaudible to the court, but you can let your imagination run wild there.

In true mafioso fashion, the shakedown ends with a reminder of how the family will always be there in the end. "You know we love you," Valenti tells Muscarella, after confronting him about money that he may or may not have owed at his own workplace.

The next morning, Muscarella meets Valenti at a Starbucks in Howard Beach, Queens, with a check made out for $3,000 after negotiations over the amount owed. "I don't mean no disrespect," Valenti reminds him again, as Muscarella is heard taking off. He then immediately calls Asaro with the news: "I've got the money."

We're brought back to the reality in the courtroom when Valenti tells lead federal prosecutor Nicole Argentieri that he gave his $500 cut of the check to the FBI—who were closely watching these encounters—after Asaro and Valenti met at a diner nearby.

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We hear the two swap old mob stories. Heavily-accented questions like "Have you heard from Danny Rizzo?" (Rizzo being another alleged Lufthansa heist member) and "How's Jerry?" (Jerry being Asaro's son, who was recently sentenced to seven and a half years in prison after admitting he moved Katz's body) pepper the conversation. Valenti repeatedly tells Asaro of his trials and tribulations: how broke he is, how he'll lose custody of his daughter soon, and how his sons don't talk to him anymore. Asaro reassures him that he'll be OK with money, and we soon discover that Asaro—even at his old age—is still very much a Bonanno foot soldier, heavily involved in bookkeeping, loansharking, and intimidation.

Although the key tapes—the ones that could directly connect Asaro to Lufthansa—will be played later this week, the recordings served up on Wednesday offered a thrilling insight into where the mob is at in this day and age. You heard these moments when these once-big-time gangsters just seemed so out of it, and past their prime. "I just bought lentils and some arzo and shit," Asaro tells Valenti at one point. These guys aren't just detached, but old: A good chunk of the tapes is spent discussing who's dead, who has children, who's still in jail.

It was like two longtime friends shooting the shit at a high school reunion.

As the tapes played, Asaro could be seen staring down at transcript, his head in his hands. Valenti noticeably avoided eye contact with him. The irony was palpable: that rendezvous at the diner on Cross Bay Boulevard in Queens seemed impossibly long ago now that the two are seated feet from each other in a courtroom.

"You know I love you, Vin," Valenti says on the tape at one point. "You know that."

Follow John Surico on Twitter.