You're A Dead Man!

Newark, New Jersey.

Sometime between 1972–1976.

He had in his hand the power to make sure the scumbag never bothered his family again.

He felt the gun pushing against the back of his adversary’s mouth, heard the teeth chattering against the metal of the gun and saw the saliva dripping from his mouth onto the gun. Most of all, he felt the pressure of his finger on the trigger, knowing one slight tug could end his adversary’s reign of terror forever.

“You’re a dead man!” George Lytwyn, a member of Essex County’s Organized Crime Strike Force screamed to reputed Newark gangster Tommy Ricciardi. Ricciardi was in the driver’s seat of a car that included his brother and two associates. There were four gangsters in all in that automobile, but they were all frozen in fear, their badass gangster personalities wilted under the pressure of the moment, worried that if they made the wrong move the officer would pull the trigger.

It was slightly past 11:30 p.m. and the incident was taking place outside, under the bright streetlights of on South Orange Avenue, the main street of Newark’s Vailsburg neighborhood, but no one was around to witness this pending crime. No cars drove by. The only thing that could save Ricciardi was a moment of clarity by Lytwyn; however, the anger seething through Lytwyn seemed to be pushing any rational thoughts from his head. All he had on his mind was revenge.

Newark gangsters had been trying to get under Officer George Lytwyn’s skin for months. Some of their tactics were juvenile, such as the time they sent 10 pizzas to Lytwyn’s Vailsburg home. But most of their tactics were downright harassment. They sent a card to Lytwyn’s wife expressing their sympathy for her husband’s pending death. On separate occasions, they sent an ambulance, the fire department, the EMTs and a hearse to his home to pick up Lytwyn’s “dead body.”

“My mother-in-law, who lived with me, almost has a heart attack when EMTs showed up for my body,” said Lytwyn in his heavy Newark accent. “She thought I had really died. Things like that were going too far.”

Their beef with Lytwyn was that he was too good at his job. Lytwyn was part of the federally-funded taskforce charged with cleaning up the mafia-run illegal gambling racquet plaguing the city of Newark at the time. The task force was succeeding.  They had a beat on quite a few of Newark’s numbers-runners and were arresting some on almost a weekly basis, confiscating thousands of dollars in cash and illegal lottery tickets in the process. Some of the runners would be arrested, bailed out that day, back on the street working the next day, and arrested again within a week.

Tired of Lytwyn, they hoped they could intimidate him into quitting his job or backing off.

“I could not be intimidated,” boasted Lytwyn, who spent the early part of his law enforcement career as part of a two-man street-patrol unit in an area of Newark on 14th Avenue nicknamed by fellow officers as “The Bucket of Blood Post” for the amount of blood spilled at the ten rowdy bars lining the avenue. Lytwyn was such a tough officer that he once told Ira Pecznick, a known assassin for New Jersey’s infamous Campisi family, that he wasn’t “shit without a gun.” Not many people had the nerve to mouth off to a man such as Pecznick, who Lytwyn said was credited with as many as nine murders.

Lytwyn was mean, lean, athletic and aggressive. No, he was not going to be intimidated by pizzas and false EMT calls.

“But they were annoying me because they took the fight to my home,” explained Lytwyn. “I didn’t bother them at their homes so I didn’t want them to bother me at mine. But what could I do? I couldn’t let them know they were bothering me, so I just ignored it the best I could and kept doing my job.”

One Newark gangster in particular finally pushed Lytwyn over the edge.

Lytwyn has no proof who was behind the incident, but he has a strong indication that it was a man known on the streets as Randy Griffin, but whose birth name was Randy DeLuca.

“A lot of those guys changed their names to something non-Italian so that they were not easily associated with organized crime,” explained Lytwyn.

DeLuca had graduated to the rank of a controller in the Newark mafia. As a controller, he made up to 13 illegal lottery pickups on some days, which meant he handled a king’s ransom of cash and tickets. He was also bad at staying inconspicuous. Lytwyn began arresting him on almost a weekly basis. Tired of losing so much money to the police, DeLuca’s higher-ups demoted him down to a number taker in an apartment. DeLuca was furious. He worked hard to rise to the position of controller and his demotion meant he may be he stuck as a low man on the mafia totem pole forever. He decided to take his anger out on Lytwyn.

He hired Ricciardi to do his dirty work. Ricciardi was a ruthless young man who was eager to make his mark in the world of organized crime. He was often known to negotiate deals with golf clubs and bats and was not afraid to bring a gun to the meeting. In his negotiation with Lytwyn, he brought a bat.

Lytwyn was resting in the bedroom of his second floor home when he heard a loud banging noise echoing throughout the neighborhood. He ran to his window to search for the source and saw Tommy Ricciardi, his brother Daniel “Bobo” Ricciardi and two more associates bashing what they thought was Lytwyn’s car with baseball bats. It was actually Lytwyn’s brother-in-law’s car.

Lytwyn was furious. Harassing him with veiled death threats was crossing the line; actually bringing violence to his home was leaping over the line.

Lytwyn grabbed his gun and raced from his bedroom, ready to end the threat right then and there, but by the time he got outside the gangsters were already squealing their tires and kicking up dirt.

He jumped his car, with his brother-in-law joining him for back-up, and they pursued the perpetrator’s car. The two cars sped through Newark in an old-fashioned movie quality high speed chase. When they hit South Orange Avenue, Lytwyn forced the gangsters’ car to the side of the road, leapt from his car and rushed to the gangsters’ car. Drawing his gun, he grabbed the driver–Tommy Ricciardi–and shoved his gun into his mouth before any of the gangsters could react.

“You don’t fuck with my family!” he yelled, rage in the form of spit dousing Ricciardi’s face. “You’re a dead man! A fucking dead man!”

Lytwyn’s finger trembled on the trigger as he prepared to end the life of one of Newark’s worst. Before he could, however, his brother-in-law calmly approached and began talking sense into him. You’re a good cop, he reminded Lytwyn. You’re an honest cop, he said. You know this isn’t right and it isn’t you, he stated.

He was right. Lytwyn was known as an aggressive cop, but an honest one. That was why he was handpicked to join the organized crime taskforce. He was known as a man who could not be bought or owned by organized crime. He was once nothing more than a lower class child who was abandoned by his mother and raised above a bar in Newark by his grandmother. He was once nothing more than a petty street punk who stole cars for kicks. Yet, he had been able to turn his life around and rise to one of the most respected men in Newark’s law enforcement community and, along with his partners, was making a major difference in the city by putting away the criminals who were trying to turn Newark into a 1970s-version of the Wild West. If he pulled that trigger, everything he worked so hard to become would be thrown away. If he pulled that trigger, it would mean that the bad guys won. If he pulled that trigger, he would be letting down every member of his unit who had worked so hard to disrupt the flow of gambling in Newark. If he pulled that trigger, he would be no better than the gangsters he fought to put behind bars.

As those thoughts passed through his head, he pulled the gun out of Ricciardi’s mouth and holstered it.

“Don’t you ever come to my house again,” he muttered, suffering through adrenaline shock. He and his brother-in-law then casually strolled to his car and left the gangsters trembling in fear and counting their blessings that Lytwyn had a conscience.

The next day, Lytwyn was told through a third party that Timmy Murphy wanted to meet him at one of the local union halls. Timmy Murphy’s real name was Thomas Pecora and he was a top dog in the gambling ring that Lytwyn was trying to shutdown. The third party assured Lytwyn that it was going to be a friendly meeting. Murphy may have been a criminal, but he was also honorable in his own way. If he said it was going to be a friendly meeting, it would assuredly stay civil.

“Tommy was like a consigliere,” explained Lytwyn. “He was the guy that they sent in to smooth situations over.”

Pecora actually apologized for Ricciardi’s action and promised that it would never happen again. Pecora explained to Lytwyn that the attack on his home was not an authorized job and that Ricciardi was hired by a group of young men who were tired of Lytwyn arresting them because he was keeping them from moving up in “the system,” aka organized crime’s ladder. It was at that point Lytwyn put two and two together and realized it was probably DeLuca. Pecora even gave Lytwyn the name and address of a good body shop and told him that the place would fix his brother-in-law’s car up as good as new.

“Pecora didn’t so much say they would ‘do’ the guys who came to my home if they ever bothered me again, but he implied it,” laughed Lytwyn.

Pecora was true to his word. Lytwyn dropped off the car at the agreed upon auto body shop and when he picked it up it was in better shape than it was before the attack.

Why would a member of Newark’s organized crime network apologize to and help a man paid to put him behind bars?

“He knew I was just doing my job,” said Lytwyn. “Plus, I was helping him with his I guess.”

Lytwyn went on to explain that the bosses figured that if one of their “employees” was not smart enough to avoid being arrested on a regular basis, then they were not worth promoting. In a way, Lytwyn was conducting the mafia’s job interviews for them.

Lytwyn served for the organized crime commission from 1972–1976 during which time he was heavily involved in investigating the infamous Campisi family. When the federal government pulled the commission’s funding in 1976, he went on to fight narcotics in Newark.

“My job never got safer,” he laughed.

As for Ricciardi, he went on to fame and infamy of his own. He became a big shot in the New Jersey mafia as a top aide to Newark’s feared Lucchese crime family and is considered to be the inspiration behind The Soprano’s character of Silvio. He also became a mafia rat, turning state’s evidence in the 1990s. Lytwyn said Ricciardi’s testimony helped to put a number of mafiosos behind bars.

“Looking back, they probably wish I did kill him,” laughed Lytwyn. “And it worked out for everyone else that I did not.”

Cigar City – Issue 35 – November 2011