Fingering a .22-Cal. Killer
Break in the hit-team hunt
The Mafia's current version of Murder, Inc. is a squad of professional hit men armed with silencer-equipped, .22-cal. automatic pistols. Although they have accounted for at least 20 Mob executions over the past two years, mystified lawmen knew them only as the ".22-cal. hitters" (TIME, April 18). But now the FBI believes it has a big break in the case --and indeed one of the killers. Last week federal prosecutors in Los Angeles were preparing indictments against an underworld moneylender named Joseph Ullo, charging him with two of the .22-cal. slayings.
Ullo, 49, a short, wily onetime New York City hoodlum who moved west 14 years ago, had been arrested a week earlier on a convenient charge of loan-sharking, with bail set at $1 million. Federal officials believe that he murdered Jack Molinas, 43, a gambling figure and porn-film distributor who was found shot in the head in his Hollywood Hills home in August 1975. The other victim: Vincent Calderazzo, a New York Mafia soldier whose bones were discovered by hikers in a shallow desert grave near Victorville, Calif., in March. Both were killed with .22s.
Authorities have the testimony of three accomplices in the murders. They also have two .22-cal. weapons that one accomplice says were used in the killings; a gun fanatic, he could not bear to follow Ullo's orders to dispose of the pistols and instead stashed them in a safe. FBI agents found them there, along with seven other guns allegedly used by Ullo. The three witnesses told their stories last week at Ullo's bail hearing. Eugene Connor, 43, a man with an arrest record of car theft, said that he was Ullo's getaway driver on the night of the Molinas slaying. Reason for the hit, according to Connor: Molinas refused to pay a $50,000 debt to Ullo. Connor says he waited in the car while Ullo crouched behind a neighbor's backyard fence, waiting for Molinas to return home. Then, Connor has testified, Ullo dropped Molinas with a single shot; Connor heard the popping sound that is characteristic of a silencer-equipped .22.
The story behind the Calderazzo killing was apparently more complicated. Investigators say that it involved an old associate of Ullo's from his New York City days: Manhattan Mobster Vincent ("Chin") Gigante, a power in the Mob family once headed by Vito Genovese. Calderazzo worked in Gigante's gambling network. Following a 1976 FBI raid on his operation, Gigante suspected he had been betrayed by Calderazzo and ordered him to Los Angeles--ostensibly for his own protection.
Calderazzo's sojourn soon ended at Ullo's San Fernando Valley home. The FBI's two other witnesses, Robert Zander, 28, and Craig Petzold, 32, say that they were working at Ullo's place when they heard screams from a guesthouse. Minutes later, they said, Ullo summoned them to the house, where they saw Calderazzo's body. They testified that Ullo gave Zander a .22 automatic with instructions that it be delivered to Connor. Then the pair were ordered to dump Calderazzo's body in the desert, where it became fodder for scavenging animals.
The FBI hopes to link Ullo with a third Mafia hit victim: Michael Ariola, a massage-parlor operator who was shot with a .22 in Los Angeles last year during a Mob takeover of such emporiums. His body was found in a car trunk at the Los Angeles airport. Just before his death, the FBI has learned, Ariola rejected an Ullo demand for a share of his massage-parlor revenue.
At his bail hearing, Ullo's bond was cut to $250,000, but he was told that if he managed to post the sum he would have to report to a U.S. marshal twice a day, every day. At week's end Ullo was still behind bars. That was surely a relief to Witnesses Connor, Zander and Petzold. All are in protective custody after alleged death threats by Ullo. They have more reason than most to remember that two victims of the .22-cal. hitters were FBI informants--and four others were potential prosecution witnesses.
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