Simone Rizzo DeCavalcante, dapper and swarthily handsome, was known in the newspapers as "Sam the Plumber," though he preferred the appellation "Princeton Sam." One nickname came from his legitimate front-a plumbing concern in Kenilworth, New Jersey-the other from his residence in nearby Princeton township. He was the boss of a small Cosa Nostra family based in southern New Jersey. According to the New York Times, he was "the smartest and smoothest and least vicious of the aging Mafia leaders in the East." Almost alone among them, he had never spent a night behind bars.

During the years that Stem was in New Jersey on the Weber and Colonial cases, another attorney from Organized Crime, Peter Richards, was building a case against the 59-year-old DeCavalcante. The indictment was filed in March 1968.

As criminal actions go, it was hardly "a federal case." Two minor-league mafiosi, Gaetano Vastola and Daniel Annunziata, had stuck up a crooked dice game in Trevose, Pennsylvania, near Philadelphia, and demanded a $20,000 payoff. The operators balked and sought DeCavalcante's help. Under DeCavalcante's mediation, the $20,000 demand was scaled down to $12,000. Sam the Plumber's "fee" was $3800. The government contended that the raid and sit-down had been engineered from the start by DeCavalcante. He was indicted-along with Vastola and Annunziata-for conspiracy to extort.

DeCavalcante's lawyer, a former assistant U.S. attorney named Sidney Franzblau, filed a number of pretrial motions. Among other things, he asked for the results of any electronic surveillance of his client. Under recent rulings of the U.S. Supreme Court, the prosecution was required to disclose this, and the government had dropped several major cases rather than reveal what it had overheard. But in this instance the government complied. On June 10, 1969, Satz's office filed with the court clerk 12 volumes containing some 2000 pages of DeCavalcante's conversations.

Franzblau was astounded: "I've never heard of the government releasing such information before."

Most of the conversations had been overheard by the FBI's "criminal informant NK 2461-C"-the bureau's code for a microphone planted in DeCavalcante's office between August 31, 1964, and July 12, 1965. It was one of 98 eavesdrops and wiretaps the FBI had placed in the homes and offices of Mafia members in that Valachi era. Their purpose was not to uncover evidence. The "bugs" were illegal, and evidence obtained from them could not be introduced in court. They were planted as part of the government's intelligence effort to pinpoint the members of the mob and to determine their place in the underworld hierarchy.

The DeCavalcante tapes were a gold mine of information. Sam the Plumber had acted as mediator in the `Bananas War"-the Cosa Nostra "commission's" campaign to depose Joseph Bonnano, head of one of the five New York City "families." DeCavalcante's conversations gave the government not only a who's who of organized crime but a blow-by-blow account of the underworld power struggle.

The tapes also supplied a few leads to the mob's link with New Jersey politicians. The name of Elizabeth's mayor, Thomas Dunn, repeatedly came up in the conversations, mostly when underworld underlings sought DeCavalcante's help in getting government jobs for friends and relatives.

Sometimes more important names were mentioned. On December 30, 1964, DeCavalcante met with Joseph Zicarelli, better known as "Joe Bayonne," the mob boss of the Jersey waterfront. They discussed putting in "the fix" in a pending deportation proceeding against the father of one of DeCavalcante's capos (captains). Zicarelli noted that he'd once been friendly with Senator Harrison Williams, but after his arrest some six years before, Williams would have nothing to do with him. As a last resort, he continued, there were three or four federal judges, but the best bet would be to advise "Neal, the congressman" - Representative Cornelius Gallagher.

The DeCavalcante tapes also provided a rare look into the private life of a public enemy. There were discussions of legitimate business, domestic squabbles, arguments about the cost of weddings and charitable contributions, even whether to pay the boy five dollars for shoveling snow off the sidewalk (they didn't). But mostly the talk was of crime. And most of it was penny-ante stuff gambling, some shylocking, disposal of stolen goods.

One tape, though, disclosed more grisly matters. It came from a night of reminiscing by DeCavalcante, Angelo (Gyp) DeCarlo, called "Ray" by his friends, and Anthony (Tony Boy) Boiardo. DeCarlo and Tony Boy's father, Ruggiero (Richie the Boot) Boiardo, were old-time mobsters, powerful capos in the Vito Genovese family. Tony Boy had entered the family business.

"How about the time we hit the little Jew," Tony Boy recalled.

"As little as they are, they struggle," DeCarlo said.

"The Boot hit him with a hammer," Boiardo continued. "The guy goes down and he comes up. So I got a crowbar this big, Ray. Eight shots in the head. What do you think he finally did to me? He spit at me and said, `You obscenity!'" [FBI's euphemism.]

"They're fighting for their life," DeCarlo observed.

That triggered DeCavalcante's memory: "Ray, you told me years ago about the guy where you said, `Let me hit you clean.'"

"That's right," DeCarlo said. "So the guy went for it. There was me, Zip and Johnny Russell. So we took the guy out in the woods, and I said, `Now, listen.... You gotta go. Why not let me hit you right in the heart, and you won't feel a thing?' He said, `I'm innocent, Ray, but if you've got to do it....' So I hit him in the heart, and it went right through him."