Bath Avenue Crew Rose High, Fell Hard
This story from 2014 is one of the most popular on this site—and we didn't even know it until very recently (for reasons stemming from the fallibility of generalized analytics data.)
Members of the Bath Avenue Crew were as young as 8 years old when they began to align themselves with the biggest, baddest gang in America: Cosa Nostra, specifically the Five Families.
They saw the wiseguys on the street pulling up to the curbs in their big shiny Cadillacs, loafing around social clubs wearing pricey suits and sporting hundred-dollar haircuts and manicured fingernails.
But the guys presented more than just a cold, distant image to watch; Mafia members interacted with the kids, joked around with them and showed them there were other ways to make it through life. The wiseguys doled out twenty-dollar bills like they were nothing. The wiseguys patted them on the back, told them they were "good kids," and maybe asked them to watch the cars. Or keep an eye out for strangers walking the neighborhood. Maybe they'd ask the kids to break a window now and then. It was an easing-in process.
The kids were young but no dummies. They could make a fortune just hanging out at Nick's, the candy store, shoveling into their pockets all the $20 bills that were handed to them on the way. Go to work? What for? The street hands you money just for showing up!
At 13 they're loaning money (!), hiding dirty guns, and still parking cars -- maybe spending a hot summer afternoon sudsing up a fat Caddy and spraying it to a gleam with a hose.
For the Bath Avenue Crew, Anthony Spero, former Bonanno consiglieri, was the main man.
As the 1980s ticked by and crack started hitting the big city, making daily headlines, the ranks of the Bath Avenue Crew had grown and the members were no longer kids but men, well-steeped in the traditions of Cosa Nostra. Committing a wide range of crimes -- everything from robbing banks and home invasions to killing people. (A lot of people, actually.)
Granted, this isn't small town USA. This is Brooklyn, New York, which from the 1970s through 1990s was the place where the mob guys hung out openly. In particular this is Bath Avenue, which runs straight across Bath Beach, Brooklyn, beside it is Bensonhurst, separated by 86th Street to the northeast. To the north, also across 86th Street, is New Utrecht. Northwest across 14th Avenue is Dyker Beach Park and Golf Course, and southeast across Stillwell Avenue is Gravesend. To the south, across Gravesend Bay and Coney Island Creek, are Seagate and Coney Island.
This was the Mafia's heart, for decades. All five families had a toehold somewhere along the Avenue. Social clubs were lively meeting places that overflowed with wiseguys day and night.
At a certain point, all the old mob chieftains wound up in prison: Gotti, Luchese chiefs Vic Amuso and Gaspipe Casso, and Bonanno boss himself Joe Massino.The Colombos had split into deadly factions at war with each other.
This left Anthony Spero alone on the street. A decades-long member, Spero carried a lot of weight in the area. Other capos, soldiers, in all five families, often deferred to Spero because he was so respected. He was acting boss of the Bonanno family, briefly; his role was consiglieri, however. And acting on the street for Spero -- simply "Anthony" to the fellas -- was Joe Benanti, the drinker who loved getting stoned, who was offered a promotion to captain, which he turned down because "he didn't want guys reporting to him," a source said. "He did his own thing."
Benanti was the more accessible of the two Bonanno figureheads for the Bath Avenue Crew.
If this were a film we'd have to now showcase the obligatory slow-motion friendship scene. Group of young friends laughing, shoving each other while sitting in a pizzeria eating slices.... Too cliche. Kids meeting on a rooftop late at night splitting up a mountain of cash... that'd be better and more accurate....
Five founded the crew; seven got the infamous ankle ink, but the original crew consisted of five, a former crew members says.
Paulie Gulino
Jimmy Calandra
Joey Calco
Tommy Reynolds
Fabrizio DeFrancisci
Mikey Yammine and Anthony Gonzalez later joined the crew, and they each had a number, from one to seven, inked onto their ankles.
It supposedly stood for "all for one, one for all." "We're brothers until the end." "We're devoted to getting our button from the Bonanno family."
Paulie "Brass" Gulino had the number one tattooed on his ankle. He also was the embodiment of number one in that he was the boss of the crew. The man who talked to Benanti, and sometimes Spero. The crew vested all their hopes in Paulie getting made first. That would put the crew on a much more intimate footing with the Bonanno crime family.
The first major operation for the crew was to get payback when one of their own was murdered on the street.
As the Bath Avenue Crew had formed, so had many other crews in Brooklyn. Each was associated with a family. Guys in these crews were probably more dangerous than Mafia members because these kids had everything to prove -- they had reps to earn, street creds to be put away as if in a bank. So one day when the books were opened, maybe one of them would get made.
It was an honor worth killing over. Nothing earns weighty credit like taking a life. It's a way to leapfrog ahead. You can be a great earner, but a great earner and proven hitter is better.
So Mikey Hamster wanted everyone to know that he had killed a member of the Bath Avenue Crew. He touted the fact that he, personally, had done that piece of business. (In actuality, he had not committed the killing of the Bath Avenue crew member, he was just taking credit for the killing.)
And like Mikey Hamster did what he thought was best for him, the Bath Avenue Crew decided to do what was best for them -- in the name of the member whose life was taken.
Jimmy Calandra and Joey Calco got together with Paulie Gulino. Not much discussion was needed. Paulie Brass handed them a .380 (which was the round famously used by many German officers during World War II in the Walther PPK).
The two hunted for Mikey Hamster, Joey Calco driving and Jimmy Calandra riding shotgun. Soon the two watched their target get into Bobby DeCicco's car. They followed it to where it stopped, at the stoplight on 17th Avenue and Benson. Mikey Hamster, apparently saw the car behind them, rolled the window down and stuck his head up. Because he was a tough guy.
From the driver's seat, Calco let loose a barrage from a gun and then Mikey Hamster had leaped out of the car and was attempting to hop away. Calco kept blasting, right from the driver's seat.
Then Calco stopped shooting and grabbed the wheel. He hit the gas and the car shot down the block. Calandra had shoved the gun down his pants.
Red lights flickering in the rear view. A cop was pulling them over. They had just shot someone down, the hot gun burning Jimmy's leg, and a cop was pulling them over.
The cop approaches the car. The two inside are probably in shock, hearts pumping as they see the blue uniformed officer standing next to them. The officer had pulled the two over for speeding, apparently, because both Calco and Calandra heard the burst of static from the police radio followed by the flat announcement of "shots fired" at such and such address.
"It's your lucky day," the officer tells the two crew members, then hurries to his car to drive to the scene of the shooting. He had had the shooters cold, but hadn't realized it.
The Bath Avenue Crew also was heavily into drugs, with members robbing and extorting dealers, many of them were distributors themselves with their own street dealers.
Fabrizio was considered one of the more ruthless members. According to court papers filed years later, he had "stabbed, beat and burned his victims [and was known for committing] at least three acts of brutal torture involving a blowtorch, a noose and a cigarette lighter."
Tommy Reynolds seemed pretty ruthless himself. In a fit of rage he poked someone through the eye with a fork.
They were all ruthless, committing a double homicide for an eight ball (an eighth of an ounce) of cocaine.
Then the druggie Bickelman robbed the wrong house.
Anthony Spero, the most respected and powerful mobster on the street for a while, anyway, had had two daughters. Small-time thief Vincent Bickelman had robbed the home of one of them.
He stupidly tried to sell the goods right there in Bath Beach. Some crew members beat the shit out of him, took his wares off him and brought them to Benanti, who consulted Spero.
Benanti was soon telling them, "Anthony Spero wants him dead to make an example out of him."
Gulino took the order. The crew thought they were going to be riding high once Gulino pulled off the hit. None of them had an inkling that while it marked their rise, it also was the beginning of the end.
Gulino -- who even made Mafia members uneasy due to his homicidal tendencies -- pulled the hit off around the corner from a police station, firing five rounds into the hapless Bickelman.
The guys hefted drinks at a bar that night, in celebration of a murder. They wanted everyone to know about the hit -- and that they had pulled it off for Anthony Spero. Remember Mikey Hamster? Same deal, now for the Bath Avenue Crew. The hit cemented their reputation with the Bonanno family.
Gulino was well on his way to getting inducted. It was only a matter of time.
Massino got out of prison and immediately started to reform the family, closing social clubs, and renaming himself "The Ear." The family was losing serious money from its shrinking presence in labor racketeering, so Massino sent Rob Lino to Wall Street.
And Tommy Reynolds, who was distributing crack, himself became a crackhead.
Chris Paciello, who worked with both the Bath Avenue Crew and the New Springville Boys (when "Mob Wives" husband Lee D'Avanzo was boss of the Staten Island-based crew), needed help pulling off an easy job. It was 1993 now. The job was a basic home invasion, on Staten Island. Only this home had a safe with a million stashed in it. Some old guy would be there alone. Paciello's information was all wrong, too.
Calandra brought Reynolds, the crackhead, with them. Because Reynolds was the guy Calandra brought with him to do home invasions.
But when Calandra and Reynolds knocked on the night of Feb. 18, a woman opened up and stood there. Reynolds shot her in the face. A mistake.
The two ran for the car, which darted away into the night -- but Judy Shemtov, a 46-year-old housewife, who had been sipping tea with her husband before hearing a knock at the door, was dead.
The 20th Avenue Crew had grown up alongside the Bath Avenue Crew and in some ways could be viewed as a mirror image. They had the reputation for violence that the Bath Avenue Crew had, they had lost guys and avenged their deaths. They belonged to the tough Colombo family, which had just finished up a bloody internecine family war.
You can rise high with lightening speed. But the order for your death can be given just as fast no matter how important you think you are.
Realization sank in. They had been friends but had turned into gangsters. Gangsters can't have friends, not really. Because in that distorted life, your friends are your killers.
Jimmy had kept his mouth shut and did his time -- and now that he was finally back home, his "friends" had flipped and were aiming to put him away for life.
What was he? A sucker?
 |
| Bath Avenue Crew founding members. |
They saw the wiseguys on the street pulling up to the curbs in their big shiny Cadillacs, loafing around social clubs wearing pricey suits and sporting hundred-dollar haircuts and manicured fingernails.
But the guys presented more than just a cold, distant image to watch; Mafia members interacted with the kids, joked around with them and showed them there were other ways to make it through life. The wiseguys doled out twenty-dollar bills like they were nothing. The wiseguys patted them on the back, told them they were "good kids," and maybe asked them to watch the cars. Or keep an eye out for strangers walking the neighborhood. Maybe they'd ask the kids to break a window now and then. It was an easing-in process.
The kids were young but no dummies. They could make a fortune just hanging out at Nick's, the candy store, shoveling into their pockets all the $20 bills that were handed to them on the way. Go to work? What for? The street hands you money just for showing up!
At 13 they're loaning money (!), hiding dirty guns, and still parking cars -- maybe spending a hot summer afternoon sudsing up a fat Caddy and spraying it to a gleam with a hose.
For the Bath Avenue Crew, Anthony Spero, former Bonanno consiglieri, was the main man.
He also was the man for whom they would carry out orders that cost some their lives, others their freedom, and all their souls. Or at least that is what some would say up on the witness stand. It was powerful testimony and it helped put Spero away at the conclusion of what was a case built to a remarkable extent on circumstantial evidence.
As the 1980s ticked by and crack started hitting the big city, making daily headlines, the ranks of the Bath Avenue Crew had grown and the members were no longer kids but men, well-steeped in the traditions of Cosa Nostra. Committing a wide range of crimes -- everything from robbing banks and home invasions to killing people. (A lot of people, actually.)
Granted, this isn't small town USA. This is Brooklyn, New York, which from the 1970s through 1990s was the place where the mob guys hung out openly. In particular this is Bath Avenue, which runs straight across Bath Beach, Brooklyn, beside it is Bensonhurst, separated by 86th Street to the northeast. To the north, also across 86th Street, is New Utrecht. Northwest across 14th Avenue is Dyker Beach Park and Golf Course, and southeast across Stillwell Avenue is Gravesend. To the south, across Gravesend Bay and Coney Island Creek, are Seagate and Coney Island.
This was the Mafia's heart, for decades. All five families had a toehold somewhere along the Avenue. Social clubs were lively meeting places that overflowed with wiseguys day and night.
At a certain point, all the old mob chieftains wound up in prison: Gotti, Luchese chiefs Vic Amuso and Gaspipe Casso, and Bonanno boss himself Joe Massino.The Colombos had split into deadly factions at war with each other.
This left Anthony Spero alone on the street. A decades-long member, Spero carried a lot of weight in the area. Other capos, soldiers, in all five families, often deferred to Spero because he was so respected. He was acting boss of the Bonanno family, briefly; his role was consiglieri, however. And acting on the street for Spero -- simply "Anthony" to the fellas -- was Joe Benanti, the drinker who loved getting stoned, who was offered a promotion to captain, which he turned down because "he didn't want guys reporting to him," a source said. "He did his own thing."
Benanti was the more accessible of the two Bonanno figureheads for the Bath Avenue Crew.
If this were a film we'd have to now showcase the obligatory slow-motion friendship scene. Group of young friends laughing, shoving each other while sitting in a pizzeria eating slices.... Too cliche. Kids meeting on a rooftop late at night splitting up a mountain of cash... that'd be better and more accurate....
Five founded the crew; seven got the infamous ankle ink, but the original crew consisted of five, a former crew members says.
Paulie Gulino
Jimmy Calandra
Joey Calco
Tommy Reynolds
Fabrizio DeFrancisci
Mikey Yammine and Anthony Gonzalez later joined the crew, and they each had a number, from one to seven, inked onto their ankles.
It supposedly stood for "all for one, one for all." "We're brothers until the end." "We're devoted to getting our button from the Bonanno family."
Paulie "Brass" Gulino had the number one tattooed on his ankle. He also was the embodiment of number one in that he was the boss of the crew. The man who talked to Benanti, and sometimes Spero. The crew vested all their hopes in Paulie getting made first. That would put the crew on a much more intimate footing with the Bonanno crime family.
The first major operation for the crew was to get payback when one of their own was murdered on the street.
As the Bath Avenue Crew had formed, so had many other crews in Brooklyn. Each was associated with a family. Guys in these crews were probably more dangerous than Mafia members because these kids had everything to prove -- they had reps to earn, street creds to be put away as if in a bank. So one day when the books were opened, maybe one of them would get made.
It was an honor worth killing over. Nothing earns weighty credit like taking a life. It's a way to leapfrog ahead. You can be a great earner, but a great earner and proven hitter is better.
 |
| Living the good life. |
So Mikey Hamster wanted everyone to know that he had killed a member of the Bath Avenue Crew. He touted the fact that he, personally, had done that piece of business. (In actuality, he had not committed the killing of the Bath Avenue crew member, he was just taking credit for the killing.)
And like Mikey Hamster did what he thought was best for him, the Bath Avenue Crew decided to do what was best for them -- in the name of the member whose life was taken.
Jimmy Calandra and Joey Calco got together with Paulie Gulino. Not much discussion was needed. Paulie Brass handed them a .380 (which was the round famously used by many German officers during World War II in the Walther PPK).
The two hunted for Mikey Hamster, Joey Calco driving and Jimmy Calandra riding shotgun. Soon the two watched their target get into Bobby DeCicco's car. They followed it to where it stopped, at the stoplight on 17th Avenue and Benson. Mikey Hamster, apparently saw the car behind them, rolled the window down and stuck his head up. Because he was a tough guy.
From the driver's seat, Calco let loose a barrage from a gun and then Mikey Hamster had leaped out of the car and was attempting to hop away. Calco kept blasting, right from the driver's seat.
Then Calco stopped shooting and grabbed the wheel. He hit the gas and the car shot down the block. Calandra had shoved the gun down his pants.
Red lights flickering in the rear view. A cop was pulling them over. They had just shot someone down, the hot gun burning Jimmy's leg, and a cop was pulling them over.
The cop approaches the car. The two inside are probably in shock, hearts pumping as they see the blue uniformed officer standing next to them. The officer had pulled the two over for speeding, apparently, because both Calco and Calandra heard the burst of static from the police radio followed by the flat announcement of "shots fired" at such and such address.
"It's your lucky day," the officer tells the two crew members, then hurries to his car to drive to the scene of the shooting. He had had the shooters cold, but hadn't realized it.
The Bath Avenue Crew also was heavily into drugs, with members robbing and extorting dealers, many of them were distributors themselves with their own street dealers.
Fabrizio was considered one of the more ruthless members. According to court papers filed years later, he had "stabbed, beat and burned his victims [and was known for committing] at least three acts of brutal torture involving a blowtorch, a noose and a cigarette lighter."
Tommy Reynolds seemed pretty ruthless himself. In a fit of rage he poked someone through the eye with a fork.
They were all ruthless, committing a double homicide for an eight ball (an eighth of an ounce) of cocaine.
Then the druggie Bickelman robbed the wrong house.
Anthony Spero, the most respected and powerful mobster on the street for a while, anyway, had had two daughters. Small-time thief Vincent Bickelman had robbed the home of one of them.
He stupidly tried to sell the goods right there in Bath Beach. Some crew members beat the shit out of him, took his wares off him and brought them to Benanti, who consulted Spero.
Benanti was soon telling them, "Anthony Spero wants him dead to make an example out of him."
Gulino took the order. The crew thought they were going to be riding high once Gulino pulled off the hit. None of them had an inkling that while it marked their rise, it also was the beginning of the end.
Gulino -- who even made Mafia members uneasy due to his homicidal tendencies -- pulled the hit off around the corner from a police station, firing five rounds into the hapless Bickelman.
The guys hefted drinks at a bar that night, in celebration of a murder. They wanted everyone to know about the hit -- and that they had pulled it off for Anthony Spero. Remember Mikey Hamster? Same deal, now for the Bath Avenue Crew. The hit cemented their reputation with the Bonanno family.
Gulino was well on his way to getting inducted. It was only a matter of time.
Massino got out of prison and immediately started to reform the family, closing social clubs, and renaming himself "The Ear." The family was losing serious money from its shrinking presence in labor racketeering, so Massino sent Rob Lino to Wall Street.
And Tommy Reynolds, who was distributing crack, himself became a crackhead.
Chris Paciello, who worked with both the Bath Avenue Crew and the New Springville Boys (when "Mob Wives" husband Lee D'Avanzo was boss of the Staten Island-based crew), needed help pulling off an easy job. It was 1993 now. The job was a basic home invasion, on Staten Island. Only this home had a safe with a million stashed in it. Some old guy would be there alone. Paciello's information was all wrong, too.
Calandra brought Reynolds, the crackhead, with them. Because Reynolds was the guy Calandra brought with him to do home invasions.
But when Calandra and Reynolds knocked on the night of Feb. 18, a woman opened up and stood there. Reynolds shot her in the face. A mistake.
The two ran for the car, which darted away into the night -- but Judy Shemtov, a 46-year-old housewife, who had been sipping tea with her husband before hearing a knock at the door, was dead.
The 20th Avenue Crew had grown up alongside the Bath Avenue Crew and in some ways could be viewed as a mirror image. They had the reputation for violence that the Bath Avenue Crew had, they had lost guys and avenged their deaths. They belonged to the tough Colombo family, which had just finished up a bloody internecine family war.
Imagine the towering egos, the mindsets, the need to build cred. Is it a surprise that it was only a matter of time and proximity before the two crews went to war?
There were many shootings between the crews who turned south Brooklyn into a shooting gallery. Calandra, for one, wouldn't leave his house without a bullet proof vest and four pistols on him.
The violence reached such a high level that Spero stepped in to quiet things.
He allowed everyone a way to save face, put the guns away, and get back to what was important for his Bath Avenue Crew: making Spero money.
Gulino didn't want things to go down this way. He wanted war, he wanted to fire his gun into the heads of other guys and rob them of their lives. He wanted to prove himself all the way to the max -- that way, Spero would have had to get Massino to bring Paulie Brass formally into the crime family.
Spero told him to stop when Gulino wanted Spero to issue death warrants. He wanted Spero's full support to carry on the street war until the end.
Then he wanted Spero dead once he realized Spero wasn't going to go for any of this.
Then he wanted Spero dead once he realized Spero wasn't going to go for any of this.
The two had a loud argument. Gulino committed suicide, there in front of Spero. He put his hands on the Old Man and shoved him. Spero turned his back on Gulino and quietly walked away.
 |
| Paulie Gulino. |
The Mafia is the expert when it comes to killing guys like Gulino -- meaning, guys who know they are to be killed, but know how to defend themselves anyway. And are fearless. The mob did with Gulino what it always does with that kind of hard case. They got the only guys in the world he trusted to shoot him in the back of the head.
Joey Calco and Tommy Reynolds paid Gulino the visit, because they were the only two he would open the door for when they came knocking. Jimmy Calandra was cooling off in prison for some earlier crime when this happened.
Joey and Tommy were the only two guys who could ask for a drink and Gulino would turn his back to them to get them a drink.
Joey killed Paulie Brass, his lifelong friend. He and Reynolds departed, leaving Gulino on the floor for his parents to find him.
Calandra called Reynolds from prison when he'd heard. "Did you do it!" Jimmy shouted into the phone. Reynolds was crying into the phone. "No! No!" but Jimmy knew he was hearing "Yes! Yes!"
Calandra got out -- and the Avenue seemed bare. A lot of folks got pinched while he was away. He had time to reflect on the Shemtov killing and the fact that his lifelong buddies had killed another lifelong buddy.
He was quickly hustled back into a police car before he knew it. A detective told him as they drove to the station that his past had come back to haunt him.
Jimmy had kept his mouth shut and did his time -- and now that he was finally back home, his "friends" had flipped and were aiming to put him away for life.
What was he? A sucker?
He had enough. "Fuck it," he said. He flipped and made an agreement, and testified against Spero.
Of all the Bath Avenue Crew members, Fabrizio is the only one who was eventually inducted into the Bonanno family. He was sentenced to life in prison in 2001.
Joey Calco is in prison. According to the New York Daily News: "Calco — a former hit man for the Bonanno crime family with two murder convictions under his belt — had reinvented himself in the witness protection program as Joseph Milano, the owner of Goomba’s Pizza in Florida.
"But Calco’s new life unraveled in 2009 over a beef with customers who were demanding their money back because he screwed up the calzone order. Calco vaulted over the counter and pistol-whipped the victims in a brutal attack captured on video camera.
"Calco was sentenced to 13 years in prison for the calzone beatdown and possession of a gun."
"But Calco’s new life unraveled in 2009 over a beef with customers who were demanding their money back because he screwed up the calzone order. Calco vaulted over the counter and pistol-whipped the victims in a brutal attack captured on video camera.
"Calco was sentenced to 13 years in prison for the calzone beatdown and possession of a gun."
Reynolds got life for the Shemtov slaying.
Yammine flipped on Paciello, Calandra and Reynolds.
Spero and Benanti both died in prison.
Jimmy Calandra is finishing up a true crime account of the Bath Avenue Crew.
Read about life after Bath Avenue for Jimmy Calandra...Ex-Bath Ave Crew Member Let Fists Do the Talking During Would-be Assault....