Seton Hall

Hardball

By July 2001 they were ready to make their move. Sensing that Karpenski was likely to break his silence, they turned their attention to the kid they perceived as the next weakest link in the chain, Cataldo.

Two weeks before Cataldo was scheduled to testify before the grand jury, a second and wholly unrelated grand jury that just happened to be sitting a few yards down the hall handed up an indictment charging his father, Santino "Tic" Cataldo, on charges of murder stemming from a 20-year-old mob hit. One of the key witnesses against the elder Cataldo was a guy named Tom Ricciardi who had earned a degree of celebrity in North Jersey as an admitted hitman for the Lucchese family who had turned informant. At the time he testified, Ricciardi was being held in federal custody, serving a truncated sentence for racketeering, according to sources familiar with the case.

But to the Cataldo family, especially Thomas Cataldo, Tic's son, Tino's older brother, and, as it turned out, the lawyer representing the boy, it was clearly a tactic designed to rattle them. "It's clear that they were trying to pressure my brother,' Thomas Cataldo says. But it didn't work. When Santino Cataldo appeared before the special grand jury he told the same story he had told investigators when they first questioned him. "My brother was available for interviews, and...apparently, they're not satisfied with the information... because it doesn't match whatever they believe."

For their part, the cops refuse to allow that Tic Cataldo's indictment and arrest on the eve of his son's grand jury appearance could have been anything other than serendipity. As one law enforcement source coyly put it, "funny how that happened, isn't it?"