High But Not Dry

THE MOMENT WAS MORE MARX BROTHERS THAN classic Mafia. Wrapped in a bath towel at his wooded redoubt near Mount Olive, New Jersey, fugitive Anthony Salvatore Casso, 52, one of the nation's most feared Mafia leaders, surrendered -- hands up high, dripping wet -- to an FBI SWAT team. Cracked one agent: "He didn't have his gun in the shower like in the spaghetti westerns." Federal agents say that Casso, a Lucchese family underboss street-named "Gaspipe" (possibly because of his blowtorch safecracking skills), was hated within the crime family because of his penchant for ordering hits simply because a fellow mobster annoyed him. "We felt that some of the tips were coming from the Luccheses," says FBI agent Donald North, who supervises organized-crime investigations in New York City. "The family wanted him off the street." The elusive Casso was on the run from federal racketeering charges. During the don's 32 months underground, prosecutors charge, he ordered at least seven murders -- many over the phone. Appropriately, FBI agents traced Casso through his cellular-telephone calls transmitted through a radio tower near his hideout.