There are some offers you can’t refuse. Such was the case when dog trainer Warren Eckstein received a call from a guy named Walter looking for some help with his boss’s hound.
Turns out, Walter had quite the boss: Eckstein was being summoned to the Nassau Shores, Massapequa, home of mob boss Carlo Gambino.
That was around 1972, when Eckstein, who was 22 at the time, had a cheeky ad in a Five Towns, Long Island, pennysaver. It promised, “For $15, I’ll teach your dog Yiddish.”
Gambino was merely aiming for obedience. Eckstein obliged. “They had no problem with my price but they did have a problem with my standard contract,” Eckstein, now 72, told The Post. “I was told, ‘No contract. Just do your job and you’ll get paid.’ “
Gambino was elderly — he died four years later — “and I had to train the dog to not drag people when they walked him,” said Eckstein, who now hosts “The Pet Show” on Radio America, where he gives advice to pet owners. “Once I knew it was Gambino’s dog, I made sure he was as well trained as Rin Tin Tin.”
Pleased with Eckstein’s work – Walter once slipped the trainer an extra $500 so he could buy a dining room set that he and his newlywed wife desired – the mob boss apparently told cohorts that Eckstein was good, reliable and discreet. “This was a time when mobsters all used the same attorney, doctor and accountant,” said Eckstein, who quickly became the gang’s go-to trainer.
“One thing I learned, though, was that some of these guys hated to part with cash. They offered to pay me in cocaine, but I asked them to please stick with money.”
A few weeks after Eckstein had successfully trained Gambino’s dog, another mobster reached out. “That was Angelo Ruggiero, who was bosom buddies with Gotti,” remembered Eckstein. “He had either a Rottweiler or Doberman and he wanted the dog trained for protection. It turned out that Ruggiero was dealing drugs at a time when people in the mob were not supposed to be doing that. I assume that he wanted the dog to protect his family members from fellow mobsters. I showed up, his teenage son took me into the garage and handed me $1,500.”
There were occasions when Eckstein saw things he wished he hadn’t. “Sometimes the guys had guns on their tables,” he said. “And when I went to Henry Hill’s house in Rockville Center, there was a money-counting machine clicking through a pile of cash.”
“They offered to pay me in cocaine, but I asked them to please stick with money.”
Warren Eckstein, a dog trainer to mobsters
Then there was the mob enforcer who treated his wife worse than he treated his pooch. “He got angry after hearing me suggesting to his wife that she should follow my advice in terms of training the dog between visits,” Eckstein said. “He told her to go to her room and she listened. I didn’t like that behavior but I didn’t say a word. Sometimes you instinctively have to shut up.”
Other times, he was the target of intimidation.
“I worked with the Rottweiler that belonged to Philly Basile,” said Eckstein. “I remember one of his associates calling me and saying, ‘The dog peed in the house. It’s not worth killing you over. But can you come by right away and work with him?’ I did, and I helped to resolve the problem by putting the dog on a schedule and confining him to a small area in the kitchen. He never peed indoors again. Maybe that’s why I’m talking to you now.”
At least one of his hotshot clients, however, did not fare as well in the life-or-death game. “He and his brother were paying me to train a little Doberman puppy called Phoenix,” said Eckstein. “I was boarding him and got money orders for a couple of months. Then the money orders stopped coming and the guy disappeared. I assume he was killed or went into witness protection. I kept Phoenix.”
After some 20 years of training dogs associated with some two dozen mobsters, that corner of Eckstein’s business dried up – “Half of them were dead or in jail by the early ‘90s” – and Eckstein moved to Los Angeles, where he worked with pets belonging to the likes of Lily Tomlin (who said her dog had multiple personalities), Al Pacino and David Letterman.
But he’ll never forget his time spent with the canines of criminals.
“They were gentle with their animals,” he said. “Most of the time, the dogs were more alarm dogs than attack dogs. The mobsters knew how to resolve problems on their own. Like maybe they’d want to take a guy for a ride. I couldn’t train a dog to do that.”
