I've wondered that a fear was that Big Paul loved his luxurious lifestyle too much to do prison time, and that, as he was 70, he was basically looking at dying in prison no matter what the sentence was. The fear as such was that he'd flip to avoid spending his last years in a prison cell.
My question to you is, if Paul wasn't clipped, would he have flipped?
The answer is no. The reason for that is Castellano wouldn't have been given the opportunity.
When Walter Mack headed up the investigations, the goal was to wipe out the mafia, turn Mulberry Street into a ghost town. Then Giuliani swooped in and appropriated the helm of the investigation for himself. The main change Giuliani made was to shift the targets of the investigation to only the top people, AKA the bosses, and then name it "The Commission Case". Originally, countless gangsters were probably going to be arrested all at once. After Giuliani you have a case being made against 6 or so individuals. Therefore Big Paul wasn't going to be offered a deal, and I doubt he would have taken it. He was too close to Carlo and the old school to flip like Massino did.
Giuliani
protected the mafia.
