by Peter Lance
Things stayed quiet for the next two weeks and no evidence was ever presented by the government that Tommy felt threatened at that point. Then, on the night of October 22, Diane Montesano and Ocera were leaving the club around one thirty A.M. after closing for the night. Diane was carrying the cash receipts from the restaurant, which she was taking home to deposit the next day, so Ocera walked her to her car.12
As they approached their vehicles, Montesano noticed two cars across the street parked in the lot of the nearby Long Island Rail Road station. “I knew there were no trains coming in or leaving at this time,” she later testified.
Tommy got in his car and pulled out of the restaurant lot first, but Diane was concerned that there might be a break-in at the restaurant. So rather than following Ocera, she boldly drove across to where the two cars were parked. As she approached them, she noticed that each car had dark tinted windows. The headlights were off but the engines were running. One of the cars had a broken taillight, she testified, and she could just make out “two figures” in each vehicle. She was “concerned,” she said, “because [she] carried all the monies from the restaurant.”
Now, having lost sight of Ocera’s car, Montesano headed home. Since “there was not a direct route to [her] house,”13 she followed a series of side streets that “curved and turned”—until suddenly she came upon a Cadillac in front of her with New Jersey plates. Later, Montesano would recall that it was one of the two cars from the railroad station. Apparently the driver knew the way to her house, and as he drove past a streetlight, Diane could just make out his face. She later picked his picture out of a series of FBI surveillance photographs of Colombo family members.
It was Gregory Scarpa Sr.
Driving at Her Head-On
The Caddy turned off on a side street, she said, but when she got home a few minutes later she noticed the other car from the LIRR station parked “directly in front” of her house. Afraid that she might get cornered in her driveway, Montesano drove past it, when suddenly, “a car came towards [her] with its lights off,” then “put on [its] bright headlights.”
The streets were wet and covered with leaves. As the vehicle came at her head-on, Diane was forced to swerve up onto the sidewalk.
“I almost lost control of my car,” she testified. But somehow she managed to drive past the car, roaring up the street and quickly turning. Then suddenly, she found herself once again confronting the Cadillac. “The car that I had been following with the New Jersey plates . . . had turned in the opposite direction and was now in front of me,” she said.
Somehow, Montesano was able to get past it. Then, about two minutes later, she encountered Tommy Ocera, who was now approaching her house in his vehicle. Ocera quickly parked and got into her car. She told him what had happened and switched off her headlights. For the next few minutes, she said, they drove quietly through the back streets of her neighborhood trying to assess the situation.14
At that point Ocera suggested that they drive to Brooklyn, but when they approached the entrance to the Southern State Parkway, they were surprised to see that one of the cars from the LIRR station—the one with the broken taillight—was half a block in front of them.
Tommy quickly told her to keep going and they found the next parkway entrance. Montesano testified that they drove for a few miles, then pulled off the Southern State and went to an all-night diner. From there, she said, Ocera called his daughter Tracey, who lived with him. He told her to “lock the doors and stay in the bedroom” until he arrived. After that, Diane and Tommy drove back to the Manor to make sure there hadn’t been a break-in. They then returned to Diane’s place so Ocera could pick up his car. It was now about four thirty A.M.
Montesano approached her front door warily and unlocked it. There was no sign of any forced entry as Tommy accompanied her inside. He stayed for a while and Montesano gave him a shotgun that her husband had kept for home protection. As he drove home, Montesano later testified, Tommy stayed on his car phone and talked to her all the way. When he got inside his house and saw that his daughter was safe, he called Diane. “Everything was fine,” he told her.
According to Montesano, they both worked the next night. Vic Orena Sr. came in with a small party, including his driver Schwartzie Cascio. At one point, the incident from the night before came up. Vic seemed to laugh it off. He joked with Montesano that she was “a very good driver” and maybe he could hire her to replace Schwartzie.15 In her testimony at Vic Sr.’s trial, she expressed no sense of any threat from the acting boss, who she insisted had treated her cordially.16 Nor did she indicate that Tommy Ocera was concerned about retaliation from Orena or his sons. But after that night, at what she described as Ocera’s “request,” she and Tommy started parking their cars away from each other in the restaurant lot.
A few weeks later, on the night of November 12, Montesano and Ocera went to a small club near the restaurant after work to hear the piano player from the Manor, who was performing a solo engagement. Ocera seemed to be in a good mood, she said. He bought a round of drinks for the pianist and the people sitting at the bar. Later he accompanied Diane back to her place and stayed for a few hours before leaving.
It was the last time she saw him alive.
The Feds’ Account of Ocera’s Hit
On April Fools’ Day 1992, at the height of the third Colombo war, Vic Orena Sr. was arrested for Tommy Ocera’s murder. He was seized in the basement of the house of his girlfriend, Gina Reale, the daughter of a Gambino family associate.17 Orena’s sons Andrew and John were with him at the time.
There were four shotguns in the house, which they contend were for protection. By that point Greg Scarpa had already murdered one member of their faction, and six weeks later he’d rub out a second. At the time of the arrest, based on the word of James Fox, then the assistant director in charge of the FBI’s New York Office, the New York Times reported that “two assault rifles” were seized at this house, but that was untrue.
The Feds later claimed to have found “a small arsenal” at the safe house,18 but the only other weapons discovered were six handguns and two magazines curiously found in a plastic garbage bag under an open deck behind the house.19 A single latent fingerprint was lifted from the bag, but it failed to match any of the “various subjects of the investigation,” including Orena.
Later, when Vic’s lawyers requested the bag for analysis, it had gone missing.20 Gregory Scarpa Jr. would later testify that the guns were planted by his younger brother Joey under the direction of his father, Greg Sr.21 At the time of the arrest, the yard around the house was open, with no fence preventing access to the deck.22 Yet, in attacking the defense’s planted-gun theory, prosecutors at Orena’s trial showed the jury pictures of the backyard after it had been fenced in.23
Also seized at the house were a number of cell phones, bulletproof vests, and Cole reverse phone number directories, which the Feds argued Vic Sr. and his sons were using to hunt their rivals on the Persico side of the family. But as we’ll see, despite some retaliatory attacks, the Orena faction largely spent the war playing defense, while Scarpa, in his General Schwarzkopf mode, amped up the death toll.
When it came to the Ocera murder, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District provided no direct evidence linking Vic Orena to the crime. The best the prosecutors could offer was a case built entirely on circumstantial evidence and hearsay.
Freelance Undertaker and Killer
According to the Feds, one of the lead killers in the Ocera murder was Giachino “Jack” Leale, a florist and undertaker.24 But the U.S. attorney was forced to tell the story of Ocera’s brutal rubout through the testimony of Michael Maffatore and Harry Bonfiglio, two low-level Colombo henchmen, whose description of the killing came via second- and thirdhand hearsay information. Facing life sentences, both men had cut deals with the Feds, and they made far-from-reliable witnesses. Maffatore, an eleventh-grade dropout, was a self-described dealer and user of angel dust (PCP) who admitted that the
drug often made him “see things that [weren’t] really there.”25 Meanwhile, the sixty-two-year-old Bonfiglio confessed that he’d experienced “memory loss” after a stroke.26
Throughout the trial, Orena’s aggressive attorney Gus Newman repeatedly objected to the pair’s hearsay testimony, but Judge Weinstein overruled most of his objections under an exception to the Rule Against Hearsay for co-conspirators. Newman argued that these lower-tier Colombo associates could hardly be considered co-conspirators of Vic Orena—particularly once the war had started and they were on the other side. But Weinstein rejected that argument, finding that “the ongoing Colombo conspiracy was continuing and that these conversations were in aid and during the continuance of the conspiracy.”27
Such rulings from Weinstein helped prosecutors Andrew Weissmann, George Stamboulidis, and John Gleeson to convict Orena for the Ocera homicide based in part on their witnesses’ hearsay accounts.
Maffatore, who admitted committing arson and robbery, had also dealt cocaine and pot and did time for smuggling three hundred pounds of marijuana into New York.28 As recently as January 1991, he’d been jailed after back-to-back coke sales to undercover cops and was facing life in prison as a “persistent felon.” On the stand, Maffatore admitted that in the fall of 1989 he was on a work release program for a previous offense and was supposed to be working at a pizzeria by day, but in fact he was driving for Leale, the mortician-florist, whom he’d met on July 4.
Leale, who was reportedly a made guy,29 lacked the funds to own his own funeral home, so he did freelance wakes for various underworld associates.30 Maffatore had been introduced to Leale by Jack’s brother-in-law Harry Bonfiglio, a ninth-grade dropout who’d formerly driven brewery trucks. Maffatore lived near Bonfiglio in Middle Village, Queens. While Bonfiglio admitted he’d never met Tommy Ocera, Maffatore said he’d met him twice after driving Leale to meetings at the Manor in October 1989.
Maffatore also ran into Ocera a third time, he said, when he visited one of Tommy’s gambling clubs. At that point, he claimed that he’d also met Pasquale “Patty” Amato, an associate of Vic Orena Sr.’s who was purportedly Leale’s capo.
Central to the testimony of both Maffatore and Bonfiglio was a trip they claimed to have taken with Leale sometime in November 1989, after Leale was allegedly contacted by Little Vic.
Each of them testified that they’d driven with Leale to a “social club” run by Orena in Cedarhurst, Long Island.31 After Leale left the car, which Maffatore was driving, the pair claimed that he met with Vic Sr. for a “walk-and-talk” lasting about fifteen minutes.
Maffatore said that when the acting boss and the soldier reportedly returned to the car, he heard nothing of the conversation.32 But Bonfiglio, who was sitting just behind him in the backseat, insisted that he somehow overheard Vic say, “I want this thing taken care of.”33 In Maffatore’s version of events, Leale got in the car and waited five minutes before telling them that he’d received “a contract” to kill Tommy Ocera. As Bonfiglio told it, Leale disclosed the alleged contract as soon as he entered the vehicle.
The jury was left to decide how plausible it was that a Mafia boss would order a low-level soldier to undertake a hit—not to mention allowing two even lower-level crew members to overhear him. But Maffatore went further, claiming that after the Orena meeting he drove Leale to Ocera’s gambling club on Merrick Road, where he met “Big Patty” Amato. At that point, Maffatore said he overheard Amato telling Leale that “they didn’t want [Ocera’s] body found.”34 Bonfiglio was also supposedly present, but he claimed he was “in the kitchen” and wasn’t privy to that exchange.
Nevertheless, Maffatore testified that on the night of November 13, 1989, he got a call from Leale instructing him and Bonfiglio to meet Leale the next day at his house and bring their own cars. Maffatore drove a Ford LTD and Bonfiglio a four-door Dodge Aspen. The next morning, after they arrived at Leale’s place, Leale reportedly told Bonfiglio to leave the Aspen. He’d meet them later at a diner.
According to Maffatore, “Jackie [Leale] showed up about 10:30 A.M. with Tommy[’s body] in the trunk of the car.”35 He then purportedly instructed the two of them to drive the car back to their neighborhood in Queens and wait for his call. Maffatore said that he balked because his trunk was ajar, but Leale insisted.
Later, Bonfiglio testified, he drove all the way back to Middle Village along the Southern State Parkway on Long Island with a part of the body bag containing Ocera’s remains “exposed.”
Chapter 23
BRAINS, BUTCHER, AND BULL
According to Maffatore’s testimony, the car sat outside Bonfiglio’s house on a public street in Queens for more than ten hours. Later, when Harry’s wife asked to use it, he refused to let her and told her it was “because there [was] a body in the trunk.”
At that point she “ran in the house” screaming.1
Later that night, after buying picks and shovels, the two men reportedly drove with Harry’s son and his friend George to Forest Park in Queens. There they dug a hole, but Maffatore said that as they carried Ocera’s remains, they dropped them and the body bag went “down the hill.” They finally buried the corpse in a shallow grave and went back to Bonfiglio’s house, only to discover that they’d forgotten the pick they’d used to dig the grave. So rather than leave one of the burial tools at the site, Maffatore said, he went back to retrieve it. According to Bonfiglio, two days later Leale was given both of Ocera’s gambling clubs as a reward for his participation in the hit.2
Neither of these two witnesses for the Feds was a party to Ocera’s murder. The only thing they could testify to with any certainty was the burial of the body. Nonetheless, the jury was permitted to listen as Bonfiglio claimed that Leale and Amato met Ocera at Amato’s house and “Patty put him down” while “Jack whacked him”—purely hearsay, since Bonfiglio was not there at the time.3 Similarly, Maffatore admitted that all the information he had about Vic Orena had come indirectly from Jack Leale.
But Leale, who would have been a better witness, never took the stand. And for good reason: Jack the undertaker had himself been murdered on or about November 4, 1991, in what turned out to be the first homicide of the third Colombo war.
At that time, Lin DeVecchio filed the following 209 based on what he’d heard about the killing from Greg Scarpa:
The recent hit on JACK LEALE was done by the ORENA faction of the COLOMBO Family, although the PERSICO side was as anxious to have LEALE “hit.” The source said LEALE made the fatal mistake of relying on too many non-made individuals to dispose of TOMMY OCERA’s body, which was subsequently found by the FBI. The source said LEALE was obviously set up by someone he trusted.4
In his book, We’re Going to Win This Thing, DeVecchio quotes from that 209—but tellingly leaves out the last line about Jack’s being “set up.” That might be because the likely candidate for the person “he trusted” was DeVecchio’s own informant, Greg Scarpa. As demonstrated in the numerous 209s that DeVecchio filed throughout the war, either Scarpa misled his control agent about murders he was committing himself, or DeVecchio knew about his informant’s activities and filed incomplete reports about them to his superiors. In either scenario—whether Lin acted with intent or negligence—it’s clear that Greg Scarpa was controlling the flow of intelligence and spinning it his way.
With Leale dead, the Feds had to rely on Maffatore to speak for him, but the former PCP dealer’s testimony alone would have been insufficient to convict Orena without corroboration. So the FBI induced him to wear a wire on Bonfiglio, who was arrested and indicted as a co-conspirator. Though at first Harry was unwilling to cooperate, once he was tried and convicted in January 1992 Bonfiglio finally agreed to flip. Significantly, Maffatore admitted under cross-examination that while Bonfiglio mentioned Patty Amato and Jackie Leale many times in surreptitious recordings, he never mentioned Vic Orena.5
At one point in the tapes, Bonfiglio joked to Maffatore that if he’d been caught with the body in his
trunk, “[a] hundred fuckin’ years I would have got. They would have melted the key.”6 While both witnesses were facing life sentences before their testimony against Orena, each admitted that, based on the deals they’d cut with the Feds, they could end up with “zero” jail time.
Another witness who testified, “Joey Brains” Ambrosino, added different details about the murder, but they were thirdhand. Ambrosino claimed that Carmine Sessa had told him that the murder in Patty Amato’s house involved Leale; Thomas Petrizzo, a Colombo captain loyal to Vic Sr.; and Frank “Chickie” Leto. Since Sessa wasn’t present at the murder either, Ambrosino was two steps removed from the rubout. But that didn’t stop him from adding at least one new detail: that Ocera had been stabbed “in the neck.”7
In return for his testimony, the thirty-five-year-old Ambrosino, who was facing twenty years, admitted that he could get no jail time at all—despite his confessed participation in the murder of Anthony “Bird” Collucio, a member of Michael Sessa’s crew.8 Then, in the absence of any physical evidence tying Vic Orena to the execution or disposal of Tommy Ocera, the Feds sought to bolster the case with the testimony of two high-level Mafia turncoats: Sammy “the Bull” Gravano, the former underboss of the Gambino family who became famous as the principal witness against John Gotti Sr., and Alphonse “Little Al” D’Arco, the former acting boss of the Luccheses.
The Star Witnesses
At the opening of Orena’s trial, the Feds actually attributed three separate motives to him for the slaying. At first they said that Ocera was skimming profits from a carting company, but they were never able to link Orena to that enterprise. Next they claimed that Orena was concerned that, having lost the loan-sharking records, Ocera might be convinced to flip in return for immunity from the crimes they recorded.
