The Big Heist

by Anthony M. DeStefano

  Asaro got $400 a week from the chop-shop action, Gralto would recall later. He had no recourse but to pay: “So no other thieves robbed me, and no other wise guys would shake me down.” Gralto usually paid Asaro at The Triangle at 101st Avenue and Rockaway Boulevard. Seeing that he and Vera were splitting their weekly profit from the chop shop of $12,000, what Gralto paid Asaro seemed like a small amount to keep trouble off his back.

  Although Gralto remembered having to pay Asaro a good $1,600 monthly in protection, the relationship wasn’t all a one-way street. By being under Asaro’s wing, Gralto was protected from being preyed upon by other Mob associates and crime families. Asaro also on occasion would refer thieves to Gralto who needed to dump stolen cars from which parts could be harvested.

  But the payments Gralto was making to Asaro were like throwing money away. He wanted out of the arrangement and had Vera talk to her friend Ronald Trucchio, a Gambino crime family soldier. Trucchio was willing to talk with Asaro and maybe split the $400 weekly payment with him.

  When he heard that Trucchio had been approached, Asaro, in the words of Gralto, “pretty much went nuts.” Asaro reminded Gralto that Trucchio was a mere soldier and that he, Asaro, was a captain who didn’t have to talk to him. Trucchio would have to speak with his own boss, who at that point in time on the street was Joseph “Jo Jo” Corozzo. Gralto explained the situation with Corozzo who diplomatically said he would speak to Asaro.

  But for reasons that were never made clear, Asaro wouldn’t agree to work with Trucchio, and in the end a deal was struck for a buyout of sorts: a lump sum payment of $5,000 to Asaro to end the relationship. Gralto took the deal, and in late 1993 closed down Conduit Auto, moving his chop-shop operation to Oceanside in Nassau County, closer to where he lived. He continued to take stolen cars and parts from Bosshart and his cronies.

  Yet Gralto’s freedom from the mob was short-lived, and in the end it might have been better for him to have stayed with Asaro, the devil he knew. Once Gralto was no longer under Asaro’s protection, he became easy prey for other gangsters, namely Bosshart and his crowd who in February 1994 abducted Gralto at gunpoint and took him to a warehouse in Maspeth where he saw to his horror that his worker David Torres had been tied to a pole and was screaming as he was being cut with a small saw. Bosshart and his people believed Torres had been stealing car parts from them on Gralto’s orders and wanted to punish him.

  For good measure, they started hitting Torres with a cable. Someone struck Gralto on the back of his head with a gun. With Torres screaming for his life, Gralto yelled at the attackers to leave the poor guy alone, that he had a family. What are you going to do, said Gralto, kill him over car parts? Then Bosshart shot Gralto in the calf, and the chop-shop owner crumpled to the floor bleeding. Everybody then drove Gralto to his home on Long Island, locked him in the bathroom and then herded Gralto’s four kids, the youngest being a one-year old and the oldest age eleven, into the kitchen.

  There is little gangsters won’t do when they smell money. In Gralto’s house there was a safe that was anchored to a wall. There was about $50,000 in cash inside, as well as about $30,000 in jewelry owned by Gralto, Vera, and the children. One of the home invaders took a crow bar and in a feeding frenzy pried the safe from the wall and carried it out of the house. It was a fairly big safe, about two-and-a-half feet square. Gralto was left on his own to stanch the bleeding from the bullet wound.

  When Vera found out about the robbery she went straight to Trucchio who apologized and said the two men who were with Bosshart shouldn’t have abused Gralto and ripped him off. Bosshart wasn’t under the wing of the Gambino family, so there wasn’t much he could do about him. Trucchio eventually got back $30,000 in cash and the jewels and returned it. He was sorry about everything that had happened.

  Clearly, Gralto wasn’t going to be able to go it alone without any protection. He decided it was best to stay under Asaro’s wing and, as he would later testify, resumed paying him protection money. This time Gralto would deliver the payments of about $500 a week to Asaro at a pasta restaurant in Hewlett, Long Island, where he liked to spend time. But by December 1994, Gralto again wanted out and paid Asaro another $5,000 buyout fee, a rather modest sum considering how lucrative his chop shops were. Detectives who investigated Gralto estimated that his illegal businesses were raking in millions of dollars from stealing and cutting up about twenty cars a week.

  By 1995, Queens prosecutors and the NYPD had been making concerted pushes in an effort to get a handle on the stolen car rings plaguing Queens, and after months of surveillance and gathering of wiretap evidence indicted Asaro, Gralto, and ten others on charges they ran a multi-million-dollar car-theft ring. The criminal combination stole cars all over the metropolitan area. It was the first time prosecutors had used the state’s organized crime control act to go after such a ring. Asaro was named by Queens District Attorney Richard Brown as the man controlling the operation even though he was only taking protection money.

  The Queens case was quite serious for Asaro. He faced a possible maximum sentence of twenty-five years in prison under the organized-crime law. New York City officials were fed up with the level of car thefts, and they were going to make examples of Asaro and his co-defendants such as Gralto. One by one, those arrested in the case saw the futility of fighting the indictment and pleaded guilty. Gralto was among them and although he got a three-to-nine-year prison sentence after pleading guilty, he agreed to testify against Asaro. In return, prosecutors agreed to recommend that his sentence be reduced to a maximum of only three years.

  For a while, the justice system gave Asaro a break. In a surprise ruling, the trial judge dismissed the case against Asaro. But an appeals court reinstated the indictment. Gralto was the prosecution’s star witness against Asaro, and he rehashed his history of payoffs and the operation of the syndicate. In an effort to paint Gralto as unreliable, defense attorney Steven Mahler had Gralto’s ex-wife testify how miserable he was, calling him a cocaine addict and a habitual liar.

  As compelling as Gralto’s testimony and wiretap evidence was, the jury couldn’t come down with a unanimous decision and wound up split ten votes to two for conviction in June 1998. Asaro had dodged a bullet. But with his notoriety and the need to show they were serious about auto thefts, prosecutors retried Asaro in November 1998 and that time got the result they had wanted. Asaro was convicted of enterprise corruption, the New York State version of the tough federal racketeering statute. Thirteen of a total of sixteen defendants in the case had been convicted of a felony charge and Queens District Attorney Richard Brown said that the victory had helped in some measure to stem the once out of control car theft problem in his borough, making Asaro an unwitting poster boy in the war on crime.

  “In my view, the huge decrease in auto theft in Queens that we have seen between 1990 when over 50,000 vehicles were stolen here in Queens County and last year (1997) when there were 19,981 such thefts, is due, at least in part, to our success in this and similar cases,” said Brown after Asaro was led away to a cell to await sentencing.

  In New York State, the majority of sentences are indeterminate, meaning there is a range of years and months with a maximum set in the law. Unless there is a mandatory minimum term, a judge is free to set a range up to the maximum, which in Asaro’s case was twenty-five years. When it came time to give Asaro his just desserts, Judge Robert McGann served up a prison sentence of four to twelve years, about the middle range for the top enterprise-corruption count. Asaro was shipped off to Clinton Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison in the upstate New York village of Dannemora. From there, Asaro filed various legal writs in Brooklyn federal court to get his sentence overturned. But by late 2002, Asaro had exhausted all of his legal options and had to serve his sentence of four to twelve years. In prison, Asaro was effectively out of crime-family business, and his son Jerome took over for him as an acting captain.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  “WE’RE IN TROUBLE”
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  THE MORNING OF JANUARY 9, 2003, Joseph Massino, the boss of the Bonanno crime family, answered a knock on the front door of his Georgian-style home in Howard Beach to find FBI agents Kimberly McCaffrey and Jeffrey Sallet with a warrant for his arrest. It was hardly a surprising development for the portly Massino, who over a period of several days had seen various agents in surveillance mode around the neighborhood and knew that some of his compatriots had been talking to investigators.

  “I was expecting you yesterday,” Massino told both young agents as they flashed their badges and prepared to take him into custody.

  Massino’s arrest came as other federal agents that morning were rounding up other Bonanno crime family members, including his brother-in-law Salvatore Vitale and Frank Lino, one of Massino’s captains. Lino had been a survivor of sorts, having escaped the bloody murder scene in May 1981, when the Three Captains—Dominick Trinchera, Philip Giaccone, and Alphonse Indelicato—were slaughtered in an old Brooklyn social club in a preemptive strike by Massino against a potential takeover of the crime family.

  The Massino arrest was the culmination of a lengthy historical investigation by the FBI in which McCaffrey and Sallet, both accountants by training, followed the money trail and steadily built a case against the crime boss. By the time they took Massino out of his house, the crime-family probe had already led to the arrests of Bonanno captains Frank Coppa, Richard Cantarella, and Anthony Graziano. In total some twenty-six crime-family members had been nabbed in the preceding months. Once a group that prided itself on surviving so many law-enforcement investigations, the Bonanno family was now under siege.

  Things quickly went further downhill for Massino. On February 28, 2003, just two months after the indictment had landed, word leaked out that Vitale had decided to become a cooperating witness for the government. It was the worst possible news for Massino because Vitale, aside from being his wife’s brother, had been one of the men closest to him in the affairs of the crime family. Vitale had evidence about Massino’s role in a number of mob murders and all sorts of other illegal activities. Vitale would be the guide for the FBI through the machinations of the Bonanno family when it came time for Massino to stand trial. By May, with so many cooperators providing information about him, Massino was hit with additional charges, including that of the murder of crime-family member Anthony Mirra.

  About the time Massino was absorbing all of the bad news and the prospect of having to spend the rest of his life behind bars, Vincent Asaro was walking out of upstate Shawangunk Correctional Facility, where he had been transferred, as a free man after serving about four-and-a-half years for his chop-shop conviction. His discharge from prison took place in May 2003, and he was returning to a Mafia scene in Howard Beach that was markedly different from the one he had left behind in 1998. The Bonanno family had worked for years without being attacked by the government to any significant degree, and its rackets, as well as the power of Massino, had made the family a force to be reckoned with after years on the outside of the official Mafia ruling Commission. But by 2003, the hierarchy of the Bonanno borgata was running scared, afraid of informants and scrambling to keep a power structure to control the members.

  * * *

  As Sallett and McCaffrey were bundling Massino into their official car for the drive to FBI headquarters in Manhattan, Vincent Asaro was getting closer to becoming a free man. Asaro would officially be released from state prison in May 2003 after serving over four and a half years, the time he was required under the minimum range of his December 1998 sentence for enterprise corruption. He had been a well-behaved prisoner, and that had also worked in his favor. Back on the street, Asaro was still a soldier in the Bonanno family, and it would be a long time before he regained his status as a captain.

  Massino didn’t hold Asaro in very high regard. But when the crime boss was arrested Asaro’s world in the mob faced new uncertainty. With Massino off the street and in a federal detention center in Brooklyn, the Bonanno family would have to be run by a committee of other captains. As John Gotti found out before he died in June 2002, it is difficult for a boss to keep tabs on his men. It is also sometimes difficult for a boss to keep the illegal money flowing to his coffers, although in Massino’s case, he had a stockpile of millions of dollars in cash in his house and there was additional income from his legitimate businesses.

  Asaro was not a wealthy man, and after coming out of prison, he had to work hard to earn a living, either legitimately or otherwise. He was sixty-eight years old when he walked out of Shawangunk prison, and his big earning days were behind him. Asaro still had an interest in a legitimate fence company, and he was eligible for Social Security. But it seemed that money and Asaro always parted ways quickly. He either would spend his cash on drinks or at the race track: gambling was his curse, and Asaro knew it.

  On Long Island, the Sea Crest Diner in Westbury has the dubious distinction of being known to some as the “Rape Diner,” so called because it was the site in 1982 of a horrendous crime. Five attackers forced nearly 100 patrons to strip and in some cases have sex with each other. The attackers shot two people and raped a waitress. It went down as one of the most brutal and horrendous crimes in Long Island history. The five suspects were caught and convicted for over 800 counts of rape and other crimes. So, when anybody mentioned the Rape Diner as a meeting place, the location was the Sea Crest. Enough said. Even mobsters referred to it that way.

  With Massino behind bars, his crime family was ruled on the street by a special committee of three gangsters: Anthony Urso, Joseph “Joe Saunders” Cammarano, and Peter “Peter Rabbit” Calabrese. When Calabrese had some family issues he had to deal with and couldn’t spend the time on the committee, informants said that Vincent “Vinny Gorgeous” Basciano acted in his stead. All committee members were answerable to Massino but had wide latitude to take care of crime-family street business. The committee knew that the government had the help of jailed Bonanno captains Frank Coppa, Frank Lino, Joseph D’Amico, and former underboss Salvatore Vitale. So if the three committee members had to meet, they did it face to face and in a surrounding where they didn’t think it would be possible for the FBI to listen to them. A public place like the Sea Crest Diner filled the bill. So did the Greenview Town House Restaurant in nearby Orange County. The committee moved around when it had to for security.

  Of course diners and public restaurants are open to anyone, and the FBI could easily spot a mobster entering an establishment and see who he was sitting with. But eavesdropping on a table conversation would be difficult, unless there was a spy in the group. Well, for several months in late 2003 the FBI had the good fortune to have the cooperation of James “Big Louie” Tartaglione, a Bonanno captain who had decided to come back to New York, ostensibly because Massino wanted him to help with a crime family in disarray. Tartaglione, under the guise of trying to sort out the Bonanno family problems, went to see ruling committee members at both the Sea Crest Diner and The Greenview while wearing a body recorder. Cammarano, Urso, and Basciano spoke freely about crime-family business, including the latest gossip. One of their recurring subjects was Vincent Asaro.

  According to recordings Tartaglione made on September 13, 2003 and turned over to his FBI handlers, the conversation about Asaro portrayed him at that point in his life as a man who was broken and dispirited.

  “Talking about Vinnie Asaro, how is he doing?” asked Tartaglione.

  “Vinnie’s sick,” answered Cammarano.

  “Is he very sick?” Tartaglione wanted to know.

  “Got the cirrhosis of the liver,” said Cammarano.

  That condition didn’t surprise Tartaglione who remembered Asaro as being a heavy drinker back in his younger days, although he had more or less gone on the wagon and had tried to clean up his act.

  But for Urso, drinking wasn’t the only problem for Asaro. He was so broke that being in the crime family wasn’t doing much for his self-esteem or reputation among his so called peers. It seemed as though As
aro’s lack of money had made him abusive as a captain, a “skipper” as the rank was called.

  “It’s like our friend said, when you make a skipper and you make a skipper that’s broke, he abuses his men for this,” said Urso, quite possibly referring to something Massino was known to have said about others. “That is the God’s honest truth. And that’s what he did, abused everybody.”

  “Well is he still at the track every day still?” asked Tartaglione

  Sure, said Cammarano, who knew how much money Asaro had squandered on the horses. The track certainly killed Vinnie was how Tartaglione saw things.

  The money Asaro was throwing around at the racetrack was cash he couldn’t really afford. As soon as a dollar bill landed in his hands it seemed to fly away in the vain hope of following a winning horse. Urso said Asaro owed people money, and he wasn’t paying his debts. Urso was going to call him in and tell him to start paying off people.

  “Gotta start with Vito. He owes Vito sixteen thousand,” remembered Cammarano, without further identifying the lender.

  Asaro had borrowed frequently over the years from fellow gangsters, the FBI had heard. One informant had related to agents that Asaro had taken up to $30,000 over the years from Massino, who had a significant loansharking business. Some crime family members were into Massino for over $100,000, so Asaro’s amounts were relatively small. Asaro owed a number of people, and there was little sign that he was paying it back, according to Cammarano.

  “Is he earning?” said Tartaglione.

  “Is he earning? Who the fuck knows, Lou, I don’t know,” said Urso.

  Certainly in the 1990s when he had the chop-shop income Asaro had some money coming in. Gambling also seemed a source of income. Vitale had recalled for the FBI that also during the 1990s after the death of a bookmaker known only by the name “Stretch” that the operation was turned over to Asaro who allegedly ran it with his son Jerome. Although the Asaros may have run the business on a daily basis, Vitale told the agents that he actually owned the operation.