King of the Godfathers

by Anthony Destefano

  Normally, the underboss position is a powerful one in the Mafia, but over the years Vitale had chafed at the paltry power Massino had given him, going as far as to forbid Vitale from speaking to the captains in the crime family. The trust that once ran deep between the two men had evaporated. Some of the Bonanno captains thought Vitale was too dirty and knew too much to be trusted. Better off with Vitale dead, some said. Privately, they wondered if Massino’s judgment about Vitale was clouded by the fact that he was his wife’s brother.

  Vitale had been involved in a number of murders—“pieces of work,” as wiseguys would call them. Knowing what he knew about the crime family business, Vitale could be dangerous if he weakened. And Massino knew that. Just three weeks earlier, a few Bonanno mobsters voiced distrust of Vitale.

  “Sal is gonna rat on every fucking body,” said Anthony Urso, one of Massino’s key captains, who was overheard on a surveillance bug.

  Rats were the bane of the Mafia. La Cosa Nostra was riddled with them and it made Massino even more paranoid. If he suspected any man was a rat, Massino gave him a ticket—he called it a “receipt”—to the grave. Joseph Massino was from the old school of tough guys who never turned on their friends. You never squeal: it was a creed that Massino even taught his daughters to live by. It was the way of life and you swore to it with your blood the day they made you a wiseguy by burning the card with a saint’s picture in the palm of your hand.

  Massino would tell people he was proud of his crime family, the only one that had never had an informant or rat in all its years of existence. Omerta had never been violated within the family until old man Joseph Bonanno revealed some of La Cosa Nostra’s secrets in his 1980 autobiography A Man of Honor. Massino had become so angry over Bonanno’s tale that he wanted to change the name of the crime family to Massino. Time in jail, not tell-all books, went with the job of being a mob boss. John Gotti, Vincent Gigante, Carlo Gambino, Anthony “Tony Ducks” Corallo, Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno, Carmine “the Snake” Persico—they all took their medicine and didn’t rat out anybody. Massino would be a stand-up guy. That was part of a boss’s job. Everybody knew that.

  It turned out McCaffrey was wrong in her characterization of the charges against Massino during the car ride back to Manhattan. It might have been a ploy to see if Massino talked, but the indictment in the process of being unsealed that morning by Brooklyn federal prosecutors did not mention the killings of the three captains. In reality, Massino had been indicted for the 1982 slaying of another old friend: Dominick “Sonny Black” Napolitano. The killings of Trinchera, Giaccone, and Indelicato, as well as several others, wouldn’t be laid at Massino’s feet until much later.

  The FBI car in which Massino rode went through the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, north on West Street, left onto Worth Street, and then headed into the basement of the forty-five-story federal office building known as Twenty-six Federal Plaza. A 1960s-style soaring rectangle of glass, stone, and chrome on Foley Square, the building housed most of the federal law enforcement agencies in the city. Anyone arrested in a major FBI operation—and Massino’s bust was big—was usually taken to “Twenty-six Fed” and put through the ritual processing: fingerprinting, photographing, and the recording of personal information. One thing the agents decided against was a “perp walk,” that is, parading Massino before prying newspaper photographers. They had decided to treat him with a little dignity.

  For the Bonanno squad known by the designation C10, the processing of defendants all took place on the twenty-second floor and although it was serious business, Massino couldn’t help joking with the agents as he was fingerprinted, saying he probably wouldn’t get bail if he hired one attorney he knew from the old neighborhood. The agents knew at that point that bail was the remotest long shot for Massino, but they let his remark pass. Spotting one of the squad supervisors, Nora Conely, Massino had a flash of recognition. He remarked that he had seen her talking once to his old friend Louis Restivo, one of the owners of CasaBlanca Restaurant, about a fugitive.

  She was second in command of the squad, McCaffrey explained to Massino.

  “Like an underboss,” Massino answered McCaffrey, putting it in lingo he understood.

  Massino was going to spend the rest of the day shuttling between the FBI offices and across the Brooklyn Bridge to the U.S. District Court, where he would eventually be arraigned on the charges before a federal magistrate. It would take hours for that to happen. In the meantime, as the rest of the city awakened, another ritual was getting underway. Federal officials began to alert news agencies that they had a big announcement and at One Pierrepont Plaza, an office tower in downtown Brooklyn, copies of a four-page press release were stacked on a table in the law library of the office of the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, a fancy way to describe Brooklyn and everything to the east.

  The document had a long title: Boss and Underboss Charged with Racketeering, Murder, and Other Crimes in Culmination of Four-Year Investigation and Prosecution of the Bonanno Organized Crime Family—Murders Include Retaliation for Infiltration of Family by “Donnie Brasco.”

  Press releases from prosecutors don’t just relate the news; they also mention who the big shots are in law enforcement who want credit, or at least hope to get some mention in the news accounts that will follow. This press release was no exception. It listed Roslynn R. Mauskopf, U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York; Kevin P. Donovan, Assistant Director in Charge, Federal Bureau of Investigation, the man who was McCaffrey and Sallet’s boss; Paul L. Machalek, special agent in charge of the criminal investigations unit of the Internal Revenue Service; and James W. McMahon, the superintendent of the New York State Police.

  The next four names listed in the press release told the world who was in trouble. First named was Massino, “who is the only boss of the five LCN families in New York not currently incarcerated.” In law enforcement jargon the initials LCN stood for La Cosa Nostra, the Italian expression commonly used to describe the American Mafia. Though the public, press, and even police refer to organized crime composed of men of Italian heritage as the Mafia, purists are quick to point out that the term Mafia really refers to the organized crime based in Italy. The term la cosa nostra, which loosely translates as “our thing” or “this thing of ours,” is actually what the FBI prefers.

  Rounding out the list of those arrested that morning was, as Massino already knew, Salvatore Vitale, “who serves as the family’s underboss.” Also nabbed was Frank Lino, a mean-spirited, fireplug-sized Brooklyn man seven years’ Massino’s senior who had somehow survived mob infighting to become a capo or captain. Finally, there was Daniel Mongelli, a pubescent-looking thirty-seven-year-old who made up for what he may have lacked in intelligence with loyalty to a life of crime. His reward was the title of acting captain in Massino’s regime.

  As she gripped the podium before the assembled reporters and photographers, federal prosecutor Mauskopf said that the arrest of Massino and Vitale meant that the leadership of the Bonanno family was either in prison or facing the prospect of a lifetime behind bars. This was Mauskopf’s first major organized crime indictment and her statement included such usual obligatory prose. She reminded everyone that the government was committed to eradicating the influence of organized crime in the city and that the case demonstrated this resolve.

  But she also noted that this was a superseding indictment, meaning it built on an earlier set of charges that had led to the arrest of other Bonanno crime family figures like captains Anthony Graziano, Richard Cantarella, and Massino’s old friend, Frank Lino. In all, Mauskopf noted, twenty-six members and associates of the Bonanno clan had been charged in the previous twelve months. Clearly, the crime family was facing big trouble. Time, she said, had not been good to the mob.

  “In the early years, the middle years of the twentieth century, the structure of traditional organized crime was formulated, in large measure right here in Brooklyn,” Mauskopf told the reporters assembled in
her office. “At the beginning of the twenty-first century, as a result of federal law enforcement’s efforts, their determined, their sustained, and their outstanding efforts, the heads of the five families and a significant portion of their members had been brought before the bar of justice.”

  Such self-congratulatory comments by law enforcement were common at such news events. But Mauskopf’s attempt to give the case a touch of history caught the attention of many journalists who had been following the machinations of organized crime. The reference to “Donnie Brasco” and the murders that surrounded him tied Massino’s arrest to one of the most legendary sagas of latter-day Mafia history. Brasco was in fact Joseph Pistone, who as an FBI agent beginning in the late 1970s infiltrated a branch of the Bonanno family. (Pistone’s role was celebrated in the 1997 film Donnie Brasco starring Al Pacino.) Working undercover, Pistone posed as Brasco, jewel thief. With the patience of a crafty spy, he ingratiated himself with Bonanno soldier Benjamin “Lefty Guns” Ruggierio and his captain, Dominick “Sonny Black” Napolitano.

  For three years Pistone gathered evidence against his mob friends, fooling them so completely that he was even proposed for membership to the crime family, a state of affairs that had angered Massino if only because no one really knew this Brasco fellow. In hindsight, Massino’s wariness about Pistone demonstrates his survival instincts. When Pistone’s undercover role was dramatically and publicly revealed in 1981, the results were predictable. Like the dark days of some Stalinist purge, the Bonanno family went through bloody days of reckoning. Those who had allowed Pistone to infiltrate the family had to pay the price. Napolitano was high on the list and federal officials believed he was murdered for the unpardonable sin of vouching for Pistone. The indictment charged that Massino, along with Frank Lino, engineered Napolitano’s slaughter.

  Pistone’s infiltration of the Bonanno family had made it not only the laughing stock of the Mafia but also a pariah. Believing they couldn’t trust the Bonanno hierarchy, the other mob families in New York kept the wounded family at bay and cut it out of some rackets. Among the fruits denied the Bonanno family was a cut of the lucrative “concrete club” that had evolved in the early 1980s. The club members were the four Mafia families who took a percentage through kickbacks of every cubic yard of concrete that was poured in New York City. This amounted to millions of dollars in illegal profits and contributed to what critics said was the inordinately high cost of doing construction in New York.

  It was in May 1984, in a private home on Cameron Avenue in Staten Island, that the boss of the Gambino family crime family, Paul Castellano, lorded over a meeting of representatives of three other Mafia families—the Genovese, Colombo, and Lucchese families—to hash out business disputes over their construction rackets, including the concrete shakedown. Investigators were also watching and recorded the men going to the meeting. In 1986, federal prosecutors in Manhattan secured convictions for the concrete racket against the leadership of the Mafia Commission: Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno (Genovese crime family), Anthony “Tony Ducks” Corallo (Lucchese crime family), Carmine “the Snake” Persico (Colombo crime family), and their assorted lieutenants for taking part in various rackets.

  But the Bonanno family, having been denied a cut of the concrete scheme, escaped conviction in the Commission case. True, Philip Rastelli, the Bonanno boss at the time, had been indicted. But Rastelli’s case had been severed from the Commission trial and was never convicted. (He was found guilty in an unrelated Brooklyn federal racketeering trial.) Ironically, by being kept out of the loop by the other crime families in the concrete case, the Bonanno clan dodged a big bullet and continued to operate with much of its leadership intact. While other crime families were knocked off balance, the Bonannos were able to consolidate and recover from the disaster of L’Affaire Brasco.

  But that honeymoon was over. The news release that accompanied Massino’s indictment listed more murders. Vitale, investigators said, had set up the murder of Robert Perrino, a delivery supervisor at the New York Post, in 1992. After Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau began an investigation into the Bonanno family’s infiltration of the newspaper’s delivery department that investigators believed had become a mob fiefdom, Vitale panicked. The indictment charged that Vitale and others, fearing Perrino might cooperate with law enforcement, arranged for the newspaper supervisor’s death in 1992.

  Daniel Mongelli was charged with killing Louis Tuzzio in 1990. Tuzzio was a crime family associate whose death had already been charged in an earlier indictment against Robert Lino, Frank Lino’s cousin. Tuzzio was murdered as a favor to John Gotti, payback for a bizarre shooting stemming from the death of Everett Hatcher, a Drug Enforcement Administration agent, at the hands of aspiring Bonanno family member Gus Farace in 1989. Tuzzio didn’t die because Hatcher had been killed but rather, investigators said, because one of Gotti’s associates had been wounded during the killing of Farace. Gotti had to be appeased. The mob can police its own as payback for screw ups—Hatcher’s murder brought a lot of law enforcement heat on the mob—but it better be done cleanly.

  There were some other charges against Massino involving gambling in cafés in Queens. Joker Poker machines and baccarat games were profitable staples of the crime family along with loan-sharking, which Massino was also charged with. But loan-sharking and gambling charges against a mob boss were an old story. What really had Massino tied up was murder. While more killings would be laid at Massino’s feet in the months to come, prosecutors only needed one—the Napolitano hit—to make the case that Massino should not be given bail.

  “It has taken over two decades to get the goods on Joe Massino for the murder of ‘Sonny Black’ Napolitano, but justice delayed is not always justice denied,” said Kevin Donovan, the top FBI boss for New York City, to reporters.

  Donovan referred in passing to a pair of agents who had doggedly tracked Massino for years. But he didn’t mention their names. Sallet and McCaffrey didn’t seek adulation and preferred to keep a low profile.

  Massino’s youngest daughter, Joanne, had walked her own daughter to the nearby parochial school on the morning of January 9 as she always did. The child had often accompanied both her mother and grandfather on shopping trips to Cross Bay Boulevard in Howard Beach, Queens, near Kennedy International Airport. Joanne had felt the peering eyes of the FBI and, like her father, had spotted the numerous cars that seemed to be following them.

  It was a little after 8:00 A.M. when Joanne came back to her home on Eighty-fourth Street in Howard Beach. Both she and her eldest sister, Adeline, had decided to stay close by their parents after each girl got married, so it was almost a daily ritual that the Massino girls saw their parents. (A middle sister had moved out of state.) Now that Joanne was divorced, she remained in the home she once shared with her ex-husband, who had moved to Long Island. As soon as she returned from escorting her daughter to school, Joanne spotted her mother in front of her own home a few doors away. The older woman didn’t say a word, she just gestured.

  “Come here, quick, I have something to tell you about your father and it isn’t good,” Josephine Massino seemed to say with an urgent wave of her hand toward her daughter, who knew in an instant that there was trouble.

  Adeline, who lived about four blocks north of her parents, was at the Dunkin’ Donuts store on Cross Bay Boulevard, the very same place the FBI agents would visit to pick up snacks for the long surveillances of her father. It was the morning ritual of this particular Howard Beach Little League mom to get her cup of coffee there and then visit her folks.

  Though Joanne had the dark Neapolitan eyes of her father, Adeline took after her mother, right down to the auburn tint of the hair (which if truth be told, they both had done at the same beauty salon on the boulevard). Walking with her embossed coffee cup through the front door of her parents’ house, Adeline was oblivious to the tumult that had begun to envelope her family. She would find out about it soon enough.

  CHAPTER 2
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br />   Amici

  When Roslynn R. Mauskopf, the federal prosecutor, told the news reporters that La Cosa Nostra got its start in the borough of Brooklyn, she really was telling the truth. But she may not have realized all the historical details. There were a few twists and turns before Brooklyn became the Mafia’s American holy land.

  The roots of Italian organized crime in New York City were tied closely to the great waves of immigration in the early part of the twentieth century. To understand what Joseph Massino inherited nearly 100 years later, one has to look at those early days, when the mob was evolving and its values were being adapted to life in America. The story of what became the Bonanno crime family was like some long, medieval tapestry, a continuing saga interwoven with the life stories of many of the Mafia’s key personalities and bloody events.

  By the turn of the twentieth century and continuing into the years immediately after World War I, Italians were among the largest group of immigrants coming to the United States. It was a largely economic immigration to be sure, pulling Italians from the economically depressed southern areas of Italy, the mezzogiorno region composed of Naples, Calabria, and Sicily. While Italians settled in many cities, New York was a main attraction. It became a cliché image, the mass of immigrants dressed in Old World-style garb, gazing in awe at the Statute of Liberty as the crowded passenger liners sailed into New York harbor and made their way to Ellis Island, the first point of entry into the United States. Earlier immigrants who settled in the five boroughs of New York served as the seed for the later arrival of amici, relatives and friends from the same villages and towns in southern Italy.