King of the Godfathers

by Anthony Destefano

  Aside from an unthinkable breach of FBI security or dumb slip up, there was no way Ruggiero could have known that Brasco was really undercover FBI agent Joseph Pistone. So when Ruggiero introduced Pistone to Napolitano, the FBI was in the process of tightening the noose on the Bonanno captain. The agency was doing that in ways Pistone didn’t even know about. Other agents in the FBI had planted listening devices in a number of Bonanno social clubs and among those targeted was the Motion Lounge, the nondescript meeting place at 120 Graham Avenue where Napolitano held court. Not that Massino’s haunts escaped such surveillance since a bugging device was also placed in his J&S Cake Social Club business in Maspeth on Fifty-eighth Road.

  As fate would have it, Napolitano gave Ruggiero the option of being under Joe Massino, but Ruggiero decided to stay with Napolitano. It was a fateful choice because had Ruggiero chosen to go with the beefy guy in Maspeth, Massino’s fortunes might have turned out much differently. But at least in the early days of 1980, Napolitano had done well with Pistone. The undercover agent had been able to steer Napolitano into an arrangement with Florida’s crime boss Santos Trafficante. It was a deal that gave Napolitano a great deal of clout and put the Bonanno family into a nightclub in Florida known as the King’s Court Bottle Club. It was actually an undercover business being run by Pistone’s fellow agents in the Miami and Tampa offices of the FBI. Not only was the FBI watching Napolitano’s deals in New York but also had him covered in Florida.

  With Rastelli in prison, the Commission appointed an acting street boss, Salvatore “Sally Fruits” Ferrugia, to run things on a day-to-day basis. Of course, Napolitano was flying high, making connections with Trafficante. But Salvatore Vitale and others believed it was Massino who was the real power on the street in the crime family, the guy with the resources to make things happen. It soon became clear on the street that Napolitano and Massino were going through their own dance for power in the crime family.

  “Sonny and Joey are feuding,” Ruggiero told Pistone at one point, “because Sonny’s got more power. So Joey’s got an unlisted telephone number now. He ain’t talking to anybody because of this feud with Sonny.”

  Just who had more power in the family depended on who you talked to. Massino could have just as easily taken an unlisted telephone number thinking it would deter surveillance. No matter what kind of power plays Massino and Napolitano were carrying on with each other, there was a more serious political undercurrent in the family, one that even the demise of Galante had not resolved. While Rastelli was considered to be the boss of the family, some of his captains began to view him as ineffective. His continued incarceration had denied the family a full-time boss and instead left it to the ministration of a caretaker, Ferrugia, who was no match for the dominant personalities of Massino and Napolitano. Eventually, Nicholas Marangello, the family underboss, and Steven Cannone, the consiglieri, took over as a committee running things while Rastelli was away.

  Three captains in particular became disenchanted with this leadership, and they began to make noise. It was the kind of stuff Massino got wind of. One day in his social club near Rust Street Massino confided to Vitale the troubling news that the three capos—Philip Giaccone, Alphonse “Sonny Red” Indelicato, and Dominick “Big Trin” Trinchera—were actually plotting to take over the entire Bonanno operation.

  “Rastelli is a bum,” was what the three captains had been saying about the incarcerated boss to justify their actions.

  Vitale, who was only a crime family associate at that point in the early 1980s, had met Giaccone, who was known by the moniker “Phil Lucky.” In the early days, Giaccone had actually been Massino’s captain before the man from Maspeth won his promotion after Galante’s death. Trinchera was another obese mobster who was close to 300 pounds. Indelicato’s son, Anthony Bruno Indelicato, had been one of the three men suspected of doing the actual shooting of Galante in 1979.

  Massino, Vitale told investigators years later, didn’t tell him much about the plotting but did say that the Commission had intervened when the rumors became rife and decreed that there should be no bloodshed. The other Mafia families decided that everybody should wait for Rastelli to get out of jail and then work out the problem.

  “Work it out among yourselves, no gun play,” was how Vitale characterized the Commission’s dictate.

  That seemed to hold things in check for a while. Apart from Massino and Napolitano, the incarcerated Rastelli could count on the support of Cannone and Ferrugia. On the other side, the three captains were backed by the top Sicilian Cesare Bonventre and his Zip associates from Knickerbocker Avenue. With the Sicilians in their corner, the three captains were not to be trifled with, particularly since they had the support of Vincent “the Chin” Gigante, the Genovese family boss and his powerful Westside contingent. Had the Sicilians had their way, they could have pushed Salvatore Catalano, the heroin dealer, as a candidate for boss. In fact, for about a week Catalano was pushed forward as the boss. Catalano had been a made member of the Sicilian Mafia; therefore, under the arcane code of the American Mafia he could not become a boss in the United States: “You were either all Italy or all United States” as one mafioso put it. It also didn’t help Catalano that his command of English was not that good.

  Well wired with his own informants in the other crime families, Massino picked up rumors that the peace would not hold. Police later learned that a Colombo crime family member—Carmine Franzese, who had a close personal relationship with Massino—passed along the tip that Giaccone, Trinchera, and Indelicato were stocking up on automatic weapons to carry out a putsch against Rastelli and his supporters. Because the other side was loading up, the Rastelli faction had to do something. The Sicilians in particular had a reputation for being bloodthirsty and disloyal, factors that made them potent adversaries. A preemptive strike was needed.

  As Vitale later told investigators, Massino turned to his old friend on the Commission, Gambino boss Paul Castellano, as well as Carmine Persico, head of the Colombo crime family. Their advice to Massino was simple and straightforward: Do what you have to do to protect yourselves. When Vitale heard that from Massino, he fully understood what the message from the Commission had been: Kill the three capos. That things had come to this point had troubled Massino, who believed, according to Vitale, that weakness on the part of Marangello and Cannone had allowed the three captains to think they could flout the crime family’s administration.

  The thing about Mafia social clubs in New York City was that it was usually a safe bet that they would always have something going on. The clubs were thrones for the powerful and those who sought an audience with the kings of La Cosa Nostra. The clubs were also venues for planning, meeting, or just simply talking over a cup of espresso. Police and federal agents got into a habit of watching the comings and goings at the clubs much like Kremlinologists studied the lineup of Moscow’s May Day parades for signs of where the power lay in the Soviet Union to discern who was up and who was down in the mob.

  In Maspeth in 1981, any FBI agent worth his or her salt knew that Joseph Massino held court at the J&S Cake Social Club on Fifty-eighth Road. If any agent had no particular assignment but wanted to check out the boys in Massino’s orbit on a particular day, a swing by J&S Cake wasn’t a bad way to spend the time. You never knew what you would find.

  It was at about 5:05 P.M. on May 5, 1981, that Special Agent Vincent Savadel decided to make a run by the Massino club in his government-issued sedan. He had already swung by another Massino hangout at 58–14 Fifty-eighth Avenue and jotted down one license plate when he went around the block to Fifty-eighth Road. Just as Savadel drove by, he spotted Massino coming out of the two-story building in the company of what he later reported were “several white men.”

  The body language of Massino and his associates seemed to convey that they were going someplace, Savadel thought. The agent drove a short distance to the corner on Rust Street and, figuring the Massino crowd was going to drive away, waited in his car.


  It wasn’t a long wait. A brown Cadillac came out from Fifty-eighth Road and made a right turn, northbound, on Rust Street. As the car passed him, Savadel noticed that there were at least four people inside. It was a car that had been outside Massino’s social club.

  Moments later a dark red, almost maroon-colored, Buick also came out from Fifty-eighth Road and made the same turn, following the Cadillac. As the car passed Savadel’s parked FBI vehicle, the driver looked at the government agent. Savadel’s and the driver’s eyes locked on each other. The driver momentarily gazed at Savadel with a perceptive lingering glance that signaled recognition. Savadel also knew who he was looking at: Joseph Massino.

  Making a U-turn, Savadel followed both cars north on Rust. Massino seemed to be looking in his rearview and sideview mirrors, checking out the FBI car. The two cars accelerated and then Massino’s vehicle pulled on to the wrong side of the two-way street until he was next to the Cadillac. Savadel noticed Massino gesturing with his hands and talking. Then Massino gunned his accelerator and took the lead, with the Cadillac following.

  Traveling fast on the back streets, Massino’s car disappeared from sight, leaving Savadel to follow the brown Cadillac as it entered the Long Island Expressway going eastbound. The Cadillac quickly exited on to Maurice Avenue, leaving Savadel to continue eastbound on the expressway. As he did so, he glanced at the Cadillac. The men inside the vehicle looked at him as well.

  Savadel couldn’t follow the Cadillac because of traffic. He had also lost Massino’s vehicle in the high-speed drive from Rust Street. The agent had no idea where the men were all going that evening when they launched into their sprint with the cars. Still, the agent remembered what happened. There was no telling when the car chase might become important.

  After peeling off from the car chase, Savadel called the Bonanno investigators at the FBI operational center that was located not too far away in Rego Park. He related what he had just seen, likening Massino and company’s driving antics to a “fire drill.” What did it mean? Nobody in the office knew for sure. Instinctively, Special Agent Charles Rooney, who was working one aspect of the Bonanno crime family involved in major international heroin deals, scribbled down what Savadel had reported on a small Post-It note and stuck it on a chart in the office. You never know when all those gyrations with cars might mean something, he thought.

  It was also on May 5, 1981, that Donna Trinchera spoke with her husband just as he left the couple’s Brooklyn house. There was a meeting he said and he was going to it. The thin, blond woman didn’t question her spouse too much. It was a meeting, that’s all, he said. She expected him to be home at some point.

  In fact, it was the third such meeting Trinchera and his two friends had gone to in recent weeks. One had been at the Ferncliffe Manor and the second at the Embassy Terrace at Avenue U and East Second Street in Brooklyn. Nothing had been resolved at either sitdown. The third meeting of the Bonanno crime family administration was set for the early evening hour at a social club in Brooklyn on Thirteenth Avenue. Since it was a conclave of the upper echelon of the crime family, neither Trinchera nor the two men he arrived with, Philip Giaccone and Alphonse Indelicato, were armed. The rules were that an administration meeting meant that no one packed a weapon, the better to avoid hotheaded reactions that might get out of hand.

  But the three captains had always suspected that a meeting could be a death trap, so they took precautions. The night before the Embassy Terrace meeting the three captains, plus Alphonse Indelicato’s son Bruno, stockpiled some guns at a bar owned by Frank Lino, an acting Bonanno captain, about two blocks away. In case the three captains were killed, Lino and Bruno Indelicato were told to retaliate and kill as many of the opposition as possible.

  Unarmed, the three Bonanno captains walked to the building for the third meeting. They were followed by Lino. Nobody in that little group seemed to notice a fair-haired young man from Maspeth sitting in a car a block away with a walkie-talkie. If they had, it wouldn’t have seemed so strange since Duane Leisenheimer was always around Joseph Massino, who had every right to be at an administration meeting. Trinchera rang the doorbell.

  Inside, the sound of the bell let the men who were waiting know the visitors had arrived. Four of them were standing in a closet, and when they heard the bell they pulled ski masks over their heads. The closet door was open just enough so that those inside could see Trinchera walk in first to the big meeting room. He was followed by Giaccone. Then came Indelicato. He was the key. When the men saw Indelicato come into the room, they knew what they had to do. They had been told earlier that if Indelicato didn’t show up it would be a regular meeting in the room. If he did show up, well, that would be that.

  The three men, plus Lino, had come to the meeting to take a third stab to see if the bad blood and tension with their family could somehow be lessened. Everybody in their world knew that the Bonanno family had a power struggle so the meeting was called to iron things out. Joseph Massino had wanted it and the three captains who had arrived knew that he was a formidable power, a man with the clout to call everybody together. They, too, wanted to talk. Lino would be their witness.

  The three late arrivals saw in the big room those who were followers of Massino and the other powerful captain Sonny Black Napolitano. Naturally, Massino was there. So was Joseph Zicarelli from New Jersey, known as “Bayonne Joe,” and Nicola DiStefano, whose fights of yesteryear had earned him the sobriquet of “Nick the Battler.” There was also a Sicilian gangster named Antonio Giordano, as were several other members of the crime family high echelon. Scanning the small crowd, the three captains would have noticed, perhaps oddly, that Napolitano wasn’t there.

  Gerlando “George” Sciascia spotted Indelicato in the crowd and ran the fingers of one hand through his hair. For the others in the closet that was the prearranged signal that meant they could start.

  The four men in masks burst from the closet. One had a Tommy gun, another a shotgun, and two carried pistols. Two of them ran to guard the exit door. Vito Rizzutto, turned to the three captains.

  “Don’t anybody move, this is a holdup,” said Rizzutto.

  Seeing the masks and the guns, Trinchera, Indelicato, Giaccone, and Lino reacted. They knew at that instant that their worst suspicions had been realized. They had been lured into a trap. Their survival instincts kicked in with a suddenness that surprised some in the room. Trinchera made guttural noise and charged the assailants.

  Unarmed and unassuming, the three luckless men had nowhere to turn. Rizzutto and Sciascia opened up with a shotgun and pistol. Trinchera lost part of his abdomen in one blast. Indelicato tried to run out the exit but fell just short of the door when another shotgun blast hit him. Sciascia came over, pulled out a pistol, and shot him one more time in the left side of the head. Giaccone was lying dead in the big room.

  Lino, the last man to enter the killing zone, turned around when the shooting started and in the confusion of those early seconds ran right past the two men who were supposed to seal off the exit. There was no stopping him. He moved so fast there was no use trying to follow him.

  The shooting was over in seconds. There was blood and viscera all over the big room. Besides the gunners, the only one left standing in the middle of the chaotic scene was the big man himself, Joseph Massino.

  Early the next morning, May 6, 1981, FBI agent Charles Rooney returned to his office on Queens Boulevard in Rego Park. Many of the agency’s organized crime squads worked out of the modern steel and glass building. It was a convenient location for them because so many of the targets of investigations lived and worked in Queens, Brooklyn, and Long Island. The location provided the agents with easy highway access to those areas. The office also housed several pen registers, devices that were able to note whenever a particular telephone was called or was being used to place a call. Pen registers were not wiretaps, so the FBI didn’t need a warrant to tie them into a particular telephone number through the telephone companies.

 
Rooney was in his office by 8:00 A.M. All of a sudden, the pen registers started to click on, sounding like a bunch of electronic crickets. Then they started sounding like a bunch of adding machines as they quickly typed out on paper the telephone numbers that each of the monitored lines was calling. Since each machine had been linked to a particular telephone number in the Bonanno investigation, it was clear that the targets in the case were busy calling each other.

  But what were they calling each other about? Rooney and his fellow agents could only watch in amazement as the machines recorded the various telephones making and receiving calls.

  One of the machines registered calls on the telephone at Massino’s J&S Cake Social Club. But without listening into the call the FBI could only guess what Massino and the other investigative targets were talking about. For all they knew, he might be taking a lot of orders for ham sandwiches. But Rooney and the others surmised it was something much bigger than that to make the pen registers so hot.

  The pen registers were one of three strange clues Rooney and the other FBI agents noticed over the next three days. Another tantalizing lead for Rooney came from Pistone, who telephoned his fellow agents with the information that Benjamin Ruggiero, having dropped out of sight for a few days, had called him to say “everything is fine, we are winners.” Then Rooney learned that an associate of the Bonanno family, Antonio Giordano, had been checked into Coney Island Hospital with a bullet wound. To Rooney, the fact that Giordano, a resident of Bushwick, in northern Brooklyn, would take himself to a hospital in the southern part of Brooklyn seemed odd. An FBI agent visited Giordano, who was suffering from paralysis after being shot in the back. The wounded man insisted to the agent he was shot in a traffic altercation. It was a story he stuck with.

  Though seemingly disparate incidents—the frenzy of activity on the pen registers, Ruggiero’s comment to Pistone, and the shooting of Giordano—they appeared more than just coincidental to Rooney and his FBI colleagues on Queens Boulevard. Something clearly had happened in the Bonanno crime family. But what?