King of the Godfathers

by Anthony Destefano

  James Walden, a prosecutor in the Brooklyn U.S. Attorney’s Office, secured a number of indictments against Amato, Spero, and their associates. Both Spero and Amato had been spotted by FBI agents meeting in Queens with Massino. Years later, Walden said revenues from drug dealing might have gotten as high up the crime family chain as Spero. He thought it plausible that Massino, who had warned Frank Lino about drug dealing, may have taken a cut of the money as tribute, even if he knew it was narcotics cash.

  Though convicted of racketeering, Spero decided not to cooperate with the government, so he never implicated Massino. It might have been possible to use information from the Spero-Amato prosecutions to eventually build a case against Massino. But some prosecutors knowledgeable about those investigations said that could have taken years of constant surveillance, wiretaps, and other time-consuming methods. In the meantime, the Bonanno family would have been run by a leadership that remained intact.

  Instead, Stubing sat down with Sallet and McCaffrey and gave them a history of the Bonanno family and its main players. The supervisor had one clear direction for his young agents: Don’t focus immediately on the big boss; instead, find the people around him. Find the weak links. It was the time-honored domino theory of investigation: get one important criminal to cooperate and that might lead up the food chain to the kingpin.

  In terms of Massino, Stubing told his agents, the ultimate key would be his brother-in-law, Salvatore Vitale, the crime family underboss. Since he had been initiated into the Mafia in the 1980s, Vitale had been a close confidante of Massino and his eyes and ears while in prison. It was a relationship made more complex by the fact that Vitale had essentially been raised by Massino’s wife, Josephine. Later, it was Vitale who served as a surrogate father to Massino’s daughters in the crime boss’s absence. Vitale was the “swing man” in the Bonanno family regarding Massino.

  “I told Jeff and Kim that if you can’t get one without the other, you are going to lose,” recalled Stubing.

  Fortified by Stubing’s lectures on the crime family, Sallet and McCaffrey contacted Assistant U.S. Attorney Ruth Nordenbrook over at the federal prosecutors’ offices in Brooklyn. With wide-rimmed glasses, black outfits, and black hair, which she often wore pulled back, Nordenbrook looked as much like a college literature professor as she did a federal prosecutor. She had joined the office in the late 1970s and earned her early mark doing some of the first credit card fraud cases. By the 1990s, she had picked up a number of organized crime cases that found her prosecuting several Bonanno family members. One of them was Anthony Graziano, a Bonanno captain who plead guilty to tax crimes.

  But what really earned Nordenbrook some notoriety was her philosophy that the wives of mafiosi shouldn’t be immune from prosecution if they took part in crimes, with or without their husbands. It had been something of an unwritten rule that the wives were off limits to prosecutors, that their spouses would take the fall. But Nordenbrook didn’t like playing by that mob rule and chafed when some of her colleagues in law enforcement wanted to. She lived up to her ideals by prosecuting Marie Attanasio, the wife of Louis “Ha Ha” Attanasio, for tax fraud in 1984, a case that ended with an acquittal. Years later, she prosecuted loan shark John Zancocchio and later went after his wife, Lana, the daughter of Anthony Graziano, getting her convicted for tax evasion.

  With Nordenbrook’s insights as guidance, Sallet and McCaffrey started the FBI part of the investigation into the finances of the Bonanno administration. Armed with subpoena power through Nordenbrook’s role as investigating prosecutor, Sallet and McCaffrey started looking at the particular finances of Massino and Vitale. Nordenbrook’s supervisor over at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Brooklyn was Mark Feldman, a career prosecutor who saw the value of a detailed financial probe and kept the two agents focused on their objective despite the desire of other investigators to focus on the murders in the crime family. Although they weren’t coming up with hard evidence of crimes being committed by the two brothers-in-law, the agents did start to notice some intriguing relationships.

  One of the things that jumped out was that Josephine Massino was discovered to have an interest in a number of parking lots in Manhattan. Though she had been a housewife for most of her life, Josephine Massino had business relationships with her brother, Salvatore; his wife, Diana; Loretta Castelli, who was the wife of crime captain Richard Cantarella; and others. The agents surmised that Massino might be the real power behind his wife’s presence in those partnerships, but on the face of it there didn’t appear to be anything wrong with the finances of those companies.

  But after plowing through myriad financial records, Sallet and McCaffrey found a new name that kept appearing again and again as the recipient of a number of checks. It was the name of Barry Weinberg, a Queens man who had an interest in a number of parking ventures around the city. Checks uncovered by the agents showed a number of payments, sometimes for as much as $16,666, going to Weinberg.

  Who was Barry Weinberg? He was a nervous, stoop-shouldered, and chain-smoking entrepreneur. Surveillance had revealed that Weinberg, who lived in Queens, would often meet with Richard Cantarella in Little Italy at restaurants like the Dixie Rose Café and DaNico. Their relationship at that point was not clear. But in reviewing Weinberg’s finances with the Internal Revenue Service, Sallet and McCaffrey discovered evidence that he was involved in tax evasion—lots of it. One official said that he had income of $14 million for several years, money that he appeared to evade paying taxes on in grand scale. On January 9, 2001, Weinberg was arrested and brought by the agents to a small office in downtown Manhattan. After puffing his way through innumerable cigarettes, Weinberg quickly decided that the agents had a very strong case against him. So he did what many would do. He decided to cooperate with the FBI. He also went one step further: he also agreed to wear a recording device.

  Weinberg soon made recordings of a number of Bonanno family members and associates. His list of targets was pretty impressive: Frank Coppa, Richard Cantarella, and his son Paul, as well as Joseph “Mouk” D’Amico. Not everyone recorded on over eighty tapes made by Weinberg was caught committing a crime. But Coppa, an old friend of Massino’s, and Richard Cantarella, the tapes showed, were milking Weinberg for cash in what appeared to be an extortion scheme.

  Coppa, who had traveled with Massino and his wife to Europe, was a portly man who had a head for business. Starting out in his working life as a grocery clerk, he went on to jobs in the waterfront and trucking. At the age of nineteen, he had his first arrest for the attempted burglary of a clothing store. He had been inducted into the Mafia in 1977 at a ceremony presided over by Carmine Galante. Investigators believed that had he led a law-abiding life, Coppa could have made a fortune legitimately. Instead, he became entangled in a number of frauds over the years, including some involving the stock market. He had blood on his hands as well, having been present the night Sonny Black Napolitano was killed.

  Coppa was also the target of an assassination attempt in the late 1970s when a bomb detonated in his vehicle outside a Bagel Nosh store. Coppa believed the culprit was a mobster by the name of Tony Coglitore, who had been swindled out of about $8,000 by Coppa. Commercial arbitration in Mafia stock scams aren’t the normal way such disputes are settled. After Coppa, who was then a Bonanno soldier, was injured in the explosion, he spoke with his captain, Matteo Valvo, who said he could seek retaliation. Coppa later said he had Gambino soldier Eddie Lino and another man try to kill Coglitore.

  Weinberg continued to tape Coppa and the others for several months. Nordenbrook and her two agents believed there was enough evidence to support both an extortion charge and a charge of money laundering against Cantarella. As they also focused on Salvatore Vitale’s finances, they came up with leads that showed that he had infiltrated the branch of a Long Island bank. Vitale had moved from Queens in the 1990s and settled with his wife in the town of Dix Hills, not far from the Farmingdale office of King Caterers, the business where he had a no-sh
ow job with Massino. Vitale targeted the branch of a local bank but had been sloppy in his scam, drawing the attention of the FBI and setting himself up for an indictment.

  However, everything Sallet and McCaffrey were working on suddenly took a backseat beginning on the morning of September 11, 2001. Both agents were at the federal courthouse in Foley Square in downtown Manhattan as case agents for a trial when just blocks away American Airlines Flight 11 plowed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center.

  The terrorist attacks that day brought about the mobilization of U.S. law enforcement. The FBI and other federal agencies dragooned every available person to assist in the recovery at ground zero. Joining scores of other investigators in the Hades-like setting left by the destruction of the Twin Towers, Sallet and McCaffrey helped scour the site for two days searching for the black boxes of the two airlines used by the terrorists.

  With September 11, the priorities of law enforcement at every level shifted. Gone were the old assignments. New York City put cops on heightened security duty at bridges, tunnels, airports, and other public venues, even baseball parks. Prosecution of quality of life crimes like prostitution fell by the wayside as police struggled to meet the demands of protecting the city. At the FBI, agents were quickly shifted into counter-terrorism investigations and away from traditional areas like organized crime. After rummaging through ground zero, Sallet was reassigned to Washington, D.C., where he was part of a team of agents that spent six months probing the finances of the hijackers.

  McCaffrey briefly worked on the September 11 investigation but was kept at Twenty-six Federal Plaza where, despite the massive deployment of agents on terrorism cases, she kept the Bonanno crime family investigation alive. She would have continued to have Weinberg prowling the streets of Little Italy with his body wire, but there were signs that the nervous informant was wearing out his welcome with the mob. Cantarella seemed suspicious of the businessman and even said as much to Vitale, who offered help if Cantarella wanted to kill Weinberg. The worst thing that happened was that Cantarella told Weinberg not to come around the various restaurants in Little Italy where they had dined. That was enough to have McCaffrey, Stubing, and Sallet, who was still in touch with the Bonanno investigation while working on the terrorism probe, decide to pull Weinberg from the street in December 2001.

  But as one avenue of investigation shut down another opened up. The Weinberg tapes and other evidence indicated that Massino and Cantarella were involved in crimes and pointed to a man named Agostino Scozzari as a possible source of information. Scozzari was a German businessman of Italian ethnicity who had emigrated after he had made a lot of money in Europe in the scaffolding business. Because of his Italian heritage, Scozzari gravitated to the Little Italy area of Manhattan and opened up a restaurant. In the close environs of Mulberry Street, Scozzari became associated with Cantarella. Scozzari was never arrested, but Sallet and McCaffrey persuaded him to cooperate in their investigation.

  Scozzari’s incentive to cooperate would never be revealed. Regardless, in December 2001 Scozzari started wearing a recording device and made over twenty tapes of talks he had with Cantarella. The recordings indicated that Cantarella had introduced Scozzari to Massino, telling the informant it was Massino, who was called “Joe” on the tape, who helped him become a Mafia member in the early 1990s.

  Cantarella was also overheard on tape complaining to Scozzari about the newspaper publicity Massino had received after the death in June 2002 of Gambino boss John Gotti from cancer. That kind of publicity, which painted Massino as being the big Mafia boss in town, could only draw law enforcement attention for Massino, he said.

  “What the paper is saying is that Joe is the big guy now,” Cantarella said. “That’s not good. You know what I mean? That’s not good. That’s not good.”

  Cantarella, who went by the moniker of “Shellack Head” because of his high-coiffed, slick hairstyle, was facing some serious problems beyond his financial picture. He and some others in the crime family and their relatives held no-show jobs at the New York Post in the delivery and distribution area. Among them was Al Embarrato, Cantarella’s uncle, a Post delivery foreman and an old mobster who was seen by the FBI over the years hanging out at the Toyland Social Club and other places frequented by the crime family. The mobsters ran loan-sharking and other rackets out of the Post facility on South Street in lower Manhattan.

  By 1992, Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau got a state grand jury to indict Cantarella, the eighty-two-year-old Embarrato, and several others, including the Post’s delivery supervisor Robert Perrino. Two Post executives admitted to Morgenthau’s staff during the course of the probe that they had a role in fraudulently inflating daily circulation figures by about 50,000 phantom copies to get more money from advertisers. Both executives plead guilty to labor law violations in exchange for helping prosecutors with the case. In 1994, Cantarella pled guilty in the state case.

  During their probe, state investigators looked for Perrino, a relative of imprisoned Bonanno consiglieri Nicholas Marangello, when they raided his home with a search warrant. But while they found about $100,000 in cash and several weapons, Perrino was missing.

  Nordenbrook and the agents secured a search warrant for Cantarella’s home and in August 2002 took boxes of financial records from his home in Staten Island. The materials showed that Cantarella and his family, as well as Josephine Massino and her brother, Salvatore Vitale, were involved in parking lot ventures. It was Cantarella’s wife, Loretta Castelli, who sometimes had a 50 percent interest in the businesses, although prosecutors believed she simply served as her husband’s nominee. The search also revealed a safe containing a list of Cantarella’s crew members. His telephone address book was also taken by FBI agents and not surprisingly it was found to contain the names and numbers of Massino and his wife, Josephine, as well as Vitale, who was listed as “Sal Handsome.”

  In October 2002, Nordenbrook, who was now partnered with Assistant U.S. Attorney Greg Andres in the Bonanno investigation, secured indictments of Coppa, Cantarella, his wife, and thirty-one-year-old son Paul, as well as several other Bonanno family members and associates. Among them was Anthony Graziano, the foul-tempered captain the late Gerlando Sciascia thought was a druggie and who was charged with racketeering. It was the opening salvo of the probe into the financial hierarchy of the crime family.

  The extortion charges were serious enough, but Cantarella faced a worse problem. The grand jury had accused him of taking part in the murder of Post delivery supervisor Robert Perrino. A suspect in the labor racketeering probe at the newspaper carried out by Morgenthau’s office, Perrino disappeared on the night of May 5, 1992, after leaving the home of his daughter on Long Island. His body had never been found. Murder in aid of racketeering carried a penalty of life in prison without parole for Cantarella should he go to trial and be convicted.

  The charges also put Coppa in a deep predicament. His various Wall Street scams had earned him a conviction for stock fraud and in July 2002 he was serving a stiff seven-year prison term. The October 2002 charges of extortion involved the beleaguered Weinberg and could earn Coppa another several years, since he would be a repeat offender with a big criminal history. Such extra time would be added to what he was already serving on the stock swindle. On top of that, he faced a fine of $1 million, which would have been on top of the $5 million he had to pay back to his Wall Street victims.

  Frank Coppa had some serious thinking to do. At the age of sixty-one and suffering from a heart condition, he did not like prison. In fact, in 1992 when he had done another stint in jail, he had cried about doing time because, as he later said, “I had left my family.” He may have been a con man and thief for most of his life, but Coppa didn’t like to pay the price if his landlord was the Bureau of Prisons.

  But caught Coppa was, and he knew it. There was evidence uncovered by Sallet and McCaffrey that he had told Weinberg that only he, Coppa, could be his broker for the parking lot deals. H
e had taken the oath of omerta in front of Carmine Galante and he knew that betrayal of the code of silence meant death. Well, it could mean death if the mob ever got to you. Coppa knew that the federal government had a witness protection program. He also knew that deals could be made, even if you were a killer like Sammy “the Bull” Gravano, who claimed to have helped kill nineteen people but later got out of prison in less than five years after helping convict John Gotti. Like Gravano, a lot of mafiosi turned their backs on omerta and salvaged what they could of their lives.

  Coppa didn’t want to die in prison. He also wanted to be close to his wife and family. The portly mobster made his own calculation. Omerta may have worked for Joseph Bonanno and the older Sicilians, but nobody believed in that anymore. Coppa, the man with a head for numbers and betrayal, decided his future wasn’t with La Cosa Nostra. It certainly wasn’t with Joe Massino. Now, life was all about self-preservation and family of a different sort.

  It took about two weeks for Coppa to contact his attorney to tell prosecutors he wanted to make a deal. The first step was a “proffer,” a session in which Coppa told the FBI what he knew. Proffer sessions are common in criminal cases. They afford prosecutors a chance to see what information a potential informant really has while the informant is not in danger of being prosecuted for what is mentioned in the session, assuming he is truthful.

  In Coppa’s case, he talked for ten days straight. But because Nordenbrook had prosecuted some Mafia women and even once threatened to prosecute his sister, Coppa didn’t want her around to hear what he had to say.

  “I was told he hated me because I did the women,” Nordenbrook later recalled. Nordenbrook protested about the way Coppa was trying to dictate the terms of his proffer session. But at least one FBI official saw no harm in playing up to Coppa’s sense of Mafia ethics. Nordenbrook felt she didn’t have to apologize for her pursuit of Mafia wives and other women. In her view, it was unacceptable that mafiosi could try to shelter their income and ill-gotten gains with their women. But she also realized that no one of Coppa’s stature in the Bonanno crime family had ever turned into a cooperating witness before. So Nordenbrook decided not to make a big stink and possibly spoil Coppa’s decision to flip. She stayed away from his proffer sessions.