King of the Godfathers

by Anthony Destefano

  “Yes, he should take one now,” said Azrack.

  Mob bosses instill fear in many, but age also makes them prime candidates for the geriatric ward. Amid the whispers of the lawyers and the bustle of the courtroom crowd, the only other sound was the rattle of the Glucophage pills, sounding like candy Chiclets, as Massino dispensed his dosage from a plastic bottle.

  CHAPTER 18

  All in the Family

  She just had to know.

  The life Joseph Massino had lived for most of his forty-year marriage couldn’t have been a secret to his wife, Josephine. There were just too many arrests, too much time spent away in prison, too many newspaper headlines, too many solicitous dropoffs of cash at the house by men who were deferential to him for Josephine to think that Joseph was any candidate for sainthood.

  It would be easy to condemn wives like Josephine Massino for staying with a mafioso husband and not leaving him and renouncing his way of life. But she was a woman of many deeply seated loyalties, including the Sicilian quality of fealty to family and the Catholic tradition that marriage was to last no matter what. Her brother, Salvatore Vitale, had also become part of the Life, as the gangs lifestyle was called, and was another psychological involvement that complicated things. Then again, her husband had done pretty good in his lines of work, legal and illegal. He had provided.

  So, on the morning of January 9, 2003, at the house on Eighty-fourth Street in Howard Beach, Josephine Massino told her daughters what they had come to expect and dread for many months. Their father was arrested. It was that simple. They could wait to see if by some long shot he would make bail that day. Of course, he wouldn’t.

  So Josephine Massino had to face things alone again. Counting Joseph Massino’s time in prison and his years on the lam in Pennsylvania, his wife had been without a spouse in the house for about ten years. Some people, especially the wives of those killed in Bonanno family bloodbaths, could care less about her loneliness. At least she knew where her husband was. Some of the crime family victims were lying in unmarked graves, dissolved by lye, in places no one remembered.

  Things promised to get worse for Massino’s wife. The federal government had a potent tool with the racketeering law because it could not only prosecute mafiosi but also go after their assets. The theory behind the law of “forfeiture,” as the government grab bag was called, was that criminals shouldn’t be able to profit from their crimes. Usually, in big mob cases prosecutors would list assets of a defendant they believed were the wages of crimes and that a criminal had no right to keep. In Massino’s case, the government wanted to seize not only the house he and Josephine had lived in for two decades but also his mother’s house in Maspeth and several properties held in Josephine’s name in Florida and New York, as well as her deceased parents’ house in Queens.

  Some of the buildings listed in the indictment were rental properties from which Josephine derived income. But prosecutors saw it as simply a way that Massino sheltered his assets, figuring that if he was prosecuted the government wouldn’t be able to take property held in his wife’s name. It didn’t matter. Greg Andres was going after any Massino buildings the FBI could find.

  For Joanne Massino, the indictment led not only to the jailing of her father but also of the man who had become a surrogate parent: uncle Sal Vitale. As in the case of her mother, the arrest for Joanne symbolized another episode of abandonment. It was compounded by the fact that Vitale, a man who had been a source of stability as she grew up as a teenager, was also gone now. Her older sister, Adeline, later said she was overwhelmed by the charges and simply couldn’t believe them. She sometimes chuckled about her naiveté. How could her father be at all of those Mafia meetings like the newspapers said? He traveled everywhere with his wife and even brought his grandchildren along.

  Joanne seemed wiser to ways of the Life. Joanne had been plugged into street talk in Howard Beach and knew that chubby Frank Coppa had turned into a government witness in late 2002. She even told her uncle, Sal Vitale, the news when she and her mother visited him while he was under house arrest for the Long Island case. It was the kind of news that made Josephine Massino and her daughters realize that it was just a matter of time before the FBI cars would prowl the neighborhood looking for Joseph Massino.

  There was a ritual at the federal Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn whenever a high-profile defendant was incarcerated. It was a parade of lawyers that was like a Sunset Park Mardi Gras. Massino, like New York’s major crime boss, was a good client to have because his case would draw news coverage and he could pay his fees. What more could a defense attorney ask for?

  As soon as Massino was brought into the jail facility, some of the big criminal defense attorneys trooped in to see him. It was basically an audition for lawyers, who told Massino why they might be the best person to handle his defense for the fees they required. The sessions were good for Massino because if nothing else they kept him out of his cell and allowed him to spend his time in the lawyer conference rooms having some human contact. If he was really lucky, the attorneys would have remembered to bring him candy and sweets from the jail house vending machines.

  Attorney David Breitbart was a known quality to Joseph Massino. For a short period of time before Massino’s 1987 trial, Breitbart actually represented him until a scheduling problem forced Massino to hire Sam Dawson. A former high school teacher, Breitbart had carved out his own niche as a defense attorney known for his skill at cross-examination. He started defending drug cases in the 1970s and among his more infamous clients was Leroy “Nicky” Barnes, the king of Harlem heroin. Breitbart had won a number of mistrials for Barnes until the drug dealer was finally convicted in 1978 and sentenced to life in federal prison.

  Breitbart’s creed was that all witnesses can be vulnerable on cross-examination and it is a defense attorney’s job to probe persistently to find the contradictions, inconsistencies, and embarrassing facts that would destroy the person’s credibility as a prosecution witness. Breitbart was short in stature but he exuded a self-confidence and was not easily rattled, qualities that could infuriate his opponents in the backbiting world of criminal defense work. He was also something of a moody loner in the gossipy legal fraternity of the city.

  Massino put out a call for Breitbart, who had actually put in a notice of appearance in the case. Once he got to the federal jail, however, Breitbart saw that a number of his legal brethren were on the list ahead of him to try to sign up the mob boss as a client.

  “You know, I put in a notice of appearance in this case,” Breitbart said to one of the other attorneys trying to entice Massino as a client.

  “We will see about that,” the lawyer responded.

  In the end, Breitbart had a major advantage. He had already represented John Cerasani in the 1982 Bonanno racketeering trial. That was a case in which the murder of the three captains was charged as a conspiracy. As a result, Breitbart was familiar with a lot of the institutional history of the Bonanno crime family as it came out in that trial. He was also familiar with the testimony and witnesses, factors that just might play into Massino’s trial. There was something else. Cerasani was the only defendant acquitted of all the charges at that trial. Massino put Breitbart on the case.

  Things were rough for the Massino family with the arrests. But more shocking news was lined up like a freight train, ready to run over Joseph Massino, his wife, and daughters.

  The day Massino was arrested, his wife heard from her doctor and discovered that she had uterine cancer. Surgery had to be performed. Terrific. There was no way Josephine Massino was going to tell her husband that, she recalled later. She wanted to keep as much of the bad news from him as she could. But there were other things that could never be kept quiet.

  In the past two years, things had not been good between Diana and Salvatore Vitale. His house arrest on the 2001 indictment allowed Vitale to go to work, but he had to be home by 6:00 P.M. Vitale was allowed to take his wife out to dinner three nights a week
. The probation officer just required Vitale to fax over the name of the restaurant. Still, the stress of home detention and the legal problems aggravated what was already a pressure-filled Vitale marriage. The couple had separated and there were all kinds of stories about Vitale’s girlfriend. When her husband got arrested in the bank case in 2001, Diana complained that Massino’s family didn’t show any concern and never visited, a remark that prompted a visit by Adeline and her husband.

  After the January 2003 arrest, Diana Vitale looked to Josephine Massino and her daughters for emotional support—and vice versa. Telephone calls became more frequent between the women. They now faced a common predicament with the two men in custody. At one point in late February, one of Vitale’s sons called up Josephine to simply say he loved her. She was deeply touched.

  A day later there was nothing.

  Joanne Massino remembered making some calls to her aunt Diana’s house on Long Island, and her messages got no response. It wasn’t just the Massino family phone calls that weren’t being returned. Other relatives and friends had tried as well. An elderly aunt quizzed her niece, Joanne.

  “What is going on? I haven’t heard from Diana,” the aunt said.

  On February 28, nearly two months after the Massino indictment, defense attorney John Mitchell checked his fax machine in his Manhattan law office. Mitchell, one of a cadre of well-known defense attorneys who specialized in organized crime cases, had been retained to represent Sal Vitale in the Bonanno case. Noticing a document in the receiving tray of the machine, Mitchell picked it up and read. The message said tersely that Vitale had a new lawyer, a fellow named Bradley Simon. The fax had actually come from Simon and he asked Mitchell to send over the Vitale case files and thanked him in advance for his cooperation.

  Defendants switch lawyers all the time. But Simon was among a group of attorneys who sometimes represented clients who had decided to help law enforcement after being arrested. Some defense attorneys viewed the actions of such “cooperating attorneys,” as one lawyer called them, as being unworthy of wearing the mantle of defense lawyer. But there was really nothing ethically wrong with the practice and defendants who went over to Team America, as the government was called, needed skilled legal help in negotiating deals and protecting their interests.

  The fact the Vitale had Simon as a lawyer was a clear indication to Mitchell that his former client had decided to cooperate. This was the worst possible news for Massino because while Frank Coppa and Richard Cantarella, the other turncoats, didn’t know everything Massino might have been done, Vitale had been an aide-de-camp to his brother-in-law. Vitale knew much of the institutional history of the Bonanno family and knew many more of Massino’s dark secrets: the murders he played a role in and the illicit profits he raked in. Massino was definitely in trouble.

  Mitchell made a call to Breitbart. The lawyer then told Massino, who made a jail house telephone call to tell Josephine.

  Betrayal. Now the Massino case was more than just another mob whodunit. It was a story that Shakespeare would have loved.

  Massino had been leery of his brother-in-law from the first hours they were locked up together and believed he might have become an informant as soon as he believed the metal handcuffs on his wrists. Both men had been taken to different federal jails: Massino to Brooklyn and Vitale to Manhattan.

  “Where is my brother-in-law?” Massino asked the guards in the holding area. When he didn’t see Vitale, he suspected he might have turned cooperator. At that point, Massino’s suspicions had been premature, but not by much.

  On Eighty-fourth Street in Howard Beach, the Massino women felt the traitorous action of Vitale deeply.

  “It was like a building coming down on my head,” Josephine Massino recalled later.

  The relationship Josephine had developed with her brother since childhood was one that intensified the emotions she felt with his decision to turn on her husband. Within her Sicilian immigrant family, it had fallen on Josephine to raise Vitale since her parents were constantly working to provide for all four siblings. It was natural then for their relationship to be special and for Josephine to be protective of Salvatore. In her study of brother and sister relationships, author Francine Klagsbrun states that older sisters always manage to be protective and caring of their younger brothers. In an Italian family with only Salvatore to carry on the family name, the need for his sisters to protect him and in the process spoil him must have been a task implicitly communicated to them by their parents.

  So by turning on Massino, Vitale was turning on his closest sister, the one person in the family with whom he had developed a special bond of caring and trust. The severing of that bond, on top of the financial and legal jeopardy it created for Josephine, made her brother’s decision to turn on Massino all the more traumatic.

  Joanne Massino didn’t have those deep familial ties to Vitale. But her uncle had nonetheless played a special role in her life. He had become a second father. She had been a freshman in high school when her father went on the lam and Vitale played the role of surrogate father. When Joanne was ready for her Sweet Sixteen party, it was Vitale who made the arrangements for a catering hall and danced with his niece to the sounds of the syrupy Luther Vandross song “Always and Forever.” The teenaged Joanne was so taken with the way Vitale stepped up for her that whenever the song played on the radio, she would call him to say which station he should tune to. They even had a special beeper code—“143”—which meant “I love you.”

  But now the sweetness was gone, and replaced by venom. Learning of Vitale’s decision to turn against her father, Joanne cursed her uncle. Rushing through her home in Howard Beach, she opened drawers and photo albums to gather up as many pictures of Vitale as she could find. First communion pictures, weddings, the Sweet Sixteen party, Thanksgiving, Christmas—she ripped them to shreds and then dumped them in the trash. She kept one photo of Vitale’s four sons and one day was poised to get rid of it as well. Her mother was reluctant to have it discarded. No, Josephine said with a wistful look as she held the picture in her hand. Don’t discard it, she implored her daughter. In the end, Josephine took it home. It was likely to be one of the only images she would ever retain of her nephews being together.

  Adeline Massino didn’t have the same kind of close connection to her uncle Sal as her sister. Adeline was about twenty years old and seriously dating when her father went on the lam, so she likely didn’t have the same kind of emotional need for a father figure as her sister. A psychology major in her college days, Adeline had become increasingly uncomfortable with her uncle Sal. There was something she didn’t trust about him. He seemed too full of himself. His preening, his vanity, his fixation on being a boss man, turned her against him. But even if she only had vague knowledge and suspicion about her father’s life, Adeline Massino knew that her uncle’s decision to testify was trouble.

  Actually, Vitale’s decision to turn was a no-brainer for him. He had resented Massino for years, since the mid-1990s. His brother-in-law may have given him the title of underboss, but he assigned him no captains and kept him on a short leash. Vitale felt emasculated. He had always been the big boy in his own family, growing up in an Italian household with three doting sisters who spoiled him rotten and made him the center of attention. With Massino he was disrespected and belittled. What was worse was that the deprecation came at the hand of a man who had married his sister.

  Vitale was unable to even get Christmas gifts from the family captains. In mob parlance, he had been put “on the shelf.” Of course, Massino had his reasons. Vitale wasn’t liked by the other Bonanno family members and his brother-in-law told him that. Some wondered out loud that the only thing keeping Vitale alive was the fact that he was related to Massino by marriage.

  The isolation he felt in 2001 from Josephine and her daughters was something Vitale blamed on Massino. Those who study brother-sister relationships say the bonds that develop can sometimes lead to powerful undercurrents where the spouse of one
sibling may be viewed as an adversary by the other sibling. This kind of resentment just might have been at the core of the hatred Vitale developed for Massino. But if it was, Vitale never acknowledged it.

  Proffers agreements are known as “Queen for a Day” letters, a reference to the 1950s television show where ordinary housewives were lavished with gifts and attention for one day in their life. In Vitale’s case, he spent over a week proffering to prosecutor Andres, telling him what he knew about Massino, the Bonanno crime family, and the various murders. Cesare Bonventre, Alphonse Indelicato, Dominick Trinchera, Philip Giaccone, and Gabriel Infanti—they were victims Vitale put squarely around Massino’s neck in the early days of March 2003.

  Jeffrey Sallet and Kimberly McCaffrey, as well as fellow agents Nora Conley and James McGoey, sat mesmerized as Vitale told them stories of how the Bonanno crime family worked. This was the real deal, the history of the crime family fleshed out by someone who had lived through a good part of it. He talked about Massino’s loan-sharking, gambling, and arsons. Vitale also talked about his own crimes, which included the murders everybody in law enforcement thought Massino played a hand in but could never prove. It was nice to have somebody like Vitale fill in the details of the mob hits. But suddenly that caused an unexpected problem.

  On March 7, 2003, as he was being debriefed by the FBI agents, Vitale started to tell them about the slaughter in the Bronx of Gerlando Sciascia. The agents clammed up and suddenly closed their notebooks. That killing was a potential death penalty murder they told Vitale. They couldn’t talk to him about it unless the Department of Justice agreed to exclude Vitale from the death penalty as an option. Seeing the wisdom of keeping a key witness in the fold, Washington agreed to cut Vitale out of the death penalty calculation.