King of the Godfathers

by Anthony Destefano

  Free of the embargo caused by the death penalty concerns, Vitale continued to talk to the agents. He did so for a good part of the next year. Some of the information amounted to mob gossip, such as how reputed mob associate Sandro Aiosa had a reputation for being a “liar and a cheat.” He told the agents who was up and who was down in the Bonanno family, gave the agents lists of names of members in all the crime families, and even provided the names of deceased gangsters to fill in gaps in the FBI crime family lists. Did anybody realize that the Mafia had a prohibition about performing oral sex on a woman and then talking about it? According to Vitale, one Bonanno associate who had been proposed for membership was scratched from consideration because he had been overheard discussing cunnilingus. Another, John Arcaro, was inducted as a courtesy before his death in April 2001, according to Vitale.

  Under Mafia rules, the five families could induct new members to replace those who had passed away. It was a way of keeping the status quo. But according to Vitale, he played a little scam. On a few occasions he made up the names of deceased Bonanno soldiers to pad the membership roles and allow the family to induct more members than the rules allowed.

  At least once Massino played the role of marriage broker, Vitale said, approving the nuptials of one Bonanno soldier to a woman who was once engaged to a Lucchese soldier. It seemed the Lucchese crime family didn’t want the wedding to go off. But Massino said it could, according to Vitale.

  But it was with more substantial stuff that Vitale enthralled the agents, stories of big Mafia meetings where legendary mob bosses sat down with him and Massino. Around 2000 a lot of those meetings involved what La Cosa Nostra was going to do about the wayward and dissolute Colombo crime family. The family had been riddled with turncoats and informants, as well as bloodied by continuous warfare. The mob bosses considered a number of moves, some of them drastic. Some called for dissolving the Colombo group and dividing up the members among the other Mafia families. It was a plan that was rejected, Vitale said, because the other families wouldn’t want to take on men they didn’t know.

  Another plan, not much different than the first, was to put all the Colombo family member names in a hat and have the four other crime families draw the names they would take into their family, he said. Some even considered not recognizing the Colombo group at all but thought doing so would show too much disrespect for Carmine Persico, the old family boss who was serving a life sentence, said Vitale.

  These meetings sometimes got to be catty and backbiting affairs. One time Peter Gotti, who was the acting boss of the Gambino crime family, was asked why his imprisoned brother John didn’t step down as head of that family. Peter Gotti, obviously angry, responded by asking why didn’t Vincent “the Chin” Gigante, who was also in prison, step down as boss of the Genovese family, said Vitale. The response from another Genovese member at the meeting was that Gigante would be getting out of prison one day—something that wouldn’t be happening for John Gotti.

  Vitale also told the agents some intriguing bits. He said that at one point he and Massino had chatted in Howard Beach with Gotti’s son, known as John Jr. The subject of the conversation was Thomas Uva, who with his wife, Rosemary, were believed to be burglarizing mob social clubs all over the city. A lot of mobsters wanted the Uvas dead and the Mafia families put an “open contract” out on them, meaning anyone could collect on it. The younger Gotti remarked “we took care of it” when the couple was discussed, said Vitale. Thomas and Rosemary Uva were shot dead on a Queens street on Christmas Eve 1992. For years, investigators suspected Junior Gotti might have played some role, but he was never charged, and he always denied any involvement.

  The bad state of affairs of the mob was often on the agenda at such meetings. Vitale said that at one sitdown session with Peter Gotti, acting Colombo boss Vincent Aloi, and reputed Genovese captain Barney Bellomo, he asked for permission to induct fifteen new members into the Bonanno family. In response, Nicholas “Little Nicky” Corozzo of the Gambino family asked “Where are you going to find fifteen new members?” Peter Gotti jumped in and said that it was not the time to make new members because of the continuing pressure of law enforcement.

  As fascinating as such inside talk about the Mafia was, Vitale’s real value to the FBI agents listening to him was the hard details he had about the murders. In the murder of the three captains on May 5, 1981, Massino just wasn’t involved in the planning of the hit, he was actually present the moment the slaughter took place, Vitale told the agents. In the pandemonium that occurred during the shooting, Vitale said he didn’t get a chance to fire his gun and saw a terrified Frank Lino flee through a door he had been assigned to guard. Vitale said he stayed around to clean up the bodies with Dominick “Sonny Black” Napolitano and others, placing the corpses in drop clothes and then following a van that drove the gruesome cargo to Howard Beach.

  Vitale’s information about the three captains was dynamite for the prosecution. It was the first direct evidence of an eye witness and participant to implicate Massino in the planning and execution of the slayings. Previously, the evidence was indirect and circumstantial. Even taped remarks that Massino had screwed up in disposing of the bodies had not been enough to win a conviction, as the 1987 trial showed.

  Sonny Black Napolitano’s murder was also laid at the feet of Massino by Vitale. After it became known in July 1981 that undercover agent Joseph Pistone had penetrated the Bonanno family, an angry Massino, walking with Vitale in Howard Beach, said that if he had to go to jail because of Pistone, it would be Napolitano who would get a “receipt,” meaning be killed. Vitale told the agents that after picking up a stolen van one day from Duane Leisenheimer, he drove Massino and Steven Cannone to a house in Staten Island. It was during the drive, said Vitale, that Massino said that Napolitano was going to be killed that very night. The three men waited in the van outside the Staten Island house until a man, who Vitale identified as Bobby Lino Sr., came out and said, “It was all done.”

  Throughout March 2003, Vitale told the FBI agents about both his and Massino’s involvement in a total of ten murders: Alphonse Indelicato, Dominick Trinchera, Philip Giaccone, Dominick Napolitano, Anthony Mirra, Cesare Bonventre, Gerlando Sciascia, Gabriel Infante, Joseph Pastore, and Vito Borelli. He also tied Massino into a conspiracy to murder union official Anthony Giliberti. Vitale confessed to playing a role in conspiracies to murder two other men and involvement in two actual murders that didn’t involve Massino.

  As a mobster, Vitale had done a lot of work. Now he was doing it for the FBI. Vitale told special Agents Sallet, McCaffrey, Conley, and McGoey about his life of crime, implicating Massino and a lot of other Bonanno brethren in crimes that ranged over two decades. There were even times he talked about his sister, Josephine. Had he not insisted in his negotiations with prosecutors that nothing he told them could be ever used against her, she might have found herself in trouble as well. Vitale told the FBI that while Massino was incarcerated he visited his sister and turned over cash to her that represented her husband’s share of loan-sharking and gambling profits.

  After Vitale decided to cooperate, there was a stampede of other Bonanno members to sign on to the prosecution’s team. Frank Lino, who had been arrested with Massino in January, felt vulnerable. It had been Vitale, while he was part of the ruling committee of the family, who had Lino carry out some homicides.

  “When he cooperated, there was no way I was going to win anymore,” Lino said later. “He was giving all the orders to do all the killings when he was there.”

  So after nearly three months in jail—most of it in solitary confinement—Lino decided he wanted to cooperate. On April 4, 2003, a little over a month after word had leaked out about Vitale’s turncoat status, Lino told Andres he wanted to make a deal.

  But even before Vitale and Lino there was “Big Louie.” The tall, gangly Big Louie was really James Tartaglione, a mobster who had earned his stripes in the 1980s. His thick glasses and bony face made him look like a h
igh school underachiever who didn’t have the mind or inclination to do much in life but work in a grocery store. But Tartaglione was well liked by Massino and had done his own pieces of work for the Bonanno family.

  Yet, there came a point in Tartaglione’s life when he tired of the mob. He had been convicted earlier in the decade and decided to spend his time in Florida. Massino had been troubled by too many Bonanno members taking a break and moving out of state. He tried to pull Tartaglione back but the newly minted Floridian resisted. He had a great life in the Sunshine State and wanted to retire there, spend time with his family, and peacefully watch the sun set.

  The indictments in New York had Tartaglione worried. It was just a matter of time before other informants began placing him at the scene of murders. Tartaglione had been outside the door of the Brooklyn social club when the three captains were slain in May 1981. In 1984, Vitale had asked him to help out in the murder of Cesare Bonventre. It was Tartaglione who pulled a squirming, mortally wounded Bonventre out of the car in a garage. Tartaglione had been involved in loan-sharking, arson, and gambling. He had some baggage to be concerned about.

  Still on probation for his earlier federal conviction, Tartaglione had always remembered the woman prosecutor in Brooklyn who he came to respect. She was younger than he was, but like him her graying hair showed her seasoning. When his daughter thought she had breast cancer, the woman had passed along to Tartaglione the name of a medical specialist who could help. (No cancer was detected.) The prosecutor was Ruth Nordenbrook, and through his Florida probation officer Tartaglione reached out to her shortly after Massino had been indicted.

  Some of Nordenbrook’s associates in the Brooklyn U.S. Attorney’s Office had figured that her patient manner and bonding with Tartaglione, even though she had prosecuted him, would somehow pay off.

  “He thought I dealt with him fairly,” Nordenbrook later recalled.

  One incident in particular solidified Tartaglione’s respect for the middle-aged prosecutor. Tartaglione was due in court one day on the federal case Nordenbrook had brought. But when his daughter collapsed in the doctor’s office, Tartaglione naturally missed his court date. Normally, when a defendant who is out on bail doesn’t show up in court, it could be grounds for a contempt citation and a charge of bail jumping. But Nordenbrook didn’t insist on any such action and for that Tartaglione was grateful.

  So, despite some resistance from at least one FBI supervisor, Nordenbrook flew to Florida with fellow prosecutor Greg Andres and convinced Tartaglione to sign a cooperation agreement.

  The odd thing about Tartaglione’s decision was that he didn’t wait for an indictment to make his decision. True, he might have eventually been charged based on what the other turncoats said. But since he was free and living outside a jail cell, Tartaglione was the one cooperator who could circulate freely among his criminal confederates.

  The FBI immediately saw the usefulness of Tartaglione’s freedom and convinced him to begin wearing a wire as he met with key Bonanno crime family members and others. Now, not only did the federal government have witnesses like Vitale, Coppa, and Lino, they actually had a made member of the crime family making tapes. It was another coup for the government that had exceeded anyone’s expectations.

  From January 2003 until January 2004, Tartaglione taped over forty-five conversations with Bonanno captains Vincent Basciano, Anthony Urso, the crime family’s acting boss while Massino was in custody, Joseph Cammarano, acting underboss, and others. Federal prosecutors have released only small portions of the recordings, but they reveal that many of those conversing with Tartaglione talked openly about the way the Bonanno family was trying to adjust to the pressure from the arrests and prosecutions.

  It was during this chaotic period that Cammarano was recorded telling Tartaglione to move back from Florida “to show strength.” Meetings of the Bonanno family administration found mobsters talking about trying to locate the families of turncoats and to induct new members to build up strength. Since legal troubles were causing Massino big legal bills, the crime family decreed what prosecutors called a monthly “tax” of $100 for each member to pay into a war chest.

  In one snippet of a recording of a September 2003 crime family meeting that was widely circulated in court documents, Urso was heard speaking about killing the families of turncoats.

  “This has got to stop,” said Urso. “Fuck it, he can do it, I can do it. This is how they should have played, and they might have done this before you turned, we wipe your family out.”

  “Why should the rats’ kids be happy, where my kids or your kids should suffer because I’m away for life. If you take one kid, I hate to say it, and do what you gotta do, they’ll fucking think twice,” said Urso.

  Cammarano cautioned Urso, court records show, that such a bloody strategy of retribution would only bring on more law enforcement pressure. It might also reflect poorly on Massino, added Cammarano.

  What Tartaglione was thinking when he heard Urso’s rant about the family of informants, all the while he was secretly recording him, was never disclosed. But his recordings, as well as the evidence given by Vitale, Coppa, Lino, and other turncoats, gave the FBI a field day. In May 2003, a federal grand jury in Brooklyn indicted Massino on more murder charges, accusing him of killing Anthony Mirra for the Joseph Pistone-FBI infiltration of the Bonanno family. Frank Lino, who was already talking to prosecutors, was indicted for the 1990 murder of Louis Tuzzio, the man killed as a favor to John Gotti.

  A glowing news release from the Brooklyn U.S. Attorney’s Office stated the latest tally: “To date, both the Bonanno family boss and under have been charged, as well as six captains, two acting captains, eight soldiers and twelve associates. With the 2001 conviction of Bonanno family consiglieri Anthony Spero, all three members of the Bonanno family administration have now been charged with, or convicted of, murder, and all potentially face life imprisonment.”

  Because of concerns about the families of turncoat mobsters like Vitale, Tartaglione, and the others, federal prosecutors resorted to courthouse cloak-and-dagger operations. It was unwise, investigators reasoned, for guilty pleas of cooperators like Vitale to be taken in the downtown Brooklyn federal courthouse. Secret guilty pleas, with courtrooms sealed off and spectators not allowed, happened all the time. But the Bonanno investigation was fraught with too many perils. Officials feared that if word leaked out that a particular person was pleading guilty with a cooperation agreement, the individual’s family members might be in peril. Comments of the kind Urso made to Tartaglione only reinforced those fears.

  So, on particular days when a Bonanno turncoat was pleading guilty, Judge Nicholas Garaufis, who had been picked by random selection to handle the cases involving the crime family, disappeared from his chambers on Cadman Plaza East in Brooklyn. Garaufis had been active in Queens County politics and had once served as counsel to Borough President Claire Shulman, the woman who replaced the corruption-tainted Donald Manes, who committed suicide in early 1986 during the city Parking Violations Bureau scandal. After stints as a private lawyer in Bayside and as an assistant attorney general in New York state, Garaufis went on to become counsel to the Federal Aviation Administration. He was nominated to be a federal judge in 2000 by President Bill Clinton. An affable man of Greek ethnicity, Garaufis was press savvy and prided himself on open courtrooms. But sometimes necessity required secrecy.

  On certain days, Garaufis would walk over to the nearby Marriott Hotel on Adams Street. There, he would go to a suite that had been booked by federal prosecutors and on entering he would find FBI agents, a court stenographer, and various assistant U.S. attorneys. Also in the room was a defendant who had decided to cooperate with the government and his attorney. Garaufis would preside in the room as the cooperator pled guilty to various crimes and admitted that he had signed an agreement to testify at any trial. For added security, Garaufis sometimes drove to one of a number of hotels near LaGuardia Airport in his home borough of Queens, where othe
r cooperators were taken to enter their guilty pleas.

  Despite these precautions, word of who had decided to cooperate leaked out anyway. By then, there had been more indictments. August 20, 2003, saw another news release revealing that Massino was charged with three more homicides: the killing of Cesare Bonventre in 1984, of Gabriel Infante in 1987, and of Gerlando Sciascia, whose death in 1999 had piqued the interest of FBI Director Louis Freeh.

  Some new defendants were also added to the ever growing list of Bonanno family members under arrest. Two reputed Bronx members of the family, captain Patrick “Patty from the Bronx” DeFilippo and soldier John Joseph Spirito, were charged with taking part in the Sciascia killing while Massino was vacationing in Mexico with Josephine. (That kind of detail was something Vitale knew and apparently was a key source of what was alleged in the indictment.) It was Spirito, a tough guy with the thick, bony face of a prize fighter, who was accused of picking up the ill-fated Sciascia and then dumping his body in a Bronx street to make it look like the Canadian gangster was killed by drug dealers.

  Defendants awaiting trial without bail often hold joint defense meetings in jail. After the Sciascia indictment, Massino, Spirito, DeFilippo, and other defendants held joint defense meetings at the Brooklyn federal detention center to plot strategy with their lawyers. Massino sat at the head of the table in the jail conference room, a posture that seemed to say he was in charge. He usually had two sandwiches brought in from the vending machines, and if he didn’t think the cheese was warm enough he had one of his underlings microwave it again.

  Murray Richman, a well-known criminal defense from the Bronx, was representing Spirito and made it clear to any one who was present that he didn’t like these jail house meetings. Richman had a simple rule that one out of four people would turn informant, ruining the defense strategizing. Massino thought differently.