by Lamothe, Lee
In August 1982, shortly before his departure from Italy, Nick met with Bono in person, but police could not get close enough to intercept their conversation. Nick had a busy time in 1982 and 1983, constantly shuttling between Caracas, Milan and Montreal.
“The suspected purpose of these meetings was to discuss heroin shipments from Italy to the United States,” the FBI concluded. The Venezuelan authorities were also helping to build the case, providing the FBI and the RCMP with a detailed report of their investigations into the Sicily-Canada-U.S.-Venezuelan axis, listing several Canadian, Sicilian and American Mafia members.
Taking into account the meetings between Nick and Bono in Italy, the sales calls by Sciascia and LoPresti to the Gambino soldiers in New York and the extensive international telephone contacts made by visiting Montrealers, FBI agents were sure they were on to something huge.
“The targets of these investigations are probably the largest and most significant group involved in importing heroin through Sicily into the United States,” states an FBI report dated June 14, 1982. “This group’s illegal activities are the most graphic example of internationalization of the Mafia. Their drug importation network is the Cadillac in the New York area, involving staggering amounts of heroin and money.”
There were clear overlaps between this probe and the massive Pizza Connection case that focused on Sal Catalano, the Zips’ Brooklyn street boss, and his coterie. Agents tracking Catalano in Brooklyn and Sciascia in the Bronx were frequently comparing notes. Many of the players overlapped. Telephone records showed members of different groups in constant contact with each other; surveillance reports showed an astounding interplay, as seemingly unrelated and unconnected players from different Sicilian and American Mafia families networked busily. Bonventre, Amato, Sciascia, LoPresti and Catalano; the same names kept surfacing. Giovanni Ligammari, one of the Zips photographed alongside Vito Rizzuto, Sciascia and Joe Massino on the day after the murder of the three captains, was also arranging the payments from investors in the Pizza Connection heroin network.
How did it all relate? And how did all the intermingling trafficking schemes come together? Where did one conspiracy end and the other begin? Agents were befuddled. The investigation into the Zip connection was hampered by the difficulty of penetrating their insular group. Street sources and informants were slim. The people the investigators wanted to get close to did not let strangers get too close. They were, frustrated FBI agents noted, “bound together either by blood or marriage.” Another problem was that, despite all of their work, investigators had found precious little heroin. The shortcoming was not lost on them.
Alerted by Italian police to the freight being arranged by Nick and discussed with Bono, the FBI, DEA and U.S. Customs monitored a series of suspicious shipments sent throughout the summer of 1982 from Italy to Montreal, with stops in New Jersey. The link between shipments from Montreal and gangsters in New York was also coming across loud and clear in the Angelo Ruggiero wiretaps.
“I got a call from Montreal. Understand? The people I know,” Sciascia said to Ruggiero on June 15, 1982, three days after Nick and Bono spoke about the suitcase. “They want to know, before they do any move, what the profit [is] they gonna get paid,” Sciascia said. In the same conversation, he mentioned that they had received the “docked goods.”
Agents selected one of the suspicious shipments for interdiction. On the day before the ship was scheduled to arrive at a New Jersey port, a command post was set up at the Customs station in Newark.
On August 6, 1982, the MV Tulsidas pulled into a New Jersey port and was confronted by Customs, FBI and DEA agents. The crew was ordered to unload three large shipping containers whose manifests declared them to contain furniture and antique lamps destined first for Halifax, Nova Scotia, then on to Montreal. Once the containers were on American soil, agents swarmed over the contents. To their dismay, they found no contraband—only furniture and lamps. The red-faced agents repackaged and reloaded the cargo on to the Tulsidas, but their investigation did not retract at the misfire.
Police in Montreal and New York continued to follow suspects who were in the Sixth Family, although the FBI complained in internal memos of unspecified problems in Canada that prevented the RCMP from installing electronic bugs on the telephones of its targets. The FBI were convinced that Sciascia, LoPresti—and the Rizzutos as well—had conspired to bring large quantities of drugs into the United States, according to testimony given in a New York court two decades later.
For 19 years, Kenneth McCabe had been a criminal investigator with the United States Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of New York, specializing in cases brought against members of the Mafia. Before that, he was a detective with the New York City Police Department, assigned to an organized crime unit in Brooklyn. Testifying at a trial in New York in 2004, shortly before his death, McCabe was asked by the defence attorney for an accused Bonanno mobster about the Canadian connections to the early drug boom. McCabe said that in the early 1980s, Sciascia was a captain in the Bonanno Family.
“His crew was a Canadian crew,” McCabe said.
“Would it be fair to say, sir, from your knowledge, [that] Sciascia, Rizzuto and LoPresti were the people who would bring the drugs into the country?” lawyer David Breitbart asked.
“They were definitely involved in importation of drugs, yes.”
FBI agents realized that there were related drug networks all pumping heroin into New York, each following a similar pattern—a convergence of New York distributors linked to American Mafia families and Sicilian Mafia suppliers, much of it through Sixth Family middlemen in Canada and Venezuela.
The men they had been tracking, declared an internal FBI report on their investigations into Sciascia, were “the upper echelon of Italian drug traffickers in the world.” By late 1983, agents and federal prosecutors started sorting out whom to indict and when, and which people could best be prosecuted in connection to which network. Evidence against the Canadian wing of the heroin pipeline was used to obtain search warrants and arrest warrants in the closing days of the Pizza Connection case. LoPresti and Sciascia were both named in the affidavits used to obtain warrants against others. In the end, however, the Sixth Family would remain untouched when the Pizza Connection indictments were unsealed. On April 9, 1984, their colleagues, including Sal Catalano, Gaetano Badalamenti, Baldo Amato and Giovanni Ligammari, were arrested. Also wanted, but not found, was Cesare Bonventre.
Maybe it was Bonventre’s ambition or the ease with which he was drawn into murder conspiracies that made people nervous. Or perhaps his arrogance made them angry. Bonventre’s self-absorption certainly infuriated Massino. When Massino was on the lam, hiding in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania from an indictment, Bonanno members wishing to curry his favor provided him with money and morale-boosting visits. The Zips, however, stayed away.
“He was just amazed that no one sent him nothing and Cesare didn’t send him nothing,” said Vitale. “He felt he was on the lam for the Bonanno Family because he killed the three captains,” he said. “And the family should take care of him and no one [from the Zips] sent him nothing.” Massino seemed to be having second thoughts about his unholy alliance with the Sicilian gangsters, probably realizing then, if not before, that they owed their allegiance to no one but themselves. He was determined not to make the same mistake that had cost Carmine Galante his life. Massino called in Louis “Louie Ha-Ha” Attanasio, who was the acting captain in Bonventre’s crew, Duane “Goldie” Leisenheimer, the blonde-haired man who had helped deal with the three captains, and Vitale; then he sat down at the dining-room table at his hideout and mapped out an assassination plot worthy of the suspicious and smart Bonventre.
“What happens if he comes with Baldo?” Vitale asked Massino, knowing that Bonventre and Amato seemed inseparable.
“If he comes with Baldo, kill Baldo too,” Massino said. Massino then warned: “He’s a very sharp guy. You will have to be careful.”
With Massi
no’s dark genius guiding them, a plot suitable for ensnaring the crafty Zip was formulated. Bonventre was to be called to a purported meeting with Philip Rastelli, an invitation he was not at liberty to decline. Rastelli was even asked to actually sit in a diner and wait, just in case the plot went awry and Bonventre actually had to be taken to the meeting—they did not want Bonventre tipped off, so they could try again later. Vitale was to pick up Bonventre and Louie Ha-Ha to drive them to the meeting, Vitale said. Louie Ha-Ha would quickly hop into the back seat, leaving the front passenger seat for Bonventre. As the three drove along near Goldie’s auto garage, if the coast was clear, Vitale would give Louie Ha-Ha a prearranged signal. He was to say, “It looks good to me.” Louie would then pull out a gun he would be hiding in his boot and shoot Bonventre in the back of the head at point-blank range. Vitale would then quickly turn the car into Goldie’s garage and Goldie would be standing out front, ready to pull down the large door as soon as the car pulled inside, giving them privacy to dispose of the body. Louie had earlier told Vitale it would be an easy kill. Whenever he shot into the back of someone’s head, death was immediate, Louie allegedly told Vitale. “Whenever I shoot a person, one shot, goes right to sleep,” he said, according to Vitale. It seemed a solid enough plan, certainly more carefully crafted than most gangland murders. Such attention to detail was a testament to Bonventre’s reputation.
In April 1984, the team moved to execute both the plan and Bonventre. Vitale pulled up in a Dodge K car that he had rented. This, too, was to avoid making Bonventre suspicious—if he saw any of the tell-tale signs that the car was stolen, he would know something was wrong. Vitale collected the pair near Brooklyn’s busy intersection of Metropolitan and Flushing avenues, and Louie hopped into the back seat, leaving the passenger seat open for Bonventre. It likely seemed a sign of respect to Bonventre, who accepted the superior seating without hesitation. He was, after all, a captain. As Vitale neared the turning for Goldie’s garage, all was clear.
“It looks good to me,” Vitale said. Louie Ha-Ha shot into the back of Bonventre’s head, Vitale said. Bonventre did not go to sleep.
“That’s when Cesare started fighting me for the steering wheel,” said Vitale. “I was holding him back with my right arm, he was trying to put his foot on the gas pedal to crash the car and he was trying to grab the steering wheel. I kept hold of him and that’s when Louie Ha-Ha shot him again,” Vitale claimed. Bonventre was still alive and the struggle for control of the car made it obvious that the plan was not going smoothly.
“A K-car comes down at a pretty high rate of speed and somewhat reckless—goes flying down the block,” said Leisenheimer, who was waiting outside of the garage for the car carrying Bonventre’s body to pull in. “When it passed me, it looked like there was a commotion going on in it, but it passed real fast. In other words, it was just like something didn’t look right.” Vitale managed to get the car into the garage and slam on the brakes.
“When they pulled the body out of the car, the body was still shaking up and down,” said James “Big Louie” Tartaglione, who was inside the garage waiting for them to arrive. “Louie Ha-Ha takes the gun and shoots him a couple of more times,” he said. Bonventre would fight no more. As one gangster later said: “The guy didn’t wanna die.” Bonventre left behind a wife just weeks away from giving birth to their first child, a son. The gangsters in charge of the body disposal were told to make sure that it was never found.
Afterwards, everyone was afraid of the reaction from the Zips, Louie Ha-Ha most of all. When Bonventre disappeared, his friends were eyeing Ha-Ha with the greatest of suspicion. Louie Ha-Ha, who had been promised a promotion to captain in Bonventre’s place for his efforts, was impatient for the move up. He felt that being a captain would offer him protection from vengeful Zips.
“He was supposed to make me a captain,” Louie Ha-Ha complained to Vitale about two weeks after the murder. “Tell him to hurry up and do it because, if he doesn’t, the Zips are going to kill me.” Massino was true to his word and Louie Ha-Ha was promoted. But that was not the end of the trouble that Bonventre caused for his killers. If executing him was more difficult than expected, making his body disappear was equally problematic.
Not long after the shooting, on April 16, 1984, officers with the New Jersey State Police and agents with the FBI arrived with a search warrant at T&J Trading Inc., a former macaroni factory that was being used as a multi-story warehouse. When they entered a room on the fourth floor, they were hit by a distinct smell.
“There was a pretty pungent odor of death,” said Joseph Keely, a now retired New Jersey State trooper who worked on the crime scene that afternoon. “Bodies, after they start decomposing, leave a pretty pungent odor and that is what I was smelling.” The officers were drawn to three 55-gallon drums with their lids tightly sealed. When opened, the mysterious disappearance of Bonventre, who was then wanted in the Pizza Connection case, was solved. His body had been severed just below the waist. The torso and head were in one drum, the legs were in a second. The third drum contained some personal papers and an attaché case. The body parts had been covered in glue and immersed in lime, a chemical that masks the smell of rotting flesh.
“It was pretty well along in the decomposition stage,” said Keely. The combined smell of decomposition and chemicals forced the officers to don gas masks. A gold chain and $1,000 cash were found with the remains. An autopsy showed he had been shot in the head three to five times before being chopped up. Prophetically, when Bonventre had failed to show up in court for arraignment in the Pizza case days earlier, his lawyer said that Bonventre had gone missing and “wasn’t likely to return shortly.”
The Canadians managed to avoid a Pizza Connection indictment without facing such horror. They had simply been cut loose from the arrest list by the prosecutors at the last minute. It was another stunning bit of the luck that followed the Sixth Family.
Part of the reason for the reprieve was that Sciascia, LoPresti and others were also the focus of a parallel investigation in a neighboring New York judicial district. With the Pizza Connection case already threatening to topple over because of its complexity and size, prosecutors in the Southern District of New York were quite willing to sever some of the defendants who would likely be indicted in the future by prosecutors in New York’s Eastern District. It spared the Sixth Family from being caught up in what became—after 17 months of trial—the longest criminal prosecution in U.S. history and one of the most publicized organized crime cases to this day. The case led to 18 convictions against most of the defendants.
Unperturbed by the massive Pizza indictments, the Sixth Family pressed on, after only a momentary reassessment. With Sciascia established in New York and LoPresti moving between Montreal and New York, the Canadian drug connection continued to move large loads of heroin to the American market. For the better part of a year after the Pizza arrests, LoPresti and Sciascia carried on their business.
With police tripping over themselves while watching the pair in New York and Montreal, with the added attention from Salvatore Ruggiero’s plane crash and the compromising wires on his brother, Angelo, how long could that luck be expected to last?
CHAPTER 22
MANHATTAN, JANUARY 1985
Joe LoPresti was well dressed in a starched white dress shirt and a long tan cashmere coat when federal agents came for him at a Manhattan hotel, at 1:15 p.m. on Thursday, January 17, 1985. The agents had arrived armed with an arrest warrant, issued when an indictment in the Eastern District of New York was filed against him and Gerlando Sciascia for bringing massive quantities of heroin into the country. At the time of his arrest, LoPresti was on one of his many business trips to New York on behalf of the Sixth Family. Such business allowed him to travel light. His only luggage was a black briefcase and a garment bag.
Despite his size and strength, LoPresti knew better than to resist when approached, and the FBI agents politely informed him of his arrest. LoPresti, in turn, politely acce
ded to their demands, turning over his briefcase, in which agents found various business cards, photographs, brochures, a car-rental agreement, an Eastern Air Lines plane ticket and a toiletry kit. In his garment bag was a suit, another change of clothing and shaving items. He had $2,143 in a large roll of bills and a pocketful of change totaling $5.05. He wore a gold wedding band and an expensive Cartier watch. LoPresti went with the officers to a waiting car and, during the 15-minute ride to the FBI’s office, expressed surprise at the charges.
“What makes you guys think I’m involved with drugs?” he asked. “If anyone’s to blame for the predicament you’re in, it’s yourself, Ruggiero and Sciascia,” an agent said, hinting at the bugs in Angelo “Quack Quack” Ruggiero’s house.
“What Angelo does is Angelo’s business,” LoPresti said. “I don’t know his business.”
“How long have you known Angelo Ruggiero?” the agent asked. LoPresti quickly changed his strategy.
“I don’t know Angelo Ruggiero, I never met him,” he said, perhaps too late. He did not deny knowing Sciascia, however, truthfully telling the agents that the two had been born in the same town in Italy and been close personal friends ever since. He did not, he told agents, have any idea where Sciascia might be. He had not seen him for more than a year, he said. The agents knew he was lying. They knew LoPresti and his wife had spent some of the summer visiting with Sciascia and his wife. They also knew of FBI and RCMP surveillance showing the two together on both sides of the U.S.-Canada border.
