by Lamothe, Lee
The joy that the officials could not contain on the day of the arrests was born of the frustration and humiliation they had lived with for years.
CHAPTER 38
NEW YORK, 2001
It had been more than 20 years since the FBI had done serious damage to the Bonanno Family although, it must be said, the attack back then was so spectacular and devious it has lived on in legend. For six years, FBI Special Agent Joseph D. Pistone had assumed his undercover guise as Donnie Brasco and been accepted as an associate into the family. Once his duplicity was revealed, Pistone’s evidence in court deeply shook the family with some 200 indictments and 100 convictions—but it did not extinguish the Bonannos. Pistone’s work toppled many a gangster, but Joe Massino—who was charged with aiding in the murders of the three captains at a 1987 trial featuring Pistone as the star witness—managed to beat the rap. Even after the indictments stopped flowing from Pistone’s evidence, the stinging wounds remained for the Bonannos, as his exploits were documented in a bestselling book and then a popular movie, Donnie Brasco, starring Al Pacino and Johnny Depp. In response to the breach of security, the family lost its seat on the Commission and had become something of a Mafia pariah.
Since then, however, the FBI’s success against the Bonanno Family had been slim. The Bonanno Squad was struggling and, all the while, the family was rebuilding. As the leaders in New York’s other Mafia families wobbled and toppled, the Bonannos seemed impervious to serious prosecution. It became a point of pride for the gangsters and, over the years, served to regenerate the family. The humiliation over the Brasco infiltration was slowly being erased.
In 1986, Carmine Persico, boss of the Colombo Family, was convicted on racketeering charges and sentenced to life imprisonment. In 1992, John Gotti, the famously flamboyant boss of the Gambino Family, was finally convicted of racketeering and handed a life sentence, after three acquittals. That same year, Vittorio “Little Vic” Amuso, boss of the Lucchese Family, was sentenced to life imprisonment for racketeering. In 1997, Vincent “Chin” Gigante, a Mafia old-timer who was head of the Genovese Family, was imprisoned for racketeering. By the late 1990s, the leadership of four of New York’s Five Families was in disarray.
Lending proof to the adage that what does not kill you makes you stronger, Joe Massino had learned much from evaluating how Donnie Brasco had got so close to so many in his family. Massino also weighed the failures of other bosses who were convicted and the methods used to ensnare them. He even studied the FBI personnel who were assigned to investigate him and then took pleasure in letting them know it; he often congratulated agents on any in-house promotions and sometimes mentioned in passing their educational background or past accomplishments.
The Bonanno Family, under Massino, was experiencing a distinct renaissance, remaining surprisingly buoyant in an era of gangland disarray. This fact was not lost on the media. Reporters and columnists picked up on Massino’s status as the only official New York boss who was not imprisoned and dubbed him “The Last Don.” The name was a ringing endorsement of Massino’s enterprising ways as a gangster. It was also more than a little frustrating for the men and women who had been trying to topple him.
The Bonanno Squad had reassessed its progress in 1998. The unit, which has the official FBI designation of Squad C-10, an abbreviation for Criminal Investigative Unit Number Ten, had a lot on its plate. Its workload was the most divided of all of the squads assigned to the Five Families in New York. Along with monitoring and investigating the Bonanno Family’s activities in the city, Squad C-10 was responsible for the DeCavalcante Family based in neighboring New Jersey, the Teamsters union and also—in a nod to the Bonannos’ peculiar relationship with gangsters in Canada and Sicily—international organized crime linked to New York.
As Sal Vitale’s discovery of the FBI’s bug in the ceiling of Massino’s club highlighted, electronic eavesdropping had not yielded the same success against the Bonannos as had, for example, the bug in the home of Angelo “Quack Quack” Ruggiero, one of the Sixth Family’s Gambino partners. And despite making generous offers to a number of Bonanno members facing charges, authorities had not convinced a single one to cooperate. While the FBI and federal prosecutors were increasingly aware of the effectiveness of mob turncoats in securing difficult convictions, particularly in the face of the testimony of Salvatore “Sammy Bull” Gravano, the Bonanno men had remained steadfast.
Even those gangsters who faced certain death from their colleagues for vouching for Donnie Brasco refused to cooperate, despite overt offers from the government. Sonny Black refused to accept even an agent’s telephone number. Instead, he handed his jewelry to the bartender at the Motion Lounge social club, said he might not be coming back and glumly went to meet mob colleagues who, as he suspected, had orders to kill him. On orders from Sciascia and Massino, Frank Lino lured Sonny Black to a meeting at a fellow mobster’s house and then pushed him down a flight of stairs. At the bottom, he was shot, but the gunman’s weapon jammed. As he lay on the floor wounded, Sonny Black looked up at his friends and implored them, “Hit me one more time; make it good.” They complied.
Bonanno gangsters were smug in the knowledge that no made Bonanno member had ever become a rat. It was a point Joe Massino would emphasize at the induction ceremonies for members into his family.
“During the ceremony, Mr. Massino would tell us his family were the only family that never had any informants in history. We had two individuals in the electric chair in the Fifties, but never had a rat in the family,” Sal Vitale said. The resuscitation of the Bonanno Family was enough for the organization to regain its seat on the Commission, and then raised Massino to the pinnacle of American crime as the Commission’s senior member.
“The other four families, all their bosses were in jail. Who is actually going to these [Commission] meetings were an underboss or an acting underboss. So Joe felt it was beneath him for him to attend, so he would send me,” said Vitale. Oh, how the mighty Commission had fallen.
Massino continued his evolution from street tough to wily mob boss, even if the organization, as a whole, was becoming a shadow of its former self. By late 1993, his longevity and success at avoiding serious prosecution led him to quietly re-christen the entire crime family in his honor.
“We turned it into the ‘Massino Family,’” Frank Lino said. The gangsters were anxious to bury their association with their namesake Godfather.
“Joe Bonanno, he wrote a book about the Commission. They just wanted to do away with his name,” Lino said. “They said he betrayed, you know, the family.”
Vitale confirms the change: “Joe Bonanno wrote a book. He was the founding father of the Bonanno Family. He wrote a book. I think it was called A Man of Honor, and since he wrote that book, he disrupted our life. So we don’t want to be known as the Bonanno Family. So, behind closed doors, we were known as the Massino Family,” Vitale said.
“Mr. Massino felt that it should not be called the Bonanno [Family],” said Vitale. “We are not open for publication, public knowledge. It is not for the average person to know who we are. By him writing the book, it brought us all to the surface, so that is why we felt he disrespected us.” News of the change in the family’s name slowly filtered out to Bonanno members.
“We didn’t go around making it public knowledge to our captains, but during our ceremony, or during a meeting, we would say, you know, the ‘Massino Family,’” Vitale said.
By the mid-1990s, there was a new way of conducting business in the family. In fact, Massino tried to move the organization closer to its roots, as the Mafia had largely remained in Montreal. He initiated a rule, through the Commission, insisting that new Mafia members be “full Italian,” meaning both parents had to trace their ancestry back to the birthplace of their secret society. For years, as long as a crook could bring in cash and had a father who hailed from the old country, he was prime American Mafia material. Massino also recognized the strength that came from the bonds of family—t
rue family—and encouraged his members to induct their sons.
“He felt that he knew the bloodline; he felt that if it was good enough for the father it should be good enough for the son,” said Vitale.
Massino also moved to insulate himself from prosecution. He ordered that the gangsters’ social clubs, which had long formed an integral part of the New York Mafia mystique, be shut down to limit opportunities for police investigators to monitor their activities. Massino himself stopped attending mob-linked wakes, weddings and funerals—once a staple of a mob boss’s routine. He wanted to reduce his public exposure. Talking about anything of substance over a home or cell phone was banned. To compensate, Vitale assigned each of his 15 captains a two-digit number as a code. Sciascia’s was 02. When any of them needed to reach the Bonanno administration, they would call Vitale’s pager from a public pay phone and leave the phone booth’s number, followed by the captain’s two-digit code. Vitale would then go to another public pay phone and return the call.
“I would know who I am speaking to by the last two digits,” said Vitale. Massino even tried to erase his own name from FBI wiretaps, recordings he assumed—he knew—were secretly being made all around him.
“You were told not to use his name,” Lino said. Massino’s men were supposed to use a hand gesture, touching their ear or grabbing their earlobe, in place of speaking his name out loud when referring to him in conversation. At a meeting at Massino’s Casa Blanca Restaurant, the boss told Lino that the soldiers and captains needed to protect him as the boss, or “our family would probably disintegrate.” The men generally went along with the directives, since they acknowledged that they indeed had an interest in protecting Massino, so long as he was a productive and successful boss, protecting their profits and their dealings with the other Five Families.
“You are only as strong as your boss to the other families,” Vitale noted.
Massino’s intense insulation meant the FBI needed also to evolve. Around 1999, a different strategy was emerging, an approach that mimicked the advice given by the Nixon-era informant Deep Throat to investigative journalists: “Follow the money.” The probe that would threaten to topple the Bonanno Family bosses became a decidedly unromantic paper chase, one relying not so much on action-oriented cops but on careful, nitpicking accountants. The new breed of agents painstakingly tracked how, and from whom, the Bonanno Family was drawing revenue and where that money was going.
Kimberly McCaffrey and Jeffrey Sallet were two FBI Special Agents attached to Squad C-10 who were also trained forensic accountants. They started sifting through documents—tax returns and financial records—tracing the flow of Massino’s illicit cash.
“In those days, everyone was going out on surveillance, while we would be going through each paper in a stack of boxes,” McCaffrey said. “We’d find a K-1 financial statement and get excited, and people would joke, ‘you guys are such geeks.’” The plodding work by the FBI’s “geeks” recognized that much of the mob’s activities qualified more as white-collar crime than crude shakedowns.
“We looked into sources of income and expenses and at the hierarchy of the family, looking for financial associations, financial crimes,” McCaffrey said. “We used grand jury subpoenas, interviews, surveillances, reviewing bank documents, financial records.”
“This phase of our investigation of the Bonanno Family began with a non-traditional approach to fighting organized crime,” the FBI’s Pat D’Amuro said. “A team of forensic accountants followed the money and identified patterns of connection and criminal activity.”
A new, intricate probe was launched—not into unsolved mob murders or international heroin deals, but into parking lot receipts. The K-1 reports McCaffrey and Sallet studied were statements of joint partnerships and earnings submitted with tax returns. They showed that Massino and Vitale were earning money from several New York parking lots in a business arrangement with the wife of Richard “Shellackhead” Cantarella, a Bonanno captain. By 2000, the probe of that arrangement had led to Barry Weinberg, a businessman who loved socializing with mobsters and who, in return for the excitement, helped them in their business pursuits. Agents felt they had found their weak link.
McCaffrey and Sallet confronted Weinberg in January 2001, when they had his Mercedes pulled over in midtown Manhattan by New York City police, who then hustled him into an unmarked van. The agents threatened to charge him with tax evasion and other offenses and, within minutes, the man crumpled. A timorous, white-collar criminal to the core, Weinberg had no interest in even a short stay in jail and agreed to cooperate in the Bureau’s hunt for bigger fish. Weinberg spent the next year meeting with Shellackhead and Frank Coppa, another Bonanno captain, while wearing a secret recording device, the first such infiltration of the Bonannos since Donnie Brasco hung up his wires. With that investigation beginning to gain traction, the Bonannos were hit from another direction.
BOCA RATON, FLORIDA, MARCH 2002
On March 19, 2002, Anthony “TG” Graziano, the 61-year-old gangster whom Gerlando Sciascia had grown to despise and who, by then, had become the Bonanno consigliere, was indicted for racketeering in New York. The indictment was linked to a second indictment filed against him the next day in Florida, one that hinted at the value of financial investigations like McCaffrey and Sallet’s. The New York case was about low-brow murder, drugs and extortion, while the Florida case was over a sophisticated investment swindle. In New York, it involved torturing a wayward colleague with a blowtorch, dragging another around a room at the wrong end of a noose and burning a third with a cigarette lighter. In Florida, it was about smooth-talking financial bamboozling through high-pressure telephone sales pitches seeking investors in bogus foreign exchange markets. Between them, the two indictments against Graziano presented the twin faces of the modern mob and illustrated the need for a new and more flexible approach in the FBI’s organized crime investigations.
Graziano’s eventual conviction and 11-year sentence would also serve, in the months ahead, as a potent reminder to his Bonanno colleagues of the steep consequences of an indictment under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act. Arrested alongside Graziano in the Florida case—an investigation that saw a Tampa police officer working undercover, posing as a money launderer—was John J. Finkelstein, a Montreal businessman who relocated to Boca Raton and oversaw four “boiler rooms” where fraudsters bilked investors across North America, many of them seniors, out of US$11.7 million on behalf of the Bonanno Family. Finkelstein, described by his lawyer as a devout Jew and family man, had a distinctly undesirable nickname among his underworld colleagues. They called him “Fink.”
Such nicknames might have fed Massino’s paranoia over informants coming close to him. He followed the cases of each of his mob associates with careful diligence, seeking hints of their cooperation with the government, such as defendants suddenly changing lawyers, irrationally pleading guilty or receiving light sentences. Any underling who fit any of these criteria was immediately suspect. The boss routinely had New York lawyer Matthew Mari, who has a long association with the Bonannos through representing several members and associates, check court files for updates on the status of prosecutions against Massino’s colleagues, prosecutors claimed in a memorandum filed in court. No one seemed above suspicion, not even Sal Vitale, Massino’s brother-in-law. Massino suspected Vitale was a “rat” long before Vitale had actually decided to become one. He voiced his concerns and his growing dislike of Vitale to fellow gangsters. He went so far as to suggest Vitale would be killed. Fellow Bonanno members reportedly started calling Vitale “Fredo,” the name of the weak brother who betrayed the boss in The Godfather: Part II. In the film, Fredo was killed for his disloyalty.
It was a gross strategic blunder on Massino’s part. With so many informants and wiretaps aimed his way, it did not take long for this loose talk to come to the attention of the FBI, and astute agents were later able to put it to good use. With federal agents squirrelin
g away any piece of potential evidence against the Bonanno inner circle, even Massino’s considerable efforts to protect himself would soon prove to be in vain. Betrayal loomed large.
BROOKLYN, OCTOBER 2002
Frank Coppa was not a typical member of the Mafia. For starters, he finished high school and even started college. Then there was his appearance; a rotund man with a round, balding head, he looked more like a parish priest than a fierce gangster. Just a year after his induction into the Mafia in 1977, Coppa was set apart again when he was injured in a car explosion, a victim of a rare bombing among American mobsters, who generally prefer the more personal approach of a gun. Coppa’s greatest distinction, however, was yet to come. Coppa knew well the ramifications of the oath of omertà, something he had sworn before Carmine Galante himself. When he accepted the offer of membership, he swore his silence.
