by Lamothe, Lee
“That means you live by the gun and you die by the gun,” he said.
Coppa was 61 years old and a few months into a five-year sentence for stock manipulation when he was hit again with a racketeering indictment that could lead to 20 years’ imprisonment. Never a hard man, despite having a hand in several gangland murders, Coppa considered himself something of a gentleman bandit, and prison was not an environment he was thriving in. He reportedly burst into tears in front of disgusted inmates early in his incarceration. Contrary to his earlier assessment of living by the gun and dying by the gun, Coppa was facing a slow, languishing end as a frightened man in a prison cell. FBI agents could practically smell his fear and zeroed in on him, offering salvation to the priestly-looking figure.
In November 2002, Coppa did what no inducted member before him in the storied history of the Bonanno Family had ever done; he agreed to become a cooperating witness for the government against his Mafia colleagues.
“I didn’t want to do no more time,” was his simple explanation. His subsequent revelations, during secret debriefings, amazed agents on Squad C-10 as they listened to him unravel once-perplexing mob mysteries. He recounted in detail the murders of Sonny Black, Robert Perrino and Tony Mirra, all the while implicating Joe Massino, Sal Vitale, Frank Lino, Richard “Shellackhead” Cantarella and other leading Bonanno members. Coppa’s information and promised testimony in court was hailed by the government as a “landmark achievement.” On its own, it was certainly an important development and, for the hard-pressed Squad C-10, a point of gratification. Coppa’s true importance, however, stemmed primarily from the domino effect it caused after news of his cooperation rippled through the underworld. In that, he was nothing less than historic.
When word of Coppa’s defection reached Massino, the news chilled him. He sent for Vitale. Despite Vitale being monitored with an electronic ankle bracelet while awaiting trial and strictly banned from communicating with Massino, the dutiful Vitale answered the call. Massino’s message was short and sobering.
“Frankie Coppa went bad,” he said.
When the rest of the Bonanno leadership learned of Coppa’s break from them, Shellackhead, who had been indicted alongside Coppa for racketeering, realized his chances of beating a conviction had just evaporated. When Shellackhead was arrested, police also charged his wife and son, Paul. His son had also been inducted into the Bonanno Family. Always a bright man whose ability to exploit a deal had made him one of the Bonannos’ wealthiest New York gangsters, Shellackhead quickly applied his gambler’s wits to calculating the odds of regaining his freedom. The odds were against him. In December 2002, just one month after Coppa turned, the Cantarella family also placed its faith in the government. Shellackhead’s insights into the Bonanno operations were far greater than Coppa’s because he had long had special access to the boss. Once a week, from 1996 until 2002, he had dinner with Massino at the Casa Blanca Restaurant in Queens. The two covered a lot of material over pasta and wine. Massino was grooming him for a position of power within the family and using him to fulfill the traditional job of the underboss—without the title—by placing him as the main liaison between the boss and his captains. It was a move to further insulate Massino from prosecution and also reflected his growing mistrust of Vitale. That move left Vito Rizzuto as one of the select few who could talk directly to Massino—if he had anything to say to him, Vitale said.
With Shellackhead and Coppa now onside, prosecutors leaned heavily on their proffered testimony to draft indictments against their top two Bonanno targets—the boss and the underboss of the Bonanno Family. On January 8, 2003, a grand jury in the Eastern District of New York returned a 19-count indictment against Massino and Vitale. The RICO indictment named Massino in the slaying of Sonny Black, and Vitale in the Perrino killing. Also named in the same indictment, for his role in Sonny Black’s death, was Frank Lino.
The next day, the government said it had 20 criminals willing to testify on the government’s behalf to the existence of the Bonanno Family, 15 of whom would further name Massino as the boss. In court filings that followed, what Massino had already known was confirmed publicly by the government—two of those cooperating witnesses were made Bonanno members. To his surprise, Vitale was not one of them.
Officials kept Massino and Vitale in separate prisons as they started their journeys through the courts. Away from Massino, agents alerted Vitale to the fact that Massino was targeting him as a weak link and they offered him a deal. Vitale was ripe for such maneuvers. Already upset at the downturn in his mob fortunes under the reorganized Bonanno enterprise, Vitale had for months been pondering his future. His wife had even visited Massino to personally ask him if he intended to kill her husband, an approach that was greeted with much guffawing by gangsters who later heard about it. Massino had already broken the news to Vitale that most of the men “despised” him. And, although Massino left Vitale with the official title of underboss, he directly undermined him by relying on Shellackhead instead.
“He put a wedge, in that period of time, between me and the captains, leaving me in a very vulnerable position,” Vitale said. “He took the captains away from me; they weren’t allowed to call me, they weren’t allowed to give me Christmas gifts. … I had the position as underboss but the captains couldn’t call me, couldn’t associate with me. The captains couldn’t make me earn any money. I was more or less … shelved. You might have the title but you are not doing anything, you are just, for lack of a better word, you are a figurehead.”
When Vitale was earlier charged, in 2001, no one called his wife to offer support. When he had a health scare, only one soldier visited him in hospital. Feeling alienated and vulnerable, Vitale made his decision and sent word, through one of his son’s friends, who was a lawyer, that he was willing to discuss cooperation. He was whisked to a safer prison facility and started talking to federal prosecutors.
“I felt that my wife and kids were going to be left in the street. That’s why I decided to do what I’m doing,” Vitale said of his decision. He showed his affection for Massino by describing their split in a term usually reserved for the end of a romantic relationship: “We broke up.”
Now, feeling betrayed and vulnerable, he offered damning information that profoundly threatened Massino and the Bonanno Family. Vitale also had plenty to say about Canada.
As with the other turncoats, Vitale began lengthy debriefings during which he tore down the curtains that had long blocked the government’s view of Joe Massino, the modern incarnation of the Bonanno Family and the men who made it powerful, including Vito Rizzuto.
If Coppa’s action was the opening trickle, Vitale’s decision to join him opened the floodgates. Bonanno members and associates, suddenly facing substantial prison terms, began to fear they would be the ones caught out. No one wanted to be the sad gangster left to face the full wrath of the courts without a cooperation agreement and with the fingers of their former colleagues-in-arms—men who were equally guilty or, in some cases, substantially more so—all pointing at them in court. With news or rumors of each new turncoat, Bonanno mobsters quietly cataloged in their minds what that person might have on them, and then weighed the danger they faced of being incriminated. When the odds looked particularly grim, they were increasingly switching sides.
Confirmation of Vitale’s defection, although not really taking the Bonanno leadership by surprise after Massino’s public musings, hit the gangsters hard. Frank Lino found it deeply distressing, for he knew that Vitale would considerably bolster the case against him for the Sonny Black murder by corroborating the expected testimony from his old friend Frank Coppa. Worse, Vitale could pin other murders on him.
Throughout his Mafia career, Lino proved time and again that he had an uncanny instinct for self-preservation. Escaping what was meant to be certain death in 1981, when the three captains were massacred in front of him, was perhaps the most dramatic example of his unnatural longevity. His quick willingness to set his loyalty t
o Sonny Red aside—once it was clear Massino was winning the power struggle—was another. Likewise, in early 2003, with life imprisonment hovering over him, Lino did it again, this time abandoning his oath of omertà. It was not just his crime family he needed to turn against, however. As a lifelong criminal and longtime underworld player, he was required by the government to catalog all of his past crimes, who he committed them with and to list all of the made members of the mob and its associates that he was aware of. This meant turning in his son, Joseph, who was also a made man in the Bonanno Family, and other relatives. Even Duane “Goldie” Leisenheimer, Massino’s loyal acolyte, who had gone to prison in the past to protect the boss, turned on the mob and became yet another cooperating witness for the government. The array and rank of Bonanno informants climbing onboard surprised investigators.
“The number of so-called ‘made members’ of the Bonanno Family who have abandoned the oath of omertà and cooperated actively with the investigation, and who have indicated a desire to cooperate, is truly unprecedented,” said the FBI’s Pat D’Amuro. “Instead of beating people up, they are beating down our doors in an effort to cooperate.”
Some of the informants, including Joseph “Joey Mook” D’Amico and James “Big Louie” Tartaglione agreed to wear wires when they met with fellow gangsters, secretly recording their conversations, another first in the government’s assault against the Bonannos. The government would record veteran gangsters discussing serious underworld business, including family administration meetings and sitdowns with members of three of New York’s Five Families: the Gambino, Colombo and Genovese families. In one recording, made during a meeting in September 2003, when the Bonanno Family was really feeling the heat from news of the informants, Anthony Urso, the acting boss at the time, was heard suggesting one way to stem the flood of rats.
“You gotta throw somebody in the streets—this has got to stop. Fuck it, he can do it, I can do it. This is how they should have played and they might have done this before: [if] you turned [informant], we wipe your family out,” he said. “How would Sal feel if I killed one of his kids?” Urso asked Big Louie. “Why should the rat’s 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 fuckin’ think twice.”
It would be a reprehensible thing for anyone to suggest, let alone a family man such as Urso. In a bid to aid Urso in obtaining a release on bail after he too was arrested, his own son, Steven Craig Urso, an associate professor at Nassau Community College in Garden City, New York, wrote to the judge: “I would like you to know that my father is a kind and considerate man. … My dad has also taught me so much—honesty, respect and the value of hard work. … Despite his many challenges and his physical injuries, he has always maintained a healthy and modest lifestyle. He also taught me how to respect both my mind and body and how to meet life’s challenges with both courage and dignity.” The elder Urso himself seemed to have a change of heart—or at least told the judge he had—when he renounced his life in the Mafia.
“I still battle with my demons over this young man’s death almost every day of my life. I wish there had been something I could have done to save him,” he wrote to Judge Nicholas Garaufis of the Bonanno associate he had killed. “I have made some bad choices in life, but sometimes by the time you realize that you made a mistake, it’s too late to walk away. Now that I am finally free of that life of crime, all I can hope and pray for is the opportunity to live out the last years of my life in peace with my loved ones.”
Although Urso was dissuaded from going after the family of “rats” by his fellow gangsters, it suggested the desperation the Bonanno gangsters were feeling. It also highlighted the potential danger of becoming a government informant. This was underscored by Lino, who said informants like him faced a death sentence on the streets: “If I was not cooperating, I would be killing the witnesses,” Lino said.
Along with fear of the turncoats, conversations among the senior members of the Bonanno administration—the men chosen to fill in while Massino was incarcerated—reveal their attempts at protecting the remaining Bonanno assets. With “Big Louie” Tartaglione, a veteran Bonanno captain, secretly recording the conversations for the government, the senior New York mobsters refer to “them up there,” according to transcripts of the recordings. “Up there” is code for Canada, Tartaglione later said.
“When he’s got a case going, he don’t wanna show them, like now, [that] we got Canada too,” Joseph “Joe Saunders” Cammarano said during one conversation. Tartaglione later decoded the chat; Joe Massino did not want his men discussing New York’s relationship with Montreal while the FBI was all over them.
“They don’t want [people] saying… ‘Canada this and that.’ Leave it alone so maybe you don’t let the cat out of the bag,” Tartaglione explained. After Cammarano said they all needed to protect the Canadian contingent, Anthony Urso said it was likely too late. The rats, he said, will have already blabbed.
“You think he didn’t say he was out there with me, with all those people?” Urso said, a reference to Urso’s trip to Montreal with Vitale a few years earlier, when they met Vito and some of his men.
The Bonanno mobsters who remained unindicted grew increasingly resigned to the outcome of the demise of omertà within their ranks. In a frank assessment, Vincent “Vinny Gorgeous” Basciano predicted how it would turn out.
“At the end of the day, we’re all gonna be in jail,” he said.
It was not long after those words were spoken that Vito Rizzuto and his New York colleagues were arrested.
On February 13, 2004, Vito’s co-defendants—those who had been arrested on the same day as him in the sweep through New York—got their first tangible look at the strength of the government’s case against them. The first installment of the government’s evidence was turned over to defense lawyers, in accordance with the rules of disclosure. Included in that early batch were 250 exhibits and more than 70 audio recordings—the result of the informants’ having secretly worn wires while striking up conversations with associates.
“Additional discovery will follow,” Greg Andres, the prosecutor, added dryly. The volume and extent of the evidence proffered from so many informants, each adding a layer of corroboration to the other, presents a daunting challenge for any defendant. A jury could easily turn away in disgust from one unsavory turncoat, or, under clever cross-examination, two of them could be made to appear too unreliable to base a conviction on. But six or more cooperating informants sticking largely to the same story would be considerably persuasive.
For Vito, however, his judicial prospects would only get worse—potentially much worse—when another unexpected and almost inconceivable informant stepped out from the shadows.
CHAPTER 39
BROOKLYN, JULY 30, 2004
After nine weeks of spirited trial, the foreman of an anonymous 12-member jury stood before Judge Nicholas Garaufis and announced their findings. Joseph Massino, then 61 and the boss of the Bonanno Family, was found guilty of ordering seven gangland murders. It left him facing a mandatory life sentence. Among the murders he was found to have orchestrated were the May 5, 1981, ambush of the three captains, as well as the slayings of Sonny Black and Anthony Mirra for letting Donnie Brasco near the family. At the trial, Greg Andres and his assistant attorneys, Robert Henoch and Mitra Hormozi, had led six former Bonanno underlings of Massino’s to the stand to point their finger incriminatingly at the boss.
“For the first time in the history of organized crime prosecution, members of the Bonanno Family who once took the oath of omertà took the oath of a witness,” a U.S. Department of Justice official said, after the convictions.
The government’s record against the Bonannos was now unparalleled. Joe Massino brought to 30 the number of Bonanno defendants convicted after trial or pleading guilty to federal indictments. That total included the boss, the underboss, the consigliere, four member
s of the family’s ruling committee, 10 captains or acting captains and seven made members who were soldiers. Further, 33 additional members and associates were under indictment and facing justice, including Vito Rizzuto.
The U.S. government lost little time in noting one measure of its achievement: the official bosses of all Five Families of New York were now behind bars serving substantial prison sentences. Massino’s troubles were not over; he still faced a second indictment—this one for ordering the execution of Gerlando “George from Canada” Sciascia.
This charge was different from the others for one ominous reason—the murder had taken place in 1999, five years after the death penalty for a racketeering murder was placed on the books. The law had been passed despite quiet, behind-the-scenes lobbying of politicians by gangsters. The gangsters’ fear was well placed. The Massino case proved that the government would not flinch from sending a mob boss to face execution. This case against Massino was now a matter of life or death.
In November 2004, prosecutors made it official: if Massino was convicted, they would seek to execute him for ordering Sciascia’s death. The announcement, however, was attacked by Judge Garaufis, the trial judge, as being an uncalled for parting shot from John Ashcroft, the U.S. Attorney General, who had already announced his retirement from office when he issued the call for the mob boss’s execution.
