King of the Godfathers: "Big Joey" Massino and the Fall of the Bonanno Crime Family (12 page)

CHAPTER 12

The Gathering Storm

By February 1981, the deep penetration Joseph Pistone had made of the Bonanno crime family had produced enough evidence that federal prosecutors in Manhattan began the secretive and complex task of targeting the upper echelon of the crime family for indictment. It became clear to investigators that the old legend that the Mafia didn’t get involved in narcotics was really just a myth. Cocaine and heroin trafficking had become the province of a number of high-ranked mafiosi.

In the Bonanno family, the focus of investigators turned to Alphonse “Sonny Red” Indelicato. He was believed to be one of the family’s major cocaine and heroin traffickers and used his contacts in Florida to facilitate the deals. If the FBI needed a strong indication that Indelicato and his two close associates, Dominick Trinchera and Philip Giaccone, might be involved in narcotics, they found a clue during a wedding in 1980 at the Pierre Hotel in Manhattan. One of the reputed bosses of the Milan faction of the Italian Mafia was getting married at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Manhattan and the big bash was surveilled by the FBI. There were lots of pictures taken by agents and the collage of photos seemed like a Who’s Who of organized crime, remembered Charles Rooney. Indelicato, Trinchera, and Giaccone were in attendance as was Salvatore Catalano and a lot of the Sicilians from Brooklyn.

The FBI had just commenced a major heroin investigation involving a curious group of Sicilians who seemed to be in Brooklyn but who had various ties to Bonanno family members. The FBI wasn’t sure what the Sicilians were at that point, perhaps a separate clique within the crime family or maybe a distinct family unto themselves. It would take four more years before the FBI would tie the Sicilians into the international heroin trade in a case that would later become known as the Pizza Connection.

But in 1980, whoever the Sicilians were, they accepted the likes of Indelicato and his two friends. Curiously for the FBI, neither Joseph Massino nor Dominick Napolitano were at the wedding reception, a fact that investigators believed indicated that perhaps both men wanted nothing to do with drugs or that some other kind of crime family power play was underway. In any case, federal prosecutors suspected Indelicato was a key player in the narcotics trade and by early 1981 they targeted him for investigation. But with the events of May 5, 1981, when Indelicato, Trinchera, and Giaccone were slaughtered at a social club on Thirteenth Avenue in Brooklyn, federal prosecutors in Manhattan lost their initial target.

However, with the death of Indelicato, investigators quickly shifted their sights to Joseph Massino and Dominick Napolitano and their crews. Both Massino and Napolitano were by August of that year suspected by investigators to have orchestrated the murders of the three captains. In addition, both Massino and Napolitano were believed by federal prosecuters to have been involved in narcotics, as well as extortion and gambling.

Allegations surrounding Massino about drugs proved to be rather ambiguous and amorphous. His brother-in-law, Salvatore Vitale, later told FBI agents that at some point in the late 1970s, a time when Massino was an up and coming soldier, he instructed him and Duane Leisenheimer to bring a car to Fort Lee, New Jersey. The first town over the George Washington Bridge, Fort Lee has had its share of gangsters living and working within its confines. When Vitale arrived with the car, he spotted Gambino mobster Angelo Ruggiero and Massino nearby. Ruggiero was a known Gambino drug merchant and his appearance with Massino led Vitale to think that perhaps drugs were in the trunk of the car he had just dropped off. He also told the agents that Massino would make trips alone on Saturdays to visit another mobster, something he thought seemed suspicious.

Napolitano, as far as law enforcement was concerned, went missing in August 1981, a fact that led the FBI to think he was either dead (as informants claimed) or had fled to escape indictment or retribution for the Donnie Brasco disaster. Pistone, of course, was off the street. Nevertheless, the federal government’s investigation into the New York crime families continued at an unrelenting pace. Joseph Massino was turning out to be a major target.

From offices in Manhattan and Brooklyn, federal prosecutors and FBI agents applied for several court orders for wiretaps in 1981 that targeted key Bonanno crime family locations. While he was alive, taps were placed on the telephones at Napolitano’s Motion Lounge. Another tap was also placed on Benjamin Ruggiero’s Manhattan telephone, as well as the home telephone of at least one other Manhattan-based family soldier. But it was in late August 1981 that permission was obtained by the FBI to place taps on Massino’s home telephone in Howard Beach and his J&S Cake Social Club in Maspeth. The FBI wanted to bug not only Massino but also Vitale.

The affidavit filed in court by FBI agent Edward T. Tucker to get taps placed on Massino’s telephone spelled out just how powerful and deadly law enforcement officials considered the Maspeth caterer to be. Tucker said that it had been Benjamin Ruggiero who placed Massino—who is identified in the agent’s affidavit as “Messina”—squarely in the planning of the murder of the three captains that May. Massino himself, according to Tucker, was overheard by an informant saying, “We got three of them, but two got away,” an apparent reference to the fact that Frank Lino and Bruno Indelicato had not been killed along with Trinchera, Giaccone, and Alphonse Indelicato that fateful night.

Conventional wisdom was that the three captains were killed because they tried to supplant Rastelli’s power. But Tucker said that other mobsters had told an undercover agent (presumably Pistone) of another possible motive: Alfonse Indelicato’s close affiliation with the Sicilian faction of the crime family had made Massino worried that the Zips might kill him. A preemptive strike thus seemed to be needed.

Apart from his suspected role in the three captains slaughter, Massino was also discovered to have developed a close working relationship with up and coming Gambino family captain John Gotti, said Tucker, referring to intelligence developed from a confidential law enforcement source. A neighbor of Massino in Howard Beach, Gotti had at that time not received the publicity and notoriety that would dog him later in life. He was the boss of a crew of gangsters who had graduated from hijacking to drug dealing and other crimes. Gotti was also a big gambler and that was how Massino became tied to him, said Tucker.

“In May 1981, this Source advised the FBI that Messina and Gotti along with another Gambino Family capo Angelo Ruggiero and two others each owned a percentage of the ‘house’ in a high stakes dice game run by Gotti on Mott Street in Manhattan,” stated Tucker. Mott Street in Manhattan is a main avenue in Chinatown but it also crosses into Little Italy, where lots of Mafiosi lived, worked, and conducted business.

But there was a more bizarre episode reported by Tucker that seemed to show that Gotti and Massino were working together to carry out the murder of the still hiding Bruno Indelicato, the supposedly cocaine-enraged son of the murdered Alphonse. Tucker learned from the same confidential source that Gotti’s brother, Gene, and Angelo Ruggiero were overheard relating how they had been driving on a New York City expressway when they were followed by what they thought was a police car.

“When this car pulled up a man inside the car pointed a gun out the window and they [Gene Gotti and Ruggiero] recognized the driver of the car to be Anthony Bruno Indelicato,” said Tucker. “Gotti and Ruggiero related that they were able to exit the expressway and get away.”

The reason for the roadside encounter, the source told Tucker, was that the killing of Alphonse Indelicato had been approved by Aniello Dellacroce, the underboss of the Gambino crime family and mentor for John Gotti. This made Gambino family members a target for Bruno Indelicato’s revenge. As a result, Massino and John Gotti became united in a common effort to find and kill Bruno Indelicato, not only to protect themselves but also Dellacroce, said Tucker, referring to his informant.

Other sources cited by Tucker said that Massino, while he disliked using the telephone to conduct business, would nevertheless sometimes talk on the social club telephone to contact loan-sharking victims about their debts. Vitale would also use the telephone there to call Massino about gambling and loan-sharking, activities the same sources said Massino ran out of J&S Cake Social Club.

As icing on the cake, Tucker said that the FBI pen registers picked up Massino’s home telephone making calls to the home of one of Rastelli’s brothers, Bonanno street boss Salvatore Ferrugia, as well as John Gotti. In Tucker’s view, these calls showed that Massino was a high-ranking Bonanno captain who was loyal to Rastelli. Massino remained, said Tucker, a subject worthy of electronic surveillance.

Judge Eugene Nickerson signed the surveillance authorization on August 27, 1981. Wiretaps were placed on the telephones and a bug was set up inside J&S Cake Social Club. One night a team of about a half-dozen FBI agents led by Patrick Colgan penetrated Massino’s social club on Fifty-eighth Road in Maspeth. One agent picked the locks, another decommissioned the alarm, and another planted the bug as Colgan made sure nothing went wrong. The black-bag job took about forty-five minutes to complete. But no sooner was the bug up and running than it stopped functioning.

Bugging devices can be so useful when they work right. But one vulnerability they have is their essential nature of being radio transmitters. A sensitive radio receiver anywhere near a bugging device can pick up the transmission. It just so happened that just a day or two after Colgan and his crew had planted the listening device in Massino’s social club that Salvatore Vitale began fiddling with a police scanner. The surveillance-conscious Massino likely had the scanner at J&S Cake to monitor police frequencies. But a sound that Vitale had picked up froze everyone at the club. It sounded like a strange frequency and Massino, who was sitting at a table, became suspicious.

Duane Leisenheimer was in the bathroom and Massino called out to him to clap his hands. Leisenheimer complied and the scanner picked up what sounded like a clap.

Massino now knew his club was bugged and he searched the ceiling until he found the listening device over the area above the card table. Vitale took it out and the surveillance device stopped at that moment.

After being told of the dead bugging apparatus, Colgan’s FBI supervisor told him to go back in and retrieve the device.

“How do you expect us to get it out?” Colgan lamented, knowing the difficulty that surrounded the initial planting of the device. The club had a special key-coded alarm system that had allowed the agents only thirty seconds or so to override it.

“I don’t care, get it,” the supervisor said.

So shortly after lunch one afternoon in the late summer of 1981, Colgan and a partner walked down Fifty-eighth Road and followed Salvatore Vitale through the door of the club. Vitale had been oblivious to their footsteps. One of the other men in the club nervously asked Vitale who was following him. Vitale turned and stared at Colgan and his parnter.

“We are FBI,” Colgan told Vitale.

“Fuck you,” Vitale answered and took a swing at the agent. (Years later Vitale told a different version, saying he asked what the agent wanted.)

Suddenly, a voice from the backroom called out, “Cool it Sal, it’s only Pat.”

Massino had recognized his old professional adversary from the hijacking squad and defused the situation.

“I have been expecting you,” Massino told Colgan as he gave him the bugging device.

“Joe, it crossed my mind,” Colgan said.

Massino asked the agents to have a can a beer and broke out some Budweiser. Colgan, his partner, Massino, and Vitale then sat at the bar and made small talk. The four men sounded like old friends from the neighborhood, asking after each other’s family. Colgan couldn’t help notice that Massino had gained more girth and had a belly that overhung his belt more than ever. He diplomatically told Massino he looked bigger. Massino complimented Colgan about his recent promotion to supervisor in the FBI. Colgan said he had heard Massino had received a promotion as well.

After finishing the drinks, Colgan slapped a few dollars down on the bar—despite Massino’s polite protest—and left with the bugging device. The timing of the discovery of the bug was fortuitous because if there was talk within Massino’s club about the murders or anything else of interest to federal agents, the listening device didn’t pick it up. Back at FBI headquarters in Manhattan the bug was tested. It worked perfectly.

By the fall of 1981, Massino and Napolitano were being heavily probed for their involvement in the murder of the three captains, as well as for other acts of racketeering through the Bonanno crime family. On November 23, 1981, the first indictment stemming from special Agent Joseph Pistone’s penetration of the Bonanno family was announced in U.S. District Court in Manhattan. Six men, Dominick Napolitano, Benjamin Ruggiero, Nicholas Santora, John Cerasani, James Episcopia, and Antonio Tomasulo were accused of participating in the conspiracy as well as in other acts of racketeering involving the Bonanno crime family.

The announcement of the charges on November 24, 1981, was the first indication that the FBI had two undercover agents who had penetrated the crime family. Joseph Pistone and Edgar T. Robb weren’t named in the press conference but just the fact that such an infiltration of the Mafia had taken place was big news. Aside from the conspiracy to kill the three captains, the defendants were charged with various narcotics offenses and gambling. It was also disclosed that the group had tried in June 1980 to burglarize the Manhattan apartment of Princess Ashraf Pahlevi, the twin sister of the deposed Shah of Iran. That break-in was bungled when a security guard fired a shot at the would-be intruders.

In a preemptive move designed as much to convince him to become a witness as to save him, federal agents in August 1981, three months before his formal indictment, had arrested Ruggiero. The FBI had known from its informant within the Bonanno family, undoubtedly Raymond Wean, that Ruggiero was targeted for assassination. Since the FBI didn’t think Ruggiero would stay in the area if told of the plot against him, he was first arrested for the murder of Alphonse Indelicato, the only one of the three murdered captains whose body had been found. The FBI then told Ruggiero about the threat to his life.