King of the Godfathers: "Big Joey" Massino and the Fall of the Bonanno Crime Family (15 page)

“I never thought of doing anything illegal, sir,” Pistone said.

When Koppelman said that Pistone had “twisted the truth” for years while undercover, he asked the agent if he was doing the same on the witness stand.

“That is incorrect,” Pistone said. He said he lied only with individuals he was investigating to enhance his credibility with them.

Cerasani was represented by Manhattan attorney David Breitbart, who had leapt to prominence after representing the one-time Harlem drug kingpin Leroy “Nicky” Barnes. Brietbart’s advocacy had earned three acquittals for Barnes although a fourth trial led to a conviction—and life in prison for the drug dealer. With an in-your-face method of questioning, Breitbart had a habit of facing a hostile witness, hands in trouser pockets, and pepper them with persistent, embarrassing questions that sometimes elicited angry responses.

In defending Cerasani, Breitbart had asked a lot of questions that brought up Massino. Through Breitbart’s questioning, Massino, although he was absent from the trial, had a presence in the case. However, it was just that tactic that began to anger some of Massino’s allies who had been watching the progress of the case. They didn’t care much for Breitbart’s tactics. So, one August afternoon after the trial had finished for the day, Massino’s ever loyal brother-in-law, Salvatore Vitale, accompanied by James Tartaglione, paid a visit to Breitbart’s office off Broadway in lower Manhattan.

Vitale didn’t mince any words. Stop mentioning Massino’s name, he told Breitbart. Stop mentioning Massino’s name or he, Vitale, would throw Breitbart out the window, Massino’s brother-in-law later told the FBI. Though he was not tall in stature, Breitbart had martial arts training, and while taken aback by Vitale’s remark, he told him to cool off. Nothing he said in court could ever be used against Massino, Breitbart replied. Though it was a strange meeting, the irony of it all would play out years later when it would be Breitbart to whom Massino turned for legal help.

On August 25, 1982, the jury began its deliberation after two full days of summations and hours of final instructions from Sweet. The prosecution admitted that Pistone and his testimony were crucial to the case while the defense attorneys said that the government had spent millions of dollars on a farcical case that nabbed “minnows.”

Robert Koppelman, Ruggiero’s attorney, said that there wasn’t one witness who testified with any firsthand knowledge of the crimes, particularly the murder of the three captains in May 1981. Breitbart, in his closing statement on behalf of Cerasani, called Pistone a liar and said Wean, Massino’s old hijack buddy from Maspeth, was “evil incarnate.”

Three days later the verdict was in: Ruggiero, Santora, and Tomasulo were convicted of the racketeering conspiracy charge, which accused them of being involved in affairs of the Bonanno crime family. Specifically, the jury found Ruggiero and Santora guilty of conspiracy in the murders of Trinchera, Giaccone, and Indelicato. Tomasulo was convicted of conspiracy to distribute Quaaludes and conspiracy to conduct illegal gambling. Anthony Rabito was acquitted of the main conspiracy count but convicted of a drug offense. All would receive prison sentences. Part of Santora’s conviction was later overturned.

John Cerasani, the reputed crime family soldier who Ray Wean provided evidence against, was acquitted of everything, including the charge he took part in the abortive robbery of the home of the sister of the former Shah of Iran. When the verdict was announced, the convicted men embraced Cerasani, who was free to walk out of the courtroom. The other defendants were taken away by federal marshals.

On August 12, 1982, about two weeks before the verdict, Police Officer Edward Mosher of the 122nd Precinct in Staten Island responded to a call. A man passing through the wooded area near the intersection of South Avenue and Bridge Street came across a hospital body bag that contained human remains. The corpse was in an advance stage of decomposition and Mosher’s report contained what had to be a big understatement: “Suspicious death! No arrest.”

Investigators weren’t sure if the corpse was that of a man or woman. The right arm had fallen away from the body and some of the fingers were missing, possibly from animal activity. The body bag contained the words “Bellevue Hospital Mortuary.”

Back at the morgue the corpse was so decomposed that the doctor doing the autopsy noted many times in his report that organs had shrunken or rotted away. The body was in a state of adiposcere, meaning much of its tissues had congealed into a mass of fatty tissue. The eyes were sunken so that there was no color to the irises. An x-ray determined that there were bullet fragments in the brain, although that organ was also severely decomposed. The fragments, consisting of a bullet and the metal jacket that had once surrounded it, were recovered from the skull. There was a bullet hole in the left rear of the skull and since there didn’t appear to be any other fatal injuries the coroner’s report said that death was from a fatal gunshot wound to the head. Forensic specialists at the city medical examiner’s office labored for weeks, studying dental records, doing x-rays, and making all kinds of studies.

With a body in such poor condition, forensic experts had to rely on dental comparisons to make an identification. Although one or two teeth seemed to be missing postmortem, there was still enough left. On November 10, 1982, the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner announced that the body found in Staten Island was identified as being that of Dominick Napolitano, who had been missing for over a year.

The discovery of Napolitano was an eerie foreshadowing of Ruggiero’s fate at sentencing five days later. Judge Sweet gave him forty years in prison, robbing Ruggiero of any hope that he would live life as a free person outside of a cell; instead, he would be relegated to spending his days making futile pleas to the court for a reduction of his sentence. Maybe his old friend Sonny Black got the better deal.

CHAPTER 13

Murder on the Lam

From his haven in the Poconos, Joseph Massino followed the machinations of the New York City trials and saw that Joseph Pistone was deadly as a centerpiece of the government’s case. Raymond Wean, his old buddy from the hijacking days in Maspeth, was more problematic since the defendant he testified against, John Cerasani, was the only person who was acquitted and walked away a free man.

Had Massino gone to trial along with the others, he would have been playing a crap shoot. It was true that Massino was charged with conspiracy in the murder of the three captains, rather than with the actual participation to kill them. But a conviction on the conspiracy would have subjected Massino to a possible conviction for racketeering, which turned out to be the fate of Benjamin Ruggiero and Nicholas Santora and resulted in substantial prison sentences. As Salvatore Vitale later told investigators, Massino figured he had a better chance of beating the case if he didn’t go on trial with the others. It was a strange bit of intuition on Massino’s part, but it turned out to be not too far from the mark.

Massino stayed on the lam, shuffling around the Poconos and making trips back and forth to New York City for well over a year after Ruggiero and the others were convicted. If there was any big business to attend to, if a “piece of work” needed to be arranged, the leaders of the Bonanno family knew where they could find Massino. In turn, he knew how to call on them.

Cesare Bonventre was born in the mob. Having grown up in the Mafia breeding ground in Sicily known as the city of Castellammare del Golfo, Bonventre was blooded to the life of La Cosa Nostra by virtue of his uncle, John Bonventre, the underboss of Joseph Bonanno. When a number of ambitious young Castellammarese took up Carmine Galante’s advice and immigrated to Brooklyn, Cesare Bonventre was one of them. He became a fixture among the Sicilians in the cafés on Knickerbocker Avenue, and by the late 1970s he became a close associate of Galante.

There was something about Bonventre that made him stand out from the other Castellammarese and ethnic Italians of the Bonanno family. Unlike the other pasta and pastry loving wiseguys with the high body mass indexes, Bonventre was tall and lean, almost athletic. While the other Bonanno confederates looked like fashion disasters, Bonventre, with his stylish clothing, aviator sunglasses, and European man’s purse, reeked of Italian couture and made him look like a Continental lady killer.

Cesare Bonventre had also been lucky. The day Galante was gunned down in Bushwick, it was Bonventre and Baldassare Amato who were supposed to be bodyguards for the slain mafioso. Neither Bonventre nor Amato were hurt in the assassination of Galante, although others nearby were either killed or wounded. The fact that both men escaped unscathed seemed to be a sure sign that the Sicilian faction of the Bonanno family, of which they were members, had gone along with the hit.

Fleeing the crime scene, Bonventre and Amato headed for the hills only to resurface a couple of weeks later in the company of a lawyer who escorted them into the office of Brooklyn District Attorney Eugene Gold. The two Galante bodyguards answered questions from investigators about the murder. But there seemed to be little to tie them to the killers, so they were let go and were never charged—at least with Galante’s killing. Not long after that, Bonventre, at the age of twenty-eight, became a Bonanno captain, the youngest of that rank in the family. Amato earned his stripes as a soldier.

Bonventre and Amato had other family business to take care of. In the early 1980s, they and other Sicilians became part of a large-scale international heroin importation ring. The conspiracy was grounded in both Italy and the United States. Sicilians, both in Brooklyn and back in Sicily, were involved in the refinement and shipping of the heroin to the United States, where pizza parlors served as key meeting places and venues for some of the money transactions surrounding the narcotics trafficking.

On February 2, 1980, about six months after Galante was murdered, the FBI began an investigation of the Bonanno family, and Charles Rooney, an experienced agent who had been doing white-collar crime investigations for the agency out of its Rego Park office, was assigned the case. It was not an easy job. The FBI had done a lot of surveillances of the crime family, particularly at the Toyland Social Club, and Joseph Pistone was well entrenched in his undercover role as Donnie Brasco. But piecing together a major heroin case would take more than just sitting in surveillance vans or waiting for Pistone, who was not a made member of the Mafia and had virtually no interaction with the Sicilian wing of the crime family, to report back what the mobsters allowed themselves to tell him.

So, for three years Rooney and the other agents undertook the arduous task of first identifying the Sicilian players in the heroin connection. They did it by intensive surveillances all over the New York and New Jersey metropolitan area. The spying discerned that one Sicilian in particular, Salvatore Catalano, a major figure in the Bonanno crime family, was central to the heroin ring. Catalano had become the boss of the family for about a week but couldn’t hold the job since he had trouble communicating with the rest of the family and had already been made in Italy. Concerning the latter, per American Mafia code, he could not be a boss because he hadn’t been made a member of the American Mafia.

The surveillance by Rooney and the other case agents never put Catalano in close proximity to Joe Massino. In fact, Massino was conspicuously absent from major Sicilian functions like weddings and funerals, a likely indication that he kept himself apart (or was deliberately kept apart) from the heroin trade, regardless of what Vitale later told the FBI.

By 1984, after the FBI had placed key wiretaps on the Sicilian traffickers, they were charged in a spectacular case that became known as the “Pizza Connection.” The April 9, 1984, news conference announcing the arrests brought U.S. Attorney General William French Smith, FBI Director William Webster, and Manhattan U.S. Attorney Rudolph Giuliani together for the announcement that the Sicilian drug ring had brought in over $1.5 billion in heroin into the country over a five-year period. Reporters covering the story later said that the name originated after they prodded Giuliani to use the term
Pizza Connection
and the moniker stuck.

The FBI used a massive 300-plus-page criminal complaint, drafted by Rooney, to initiate the case in which he named Catalano, Bonventre, Amato, Sicilian mafioso Gaetano Badalamenti, and over a dozen other men as defendants. Like the complaint, the Pizza Connection trial would be a monster affair, spanning eighteen months in Manhattan’s federal court. But Cesare Bonventre would never live to see it.

The New York boys of the Bonanno crime family had plenty of access to Joseph Massino while he was hiding out in Pennsylvania. In early 1984, a group of Massino’s friends made the trip. Salvatore Vitale was among them. He later told the FBI that he was accompanied by two other men, Louis “Ha Ha” Attanasio and James Tartaglione. Attanasio earned his particular moniker not because he was a good joke teller but, so the story goes, he laughed when he heard someone in the underworld died. Neither Vitale nor Tartaglione, a gangly, bespectacled man with a boney face, were actually made members of the crime family. But Attanasio was and bore the rank of acting captain.

When Massino had such visits and wanted to keep too many people from knowing his business, he went on a solitary “walk-and-talk” with one person of his choice. Vitale said that his brother-in-law took a brief constitutional with Attanasio as he and Tartaglione watched.

Massino never told Vitale what he talked about on that walk. But Attanasio did, and according to Vitale it wasn’t good news.

“We are going to kill Cesare and I need you to help set it up,” said Attanasio, according to Vitale.

Why did Bonventre have to die? The FBI came up with two key theories. One centered on speculation that he had offended someone, possibly in another crime family, with poor-quality heroin. Another assumed that he had gained too much power too quickly and because he was so ruthless he was viewed as a threat to boss Philip Rastelli and his supporters such as Massino.

Whatever the reason, Vitale said he worked in earnest to set up Bonventre. Because Rastelli was released from prison in April 1984 after serving his term for extortion in the lunch wagon case, Vitale enlisted the crime boss in the plot. According to Vitale, he told Bonventre a fabricated story that Rastelli wanted to meet him at a diner in Queens. A car was needed for the hit and Vitale turned to the fair-haired Duane Leisenheimer, who promptly commandeered a stolen car.

As planned by Vitale, the killing of Bonventre was to take place in a garage in Queens located near the intersection of Fifty-seventh Street and Metropolitan Avenue. The day of the killing, Bonventre parked his car at the corner of Flushing and Metropolitan avenues and sat in the front seat of the stolen car being driven by Vitale. Louis Attanasio sat in the backseat. The prearranged signal for the actual killing, Vitale told the FBI, was to be his remark, “It looks good to me.”

A few blocks later, with Bonventre settled into the front seat, Vitale started to make a turn on to Fifty-seventh Street where the garage was located.

“It looks good to me,” Vitale said.

Bonventre might have thought the remark referred to the way Vitale negotiated the turn into the garage. On hearing the signal, Attanasio, according to Vitale’s later testimony in federal court, reached into his boot, pulled out a gun, and fired two shots into the back of the handsome Bonventre’s head before the car entered the garage.

Incredibly, though wounded grievously, Bonventre struggled. He tried to put his foot on the gas, perhaps in a futile gesture to crash the car and take his assassins with him. It didn’t work; Vitale was able to drive the car into the garage when he saw Leisenheimer open the door to the building.

Next, Leisenheimer opened the car door and a dying Bonventre fell out, flopping and heaving like a dying fish. Vitale said to investigators that he and Attanasio also got out of the car and walked around to the opened vehicle door. It was then, Vitale told the FBI and also testified in Brooklyn federal court, that Attanasio pumped two more shots into Bonventre.

It was done. Bonventre’s body was placed in the trunk of the car that had delivered him to his death and driven to the Clinton Diner. It was now Gabriel Infanti’s turn to do the dirty work. Meeting Vitale at the diner, Infanti had the job of disposing of the body and the vehicle. Infanti had specific instructions that the body was not to be found. He assured Vitale it would disappear forever. In fact, a week later a proud Infanti told Vitale that Bonventre had been chopped up and buried.

Well, forever lasted about two weeks. On April 16, 1984, New Jersey law enforcement officials were called to a warehouse in Garfield. Inside, they found two fifty-five-gallon drums packed with grisly contents. One drum contained a human torso with the head. The other contained the legs. Further investigation determined that the corpse had first been taken to nearby Wallington, where it was placed in a vat of adhesives before the dismemberment took place.

Police told reporters that the dismembering operation wasn’t successful and that the remains were finally moved to the Garfield warehouse. After three weeks of forensic investigation the body was identified as being that of the thirty-three-year-old Cesare Bonventre. His body had been discovered ten days after Rooney and the other FBI agents in the Pizza Connection case had scoured New York City to serve him an arrest warrant.

Vitale had to tell Massino that Bonventre’s remains had been found. Aside from disappointment in Infanti, Vitale recalled that Massino became concerned that Infanti had lied about burying the corpse. It was certainly not a good way for Infanti to get in the good graces of Massino, who despite being on the lam was the most powerful person in the crime family “The guy fucked up,” Infanti told Vitale, referring to yet another person who had been tasked with the job of disposing of the remains. A tough-talking Infanti assured Vitale that he would take care of the man who botched the burial. But who would take care of Infanti?