King of the Godfathers: "Big Joey" Massino and the Fall of the Bonanno Crime Family (18 page)

Reprising his role in the earlier trial, which centered on the murder of the three captains, undercover agent Joseph Pistone again took the witness stand in Massino’s case. A lot of Pistone’s testimony repeated what he had stated in the 1982 trial, which recounted his covert penetration of the crime family and the close relationship he developed with Sonny Black Napolitano and Lefty Guns Ruggiero. Both Napolitano and Ruggiero, according to Pistone’s testimony, were intimately involved with the killing of the three captains. But when it came to Massino, the evidence was highly circumstantial. Pistone was able to recollect a conversation he had with Ruggiero about the way Massino had screwed up the disposal of the bodies of the three murdered captains. Things had been so slipshod and hastily done that Alphonse Indelicato’s corpse was found in the vacant lot in Queens three weeks after the killings.

Pistone’s testimony, while circumstantial, could be seen as implicating Massino in the murder conspiracy. After all, wouldn’t the other members of the conspiracy have to entrust such a crucial job—the disposal of the bodies—to a person who was also part of the plot? That was essentially what Assistant U.S. Attorney Helen Gredd argued to the jury in her summation.

“Lefty didn’t give Pistone all the details of how the three murders were planned or carried out but he confirmed that Joe Massino was a part of that plan, by telling Pistone about something that Massino had agreed to take care of but had screwed up, getting rid of Sonny Red’s body,” Gredd stressed to the jury.

But Dawson brought up the fine point that when Sonny Black Napolitano recounted to Pistone who was involved in the murders, Massino’s name was never mentioned.

“Not a single mention all day of Joseph Massino being happy about it, being a participant in it, having planned it, being interested in it. Not a single mention of Joseph Massino,” noted Dawson.

The verdict took many by surprise. It was also a bit confusing. On June 3, 1987, the jury found that Massino had not conspired in the murder of the three captains. Apparently, Pistone’s testimony didn’t carry enough weight. Massino was also acquitted of the conspiracies to murder Pastore and Bruno Indelicato, the son of slain capo Alphonse. But the jurors found that he and Vitale were guilty of hijack-and theft-related acts: Massino for the 1975 Hemingway tractor-trailer heist and for possession of stolen tuna fish and frozen shrimp; Vitale for possession of the tuna fish and shrimp. That should have been enough to convict both of the racketeering conspiracy charges.

But there had been a legal twist to the case, one first spotted by Jon Pollok, the lawyer who negotiated Massino’s surrender in 1984. It appeared that the hijacking charges, the only charges for which Massino and Vitale were convicted, involved events that took place over five years before the indictment. Because of that, Judge Sweet had to ask the jury to consider a special question: Did the racketeering enterprise continue beyond October 1979? The date was important because it represented the date in time that was more than five years from the date of the third superseding indictment in the case in October 1984. If the jury found that conspiracy continued beyond October 1979, the panel then had to consider whether Vitale and Massino were part of it.

According to court records, it took the jury less than twenty minutes to come to a decision about the special verdict form. No, the jurors decided, the racketeering conspiracy was not shown to continue beyond October 1979. Massino and Vitale were off the hook. They had been acquitted on a legal technicality.

The verdict showed that a combination of luck and stealth, as well as some superb defense lawyering, had worked in Massino’s favor. Even with Ray Wean having evidence that Massino told him that Pastore was “gone,” even with Pistone’s detailed testimony and his tapes of mobsters talking about the murder of the three captains, the jury had reasonable doubt about Massino conspiring to kill anyone.

The problem was that there was no direct evidence, no testimony of a witness who participated in any of the killings, that linked Massino to a murder conspiracy. Massino, as was his cautious nature, had been fairly discrete in his conversations with the witnesses who did testify. The jury was then left with a very incomplete and ambiguous portrayal of his activities. It all failed to convince the jury that Massino was involved in the murders.

Massino’s courtroom victory was a lesson for the prosecution, as well as for any investigator who thought of targeting the Mafia leader. They had better have their ducks in a row and the strongest case possible if they wanted to get a conviction. Any less would be just too damned unpredictable.

After the special verdict was announced, there were handshakes all around the defense table. Massino was taken back to the local federal jail since he was serving a prison sentence on the Teamster case. Vitale was free to leave the courthouse. In Massino’s absence, he had all kinds of business of a family sort to deal with.

CHAPTER 16

By the Numbers

“What do you think is going on?” asked FBI Director Louis Freeh.

Though he was based in Washington, D.C., Freeh kept abreast of crime news out of New York City, where he had worked as a federal prosecutor in the 1980s. That morning, March 20, 1999, the Manhattan tabloids had reports about the killing of a Bonanno crime family captain named Gerlando “George” Sciascia on a Bronx street. His face was bloodied from three shots to the head and his left eye was shot out.

Freeh, who had led some of the big prosecutions of the crime family in the 1980s, had a meteoric rise in his career that led to his appointment by President Bill Clinton to the directorship of the FBI in 1993. But he never lost his interest in the Bonanno group. The killing of Sciascia, a major family member out of Canada, was a sign that something big had happened. So Freeh called his trusted friend, Charles Rooney, special agent in charge of the Chicago office of the FBI, to brainstorm.

Rooney had studied the Bonanno crime family for years and had an encyclopedic knowledge of the group, as well as an indelible memory. He had put together the Pizza Connection case and had known all the players in the family. He especially knew the ways of Joseph Massino. He had a quick answer for Freeh about Sciascia’s death.

“This is Joey cleaning house,” said Rooney.

What Rooney meant was that Massino was continuing what the investigator believed was a long process of killing off anyone who might be able to implicate him in the 1981 murder of the three captains or any other homicides for that matter. A surveillance picture taken on May 6, 1981, at a Bronx motel, the day after Dominick Trinchera, Philip Giaccone, and Alphonse Indelicato had been killed, showed Massino with three other men: Vito Rizzuto, a key Bonanno captain from Canada and a suspected shooter in the killing of the three captains, Gianni Liggamari, a mafioso from New Jersey, and Sciascia.

There were other theories to be sure that would emerge about the Sciascia killing. Among them would be the fact that Sciascia had spoken his mind about the drug use of Anthony Graziano, an old Bonanno captain who Massino had a soft spot for. But to Rooney’s way of thinking, a lot of high-ranked mobsters like Massino got paranoid about their crimes. Massino in particular was overly sensitive about breaches in security and tried to foresee who might be a turncoat. So it made sense, Rooney believed, that Massino was trying to cover his tracks in the three captains homicide.

“You just get a sixth sense of it,” Rooney later said. “You just learn how they think.”

The motel picture and the strange deaths of some of the mobsters depicted in it pulled it all together in Rooney’s mind about the mob homicides that had been cropping up. He felt Massino had to be involved and said as much to Freeh. After serving the majority of his ten-year sentence for labor racketeering, Massino had been paroled in 1992. Even before Massino walked out of prison, the Bonanno captains held a meeting and elected him the new boss after Philip Rastelli died in 1991. To Rooney and a lot of organized crime experts in the FBI, Massino was now the boss to watch. He wouldn’t be an easy target.

Back in the New York FBI office, supervisor John Stubing didn’t need any convincing that Joseph Massino was a hard guy to build a case around. A career agent, Stubing took over as acting head of squad C10 in November 1995, a job that became permanent in April 1996. Stubing oversaw investigations that targeted both the Bonanno and DeCavalcante crime families and he knew from experience that Massino was a crafty adversary who studied the ways of his law enforcement foes.

“Massino knew how to insulate himself from the day-today activities,” Stubing recalled. “He knew how to play the game.”

Not long after he took over as squad supervisor, Stubing paid a surprise visit to Massino at a company he had on Long Island known as King Caterers. It was an outfit he and Salvatore Vitale had taken an interest in during the early 1990s to, as law enforcement officials believed, protect the owner from extortion by another crime family. In return, Vitale and Massino took home salaries and benefits.

At King Caterers, Stubing had a friendly chat with Massino and quickly recognized that the mobster had a lot on the ball. Massino seemed to remember every time he had been watched by law enforcement and had a good memory of his past racketeering case. To Stubing, who had seen the stunning victory the Maspeth gangster had pulled off in his 1987 murder conspiracy trial, Massino was a mafioso who represented the toughest quarry out of the old mob tradition. He had some simple watch words: keep your mouth shut and take care of your own problems.

Building on mob intelligence mined in the 1970s and 1980s, the FBI in New York had kept the Bonanno family in its sights. Even though Massino had been in prison from 1987 until 1992, FBI agents had plenty of targets in the family. Setting up cameras in 1991 outside a social club run by Sal Vitale in an alley adjacent to 69–64 Grand Avenue in Maspeth, agents photographed not only Vitale but also Bonanno captains Louis Restivo, Anthony Urso, Michael Cardiello, and the ill-fated Gerlando Sciascia. Vitale, who was Massino’s underboss, was effectively an acting boss of the crime family during his brother-in-law’s absence, so his Queens club was a focal point for the Bonanno leadership.

The Maspeth investigation became known by the code name “Grand Finale.” Aware of the possibility of bugging devices in the club, Vitale and the others appeared to make calls from a pay telephone outside the nearby Maspeth Public Library. The FBI spotted that maneuver and got a court order for a tap on that line.

The Grand Finale case didn’t lead to anything big. In reality, the Bonanno squad had a lot on its plate because around the time of the Grand Avenue social club probe the Colombo crime family got into a bloody internecine feud and Stubing’s squad had responsibility for that problem as well. When Massino finally got out of prison in 1992, he resorted to his cautious methods of operation, insulating himself and avoiding weddings, funerals, and other events where he might be photographed by the police. He was also careful about what he said over the telephone. The penetration by Pistone was also fresh on Massino’s mind and he was extra cautious about possible informants. It was a kind of wiliness that Stubing knew would make Massino a tough investigative target.

Traditional methods of investigation, Stubing reckoned, seemed obsolete against Massino. The Bonanno boss had studied law enforcement methods—he carefully watched car mirrors to spot surveillance vehicles—and he knew how federal agencies tried to build a racketeering case. Informants said that Massino decreed that gambling couldn’t take place in any building he owned out of fear that the federal government might try to seize the property. But since money was at the root of organized crime activity, Stubing and his staff believed they had to follow the cash if they had any hope of nabbing Massino.

“I knew that nothing else was going to work against this guy,” Stubing remembered some years later.

A forensic accounting approach, in which investigators delved into the source of money generated by mobsters and their associates, had been of some success in other cases, particularly intricate fraud schemes. The Bonanno squad had subpoened a lot of financial records of crime family members and associates. But Stubing didn’t have enough background to crunch those kinds of numbers. He had to look for people who could work with financial records, so he made the unusual request to his superiors to have agents who were accountants assigned to study an organized crime family. Stubing learned that there were two new agents in New York who might be just what he needed.

When Special Agent Kimberly McCaffrey’s beeper went off, she saw the call back number was that of her supervisor in the Manhattan FBI office. He had good news. After months of drudgery as a new agent doing surveillance work, McCaffrey had been assigned to the C10 squad. She was to report to work immediately. It was early March 1999 when McCaffrey walked into the squad office at Twenty-six Federal Plaza for the first time. Gerlando Sciascia still had about a couple of weeks to live.

McCaffrey hadn’t started out in life aiming to be an FBI agent. Her first real passion had been gymnastics, which she began doing at her suburban New Jersey Catholic school. A petite woman, McCaffrey took to the sport easily and excelled in high school-level competition, although she was sidelined for a while after dislocating her elbows on the uneven bars. The injuries didn’t deter McCaffrey from competing in the sport at Towson State University in Maryland. But in January 1994, while representing Towson in competition, McCaffrey had another accident, this time blowing out a knee during a floor exercise. Sports wouldn’t be in her future, at least not at the level demanded by competitive gymnastics. McCaffrey focused on something that would give her a steady job: accounting. Being an FBI agent wasn’t on her mind at all.

Unlike McCaffrey, Jeffrey Sallet had always wanted to be a G-man. He had studied accounting in college, with the FBI as his long-range career goal. Grounded in the world of balance sheets, Sallet liked certitude. But he wasn’t a nerdy guy with a plastic pocket protector who never took chances. He liked to ski and had what could be said to be an eclectic taste in music. When Sallet worked at the firms of Arthur Andersen and Ernst & Young, his mentor was a former FBI agent who introduced him to the world of forensic accounting. With a little prodding from his mentor, Sallet joined the FBI in July 1997 at the age of twenty-seven, a little less than a year before McCaffrey, who signed on at the age of twenty-five. In FBI life, they were both just kids.

Sallet had already been on the Bonanno squad a few months when McCaffrey came on board. By the time both young agents were together, the situation with the New York Mafia had changed enormously since the days Joseph Pistone was posing as a wiseguy. Four of the five mob families had been targeted so often by investigators that a lot of the old household names—Gotti, Persico, and Colombo—were either incarcerated or dead. Their replacements had, as in the case of the Lucchese crime family, turned government witness or were under indictment. A lot of the old rackets such as the concrete industry, the garment district, and the waterfront had been seriously constricted by continued investigations.

The Bonanno family had also taken its share of hits and for years had been the laughing stock of La Cosa Nostra because of Pistone’s penetration. That breach of mob secrecy in the Brasco affair, as well as the family’s profligate drug trafficking shown in the Pizza Connection case, had deprived it of a seat on the ruling Commission. The Bonanno family had also gone through a period of about two decades when its leaders such as Philip Rastelli and Joseph Massino were incarcerated. Though both men ran the affairs of the family by communicating through intermediaries and ruling committees, it was still a cumbersome arrangement. The committees sometimes went off and ordered homicides without the bosses’ knowledge.

But in a curious way, the earlier problems that befell the Bonanno family provided some insulation from law enforcement scrutiny. Stubing noted to his young agents that by not having a seat on the Commission, the Bonanno family was not part of the concrete conspiracy that was at the center of the 1986 Commission trial or the so-called Windows case, involving allegations of crimes in the window replacement industry. As a result, the Bonanno family had to adapt and change to find new rackets. One lucrative area turned out to be Wall Street, where stock fraud schemes became the specialty of captains Frank Coppa, Frank Lino, and some of their other associates.

Aside from plowing new territory with the financial crimes, the Bonanno group also kept a hand in drug dealing. It was no longer the secretive world of heroin trafficking of the Pizza Connection days, but the more run-of-the-mill crack-cocaine business. Working out of a group of cafés and coffee shops in Queens and Brooklyn, a couple crews of crime family associates ran distribution operations.

Prosecutors suspected that the cocaine trade in Brooklyn was run by associates of Anthony Spero, a Bonanno captain with a social club on Bath Avenue. In Queens, federal investigators stumbled across Baldassare Amato, who had been convicted years ago in the Pizza Connection case but never seemed to learn his lesson. Amato appeared to be the mentor to a bunch of mob associates who based themselves out of a café in Ridgewood known as Café Giannini. The “Giannini Crew” robbed some gambling operations in other clubs and also became involved in drug dealing, according to investigators.

James Walden, a prosecutor in the Brooklyn U.S. Attorney’s Office, secured a number of indictments against Amato, Spero, and their associates. Both Spero and Amato had been spotted by FBI agents meeting in Queens with Massino. Years later, Walden said revenues from drug dealing might have gotten as high up the crime family chain as Spero. He thought it plausible that Massino, who had warned Frank Lino about drug dealing, may have taken a cut of the money as tribute, even if he knew it was narcotics cash.

Though convicted of racketeering, Spero decided not to cooperate with the government, so he never implicated Massino. It might have been possible to use information from the Spero-Amato prosecutions to eventually build a case against Massino. But some prosecutors knowledgeable about those investigations said that could have taken years of constant surveillance, wiretaps, and other time-consuming methods. In the meantime, the Bonanno family would have been run by a leadership that remained intact.

Instead, Stubing sat down with Sallet and McCaffrey and gave them a history of the Bonanno family and its main players. The supervisor had one clear direction for his young agents: Don’t focus immediately on the big boss; instead, find the people around him. Find the weak links. It was the time-honored domino theory of investigation: get one important criminal to cooperate and that might lead up the food chain to the kingpin.

In terms of Massino, Stubing told his agents, the ultimate key would be his brother-in-law, Salvatore Vitale, the crime family underboss. Since he had been initiated into the Mafia in the 1980s, Vitale had been a close confidante of Massino and his eyes and ears while in prison. It was a relationship made more complex by the fact that Vitale had essentially been raised by Massino’s wife, Josephine. Later, it was Vitale who served as a surrogate father to Massino’s daughters in the crime boss’s absence. Vitale was the “swing man” in the Bonanno family regarding Massino.