King of the Godfathers: "Big Joey" Massino and the Fall of the Bonanno Crime Family (2 page)

“Frankie Coppa got to work quick,” Massino said to the agents as the sedan made its way through traffic.

To the uninformed that terse remark meant nothing. But by blurting it out, Massino was letting Sallet and McCaffrey know that he knew his old friend, Frank Coppa, a Bonanno captain, had become a cooperating witness. Once Massino’s closest of friends, Coppa had been moved from the prison facility at Fort Dix, New Jersey, where he had been serving time for securities fraud, to a federal witness protection prison. It was there that Coppa had been telling investigators what he knew of Massino and the crime family.

Massino now had enough information to know that his predicament was serious. McCaffrey told him that among the many racketeering charges being unsealed that morning in the Brooklyn federal district court were those involving the murders of three rival Bonanno captains in 1981.

“That was a long time ago and I had nothing to do with it,” Massino said.

In fact, Massino had been acquitted of conspiracy to commit those murders in an earlier racketeering trial. The killing of the three captains—Dominick Trinchera, Alphonse Indelicato, and Philip Giaccone—was part of one of New York’s most legendary Mafia power struggles. The remains of the three captains were found in a weedy lot on the Brooklyn-Queens border not far from Massino’s home. Some other crime family members were convicted of the murders in 1983. But in the trial of Massino and his brother-in-law, Salvatore Vitale, the government’s case was weaker and they beat the rap.

In the mob, all friendships could be dangerous. If Coppa or anyone else had been telling investigators what they knew of the deaths of the three captains, they could come back to haunt Massino. McCaffrey thought it curious that right after being told that he was charged with having actually participated in those killings that Massino asked if his brother-in-law had been arrested as well.

Yes, he had been, Massino was told.

Though he didn’t respond or show any emotion when told of Vitale’s arrest, the news must have caused Massino’s already high blood pressure to spike. The brother of Josephine Massino, Vitale had been Massino’s childhood friend and over the years had become a close confidant. Massino shared a lot with him, from learning how to swim in the Astoria pool to introducing Vitale to the illegal scores with truck hijacking. Eventually, as Massino rose in the ranks of the mob, Vitale rode his coattails, rising to the rank of underboss. “Good Looking Sal” or “Sally,” as Vitale was known, relished the aura of being a mob boss. His vanity was a subject of gossip. His favorite cologne seemed picked as if to symbolize his status: it was the “Boss” fragrance of designer Hugo Boss.

Normally, the underboss position is a powerful one in the Mafia, but over the years Vitale had chafed at the paltry power Massino had given him, going as far as to forbid Vitale from speaking to the captains in the crime family. The trust that once ran deep between the two men had evaporated. Some of the Bonanno captains thought Vitale was too dirty and knew too much to be trusted. Better off with Vitale dead, some said. Privately, they wondered if Massino’s judgment about Vitale was clouded by the fact that he was his wife’s brother.

Vitale had been involved in a number of murders—“pieces of work,” as wiseguys would call them. Knowing what he knew about the crime family business, Vitale could be dangerous if he weakened. And Massino knew that. Just three weeks earlier, a few Bonanno mobsters voiced distrust of Vitale.

“Sal is gonna rat on every fucking body,” said Anthony Urso, one of Massino’s key captains, who was overheard on a surveillance bug.

Rats were the bane of the Mafia. La Cosa Nostra was riddled with them and it made Massino even more paranoid. If he suspected any man was a rat, Massino gave him a ticket—he called it a “receipt”—to the grave. Joseph Massino was from the old school of tough guys who never turned on their friends. You never squeal: it was a creed that Massino even taught his daughters to live by. It was the way of life and you swore to it with your blood the day they made you a wiseguy by burning the card with a saint’s picture in the palm of your hand.

Massino would tell people he was proud of his crime family, the only one that had never had an informant or rat in all its years of existence.
Omerta
had never been violated within the family until old man Joseph Bonanno revealed some of La Cosa Nostra’s secrets in his 1980 autobiography
A Man of Honor.
Massino had become so angry over Bonanno’s tale that he wanted to change the name of the crime family to Massino. Time in jail, not tell-all books, went with the job of being a mob boss. John Gotti, Vincent Gigante, Carlo Gambino, Anthony “Tony Ducks” Corallo, Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno, Carmine “the Snake” Persico—they all took their medicine and didn’t rat out anybody. Massino would be a stand-up guy. That was part of a boss’s job. Everybody knew that.

It turned out McCaffrey was wrong in her characterization of the charges against Massino during the car ride back to Manhattan. It might have been a ploy to see if Massino talked, but the indictment in the process of being unsealed that morning by Brooklyn federal prosecutors did not mention the killings of the three captains. In reality, Massino had been indicted for the 1982 slaying of another old friend: Dominick “Sonny Black” Napolitano. The killings of Trinchera, Giaccone, and Indelicato, as well as several others, wouldn’t be laid at Massino’s feet until much later.

The FBI car in which Massino rode went through the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, north on West Street, left onto Worth Street, and then headed into the basement of the forty-five-story federal office building known as Twenty-six Federal Plaza. A 1960s-style soaring rectangle of glass, stone, and chrome on Foley Square, the building housed most of the federal law enforcement agencies in the city. Anyone arrested in a major FBI operation—and Massino’s bust was big—was usually taken to “Twenty-six Fed” and put through the ritual processing: fingerprinting, photographing, and the recording of personal information. One thing the agents decided against was a “perp walk,” that is, parading Massino before prying newspaper photographers. They had decided to treat him with a little dignity.

For the Bonanno squad known by the designation C10, the processing of defendants all took place on the twenty-second floor and although it was serious business, Massino couldn’t help joking with the agents as he was fingerprinted, saying he probably wouldn’t get bail if he hired one attorney he knew from the old neighborhood. The agents knew at that point that bail was the remotest long shot for Massino, but they let his remark pass. Spotting one of the squad supervisors, Nora Conely, Massino had a flash of recognition. He remarked that he had seen her talking once to his old friend Louis Restivo, one of the owners of CasaBlanca Restaurant, about a fugitive.

She was second in command of the squad, McCaffrey explained to Massino.

“Like an underboss,” Massino answered McCaffrey, putting it in lingo he understood.

Massino was going to spend the rest of the day shuttling between the FBI offices and across the Brooklyn Bridge to the U.S. District Court, where he would eventually be arraigned on the charges before a federal magistrate. It would take hours for that to happen. In the meantime, as the rest of the city awakened, another ritual was getting underway. Federal officials began to alert news agencies that they had a big announcement and at One Pierrepont Plaza, an office tower in downtown Brooklyn, copies of a four-page press release were stacked on a table in the law library of the office of the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, a fancy way to describe Brooklyn and everything to the east.

The document had a long title: Boss and Underboss Charged with Racketeering, Murder, and Other Crimes in Culmination of Four-Year Investigation and Prosecution of the Bonanno Organized Crime Family—Murders Include Retaliation for Infiltration of Family by “Donnie Brasco.”

Press releases from prosecutors don’t just relate the news; they also mention who the big shots are in law enforcement who want credit, or at least hope to get some mention in the news accounts that will follow. This press release was no exception. It listed Roslynn R. Mauskopf, U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York; Kevin P. Donovan, Assistant Director in Charge, Federal Bureau of Investigation, the man who was McCaffrey and Sallet’s boss; Paul L. Machalek, special agent in charge of the criminal investigations unit of the Internal Revenue Service; and James W. McMahon, the superintendent of the New York State Police.

The next four names listed in the press release told the world who was in trouble. First named was Massino, “who is the only boss of the five LCN families in New York not currently incarcerated.” In law enforcement jargon the initials LCN stood for La Cosa Nostra, the Italian expression commonly used to describe the American Mafia. Though the public, press, and even police refer to organized crime composed of men of Italian heritage as the Mafia, purists are quick to point out that the term
Mafia
really refers to the organized crime based in Italy. The term
la cosa nostra,
which loosely translates as “our thing” or “this thing of ours,” is actually what the FBI prefers.

Rounding out the list of those arrested that morning was, as Massino already knew, Salvatore Vitale, “who serves as the family’s underboss.” Also nabbed was Frank Lino, a mean-spirited, fireplug-sized Brooklyn man seven years’ Massino’s senior who had somehow survived mob infighting to become a
capo
or captain. Finally, there was Daniel Mongelli, a pubescent-looking thirty-seven-year-old who made up for what he may have lacked in intelligence with loyalty to a life of crime. His reward was the title of acting captain in Massino’s regime.

As she gripped the podium before the assembled reporters and photographers, federal prosecutor Mauskopf said that the arrest of Massino and Vitale meant that the leadership of the Bonanno family was either in prison or facing the prospect of a lifetime behind bars. This was Mauskopf’s first major organized crime indictment and her statement included such usual obligatory prose. She reminded everyone that the government was committed to eradicating the influence of organized crime in the city and that the case demonstrated this resolve.

But she also noted that this was a superseding indictment, meaning it built on an earlier set of charges that had led to the arrest of other Bonanno crime family figures like captains Anthony Graziano, Richard Cantarella, and Massino’s old friend, Frank Lino. In all, Mauskopf noted, twenty-six members and associates of the Bonanno clan had been charged in the previous twelve months. Clearly, the crime family was facing big trouble. Time, she said, had not been good to the mob.

“In the early years, the middle years of the twentieth century, the structure of traditional organized crime was formulated, in large measure right here in Brooklyn,” Mauskopf told the reporters assembled in her office. “At the beginning of the twenty-first century, as a result of federal law enforcement’s efforts, their determined, their sustained, and their outstanding efforts, the heads of the five families and a significant portion of their members had been brought before the bar of justice.”

Such self-congratulatory comments by law enforcement were common at such news events. But Mauskopf’s attempt to give the case a touch of history caught the attention of many journalists who had been following the machinations of organized crime. The reference to “Donnie Brasco” and the murders that surrounded him tied Massino’s arrest to one of the most legendary sagas of latter-day Mafia history. Brasco was in fact Joseph Pistone, who as an FBI agent beginning in the late 1970s infiltrated a branch of the Bonanno family. (Pistone’s role was celebrated in the 1997 film
Donnie Brasco
starring Al Pacino.) Working undercover, Pistone posed as Brasco, jewel thief. With the patience of a crafty spy, he ingratiated himself with Bonanno soldier Benjamin “Lefty Guns” Ruggierio and his captain, Dominick “Sonny Black” Napolitano.

For three years Pistone gathered evidence against his mob friends, fooling them so completely that he was even proposed for membership to the crime family, a state of affairs that had angered Massino if only because no one really knew this Brasco fellow. In hindsight, Massino’s wariness about Pistone demonstrates his survival instincts. When Pistone’s undercover role was dramatically and publicly revealed in 1981, the results were predictable. Like the dark days of some Stalinist purge, the Bonanno family went through bloody days of reckoning. Those who had allowed Pistone to infiltrate the family had to pay the price. Napolitano was high on the list and federal officials believed he was murdered for the unpardonable sin of vouching for Pistone. The indictment charged that Massino, along with Frank Lino, engineered Napolitano’s slaughter.

Pistone’s infiltration of the Bonanno family had made it not only the laughing stock of the Mafia but also a pariah. Believing they couldn’t trust the Bonanno hierarchy, the other mob families in New York kept the wounded family at bay and cut it out of some rackets. Among the fruits denied the Bonanno family was a cut of the lucrative “concrete club” that had evolved in the early 1980s. The club members were the four Mafia families who took a percentage through kickbacks of every cubic yard of concrete that was poured in New York City. This amounted to millions of dollars in illegal profits and contributed to what critics said was the inordinately high cost of doing construction in New York.

It was in May 1984, in a private home on Cameron Avenue in Staten Island, that the boss of the Gambino family crime family, Paul Castellano, lorded over a meeting of representatives of three other Mafia families—the Genovese, Colombo, and Lucchese families—to hash out business disputes over their construction rackets, including the concrete shakedown. Investigators were also watching and recorded the men going to the meeting. In 1986, federal prosecutors in Manhattan secured convictions for the concrete racket against the leadership of the Mafia Commission: Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno (Genovese crime family), Anthony “Tony Ducks” Corallo (Lucchese crime family), Carmine “the Snake” Persico (Colombo crime family), and their assorted lieutenants for taking part in various rackets.