King of the Godfathers: "Big Joey" Massino and the Fall of the Bonanno Crime Family (20 page)

Frank Coppa had some serious thinking to do. At the age of sixty-one and suffering from a heart condition, he did not like prison. In fact, in 1992 when he had done another stint in jail, he had cried about doing time because, as he later said, “I had left my family.” He may have been a con man and thief for most of his life, but Coppa didn’t like to pay the price if his landlord was the Bureau of Prisons.

But caught Coppa was, and he knew it. There was evidence uncovered by Sallet and McCaffrey that he had told Weinberg that only he, Coppa, could be his broker for the parking lot deals. He had taken the oath of omerta in front of Carmine Galante and he knew that betrayal of the code of silence meant death. Well, it could mean death if the mob ever got to you. Coppa knew that the federal government had a witness protection program. He also knew that deals could be made, even if you were a killer like Sammy “the Bull” Gravano, who claimed to have helped kill nineteen people but later got out of prison in less than five years after helping convict John Gotti. Like Gravano, a lot of mafiosi turned their backs on omerta and salvaged what they could of their lives.

Coppa didn’t want to die in prison. He also wanted to be close to his wife and family. The portly mobster made his own calculation. Omerta may have worked for Joseph Bonanno and the older Sicilians, but nobody believed in that anymore. Coppa, the man with a head for numbers and betrayal, decided his future wasn’t with La Cosa Nostra. It certainly wasn’t with Joe Massino. Now, life was all about self-preservation and family of a different sort.

It took about two weeks for Coppa to contact his attorney to tell prosecutors he wanted to make a deal. The first step was a “proffer,” a session in which Coppa told the FBI what he knew. Proffer sessions are common in criminal cases. They afford prosecutors a chance to see what information a potential informant really has while the informant is not in danger of being prosecuted for what is mentioned in the session, assuming he is truthful.

In Coppa’s case, he talked for ten days straight. But because Nordenbrook had prosecuted some Mafia women and even once threatened to prosecute his sister, Coppa didn’t want her around to hear what he had to say.

“I was told he hated me because I did the women,” Nordenbrook later recalled. Nordenbrook protested about the way Coppa was trying to dictate the terms of his proffer session. But at least one FBI official saw no harm in playing up to Coppa’s sense of Mafia ethics. Nordenbrook felt she didn’t have to apologize for her pursuit of Mafia wives and other women. In her view, it was unacceptable that mafiosi could try to shelter their income and ill-gotten gains with their women. But she also realized that no one of Coppa’s stature in the Bonanno crime family had ever turned into a cooperating witness before. So Nordenbrook decided not to make a big stink and possibly spoil Coppa’s decision to flip. She stayed away from his proffer sessions.

So it was with Greg Andres, as well as with Sallet and McCaffrey, that Coppa talked. He told them what he knew about Joseph Massino and life in the mob.

The deal that Coppa worked out with the federal government depended on his cooperation with the Bonanno investigation. If he helped prosecutors, Coppa would get a letter from the government that spelled out his cooperation to the judge who had sentenced him. Coppa was also promised, assuming he cooperated to the government’s liking, that prosecutors would make a motion to the court, known as a Rule 35 motion, to get his sentence reduced. It would be up to the judge to decide how much of a reduction Coppa would get. His wife and one son who wasn’t involved in crime would be relocated by the government. Lastly, Coppa wouldn’t have to testify against his other son, Frank Jr., who he told investigators was a member of organized crime.

Coppa’s decision to turn into a witness for the prosecution, a decision directly precipitated by his indictment that came from Sallet and McCaffrey’s financial sleuthing, was a very big deal for a number of reasons. Coppa had been close to Massino—although not as close as Vitale had been—and he knew about the crime boss’s illegal financial dealings, particularly in the area of loan-sharking. Since he passed up thousands of dollars a month in tribute to Massino, Coppa was in a position to help investigators build a tax evasion and money laundering charge against the Bonanno boss.

But there was some much more powerful stuff Coppa possessed in his memory. Though he didn’t kill a lot of people himself, Coppa was a font of information about several homicides. Better yet for the investigation, Coppa could implicate Massino—sometimes directly, sometimes circumstantially—in mob murders. Among them were the killing of the three captains and Dominick Napolitano, homicides that had become the Holy Grail of the investigation.

Richard Cantarella might have been a big boy in the Bonanno crime family. After his induction into the life of La Cosa Nostra in 1990, he began dining with Massino weekly at his J&S Cake Social Club and got promoted quickly to the rank of acting captain. He made a lot of money through his shakedown of Weinberg, the parking lot ventures, and other rackets. He got his hands dirty with murder. Before his indictment, Sallet and McCaffrey had approached him about cooperating, but he didn’t budge and even told Massino about the FBI attempt to turn him.

But when things got rough, Cantarella wasn’t a true believer or stand-up guy. Though brought into the life of crime by his uncle Al Embarrato, the rule of omerta meant nothing to Cantarella. As soon as he was indicted in October 2002, Cantarella figured cooperation was his way out of trouble, his ace in the hole. “In my mind I knew I was cooperating,” Cantarella later said.

Cantarella’s deal with prosecutors involved the same kinds of general conditions and promises worked out for Coppa. There would be a letter to the judge who would sentence him extolling his cooperation with the prosecution and asking for a sentence reduction. But the deal didn’t involve his son or his wife. They had to work out their own plea bargains.

So in the space of a few weeks in late 2002, the government’s squeeze play on the Bonanno crime family showed results that no one had anticipated would have happened so fast. Two significant captains in the crime family had agreed to cooperate. Coppa and Cantarella had a lot to offer because they both had intimate knowledge about several mob homicides. Both were men who Joseph Massino trusted and had relied on to run the crime family at different times. But in the end they waved the white flag of surrender as soon as the first salvo was fired by the government. That kind of news was not good for Joe Massino. He had been so wrong about them.

CHAPTER 17

Ghosts

“Criminal cause for arraignment, United States versus Joseph Massino, Salvatore Vitale, and Daniel Mongelli, docket number zero-two cr three-zero-seven,” the woman court clerk announced. “Please state your appearances.”

A few hours after the news conference ended announcing his arrest on January 9, 2003, Joseph Massino and his codefendants were brought across the East River into federal court in Brooklyn before a federal magistrate judge. The six-story courthouse was opened in 1961 on Cadman Plaza, a park by the Brooklyn anchorage of the Brooklyn Bridge.

Though woefully in need of more space (a new fourteen-story replacement building was going up next door), the Eastern District Courthouse had a spacious ceremonial courtroom on the second floor. It was there that arraignments, initial court appearances for those charged in which they invariably enter pleas of not guilty, took place. Massino entered the courtroom shortly after lunchtime. His case was one of a number of criminal matters on the calendar.

The first to speak was Greg Andres, the assistant U.S. attorney in charge of the Massino case. A lean man with the narrow eyes of a panther on the hunt, Andres told the attending magistrate, Joan Azrack, that he was representing the government and was accompanied by Ruth Nordenbrook.

Though it had been Nordenbrook, one of the veteran federal prosecutors in Brooklyn, who had shepherded the efforts of FBI agents Sallet and McCaffrey, the bureaucracy in which she worked had its own machinations and power plays. For one reason or another, Andres, at least twenty years’ Nordenbrook’s junior, had been given the job of prosecuting Massino. The Bonanno investigation had been a source of tension between various prosecutors in the office in terms of the approach that would work best. Nordenbrook believed the financial probe targeting the hierarchy of the crime family was the best way to go. Others thought the case should focus on murders and racketeering. Andres ultimately saw the wisdom of using the financial probe to get witnesses who could then help make a larger murder investigation. Supervisor Mark Feldman had kept a steady hand on the tiller and kept his team focused on the financial probe. In the end, Andres’s superiors gave him the nod to be the lead prosecutor. When it came time to arraign Massino in court, Nordenbrook, without any noticeable discomfort, took a second seat to Andres.

Massino’s old friend and lawyer Matthew Mari of Manhattan appeared on his behalf. Mari’s links to the Bonanno crime family were more than just professional. Though himself not involved in anything illegal, it had been Mari’s father, Frank, who had been for a short time the boss of the crime family. His father’s notoriety was a cross Matthew Mari would have to bear for the rest of his life. A reputed hit man, Frank Mari was picked to run the Bonanno clan in a May 1969 meeting of crime family captains in a restaurant in Manhattan. His major credential for the job it seemed was that he had been able to survive the so-called Banana War of the mid-1960s.

Frank Mari disappeared not long after he was named boss, and his son went on to become a criminal lawyer who represented some of his father’s old associates, as well as other defendants in criminal cases. Grainy surveillance photos had even shown the younger Mari attending some social events with the mobsters. As the afternoon wore on, Mari’s previous representation of Bonanno family members would become an issue.

Representing Vitale were John Mitchell, a veteran defense attorney from Manhattan who also specialized in criminal appeals, and Sheldon Eisenberger. Mongelli was represented by Gerald Marrone. After the attorney introductions ended, Azrack got straight to work.

“Alright, Mister Massino, have you viewed the charges with your attorney?” the magistrate asked.

“Yes,” Massino responded in his characteristic husky voice.

“Do you understand what you are being charged with?” Azrack asked.

“Yes,” Massino again responded.

Looking at Mari, Azrack asked if he wanted to enter a plea on his client’s behalf.

“Yes,” said Mari. “Not guilty.”

“Mister Vitale, where are you?” Azrack said, looking around for Massino’s brother-in-law.

“Right here your honor,” responded Vitale.

“What plea do you want to enter?”

“Not guilty,” answered Vitale.

Mongelli also entered a not guilty plea, and Azrack then turned to the issue of bail. It was at this point that Andres told the court what the news media and defense attorneys already knew: that bail was going to be a remote possibility.

“The government will be asking for detention for each of the defendants on dangerousness grounds,” said Andres. “They are each charged with murder or murder conspiracy.”

As happened in cases against crime bosses, federal prosecutors put together a long letter and a thick legal memorandum of law spelling out just why Massino should not be given bail. Anyone familiar with the workings of the criminal justice system knows bail is a method of ensuring the courts that a defendant will appear for future proceedings and stay within the jurisdiction of the court, which in Brooklyn also meant Staten Island and the surrounding counties of Queens, Nassau, and Suffolk. Usually, a defendant executes a bond by paying around 10 percent of the bail amount set by the magistrate. Sometimes real estate or other property like stocks and bonds are used to secure the bond.

With changes in the law in 1984, federal courts had become much tougher places for major criminal suspects such as mob bosses and drug gang leaders to get bail. The Bail Reform Act allowed judges (and magistrates) to order a suspect detained, which means held without bail, if the person was found to be a danger to the community or a risk to flee the jurisdiction. Though critics would maintain that the bail act provisions could be used as a form of preventive detention or punishment without trial, the U.S. Supreme Court had upheld it.

There were four factors that the court needed to consider whether to detain a suspect: the nature of the crimes charged, the history and character of the defendant, the seriousness of the danger posed to the community if the defendant was released on bail, and evidence of guilt. On each of these factors, Greg Andres said in his letter to Azrack, Massino was a loser and should be held without bail. Andres spelled out in his memo to the court that Massino had to be held without bail because he was dangerous in a way that few other crime bosses were.

A former Peace Corp volunteer from the New York City area who spent his time in the hot and semiarid West African nation of Benin, Andres now had what could be the biggest case of his life. It was the kind of prosecution that was a major stepping stone in the career of an aggressive and imaginative young attorney like Andres. He had been an aspiring player in the ranks of the office for a few years and got his big turn at bat when he was tapped as the lead in the Bonanno family investigation.

“Massino, who himself has a violent criminal history, heads a violent criminal enterprise which totals more than one-hundred soldiers, men who have pledged to commit acts of violence for the Bonanno family,” Andres stated in his memorandum. “That Massino himself has been involved in serious acts of violence, including the charge murder and several others, makes the case for detention overwhelming.”

Though he was only charged with one murder, Andres made clear that Massino would eventually be facing more accusations that he took part in other gangland hits. There was a witness, Andres revealed without disclosing anyone’s name, who would prove that Massino once said he was involved in seven murders, all with Vitale. That remark showed that FBI agent Kim McCaffrey had been right about Massino being implicated in a number of murders. It just wouldn’t be listed in the indictment Andres had in his hand this particular day.

Andres also had behind him the weight of some higher rulings from appellate courts, which said that just by holding a leadership position in a crime family meant that a suspect was dangerous. It didn’t even matter, some judges said, that a defendant might not have committed any acts of violence. A leadership role in the mob put a person in a position where society couldn’t be protected by even the toughest of bail measures.

There was no question, Andres argued, that Massino was the Bonanno boss. He said that not only would witnesses say as much but also that Massino had been seen over the years—despite his consciousness of surveillance—in the company of John Gotti and most of the upper echelon of the Bonanno crime family. Bolstering that argument, the prosecutor dredged up the tape-recorded remark an indiscreet Cantarella had made to an informant five months earlier about how Massino ensured that he would become a Mafia member. The same draconian denial of bail also applied, courts had ruled, to acting bosses, captains, soldiers, and associates. In other words, if Massino was not going to get bail, underlings like Frank Lino, Vitale, and Mongelli couldn’t count on going home either.

The memorandum made clear that not even Clarence Darrow, let alone Matthew Mari, would have any success in getting Massino sprung from jail. Though Andres and Nordenbrook’s memo asking that Massino, Vitale, and Mongelli not have bail was filled with all sorts of accusations, the issue was not to be argued on this particular afternoon. The defense attorneys agreed to their clients being held for the moment with the possibility that they could apply for bail—admittedly a remote possibility—at a later date.

Andres, Mari, and the other defense attorneys argued their positions about bail to Azrack in a courtroom where the dark wood paneled walls were lined with large oil portraits and photographs of past and present federal judges who had sat in the district. The earliest image was that of mutton-chopped Charles Benedict, the first judge for the Eastern District appointed by President Abraham Lincoln in 1865, a month before he was killed by John Wilkes Booth. It was a room where many ghosts lurked. If his spiritual antenna were tuned, Joseph Massino would have sensed the maligned presence of one of those who had once preceded him in the courtroom. It was Philip Rastelli, the wizened mob politician who had once sat shaking with apprehension as he faced arraignment on his own racketeering charges in 1986.

“I didn’t do nothing!” an ailing Rastelli once blurted out as he was bundled off into an ambulance after his court appearance. He recovered and went on to be convicted of racketeering.

Though he became a shadow of the powerful mobster he once was, Rastelli proved to be the bridge with the past. In the fractious interregnum between elder Mafia statesman Joseph Bonanno, for whom the family was named after, and the twenty-first century, it was Rastelli who helped provide stability and link the crime family’s past to the future. That future, investigators said on January 9, 2003, was embodied in Joseph Massino, the one-time lunch wagon operator who Rastelli mentored and baptized with the blood of many fallen rivals.

If there was any one person who Massino could point to as the person tying him to the legacy of the Bonanno crime family and ensuring him his title as boss, it was Rastelli. Then, too, if he wanted to feel some self-pity as he waited for his arraignment to end, Massino could have looked to Rastelli as the root of his problems. For it was Rastelli who not only took Massino under his wing but also anointed him as an emissary of death, the conduit through which the orders for many a mob murder was passed. The mob polices itself through brute force—murder when necessary—and among the ghosts were those of many in the Mafia whose executions would come back to haunt Massino.

Massino wouldn’t shake or cry out like Rastelli had once done, not even when Azrack denied him bail, which she would do eventually. After Azrack talked with the attorneys over scheduling and future court dates, Andres raised the issue of why he thought Mari couldn’t stay on the case. The prosecutor’s main concern was that Massino’s attorney had a number of conflicts of interest. The Brooklyn federal prosecutor’s office was painfully aware of how the existence of legal conflicts could hurt their cases. In 2000, an appeals court reversed one of the high-profile convictions of former police officer Charles Schwarz in the sodomy attack by police on Haitian immigrant Abner Louima because Schwarz’s attorney at his first trial had an “unwaivable” conflict of interest. Since then, the Brooklyn U.S. Attorney’s Office seemed to take great pains in raising potential conflicts with defense attorneys before cases progressed very far. Mari had his own special issues.

“I have discussed this with Mister Mari,” Andres explained to Azrack. “He has a variety of conflicts, actual conflicts, with respect to his representation of Mister Massino. Among other things he represented at one time one of the murder victims in the indictment, Robert Perrino. He has represented other members and associates of the Bonanno crime family.”

“Based on some published reports that I may have actually represented someone who could be a witness in this case,” Mari interjected, “I have discussed that with Mister Massino and, uh, its his present intention to retain other counsel prior to, prior to the next court date.”

The arraignment was essentially finished, but as had been seen in so many Mafia cases, particularly those with elderly or overweight defendants, medical issues always loomed. The Mafia was aging and court appearances were like medical consults. Before anyone was able leave the courtroom, Azrack acted like an assistant in a doctor’s office.

After Azrack was told that Massino had diabetes, she had her courtroom clerk hand over some medication forms to the Bonanno boss’s lawyer.

“Is it just for diabetes, just diabetes?” Azrack asked Massino.

“Sugar diabetes, that is it your honor,” answered Massino, using an archaic term for his illness.

Vitale then piped up that he had a heart attack at age thirty-one and was on medication as well. So, for the next few minutes, Massino and Vitale filled out forms with their attorneys about the various medications they needed. Massino told Mari that he took Glucophage and Avandi, two medications that were used to control his type-2 diabetes. Overweight, a big eater, and living a sedentary life, Massino had been diabetic for years. Having been rousted from his home over eight hours earlier, Massino’s medication schedule was all screwed up so he had Mari ask Azrack if he could take one of his pills. He was supposed to take Glucophage up to three times a day.