King of the Godfathers: "Big Joey" Massino and the Fall of the Bonanno Crime Family (26 page)

The import of Lino’s testimony was readily apparent to the courtroom audience. He had put Massino directly into the planning of the Napolitano murder and placed him at the scene of the killing. By this point in the trial, Lino had implicated Massino in four homicides and did further damage by testifying that Massino had tried to recruit him to serve as part of a special hit team with Anthony Graziano as a way of not having too many people know about family murders.

Lino testified about one other homicide, that of Gabe Infanti in the winter of 1987 when Massino was in prison. Sal Vitale and Anthony Spero planned the Infanti murder, according to Lino’s testimony, at his Brooklyn Mother Cabrini Social Club. Infanti was actually killed at a warehouse in Queens where Frank “Cheech” Navarra had some loft space. Lino didn’t actually see the murder but testified that Louis Restivo, a family soldier, had brought Infanti to the location. When Lino finally did enter the building, he said he went into the loft and found Infanti face down on the floor bleeding and dead. Vitale was also present, as were Thomas Pitera and Restivo, said Lino.

Infanti’s body was ultimately buried in a shallow grave in Staten Island near a pool company, said Lino, adding that lye had been tossed in to disintegrate the corpse. A few years later, after Pitera was arrested and Vitale feared he might cooperate, Lino said an attempt was made to dig up Infante’s body but that no remains were found.

After the murders, Lino was questioned by Andres about a wide variety of Bonanno family businesses including loan-sharking, gambling, and how money was passed up to the family administration. According to Lino, Massino ran a big loan-sharking business and had loaned him about $500,000 over the years with resulting interest payments totaling $1 million. Lino also admitted to running as many as 100 Joker Poker gambling machines and added that Massino and Vitale had their own sports betting operation.

Lino said he made a lot of money in the mob and related how he kicked in $100 month to a Bonanno family kitty used to pay legal expenses. Massino himself, Lino testified, sometimes chipped in; at one point, Massino paid $100,000 in legal fees for Lino’s son, Robert.

As the first mob cooperator to take the witness stand, Lino had given a gripping account of the murders and in the process had done a lot of damage to Massino. But he was only one witness. It was up to the defense to probe and find ways to attack his credibility and show why he may have had motive to lie. That would be Breitbart’s job.

The aim of the defense was to make Lino out as an odious, untrustworthy man who had been pressured by solitary confinement to cooperate and would thus say anything that would earn him his freedom. Lino admitted under Breitbart’s questioning that his time in solitary confinement at the Brooklyn Metropolitan Detention Center was tough. The facility kept lights on twenty-four hours a day, and his cell in the Manhattan Correction Center, where he was transferred, was filthy and a “painful” place to stay, said Lino But the wearing affects of solitary confinement didn’t amount to the kind of Abu Ghraib-like torture Breitbart had alluded to in his opening statement.

Lino said he decided to cooperate after learning that Vitale had turned.

“When he cooperated, there was no way I was going to win anymore,” said Lino. “He was giving all the orders to do all the killings when he was there.”

Breitbart questioned Lino about the trial preparation he was put through and got the witness to say that Andres had asked him questions about three or four times and that he had been questioned a dozen times by the FBI agents. But he denied that Andres had ever told him that he could get a “pass” for the six homicides he had been involved with, much like noted turncoat Salvatore Gravano, who was freed even after admitting to having a role in nineteen gangland murders. Lino was also emphatic that prosecutors and the FBI had never said they “wanted Joe Massino.”

Breitbart cross-examined Lino about the three captains and other murders but the witness never really gave any significant contradictions from his earlier direct testimony. In short, Lino’s account held up, even under Breitbart’s close questioning. But Lino did come off as obnoxious, disagreeable, and amoral under cross-examination. He admitted that he didn’t care if some of his associates sold drugs near public schools and recounted his own drug abuse. He also snipped back at Breitbart, conduct that irritated some on the prosecution team.

“Isn’t it a fact, sir, that you were considered the cheapest guy on the street, you stole from everyone?” Breitbart asked Lino.

“That’s not true,” responded Lino, who began to chuckle.

Breitbart asked if he said something funny.

“Yeah, I’m laughing at the ‘cheapest guy,’ you should have been as cheap as me sport,” said Lino.

Once, when Breitbart’s questioning implied that Lino was lying, the witness dropped any pretense of decorum and responded with a wisecrack, “Why don’t you give us all lie detector tests and we will see who is telling the truth.”

Another time Lino forgot the line of Breitbart’s questioning and said, “I’m not trying to be funny.”

“There is absolutely nothing funny about you,” Breitbart shot back in a voice dripping with a contempt that spoke to the witness’s inhumanity.

CHAPTER 22

“I Didn’t Want to Do No More Time”

It was 1977 when Frank Coppa met Joseph Massino at the Fulton Fish Market in Manhattan. The meeting place was symbolically appropriate on a number of levels. The seafood there was always plentiful in restaurants and both men liked to eat. The wholesale market, which occupied a two-block area south of the Brooklyn Bridge, had also been Mafia territory where enforcers from the Genovese crime family controlled rackets.

Massino was introduced to Coppa by an elderly Bonanno captain named Matteo Valvo, who had once been active in a union representing toy and novelty workers and owned a fish store in Brooklyn. Coppa and Massino became fast friends and over the years the two progressed through the ranks of the crime family. It was in the 1960s and 1970s that Coppa saw the potential for Wall Street as a place to illegally make money and got involved in a number of scams selling unregistered securities and manipulating the price of smaller stocks.

After Massino took over as family boss he placed Coppa in a group of crime captains and other high-ranked members who administered family affairs. It was a position of great trust. It also turned out to be a disaster for Massino when Coppa decided to cooperate with authorities.

Coppa, the first Bonanno family member to turn on Massino in late 2002, took the witness stand on June 7. A rotund, balding man, Coppa seemed to lock eyes with Massino for a few brief, uncomfortable seconds in the courtroom. He quickly told the jury that his stock market misdeeds earned him a three-year prison term in July 2002 for stock fraud. Coppa indicated that the thirty-six-month prison term wasn’t a problem until in October 2002 he was indicted for the extortion of parking lot entrepreneur Barry Weinberg. That indictment meant that Coppa could be facing as much as eighty more months of prison time.

“I didn’t want to do no more time,” Coppa said under Robert Henoch’s questioning. “I thought about it and I had my lawyer call the agents.”

It was early in his testimony that Coppa showed how much Massino had confided in him. By 2000, Massino began to distrust his brother-in-law, Salvatore Vitale, for a number of reasons.

“He didn’t like the way he was carrying himself, like he was a big shot,” said Coppa. “He didn’t like the way he was with his family. He had problems with his family and that is what he complained about.”

There was more for Massino to worry about. Coppa said that Massino distrusted Vitale because he knew about “seven pieces of work” they had done together over the years.

“You said ‘seven pieces of work,’ what were you referring to when you say that?” Henoch asked.

“Murders,” replied Coppa, gesturing with his thumb and index finger as if they were a gun. He explained that it was actually Massino who had used that very same gesture in their conversation.

Had Vitale not been Massino’s brother-in-law, he would have killed him, said Coppa.

After flirting with the subject of homicides, Henoch asked Coppa to explain how he had learned of the death of Gabriel Infanti. While on vacation with Massino, Coppa explained, the crime boss said Infante was killed because Massino was afraid he was going to cooperate with authorities in a civil racketeering case. It was a statement that, unlike Lino’s testimony, which dealt only with the actual killing, showed Massino talking about the motive he had for the Infante homicide.

Moments later, Coppa recalled that he also had a conversation with Massino about the murder of Bonanno family member Russell Mauro. According to Coppa, Massino said Mauro was killed because “he was heavy into drugs.”

The Mauro homicide wasn’t something Massino was on trial for. Instead, it was one of those bad acts that prosecutors won the right to bring up at trial to show the defendant’s power and control of the crime family racketeering activity. Coppa didn’t have any firsthand knowledge about the Mauro killing. But he knew plenty about the death of Dominick “Sonny Black” Napolitano.

Yes, he had opened the door when Frank Lino, Steven Cannone, and Napolitano rang the doorbell at the Staten Island house, Coppa told the jury.

“I opened the door, walked him to the basement door, opened the basement door, Frank Lino went down the basement with Sonny Black, and at that point he got shot,” said Coppa.

While not seeing Napolitano get shot, Coppa said he heard three shots as he was walking Cannone to the front door.

“Sonny Black died like a man, he said make it quick.” According to Coppa, Robert Lino was one of the shooters in the basement.

It was Frank Lino who gave Napolitano’s car keys to Cannone, said Coppa. Then Lino and Cannone walked to the left up the street to a backup car. Coppa said he walked to the right to go to his car.

Coppa never testified that he saw Massino in the vicinity of the Napolitano murder. But he did say that Lino told him Massino had been waiting at the street corner for Cannone. Taken together, Coppa’s testimony buttressed Frank Lino’s testimony about Massino’s whereabouts and involvement in the homicide. (Oddly, Coppa was unable to recognize a photo taken of Napolitano when he was alive.)

At the same time that Napolitano’s body was being driven away in the back of a Cadillac, Coppa said he and Frank Lino went to a church feast in Brooklyn.

To underscore the close relationship between Coppa and Massino—as well as to lay the groundwork for some more damaging testimony—Henoch showed the jury some vacation photos Coppa had given over to the agents. They showed Massino and him mugging it up in France. One comical shot showed both portly men towering over a small Fiat, while another had them side by side, Massino’s stomach stretching his polo shirt and Coppa’s belt cinching tight across his midsection, making him look like a sausage casing. Some jurors seemed amused.

But the business in Monte Carlo was not all amusing. It was there, Coppa testified, that Massino talked about the death of Philip Giaccone, one of the three captains slain in 1981.

“He wasn’t sorry that Philly Lucky got killed because [Massino] didn’t like him,” said Coppa.

Coppa wasn’t present during the murder of the three captains, but his testimony corroborated a key part of Lino’s earlier statements to the jury. Coppa said that Lino did call him immediately after the killings and sounded very traumatized, saying that Massino had been present along with others at the time of the shootings. Coppa also said, just as Lino had recalled, that he went with Lino to Massino’s house after the shootings and that Lino had a discussion with Massino.

As he had told the FBI in his earlier debriefings, Coppa testified that he had paid millions of dollars over the years to Massino and the Bonanno crime family in the form of tribute and loan-sharking fees. The payments for the loans totaled thousands of dollars a month, often going through Vitale to Massino, said Coppa. Christmas gifts of up to $20,000 were also paid to Massino. Testimony about the money was being used by the prosecution to flesh out their financial case against Massino, who was also on trial for loan-sharking and money laundering, in an effort to get at the millions of dollars he made as a mob boss.

Things got tense in the courtroom for the prosecution when Coppa’s son, Frank Coppa Jr., a reputed member of the crime family, appeared in court during Breitbart’s cross-examination. Garaufis called for a sidebar, a conference by the side of his bench out of earshot of jurors.

The presence of his son was “torturing” Coppa, said Andres, and he strongly indicated that he thought Massino might have passed an order to have Coppa’s son come in the courtroom “upon penalty of death” if disobeyed. The prosecutor wanted any cross-examination of Coppa to steer clear of references to his son.

Breitbart and Edwards were perplexed by the notion that Coppa’s son had come to a public courtroom simply to intimidate his father. It was a notion that seemed rooted in the scene in the film
The Godfather,
where the brother of one mafioso was brought in to shame his sibling into silence before a congressional committee. But in reality, Coppa was under an obligation to testify truthfully, he had signed a cooperation agreement with the government, and his future liberty depended on his being a useful witness. It sounded implausible that Coppa could or would be intimidated by the presence of his son. In the end, it was a tempest in a teapot and Breitbart said he hadn’t even planned to ask Coppa about his son.

But Breitbart brought out other things that must have caused Coppa to squirm in his chair. For instance, Coppa admitted on cross-examination that he had lied to a judge in a 1990s stock fraud case to hide his true financial status. He also admitted to the jury that he still had a net worth of $2 million, an amount he hoped wouldn’t be used to repay investors who had lost $5 million in his schemes.

In an attempt to show that Coppa may have killed a gay entertainer, Breitbart asked him about an alleged incident at Sammy’s Steakhouse Restaurant in Manhattan, a place that had a showcase theater. Coppa said the theater was a gay scene with transsexual entertainers. Breitbart dropped a titillating question when he asked Coppa if anyone had ever walked in on him having sex with a male entertainer playing the role of the singer Cher.

The question brought an immediate objection from the government and Garaufis called for another sidebar.

“Is there some relevance to the question here?” Garaufis asked.

“Yes, he murdered Cher,” said Breitbart. “It wasn’t Cher though, it was the boy that he was having sex with.”

Breitbart explained that Ronald Filocomo, the man who was identified in testimony as being one of the shooters in the Napolitano murder, had walked in on Coppa, who was mounted on the performer. Breitbart said his source of information was Filocomo, who he spoke with in his jail cell.

Garaufis waivered and thought such testimony would be prejudicial. Breitbart then asked that the court order Filocomo to testify, which Garaufis had no power to do.

Finally, Garaufis allowed Breitbart to ask Coppa if he had a “relationship” with Cher and if he killed him. Coppa said Cher was actually his accountant but denied killing the performer, whose first name was Joseph.

Coppa had a lot of baggage affecting his credibility because he had admitted under Breitbart’s questioning to having lied to a federal judge during one of his earlier stock swindles to shelter some assets.

“Would it be fair to say that if you lied to save a few dollars you would lie to save your life,” Breitbart asked, referring to Coppa’s cooperation agreement.

“No,” Coppa responded. “Because if I lied I wouldn’t be saving my life.”

Coppa said that under the terms of his cooperation agreement with the government prosecutors would write a letter to his sentencing judge in an effort to get him a lower sentence. He admitted that he spoke to prosecutors about the sweet deal Sammy Gravano got in the John Gotti trial. Gravano received a five-year sentence from the court in return for his cooperation on the Gotti racketeering case.

“Hopefully I will get out of jail soon,” said Coppa.

Though he was the first Bonanno family member to turn on Massino, the impact of Coppa’s testimony was more to buttress the compelling details Lino had spelled out on the Napolitano homicide. He also backed up Lino’s account of the crucial meeting with Massino after the murder of the three captains. The offhand remarks Massino had made about the killing of Gabe Infanti was also powerful circumstantial evidence. Unlike Lino, whose sparring with Breitbart made the mafioso sound like a bully boy and thug, Coppa seemed matter-of-fact.