King of the Godfathers: "Big Joey" Massino and the Fall of the Bonanno Crime Family (27 page)

CHAPTER 23

“This Is for Life”

It was never made clear why James Tartaglione had the nickname “Big Louie.” When he took the witness stand in the Joseph Massino trial, the bony sixty-six-year-old Tartaglione had a unique position among the witnesses in the case. While the others decided to cooperate with the government after being arrested, he had decided to help the FBI while he was very much a free man.

Of course, at the time he decided to cooperate Tartaglione might not have remained a free man for very much longer. Because he had so many dealings with Salvatore Vitale, Tartaglione sensed that when Massino’s brother-in-law became a cooperator that it was only a matter of time before he would also be named in a federal indictment. It was then that he decided to reach out to prosecutor Ruth Nordenbrook.

On the witness stand Tartaglione, dressed in a sports jacket and open-necked shirt, recounted for hours his involvement with crimes and details of the inner workings of the Bonanno family. He was in a good position to explain these things because Massino had entrusted him with the job of being on committees that oversaw the workings of the family. It was also Massino, said Tartaglione, who told him about contacts the family had maintained with the other Mafia groups in New York dealing with the construction and gasoline businesses.

The more important aspect of Tartaglione’s cooperation, however, was that during the time he was able to travel freely he agreed to wear recording devices in 2003 and secretly tape his conversations with various high-ranked Bonanno family members. He also taped some of the lawyers who had been representing them. Some of the tapes would become useful pieces of evidence as the Massino trial unfolded.

However, just before trial in March 2004, the revelation that Tartaglione had been taping his own attorney, Scott Leemon, who also had some contact with Massino, caused a furor. Court records showed that Tartaglione had recorded at least five conversations with Leemon in 2003. David Breitbart was furious because Leemon had been part of joint defense strategy meetings involving several defendants in the case. As a result, Breitbart suspected that the taping of Leemon was done to spy on the defense camp and he made a motion to either have Andres removed from the case or the tapes made by Tartaglione suppressed.

Anticipating problems of this sort, the government had set up a “firewall” that insulated Andres and the other Massino prosecutors from knowing what the Leemon recordings had revealed. That kind of insulation was created by having Assistant U.S. Attorney Bridget Rohde and an FBI agent review the recordings. In a pretrial ruling, Judge Nicholas Garaufis decided that the taping of Leemon was not improper and allowed it to continue.

On the witness stand, Tartaglione told jurors about some of the facts of Mafia life. Like the other witnesses, he said the Bonanno family was known as the Massino family. The boss of a mob family is akin to taking care of the crime family members like a regular father.

“He has to take care of all of his children,” said Tartaglione.

Tartaglione was first made a member of the Mafia in 1983 and about a year later he rose to captain. After Massino came out of prison in the early 1990s, Tartaglione said he was placed on the committee that administered the family. Once in the Mafia you did what the family and the boss wanted you to do, he said.

“This is for life,” said Tartaglione about the commitment a member of the Mafia makes.

Tartaglione admitted being involved in murders, assaults, car theft, extortion, hijackings, and loan-sharking. He met other crime family members at weddings, wakes, and social clubs like John Gotti’s locales on 101 Street in Corona and in Manhattan at the old Ravenite Social Club on Mulberry Street.

Tartaglione implicated Massino in an arson of the office of Doctor Leifer, a dentist who had been friendly with both Massino and his wife, Josephine. Leifer wanted the office burned, Tartaglione testified, so Tartaglione and Sal Vitale took part in what was described as straightforward crime. Leifer gave Vitale the keys to the back door of the building for easy access. Five gallons of gasoline was then poured throughout the premises and lit. But Tartaglione said the building didn’t burn down completely and Massino later told him “you did a bad job,” nevertheless paying him $1,500 for the night’s work.

Like the film
Rashomon,
in which a crime was retold cinematically from the viewpoint of various witnesses, prosecutors had numerous witnesses against Massino relate what happened during the murder the three captains. Each account was different because it was told from separate recollections of the witnesses who were involved in different ways. While differing, the accounts merged to give a complete picture of what happened in and around the Brooklyn social club where the slayings took place. Each account also implicated Massino. In the case of Tartaglione’s testimony, he was the first witness to talk about how Massino was intimately involved in the preplanning and direction that led to the murders.

Questioned by Mitra Hormozi, Tartaglione said he showed up at Massino’s Queens social club the day of the murders and overheard the crime boss asking Duane Leisenheimer if he had the scanners and walkie-talkies. Satisfied with the answer, Massino then told everyone present—including Vitale, Dominick “Sonny Black” Napolitano, and Leisenheimer—“Let’s go.”

According to Tartaglione, the van he was transported in also carried Anthony Rabito. The driver was Napolitano. At the “location,” said Tartaglione, he and the others sat in the van until a message came over the walkie-talkie telling them to go into the club.

After driving toward the club, Tartaglione recalled, he saw Vitale being hugged and kissed by other Bonanno members on the scene.

“I gave Sal a big hug and a kiss,” said Tartaglione. “At that particular point I knew that somebody was killed.”

Inside the club, Tartaglione said he saw Rabito, “Boobie” (John Cerasani), and others who he refered to as “Italian guys,” meaning Sicilians. He noticed that those inside the club were wrapping up three dead bodies. Vitale then asked him to pick up spent shell casings on the floor.

The bodies were placed in a van and then Tartaglione said he was asked to follow the vehicle with the bodies as it was driven to Woodhaven Boulevard. On May 5, 1981, Tartaglione was not yet a made member of the Mafia and he wasn’t told that day of the identity of the three victims. But through gossip he learned they were Philip Giaccone, Dominick Trinchera, and Alphonse Indelicato.

Apart from his recollection of the moments at Massino’s club, Tartaglione’s testimony didn’t mention Massino at the scene of the three captains murder. However, he said that one day at a restaurant Massino walked over to him and said, “Louie, you did a good job.”

There were other things that Tartaglione remembered that seemed to link Massino to the three homicides. He said that Massino talked to him about going to Florida to seek out Bruno Indelicato, the son of the dead captain, whom many feared would strike back in retaliation for his father’s murder. (Tartaglione never went.) Not long after that, Vitale told him “we might have a problem,” referring to the fact that one of the bodies was rising through the ground at its burial place in Queens.

Another part of Tartaglione’s testimony was circumstantial evidence that Massino might have had something to do with the killing of Anthony Mirra, although it was hardly compelling since the murder took place before Tartaglione became a made member of the family, so he wasn’t privy to a lot of inside information. He testified that at Massino’s J&S Cake Social Club he overheard a conversation in which Massino, referring to the Mirra homicide, told James Episcopia that they should have taken the cash Mirra was believed to have in his socks.

But there was one murder that Tartaglione knew a lot about because he was closely involved. Having been told by Vitale that the crime family wanted him “to do work,” Tartaglione understood that to mean a homicide. FBI agents had learned that the actual groundwork for the murder of Cesare Bonventre was laid sometime in 1984, when Massino was on the lam and he met with Louis Attanasio in Pennsylvania. Vitale and Tartaglione were present when Attanasio and Massino went for a private walk. Though he wasn’t privy to any conversation Attanasio had with Messino, Vitale later told investigators that Attanasio had related that Massino had said Bonventre had to be killed.

Though he didn’t recall a precise date, Tartaglione testified that he went to a garage off Grand Avenue and Fifty-seventh Street in Queens one day and waited. When a car arrived inside the garage, one of its doors opened and Bonventre’s body was pulled out, he said. It was then that Bonventre was shot by Attanasio as the mortally wounded man lay on the garage floor, said Tartaglione.

Through his testimony, Tartaglione gave evidence on five of the seven homicides the prosecution was trying to pin on Massino. He also testified about several other killings that didn’t involve Massino but that Vitale was involved in: Antonio Tomasulo,
New York Post
supervisor Robert Perrino, and Russell Mauro.

Perhaps the most interesting piece of evidence Tartaglione provided to investigators in the case were the recordings he secretly made of his crime family brethren. Never before had such a high-ranked member of the Bonanno family agreed to wear a wire and Tartaglione did so not only during meetings with his own lawyer but also with several members of the crime family administration who were running the family while Massino was in jail awaiting trial.

Tartaglione made tapes for several months and finally ended his covert surveillance in January 2004. Andres and the prosecution team didn’t introduce all of Tartaglione’s recordings into evidence but did play several tapes for the jury. Of course, Massino was in jail when the recordings were made and his voice wasn’t captured. But he is alluded to several times on the tapes and in fact Tartaglione repeated for the jury the old story that the crime boss is only mentioned in conversations indirectly as “that guy” or “the ear.”

One of the recordings showed the fear that Vitale’s wife, Diana, had that Massino was going to kill her husband. Vitale had been so frightened of his brother-in-law at one point that he stayed away from him. According to Tartaglione, Massino was asked point-blank by Diana, “Are you going to do anything to my husband?”

On another recording, Anthony Urso, who was acting family boss after Massino was arrested, complained about the flood of informants and turncoats infecting the family and said that as a deterrent they should be killed, along with their families.

“You tell them, ‘Whomever turns, we’ll wipe your family out,’” said Urso.

On another tape, Vincent Basciano, the Bronx hair salon owner who later became the reputed acting boss of the family, was heard expressing undying loyalty to Massino.

“I got 100 percent faith in him,” said Basciano. “Listen to me. If I’m your fucking guy, if I’m gonna walk on hot coals, if I gotta fucking jump in the ocean, let me do it for one guy”

Basciano’s statement of loyalty reflected an old way of thinking, an unswerving allegiance to the boss of the family. As events would later play out in the Massino saga, such fealty would be terribly misplaced.

Tartaglione taped enough people in the crime family to keep investigators busy for months. Prosecutors used only a handful of the recordings at Massino’s trial. But through interviews, court records, and other documents it was learned that Tartaglione got his fellow gangsters to talk about a wide array of things, ranging from their favorite restaurants, dating problems, and the best defense attorneys to use in case of trouble. The evil done by turncoats like Sal Vitale, Frank Coppa, and Frank Lino were also talked about at length.

According to some of the conversations, the Bonanno family was under the delusional perception that because the government wanted to use more than one informant that there must be problems with the case against Massino. Somehow, said reputed Bonanno underboss Joseph Cammarano on one of the recordings, Massino’s good memory would be used to trip up Vitale on the witness stand. He was the Mafia elephant who never forgot.

Vitale had earned a special opprobrium from the Bonanno gangsters. Tartaglione believed that Massino’s brother-in-law could take everyone down but didn’t think he had been an informant as far back as five years, which is what some in the Bonanno crime family believed. If that was the case, Massino would have been arrested a long time ago and Vitale would have made a run at being boss of the family, a hypothetical scenario that, had it played out, would have made a crime boss a cooperating witness from the moment he took command.

In their meetings with Tartaglione, both Cammarano and Urso, according to records, bemoaned the fact that the FBI was so vigorously pursuing the crime family and even trying to use the death penalty against Massino in the second case. But at least one Bonanno boss didn’t think the federal government would really try to use the death penalty against Massino. They had bigger concerns. They had to hunt for Osama bin Laden.

CHAPTER 24

“He Is a Rat”

When he took the witness stand at the trial of Joseph Massino, there was one thing that Richard Cantarella wanted to be sure about: he had to be well dressed for his appearance.

On the streets of Little Italy, Cantarella had always been known as being a man fastidious about his appearance. His coiffed hair was styled so neatly that the moniker “Shellack Head” stuck to him like his styling gel. When it was his time to testify, Cantarella made sure that his wife brought him half a dozen boxes of new shirts from Neiman Marcus. Star witnesses, even if they would scramble your brains with a bullet, have to look good.

Dressed in a dark suit and a white open-necked shirt that was right out of its package, Cantarella walked into court on June 10, 2004, as the fourth major mob turncoat in the Massino trial. He also had on a pair of tinted sunglasses.

Though he was an admitted killer, Cantarella was, like Frank Coppa, a man with a head for business. He had been involved in parking lots when Salvatore Vitale approached to say that he and Massino wanted to become involved in the same business. Three parking lots became the object of partnerships with Massino’s portion being held in the name of his wife, Cantarella told the jury.

But Massino just didn’t approach Cantarella for business out of the blue. The well-dressed gangster had made a quick and steady rise through the ranks of organized crime until he had become one of Massino’s captains. Eventually, Cantarella was appointed by Massino to be part of a committee to run the family affairs, taking over a spot that had been vacated by James Tartaglione.

Cantarella had come from a personal family line that had substantial ties to the Bonanno crime clan. His uncle, Al Embarrato, had been a longtime Bonanno captain and his cousin, Joseph “Mouk” D’Amico, had been a soldier. After Cantarella was inducted in 1990 with Massino as his main backer, he began to dine with the crime boss at J&S Cake Social Club, as well as at CasaBlanca Restaurant in Maspeth, a place Massino owned with soldier Louis Restivo.

Since he had developed a good rapport with prosecutor Mitra Hormozi, she handled Cantarella’s direct examination on the witness stand. Cantarella’s real value to the prosecution was not just in his explanation of the structure of the Bonanno family and Massino’s eating schedule but in the ability to tie the defendant into the Anthony Mirra homicide. Questioned by Hormozi, Cantarella told the jury that on a trip to the northern end of Little Italy with Embarrato, Cantarella stayed outside while Embarrato entered a building. Coming back to the car, Embarrato turned to Cantarella and gave him some sober news.

According to Cantarella, his uncle stated, “‘I just got an assignment from Joe Massino to kill your cousin Tony, he is a rat.’”

Mob insiders and investigators knew that Mirra was on thin ice ever since the revelations surfaced that FBI agent Joseph Pistone had infiltrated the crime family. It had been Mirra who first met Pistone and used him as a driver. Eventually, Pistone used his entrée with Mirra to become close to others like Dominick “Sonny Black” Napolitano and Benjamin “Lefty Guns” Ruggiero. The results were disastrous for the Bonanno family.

The actual killing, Cantarella testified, was done by D’Amico, who fired into the right side of Mirra’s head in a parking lot in lower Manhattan’s West Side. A shaken D’Amico then got into a getaway car that Cantarella said he drove.

Cantarella also told of his involvement with a number of other homicides. Those killings, he said, didn’t involve Massino. But the events surrounding one murder, that of
New York Post
distribution supervisor Robert Perrino, revealed the depth of the penetration the mob once had at the tabloid.

The mob never had anything to do with the editorial functions of the
Post
or its executive offices. Instead, the Mafia was able to exploit the central weak point in any newspaper’s operation: the distribution system. If a newspaper can’t get its newspapers out to the newsstand, its circulation is dealt a fatal blow, particularly for a publication like the
Post,
which depended for its survival on single-copy sales on the street.

The distribution system at the
Post
was like a Christmas tree for the Bonanno family. On cross-examination by David Breitbart, Cantarella said he was getting paid by the
Post
for a no-show job for about $800 a week from 1985 to 1992. He wasn’t the only one reaping benefits. Vitale was pulling in some weekly cash and one of his sons also had a no-show job, said Cantarella. In addition, Cantarella said his cousin, Joe D’Amico, had a job at the newspaper and had clout with the union, which covered the distribution operation. A reputed Bonanno soldier named Joe Torre also had a job as a driver and loader, according to Cantarella.

But in 1992 the investigation by the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office was heating up. The prosecutors’ targets were Perrino, Al Embarrato, and officials from the union that covered the distribution system workers, said Cantarella. Vitale became concerned about Perrino and asked Cantarella if the
Post
supervisor was showing any signs of weakness that might lead him to cooperate. Cantarella said he told Vitale he didn’t see any indication Perrino might become a turncoat. But even that wasn’t enough to allay Vitale’s fears about Perrino, whom Cantarella said knew about the mob’s no-show jobs and that circulation was being inflated by newspapers, which were sometimes dumped in the river rather than returned as unsold.

Perrino, who was complicit in a lot of the Bonanno shenanigans at the
Post,
left his Long Island home on May 6, 1992, and was immediately listed as a missing person. Nothing was heard of Perrino’s whereabouts until in December 2003 FBI unearthed his remains from the floor of a warehouse in Staten Island. Frank Lino had provided information to the FBI about the murder and said Perrino’s body was taken from a bar in Brooklyn where he was killed to the construction warehouse of a Bonanno family associate. It was at the warehouse that Perrino’s corpse was put in a steel drum and covered with concrete. As Cantarella testified, Frank Lino told investigators that it had been Vitale who orchestrated Perrino’s murder.

Massino did not know of and hadn’t approved of the Perrino murder, said Cantarella. Talking after the homicide, Massino told Cantarella that he was upset with Vitale for ordering the Perrino killing. Had Massino known in advance of the murder, he would not have let it happen, said Cantarella.

Cantarella’s testimony showed that Massino was neither involved in the Perrino homicide nor that of Richard Mazzio, which also took place in 1992. But Cantarella had done his damage to Massino with the testimony about the Mirra homicide and his ascendancy to the leadership position in the Bonanno family. He also told the jury that Massino was involved in plenty of other Bonanno crime family operations including loan-sharking and gambling that involved games of baccarat and Joker Poker machines.

After Cantarella finished testifying, the prosecution called his cousin, Joseph D’Amico, to the stand. D’Amico was the fifth Bonanno family member to turn against Massino. Like his cousin, D’Amico dressed well, wearing a gray suit, a white shirt, and a rose-colored tie. While the other turncoats were uncomfortable as witnesses, it was D’Amico who expressed how distasteful his life as an informant had become.

D’Amico told the jury that his own mother had been a loan shark. But he denied a fanciful story that had been circulating among Mafia cognoscenti for years that she had paid the late Carmine Galante up to $50,000 so that her son could be inducted into the crime family.

“If that was true I would like my money back,” D’Amico quipped.

D’Amico said he liked the mob life and told the jury that his induction in 1977 into the Mafia took place in the kitchen of an apartment in Little Italy. It was during the ceremony, D’Amico recalled, that one of the participants asked him, “Would you leave your own family and protect someone in this family first?” His response was a simple “yes.”

Asked about the Mirra homicide, D’Amico confirmed what Cantarella had said earlier. Mirra had embarrassed the family and had committed an unforgivable sin when he brought undercover agent Joseph Pistone within the orbit of the Bonanno family. D’Amico admitted that he shot his cousin in the head.

Mob life was clearly what D’Amico had lived for. He seemed to revel in the excitement and danger. He told the jurors that he even had John Gotti as a wedding guest, and he submitted a picture into evidence that showed a smiling Gotti shaking the hand of a beaming D’Amico, all dressed up in a black tuxedo and sporting a white bow tie.

Cross-examined by David Breitbart about leaving Mafia life, D’Amico said he had done so reluctantly.

“I rather not be here,” D’Amico said. “I rather be where I was, living downtown.”

Any other place would suit D’Amico fine. He just would rather not be in the Brooklyn courtroom facing the stares of Joseph Massino.