King of the Godfathers: "Big Joey" Massino and the Fall of the Bonanno Crime Family (9 page)

Galante died immediately where he fell. The blast had knocked him out of his chair. His cigar remained tightly clenched in his jaw, while his right arm was bent at his side and the left hand was drawn up across his chest as if he were soundly asleep. The elder Turano was mortally wounded and would never make it out of the hospital emergency room. His son survived. Meanwhile, Amato and Bonventre got away unharmed, a fact that didn’t go unnoticed by the police.

At 4:08 P.M., teletypes in newsrooms around the city spat out an urgent bulletin: “Reputed Mafia Chieftain Carmine Galante and an associate were shot dead in an Italian restaurant in Brooklyn, police said.” That was all it took for reporters and editors to launch into a frenzy of coverage. GALANTE EXITS IN (MOB) STYLE: GODFATHER BLOWN AWAY AL FRESCO IN B’KLYN, said the
Daily News.
News photographers snapped sensational shots of Galante’s corpse splayed on the patio, complete with his bloody eyeless socket. Cops finally took a plastic table cloth and draped it over his upper body to give him a last bit of dignity and an escape from the prying cameras.

The photo of the blasted Galante that showed him dying with a cigar clenched in his teeth was sensational. But the police investigation that followed seemed to raise some suspicion that perhaps a cop had placed the cigar in his mouth to make it look good, especially for the news photographers who resourcefully went to neighboring rooftops and took the crime scene pictures. However, Kenneth McCabe, one of the detectives who investigated the case, later said that the medical examiner determined that Galante had indeed died with the his last smoke clenched in his jaw.

There was a lot of law enforcement speculation about Galante’s killing. Undercover FBI agent Joseph Pistone wasn’t in New York City when Galante was killed but was instead in Florida taking part in a related undercover probe in which he and other agents were running a nightclub as a way of attracting the mob’s attention. Pistone only learned of Galante’s death after he received a telephone call from his mobster friend Lefty Ruggiero. As Pistone later testified, Ruggiero was coy in giving away information.

“In the first conversation Ruggiero had asked me if I had read the New York papers, and I told him no, I didn’t. I had not at that point,” Pistone said during his testimony in the famous 1985 Pizza Connection trial. “And he instructed me to go buy a New York paper, he said, ‘You’ll be in for a surprise.’”

Pistone picked up the papers and saw the news about Galante and said he eventually made his way back to New York later in July 1979, where he visited Ruggiero at his club on Madison Street. It was at that point, Pistone said, that Ruggiero said that with Galante out of the way there were going to be big changes in the Bonanno family.

“He said now that Galante had gotten whacked out that Rusty Rastelli was going to be the boss of the Family,” Pistone recalled. That shouldn’t have come as a big surprise since Rastelli had been the only other power in the family capable of challenging Galante.

According to Pistone, Nicky Marangello and Michael Sabella, two Galante allies, were also on the hit list to be murdered but some people intervened, and instead they were demoted—Sabella to the rank of soldier and Marangello removed as underboss—Ruggiero said.

There were some other changes reported by Ruggiero: among them was the fact that Joe Massino had been elevated to the rank of captain. This was a major promotion, coming a mere two or three years after Massino had been initiated as a mob member, and was a clear indication that his stock was greatly on the rise in the Rastellli regime.

But while Pistone was told what the promotions and demotions would be, he apparently wasn’t told by Ruggiero the how and why of Galante’s killing. At least in the early months and years after the Knickerbocker Street slaughter, the FBI and police believed that the Galante hit was sanctioned by the Mafia Commission because such extreme action of killing a boss needed high-level authorization. Evidence quickly emerged to support the theory that the Commission was involved. Within a half-hour or so after the killing, NYPD surveillance teams saw a number of Bonanno captains such as Steven Cannone, Bruno Indelicato, and Dominick “Sonny Black” Napolitano go to the Ravenite Social Club on Mulberry Street, where they greeted and kissed Gambino crime family’s aging underboss Aniello Dellacroce.

Police and FBI agents who studied the tape of the Ravenite gathering were alerted to what they believed was the butt of a gun sticking out from Indelicato’s waistband. That meeting was a sign to some of the agents that the other crime families (i.e., the Commission) were involved in signing off on Galante’s assassination. It is also important to remember that the Bonanno family was essentially being monitored by the Commission for years since the ouster of Joseph Bonanno. Finally, some years later an associate of the Colombo crime family testified that family boss Carmine Persico told him he had voted against Galante’s murder but that the heads of the Gambino, Lucchese, and Genovese crime families had okayed the plan.

But from where did the plot to kill Galante emanate? The idea it seems came from Rastelli. With Massino and Napolitano as allies and using them as emissaries to other loyalists, Rastelli put together a pure Machiavellian power play. Galante may have been a ruthless killer in his own right but he had alienated many and his drug dealing had won him the contempt of some of the heads of the other families. In the end, Galante wasn’t the boss but was living out what one FBI agent privately confided was a Napoleonic complex—Bushwick style. His Zip allies like Amato and Bonventre, knowing where the true power lay, set him up at the restaurant. Rastelli showed that he was the true boss and loyal captains like Massino, who one mobster later testified was actually outside the restaurant when Galante was shot dead, assured him the leadership.

The wake for Carmine Galante was at a small downtown funeral parlor on Second Avenue in Manhattan. His funeral was also modest. Like some other mobsters, Galante was buried at St. John’s Cemetery in Queens, a burial ground run by the Diocese of Brooklyn. Over the years, famous crime bosses like Joseph Profaci, Vito Genovese, Carlo Gambino, Aniello Dellacroce, John Gotti, and even Philip Rastelli were interred there. They repose either within the immense cloister building or very near it in private mausoleums and well-tended graves that are tourist attractions. Sprigs of palm sometimes adorn them.

Galante is buried nowhere near the cloister building. Instead, his small grave is on the southern fringe of the cemetery, just yards from the busy Metropolitan Avenue. A modest granite stone with the carved image of Christ and the Sacred Heart marks the spot. “Love Goes on Forever,” reads the inscription, along with the simple words “Beloved Carmine.” It is very easy to overlook.

CHAPTER 8

The Three Captains

The most noticeable thing about the three-story building at the intersections of Graham and Withers streets in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, was the pigeon coop on the roof. When he needed time away from the street or the business in his social club on the first floor, Dominick “Sonny Black” Napolitano would retreat to the rooftop to be alone with his birds. Surrounded by his clutch of racers, Napolitano could take stock of the world and plan his moves as he looked out over the street scene outside his club, the Motion Lounge.

By 1980, there was a lot Napolitano had to think about. Both he and Joseph Massino had come out on top in the latest internecine struggle within the Bonanno crime family. They both had the ear of boss Philip Rastelli and were considered among the major captains of the family. They had been the imprisoned crime boss’s conduit to the outside and records show that Massino had made a number of visits to the Lewisburg Penitentiary when Rastelli was housed there. Under the crime family reshuffling that went on after Carmine Galante was killed, Napolitano took over most of the crew of soldiers that had been run by the demoted Michael Sabella. Among those who were put under Napolitano was Benjamin “Lefty Guns” Ruggiero.

Since he got out of state prison, Napolitano jumped back into the swing and ran his Brooklyn crew—Massino had one of the Queens crews—through deals involving stolen gems and artwork pilfered from JFK International Airport. Ruggiero had hooked up with a guy Napolitano had begun to admire as a newcomer who had proved to be a good earner for the family. It was a new face introduced to him by Ruggiero. This new guy was known as Donnie Brasco.

Aside from an unthinkable breach of FBI security or dumb slip up, there was no way Ruggiero could have known that Brasco was really undercover FBI agent Joseph Pistone. So when Ruggiero introduced Pistone to Napolitano, the FBI was in the process of tightening the noose on the Bonanno captain. The agency was doing that in ways Pistone didn’t even know about. Other agents in the FBI had planted listening devices in a number of Bonanno social clubs and among those targeted was the Motion Lounge, the nondescript meeting place at 120 Graham Avenue where Napolitano held court. Not that Massino’s haunts escaped such surveillance since a bugging device was also placed in his J&S Cake Social Club business in Maspeth on Fifty-eighth Road.

As fate would have it, Napolitano gave Ruggiero the option of being under Joe Massino, but Ruggiero decided to stay with Napolitano. It was a fateful choice because had Ruggiero chosen to go with the beefy guy in Maspeth, Massino’s fortunes might have turned out much differently. But at least in the early days of 1980, Napolitano had done well with Pistone. The undercover agent had been able to steer Napolitano into an arrangement with Florida’s crime boss Santos Trafficante. It was a deal that gave Napolitano a great deal of clout and put the Bonanno family into a nightclub in Florida known as the King’s Court Bottle Club. It was actually an undercover business being run by Pistone’s fellow agents in the Miami and Tampa offices of the FBI. Not only was the FBI watching Napolitano’s deals in New York but also had him covered in Florida.

With Rastelli in prison, the Commission appointed an acting street boss, Salvatore “Sally Fruits” Ferrugia, to run things on a day-to-day basis. Of course, Napolitano was flying high, making connections with Trafficante. But Salvatore Vitale and others believed it was Massino who was the real power on the street in the crime family, the guy with the resources to make things happen. It soon became clear on the street that Napolitano and Massino were going through their own dance for power in the crime family.

“Sonny and Joey are feuding,” Ruggiero told Pistone at one point, “because Sonny’s got more power. So Joey’s got an unlisted telephone number now. He ain’t talking to anybody because of this feud with Sonny.”

Just who had more power in the family depended on who you talked to. Massino could have just as easily taken an unlisted telephone number thinking it would deter surveillance. No matter what kind of power plays Massino and Napolitano were carrying on with each other, there was a more serious political undercurrent in the family, one that even the demise of Galante had not resolved. While Rastelli was considered to be the boss of the family, some of his captains began to view him as ineffective. His continued incarceration had denied the family a full-time boss and instead left it to the ministration of a caretaker, Ferrugia, who was no match for the dominant personalities of Massino and Napolitano. Eventually, Nicholas Marangello, the family underboss, and Steven Cannone, the consiglieri, took over as a committee running things while Rastelli was away.

Three captains in particular became disenchanted with this leadership, and they began to make noise. It was the kind of stuff Massino got wind of. One day in his social club near Rust Street Massino confided to Vitale the troubling news that the three capos—Philip Giaccone, Alphonse “Sonny Red” Indelicato, and Dominick “Big Trin” Trinchera—were actually plotting to take over the entire Bonanno operation.

“Rastelli is a bum,” was what the three captains had been saying about the incarcerated boss to justify their actions.

Vitale, who was only a crime family associate at that point in the early 1980s, had met Giaccone, who was known by the moniker “Phil Lucky.” In the early days, Giaccone had actually been Massino’s captain before the man from Maspeth won his promotion after Galante’s death. Trinchera was another obese mobster who was close to 300 pounds. Indelicato’s son, Anthony Bruno Indelicato, had been one of the three men suspected of doing the actual shooting of Galante in 1979.

Massino, Vitale told investigators years later, didn’t tell him much about the plotting but did say that the Commission had intervened when the rumors became rife and decreed that there should be no bloodshed. The other Mafia families decided that everybody should wait for Rastelli to get out of jail and then work out the problem.

“Work it out among yourselves, no gun play,” was how Vitale characterized the Commission’s dictate.

That seemed to hold things in check for a while. Apart from Massino and Napolitano, the incarcerated Rastelli could count on the support of Cannone and Ferrugia. On the other side, the three captains were backed by the top Sicilian Cesare Bonventre and his Zip associates from Knickerbocker Avenue. With the Sicilians in their corner, the three captains were not to be trifled with, particularly since they had the support of Vincent “the Chin” Gigante, the Genovese family boss and his powerful Westside contingent. Had the Sicilians had their way, they could have pushed Salvatore Catalano, the heroin dealer, as a candidate for boss. In fact, for about a week Catalano was pushed forward as the boss. Catalano had been a made member of the Sicilian Mafia; therefore, under the arcane code of the American Mafia he could not become a boss in the United States: “You were either all Italy or all United States” as one mafioso put it. It also didn’t help Catalano that his command of English was not that good.

Well wired with his own informants in the other crime families, Massino picked up rumors that the peace would not hold. Police later learned that a Colombo crime family member—Carmine Franzese, who had a close personal relationship with Massino—passed along the tip that Giaccone, Trinchera, and Indelicato were stocking up on automatic weapons to carry out a putsch against Rastelli and his supporters. Because the other side was loading up, the Rastelli faction had to do something. The Sicilians in particular had a reputation for being bloodthirsty and disloyal, factors that made them potent adversaries. A preemptive strike was needed.

As Vitale later told investigators, Massino turned to his old friend on the Commission, Gambino boss Paul Castellano, as well as Carmine Persico, head of the Colombo crime family. Their advice to Massino was simple and straightforward: Do what you have to do to protect yourselves. When Vitale heard that from Massino, he fully understood what the message from the Commission had been: Kill the three capos. That things had come to this point had troubled Massino, who believed, according to Vitale, that weakness on the part of Marangello and Cannone had allowed the three captains to think they could flout the crime family’s administration.

The thing about Mafia social clubs in New York City was that it was usually a safe bet that they would always have something going on. The clubs were thrones for the powerful and those who sought an audience with the kings of La Cosa Nostra. The clubs were also venues for planning, meeting, or just simply talking over a cup of espresso. Police and federal agents got into a habit of watching the comings and goings at the clubs much like Kremlinologists studied the lineup of Moscow’s May Day parades for signs of where the power lay in the Soviet Union to discern who was up and who was down in the mob.

In Maspeth in 1981, any FBI agent worth his or her salt knew that Joseph Massino held court at the J&S Cake Social Club on Fifty-eighth Road. If any agent had no particular assignment but wanted to check out the boys in Massino’s orbit on a particular day, a swing by J&S Cake wasn’t a bad way to spend the time. You never knew what you would find.

It was at about 5:05 P.M. on May 5, 1981, that Special Agent Vincent Savadel decided to make a run by the Massino club in his government-issued sedan. He had already swung by another Massino hangout at 58–14 Fifty-eighth Avenue and jotted down one license plate when he went around the block to Fifty-eighth Road. Just as Savadel drove by, he spotted Massino coming out of the two-story building in the company of what he later reported were “several white men.”

The body language of Massino and his associates seemed to convey that they were going someplace, Savadel thought. The agent drove a short distance to the corner on Rust Street and, figuring the Massino crowd was going to drive away, waited in his car.

It wasn’t a long wait. A brown Cadillac came out from Fifty-eighth Road and made a right turn, northbound, on Rust Street. As the car passed him, Savadel noticed that there were at least four people inside. It was a car that had been outside Massino’s social club.

Moments later a dark red, almost maroon-colored, Buick also came out from Fifty-eighth Road and made the same turn, following the Cadillac. As the car passed Savadel’s parked FBI vehicle, the driver looked at the government agent. Savadel’s and the driver’s eyes locked on each other. The driver momentarily gazed at Savadel with a perceptive lingering glance that signaled recognition. Savadel also knew who he was looking at: Joseph Massino.

Making a U-turn, Savadel followed both cars north on Rust. Massino seemed to be looking in his rearview and sideview mirrors, checking out the FBI car. The two cars accelerated and then Massino’s vehicle pulled on to the wrong side of the two-way street until he was next to the Cadillac. Savadel noticed Massino gesturing with his hands and talking. Then Massino gunned his accelerator and took the lead, with the Cadillac following.

Traveling fast on the back streets, Massino’s car disappeared from sight, leaving Savadel to follow the brown Cadillac as it entered the Long Island Expressway going eastbound. The Cadillac quickly exited on to Maurice Avenue, leaving Savadel to continue eastbound on the expressway. As he did so, he glanced at the Cadillac. The men inside the vehicle looked at him as well.

Savadel couldn’t follow the Cadillac because of traffic. He had also lost Massino’s vehicle in the high-speed drive from Rust Street. The agent had no idea where the men were all going that evening when they launched into their sprint with the cars. Still, the agent remembered what happened. There was no telling when the car chase might become important.

After peeling off from the car chase, Savadel called the Bonanno investigators at the FBI operational center that was located not too far away in Rego Park. He related what he had just seen, likening Massino and company’s driving antics to a “fire drill.” What did it mean? Nobody in the office knew for sure. Instinctively, Special Agent Charles Rooney, who was working one aspect of the Bonanno crime family involved in major international heroin deals, scribbled down what Savadel had reported on a small Post-It note and stuck it on a chart in the office. You never know when all those gyrations with cars might mean something, he thought.

It was also on May 5, 1981, that Donna Trinchera spoke with her husband just as he left the couple’s Brooklyn house. There was a meeting he said and he was going to it. The thin, blond woman didn’t question her spouse too much. It was a meeting, that’s all, he said. She expected him to be home at some point.

In fact, it was the third such meeting Trinchera and his two friends had gone to in recent weeks. One had been at the Ferncliffe Manor and the second at the Embassy Terrace at Avenue U and East Second Street in Brooklyn. Nothing had been resolved at either sitdown. The third meeting of the Bonanno crime family administration was set for the early evening hour at a social club in Brooklyn on Thirteenth Avenue. Since it was a conclave of the upper echelon of the crime family, neither Trinchera nor the two men he arrived with, Philip Giaccone and Alphonse Indelicato, were armed. The rules were that an administration meeting meant that no one packed a weapon, the better to avoid hotheaded reactions that might get out of hand.

But the three captains had always suspected that a meeting could be a death trap, so they took precautions. The night before the Embassy Terrace meeting the three captains, plus Alphonse Indelicato’s son Bruno, stockpiled some guns at a bar owned by Frank Lino, an acting Bonanno captain, about two blocks away. In case the three captains were killed, Lino and Bruno Indelicato were told to retaliate and kill as many of the opposition as possible.

Unarmed, the three Bonanno captains walked to the building for the third meeting. They were followed by Lino. Nobody in that little group seemed to notice a fair-haired young man from Maspeth sitting in a car a block away with a walkie-talkie. If they had, it wouldn’t have seemed so strange since Duane Leisenheimer was always around Joseph Massino, who had every right to be at an administration meeting. Trinchera rang the doorbell.