The Good Rat (9 page)

Nobody noticed the large old Cadillac that came slowly down the street. The driver parked in front of Nicky Guido’s, and then two men got out and here they came, one on the street side, the other on the sidewalk.

Nicky Guido did exactly what everybody would expect him to do. He threw himself atop his uncle just as the men started shooting.

In her kitchen across the street, Dottie Laux heard shots. She saw heads running by her window. She and her husband came out into the street.

The Cadillac was gone. They hadn’t seen it. They saw the heads through the windshield of Nicky’s car. One was the uncle’s, who was trying to get out from under his dead nephew.

Dottie Laux ran to the car. “I did not realize,” she said.

Her husband said, “Go inside.”

In the front seat, Nicky Guido, his new white jacket now red.

He died the hero he wanted to be.

That day Detective George Terra was in his car when he heard the news. He remembers it was still light when he stopped at the Seventy-sixth Precinct. He went up the stairs to the detectives’ office and announced, “That Guido. They shot the wrong guy.”

• A:
  First it was all over the—it was all over the news, and then Frankie, Frankie Santora reached out for me, and I met him, and I said, You know, your guys killed the wrong Nicky Guido.
  
• Q:
  And what did Santora say about that?
  
• A:
  He said Gas should have paid the four thousand dollars and got the right information on Nicky Guido. Gas got it off of somebody who worked in the gas company, and he got the wrong guy.
  
• Q:
  Did you ever have a conversation with Mr. Eppolito about the good Nicky Guido being killed?
  
• A:
  He told me the same thing that Frankie Santora did.
  
• Q:
  Which was what?
  
• A:
  Gas should have paid the money, and he would have got the right guy.
  

Today you knock on the door of the good Nicky Guido’s aunt and she says, “What do you want?” She is on a hospital bed in the living room of her house at 514 Seventeenth Street.

“I wanted to ask you about your nephew.”

“What for? They keep bringing it up to torture my sister.”

Her sister, Nicky Guido’s mother, refuses to speak to anybody.

The aunt’s son, Nicky Guido’s cousin, Carmine, comes out of a dim front room where he had been sleeping.

Their neighbor Dottie Laux had told me that Carmine was a limousine driver. “Late customers?” I say. “Long hours, limousines.”

“I don’t drive a limousine,” the cousin says. He is about forty, short and stocky with sparse hair.

“Oh, I thought you were a driver,” I say.

“I work nights, security for Bear Stearns,” he says. “What do you want here?”

“To talk about your cousin.”

“Can’t they leave us alone?” he says.

“Yeah, leave us alone,” his aunt says over her shoulder.

The cousin says, “The time Nicky got killed, they had me in the precinct nine hours. They wanted to know if he was in the Mafia. He was Italian, he got shot, he had a brand-new car. Why didn’t I tell the truth that he was a mobster? I was probably being asked by the two cops who killed him.”

“What do you want?” the aunt says.

“To talk.”

“Get out of here and leave us alone. Where are you from?”

“From you,” I say.

Eppolito, big, brazen, and brawling, and Caracappa, slender, stealthy, silent—each lived with a clear view of hell. People are said to be born with good thriving somewhere within, but these two cops overwhelmed any decency with venom and a frenzied grasping of money for murder, never enough money, always wanting more.

• Q:
  You talked about Santora getting murdered, and can you just tell the jury, again, about when that happened?
  
• A:
  In 1987, probably towards the end of the summer.
  
• Q:
  Did you have a conversation with Casso at all about Santora’s murder?
  
• A:
  Yes. When I went up to Casso and told him that Frank was killed, he told me, jeez, I didn’t know that was our friend. He said, If I knew that, I could have stopped it.
  
• Q:
  Was Santora killed alone or with someone else?
  
• A:
  Was killed with Carmine Varriale.
  
• Q:
  Did you know whether Carmine Varriale was a target of Casso’s?
  
• A:
  Carmine Varriale was a target. Gaspipe was having
  problems with him all along. I don’t know if that’s the reason he got killed, but Frankie definitely wasn’t the target. Frankie just had bad luck by being with him.
  
• Q:
  Did there come a time that you had a meeting with Mr. Eppolito?
  
• A:
  In Mrs. Santora’s house. I would say, within a month. I went there to Frankie’s house, and I sat down in his dining room and with Louie at the table and Frankie’s wife went into another room, and Louie says, I’m pretty sure you know who I am, and I said, Yes, I know who you are. I have seen you on a few occasions. You’re Frankie’s cousin, and he said yes. And he asked me if I had a desire to continue the business that we were doing together.
  
• Q:
  What did you take that to mean?
  
• A:
  To work directly with Louie. Continue getting information.
  
• Q:
  Does there come a time that you get contact information from Mr. Eppolito?
  
• A:
  Yes. I got his home phone number.
  
• Q:
  Did you give him any contact information?
  
• A:
  My beeper number. And my daughter’s phone number in my house. Only to be used in an emergency. My daughter was not living at the house at that time.
  
• Q:
  Did you recognize anybody outside after you left that meeting in Mrs. Santora’s?
  
• A:
  Yes. I saw a gentleman sitting in his car like this on the
  passenger side of the car, almost directly in the driveway. He had his head on his hand like this, and he was watching. I didn’t know him by name, but I recognized him as Louie’s partner, Steve Caracappa.
  
• Q:
  After the discussion with Mr. Eppolito, did you speak to Casso?
  
• A:
  About the four thousand, yes. He said, What do you think. I said, Well, so far they’ve been real good to you. He says, Yes, I agree with that. And let’s do it. Tell them if they want to do this, and we go forward on it, that they have to work exclusively for us. We don’t want them giving information to other guys in other families and possibly have a problem back from it which will eventually come back to us.
  
• Q:
  Did you discuss methods of contacting one another?
  
• A:
  When I would call Louie, I would always use the name Marco, and if I beeped, he had given me a beeper number for Steve, and I agreed to use my prefix in my home phone number, 259, and put that behind the beeper so he would know it was me. Louie would come to my house about ten o’clock at night. I would know he was coming. I would put on the porch light, and he would tap on my front window, and I would go and open the door, and him and I would meet in my house. I have met Louie on the Southern State Parkway. I met Louie on the Long Island Expressway. Louie had some form of an acquaintance with a lady who lived on Eighty-fourth
  Street. I met him there a couple of times, and originally I met Steve with Louie at Perkins Pancake House in Staten Island, and Steve and I both agreed—it was in the parking lot—and we both agreed it wasn’t a good spot for us to be seen, because we could be seen together there, and I got in the car, and Steve took me to a cemetery in Staten Island, and then he took me to where his brother lived and where his mother lived, and it was on a block with a church and a school, and he says, When it meets both of our conveniences, I’ll meet you here and you beep your horn, and we’ll go to the cemetery and talk there. I also met Steve at his house. In the apartment in New York City.
  
• Q:
  When Mr. Eppolito came to your house, was he with Mr. Caracappa or alone, or how did that work?
  
• A:
  Most of the time, in the beginning especially, Louie came alone. Then Louie and I had a big argument, and Louie said he wanted to meet Gaspipe, and I said, Louie, that don’t make no sense. Why do you want to do that? He said, We’ve been so good with our information, I think we deserve more money. I said, That isn’t going to happen. You are not going to meet him. He says, I’m willing to stand on one side of the door. He could be on the other side of the door. We don’t have to see each other. I said, Louie, that isn’t going to happen, and he got a little indignant with me. We had an argument, and if you look at Mr. Eppolito, he is three times my size.
  And I pushed him out the door to my house, and we had an argument, and I said don’t ever come back to my house anymore.
  
• Q:
  When did any meetings happen after that?
  
• A:
  About a month later, Steve Caracappa came to my house with a box of cookies, and he says, Is it okay if we talk? And I says sure. I like Steve. I liked him then. I like him now. I am not doing him any good by being a rat, but I always liked him.
  
• Q:
  What did you and Mr. Caracappa talk about?
  
• A:
  Him and I talked about continuing the service of Gas, instead of Louie. He would meet with me because he knew Louie and I had the argument. Louie must have went back and told him, and I also told him.
  
• Q:
  Then you said a certain amount of time went by before you started to meet with Mr. Caracappa?
  
• A:
  A month after that, Steve came to my house. If my wife was sleeping, we would talk in the living room, which was the first room into the house. If my wife was awake, we would go into the back to where my daughter used to live.
  
• Q:
  Mr. Kaplan, did there come a time that you learned where Mr. Caracappa was assigned within the police department?
  
• A:
  Louie had told me that Steve had a big job. He was assigned to the major-case squad, and he was there acting with FBI agents on a daily basis.
  

You find out right now what a greedy imbecile we have here in Eppolito. He has precisely what it takes to be a thieving, conniving Mafia cop.

• A:
  One time Louie Eppolito was getting a C-note, and he said, I’m going away on vacation. This was—we were new friends at that time, and he told me, I’m taking my family away on vacation, and I’m taking my mother-in-law with me, and my American Express is just about maxed out, and would I—would I be willing to send him some money if he needs it. And I said, Louie, why would we want to do that? If you need the money, I’ll give it to you now. He says, No, I really don’t want the money unless I need it. But if I need it, will you promise me you’ll send it to me? And I said yes.
  

Eppolito stands on the shores of Gravesend Bay, Brooklyn, about to take a trip to the Caribbean, during which he may need more money than he has. He asks Kaplan if he can provide, and Burt says yes, fine, come and get it. But no, Eppolito does not want the money in Brooklyn. He wants it delivered to him in the Caribbean. And not by Western Union, which might cost ten dollars. No, he says, “If I need it, have somebody buy a round-trip plane ticket and a hotel room to bring it to me,” which could cost more than the loan. The prosecutor asks and Kaplan answers.

• A:
  And he did call me from one of the islands, and he said he needed the money, and I gave the money to Tommy, and he took it down to him. I think it was a couple of thousand dollars. It may have been three. Louie was in one of the islands. Caribbean—I don’t know how you pronounce it.
  

In 2004, two years before Burt Kaplan took over this courtroom, Joe Massino sits in another one just down the hall and looses the worst of devils, the one who betrays hell. Joe Massino sits in the lights and imagines he lives again on one of the great nights of his life, when he swore in a whole squad of new Bonanno soldiers at the J & S Cake plant on Fifty-eighth Road in Middle Village, Queens.

“You can be proud of being in this family,” Joe Massino told these new members of the Mafia. “In the history of the Bonanno family, there has not been one informer, not one fucking rat. We are the only family that has never had a rat. Years back there were two members of this family who died in the electric chair because they wouldn’t tell anybody nothing. We are the only family that never had an informer. All these others, they bred rats. Not us. Not never. I’m proud of this family. This family got real honor. We believe in
omertà
.”

Joe Massino knows everybody and everything about the waning days of the Mafia. He is a traditional mobster. He eats until he can’t fit at the table. He ran a restaurant with the best pork bracciole in the whole city. He flicks a thumb down, and somebody dies. He has a wife and daughters and
several girlfriends. He lives in Howard Beach, Queens, which had an overcrowding of big gangsters. Joe’s house was a few blocks from John Gotti’s. And also near Vic Amuso, who is also wide and, before handcuffs, a boss of the Lucchese family. Joe Massino was known best for picking up the tab and paying in cash for honored guests in his own restaurant, the CasaBlanca. The reason was far beyond hospitality; he didn’t want some agent to prove that he owned the place. But now he sat in court, and the courtroom doesn’t allow facades.

Joe Massino is a gangster with a perfectly horrible record of whom something mildly good can be said. As a boss of the Bonanno family, Joe had a domestic policy that gave the right of common sense to the bereaved. For expired mobsters who didn’t require secret burials, there was a form of grieving directed by Anthony Elmont. He is named after the Elmont neighborhood around Belmont Park Race Track. Upon a death he called captains to advise them of the loss and to command which of them may attend the funeral. He had to balance a traditional show of grieving and respect with the need to remain away from the sweeping lenses that federal and local cameras trained on a mob funeral. There were fifteen captains in the Bonanno family. Each captain had a crew of ten soldiers. A soldier could have any number, twenty-five and more, listed as associates. Any captain who felt it was important for his men to attend a funeral had to clear this with Anthony Elmont. There would be no more hundred-car funeral processions starring
in FBI documentaries. There could be as few as one representative per captain at a funeral.

Joe Massino also tightened wedding attendance. He ruled that the bride’s family should invite all captains and crews, numbering perhaps 150 people in the Bonanno lineup. The invitation meant that wedding gifts were not only very nice but vital to life, with a gift defined as cash. But the captains were allowed to send just one man per crew to the ceremony and reception. This meant that rather than 150 men and their wives to feed, there would be at most thirty representatives in attendance. This cut down dramatically what the caterer could charge and therefore increased by sixfold what the newly married couple would make on the day.

But now who could believe anything Massino had to say? All his life Joe has had a religious belief in
omertà,
a stop on his own personal stations of the cross. Joe Massino looks up from the computer that he and all lawyers keep on the table in front of them. At this moment he concentrates on the monstrous sacrilege being committed in the courtroom in front of him.

Good-Looking Sal Vitale, wrapped in a fine double-breasted dark suit, is on the witness stand testifying for the government against Joe. Sal is the brother of Joe’s wife, Josephine. This means he is Joe’s brother-in-law. Joe made him the underboss of the Mafia’s Bonanno crime family. In deepest gratitude Sal now talks against Joe on charges of murders and being the head of the crime family. One of the
murder charges aimed at Joe Massino could even carry a death penalty.

Did Joe ever kill somebody? What are you talking about? He killed the three capos. Dominick Trinchera, Sonny Red Indelicato, and Philly Lucky. “I can prove it, you know,” Good-Looking Sal said.

The inside of Joe’s head turns white with fear. Joe Massino is good and overweight. He is fencing with three hundred. He has a round, bland face and short white hair. The heritage of great mobster suits ended at Joe’s plain blue outfit and open-collar white shirt. Glasses are perched on his nose as his pudgy fingers touch the computer keyboard.

“How could Sal do this? Joe taught him how to swim,” Sal Restivo from Joe’s restaurant complains. “How could you turn against somebody taught you to swim? He taught Good-Looking Sal to swim, he don’t drown.”

Joe always was a very good swimmer. He could swim from Coney Island all the way across a wide inlet to Breezy Point, on the ocean. Joe taught Sal how to breathe with his face in the water. Then he taught him all the strokes. A lot of good that did. Now he is trying to drown Joe Massino.

“Joe Massino asked me to borrow ten thousand off of Doo Doo Pastore so that when he killed Doo Doo, he wouldn’t have to give it back,” Sal testifies. “I asked Doo Doo for ten, and he only gave me nine. I gave it to Joe Massino. Joe Massino told me he shot Doo Doo twice in the face. Then he told me to clean up.”

Good-Looking Sal was asked what he hoped to get for his testimony. It was a 5K1 letter from prosecutors to the sentencing judge that tells in a fine light the crimes of the defendant and the extent of his cooperation with the government.

“And is that letter important to you?” Sal is asked on the stand.

Very important, he says. Because it allows the sentencing judge to vary from the guidelines. He doesn’t have to give me life. If I breach the agreement, by lying, I’ll do life.

The murders of the three captains, which were supposedly committed in deep silence and security, were known everywhere right after the last shot, and you could get a play-by-play at any clubhouse in the city. Everybody knew it was done at Joe’s command and that he was right in the center of the shooting. Which was going to leave Joe facing the sourest hours of his life, when he was forced to choose between liberty and informing. He had no reference for such an undertaking. He knew of no way to consider such a thing, because it had not happened before, ever, for he was a boss, and it was unthinkable that he would break the great traditions of the Mafia.

It all started when a man named Sonny Red Indelicato felt that he should be the boss of the Bonanno mob. He could supplant Joe Massino via bullets. Sonny Red was a captain. He went to two other captains, Dominick Trinchera
and Philly Lucky, and pointed out the benefits of a family with Sonny Red in charge.

Joe Massino learned of the plot. On May 5, 1981, he called an administrative meeting with the three captains. You cannot carry a weapon at any such sit-down. Joe held this one in an empty building on Thirteenth Avenue in Brooklyn. There were a thousand guns present, all his.

“The minute you walked in,” Vitale testifies, “there was a coatroom with a little foyer. The minute I walked into the club, in the foyer, with Vito, Emanuel, and some old-timer, we were issued weapons, told to have ski masks that we’d wear when we came out to face the three capos. In the closet the four of us left the door open a smidge to look out. Emanuel had this grease gun. He said he had been in the army and knew how to work it. It fired four times. Joe Massino come to the door, and he says, Don’t fucking shoot until you got somebody to shoot. We were in the closet. We all had our weapons loaded. We waited for the doorbell to ring. Once it did, we put on the ski masks. We seen Trinny enter, Phil Lucky, I didn’t know Sonny Red and Frankie Lino. George Sciascia said he would put his hand through his hair on the side of his head, it is a go. Massino says, When you enter the room, say, This is a holdup, everybody against the wall, giving the impression of the ski masks making it a heist. We wanted them to go up against the wall so that we’d be able to kill all three of them. When the doorbell rang, we looked through the crack and George gave us the sign, the hand to the hair, and we, being me, Vito, Emanuel, and the old-timer, come out of the closet.

“Who was the lead guy was Vito. Emanuel was second, the old-timer went third. I went last, Vito entered the room with Emanuel, while me and the old-timer guarded the exit door. I heard Vito say, Don’t anybody move, this is a holdup, and then shots were being fired. I am kneeling at the door. I seen Vito shoot. I don’t know who he shot. I see Joseph Massino punch Philly Lucky. I freeze for five seconds on one knee. Sonny Red fell between me and the old-timer. Fell to my left. I seen George reach in the back, pull out a gun, and shoot him on the left side of the head. By that time it was all over. Dominick Trinchera was shot many times with the grease gun. He flopped like a fish. Philly Lucky? I think he got shot from everywhere. He wasn’t getting up.

“Everybody left. There was blood all over. Me and Joe Massino were the only ones in the room.”

On this day, twenty-three years later, Sal Vitale and Joe Massino are still alone in that room, covered in blood that never dried.

One look at the jury listening to this rat Sal told Joe that not only did they believe all but they couldn’t wait to hear more. The jury’s statement on the government’s case came soon enough. “Guilty,” the foreperson said many times in a clear voice.

Right away in Washington, Attorney General John Ashcroft directed prosecutors in Brooklyn to start a capital-punishment case against Joe Massino for another murder: George Sciascia from Canada, a star of the shootings of the
three capos. George got good and chesty and told Joe Massino that he wanted to have something to say about running the family. George was belted out in the Bronx. Entire flights of stool pigeons immediately went into the grand jury to show that Massino had the murder done with sufficient reflection. That is bad.

Convicted of killing the three captains, Joe Massino spent the night in jail under the Gowanus Expressway in Brooklyn. He thought about the death penalty. They could put him on a table and pump poison into his arm. Death by lethal injection. Joe was told about that. They make it sound easy on the prisoner. Well, the guy fucking drowns inside, and it don’t happen fast, and he feels every instant. This made Joe think.

One of his lawyers, Flora Edwards, working with David Breitbart, went late in the afternoon to check on his diabetes medicines. She had gone to the jailhouse, the Metropolitan Detention Center under the highway on the Brooklyn docks. A guard in the lobby went down the list on his computer. He shook his head. “Not here.”

“I can’t find Joe,” Flora Edwards called in to Breitbart on this late afternoon. “It’s five o’clock, and they don’t have him.”

That was a Tuesday. On Wednesday morning she went to the ninth-floor special housing unit, called “Shu,” and still nobody knew anything about Joe Massino.

She went back to her office and wrote a letter to the judge, Nicholas Garaufis. “I can’t find my client.”

She then called Greg Andres, the prosecutor.

“I’m not at liberty to talk,” he told her.

Flora put the phone down. She was stunned. “He flipped,” she said.

On that same May 5, 1981, on a darkened street corner surrounded by middle-income ranch and split-level houses, at the intersection of 164th Avenue and Cross Bay Boulevard in Howard Beach to be exact, Gene Gotti, John Carneglia, and Angelo Ruggiero awaited the body of the late Philly Lucky. It was to be dropped off by Joe Massino. He had seen to it that Philly Lucky and the other two captains were well murdered, and now he was responsible for the bodies. On his way home, which was only blocks away, Massino stopped and made his delivery to the three men. They had been assigned to body disposal by John Gotti, who also lived close and was providing this service as a courtesy to his neighbor and colleague. Room for Philly Lucky was found in a place called the Old Mill, also known as the Hole. The three men, swinging shovels, put Philly Lucky into the mud.

The three got a gravedigger’s reward: Gene Gotti is in prison forever. Carneglia was killed. Ruggiero died, too.

Twenty-three years later, here is Joe Massino cooperating. FBI agents secure the mud of the Old Mill as if it were the federal treasury. Heavy-equipment union workers operating bulldozers and reverse hoes dig up the large muddy lot, shaking the earth for parts of dead mobsters. Agents stand guard even on the streets that lead to the empty
ground. They wear blue rain jackets with large gold lettering—FBI—on the back. Teams of FBI are performing manual work, digging up the Hole, filling a bulldozer’s scoop with loose heads and collarbones. Squads finishing a stint shuck the rain jackets and reveal white office shirts and ties as they head to their cars for the drive home to Jersey or Long Island. Even this close proximity to hard labor is considered a bad day. Only yards away is Jamaica Bay, which runs under a bridge to the deep Atlantic Ocean. Yet the mobster burial crew dug a grave in the Hole for Philly Lucky. They must have dropped him on an old mattress, for now the digging by machines causes the remains of Philly Lucky to come popping up through the mud as if on springs and into the grateful hands of the agents.

The Hole was used for decades as the site of informal burials. It was a lot covered with weeds and mud and tires and car parts in Ozone Park, Queens. Around it, homemade frame houses were built so low into the ground that only the rooftops could be seen from the highway.

Years ago the lot would be crowded for Sunday-morning dogfights, with up to three hundred men in suits and hats and smoking De Nobilis, the short black cigars that smelled for blocks. Nearly all spoke Italian. The air was free of the rule of any law except their own, and that was the Mafia. The Hole was under the control of Sammy Falco and Sammy Puma, who were good people. Falco had a scar on his face from a fight in the Bright Eyes bar.