The Sixth Family (67 page)

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Authors: Lee Lamothe

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Kimberly McCaffrey and Jeffrey Sallet were two FBI Special Agents attached to Squad C-10 who were also trained forensic accountants. They started sifting through documents—tax returns and financial records—tracing the flow of Massino’s illicit cash.
“In those days, everyone was going out on surveillance, while we would be going through each paper in a stack of boxes,” McCaffrey said. “We’d find a K-1 financial statement and get excited, and people would joke, ‘you guys are such geeks.’” The plodding work by the FBI’s “geeks” recognized that much of the mob’s activities qualified more as white-collar crime than crude shakedowns.
“We looked into sources of income and expenses and at the hierarchy of the family, looking for financial associations, financial crimes,” McCaffrey said. “We used grand jury subpoenas, interviews, surveillances, reviewing bank documents, financial records.”
“This phase of our investigation of the Bonanno Family began with a non-traditional approach to fighting organized crime,” the FBI’s Pat D’Amuro said. “A team of forensic accountants followed the money and identified patterns of connection and criminal activity.”
A new, intricate probe was launched—not into unsolved mob murders or international heroin deals, but into parking lot receipts. The K-1 reports McCaffrey and Sallet studied were statements of joint partnerships and earnings submitted with tax returns. They showed that Massino and Vitale were earning money from several New York parking lots in a business arrangement with the wife of Richard “Shellackhead” Cantarella, a Bonanno captain. By 2000, the probe of that arrangement had led to Barry Weinberg, a businessman who loved socializing with mobsters and who, in return for the excitement, helped them in their business pursuits. Agents felt they had found their weak link.
McCaffrey and Sallet confronted Weinberg in January 2001, when they had his Mercedes pulled over in midtown Manhattan by New York City police, who then hustled him into an unmarked van. The agents threatened to charge him with tax evasion and other offenses and, within minutes, the man crumpled. A timorous, white-collar criminal to the core, Weinberg had no interest in even a short stay in jail and agreed to cooperate in the Bureau’s hunt for bigger fish. Weinberg spent the next year meeting with Shellackhead and Frank Coppa, another Bonanno captain, while wearing a secret recording device, the first such infiltration of the Bonannos since Donnie Brasco hung up his wires. With that investigation beginning to gain traction, the Bonannos were hit from another direction.
BOCA RATON, FLORIDA, MARCH 2002
On March 19, 2002, Anthony “TG” Graziano, the 61-year-old gangster whom Gerlando Sciascia had grown to despise and who, by then, had become the Bonanno
consigliere,
was indicted for racketeering in New York. The indictment was linked to a second indictment filed against him the next day in Florida, one that hinted at the value of financial investigations like McCaffrey and Sallet’s. The New York case was about low-brow murder, drugs and extortion, while the Florida case was over a sophisticated investment swindle. In New York, it involved torturing a wayward colleague with a blowtorch, dragging another around a room at the wrong end of a noose and burning a third with a cigarette lighter. In Florida, it was about smooth-talking financial bamboozling through high-pressure telephone sales pitches seeking investors in bogus foreign exchange markets. Between them, the two indictments against Graziano presented the twin faces of the modern mob and illustrated the need for a new and more flexible approach in the FBI’s organized crime investigations.
Graziano’s eventual conviction and 11-year sentence would also serve, in the months ahead, as a potent reminder to his Bonanno colleagues of the steep consequences of an indictment under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act. Arrested alongside Graziano in the Florida case—an investigation that saw a Tampa police officer working undercover, posing as a money launderer—was John J. Finkelstein, a Montreal businessman who relocated to Boca Raton and oversaw four “boiler rooms” where fraudsters bilked investors across North America, many of them seniors, out of US$11.7 million on behalf of the Bonanno Family. Finkelstein, described by his lawyer as a devout Jew and family man, had a distinctly undesirable nickname among his underworld colleagues. They called him “Fink.”
Such nicknames might have fed Massino’s paranoia over informants coming close to him. He followed the cases of each of his mob associates with careful diligence, seeking hints of their cooperation with the government, such as defendants suddenly changing lawyers, irrationally pleading guilty or receiving light sentences. Any underling who fit any of these criteria was immediately suspect. The boss routinely had New York lawyer Matthew Mari, who has a long association with the Bonannos through representing several members and associates, check court files for updates on the status of prosecutions against Massino’s colleagues, prosecutors claimed in a memorandum filed in court. No one seemed above suspicion, not even Sal Vitale, Massino’s brother-in-law. Massino suspected Vitale was a “rat” long before Vitale had actually decided to become one. He voiced his concerns and his growing dislike of Vitale to fellow gangsters. He went so far as to suggest Vitale would be killed. Fellow Bonanno members reportedly started calling Vitale “Fredo,” the name of the weak brother who betrayed the boss in
The Godfather: Part II
. In the film, Fredo was killed for his disloyalty.
It was a gross strategic blunder on Massino’s part. With so many informants and wiretaps aimed his way, it did not take long for this loose talk to come to the attention of the FBI, and astute agents were later able to put it to good use. With federal agents squirreling away any piece of potential evidence against the Bonanno inner circle, even Massino’s considerable efforts to protect himself would soon prove to be in vain. Betrayal loomed large.
BROOKLYN, OCTOBER 2002
Frank Coppa was not a typical member of the Mafia. For starters, he finished high school and even started college. Then there was his appearance; a rotund man with a round, balding head, he looked more like a parish priest than a fierce gangster. Just a year after his induction into the Mafia in 1977, Coppa was set apart again when he was injured in a car explosion, a victim of a rare bombing among American mobsters, who generally prefer the more personal approach of a gun. Coppa’s greatest distinction, however, was yet to come. Coppa knew well the ramifications of the oath of
omertà
, something he had sworn before Carmine Galante himself. When he accepted the offer of membership, he swore his silence.
“That means you live by the gun and you die by the gun,” he said.
Coppa was 61 years old and a few months into a five-year sentence for stock manipulation when he was hit again with a racketeering indictment that could lead to 20 years’ imprisonment. Never a hard man, despite having a hand in several gangland murders, Coppa considered himself something of a gentleman bandit, and prison was not an environment he was thriving in. He reportedly burst into tears in front of disgusted inmates early in his incarceration. Contrary to his earlier assessment of living by the gun and dying by the gun, Coppa was facing a slow, languishing end as a frightened man in a prison cell. FBI agents could practically smell his fear and zeroed in on him, offering salvation to the priestly-looking figure.
In November 2002, Coppa did what no inducted member before him in the storied history of the Bonanno Family had ever done; he agreed to become a cooperating witness for the government against his Mafia colleagues.
“I didn’t want to do no more time,” was his simple explanation. His subsequent revelations, during secret debriefings, amazed agents on Squad C-10 as they listened to him unravel once-perplexing mob mysteries. He recounted in detail the murders of Sonny Black, Robert Perrino and Tony Mirra, all the while implicating Joe Massino, Sal Vitale, Frank Lino, Richard “Shellackhead” Cantarella and other leading Bonanno members. Coppa’s information and promised testimony in court was hailed by the government as a “landmark achievement.” On its own, it was certainly an important development and, for the hard-pressed Squad C-10, a point of gratification. Coppa’s true importance, however, stemmed primarily from the domino effect it caused after news of his cooperation rippled through the underworld. In that, he was nothing less than historic.
When word of Coppa’s defection reached Massino, the news chilled him. He sent for Vitale. Despite Vitale being monitored with an electronic ankle bracelet while awaiting trial and strictly banned from communicating with Massino, the dutiful Vitale answered the call. Massino’s message was short and sobering.
“Frankie Coppa went bad,” he said.
When the rest of the Bonanno leadership learned of Coppa’s break from them, Shellackhead, who had been indicted alongside Coppa for racketeering, realized his chances of beating a conviction had just evaporated. When Shellackhead was arrested, police also charged his wife and son, Paul. His son had also been inducted into the Bonanno Family. Always a bright man whose ability to exploit a deal had made him one of the Bonannos’ wealthiest New York gangsters, Shellackhead quickly applied his gambler’s wits to calculating the odds of regaining his freedom. The odds were against him. In December 2002, just one month after Coppa turned, the Cantarella family also placed its faith in the government. Shellackhead’s insights into the Bonanno operations were far greater than Coppa’s because he had long had special access to the boss. Once a week, from 1996 until 2002, he had dinner with Massino at the Casa Blanca Restaurant in Queens. The two covered a lot of material over pasta and wine. Massino was grooming him for a position of power within the family and using him to fulfill the traditional job of the underboss—without the title—by placing him as the main liaison between the boss and his captains. It was a move to further insulate Massino from prosecution and also reflected his growing mistrust of Vitale. That move left Vito Rizzuto as one of the select few who could talk directly to Massino—if he had anything to say to him, Vitale said.
With Shellackhead and Coppa now onside, prosecutors leaned heavily on their proffered testimony to draft indictments against their top two Bonanno targets—the boss and the underboss of the Bonanno Family. On January 8, 2003, a grand jury in the Eastern District of New York returned a 19-count indictment against Massino and Vitale. The RICO indictment named Massino in the slaying of Sonny Black, and Vitale in the Perrino killing. Also named in the same indictment, for his role in Sonny Black’s death, was Frank Lino.
The next day, the government said it had 20 criminals willing to testify on the government’s behalf to the existence of the Bonanno Family, 15 of whom would further name Massino as the boss. In court filings that followed, what Massino had already known was confirmed publicly by the government—two of those cooperating witnesses were made Bonanno members. To his surprise, Vitale was not one of them.
Officials kept Massino and Vitale in separate prisons as they started their journeys through the courts. Away from Massino, agents alerted Vitale to the fact that Massino was targeting him as a weak link and they offered him a deal. Vitale was ripe for such maneuvers. Already upset at the downturn in his mob fortunes under the reorganized Bonanno enterprise, Vitale had for months been pondering his future. His wife had even visited Massino to personally ask him if he intended to kill her husband, an approach that was greeted with much guffawing by gangsters who later heard about it. Massino had already broken the news to Vitale that most of the men “despised” him. And, although Massino left Vitale with the official title of underboss, he directly undermined him by relying on Shellackhead instead.
“He put a wedge, in that period of time, between me and the captains, leaving me in a very vulnerable position,” Vitale said. “He took the captains away from me; they weren’t allowed to call me, they weren’t allowed to give me Christmas gifts. … I had the position as underboss but the captains couldn’t call me, couldn’t associate with me. The captains couldn’t make me earn any money. I was more or less … shelved. You might have the title but you are not doing anything, you are just, for lack of a better word, you are a figurehead.”
When Vitale was earlier charged, in 2001, no one called his wife to offer support. When he had a health scare, only one soldier visited him in hospital. Feeling alienated and vulnerable, Vitale made his decision and sent word, through one of his son’s friends, who was a lawyer, that he was willing to discuss cooperation. He was whisked to a safer prison facility and started talking to federal prosecutors.
“I felt that my wife and kids were going to be left in the street. That’s why I decided to do what I’m doing,” Vitale said of his decision. He showed his affection for Massino by describing their split in a term usually reserved for the end of a romantic relationship: “We broke up.”
Now, feeling betrayed and vulnerable, he offered damning information that profoundly threatened Massino and the Bonanno Family. Vitale also had plenty to say about Canada.
As with the other turncoats, Vitale began lengthy debriefings during which he tore down the curtains that had long blocked the government’s view of Joe Massino, the modern incarnation of the Bonanno Family and the men who made it powerful, including Vito Rizzuto.

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