Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America's Most Powerful Mafia Empires (109 page)

Mafia watchers soon saw that Galante’s murder had failed to resolve the internecine Bonanno battles for dominance. Instead of tranquility, Galante’s death ignited violence that was exacerbated by a startling disclosure in 1981. The FBI agent Joseph Pistone, under the pseudonym “Donnie Brasco,” had infiltrated a Bonanno crew. The first agent ever to worm his way into the Mafia, over six years Pistone gathered a cache of priceless information about the family’s internal structure, and incriminating evidence that produced convictions of dozens of Bonannos and allied mafiosi in Florida and Milwaukee. Pistone’s brilliant feat incensed big shots in other families. Although no major New York mobsters immediately landed in prison, they felt endangered by the chaos in the Bonanno clan. As a result, the family was kicked off the Commission and restricted in its collaboration with other mafiosi and associates.

By 1988, FBI officials thought so little of the Bonannos’ capabilities and withered strength that they discontinued the Bonanno Squad as a separate entity, merging it with the Colombo Squad as a combined unit. The rationale was that in the wake of the Commission case and other investigations, both families were so wracked by criminal convictions and weakened by infighting that they were rudderless and moribund. At that time, the FBI spotlight shown more brightly on the three largest and most formidable Cosa Nostra groups, the Gambino, Genovese, and Lucchese gangs.

“The Bonannos were not in our focus,” Stubing recalls. “Even the wiseguys in other families were laughing at them. They were written off as a joke. Nobody took them as a serious threat.”

Defections in the 1990s of high-ranking stars from other families had contributed to the bureau’s minimizing the Bonannos as an insignificant planet in the Mafia universe. Sammy Gravano and other celebrity turncoats had little information to offer about the Bonannos because the family was out of the Mob’s mainstream, expelled from the Commission, and excluded from lucrative consortiums in construction fields and in other rackets.

When Stubing became supervisor of the Bonanno-Colombo Squad in 1995, he sensed, however, that the tide had turned for the Bonannos. From his earlier digging around as a case agent, he suspected the borgata was flourishing and that its exclusion from joint projects with other families had actually shielded it from intense scrutiny and indictments. He was convinced the Bonannos were carving out exclusive and original terrain and had not been compromised by the torrent of traitors from other families, whose tips and trial testimony were decimating rival borgatas.

Stubing’s lobbying persuaded the bureau after an eight-year hiatus to restore the Bonanno Squad as an independent unit in 1996. Stubing was its first commander. But two years of surveillance, leg work, and searching for evidence by the squad’s ten or so agents failed to find a vulnerable point in the Bonanno’s edifice. Conventional techniques that had undermined other families—electronic eavesdropping and attempts to cultivate informants and cooperative witnesses—had been unproductive. Stubing could not point to a single valuable snitch or to a developing case against a Bonanno bigwig or major capo.

“We had employed all the traditional techniques that had been effective against the LCN and they weren’t working this time,” Stubing says. “I looked around for a new idea and it came gradually. It wasn’t a sudden brainstorm and there was nothing magical about it.”

The investigative tactic that he hit upon had not been applied previously against a New York Mob family. Stubing would gamble on an unorthodox paper-trail search, “forensic accounting,” with the ultimate goal of getting the mobster he knew was responsible for reinventing the Bonanno family in the government’s crosshairs. The squad’s main target was an emerging Mafia titan named Joseph Charles Massino.

“You Did a Good Job,
Louie”

O
ver a thirty-year span, every agent and prosecutor who matched wits with Joe Massino was impressed by his disarming politeness and photographic memory. Unlike many mafiosi, he never snarled defiantly at lawmen; when arrested, interrogated, or put on trial, Massino was soft-spoken, unruffled, often jovial. His retention of details was awesome. Years after agents questioned him, he recalled their names and even the license-plate numbers of the unmarked cars in which they trailed him. Once, he affably apologized to an agent for having eluded him during a surveillance. A lawyer who represented Massino was impressed by his grasp of complex legal issues and his recall of numerous points discussed weeks earlier. Wherever he went in the underworld and upperworld, he generated respect.

Massino grew up and operated most of his life in the distinctly unfashionable working-class neighborhood of Maspeth, a slice of Queens dominated by one-and two-family row houses, dilapidated factories, warehouses, clogged highways, and a glut of cemeteries. Born in 1943, he was the second of three sons of a second-generation Italian-American couple. His mother took care of the boys, and his father earned a living as a fruit vendor. Joe got as far as his sophomore year at Grover Cleveland High School before leaving, and soon enough came to the
attention of police in Queens and Brooklyn as a rookie wiseguy. Through a teenage friend, who was a nephew of Philip Rusty Rastelli, Joe hooked up with the uncle, a Bonanno capo who lived and made his base in Maspeth. Guided by Rastelli, whom he affectionately called “Unc,” Massino advanced incrementally as an associate and earner. By Massino’s late twenties, he was in the intelligence dossiers of the New York Police Department and the FBI as a versatile truck-cargo hijacker, bookie, and loan shark. He ran numbers games and loan-sharking deals from a snack truck parked at construction sites and truck depots. The wagons, known as “roach coaches,” sold sandwiches, hot dishes, pastries, and soft drinks, but were also covers for Massino’s illegal gambling and shylock endeavors.

A burly, five-feet nine-inches tall, Massino’s weight surged to over 250 pounds when he was in his early thirties. “He ate too many of his own sandwiches and donuts and his weight ballooned,” says Patrick F. Colgan, one of the first FBI agents to track the mobster. Attached to the bureau’s hijacking squad, Colgan learned that Massino was made and a protégé of Rastelli. By the mid-1970s, agents evaluated him as a hijacker “kingpin” in New York, specializing in liquor and ground-coffee hauls. “When these occurred, we knew it was probably Joey,” Colgan notes.

In the 1970s, hijackers pulling off five to six major road robberies every week in the New York region were a bureau headache. Massino’s team of thieves was ranked among the best. From informers’ tips, Colgan suspected that at a minimum Massino had gotten away with $2 million worth of Kodak film, a $500,000 cargo of clothing en route to the department store Saks Fifth Avenue, and a $100,000 supply of coffee. The modus operandi for most heists was to block a truck, jump on the running board, and stick a gun in the driver’s face. Massino preferred a more orderly method: prearranged “give ups” by teamsters. “Some drivers were into shylocks and the only way they could pay the vig was by going along with a theft,” Colgan explains.

The key to Massino’s success was his ability to find “a drop,” a concealed parking lot or a warehouse, where stolen goods could be unloaded before the crime was reported. Massino paid crew members $1,500 to $2,000 to strip a stolen cargo and load the goods into smaller trucks and vans for delivery to fences and prearranged clients. He, of course, got the cream of the profit from the loot.

FBI agents credited Massino with having “hooks,” connections, for available warehouses and lots, especially in industrial sections of Maspeth, and having exceptional contacts with fences who would take entire cargos of hot
goods. Known in the hijacking fraternity and the FBI as “Fat Joey,” he often served as a middleman arranging—for a cut—drops and fences for other thieves. His organization became an underworld clearinghouse for a wide variety of hijacked and fenced swag. The merchandise that passed through Massino’s portals included lobsters, shrimp, air conditioners, television sets, and liquor.

Massino’s expertise led to a comradeship with another young hijacker of his era, the Gambinos’ John Gotti. They became neighbors when Massino moved with his wife and three daughters to Howard Beach. Colgan says Massino often helped out Gotti. “Joey had two valuable traits: he was good at hiding a load at an exchange drop, and could supply something that was not that easy to come by, a single fence to take the load off your hands.”

Although the FBI’s hijack squad bird-dogged Massino, he was difficult to corner. Agents thought they had him trapped in a warehouse crammed with stolen goods, but as they rushed in through a front door he disappeared through a rear escape route. On another occasion, agents discovered that Massino’s crew stashed stolen expensive men’s suits in a warehouse in the Corona section of Queens, and propelled the clothes on a rope line attached to a haberdashery across the street whenever customers showed up for a cut-rate sale. “He was brazen and got away with a lot,” agent George Hanna concedes. “He was smart and feared and nobody would give him up.”

Pat Colgan thought he had the slippery Massino caged after a dustup in 1975. Driving alone, the agent spotted a hijacked truck with a cargo of clothes exiting a parking lot outside a Maspeth diner. As Colgan tried to follow, he was blocked for several minutes by a car, which then sped after the truck. Picking up the pursuit, Colgan saw the driver who had interfered with him stop the truck, hop on the running board, return to his own car, and race away. Recognizing Massino as the driver who had cut him off in the parking lot, Colgan thought, “Joey must have told the driver of the rig to dump it and try to escape.”

A half mile from the diner, Colgan caught up with the hijacked truck driver, fleeing on foot. “Don’t move or I’ll blow you away,” Colgan commanded his captive, whom he recognized as Ray Wean, a six-feet-tall, 350-pound enforcer working for Massino. “Wean’s so big, I can’t handcuff him, and in a minute Joey drives back in his car and asks, What’s going on?’ ‘Stay put, I got bad news for you, Joey, you’re under arrest.’”

Seeing that Colgan was without backup support, Massino hurried back to his car, shouting, “I gotta go to the bathroom,” and drove off.

Two days later, in the company of a lawyer, Massino surrendered to stand trial with Wean for theft from an interstate shipment. Wean was convicted and served less than a year in prison. It was Massino’s first felony count and, without testifying, he relied on his lawyer’s opening and closing arguments that he had innocently stopped his car to find out if Wean, a casual acquaintance whom he knew from the neighborhood, was in trouble. The strategy worked and the jury acquitted him.

Although Colgan’s testimony failed to convict Massino, Wean’s arrest provided dividends three years later. Facing a long sentence for another robbery, Wean reached out to Colgan for aid and become an undercover informer in exchange for avoiding prison time. Over several years, Wean, who was not Italian and not made, snitched about mobsters but was hesitant to implicate Massino. “Ray was a monster, a psycho, not afraid of anything,” Colgan asserted. “Yet he was scared to death of Joey for good reasons. Massino seemed very gregarious; he could talk a dog off a meat wagon, only he would then kill the dog.”

Carmine Lilo Galante’s assassination was an important building block for Massino, and he appears to have been an essential participant in the murder of the ambitious Bonanno gangster. Sometime in the early 1970s, Philip Rusty Rastelli, assuming that he was the new Bonanno boss, had inducted Massino into the borgata while Galante was still in prison on a narcotics rap. By 1979, the situation was reversed: Galante, free on parole, was maneuvering to seize control of the borgata and Rastelli was locked up on an extortion conviction.

Loyal to Rastelli, Massino visited him at the federal prison in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, serving as his main messenger to his forces in New York. Learning of Massino’s trips, Galante summoned him for a dressing down and ordered him to cease being Rastelli’s liaison. Refusing, Massino told Galante, “He’s like my uncle. He raised me, baptized me [into the crime family]. I can’t abandon him.” Disclosing the conversation to his closest confederate, his brother-in-law Salvatore Vitale, Massino admitted that he feared that the volcanic Galante might whack him for sticking with Rastelli.

Before any harm came to Massino, he delivered a request from Rastelli to his troops and to the Commission for a contract on Galante. The Commission approved, and on July 12, 1979, Massino was stationed outside a Brooklyn restaurant in Bushwick, probably as a backup shooter or in a crash car to block any passing police units. In the private patio of the Joe and Mary
Italian-American Restaurant, a hit squad eliminated Galante as a threat to Rastelli and Massino.

At the time of Galante’s demise, Massino purportedly was an experienced hand at Mob homicides. Decades later, prosecutors learned that he had participated in at least two previous murders. In fact, Paul Castellano, the Gambino boss and top Commission member in 1979, supposedly owed Massino a favor for one “piece of work.” Through his partnerships with the Gambinos, Massino had been recruited along with John Gotti to kill and dismember Vito Borelli, a boyfriend of Castellano’s daughter, according to court documents. The apparent motive for the slaying was vanity. The imperious Gambino chieftain became infuriated upon hearing that Borelli had disparaged his looks, saying he resembled Frank Perdue, the poultry purveyor whose face was well known as a TV pitchman for his products. Perdue once solicited Castellano’s aid as a Mafia magnate to get his chickens into New York’s supermarkets.