Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America's Most Powerful Mafia Empires (111 page)

After turning over the van to Gotti’s men in Howard Beach, Tartaglione wisely resisted inquiring where it was being taken. He next met Massino several weeks later. Massino offered one oblique reference to his assistance on the night of the butchery. “You did a good job, Louie.”

“Good-booking Sal”

T
he killers left one loose end.

Frank Lino, the soldier who had torn off in terror during the carnage, knew what had gone down; he could identify Massino and his accomplices; and could tip off Sonny Red’s son, Bruno Indelicato, to the double-cross and slaughter of his father and two allies. Again, Massino used his Gambino nexus to solve the problem. Eddie Lino, Frank’s cousin and a Gambino soldier, accompanied Frank to meetings where Massino and other Bonanno leaders assured him that his life was not in danger and that he had not been an intended victim. “Don’t worry, you’re not going to get killed,” Massino promised.

Lino was given a bonus: he was appointed acting capo of Bruno Indelicato’s crew with pledges from Massino, “Everything’s over”; there would be no additional casualties. He was instructed to spread the triumphant party’s justification for the triple homicide as a defensive measure for the benefit of the entire family that would ensure peace. (Fearing revenge from cocaine-addled Bruno Indelicato, who once had the guts to whack Carmine Galante, Massino and Sonny Black’s legions hunted for his head for a month. The Commission then gave Bruno “a pass,” returning him to the fold but demoted to soldier in his old crew under Frank Lino as capo.)

The day after the murders, Massino thought it best to lie low to avoid possible
police investigations or retaliation from Bruno, whose whereabouts were unknown. He repaired to Atlantic City, but his beach and casino time was cut short by an emergency appendectomy. Brother-in-law Sal Vitale was dispatched to comfort and guard him in the hospital and to escort the patient back to New York.

Nineteen days after the peace-meeting executions, Alphonse Indelicato’s body was found in a shallow grave in a vacant lot on the border of Ozone Park and East New York. A $2,000 Cartier watch was on his wrist, an obvious sign that he had not been a robbery victim. The site was less than a mile from Howard Beach, where the Gambino soldiers had taken charge of the van containing the corpses of the three victims. (The bodies of Philip Giaccone and Dominick Trinchera also were dumped in the same large muddy field, but their remains were recovered twenty-three years later, in 2004, only after a tip to the FBI.)

Sonny Black Napolitano, whose slick dark hair was the reason for his nickname, exchanged words with Massino over Indelicato’s burial. Massino had been responsible for eliminating all traces of the bodies, and Napolitano faulted him for the fouled-up burial, which provided proof of a homicide for investigators. Two months later, Sonny Black disappeared and it was evident to the authorities that he, too, must have received the extreme Mafia sentence. On the day he vanished, a lugubrious Napolitano left his prized diamond pinkie ring, a wad of cash, and the keys to his apartment with Charlie, the bartender in the Motion Lounge, his crew’s hangout in the hardscrabble Brooklyn neighborhood of Greenpoint. “I’m going to a meeting and don’t know if I’m coming back,” Napolitano said gravely.

There was a ready explanation for Napolitano’s fate. That summer of 1981, an earthquake rocked the Bonanno family when Agent Pistone surfaced from his six-year undercover operation as Donny Brasco with the stunning disclosure that Sonny Black had welcomed him into his crew and was planning to sponsor his induction into the family. Indictments were certain to follow as a result of Napolitano’s credulity.

Before Pistone’s unprecedented infiltration became publicly known, Napolitano was visited at dawn one morning by three FBI agents at his Green-point apartment above the Motion Lounge. Positive that Napolitano’s life would be forfeited as soon as the Mob bosses learned of Pistone’s exploits, the bureau was informing him as early as possible that he had been duped. Douglas Fencl, an agent Napolitano knew from previous brushes, offered Napolitano his telephone number in case he wanted the bureau to protect him. “You know better than anybody that I can’t take that,” Napolitano replied, rejecting
the proposal to defect. To prove that Pistone was an authentic agent and that he was not trying to trick Napolitano into cooperating, Fencl showed him a photograph of a smiling Pistone with himself and three other agents.

“He was a standup guy,” Fencl remarked. “He had the most to lose in the family because he had brought an agent into the family but he had no intention of cooperating, even to save his life.”

A year later, a body bag containing Napolitano’s skeleton was found in a wooded and swampy area of west Staten Island. He was identified mainly by dental records and jewelry, which relatives confirmed belonged to him. The full account of Napolitano’s death was cobbled together in 2004, twenty-three years after a Mafia bullet exploded in his brain. Witnesses testified that it was Sonny Black’s erstwhile ally, Joe Massino, who sanctioned the contract. For this hit, Massino tested the loyalty of Frank Lino, the new acting capo, who had barely escaped being gunned down with the three renegade capos.

A concrete-hard thug, Lino had shown his mettle and defiance of the police when he was twenty-five. Picked up in 1962 for helping the flight of a stickup man who had shot and murdered two detectives in Brooklyn, he kept his mouth shut despite barbaric beatings over four days by the police. A leg and an arm were broken and repeated battering of his head gave him a permanent incessant blink. Finally, a broom handle was plunged into his rectum—the same torture tactic that generated a scandal in 1997 when police officers sodomized a Haitian immigrant in a Brooklyn station house. Not yet a mafioso, Lino unflinchingly adhered to the code of
omertà
.

Massino commanded Lino to find a secure location and provide hit men for Sonny Black’s elimination. On the night of August 17, 1981, Lino picked up Napolitano and Stefano “Stevie Beef” Cannone, then the family consigliere, at the Hamilton House, a restaurant in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, and drove them across the Verrazano Narrows Bridge to Staten Island for another supposed administration meeting. Cannone, apparently ignorant of the real purpose of the ride, was brought along so that his presence would lull Sonny Black and keep him off guard.

At a house in the blue-collar Eltingville section of Staten Island, the three men were greeted at the door by Frank Coppa, a soldier, who told them the conference was to be held in the basement. As Napolitano descended, Coppa held back Cannone, slamming shut the basement door, a signal for Lino to shove Napolitano down the stairs. Two killers were waiting at the foot of the stairwell. The first shot fired by Robert Lino Sr., Frank’s cousin, apparently
missed or grazed Napolitano and the gun jammed. Sprawled on his knees, Napolitano looked up and said, “Hit me one more time and make it good.”

The second triggerman, Ronald “Monkey Man” Filocomo, fired several .38 caliber rounds to finish off Sonny Black. The murder site was the home of Filocomo’s parents. Despite his services to the family, Filocomo, who garnered his nickname by keeping a monkey as a pet, was automatically disqualified from induction as a made man because of a Cosa Nostra rule: he had once worked in law enforcement as a prison guard. With Vitale driving, Massino and George-from-Canada Sciascia had followed Lino’s car in a bakery van. They waited outside the Staten Island house as backup shooters should Napolitano have managed to get out of the cellar alive.

Lino had arranged for a separate unit to remove and bury Sonny Black’s body. Their night’s work done, Massino and Vitale returned to their homes while Lino and Coppa, close friends since childhood, drove to an Italian street festival in Brooklyn to unwind. Because of the darkness, Lino’s amateur undertakers were unable to find the grave prepared for Napolitano. Worried about being found with a corpse in their car, the burial squad hurriedly deposited the slain capo in a quickly dug hole that was discovered a year later.

Napolitano was killed to impress upon Bonanno mafiosi the need for constant vigilance, and to warn them of the penalty for being gulled by undercover agents. “I had to leave Sonny a receipt for Donnie Brasco,” Massino told Vitale. “Receipt” meant a whacking in Massino’s lexicon. Massino went on to say that even if he were someday convicted of the three capos’ murders, he would still enjoy the satisfaction of knowing that he had bumped off Napolitano in retaliation for a blunder that disgraced and endangered the entire family.

Also in Massino’s sights for extreme punishment was Benjamin “Lefty Guns” Ruggiero, a wiseguy in Napolitano’s crew, who had “bounced around” with Agent Pistone and allowed the agent to “go on record” with him as an associate. Ruggiero’s unforgivable sins were having taken Pistone under his wing, introducing him to family leaders, and vouching for him as a reliable wannabe and potential big earner. The “earnings” that Pistone handed over to entice Ruggiero and Napolitano were actually provided by the FBI, overhead for the undercover operation.

Three days after Sonny Black’s last ride, through wiretaps the FBI got wind that hit men working for Massino had summoned Ruggiero to the Holiday Bar, a grubby hangout on Madison Street in Lower Manhattan, a short stroll from Lefty Guns’s apartment in the Knickerbocker Village complex. “They were going to
whack him,” says Pat Marshall, an agent staked out near the bar. “That was a joint where people walked in through the front door and were carried out in the back.”

Racing to “snatch” Ruggiero off the streets as soon as left his apartment, a car carrying the supervising agent for the arrest collided with a bus. As Ruggiero headed toward Massino’s gunsels, another agent, Louis Vernazzo, who was secretly surveilling Ruggiero, got an emergency radio call to intercept the gangster before he reached the bar. Ruggiero shuddered with fright as Vernazzo, a muscular man with Italianate facial features, suddenly jumped out of a Cadillac carrying a shotgun. “Lefty thought he was going to be whacked and it was all over for him until he heard those comforting words, ‘FBI. Freeze!’” Vernazzo recounted to fellow agents. Ruggiero’s abrupt arrest on racketeering and gun charges probably saved his life that day.

Another endangered mobster was the fiery-tempered soldier Anthony Mirra, the first Bonanno member to use Pistone as an associate. A hulking six-footer, weighing 240 pounds, Mirra was an intimidating shake-down artist and a “knife man” who settled arguments by “sticking” his opponent. No fool, Mirra vanished from his usual haunts as soon as news of Pistone’s duplicity reached him, realizing that he was on the government’s list for indictment. But more perilous was the certainty that Bonanno higher-ups wanted him dead as another object lesson of what happened to mafiosi who allowed the FBI to penetrate the borgata, and because he might morph into an FBI stool pigeon to obtain leniency.

Frequently changing dwellings, Mirra kept in touch with only one other Bonanno wiseguy, his cousin Joseph D’Amico. Older by twenty-eight years, Tony Mirra had coached Joey D’Amico, helping him to become made at twenty-two, thereby distinguishing him as one of the Mafia’s youngest inductees. The news that he was eligible for membership came in a surprise telephone call one day, instructing him to “Get dressed.” A beholden Joey tried to emulate Tony’s Mob style and deportment, viewing him as a sagacious uncle rather than a cousin.

On February 18, 1982, Mirra telephoned D’Amico and arranged to meet him at the apartment of a girlfriend in Lower Manhattan, where he was holed up before going out for an evening of relaxation. The fifty-four-year-old Tony greeted Joey with a bear hug in the apartment on Harrison Street, near the Hudson River. D’Amico realized that his ever-suspicious cousin was patting him down to see if he was armed. A few minutes later, the cousins entered Mirra’s Volvo in the building’s garage. When Tony halted the car to use a key which opened the exit gate, from the passenger’s side Joey pulled out a pistol that he had artfully concealed and shot Mirra several times point-blank in the head.

Waiting outside in a getaway car were Joey’s great uncle, Alfred “Al Walker” Embarrato (a Bonanno mafioso and longtime racketeer at the New York Post) and Richard Cantarella, also a cousin of D’Amico and Mirra. Later, examining Mirra’s body, the police found a large stack of cash he was using while on the run—$6,779 hidden in one of his boots.

D’Amico considered the murder an entwined family affair. He got the contract from Embarrato—the man he called “Uncle Al”—who was also Mirra and Cantarella’s uncle. Upon receiving a .38 caliber gun from Uncle Al, D’Amico was told that the order came directly from Joe Massino. It had to be fulfilled even though D’Amico admired—and loved—Mirra. Uncle Al was rewarded for orchestrating the difficult hit of his nephew with a promotion to captain.

Several years later, D’Amico was stopped by Massino to discuss the pending induction of his cousin Richie Cantarella into the family. Praising Cantarella, D’Amico alluded to his participation in Mirra’s homicide. The subject of a gangland murder had been casually raised by Massino while circulating among guests at the wedding reception of his daughter Adeline.