Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America's Most Powerful Mafia Empires (112 page)

The killings and upheaval in the borgata swiftly transported Massino to a prime post as uncontested deputy for the imprisoned Rastelli and the family’s “street boss.” Accompanying Massino’s swelling importance was a shift in his attention from orchestrating hijackings and holdups to the more genteel art of labor rackets, the Ph.D. degree for big-time mobsters. Meanwhile, he held on to his assured and profitable standbys: gambling and loan-sharking. Agent George Hanna, who was pursuing Massino in the 1980s, discovered that hijackings were being eclipsed as a desirable Bonanno activity by simpler and more lucrative crimes, especially narcotics. Increasingly squeezed by law-enforcement pressure, hijackings were becoming too dangerous, and an informer reported to the FBI that $2 million worth of stolen film netted Massino’s crew chump change, a measly $60,000.

Massino’s headquarters remained in Maspeth. It was there that he and his wife, Josephine, established the J&J (Joe and Josephine) Deli, to prepare sandwiches and delicacies for roach coaches, the presumably legitimate business that justified Massino’s comfortable lifestyle. Agents were more interested in a storefront adjacent to the deli, alternately identified in real estate records as J&S (Joe and Sal) Cake and MVP Trucking, that served as Massino’s shape-up hall for crime. The MVP initials stood for Massino, his brother-in-law, Sal Vitale,
and a Bonanno associate, Carmine Peluso, the club’s unofficial chef. Among the Bonanno cognoscenti, the hangout on a side street was referred to as the “Rust Street Club” after a nearby main thoroughfare. Joe and Sal ran high-stakes card games there, usually Continental, a version of gin rummy with four decks and jokers wild. “The House,” meaning the brothers-in-law, got 10 percent of the winning pots.

Nicknamed “Good-Looking Sal,” Salvatore Anthony Vitale, was Massino’s acolyte since boyhood. Romance brought Massino into the Vitale household. Selling Christmas trees on a neighborhood sidewalk, Joe met and flirted with Josephine, Vitale’s older sister, then dated, and soon married her while both were in their teens. Four years older than Vitale, Massino functioned as a big brother, teaching him how to swim when he was twelve and, more important, how to survive on the tough streets of Bushwick where the Vitales lived, and in nearby Queens neighborhoods like Maspeth.

Graduating from Grover Cleveland High School, Vitale spent half a year at a municipal college before a two-year stint in the army. After his honorable discharge, he got a legitimate job as a corrections officer in Queens at a state rehabilitation institution for defendants convicted of low-level narcotics offenses. Bored, he quit after one year to work for Massino, operating a roach coach, using it to take numbers at 500-to-l odds while selling snacks. In his spare time, and without Joe’s knowledge, Vitale and two pals were committing petty burglaries, mainly breaking into factories. Confronting his brother-in-law, Massino offered an irresistible deal: “Phil Rastelli sent me word that you’re doing scores. If you’re doing them, do them with me.” The twenty-four-year-old proudly “went on record” under him. By the mid-1970s, Joe had schooled Vitale on the finer points of essential Mob economics, employing him in arsons for insurance rip-offs, bookmaking, hijacking, loan-sharking, and money-laundering.

Vitale marveled at his mentor’s canniness in evading arrest. “He’s aware of everything that goes on around him. You’ll never catch him sleeping. He has his eyes on everything,” he told other wannabes.

The younger criminal passed all his integrity tests with Massino, even abetting him in the July 1976 murder of the loan shark and cigarette smuggler Joseph Do Do Pastore. Admitting that he had shot Pastore to death in the apartment kitchen above the J&J Deli, Massino asked Sal to mop up the blood.
A day after the hit, Vitale used a bucket, a carpet brush, and a bottle of Lysol to clean the kitchen, even removing stains inside the refrigerator.

By the late 1970s, Vitale, much leaner and more careful of his waistline than his brother-in-law, had blossomed into Massino’s closest confidant and alter ego. Displaying to Mafia brethren his reciprocated affection for Sal, Joe honored him by serving as best man at his wedding.

“They were inseparable,” says Pat Colgan, the agent who spent a decade tracking both mobsters. “Joey was his mentor for loan-sharking, hijacking, everything. But in reality Sal was then just his gofer. If not for Joey, Sal would have been selling coffee from the back end of a truck.”

The signs of Joe’s ascendancy to de facto leader of the borgata while Rastelli was in prison were clear to Vitale. He saw the homage paid to Massino as other capos and Bonanno elders trekked to J&S Cake for walk-talk consultations with him. Taking stock of events—the disappearance and apparent murders of four Bonanno capos and the large gatherings at J&S—the FBI decided it was a strategic time to bug the club to hear what the Bonanno hierarchs were up to.

But the bureau’s eavesdropping technicians were challenged by an intricate “three-tier” defense system installed by Massino in his bulwark, a large storefront with two blackened windows and log-patterned brick sidings. “The place was fortified,” Colgan says with professional admiration. “He had the best locks, a first-class alarm system, and we knew if you got inside you had thirty seconds to use another key and then you had to punch in a code to cut off the alarms.”

Additionally, Massino had buttered up neighborhood residents and merchants, inviting them to be amateur watchmen, to alert him if agents or detectives prowled around when the club was shuttered. Colgan had a hunch about an unorthodox method of breaking into Massino’s inner sanctum. He knew that the mobster relied on a nearby resident to clean the club in the morning. The custodian had a set of keys, and the code numbers to disable the alarms were written on a scrap of paper in his wallet which he pulled out every time before entering. Upon completing his work at J&S, the cleaning man spent a good part of the afternoon ensconced at a nearby tavern. Settling down and getting comfortable, he always placed his keyring and wallet on the bar. An agent spent some time at the tavern chatting up the man and memorizing the look of the keyring and wallet perched on the bar. One day, when the cleaner went to the men’s room, the agent transferred the keyring and wallet to another agent in the bar, replacing them with similar-looking items. In a nearby motel room, a locksmith
duplicated the keys that would unlock the front door. As hoped, the code to silence the alarms was inscribed on the sheet of paper folded in the wallet.

About an hour after the keyring was pilfered, it and the wallet were switched again at the bar, and the tipsy cleaning man never noticed the exchange. Soon afterward, at three o’clock in the morning, FBI Special Operations agents were inside J&S installing a mini-microphone. But this time, the bureau’s raiders were on the losing end. For two days the bug operated without picking up an incriminating conversation; then suddenly the entire transmission system went silent. The tech experts guessed that Massino’s men had ripped out the equipment.

Sal Vitale had foiled the FBI with a primitive method for unearthing bugs. With the police radio scanner turned on, he routinely had an assistant stand in a distant corner of the club, speak loudly and make a racket, sometimes flushing the toilet. One day, the scanner picked up voices and a toilet flush being transmitted from the room. Tracing the sounds to a dropped ceiling above the main card table, Vitale dismantled the FBI microphone and transmitter lodged in the ceiling.

Scanners were only one aspect of Massino’s counterbugging defenses. All his crew members were strictly warned never to discuss business in the club. Nevertheless, he instituted another backup barrier. Every two weeks, a technician, “Tommy Computer,” well known to important mobsters, was brought in to electronically sweep J&S for law-enforcement eavesdropping devices.

Undaunted by the setback at Massino’s club, James Kallstrom, the FBI’s thrifty Special Ops Chief, wanted the pricey state-of-the-art gear returned. He ordered Colgan to retrieve it. “I’m not going to let them keep our equipment,” Kallstrom said. “It’s government property. Get it back.” Looking for an opportunity to get inside the club, Colgan “bobtailed,” dashed behind a hood buzzed in through the locked door. “The guy turns around, ‘Who the fuck are you?’ and he takes a poke at me. I duck and deck him and all the other guys are heading for me when a voice booms out, ‘Everybody cool it. It’s just Pat.’”

It was Joe Massino who came to the agent’s rescue. Calming the scrappers circling Colgan, Massino gleefully guessed the purpose of the visit, explaining in a cat-and-mouse manner, “We found it the first day. Why didn’t you just call, I’d have brought it to you.” Fetching the microphone and two bricklike transmitters, Massino offered the agent a beer. “How’d you find it?” Colgan asked. “We have our ways,” came the laughing reply.

The Mob’s Horatio Alger

A
s anticipated, Agent Pistone’s infiltration generated indictments of more than fifty mafiosi and associates in the Bonanno family and in other borgatas in Florida and Milwaukee. The ax landed first in November 1981 on five soldiers from Sonny Black Napolitano’s old crew, who were charged with conspiracy to murder the three capos and with various racketeering counts. (Sonny Black was named as lead defendant in the case, but his disappearance was not cleared up until his body was identified in 1982.) Four months after Sonny Black’s crew members were hauled in, Massino learned that his arrest was imminent on similar murder-conspiracy and racketeering accusations. “I got word that an indictment is coming down,” he whispered to Vitale in March 1982. Without disclosing the source of his information, Massino had no intention of being tried simultaneously with other defendants. That very day he was going on the lam. His plan was to outwait the first round of trials, a gambit often used by Mob leaders to gauge the prosecution’s evidence and to devise a sturdier defense. “I got a better chance of winning by myself,” he told Vitale.

The Hamptons, a popular summer resort on Eastern Long Island, was his first choice for a hideout. Although it was late winter and off-season, Massino ran into people he knew, and after two weeks he reached out for Duane Goldie Leisenheimer to find him a safer refuge.

Goldie was eager to help the man he called “chief,” grateful for the on-the-job education he had received at Massino’s side. Fascinated by automobiles, Goldie had spent a year at Brooklyn Automotive, a high school that trained mechanics, before leaving and employing his knowledge to steal cars rather than repair them. At sixteen, he made about $2,000 a week “boosting” up to fifteen cars on orders for specific models from a chop shop, which then cannibalized and sold the valuable parts. Working in the chopshop, he picked up another $300 weekly as he learned the art of dismantling hot cars. Vouching for Goldie, as “a standup kid,” the chop-shop owner introduced him to Massino, and at eighteen, the blond teenager joined Joe’s hijacking outfit. Goldie’s original duties were offloading stolen merchandise from rigs and delivering stolen goods in smaller trucks and vans to fences and obliging merchants.

Demonstrating that a Mafia leader could be an equal-opportunity employer, Massino took Goldie aside for survival lessons of the trade, even though he was not of Italian heritage. He forbade the young criminal to heist cars or sell drugs in their Maspeth area because it would bring unneeded “heat” from the law to the J&S Club and to his hijacking drops. Goldie was further advised to cease stealing cars near other Mob hangouts in Queens, especially one used by John Gotti. “If those guys catch you, you’ll end up in a trunk,” Massino cautioned.

Massino harped on constant vigilance. “Watch your mirrors,” he hammered at him, a warning about law-enforcement car surveillance. Goldie saw close up how Massino’s watchfulness stymied efforts to trap him, even countering the FBI by spying on agents before they could get a bead on him. Always on the alert, he had noticed agents using the parking lot of a Maspeth diner to switch unmarked cars when they were in the neighborhood. Thus, by furtively watching the lot, Massino’s men knew the make and license-plate numbers of bureau cars and could identify lawmen pussyfooting in the area.

Before long, Goldie was an accepted associate in Massino’s crew. Massino admired his skill at shaking off tails and frequently used him as a chauffeur for trips around town and visits to “the old man,” the boss Phil Rastelli, at prisons in upstate New York and Pennsylvania.

Goldie’s participation in the three capos murders solidified Massino’s trust in him, and in the spring of 1982, when Massino asked for his help in hiding out, Goldie suggested a haven: his parents’ vacation home in Milford, Pennsylvania, eighty miles northwest of New York in the Pocono Mountains. Goldie’s father allowed both men to stay there indefinitely, except when the parents used the place. On those brief occasions, mainly weekends, Massino moved to a motel.

The leak to Massino about an arrest and indictment was accurate. In July 1982, a federal grand jury in Manhattan unveiled RICO charges, citing him as a conspirator but not as an actual participant in the murders of the three capos.