Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America's Most Powerful Mafia Empires (113 page)

A year later Rusty Rastelli was paroled and free to assume control of the borgata as “official” boss. Yet it was clear to most Bonanno mobsters that Massino, even on the lam, functioned as the essential head of the family. He relayed orders to Vitale through prearranged telephone calls to public booths, a system similar to the one adopted later by Gaspipe Casso in the Lucchese family. Rastelli raised no objections as capos and important soldiers showed their allegiance and obeisance to his protégé by journeying to the Poconos for instructions and to report on Mob matters. A high-ranking visitor from another borgata, old hijacking buddy John Gotti, also showed up to bolster Massino’s spirits and enhance his Cosa Nostra stature.

Avoiding FBI tails, visitors to the hideout were either picked up in New York by Goldie or met him on Pennsylvania side roads before they were brought to Milford. Confident about Goldie’s ability “to watch his mirrors,” Massino ventured with him into the city for high-level meetings to resolve issues that could not be handled via the telephone or couriers.

One piece of business that Massino did take care of from the Poconos was the whacking of Cesare Bonventre, one of the gunmen who had helped rub out Carmine Galante. A Zip capo, Bonventre, for an unclear reason, had offended Massino. The contract for knocking him off was given to Sal Vitale at a 1984 meeting in the Milford hideaway. From Massino’s remarks, Vitale believed that Joe questioned Bonventre’s loyalty because he had not helped or visited him while he was on the lam and, in his words, “sacrificing” himself “for the good of the family.” Vitale speculated privately that there might be another reason for the hit: as head of a powerful Sicilian group Bonventre loomed as a rival to Massino. Goldie, who was included in the murder plan, got another explanation. Massino hinted to him that he was acting on a request from Rastelli without knowing the reason. “The old man wants Cesare to go,” Joe said without amplification.

Vitale put little stock in the notion that Rastelli was responsible for the decision. From his vantage point, Vitale thought the paroled Rastelli was worn down by the chronic family turmoil and was on the verge of retiring. “He wanted to live out his life peacefully,” Vitale recalled. “He wanted to step down the day he got home [from prison].”

Before Goldie left for the Bonventre killing, Massino cautioned him that the
Zip capo—reputedly involved in twenty-five slayings—might be a difficult quarry. “He’s a very sharp guy. You have to be careful.”

Carrying out the plot conceived by Massino, Vitale picked up Bonventre in Queens one night in April 1984, for a presumed meeting with Rastelli. Instead, with a Massino gunman, Louis “Ha Ha” Attanasio, seated in the rear of the car, Vitale headed for Goldie’s chop shop, where Goldie was waiting. As they approached the garage, Attanasio shot Bonventre in the head, but only wounded him. Struggling with Vitale for the wheel, Bonventre tried to swerve the car into a parked vehicle or the side of the road. Fighting him off with one hand, Vitale steered into the garage where Attanasio fired several more shots into Bonventre’s twitching body. “I had to shoot him again. This cocksucker didn’t want to die,” Attanasio grumbled to Goldie.

The Bonventre hit was a benchmark event for Vitale. As a reward and recognition for his services, his brother-in-law authorized his induction as a goodfellow—a made man. With Massino and consigliere Steve Cannone officiating, Vitale, at age thirty-seven and after fifteen years of service to Joe, joined the Honorable Society. Most of the ceremony was in Italian, and Vitale, a second-generation American, barely understood a word.

Two years elapsed without the FBI closing in on Massino. Periodically agents followed Vitale and other known crew members, hoping they might lead them to the fugitive. Acting on a suggestion from an informer, the agent in charge of the manhunt, Pat Marshall, did concentrate on the Poconos. His investigation produced a solid clue: Massino had sent dolls to his daughters from an antique shop in the region. But that single lead was insufficient to track down Massino’s lair in the huge Poconos region.

What agents did not know was that Massino was using the alias “Joe Russo,” and that he committed an incredible blunder. Inexplicably, he tried to shoplift a bottle of aspirin worth less than one dollar from a store in the Poconos and was caught. He managed to talk his way out of the petty theft, showing identification as Joe Russo. No fugitive by that name was wanted in any “All Points Bulletin” and the local police allowed him to go free.

Belatedly, the FBI learned that Massino had been romantically comforted in his hideout. A woman with whom he was having an affair was driven from New York by Goldie for weekend assignations in motels. They had met when Massino, on numerous prison trips to visit Rastelli, had provided rides for her in his Cadillac or Lincoln to visit her husband serving time in the same institution.

The manhunt ended on Massino’s terms after twenty-eight months. He returned
to New York and surrendered in July 1984. Before showing up, he and his lawyers had time to study the court proceedings of the first five Bonanno mobsters from Sonny Black’s crew tried on charges stemming from Agent Pistone’s undercover exploits. Three, including Lefty Guns Ruggiero, were found guilty on RICO violations that they knew of the plot to kill the three capos. In fact, unbeknownst to agents and prosecutors, they actually had been back-up shooters and helped remove the bodies from the ambush site. The trial evidence was based largely on Pistone’s infiltration testimony and a taped recording incriminating them in the massacre. As Massino had anticipated, the trial charted the limited evidence then compiled by the FBI in the murder case and revealed the prosecution’s fundamental courtroom strategy.

“Get used to my face, because you’re going to see a lot of it for a long time,” Pat Marshall, the agent who had been hunting Massino, forewarned when he was brought to FBI headquarters for fingerprinting and photographing. As the case or lead agent for Massino’s trial, Marshall recognized that he was confronting an imperturbable foe. “He took my warning with a grain of salt and said calmly, ‘No problem, do what you got to do.’”

Massino made bail, but Marshall and prosecutors were far from through with investigating him and Goldie Leisenheimer. Called before a grand jury and granted immunity from prosecution, Goldie refused to answer questions about his sojourn with Massino in the Poconos. He was cited for contempt and imprisoned for fifteen months, the length of a grand jury’s inquiry into new charges against Massino and other Bonanno gangsters. The night before Goldie’s incarceration, Massino and his crew toasted him at a party in the J&S Club. Congratulating and embracing him as a “standup guy,” the boys handed him envelopes totaling $17,000 in cash as a reward for his protection of Joe.

Within a year of his return, Massino was hit with another RICO indictment; as a codefendant with Rusty Rastelli, he was accused of union racketeering and extortion. Picked up at his Howard Beach home, Massino politely asked to be cuffed outside, not in the presence of his wife and teenaged daughters, Adeline and Joanne. “Because he was always the gentleman and cordial with us,” Marshall granted him that favor.

Soon afterward, in June 1985, Marshall pounced on him again in Howard Beach as he sat talking in Sal Vitale’s parked Buick near Joe’s home. This time, Marshall was after both men. An additional charge had been tagged against Massino in the three capos murder case: conspiracy to murder Joseph Do Do Pastore, the loan shark and cigarette bootlegger who had been gunned down in
the apartment above the J&J Deli a decade earlier. The superseding indictment also named Vitale, not as a defendant in any of the four murders, but as an accomplice in alleged hijackings.

Handcuffed, the brothers-in-law were placed in separate FBI cars, with Marshall riding in the same auto with Massino and two other agents. Because of Massino’s girth, Marshall needed two sets of cuffs to lock his hands behind his back. When the agents stopped for a nearby traffic light, another car screeched to a halt alongside them. The imposing figure of John Carneglia, one of John Gotti’s goons who lived in the neighborhood and had assisted Massino in disposing of the three capos’ bodies, approached. Slamming his hand on the roof of the FBI car, Carneglia, demanded: “Joey, are you all right?” The agents, aware of Carneglia’s hatred of lawmen and reputation for hair-trigger violence, fingered their guns. “Get out of here before you get hurt,” one agent warned Carneglia. After an exchange of icy stares, Carneglia backed off, saying he would call Massino’s lawyer.

At the booking, Marshall noted that Massino was flush with funds, carrying $3,192 in his pockets. He quickly raised $1 million bail for the new accusations. Befitting his position as an important Mafia official, Massino seemed un-fazed as he prepared for two pending RICO battles. He continued to show up at his customary haunts in Maspeth, supervising his semilegitimate roach coach and food businesses and his clandestine Mob enterprises. He even found time to frolic at Caesar’s Palace Casino in Atlantic City, where he ran up a $15,000 debt on a credit line, losses which he never paid.

In a rare turnabout, the surveillance-conscious Massino threw caution to the wind when it came to public appearances with his longtime Mafia comrade John Gotti, then a Gambino capo. Flaunting their relationship, the two mobsters from different families were often spotted visiting each other at their respective clubs. Disregarding the Commission’s ban on close affiliations with the ostracized Bonannos, Gotti displayed to Mafia lords his confidence in Massino. One ostentatious example of their close relationship was Massino’s attendance at the wedding of Victoria Gotti in 1984. A year later, after the death of Gambino underboss Aniello Dellacroce, Massino arrived conspicuously at Dellacroce’s wake in the same car as Gene Gotti. His appearance with the mourning Gotti brothers was a reciprocal sign of his support for them in their rancorous confrontation with Gambino boss Paul Castellano. (A short time
later, FBI eavesdropping tapes would jolt Massino when he heard that Gotti, in conversations with cronies, had disparaged him as “the whale” and “a punk.”)

The spring of 1986 finally brought Massino into Federal District Court in Brooklyn for the first trial, as a codefendant with Rusty Rastelli, the government’s main target. The Bonanno godfather had been indicted a year earlier in Manhattan in the Commission case, but those charges were dropped in favor of a giant labor-racketeering case against him, Massino, and ten other defendants. Over two decades, Bonanno chiefs and officials of teamsters’ Local 814 had teamed up for systemic, standardized shake-downs. The mobsters and corrupt union bosses milked more than $1 million yearly from New York’s largest moving and storage companies by rigging contracts and extorting payoffs to prevent labor problems.

A chagrined Massino thought he had been hit with a bum rap. “I never made a penny,” he griped to associates about charges that he had profited immensely from the conspiracy. The crucial testimony came from an admittedly corrupt teamsters’ official, Anthony Giliberti, who cooperated with the government after surviving a botched hit. Massino confided to other mafiosi that he had slapped around Giliberti: “I gave him a crack.” In the scale of Mafia misdeeds, he considered a mild beating as an unjust reason for indictment. Giliberti, who had been threatened by Massino, was certain that he had been behind the plot to murder him, but that accusation was not leveled against Massino.

Dressed daily in off-the-rack dark suits and sport jackets, Massino was more deferential and jovial with prosecutors and agents in the courtroom than his fellow suspects. Laura Brevetti, the lead prosecutor from the federal Organized Crime Strike Force, observed his lighthearted attitude during a recess in a nearly deserted courtroom. That day Brevetti was using a chart to illustrate rigged bids and overcharges gobbled up by a moving company accused of delivering 5 percent kickbacks to the Bonannos. Studying the chart, and referring to the excess profits made by the head of the firm, Massino snickered loud enough for the prosecutor to hear, “I think the son-of-a-bitch owes me money.” (Ironically, one Mob-inflated contract was for moving the FBI’s furniture and equipment into new downtown offices.)

Bumping into Pat Colgan in the courthouse hall, Massino had a friendly greeting for his longtime adversary. “Hey, Pat, I hear you’ve been promoted,” Massino said, revealing that he knew of the FBI agent’s appointment to a supervisory job. “I hear the same thing about you, Joey.” A huge grin was Massino’s silent reply.

Rastelli was an epileptic and Massino came to his aid several times during
the trial. Once, Massino showed his exceptional strength, prying open a telephone booth door and lifting out the trapped Rastelli during a seizure. He also comforted Rastelli and made sure he would not bite his tongue when he collapsed at the defense table. During that seizure, Rastelli’s loafers flew off, and when Massino picked them up, Brevetti heard another defendant, Nicholas “Nicky Glasses” Marangello, a former underboss, rasp, “Don’t be too quick to fill those shoes, Joe.”

Joe Pistone’s undercover work provided damaging firsthand evidence against the Bonanno gangsters. Leaving the witness box, the agent was stunned by Marangello’s naïveté. Referring to him by his pseudonym, Marangello blurted out, “Donnie, how could you do this? You’re one of us.” Testimony from Pistone and fifty prosecution witnesses convinced the jury to convict the dozen defendants. In January 1987, Rastelli was sentenced to twelve years, and Joe Massino, for the first time in his criminal life, was going to prison. The maximum sentence was ten years.

Shortly after the verdicts, Laura Brevetti, the main prosecutor, got disquieting news about Massino’s hidden hostility toward her and of a possible death threat. One of the dozen defense lawyers revealed to her that Massino, resenting the aggressive prosecution, had said under his breath, “I hope she dies of AIDS.”

When the verdicts came down, Gotti was the new Gambino boss, and an informer told the FBI that, in an attempt to ingratiate himself with his godfather, a Gambino capo had offered to place contracts on Brevetti and the presiding federal judge at the rackets trial, Eugene Nickerson. Their motive was to avenge the conviction of Gotti’s prized friend Joe Massino, and it illustrated that the Gotti-Massino axis was keenly recognized by Gambino stalwarts.