Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America's Most Powerful Mafia Empires (116 page)

Massino appeared at the catering plant once a week, usually passing the time by playing cards. In the event of an investigation, the company’s cover story was that in addition to advising on roach coach routes, he prepared a succulent sauce for their products. Scores of trucks, cars, and people meandered in and out of the place on work days, complicating investigators’ attempts to keep tabs on men Massino actually met inside the vast one-story building.

Interviewed at the plant by
The New York Times
, a good-humored Massino brushed off allegations that he was the latest godfather. “I don’t believe there is such a thing as the Mafia. A bunch of Italian guys go out to eat, and they say it’s the Mafia.” Protesting that he was “legitimate,” Massino said that besides the catering job he earned a living managing real estate properties. “I did my time; I paid my dues,” he replied to this author, then a
Times
reporter.

The job at King Caterers was part of Massino’s plan to justify to the 1RS that he had a legitimate income to support a home valued at $750,000, and the means to acquire real estate in Queens and in Florida and to invest in parking lots in New York. Most of the acquisitions were in his wife’s name, and she drew between $9,000 and $17,000 yearly from the lots. Overall, his net worth eventually would top $10 million.

Listings on his tax returns failed to record Massino’s illicit income from loan-sharking and gambling, and tribute from crews under his reign. He and Vitale operated a surefire “bank,” compelling capos and soldiers to borrow at interest rates of 1.5 percent weekly, which they lent at even higher amounts to their victims. Capos stressed to soldiers in their loan-sharking rings the dire necessity to obtain money and interest owed them on time, because of the compulsory vig payments that went to the administration. No one ever defaulted. “They know better,” said Vitale. “How can you not pay your boss and underboss.” With
$600,000 on the streets, the weekly vigorish reached $9,000 for Joe and Sal.

All loans were approved by Massino but Vitale supervised the bookkeeping, listing the amounts and payments in a pocket-sized spiral notebook, his shy book. Steady client Frank Lino borrowed $500,000, and over the years repaid about $1 million, a sizable return for the hierarchs.

Sports gambling was handled for Massino by “controllers,” professional bookies who split profits fifty-fifty with their leaders. A good week would produce $10,000 to $12,000 for the administration. Massino discontinued baseball wagers in the late 1990s, complaining that he was “getting killed by the Yankees,” a team that won consistently for their betting fans in New York.

Easy money for the borgata and the administration poured in through illegal video gambling games, generally called Joker Poker. Placed in cafés, bars, restaurants, pizzerias, Mob social clubs, and even candy and bagel stores, the machines accepted coins and bills up to a $100 limit. Each machine metered winnings and losses, and when finished, a player collected the remaining credit from the proprietor, who split earnings fifty-fifty with the mobster who owned the video game.

The Bonannos and other families in the 1990s offered four types of gambling machines:

Capo Frank Lino, who was a distributor of dozens of Joker Poker machines, chalked up as much as $40,000 a week in profits. Massino’s administration demanded 10 percent of all earnings from video gambling. Calling the payments a “tithe,” Lino told a colleague, “I guess the Mafia takes after the church.”

An unwritten law required monthly cash “tributes” from Massino family capos and a generous contribution at Christmas. A wealthy captain, Frank Coppa, usually gave $6,500 a month and $20,000 for Christmas; and capo Richard Cantarella forked over $1,500 a month and $25,000 at Yuletide. The Canadian crew sent $15,000 every Christmas. Another generous capo, James “Big Louie” Tartaglione, estimated that in two decades he passed along $150,000 to Massino. Even Vitale kicked in to the boss with $10,000 at Christmas.

It took Massino less than five years to establish himself as New York’s and the nation’s paramount don, benefiting from the mass convictions that beset the other families in the 1990s. John Gotti (of the Gambinos), Vincent Gigante (of the Genoveses), Vittorio Amuso and Anthony Casso (of the Luccheses), and Carmine Persico and Victor Orena (of the Colombos) had all been swept into prison. Their organizations were fractured, struggling to regroup in 1998. The Bonannos were the exception; their administration was untouched, and Massino filled power vacuums vacated by the imprisoned godfathers. Recovering from the “Donnie Brasco” undercover debacle, when the family’s roster had dropped below 100 made men, Massino had brought it up to over 150 in 15 functioning crews. His strict discipline and security strictures appeared to be working. In contrast to the flood of defectors in other borgatas, not a single Bonanno/Massino made man had become a turncoat—a sign of unflinching loyalty to
omertà
and to Big Joe.

The only free full-fledged godfather in New York, Massino’s influence enabled him to set general policies for all Mafia families. Confident of his own security and ability to evade surveillance, he called for a rare Commission meeting at an unknown date in late 1999 or early 2000, and agreed to be present. It was attended by the Gambinos’ boss Peter Gotti and acting bosses from the three other families. The conference site, chosen with care by Massino, was at the home of a highly trusted Massino soldier, Louis Restivo, in Rego Park, a largely Jewish middle-class Queens neighborhood not frequented by mobsters.

An important agenda item for the Commission was finding a solution to the interminable internal battles for control of the Colombo family. Massino was unable to mediate that thorny issue, explaining afterward to Vitale that the dispute “was too far gone.”

The other major topic was replenishing the dwindling borgatas, hard hit by RICO convictions. In addition to quickly replacing dead and retired members, each family would get a bonus every year of two soldiers at Christmas time. A New York Cosa Nostra law requires that the names of all proposed members be vetted by other families. A family has two weeks to raise an objection about the acceptability of another borgata’s candidate before the admission ceremony was conducted.

Soon after the Commission meeting, Massino suspected that other families were cheating to pad their ranks more swiftly. They were reusing the names of dead soldiers to expedite inductions and to beef up their strength. The basic
size of each family had been rigidly established by Lucky Luciano in the 1930s to prevent one family from becoming too large and sparking Mob rivalries and wars. Determined to abide by the old rules, Massino instructed Vitale to maintain a necrology list to block other borgatas from recycling the names of dead mobsters.

In keeping with his new status as the nation’s most secure godfather, Massino became more modish. He filled a closet with hand-stitched, European-styled suits and other clothing crafted by a Bensonhurst tailor to fit his obese frame. Content with mid-sized Fords and Buicks and Cadillacs during his days as a hijacker and capo, he now opted for Mercedes-Benzes.

Always interested in food, he became the behind-the-scenes owner in 1996 of the Casa Blanca Restaurant in Maspeth. Dining there frequently (a light lunch was linguine with sautéed peppers) and in the most open display of his importance, he had no compunction about breaking breadsticks and enjoying heaping plates of veal and pasta with capos and soldiers. Since the restaurant—officially owned by a soldier, Louis Restivo—was a public place, it would be difficult for prosecutors to prove that it was a Mob hangout where criminal activities were discussed.

The Casa Blanca was a blue-collar contrast to the voguish Manhattan nightspots that had been frequented by his former neighbor John Gotti. Indicative of Massino’s outer-borough focus, the restaurant was located on a drab commercial street next to a Pep Boys auto supply store. Seating eighty customers in a pseudo-art deco room, bathed in bright neon lights, its most conspicuous motif was adulation of the classic 1942 movie Casablanca. A life-size statue of Humphrey Bogart in a white dinner jacket dominated the bistro’s entrance, and all its walls were bedecked with posters for the movie and photos of its cast. The door to the men’s room bore a picture of Bogart, and the women’s room door was graced with the image of the film’s costar, Ingrid Bergman. Featuring Sicilian and southern Italian dishes, the menu included a “Bogey Special” brick-oven pizza and, capturing a famous slice of dialogue by Bogart, a “Here’s Looking at You, Kid” pizza.

A compulsory dining spot for Massino’s mobsters, the restaurant’s success allowed him to skim $750 a week from its receipts. To stay in Massino’s good graces, soldiers and associates were importuned to hold their parties in the restaurant’s adjacent catering hall. “It’s the boss’s place. Why give your money to anyone else?” capo Richard Cantarella strongly suggested to his crew members when they were planning social events.

Clearly, Massino won the opening skirmishes against the FBI’s C-10 Bonanno Squad, which was even unaware of the borgata’s name change. Reviewing the campaign in 1998 with other agents, the squad’s supervisor, Jack Stubing, estimated that in five years “the Ear” had revived the family through standard Mafia rackets and was opening new frontiers in the 1990s booming stock market. Intelligence reports suggested that some of Massino’s capos were Mob pioneers in corrupting brokerage firms, mainly by loan-sharking to high-living employees in financial straits. “They get a victim on the hook and put his talents to use in pump-and-dump and other schemes,” Stubing told a new squad agent, Nora Conley. “They’re getting stronger rather than weaker.”

Stubing had tried every trick in his bag to crack Massino’s defenses. Searching for an unorthodox approach, Stubing floated an idea to Kevin Donovan, the agent in charge of the entire Organized Crime Division in New York. He wanted to borrow forensic accountants, agents used for white-collar business and stock-fraud cases, whom the bureau had never considered particularly useful for initiating Mob investigations. Instead of “facing him head-on,” Stubing thought accountants might get to Massino through a flanking maneuver: scrutinizing records of Massino’s and Vitale’s underlings, who were minting money for them. Stubing’s plan was to pinpoint associates and others suspected of arranging the family’s money-laundering schemes, or who were themselves extortion victims. All were potential weak links and likely to fear long prison terms if they were nabbed on financial crimes. A little pressure from threatened tax-evasion or RICO indictments might persuade these moneymakers and victims to cooperate, wear wires, and allow their phones to be tapped for incriminating evidence against Massino and his top commanders. It was a long-range gamble to construct a case methodically, inch by inch, tracing how loot flowed to Joe and Sal.

“It’s impossible to change records in the banking system,” Stubing told Donovan. “If we had someone who knows what to look for, where the money is going, and how it got there, we might unlock Massino’s empire.”

Stubing knew that regular Mafia agents had no training to decipher financial records, and he was counting on a relatively new species of forensic accountant to duplicate for his squad the successes they were achieving in embezzlement and fraud investigations. “The wiseguys can lie and cheat but bank records don’t change,” Stubing stressed to Donovan.

Stubing got his reinforcements, two young agents who were tyros when it came to pursuing Cosa Nostra despots but were qualified certified public accountants. The first was Jeffrey Sallet, a cheerful twenty-nine-year-old with a photographic memory for details, who had been with the bureau less than two years before plunging into the Massino investigation in mid-1998. Raised in a Boston suburb, Sallet had been inspired to become a G-Man by his uncle’s compelling stories about his adventures as a Treasury Department investigator.