Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America's Most Powerful Mafia Empires (117 page)

Next on board in March 1999, was raven-haired Kimberly McCaffrey, barely five-feet tall yet seemingly indefatigable at age twenty-six, with a year’s experience as an agent. A Junior Olympics medal holder, she won a gymnastic scholarship at Towsend University in Maryland. Joining the Bonanno Squad, her knowledge about the Mafia was limited to her reading as a teenager in northern New Jersey about John Gotti’s career and his ability to beat convictions. “I couldn’t understand why he was on the street and not in jail,” she later told friends. “It gave me the idea that someday I’d use my skills to combat the Mob.”

Quickly pleased with his two forensic accountant agents, Stubing reported to Donovan, “They can look at a box of checks and records and instantly recognize patterns of laundering and tax evasion. It’s something none of the rest of us can do.”

Across the East River from FBI headquarters, where the two accountants were toiling to construct a paper trail to Massino, a more conventional police effort was enveloping the borgata’s “Old Man,” consigliere Anthony Spero. Unrelated to Stubing’s master plan, a three-year police and federal Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) investigation in Brooklyn had pinned murder and racketeering charges on Spero in 1999. The counselor’s troubles arose from the Mafia’s chronic pitfall: associating with narcotics dealers.

Spero had long operated out of a south Brooklyn Italian-American section, Bath Beach and Bensonhurst, where he ran the Big Apple Car Service as a cover. He was famous in the neighborhood for his skill at tending pigeon flocks from a rooftop and cashing in on the Joker Poker craze by manufacturing and distributing the illicit video gambling games in Brooklyn and Queens. Out of respect for Spero’s loyalty, experience, and age, Massino had granted him an exemption to the social club ban, allowing him to maintain a neighborhood hangout, the West End Social Club, next to his livery company. A gang of young trigger-happy wannabes, “the Bath Avenue Boys,” admirers of the legendary Spero, made the club their second home, carrying out assignments—robberies,
assaults, and murders—on orders from the consigliere’s henchmen, never directly from him. One homicide victim was a junkie who made the mistake of burgling Spero’s daughter’s home.

Deeply immersed in the narcotics trade, ranging from sales of kilos to pushing “dime” ($10) bags of cocaine on the streets, nineteen Bath Avenue Boys were caught by the police and the Drug Enforcement Administration. A thuggish bunch, the boys relied on blowtorches and baseball bats to discipline anyone suspected of cheating them. Once in custody, many of the tough guys were stricken with loose lips, implicating Spero and his chief dispenser of orders, Joseph “J.B.” Benanti, a made man. A decade earlier, when William Vander-land, an FBI agent, promised Spero, who had never served a long prison stretch, that he would get him, the veteran mobster replied crisply, “I can handle it.” Listening in 2001 to the guilty verdict for heading a RICO enterprise, Spero’s face reddened at the unimaginable news of a life sentence at age seventy-two, a conviction based entirely on circumstantial evidence, without direct testimony that he specifically had ordered the commission of any crime.

Afterward James Walden, the lead federal prosecutor at Spero’s trial, acknowledged that investigators “searched and hoped for evidence to entangle Massino” but were unable to find a shred against him. “The other families were in mass confusion but it looked as if Massino had shored up his internal structure,” Walden said.

Spero’s difficulties heightened Massino’s dread of being implicated by loose talk picked up by a wired informer or through a telephone tap. Previously, he had felt safe in walk-talks on streets and hushed conversations with Vitale and a handful of capos in the Casa Blanca. Before the start of Spero’s trial in 2001, he stepped up vigilance by leaving the country for supersensitive discussions with trusted capos. He appointed them to temporarily take over the consigliere’s duties by serving on a panel, his version of an executive committee. Massino was confident American law-enforcement agents could not pursue him abroad. In a relaxed atmosphere away from the threat of surveillance, he educated his warlords on their new responsibilities. The mobsters usually were accompanied by their wives, a ploy which helped camouflage the excursions as innocent tourist vacations. Capo Frank Coppa, who previously had lavished jewelry and a fur coat on his godfather, picked up the entire tab for a jaunt to France and Monte Carlo with Massino and their wives. Massino reciprocated in Paris by giving a gift of rosary beads to Coppa.

Another capo, widely considered in the family as the acting consigliere, Anthony
Graziano traveled with his wife, Ronnie, and the Massinos to Mexico. Known as “T.G.,” Graziano, in his early sixties, was a cash cow for the administration; heading a crew in Staten Island and Brooklyn that was a prolific distributor of cocaine; conducting a loan-sharking business with $500,000 on the streets; and operating a vast stock of illegal Joker Poker videos. T.G.’s crew was notorious for its savagery, singeing victims with cigarette lighters and dragging a slow-paying loan-shark client by a noose around his neck. Widening his horizons, Graziano opened a boiler-room shop in Florida to exploit the 1990s economic upswing by engaging in stock and telemarketing swindles. Returning from Mexico after a private interlude with his godfather, a nostalgic Graziano lined the walls of his Staten Island game room with photos of the smiling Massino and Graziano couples touring Mexico. The pictures were placed next to his prized collection of stuffed animal heads.

Airline records and videotapes of Massino and Graziano arriving at Newark Liberty International Airport from Mexico confirmed for the FBI the cozy relationship between Massino and Graziano. Agents suspected that Graziano had been promoted to replace Spero and that he was being briefed on his new duties during the overseas trips. They also observed Graziano emerging with Massino from the office of a doctor treating Massino for diabetes, another place the two men might feel secure to review mutual Mob enterprises.

Learning from an informer that at least three of Graziano’s associates would deliver Christmas “tributes” to him, agents obtained a warrant to frisk him upon leaving the Bistro, a Staten Island restaurant, in December 2001. Disregarding Massino’s edict on courtesy, Graziano growled at the agents, Joseph Bonavolonta (the son of retired FBI Mafia investigations supervisor Jules Bonavolonta) and Gregory Massa: “Why the fuck are you bothering me? Why aren’t you out looking for bin Laden?” Rather than argue with the irate gangster, the agents confiscated as possible evidence of illegal payoffs more than $5,000 packed into a bulging envelope which was marked “Buono Natale” [sic]—Merry Christmas in Italian. Another $1,292 was found in his pockets. Reporting the harassment to Vitale, T.G. was relieved that he was not carrying twenty-five other envelopes containing thousands of dollars from soldiers and associates.

Massino’s regard for Graziano was so strong that he was willing to protect him by killing a former ally and a highly respected capo, Gerlando “George-from-Canada” Sciascia. Sciascia, had played a vital role in Massino’s extermination of the three rival capos in 1981, and had supported his takeover of the
family when he came out of prison a decade later. A wealthy Sicilian-born international heroin trafficker, Sciascia operated in the United States and Canada and headed the family’s Montreal crew. After being acquitted in Brooklyn on federal charges of conspiring with the Gambinos’ Gene Gotti in a drug deal, Sciascia returned to Canada but was soon deported as an undesirable alien. Allowed to enter America in 1997, he moved into a fashionable apartment on Manhattan’s East Side, remaining the long-distance manager of the Montreal faction and continuing to oversee drug deals.

Obviously trusted by Massino, he was put on a committee to undertake some of the duties consigliere Anthony Spero had to give up after his indictment. Working with Graziano, Sciascia grew concerned that T.G. was unreliable, often dipping into his own cocaine supplies. “Every time I see this guy he’s stoned,” Sciascia complained, urging Sal Vitale to report the situation to Massino. Swearing “on my children’s eyes,” Graziano denied to Massino that he was snorting coke, insisting that the only drug he took was “stomach medicine.”

Massino settled the dispute between the two capos in March 1999. At the twenty-fifth wedding anniversary party of Vitale’s nephew, Massino pulled aside his underboss. “George has got to go,” Vitale recalls Massino telling him as they sat alone at a table in the Amici Restaurant in Hempstead, Long Island. Leaving the next morning for a holiday week in Cancun, Mexico, to establish an alibi, Massino wanted Sciascia whacked while he was away.

Following instructions, Vitale placed the contract with capo Patrick “Patty-from-the-Bronx” DeFilippo and soldier John “Johnny Joe” Spirito. Vitale supplied DeFilippo with a pistol and a silencer for the job, and Patty later gave him the details of the hit. In Vitale’s account, DeFilippo had an “ongoing beef” with the sixty-five-year-old Sciascia and arranged to meet him on the evening of March 18, 1999, for a sit-down. To set up Sciascia, DeFillippo lied that they would rendezvous with another mobster who would referee their quarrel. With Spirito at the wheel, DeFilippo picked up Sciascia near his Manhattan apartment. During the ride, DeFilippo, sitting next to Sciascia, allegedly riddled him with bullets in the head and torso, and dumped the body on a dead-end street in the Bronx. Vitale circulated a story among capos that the crime was unsanctioned and unrelated to the Massino administration, and appeared to be a hit relating to a private narcotics deal. The smoke screen was intended to prevent Sciascia’s Canadian crew of Zips from retaliating against Massino.

To mislead the Canadians and the rest of the family, Massino spread the word to his capos that the administration was searching for the killers. He ordered
a huge turnout of more than forty wiseguys at Sciascia’s wake to flaunt his pretended grief and respect for the slain capo. DeFilippo, the reputed assassin, attended, but Massino maintained his policy of avoiding gatherings that attracted law-enforcement photographers. Soon afterward Massino apparently expressed to two favored captains his true feeling that Sciascia deserved to die. “It served him right for telling me how to run the family,” he remarked to Richie Cantarella. “That’ll teach him to talk about my capos.” Another clue about the motive for Sciacia’s slaying came from Frank Coppa, to whom Massino admitted his displeasure that George-from-Canada “wanted to get rid of T.G.” or “hurt him.”

At a meeting in a Howard Beach diner, Vitale informed Massino that the car in which Sciascia had been shot had to be destroyed because the bloodstains could not be removed from the upholstery. “Poor George, he must have bled to death,” Massino said lightly, adding that the family treasury would reimburse Johnny Joe Spirito for the loss of the vehicle. As a personal reward for Spirito, Massino cited the hit on George sufficient reason for straightening him out, inducting him, according to Vitale. The godfather considered it “a piece of work” well done.

Mafia Groupies

J
oe Massino became a frequent world traveler—for security reasons. His overseas journeys, however, failed to secure his carefully constructed protective walls. Three years of poring over financial records were gradually producing dividends for Jack Stubing’s forensic accounting sleuths, Jeffrey Sallet and Kimberly McCaffrey. Early on, they had singled out Sal Vitale as a “key guy” because of his long service as Massino’s indispensable right hand, and in 2001, he was in their net. Having grown rich as the family’s number-two man, Vitale had moved from modest Howard Beach—where Massino still lived—to tony Dix Hills in Long Island. Separating from his wife, Diana, he moved again in 1998 to a $400,000 town house in Syosset, another upscale Long Island town. The Long Island suburbs served both as his home and as a fertile ground for an unusual gambling and loan-sharking syndicate that converted a bank into a Mob annex and launderette.

With help from Suffolk County detectives investigating illegal gambling and a tip from an informer in an unrelated case, McCaffrey and Sallet discovered that Vitale and several associates in a makeshift crew were exceptionally well treated at a branch of the European American Bank in Melville, Long Island. Examining the bank’s records, the agents noticed numerous convoluted deposits, withdrawals, and transfers slightly below $10,000. Banks are required
to submit detailed forms—Currency Transaction Reports—to the Treasury Department for transfers over $10,000. It is a means of uncovering patterns of money laundering and tax evasion, known as “structuring.” The two agents traced a spate of transactions just below the $10,000 cutoff to Vitale and his Long Island accomplices. Over five years, the underboss and henchmen filtered a sizable amount through that one branch bank.

The investigation picked up steam when loan-sharking and gambling victims, tracked down by the FBI and Suffolk County detectives, agreed to cooperate. They told of meetings with Vitale’s enforcers in a conference room at the bank, where Vitale’s goons were transacting loan-sharking business. While regular bank customers dealt with tellers, mobsters were in a back room threatening their own clients. Gambino associate Vincent “Vinny D” DeCongilio, who also laundered money through the bank, was particularly feared for punishing delinquent debtors by bashing them with his cane.