Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America's Most Powerful Mafia Empires (118 page)

Vitale and six associates, including the bank’s manager, were corralled in November 2001, on racketeering-enterprise charges. Earlier, another employee who had been paid off for turning the branch into a Mob mall, cooperated in exposing the mobsters’ grip on the branch. Released on $500,000 bail and facing twenty years for racketeering, loan-sharking, and money laundering, Vitale, who had never spent a single hour in jail, began negotiating. His guilty plea and admission to collecting one-quarter of the crew’s profits, resulted in the probability of a sharply reduced sentence of forty-five months. Awaiting formal sentencing, he was placed under house arrest through electronic monitoring of his movements. The sentence delay was caused partly by Vitale’s request to be placed in a prison substance-abuse program, claiming he was an alcoholic. There is no evidence that he had ever been a heavy drinker, but the program would make prison life easier and shorten his incarceration by one full year. Following Vitale’s lead, the bank manager and four other crew members “copped out,” to wangle shorter sentences.

Ironically, the investigation of Vitale occurred as his relationship to Massino was withering. Beginning in the mid-1990s, Massino gradually stripped Sal of authority, relying more on the capos he had placed on panels to oversee the borgata’s daily operations and channel his loot to him. Vitale was allowed to retain his underboss title and participate with Massino in their old projects, mainly loan-sharking, gambling, and shake-downs of King Catering. Massino’s cold explanation to Vitale for the demotion was that rank-and-file capos and soldiers “detest you.” Virtually banished, Vitale was even prohibited
from appearing at the Casa Blanca, where every capo was welcomed at Massino’s table in the restaurant.

Indignant at being shelved and turned into an outcast, Vitale was powerless to resist. Seething, he complained that Massino had sharply cut his illegal revenues by driving a wedge between him and the rest of the family. “There was nothing I wouldn’t have done for the man,” Vitale whined to a capo who still talked to him. “He’s taken the captains away from me; they aren’t allowed to call me; they aren’t allowed to give me Christmas presents.”

Massino gave Richard Cantarella and Frank Coppa his reasons for ostracizing Vitale: he was incensed at “the way Sal carried himself,” acting “like a big shot.” Over the years, Massino said, his underboss had become too haughty and vain, encouraging the use of the nicknames “Good-Looking” and “Handsome Sal.” Massino thought his brother-in-law was cloning John Gotti’s expansive personality, trying to dress modishly, and having his hair coifed by stylists. A sign that Massino saw as incipient disloyalty was Vitale’s refusal to encourage any of his four sons to join the crime family. The sons of Frank Coppa, Frank Lino, Richard Cantarella, and other capos had enlisted as soldiers.

Vitale continued to deliver plunder to Massino from their long-established mutual enterprises and saw him at social events involving their personal families. Denied financial support from the borgata’s capos, the underboss struck out on his own, developing new rackets in Long Island. Distance failed to assuage Massino’s hostility toward him. “Watch yourself, Joe’s not too pleased with you,” Jimmy Galante, a soldier and nephew of the slain Carmine Galante, warned the pariah underboss. Frank Coppa, who was in Massino’s inner circle, advised Sal of the boss’s continued animosity: “Be careful, stay in Long Island, and make yourself scarce.”

Vitale believed he had redeemed himself when Massino gave him the contract on George-from-Canada. “When he needs a shooter, he calls on me,” Vitale thought to himself. That hope was short-lived, and his guilty plea in the Long Island RICO case only heightened Massino’s distrust of him. Massino unlocked the family’s war chest to pay $50,000 of Vitale’s legal fees, but he wondered if a relatively short sentence of less than four years meant that he might be squealing. Discussing Vitale’s situation with Coppa, Massino said, “We did seven pieces of work together,” an acknowledgment that Vitale could implicate him in seven gangland murders. Shaping his hand as if it were a gun, Massino added that he was sparing Sal because he was his brother-in-law. “Otherwise, I’d take him out.”

Equally bitter, Vitale believed he had been abandoned by Massino and the family after his arrest. He lamented that, except for one soldier, no one from the borgata had visited or called him when he was hospitalized with a mild heart attack. “I didn’t get no support from the men,” he grumbled to a friend as he waited to begin his sentence. “My wife and kids are going to be left in the street.” It was an odd complaint since he had almost $500,000 in hidden cash, several million dollars in real estate holdings, and was estranged from his wife.

The next major trophy collected by the Bonanno Squad was Anthony T.G. Graziano. He was accused in 2002, on twin New York and Florida indictments for racketeering, murder conspiracy, extortion, fraud, drug trafficking, and an $11 million swindle. Facing insurmountable evidence, Graziano threw in the towel, pleaded guilty, and received an eleven-year sentence. Convicted with him was most of his crew, a dozen soldiers and associates. The agent accountants had a marginal part in capturing Graziano; much of the evidence had been spawned by the Bath Avenue Boys, the plug-uglies and narcotics peddlers who helped sink the consigliere Anthony Spero. The garrulous boys had worked as musclemen on drug deals for Graziano and Spero’s crews. After implicating Spero, they gave the FBI leads to Graziano’s criminal escapades and were willing to testify against him, dickering for lenient sentences.

The stock market bubble in the 1990s was a golden opportunity for Mafia pillaging, and Massino’s capos were among the early buccaneers. Like Graziano, Frank Coppa and Frank Lino saw that the public’s feverish greed offered pickings just as easy as loan-sharking and illegal gambling. Coppa, the first to branch out into high finance, had been profiting as a mobster since he was made by Carmine Galante in 1977. Under the illusion that Lilo was the Bonanno boss, Coppa was startled to learn differently after his assassination. Considering himself “an earner, a con man, not a killer,” Coppa nevertheless participated in two murders and ingratiated himself with Massino by assisting Lino in whacking Sonny Black Napolitano.

A loan shark with clients in small brokerage firms, Coppa comprehended that “Wall Street likes muscle and wants to do deals with the Mafia.” His Mob status gave him ground-floor entry to pump-and-dump swindles engineered at two brokerage houses. “Buy cheap and create demand” was his formula for churning out hundreds of thousands of dollars of easy money. With $2 million in cash and gold, much of it hidden in safe deposit boxes, he was proud of his
underworld reputation as a “high liver,” owner of luxurious homes in New Jersey and in Florida. By his mid-fifties, Coppa’s extravagant lifestyle, including cocaine sprees and trencherman meals, had altered his once solid six-foot-two soldier’s frame into that of an aging, potbellied mobster.

Caught for tax evasion in 1992, Coppa had a hard time adjusting to prison; it was his first felony conviction. He burst into tears at the start of a two-year sentence in a minimum-security institution. Released from prison in 1994, he reverted to his old ways as a prodigious money producer for Massino, who spurred his success by making him a captain and, at one point, giving him four crews to supervise.

The combined efforts of the Bonanno Squad and stepped-up government vigilance against Mafia intrusions in the financial markets ended Coppa’s Wall Street gambols. In the spring of 2002, he was again convicted, this time for stock frauds, and sentenced to three years.

Coppa’s early success in red-hot Wall Street motivated his long-time Mob colleague Frank Lino to emulate him. The two men had palled around and committed crimes together since they were teenagers in Brooklyn’s Bensonhurst and Gravesend sections. Lino auditioned as a wannabe with the Genovese, Colombo, and Gambino families before Coppa informed him that the Bonannos were eager for recruits. Recognized in Mafia environs for having withstood a savage police beating rather than rat out a cop-killer fugitive, Lino was accepted by the Bonanno faction headed by Sonny Red Indelicate. Nicknamed “Blinkie” because of the eye disorder caused by police bashings, Lino was straightened out on a date he always remembered: October 30, 1977, his thirty-ninth birthday.

A committed Massino supporter after the three capos’ murders, Lino made millions for himself and the administration through loan-sharking, credit card thefts, bookmaking, and Joker Poker. A rapid blink, a pixiesh smile, and a soft voice belied Lino’s feral persona. On behalf of the administration, he participated in six murders, including hits on capos Sonny Black Napolitano and Gabe Infanti, although he was never known to have squeezed the trigger. Before Massino closed down the family’s street clubs, Lino sponsored one in Gravesend with a title that was something of an oxymoron for a Cosa Nostra hangout—the Mother Cabrini Social Club, named for a nun who aided Italian immigrants and was the first United States citizen to be canonized.

Lino’s record for escaping prison sentences despite four convictions over a forty-year period was shattered in 1997 by the government’s crackdown on stock
manipulations. Massino paid $75,000 for legal bills, but Lino was convicted of pumping-and-dumping frauds, plus extortion, and sentenced to fifty-seven months in a federal penitentiary. Almost totally ignorant of the basic stock market vocabulary, like “Initial Public Offerings” or “selling long or short,” Lino was incapable of originating financial trickery by himself. He relied on Coppa’s advice and his intimidation of brokers to cash in. A defense lawyer’s comment that Lino was a stock market dunce was truthful: “My client doesn’t know where Wall Street is.”

The removal of Lino, Coppa, Graziano, and even the downgraded Vitale created gaps in Massino’s chain of command, but his defenses against indictment seemed as impervious as ever. None of the charges against his underboss and capos implicated him, and he had a candidate ready to temporarily fill in as acting underboss. His choice as prime liaison to captains and important soldiers, and his continued bulwark against dreaded arrest, was Richard Cantarella.

Cantarella got an early start in the Mafia through Al Walker Embarrato who was his uncle. The soldier-capo Embarrato introduced his nephew, while in his teens, to wiseguy society and culture by taking him to social activities at storefront hangouts, and to wakes and funerals. These were opportunities for a bright wannabe to pick up pointers on Cosa Nostra protocol and to learn from his uncle how crooked compacts were arranged.

Mobsters are quick to apply nicknames, and the newcomer got stuck with a crude one, “Shellackhead,” for his heavily pomaded hair, but it did not impede his progress. Through his Bonanno connections, Richie learned that by bribing a city official in the NYC Department of Marine and Aviation, Enrico “Rick” Mazzeo, he could lease news and snack stands at the Staten Island Ferry terminals. The concessions were guaranteed moneymakers, and Cantarella increased his take by using them for bookmaking purposes. Uncle Al, the borgata’s powerhouse at the New York Post, also supplied him with a no-show union job as a “tail man,” a helper on a newspaper delivery truck. The phony employment at the Post was an organized-crime entitlement for knowing the right people. Cantarella got a weekly pay check of $800, plus medical and welfare benefits, while he paid a substitute $300 to haul around and drop off bundles of newspapers.

An obedient Mob protégé of Uncle Al, Cantarella was the getaway driver for the hit in 1982 on his cousin Tony Mirra, who suffered the extreme penalty for
vouching for FBI agent Joe Pistone. Four years later, Cantarella supervised a homicide in his own behalf. Caught on corruption charges, Rick Mazzeo, the former city official, was home from prison but jobless and frequently high on drugs. Taking no chances that Mazzeo might turn into a songbird, Cantarella invited him out one evening, and shot him in the back of the head as they walked through a deserted garage. Cantarella’s cousin, Joey D’Amico, who had been the triggerman in the hit on their cousin Tony Mirra, was along for the homicide, and also plugged Mazzeo in the head. Joey collaborated in the gunplay as a sign of underworld camaraderie and solidarity with Richie, even though it was a hit unauthorized by the administration.

Advancing along the usual mobster highway of loan-sharking and gambling, Cantarella fell into disfavor with Uncle Al, who blocked his induction as a mafioso. A capo with influence, Embarrato thought Cantarella was engaged in too many deals with a Gambino soldier, Joseph Joe Butch Corrao, to the detriment of the Bonanno borgata. The ill will became so heated that Richie contemplated killing his uncle. Joe Massino solved the problem, intervening from prison in Talladega, ordering Cantarella’s acceptance into the Honorable Society.

The new button man was straightened out in July 1990, just as the Manhattan district attorney’s office began looking into the Bonanno cesspool at the Post. At the time, the Post’s plant was in Lower Manhattan on South Street, near Bonanno country, where many of them lived, congregated in social clubs, and drank at the infamous Holiday Bar. The Bonannos’ control of delivery jobs and their associated rackets at the newspaper had been an open secret among union reformers for years.

By brute force in the newspaper drivers’ union, and with Embarrato on duty as a foreman, the Bonannos dispensed no-show sinecures through the newspaper’s delivery system. The perks were handed out to Cantarella, D’Amico, one of Vitale’s sons, and a dozen other wiseguys and their relatives. On the newspaper’s management side, Bonanno associate Robert Perrino, the
Post’s
superintendent of delivery, worked in tandem with the borgata. Perrino, the son-in-law of Nicky Marangello, the family’s former underboss, got a cut from loan-sharking, drug sales, and gun-running activities that thrived on the loading docks under the protection of the Bonannos. He profited sufficiently to kick back $500 to $600 a month to Massino and Vitale.

By 1992 the DA’s investigation was hot enough for Vitale and Cantarella to learn about grand jury subpoenas of the
Post’s
employment records and more
ominous news that conversations in Perrino’s office had been bugged and videotaped. Goldie Leisenheimer, who also had a Post delivery job, heard that Perrino “is knocking and badmouthing a lot of people,” and muttering, “I’m not taking the fall by myself.”