Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America's Most Powerful Mafia Empires (120 page)

The paper chase of Weinberg took a year, and the forensic accountants’ instincts were right: he had evaded at least $1 million in taxes over a decade in which he neglected to file tax returns and to report estimated profits totaling a staggering $14 million. On the morning of January 9, 2001, driving in a new $90,000 Mercedes to one of his parking lots in Midtown Manhattan, Weinberg was pulled over by a police cruiser for a traffic violation. It was a ruse. Alighting from his car, he was hustled into an unmarked van where Sallet and McCaffrey waited. “You have fifteen minutes to make a life decision,” Sallet began. The agents informed the now jittery Weinberg that he was accused of income tax evasion and that he had only one option to avoid prison: he would have to work undercover, secretly record conversations with Cantarella and other mobsters, and eventually be placed in the Witness Protection Program. Otherwise, he would be processed immediately on tax charges, thereby losing all his value as
a confidential witness because Cantarella and his crew would shun him, fearful that he might have made a deal with the government.

Needing less than fifteen minutes, Weinberg chose the avenue of cooperation. That day he began “proffering,” the process before a formal plea agreement can be signed, in which a defendant discloses to prosecutors and agents all of his own crimes and all illegal acts of which he is aware. Prosecutors could then evaluate Weinberg’s value as an informant and potential witness, and determine the degree of leniency that might be offered to him.

Weinberg had plenty to tell. He described a decade or more of frauds and payoffs not only with Cantarella but also with another capo, Frank Coppa, who was involved in parking lot deals and had independently shaken him down for about $85,000. Details of parking-lot partnerships, money laundering, and extortion by both capos were illuminated. Weinberg’s payoffs to Cantarella alone reached $800,000 and he revealed how he had shelled out another $250,000 six months earlier, after being beaten by Cantarella. Angered because he believed that Weinberg had complained about him to other mobsters, Cantarella confronted him in front of the popular Caffe Roma in Little Italy. Yelling, “Why are you talking about me,” Richie punched him in the face, knocking him to the sidewalk. The capo demanded a peace offering of $500,000 before he would permit Weinberg to continue associating with him. Cantarella settled for $250,000 but with a threat: “You owe me for everything.”

Turning Weinberg into an undercover operative was an unprecedented achievement for the C-10 Squad. Except for Agent Joe Pistone, the FBI had never infiltrated the Bonannos with an informer who would be secretly taping made members and who had access to capos. Their success with Weinberg created a double undercover triumph. During the debriefing with Sallet and McCaffrey, Weinberg implicated in money-laundering practices Augustino Scozzari, the businessman he had brought into Cantarella’s web. A brusque conversation with the two agents about the legal consequences of conspiring with gangsters persuaded Scozzari to abandon his romanticized concept of the Mafia, and to join the undercover campaign. He, too, secretly began taping meetings with Cantarella. “It wasn’t difficult to turn him,” Sallet said. “Money guys like to live well and have a lot to lose.”

The groupies were quickly converted into stellar FBI informers, ultimately producing more than one hundred tapes incriminating Cantarella and his crew. Eventually, Cantarella grew nervous that Weinberg might be a stool pigeon. He discussed his doubts about Weinberg with Massino, and the godfather
shaped his hand into a gun, asking if he needed help to solve the problem. Before the mobsters could harm Weinberg, McCaffrey and Sallet sensed from Cantarella’s secretly taped remarks that Weinberg was endangered. After a year of undercover service, Weinberg was pulled out in December 2001 and bundled into the Witness Protection Program. (The reformed groupie survived two years, dying of cancer at age fifty-eight.)

Perhaps because of Augustino Scozzari’s Italian ancestry, Cantarella trusted him, even after he knew that Weinberg was singing to the authorities. Relying on his ability to detect double-dealers, Cantarella was confident that the lightning bolt of an informer would never strike him twice, and continued speaking freely and recklessly with Scozzari into the summer of 2002.

Six months after Weinberg’s defection, Scozzari was still in Cantarella’s good graces and succeeded in taping Cantarella talking about C-10’s top target, Joe Massino. Moreover, Cantarella forgot or disregarded Massino’s caveats against dropping his name, even obliquely, in conversations. After John Gotti’s death in June 2002, Cantarella was troubled by newspaper reports and publicity that Massino’s stock was soaring in the Mafia. “What the paper is saying is that Joe is the big guy now,” the capo related to Scozzari. “That’s not good. You know what I mean? That’s not good.”

That same summer, Cantarella was at it again, boasting to Scozzari that Massino, while in prison in 1990, had intervened to get him his button as a made man. “Actually the guy who did it was Joe. He was in jail. And he sent the word.…He did 10 years.…He said I want justification why Al [Embarrato] is holding Richie [Cantarella] back. Because somebody sent a whisper in Joe’s ear.”

Time was running out for Cantarella, and in August agents raided and searched his luxurious $1.7 million home. They located a safe containing a roster of his crew members and the unlisted telephone numbers of Massino, Vitale (under the heading, “Handsome Sal”), and Bonanno capos. Making a pitch to Cantarella to cooperate, Sallet said, “You’re facing serious charges very soon. We’re not bullshitting you. You know what you’ve done and so do we.”

Stonewalling the agents, Cantarella rejected the offer to switch sides. Instead, complying with Mafia rules, he notified Joe Massino about the raid and the agents’ pressure. He realized that Weinberg and Scozzari—who had also been whisked off the streets—were in the prosecution’s pocket. But he was satisfied that while he might be indicted for economic crimes, government prosecutors could not fasten on him what he most feared—murder raps.

Less than two months later, he was proved wrong. On October 2, 2002, Sallet
and McCaffrey were pounding on his door before dawn, rousing the sleeping Richie and his wife, Lauretta. The acting underboss was indicted on twenty-four racketeering counts, specifying every conceivable Mafia crime, including murder. At age fifty-eight, he faced life imprisonment for a homicide committed ten years earlier and which he assumed the FBI and police had forgotten: the slaying of the Bonannos’ corrupt accomplice at the New York Post, Robert Perrino. There was no way he could have anticipated the diligence of Sallet and McCaffrey in reexamining moldering cases connected to him and other Bonanno rajahs. Working for three years with New York State Police detectives who had originally investigated Perrino’s disappearance, they stitched together sufficient evidence from old wiretaps and a newly cultivated informer connected to the Bath Avenue Boys to link Cantarella to the murder conspiracy.

Handcuffed along with Cantarella was his fifty-five-year-old wife, accused of hiding and laundering his spoils through bank accounts and transactions in her name. Their thirty-one-year-old son Paul was simultaneously grabbed as an enforcer for his father and for participating in robberies and abductions.

Along with the three Cantarellas, twenty other Bonanno mafiosi and associates were indicted in the FBI roundup. Capo Frank Coppa, four months into a five-year sentence on his second stock frauds conviction, was hit with new charges of extorting Barry Weinberg. Traumatized by his first prison stretch, when he burst into tears in front of other inmates, Coppa at sixty-one knew that a RICO conviction of up to twenty additional years was a death knell, and that his concealed $2 million nest egg would be worthless. Before a month elapsed, Coppa took a fateful step that no made man in the seventy-year history of the Bonanno/Massino borgata had ever dared. He became a government witness. Through his lawyer, he notified the FBI that he would cooperate with the prosecution and testify against Massino, Vitale, Cantarella, and all his Mob brethren, in the hope of a sharply reduced sentence. “I don’t want to do any more time,” he appealed to agents and prosecutors.

Previously, when a multitude of “rats” in other families proffered deals with prosecutors, the Bonanno/Massino family had remained a bedrock of loyalty to
omertà
. Even during the trying times and long sentences meted out in the wake of Agent Pistone’s infiltration, not a single soldier or capo had sought a favor from prosecutors or had violated the omertà oath. Coppa’s defection in November 2002, provided the FBI and prosecutors with a gigantic breakthrough in the investigation of Joe Massino. Associated with Massino for a quarter of a century, Coppa could delineate Massino’s rise to power and catalogue the
boss’s multitude of crimes. He could also corroborate Massino’s involvement in gangland hits through the incriminating statements the boss had made to him in convivial moments.

Coppa’s most startling revelation was his eyewitness description of the murder of Sonny Black Napolitano in the basement of a Staten Island home. It was the first account ever obtained of the hit, and Coppa identified the main participants, including Massino. Since boyhood, Coppa had been a partner with Frank Lino in violent and white-collar crimes, and had frolicked with him at cocaine parties and other social events. Now Coppa turned in his lifelong comrade, fingering him as another key performer in Sonny Black’s murder.

Far from finished with his murder disclosures, Coppa bolstered evidence against Richie Cantarella in the Perrino murder, and implicated an even more important figure—Sal Vitale. In his early days as a soldier, Cantarella had been in Coppa’s crew, and Richie bragged to him about helping Vitale lure Perrino to a deadly meeting and getting rid of the body. In another talkative mood, Cantarella gave details to Coppa about having been the getaway driver in the murder of his cousin, Tony Mirra.

From his lawyers and from jailhouse scuttlebutt, Cantarella heard that Coppa had flipped. Held without bail as a danger to the community and stewing in a cell, Cantarella realized that Coppa’s treason would heap more murder charges against him and bury him for life in prison. A month after Coppa crossed the defectors’ Rubicon, the three Cantarellas negotiated plea-bargains and also were absorbed into the Witness Protection Program. The only prospect Cantarella had for reducing a life sentence required him to betray Mafia superiors. That meant helping to convict Sal Vitale and the Mafia’s foremost godfather, Joe Massino.

The tiny cracks in Massino’s security facade were widening, and by January 2003, it was clear that his carefully wrought protective walls had disintegrated. He knew that Coppa and Richard Cantarella and his son Paul had been spirited away in the dead of night from their cells. Free on bail, Mrs. Cantarella had vanished from her Staten Island home, obviously joining her husband and their son in protective custody at a federal prison wing or military base, where high-level informers are usually housed. Conclusive proof that the two captains were cooperating with the government came when their lawyers were summarily replaced by attorneys friendly with the U.S. Attorney’s office.

A master at sniffing out the most subtle tails, Massino saw that he was under siege. He had installed video cameras in the his Howard Beach home for
panoramic views of the placid street, and the cameras confirmed that agents were staked out near his front door. At the start of the New Year, George Hanna, the new Bonanno Squad supervisor, had ordered a twenty-four-hour vigil. Recalling Massino’s flight in 1982 from a pending RICO indictment, and suspecting that he might have established hideaways on his overseas trips, Hanna made sure he would not slither away this time.

At 6:00
A.M
., on January 9, 2003—a day before his sixtieth birthday—Joe Massino was up and dressed when the doorbell rang at his home. There to arrest him were three C-10 squad members, wearing blue raid jackets with yellow FBI lettering on the back; an IRS agent; and a state police detective who had worked on the investigation. “It’s no surprise to him,” Seamus McElearney, a strapping six-foot-tall FBI agent, inferred as Massino, looking unperturbed, extended his wrists for handcuffs. “He knew we were coming. It was just a matter of when.” At a kitchen table, Josie Massino, wrapped in a bathrobe, looked on silently as the agents intoned the Miranda rights against self-incrimination to her husband. From the hallway, before Massino was led to a waiting car, the agents got a narrow peek at expensive furniture and a crystal chandelier in an adjacent dining room.

Kim McCaffrey and Jeff Sallet, who launched the paper chase that had sprung the trap on Massino, had never spoken to him, but he recognized them. “You must be Kimberly and you must be Jeffrey,” he said, singling them out in the arrest team. McCaffrey asked why he was up and dressed so early? “I was on my way to the pastry shop,” he replied, jesting. “I thought you were coming yesterday. I saw surveillance cars in the area.”

Wearing a pocketless black velour jogging suit, Massino had no possessions on him, not a wristwatch nor a penny. “He knows what to expect in jail,” McElearney mused. Once inside a federal detention lockup, all expensive trinkets and money would be taken away and he would be issued prison garb.

On the ride to Manhattan for fingerprint and photograph processing at FBI headquarters, Massino opened the conversation, predicting he would be held without bail. “Frankie Coppa got to work quick,” he continued, showing his awareness of the first Mafioso to double-cross him. Told that he would be charged as a planner and backup shooter in the murder of Sonny Black Napolitano, Massino shot back, “That was a long time ago. I had nothing to do with it.”

Sallet and McCaffrey asked how he had identified them by name without any previous meeting. “You wired up Barry a lot,” he replied, referring to the tapes Weinberg had recorded. Indicating his knowledge of the agents’ backgrounds, he
mentioned that McCaffrey had been recruited by the bureau shortly after college. She wondered where he had picked up the personal information. “You do your homework, I do mine.” He grinned.