Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America's Most Powerful Mafia Empires (121 page)

The godfather had a lot of help with his “homework.” Cantarella had spoken with Sallet and McCaffrey during the raid at his home and he must have described them to Massino. Before Cantarella became a cooperative witness, discovery evidence, including details of Weinberg’s wiring, had been turned over to Cantarella’s lawyer, an attorney who represented many Bonanno defendants. The agents presumed that someone in the attorney’s office relayed the discovery information or copies of the documents listing their names to Massino.

While Massino was being processed at the FBI’s offices, he was introduced to Nora Conley, C-10’s second-in-command. “That’s similar to the underboss,” he quipped.

Another big catch that morning was the titular underboss, Sal Vitale. On bail and under house arrest, he had been awaiting formal sentencing for his loan-sharking and money-laundering ventures at the European American Bank. For that plea arrangement, he had been assured a sentence of less than four years. Conviction on new RICO counts would be far graver, translating almost certainly into life imprisonment for fifty-five-year-old Good-Looking Sal.

Upon completion of Vitale’s processing on the FBI’s twenty-sixth floor, McCaffrey and Sallet played a divide-and-conquer card. They showed him the legal memorandum for an order to detain Joe Massino without bail as a danger to the community and a flight risk, which prosecutors would present to a judge that afternoon at Massino’s arraignment. Of particular interest to Vitale, the agents pointed out, was a statement in the court papers that severely affected him. On the record, prosecutors stated they had evidence that Massino believed that Vitale might be a deserter-informer—and was ready to kill him.

“You have to make a decision,” Sallet said after Vitale read the court document. “There are a couple of ways to go.” Vitale was silent as a stone. But to McCaffrey, his dour eyes signified whirling emotions about loyalty to a brother-in-law who intended to whack him. “Sal,” she thought, “knows it’s the end of the line.”

The Domino Syndrome

W
ith his waddling walk, his copious size exaggerated by his black warm-up suit, Joe Massino cut an odd figure in a courtroom on the afternoon of his arrest. Crowing over his indictment, FBI and prosecution officials at news conferences hailed the apprehension of “the last Don” from the five families still at liberty. As Massino had anticipated, the prosecution won its motion to detain him indefinitely as a “danger to the community” until his trial. At the arraignment, Sal Vitale was automatically remanded to a cell because he was awaiting sentence for his earlier racketeering conviction.

Massino seemed unruffled, his composure probably founded on his quick appraisal of the specifics in the indictment. Most of the charges were boilerplate enterprise allegations of profiting from gambling and loan-sharking that are hurled in almost every RICO trial. The headline charge was his having orchestrated and participated in the murder twenty-two years earlier of Sonny Black Napolitano. At the hearing, prosecutors revealed that they had two unidentified made men and thirteen others lined up to testify against him on all the counts. It was obvious from prosecutorial claims that Frank Coppa and Richard Cantarella were the omertà violators, and probably the only witnesses who might seriously endanger Massino. Coppa had been present at the Napolitano hit and Cantarella had inside knowledge about Joe’s activities as boss. Since
there were no tapes in Joe’s own voice to implicate him, the prosecution’s strategy would depend heavily on the reliability of two career-criminal witnesses with a history of deception and lying. An experienced lawyer worth his salt probably could demolish them on cross-examination by pounding at their selfish motives to save their own necks by sacrificing Massino’s. From first impressions, the other government witnesses apparently lacked firsthand evidence against him and appeared to pose no major threat.

“This guy can’t hurt me,” was Massino’s standard refrain at strategy meetings with his lawyers and those representing Sal Vitale and another codefendant, Frank Lino, who was indicted for Napolitano’s murder and other broad racketeering acts. The critical charge against Vitale—the decade-old disappearance and presumed murder of the
New York Post’s
delivery official, Robert Perrino, also was wobbly, even if Cantarella admitted his role and testified against the underboss.

Outwardly, Massino and Vitale, each charged with separate murders, appeared to be in lockstep, presenting a unified defense on the same racketeering counts. A month after their arrest, the brothers-in-law sat side by side at a pretrial hearing when Greg Andres, the chief prosecutor, detonated a blockbuster. Explaining why Massino was jailed in Brooklyn and Vitale in Manhattan, and why they were kept apart when not in a courtroom, Andres said the government had reliable information that Massino had considered “hurting” Vitale. “Hurting” was the lawyer’s euphemism for murder. Andres did not reveal that the information came from debriefings of Coppa and Cantarella. Both turncoats had heard Joe’s harsh opinion that Sal probably won a soft sentence in Long Island only by secretly cooperating and spying on him for the government.

Talking with his lawyer, John Mitchell, who had also represented him in the Long Island plea-bargain, Vitale brushed off the prosecutor’s assertion that his life was endangered as a “ploy, bullshit to get me to cooperate.” But Massino still remained dubious of Vitale’s reliability. At the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, he told fellow inmate Frank Lino that he was “very upset” with Sal and was planning to “give him a receipt,” his Mob lingo for killing. Massino’s coterie of Bonanno defendants at the jail joined in the chorus, referring to Vitale as “Fredo,” the traitorous Corleone brother in
The Godfather: Part II
.

Two weeks after the court hearing, Massino’s suspicions became a reality. Through a son’s lawyer friend, Vitale secretly notified the prosecution that he wanted to bolt. Quickly transferred from a Manhattan cell to a more secure government setting, he began uncoiling the secrets of three decades of crime
partnerships with Massino and other mafiosi. An astonished John Mitchell got a hand-delivered letter signed by Vitale, stating that he had been peremptorily fired as his lawyer. “He gets the Academy Award for his performance,” Mitchell observed as the news of Vitale’s defection sank in. “I saw him in jail on a Friday, and he was his usual charming, affable, self-effacing self. A few days later he was gone. He even sent me part of the fee, $25,000; that’s not the kind of thing you do if you’re considering to go over. I’m flabbergasted.”

A seed sown by Agents McCaffrey and Sallet on the day of Vitale’s arrest had borne fruit. They had shown him the prosecution’s court memorandum that Massino had talked with other mobsters about eliminating him. The threat took hold quickly. On the very day of their joint arraignment, Vitale decided to desert Massino as soon as it could be safely arranged. “That’s when I thought my thoughts and said, ‘He doesn’t deserve the respect and honor with me sitting next to him,’” Vitale related at a debriefing to agents and prosecutors. Displaying his new helpful spirit, Vitale turned over his rackets’ ready cash, $481,000 hidden at his home and in a bank safe deposit box under an alias. Another item of interest at his home was his shy book, a catalogue of his and Massino’s loan-shark clients and their arrears.

Like all witnesses angling for a reduced sentence, Vitale was required to chart the details of all his crimes and his knowledge of those committed by other mobsters. He pleaded guilty to having participated in eleven murders and a bevy of RICO violations over thirty years. His quest for leniency instead of life imprisonment hinged on a 5K1.1 document, a letter to the sentencing judge from prosecutors outlining his value to the government and recommending a reduction in sentence. Vitale did extract one concession from the prosecutors: none of his admissions or information could be used to prosecute Josie Massino, his sister and Massino’s wife. In effect, he immunized her from complicity in receiving Mob payoffs while Massino was imprisoned and knowingly relaying Mafia messages between him and her husband.

Confirmation of Vitale’s defection was delivered by defense lawyers at a conference with Massino and Frank Lino at the Brooklyn jail. Although Massino knew that Vitale’s emergence as the prosecution’s most sensational witness was a shattering setback, to his lawyers he appeared stolid, absorbing the news without indicating that it troubled him. Lino tried to appear equally calm and undisturbed, but inwardly he was desolated. The lone witness who had previously tied him to Sonny Black’s murder was Frank Coppa, and without strong corroboration his testimony might be discredited as a self-serving attempt
to curry favor in exchange for early release from prison. Sal Vitale would be a more threatening witness. He could corroborate Lino’s role in three additional homicides and compromise him in the notorious massacre of the three capos. “This meeting is a funeral and I’m dead,” Lino reckoned, not daring to speak up and show weakness in Massino’s presence.

Lino, whose son Joseph was a soldier in the family, was in a quandary. He feared Massino would retaliate against his children and grandchildren if he suspected that his loyalty was buckling. Nevertheless, he wanted a deal to avoid a lifetime in prison, and he slipped a message to the prosecution that he might cooperate. Placed in solitary confinement for his own protection, Lino refused to attend strategy meetings with Massino and their lawyers while he haggled with the U.S. Attorney’s staff. He even refused to speak with the new attorney retained by his son Joseph. Lino had no complaint about eighty-one days in solitary confinement, which he called “the Hole” and “the Shoe,” considering it far safer than living with the general prison population once it was whispered that he was a canary. Proffering with the prosecution took almost three months before Lino signed on to become “a cooperative witness.” Obligated to identify everyone whom he knew was a mafioso or an associate, Lino included his son’s name in the Bonanno/Massino corps of soldiers. “You already know he’s a made member. What’s the big deal?” he rationalized to FBI agents.

By the spring of 2003, Massino and his lawyers knew that four self-confessed, highly placed mobsters were primed to testify against him, but they did not know that there were additional converts abandoning him.

Richie Cantarella’s arrest the previous autumn had required Massino to appoint an acting capo for his crew, and his choice was Joey D’Amico. A made man since he was twenty-two D’Amico was sufficiently calloused at an early age to kill his cousin Tony Mirra on Massino’s orders to avenge the Donny Brasco fiasco. Showing his fortitude, D’Amico took an eighteen-month rap for perjury in the wake of the grand jury investigation of the three capos murders. Later, in the 1990s, he gained a reputation as “a party guy,” who enjoyed coke and marijuana interludes. Finally settling down as a member of his cousin Richie Cantarella’s crew, D’Amico concentrated on family rackets and gained Massino’s respect.

Several days before Massino’s January arrest, two new solders from Cantarella’s crew, Gino Galestro and Joseph Sabella, requested an urgent meeting with their acting captain. At Radio Mexico, an unpretentious restaurant near the Fulton Fish Market, unlikely to be on the FBI’s surveillance screen as a Mob hangout, the two soldiers reported that Cantarella’s Staten Island home was suddenly vacant, the
driveway packed with uncleared snow; Cantarella’s wife, free on bail, had disappeared; and their grandchildren had been abruptly removed from their schools. The signs were clear: the Cantarellas were in the Witness Protection Program.

“Go home, hug your kids, you’re probably going to jail,” D’Amico dejectedly told Galestro and Sabella. His cousin Richie was probably ratting out everyone in the crew and would incriminate him in hits they had done on Tony Mirra and Enrico Mazzeo. “He’s going to bury me,” was the thought dominating D’Amico for days until he made a telephone call to George Hanna, then the supervisor of the FBI’s C-10 Bonanno Squad. Secretly pleading guilty to four murders and a parcel of other crimes, D’Amico agreed to work undercover against the family. In another FBI breakthrough, Joey D’Amico became the first made man in the Bonanno/Massino borgata to wear a wire and stealthily record evidence to capsize the gang he had sworn to protect.

On a Florida holiday in 2002, before his arrest, Joe Massino stopped in Boca Raton to chat with and welcome back from prison James Big Louie Tartaglione. A million-dollar earner for himself and the family, Big Louie had been an immensely successful loan shark (he always had ten to fifteen suckers on his hook) until he was nailed in 1997 for extortion and imprisoned for five years. Well off financially at sixty-five, Tartaglione was ready for sunny retirement, although Massino wanted him to return to New York and again serve on his executive committees. Still on supervised release (parole) and aware of the FBI crackdowns against Graziano and Cantarella, Tartaglione stalled until the news of Vitale’s defection struck like a lightning bolt. Instead of heading north to help out Massino, Tartaglione contacted Ruth Nordenbrook, the federal prosecutor in Brooklyn who had obtained his guilty plea to loan-sharking. Although she had convicted him, Tartaglione was grateful to Nordenbrook for having helped his daughter with a medical problem during the court proceedings. From Tartaglione’s comments, Nordenbrook, a seasoned Mafia prosecutor, understood that he was finished as a mafioso and eager to jump ship, but she cautioned him that there was no guarantee of a lighter sentence. Meeting in Florida with her and C-10 Agents Joseph Bonavolonta and Gregory Massa, Tartaglione admitted, “If Sal tells the truth, I’m in trouble. I have a lot of mortal sins that Sal knows about.” Among his worst sins were participating in two hits and helping dispose of the bodies of the three capos killed in 1981.