Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America's Most Powerful Mafia Empires (122 page)

Tartaglione’s request for leniency required him to do more than testify; he
had to wear a wire and work undercover. Early in May 2003, he returned to New York, notifying the jailed Massino through the family’s grapevine that he would help run the borgata in its hour of need. The deception went smoothly, and he even introduced to Massino’s surrogate leaders a female FBI agent, pretending that she could obtain confidential law-enforcement files from a court employee friend. Over nine months, Big Louie produced forty-five incriminating tape recordings and a miscellany of raw intelligence pinpointing the family’s temporary hierarchy. The new top man appointed by Massino was the acting boss, Anthony “Tony Green” Urso, and Tartaglione’s tapes caught Urso lamenting the consequences of Vitale’s betrayal. “Sal is going to rat on every fucking body.” On another occasion, discussing Vitale’s duplicity and anticipated testimony, Urso added, “How would Sal feel if I killed one of his kids?” Totally hoodwinked, Urso trusted Tartaglione sufficiently to let him review confidential lists of proposed new members in other families.

Remembering Massino’s edict about mentioning his proper name, capos and soldiers on Tartaglione’s tapes usually made cryptic remarks about “our friend” and “the other guy.” A videotape rigged by the FBI of Tartaglione meeting with his crew in a warehouse included shots of wiseguys touching their ears when saying “our friend.” There were slipups, however, and agents heard “the Massino family” from the lips of a careless mobster.

The past also crept up on Duane Goldie Leisenheimer, who as a teenager Massino had taken under his wing. Vitale and other turncoats were generating evidence about Goldie’s involvement in the three capos massacre, the slaying and mutilation of Cesare Bonventre, and numerous crimes sufficient for a RICO conviction and twenty years in prison. Still a newspaper truck driver, the now-married forty-six-year-old Goldie got a surprise visit in June 2003, from the case agents, Sallet and McCaffrey. “You went to jail once for this guy. You don’t have to do it again,” Sallet bluntly advised, referring to Goldie’s fifteen-months’ contempt conviction for refusing to testify about helping Massino hide out in the early 1980s. Considering himself “a standup guy,” Goldie was mum, saying he would consult a lawyer. He also got a stern message from Greg Andres, the lead prosecutor: “You have a lot more to worry about than contempt this time.” Soon after the government’s warnings, Goldie’s lawyer was visited by a private investigator from Massino’s defense, probing to see if Leisenheimer intended
to snitch on his onetime patron. That visit backfired. Convinced his life was in danger, Goldie sprinted into the government’s arms, supplying the prosecution with another witness to buttress its contention that Massino had been a Mafia Goliath for twenty-five years.

By summer’s end in 2003, prosecutors possessed a bumper crop of unanticipated evidence from seven defectors, and a vastly different trial was in preparation against Massino. The original two main codefendants, Vitale and Lino, were in the prosecution’s corner, and superseding indictments placed Massino in a vortex as the lone defendant in a tangled RICO conspiracy: eleven counts and sixteen specific racketeering acts. A case involving one murder, Sonny Black Napolitano’s death, had ballooned into seven homicides and added accusations of attempted murder, arson, loan-sharking, illegal gambling, extortion, and money laundering. The bulk of the new charges, based on Vitale’s confession and his long association with Massino, allowed the prosecution under the RICO law to plumb allegations of “enterprise” crimes dating back more than thirty years. Prominent in the enlarged indictment was the slaughter of the three capos in 1981. Massino had been acquitted in 1987 of “conspiracy” to murder the trio; the new charge did not subject him to double jeopardy because the charge had been altered to a substantive act of having directly participated in the shootings.

An eighth murder charge in the welter of indictments carried the extreme sentence—capital punishment. Largely through Vitale’s grand jury testimony, Massino was accused of placing the contract on Gerlando George-from-Canada Sciascia because he had dared to criticize one of Joe’s favorite mobsters, Anthony T.G. Graziano. The seven other murders had been committed before 1994, the year Congress enacted a statute that allowed the death penalty for conviction on a homicide in “aid of racketeering.” Sciascia was shot to death in 1999, and his murder fell under the provisions giving the government the option of seeking execution upon conviction. The law was aimed principally at leaders of drug cartels and violent street gangs; Massino had the distinction of being the first godfather to possibly face execution for his crimes. Because of evidentiary technicalities in a capital punishment case, the Sciascia murder charge was severed from Massino’s omnibus RICO trial and would be tried separately.

A plethora of criminal defense lawyers ached to represent the accused celebrity godfather Massino, and courthouse gossip suggested that some thirty
attorneys offered themselves as candidates. Massino’s choice was David Breitbart, who facetiously and proudly represents himself to reporters as a “fast-gun lawyer for hire.”

Breitbart said Massino singled him out from the pack “because he wants a fighter who will not be intimidated by government agencies or prosecutors.”

Athletic and brainy as a youngster, Breitbart made the basketball team at the city’s academically rigorous Bronx High School of Science, earned black belt honors in jujitsu, and was a school psychologist, teacher, and reading specialist before becoming a lawyer. After two years as a prosecutor in the Bronx DA’s office, he moved to the defense table, and his first notable client was Leroy “Nicky” Barnes, a major narcotics merchant known as “Mr. Untouchable.” He won acquittals for the drug baron on state murder, drug, and gun charges until federal prosecutors convicted Barnes of heading “the most venal drug ring” in New York in the mid-1970s.

Besides run-of-the-mill civil-suit clients, Breitbart’s regulars included Genovese, Lucchese, and Colombo defendants, and he won a relished acquittal for John “Boobsie” Cerasani in a memorable organized-crime trial. Cerasani was the only accused Bonanno soldier found not guilty in 1982 on racketeering charges stemming from Joe Pistone’s infiltration of the family. Priding himself on his ability to demolish prosecution witness, Breitbart proclaimed his scalding cross-examinations were “the blast furnace of truth.” Barbara Jones, a former prosecutor who became a federal judge, was so impressed by trial battles with Breitbart that she invited him every year to demonstrate cross-examination techniques to her students at Fordham University’s Law School.

Facing off in court as lead prosecutor against Massino was Greg (his given name, not an abbreviation) Andres. An Assistant U.S. Attorney in Brooklyn, he was born in Alexandria, Virginia, thirty-six years earlier—about the same time Breitbart began his law career. On the fast track as a premier prosecutor, Andres had a distinguished academic record. He was sufficiently scrappy to qualify for the Notre Dame boxing team and to survive two bouts of malaria while in the Peace Corps in Benin, West Africa. A quick learner about the Mob’s tenets, in less than five years he had helped imprison more than one hundred defendants, most of whom pled guilty. His biggest victories came serving on the prosecutorial team that convicted the Bonanno consigliere Anthony Spero, and he obtained a guilty plea from the next consigliere, T.G. Graziano.

Acrimony ruled as soon as Breitbart and Andres met in pretrial skirmishes over routine motions and the defense’s demands for quick release of discovery
materials. Andres won most of the crucial legal disputes. Of particular importance for the prosecution, he was allowed to elicit testimony about George-from-Canada Sciascia’s rubout, even though that case would be tried separately. Additionally, the prosecution was permitted to cite through witnesses other uncharged murders and crimes linking Massino to the overall RICO enterprise conspiracy. Although the jury would not decide Massino’s complicity in the uncharged crimes, evidence about them added credibility to the prosecution’s portrayal of him as a long-established, vicious criminal. A sore point for Breitbart was the Sciascia murder accusation, with the specter of execution. “They’re raising the stakes to coerce a plea,” Breitbart asserted. “He’s sixty years old and a plea is the same as capital punishment for him. It means dying in jail.”

For once in his life, Joe Massino was the underdog, and no one understood that better than Breitbart and his associate counsel, Flora Edwards, as trial testimony began in May 2004 in a downtown Brooklyn courtroom. Before the first witness was called, the lawyers were clued-in on the prosecution’s basic attack plan, and it seemed overwhelming. One, perhaps two, turncoats were almost standard props as witnesses in RICO dramas. But never before at a godfather trial had the prosecution presented as its cornerstone theme a coven of seven formidable wiseguys, starring a confessed underboss, Sal Vitale.

Massino had personally picked Flora Edwards to “second seat,” back up, Breitbart, aware of her reputation in organized-crime cases as “the princess of paper.” She could expeditiously produce cogent, well-researched motions and briefs in the midst of hectic trials. And Massino’s trial promised to be a fierce contest in which a seemingly minor legal point could affect the jury or prove decisive in a later appeal.

The two attorneys from the onset of jury selection faced another extraordinary task: diminishing the notoriety clinging to Massino. A panel of twelve jurors and eight alternates had been screened by the judge for their presumed lack of bias concerning Mafia allegations. Yet they surely scented a whiff of danger in the way they were treated. For their protection, jurors’ names were withheld from the defense and prosecution, and they were forbidden from revealing their surnames or addresses to each other. As another measure to protect their anonymity and prevent jury tampering, federal marshals escorted them back and forth from home to court every day.

Breitbart’s counterstroke was a Commission trial-type defense. Acknowledging that it was foolhardy to deny the Mafia’s existence, he tried to turn the concession
to Massino’s advantage. “Whether or not Joe Massino is the boss is not sufficient to prove the underlying acts,” Breitbart addressed the jury, stressing that the prosecution lacked direct evidence that Massino had committed a single crime. “You can vote not guilty even if you find he’s a boss.”

The defense’s toughest challenge was undercutting Sal Vitale. Both sides knew that Vitale’s relationship with Massino overlapped all the major charges, and that his evidence glued together the testimony of the other defectors. The courtroom’s two hundred seats were packed with spectators, many of them prosecutors and defense lawyers professionally interested in the bout between the elite witness and the masterly cross-examiner.

A surreal melodrama also was under way between Vitale and his sister, Josie Massino, seated in the first gallery row, twenty feet from her husband. Always professing Joe’s innocence to reporters, she sat stoically on the numbingly hard wooden benches every day of the trial—but never so attentively as during Sal’s five days in the witness stand. Vitale avoided looking at her and her daughters, Adeline and Joanne, seated alongside her, even when his testimony concerned claims that he had comforted them with loving attention and money while Massino was in prison. Josie’s eyes bore in at Vitale, the man she once doted on as her “baby brother,” with the intensity of heat-seeking missiles. “He’s my flesh and blood, but how could you forgive what he has done not only to me but to my husband and the father of my children?” she told John Marzulli, a Daily News reporter, during a recess.

Breitbart’s acerbic questions and deft attempts to extract admissions from Vitale that jealousy and envy had led him to cover up his own crimes by framing Massino failed. The lawyer was unable to expose any glaring inconsistencies or flat-out lies, managing only once to crack Vitale’s deadpan, low-voiced aplomb. Asked to point out Massino in the courtroom, Vitale’s contempt was palpable. “Yeah, the gentleman right there with the glasses. The guy who’s staring at me. That’s him.”

His testimony over, a relieved Vitale sprang up as if expelled from a fighter pilot’s ejection seat, darting out a side door without a backward glance at his sister and brother-in-law.

Every day, Josie dressed in well-tailored suits and brought two large bags of home-cooked and takeout food for her husband’s lunch, exchanging whispered words and affectionate glances with him. She listened impassively to accounts of hideous atrocities attributed to Massino and the revelations of his romantic peccadilloes while on the lam. Massino’s uniform was a boxy blue or gray suit
and open-collared white shirt. Scribbling notes and passing them to his lawyers at the defense table, he chewed gum or snacked incessantly on luncheon leftovers or candy. A diabetic, during breaks in the testimony he used medical equipment to test his blood-sugar level and blood pressure.

The court sessions, usually lasting up to eight hours, seemed to weigh on Massino; his face became more chalky and haggard as turncoat witnesses and former FBI agents replayed conversations and incidents recounting his activities over a thirty-year period. It was a courtroom version of
This Is Your Life
, with the prosecution displaying a huge board with some sixty mug shots and dozens of surveillance photos of dead and living mobsters assertedly linked to his underworld ascension. Instead of hearing proper names, the jury had to adjust to the Mob’s preference for identifying each other by arcane nicknames: Marty Bopalone, Louis Ha Ha, Tommy Karate, Joe Beans, Louie Bagels, and Peter Rabbit.

Possessing almost identical
curricula vitae
, the prosecution’s seven main defectors presented a composite chronicle of late-twentieth-century Mafia culture. All were children of working-class urban families, had little formal education, were early and eager recruits, and all became successful and wealthy mafiosi. Their histories demonstrated that ignorance was not an impediment to advancement in the Mob. Exemplifying that trend, James Tartaglione testified that he had difficulty comprehending what he read, could not recall pertinent dates, and was unaware that Cosa Nostra was Italian for “Our Thing.” He thought it meant “friends.” Only one of the seven showed a glimmer of remorse for the murders and other gory events that encompassed their lives. Frank Lino broke down, crying softly, while reliving the ambush of the three capos. In that episode, however, he was himself almost a victim rather than a hit man. All of them agreed with Tartaglione about carrying out a gangland whacking: “It’s either him or me. If I disobey an order, I’m the one who’s going to get killed.”