Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America's Most Powerful Mafia Empires (123 page)
Authors: Selwyn Raab
Breitbart’s thrusts to puncture and impeach the defectors’ accounts of Massino’s history erupted into testy duels with Andres. At the start, presiding U.S. District Court Judge Nicholas Garaufis reined in the adversaries with his gift for witty, ego-cutting admonishments. As the cross-examinations became more heated, so did the bickering between Breitbart and Andres. The prosecutor complained that Breitbart misstated facts and uttered improper, stage-whispered asides to the jury, demeaning and falsely characterizing answers by
witnesses. In return, Breitbart protested that Andres besmirched his reputation, and at one point, sought a mistrial, saying the judge’s restrictions on his questions and court conduct created “an impossible climate for my client.”
An even-tempered jurist with a ready smile who sometimes sat on the judge’s elevated bench without his formal black robe, Garaufis rebuked both adversaries, “Hold your tongues or there will be fines.” His sharpest censure was aimed at Breitbart. The judge once abruptly halted a cross-examination and sent the jury out of the court because Breitbart ignored his instructions about improper questions. “Your sarcasm oozes out of your lips,” said Garaufis, ordering Breitbart to sit down and cease complaining that his rulings were biased against Massino.
A parade of seventy-eight witnesses and over three hundred exhibits, photographs, and audiotapes were presented by the prosecution during nine weeks of testimony. The defense’s lone witness was an FBI agent called in a feeble move to discredit Vitale by showing a minor inconsistency between Vitale’s testimony and information he had earlier provided in a debriefing. Outside the court, Breitbart, who turned sixty-five during the trial, confidently pronounced that his cross-examinations had won the day, without the necessity of rebuttal testimony.
Breitbart’s last chance was the summation to the jury, and his heaviest obstacle was deflating the seven turncoats’ aggregate testimony. He accused the FBI and the prosecutors of inventing and embellishing indictments through disreputable informers to justify a string of costly, failed investigations of Massino over three decades. Despite numerous electronic eavesdropping attempts, he noted, the FBI had never obtained an incriminating word from Massino’s lips, nor was there a fingerprint or other physical evidence implicating him in a crime. To get Massino, Breitbart asserted, the government had corrupted justice by promising freedom or light sentences to sociopaths responsible for a total of eighteen murders. “This group of individuals is the most selfish, most arrogant, and most corrupt who have ever been put together in the history of the courtroom,” he told the jury. “Give us Joe Massino and you can go home.”
Barely looking at his notes in a five-hour recitation, frequently seeking eye contact with jurors, the lawyer’s greatest venom was reserved for Vitale, calling him a “crazy madman, despised by his people,” and who “hated Joe Massino.” Tacitly admitting that Massino was a Mob boss, Breitbart tried to use the concession to turn the tables on the prosecution’s own expert testimony that only a godfather could order hits. Since the seven murders Massino was charged with
at this trial occurred before he became boss in 1992, the lawyer insisted that fact alone proved his innocence. Citing the Cosa Nostra’s power structure and its table-of-command rules, Breitbart contended that Massino, a capo before 1992, had lacked the authority to order the killings. He tried to deflect blame and responsibility for the crimes onto the previous ruler, Phil Rastelli, and other Bonanno bigshots. In a paradoxical interpretation of evidence, he characterized Massino’s reign as benign and without bloodshed. “He showed a love of life, not a love of death,” Breitbart declared.
Throughout the trial, Andres and two other government prosecutors, Robert Henoch and Mitra Hormozi, obtained testimony from the turncoats that Massino had been the de facto boss long before he was officially installed. Anticipating the defense’s contention, Henoch in opening remarks to the jury asserted that under Massino’s rule, “If you messed up, you didn’t get a bad report card; failure was punished by death.”
Delivering part of the prosecution’s summation, Hormozi placed the onus for the contract hits on Massino. “Some might say the person who gives the orders, or decides whether someone lives or dies, is more responsible than the person who pulled the trigger.”
It fell to Andres, in an energetic rebuttal of Breitbart’s arguments, to tie together all the strands of the prosecution’s mammoth case. Defending the use of defectors as a necessary evil to uproot Mafia bosses, he ticked off the murders and felonies that had been unsolvable without their admissions. The deserters, he acknowledged, were selfish and looking to get out of prison, but he pledged that all would be sentenced. “They’re criminals, murderers, part of a criminal enterprise—that man’s enterprise,” he concluded, pointing at Massino, “the one person yet to be held accountable—the highest-ranking man in the enterprise.”
Eleven reporters covering the trial followed a pressroom tradition by establishing a pool bet on the length of jury deliberations and the verdict. They disagreed on how long the panel of ten women and two men would be out, but were unanimous about the outcome: guilty. Five days later, on July 30, 2004, the jury forewoman needed almost fifteen minutes to announce the unanimous verdicts on eleven counts and fifty specific racketeering acts. “Oh, God,” Massino’s daughter Adeline moaned, her head bowed in her hands, as the forewoman pronounced “Guilty” or “Proven” sixty-one times. The jury also required Massino to forfeit almost $10.4 million, the estimated amount of his criminal haul over one decade. The judgment included the seizure of the Casa Blanca, his favorite restaurant.
When it was all over, Massino turned to his wife, gesturing with open palms as if silently asking, “What are you going to do?”
Despite numerous and crafty precautions to avoid the fate that befell other godfathers, Joe Massino never anticipated the confluence of events that swamped him. He had thwarted conventional FBI tactics for more than a decade and had faith in his invulnerability. How could he have foreseen that the two forensic accountants, Agents Sallet and McCaffrey, would launch an unparalleled examination of the entire family? They brought about his downfall through a labyrinthian paper chase that stemmed from one of his rare law-abiding acts, filing income tax returns.
By using capos to run the family’s financial engines, Massino devised insulated walls that worked efficiently for ten years to ward off routine FBI scrutiny. By enriching captains and their sons, he felt assured they had too much at stake to incriminate him. He visualized the decentralization system as a rock-solid barrier to indictments; it became an Achilles’ heel when the capos turned on him as their only chance for leniency.
Massino’s biggest blunder was his mistreatment of Sal Vitale. Even so, the humiliated brother-in-law apparently was prepared at first to ride out their joint RICO storm. All evidence indicates that Vitale had no intention of betraying Massino until Sallet and McCaffrey warned him about the plot on his life. If Vitale had remained steadfast, Massino would have stood a strong chance of beating the original indictment and again frustrating the FBI’s best efforts to bring him to justice. A traditionalist, Massino broke a Cosa Nostra cardinal rule by blatantly “disrespecting” Vitale, his most dedicated supporter for thirty years. It was a fatal error. Vitale’s decision to become “a C.W.,” a cooperative witness, was the decisive factor in accelerating the domino syndrome of defections that cinched Massino’s conviction.
His judgment mistake about Vitale had enormous ramifications beyond Massino’s own plight. Returning from prison in 1992, he had invigorated a fading borgata into a sturdy clan of more than 150 soldiers in 15 crews prospering from family rackets. Much of Massino’s illicit army, however, was erased by the sudden spate of important indictments aided immensely by Vitale’s encyclopedic knowledge of the family’s crimes and incriminating remarks obtained through Big Louie Tartaglione’s undercover tapes. The new evidence sparked mass arrests of the family’s second tier of leaders along with thirty-two capos
and soldiers. Over two years, almost half of the gang’s cadre—some sixty members and most veteran commanders—were imprisoned or awaiting trial.
Heading the newly arrested list was Vincent “Vinny Gorgeous” Basciano, Massino’s latest handpicked acting boss. Denied bail on a RICO-murder indictment, Basciano in November 2004 found himself alongside Massino in Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center. A beauty salon owner, whose rackets were mainly in the Bronx, Basciano, 45, was nicknamed as much for his profession as for his supposed good looks.
Vinny Gorgeous had a lot to discuss with Massino concerning their mutual problems, and the boss, aka Joe the Ear, was suddenly an attentive listener. He realized that Basciano could be the key to his future. Betrayed by a nest of Mob “rats,” Massino, soon after his conviction decided to convert. Astonishing law-enforcement officials, he volunteered to become an informant. And, he was using the unsuspecting Basciano as his ace-in-the hole for cutting a deal with the government for leniency. He claimed that he could implicate Basciano in a parcel of unsolved, serious felonies and get the acting boss to talk about a spectacular crime that he was planning—the murder of a prosecutor.
In early January 2005, Massino recorded two jailhouse meets with Basciano; the topics ranged from continued Bonanno operations to unsolved murders. The most explosive item supposedly proposed by Basciano was a hit on Greg Andres, the federal attorney in charge of Bonanno family prosecutions.
Based largely on Basciano’s alleged remarks, in late January he was charged with conspiring to kill Andres. Moreover, the superseding indictment disclosed a bombshell: Massino was cooperating with his former arch enemies, the government team that had long pursued him. His reasons for joining “Team America,” were easy to fathom. Law-enforcement officials and defense lawyers knew that he wanted his relatives to retain some of his $10 million loot, and hoped to spare his wife and his eighty-nine-year-old mother from eviction from their homes. (The government planned to seize the houses as having been acquired through criminal proceeds.)
Another compelling factor for betraying his Mob family was the mandatory life imprisonment awaiting him for his 2004 RICO conviction. And looming over him was a possible sentence of execution by legal injection if convicted at a second trial for ordering the 1999 Mob murder of Gerlando Sciascia.
Besides taping Basciano, Massino reportedly tipped off agents to the gangland graveyard where they dug up the remains of Philip Giaccone and Dominick Trinchera, the capos massacred two decades earlier on his orders.
Law-enforcement officials also were eager to unlock Massino’s secrets about his forty years as a major mobster and his knowledge of recent crimes committed by higher-ups in the other four families. (In an ironic turnabout, Massino retained a former foe, Edward McDonald, to negotiate a deal with prosecutors for sentence breaks. McDonald had headed the Eastern District’s Organized Crime Strike Force when it convicted and imprisoned Massino as a Mob racketeer for the first time in 1986. With McDonald pitching for Massino, at least one notable compromise was reached with prosecutors. Massino pleaded guilty to the hit on Sciascia and the government withdrew its request for the maximum penalty—death.) Spared the death sentence, Massino, in June 2005, was ordered by Judge Nicholas Garaufis to serve two consecutive life terms.
For his cooperation, Massino obtained a $1 million financial break, which allowed his wife to keep their faux-Georgian home. Josephine Massino turned over to the government about $9 million, including $7.6 million in cash, gold bars, and real estate properties. In relinquishing the criminally acquired nest egg, Mrs. Massino indicated that a marital rift had developed over her husband’s abandonment of
omertà
. The long-devoted wife informed reporters that she disapproved of Joe’s apostasy and was uncertain about visiting him in prison.
Massino, the Mafia’s highest-ranking canary, can still harbor a hope for freedom. His double life sentence could be shortened if prosecutors find that his testimony and disclosures prove effective in a raft of high-profile Cosa Nostra cases.
Once viewed as a pillar of the Mafia’s old-world morals and omertà, Massino is the first New York-area boss to become a turncoat. (The only other Cosa Nostra chieftain to testify against his family was Philadelphia’s Ralph Natale, who turned in 2000 after being convicted on RICO charges.) Long portrayed by law enforcement and mobsters as the last major twentieth-century don, Massino was looked upon as the Mafia’s savior. His final handiwork at age sixty-two, however, left the Bonnano borgata in shambles and his conversion threatened other Mafia families.
“Like everyone he had previously condemned and tried to kill for cooperating, he too cracked,” said a veteran lawyer who defended Bonanno wiseguys, and who asked to be quoted anonymously. Summing up the views of other attorneys who represent mafiosi defendants, he added: “At the end, after a lifetime of crime, Joe was just another hypocrite. He desperately wanted ‘a pass,’ a chance to walk the streets again.”
Back to the CavesA
t the dawn of a new century, the American Mafia was portrayed as a crushed Colossus. With numbing frequency, prosecutors and FBI officials were unsealing indictments that seemingly decimated the Mob’s sacred stronghold in New York. The message from the gleeful authorities was clear: the once-invincible five families, together with borgatas in the rest of the country, were nearing extinction. Some enthusiasts rhapsodized that it was the “Twilight of the Godfathers”. The combined federal and state campaigns were arguably the most successful anticrime expedition in American history. Over a span of two decades, twenty-four Mob families, once the best-organized and most affluent criminal associations in the nation, were virtually eliminated or seriously undermined. (By comparison, a more costly half-century campaign against the narcotics scourge remains a Sisyphean failure.)
September 11, 2001, however, radically transformed that rosy scenario.
The terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon endowed the Cosa Nostra with an undeserved bequest: renewed hope for survival.
The events of 9/11 have been a decisive factor in altering the Mob’s prospects. The hijacked planes that destroyed the Twin Towers and ripped into the Pentagon, killing nearly three thousand innocent people, indirectly provided a reprieve for the Mafia. Since those kamikaze raids by Al Qaeda, the FBI
and regional police forces justifiably have been dedicated to one paramount mission: guarding against terrorist attacks.
But even before 9/11, federal and local investigations of the Mafia were slowing down, official logic having concluded that the Mob, a terminally ill enemy, required less attention. Most indictments and convictions garnered in the first years of the millennium had been generated by investigations long in the pipeline, begun during the apogee of the FBI and state efforts in the 1990s. The first years of the new century saw fewer resources committed against wiseguys throughout the country, and 9/11 accelerated that trend. For three months after the World Trade Center carnage, almost all Mafia squad agents in New York were pulled off active investigations to pitch in on counterterrorism work. Some agents were reassigned for as long as seven months, and some never returned to Cosa Nostra duties. “There’s no question that major operational plans were postponed for a time after 9/11,” James Margolin, an FBI spokesman, concedes.
Counterespionage and the Mafia had been the two uppermost FBI concerns for over a quarter of a century. Abruptly, the Mob was reduced to a backseat status. Announcing the bureau’s revised agenda in May 2002, FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III significantly excluded the Mafia in evaluating the agency’s most pressing challenges. “Protect the United States from terrorist attack” headed the list; preventing violent and major white-collar crimes and combating public corruption had displaced the Cosa Nostra, which was relegated to the lower end of the priority table.
Other examples of the downgrading were evident. Even bureau-speak was symbolically altered at the FBI’s Washington headquarters where the Organized Crime Section, which had overseen all “LCN” investigations, was renamed the “Transnational Criminal Enterprise Section.”
For over two decades, every FBI assistant director placed at the helm of the New York office, the largest of fifty-six field branches, always came with extensive experience in supervising Mafia investigations. Indicative of the changing times, Mueller revised that pattern in 2003, selecting an expert on counterterrorism, Pasquale D’Amuro, to New York’s top post. The five family squads were reduced in size, remaining under the umbrella of the bureau’s Criminal Division while a substantially enlarged “Counter Terrorism Division” was created as an independent unit.
Overall, in the nation, the FBI repositioned more than five hundred of its eleven thousand agents from traditional crime-fighting duties to the struggle
against Al Qaeda and its terrorist offshoots. Officials acknowledged that full-time organized-crime squads were cut or eliminated, but the precise numbers are secret.
In New York City, the linchpin in the FBI’s crusade against the American Mafia, a sizable portion of its eleven hundred agents were moved to antiterrorism operations. At the high point of the FBI’s war against New York’s borgatas in the 1990s, as many as 350 agents and 100 police investigators worked full- or part-time on Mafia task forces. By 2005, that contingent of 450 was trimmed by roughly two-thirds. Some one hundred agents were assigned permanently or temporarily, aided by a handful of New York Police Department officers, instead of the one hundred police officers that once reinforced the bureau’s Mob squads. Meanwhile, the Counter Terrorism Division was beefed up to more than three hundred permanent agents, plus four hundred investigators from other federal agencies and the NYPD.
Defending the personnel transfers, the FBI brass found abundant grounds for minimizing the Mafia as a threat. Many believed that the government had achieved its prime goal of dismembering the Mob to the status it held at the beginning of the twentieth century: a clutch of loose-knit, quarrelsome street gangs lacking competent leadership. “Their future is dim and fraught with peril,” WK Williams, the FBI official in Washington directing the bureau’s nationwide efforts against the Mafia, predicted in a 2004 interview. (Williams uses initials for his given names without periods.)
Confident that the Mafia’s glory days were over, optimists were convinced that a few final nails would seal its coffin. To support that contention, current and former law-enforcement officials could cite a lengthy tableau of defeats inflicted on La Cosa Nostra.
1. Only families in New York and Chicago, the largest traditional bases, retained a semblance of organizational frameworks. Elsewhere in the nation, the twenty-odd borgatas were in disarray or practically defunct, except in areas where the New York and Chicago families had branches, especially in Florida. The remaining strength of the Mob was largely concentrated in New York and the Northeast Corridor, according to Williams.
2. Almost all established leaders in the New York and the nation’s important families were in prison.
3.
Omertà
—the protective code of manhood and silence—had crumbled.
An endless exodus of turncoats was seeking shelter from RICO punishment by cooperating for lenient sentences. Even big shots were “turning” after a half century in which not a single leader or capo had switched sides.
4. Former Italian-American neighborhoods, transformed by demographic and sociological changes, no longer served as sanctuaries and as hubs for enlisting generations of reliable recruits. Discipline was unraveling and wannabes—like the Bath Avenue Boys in the Bonanno family—were increasingly addicted to drugs, vulnerable to arrests, and tattling to save their skins.
5. Racketeering alliances with core unions, most notably the teamsters’ and construction trades’ locals, had been weakened or severed through wholesale convictions of corrupt labor leaders and the appointment of internal watchdogs.
6. Money trees in Las Vegas for the most powerful families had been chopped down by government oversight of the teamsters’ union, preventing union loans to Mob-tarnished hotels, and through acquisitions of the largest casinos by legitimate multinational corporations. The days of skimming gambling profits had apparently ended, and tighter licensing supervision by Nevada regulators had blocked casino takeovers by mobsters.
7. Domination of New York’s invaluable resources—the wholesale food markets, the Garment Center, the garbage-carting industry, and the Javits Convention Center—had been curtailed, if not totally eliminated, by blacklisting scores of tarred companies, followed by tough licensing laws introduced in Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s administration. These regulatory steps were seen as firewalls preventing wiseguys from regaining influence at these commercial prizes. (The storied Fulton Fish Market, long beleaguered by mobsters, will be essentially shut down in 2005. Transplanting its businesses to a modern, enclosed facility in the Bronx was expected to strengthen the city’s enforcement of rules aimed at barring future Mafia takeovers.)
8. Convictions had shattered the Mafia’s Commission, and there was little likelihood that another supreme body could regain authority to resolve disputes, enforce traditions, and maintain the Mafia’s institutional codes.
“There is no resemblance to the power they exerted in the ’80s and ’90s,” says James Kallstrom, the former head of the bureau’s New York office and a pivotal player in the FBI’s maneuvers against the Mob. “They still have thugs and thieves out there but they have zero influence and no major impact anymore on controlling unions like the teamsters and major industries.”
Echoing Kallstrom, Ronald Goldstock, the former New York prosecutor
who was instrumental in generating the Commission case, portrays the remaining borgatas as disorganized rabble. “The Mob has been so weakened that it can’t supply the services it once did to its members. Nobody obeys the rules anymore. They may be continuing criminal activities, but they’re acting as individuals, not as a viable organization.”
Shortly before he died in 2003, former New York detective Ralph Salerno, an early warrior against the Cosa Nostra, visualized it as a fading anachronism. A major reason for its defeat, he thought, was the “dumbing down” of recruits. “At one time, not so long ago, there was a supply of young Italian-Americans who wanted to be in the families. Now, they want to be CEO’s of legitimate corporations. The families no longer attract young men with brains.”
From their vantage point, defense lawyers offered an additional explanation for the succession of courtroom debacles suffered by godfathers and high-ranking loyalists. The attorneys contend that the harsh prison penalties imposed for RICO convictions spurred the deluge of deserters that demolished the Mafia’s long-range survival plans. Expressing the views of lawyers who have represented major organized-crime suspects, Gerald Shargel says, “The prospect of getting a sentence of twenty to forty years or life without parole is a strong motivation to get people to cooperate.” Shargel, who defended John J. Gotti, several of his relatives, and Sammy Gravano, contends that juries have become “more conservative” and likely to bring in guilty verdicts in Mob-related cases. “In the 70s and ’80s, we got a lot of acquittals. Today, there is a stronger presumption of guilt if jurors hear the word ‘Mafia.’ What it means is that there are very few old-fashioned types left who are willing to risk a trial and draconian punishment.”
The prevailing officialdom consensus holds that the Cosa Nostra entered the twenty-first century battered and reeling, with obituaries being prepared by thoughtful analysts. Nevertheless, there are cautionary markers, at least in New York, suggesting that the patient is not ready for the graveyard. Consider the following manifestations in the first years of the millennium:
Gambling and loan-sharking—the Mafia’s symbiotic bread-and-butter staples—appear to be unstoppable. A Gambino capo was uncovered supervising bookie joints in Queens grossing $30 million a year. The Bonannos were profiting from similar setups, netting $20 million and $10 million annually from two sports betting rings in suburban Long Island. A crackdown by the Queens DA’s office broke up a Bonanno-controlled high-tech international enterprise that allegedly handled a staggering $360 million in sports bets between 2002 and 2005. Sensible gamblers will always prefer wagering with the Mob rather than
with state-authorized Off-Track Betting parlors and lotteries. Bets on baseball, football, and basketball games placed with a bookie have a 50 percent chance of winning, without the penalty of being taxed, while the typical state lottery is considered a pipe dream because the chance of winning is infinitesimal.
Additionally, Mob gambling networks are almost always tied into loan-sharking for compulsive gamblers who need instant credit, regardless of the staggering vigorish rates. Twenty soldiers and associates of a Genovese crew in New Jersey were arrested for operating a gambling and loan-sharking branch that charged up to an astronomical 156 percent interest.
Despite endless attempts to reform the construction industry and building trades unions, Mob families are still up to their old tricks. One outrageous example was hiking the cost of a $400 million skyscraper office building-renovation in Manhattan for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the main public transit agency in the New York region. A federal indictment charged that the project developer—a longtime Gambino associate—conspired with the family’s Mob-affiliated contractors and corrupt union officials to siphon more than $10 million through inflated bills and violation of union hiring regulations. The developer admitted paying weekly tribute of $12,500 for years to a Gambino soldier as part of the family’s share of the overcharges.
In another ripoff, before being convicted, a troupe of Genovese and Gambino soldiers plucked $2 million from “no show” jobs handed out by a union that operated temporary elevators at construction sites. Similarly, twenty-two Colombo and Genovese members were in a select group that obtained $3.5 million from phony jobs with a union that handled heavy equipment and from a painters’ local. Work sites exploited by the Mob included the new Museum of Modern Art and baseball stadiums built for the Yankees’ and the Mets’ minor league teams. The recipients of the largesse included a son of imprisoned Colombo boss Carmine the Snake Persico and the sons of other Colombo stars. A déjà vu aspect of these interfamily scams was the creation of a “panel,” reminiscent of the “clubs” set up decades earlier by the Mafia to apportion loot among the various gangs.