King of the Godfathers: "Big Joey" Massino and the Fall of the Bonanno Crime Family (23 page)

So, despite some resistance from at least one FBI supervisor, Nordenbrook flew to Florida with fellow prosecutor Greg Andres and convinced Tartaglione to sign a cooperation agreement.

The odd thing about Tartaglione’s decision was that he didn’t wait for an indictment to make his decision. True, he might have eventually been charged based on what the other turncoats said. But since he was free and living outside a jail cell, Tartaglione was the one cooperator who could circulate freely among his criminal confederates.

The FBI immediately saw the usefulness of Tartaglione’s freedom and convinced him to begin wearing a wire as he met with key Bonanno crime family members and others. Now, not only did the federal government have witnesses like Vitale, Coppa, and Lino, they actually had a made member of the crime family making tapes. It was another coup for the government that had exceeded anyone’s expectations.

From January 2003 until January 2004, Tartaglione taped over forty-five conversations with Bonanno captains Vincent Basciano, Anthony Urso, the crime family’s acting boss while Massino was in custody, Joseph Cammarano, acting underboss, and others. Federal prosecutors have released only small portions of the recordings, but they reveal that many of those conversing with Tartaglione talked openly about the way the Bonanno family was trying to adjust to the pressure from the arrests and prosecutions.

It was during this chaotic period that Cammarano was recorded telling Tartaglione to move back from Florida “to show strength.” Meetings of the Bonanno family administration found mobsters talking about trying to locate the families of turncoats and to induct new members to build up strength. Since legal troubles were causing Massino big legal bills, the crime family decreed what prosecutors called a monthly “tax” of $100 for each member to pay into a war chest.

In one snippet of a recording of a September 2003 crime family meeting that was widely circulated in court documents, Urso was heard speaking about killing the families of turncoats.

“This has got to stop,” said Urso. “Fuck it, he can do it, I can do it. This is how they should have played, and they might have done this before you turned, we wipe your family out.”

“Why should the rats’ kids be happy, where my kids or your kids should suffer because I’m away for life. If you take one kid, I hate to say it, and do what you gotta do, they’ll fucking think twice,” said Urso.

Cammarano cautioned Urso, court records show, that such a bloody strategy of retribution would only bring on more law enforcement pressure. It might also reflect poorly on Massino, added Cammarano.

What Tartaglione was thinking when he heard Urso’s rant about the family of informants, all the while he was secretly recording him, was never disclosed. But his recordings, as well as the evidence given by Vitale, Coppa, Lino, and other turncoats, gave the FBI a field day. In May 2003, a federal grand jury in Brooklyn indicted Massino on more murder charges, accusing him of killing Anthony Mirra for the Joseph Pistone-FBI infiltration of the Bonanno family. Frank Lino, who was already talking to prosecutors, was indicted for the 1990 murder of Louis Tuzzio, the man killed as a favor to John Gotti.

A glowing news release from the Brooklyn U.S. Attorney’s Office stated the latest tally: “To date, both the Bonanno family boss and under have been charged, as well as six captains, two acting captains, eight soldiers and twelve associates. With the 2001 conviction of Bonanno family consiglieri Anthony Spero, all three members of the Bonanno family administration have now been charged with, or convicted of, murder, and all potentially face life imprisonment.”

Because of concerns about the families of turncoat mobsters like Vitale, Tartaglione, and the others, federal prosecutors resorted to courthouse cloak-and-dagger operations. It was unwise, investigators reasoned, for guilty pleas of cooperators like Vitale to be taken in the downtown Brooklyn federal courthouse. Secret guilty pleas, with courtrooms sealed off and spectators not allowed, happened all the time. But the Bonanno investigation was fraught with too many perils. Officials feared that if word leaked out that a particular person was pleading guilty with a cooperation agreement, the individual’s family members might be in peril. Comments of the kind Urso made to Tartaglione only reinforced those fears.

So, on particular days when a Bonanno turncoat was pleading guilty, Judge Nicholas Garaufis, who had been picked by random selection to handle the cases involving the crime family, disappeared from his chambers on Cadman Plaza East in Brooklyn. Garaufis had been active in Queens County politics and had once served as counsel to Borough President Claire Shulman, the woman who replaced the corruption-tainted Donald Manes, who committed suicide in early 1986 during the city Parking Violations Bureau scandal. After stints as a private lawyer in Bayside and as an assistant attorney general in New York state, Garaufis went on to become counsel to the Federal Aviation Administration. He was nominated to be a federal judge in 2000 by President Bill Clinton. An affable man of Greek ethnicity, Garaufis was press savvy and prided himself on open courtrooms. But sometimes necessity required secrecy.

On certain days, Garaufis would walk over to the nearby Marriott Hotel on Adams Street. There, he would go to a suite that had been booked by federal prosecutors and on entering he would find FBI agents, a court stenographer, and various assistant U.S. attorneys. Also in the room was a defendant who had decided to cooperate with the government and his attorney. Garaufis would preside in the room as the cooperator pled guilty to various crimes and admitted that he had signed an agreement to testify at any trial. For added security, Garaufis sometimes drove to one of a number of hotels near LaGuardia Airport in his home borough of Queens, where other cooperators were taken to enter their guilty pleas.

Despite these precautions, word of who had decided to cooperate leaked out anyway. By then, there had been more indictments. August 20, 2003, saw another news release revealing that Massino was charged with three more homicides: the killing of Cesare Bonventre in 1984, of Gabriel Infante in 1987, and of Gerlando Sciascia, whose death in 1999 had piqued the interest of FBI Director Louis Freeh.

Some new defendants were also added to the ever growing list of Bonanno family members under arrest. Two reputed Bronx members of the family, captain Patrick “Patty from the Bronx” DeFilippo and soldier John Joseph Spirito, were charged with taking part in the Sciascia killing while Massino was vacationing in Mexico with Josephine. (That kind of detail was something Vitale knew and apparently was a key source of what was alleged in the indictment.) It was Spirito, a tough guy with the thick, bony face of a prize fighter, who was accused of picking up the ill-fated Sciascia and then dumping his body in a Bronx street to make it look like the Canadian gangster was killed by drug dealers.

Defendants awaiting trial without bail often hold joint defense meetings in jail. After the Sciascia indictment, Massino, Spirito, DeFilippo, and other defendants held joint defense meetings at the Brooklyn federal detention center to plot strategy with their lawyers. Massino sat at the head of the table in the jail conference room, a posture that seemed to say he was in charge. He usually had two sandwiches brought in from the vending machines, and if he didn’t think the cheese was warm enough he had one of his underlings microwave it again.

Murray Richman, a well-known criminal defense from the Bronx, was representing Spirito and made it clear to any one who was present that he didn’t like these jail house meetings. Richman had a simple rule that one out of four people would turn informant, ruining the defense strategizing. Massino thought differently.

“Not my guys,” said Massino, referring to Spirito and DeFilippo.

But Massino was ignoring the obvious. Turncoats had already occurred in his ranks—Coppa, Vitale, Lino, and Tartaglione had already become cooperating witnesses. They had put Massino in a bind for five homicides. There was also something else for him to worry about.

FEDS MULL WHACKING MOBSTER, said the
Daily News
headline for a 388-word story on page nine in its August 21, 2003, edition. The item said that for the Sciascia murder, Massino, DeFilippo, and Spirito could face the death penalty. “If U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft authorizes Brooklyn prosecutors to seek capital punishment, it would mark the first time an alleged boss of a New York crime family faced possible execution by the government,” the story by reporter John Marzulli stated.

On Eighty-fourth Street in Howard Beach, Joanne Massino was sleeping late. Since her divorce, she hadn’t worked much, but in the summer months she had a full-time job of sorts figuring out things to do with her son and daughter. The children would write to their grandfather at the Brooklyn federal jail but really didn’t know the full import of what had been happening. Their mother kept the worst of the news from them.

Up the stairs of Joanne’s two-story modern home, built on land she had been given by her mother, came her ten-year-old daughter. The child was going to treat her mom to breakfast in bed and the morning newspaper, which was rolled up and held fast with a rubber band. Joanne thanked her daughter and still in bed opened up the paper. The item on page nine gave her a start. She was puzzled by what she read. New indictment? Death penalty? Joanne hadn’t heard of the new charges. But the words “death penalty” caused her further incomprehension.

“With five made members of the Bonanno crime family now cooperating with the feds—including underboss Sal Vitale—the hits keep on coming for Massino,” Marzulli noted.

Seeing her uncle’s name and reading it in the same story about the prospect of her father being executed, all thanks to Sal Vitale, sparked another rage in Joanne. Then she cried hysterically.

CHAPTER 19

“Let’s Bring In the Jury”

The charges against the Bonanno crime family kept coming.

On January 20, 2004, just a year after Massino had been charged, a Brooklyn federal grand jury returned another set of indictments as a result of evidence provided by turncoats Salvatore Vitale, James Tartaglione, Frank Lino, and Frank Coppa. This time, the government was aiming at cleaning house in a big way.

Among those charged in this indictment were Anthony Urso and Joseph Cammarano, the two men who had been taped by Tartaglione musing about executing the families of turncoats. Urso was identified as the acting Bonanno boss now that Massino was incarcerated, while Cammarano was his underboss since Vitale was out of the picture.

Cutting its way through the Bonanno hierarchy, the grand jury also indicted over two dozen other members and associates. The catch was impressive. Charged with various acts of racketeering were such illustrious names as Vito Rizzuto, the Canadian soldier suspected of being one of the assassins who jumped out of the closet during the murder of the three captains in 1981. Other key captains charged were Louis Attanasio, a suspect in the 1984 slaying of Cesare Bonventre and restaurant owner Louis Restivo on charges he played a role in the killings of Gabriel Infanti and crime family associate Anthony Tomasulo.

All together, eight captains or acting captains, thirteen soldiers, and four associates of the crime family were charged. The consequences for the Bonanno family were ominous.

“Since March 2002, the government has prosecuted more than 70 members and associates of the Bonanno family,” crowed the government news release. “Today, virtually the entire family leadership of the Bonanno family has been incapacitated, with only a few family captains remaining unindicted.”

From one of the most insulated crime families that Joseph Massino boasted had never had a major turncoat, the Bonanno family had seen six of its made members, including the underboss, agree to cooperate with the prosecution. Massino had once decreed that the family name should be changed from Bonanno to Massino because the old patriarch, Joseph Bonanno, had disgraced his legacy by writing a book that exposed some La Cosa Nostra secrets. Bonanno died in 2002. But had he seen the way “This Thing of Ours” had become tattered, he might have sued Massino for sullying his old family name.

The indictment cut like a scythe through the Bonanno family and there was a rush of people to take guilty pleas and hope for a break on sentencing. Vitale, Lino, and the other turncoats had made their deals with the government. So did Daniel Mongello, one of the other soldiers nabbed in the January 2003 roundup. So many gangsters worked out guilty pleas that by May 2004 there was only one person left standing who was going to go to trial: Joseph Massino.

The trial of Joseph Massino was preceded by nearly a month of jury selection. Normally, it takes about a day or two to select a jury to hear a run-of-the-mill criminal case in Brooklyn federal district court. But in big cases, particularly where there are allegations of organized crime, the whole process takes much longer. Massino’s trial was no exception. To weed out bias or people who couldn’t fairly decide the fate of the defendant, potential jurors had to answer detailed questionnaires about everything from their reading habits to whether they or family members had ever been victims of a crime. After the questionnaires were perused by prosecutors and defense attorneys, the people in the jury pool were called into court and individually questioned about some of the answers they had given. Depending on what was said by the potential jurors, they were either dismissed from further consideration or told to stand by.

Mafia cases in the Brooklyn federal court also invariably use anonymous juries. The practice of using such panels had come into vogue during the big mob trials of the 1970s and 1980s, when courts feared that Cosa Nostra defendants might try to bribe, influence, or intimidate juries. There was good reason to believe that could happen since John Gotti’s minions were found to have done it twice, once during his 1986 trial in Brooklyn and another time in 1990, when he was on trial in Manhattan on state charges. Both times he was acquitted.

So, in Massino’s case the approximately 200 potential jurors who trooped into the Cadman Plaza courthouse in early May 2004 had already been given numerical designations to use on their jury questionnaires. Their identities were known by only a small group of court personnel, even though there was no indication that Massino was thinking about trying to meddle with the jurors.

The questioning revealed some who had obvious bias against Massino, like the man who said he thought the Howard Beach gangster looked like Tony Soprano, the lead character played by actor James Gandolfini in
The Sopranos
show on HBO. Another man said he didn’t think loan-sharking was a crime since borrowers in the Hispanic community, where usury was common, knew that high interest rates went with such loans.

On May 19, 2004, after three weeks of questioning, the prosecutors and defense attorneys officially agreed on a panel of twelve regular jurors—four men and eight women—and eight alternates to sit in judgment of Massino. The trial was scheduled to open on May 24, 2004.

Criminal cases have their special rhythm. After an arrest and not guilty plea, the defense has to work out a strategy to beat the case or else fold up and plea bargain, hoping for a break. In Massino’s case, a plea was out of the question. As the man who was heir to a Mafia tradition of leadership laid down by patriarch Joseph Bonanno, Massino had always sung the praise of the crime family that never had a made member turn informant. Besides, he denied to his family, lawyers, and anyone else who listened that he had anything to do with the murders the government was trying to pin on him.

Before jury selection even began, David Breitbart’s strategy was to first chip away at the indictment. He believed history and the law were on his side. Massino had already been charged before with complicity in the May 5, 1981, murders of the three captains—Dominick Trinchera, Philip Giaccone, and Alphonse Indelicato. In 1987, a federal jury in Manhattan had found him not guilty of conspiring to kill the three men. To a layman, it sounded like Massino had been cleared of the murders. Well, not exactly.

In the 1987 trial, the charge involving the murder of the three captains was a murder conspiracy charge that was believed to be one of a number of racketeering acts committed by Massino. He was not charged with actually committing the murders but with agreeing and plotting to carry out the crime. Under U.S. Supreme Court rulings dating back to 1932, the government was not prevented from bringing new murder charges against Massino because a substantive crime and a conspiracy to commit the crime weren’t the same offense. In other words, there would be no double jeopardy under the Fifth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. It was Breitbart’s job to find a way around that rule of law.

Breitbart was assisted in trial preparation by Flora Edwards, a former official at the City University of New York who gravitated into criminal law. Edwards liked legal research and writing and took pride in the nickname “Princess of Paper” because of the facility she had with the written word. Together, Edwards and Breitbart fashioned an argument that held that Massino’s 1987 acquittal prevented the government from now retrying certain issues decided by the jury in the earlier trial.

A key to the defense argument was that in acquitting Massino in 1987, the jury decided that he didn’t intend to kill Trinchera, Giaccone, and Indelicato, something the federal government was now attempting to try him for again in 2004. The prosecution’s response was that the 1987 jury could have acquitted Massino of the murder conspiracy on the grounds that the government failed to prove that he joined the plot, than that the prosecution failed to prove he had the intent to kill the three men.

It all sounded like a great deal of legal hair splitting. But if the earlier verdict was based on a lack of evidence of a conspiratorial agreement instead of on an intent to kill the three captains, then the government was within its right to bring the latest charges to trial. To decide that issue, Judge Nicholas Garaufis had to read the mind of the earlier jurors and Judge Robert Sweet based on the old trial record. After reading the transcripts, Judge Robert W. Sweet’s jury instructions, and the 1987 verdict sheet, Garaufis agreed with the prosecutors, and in a ruling dated March 24, 2004, he told the lawyers why.

“The question for the court to decide, therefore, after examining the ‘pleadings, evidence, charge and other relevant matter,’ is whether Massino has carried his burden of proving that the 1987 jury ‘necessarily’ decided that Massino did not intend to cause the deaths of Indelicato, Giaccone, and Trinchera,” Garaufis stated. “After conducting such an examination, I conclude that the 1987 jury did not necessarily make such a finding.”

Garaufis went on to say that “I conclude that a rational jury in 1987 could have based its acquittal on the government’s failing to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Massino entered into an agreement to murder Indelicato, Giaccone, and Trinchera.”

Massino’s attempt to whittle down three homicide charges in the indictment had failed. He also faced another problem. Though seven homicides were charged in the indictment, Greg Andres wanted to bring out during the trial other killings and murder conspiracies from the early 1970s through 1999 that the government believed Massino played a role in, as well as acts of loan-sharking, extortion, theft, hijacking, arson, and illegal gambling. Andres even believed that the accusation of Massino shoplifiting a bottle of aspirin while on the lam in Pennsylvania was a prior bad act that the current jury should be aware of. The reason for bringing out such evidence, Andres argued, was to give background to the racketeering conspiracy for which Massino was standing trial.

There were seven uncharged murders and murder plots Andres believed he could bring out during Massino’s trial. The murders the government wanted to incorporate in the trial, despite the fact that they weren’t charged in the trial indictment, included the killing of Vito Borelli, Joseph Pastore, Carmine Galante, Gerlando Sciascia, Robert Capasio, and Joseph Platia. The latter two homicides occurred around July 1984 and were ordered by Massino while he was out on bail after returning from his time as a fugitive, Andres told the court. Andres also said that Massino had a hand in the plot to kill Bruno Indelicato, the son of one of the murdered three captains, Alphonse Indelicato.

Breitbart and Edwards said that the admission of such evidence of uncharged crimes was highly prejudicial to Massino and in the case of the shoplifted aspirin was irrelevant. Garaufis largely disagreed. On May 21, 2004, the Friday before Massino’s trial was scheduled to start, Garaufis said he would allow Andres and the prosecution team to use evidence of a number of the killings, including the slaying of Galante, to show not only the level of trust he had in his turncoat brother-in-law Salvatore Vitale but also to show the dimensions of the Bonanno racketeering enterprise. But Garaufis ruled that evidence of the killing of Vito Borelli, murdered because he insulted Paul Castellano with the “Frank Perdue” quip, had no place in the trial. That murder, Garaufis said, just didn’t seem connected to the Bonanno enterprise which Massino was accused of running. The aspirin shoplifting incident also had nothing to do with the racketeering case and was also out, said Garaufis.

Josephine Massino and her daughter, Adeline, happened to be in court while Garaufis was reading his decision on the evidence about the uncharged crimes. The meaning was plain to them, although the legal reasoning that allowed the government to use so much bad evidence certainly wasn’t. Massino shot a glance over to his wife that said it all. It had been a bad day.

New York’s major tabloid newspapers make it a habit of running major stories, dubbed “curtain raisers” on the weekend before big trials. On Sunday, May 23, 2004, all the city’s dailies ran big stories about the Massino trial that was opening the next day. The articles varied in length with
Newsday
doing the longest. Short sidebars were also done about the defense attorneys and prosecution team. The stories had the same general tone: Joseph Massino, the last big Mafia boss, was on trial for being a murderous leader, and some of his closest friends were going to testify against him. Life in prison was the only thing in his future.

That Sunday morning at her Howard Beach home, Josephine Massino opened up a copy of
New York Newsday.
The front page jolted her. There in the center of the page was a color picture of her husband, somber-faced, his hair neatly combed, and wearing the black pullover he was arrested in on January 9, 2003. It was his arrest photo and arrayed around it on the page were pictures of four other Mafia bosses of the past: Carlo Gambino, Paul Castellano, John Gotti, and Joseph Bonanno.
THE LAST DON: MASSINO TRIAL SAID TO BEGIN THE END OF AN ERA FOR ORGANIZED CRIME BOSSES,
the headline said.

None of the other tabloids had placed the Massino story on the front page with such prominence. But each paper had something. Suddenly, seeing the story like that, underscored for Josephine Massino that the trial was starting and that it was indeed show time. She spoke with her daughters and decided to do something she never expected to do. Josephine Massino wanted to talk to the news media. So did Adeline and Joanne. The crush of stories had overwhelmed them. Seeing it all splayed in the papers made them finally want to speak out to show the world that Joseph Massino was not a monster.

The Massino women had been very guarded with the press during jury selection, but would occasionally engage in small talk with me during courtroom breaks. That Sunday, digging out my business card, Joanne Massino called me and said her mother urgently wanted to talk. Detouring from a trip to Shea Stadium where the New York Mets were playing the Atlanta Braves, I wound up in Howard Beach, hoping that none of the women would change their minds.