King of the Godfathers: "Big Joey" Massino and the Fall of the Bonanno Crime Family (28 page)

CHAPTER 25

“I Had Killed for Him”

The first month of the trial seemed a surreal spectacle for the family of Joseph Massino. It followed a routine in which Josephine Massino would drive in from Howard Beach, sometimes accompanied by both of her daughters, and then run the gauntlet of news photographers outside the courthouse in Brooklyn. Once inside, she would take her seat in the front row of the public seating in an area the U.S. Marshals had reserved for the defendant’s family.

If Josephine got to court early enough before the session started, she would be able to converse with her husband about family finances, which because of restraints put on their bank accounts by the government, could not be easily accessed. Massino always thought a lot about food and he often asked his wife a central question: “What did you eat?” He knew that the stress of the trial was causing her to lose weight and that was bothering him. There had also been an unexpected complication. Josephine’s older sister, Anna, had suffered what appeared to be a stroke a few days after opening statements and this meant hospital visits at the end of the day.

It was always something. Massino learned of his sister-in-law’s medical trauma during a visit by his wife and daughters to the Brooklyn jail where he was being held. He immediately sensed a problem from the depressed look on the faces of his wife and daughters.

“Let Mommy tell you,” Joanne told her father as he pressed for details.

“What?” Massino asked again.

“Let Mommy tell you,” she insisted.

Finally, as Josephine Massino began to relate the story of her sister’s travails, the weeks of tension and stress became unbearable. She broke down as she told Massino the details. Her sister had been the center of gravity for the family. One of Josephine Massino’s problems, and she had many at this point, was that she kept her emotions pent up as the problems began to mount. With Anna out of action, Josephine had no one to seek solace from. She had no outlet. She told friends she didn’t want to go for walks, talk to a priest, or do things that might release the tension.

Even if the Massino women wanted to escape the reality of their lives, it would have been difficult to get away entirely. The newspapers and television stations were running daily coverage of the trial, with gory details of the three captains and other murders played out in bold headlines. Pictures of Josephine Massino and her two sisters were shown to the jury because they also captured Massino himself in the presence of other mobsters. Even a surveillance photo taken at the Sands beach club in Atlantic Beach when Adeline had her wedding was shown. When Frank Coppa testified, the jury saw his holiday snaps, which showed him and his wife with Massino and Josephine in Paris and Monte Carlo. Nothing seemed private anymore.

For the Massino women, the trial seemed unreal. Of course, they understood that events involving their very own family were being portrayed. But it all sounded like some movie.

On June 28, 2004, things got even more personal. Josephine Massino had been waiting for weeks for her brother to take the witness stand. There had been rumors that Salvatore Vitale would have been called early. Instead, the prosecution intended to use him as the capstone to a case that was getting increasingly stronger with each witness appearing to buttress what the preceding ones had told the jury.

It was 4:20 in the afternoon when Salvatore Vitale finally walked through the rear door of the courtroom, the one that confidential witnesses who were under federal protection always made their entrance. Vitale had reveled in the street name “Good Looking Sal.” But while he still had the fading features of an old nightclub lounge lizard, Vitale had not aged well. His face seemed puffy and his hair was no longer dark but mostly gray. It was little known, but Vitale had suffered a heart attack some years earlier. On this day, when he raised his right hand to swear to tell the truth on the Bible held by court clerk Joseph Reccoppa, Vitale was fifty-six years old. He looked ill at ease.

The courtroom was dead silent as Vitale shifted into his seat. His sister, Josephine, sat sphinx-like, her mouth pressed shut and her lips in a straight line that contained her deep-seated rage. Her daughter, Joanne, sat next to her, arms folded in defiance. Adeline clutched a notebook into which she had been writing notes about the testimony of each witness.

With prosecutor Greg Andres as his interlocutor, Vitale began what would be a momentous week of testimony. Things started slowly with Vitale recounting how he had met Massino at the age of eleven or twelve while growing up in Maspeth. Their relationship was what he described a “good relationship” that led to a close friendship. When Vitale returned from a stint in the military, he took a job on one of Massino’s catering trucks, using it as a base for numbers running until the early 1990s.

Through the other witnesses, the prosecution had already established some of the practices and procedures of the Mafia—the passing of money from rackets up the chain of command and how the orders of the boss had to be obeyed at all costs—but Vitale had to flesh them out a bit. Moving in broad strokes, Andres had Vitale explain that once Massino went to prison in the late 1980s Massino used him to communicate with Bonanno family members. Vitale said that both he and Anthony Spero were used by Massino as a committee to run the family on a day-to-day basis. About once a month, said Vitale, he visited Massino during this period in prison.

Vitale eventually stopped seeing Massino in prison because the crime boss feared that officials might become suspicious of them and not let him out of prison. He would let his surrogates run things on their own.

“Whatever you and Anthony Spero want to do is fine with me,” Massino said, according to Vitale.

Before the prison visits stopped, Massino told Vitale that while Philip Rastelli was the boss, the old mobster was sick and would die soon. Massino liked Rastelli but didn’t respect his leadership ability. How smart could Rastelli be—he spent half of his life in jail, Vitale remembered Massino saying. When Rastelli died, Massino wanted Spero to call a meeting. At the meeting of the captains, Massino said someone, either his brother-in-law or James Tartaglione, should second the motion to make Massino boss. Vitale said that Massino had another directive: protect the family at all costs, even if it meant killing someone.

Rastelli died in 1991 and it was during a meeting at a house in Staten Island that Spero held the rigged election and the imprisoned Massino was officially anointed as boss, a job he really already held de facto for years.

He may have loved his sister, but it didn’t take long for Vitale to link Josephine to her husband’s dealings. He stated that while he was barred from visiting Massino, he communicated with him through his sister. He also testified that Massino continued to make money from criminal activity while in prison and that he passed along the boss’s share to Josephine. On the subject of money, Vitale said that it was the key goal of the Bonanno family and that he personally made two or three million dollars from the rackets, cash he split with Massino.

“I didn’t have any obligation to do that, he gave me the position I had, he made me what I am,” said Vitale. “He made me a Goodfellow, he made me the captain, he made me underboss, I felt any score came to me through the men, it only would be right to give him 50 percent.”

It was in the mid-1990s that Vitale said his relationship with Massino changed radically. Though Massino had made him underboss, Vitale said the position was an empty shell. Massino kept captains away from Vitale, forbidding them from even calling his brother-in-law. Christmas gifts were also banned. In Mafia-speak, Vitale was “on the shelf.” He had a title but it was just a job as a figurehead. The loss of status had gnawed at Vitale and he felt vulnerable, believing his wife and children would be left in the street if anything ever happened.

Even though he was shelved from 1995 to 2003 and felt degraded, Vitale said he continued to kick up money to Massino and commit crimes for him.

“I had killed for him,” said Vitale.

Before the bad blood developed between the two men, Vitale said that he took a strong personal interest in Massino’s family, particularly when the crime boss was in prison.

“I was taking care of my sister and her children…support her, take her out to dinner, keep her strong,” explained Vitale.

Josephine showed no reaction to that comment, but her daughter, Joanne, bolted from her seat in a huff, muttering, and walked out the courtroom door. The brief flurry caught Greg Andres’s attention and although he didn’t stop his questioning, the prosecutor brought it up to Garaufis outside the presence of the jury.

“There were a variety of people in the audience that told me they heard one of his [Massino] daughters saying that Mister Vitale was lying, it was audible and the jury reacted to that,” Andres said. He asked Garaufis to either move the family from its coveted front-row seats or bar Massino’s kin from the courtroom.

David Breitbart, who had been having numerous skirmishes with Andres over issues large and small, questioned whether what Andres said was true.

“I didn’t hear a word and I was sitting in the well of the court,” the lawyer said.

Massino’s family kept their seats in the front row, just in time for them to hear the beginning of the worst of what Vitale had to offer. Vitale admitted he committed eleven murders and that eight of them also involved Massino. He ticked off what was now a familiar list of victims for the jury: Joseph “Doo Doo” Pastore, Philip “Lucky” Giaccone, Dominick Trinchera, Alphonse “Sonny Red” Indelicato, Dominick “Sonny Black” Napolitano, Cesare Bonventre, Gabriel Infante, Anthony Tomasulo, Robert Perrino, Russell Mauro, and Gerlando Sciascia.

Three of the murders, Vitale said, were ordered by both himself and Anthony Spero. Those victims were Perrino, the
New York Post
supervisor, Tomasulo, who was threatening Bonanno members and cheating on gambling earnings, and Mauro, a Bonanno member who was abusing drugs and suspected of talking to law enforcement.

The significance of Vitale’s grim list of victims was not lost on anyone in the courtroom. While other witnesses like Frank Coppa, Frank Lino, and Joseph D’Amico talked knowledgeably about one, two, three, or four of the murders, Vitale had a wider field of vision. He could implicate Massino in all six charged murders, plus a few more as a bonus for the prosecution. The list of victims set up hours of testimony from Vitale about the murders he and Massino took part in during their decades in the Bonanno family. It was “This Is Your Life Joseph Massino” through the story of gangland hits.

Vitale didn’t play a role in actually killing Pastore, Massino’s old cigarette smuggling partner. But he agreed to clean up the small apartment on Fifty-eighth Avenue in Maspeth after the murder when Massino asked him to do so. Vitale also related how Massino, just before Pastore was killed, asked his brother-in-law to borrow nearly ten thousand dollars from the victim, money that would never be repaid.

“I went upstairs with a bucket and brush and cleaned up the area,” said Vitale. He didn’t find a body but he did see a mess. “All blood, all over the place, even inside the refrigerator.”

The murder of the three captains occurred at a time when Vitale was not yet a member of the crime family. But he played a key role nonetheless. What he had to tell the jury put Massino squarely in the planning and execution of the slaughter. As he had told the FBI in his many hours of debriefings, Vitale said that Massino had solicited the advice of Gambino boss Paul Castellano and Junior Persico of the Colombo family when he learned that the three captains were supposedly arming themselves.

“Joe Massino said they said you have to defend youself, do what you have to do,” Vitale stated.

Pressed by Andres for what that statement meant, Vitale answered, “Kill the three captains.”

Dominick Napolitano, who was aligned with Massino in the power struggle, wanted his new friend Donnie Brasco, who was actually undercover FBI agent Joseph Pistone, to play a significant role in the slaughter of the three captains, Vitale remembered. But he said that a wary Massino said no.

Vitale, who had earlier obtained drop cloths and rope with which to tie up the bodies, said he was hiding in a closet with Vito Rizzuto of Canada, another Canadian named “Emmanuel,” and another man who carried a shotgun. Rizzuto and Emmanuel had pistols and Vitale said he had a tommy gun, which he accidentally discharged before the real shooting started. Everyone wore ski masks.

On the prearranged signal, Gerlando Sciascia running his hand through his hair, everyone in the closet ran out and Rizzuto declared it was a stick up, said Vitale. While Vitale and the shotgun-toting gangster were told to guard the exit door so no one escaped, Lino made his escape before anyone could stop him, Vitale remembered.

Vitale saw all the men in the room when the shooting started and he remembered seeing Massino hit Giaccone, although he didn’t tell the FBI that in his debriefings.

“It was all hell broke lose,” Vitale said when cross-examined by Breitbart. “It was a matter of seconds, five seconds, ten seconds.”

In the eerie moments after the killing, Vitale remembered coming back into the room where the shootings occurred and noticing that almost everyone had left.

“The only one standing in the room with the three dead bodies was Joe Massino,” said Vitale. “We just looked at each other to say ‘where did everybody go?’”

Vitale stayed around with the others to pack up the bodies in the drop cloths and lift them into a van that was driven to Howard Beach by James Tartaglione. At the intersection of 161st Avenue and Flushing Boulevard, two Gambino crime family members, Gene Gotti and John Carneglia, were waiting to take the corpses away for disposal, said Vitale.

The bloodshed of 1981 continued, Vitale said, with the murder of Napolitano, whose death was arranged by Massino. Vitale said he learned of the plot after Massino summoned him to Howard Beach and took him on a walk-and-talk stroll. Massino was angry, said Vitale, over the Donnie Brasco penetration of the crime family by the FBI and was going to give Napolitano “a receipt” for the fiasco. That term meant that Massino wanted Napolitano dead, Vitale told the jury. He added that his brother-in-law believed that even if he was convicted of the murder of the three captains, he would have the satisfaction of killing Napolitano.