King of the Godfathers: "Big Joey" Massino and the Fall of the Bonanno Crime Family (3 page)

But the Bonanno family, having been denied a cut of the concrete scheme, escaped conviction in the Commission case. True, Philip Rastelli, the Bonanno boss at the time, had been indicted. But Rastelli’s case had been severed from the Commission trial and was never convicted. (He was found guilty in an unrelated Brooklyn federal racketeering trial.) Ironically, by being kept out of the loop by the other crime families in the concrete case, the Bonanno clan dodged a big bullet and continued to operate with much of its leadership intact. While other crime families were knocked off balance, the Bonannos were able to consolidate and recover from the disaster of L’Affaire Brasco.

But that honeymoon was over. The news release that accompanied Massino’s indictment listed more murders. Vitale, investigators said, had set up the murder of Robert Perrino, a delivery supervisor at the
New York Post,
in 1992. After Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau began an investigation into the Bonanno family’s infiltration of the newspaper’s delivery department that investigators believed had become a mob fiefdom, Vitale panicked. The indictment charged that Vitale and others, fearing Perrino might cooperate with law enforcement, arranged for the newspaper supervisor’s death in 1992.

Daniel Mongelli was charged with killing Louis Tuzzio in 1990. Tuzzio was a crime family associate whose death had already been charged in an earlier indictment against Robert Lino, Frank Lino’s cousin. Tuzzio was murdered as a favor to John Gotti, payback for a bizarre shooting stemming from the death of Everett Hatcher, a Drug Enforcement Administration agent, at the hands of aspiring Bonanno family member Gus Farace in 1989. Tuzzio didn’t die because Hatcher had been killed but rather, investigators said, because one of Gotti’s associates had been wounded during the killing of Farace. Gotti had to be appeased. The mob can police its own as payback for screw ups—Hatcher’s murder brought a lot of law enforcement heat on the mob—but it better be done cleanly.

There were some other charges against Massino involving gambling in cafés in Queens. Joker Poker machines and baccarat games were profitable staples of the crime family along with loan-sharking, which Massino was also charged with. But loan-sharking and gambling charges against a mob boss were an old story. What really had Massino tied up was murder. While more killings would be laid at Massino’s feet in the months to come, prosecutors only needed one—the Napolitano hit—to make the case that Massino should not be given bail.

“It has taken over two decades to get the goods on Joe Massino for the murder of ‘Sonny Black’ Napolitano, but justice delayed is not always justice denied,” said Kevin Donovan, the top FBI boss for New York City, to reporters.

Donovan referred in passing to a pair of agents who had doggedly tracked Massino for years. But he didn’t mention their names. Sallet and McCaffrey didn’t seek adulation and preferred to keep a low profile.

Massino’s youngest daughter, Joanne, had walked her own daughter to the nearby parochial school on the morning of January 9 as she always did. The child had often accompanied both her mother and grandfather on shopping trips to Cross Bay Boulevard in Howard Beach, Queens, near Kennedy International Airport. Joanne had felt the peering eyes of the FBI and, like her father, had spotted the numerous cars that seemed to be following them.

It was a little after 8:00 A.M. when Joanne came back to her home on Eighty-fourth Street in Howard Beach. Both she and her eldest sister, Adeline, had decided to stay close by their parents after each girl got married, so it was almost a daily ritual that the Massino girls saw their parents. (A middle sister had moved out of state.) Now that Joanne was divorced, she remained in the home she once shared with her ex-husband, who had moved to Long Island. As soon as she returned from escorting her daughter to school, Joanne spotted her mother in front of her own home a few doors away. The older woman didn’t say a word, she just gestured.

“Come here, quick, I have something to tell you about your father and it isn’t good,” Josephine Massino seemed to say with an urgent wave of her hand toward her daughter, who knew in an instant that there was trouble.

Adeline, who lived about four blocks north of her parents, was at the Dunkin’ Donuts store on Cross Bay Boulevard, the very same place the FBI agents would visit to pick up snacks for the long surveillances of her father. It was the morning ritual of this particular Howard Beach Little League mom to get her cup of coffee there and then visit her folks.

Though Joanne had the dark Neapolitan eyes of her father, Adeline took after her mother, right down to the auburn tint of the hair (which if truth be told, they both had done at the same beauty salon on the boulevard). Walking with her embossed coffee cup through the front door of her parents’ house, Adeline was oblivious to the tumult that had begun to envelope her family. She would find out about it soon enough.

CHAPTER 2

Amici

When Roslynn R. Mauskopf, the federal prosecutor, told the news reporters that La Cosa Nostra got its start in the borough of Brooklyn, she really was telling the truth. But she may not have realized all the historical details. There were a few twists and turns before Brooklyn became the Mafia’s American holy land.

The roots of Italian organized crime in New York City were tied closely to the great waves of immigration in the early part of the twentieth century. To understand what Joseph Massino inherited nearly 100 years later, one has to look at those early days, when the mob was evolving and its values were being adapted to life in America. The story of what became the Bonanno crime family was like some long, medieval tapestry, a continuing saga interwoven with the life stories of many of the Mafia’s key personalities and bloody events.

By the turn of the twentieth century and continuing into the years immediately after World War I, Italians were among the largest group of immigrants coming to the United States. It was a largely economic immigration to be sure, pulling Italians from the economically depressed southern areas of Italy, the
mezzogiorno
region composed of Naples, Calabria, and Sicily. While Italians settled in many cities, New York was a main attraction. It became a cliché image, the mass of immigrants dressed in Old World-style garb, gazing in awe at the Statute of Liberty as the crowded passenger liners sailed into New York harbor and made their way to Ellis Island, the first point of entry into the United States. Earlier immigrants who settled in the five boroughs of New York served as the seed for the later arrival of
amici,
relatives and friends from the same villages and towns in southern Italy.

Because a substantial number of Italian immigrants settled in Brooklyn, the borough attracted its share of new arrivals—a trend that continued late into the twentieth century. When World War I ended, one Italian man became the top Mafia figure and lorded over an enterprise of young criminals who he ruled with an iron fist. Joe Masseria was known in the underworld as Joe the Boss. A fat, short man, Masseria was known for his prodigious appetite for food and drink. Dinner with Joe the Boss saw his underlings try in vain to keep up with his devouring of plates of pasta and meats, washed down with Chianti.

Old mug shots show Masseria with a fat, round face and small piglike eyes. He was one of the “Moustache Petes,” though he was clean shaven, the derisive name given to the old-timers who rose to the upper levels of Italian organized crime and were known for keeping with their Old World mentality. A peasant in manners—Masseria was said to have spewed food as he talked with animation over dinner—he had a retinue of young, ambitious mob toughs who ensured that his orders would be followed. Their names should be very familiar. Among them was Al Capone, Salvatore Lucania, better known as Charles “Lucky” Luciano, Vito Genovese, and Frank Costello (Francesco Castiglia), men who in their own right became major Mafia leaders and legends of their time. Masseria recruited men like Luciano, Genovese, and the others to beef up the ranks of a Mafia organization that was actually run by Ignazia “Lupo” Saietta. Known as a sadistic Sicilian, Lupo emigrated from Sicily to avoid a murder prosecution, and as a Mafia member he took over the Unione Siciliane, a sort of fraternal organization and mutual-aid society of Italian immigrants.

In 1910, Lupo was sentenced to thirty years in prison and Masseria was essentially the boss of the American Mafia in his absence. He consolidated his power and saw to it that fellow Sicilian immigrants had key positions of power under him as a way of ensuring fealty and obedience. It was after building an organization that owed its loyalty to him that Masseria is reported to have made a bold political maneuver that removed Lupo from the picture—without a shot being fired. According to Tony Sciacca in the book
Luciano: The Man Who Modernized the American Mafia,
Masseria convinced Lupo that even if he were to be paroled on the counterfeiting charge that he risked being arrested again for a parole violation.

“Joe the Boss would run the American Mafia, with Lupo as an unofficial advisor, immune from reimprisonment by remaining in the shadows,” Sciacca states. “The legend in Little Italy has it that Lupo agreed to accept retirement.”

Through the intercession of Harry Daugherty, the U.S. attorney general, Lupo was paroled in 1921 by President Warren G. Harding. Free from a prison cell, Lupo came to Little Italy, kissed Masseria on the cheeks, and then left for a year’s sabbatical to Sicily. He was never a factor again in the American Mafia.

With the help of Luciano, Genovese, and others, Masseria became the undisputed boss of the Mafia in the United States. Under his leadership, the organization developed its own corner of the drug trade, bringing opium into New York City, bootlegging, and protection rackets in the Italian community. But it was not enough.

The Italian immigrants were not all alike in that they brought with them to America old clannish ways and prejudices. A Sicilian might hold secret resentment of the Neapolitan and vice versa. Among the Sicilians, of which Masseria was one, suspicions developed as well. Some of those aligned with Masseria traced their origins to the area around the town of Castellammare del Golfo in western Sicily. This was not the area where Masseria traced his roots, and the various Castellammarese who took up residence in Brooklyn viewed another charismatic Sicilian named Salvatore Maranzano as their leader. Tall, lean, and sporting a thin moustache, Maranzano was the physical opposite of Masseria. He seemed like a banker, in sharp contrast to the short, burly, and voracious Masseria. Maranzano, who was something of an intellectual among the immigrants, kept in his apartment volumes about the Roman Empire under Julius Caesar, including his battle tactics.

Many of the Castellammarese who settled in Brooklyn did so in the area around Roebling and Havermeyer streets, near Metropolitan Avenue. It is a part of Brooklyn known as Willliamburg and it was in this area, close to the waterfront, that Maranzano held court with fellow Sicilians. Among them were many who would come to hold their own place in the genealogy of the Mafia: Thomas Lucchese, Joseph Profaci, Stefano Magliocco, and Stefano Magaddino, a mafioso from Buffalo. There was also a young, handsome Castellammarese who at the age of nineteen had arrived in New York in 1924 after taking a circuitous smuggling route that led from Sicily, Tunisia, Marseille, Paris, Cuba, and then by a small motorboat to Tampa, Florida. He had fled Sicily at a time when the government was trying to crack down on the Mafia. His name was Joseph Bonanno.

Living with relatives in Brooklyn, Bonanno passed up opportunities to toil in the decent obscurity of lawful occupations and instead saw his destiny in the world of crime. It was of course a calculated choice of Bonanno’s to seek his fortune in ways the vast majority of his fellow immigrants shunned. In his classic biography of Bonanno,
Honor Thy Father,
author Gay Talese says Bonanno sought respect and saw himself as a leader of men. He was prepared to do what he needed to pursue his goals.

“He did believe that the ruling classes of America as in Sicily had great respect for two things—power and money—and he was determined to get both one way or the other,” Talese states. “So in his first year in Brooklyn, Bonanno affiliated himself with the neighborhood Mafiosi, who were obviously doing well; they were driving new cars and wearing finer clothes than their humble countrymen who got up each day at dawn to toil in factories or work in construction gangs.”

Aligned with Maranzano, Bonanno made a name for himself in the rackets of the time. There was bootlegging, gambling, and smuggling of weapons. The Brooklyn Italian lottery was also controlled by Bonanno, and it was his organizational ability, as well as his polished, diplomatic manner that earned him respect. Wise enough not to squander his earnings, Bonanno invested in other legitimate businesses such as garment factories, cheese producers, and even a funeral parlor.

Success of Castellammarese men like Bonanno served to make Masseria suspicious of the growing strength of Maranzano and his followers. Historians of the Mafia are unanimous in saying that Masseria, concerned about the independence being shown by Maranzano and his men, planned to strike against them to eliminate their rivalry. Larger tribute payments were demanded by Masseria. These were rebuffed by Maranzano’s allies and Masseria knew by 1930 that he had to annihilate the competition.

But just as he was preparing to go to war against the Castellammarese, Masseria’s hunger for money and power led him to make a big tactical mistake. Masseria attempted to extort the ice-making business of one of his own crime captains, Gaetano Reina. When Reina resisted, Masseria had him killed in February 1930, just as the ice merchant was leaving a building on Sheridan Avenue in the Bronx. The killing of Reina prompted his gang members to ally with Maranzano and a period of Mafia assassinations and gunfights known as the Castellammarese War broke out in New York. It was a time of bloodshed that would ultimately go a long way to shaping the modern Mafia in the United States.

The killings went on for over a year as Masseria struck against the bootlegging businesses of the Maranzano crowd. With allies like Thomas Lucchese, Carlo Gambino, Vito Genovese, and of course, Lucky Luciano, Masseria seemed in a stronger position. But Maranzano had important alliances as well, including the help of a young mob associate known as Joseph Valachi, who would eventually marry the daughter of the assassinated Reina. There was intense mob bloodshed in the war, with some estimates saying over fifty men died on both sides. Whatever the body count, the war proved bad for business and the costs were troubling Luciano and Genovese. They reached out to Maranzano in an effort to stop the fighting.

In return for setting up Masseria for the kill, Maranzano agreed with Luciano and Genovese that the war would stop and that they would be safe. Masseria had escaped death a number of times, so he would not be an easy target. It was Luciano who rose to the task of setting the old man up for the kill. What happened next was reminiscent of a scene right out of
The Godfather.
Convincing Masseria that it was safe to have dinner outside of his Manhattan apartment, Luciano accompanied his boss on the afternoon of April 15, 1931, to Coney Island. The restaurant was a well-known Italian eatery run by Geraldo Scarpato. Masseria’s prodigious appetite was on display as he consumed plates of pasta and drank Chianti. After lunch Luciano convinced Masseria to play some cards and then excused himself to go the bathroom.

With Luciano out of the room, several armed men suddenly arrived outside Scarpato’s at around 3:30 P.M. in a car driven by Ciro Terranova, the mafioso known as the “Artichoke King” because of the way he extorted the myriad pushcart peddlers in East Harlem. With Terranova remaining behind the wheel, a handful of gangsters—no one is certain just who took part—entered the restaurant and blasted away at Masseria, who died as soon as he hit the floor. When police arrived, Luciano told them he had been in the bathroom, a fact corroborated by the restaurant staff. Apart from a commotion when the shooting started, Luciano said he saw and heard nothing.

With Masseria out of the picture, Maranzano moved quickly to consolidate his power and bring the other mobsters under his control. It was at a meeting in a Bronx social hall that Maranzano threw a big dinner attended by hundreds of Mafia members and associates. It was an event that for all practical purposes marked the formal organization of Italian organized crime in the United States as it would be known for decades. Though powerful mobsters like Capone in Chicago and Luciano were said to be against the idea of a big boss lording over the crime families, Maranzano pushed the idea of himself being anointed the Caesar of organized crime. According to the recollection of mob turncoat Joseph Valachi, Maranazano spelled out an organization of criminals that was modeled on the legions of ancient Rome.

“Mr. Maranzano started off the meeting by explaining how Joe the Boss was always shaking down members, right and left,” Valachi said in his memoirs, the
Valachi Papers,
which were written by Peter Maas. “He told how he had sentenced all the Castellammarese to death without cause.”

“He was speaking in Italian,” Valachi recalled, “and he said, ‘Now it is going to be different.’ In the new setup he was going to be the
Capo di tutti Capi,
meaning the ‘Boss of All Bosses.’ He said that from here on we were going to be divided up into new Families. Each Family would have a boss and an underboss.”

Beneath the top echelon of bosses were to be lieutenants or
capodecini
under which were the regular members or soldiers. Instilling a military-style structure to the crime families, Maranzano set up a chain of command that required soldiers to talk about problems with their lieutenant who might then go higher up the chain to the underboss or boss.

Surrounded by a large crucifix and religious pictures, Maranzano talked continuously to the multitude of gangsters about the code of conduct that mafiosi must live by. The Mafia came before everything, and its members who violated the secrecy of the organization and talked to outsiders about its business would be killed, Maranzano said.

As a result of the Bronx meeting, bosses for five Mafia families emerged with Maranzano’s blessing. They were Luciano, Thomas Gagliano, Joseph Profaci, Vincent Mangano, and Frank Scalise. By his own account, Joseph Bonanno was part of Maranzano’s family and was an aide-de-camp to the crime boss. But while Luciano and the others should have felt comfortable with the power they now had and the relative peace in their world, they saw Maranzano as a power-hungry despot who threatened their rackets. Maranzano proceeded to shake down other mobsters under the guise of requiring them to buy tickets for banquets in his honor, affairs that netted him more than $100,000, a princely sum in 1931. Luciano in particular thought that the rule of a supreme boss lording over the crime families was an anachronism. Maranzano had turned out to be as much of a destructive force as Masseria had been. If Valachi was accurate in his recollection, Maranzano saw Luciano, Capone, and Genovese as threats and wanted them killed.