Read King of the Godfathers: "Big Joey" Massino and the Fall of the Bonanno Crime Family Online

Authors: Anthony M. DeStefano

Tags: #Criminals, #Social Science, #Massino, #Gangsters - New York (State) - New York, #Mafia - New York (State) - New York, #Criminals & Outlaws, #Espionage, #Organized Crime, #Murder, #True Crime, #Case studies, #Criminals - New York (State) - New York, #Serial Killers, #Organized crime - New York (State) - New York, #Biography: General, #Gangsters, #Joey, #Mafia, #General, #New York, #Biography & Autobiography, #New York (State), #Criminology

King of the Godfathers: "Big Joey" Massino and the Fall of the Bonanno Crime Family (10 page)

BOOK: King of the Godfathers: "Big Joey" Massino and the Fall of the Bonanno Crime Family
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Inside, the sound of the bell let the men who were waiting know the visitors had arrived. Four of them were standing in a closet, and when they heard the bell they pulled ski masks over their heads. The closet door was open just enough so that those inside could see Trinchera walk in first to the big meeting room. He was followed by Giaccone. Then came Indelicato. He was the key. When the men saw Indelicato come into the room, they knew what they had to do. They had been told earlier that if Indelicato didn’t show up it would be a regular meeting in the room. If he did show up, well, that would be that.

The three men, plus Lino, had come to the meeting to take a third stab to see if the bad blood and tension with their family could somehow be lessened. Everybody in their world knew that the Bonanno family had a power struggle so the meeting was called to iron things out. Joseph Massino had wanted it and the three captains who had arrived knew that he was a formidable power, a man with the clout to call everybody together. They, too, wanted to talk. Lino would be their witness.

The three late arrivals saw in the big room those who were followers of Massino and the other powerful captain Sonny Black Napolitano. Naturally, Massino was there. So was Joseph Zicarelli from New Jersey, known as “Bayonne Joe,” and Nicola DiStefano, whose fights of yesteryear had earned him the sobriquet of “Nick the Battler.” There was also a Sicilian gangster named Antonio Giordano, as were several other members of the crime family high echelon. Scanning the small crowd, the three captains would have noticed, perhaps oddly, that Napolitano wasn’t there.

Gerlando “George” Sciascia spotted Indelicato in the crowd and ran the fingers of one hand through his hair. For the others in the closet that was the prearranged signal that meant they could start.

The four men in masks burst from the closet. One had a Tommy gun, another a shotgun, and two carried pistols. Two of them ran to guard the exit door. Vito Rizzutto, turned to the three captains.

“Don’t anybody move, this is a holdup,” said Rizzutto.

Seeing the masks and the guns, Trinchera, Indelicato, Giaccone, and Lino reacted. They knew at that instant that their worst suspicions had been realized. They had been lured into a trap. Their survival instincts kicked in with a suddenness that surprised some in the room. Trinchera made guttural noise and charged the assailants.

Unarmed and unassuming, the three luckless men had nowhere to turn. Rizzutto and Sciascia opened up with a shotgun and pistol. Trinchera lost part of his abdomen in one blast. Indelicato tried to run out the exit but fell just short of the door when another shotgun blast hit him. Sciascia came over, pulled out a pistol, and shot him one more time in the left side of the head. Giaccone was lying dead in the big room.

Lino, the last man to enter the killing zone, turned around when the shooting started and in the confusion of those early seconds ran right past the two men who were supposed to seal off the exit. There was no stopping him. He moved so fast there was no use trying to follow him.

The shooting was over in seconds. There was blood and viscera all over the big room. Besides the gunners, the only one left standing in the middle of the chaotic scene was the big man himself, Joseph Massino.

Early the next morning, May 6, 1981, FBI agent Charles Rooney returned to his office on Queens Boulevard in Rego Park. Many of the agency’s organized crime squads worked out of the modern steel and glass building. It was a convenient location for them because so many of the targets of investigations lived and worked in Queens, Brooklyn, and Long Island. The location provided the agents with easy highway access to those areas. The office also housed several pen registers, devices that were able to note whenever a particular telephone was called or was being used to place a call. Pen registers were not wiretaps, so the FBI didn’t need a warrant to tie them into a particular telephone number through the telephone companies.

Rooney was in his office by 8:00
A.M.
All of a sudden, the pen registers started to click on, sounding like a bunch of electronic crickets. Then they started sounding like a bunch of adding machines as they quickly typed out on paper the telephone numbers that each of the monitored lines was calling. Since each machine had been linked to a particular telephone number in the Bonanno investigation, it was clear that the targets in the case were busy calling each other.

But what were they calling each other about? Rooney and his fellow agents could only watch in amazement as the machines recorded the various telephones making and receiving calls.

One of the machines registered calls on the telephone at Massino’s J&S Cake Social Club. But without listening into the call the FBI could only guess what Massino and the other investigative targets were talking about. For all they knew, he might be taking a lot of orders for ham sandwiches. But Rooney and the others surmised it was something much bigger than that to make the pen registers so hot.

The pen registers were one of three strange clues Rooney and the other FBI agents noticed over the next three days. Another tantalizing lead for Rooney came from Pistone, who telephoned his fellow agents with the information that Benjamin Ruggiero, having dropped out of sight for a few days, had called him to say “everything is fine, we are winners.” Then Rooney learned that an associate of the Bonanno family, Antonio Giordano, had been checked into Coney Island Hospital with a bullet wound. To Rooney, the fact that Giordano, a resident of Bushwick, in northern Brooklyn, would take himself to a hospital in the southern part of Brooklyn seemed odd. An FBI agent visited Giordano, who was suffering from paralysis after being shot in the back. The wounded man insisted to the agent he was shot in a traffic altercation. It was a story he stuck with.

Though seemingly disparate incidents—the frenzy of activity on the pen registers, Ruggiero’s comment to Pistone, and the shooting of Giordano—they appeared more than just coincidental to Rooney and his FBI colleagues on Queens Boulevard. Something clearly had happened in the Bonanno crime family. But what?

Rooney found one more thing to puzzle over. An FBI surveillance team had photographed Massino outside the Capri Motor Inn in the Bronx the same day the pen registers went crazy. Massino was in the company of Vito Rizzuto, a Bonanno captain from Canada, and George Sciascia, another Bonanno member from Canada. Also present was Gianni Liggamari, a major Bonanno family drug dealer from Sicily. The Canadians were heavyweight Mafia members in a country where the Bonanno family long had representation. That Massino was meeting with them at a time of so much tantalizing intelligence only served to increase Rooney’s curiosity.

CHAPTER 9

The Inside Man

Dominick Trinchera, Philip Giaccone, and Alphonse Indelicato didn’t know they were going to die when they walked into the social club on May 5, 1981. But undercover agent Joseph Pistone certainly had enough indications that at least Giaccone was a target. Benjamin “Lefty Guns” Ruggiero had told Pistone that Giaccone was the object of a hit attempt as early as April but that it had been called off. The thinking was that all the three captains should be killed together.

In later court testimony, Pistone recalled that on April 23, 1981, Ruggiero explained that it was Dominick Napolitano and Joseph Massino who had put together the planned hit. Because of that, said Ruggiero, the Commission had assured both captains that Philip “Rusty” Rastelli would be the absolute boss. On top of that, Ruggiero told Pistone, the Sicilian Zips had come over to Massino, assuring that the Rastelli loyalists would have crucial support in the coming showdown.

Ruggiero dropped some more hints, Pistone later recalled, when he told the undercover agent that the three captains (who were still alive at that point) had lost the power play for the crime family. The deal had been ratified by the Mafia Commission, Ruggiero indicated.

“They lost, and they lost nationwide. New York, Miami, Chicago, they lost nationwide,” Ruggiero told Pistone, cryptically.

“Rusty was the boss,” Ruggiero added, referring to Rastelli.

In recounting later on the witness stand and in his book of the deadly days around May 5, 1981, Pistone said that when Ruggiero suddenly went missing, another FBI agent reported that informants were saying the three captains—Trinchera, Giaccone, and Indelicato—had been assassinated. It took about ten days but Pistone got called by Napolitano for a meeting at the Motion Lounge. What he learned there would answer the questions Charles Rooney and the other FBI agents had been puzzling over ever since their pen registers went hyperactive on May 6, 1981.

Pistone remembered a calm Napolitano sitting at the bar. There were the usual associates at the club: Jimmy “Legs” Episcopia and John “Boobie” Cerasani. Pistone also noticed a tall, stocky, thick-handed guy who had been around Massino a lot. His name, Pistone would later learn, was Raymond Wean.

After some greetings, Napolitano and Pistone sat alone at a card table in the club room next to a small pool table. Napolitano told Pistone that the three captains had indeed been murdered. There had been one complication though. Indelicato’s son, Anthony Bruno, was still around and the information the mob had was that he was running around in Miami, coked up and bruising to avenge his father. If Pistone found him in Florida, Napolitano said, just have him killed.

“Be careful, because when he’s coked up, he’s crazy,” Napolitano told Pistone.

Pistone later recalled that Wean left the club shortly after Pistone entered and made a telephone call to the FBI relating how a strange guy named “Donnie” had appeared and seemed very friendly and close to Napolitano. Wean made the call to his new best friend. He was Patrick Colgan, the FBI agent who had arrested him and Joseph Massino six years earlier over a hijacked load of clothing on Grand Avenue.

The problem for Wean though was that after his 1977 federal conviction he just couldn’t stay out of trouble. Nassau County police picked him up on a felony charge and if convicted again Wean would have been a three-time loser and facing more jail time. As he cooled his heels in the county lockup, Wean’s common-law wife reached out to Colgan.

“He likes you. He trusts you,” Wean’s wife told Colgan, as she pleaded with the agent to visit her lover in jail.

Out in Nassau County Wean knew that his only ticket out of a long prison term was to cooperate. He knew a lot about the Bonanno crime family and Massino, Wean said. He also didn’t want to die in jail, a distinct possibility since Wean had already suffered from a heart attack.

“I’ll cooperate and testify,” Wean told Colgan. “I will go up against Joey.”

Wean became an informant. He did so because Joe Massino had never really taken care of him. Wean had done some serious jail time for being a part of Massino’s hijacking operations and in all of those years away from his family, one former FBI agent recalled, the lady love of the big-bodied truck robber never got anything from his Maspeth crony to ease the financial crunch. One of Massino’s failings was that he didn’t take care of the people he climbed the backs of in his steady rise as a gangster. It would be something that would come back to haunt him.

But before Wean could do anything, he had to make a $100,000 bail in the Nassau County case, a sum that he had no way of raising. To make Wean’s release possible, Colgan and an assistant U.S. attorney from Brooklyn took the unusual step of testifying at a special secret court hearing before a state court judge about Wean’s intended cooperation and the need for a lower bail. The court agreed to lower the bail to $40,000. Because the FBI wasn’t going to post the bond, Colgan suggested to Wean that perhaps his parents could raise the cash. Wean contacted his elderly mother and father, and they agreed to help him. He made bail.

With a grateful Wean on his side, Colgan said he wanted him to try to hang around Massino and see if he could secretly tape him. But as it turned out, Wean spent more of his time around the Motion Lounge because Massino had told him to make himself useful to Napolitano, Pat Colgan later recalled. It was clear to many in the FBI at this point that Massino was the up and coming power in the family and he really didn’t need to run around with a street guy like Wean. Neither Wean nor Pistone knew of their separate roles in what would soon become part of a nightmare for the mob. While the FBI had known almost immediately about the killings of the three captains, no corpses had surfaced. That changed on Sunday, May 20, 1981.

Ruby Street in eastern Brooklyn literally straddles the borough’s border with Queens. It is an area of old detached houses and surrounding vacant spaces where tomato plants grow by the roadside. There is the feel of a forgotten neighborhood, a No-Man’s Land in a city of over 8 million souls. It is also a place for secrets.

At the intersection of Ruby and Blake Avenue was a fairly large vacant lot that like most neglected spaces in the city became overgrown with weeds. Kids liked to play in it and did so on that particular Sunday in May. They were looking to amuse themselves when they noticed a peculiar object sticking up from the dry soil It was a human hand, and from the looks of things it had been hastily buried. It was as if whoever did the burial didn’t care if the corpse was found.

When the police arrived, they discovered the rest of the partly decomposed body of a man who had been buried about two feet down. The corpse was wrapped in a tufted blanket used by moving companies to protect furniture, and a police officer who responded to the scene noted there was a rope around the body’s waist. The corpse was clothed in an orange t-shirt, tan dress slacks, and brown cowboy boots. The body had two tattoos on the left arm: a heart pierced by a dagger and an inscription that read “Holland 1945 Dad.” The dead man was wearing a stainless steel Cartier watch and had in his pocket a leather Gucci key case that contained keys to a Volvo.

Three gunshot wounds were found: two in the body and one in the head. The fatal shot appeared to be one in the back that had punctured the aorta. Though the body had suffered from some decomposition, one of the forensic experts injected some fluid into the shriveled fingers—a standard practice—so that fingerprints could be taken. The medical examiner took a few days but after a relative showed up to look at the body it was quickly confirmed that the corpse in the vacant lot was that of Alphonse “Sonny Red” Indelicato. One of the dead captains had been found.

BOOK: King of the Godfathers: "Big Joey" Massino and the Fall of the Bonanno Crime Family
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