King of the Godfathers: "Big Joey" Massino and the Fall of the Bonanno Crime Family (13 page)

Even his arrest didn’t stop Ruggiero’s fellow mobsters from trying to plot his demise. During one of Ruggiero’s unsuccessful court hearings aimed at his getting bail, Assistant U.S. Attorney Barbara Jones, told the court that an informant told her that Ruggiero would be killed as soon as he got out of jail.

Massino wasn’t charged in the Napolitano case even though he was suspected of having taken part in the conspiracy that led to the murders. But by the time the indictment against Napolitano and the others was being unsealed, investigators were conducting an additional investigation of Massino for loan-sharking and narcotics distribution. Separate investigations were also beginning on the other Mafia families as well, probes that would take years to complete. One of those investigations focused on the dealings of the Gambino family and its new, emerging members. Among them was the brash and generally unknown captain John Gotti. A neighbor and friend of Massino’s for the better part of a decade, Gotti, who was schooled in the ways of mob life by underboss Aniello Dellacroce, had a crew that counted among its members his brother Eugene Gotti and Angelo Ruggiero.

By November 1981, federal prosecutors had zeroed in on the two Gotti brothers and Ruggiero for their own particular racketeering offenses that included loan-sharking, gambling, narcotics, and murder. Investigators knew that Ruggiero was such an uncontrollable talker that he had earned the nickname on the street of “Quack-Quack,” a reference to the quacking of a duck. Since he talked so much, FBI agents got a court order to wiretap Ruggiero’s telephone at his home on Eighty-eighth Street in Howard Beach. That tap lasted about a month until Ruggiero moved to a new home in Cedarhurst, Long Island, when agents got a court order to wiretap two phones there.

With subpoenas flying around Howard Beach and the rest of the city on the probe of Massino and the Bonanno family, it was no secret that a major federal investigation was underway. Angelo Ruggiero, a friend and one-time neighbor of Massino, had already been subpoenaed to testify, but under the advice of his lawyer, Michael Coiro, he asserted his privilege against self-incrimination and didn’t testify. Once away from the grand jury, however, Ruggiero and Massino talked openly on the telephone about the investigation and the ominous things it portended. The FBI agents were right about Ruggiero, he just didn’t know how to control his chatter.

For instance, on November 25, 1981, two days after the announcement of the Napolitano indictment, Ruggiero told Massino about having received the subpoena from “Mrs. Jones,” a reference to Barbara Jones, the assistant U.S. attorney in Manhattan who was investigating Napolitano, Massino, and the Bonanno family.

“How the hell did [the agents] throw you into this?” Massino asked Ruggiero. Though both gangsters, Ruggiero had little or no connection to the Bonanno activities, the most notorious being the murders of Trinchera, Giaccone, Indelicato, and—though still unknown to law enforcement—the slaughter of Napolitano.

Massino was clearly getting concerned about the investigation and was overheard wondering if Jones had a subpoena for him as well. It was at this point that Massino asked Ruggiero if it was even wise for him to go home if Jones was getting ready to haul him before the grand jury.

It was during this conversation in November 1981 that Massino hinted that he was entertaining the idea of leaving town. Five of his crime family associates had already been arrested (Napolitano, though charged, was moldering in a mob graveyard). He knew that the investigation was focusing on his connection to the murder of the three captains, crimes that could carry a life sentence if convicted. A sense of dread and panic seemed to be setting in.

Massino told Ruggiero that he wished he could go to sleep and wake up after the approaching Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays. Maybe these troubles would be all over, the panicky mobster said.

“It ain’t going to be any better,” Ruggiero responded.

Subpoenas were everywhere. And there was rumors of more indictments. Furthermore, an FBI agent had penetrated the Bonanno family.

These were the things in early 1982 that added to Massino’s sense of discomfort and dread of what could be in store for him. Ruggiero’s remarks didn’t help him either.

Around the J&S Cake Social Club in Queens, the conversations that took place reflected the troubles. As Vitale later told the FBI, he remembered Massino and mobster Al Embarrato, known by the name “Al Walker” on the street, talking about the Pistone penetration of the crime family. The search for scapegoats didn’t stop with the killing of Napolitano. Even though it was Napolitano who had been taken in by Pistone and had pushed the undercover FBI agent for crime family membership, it had been Anthony Mirra who had first unwittingly befriended Pistone.

A bulky man with a reputation for being a killer who was quick with a knife instead of a gun, Mirra was a hothead with anger-management problems who ran some loan-sharking and gambling operations. As a soldier in the Bonanno family, Mirra reported for a while to a captain named Michael Zaffarano, a pornographer who died of a heart attack during an FBI raid in 1980. Mirra used Pistone as a driver, but after Mirra was arrested and sent to prison for a narcotics charge, Pistone gravitated to Benjamin Ruggiero.

In a snippet of conversation Vitale told FBI agents he overheard, Massino told Embarrato that Mirra “had to go.” Mirra had been released from prison in 1981 for the drug case and was around town again. Some Bonanno members now thought he was an informant, which wasn’t a good thing to be called with the FBI playing hardball and building criminal cases all over town.

After Pistone’s true identity had become known, Mirra had kept a low profile and had been very hard to reach. “He wasn’t meeting with anybody,” one mobster said. Embarrato got the job of farming out Mirra’s murder and in a case of delegating responsibility passed the order for the hit to Richard Cantarella, who in turn involved Joseph D’Amico, someone Mirra trusted.

On February 12, 1982, as Mirra fumbled for a key to open the security lock of a garage where he kept his gray Volvo, he was shot in the head at near point-blank range by D’Amico. Crime scene photos captured Mirra slumped in the driver’s seat, his chin against his chest as if he were taking a nap. A rivulet of blood had trickled out of his right ear and stained his winter coat.

“I was the only one who could get close to him,” D’Amico later told investigators.

Any number of suspected informants could have been killed. But no matter how many died, the fact of the matter was that Joseph Massino never shook the feeling of foreboding he had in March 1982. He wanted to get out of town, and fast.

Turning to the fair-haired kid, Duane Leisenheimer, Massino traveled with his driver to the Hamptons. It was in the off-season since the Hamptons didn’t get swinging until May at the earliest and the hideaway might provide time to think. Still, Massino and Leisenheimer saw too many people they thought they knew in the beach towns along Long Island’s south shore and decided to pull up stakes again and head back to the city.

Vitale remembered getting a call from his brother-in-law and told to come to Junior Palermo’s home on Ocean Parkway in Brooklyn. Palermo was a Colombo crime family soldier who Massino knew. No new charges had been filed against anyone but there were simply too many bad vibes, Massino said. It was time to split.

So Joseph Massino, you are supposed to be a wealthy gangster with the vast resources of the Mafia at your disposal. You know the cops are itching to arrest you. The world is your oyster. Where are you going to go now? Well, it isn’t Disneyland, much less Brazil.

“I need a place to go for about thirty days,” Massino told Leisenheimer. “What about your parents’ house?”

Leisenheimer’s family had moved to Pennsylvania’s Pocono Mountains area and his mother had a house in the town of Milford. There were plenty of hotels and motels in the area. A careful person could get lost there and stay out of sight. If necessary, Leisenheimer’s family could simply be told that his friend Joe was ducking a subpoena.

Leisenheimer later recalled that his father had no problems with his son staying at the family home. But the elder Leisenheimer, his son said, had only a couple of provisos: “Keep the place clean but when I want to go there, you guys got to leave.”

So in the face of approaching trouble, Joseph Massino didn’t stand around to face the music. But for a guy who spent most of his life in working-class Maspeth, the possibilities Massino saw for life on the lam were not very exotic. He packed up his travel bag and headed west, not to some obscure town or exotic location, but instead to a place made famous for its honeymoon bungalows and heart-shaped bath tubs.

Massino’s nose for trouble served him well. No sooner had he and Leisenheimer headed for the gentle rolling hills of the Poconos than on March 25, 1982, a federal grand jury in Manhattan indicted Massino and others. It was as bad as he expected. The new charges, actually an expansion of the earlier November 1981 indictment against the other Bonanno members, accused Massino of involvement in the murder of the three captains. There was also a charge against Massino for hijacking.

“Mr. Messina,” said one newspaper, “who was labeled in the indictment as a ‘capodecina,’ or captain, in the crime family, is a fugitive.”

With Massino a step ahead of the sheriff, so to speak, and nowhere to be found by the FBI, a bench warrant was issued by a federal judge for his arrest. By then, Massino was quietly spending time at the Milford House, an inn in Pennsylvania. He used the alias “Joe Russo” and on weekends he and Leisenheimer, who used the name “Duane Kelly,” went to the younger man’s family home in the area.

But living so close to New York and trying to hide out meant you had to be careful. Massino thought he was hiding but he learned that he could run into people he knew when he least expected it. He had hardly been on the lam a month when Massino decided to take a break in the cocktail lounge of a Holiday Inn in Port Jervis. Massino was seated at a table when in walked an old acquaintance named Salvatore Polisi. A mob associate and criminal out of New York, Polisi recognized Massino from some meetings they had in Queens and decided to shake Massino’s hand.

“How are you doing?” Polisi asked Massino.

“He was kind of nervous or concerned about me just meeting him,” Polisi later remembered about Massino’s reaction.

Massino didn’t want for much. Vitale, it was later learned by police, would bring him packets of cash and there were occasional visits back to New York City when Massino stayed at the Ocean Parkway, Brooklyn, home of Junior Palermo, a member of the Colombo crime family. When they had to, Bonanno family members made the trip to the Poconos to caucus with Massino. Vitale made over a dozen trips. John Gotti even made the trip a couple of times, meeting Leisenheimer at the Milford Diner and then being driven to the Leisenheimer family home. On occasion, Leisenheimer drove back to New York and picked up other visitors. This was 1982, before cell phones came into wide use, but Massino was able to stay in telephone contact with Vitale through a system that relied on the use of different telephone numbers that had been reduced to a code.

Cash and calls weren’t the only thing Massino got on the lam. In the summer of 1976, Massino was making trips to Dannemora Correctional Facility when he gave a ride to a pretty twenty-two-year-old Bayside High School graduate known as Linda, whose husband happened to be incarcerated there as well. Something then happened. As Linda later told investigators, she began to date Massino on a “personal level,” driving with him to the Lewisburg federal prison when he visited Rastelli. Having divorced her husband in 1979, Linda said she kept seeing Massino until their relationship broke off in 1980. Their affair rekindled, Linda told a federal grand jury, in July 1982. With Massino a fugitive, Linda said she visited him in different Pennsylvania motels. She remembered being driven by Leisenheimer for those rendevous during which Massino told her about his indictment for the three captains murder and hijacking.

Given the fugitive status of Massino and the continuous trips being made by crime family members to the Poconos for visits, the question is raised about how much effort the FBI put into looking for him. Massino himself believed that the agents had enough on their hands with the approaching trial of his cohorts for the three captains murder and that he was a low priority. But in fact they were looking.

The FBI believed Vitale was the key in this period to finding Massino and began to pay him unannounced visits and shadowed his movements. For instance, on August 31, 1982, three FBI agents including Charles Rooney stopped by the J&S Cake Social Club in Maspeth. In the doorway stood Vitale, his business partner Carmine Peluso, and a nervous cook. It wasn’t the first time the agents had stopped by.

Rooney did the talking. He flat out told Vitale that if Massino turned himself in the FBI wouldn’t make so many visits. After all, Rooney explained, Massino was a fugitive and they were looking for him. If Massino came back and surrendered, there simply wouldn’t be a need for the FBI visits.

Vitale, according to an FBI report of the meeting, then did something that seemed strange. He reached into the right pocket of his trousers and pulled out a large wad of cash wrapped in a rubber band, counted it, and then placed the cash in his left pocket.

“Can we talk off the record?” Vitale asked.

“What do you have to say?” one of the other agents asked.

It turned out Vitale had nothing much to say. The agents, he said, were coming on like gangbusters, scaring the poor cook. “He is probably in the back of the shop having a nervous breakdown,” Vitale said of the young man.

There wasn’t much point to the rest of the encounter and the agents reiterated that they were looking for Massino before getting in their car and driving away. Given the ease Massino apparently had in slipping in and out of the city during his months on the lam, it is likely he was already local in the New York City area when the agents visited Vitale.

But try as they might, the agents simply could never find Massino. They stopped by Massino’s home in Howard Beach, usually around holidays such as the Fourth of July, Labor Day, or Memorial Day. They spoke to Massino’s wife, Josephine, who told them the obvious: her husband was not around.