King of the Godfathers: "Big Joey" Massino and the Fall of the Bonanno Crime Family (22 page)

Adeline Massino didn’t have the same kind of close connection to her uncle Sal as her sister. Adeline was about twenty years old and seriously dating when her father went on the lam, so she likely didn’t have the same kind of emotional need for a father figure as her sister. A psychology major in her college days, Adeline had become increasingly uncomfortable with her uncle Sal. There was something she didn’t trust about him. He seemed too full of himself. His preening, his vanity, his fixation on being a boss man, turned her against him. But even if she only had vague knowledge and suspicion about her father’s life, Adeline Massino knew that her uncle’s decision to testify was trouble.

Actually, Vitale’s decision to turn was a no-brainer for him. He had resented Massino for years, since the mid-1990s. His brother-in-law may have given him the title of underboss, but he assigned him no captains and kept him on a short leash. Vitale felt emasculated. He had always been the big boy in his own family, growing up in an Italian household with three doting sisters who spoiled him rotten and made him the center of attention. With Massino he was disrespected and belittled. What was worse was that the deprecation came at the hand of a man who had married his sister.

Vitale was unable to even get Christmas gifts from the family captains. In mob parlance, he had been put “on the shelf.” Of course, Massino had his reasons. Vitale wasn’t liked by the other Bonanno family members and his brother-in-law told him that. Some wondered out loud that the only thing keeping Vitale alive was the fact that he was related to Massino by marriage.

The isolation he felt in 2001 from Josephine and her daughters was something Vitale blamed on Massino. Those who study brother-sister relationships say the bonds that develop can sometimes lead to powerful undercurrents where the spouse of one sibling may be viewed as an adversary by the other sibling. This kind of resentment just might have been at the core of the hatred Vitale developed for Massino. But if it was, Vitale never acknowledged it.

Proffers agreements are known as “Queen for a Day” letters, a reference to the 1950s television show where ordinary housewives were lavished with gifts and attention for one day in their life. In Vitale’s case, he spent over a week proffering to prosecutor Andres, telling him what he knew about Massino, the Bonanno crime family, and the various murders. Cesare Bonventre, Alphonse Indelicato, Dominick Trinchera, Philip Giaccone, and Gabriel Infanti—they were victims Vitale put squarely around Massino’s neck in the early days of March 2003.

Jeffrey Sallet and Kimberly McCaffrey, as well as fellow agents Nora Conley and James McGoey, sat mesmerized as Vitale told them stories of how the Bonanno crime family worked. This was the real deal, the history of the crime family fleshed out by someone who had lived through a good part of it. He talked about Massino’s loan-sharking, gambling, and arsons. Vitale also talked about his own crimes, which included the murders everybody in law enforcement thought Massino played a hand in but could never prove. It was nice to have somebody like Vitale fill in the details of the mob hits. But suddenly that caused an unexpected problem.

On March 7, 2003, as he was being debriefed by the FBI agents, Vitale started to tell them about the slaughter in the Bronx of Gerlando Sciascia. The agents clammed up and suddenly closed their notebooks. That killing was a potential death penalty murder they told Vitale. They couldn’t talk to him about it unless the Department of Justice agreed to exclude Vitale from the death penalty as an option. Seeing the wisdom of keeping a key witness in the fold, Washington agreed to cut Vitale out of the death penalty calculation.

Free of the embargo caused by the death penalty concerns, Vitale continued to talk to the agents. He did so for a good part of the next year. Some of the information amounted to mob gossip, such as how reputed mob associate Sandro Aiosa had a reputation for being a “liar and a cheat.” He told the agents who was up and who was down in the Bonanno family, gave the agents lists of names of members in all the crime families, and even provided the names of deceased gangsters to fill in gaps in the FBI crime family lists. Did anybody realize that the Mafia had a prohibition about performing oral sex on a woman and then talking about it? According to Vitale, one Bonanno associate who had been proposed for membership was scratched from consideration because he had been overheard discussing cunnilingus. Another, John Arcaro, was inducted as a courtesy before his death in April 2001, according to Vitale.

Under Mafia rules, the five families could induct new members to replace those who had passed away. It was a way of keeping the status quo. But according to Vitale, he played a little scam. On a few occasions he made up the names of deceased Bonanno soldiers to pad the membership roles and allow the family to induct more members than the rules allowed.

At least once Massino played the role of marriage broker, Vitale said, approving the nuptials of one Bonanno soldier to a woman who was once engaged to a Lucchese soldier. It seemed the Lucchese crime family didn’t want the wedding to go off. But Massino said it could, according to Vitale.

But it was with more substantial stuff that Vitale enthralled the agents, stories of big Mafia meetings where legendary mob bosses sat down with him and Massino. Around 2000 a lot of those meetings involved what La Cosa Nostra was going to do about the wayward and dissolute Colombo crime family. The family had been riddled with turncoats and informants, as well as bloodied by continuous warfare. The mob bosses considered a number of moves, some of them drastic. Some called for dissolving the Colombo group and dividing up the members among the other Mafia families. It was a plan that was rejected, Vitale said, because the other families wouldn’t want to take on men they didn’t know.

Another plan, not much different than the first, was to put all the Colombo family member names in a hat and have the four other crime families draw the names they would take into their family, he said. Some even considered not recognizing the Colombo group at all but thought doing so would show too much disrespect for Carmine Persico, the old family boss who was serving a life sentence, said Vitale.

These meetings sometimes got to be catty and backbiting affairs. One time Peter Gotti, who was the acting boss of the Gambino crime family, was asked why his imprisoned brother John didn’t step down as head of that family. Peter Gotti, obviously angry, responded by asking why didn’t Vincent “the Chin” Gigante, who was also in prison, step down as boss of the Genovese family, said Vitale. The response from another Genovese member at the meeting was that Gigante would be getting out of prison one day—something that wouldn’t be happening for John Gotti.

Vitale also told the agents some intriguing bits. He said that at one point he and Massino had chatted in Howard Beach with Gotti’s son, known as John Jr. The subject of the conversation was Thomas Uva, who with his wife, Rosemary, were believed to be burglarizing mob social clubs all over the city. A lot of mobsters wanted the Uvas dead and the Mafia families put an “open contract” out on them, meaning anyone could collect on it. The younger Gotti remarked “we took care of it” when the couple was discussed, said Vitale. Thomas and Rosemary Uva were shot dead on a Queens street on Christmas Eve 1992. For years, investigators suspected Junior Gotti might have played some role, but he was never charged, and he always denied any involvement.

The bad state of affairs of the mob was often on the agenda at such meetings. Vitale said that at one sitdown session with Peter Gotti, acting Colombo boss Vincent Aloi, and reputed Genovese captain Barney Bellomo, he asked for permission to induct fifteen new members into the Bonanno family. In response, Nicholas “Little Nicky” Corozzo of the Gambino family asked “Where are you going to find fifteen new members?” Peter Gotti jumped in and said that it was not the time to make new members because of the continuing pressure of law enforcement.

As fascinating as such inside talk about the Mafia was, Vitale’s real value to the FBI agents listening to him was the hard details he had about the murders. In the murder of the three captains on May 5, 1981, Massino just wasn’t involved in the planning of the hit, he was actually present the moment the slaughter took place, Vitale told the agents. In the pandemonium that occurred during the shooting, Vitale said he didn’t get a chance to fire his gun and saw a terrified Frank Lino flee through a door he had been assigned to guard. Vitale said he stayed around to clean up the bodies with Dominick “Sonny Black” Napolitano and others, placing the corpses in drop clothes and then following a van that drove the gruesome cargo to Howard Beach.

Vitale’s information about the three captains was dynamite for the prosecution. It was the first direct evidence of an eye witness and participant to implicate Massino in the planning and execution of the slayings. Previously, the evidence was indirect and circumstantial. Even taped remarks that Massino had screwed up in disposing of the bodies had not been enough to win a conviction, as the 1987 trial showed.

Sonny Black Napolitano’s murder was also laid at the feet of Massino by Vitale. After it became known in July 1981 that undercover agent Joseph Pistone had penetrated the Bonanno family, an angry Massino, walking with Vitale in Howard Beach, said that if he had to go to jail because of Pistone, it would be Napolitano who would get a “receipt,” meaning be killed. Vitale told the agents that after picking up a stolen van one day from Duane Leisenheimer, he drove Massino and Steven Cannone to a house in Staten Island. It was during the drive, said Vitale, that Massino said that Napolitano was going to be killed that very night. The three men waited in the van outside the Staten Island house until a man, who Vitale identified as Bobby Lino Sr., came out and said, “It was all done.”

Throughout March 2003, Vitale told the FBI agents about both his and Massino’s involvement in a total of ten murders: Alphonse Indelicato, Dominick Trinchera, Philip Giaccone, Dominick Napolitano, Anthony Mirra, Cesare Bonventre, Gerlando Sciascia, Gabriel Infante, Joseph Pastore, and Vito Borelli. He also tied Massino into a conspiracy to murder union official Anthony Giliberti. Vitale confessed to playing a role in conspiracies to murder two other men and involvement in two actual murders that didn’t involve Massino.

As a mobster, Vitale had done a lot of work. Now he was doing it for the FBI. Vitale told special Agents Sallet, McCaffrey, Conley, and McGoey about his life of crime, implicating Massino and a lot of other Bonanno brethren in crimes that ranged over two decades. There were even times he talked about his sister, Josephine. Had he not insisted in his negotiations with prosecutors that nothing he told them could be ever used against her, she might have found herself in trouble as well. Vitale told the FBI that while Massino was incarcerated he visited his sister and turned over cash to her that represented her husband’s share of loan-sharking and gambling profits.

After Vitale decided to cooperate, there was a stampede of other Bonanno members to sign on to the prosecution’s team. Frank Lino, who had been arrested with Massino in January, felt vulnerable. It had been Vitale, while he was part of the ruling committee of the family, who had Lino carry out some homicides.

“When he cooperated, there was no way I was going to win anymore,” Lino said later. “He was giving all the orders to do all the killings when he was there.”

So after nearly three months in jail—most of it in solitary confinement—Lino decided he wanted to cooperate. On April 4, 2003, a little over a month after word had leaked out about Vitale’s turncoat status, Lino told Andres he wanted to make a deal.

But even before Vitale and Lino there was “Big Louie.” The tall, gangly Big Louie was really James Tartaglione, a mobster who had earned his stripes in the 1980s. His thick glasses and bony face made him look like a high school underachiever who didn’t have the mind or inclination to do much in life but work in a grocery store. But Tartaglione was well liked by Massino and had done his own pieces of work for the Bonanno family.

Yet, there came a point in Tartaglione’s life when he tired of the mob. He had been convicted earlier in the decade and decided to spend his time in Florida. Massino had been troubled by too many Bonanno members taking a break and moving out of state. He tried to pull Tartaglione back but the newly minted Floridian resisted. He had a great life in the Sunshine State and wanted to retire there, spend time with his family, and peacefully watch the sun set.

The indictments in New York had Tartaglione worried. It was just a matter of time before other informants began placing him at the scene of murders. Tartaglione had been outside the door of the Brooklyn social club when the three captains were slain in May 1981. In 1984, Vitale had asked him to help out in the murder of Cesare Bonventre. It was Tartaglione who pulled a squirming, mortally wounded Bonventre out of the car in a garage. Tartaglione had been involved in loan-sharking, arson, and gambling. He had some baggage to be concerned about.

Still on probation for his earlier federal conviction, Tartaglione had always remembered the woman prosecutor in Brooklyn who he came to respect. She was younger than he was, but like him her graying hair showed her seasoning. When his daughter thought she had breast cancer, the woman had passed along to Tartaglione the name of a medical specialist who could help. (No cancer was detected.) The prosecutor was Ruth Nordenbrook, and through his Florida probation officer Tartaglione reached out to her shortly after Massino had been indicted.

Some of Nordenbrook’s associates in the Brooklyn U.S. Attorney’s Office had figured that her patient manner and bonding with Tartaglione, even though she had prosecuted him, would somehow pay off.

“He thought I dealt with him fairly,” Nordenbrook later recalled.

One incident in particular solidified Tartaglione’s respect for the middle-aged prosecutor. Tartaglione was due in court one day on the federal case Nordenbrook had brought. But when his daughter collapsed in the doctor’s office, Tartaglione naturally missed his court date. Normally, when a defendant who is out on bail doesn’t show up in court, it could be grounds for a contempt citation and a charge of bail jumping. But Nordenbrook didn’t insist on any such action and for that Tartaglione was grateful.