King of the Godfathers

by Anthony Destefano

  In its own way, World War II was a fortuitous event for the Mafia and allowed a number of American bosses a cushion of several years from legal trouble. Though it was a well-kept secret at the time, it is now well documented that U.S. officials turned to some of New York’s mob bosses for help in the war effort. The first approach came after the passenger liner Normandie burned and foundered at its mooring on the West Side of Manhattan. Anxious to combat sabotage on the waterfront—something suspected of having caused the Normandie to burn—military and government officials turned to Joseph “Socks” Lanza, a Genovese man on the waterfront along the East River, including the Fulton Fish Market. Though under indictment for extortion, Lanza was seen as the right man for the job. While it is impossible to say if his efforts thwarted any sabotage or scared away any Axis spies, nothing akin to the Normandie incident happened again during the war.

  Officials also turned to Luciano, who during the early part of the war was serving his sentence for prostitution-related offenses in the tough Dannemora prison in upstate New York. Luciano agreed to help and used his influence with his associates to help security on the West Side docks. But the really important help Luciano gave the Allied war effort came when from prison he established contact with his amici in Sicily. He instructed them to serve as spies and guides for the invading U.S., British, and Canadian forces who landed on the island in the summer of 1943.

  After the Allies were able to take Sicily in five weeks, they leapfrogged to the Italian mainland with the invasion of the Salerno-Naples area. Again, the Allies had the help of another New York Mafia boss, Vito Genovese. Living in Naples since he fled New York following his indictment for murder of an old business partner, Genovese had become something of a stellar citizen. He even reportedly arranged for the murder on a Manhattan street in 1943 of one of dictator Benito Mussolini’s most vocal opponents, Carlos Tresca. For the Allies, Genovese worked as a translator and, as Talese later reports, was able to provide information about the Italian black market profiteers.

  Genovese’s wartime efforts didn’t insulate him from problems. The FBI had him extradicted back to New York to stand trial for the Fernando Boccia murder. But conveniently, the key witness against Genovese was poisoned to death in the Brooklyn jail cell where he was being held as a material witness. Deprived of the witness’s crucial testimony, prosecutors dropped the case against Genovese. He was free to live and work at his pleasure in New York.

  The war assistance by some of the mob bosses didn’t give them carte blanche to do business as usual. Luciano had Washington’s gratitude and won his freedom from prison when New York Governor Thomas Dewey, the very man who while working as Manhattan’s district attorney secured Luciano’s conviction, signed an order commuting his sentence on February 2, 1946. But as part of the deal, Luciano had to agree to voluntarily depart the United States (he was not a naturalized citizen), which he did shortly after Dewey signed the commutation order. Before setting sail on the Laura Keene, an old Liberty ship, Luciano, in another example of how the mob guys could get one over, was able to leave the immigration station at Ellis Island and attend a farewell party in his honor at the Village Inn in Greenwich Village. Mafiosi, judges, and politicians attended and reportedly gave Luciano thick envelopes presumably stuffed with cash. After sailing back to Italy on February 9, Luciano had to work through his emissaries, chief among them being Genovese, who was out from under the yoke of his legal troubles.

  The war years had emboldened the mob, having seen how its effective power on the street and the docks had worked to its advantage. Crime families, including that of Joseph Bonanno, also developed rackets by trading in rationed goods, including precious gasoline stamps. But other core (and illegal) Mafia businesses in New York such as the docks, labor unions, and the garment industry were also prospering. Despite prosecutions by Dewey, the Mafia families also enjoyed a tremendous amount of connection to New York politicians and judges.

  By the end of the war, Luciano had control of his family through Genovese and was a major force. Rounding out the leadership of the New York families were four other bosses from the time Maranzano was deposed: Joseph Profaci, Vincent Mangano, Thomas Gagliano, and, of course, Joseph Bonanno. However, Genovese had an ambitious Frank Costello to contend with and that created problems. It was Costello who had cultivated friendships and allegiances at a time when Genovese had been ducking prosecution in Italy. Profaci, Mangano, and Gagliano all had aspiring and power-hungry underbosses and associates to deal with. But Bonanno had no such complication of leadership and command. He was the sole power in his crime family, unchallenged by any upstarts or intrigue.

  CHAPTER 3

  The Toughest Kid on the Block

  Traveling east along Metropolitan Avenue from Williamsburg where Joseph Bonanno got his start as a criminal, you will soon cross into the area of New York City known as Maspeth. The origin of the neighborhood’s name is obscured within some mix of the old Dutch and Indian languages. It was once a swampy area, the Indian name meaning “the place of bad waters.” In the nineteenth century, it contained large trout ponds that were drained over a century ago. Today, the largest body of water in Maspeth is the Newtown Creek, an estuary officials have been gamely trying to clean up for years.

  When western parts of what is today known as Queens became accessible by the railroad and ferries in the nineteenth century, industry grew and Maspeth saw a large influx of working families. Factories sprung up where workers spun hemp into rope and processed fertilizer and flooring. The neighborhood became another magnet for immigrants. The cheap housing and residential character of the place drew Italian, Irish, and Polish immigrants. Well into the twenty-first century Maspeth was one of the main residential areas for firefighters, sanitation workers, laborers, and truck drivers who traced their ancestry back to Italy.

  It was immediately after World War II that an Italian immigrant family with the surname of Vitale took up residence close to Maspeth. Giuseppe and Lilli Vitale had emigrated from the village of San Giuseppe, some forty miles south of Palermo in the western part of Sicily. Life in the old country had not been easy, particularly when faced with the infant mortality rates that Sicilian families experienced. Like most Sicilian households, the Vitale family had hoped for a son. They already had a name. The boy would be called Giuseppe or “Joseph” in English.

  Male offspring were favored by parents since they could guarantee the family name would be passed on. But the Vitale family was not going to be blessed with a son, certainly not while living in the hardscrabble hills of the Sicilian countryside. Two baby boys died, either in childbirth or shortly after. Twice the Vitale parents had to bury the tiny bodies as their three daughters watched.

  In Maspeth, the Vitale family lived in the kind of working obscurity that immigrants found as their niche. They weren’t rich but they had by all accounts a quiet, nurturing home life where the three daughters—Anna, Betty, and the youngest Josephine—thrived. Giuseppe, also known as Joseph, and Lilli Vitale took one more chance at having a son. Seemingly cursed with bad luck with sons named Giuseppe, the parents decided that if another male child came into their lives he would be named something different. On September 22, 1947, Lilli Vitale gave birth to a son, and he was baptized as Salvatore. He survived. The family had great hopes for him.

  Both employed, Giuseppe and Lilli spent a great deal of time out of their house and entrusted the care of Salvatore to their daughters. Josephine was four years older than her baby brother but even at such a young age, with her parents spending so much time out of the house making a living, she became a surrogate mother.

  The Vitale girls fussed over Salvatore in ways that were certain to spoil him. He got what he wanted when he wanted it, usually from Josephine. Yet, family members would later remember that despite all the doting from his siblings, Salvatore Vitale did not respond in kind to his sisters. Sure, he may have been spoiled, but he seemed to lack affection, his relatives would later recall. He didn’t do any
thing terribly wrong as a child. But while the Vitale women centered their lives around the home, Salvatore seemed distant and cold. He should have been another girl, his father would say of his only son, according to one family member.

  Maspeth is bisected by the Long Island Expressway, the concrete ribbon of a roadway that became over the years the crowded conduit for much of the traffic going to and from New York City. The part of Maspeth north of the expressway—where the Vitale family would buy a house on Sixty-eighth Street near Grand Avenue—retained its residential character. The same was largely true of the southern part of the community, although residential development was hemmed in by large cemeteries.

  It was a few blocks from the main shopping boulevard of Grand Avenue in Maspeth that another working-class family took up residence. Like the Vitales who lived about five blocks away, Anthony and Adeline Massino were Italian Americans. But while the Massinos traced their heritage to the city of Naples and its environs, they were second-generation Americans born and raised in the United States. They had three children, Joseph, John, and Anthony. Their father worked in a neighborhood grocery store.

  Joseph Massino was a boy comfortable on the streets. Big boned, trim, and muscular, he was athletic but not very good in school. Friends would later recall he became very adept in math. In a working-class neighborhood where as a kid you had to hold your own to make your mark, he earned a reputation of being one of the toughest on the block. He could kick ass with the best of them.

  Joseph Massino only got to the seventh grade in what is now Intermediate School 73 on Fifty-fourth Avenue. Bored with school, Massino took a variety of jobs, including as a summer lifeguard at beach clubs in Atlantic Beach on Long Island and in Florida. In something of a Maspeth legend, which Massino himself would insist was true, he supposedly once swam from Breezy Point in the Rockaways to Manhattan Beach, a distance of over one mile. Stories also circulated that he would jump off the Cross Bay Bridge, which connected the Rockaways to the mainland, and swim for hours.

  With a reputation for being a tough guy and with a full head of wavy black hair, Massino’s rugged looks caught the eye of neighborhood girl Josephine Vitale, who was seven months younger. She had been voted the best looking in her eighth grade class. The year was 1956.

  Around the time Joseph Massino and Josephine Vitale were getting acquainted in working-class Maspeth, the American Mafia was on the verge of some big changes. Bonanno was shuttling back and forth between Tucson, Arizona, and New York. He made one side trip to Havana, Cuba, which in those days was a playground for the rich and infamous. As he recounted the Havana trip in his autobiography, Bonanno hooked up with the financial mob wizard Meyer Lansky, who owned a piece of the Hotel Nacional, and spent his days wandering the streets of old Havana, where he stayed in some flophouse hotel in 1924.

  The way Joseph Bonanno recounted the Havana trip it was nothing more than a nostalgic trip away from home of some “Ulysses,” as he likened himself, who had his fill of adventure in life. His son, Bill, in his 1999 autobiography, put a different spin on the Havana trip on which he accompanied his father. Bill Bonanno said that his father met up with not only Lansky but also New York Mafia bosses Albert Anastasia, Frank Costello, and Joseph Profaci. “We were there for pleasure, not business, but business came up,” the younger Bonanno said. Cuba’s dictator Fulgencio Batista met with the mobsters and tried to get them to somehow influence the Eisenhower administration to take a more active role against the insurgency led by Fidel Castro. According to Bill Bonanno, Castro figured the mafiosi had an interest in the island’s drug trade, aside from the millions made in the casinos.

  The conventional wisdom about the American Mafia’s stance on drugs has been that the bosses were against narcotics trafficking. But if it was a hands-off policy, it was riddled with holes like Swiss cheese. Bill Bonanno asserted that in 1947 in a clandestine Mafia Commission meeting on a yacht off Florida—and not in Havana as widely believed—the bosses argued about drugs. According to Bonanno, the “liberal” faction of the Commission, composed of Vito Genovese and Thomas Lucchese, wanted to get involved in heroin. The conservatives, led by Joseph Bonanno, thought it was a bad idea and prevailed on the Commission to pass a resolution prohibiting narcotics trafficking. The elder Bonanno, his son stated, believed drugs would destroy the families.

  Despite such prohibitions, a number of New York Mafia leaders began to push harder and allowed some of their men to get involved in narcotics. The same divisiveness over drugs also split the Sicilian Mafia. When Joseph Bonanno made a trip to Sicily in early fall of 1957—again part pleasure and part business—he learned that New York Mafia families were involved in the trafficking of heroin and its opium base, according to his son. Impossible, the elder Bonanno responded when told of the New York connection. “They are up to their asses in it,” an old friend explained. “They couldn’t care less about our glorious tradition.”

  The main violator of the Mafia drug ban was certainly Vito Genovese, who finally got Frank Costello out of the leadership role in their family by ordering an assassination attempt of his rival. The plot to kill Costello culminated in a shooting in May 1957 as the dapper Costello was returning to his apartment in Central Park West. The gunman has long been reputed to have been Vincent Gigante, whose bullet grazed Costello in the head but didn’t kill him. Getting the message, Costello retired as boss of Lucky Luciano’s old family. From then onward, Genovese pushed the narcotics connections, ultimately pushing so hard that he was arrested on narcotics charges by federal officials in 1958 and after his conviction was sent to prison where he died in 1969.

  It was very soon after the Costello assassination attempt that one of the other conservative bosses, Albert Anastasia, was targeted for death. The plotters were rival Vito Genovese, who conspired with Carlo Gambino, then a rising captain in Anastasia’s family. Gambino had already arranged the murder of Anastasia’s underboss Frank Scalise, the first step to seizing control of the family. The assassination of Anastasia as he sat in a barber’s chair at the Park Sheraton Hotel on October 25, 1957, became one of the legendary mob murders in New York.

  Anastasia’s murder was splashed on the front page of all of New York’s major daily newspapers—there were more than ten of them at the time—and Joseph Massino couldn’t have missed seeing the big story. But Joseph Bonanno did at least initially. He was in Sicily when Anastasia was killed and only learned of it when he returned to New York. For a startled Bonanno, the killing of one of his conservative allies on the Commission was a bad sign. “The Pax Bonanno, that I was so proud of having forged was on the verge of disintegration,” he said years later.

  Immediately after Anastasia’s death, the American Mafia leaders called a massive summit conference in the town of Apalachin in upstate New York, which had been the site of a Commission meeting in 1956. The setting was the home of Joseph Barbara, a mafioso with ties to local politicians and police. Bonanno was opposed to the 1957 meeting, thinking it was ill advised and the location not the safest place for mob bosses to gather. Evidently, Barbara reported having trouble with greedy local law enforcement officials.

  Nevertheless, the meeting was held on November 14, 1957, and on the agenda were three items: the ratification of Gambino’s takeover of the Anastasia family; ways to deal with the new, tough federal narcotics control law that took effect in 1956; and aggressive unionization of garment factories tied to the mob in eastern Pennsylvania.

  The meeting turned into a disaster for the mafiosi who attended. Local police noticed the traffic going into Barbara’s property and set up a roadblock, checked the cars, and noted the names on the driver licenses. Bosses like Vito Genovese, Carlo Gambino, Joseph Profaci, and Joseph Magliocco were noted by police. Bonanno, who had tarried in nearby Endicott with his cousin, Stefano Maggadino, said he heard about the roadblocks on the news reports and avoided the meeting altogether. In total, about sixty members of various Mafia families were listed by police as being at Barbara’s home a
nd while no one was immediately arrested, investigation of the meeting spawned further investigations that led to arrests for years to come.

  While Mafia politics can sometimes move with the speed of a bullet, in the case of Anastasia’s murder, the full ramifications would not be felt for years. Things moved in convoluted fashion and ultimately the changes in two leadership positions in the space of a few months meant that the so-called liberal wing of the Commission, composed of Thomas Lucchese, Vito Genovese, and Carlo Gambino, who took over from Anastasia, was equal in number to the more conservative men of tradition represented by Joseph Bonanno, Joseph Profaci, and Stefano Maggadino, from Buffalo.

  For Bonanno, the new alignment in the Commission was a sign that the old traditions of the Mafia were changing in ways that he found distasteful. While the Castellammarese, who shaped the American Mafia since the 1930s, were bound by Sicilian traditions of loyalty and honor, others seemed seduced by the constant chase for money. The descent into narcotics was the clearest indication that the production of capital through risky enterprises was viewed by some as worth the danger. The publicity and law enforcement interest in the Mafia after Apalachin also painted what Bonanno saw as an honorable way of life as nothing more than a conspiracy bent on destroying America.

  Bonanno also believed that the Mafia was hurting its own image with the public assassinations like that of Anastasia. The year 1961 was a case in point. Upstarts in Profaci’s family, a group of young Turks led by the Gallo brothers—Joey, Albert, and Larry—revolted against the boss. The Gallos were really nothing more than mob toughs who went around strong-arming businesses to take their jukeboxes. Investigators even determined that the Gallos had set up their own union of jukebox repairmen as part of the racket. But as former New York Police Department (NYPD) detective Ralph Salerno recounted, the publicity the brothers received from a 1957 U.S. Senate hearing chaired by Senator John McClellan gave them an inflated sense of self-importance.