King of the Godfathers

by Anthony Destefano

  Rastelli kept some routes in reserve and doled them out as favors for friends. Of course, there was a catch for such a guarantee of livelihood. The vendors had to pay $10 to $15 a week—not an insignificant sum in the 1960s—for membership (protection) to Rastelli’s association. But it was the wholesale suppliers of the lunch wagons who were really cash cows. They had to pay off Rastelli’s crowd as well, sometimes over $900 a month, for the privilege of supplying sandwiches and drinks to the lunch wagons. If those payments weren’t made, the suppliers would see their lunch wagon customers dry up. It was classic racketeering activity, maybe not the most flashy stuff around but it suited Rastelli well.

  When the great Banana War sputtered to a close in 1968 and Joseph Bonanno and his family decamped for Arizona, Joseph Massino was a strapping twenty-five-year-old man with a wife—he had married Josephine in 1960—and young daughter. For work he ran a lunch wagon, taking a cue from his mother’s side of the family, which began outfitting the trucks to carry snacks to factories. Since he lived in Maspeth, Massino didn’t have far to travel to service the factories that lined Grand and Metropolitan avenues. “Joe Maspeth” was how the lunch wagon crowd knew him. Friends remember that it was a struggle at first. Massino was strapped for cash and in the wintertime he took to standing around Grand and Metropolitan avenues selling Christmas trees to earn a few more dollars. He even had to borrow a few hundred dollars from relatives to pay the medical bills for the birth of his first child. But Rastelli liked him and that counted for something.

  The lunch wagon business might have been a racket, seeing how Rastelli controlled things, but for his friends like Massino things worked out. The lunch business could be a living and for a thrifty husband and father like Massino the work was enough to get by. In 1966, records show that Joseph and Josephine Massino took out their first mortgage for $16,000 at 5.5 percent interest from the Greenpoint Savings Bank to purchase a house on Caldwell Avenue in Maspeth, just a few doors down from where his parents lived at number 71–21 Caldwell. Joseph and Josephine Massino, who had been living a few blocks away in a two-story frame house on Perry Avenue just off the Long Island Expressway, needed the extra space since they had a five-year-old daughter, Adeline, and were planning for more children. The payments for what appears to be Massino’s first tangible stake in the American dream of home ownership amounted to $98.26 a month.

  Anyone connected to Philip Rastelli and his brothers, Carmine and Marty, had an easy entrée to mob life. Philip Rastelli wasn’t flashy, but his rackets were solid. Massino was close to Rastelli’s brother Carmine, who ran a depot where the lunch wagons filled up with supplies, so he was guaranteed good deals and fresh pastries. Massino’s spot for his coffee stand was on Remsen Place in Maspeth, right around the corner from the house on Perry Street and just a short walk from his new house on Caldwell Avenue. The lunch wagon Massino had was dubbed the “roach coach,” which may or may not have reflected the level of hygiene practiced in the food trade. Gradually, through the Rastelli connection, Joseph Massino, the beefy food vendor who also earned the nickname “Joe Wagons,” became intertwined with the Bonanno crime family. It would prove to be an auspicious time for Massino to build such ties.

  The war for leadership of what had been the crime family of Joseph Bonanno had led to a confusing situation to say the least. By the spring of 1967, law enforcement officials in the United States and Canada believed from their surveillance reports and other investigations that Bonanno had maneuvered a comeback of sorts because of the weakness exhibited by the leadership of Gaspar DiGregorio, the man who was backed by Stefano Maggadino for the role of boss when Bonanno disappeared. But even a top NYPD inspector in charge of intelligence had to admit that in the end investigators were groping to understand what was going on in the crime family.

  DiGregorio’s abdication after he suffered a heart attack only months after he was chosen as boss led the way to power plays by Bill Bonanno, which had resulted in the Troutman Street shootout and the open warfare that followed. But by late 1968, police perceived a different situation in the Bonanno family, one in which Joseph Bonanno accepted Paul Sciacca as the new boss and had agreed to move permanently with his family to Arizona. MAFIA LEADERS SETTLE “BANANA WAR” was the headline of a November 24, 1968, New York Times story about the development.

  Police-organized crime investigators, like Kremlinologists of the cold war period who studied the Soviet Union, looked to social circumstances and public appearances to divine what was taking place behind the scenes in the Mafia. In terms of the Bonanno family, it was a September 14, 1968, wedding on Long Island that led police to believe that the crime family war had been settled. As police told the Times, Bonanno loyalists and Sciacca supporters who had been on hostile terms were “disported together convivially” at the wedding reception of Sciacca’s son, Anthony, to Florence Rando, a niece of Frank Mari.

  The Sciacca-Rando wedding wasn’t the nuptial of the century, but it drew a lot of attention from law enforcement because such celebrations are places where mobsters want to be seen and do business. The guest lists for such functions are studied because they provide clues to who is in and who is out in the mob hierarchy. In this case, there were 200 guests who attended a reception at the Woodbury Country Club and detectives filled nine pages of notes with their jottings of the various car license plates.

  There is no evidence that Joseph Massino, who at that stage in his life was nothing more than an associate in the crime family, attended this particular wedding. But his mentor Rastelli was spotted by police at the reception and his presence signaled that those who had once been loyal to Joseph Bonanno and his son had buried the hatchet with the Sciacca faction. Rastelli was clearly safe and in his role as captain had not lost any stature. A peace of sorts had blossomed.

  However, Sciacca suffered from a bad heart. So he wanted to stop his involvement with the crime family and was in the process of grooming Mari to become his successor. A triggerman and reputed dope dealer, Mari was elected family boss during a sitdown in a restaurant in Manhattan in May 1969. His reign was short. In September 1969, Mari, his bodyguard James Episcopia, and Sciacca loyalist Michael Adamo disappeared. There bodies were never found. Police suspected Mari had been killed as payback for having a role in the murder of Joseph Bonanno’s bodyguard Sam Perrone a year earlier. Another theory was that some mobsters simply resented the way Mari was pushed forward, particularly since he hadn’t distinguished himself.

  The Bonanno family could have lurched into another period of disarray, but the Commission took the unusual step after Mari’s disappearance of appointing a triumvirate to rule the family, at least temporarily. The three leaders who were to work as a team were Natale Evola, who had weathered a narcotics conviction to maintain his power in the garment trucking industry, an obscure crime captain named Joseph DiFilippi, and the none-too-flashy Philip Rastelli.

  As a member of the crime family’s governing committee, Rastelli’s stature within the mob had grown and those like Massino who had hitched themselves to him began to see their lives tightly intertwined with his fortunes. It would take years for the importance of this connection between Massino and Rastelli to become apparent. Much of what would later happen to Massino could be traced to Rastelli’s influence. Theirs was a mentoring relationship and the ties that developed would endure for a lifetime.

  It was also in 1970 that a Brooklyn kid with straw blond hair and a Germanic name started hanging around Massino’s Remsen Place coffee trucks. The youngster with the pale complexion stood out among the darker Italians in the neighborhood. He was barely a teenager when he met the twenty-something Massino, but their relationship would take its own fortuitous turn. Duane Leisenheimer, whose fair hair earned him the nickname “Goldie,” was really up to no good and going nowhere when he met Massino. A student at Brooklyn’s Automotive High School on Bedford Avenue in Williamsburg, Leisenheimer was on his way to becoming an auto mechanic but could only make it through his sophomore yea
r before dropping out. Still, he liked cars and noticed that Massino’s Oldsmobile had cracked windows, which was odd since an auto glass business where the youngster worked was around the corner from Massino’s coffee stand.

  Leisenheimer liked cars so much he started stealing them. He said he was sixteen years old when he stole his first vehicle and started doing some work in a local chop shop. For those unfamiliar with the term chop shop, it is a place where stolen cars are stripped for parts that can then be resold at double or even triple the value of the complete vehicle. Leisenheimer made $150 for each stolen car. In no time, he was stealing them at the rate of fifteen vehicles a week—not bad money for a high school dropout. But it could be bad for the neighborhood to have a budding car thief hanging around, so Massino told Leisenheimer not to steal cars from the area or park them around the stand.

  “I don’t want your heat,” Massino told him.

  Massino also didn’t want his own heat, his own troubles, to burn the youngster. Of course, Massino had plenty of heat to worry about. Though he had a nice business with the coffee and sandwich stands he acquired, he sold more than food out of the lunch truck. The neighborhood workers who came for a bite to eat were also able to play the numbers with Massino, who used the trucks as a small gambling location. For them it was the poor man’s lottery. He undoubtedly was kicking up some of the proceeds to Rastelli.

  Massino had another side job that was a natural for Maspeth. The area around Grand and Metropolitan avenues was riddled with factories, warehouses, and trucking depots. It was New York City’s loading dock. Trucks were all over the place and they were laden with consumer goods that everybody wanted and would pay good money for. Apparently, with Rastelli’s blessing Massino started hijacking trucks and needed help. He asked around about the young car thief in the neighborhood.

  “He is a stand-up guy,” said one of the local toughs about Leisenheimer. In plain English that meant the kid from Brooklyn wouldn’t rat anybody out.

  It was all Massino needed to hear. So even though he couldn’t steal cars from the neighborhood, Duane Leisenheimer could be a hijacker, courtesy of Joe Massino and Philip Rastelli. In just one night the car kid from Brooklyn could make up to $2,000 helping Massino move truckloads of stolen television sets, men’s suits, Huckapoo shirts, and Farberware. That was more money than Leisenheimer might make in a week of stealing cars. Maspeth was turning into a nice place for the Brooklyn high school dropout.

  Leisenheimer wasn’t the only young man who gravitated to Massino. Salvatore Vitale, the younger brother of Massino’s wife, Josephine, had bonded at an early age to the budding lunch wagon entrepreneur who was five years his senior. In 1968, Vitale ended a short tour of duty in the army as a paratrooper. He tried going straight and spent two years serving as what he would later say was a job as a “narcotics correction officer,” which was ironic considering the involvement over the years of some of the Bonanno family in narcotics. When he left that job, Vitale approached Massino for work. There was plenty to do with the hijacking business, as well as with part-time work as a burglar, and Vitale was a willing recruit for both types of work.

  “If you are going to do scores, do them with me,” Vitale remembered Massino telling him. It would lead him into another world of big-time break-ins, hijacks, and fur district rip-offs in Manhattan. The commodities stolen ranged from coffee to air conditioners to tennis rackets. Sometimes Vitale and Massino would become very daring and inventive. In one episode later recounted to investigators, Vitale remembered how he rented a storage vault under a fake name in Manhattan’s fur district just south of Thirty-fourth Street. During summer nights in August, Vitale said, he would get the locks off other storage vaults, remove furs, and store them in his locker. Another time, he, Massino, and a Colombo crime family member made about $34,000 in the theft of watches from a store in Livingston, New Jersey. For that job, Vitale said, they cut some telephone lines.

  Inevitably, Rastelli, by virtue of his leadership role, was a high-profile target for law enforcement, and he made it easy for the cops. In July 1970, Rastelli was indicted by a Suffolk County grand jury. The secret panel met in such secrecy and with such concern for witnesses that the windows of the district attorney’s office were covered with paper and some of the hallways were closed to the public and patrolled by armed guards. Rastelli was among five men charged with usury. The indictment stated that Rastelli’s loan sharks charged interest up to 300 percent a year (25 percent was the legal limit) and terrorized nearly two dozen customers. One customer was a local Suffolk County bail bondsman who got so far into debt that he was forced to bring in extra customers to Rastelli and his crew.

  Rastelli was convicted in December 1972 on loan-sharking charges and was sentenced to prison. His incarceration deprived the crime family of one part of the leadership troika, but Rastelli was still able to participate and get information through the visits of his brothers, Carmine and Marty, as well as through associates like Massino. This kept Rastelli in the loop at a time when—unbeknown to many—Natale Evola was in serious trouble.

  In 1972, federal officials began a series of ambitious undercover operations in Manhattan’s garment district. Long a stronghold for the Mafia, the garment area surrounding Seventh Avenue was honeycombed with factories, cutting rooms, showrooms, and innumerable small businesses that supplied the clothing companies with everything from bolts of cloth to zippers. The mob had gained its influence over the industry through labor racketeering in which the unions used the services of mob toughs to go along with the union demands. On the other side, employers used Mafia associates to help set up shadow companies and operations that were nonunion to avoid paying workers contract wages and benefits.

  Garment manufacturers also worked on extremely tight profit margins and had to be able to change their production operations to meet the shifting fashion styles and the sudden rush of orders from department stores. It was a tough business and when banks and factors (companies that lend money against a firm’s accounts receivables) were reluctant to come up with cash, Seventh Avenue executives turned to Mafia loan sharks for quick infusions of financial help. Never mind that interest rates could go over 300 percent a year. Manufacturers hoped that the orders they would be able to fill after getting mob financial help would bring in enough quick payment from retailers to have the mob debts paid off quickly. Sometimes it worked. Other times a financially stressed manufacturer had to take on the mob as a silent partner.

  The trucking companies were vital to the industry because cut goods, the separate pieces that made each item of apparel, had to be shipped to contracting firms where the clothing was actually assembled. Once that was done, the finished goods had to be sent back to the manufacturer for shipment to warehouses and retailers. It was all done by trucks and it was the truckers who provided the lifeline for so much of the industry. As such, truckers like Evola had inordinate power over the garment industry because they could create transport bottlenecks through which everything passed.

  Garment truckers policed themselves with a “marriage” system. As far back as any one could remember, the truckers had a cartel-like arrangement in which no one stole accounts. Sometimes separate buildings, and all the dress manufacturing firms within, were considered the territory of one trucker. The manufacturers were essentially “married” to a certain trucker. There was no “divorce” from the relationship unless the manufacturer went out of business for six months. If the trucking company closed, the manufacturer’s account was taken over by another hauler.

  Evola was not the only Mafia boss involved in the garment trucking industry, but as a caretaker of the Bonanno family he was certainly the most prominent. To target the coercive marriage system among truckers and other crimes in the garment district, federal prosecutors in 1973 established two undercover companies in Manhattan: a mom-and-pop trucking firm and a coat manufacturing company. The coat company, known as the Whellan Coat Company, employed as its chief executive a veteran garment district
executive who was able to lead investigators to Evola and his cronies.

  The plan was to see if Evola would try to coerce the new company into using certain trucking companies. There were some tantalizing leads, particularly when one of Evola’s cronies, an elderly Austrian immigrant named Max Meyer, indicated to an undercover agent that there was indeed a trucking cartel. But as soon as the undercover operatives visited Evola at his trucking depot on West Thirty-eight Street in Manhattan they noticed he was walking with the assistance of a cane and walker. As the weeks went by, he appeared in the office less and less. The old Bonanno boss was ailing with cancer and the investigative game plan, which also called for the undercover agents to get a meeting on garment district business with Rastelli, had to be revised. Evola died on August 28, 1973, and investigators were never able to implicate him in any coercion.

  Evola’s death left Rastelli as one of the powers in the Bonanno family. DiFilippi, the other part of the ruling triumvirate, did not have the stature or support to challenge Rastelli. Had he been able to stay out of trouble, Rastelli might have been able to cement his leadership with the passing of Evola and build his own dynasty, avoiding some of the strife that would follow. But while he was able to play the deadly Machiavellian game of mob politics, Rastelli had not been very astute about the cops. For much of his adult life Rastelli had been in prison and in 1974 the prospect of his seeing freedom continued to recede. The problem was the lunch truck business.