King of the Godfathers

by Anthony Destefano

  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 sho
wed 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.

  CHAPTER 10

  Up on the Roof

  What a fuckup.

  Dominick “Sonny Black” Napolitano had no other way of describing what had happened at the Ruby Street lot.

  Neither Alphonse Indelicato’s body nor those of any of the other dead captains was to have been found. But here it was, not even three weeks after they had been killed and the corpses were starting to surface. That was not supposed to be, Napolitano told his crew members, if Massino had done the job right.

  The finding of Indelicato’s body raised concern that the corpses of Dominick Trinchera and Philip Giaccone would also surface. If that happened, it would lead to more leads that could, even with the state of forensic science in 1981, provide evidence that could implicate the Bonanno faction, which had engineered and carried out the murders. Massino, police later learned, had farmed out the disposal of the bodies to the Gambino crime family, which did a sloppy job.

  Disconcerted over the discovery of Indelicato, the Bonanno family became nervous. As the earlier episode with the pen registers in the FBI Rego Park office indicated, the agency needed to get some good wiretaps and to plum informants for clues. Joseph Pistone had been able to glean information showing how the Rastelli faction had clearly won the day, but there was still the need to gather more intelligence.

  It also became clear to FBI officials that Pistone’s long-running tenure as an undercover agent within the crime family was coming to an end. The politics of the family still remained dangerously unstable. Massino and Napolitano were vying for the job as the powerful captain in the family and it was evident there was friction between the two even though they had both won the backing of the Commission for Rastelli. Massino was also very wary and looking closely for signs of informants.

  Napolitano had not just given Pistone a contract to kill Bruno Indelicato on a whim. The Bonanno captain had come to trust the undercover agent and became impressed with his ability to earn money through the King’s Court Bottle Club in Florida, not knowing it was an FBI undercover company. By 1981, the books of the crime family, so to speak, were being opened again for new members and Napolitano told Pistone he was going to propose him for membership. The plan was for Pistone to be proposed to become a made member shortly after boss Philip Rastelli came out of prison later in the year after serving his sentence for the lunch wagon extortion case.

  Napolitano didn’t keep secret his plan to have his buddy Pistone become a made member. He talked about it openly. As Salvatore Vitale later told police, he and Massino learned of the plan to elevate Pistone during a visit to Napolitano’s Motion Lounge. Vitale had driven Massino to the club on Withers Street in Williamsburg, where his brother-in-law got out of the car and approached Napolitano. It was clear from the body language of the two captains that they were having a heated conversation, Vitale noticed. Massino seemed very upset.

  Walking away from Napolitano, an angry Massino returned to the car where Vitale was waiting.

  Napolitano wanted to “straighten out” the brash newcomer Donnie Brasco, a fuming Massino told Vitale. What especially bothered Massino was that Brasco would be proposed for membership before Vitale. It also seemed odd to Massino, indeed imprudent, that Napolitano would even think about submitting this fellow Brasco’s name for mob membership after only knowing him for a couple of years, Vitale recalled. It takes years of close association with someone for mob bosses to feel comfortable with a man before proposing membership. Brasco had rocketed into contention almost overnight and no one knew if he even did a “piece of work,” meaning had a hand in an actual killing sanctioned by the crime family. Massino and Napolitano already had some friction between them and now there was the added problem of Brasco being favored over the ever loyal Vitale.

  Though Pistone later said that he saw benefits to the FBI having one of its agents serving undercover as a made member of the Mafia, the law enforcement agency saw things differently. Killings from the Bonanno factionalism had spread to those outside the crime family when two other mobsters believed to have been friendly with Alphonse Indelicato were murdered. Things were getting dicey. The decision was made to pull Pistone from his undercover assignment at the end of July 1981. The man known as Donnie Brasco to the men in the world of the Bonanno crime family would cease to exist. Joseph Pistone would then resurface in his true identity on the witness stand.

  Court records show that Pistone, as well as another FBI agent, Edgar T. Robb, who was known by the street name of “Tony Rossi,” were officially pulled from their undercover roles on July 30, 1981. Robb had worked as the undercover agent at the King’s Court Bottle Club in Florida, the place Napolitano and Benjamin Ruggiero had conducted business in and believed to be their racket. Pistone wanted to tell Napolitano himself about his true identity, but that was one final role he wouldn’t play. FBI officials decided the Bonanno mobsters in New York had to be told of Pistone’s true identity, by other special agents. Napolitano, Ruggiero, and any others involved with Pistone were to be told he was a government agent and not an informant because it was believed it would help safeguard Pistone from retribution.

  “Our belief, again based upon experience, was that while members of La Cosa Nostra have readily killed any number of ‘informants’ or ‘stool pigeons,’ they would not threaten the lives of undercover FBI agents,” said one of Pistone’s supervisors.

  Despite the high stakes in criminal investigations, FBI agents and police often developed working relationships with the mobsters they targeted. Not only did the agents of law enforcement come to know their targets but also the mobsters themselves saw the investigators as a form of brethren. Mobsters knew the cops had a job to do and for the most part respected them, particularly if they did the job well and treated the people they targeted with some respect. In return, the wiseguys in the crime families reciprocated the simple courtesies and respect they received.

  On July 30, 1981, three veteran FBI agents took a trip to Williamsburg and parked not far from the Motion Lounge. Together, special agents Doug Fencl, Jim Kinne, and Jerry Loar, all dressed in summer blazers and suits, went to the building at the corner of Withers and Graham in Williamsburg, which housed the Motion Lounge. Fencl rang the bell to Napolitano’s apartment on the second floor. Napolitano screamed out, asking who was calling.

  “Doug Fencl, I need to talk to you,” the agent said.

  “Come up,” said Napolitano.

  Once inside the apartment, Fencl sat with Napolitano around the dining room table. The agents asked Napolitano if he knew Donny Brasco and Tony Rossi and he said he did. Fencl then told Napolitano that they were FBI agents.

  Fencl pulled out a picture of Pistone, Robb, and other FBI agents. The photo showed a smiling Fencl and a total of four other men including special Agent Loar posing against a wood-paneled wall that had been brightly lit by the camera flash. It wasn’t a very arty shot. To the left of Loar stood Pistone in a stripped polo shirt and his hands clasped in front of him. Pistone seemed almost expressionless in the picture but looking closely you could see the slight suggestion of a smile on his face. That man in the short-sleeved shirt, Fencl told Napolitano, was an FBI agent.

  Napolitano kept his cool and said he didn’t know Pistone but that if he did meet him in the future he would know who he was and that he worked for the FBI. Fencl also told Napolitano that he could have a potential problem with his gangster friends for bringing both undercover agents into Bonanno crime family business. Fencl pulled out his business card and offered it to Napolitano, just in case he needed it.

  “You know better than anybody I can’t take this,” said Napolitano. “I know how to get a hold of you if I need to.”

  The agents left the lounge and were captured on film by an FBI camera as they crossed Withers Street.

  Though he had been cool and collected when Fencl to
ld him who Pistone was, Napolitano quickly jumped into action after the trio of agents left. His crew members, Ruggiero, John Cerasani, and others were called in for a hasty meeting and told what Fencl had said. There was disbelief. On one wiretap a crew member was overheard saying that the FBI must have kidnapped Brasco (Pistone) and then forced him to pose with the agents in the picture Fencl had showed Napolitano.

  According to Pistone, Napolitano and his crew kept the disclosure to themselves and began to look for him, putting out feelers in Florida and Chicago but came up blank. Pistone was of course off the street and would no longer be found in the old haunts of his alter ego Donnie Brasco. Napolitano knew that he had to inform the powers that be and he made several other calls. One of those calls was to Massino, another was to Paul Castellano. Rastelli eventually got word in prison.

  In the hours immediately after the shocking disclosure that Donnie Brasco, the man he had been pushing for membership in the family, was really an FBI agent, Napolitano needed some time to himself. He did what he always did to escape and think. He went up to the roof where his pigeon coop was and looked out over Withers and Graham streets.

  Surveillance photos caught a worried-looking man, his brow creased with deep frown lines, surrounded by pigeons. The winged creatures were the only living things Dominick Napolitano could really trust.

  CHAPTER 11

  Do It to Me One More Time

  Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno had long been a power in the Genovese crime family. By the summer of 1981, he was getting on in years—he was seventy years old—but still held sway as a major source of loan-sharking money in the garment district and a controlling force behind the crime family’s gambling operations in central Harlem. Federal investigators considered him the boss of the Genovese family, although the real power was held by Vincent Gigante. Salerno was a front man, important in his own right, but still just a front.