King of the Godfathers

by Anthony Destefano

  Salerno traveled around a lot, mainly between New York, Florida, and Las Vegas, places where he had legal and illegal business holdings. He had a large farm near the upstate New York town of Rhinebeck that he escaped to every Friday. But when he was in the city during the week, Salerno could be found at his social club on 115th Street in Manhattan. The Palma Boys Social Club was another one of those nondescript places where mobsters knew they could find their bosses and associates. The origin of the name was obscure, it was possibly an allusion to the Spanish word for palm or a bay in Majorca. In nice weather, Salerno, who wore a wide-brimmed hat, would sit outside the club with one of his trademark cigars clamped in his mouth. He walked with a cane for assistance.

  After Joseph Pistone had surfaced in his true identity as an FBI agent, bureau officials knew that there was a great incentive for the Mafia families in New York to prevent him from testifying any way they could. Pistone had collected a great deal of evidence against the Bonanno family. The depth of his unprecedented penetration of the mob, his FBI colleagues believed, was an embarrassment to many if not all of the bosses of New York’s five families. At least one informant had reported that pictures of Pistone and Edgar T. Robb had been circulated to Mafia families throughout the United States. To let the mob know that Pistone and Robb were federal agents, the FBI decided to talk with leaders of each Mafia family. The object of the talks was simple: Pistone and Robb were federal agents, and any attempt to harm them would bring the wrath of the government down on those who tried.

  One of the mobsters approached for a little chat was Salerno. Agents found him at the Palma Boys club, seated in the back at his habitual table. He had on a suit and tie and was smoking one of his ubiquitous cigars. The agents told him they were investigating some mob homicides, notably the deaths of the three Bonanno captains, and that the bureau also didn’t want Donnie Brasco (Pistone) harmed.

  Salerno was a little perplexed about why the FBI was worried about the disappearance and death of three mobsters. The mob takes care of its own, Salerno told the agents. If the three captains were killed, they probably deserved it, he added.

  Though a gruff talker, Salerno understood what the agents were saying about Pistone.

  “Nobody is gonna hurt Donnie Brasco,” Salerno assured the agents.

  Salerno didn’t hold the Bonanno crime family in high regard. That became evident after he was heard on a bug placed in the Palma Boys club saying the family was a collection of drug dealers—“junk men” as he called them. So his remarks that the Genovese crowd wouldn’t do anything drastic about Pistone seemed a sign to the FBI that the Bonanno family’s penetration by Pistone wasn’t going to result in any Mafia-wide hunt for the agent. However, it was another story with Benjamin “Lefty Guns” Ruggiero.

  When Pistone first made his entrée with the Bonanno family, Ruggiero was in effect his mentor. A gangly man who seemed like Rodney Dangerfield because he was always denied the respect he deserved for being a good soldier for the mob, Ruggiero took Pistone under his wing and taught him the ropes about mob protocol and how to make his way around mobsters. Pistone, through his secret law enforcement connections, was able to generate money for Ruggiero’s associates, the most important being Dominick “Sonny Black” Napolitano. It was Napolitano whom Ruggiero decided to align himself with instead of Joseph Massino in the aftermath of the assassination of Carmine Galante. So, when Pistone’s undercover identity was uncloaked, it was Ruggiero who felt particularly betrayed.

  FBI sources in the mob reported that Ruggiero became obsessed with finding Pistone. One FBI informant said that Ruggiero stated that he was going to find and kill Pistone “if it was the last thing he did.” Investigators took the threat more seriously when the same source said that Ruggiero was going to ingenious lengths to find out anything about Pistone that might help locate him. Since Pistone had stayed in a particular Holiday Inn when he visited Florida on undercover business, Ruggiero had contacts who would try to obtain through hotel records the telephone numbers “Donnie Brasco” called, said the source who was only identified as “Source A” in FBI court records. In a more ominous vein, the source said that he had actually seen one such telephone number obtained from a Holiday Inn in Miami Beach where Pistone had stayed. Ruggiero seemed obsessed with the search, and his only mission was to locate “Donnie” said the informant.

  Throughout August 1981, Ruggiero worked feverishly trying to find Pistone, the man who had betrayed him. But where was Napolitano and what was he doing? Federal agents had picked up informant information that the powerful Bonanno captain had disappeared and might have been killed. But it was just as possible, investigators thought, that Napolitano had fled to either avoid arrest or the harm he might face from his mob brethren. In August 1981, nobody in law enforcement knew for sure what had happened to Napolitano.

  Sonny Black Napolitano said he had a meeting to attend and his girlfriend, Judy Brown, didn’t press him for details. He gave her some of the jewelry he had—Napolitano favored expensive rings—and left her the keys to his apartment. He took his car keys because he had to drive. It was an evening in August 1981, just a couple of weeks after the Pistone bomb shell had landed on the world of the Mafia.

  Napolitano drove himself to the parking lot at Hamilton House, a restaurant in the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn. Known for its American cuisine until it closed in the 1990s, the Hamilton House was a central meeting place that was convenient to Staten Island because of its nearness to the Verrazano Narrows Bridge.

  After parking, Napolitano spotted Frank Lino and Steven “Stevie Beef” Cannone. Lino was a short and stocky gangster who started his life in crime at the age of fifteen when he was a member of the Avenue U Boys, a south Brooklyn gang that did robberies and set up card games for money. A mere three years later, at the age of eighteen, Lino started doing crimes for all five New York Mafia families and finally in October 1977, he became initiated into the Bonanno family. Cannone was a high-ranked Bonanno member from Elizabeth Street in Little Italy who had done time in a federal penitentiary for narcotics in the 1930s. During the fallout in the crime family when Joseph Bonanno was effectively deposed, Cannone was allied with the Paul Sciacca faction. Considered the consiglieri of the family, Cannone could be found spending his hours at the Toyland Social Club in lower Manhattan.

  With Napolitano and Cannone in his car, Lino drove from Hamilton House over the Verrazano to Staten Island. Occasionally, Lino checked his rearview mirror to see if a van was following his car. It was.

  Getting off the highway on Staten Island, Lino drove to the house of the father of Ronald Filocomo, a mob associate whose previous employment as a state correctional officer denied him the chance to become a made member of the Bonanno family. Still, Filocomo did what he could for the crime family and on that particular day in August 1981, he allowed his home to be used as a meeting place.

  Once they reached Filocomo’s house, Lino, Napolitano, and Cannone went to the front door. Frank Coppa, a Bonanno captain whose girth rivaled that of Massino’s, let them in. The meeting was to take place in the basement. Lino opened the cellar door. It was the last courtesy Napolitano would ever receive from anybody.

  Acting quickly, Lino threw Napolitano down the basement stairs. There was one shot and then somebody’s gun jammed. Napolitano, knowing the end was near, didn’t want to suffer.

  “Hit me one more time and make it good,” Lino heard him say.

  There was another shot. Then nothing.

  How fortunes had changed. Just weeks earlier, after having engineered the killings of the three rival capos—Dominick Trinchera, Philip Giaccone, and Alphonse Indelicato—Napolitano had been riding high. Many considered him the most prominent and powerful captain of the Bonanno family, although he clearly had to jockey for power with Massino. Napolitano had worked up a nice racket in Florida with that newcomer Donnie Brasco at the King’s Court Bottle Club and even got to hobnob with Florida’s crime boss Santos Trafficante. Napolitano was a
force to be reckoned with. Never mind Massino’s suspicions about Brasco. He knew the man like a brother.

  But in a world where American and Soviet spies had been playing deep penetration games for years, it was relatively easy for an FBI agent like Joseph Pistone to secret himself into a Mafia family. The mob’s guiding principle, its raison d’etre, was to make money. To be sure there were rules to follow, ones like the code of silence that gave lip service to the old ways and mores of the Castellammarese. But with money and not the deeper filial loyalty of a common heritage driving the more contemporary gangsters, the smell of quick cash blinded them.

  Joseph Massino liked money but he kept his antenna tuned for trouble, be it an informant or undercover agent. Then again Massino was just plain lucky that Pistone never came close to his crew. If he had, if Lefty Guns Ruggiero had decided to join Massino’s crew, the man lying dead at the bottom of the basement stairs might well have been the portly caterer from Maspeth instead of the pigeon fancier from Williamsburg.

  Frank Lino walked outside the house in Staten Island after the shooting stopped. In the basement, Napolitano’s body was being put in a body bag. Lino walked over to a van with sliding doors parked down the street, the one that had followed him from Brooklyn.

  It was all done, Lino said to the men in the van.

  Lino then put Napolitano’s car keys for the vehicle that had been left at Hamilton House in the hands of one of the men in the van, Joseph Massino.

  One of the things people knew about Lefty Guns Ruggiero was that he liked tropical fish. His small apartment in Little Italy was filled with fish tanks arrayed with all sorts of species he delighted in keeping. But in the summer of 1981, obsessed with finding Pistone, the fish collection probably wasn’t the first thing Ruggiero was thinking about.

  Charlie Cipolla, another reputed member of the same Bonanno crew with Ruggiero, was also a fish fancier. So, on an August day in 1981, Cipolla suggested out loud that he had a rare fish he thought of giving to Ruggiero. It would have been a nice gesture. Cipolla said it loud enough that not only John Cerasani heard it but that an informant standing nearby did as well. The informant was later identified in court documents as being someone “who continues to operate in an undercover capacity,” undoubtedly Raymond Wean.

  According to Wean, Cerasani had an ominous reply to Cipolla’s musing about a gift for Ruggiero.

  “Forget it,” Cerasani said. “Lefty is gonna be with fishes. He won’t need a pet.”

  CHAPTER 12

  The Gathering Storm

  By February 1981, the deep penetration Joseph Pistone had made of the Bonanno crime family had produced enough evidence that federal prosecutors in Manhattan began the secretive and complex task of targeting the upper echelon of the crime family for indictment. It became clear to investigators that the old legend that the Mafia didn’t get involved in narcotics was really just a myth. Cocaine and heroin trafficking had become the province of a number of high-ranked mafiosi.

  In the Bonanno family, the focus of investigators turned to Alphonse “Sonny Red” Indelicato. He was believed to be one of the family’s major cocaine and heroin traffickers and used his contacts in Florida to facilitate the deals. If the FBI needed a strong indication that Indelicato and his two close associates, Dominick Trinchera and Philip Giaccone, might be involved in narcotics, they found a clue during a wedding in 1980 at the Pierre Hotel in Manhattan. One of the reputed bosses of the Milan faction of the Italian Mafia was getting married at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Manhattan and the big bash was surveilled by the FBI. There were lots of pictures taken by agents and the collage of photos seemed like a Who’s Who of organized crime, remembered Charles Rooney. Indelicato, Trinchera, and Giaccone were in attendance as was Salvatore Catalano and a lot of the Sicilians from Brooklyn.

  The FBI had just commenced a major heroin investigation involving a curious group of Sicilians who seemed to be in Brooklyn but who had various ties to Bonanno family members. The FBI wasn’t sure what the Sicilians were at that point, perhaps a separate clique within the crime family or maybe a distinct family unto themselves. It would take four more years before the FBI would tie the Sicilians into the international heroin trade in a case that would later become known as the Pizza Connection.

  But in 1980, whoever the Sicilians were, they accepted the likes of Indelicato and his two friends. Curiously for the FBI, neither Joseph Massino nor Dominick Napolitano were at the wedding reception, a fact that investigators believed indicated that perhaps both men wanted nothing to do with drugs or that some other kind of crime family power play was underway. In any case, federal prosecutors suspected Indelicato was a key player in the narcotics trade and by early 1981 they targeted him for investigation. But with the events of May 5, 1981, when Indelicato, Trinchera, and Giaccone were slaughtered at a social club on Thirteenth Avenue in Brooklyn, federal prosecutors in Manhattan lost their initial target.

  However, with the death of Indelicato, investigators quickly shifted their sights to Joseph Massino and Dominick Napolitano and their crews. Both Massino and Napolitano were by August of that year suspected by investigators to have orchestrated the murders of the three captains. In addition, both Massino and Napolitano were believed by federal prosecuters to have been involved in narcotics, as well as extortion and gambling.

  Allegations surrounding Massino about drugs proved to be rather ambiguous and amorphous. His brother-in-law, Salvatore Vitale, later told FBI agents that at some point in the late 1970s, a time when Massino was an up and coming soldier, he instructed him and Duane Leisenheimer to bring a car to Fort Lee, New Jersey. The first town over the George Washington Bridge, Fort Lee has had its share of gangsters living and working within its confines. When Vitale arrived with the car, he spotted Gambino mobster Angelo Ruggiero and Massino nearby. Ruggiero was a known Gambino drug merchant and his appearance with Massino led Vitale to think that perhaps drugs were in the trunk of the car he had just dropped off. He also told the agents that Massino would make trips alone on Saturdays to visit another mobster, something he thought seemed suspicious.

  Napolitano, as far as law enforcement was concerned, went missing in August 1981, a fact that led the FBI to think he was either dead (as informants claimed) or had fled to escape indictment or retribution for the Donnie Brasco disaster. Pistone, of course, was off the street. Nevertheless, the federal government’s investigation into the New York crime families continued at an unrelenting pace. Joseph Massino was turning out to be a major target.

  From offices in Manhattan and Brooklyn, federal prosecutors and FBI agents applied for several court orders for wiretaps in 1981 that targeted key Bonanno crime family locations. While he was alive, taps were placed on the telephones at Napolitano’s Motion Lounge. Another tap was also placed on Benjamin Ruggiero’s Manhattan telephone, as well as the home telephone of at least one other Manhattan-based family soldier. But it was in late August 1981 that permission was obtained by the FBI to place taps on Massino’s home telephone in Howard Beach and his J&S Cake Social Club in Maspeth. The FBI wanted to bug not only Massino but also Vitale.

  The affidavit filed in court by FBI agent Edward T. Tucker to get taps placed on Massino’s telephone spelled out just how powerful and deadly law enforcement officials considered the Maspeth caterer to be. Tucker said that it had been Benjamin Ruggiero who placed Massino—who is identified in the agent’s affidavit as “Messina”—squarely in the planning of the murder of the three captains that May. Massino himself, according to Tucker, was overheard by an informant saying, “We got three of them, but two got away,” an apparent reference to the fact that Frank Lino and Bruno Indelicato had not been killed along with Trinchera, Giaccone, and Alphonse Indelicato that fateful night.

  Conventional wisdom was that the three captains were killed because they tried to supplant Rastelli’s power. But Tucker said that other mobsters had told an undercover agent (presumably Pistone) of another possible motive: Alfonse Indelicato’s close aff
iliation with the Sicilian faction of the crime family had made Massino worried that the Zips might kill him. A preemptive strike thus seemed to be needed.

  Apart from his suspected role in the three captains slaughter, Massino was also discovered to have developed a close working relationship with up and coming Gambino family captain John Gotti, said Tucker, referring to intelligence developed from a confidential law enforcement source. A neighbor of Massino in Howard Beach, Gotti had at that time not received the publicity and notoriety that would dog him later in life. He was the boss of a crew of gangsters who had graduated from hijacking to drug dealing and other crimes. Gotti was also a big gambler and that was how Massino became tied to him, said Tucker.

  “In May 1981, this Source advised the FBI that Messina and Gotti along with another Gambino Family capo Angelo Ruggiero and two others each owned a percentage of the ‘house’ in a high stakes dice game run by Gotti on Mott Street in Manhattan,” stated Tucker. Mott Street in Manhattan is a main avenue in Chinatown but it also crosses into Little Italy, where lots of Mafiosi lived, worked, and conducted business.

  But there was a more bizarre episode reported by Tucker that seemed to show that Gotti and Massino were working together to carry out the murder of the still hiding Bruno Indelicato, the supposedly cocaine-enraged son of the murdered Alphonse. Tucker learned from the same confidential source that Gotti’s brother, Gene, and Angelo Ruggiero were overheard relating how they had been driving on a New York City expressway when they were followed by what they thought was a police car.