King of the Godfathers

by Anthony Destefano

  However, Rastelli got sick and collapsed three times during the nearly month-long jury selection process. Though he was supposed to be a big Mafia boss, Rastelli appeared to be a bit of a nervous and physical wreck. He sat at his defense table and often quivered, sometimes covering his face with his hands, as Assistant U.S. Attorney Laura Brevetti told jurors in her opening statements how the Bonanno family helped carve up the $250 million a year moving and storage industy.

  But it was more than Brevetti’s rhetoric that had Rastelli shaking. For a man who was only out of prison for about two years, the future was not looking very promising for Rastelli. Two months before the Brooklyn indictment came down, Rastelli was named as a defendant in a separate federal indictment that became known as the Commission case. In a bold stroke on February 26, 1985, the FBI and federal prosecutors in the office of Manhattan U.S. Attorney Rudolph Giuliani announced the indictment of several major Mafia leaders, including members of the ruling Cosa Nostra Commission. Named as defendants along with Rastelli, the head of the Bonanno family, were Gambino boss Paul Castellano; Aniello Dellacroce, Gambino underboss; Anthony Salerno, the street boss of the Genovese family; Lucchese boss Anthony “Tony Ducks” Corallo; Carmine “the Snake” Persico; and a handful of other defendants, including Bonanno captain Anthony “Bruno” Indelicato.

  Essentially, four key New York members of the Commission—Castellano, Salerno, Corallo, and Persico—were now under indictment. On a chart used by Giuliani and FBI Director William Webster at a news conference announcing the case, Rastelli was listed as the fifth Commission member from New York, although secretly taped conversations from a year earlier indicated that the Bonanno boss was not allowed to sit on the ruling body. Another chart showed “Joseph Messina,” although not indicted in the Commission case, as being a significant Bonanno family member.

  Giuliani later said he came up with the idea of prosecuting the Commission as a racketeering enterprise after reading Joseph Bonanno’s book Man of Honor, published in 1983. Bonanno talked at length about the Commission, and to Giuliani that ruling body was a racketeering organization, a criminal enterprise, involved in a variety of activities that would make its members criminally liable.

  Mafia members didn’t like Bonanno’s book and were turned off by the celebrity it gained the deposed boss. They also hated him for so openly betraying the code of silence and speaking about the secrets of mob life.

  “I was shocked,” said reputed Lucchese member Salvatore Avellino in a bugged conversation on March 1983, right after Bonanno gave an interview to Mike Wallace on 60 Minutes.

  “What is he trying to prove,” Avellino said, “that he’s a Man of Honor? But he’s admitting—he, he actually admitted that he has a Fam, that he was the boss of a Family.”

  The Commission case wouldn’t go on trial until September 1986, but in the meantime Rastelli and Massino had their hands full with the moving industry case. The key government witness turned out to be a relative of Rastelli’s through marriage. He was Anthony Louis Giliberti, a sixty-two-year-old former business agent and vice president of Local 814, the local whose members came from the moving and storage industry.

  Giliberti, by his own admission during his testimony, was something of a viper. A brother-in-law of Carmine Rastelli, Giliberti said that Philip Rastelli tried to gain control of Local 814 as far back as 1964 but lost out in a power play by some other “bigwigs in organized crime.” A guy who talked in street lingo, Giliberti described how he would threaten to “break the shoes” of a shakedown target. Court records also showed that while he took part in collecting payoffs from employers, money that was used as a Christmas “slush fund,” Giliberti was not above a little larceny among his fellow thieves. Sifton found, court records show, that in 1979 Giliberti began pocketing some portions of the moneys he collected and sometimes kept all of it. It was not a good practice to follow with the kinds of acquaintances Giliberti had.

  Although it wasn’t mentioned at trial, Giliberti was the victim of an attempted assassination in July 1982. He was shot nine times in front of his Queens home and suspicion fell on Massino, who had earlier smacked Giliberti in the face in a confrontation on the street. Investigators developed information that Massino was angry with Giliberti because the union official had disobeyed his order not to involve Raymond Wean in any illegal activities because of suspicion—which proved correct—that Wean was an informant.

  Giliberti survived the assassination attempt and was placed in the federal witness protection program. At the trial, his testimony was devastating to the defendants, particularly Rastelli. Giliberti told the jury that Rastelli, knowing he was going to prison in the lunch wagon extortion case, told him in 1976 what to do.

  “Philly explained to me I was his eyes and ears in the union,” Giliberti testified. “He said, ‘I’m leaving you in charge of the store. If you have any problems go to Nick [Marangello].’”

  Any payoff money was to go to Rastelli’s brother, Marty.

  Philip Rastelli collapsed a few more times in court, incidents that invariably led to recesses and delayed progress in the trial. But his swooning, apparently caused by problems with medications he was taking, didn’t do Rastelli or his codefendants any good. On October 15, 1986, the jury convicted Rastelli of twenty-four counts of labor racketeering and acquitted him of nine. Also convicted were Nicholas Marangello, the former Bonanno underboss, some former Local 814 officials, and Carmine Rastelli. Massino was convicted of being associated with a racketeering enterprise and playing a role in accepting labor payoffs even though he was neither an employer nor union official.

  Massino and Rastelli were immediately jailed after the verdicts. For Rastelli, it would be a return to life behind bars that defined much of his adulthood. For Massino, jail was a new experience in what had so far been a charmed life in which he had avoided prison. Sentencing on January 16,1987, saw Sifton give out stiff terms of twelve years to Rastelli, ten years to Massino, eight years to Marangello, and six years to Carmine Rastelli.

  The prison terms, particularly for Philip Rastelli who was ailing, were serious. But they were nothing next to the ones handed down earlier that week in the Manhattan federal court. In October 1986, the heads of the Genovese, Lucchese, and Colombo families, as well as several underlings, were convicted on various racketeering charges in the Commission case. The only reason the Gambino family was spared was that Paul Castellano had been assassinated in December 1985 and never stood trial along with the other bosses for being part of the Commission. Each of the remaining bosses—Anthony Salerno, Carmine Persico, and Anthony Corallo—were sentenced to 100-year prison terms.

  Rastelli dodged a bullet in the Commission case because although he was indicted in the Manhattan action he was severed because of the Brooklyn trial. Then, in a move that raised some eyebrows, prosecutors dropped the Commission charges against Rastelli for “reasons of judicial economy.”

  In terms of the Mafia, the Department of Justice was clearly on a roll. In the space of a month in late 1986, the heads of four of the five Mafia families were convicted of major racketeering crimes. A number of their subordinates, a group that included Massino, were also convicted. The headlines and quotes following that development told of the doom of the mob, an obituary that had been written before but that now seemed more truthful then ever.

  “The verdict reached today has resulted in dismantling the ruling council of La Cosa Nostra,” crowed Manhattan U.S. Attorney Rudolph Giuliani after the Commission verdict.

  Other experts predicted that many mafiosi would shun the spotlight and that law enforcement would continue to target up and coming leaders. Without the power of the Commission available to settle disputes, more mob violence on the streets was expected.

  With the results of years of investigations to go on, federal prosecutors and the FBI continued pressing cases. Both Joseph Massino and his old friend John Gotti, the only Mafia boss still out on the street, faced another onslaught of prosecutions. In Mass
ino’s case, there was the old indictment that he tried to flee in 1982. But after he returned in 1984, Massino had to face the music.

  But Massino’s second racketeering trial, already delayed when he fled in 1982, was not going to be an easy ride for either the government or the defendant. For a start, the government kept going to the grand jury and had it amend the original 1982 charges to the point where they added hijacking charges that included the 1975 Hemingway trucking case and a conspiracy to rob the Galerie Des Monnaies. The prosecution also beefed up the indictment with more murder allegations, adding a count to cover the conspiracy to murder Massino’s old cigarette smuggling friend Joseph Pastore. The grand jury also added someone new to the case: Massino’s brother-in-law Salvatore Vitale. The ever loyal Vitale was charged with obstruction of justice, involvement in hijackings, and a conspiracy to use hijacked goods. For good measure, Vitale was also charged with racketeering conspiracy.

  Massino’s lawyers attacked the new, so-called superseding, indictment on the grounds that the FBI agents screwed up in the way they handled surveillance tapes that prosecutors intended to use in the trial. The tapes in question were obtained from telephone wire-taps and bugs that targeted Gambino crime family captain Angelo Ruggiero from late 1981 through July 1982. While Massino wasn’t the target of the surveillance, he was overheard on telephone taps, particularly musing openly to Ruggiero about hiding out until the investigation blew over. Vitale was overheard as well not only on some telephone taps but also through a bug in Ruggiero’s Long Island home talking about a hijack incident in which he claimed his brother-in-law took a driver “right out of the truck” and then had Ray Wean drive the load.

  “Joey was the boss” in the hijacks, Vitale told Ruggiero.

  When Ruggiero questioned Vitale about what he and Massino had done with Wean, Vitale answered “nothing really serious,” referring to a load of tuna fish and bicycles.

  It turned out that the superseding indictment included the stolen tuna fish load Vitale didn’t think was so serious. Court records also show that Vitale and Ruggiero talked about a plot to murder Benjamin “Lefy Guns” Ruggiero, who at the time in 1982 was incarcerated in a federal jail in lower Manhattan. Vitale said that Massino wasn’t worried about Ruggiero but did want to “get to Wean,” who was also housed in the same jail.

  The tapes could be troublesome, so the defense lawyers went after them, asking Judge Sweet to suppress the recordings and seeking to have the indictment thrown out. Vitale also asked to be tried separately from Massino. The main argument advanced by the attorneys for Massino and Vitale about the tapes was that the government had failed to seal the surveillance recordings immediately as required by law. Court records show that the FBI agents did seal some of the recordings promptly—within a day—at the expiration date of the various court orders authorizing the surveillance. But one set of tapes in particular, made at Ruggiero’s home, had a problem. The month-long court order permitting the bugging expired on July 7, 1982. But the tapes were not sealed until July 22, a gap of fifteen days.

  The FBI was forced to admit that the delay came about because of a serious breach of security surrounding the Ruggiero investigation. On July 6, 1982, the FBI had learned that Ruggiero had received confidential information used by the agency to get court permission to plant the various bugs. Court records revealed that an FBI agent left a copy of confidential documents in a bar not far from his office in Rego Park. Somehow the material got to Ruggiero and the FBI started an investigation to find out the source of the leak. That investigation, federal investigators said, took time.

  Judge Sweet didn’t buy the FBI excuse. On April 12, 1985, he found that the agency “consciously chose” to pursue an investigation that really was “unrelated” to the act of sealing the tapes. He ruled that prosecutors could not use the 110 reels of tapes affected by the fifteen-day delay in sealing, recordings that captured Vitale talking with Ruggiero. However, Sweet said the other tapes covered by earlier court orders, those that captured Massino and Vitale talking with Ruggiero, could be used. The other defense requests were denied by Sweet.

  Giuliani’s office decided to appeal Sweet’s ruling and took the suppression of the tapes to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. It was a smart move. The higher court thought that Sweet’s ruling was too harsh and believed instead that there might be legitimate manpower reasons, such as in the case of the leak investigation, for there to be delays in sealing. On February 21, 1986, Sweet’s ruling on the tapes was reversed and the evidence could be used at trial if needed.

  The favorable ruling for the government prompted the defense to face the future with some realism. The government had been on a roll with Mafia cases and the man who was going to try Massino was Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael Chertoff, who had just come off a spectacular win in the Commission trial. He was assisted by Helen Gredd. Massino was represented by Sam Dawson, a former federal prosecutor from Brooklyn who had a reputation for being a skillful cross-examiner. Vitale was defended by Bruce Cutler, a former assistant district attorney from Brooklyn who had rapidly risen to prominence defending Massino’s old friend, Gambino boss John Gotti.

  Dawson and Cutler, chastened by the appeals court ruling and hoping to avoid a trial that involved evidence that had been used earlier to great success by the government, started plea negotiations with Chertoff. As Cutler later remembered, Dawson met him in the cafeteria of the federal court house at 40 Centre Street and said he had a deal.

  “I worked it out,” Dawson told Cutler.

  “It sounded like a good deal too,” Cutler said during an interview for this book (Dawson died of cancer in 1991). Massino didn’t have to admit to any Mafia membership and while he had to plead guilty to racketeering, the only crime he had to admit to in his plea was hijacking. The conspiracy to murder the three captains would be dropped. Though the prison sentence in the deal would be for twenty years, the sentence would run concurrent with Massino’s ten-year term for labor racketeering, which according to Cutler would wind up giving Massino four more years, allowing him to be released in 1996 instead of 1992.

  Cutler said his client Vitale would only have to face a five-year prison term for what he jokingly called “felonious moppery.” Since the sentences predated 1987 changes in the federal sentencing laws, Vitale could be out in about three years.

  But Cutler said there was a catch. The government wanted Massino to make a statement when he entered his plea that he was involved in the conspiracy to murder Dominick Trinchera, Philip Giaccone, and Alphonse Indelicato, the three captains. Massino refused, so the case went to trial.

  By the time Massino’s trial for the murder of the three captains was set to begin, he had already been in the local federal jail for over a year following his conviction in the Local 814 labor racketeering case. It had been nearly three years since he had surrendered to face the indictment. A big man used to a rich diet, Massino lost a lot of weight in jail. When the murder conspiracy case finally opened on April 28, 1987, Massino had to borrow a suit from a slimmer friend to dress for court. That more svelte buddy, it turned out, was Angelo Ruggiero, a chubby mafioso to be sure but nothing like the 300-pound girth that Massino sported.

  “This case is about money and it is about murder,” Chertoff told jurors in his opening statement. “It is the biography of a man who made his life in crime and that man is Joey Massino.”

  Chertoff said that Massino had risen to become one of the powers in the Bonanno crime family and labeled him “the Horatio Alger of the Mafia.” The deaths of the three captains was rooted in a struggle within the Bonanno family for power and Massino was part of the conspiracy that led to their deaths.

  When his turn came, Dawson told the jury that they would acquit Massino because there simply wasn’t evidence that the defendant had done anything wrong. Jurors may not like Massino’s lifestyle and it was true that he wasn’t a saint, said Dawson. But the key witness about the murder conspiracy, FBI agent Joseph Pistone
, hadn’t even met Massino.

  Vitale was not accused of being part of the murder conspiracy, but he had a closeness through marriage and friendship with Massino that could be looked on with disfavor by the jury. Cutler didn’t shy away from Vitale’s linkage to his brother-in-law.

  “Not only does he love Joe Massino, not only is he related to Joe Massino through marriage, but he is proud of it and the evidence will show that,” said Cutler.

  The case contained numerous charges related to hijackings and who better to testify about that than Massino’s old hijacking crony Ray Wean. Although he was not a member of organized crime, Wean told the jury about things that implicated Massino in the Mafia. For instance, Wean said that while he was a trustee at the federal jail in Manhattan in the late 1970s he helped and did favors for Carmine Galante at Massino’s insistence.

  Wean also testified that as soon as he got bail in early 1981 on the Nassau County robbery case—with some help by the FBI—he went to Massino’s J&S Cake Social Club and asked his old friend if there were any “scores coming down.” Massino didn’t have anything, Wean said, but offered him use of a house in Pennsylvania if he needed a place to stay. Still, Massino did talk about a stolen tuna fish load he had handled with Wean.

  To prove the Joseph Pastore murder was linked to Massino, the prosecution brought in the testimony of Salvatore Polisi. It was Polisi, a career criminal, who had run into Massino at the Port Jervis Holiday Inn while the Maspeth mobster was on the lam. Polisi testified that in early 1976, at the request of mobster Dominick Cataldo, that he “went to find a grave site for the man that was to be murdered.” Polisi said he found the site and reported back to Cataldo during a night at the bar in the Pan American Motel in Flushing. Seated at the table with Cataldo, Polisi said, were Massino and his friend “Tootie” Franzese.