King of the Godfathers

by Anthony Destefano

  “We are going to kill Cesare and I need your help to set it up,” Attanasio told him, according to Vitale.

  Vitale then told the jurors how Bonventre was driven after he left his car near Flushing Avenue and Metropolitan Avenue in Maspeth to a nearby garage. As the car he was driving approached the garage, Vitale said he blurted out the prearranged signal “It looks good to me” at which point Attanasio, who was in the backseat, shot Bonventre. A struggling Bonventre tried to crash the vehicle, and after he tumbled out of the car in the garage Attanasio shot him again for the coup de grâce, said Vitale.

  According to Vitale, Massino passed instructions to Gabe Infanti to dispose of Bonventre’s body by dismembering it. It was a job that failed utterly since the body was found a few weeks later in two steel drums in New Jersey.

  The parade of hits kept coming from Vitale as he related to the jury how it was Massino who wanted the hapless Infanti, who had screwed up disposing of Bonventre’s corpse and bungled the shooting of Teamster official Anthony Giliberti, killed for his incompetence.

  “I want it done and I want it done now,” was how Vitale characterized Massino’s order to execute Infante.

  Louis Restivo, Frank Lino, and Tommy Pitera were involved in the killing of Infanti at a warehouse, said Vitale.

  Some murders, such as those of New York Post supervisor Robert Perrino and gangsters Russell Mauro and Anthony Tomasullo, didn’t involve Massino, who was in jail at the time, said Vitale. But the 1999 murder of Gerlando Sciascia (whose death had come to the notice of Louis Freeh and Charles Rooney at the FBI) was ordered by Massino with the command “George has got to go…call Tony Green [Anthony Urso] and take care of it.” According to Vitale, Massino then said he was leaving the following day for a trip to Cancun, Mexico, and asked that the murder be done by the time he got back.

  To make it look like Sciascia was killed as part of a drug deal gone bad, his body was dumped on the street in the Bronx. To bolster the impression that the mob had nothing to do with Sciascia’s death, Massino ordered his captains to not only attend the wake but also to ask around about who would want to kill the Canadian gangster, said Vitale. But all of that mock concern, he added, was simply a smoke screen to divert suspicion from the Bonanno family. Even so, Vitale said that Vito Rizzuto, the crime family’s key member in Canada, never did believe Sciascia died over drugs.

  Evidence about the murders was bad enough. However, Vitale had plenty of insight into the financial dealings of his brother-in-law, matters that were at the core of the government’s allegation that Massino had amassed a fortune through a life of crime. According to Vitale, he and and Massino ran a loan-sharking operation from about 1975 to 1999. Vitale’s role, at least in the beginning, was to make collections on the loans while Massino served as the business builder by finding new customers. Over time, Vitale said that he and Massino each earned a million dollars from the lending. Other Bonanno family members took part in the loan-sharking, including Anthony Urso, he said.

  Prosecutors also had charged Massino with extorting hundreds of thousands of dollars from a business known as King Caterers and Vitale was well aware of what had happened. The company was located in Farmingdale, New York, which is on Long Island. One of the company principles, said Vitale, needed protection from an encroachment by Carmine Avellino of the Lucchese family. Sometime between 1984 and 1985, the official at King Caterers approached Vitale through an old friend of Massino’s in Maspeth and asked for help.

  As is common in organized crime when there is a dispute about a business, mobsters will hold a meeting, a sitdown, and hash things out. The negotiations over King Caterers took place on Prince Street in Manhattan and Vitale testified that he, Massino, Avellino, and Bonanno captain Steven Cannone attended. Massino used a bluff to increase his negotiating position by falsely saying that one of the principles of the catering firm was a distant cousin of his. In the end, King Caterers was given to Massino and the Bonanno family, said Vitale.

  In return for the protection of the Bonanno crime family, King Caterers worked out employment agreements for Massino and Vitale to act as food consultants over a three-year period, Vitale said. He and Massino were to each be paid a fee of $25,000 with the expectation that both men would become partners in the business after three years.

  Eventually, because the principles of King Caterers were not paying all their taxes, Vitale said that he and Massino decided to set up their own company—Queen Caterers—as a buffer through which they would receive payment for any bogus services they rendered to the King firm. The arrangement was to insulate them from any tax problems King Caterers might have. Vitale figured that at some point the King firm might get subpoenaed and told the company owners to say if the government asked that Massino made the sauce, which he did maybe one time. Vitale further explained that at some point he and Massino sold their share in King Caterers back to its principles for $650,000 in cash, split equally.

  As Vitale testified, he dragged his sister, Josephine, into things. Vitale had already told the FBI agents that when Massino was in prison he allegedly paid his brother-in-law’s share of money from various illegal ventures to Josephine. On the witness stand, Vitale repeated that and aside from embarrassing his sister he was potentially implicating her in wrongdoing through her acceptance of the funds. He also had said that he kept in contact with Massino while he was in jail through his wife, though he didn’t indicate what the substance of those conversations where.

  At the same time, Vitale also showed that he was trying to buffer Josephine from the possibility that she could be charged for handling alleged proceeds of crimes. He stated that as part of his agreement to cooperate with the government it was expressly stated that nothing he said could be used against his sister. Vitale also said he had agreed not to testify against his sister. It seems family still counted for something to him.

  With her family affairs laid out for the world to see, including some pictures that were meant to be happy family snaps, Josephine Massino became more exasperated. Despite the fact that Vitale wouldn’t ever testify against her, Josephine made clear her feelings about her sibling. “I hate that man,” she was overheard saying under her breath.

  It was on David Breitbart’s cross-examination that Vitale revealed the depth of his anger and loathing for Massino. Asked when he decided to become a turncoat, Vitale said it was actually on January 9, 2003, the day both he and Massino were arrested together. Resentment had been festering for a long time.

  “He separated me from the [crime] family, he tried to separate me from my personal family,” said Vitale. “When I got indicted no one called my wife and children to see if I needed anything.”

  The latter was an increasingly common complaint among other mafiosi, who resented the lack of attention and concern shown for them once they got arrested. Such cavalier inattention would have been unheard of in Joseph Bonanno’s time among the Castellammarese who made up the Mafia. But this was a changed Cosa Nostra, one with a flawed sense of loyalty among thieves. It was a major reason why Vitale decided to flip sides.

  “That is when I thought my thoughts and said he don’t deserve the respect and honor with me sitting next to him,” said Vitale contemptuously, shooting a glance at his brother-in-law. Massino stared back at him.

  Aside from some inconsistencies between what he said earlier to the FBI agents and what he said in court about events surrounding some of the homicides, Vitale seemed to hold up well on cross-examination. Andres had some questions on redirect that gave Vitale a chance to reiterate how Massino had taught him everything he knew about organized crime. In a stroke of irony, Vitale recalled that during his induction ceremony in 1984 it had been Massino who had lorded over the proceedings and had made the boastful remark, “We never had a rat in the family.”

  Vitale’s testimony was completed at 4:05 P.M. on July 6. Excused by Judge Nicholas Garaufis, Vitale got up from his chair on the witness stand. He turned without looking at either Josephine, h
er husband, and her two daughters, and walked out the rear courtroom door. An expressionless Josephine followed him out the door with her eyes. The back of his head, the one she used to stroke when he was a little boy, would be the last thing she would ever again see of the brother.

  CHAPTER 26

  “Not One We Won”

  Salvatore Vitale’s testimony about Joseph Massino was like the Rosetta Stone of archaeology when it came to the Bonanno crime family. He had been so close to Massino over the years and had taken part in so many crimes with him that Vitale provided prosecutors with an overview of just about everything the crime boss had done. Vitale also gave meaning and context to a lot of the power struggles and politics of the crime family. It was the kind of stuff a jury could eat up.

  But while the prosecution could have finished up with Vitale, there was still about three weeks of testimony that followed him. Next to the Mafia cooperators, much of the remaining testimony was dull and uneventful. Some dealt with crime scene investigations of the arson at the office of Doctor Leifer. An FBI agent told the jury about certain wiretaps that were placed on the telephones of the late Gambino captain Angelo Ruggiero in the 1980s. A low-level Bonanno operative testified about the crime family gambling operations in the cafés and coffee shops of Queens.

  About a week after Vitale had finishing testifying, another old friend of Massino’s took the witness stand. He was now forty-seven years old and looked more mature than the fuzzy surveillance photograph had depicted. Clean cut and well dressed, Duane Leisenheimer was a changed man. Once a stand-up guy who went to prison rather then testify to a grand jury about Massino, Leisenheimer was now helping the government.

  As Leisenheimer settled into the witness chair, his eyes and facial expression showed both recognition and resignation as he glanced at Massino. Under questioning by prosecutor Robert Henoch, Leisenheimer said he had already distanced himself from Massino when in June 2003 he was visited by FBI agents Kimberly McCaffrey and Jeffery Sallet at his home.

  The two agents were very direct in what they had to say and handed Leisenheimer a subpoena.

  “You went to jail once for this guy, you don’t need to go to jail again,” McCaffrey said to him.

  After retaining a lawyer, Leisenheimer said he met with prosecutor Greg Andres, who took a hard line with him, telling Massino’s old friend that he had a lot more to worry about than the contempt charge he had faced in 1984. By this time other witnesses like Salvatore Vitale and Richard Cantarella had been cooperating for months. Particularly in the case of Vitale’s cooperation, Leisenheimer was implicated in a lot of crimes.

  “It doesn’t look good,” Leisenheimer said his lawyer told him. He decided to cooperate.

  “I had a big decision to make,” said Leisenheimer. “I had a family to think about.”

  Leisenheimer related to the jury his long relationship with Massino, which began in his teens and went on for decades. Massino had been his mentor in crime, involving him as a kind of office assistant in the three captains and Cesare Bonventre murders. It was during the killing of the three captains that Leisenheimer was given the job of sitting in a vehicle a few blooks away from the scene of the murders to monitor a walkie-talkie. Leisenheimer didn’t see the shootings but was involved in the cleaning up of the crime scene, describing for the jury Vitale’s annoyance when rigor mortis had set in with the corpses.

  In the case of Bonventre’s killing, Leisenheimer described how Massino had told him while they were on the lam in Pennsylvania that Philip Rastelli was the one who put the murder plot in motion.

  “‘Cesare Bonventre’s gotta go, the old man wants Cesare to go, this is at Marty’s instigating,’” Massino said, according to Leisenheimer. He explained that the “old man” was Philip Rastelli and that “Marty” referred to Rastelli’s brother, who apparently had passed along the murder message.

  Leisenheimer said his job was to find a garage where Bonventre’s murder could be facilitated. He found a place that he sometimes used as an auto chop shop off Metropolitan Avenue. After Bonventre’s body was driven away in the trunk of an Oldsmobile, the dead man’s own car, a 1980s Cadillac, was cut up in the garage, said Leisenheimer. He then drove back to the Poconos.

  The only other key witness to testify was FBI agent Kimberly McCaffrey. Because of her involvement in the early stages of the investigation, McCaffrey was able to detail how things got started in the forensic accounting work. Questioned by Andres, she described the discovery of extortion victim Barry Weinberg and the development of his friend, Agostino Scozzari, as witnesses who had a field day making secret tapes.

  McCaffrey also gave a window into the finances of Massino and his wife. There were three parking lot businesses in lower Manhattan that she found Josephine had an interest in, along with her brother, Salvatore, and Richard Cantarella’s wife, Loretta. McCaffrey also described the compensation each received, ranging in amounts from around $18,000 in some years to as low as $7,500. McCaffrey also described for the jury the discovery of checks Josephine had written to Weinberg for amounts ranging from $16,666 to $10,000, checks that led investigators to Weinberg as a target for tax crimes. Massino’s finances weren’t the only ones detailed by McCaffrey. She told the jury how, after Vitale began to cooperate, that agents found hundreds of thousands of dollars he had stashed in safe deposit boxes, in a safe in his home, and in a secret compartment in his attic.

  There was one more FBI agent who testified about Massino’s finances. Agent Dan Gill had examined the books of King and Queen Caterers. Over an eleven-year-period, said Gill, he found that Queen Caterers, the firm Vitale said was used to hold the extortion money from King Caterers, received $1,048,500 as compensation for distribution to Vitale and Massino.

  Massino’s tax returns were also submitted to the jury and showed a steady growth in income. From 1992 when Massino and Josephine had shown a gross income of $121,667, the amount grew to $411,672 in 2001, with a high of $590,789 in 1998. Some of the income, McCaffrey said, came from real estate investments and occasional lottery winnings. Neither McCaffrey nor Gill said that the tax returns they examined found any criminal tax violations.

  Summations began on July 21 and the government’s side was presented by Mitra Hormozi. Dressed in a black pants suit, she seemed none the worse for wear after a trial that had lasted nine weeks. She had to digest over 8,000 pages of transcript for the jury.

  “All the evidence you have seen is a testament to Joseph Massino, to his ambition. To his ruthlessness and ultimately to his power,” said Hormozi. “Ironically, perhaps Mister Massino summarized it best when he told his friend Richard Cantarella in describing himself before he became boss that he was a one-man army, a one-man army for Philip Rastelli. Think about that statement, it is a powerful statement.”

  Hormozi said that the trial showed that Massino orchestrated the murders of Alphonse Indelicato, Philip Giaccone, Dominick Trinchera, Dominick Napolitano, Anthony Mirra, Cesare Bonventre, and Gabriel Infante. He also tried to get Anthony Giliberti killed. On top of that, Massino amassed millions of dollars through gambling, extortion, arson, and loan-sharking.

  “Every piece of evidence in this case, whether it came from the witnesses, the ballistics, the medical evidence, the crime scene evidence, photographs, every single piece points to the defendant’s guilt,” she said. “Not a single piece of credible evidence points to any other logical conclusion.”

  When his turn came to speak to the jury, defense attorney David Breitbart essentially conceded again that Massino was the Bonanno boss. But he hit back with the theme he had pushed all along: that Massino didn’t have the authority to have the murders committed.

  “There were no murders in the nineties,” he said about the period after Massino became crime boss. “He showed a love of life, not a love of death, because murders ceased.”

  Breitbart returned to his theme from his opening statement that the cooperating witnesses were experts in the “big lie” and could deceive people to
walk unwittingly to their deaths. He spewed venom at Vitale, calling him a “degenerate liar” and a jealous, vicious killer.

  “If you find witnesses lied about an element in the case,” Breitbart told the jury, “you have the absolute capacity to say ‘out.’”

  Since the government has the burden of proof in criminal cases, it gets a chance to rebut the defense summation and in this case the job fell to Andres. He ridiculed Breitbart’s claim that Massino was a peaceful mob boss. No handshakes cemented Massino’s rise to power, Andres said; rather, it was bullets and guns. He also noted that far from an interregnum of peace, Massino’s reign had been punctured by the murder of Gerlando Sciascia in 1999, a crime not part of the indictment but still shown by the evidence to have occurred.

  After a two-hour explanation of the law by Judge Nicholas Garaufis, the jury finally began deliberations on July 26. Four days later, on July 30, the jury signaled it had reached a verdict just before lunchtime. FBI agents, courthouse personnel, news media, and Massino’s family all filled up the courtroom. The jury foreperson, a woman, handed up the long verdict sheet to court clerk Joseph Reccoppa, who in turn handed it to Garaufis. The judge glanced at the sheet and then handed it back to his clerk, who gave it back to the foreperson. Reccoppa then asked the jury to announce its verdict.

  The words guilty and proven were spoken twenty-two times, once for every single count in the indictment and also for each of the racketeering acts—the murders, gambling, loan-sharking, arson, and money laundering—that Massino had been accused of.

  With the first guilty finding, Josephine Massino clamped her lips ever tighter and began to shake her head. As each “guilty” was announced, Massino’s daughter, Adeline, became crestfallen, her shoulders slumping each time the word was spoken. She cradled her chin in her hands, elbows on her knees, as she stared at the floor. When the verdict was finished, Massino shot a glance at his wife and shrugged as if to say, “What can you do?” Finally turning in her seat, Adeline said to no one in particular, “Not one we won, not one,” referring to the myriad charges.