by Lamothe, Lee
“Those guys are always with him. He brought them over from Sicily and he uses them for different pieces of work and for dealing all that junk,” Lefty continued, using the mob slang for heroin. “They’re as mean as he is. You can’t trust those bastard Zips. Nobody can. Except the Old Man. He can trust them because he brought them over here and he can control them. Everybody else has to steer clear of him. There’s a lot of people out there who would like to see him get whacked.”
Lefty Ruggiero was a soldier of great loyalty who had killed many times for the family. His enduring legacy as a mobster, however, will forever be his introduction into the Bonanno Family of “Donnie Brasco.” For Lefty, and for any number of other made Bonanno soldiers, Galante was the boss. It highlights the disarray within the family at the time that its leadership was such an open question. Others insisted Philip “Rusty” Rastelli, who was in prison, was still the boss, having been picked for the post in 1974 during a meeting that included Paolo Violi’s representative from Montreal. Lefty had it right that Galante’s gruff presence and monomaniacal plans were causing dissent within the family—and outside it as well—but he was misinformed about Galante’s true rank.
“He wasn’t the boss. I guess he wanted to be the boss, but he didn’t make it,” said Frank Lino, a former Bonanno captain. “He was a captain of the Montreal crew. At one time, he just wanted to take over Montreal, didn’t want anything to do with New York.”
Sal Vitale was equally emphatic: “He was never the official boss. … [Galante] was a captain with the Bonanno Family, [a] very powerful individual.”
What Galante wanted to do was to use that power to gain control of the family, unify it under his banner and then flood America with high-grade heroin. The profits would flow ever upwards until they reached him. And then, likely, go no further: not to Sicily, not to Canada and not to the other New York families. As it was, although he was not the official boss, Galante was already demanding a “boss’s cut” from all Bonanno wiseguys. Echoing the attitude of Nick Rizzuto in Montreal toward Violi, Galante just ignored the fact that the family already had a boss.
Galante was able to hijack the boss’s position not only because of his strength but because of Rastelli’s weakness. For the captains and soldiers on the street, it put them in an uncomfortable position. Galante was forcing the issue, telling them to choose sides, and Galante was a hard man to say no to. Mobsters and cops alike tell of how frightening it was just to look into his cold eyes.
Among those ambitious Bonanno soldiers and captains trying to navigate the situation was Joseph “Big Joey” Massino, a mobster who was bright and had a keen mind for strategy. Massino was broad and plump, with thick, fleshy arms and a double chin. Even with the plush exterior, however, he did not look soft. He wore his dark, wavy hair longer than most mobsters, which, coupled with his preference for T-shirts that showed his panther tattoo on his left arm, made him look less like a stereotypical Mafia leader and more like a petty thug. Just as the gentlemanly air of “Mr. Settecasi” was deceiving, so, too, was Massino’s look of being a dumb tough. If his hair and clothes rubbed older mobsters the wrong way, there was one thing Massino did that erased any concern—he was an earner. He proved himself to be resourceful, smart and careful. Born in 1943, Massino grew up in Queens and, like Sal Vitale, his childhood friend and future mob colleague, attended Grover Cleveland High School. Massino first met Vitale as a young boy when Vitale’s sister, who was friendly with Massino, introduced them. Four years older, Massino taught Vitale how to swim at the local swimming pool. Leaving school early, Massino made good money hijacking trucks and selling the stolen cargo before he moved into other mob activities. By the late 1960s he was running snack trucks around construction sites from which he sold food and drink as a cover for the more profitable activities of gambling and loan sharking. He franchised one of these routes out to Vitale for $16,000.
“It was a catering truck, a coffee wagon. Serves coffee, cake, sandwiches, lunch—so it’s a roach coach. They call it a roach coach,” Vitale said. When Vitale started breaking into factories and pulling off petty heists with two friends, it did not take long for Massino to hear of it. Vitale was unloading his deli truck one day when he was approached by Massino.
“I heard you’re doing scoring,” Massino announced.
“That ain’t true,” was Vitale’s reply.
“Don’t lie to me. Philip Rastelli sent me word, if you’re going to do scores, do it with me,” Massino said. From then on, Vitale was put on record as working for Massino, and he could lie to his mentor no more. At the time, Vitale was ignorant of the larger concerns of organized crime.
“I did not have the foggiest,” Vitale said. “There is no book. You try to follow a person that you respect, admire and he would teach you.” Massino gave him “on-the-job training,” and it was the beginning of a long partnership between the two men. Vitale had hitched his wagon to an impressive star. In the mid-1970s, Massino was inducted into the Bonanno Family at the invitation of Rastelli.
“He was friends with Louis Rastelli. Louis Rastelli was nephew of Philip Rastelli, Philip Rastelli being the boss, that’s how he got close to Philip Rastelli,” Vitale said of Massino. Massino even called Rastelli “Unc,” short for uncle, displaying the same affection his friend Louis had for his Uncle Phil. Massino worked first as a soldier in the crew headed by James Galante, Carmine’s nephew, and later, in the crew headed by Philip “Philly Lucky” Giaccone.
By the time Carmine Galante was eyeing the tarnished Bonanno throne, Massino needed all the support he could muster, especially given his known ties to the true boss. With Rastelli in prison, Galante was anxious to sever all his contact with Bonanno soldiers on the outside. One day in the late 1970s, Galante called Massino to a meeting. Vitale drove him to see Galante and waited in the car, parked nearby on a corner, for his mentor to return.
“This guy is going to kill me,” Massino said to Vitale when he got back into the car. “He doesn’t want me to visit Phil Rastelli in jail.” It was a request Massino felt he had to refuse. “He is like my uncle. He raised me, baptized me. I can’t abandon him; I have to go visit him,” Massino said. Massino, after all, owed his mob existence to Rastelli; the “baptism” was a reference to his induction into the Mafia. Despite his support for Rastelli, behind closed doors Massino was often less than adoring.
“How smart can Rastelli really be?” he once complained to Vitale. “He spent half of his life in jail.”
Others cut Rastelli a little more slack, particularly the conservative forces on the Commission. If there was one thing the bosses of the Five Families tended to agree on, it was that killing bosses was not a good idea. It was a move aimed more at their own safety than honor, but it was a pervasive—although not always strictly adhered to—rule of thumb. When Rastelli complained of Galante’s preemptory activities, he had a sympathetic audience. When the other bosses started hearing stories of Galante’s ambition to be the first among equals in New York, their desire to see him dead only heightened. With the loss of support from the other bosses, Galante lost any safety net that the Commission might have provided him. He was shedding friends left and right in New York but seemed hardly to care, primarily because he placed his faith so deeply in the Zips, men he knew—even if the FBI and the other gangsters did not—would pay little heed to the whims and wishes of the Commission. Like Violi before him, Galante was becoming increasingly isolated.
His faith in his own worth and the fealty of the Zips was grossly misplaced. It was not to him that the Zips were pledged, it was to themselves, to their Sicilian kin and to their heroin franchise. The heroin pipeline was starting to flow. The Sicilian clans had expatriate outposts in South America and their own clannish operatives in America. The Sixth Family, meanwhile, had taken Montreal, severing the firm ties Galante had had with the city under Violi. What need was there now for Carmine Galante and his grabbing, controlling demands?
Contrary to Lefty’s private sum
mation of the lay of the land to Donnie Brasco, crediting Galante’s success to the loyalty of the Zips, the Sicilian gangsters seem to have had their own secret mission.
Galante had opened the door, inviting the Sicilian Men of Honor in. Once there, they were perfectly at ease attacking their host.
VALLEY STREAM, LONG ISLAND, JUNE 5, 1979
Cynical developers often say that they name their construction projects after whatever natural feature they demolished to make room for bricks and mortar. This was perhaps how the Green Acres Mall in Valley Stream, Long Island, got its name. One of the largest shopping malls in New York State, it contained dozens of retail stores, food outlets and three large department stores. Only one shop, however, was of interest to two plainclothes police officers in an unmarked Plymouth Valiant. California Pizza offered hot pizzas, cold drinks and—at this outlet, at the time that it was run by the Sixth Family’s Gerlando Sciascia—a lot of heroin on the side. Drug sales exceeded anything running through the cash register from the food.
The Valiant entered the mall parking lot at around 9:30 p.m. on Tuesday, June 5, 1979, and made a slow sweep across the darkened pavement. In a parked car, facing the storefronts, were two men in a blue Cadillac. As the Valiant passed, the men in the Cadillac turned their faces away, but it was too late—one of the officers recognized the man sitting behind the wheel as Baldo Amato. Beside him was Cesare Bonventre. These were two of the most aggressive Zips in the Brooklyn Sicilian faction and Carmine Galante’s favorites. The Valiant continued past, out of sight of the Cadillac, and then did a wide turn and crept in between a cluster of cars near Gimbel Brothers Department Store. Hidden, the officers watched the Cadillac for half an hour until it moved closer to Sciascia’s California Pizza. The officers continued their surveillance on foot, one man watching the Cadillac, and the other the pizzeria. That was when they noticed a second Cadillac idling in the parking lot.
By now it was closing time. Through binoculars, an officer saw a man and a woman locking up. The man, silver-haired and stocky, was, in all likelihood, Sciascia. He left the pizzeria and went to a third Cadillac parked in front of his store. That car turned around near Gimbels and met the second Cadillac that was idling there. There was a shuffling about of Cadillacs and two of the cars sat, driver’s door to driver’s door, almost touching. After a minute, the second Cadillac sped away, racing through the parking lot behind Gimbels; Sciascia’s Cadillac—number three—headed north and stopped suddenly in the middle of the lot. Meanwhile, the first Cadillac, the one the officers had spotted with Amato and Bonventre inside, cut a sharp turn of its own and ended up facing south. All the curious movement piqued the officers’ curiosity. They radioed for backup and a short time later another unmarked police car cruised into the lot and stopped out of sight behind a steakhouse. Everyone waited.
“I observed [Cadillac] number three flash its high beams,” one of the officers recalled, referring to Sciascia’s car. “I observed [Cadillac] number one do the same,” meaning Bonventre and Amato’s car. “Number three then proceeded up to number one.” In a quick sequence of moves, Bonventre hopped out of one car carrying a package close to his body and climbed into the rear of Sciascia’s car; when he got out again, he was carrying his leather jacket wrapped around an object about three feet long, the size and shape of a sawed-off shotgun. He stopped briefly at the other Cadillac, apparently passing the long package over, before returning to Amato’s car. Then, as if by agreement, the three cars suddenly lurched into motion. The officers in the Valiant went after Sciascia’s Cadillac but it was gone, traveling “at a tremendously high rate of speed,” an officer said, “as fast as the car can go starting from a dead stop.”
Similarly, Cadillac number two with its unidentified occupants sped away from the plaza and was lost to the officers. The backup police car, however, went after Bonventre and Amato’s Cadillac and managed to pull it over near the exit to the westbound Sunrise Highway. The men inside identified themselves: the 28-year-old Bonventre said he was a pizzeria operator from Brooklyn; Amato, 27, said he owned a deli. Both said they were originally from Castellammare del Golfo, Sicily, and were cousins.
In the car, police found the tools of assassination. Poking out from inside a paper bag was a revolver, loaded and with the serial number stripped. In a pouch hanging from the back of the front seat was another loaded pistol. Officers also found a switchblade, bullets, two black ski masks, rubber gloves, a rubber Halloween mask and other knives. Bonventre had $1,800—all in $50 bills—in his pockets; Amato, just a few hundred. Written on what officers call “pocket litter”—scraps of paper, notes, matchbooks and so forth found in pockets—were the names and telephone numbers of the cafés in Brooklyn run by various gangsters associated with the Zips, and there were the names of heroin traffickers in America and Sicily. It would be 10 years before these names and numbers became significant—when they were linked to the defendants charged in what came to be known as the Pizza Connection case. At the time, though, the officers merely noted the numbers, as they were more interested in where the shotgun that appeared to have been passed from Sciascia’s car, had got to. Bonventre and Amato were arrested on weapons charges, granted bail and returned to whatever business they had that required guns, masks and rubber gloves. The missing shotgun might well have made an appearance the following month.
BROOKLYN, JULY 12, 1979
A stifling heat had enveloped New York when Carmine Galante stepped out of a black Cadillac, having been dropped off at the door of a favored eatery on Knickerbocker Avenue by his nephew, James Galante. Joe and Mary’s Italian-American Restaurant offered good food and was family-run, both of which were appreciated by Galante, who enjoyed eating and was related to the proprietor. The “Joe” in the restaurant’s name was Giuseppe “Joe” Turano, Galante’s cousin and a made Bonanno member. Galante sat near the door on the open-air patio, on one of a hodgepodge of mismatched chairs. He was flanked by his favorite bodyguards—two Zips, Cesare Bonventre and Baldo Amato—and joined at his table by Turano and Leonardo Coppolla, a Bonanno captain. It was late for lunch, about 2:45 p.m., but the mobsters nonetheless ate their fill.
As Galante finished his meal, a blue Mercury Montego, a car that blended in better on Knickerbocker Avenue than Galante’s black Cadillac, pulled up in front of the restaurant, blocking the roadway by double parking. One man stayed seated at the steering wheel while four others, carrying guns and wearing ski masks, climbed out. One of these stayed beside the car looking up and down the street while the three others filed into the restaurant. Inside, they again split, with one training a shotgun on the kitchen staff, telling them to shut up and stay still, while the remaining two rushed through to the backyard. From the patio came a shout, the voice of restaurant owner Joe Turano.
“What are you doing?” Any other words were drowned out by gunfire.
After the fusillade, the gunmen left as quickly as they had arrived. Leaving with them, unscathed in the melee and seemingly unperturbed, were Bonventre and Amato. Out back, Galante, Turano and Coppolla lay dead. Galante’s body was sprawled in a heap, his head resting on a concrete curb, his left eyeball popped by a bullet or shotgun pellet, his famous cigar still clenched between his teeth and his blood slowly seeping into an iron-grated drain on the patio floor.
The murder of a man as notorious as Galante sparked as much frenzy within the mob as it did in the New York tabloids. Special Agent Pistone, still undercover as Donnie Brasco, was in Miami when Galante was killed. The next morning, he received a phone call from Lefty, his mob mentor, telling him to go out and buy a New York newspaper. Pictures of Galante’s corpse were on the front of most papers.
“There’s gonna be big changes,” Lefty told Brasco. Indeed there were. At a face-to-face meeting soon after—for such things could not be said over the phone—Lefty brought him, and, inadvertently, the FBI, up to date.
“Rusty Rastelli is the new boss even though he is still in the can,” Lefty said, still unaware of t
he true nature of Galante’s position at the time of his death. “We’re gonna be under Sonny Black. He was made captain.” Dominick “Sonny Black” Napolitano’s promotion was one small part of the vast reorganization within the Bonanno Family after Galante was removed from the equation. Those who had let Galante get away with his charade as boss, particularly the official underboss, Nicky Marangelo, and Mike Sabella, a captain who ran the Casa Bella restaurant where Galante sometimes held his meetings, were busted down in rank, narrowly escaping death sentences by becoming mere soldiers. Those who had remained loyal to Rastelli were rewarded with promotions. And those who had helped kill Galante were blessed above all.
Cesare Bonventre, one of Galante’s bodyguards, was clearly in on the murder conspiracy and undoubtedly one of the shooters. For his act of betrayal he was made a captain. At 28, he was the youngest captain anyone could remember. Shortly after the murder, Bruno Indelicato—Sonny Red’s son—was similarly made a captain, as was Joe Massino. Sal Catalano, Lefty told Brasco, was made “the street boss of the Zips.” The reorganization was one of the strongest acts of leadership Rastelli had ever managed. He shook up the way his family was run on the streets and worked to ensure that the people in key positions supported him. Looking back, it shows that Rastelli had, in fact, rewarded those who had rid him of Galante. And despite the danger they presented, he accepted the Zips into the family as an official power to be reckoned with. If Galante was the one who had let them in the door, it was Rastelli who offered them a seat at the table.