by Lamothe, Lee
“Vito led the way,” Vitale said. “I was last. Vito entered the room with Emanuele while me and the old-timer guarded the exit door.”
“My job was to say ‘It’s a holdup’ when I went in the room, ‘so everybody stand still,’” Vito Rizzuto later confided. Vito insists he did not pull the trigger of the gun he admits he was holding. “The other people came in and they started shooting the other guys,” he said. Vitale disagrees.
“I seen Vito shoot. I don’t know who he hit,” Vitale said. Everyone who was in that room, however, likely agrees on Vitale’s assessment of what happened next.
“All hell broke loose.” Sonny Red and his men were braced for violence but, unarmed, there was little they could do.
“When they came in with the shotguns, Big Trinny charged them. He made a loud noise. They shot him. He died right there,” Lino said. “I knocked George down. I don’t know, you know, I jumped over Trinny. While I was jumping over him, I see Philly Lucky in the back, ready to get killed, and I see Joe hit Sonny Red with an object, I don’t know what it was.
“I was jumping, you know, over Trinny, to get out,” Lino said. “I’m jumping over a body—the guy is six-six, 400 pounds.” Lino’s chance for escape was a sign of Vitale’s hesitation.
“I froze for five seconds,” Vitale said. “By the time me and the elderly gentleman gets to the door, Frank Lino came flying past us. He was running. And kept running.” Meanwhile, Sonny Red had been struck in the back with a bullet that had cut clean through his body and a second time in his side. Injured but alive, he scrambled toward the door. Sciascia saw that their prime target was not yet dead and moved toward him.
“I seen George reach in the back, pull out a gun and shoot him on the left side of the head,” Vitale said. “By that time, it was all over.” Outside the club, Lino did not run into the Bonanno soldiers who were supposed to be watching for just such an eventuality. He spent little time weighing his options.
“I got out the door and I ran,” he said. “I made a left. I went up 68th Street, jumped over a few fences, went into these people’s home. I knocked at their door, elderly people; the man was in a wheelchair. I told him I’m not there to hurt him, if I could use their phone. They were nice, let me use their phone.
“First I called the My Way Lounge. Then I called my house,” Lino said. At his club, he spoke with a bartender, then to his brother and a few of his regulars, looking for a quick ride out of the area. “I just told them if they could get somebody to pick me up at this location. Then when I hung up, I called up my house and my son Frankie answered. I told him the same thing. He happened to get there first.”
Meanwhile, the remaining captains had also been anxious to leave the scene of the shootings, but Vitale and the old-timer waved their guns to keep them at bay until Vitale got the signal from outside the club. The plotters did not want a panicked crowd spilling out on to the street, drawing attention and, perhaps, calls to the police.
“I wouldn’t let them exit. I was calling ‘Goldie’ in the walkie-talkie, ‘Goldie, where are you?’ He came around the [street] corner [in the van]; when I knew he was outside, I let the individuals out of the club,” Vitale said. The other captains were then hustled into Goldie’s van and whisked away. Vito, Emanuele and their Sicilian colleagues, however, seemed to have suddenly and mysteriously vanished.
“I closed the door, I turned around and the only one standing in the room other than the three dead bodies was Joseph Massino,” Vitale said. Massino and Vitale had been told that there were no other exits from the club and yet people were gone who did not pass through the guarded door.
“We just looked at each other; ‘Where did everybody go?’… Me and Mr. Massino didn’t know there was another exit. After the shooting, all the Zips got out through the back door. We were standing in the middle of the room; we didn’t know there was an extra exit,” Vitale said.
The Canadian crew and their New York-based Sicilian kin seemed to have arranged an alternative route to safety—and kept it to themselves.
The body of Sonny Red lay near the door in the foyer. Big Trinny lay dead in the main room and Philly Lucky’s body was near the end wall. Massino and Vitale then left the club.
“We exited the building through the front door, walked to the corner, where we ran into Sonny Black,” Vitale said. “Massino and him had a conversation. I had stood to the side. They talked and they said it was time to go back in and package the bodies.”
Frenzy soon returned to the club. Sonny Black’s crew came in for the cleanup and faced the significant challenge of moving Big Trinny’s dead weight. Lefty Ruggiero tried to shift the limp mass but could not budge it. He then watched in amazement as Boobie threw his considerable muscle into the job. Lefty would later regale fellow gangsters with the story of Boobie’s surprising strength. The bodies were each wrapped in white bedsheets and tied tight with clothesline—once around the neck, again around the waist and a third time around the ankles.
“The men opened up the drop cloths, placed them on the floor, carried the bodies to the drop cloths, wrapped them up and put rope around them so they could carry them,” Vitale said. The bodies were then carted out of the club and dropped into a waiting van and spirited away for discreet disposal. For that part of the job, Angelo Ruggiero (who was not related to Lefty), Gene Gotti and John Carneglia—Sciascia’s heroin partners in the Gambino Family—were called into action, Vitale said.
“When I got back to the club with Sonny Black’s crew, there was so much blood,” Vitale said. “We couldn’t clean it up. It was impossible.” They turned to a rather primitive form of cleansing. Massino told Vitale to give the club’s keys to one of the Montrealers.
“He’s going to burn the place down,” Massino said.
Lino’s escape was not the only snag that night. Santo “Tony” Giordano, the Zip who was playing the congenial host for the ruse of a meeting, caught some friendly fire when the gunmen started shooting. Two fellow Zips pulled the injured Giordano from the floor and, holding him between them, rushed him from the club, out through the exit that Massino and Vitale did not know existed.
Giordano was driven to the Brooklyn apartment of his uncle, Gaspare Bonventre. The uncle walked up the stairs from his basement apartment to answer the frantic ringing of his doorbell. It was late, close to 11 p.m., and, before opening his door, he asked who was there.
“Nino, it’s Tony,” came the reply. Santo Giordano was often called Tony, and he affectionately referred to his uncle as Nino. Opening the door, the uncle saw that his nephew was in deep distress. He was alone, in pain and crumpled against an outside wall—bent over, almost on his knees.
“Uncle, uncle, help me,” Giordano said.
“What happened? What’s happening?” his uncle asked.
“Give me help. Help me,” Giordano repeated. His uncle put his arm around Giordano’s shoulder and helped him inside and down the stairs. Giordano could barely move on his own. On one side he leaned heavily on his uncle and to the other he leaned against the stairwell’s side wall. At the bottom of the steps, without a wall to offer support, he collapsed to the ground, refusing to be moved any farther. His uncle offered to carry him to a nearby chair but Giordano begged him not to move him or even touch him any more.
“No, leave me here. Leave me here,” Giordano cried. He then called out for a doctor.
“Why? What’s happened? Why can’t you stand up?” his worried uncle asked. What his uncle did not know was that his nephew’s associates were already making arrangements for medical attention—arrangements that would be more discreet than a public call to an ambulance or, worse, the police.
Dr. Edward Salerno was in his pajamas and just settling in front of the television for the 11 o’clock news. Salerno was a community doctor whose office and home shared the same building on Suydam Street in Brooklyn, where he had practiced medicine for almost 25 years. Among his patients had been Giordano, who had started seeing him infrequently in 1968
, and Sal Catalano. Salerno’s home office was near Catalano’s bar, the Café del Viale, on Knickerbocker Avenue, where the doctor would go almost every morning for a cup of coffee before his office hours began. Salerno’s attention was abruptly pulled away from the nightly news.
“The bell rang and I opened the door and I saw this man that I knew by sight. He asked me if I could go with him because there was an emergency,” Salerno later recalled. He knew he had seen the man several times at the Café del Viale but did not know his name. Salerno asked what the emergency was.
“I’ll tell you later,” came the reply. The doctor was reluctant to go. He was dressed for bed, it was late and the situation seemed mysterious, but the visitor was insistent. Salerno was handed a stack of cash. He did not know how much was there, nor did he stop to count it then, but later he found it was a wad totaling $500. Salerno changed into street clothes, grabbed his medical bag and slipped into the back seat of a waiting car. Sitting beside him was Cesare Bonventre. The car sped away.
“I asked the driver once he took the parkway where we were going. So he told me we’re going to Bensonhurst. That’s the only conversation I had with him,” he said. When the doctor arrived at the uncle’s apartment, he was ushered downstairs, where he recognized his old patient, Giordano, who was lying on the floor and screaming out in pain. Salerno checked his pulse, which was weak, and his blood pressure, which was extremely low. His patient was pale and blood flowed freely from a wound to his back. Salerno gave him an injection of morphine to ease his pain.
“He had been shot. I saw there was a bullet lodged in his chest under the skin. So I turned him around to see where the entry bullet [wound] was and I noticed the entry bullet was some place around his back,” Salerno said. “It was very fresh. I don’t know how fresh it was. There was too much blood on the floor.” He quickly realized there was little he could do in the apartment. Giordano’s condition was graver than the gangsters had realized. It was not just a matter of stitching up a hole; Giordano needed major surgery, the kind only a hospital could provide. His condition, Salerno told the men, was critical. Their friend was dying.
“I will call the ambulance,” Salerno said. Giordano protested, insisting that Salerno treat him personally. The doctor told him that he had to get to a hospital quickly. The hospital where Salerno had privileges, Wyckoff Heights Medical Center, was on the other side of Brooklyn. What Giordano needed was an ambulance to take him to the nearest facility, Coney Island Hospital, for immediate surgery, the doctor said. But even through his agony, Giordano was resolute.
“I advised him, I felt the trip wasn’t good for him because of his condition, but he insisted. So I called the private ambulance myself and in the meantime I also called the hospital and the surgery room, to have the operating room ready, and I went with Mr. Giordano in the ambulance,” Salerno said.
“He was taken to the operating room immediately. The result of the operation was that the bleeding was stopped. The man was paralyzed and the paralysis was permanent,” he said.
Although neither Salerno nor Giordano’s associates had called the police over the gunshot injury, as the law requires, an officer in the emergency room at the time noticed the fuss and approached medical staff. A report on the incident eventually made its way to the FBI. A few days after the shooting, FBI Special Agent Carmine Russo, one of the agents probing the Zips’ drug activities in Brooklyn, visited Giordano in hospital. Giordano lay bandaged and, in contrast to his screaming panic on the night of the murders, was now calm, collected and even cocky.
“I heard you had some trouble,” Russo said to the mobster, who was propped up on pillows on the hospital bed.
“Me? Oh, this? Nah, this is nothing,” Giordano replied.
“The doctors say you were shot,” the agent said.
“An accident,” answered Giordano.
“How’d it happen, Santo?”
“Argument over a parking spot.”
“Where?”
“I don’t remember.”
THE BRONX, MAY 6, 1981
At nine-thirty the morning after the three murders, FBI Special Agent William Andrew was on surveillance duty inside a house, rented secretly by the FBI, that looked out over Catalano Brothers Bakery, a café on Metropolitan Avenue in Middle Village, Queens, that was run by Sal Catalano as a base for his heroin deals. Hidden nearby with his camera and long lens, Andrew waited and watched until his radio crackled with instructions to move his camera across to the Bronx side of the Whitestone Bridge to train his lens on the Capri Motor Lodge. A police surveillance team working on the Pizza Connection heroin investigation had seen Sciascia and Massino driving in a car linked to Catalano. They watched as they switched cars in Queens and headed off in a blue Buick Regal, which had, in turn, been followed to the Capri Motor Lodge. At that point, Andrew and his camera were called in. The agent found a suitably discreet spot outside and was set up by 10:30 a.m. to watch the front of the motel. It was an uneventful vigil until shortly after noon, when four men emerged. Andrew clicked away with his camera, capturing 10 photographs over the next minute or so.
Massino and Sciascia walked out first and headed along the motel’s cut-stone and white brick façade toward its parking lot. Massino put his arm around Sciascia as they walked and talked. Two other men, unknown to the agent, followed about 15 feet behind. They also chatted as they walked and one had a garment bag nonchalantly slung over his shoulder and a cigarette dangling rakishly from his lips. The other had bushy, dark hair and wore a suit jacket over a T-shirt.
“I took photographs as they progressed down the front walkway, toward the blue Buick,” said Andrew. Massino and Sciascia turned to speak to the other men a moment, before Massino headed toward the passenger door of the Buick Regal while Sciascia hunted for the car keys. “They were followed out by the two individuals and, at some point, they were fairly close to each other and they exchanged words,” he said. “They were saying something to them, acknowledging them. I could not hear what they were saying.” While Massino and Sciascia climbed into the Buick, the other two men walked past it and got into a red Ford pick-up truck that was parked beside it. Both vehicles pulled away as Andrew shot off one last frame, capturing with his camera Sciascia and Massino driving past him.
Both Sciascia and Massino were well known to the FBI agents, but the other two men were a puzzle. The agents ran the New Jersey license plate of the pick-up truck and it came back registered to Giovanni Ligammari, a New Jersey contractor who was another of the Sicilian men involved in moving heroin through the city. It is not known when agents first identified the man with the cigarette and the garment bag. His identity was likely established when agents compared his long facial features to the profiles of the guests photographed at the Bono wedding. It was Vito Rizzuto.
While Vito, Massino, Sciascia and Ligammari were having a post-ambush meeting and Giordano was realizing he had become an underworld oddity—a paraplegic gangster—Frank Lino remained fearful for his life.
“I thought I was going to get killed sooner or later,” he said. It seemed a natural outcome of both his loyalty to Sonny Red and being a witness to the purge. After the murders, Lino went to spend the night at the home of his old mob friend, Frank Coppa, but the evening’s intrigue was not yet over for him. Lino’s cousin Eddie Lino, who was part of John Gotti’s Gambino Family crew, telephoned him at Coppa’s house to call him to a meeting. With Eddie, when Lino arrived, was the Gambino gang that had been helping in the plot: Gene Gotti, Angelo Ruggiero, Frank DeCico and Aniello Dellacroce.
“They told me that after the killing, that I wasn’t going to get killed,” Lino said. Dellacroce asked Lino if he had alerted police to the bloodletting and, after Lino’s assurance that he had not, Dellacroce turned toward Angelo Ruggiero: “Tell them to get rid of the bodies,” he said. Dellacroce then had one more thing to ask. “Do you know where Bruno is?”
Lino lied, telling Dellacroce that he had no idea where Bruno might be or what
he might be up to. The Gambino underboss then told Lino to find Bruno and to kill him.
The next day, Lino was called to yet another meeting, this one with his own crime family, but it started at Angelo Ruggiero’s house in Howard Beach. Inside were Sciascia and Nick the Battler. When Lino arrived, they trundled off together to Massino’s house, just a short distance away. En route, Sciascia and Nick talked to Lino about his miraculous escape the night before. Sciascia admitted he had placed his arm around Lino on purpose: “He was supposed to hold me down so I couldn’t escape; that I was getting killed,” Lino said. Nick said simply: “Don’t ever do that again. If you gotta die, die.” If that conversation made Lino nervous about what might be coming, at Massino’s house he felt some relief that other Bonanno captains were there, Sally Fruits, Sonny Black and Joe Bayonne among them. It did indeed look like a family meeting and not an execution, although Sonny Red might have thought the same thing the night before. This time, a direct peace offering was extended to Lino.