The Sixth Family

by Lamothe, Lee

  Keeping it from Vito and the Sixth Family was crucial, said Vitale, for the simple reason that they feared him.

  “They have, like, 19 people; we didn’t want to get involved in a war,” he said of the official strength of the Montreal allotment of made Bonanno soldiers. The strength of the Sixth Family, of course, could not be measured in such a narrow way. As Vito would soon personally show Vitale and Massino, New York’s rigid structure meant little to him.

  BROOKLYN, MARCH 1999

  It was with more secrecy than is typical of a mob hit that Massino and his handpicked men mapped out a plan of attack on Sciascia.

  Two weeks earlier, Massino met directly with DeFilippo in Danny’s Chinese Restaurant on Cross Bay Boulevard, not far from the boss’s Howard Beach home. It was there that Massino assigned him this “piece of work,” as he typically referred to the murders he was ordering. DeFilippo, a decidedly inexperienced assassin, then started scheming and by the time Vitale met with him to discuss it, he had the plot thoroughly mapped out.

  Outside DeFilippo’s York Avenue apartment in Manhattan’s upscale East Side, he and Vitale walked the streets as they spoke in private, Vitale said.

  “Joe sent me. You know what we got to do?” Vitale asked him.

  “I’m all set up,” DeFilippo replied.

  “You need a car? I could get a car,” Vitale said.

  “I don’t need a car,” DeFilippo said.

  “Patty, do you need a car?” Vitale repeated. DeFilippo insisted he did not.

  “How are you going to do this? Explain it to me,” said Vitale.

  “I’m going to kill him in Johnny Joe’s truck,” DeFilippo said, naming John “Johnny Joe” Spirito, a trusted Bonanno associate. DeFilippo was going to use his ongoing dispute with Sciascia as a crafty way to lure him to his death. Sciascia was to be told that another mobster was ready to mediate a sit-down between them to settle their beef, and to meet DeFilippo in Manhattan and from there he would be driven to the meeting. Like Bonventre, Sciascia was a suspicious and crafty man. DeFilippo felt sure Sciascia would not get into a strange car, so they would use a vehicle familiar to him to put him at ease—a white Mercury Mountaineer sport utility vehicle driven by Spirito.

  “He’ll be comfortable getting into Johnny Joe’s truck. He knows Johnny Joe,” DeFilippo told Vitale. Once Sciascia was dead, Spirito would drive the body to the Bronx and dump it in the street, DeFilippo said. For that he would earn his membership into the Bonanno Family. DeFilippo had the plot carefully arranged, including asking Michael

  “Nose” Mancuso to be nearby in his gold Nissan Altima as a back-up shooter if anything went wrong, Vitale said.

  The next day, at the York Grill near DeFilippo’s home, Vitale passed two guns and a silencer to DeFilippo.

  “Does it work? Did you try it?” asked an anxious DeFilippo.

  “No,” replied Vitale. “You want to try it? Let’s go for a ride.” The two hopped into a black Lincoln Town Car and Vitale drove through the streets of midtown Manhattan while DeFilippo fired a few rounds through the open sun roof. As they left the car to return to the diner, Vitale grabbed hold of DeFilippo to ensure he had his attention for an important message.

  “Joe told me to tell you: Hit him high, hit him low,” Vitale said, meaning, in gangster parlance, to alternate between firing bullets into the head and into the chest—up and down, up and down—to leave no mistake about the outcome.

  “I got it. Don’t worry,” said DeFilippo. Test-firings, silencers, back-up shooters, instructions on inflicting maximum damage—again, special precautions.

  On the day DeFilippo intended to strike, he called Throgs Neck Jewelers on East Tremont Avenue—a store where Sciascia could often be found, run by John Chiazzese, a relative of Sciascia’s known by some as “John the Jeweler”—and left what was meant to seem like a conciliatory message: “We will work out our differences,” DeFilippo said and asked Sciascia to meet him at the intersection of 79th Street and First Avenue in Manhattan at 9 p.m.

  When Sciascia arrived at the jewelry store, nothing in his demeanor suggested he suspected this day would be the last day of his life. He jotted down on a slip of paper, in his unsteady handwriting, where he was to meet DeFilippo: “PAT D. 79 ST AV 1.” That evening, he parked his black Jeep Cherokee on the east side of Second Avenue between 79th and 80th streets, walking the block and a half to his rendezvous with DeFilippo. At the intersection, Spirito pulled his Mountaineer to a stop and Sciascia settled into the luxury interior of the SUV’s rear seat. In the front passenger seat was DeFilippo. At some point during the ride, seven .25-caliber bullets, fired from the front and just inches away, ended Sciascia’s life a month after his 65th birthday.

  “I was in the truck when he was killed,” Spirito said. “I drove a vehicle to Boller Avenue, got out of the vehicle, opened the door and pulled the body of George Sciascia out—may he rest in peace.”

  Vitale made sure he was in the area of the hit that night, arriving half an hour before DeFilippo’s meeting with Sciascia. He drove aimlessly about for an hour before stopping across the street from DeFilippo’s apartment, where there was a pay phone. He called him.

  “Hello?” DeFilippo said, answering his phone.

  “Patty, what’s up?” an anxious Vitale said. “Come on downstairs,” he added, for such a delicate thing could never be spoken of over the telephone. DeFilippo came trotting down from his apartment and crossed the road to meet with Vitale. Again the two walked and talked.

  “What’s going on?” Vitale asked.

  “It is done. It is over,” DeFilippo said.

  Vitale had one more task to perform in this unpleasant business. He called Joe Massino and spoke a prearranged signal: “I picked up the dolls for the babies.” The code meant that Sciascia was dead.

  Shortly after 11 p.m. on March 18, 1999, a man leaving his girlfriend’s home on Boller Avenue, near the Hutchinson River Parkway, watched in horror as what appeared to be a man’s body was tossed out of a truck, landing rudely on the pavement, face up and sprawled, beside a chain-link fence. Returning indoors, he called 9-1-1 and asked for police and an ambulance. Medical assistance was not in order. Sciascia lay dead on the street, where police found him dressed in a red-and-black argyle sweater, gray dress pants, black socks and shoes and a black leather jacket. His silver hair was streaked with blood and a grimace was frozen on his punctured face. His head and body had been riddled with bullets that perforated his brain, lungs, liver and pancreas. He was indeed hit high and hit low. This time, the discovery of the body was not a concern to the Bonannos. It was part of the plan, so that it would not look like a mob hit but rather a drug dispute gone awry. In Sciascia’s wallet, police found a business card for a Montreal jewelry shop run by the wife of Gaetano Amodeo, the Mafia hitman from Cattolica Eraclea who was later found hiding in Montreal. Also found was the note he made of his planned meeting with DeFilippo and other scrawled phone messages, including several from Canada, with the names and phone numbers of Montreal associates.

  A New York City police officer tucked the first parking ticket onto the windshield of Sciascia’s Jeep promptly at 8:00 the following morning. Eight more tickets would pile up before rush hour was over as parking enforcement officers, unaware the owner was in no position to move it, grew increasingly annoyed. The Jeep was eventually towed and, when it was linked to the body found hours before, became the focus of much police scrutiny. It yielded nothing.

  There was an unexpected hitch for Sciascia’s killers, however. The next morning, Vitale’s pager beeped. DeFilippo’s number popped up and Vitale promptly returned the call from the nearest pay phone.

  “I have to meet you. It is important,” DeFilippo said.

  “Okay. The usual spot,” Vitale answered. The usual spot was a diner near a busy highway exit. This time it was DeFilippo who seemed anxious.

  “You got to get rid of the truck for me. There is too much blood in the truck. They can’t clean it up,” he sa
id.

  As DeFilippo and Vitale were fretting over the blood-soaked Mountaineer, police were breaking the heart-wrenching news to Sciascia’s family. His wife, Mary, then called Baldo Amato, who could hardly believe it. He quickly arranged a meeting with Vitale at the Blue Bay Diner on Francis Lewis Boulevard in Queens, saying it was “very important.” Vitale was sitting waiting in the diner when Amato arrived. He was a wreck.

  “They killed my goombah,” Amato wailed, using Sicilian mob slang for a close friend.

  “They did what?” Vitale replied, already working Massino’s ruse by feigning surprise.

  “They killed my goombah,” Amato repeated, his eyes filling with tears.

  “What the hell’s going on?” Vitale replied.

  “I don’t know,” Amato said. “They kill my goombah.”

  “Baldo,” said Vitale, sympathetically. “Wait for the chief to come home and we’ll discuss it with him. I don’t know what’s going on, Baldo, I don’t know.”

  When Massino returned from his Caribbean island holiday, he was briefed on the murder. He heard grisly descriptions from the gangsters who chopped up the truck.

  “The truck was filled with blood. It was completely filled with blood and at that point Joe Massino said that this poor George must have bled to death,” Vitale said.

  Massino also heaped rewards on the men who had rid him of the perceived threat from Sciascia. Spirito was inducted as a made man into the Bonanno, sponsored for membership by DeFilippo. Massino also ordered Vitale to erase the $54,000 debt DeFilippo owed him, the amount left after he worked furiously to pay down the $150,000 he had borrowed. Vitale tore DeFilippo’s page out of his “shy book,” where he tracked their loan sharking debts, and ripped it into pieces. Mancuso was later elevated to a position where he allegedly sat as acting boss of the Bonanno Family when Massino was incapacitated.

  WHITE PLAINS, NEW YORK, MARCH 1999

  Joe Massino was emphatic that his role in killing Sciascia not be known, even to those within the family whom he typically trusted. To that end, he ordered Vitale and every Bonanno captain to attend Sciascia’s wake at a White Plains funeral home. Even those mobsters not in town were told to show up.

  “I was in Las Vegas and I was called to go to his funeral,” said Frank Lino, who was a Bonanno captain. “They want me to fly there to go to the funeral.” At the wake, Vitale was busy further bolstering the subterfuge by asking the captains to investigate Sciascia’s murder.

  “On Mr. Massino’s order, I asked every captain in our family,” Vitale said. “I said the administration had nothing to do with this murder. He was like a brother to us. We want to know what’s going on. If you find anything out, bring it to our attention. … We want to know who killed George.”

  Lino remembered being pulled aside by Vitale. “Keep your ear to the ground. No one knows who killed George,” Vitale told him.

  It was all designed, said Vitale, to “put up a smokescreen, a diversion.” When a mobster is killed in battle or dies of natural causes, there is a traditional show of strength and respect from his underworld kin. Mobsters and their associates typically show up en masse at the funeral and wake and lavish flowers and gifts on the grieving family. But if a gangster dies in what is called a “sanctioned hit”—one approved by the family leadership for what is considered a legitimate breach of the underworld code—the fallen comrade is typically shunned, even in death. His fellow gangsters avoid the funeral and wake, unless they had particular blood or close personal ties. When Carmine Galante was murdered, for example, word went out that his funeral was to be a no-show for New York wiseguys. When Sciascia was killed, Massino wanted to deflect suspicion from himself, so he wanted Sciascia’s wake and funeral packed with New York gangsters. Over two days, agents watching the event documented more than 40 members and associates of the Bonanno Family in attendance, including Anthony “Tony Green” Urso, then listed by the FBI as the consigliere, and Vitale, the underboss. At least one Montreal representative was also there: Joe Renda, described by Vitale as a “goodfellow in our family” and as Vito Rizzuto’s nephew, but he is, in fact, Sciascia’s nephew.

  Massino’s charade did not work on the Sixth Family, although it certainly worked on police and the press, who started to dismiss the theory that it was a sanctioned hit because of the turnout at the funeral.

  MONTREAL, 2001

  Massino made one last attempt to bring the Sixth Family back into line. If the elimination of Sciascia had been meant to head off some threat or challenge he thought Sciascia posed, it had also severed New York’s direct link to Montreal. Massino’s first emissary had been Frank Lino. His second was Anthony Spero, his consigliere. This time, around 2001, it was an even greater sign of respect for the importance of the Sixth Family; he sent Vitale, his underboss, and Anthony Urso, who had been made the acting consigliere—it was the entire Bonanno administration, save for Massino, who had long since stopped participating in public mob meetings, now calling on Vito. With such powerful New York figures heading north, clearly Vito had no interest in crossing the border into America to meet them in New York.

  “Mr. Massino sent me there,” Vitale said, “to familiarize ourselves with them. Joe Massino wanted me to go up there to speak with Vito, to get what was going on, to familiarize ourselves with what was going on in Canada now that George was dead. … He wanted to feel their pulse, to see what they were thinking about the murder.” Sciascia’s death seemed to be a sore spot for Vito.

  “He was very hurt by what happened to George,” said Vitale.

  Sciascia’s murder had alienated Massino from the Sixth Family, physically and emotionally, and, with Sciascia and LoPresti both deceased, the Sixth Family no longer had an official representative in New York, in the eyes of the Bonanno Family administration. Massino wanted Vitale and Urso to also take care of a housekeeping matter—Massino wanted to officially name Vito as the head of the Montreal faction of the Bonanno Family. Massino felt the offer of being made a captain was a flattering one, a privilege any of his New York gangsters would kill for—and, in fact, many of them had. But Massino, like most people, grossly underestimated Vito’s international presence and far-reaching underworld interests and overestimated Vito’s interest in the streets of New York. Just as Massino had enjoyed a layer of insulation under Rastelli’s leadership—maintaining the power without drawing the added attention of being a boss—so, too, did Vito benefit from keeping his name off the charts and weekly reports of the FBI’s Bonanno Squad.

  The meeting, over lunch, between Vito and Vitale was an awkward one; one that belies the FBI’s official designation of Vito as a mere soldier, and even the Bonanno administration’s ranking of Vito as an acting captain. The meeting did not run as Massino had hoped and certainly was not the reception Vitale was used to receiving as underboss, where he dictated orders and compliant gangsters did his bidding; doubly so for soldiers being offered a coveted promotion. For a meeting between a soldier and the family’s underboss, it is noteworthy that Vitale—the underboss—was the one who seemed nervous, unsure of himself and deferential. Vitale, it turned out, was no match for Vito.

  “I meet with Vito,” Vitale said. “First, he was very annoyed that no one told him about George. I don’t think he believed that it was a drug deal going astray.” Vitale, giving false assurances on the matter, moved on to the second item on the Bonanno Family’s agenda: naming a new Montreal captain to replace Sciascia.

  “Who do they respect up here? Who is ‘the man’ up here?” Vitale asked Vito, expecting Vito to step up and declare his obvious dominance. Vito remained aloof.

  “We are all brothers. We are all equals,” Vito replied. Vitale tried again, this time more directly.

  “Who do the men respect? Who could be a good captain?”

  “My father,” Vito replied.

  The answer frustrated Vitale. The Bonannos were not about to name the 77-year-old Nick, no matter what his background and experience, as the new captain. They
wanted Vito. But Vitale seemed nervous to force the issue.

  “That isn’t the way to go,” Vitale said later, although not to Vito’s face. “He knew where I was heading and he didn’t want to become a captain … We wanted him to take the position and he avoided the question and I felt it best to leave it alone.”

  Vitale and Urso returned to New York with the question of a new captain of the “Montreal crew” unresolved. Massino was unimpressed with their report. “I should have forced you to make him official captain,” Massino snapped.

  The indifference the New York emissaries encountered from Vito in Montreal seemed to mark the severing of ties between Montreal and New York, a connection that up until then had remained solid since Carmine Galante claimed Montreal as Bonanno turf more than 50 years earlier. The ignorance of Vitale, Urso and Massino to the reality of their Montreal brethren was sweeping. When one considers that a crew of Bonanno soldiers usually numbered fewer than 10 soldiers—“A captain is supposed to have 10; we don’t have enough men,” Vitale said, so a captain could have as few as three soldiers—it must have seemed like a fool’s offer to Vito, who commanded twice as many “made” Bonanno soldiers in Canada and perhaps hundreds of made men in the Sicilian tradition carrying the Sixth Family’s influence throughout the world.