King of the Godfathers Page 13

  “When this car pulled up a man inside the car pointed a gun out the window and they [Gene Gotti and Ruggiero] recognized the driver of the car to be Anthony Bruno Indelicato,” said Tucker. “Gotti and Ruggiero related that they were able to exit the expressway and get away.”

  The reason for the roadside encounter, the source told Tucker, was that the killing of Alphonse Indelicato had been approved by Aniello Dellacroce, the underboss of the Gambino crime family and mentor for John Gotti. This made Gambino family members a target for Bruno Indelicato’s revenge. As a result, Massino and John Gotti became united in a common effort to find and kill Bruno Indelicato, not only to protect themselves but also Dellacroce, said Tucker, referring to his informant.

  Other sources cited by Tucker said that Massino, while he disliked using the telephone to conduct business, would nevertheless sometimes talk on the social club telephone to contact loan-sharking victims about their debts. Vitale would also use the telephone there to call Massino about gambling and loan-sharking, activities the same sources said Massino ran out of J&S Cake Social Club.

  As icing on the cake, Tucker said that the FBI pen registers picked up Massino’s home telephone making calls to the home of one of Rastelli’s brothers, Bonanno street boss Salvatore Ferrugia, as well as John Gotti. In Tucker’s view, these calls showed that Massino was a high-ranking Bonanno captain who was loyal to Rastelli. Massino remained, said Tucker, a subject worthy of electronic surveillance.

  Judge Eugene Nickerson signed the surveillance authorization on August 27, 1981. Wiretaps were placed on the telephones and a bug was set up inside J&S Cake Social Club. One night a team of about a half-dozen FBI agents led by Patrick Colgan penetrated Massino’s social club on Fifty-eighth Road in Maspeth. One agent picked the locks, another decommissioned the alarm, and another planted the bug as Colgan made sure nothing went wrong. The black-bag job took about forty-five minutes to complete. But no sooner was the bug up and running than it stopped functioning.

  Bugging devices can be so useful when they work right. But one vulnerability they have is their essential nature of being radio transmitters. A sensitive radio receiver anywhere near a bugging device can pick up the transmission. It just so happened that just a day or two after Colgan and his crew had planted the listening device in Massino’s social club that Salvatore Vitale began fiddling with a police scanner. The surveillance-conscious Massino likely had the scanner at J&S Cake to monitor police frequencies. But a sound that Vitale had picked up froze everyone at the club. It sounded like a strange frequency and Massino, who was sitting at a table, became suspicious.

  Duane Leisenheimer was in the bathroom and Massino called out to him to clap his hands. Leisenheimer complied and the scanner picked up what sounded like a clap.

  Massino now knew his club was bugged and he searched the ceiling until he found the listening device over the area above the card table. Vitale took it out and the surveillance device stopped at that moment.

  After being told of the dead bugging apparatus, Colgan’s FBI supervisor told him to go back in and retrieve the device.

  “How do you expect us to get it out?” Colgan lamented, knowing the difficulty that surrounded the initial planting of the device. The club had a special key-coded alarm system that had allowed the agents only thirty seconds or so to override it.

  “I don’t care, get it,” the supervisor said.

  So shortly after lunch one afternoon in the late summer of 1981, Colgan and a partner walked down Fifty-eighth Road and followed Salvatore Vitale through the door of the club. Vitale had been oblivious to their footsteps. One of the other men in the club nervously asked Vitale who was following him. Vitale turned and stared at Colgan and his parnter.

  “We are FBI,” Colgan told Vitale.

  “Fuck you,” Vitale answered and took a swing at the agent. (Years later Vitale told a different version, saying he asked what the agent wanted.)

  Suddenly, a voice from the backroom called out, “Cool it Sal, it’s only Pat.”

  Massino had recognized his old professional adversary from the hijacking squad and defused the situation.

  “I have been expecting you,” Massino told Colgan as he gave him the bugging device.

  “Joe, it crossed my mind,” Colgan said.

  Massino asked the agents to have a can a beer and broke out some Budweiser. Colgan, his partner, Massino, and Vitale then sat at the bar and made small talk. The four men sounded like old friends from the neighborhood, asking after each other’s family. Colgan couldn’t help notice that Massino had gained more girth and had a belly that overhung his belt more than ever. He diplomatically told Massino he looked bigger. Massino complimented Colgan about his recent promotion to supervisor in the FBI. Colgan said he had heard Massino had received a promotion as well.

  After finishing the drinks, Colgan slapped a few dollars down on the bar—despite Massino’s polite protest—and left with the bugging device. The timing of the discovery of the bug was fortuitous because if there was talk within Massino’s club about the murders or anything else of interest to federal agents, the listening device didn’t pick it up. Back at FBI headquarters in Manhattan the bug was tested. It worked perfectly.

  By the fall of 1981, Massino and Napolitano were being heavily probed for their involvement in the murder of the three captains, as well as for other acts of racketeering through the Bonanno crime family. On November 23, 1981, the first indictment stemming from special Agent Joseph Pistone’s penetration of the Bonanno family was announced in U.S. District Court in Manhattan. Six men, Dominick Napolitano, Benjamin Ruggiero, Nicholas Santora, John Cerasani, James Episcopia, and Antonio Tomasulo were accused of participating in the conspiracy as well as in other acts of racketeering involving the Bonanno crime family.

  The announcement of the charges on November 24, 1981, was the first indication that the FBI had two undercover agents who had penetrated the crime family. Joseph Pistone and Edgar T. Robb weren’t named in the press conference but just the fact that such an infiltration of the Mafia had taken place was big news. Aside from the conspiracy to kill the three captains, the defendants were charged with various narcotics offenses and gambling. It was also disclosed that the group had tried in June 1980 to burglarize the Manhattan apartment of Princess Ashraf Pahlevi, the twin sister of the deposed Shah of Iran. That break-in was bungled when a security guard fired a shot at the would-be intruders.

  In a preemptive move designed as much to convince him to become a witness as to save him, federal agents in August 1981, three months before his formal indictment, had arrested Ruggiero. The FBI had known from its informant within the Bonanno family, undoubtedly Raymond Wean, that Ruggiero was targeted for assassination. Since the FBI didn’t think Ruggiero would stay in the area if told of the plot against him, he was first arrested for the murder of Alphonse Indelicato, the only one of the three murdered captains whose body had been found. The FBI then told Ruggiero about the threat to his life.

  Even his arrest didn’t stop Ruggiero’s fellow mobsters from trying to plot his demise. During one of Ruggiero’s unsuccessful court hearings aimed at his getting bail, Assistant U.S. Attorney Barbara Jones, told the court that an informant told her that Ruggiero would be killed as soon as he got out of jail.

  Massino wasn’t charged in the Napolitano case even though he was suspected of having taken part in the conspiracy that led to the murders. But by the time the indictment against Napolitano and the others was being unsealed, investigators were conducting an additional investigation of Massino for loan-sharking and narcotics distribution. Separate investigations were also beginning on the other Mafia families as well, probes that would take years to complete. One of those investigations focused on the dealings of the Gambino family and its new, emerging members. Among them was the brash and generally unknown captain John Gotti. A neighbor and friend of Massino’s for the better part of a decade, Gotti, who was schooled in the ways of mob life by underboss Aniello Dellacroce, h
ad a crew that counted among its members his brother Eugene Gotti and Angelo Ruggiero.

  By November 1981, federal prosecutors had zeroed in on the two Gotti brothers and Ruggiero for their own particular racketeering offenses that included loan-sharking, gambling, narcotics, and murder. Investigators knew that Ruggiero was such an uncontrollable talker that he had earned the nickname on the street of “Quack-Quack,” a reference to the quacking of a duck. Since he talked so much, FBI agents got a court order to wiretap Ruggiero’s telephone at his home on Eighty-eighth Street in Howard Beach. That tap lasted about a month until Ruggiero moved to a new home in Cedarhurst, Long Island, when agents got a court order to wiretap two phones there.

  With subpoenas flying around Howard Beach and the rest of the city on the probe of Massino and the Bonanno family, it was no secret that a major federal investigation was underway. Angelo Ruggiero, a friend and one-time neighbor of Massino, had already been subpoenaed to testify, but under the advice of his lawyer, Michael Coiro, he asserted his privilege against self-incrimination and didn’t testify. Once away from the grand jury, however, Ruggiero and Massino talked openly on the telephone about the investigation and the ominous things it portended. The FBI agents were right about Ruggiero, he just didn’t know how to control his chatter.

  For instance, on November 25, 1981, two days after the announcement of the Napolitano indictment, Ruggiero told Massino about having received the subpoena from “Mrs. Jones,” a reference to Barbara Jones, the assistant U.S. attorney in Manhattan who was investigating Napolitano, Massino, and the Bonanno family.

  “How the hell did [the agents] throw you into this?” Massino asked Ruggiero. Though both gangsters, Ruggiero had little or no connection to the Bonanno activities, the most notorious being the murders of Trinchera, Giaccone, Indelicato, and—though still unknown to law enforcement—the slaughter of Napolitano.

  Massino was clearly getting concerned about the investigation and was overheard wondering if Jones had a subpoena for him as well. It was at this point that Massino asked Ruggiero if it was even wise for him to go home if Jones was getting ready to haul him before the grand jury.

  It was during this conversation in November 1981 that Massino hinted that he was entertaining the idea of leaving town. Five of his crime family associates had already been arrested (Napolitano, though charged, was moldering in a mob graveyard). He knew that the investigation was focusing on his connection to the murder of the three captains, crimes that could carry a life sentence if convicted. A sense of dread and panic seemed to be setting in.

  Massino told Ruggiero that he wished he could go to sleep and wake up after the approaching Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays. Maybe these troubles would be all over, the panicky mobster said.

  “It ain’t going to be any better,” Ruggiero responded.

  Subpoenas were everywhere. And there was rumors of more indictments. Furthermore, an FBI agent had penetrated the Bonanno family.

  These were the things in early 1982 that added to Massino’s sense of discomfort and dread of what could be in store for him. Ruggiero’s remarks didn’t help him either.

  Around the J&S Cake Social Club in Queens, the conversations that took place reflected the troubles. As Vitale later told the FBI, he remembered Massino and mobster Al Embarrato, known by the name “Al Walker” on the street, talking about the Pistone penetration of the crime family. The search for scapegoats didn’t stop with the killing of Napolitano. Even though it was Napolitano who had been taken in by Pistone and had pushed the undercover FBI agent for crime family membership, it had been Anthony Mirra who had first unwittingly befriended Pistone.

  A bulky man with a reputation for being a killer who was quick with a knife instead of a gun, Mirra was a hothead with anger-management problems who ran some loan-sharking and gambling operations. As a soldier in the Bonanno family, Mirra reported for a while to a captain named Michael Zaffarano, a pornographer who died of a heart attack during an FBI raid in 1980. Mirra used Pistone as a driver, but after Mirra was arrested and sent to prison for a narcotics charge, Pistone gravitated to Benjamin Ruggiero.

  In a snippet of conversation Vitale told FBI agents he overheard, Massino told Embarrato that Mirra “had to go.” Mirra had been released from prison in 1981 for the drug case and was around town again. Some Bonanno members now thought he was an informant, which wasn’t a good thing to be called with the FBI playing hardball and building criminal cases all over town.

  After Pistone’s true identity had become known, Mirra had kept a low profile and had been very hard to reach. “He wasn’t meeting with anybody,” one mobster said. Embarrato got the job of farming out Mirra’s murder and in a case of delegating responsibility passed the order for the hit to Richard Cantarella, who in turn involved Joseph D’Amico, someone Mirra trusted.

  On February 12, 1982, as Mirra fumbled for a key to open the security lock of a garage where he kept his gray Volvo, he was shot in the head at near point-blank range by D’Amico. Crime scene photos captured Mirra slumped in the driver’s seat, his chin against his chest as if he were taking a nap. A rivulet of blood had trickled out of his right ear and stained his winter coat.

  “I was the only one who could get close to him,” D’Amico later told investigators.

  Any number of suspected informants could have been killed. But no matter how many died, the fact of the matter was that Joseph Massino never shook the feeling of foreboding he had in March 1982. He wanted to get out of town, and fast.

  Turning to the fair-haired kid, Duane Leisenheimer, Massino traveled with his driver to the Hamptons. It was in the off-season since the Hamptons didn’t get swinging until May at the earliest and the hideaway might provide time to think. Still, Massino and Leisenheimer saw too many people they thought they knew in the beach towns along Long Island’s south shore and decided to pull up stakes again and head back to the city.

  Vitale remembered getting a call from his brother-in-law and told to come to Junior Palermo’s home on Ocean Parkway in Brooklyn. Palermo was a Colombo crime family soldier who Massino knew. No new charges had been filed against anyone but there were simply too many bad vibes, Massino said. It was time to split.

  So Joseph Massino, you are supposed to be a wealthy gangster with the vast resources of the Mafia at your disposal. You know the cops are itching to arrest you. The world is your oyster. Where are you going to go now? Well, it isn’t Disneyland, much less Brazil.

  “I need a place to go for about thirty days,” Massino told Leisenheimer. “What about your parents’ house?”

  Leisenheimer’s family had moved to Pennsylvania’s Pocono Mountains area and his mother had a house in the town of Milford. There were plenty of hotels and motels in the area. A careful person could get lost there and stay out of sight. If necessary, Leisenheimer’s family could simply be told that his friend Joe was ducking a subpoena.

  Leisenheimer later recalled that his father had no problems with his son staying at the family home. But the elder Leisenheimer, his son said, had only a couple of provisos: “Keep the place clean but when I want to go there, you guys got to leave.”

  So in the face of approaching trouble, Joseph Massino didn’t stand around to face the music. But for a guy who spent most of his life in working-class Maspeth, the possibilities Massino saw for life on the lam were not very exotic. He packed up his travel bag and headed west, not to some obscure town or exotic location, but instead to a place made famous for its honeymoon bungalows and heart-shaped bath tubs.

  Massino’s nose for trouble served him well. No sooner had he and Leisenheimer headed for the gentle rolling hills of the Poconos than on March 25, 1982, a federal grand jury in Manhattan indicted Massino and others. It was as bad as he expected. The new charges, actually an expansion of the earlier November 1981 indictment against the other Bonanno members, accused Massino of involvement in the murder of the three captains. There was also a charge against Massino for hijacking.

  “Mr. Mess
ina,” said one newspaper, “who was labeled in the indictment as a ‘capodecina,’ or captain, in the crime family, is a fugitive.”

  With Massino a step ahead of the sheriff, so to speak, and nowhere to be found by the FBI, a bench warrant was issued by a federal judge for his arrest. By then, Massino was quietly spending time at the Milford House, an inn in Pennsylvania. He used the alias “Joe Russo” and on weekends he and Leisenheimer, who used the name “Duane Kelly,” went to the younger man’s family home in the area.

  But living so close to New York and trying to hide out meant you had to be careful. Massino thought he was hiding but he learned that he could run into people he knew when he least expected it. He had hardly been on the lam a month when Massino decided to take a break in the cocktail lounge of a Holiday Inn in Port Jervis. Massino was seated at a table when in walked an old acquaintance named Salvatore Polisi. A mob associate and criminal out of New York, Polisi recognized Massino from some meetings they had in Queens and decided to shake Massino’s hand.

  “How are you doing?” Polisi asked Massino.

  “He was kind of nervous or concerned about me just meeting him,” Polisi later remembered about Massino’s reaction.

  Massino didn’t want for much. Vitale, it was later learned by police, would bring him packets of cash and there were occasional visits back to New York City when Massino stayed at the Ocean Parkway, Brooklyn, home of Junior Palermo, a member of the Colombo crime family. When they had to, Bonanno family members made the trip to the Poconos to caucus with Massino. Vitale made over a dozen trips. John Gotti even made the trip a couple of times, meeting Leisenheimer at the Milford Diner and then being driven to the Leisenheimer family home. On occasion, Leisenheimer drove back to New York and picked up other visitors. This was 1982, before cell phones came into wide use, but Massino was able to stay in telephone contact with Vitale through a system that relied on the use of different telephone numbers that had been reduced to a code.