King of the Godfathers Read online

  “Would you like to take a ride?” Ruggiero asked his lawyer.

  Pollok, a cautious man, had some trepidation about the cloak-and-dagger stuff, and his first reaction to the request was something like, “What are you crazy?” But his client insisted.

  A few days later, Pollok recalled, he was driven by a man whose name he doesn’t recall over the George Washington Bridge into New Jersey, where he was blindfolded. Pollok was a New Jersey resident, and even though he was blindfolded he knew from the direction of the car’s continuing travel and the feel of the road that he was going west along Interstate 80. The only thing to the west along the road was the Delaware Water Gap and Pennsylvania. Soon, the car made a right turn and a half-hour later the car arrived where Pollok knew they had been going all along: rural Pennsylvania.

  The car drove into a vacation bungalow area. Though it was late spring, there weren’t a lot of people in the area. Inside one of the buildings was Massino, “a fat guy,” as Pollok recalled. Massino said he wanted to know from Pollok what he thought about the case and whether he could mount a defense. Pollok shared with Massino the earlier assessment he had made. But being an officer of the court Pollok knew he had to convince Massino to return to New York and not remain a fugitive. Pollok had done a good sales job on Massino because a short time later, a matter of a few days it seemed, the fugitive gangster communicated to Pollok that he wanted to come back and for the attorney to see about bail.

  Back in New York, Pollok and his partner, Jeffrey Hoffman, got to work on Massino’s surrender. Their first call, Pollok remembered, was to Assistant U.S. Attorney Louis Freeh.

  “I want to bring in Joe Massino, let’s talk bail,” Pollok told Freeh.

  The prosecutor, who would later go on to head the FBI, was tough and couldn’t be talked into agreeing to give Massino bail. Bring him back and then we can talk about bail was Freeh’s position.

  “Can I see the boss?” Pollok recalled saying, referring to Barbara Jones, who had tried the 1982 case against Ruggiero and the others with Freeh.

  As professional adversaries, Pollok and Jones had known each other for years and had come to appreciate each other’s abilities. Now head of the criminal section of the Manhattan U.S. Attorney’s Office, Jones had a great deal of power. Though it took some negotiation, Pollok said that he worked out what he thought was a “reasonable” bail package for Massino of $350,000 bond cosigned by his wife, Josephine, and secured by their marital home and two apartments Massino owned. The missing gangster was coming home.

  News of Massino’s imminent return leaked out to his cronies, but oddly enough not to the FBI. In fact, special Agent Patrick Marshall and his colleagues continued to prowl New York City in search of the elusive Joseph Massino. It was a job that was getting old fast since the agents were hitting nothing but dry holes. Finally, in late June Marshall visited Gabriel Infanti, who was still smarting over the botched disposal of Bonventre’s body, and had the usual chat about needing to find Massino.

  “Don’t worry, I hear he is coming back,” Infanti told Marshall.

  Finally, on the morning of July 7, 1984, Salvatore Vitale drove Massino to Pollok’s office on Madison Avenue. From there, Massino, Jeffrey Hoffman, and Jon Pollok took a cab to Manhattan’s U.S. District Courthouse on Foley Square and walked up the long granite staircase to surrender. The time was 9:00 A.M., and in the company of the lawyers, Massino looked like anybody with business to do inside. Unlike Joseph Bonanno’s surrender some twenty years earlier after he had been on the lam, Massino’s return would not be taking anyone in the U.S. Attorney’s Office by surprise. At around 9:40 that morning, Assistant U.S. Attorney Barbara Jones got a call from the courthouse to notify her that her quarry had arrived.

  “Miss Jones, what is the history here?” asked Magistrate Sharon E. Grubin after Massino’s case was called in the courtroom.

  If she took the question literally, Jones could have spent hours relating the history of the Bonanno crime family and the role Massino was believed to have played. But she kept it short and sweet, telling Grubin that Massino had been indicted in March 1982.

  “He was never arrested and subsequent fugitive investigation failed to locate him,” Jones said. “Within the last two weeks Mister Hoffman and Mister Pollok, lawyers for Mister Messina, contacted the government and advised us that he did wish to appear before the court and surrender to stand charges.”

  By waiting, Massino had put himself in a better position for trial and he knew that. Had he stood trial with the other defendants in 1982, he risked being pulled into a vortex created by the presence of the others. Sometimes just sitting around the same table with your codefendants may create a poor inference about you in the minds of jurors. Massino was accused of involvement in the conspiracy to murder the three captains. Tape recordings introduced at trial contained the voices of Benjamin Ruggiero and Dominick Napolitano talking in conspiratorial tones and in substance to an undercover FBI agent about the killings. Massino’s name was mentioned in the recordings, but he himself was not overheard saying anything incriminating. Since no mobster had testified about the killings, the case was a circumstantial one at best and more so for Massino, who kept his distance from Joseph Pistone’s body recorder.

  There was also the potential flaw in the indictment that Pollok had picked up on. Racketeering law had been steadily evolving since the famous 1970 RICO statute, formally known as the Racketeer-Influenced and Corruption Organizations Act. Prosecutors had been using it with some success against the mob, but it still presented problems on occasion and it wasn’t unheard of for indictments to be thrown out or convictions reversed on appeal.

  But such problems wouldn’t come to light for many months. As Jones explained, part of the negotiations with the lawyers involved a bail recommendation that prosecutors had become comfortable with. The government agreed that Massino would be released on a $350,000 bond secured by the three properties. Appraisals had shown the amount of equity was enough to secure the bail package.

  But a puzzled Grubin, considering Massino’s very recent history of being in the wind, said to Hoffman, “It is somewhat unusual to release a defendant on [a personal recognizance bond] who has been a fugitive for two years.”

  Hoffman explained that the Massino family was putting its home on the line, a place where the defendant, his wife, and children had lived for over ten years. No matter what the charges, there were also some fine points about Massino’s record to consider.

  One point was that the forty-two-year-old Massino had no prior convictions of any kind. Another factor was that while Massino was charged with a racketeering conspiracy involving three murders, he was not charged with actually committing the homicides, said the attorney. The only actual substantive crimes charged against Massino in the indictment centered on two hijacking allegations. In one count, Massino was accused of stealing a load of tuna fish, the other involved “dry goods,” said Hoffman, referring to the 1975 Hemingway truck hijacking. That had been the case that Massino was able to beat in court after his statements to the FBI were thrown out by a federal judge.

  The recitation of the case history by Jones and Hoffman seemed to convince Grubin that Massino could have bail. But she had a duty as a federal magistrate to lay it on the line and tell Massino and his wife what would happen if he ever skipped town again.

  “Is his wife in the courtroom,” asked Grubin. “Have her step forward, please.”

  Josephine Massino approached Grubin and answered “I understand” when the magistrate told her that if her spouse didn’t show up in court each and every time he was supposed to that she would owe the government $350,000 and in the process possibly lose her house.

  “Do you believe that he will show up in court when he is supposed to?” asked Grubin.

  “Yes, I do,” Josephine Massino answered.

  “And will you help him to do that?”

  “Yes, I will.”

  As the paperwork was prepared to secure the bond,
Grubin next turned to Massino and told him that if he failed to show up when needed in court he could be prosecuted for bail jumping. That was a separate offense that carried a five-year prison term.

  “Do you understand that?” Grubin asked.

  “Yes, your honor,” answered Massino.

  After entering a not guilty plea, Massino, Josephine, and the lawyers waited around lower Manhattan for a session later in the day with Judge Robert W. Sweet. It was Sweet who had handled the trial of Massino’s codefendants in 1982 and had sentenced them to prison terms ranging from fifteen years in the case of Ruggiero and Nicholas Santora to four years to a minor low-level defendant who pled guilty to a robbery conspiracy. A soft-spoken jurist, Sweet was quite familiar with the facts in the case after sitting through the earlier trial. Now, he faced a reprise of the case that would develop some very unexpected turns.

  CHAPTER 15

  Horatio Alger of the Mob

  After he was released on bail, Joseph Massino made a line straight to his old club on Fifty-eighth Road in Maspeth. His brother-in-law, Salvatore Vitale, and business associate, Carmine Peluso, had kept the place, J&S Cake Social Club, in good order so that when Massino returned he was able to hold court just like he used to. There were no restrictions on who he could see while on bail, so a lot of Bonanno family cronies made the obligatory visit to the club where Massino held court.

  About a day or two after Massino showed up, FBI agent Patrick Marshall also stopped by. The visit was strictly business. There was a lot of grand jury action brewing and federal prosecutors used the FBI to serve a variety of legal papers to their mob quarry. Massino had been overheard on a number of wiretaps placed in the telephones of his friend Angelo Ruggiero of the Gambino crime family. Under the federal wiretap statute, a person whose voice was captured on the surveillance had to be served with a notice of interception. These were fairly routine and Massino, ever the gentleman, took the document from Marshall with no hassles.

  But a few hours later that same day, Marshall returned with yet another legal document. This time it was a subpoena for Louis “Ha Ha” Attanasio. Curiously, Marshall noticed that the door to the club was locked. Usually, social clubs have open doors but now that J&S Cake Social Club appeared closed, Marshall knocked on the door several times. The agent knew Massino, Attanasio, and several others were inside because he had watched the building from a location down the street. Marshall knocked again. Finally, a curious Attanasio unlocked the door and was served with the subpoena.

  Perhaps he was spooked by the fact that so many of his mob cronies were together with him. Maybe he believed the federal government had changed its mind and wanted to revoke his bail and send him to jail. Whatever the reason, while Marshall was speaking to Attanasio, Massino and his friends had bolted out the backdoor of the club and into the adjourning yard that housed another Massino business. Massino, ever the cautious one, apparently didn’t want to lose his freedom. So, Massino did what he showed a penchant for whenever trouble brewed: he ran.

  Of course, the Bonanno family was having nothing but trouble at this point. Philip Rastelli had been out of prison since earlier in the year, and he desparately wanted to assert himself with the ruling Commission. Rastelli felt he was the boss of his family, and he wanted a role on the Commission, a position no one in his family had since the debacle with Joseph Bonanno back in the 1960s. The problem was that the family’s troubles, notably the penetration by FBI undercover agent Joseph Pistone, as well as the rampant drug dealing that had been publicly revealed in the Pizza Connection case, made other mob bosses look on the Bonanno group as a bunch of crazy relatives.

  Though he wanted to be on the Commission, Rastelli had a lot of opposition. This was made clear in a number of bugged conversations of Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno, the street boss of the Genovese crime family, when he held court in early 1984 at his Palma Boys Social Club in East Harlem.

  At one point, Salerno recounted a conversation he had with Gambino boss Paul Castellano about Rastelli.

  “I said to Paul, ‘[inaudible] that’s the boss if the Family wants him. But, as far as the Commission, he cannot be on it,’” said Salerno.

  “I told the Commission,” Salerno continued, ‘Ah, ah, hey, listen this guy [inaudible] wants to be the Boss. He can be the Boss as far as I’m concerned,’ I said, ‘but he cannot be on the Commission.’”

  Rastelli was lobbying members of the Commission, including Castellano, in an effort to get the Bonanno family’s seat back on the ruling body as late as May 1984. But Salerno would have none of it and said he would veto it if pushed to a vote. The Bonanno’s family narcotics trafficking also bothered Salerno.

  “There are too many junk guys,” said Salerno in a May 22, 1984, conversation in the club. “They got a crew of eighty guys like that.”

  So Rastelli, now free from prison after serving time for extortion in the lunch wagon case, was considered the Bonanno boss. Of course, there would be no chair for him on the Commission. But it was Massino who was the preeminent captain and considered by many in the crime family to be running the show as the intelligence information about the murder of Cesare Bonventre had made clear. Vitale and others later told the FBI that it was Massino who had put the plan for that killing into motion.

  Though he was free on bail, Massino remained in the sights of law enforcement precisely because he had become a major player in the Bonanno family. The family, as the 1982 Bonanno trial and the Pizza Connection indictments showed, had become a key target of law enforcement. Events would later show that the FBI and local prosecutors were spending a lot of energy and time on the other crime families. But it was the Bonnano family that was bearing most of the heat in these early stages. Since Massino was a power in the family, it was inevitable that he would attract his own problems, no matter how careful he tried to be. With his family’s home on the line with the bail package arranged by his lawyers, Massino couldn’t just cut and run.

  Almost a year after he returned from being on the lam, Massino was hit with another federal indictment. It was a serious case of labor racketeering, an activity the mob had perfected over decades. A Brooklyn federal grand jury charged that Massino, Rastelli, his brother, Carmine Rastelli, and fourteen other defendants used Teamsters Local 814, which covered the moving and warehouse industries, to shakedown moving and storage companies in the city. It was a lengthy indictment that covered sixty-four counts and alleged that members of the Bonanno crime family, Local 814 officers, and moving company officials took part in a racketeering scheme that started in 1964 and stretched into 1985.

  The scheme alleged in the indictment showed a lot of chutzpah for the mob. Among the racketeering activities charged was that the moving companies rigged bids on contracts to move a number of government offices. Those rigged bids involved inflated charges and the irony was that one case involved the moving in 1979 of the FBI office in Manhattan, which had been in the area of Sixty-ninth Street, to the big federal building known as Federal Plaza. The cost of the FBI move was inflated by $5,000, not a princely sum by any means but still a crime, prosecutors charged, particularly because it was shared with members of the Bonanno crime family.

  There were other big names said to have been victimized by the scheme. The New York Coliseum, the city’s main convention and exhibition venue at the time, had to pay some of the defendants $5,000, while the New York Islanders had to put up an unspecified amount as well for labor peace, the indictment charged.

  Massino was arrested on June 14, 1985 in the moving industry case by his old adversary Pat Marshall of the FBI. At first, the arrest went without incident since Massino was his old gentlemanly self when he was taken into custody at his Howard Beach home. Marshall was driving and Massino sat in the backseat flanked by another agent. The vehicle was stuck in some neighborhood traffic when Marshall spotted another car pull up behind. A man jumped out of the car and went up to the side of the FBI car where Massino was sitting. Marshall recognized him as John Carneg
lia, a Gambino crime family member who lived nearby.

  “Step away from the vehicle,” a worried Marshall called out to Carneglia. The FBI agent had no idea what Carneglia was going to do.

  However, Carneglia had no hostile intentions and instead asked Massino if he was okay and if he could do anything for him, like call a lawyer. Massino seemed to reassure Carngelia, and his neighbor stepped away from the car, allowing Marshall to drive away.

  Massino languished in the local federal lockup in Brooklyn for about a week before Jeffrey Hoffman, one of the attorneys who had successfully argued for bail a year earlier when Massino returned to the city, was able to post another bond.

  Besides the racketeering count, the indictment accused Massino of taking part in fourteen payoffs from moving companies, one sportswear company, and a furniture installer. Those were all done, the indictment charged, in violation of federal labor law. Prosecutors said that Philip Rastelli, even though he was in prison during some of time period covered by the indictment, sent orders through his brothers, particularly Carmine, to union and company officials involved in the payoff scheme.

  The trial in the moving case got underway in April 1986 with an unusual request by the defense. The twelve defendants who went on trial—the five other defendants would eventually enter guilty pleas—convinced the judge, Charles B. Sifton, that they should have separate tables in the well of the court. That was needed, defense attorneys said, to make the point to the jury that the defendants were entitled to separate consideration by the jury. So, Massino, Rastelli, and the others who elected to go to trial forked over a combined total of $1,800 to rent tables and chairs. The trial was expected to last about two months.