King of the Godfathers Read online

  By 1974, Rastelli’s coercive racket with the lunch trucks caught the attention of federal investigators in Brooklyn. Although the Workman’s Mobile Lunch Association aspired to get its forty-eight charter members benefits like group insurance and discounts on truck repairs, nothing like that happened. Instead, with Rastelli operating in the background, the association was engaged in a classic shakedown. Suppliers of the lunch wagons were pressured for kickbacks amounting to a percentage of the dollar value of the items sold to the mobile canteens. Truck owners who were in the unfortunate circumstance of not being part of Rastelli’s association were persuaded by “implicit threats of violence,” as one federal court stated, to stop coming around to certain lucrative locations.

  Rastelli was indicted in March 1975 on charges that he directed a protection racket in the lunch wagon industry. The bad luck rubbed off on Massino. All the hijacking around Maspeth had also caught the attention of federal investigators who gathered evidence that the lunch wagon vendor was trafficking in goods stolen from interstate commerce. The bad luck that hit Rastelli and Massino in 1975 came at time when the Bonanno crime family was entering another period of flux and instability. While it was true that Rastelli was considered by the Commission to be a major power in the crime family, that didn’t mean he had no rivals.

  Carmine Galante, like Rastelli, might as well have been born on probation for the way his life had been going. A native-born American who grew up in East Harlem, Galante got into a life of crime at an early age. He was eleven when he got his first rap for robbery and at the age of twenty he had become enmeshed with the Castellammarese crowd of Bonanno in the Williamsburg area of Brooklyn. A fight with a policeman during a truck hijacking led to Galante earning a twelve-year sentence to state prison. He served about nine years and was released in 1939.

  Galante, who became known by the moniker “Lilo” for the cigars he smoked, stayed with the Bonanno clan and rose fairly high up in the hierarchy. Police considered him a key suspect in the 1943 assassination of Italian antifascist writer Carlos Tresca. By the end of World War II Galante was an underboss. Though at the time he was not a household name among famous gangsters, Galante’s mob stature and importance in the crime family was shown by his attendance at a 1957 meeting of top mafiosi in Palermo, Sicily. The meeting was also attended by Joseph Bonanno, another family underboss named Frank Garafola, an exiled Lucky Luciano, as well as Sicilian leaders Gaetano Badalementi and Tomasso Bucetta. The latter two would come to some prominence later in heroin dealing.

  The exact nature of the meeting has never been determined by officials, although Bonanno said in his autobiography that it had to do with trying to get the Sicilians to think corporate and to set up an American-style commission to govern their activities. That never happened. But it appears that during this Sicily conclave Galante developed deeper ties to his amici in the ancestral land. It wasn’t long before a number of Sicilian mobsters, young men known as “Zips,” a term believed to be referring to the speed at which they talked in their Sicilian dialect, immigrated to the United States and gravitated to the area around Knickerbocker Avenue in Brooklyn. They would prove to be a source of power and support for Galante later—as well as a cause in his eventual downfall.

  But before Galante had time to begin exploiting his relationship with the Sicilians, he was caught up in a major heroin bust in 1959. It was a major investigation that nabbed not only Galante but also John Ormento of the Lucchese family and Vito Genovese. Their undoing was due to the bitterness of Nelson Cantellops, a Puerto Rican drug dealer in Manhattan who had been arrested for selling drugs and became an informant to get out from under a possible five-year prison term. Cantellops’s information proved accurate and showed how brazen top echelon mobsters had become in handling narcotics and how ignored the supposed Mafia edict against drug dealing had become.

  Galante, like Ormento and Genovese, was convicted. Just at the point when he could have been developing a substantial power base and easily surpassed Rastelli, Galante was sent away to spend a twenty-year sentence in a federal penitentiary. When he was paroled in 1974, Galante immediately began trying to consolidate his power. In one signature event that is now firmly part of New York Mafia lore, Galante supposedly had the door to Frank Costello’s tomb blown open with a bomb as a way of signaling his own return from prison.

  But Galante didn’t have to try anything more drastic with Rastelli or with Massino for that matter. After a two-week trial in the Brooklyn federal court, Rastelli was convicted in April 1976 of extortion and restraint of trade. Already serving time for the Suffolk gambling case, Rastelli learned that as soon as he was to be released from state prison he would be the guest of the federal government for another five to ten years in custody for being the Maspeth lunch wagon robber baron. His release date was to be in 1983. But in Mafia power struggles things are never clear-cut and even prison will not stop the politics of mob bosses. So Galante and Rastelli became locked in their own deadly game for the leadership of the family. It was a battle that would take nearly three years to play out and in which Massino would play a significant role.

  CHAPTER 5

  A Piece of Work

  The problem with Mafia bosses is that they get an inflated sense of self-importance. Paul Castellano, the greedy boss of the Gambino crime family, was a case in point. He thought of himself as if he were the president of the United States, which is what he once told his Colombian house maid when he wasn’t trying to impress her with his virility, something that came late in his life with the help of a penile implant.

  Castellano also couldn’t take a joke and that could prove deadly. One of his daughter’s boyfriends found out about that the hard way. Joseph Massino, it seems, had a hand in that.

  Castellano’s legitimate businesses were in the meat and poultry industry. As a young man, Castellano had a full head of dark wavy hair and in his old police mug shots he actually looked handsome, despite his thick, pronounced nose. As Castellano aged, he lost a lot of his hair and what was left around the sides turned gray. His nose took on more of a prominence, and in 1975 he looked a bit like another poultry expert, Frank Perdue. With an aggressive television advertising campaign and a distinct, high-pitched whiney voice, Perdue became one of Madison Avenue’s darlings. His Perdue chicken ads drew instant recognition. Vito Borelli, a boyfriend of Castellano’s daughter, Connie, took a look at Perdue’s face in an ad and thought he noticed a similarity.

  “He looks like Frank Perdue,” Borelli said of Castellano, who at the time was waiting for a sickly Carlo Gambino to die so he could take over the crime family.

  That comment was not a good thing to say, especially when the remark got back to Castellano. A person of normal sensitivities would have laughed off the comment or even viewed it as a compliment. But Castellano took offense and according to police turned not only to his boys in the Gambino family but also to Joseph Massino to teach Borelli a lesson.

  Over the years, Massino had become close to a number of up and coming stars in the Gambino family. That he also got to know Castellano is a clear indication that Massino was himself a rising power in his own right. It was those Gambino ties that appear to have led Massino at the age of thirty-two to carry out his first “piece of work”: a murder. The victim was the loose-lipped Vito Borelli.

  Unlike some of the fabled mob assassinations where a victim is spectacularly gunned down on the street or in public, many Mafia homicides are handled like secret production lines with clear divisions of labor. Somebody will arrange transportation. Another will procure a murder weapon. Yet a third person might arrange to clean up the crime scene while more people may help dispose of the body. Of course, there are always those who will entice or inveigle the victim to show up at the place where he will lose his life.

  In mid-1975, investigators learned, Massino turned to his trusted brother-in-law Salvatore Vitale and the fair-haired Duane Leisenheimer for help. Vitale was told by Massino to pick up a stolen car from Leise
nheimer and bring it to—of all places—a cookie storage facility in Manhattan. The keys of the van, which Vitale had parked outside the storage location, were left under the seat.

  The night of the killing, an exasperated Massino called Vitale to complain that the van wouldn’t start. So Vitale drove his own car back into Manhattan and pulled up to the storage location. He saw that Massino was there in some very good company. Outside the building were John Gotti, then a young soldier in the Gambino family, his friend Angelo Ruggiero, another Gambino associate, and Frank DeCicco. Vitale also recognized Dominick “Sonny Black” Napolitano, a powerful Bonanno crime family captain. A killer who also liked to raise racing pigeons, Napolitano was one of Rastelli’s allies and as such could count on Massino for help.

  According to a law enforcement intelligence report, once outside the Manhattan location, Vitale was told to back up his vehicle and what appeared to be a body wrapped in a tan drop cloth was placed in the trunk. Then, Ruggiero and DeCicco got into Vitale’s car and told him to drive to a garage. When asked later about the incident by the FBI, Vitale couldn’t recall exactly where the garage was. He thought it might have been in Ozone Park. But what he did remember was that when the body was taken out of the trunk he saw it was Vito Borelli, with his head and body showing signs of repeated gunshot wounds. The corpse was clad only in its underwear.

  Vitale later recalled that he didn’t see what happened to the body. Whatever transpired with poor Vito Borelli’s remains was likely nothing sacred since Vitale would also remember seeing another Gambino associate, Roy Demeo, at the garage. Demeo’s forte was that of butcher and he seemed to relish the dismemberment of bodies. Demeo did it all over the city and sometimes got so frenzied in the disembowelments that ears of his victims would fly off, only to be retrieved later by dogs who happened upon the crime scene. It was his special line of work. Borelli’s body was never found.

  Vitale dropped off Ruggiero and DeCicco at Gotti’s infamous Bergin Hunt & Fish Club in Ozone Park. That was a misnomer since the girth of club patrons like Ruggiero and DeCicco showed they did very little outdoor sport or exercise of any kind beyond pulling a trigger or working the espresso machine. Their only hunting was that of the likes of human victims like Borelli. As he remembered it, Vitale was told a few days after the murder that the victim was indeed Borelli. His offense had been the Frank Perdue joke that Castellano saw as an insult.

  The Borelli murder and the body disposal indicated to Massino that his brother-in-law could be trusted to carry out an assignment for the mob with no questions asked. Vitale was basically a catering truck driver for Massino, but his childhood friend was connected to a world that was wild, dangerous, and exciting. He knew Massino was living a double life: as a married father with a stable business and as a Mafia associate on the rise. It was hard for Vitale to walk away from that, not only because Massino was married to his sister, Josephine, but also because his friend was the closest male companion he ever had growing up in a household filled with older women.

  The Borelli killing also showed that Massino had made his bones—he killed for the mob when asked. The timing couldn’t have been better because around the time Borelli was killed the ranks of the Mafia were opening up for new members. The bosses opened up their books around 1976 to 1977 and Massino was put up for membership in the Bonanno family and made it in easily. He wasn’t just big Joe Maspeth anymore, the guy you would see in the lunch wagon to play the numbers or score some hijacked goods. Now, as police learned, Massino was a full-blown wise guy, and if Rastelli or anybody else introduced him around, they would say he was “a friend of ours,” which was a coded expression to mean he was a true-blue gangster.

  From his Maspeth base, Massino developed a number of rackets. The more he did on the street, the more people Massino met. He developed ties not only to the Gambino family but also to the Colombo group through Carmine Franzese, a soldier known as “Tootie.” One of Massino’s sidelines was in the trafficking of untaxed cigarettes, always a hot commodity. Federal and state taxes could drive up the price of a carton of cigarettes by as much as 30 percent, and this was before the smoking industry was hit with the affects of the 1990s’ antismoking litigation.

  Massino’s partner in the untaxed cigarette business was an associate of the Colombo crime family known as Joseph “Doo Doo” Pastore. The product was smuggled in from South Carolina without any tax stamps and when he wasn’t working that racket Pastore would hang around Massino’s deli on Fifty-eighth Avenue, which opened in the 1970s, sampling the coffee and cakes. Massino owned the small building—real estate was not overpriced in that area of Queens—and sometimes he would use the upstairs apartment for business with Pastore, who was generally flush with cash. The street was a crease in the city, a small byway barely 100 yards long that was easily overlooked by motorists passing by on the larger avenues. Any strange cars on the block would be easily noticed, although that didn’t stop the FBI from eventually setting up a surveillance post a mere twenty or thirty yards away from the shop’s front door.

  The FBI was in the area a lot because Maspeth was a haven for hijackers and the bureau’s truck squad got to know the main traffickers in stolen property. Pastore was known to the agents as an “action guy,” a man who would take a truck any way he could and bring it back to the alleyways of this industrial part of Queens, where the reputed middlemen like Massino could move the goods to buyers or find a warehouse. By the early 1970s, Pastore was known to the FBI hijack experts to a greater extent than Massino. In June 1972, Pastore was arrested with two other men on charges he possessed a load of stolen trucking cargo. But the case against Pastore was slim and in February 1973 the government asked that the indictment against him be dismissed.

  Massino, apparently reluctant to ask directly for a financial favor from his cigarette partner, had Vitale borrow several thousand dollars from him instead. The money Vitale borrowed in the spring of 1976 from Pastore, about $9,000, was never paid back. It was never paid because Pastore was simply no longer around to collect. While the precise reason is unclear, investigators learned that Massino had become disenchanted with his old cigarette smuggling and hijacking friend and decided to end their partnership in a less than amicable parting. It is possible, seeing that the FBI had focused on Pastore, that Massino feared that his business relationship might make him vulnerable to becoming an informant. Whatever the reasons, Massino turned to Vitale, who had already proved himself in the Borelli murder.

  Like many wiseguys, Pastore was a habitué of strip clubs—“Go-Go” bars as they were known at that time. At one club on Forty-forth Street in Manhattan he met a young woman named Gloria Jean Young. An aspiring singer, Young had gravitated to the city in the hopes of advancing her career but instead began working as a Go-Go dancer. The night she met Pastore things began to happen fast. As she later told investigators, she spent the night with him at the Plaza Suite Hotel and from then on Pastore was a constant factor in her life. She explained that the mob-connected smuggler put Young up in an apartment, furnished it, and paid her rent.

  But in mid-May 1976, Young remembered, things changed drastically. She drove with Pastore to a brownstone house somewhere in Queens and waited in the car while he went inside. After about ten or fifteen minutes, Pastore exited the building and returned to the car. He looked frightened.

  “He didn’t feel very well and he felt bad and said something was coming down,” Young later recalled in court testimony. The young dancer said the incident also left her rattled and afraid for her own safety, so she decided to leave Pastore and the life they had together. The next day a girlfriend drove Young to the airport and she left town, never to see Pastore again.

  Whatever had unsettled Pastore was a bad omen. Vitale later told investigators that he had barely a day’s notice that Carmine Franzese was going to “take care” of Pastore in the apartment above Massino’s deli on Fifty-eighth Road. Vitale was told to complete his regular rounds selling coffee and donuts from one o
f Massino’s mobile lunch wagons and then return to the deli.

  Dutiful as ever, Vitale drove back to the deli the next day after the workday and met Massino. It was done, Massino told his brother-in-law, who then climbed the flight of stairs to the empty apartment. There was blood all over the floor of the little kitchen and the cabinets. Even the refrigerator had some spatter inside. However, there was no body in sight since it had already been moved to a dumpster a few blocks away on Rust Street. Picking up some towels that had been left in the apartment, Vitale later told the FBI he used them to soak up the blood and wipe down the cabinets. When finished, he took the blood-soaked towels, put them in a bag, walked around the corner to another dumpster, and tossed them all away. Good job, Vitale remembered Massino telling him.

  It was on June 1, 1976, outside 58–77 Fifty-seventh Avenue in Maspeth, literally around the corner from Massino’s social club and deli, that Pastore’s body was found. Massino told police he had last seen his old friend on May 19. Since he said he was a family friend, Massino went with Pastore’s half-brother, Richard Dorme, to identify the decomposed body. Dormer threw up in the morgue after the body was shown.

  Massino would always deny he had any role in the killings of Pastore and Borelli, although Vitale would insist his brother-in-law told him he fired two shots into Pastore’s face. So in less than a year, Vitale had graduated from Massino’s trusted gofer, by his own admission to investigators, to an accomplice in two homicides. Since the Pastore killing seemed to have been a strictly personal situation, it is doubtful Massino improved his standing with the crime family in having it arranged. But the Borelli killing was another matter since it ingratiated Massino with Castellano, the rising power and soon-to-be boss of the Gambino family, and it showed to both the Bonanno and Gambino clans that Joe Maspeth was a man who could do a piece of work. With Rastelli in prison and the Bonanno family in a state of tension over its leadership, it was not a bad time for Massino to develop alliances and to earn his stripes as a crime family member. But there is a point where gangsters, no matter how careful, get into trouble and Massino was no exception.