King of the Godfathers Read online

  CHAPTER 6

  “I Don’t Do Nothing”

  On the morning of March 11, 1975, Salvatore Taboh went to his job as a truck driver in Mahattan at around 7:00 A.M. so he could grab some breakfast before he started his work shift at the Hemingway Trucking terminal. By the time he clocked in at 8:00 A.M., Taboh had been fed and was then able to answer a call from the dispatcher to get his assignment for the day. There was no real surprise at that time because Taboh got his usual rig, tractor-trailer number 897.

  The Hemingway terminal was on Leroy and West streets in lower Manhattan, an area where a lot of trucking firms marshaled their rigs. Taboh warmed up his tractor—the part of the rig with the engine—and hooked it up to the trailer part that contained myriad number of packages of merchandise. Pulling out at about 8:30 A.M. from the terminal area, Taboh drove uptown to his first stop at Twenty-seventh Street between Fifth Avenue and Broadway. He parked his rig and went upstairs to make the delivery. Since he was early and the business that was supposed to accept the package wasn’t open, Taboh went to the next office where a woman who was working agreed to accept the item. Taboh went back downstairs to retrieve the package. He couldn’t find it because the entire tractor-trailer was gone, the whole thing, package included. Just like that.

  While rushing over to a nearby phone booth, Taboh spotted a police car and told the officers what had happened. The cops called in the stolen rig and Taboh then called his dispatcher to report what had happened. The time was about five minutes to 9:00 A.M. He couldn’t have left the truck for more than five or ten minutes.

  Across the East River in Queens, FBI agent Patrick Colgan was in his official bureau car when he got a radio transmission about the stolen Hemingway truck at about 9:20 A.M. Colgan was in Queens a lot because he was part of the FBI truck hijack squad and he knew that the borough had become a haven for hijackers. Though higher-ups in the FBI didn’t think cargo theft was a big racket for the mob, street agents like Colgan thought otherwise. Queens in particular was a hijacker’s paradise with John F. Kennedy International Airport and numerous trucking terminals, notably in Maspeth. Associates and members of the Gambino and Colombo crime families saw hijacking as a relatively low-risk crime with the potential for quick cash. One of the most prominent of reputed truck thieves, Colgan knew, was a big guy from Maspeth who had some businesses by Rust Street. Playing an educated hunch, Colgan, a five-year veteran of the agency, quickly drove to the area where Rust Street intersected with Grand Avenue. He knew the number and name on the truck he was looking for.

  What luck. At around 9:45 A.M. Colgan spotted the very Hemingway rig he was looking for parked on Rust Street, just north of the Maspeth Avenue intersection. Driving by the truck, Colgan noted its license plate number, A80808, which corresponded to the radio report. There was no one in the driver’s seat and the rig was pointing north. Colgan parked his car about 150 feet away from the stolen vehicle. His car was pointing south. Colgan waited.

  About twenty minutes after parking, Colgan saw a man walk out from a street by the nearby Clinton Diner and walk over to the waiting Hemingway tractor-trailer. The guy was Raymond Wean, a denizen of the Maspeth world of hijackers who just so happened to be on probation for a conviction on a federal hijacking charge. The time was about 10:15 A.M., less than an hour after the apparently befuddled Taboh noticed the truck missing in Manhattan.

  The rig was driven a short distance north on Rust when it suddenly made a U-turn and headed south, passing Colgan, who got a good look at Wean’s face. The FBI car fell in behind the truck rig and followed it a short distance until it came to a stop light. It was then that a blue Cadillac pulled up to the driver side of the tractor cab and Colgan noticed two men occupying the car talk with Wean. After the Hemingway rig turned right on to Grand Avenue, Wean parked it, got out, and started to walk away. He was a big, imposing man who stood well over six feet tall and weighed about 300 pounds. Wean was a working man with hands the size of ham hocks. Colgan pulled up to him, got out of the FBI car, and arrested Wean for possessing the stolen truck.

  “I was not in any truck, I was just simply walking down the street,” Wean responded.

  “Well, I not only saw you get out of it, I saw you get into it,” Colgan answered.

  “Give me a break, I’ll do anything. I am on parole in the Eastern District,” Wean pleaded.

  Wean’s wrists were so big that Colgan couldn’t put handcuffs on the suspect. So he ordered Wean to sit in the FBI car and not try to escape. As Colgan was placing Wean in the bureau vehicle, he noticed the blue Cadillac drive by. The agent’s eyes locked a glance with those of the driver, who seemed to instantly recognize that Colgan was with the FBI. A startled Joseph Massino then drove away in the Cadillac.

  As he later told a federal judge, Colgan also recognized Massino as the man who was known to the FBI as a truck hijacker and fence of stolen property. Actually, among the FBI agents Massino was not known as a strong-armed guy who would stick a gun in a driver’s face. Rather, he was known to investigators as a middleman, a broker of stolen commodities. Street agents working the hijack world said Massino was known to specialize in ground coffee, liquor, and clothing. So when Colgan suddenly saw Massino appear around the Hemingway truck, it raised suspicion that he was involved with the theft of the vehicle.

  Massino should have kept on driving away. Instead, he came back and was himself arrested. The Hemingway incident then became the first time in Massino’s life that the federal government had nabbed him. Granted, the Hemingway heist wasn’t the biggest crime around. The trailer was filled with blankets and clothing. But it led to Massino’s first federal indictment. What also made the case noteworthy was that it was the only time Massino would ever take the witness stand in his own defense, perhaps the only Mafia leader of note to ever do so in his career. By testifying, Massino won a dismissal of the first serious set of charges ever lodged against him.

  Massino and Wean, who lived in Whitestone, were indicted by a Brooklyn federal grand jury in 1975 on charges that they conspired to receive 225 cartons of merchandise stolen from an interstate shipment contained in the Hemingway truck. They were also both charged with possessing the stolen shipment. In addition, Massino, because of his drive by and return to the scene when Wean was being arrested, was charged with trying to hinder Wean’s apprehension. Records show both men made bail, with Massino posting a $10,000 bond secured by one of his business properties.

  Massino’s lawyer was Eugene G. Mastropieri, a city councilman who also practiced law (as city rules allowed). Court records show that Wean’s and Massino’s cases were severed, meaning one would be tried without the other. Wean went to trial first.

  It was close to Thanksgiving in 1976 that the Brooklyn federal judge Edward Neaher impaneled a jury in Wean’s case. By that time the case had been simplified even more because prosecutors had decided to drop the conspiracy charge and just try Wean on the one count of being in possession of stolen property. The government used Colgan and some other FBI agents, as well as the truck driver, Salvatore Taboh, as their key witnesses. There was some suspicion among the agents that the driver might have given up the truck too easily and thus was complicit in the crime. But that was never proven. In reality, the credibility of the agents was crucial for the case; the defense attorney, Robert Weisswasser, attacked Colgan in his opening statement as an “out right fabricator, a liar, a perjurer.” The defense would also make an issue of the fact that the agents didn’t immediately dust the keys found in the truck cab for fingerprints.

  Weisswasser’s tactics of attacking law enforcement didn’t work. The jury quickly found Wean guilty of the charge of possession of the two hundred and twenty five cartons of stolen property found in the truck.

  For Massino, the situation became more interesting. Judge Neaher held a hearing to determine a rather fundamental legal issue: was Massino read his Miranda rights when he was arrested on March 11, 1975? If the agents didn’t properly Mirandize him, then his statem
ents during the arrest would be invalid and that could destroy the case against him. Since the groundbreaking U.S. Supreme Court ruling in the Miranda case in 1963, law enforcement officers were under an obligation to tell defendants a series of warnings, among them that they had the right to remain silent, that anything they said could be used against them, and that they had a right to have a lawyer appointed to represent them if they couldn’t afford to pay for one. The giving of the warnings had become elementary for all agents and cops but sometimes there were screw-ups or the circumstances were ambiguous, all of which led to so-called suppression hearings being held by the court.

  Suppression hearings often boil down to a defendant’s version of events being pitted against those of the arresting officers. On February 10, 1977, Massino himself took the witness stand before Judge Neaher in the Brooklyn federal court. Since Mastropieri had brought the motion to get his client’s statements tossed out as evidence, it was Massino who testified on direct examination.

  Massino’s testimony was fairly brief. He remembered being arrested by Agent Colgan on March 11, 1975, and then asking why he was being taken into custody.

  “What did he say to you and what did you say to him at the time he placed you under arrest?” Mastropieri asked.

  “I told him, ‘What am I under arrest for,’ and he said, ‘You will find out.’ He handcuffed me and put me in a car and they took me away,” Massino said.

  In the car, Massino said he sat with two other agents but said they didn’t advise him of his rights. At FBI headquarters in Manhattan near Sixty-ninth Street Massino said some agents gave him some paper but he pushed it back to them, unread.

  “Did he ask you to sign that paper?” Mastropieri asked.

  “No, he did not,” replied Massino.

  “You heard the testimony over the course of the last two days,” Mastropieri finally said. “At any time were you given your rights by any one of the agents that testified here in court?”

  “No, I was never given my rights,” answered Massino.

  Assistant U.S. Attorney Jonathan Marks then asked Massino if he knew before the arrest date that he had a right to remain silent if asked questions by the FBI.

  “Only from watching television,” said Massino.

  “Well, did you understand that you had a right to remain silent?” Marks pressed.

  “I was never told of it,” Massino replied.

  While a person may know, even from television shows, about the Miranda rights, the law remains clear that the arresting officers or agents have to explicitly advise a defendant, no matter how widely known those warnings have become in popular culture. By insisting that he had never been warned as required by Miranda, Massino was saying the FBI had screwed up on something fairly significant.

  Marks continued to press Massino, showing him a document that court records indicate may have been either a standard form that listed the Miranda warnings or perhaps a waiver of the right to be Mirandized. But Massino stuck to his story and said that while he remembered an agent shoving a piece of paper at him at the FBI offices he didn’t read it.

  “How long did you have that piece of paper in front of you,” asked Marks.

  “Just put it in front of me. He says, ‘Look at it.’ I said, ‘I don’t look at anything. I don’t do nothing,’” Massino said.

  FBI agent Richard Redman, who rode in the bureau car with Massino back to Manhattan, gave a different story. Massino was not only advised of his rights in the car but also he said he understood them, Redman testified. During the drive to the FBI offices, Massino said he knew Wean for over twenty years and explained that the reason he drove away when Colgan spotted him in the Cadillac was that “I had to take a shit and I told him [Colgan] I would go and come back,” said Redman.

  At the FBI offices, according to Redman, Massino turned chatty and told the agents they really had Wean good when they caught him with the truck. When asked why he drove his Cadillac alongside the truck as Wean was driving, Massino responded that he had to tell his friend that the FBI was following him and “I had to shout at the dumb fuck because he didn’t hear me,” Redman remembered Massino saying.

  In essence, Massino testified that he was never given his Miranda rights by the FBI. The government contended that Massino volunteered the remarks he made to Redman and the other agents and so the Miranda rule didn’t apply. In the end, Judge Neaher said that since the agents had continued to question Massino after he said he didn’t want to talk and wouldn’t sign the form the court would suppress any statements Massino made the day he was arrested. Since the government’s case rested largely on Massino’s statements, there was little evidence remaining, so prosecutors moved to dismiss the indictment against Massino. The case was tossed out, and Massino was in the clear.

  When Neaher ruled in Massino’s favor, the big man from Maspeth was known as a hijacking leader to the FBI. But it appears that Massino’s status as a made member of the Mafia (his induction is believed to have occurred in 1976 or 1977) was still under the radar at that point. This was true even though, as Vitale later recalled Massino had been involved in the Vito Borelli and Joseph Pastore killings.

  However, Wean was now a two-time loser in federal court and Neaher sentenced him on March 10, 1977, to three years in prison. Wean had some serious thinking to do. Life on the street and hanging around with Massino in Maspeth had not been good for him, especially since he had three young kids, a wife, and an ex-wife. There had to be a better way to get by in life.

  CHAPTER 7

  Power Play

  On an afternoon in 1977, a group of about a half-dozen adult men stood outside a restaurant on Mulberry Street in Manhattan’s Little Italy. To a casual observer, the group was doing nothing in particular. Sometimes one of the men from the crowd would sneak a look inside. But for the most part they hung out, which was not unusual for the neighborhood.

  Mulberry Street had been the spine of this Italian neighborhood for decades. Italian immigrants as far back as the mid-ninteenth century had populated the area and the immigration continued well into the 1900s, attracting its fair share of Mafia members and associates. Ethnic neighborhoods like Little Italy provided a base of support, through people and cooperating merchants, for the Mafia. The clannish nature of the streets, where dialects of Italians from Naples, Sicily, Calabria, Genoa, and Tuscany textured the conversations, gave some assurance that outsiders like police would stand out and be spotted.

  The men outside the Casa Bella Restaurant on Mulberry Street were keeping a lookout not only for cops but also for any signs of danger that might threaten the people inside. Among the inside crowd on this particular day were Carmine Galante, the recently freed Bonanno crime family captain, and Mike Sabella, another captain who just so happened to own the place. Guard duty in Little Italy to protect a high-echelon mobster like Galante could be nerve wracking. Even though he was armed, Bonanno soldier Benjamin “Lefty Guns” Ruggiero, one of the men in the group outside Casa Bella, seemed to constantly fidget. Thin faced, lean, and always exhibiting a sense of nervous expectation, Ruggiero knew political undercurrents were at work in the family, and since Galante was hated by many mobsters, at any moment he could turn into a target of opportunity for his rivals. Since he was part of Galante’s security detail, Ruggiero could find himself in a gun battle in which he was expected to protect the man at all costs.

  One of the other men standing in the crowd outside Casa Bella with Ruggiero was a trim, muscular man who looked the part of an aspiring street hood, although he wasn’t armed. Curious about what was going inside, he peeked through the window. He spotted Galante’s bald head and trademark cigar as he talked with Sabella and a few others. Ever since Galante had attended the Palermo meeting in 1957 with Joseph Bonanno, he had been popular with the Sicilian men who he convinced to immigrate. These heroin-dealing Zips, as the Sicilians were called, were some of the only people Galante felt comfortable around. Everybody else could wait outside.

  The cu
rious thing about the man who peered inside Casa Bella was that even though he had all the trademark looks of a wanna-be mafioso—the gold chains, rings, and stylish sports clothes—he was actually the furthest thing from it. Known to Ruggiero as “Donnie Brasco,” he was actually Joseph Pistone, an undercover agent for the FBI. He was damn good at what he did.

  It was in 1976, having already done a few stints with the FBI in short undercover assignments, that Pistone and his supervisors wanted to exploit the possibility of a deeper penetration of the underworld. The decision was made for Pistone to go undercover in New York City as Donnie Brasco, a jewel thief who could make a score. After establishing some connections with the Colombo crime family, Pistone made the acquaintance in March 1977 of Ruggiero and Bonanno soldier Anthony Mirra at Mirra’s place, the Bus Stop Luncheonette on Madison Street, a few blocks east of Little Italy. A cold killer, Mirra had become a feared man in the crime family because of the ease with which he committed murders.

  Pistone started off handling some stolen property for the mob, and in the process he gleaned intelligence information about the Bonanno family hierarchy for his FBI handlers. Where possible, Pistone pretended to move stolen property for his unsuspecting mob cohorts but actually turned it over to his FBI handlers. In turn, the agents gave Pistone some government cash that had been earmarked for the investigation so that he could turn it over to his wiseguy connections. This not only allowed Pistone to show that he sold the stolen property but also to build more credibility with his mob connections.