King of the Godfathers Read online

  With luck, patience, and lots of bravado, Pistone became a close friend of Ruggiero and began to gather plenty of evidence for the FBI. But, unknown to Pistone, his fellow agents were carrying out a separate intelligence gathering operation in lower Manhattan that also targeted the Bonanno family.

  Local social clubs, storefronts with windows emblazoned with signs saying “members only,” were sprinkled around Little Italy and seemed to exist only as convenient meeting places for the mob. The Bonanno family had one club incongruously named Toyland Social Club at 94 Hester Street, which was run by Nicholas Marangello, the underboss of the crime family. Marangello had poor eyesight and needed thick glasses, which earned him the monikers “Eyeglasses” and “Nicky Glasses.” He had started out at the age of fifteen with a juvenile delinquency record, and by the age of nineteen he was sent to Sing Sing Prison for a ten-year term for robbery. By the time he was forty-three years old, and with a few more convictions under his belt, Marangello was in charge of some extensive gambling operations run by the Bonanno family.

  The FBI set up continuous surveillance of the Toyland club, and what they discovered was that the club was like the set of some mob movie. The club was used not only by the Bonanno crime family but also by the other families, particularly the Colombo and Gambino clans. Hidden FBI cameras took hundreds of photographs to document the mobsters who showed up. Intelligence gathering operations such as the Toyland probe are started to find leads that might later prove useful in future investigations. For instance, a wiretapped conversation might reveal to police that two mobsters agreed to meet at Toyland on a particular day to plan a crime. If surveillance confirmed that meeting, the resulting photographs might later prove useful as corroboration. But until then, the surveillance reports, known in FBI jargon as form “Ninety-twos,” and photographs from the Toyland investigation resided in government files in the hope that someday they would prove useful.

  Pistone didn’t know it at the time, but some of his visits to Toyland and to other crime family hangouts in Manhattan, were captured by the FBI cameras. Pistone would later learn that security was so tight about his undercover role that surveillance agents and police had him picked as a mob associate known only as Donnie Brasco. Having established good rapport with Ruggiero and other made members of the Bonanno family, Pistone in 1977 was soon treated like one of the guys.

  “I knew most of the regular wiseguys down on Mulberry Street, not only Bonannos but guys from other crews,” wrote Pistone in his autobiography. “I was given the familiar hugs and kisses on the cheek that wiseguys exchange. I could come and go in any of the joints I wanted.”

  So by the time Pistone had stood with Ruggiero and others outside Casa Bella to watch over Galante in the summer of 1977, he had also rubbed shoulders with a lot of other Bonanno members. Among them was the thirty-four-year-old Joseph Massino, who Pistone viewed as a rising star in the crime family. With a growing pasta belly and broad shoulders developed through his teenaged years as a lifeguard, Massino cut an imposing and intimidating figure. Surveillance photos of that period showed Massino with a head of thick, wavy black hair as he stood outside the Holiday Bar on Madison Street, just across from Tony Mirra’s luncheonette. Massino was also spotted at Toyland with his brother-in-law, Salvatore Vitale, Carmine Franzese, and, of course, Marangello.

  By now, Massino was no longer just Joe from Maspeth. In fact, having proved to the mob that he was an earner, Massino moved uptown—so to speak—buying a home on Eighty-fourth Street in Howard Beach. By then, he and his wife had their youngest of three daughters, Joanne, and it seemed right that his family move to a newer, more modern home than he had on Caldwell Avenue. As a made member, Massino’s place in the family was assured, assuming he didn’t screw up or insult the boss.

  In the summer of 1977, with Philip Rastelli in prison, law enforcement officials began to consider Galante the effective boss of the family. Rastelli, it seemed to police, had more or less given up on trying to fight for the top spot, even though he retained the loyalty of Massino, Marangello, and a substantial number of other captains and soldiers. Galante was a more ruthless character who was known to quote Plato, Augustine, and Descartes; he also had been diagnosed as being psychotic by prison psychiatrists.

  Galante’s main mission revolved around his attempt to build the crime families’ narcotics operations. After having spent nearly fifteen years in prison for trafficking in heroin, it might have been that Galante would be gun shy about peddling narcotics again. But drugs, particularly heroin, had become lucrative markets for the Mafia and intelligence reports placed Galante in the middle of things. He traveled to Florida to cement deals with drug dealers and reportedly reached an agreement with Harlem’s drug kingpin, Nicky Barnes, to have heroin distributed in the predominately black community. With Carlo Gambino’s death in 1976, there really was no old-time Mafia leader to stand in Galante’s way when it came to narcotics.

  If there had been any doubts that Galante was considered to be one of the preeminent leaders of the Mafia in the city, they were dispelled by a front-page article in the New York Times on February 20, 1977, which trumpeted his rise to power with the headline: AN OBSCURE GANGSTER IS EMERGING AS THE MAFIA CHIEFTAIN IN NEW YORK. While Rastelli had his loyalists like Massino, Galante had a small army of Sicilian cohorts who populated Knickerbocker Avenue in East New York, a part of Brooklyn that had become a magnet for the young men who migrated from Sicily. It was the Sicilians, who were lead by Salvatore “Toto” Catalano, a puffy-faced, dark-haired immigrant baker, who formed the backbone of Galante’s heroin operation.

  But as might be expected, Galante let power, or his perception of it, go to his head. The heroin operation was lucrative, yes, but Galante wanted more. Police believed he started to covet the operations of the other crime families, particularly in the emerging territory of Atlantic City, which had been under the purview of Philadelphia’s mob boss Angelo Bruno. The Sicilians on Knickerbocker Avenue had been Galante’s workhorses with heroin, but his greed was fueling their disloyalty. Something had to give.

  Police surveillance can be very good at spotting Mafia characters holding meetings and monitoring prison visits, but the substance of those meetings may be unknowable, if at all, for years. Such was the case in the months before July 1979, when officials noticed a steady stream of visitors to Rastelli at the federal penitentiary in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. News reporters were leaked the names of some of Rastelli’s visitors, and they included some prominent Bonanno crime family members: Nicky Marangello, Steven “Stevie Beef” Cannone, Philip Giaccone, Frank Lupo, and Armand Pollastrino. There was also mention made in those reports of a Bonanno soldier who had attracted little media attention until that point. He was identified as “Joseph Messino” and was said to be among a number of emissaries for Rastelli while he served his sentence.

  Rastelli needed his contacts with the outside, otherwise he had little chance of asserting any sort of power and control over the Bonanno family. Mafia bosses could be incarcerated but rarely were they unable to exercise some leadership. Looking back, it might have seemed from the headlines that Galante had the upper hand in the family, but Rastelli was not to be discounted. In fact, the imprisoned mafioso had sources of strength and resources that even Galante didn’t know about.

  Knickerbocker Avenue in East New York had plenty of Italian restaurants and coffee shops. Since Galante had much of his business with the Sicilian wing of the Bonanno family, he could sometimes be found dining or taking his espresso in one of the many small establishments where the Zips congregated. Joe and Mary’s Italian American Restaurant at 205 Knickerbocker had the added benefit of a small garden at the back where diners could take their repast amid tomato plants being raised for the salads.

  On the afternoon of July 12, 1979, Carmine Galante entered the restaurant for what police said was a bon voyage party for owner Joseph Turano, who was leaving shortly for a vacation trip to Italy. Galante arrived shortly before 2:45 P.M. with
his Sicilian immigrant bodyguards Baldassare Amato and Cesare Bonventre, a nephew of the old Bonanno crime family underboss John Bonventre. To get to the patio dining area, Galante’s entourage went through two inner dining rooms, where some other diners where having a fish dinner. The artwork on one of the walls was a cheap reproduction of Leonardo da Vinci’s renowned work The Last Supper.

  Galante sat with the two Sicilians at a table in the patio area covered with a tablecloth embossed with a floral design. He wore slacks and a light polo shirt and sat in a wooden chair with a curved back. Turano joined Galante at the table, as did Leonardo Coppolla, Galante’s forty-four-year-old friend and bodyguard. Some wine, fruit, and rolls were brought to the table. Galante lit one of his ubiquitous cigars.

  A blue Mercury pulled up in front of the restaurant and three men got out. Witnesses remembered them vividly because they all wore masks. They also noticed that one of them had a sawed off, double-barreled shotgun, another carried a regular shotgun, while the third seemed to be carrying a handgun, at least one and possibly two. The time was fixed by the witnesses at 2:45 P.M.

  The three masked men went straight through the restaurant to the patio area. One of them, someone later recalled, shouted out, “Get him, Sal.” Boy, did they ever.

  A shotgun blast from one of the assailants hit Galante in the chest while another shot hit him in the face, blowing out his left eye from its socket. Coppolla was also shot and died instantly. Turano was hit as well, as was his seventeen-year-old son, Johnny. The killers exited with the same cold efficiency with which they entered. Two crash cars had sealed off Knickerbocker Avenue and the hit team made a high-speed departure from the scene with no trouble.

  Galante died immediately where he fell. The blast had knocked him out of his chair. His cigar remained tightly clenched in his jaw, while his right arm was bent at his side and the left hand was drawn up across his chest as if he were soundly asleep. The elder Turano was mortally wounded and would never make it out of the hospital emergency room. His son survived. Meanwhile, Amato and Bonventre got away unharmed, a fact that didn’t go unnoticed by the police.

  At 4:08 P.M., teletypes in newsrooms around the city spat out an urgent bulletin: “Reputed Mafia Chieftain Carmine Galante and an associate were shot dead in an Italian restaurant in Brooklyn, police said.” That was all it took for reporters and editors to launch into a frenzy of coverage. GALANTE EXITS IN (MOB) STYLE: GODFATHER BLOWN AWAY AL FRESCO IN B’KLYN, said the Daily News. News photographers snapped sensational shots of Galante’s corpse splayed on the patio, complete with his bloody eyeless socket. Cops finally took a plastic table cloth and draped it over his upper body to give him a last bit of dignity and an escape from the prying cameras.

  The photo of the blasted Galante that showed him dying with a cigar clenched in his teeth was sensational. But the police investigation that followed seemed to raise some suspicion that perhaps a cop had placed the cigar in his mouth to make it look good, especially for the news photographers who resourcefully went to neighboring rooftops and took the crime scene pictures. However, Kenneth McCabe, one of the detectives who investigated the case, later said that the medical examiner determined that Galante had indeed died with the his last smoke clenched in his jaw.

  There was a lot of law enforcement speculation about Galante’s killing. Undercover FBI agent Joseph Pistone wasn’t in New York City when Galante was killed but was instead in Florida taking part in a related undercover probe in which he and other agents were running a nightclub as a way of attracting the mob’s attention. Pistone only learned of Galante’s death after he received a telephone call from his mobster friend Lefty Ruggiero. As Pistone later testified, Ruggiero was coy in giving away information.

  “In the first conversation Ruggiero had asked me if I had read the New York papers, and I told him no, I didn’t. I had not at that point,” Pistone said during his testimony in the famous 1985 Pizza Connection trial. “And he instructed me to go buy a New York paper, he said, ‘You’ll be in for a surprise.’”

  Pistone picked up the papers and saw the news about Galante and said he eventually made his way back to New York later in July 1979, where he visited Ruggiero at his club on Madison Street. It was at that point, Pistone said, that Ruggiero said that with Galante out of the way there were going to be big changes in the Bonanno family.

  “He said now that Galante had gotten whacked out that Rusty Rastelli was going to be the boss of the Family,” Pistone recalled. That shouldn’t have come as a big surprise since Rastelli had been the only other power in the family capable of challenging Galante.

  According to Pistone, Nicky Marangello and Michael Sabella, two Galante allies, were also on the hit list to be murdered but some people intervened, and instead they were demoted—Sabella to the rank of soldier and Marangello removed as underboss—Ruggiero said.

  There were some other changes reported by Ruggiero: among them was the fact that Joe Massino had been elevated to the rank of captain. This was a major promotion, coming a mere two or three years after Massino had been initiated as a mob member, and was a clear indication that his stock was greatly on the rise in the Rastellli regime.

  But while Pistone was told what the promotions and demotions would be, he apparently wasn’t told by Ruggiero the how and why of Galante’s killing. At least in the early months and years after the Knickerbocker Street slaughter, the FBI and police believed that the Galante hit was sanctioned by the Mafia Commission because such extreme action of killing a boss needed high-level authorization. Evidence quickly emerged to support the theory that the Commission was involved. Within a half-hour or so after the killing, NYPD surveillance teams saw a number of Bonanno captains such as Steven Cannone, Bruno Indelicato, and Dominick “Sonny Black” Napolitano go to the Ravenite Social Club on Mulberry Street, where they greeted and kissed Gambino crime family’s aging underboss Aniello Dellacroce.

  Police and FBI agents who studied the tape of the Ravenite gathering were alerted to what they believed was the butt of a gun sticking out from Indelicato’s waistband. That meeting was a sign to some of the agents that the other crime families (i.e., the Commission) were involved in signing off on Galante’s assassination. It is also important to remember that the Bonanno family was essentially being monitored by the Commission for years since the ouster of Joseph Bonanno. Finally, some years later an associate of the Colombo crime family testified that family boss Carmine Persico told him he had voted against Galante’s murder but that the heads of the Gambino, Lucchese, and Genovese crime families had okayed the plan.

  But from where did the plot to kill Galante emanate? The idea it seems came from Rastelli. With Massino and Napolitano as allies and using them as emissaries to other loyalists, Rastelli put together a pure Machiavellian power play. Galante may have been a ruthless killer in his own right but he had alienated many and his drug dealing had won him the contempt of some of the heads of the other families. In the end, Galante wasn’t the boss but was living out what one FBI agent privately confided was a Napoleonic complex—Bushwick style. His Zip allies like Amato and Bonventre, knowing where the true power lay, set him up at the restaurant. Rastelli showed that he was the true boss and loyal captains like Massino, who one mobster later testified was actually outside the restaurant when Galante was shot dead, assured him the leadership.

  The wake for Carmine Galante was at a small downtown funeral parlor on Second Avenue in Manhattan. His funeral was also modest. Like some other mobsters, Galante was buried at St. John’s Cemetery in Queens, a burial ground run by the Diocese of Brooklyn. Over the years, famous crime bosses like Joseph Profaci, Vito Genovese, Carlo Gambino, Aniello Dellacroce, John Gotti, and even Philip Rastelli were interred there. They repose either within the immense cloister building or very near it in private mausoleums and well-tended graves that are tourist attractions. Sprigs of palm sometimes adorn them.

  Galante is buried nowhere near the cloister building. Instead, his small grave is on t
he southern fringe of the cemetery, just yards from the busy Metropolitan Avenue. A modest granite stone with the carved image of Christ and the Sacred Heart marks the spot. “Love Goes on Forever,” reads the inscription, along with the simple words “Beloved Carmine.” It is very easy to overlook.

  CHAPTER 8

  The Three Captains

  The most noticeable thing about the three-story building at the intersections of Graham and Withers streets in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, was the pigeon coop on the roof. When he needed time away from the street or the business in his social club on the first floor, Dominick “Sonny Black” Napolitano would retreat to the rooftop to be alone with his birds. Surrounded by his clutch of racers, Napolitano could take stock of the world and plan his moves as he looked out over the street scene outside his club, the Motion Lounge.

  By 1980, there was a lot Napolitano had to think about. Both he and Joseph Massino had come out on top in the latest internecine struggle within the Bonanno crime family. They both had the ear of boss Philip Rastelli and were considered among the major captains of the family. They had been the imprisoned crime boss’s conduit to the outside and records show that Massino had made a number of visits to the Lewisburg Penitentiary when Rastelli was housed there. Under the crime family reshuffling that went on after Carmine Galante was killed, Napolitano took over most of the crew of soldiers that had been run by the demoted Michael Sabella. Among those who were put under Napolitano was Benjamin “Lefty Guns” Ruggiero.

  Since he got out of state prison, Napolitano jumped back into the swing and ran his Brooklyn crew—Massino had one of the Queens crews—through deals involving stolen gems and artwork pilfered from JFK International Airport. Ruggiero had hooked up with a guy Napolitano had begun to admire as a newcomer who had proved to be a good earner for the family. It was a new face introduced to him by Ruggiero. This new guy was known as Donnie Brasco.