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On this day he noticed a reporter who had just had a death in the family. Massino mouthed, "I'm sorry." This was probably the last time we'd see someone in the Mafia showing the old-world class it was always reputed to have but rarely did.
Watching her brother destroy her husband, Mrs. Massino wailed softly, "This is the same as a death in my family.You don't know what I am going through."
"How could Sal do this? Joe taught him how to swim," Tony Rabito, from Massino's restaurant, the Casa Blanca, complained. Sal Vitale is on his way to prison for a whole lot of years.
Joe Massino always was a very good swimmer. He could swim from Coney Island all the way across a wide inlet to Breezy Point, on the ocean. He taught his wife's brother, Good-Looking Sal, how to swim. This is a very big thing; you teach a kid to swim so he never drowns. Joe Massino could do that. He taught all the strokes to Good-Looking Sal.A lot of good that did.
During the trial, from out of the past, from Jimmy Weston's on Fifty-fourth Street and P. J. Clarke's on Fifty-fifth, from Pep McGuire's on Queens Boulevard, from his scungilli restaurant on Second Avenue, came Tony Cafe, who is called that because he was always in saloons. He arrived at my building one night with a handwritten open letter from Joe Massino's daughter. She pointed out that Massino had been in prison and Good-Looking Sal Vitale had been ru
"I don't know why the government is so mad at Joe," Tony Cafe said. "He's a nice fat guy, likes food."
A t this time T ony was a blessed unknown, but that would change.
Tony Cafe's previous experience was to make the mistake of rolling through the nights twenty-five years ago with the whole Mob and its new big hitter, Do
"He is Joe DiMaggio!" everybody said one night at the old Pep McGuire's on Queens Boulevard.
When next seen, Brasco took the witness stand in room 103, federal court, Manhattan.Tony Cafe (his courtroom name Anthony Rabito) sat listening with his lawyer, Paul Rao.
q: What is your name?
a: Joseph Pistone.
q: What is your occupation?
a: I am a special agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Tony was sentenced to eight years. Rao told the judge that Tony had served two years in the artillery in Korea, that both his brothers had served and that he deserved something for this.
the court: Mr. Rabito, is there anything you would like to add to what Mr. Rao has told us on your behalf?
defendant rabito: Judge, I think I got a fair trial.There are a couple of things I don't like. I fought for that flag. I was in the Army. I believe in the press. I believe in you.You open up somebody's head, you find love in my head, but in some people you find the little Italian flag.
The judge took two years off the sentence, one for each year Tony spent in the service. He did six years at Otisville federal prison in upstate New York. I didn't see him when he came out and never heard about him, so I figured he wasn't up to much, which I thought was good because a second sentence would run a thousand years. In court for one thing or another over several years,
I would take a look at the government's Mafia three-deep charts. The pictures of the Bona
Bad things now happened in the courtroom. Joe Massino was convicted and faced sentences of more years than he had to give for his country.
Right away, in Washington, Attorney General John Ashcroft directed prosecutors in Brooklyn to start a capital punishment case against Massino for another murder.They find you guilty in federal court on any charge, from stealing a postage stamp to murder. If the federals said they wanted an execution case, Massino was going to die.
No, he wasn't. He called for a prosecutor and said he wanted to cooperate. He knows everybody and everything about the waning days of the Mafia. He is a traditional mobster. He eats until he can't fit at the table. He had a restaurant with the best pork braciola for miles. He flicks a thumb down and somebody dies. He has a wife and daughters and several girlfriends. He lives in Howard Beach, Queens, which had an overcrowding of big gangsters. His house was a few blocks from that of John Gotti and also Vic Amuso, another boss. The first sounds of anger about Massino's turning came from Vito from Metropolitan Avenue. He had put up fifteen hundred dollars for Massino's Christmas present.
"Joe is a rat. I don't give my money to rats," he said. "I want my money back."
"How are you going to get it from him? He's in jail," he was told.
"From his wife," he said. "You go ask his wife."
When mobsters are reduced to fighting under the mistletoe, there is no reason for them to exist.
And now, in this court building at the same time, you saw the reason the Mafia must die. Four members of Local 15 of the
Operating Engineers Union were in court to plead guilty to selling out workingmen. They work cranes, backhoes, bulldozers, and hoists.They are proud and physical and, along with Local 40 of the Iron Workers, were about the first to walk up to the fiery mountains of the old World Trade Center, fierce, powerful, unafraid, and did all the gruesome heavy lifting for the next year. They were Irish, and their union heads admitted to being controlled by Mafia gangsters.Tom Robbins of the Village Voice, who seems to be the only reporter in the city who thinks labor is important, called the union the Mob's Engineers.
The government indicted twenty-four Mob guys in Brooklyn, including one Jackie DeRoss, who was listed as a union member but was recognized on the street as an underboss in the shrinking Colombo family. His sons, John and Jamie, had union books and were placed on jobs where attendance might have been taken. In Manhattan another eighteen mobsters in the union were indicted; one was Ernie Muscarella, a reputed boss in the Mob.
The one that bothered the most was Tom McGuire Jr., the business agent for the local. Everybody in labor knew his father, who had been business agent before him. Junior, out of Manhattan College, was unable to wail that he had to steal in order to make it in life. He was in the son game, as in "son of…" If America is weaker at this time, blame the son game, the nepotism, as much as, in this case, the Mafia.
As Massino told agents stories that would end the Mafia, McGuire was in the same court building pleading guilty to a charge of selling union books. There were many other charges, including extorting fifty thousand dollars a year from a paving company and then giving an eighty-thousand-dollar bribe to the president of the International Union of Operating Engineers in order to become a vice president of the international. But selling the union books was the hideous crime. People beg, plead, and implore for a union book. If your son can get a book, you can sleep all through the night; union jobs pay up to forty-five dollars an hour, and your son has a fine living for life.Tom McGuire Jr., now sixty, pudgy, and arrogant, sold union books for twelve thousand dollars. He had a man ru
Reading through the government's indictment, I found that one of its legal standards for introducing evidence was based on United States v. Bre