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 running the Bonanno family when many of the murders were committed.While this was true, she was not able to cover all the murders. But she did try.
"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, Donnie Brasco.
"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 Bonanno varsity players were mounted on cardboard. I never saw Tony's picture nor found his name in a news story, even if it was about guys at the bottom.
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 running things for him, purportedly a Local 15 member, Anthony Polito. He took care of anything to do with organized crime.There were no-show jobs to be given to wiseguys or allowing work rules for health and safety to be ignored on any job where contractors had come up with money. Polito is in prison.
Reading through the government's indictment, I found that one of its legal standards for introducing evidence was based on United States v. Brennan, the defendant being "a former New York State Supreme Court justice who was charged with fixing four criminal cases," the indictment reads. "The government's witness, Anthony Bruno, served as a middleman."
I used to see Justice Brennan on Queens Boulevard, and we'd have a beer once in a while. He would walk across the street to the courthouse and fix narcotics cases and, I believe, a homicide for the Mafia. He was another one of those who come without a shred of shame. His was a complete character collapse that turned him into a cheap errand boy. Reading on, I found a page of testimony about the labor men pleading guilty in Brooklyn federal court to robbing their own.
Simultaneously Joe Massino sat in the jailhouse and bargained for his life, his ten million dollars in plunder, and his two houses, one for his mother and the second, larger one for his wife and daughters. For life and possessions he would give up the entire underworld he had sworn to keep secret.
There are murders all over the place, and he must solve so many of them for the FBI. This is catastrophic for the guys on the street. Any mobsters nearing the end of their sentence will be hit with new charges and never see civilization again.
The publicity stool pigeons, "Sammy the Bull" Gravano being the latest, are illusions. Massino will end the Mafia. All the murders and dialogue that have been a large part of this nation's culture will disappear. All Mafia books and shows, The Sopranos foremost, will be based on nothing and therefore too unrealistic to make.