Big Joey Massino was sometimes called “The Ear” for his rule that members of the Bonanno crime family of New York couldn’t mention him by name, even when he wasn’t around, in case police were listening. Instead, they were to refer to him by tugging on an earlobe. That kind of vigilance helped Massino stay atop the Bonannos for two decades. Among his credos was “Once a bullet leaves that gun, you never talk about it.”
Big Joey got his start running a lunch wagon business catering to factory workers, and then worked his way up in the underworld by doing “pieces of work” for the Bonanno and Gambino crime families. His most notable “piece of work” was organizing the Three Captains Murders in 1981 that eventually put Vito Rizzuto in prison.
The twenty-first century opened badly for the Bonannos, and took a nosedive from there. In 2002, beginning a humiliating string of firsts, Frank Coppa became the first known member of the crime family to talk to police. Not long after that, acting captain Joseph D’Amico became the first made member of the Bonanno crime family to wear a police wire. Underboss Sal (Good Looking Sal) Vitale took things a step further when he became the highest-ranking member of the American mob since Sammy (The Bull) Gravano in the early 1990s to co-operate with the government. James (Big Louie) Tartaglione left his own stain on the family’s reputation when he became its first member to record an administrative meeting for investigators.
Things had collapsed in a big way for Big Joey by the time the first decade of the new century was half done. The rat infestation in his group led to his conviction for seven murders, with prosecution pending on an eighth and prosecutors mulling the death penalty on that remaining count.
Faced with the possibility of a lethal injection at Sing Sing, on July 30, 2004, Big Joey flipped. He began wearing a hidden recording device in the federal Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn and agreed to testify for the government in upcoming mob trials, including one against his successor, Vincent (Vinny Gorgeous) Basciano, who once teased and clipped hair for a living at Hello Gorgeous, a hair salon on East Tremont Avenue in the Bronx. Among other things, Big Joey’s wire caught Basciano outlining plans to murder a federal prosecutor and Nicholas Garaufis, the same Brooklyn federal judge who handled Vito’s case. Ironically, when Big Joey took the stand, he testified about talking with Basciano about killing a suspected informer: “Vinny told me that he had him killed. He said he was a scumbag, a rat.”
Things only got worse for Big Joey Massino. His seventy-one-year-old former consigliere Anthony (Fat Tony) Rabitto was knocked out of commission with sport-betting charges in June 2005. The New York Post dined out on the arrests of Fat Tony and some of his geriatric associates, headlining the story THE GOODFOGEY’S—GRANDPAS BUSTED IN $15M LOAN-SHARK AND GAMBLE RING, with a caption over a photo of Fat Tony that read RIPE BONANNOS.
The ultimate low point came when the public learned of Big Joey Massino’s decision to become the first top boss to turn stoolie. The New York Daily News dubbed the Bonannos “the Rodney Dangerfields of the city’s five mob families.” No one gave them respect anymore.
That meant both Massino and Vitale were co-operating with authorities in May 2007 when Vito was finally called before a New York judge to answer for his role as a triggerman in the Three Captains Murders. As Vitale told authorities, Massino and Dominic (Sonny Black) Napolitano invited captains Alphonse (Sonny Red) Indelicato, Philip (Philly Lucky) Giaccone and Dominick (Big Trin) Trinchera to an “administrative meeting” at a Brooklyn social club. Vito was one of the three designated shooters. With him was another Montrealer named “Emmanuel” and yet another Montrealer who was considerably older, whose name Vitale didn’t know.
“Was someone designated as the lead shooter?” a prosecutor asked Vitale.
“Vito and Emmanuel,” Vitale replied.
“Was there any discussion where the shooters, why some of the shooters were from Canada?”
“Because of a security issue. It would never leak out. And after the murders, they would go back to Montreal,” Vitale replied. He continued: “The minute I walked into the club, in the foyer, Vito, Emmanuel and the old-timer, we were issued the weapons, told to have ski masks that we’d put [on] in a closet in a coatroom and before we come out,” Vitale said.
“What was the purpose of the ski masks?” the prosecutor asked.
“I have no idea. I guess so the other captains that were there wouldn’t know who the shooters were,” Vitale said.
Vito and the two others were given guns and ski masks and sent into a closet, where they were told to crouch and wait for a sign. When they exited the closet, they were told by Massino to first say it was a stickup and then open fire. That would keep any mobsters in the club who weren’t part of the plot, and who weren’t targets, from suspecting that Big Joey was housecleaning inside his family.
“We entered the closet and left the door open a smidge so we could look out,” Vitale testified.
The signal for Vito and the other two gunmen to spring into action came when Montrealer George (George from Canada) Sciascia ran his fingers through his hair.
“I heard Vito say, ‘Don’t anybody move. This is a holdup,’ ” Vitale said. “Then shots were fired. I seen Vito shooting. I don’t know who he hit. I saw Joe Massino punching Philly Lucky.”
Their bloody chore completed, it fell upon a cleanup crew to wrap the bodies in drop cloths and carry them to a van. “It was a mess,” Vitale said. “There was blood all over the place. There was too much blood. We couldn’t clean up. It was impossible to clean up.” That’s when Massino gave the order to burn the club down, Vitale said.
At the United States Courthouse in Brooklyn, Vito was represented by lawyer John W. Mitchell, whose previous clients included the late John Gotti, former boss of the Gambino crime family. Even though he had been a gunman in three contract murders, Vito only faced the racketeering charge of conspiracy to commit murder for a criminal organization. Had he been an American living in the USA, he likely would have been charged with first-degree murder, which was a death penalty offence in New York State. However, the charge was lowered to conspiracy because American officials feared Canada wouldn’t extradite him if there was a possibility of execution.
In his pre-sentence statement to court, Vito stopped short of telling the judge that he actually fired a fatal shot. Yes, he held a gun, and yes, there were three murders, but Vito was saying the bare minimum: “I did participate.… My job was to say, ‘It’s a hold-up,’ so everybody would stand still.”
At the sentencing, Vito looked like a shell of the exquisitely dressed man who used to strut about Montreal as if he owned it. Vito was only sixty-one, which, considering the family’s history of longevity, should have given him every reason to think that when he got out of prison he would be able to resume his life at the top level of the Mafia. His father was then eighty-three and facing twenty-three charges of his own from Project Colisée, including ones for gangsterism and importing and exporting illegal drugs. Mob bosses are often just hitting their stride when they begin gumming their food. Vito had his father’s energy and the Mafia had no retirement plan. Despite Vito’s alleged ailments, Mitchell said in an interview that during Vito’s three and a half years in pretrial custody he hadn’t lost a pound, which was also rare after so long on a prison diet.
Vito told the judge that he wasn’t well and that he’d received some troubling news after a checkup a few weeks earlier. “They said they found a spot in my lungs, but they haven’t said what’s up to now yet,” Vito said. “They have to give me a CAT scan but will bring me to the hospital, but they haven’t,” he told court. It’s a tried-and-true tactic to fake medical problems when brought before a judge, so Vito’s words didn’t win him much sympathy. He was sentenced to ten years in custody, which amounted to five and a half years in real time, after he was given credit for pretrial custody in Canada and New York. If he stayed in the United States after his prison time elapsed, there would also be three years of parole. The judge recommended that Vito be held someplace where he could receive further medical testing.
Vito originally expected the deal would also include a provision that he serve his time in a prison close to the Quebec border, so his family could visit. Mitchell expected this would mean the Ray Brook medium-security correctional facility in upper New York State, a pleasant two-hour drive from Montreal. The Ray Brook facility was built in the Adirondack Mountains on the site of the 1980 Lake Placid Olympics. Despite the scenic surroundings, Mitchell dismissed the suggestion that it was a country club prison. “It’s a serious place,” Mitchell said. “There’s a lot of gangs up there. It’ll be no walk in the park, but he’ll be okay.”
Soon after the sentencing, Vito’s mood must have darkened considerably. He wasn’t being sent to Ray Brook. Instead, his home for the next five and a half years was to be in tiny Florence, Colorado, more than 2,600 kilometres (1,600 miles) from Montreal.
As Vito settled into prison life, the Bonannos’ troubles extended beyond the stampede of informants within their own ranks. They and other New York mob families were receiving a serious ass-kicking from emerging Albanian, Russian and Chinatown gangs. The Mafia no longer reigned supreme. In one particularly troubling incident for the city’s old-school mob, an Albanian boss reportedly demanded Gotti’s old table at a mob restaurant to make it clear he considered himself the new top mobster in the city. Five and a half years wasn’t a long sentence for helping to murder three men. Still, it was long enough for Vito to wonder what would be left of his old world when he was finally set free.