King of the Godfathers:. Anthony M. DeStefano
the Commission that everything stemmed from problems he had with Maggadino. With a gun held to his head by the Commission, Bonanno then haltingly moved into a forced retirement. He was lucky to get away with his life.
This strange period of strife between Bonanno and Maggadino led to the final distancing of Bonanno from playing any active role in what he called “our tradition.” Bonanno’s continued absence also brought on leadership instability within the crime family that saw various men attempt to assume the role of boss. Backed by Maggadino, one of Bonanno’s captains, Gaspar DiGregorio, made a brief pretense as boss and was able to profit from the defections of some crime family members and associates who didn’t want to be frozen out of rackets by being loyal to the Bonannos.
As a tool of Maggadino, DiGregorio tried to set up Bill Bonanno for assassination in January 1966 in what became known as the Troutman Street shootout in Brooklyn. The younger Bonanno escaped unscathed. An aspiring mob gunman named Frank Mari was later credited with firing some of the dozens of shots that never found a target. Ultimately, DiGregorio lost face because of the botched hit and suffered a heart attack; his role as factional leader was taken over by Paul Sciacca, a garment manufacturer who had been a Bonanno consiglieri years earlier. Sciacca, while not considered a powerful leader, was nevertheless acceptable to Maggadino and his allies on the Commission, namely Gambino, Lucchese, and Colombo, who by then was firmly set as leader of the old Profaci family.
Though considered by the Commission to be boss of the Bonanno family, Sciacca was really just the leader of a number of factions fighting for power in the clan. Out of a crime family believed in 1966 to number 400 members, Bonanno loyalists were estimated to have comprised about half that. DeCavalcante was recorded on one FBI tape saying that as soon as the Commission voted Bonanno out as boss in 1964 at least sixty members had already defected. Though he was tapped by his father to be among a group of three or four trusted aides to watch after crime family affairs, Bill Bonanno was distracted by his own legal problems and concerns about the safety of his wife and children. The Troutman Street shootout had also shown that Bill was in personal danger. Because Bill had to be absent quite often from New York during this period, it fell to Natale Evola, who had been an usher at his father’s wedding, to steer those loyal to Bonanno.
Times were dangerous, yes. The destruction of what Joseph Bonanno once called the Pax Bonanno had resulted in numerous shootings and murders. Aside from the abortive Troutman Street incident, there were a number of other mob killings and shootings during the “Banana War,” as the crime family clashes were known. Among those wounded was Frank Mari, one of the men believed to have been involved in the attempt on Bill Bonanno’s life.
Joseph Bonanno had prided himself on the decades of relative peace he had imposed on New York’s Mafia scene. In his view, it was the convincing force of his personality and the political ties he had to other Castellammarese leaders that made the Mafia thrive. The peace allowed each crime family to conduct its rackets and make money. But as Bonanno would say, it was because the individual members of the Mafia were restrained by shared values of respect, trust, loyalty, and honor that the families maintained discipline. However, toward the end of his tortured reign, Joseph Bonanno saw that change.
“Everyone likes to have money, but in the absence of a higher moral code the making of money becomes an unwholesome goal,” Bonanno said in his autobiography. As Bonanno saw it, the “individualistic orientation” encouraged disrespect for authority and family values. In many ways then, the old crime boss sounded like any conservative man who felt in the face of a changing world that he had become an anachronism.
The debacle with the Commission showed that Bonanno had lost his touch as a mob politician. The internecine warfare that erupted in Bonanno’s last years as boss—the Banana War—littered the streets of New York with bodies until well into 1968. By this time, though, the elder Bonanno had lost his taste for the battle. The fragmentation of his once-powerful family was also too much for its founder.
“There is no Bonanno Family anymore,” he bemoaned in his book. He was right—to a point.
CHAPTER 4
Maspeth Joe
Those old enough to remember can recall what they were doing and where they were when they heard that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963. Bill Bonanno certainly did. He said he was in a Manhattan steak house with a number of mafiosi. Among them was Philip “Rusty” Rastelli, one of a stable of Bonanno loyalists from Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
Destined for a life of crime, Rastell: had the credentials at an early age. A juvenile delinquent by the age of eight, Rastelli had his first big arrest in 1936 at the age of seventeen for homicide. It was later reduced to assault and he was sent away for a term in a reformatory school. The time upstate didn’t help him since it was only four years later that he drew a full-fledged adult prison term of five to ten years for assault and robbery. Through the 1940s and 1950s, Rastelli was arrested a few more times but saw those charges dismissed.
The eldest of three brothers who all would go on to be criminals, Rastelli, when he wasn’t in jail, was busy developing an interesting business niche. Williamsburg and its environs like Greenpoint and Maspeth were filled with trucking terminals, warehouses, and factories. The workers needed to eat but never had the time—particularly with thirty-minute lunch breaks—to do anything adventuresome. So, a service industry of food wagons developed to fill the need. Loaded with drinks, sandwiches, pastries, and coffee, the silver-bodied lunch wagons were vital to industrial New York. It would become Rastelli’s calling and his own racket.
In the 1920s and 1930s, mobster Ciro Terranova wasn’t subtle in his extortion of the pushcart vendors in Manhattan’s East Harlem and elsewhere. He would shake them down for payoffs and those who didn’t comply found themselves the object of a good beating while their pushcarts were trashed. Rastelli had a more intricate form of extortion. Beginning in 1966 he founded the Workmen’s Mobile Lunch Association. Among the benefits offered the food vendors who operated the lunch wagons was the guarantee of a daily route with no competition. Business could be so good that even some of the association officers took over routes.
Rastelli kept some routes in reserve and doled them out as favors for friends. Of course, there was a catch for such a guarantee of livelihood. The vendors had to pay $10 to $15 a week—not an insignificant sum in the 1960s—for membership (protection) to Rastelli’s association. But it was the wholesale suppliers of the lunch wagons who were really cash cows. They had to pay off Rastelli’s crowd as well, sometimes over $900 a month, for the privilege of supplying sandwiches and drinks to the lunch wagons. If those payments weren’t made, the suppliers would see their lunch wagon customers dry up. It was classic racketeering activity, maybe not the most flashy stuff around but it suited Rastelli well.
When the great Banana War sputtered to a close in 1968 and Joseph Bonanno and his family decamped for Arizona, Joseph Massino was a strapping twenty-five-year-old man with a wife—he had married Josephine in 1960—and young daughter. For work he ran a lunch wagon, taking a cue from his mother’s side of the family, which began outfitting the trucks to carry snacks to factories. Since he lived in Maspeth, Massino didn’t have far to travel to service the factories that lined Grand and Metropolitan avenues. “Joe Maspeth” was how the lunch wagon crowd knew him. Friends remember that it was a struggle at first. Massino was strapped for cash and in the wintertime he took to standing around Grand and Metropolitan avenues selling Christmas trees to earn a few more dollars. He even had to borrow a few hundred dollars from relatives to pay the medical bills for the birth of his first child. But Rastelli liked him and that counted for something.
The lunch wagon business might have been a racket, seeing how Rastelli controlled things, but for his friends like Massino things worked out. The lunch business could be a living and for a thrifty husband and father like Massino the work was enough to get by. In 1966, records show that Joseph and Josephine Massino took out their first mortgage for $16,000 at 5.5 percent interest from the Greenpoint Savings Bank to purchase a house on Caldwell Avenue in Maspeth, just a few doors down from where his parents lived at number 71–21 Caldwell. Joseph and Josephine Massino, who had been living a few blocks away in a two-story frame house on Perry Avenue just off the Long Island Expressway,