King of the Godfathers:. Anthony M. DeStefano
were planning for more children. The payments for what appears to be Massino’s first tangible stake in the American dream of home ownership amounted to $98.26 a month.
Anyone connected to Philip Rastelli and his brothers, Carmine and Marty, had an easy entrée to mob life. Philip Rastelli wasn’t flashy, but his rackets were solid. Massino was close to Rastelli’s brother Carmine, who ran a depot where the lunch wagons filled up with supplies, so he was guaranteed good deals and fresh pastries. Massino’s spot for his coffee stand was on Remsen Place in Maspeth, right around the corner from the house on Perry Street and just a short walk from his new house on Caldwell Avenue. The lunch wagon Massino had was dubbed the “roach coach,” which may or may not have reflected the level of hygiene practiced in the food trade. Gradually, through the Rastelli connection, Joseph Massino, the beefy food vendor who also earned the nickname “Joe Wagons,” became intertwined with the Bonanno crime family. It would prove to be an auspicious time for Massino to build such ties.
The war for leadership of what had been the crime family of Joseph Bonanno had led to a confusing situation to say the least. By the spring of 1967, law enforcement officials in the United States and Canada believed from their surveillance reports and other investigations that Bonanno had maneuvered a comeback of sorts because of the weakness exhibited by the leadership of Gaspar DiGregorio, the man who was backed by Stefano Maggadino for the role of boss when Bonanno disappeared. But even a top NYPD inspector in charge of intelligence had to admit that in the end investigators were groping to understand what was going on in the crime family.
DiGregorio’s abdication after he suffered a heart attack only months after he was chosen as boss led the way to power plays by Bill Bonanno, which had resulted in the Troutman Street shootout and the open warfare that followed. But by late 1968, police perceived a different situation in the Bonanno family, one in which Joseph Bonanno accepted Paul Sciacca as the new boss and had agreed to move permanently with his family to Arizona. MAFIA LEADERS SETTLE “BANANA WAR” was the headline of a November 24, 1968, New York Times story about the development.
Police-organized crime investigators, like Kremlinologists of the cold war period who studied the Soviet Union, looked to social circumstances and public appearances to divine what was taking place behind the scenes in the Mafia. In terms of the Bonanno family, it was a September 14, 1968, wedding on Long Island that led police to believe that the crime family war had been settled. As police told the Times, Bonanno loyalists and Sciacca supporters who had been on hostile terms were “disported together convivially” at the wedding reception of Sciacca’s son, Anthony, to Florence Rando, a niece of Frank Mari.
The Sciacca-Rando wedding wasn’t the nuptial of the century, but it drew a lot of attention from law enforcement because such celebrations are places where mobsters want to be seen and do business. The guest lists for such functions are studied because they provide clues to who is in and who is out in the mob hierarchy. In this case, there were 200 guests who attended a reception at the Woodbury Country Club and detectives filled nine pages of notes with their jottings of the various car license plates.
There is no evidence that Joseph Massino, who at that stage in his life was nothing more than an associate in the crime family, attended this particular wedding. But his mentor Rastelli was spotted by police at the reception and his presence signaled that those who had once been loyal to Joseph Bonanno and his son had buried the hatchet with the Sciacca faction. Rastelli was clearly safe and in his role as captain had not lost any stature. A peace of sorts had blossomed.
However, Sciacca suffered from a bad heart. So he wanted to stop his involvement with the crime family and was in the process of grooming Mari to become his successor. A triggerman and reputed dope dealer, Mari was elected family boss during a sitdown in a restaurant in Manhattan in May 1969. His reign was short. In September 1969, Mari, his bodyguard James Episcopia, and Sciacca loyalist Michael Adamo disappeared. There bodies were never found. Police suspected Mari had been killed as payback for having a role in the murder of Joseph Bonanno’s bodyguard Sam Perrone a year earlier. Another theory was that some mobsters simply resented the way Mari was pushed forward, particularly since he hadn’t distinguished himself.
The Bonanno family could have lurched into another period of disarray, but the Commission took the unusual step after Mari’s disappearance of appointing a triumvirate to rule the family, at least temporarily. The three leaders who were to work as a team were Natale Evola, who had weathered a narcotics conviction to maintain his power in the garment trucking industry, an obscure crime captain named Joseph DiFilippi, and the none-too-flashy Philip Rastelli.
As a member of the crime family’s governing committee, Rastelli’s stature within the mob had grown and those like Massino who had hitched themselves to him began to see their lives tightly intertwined with his fortunes. It would take years for the importance of this connection between Massino and Rastelli to become apparent. Much of what would later happen to Massino could be traced to Rastelli’s influence. Theirs was a mentoring relationship and the ties that developed would endure for a lifetime.
It was also in 1970 that a Brooklyn kid with straw blond hair and a Germanic name started hanging around Massino’s Remsen Place coffee trucks. The youngster with the pale complexion stood out among the darker Italians in the neighborhood. He was barely a teenager when he met the twenty-something Massino, but their relationship would take its own fortuitous turn. Duane Leisenheimer, whose fair hair earned him the nickname “Goldie,” was really up to no good and going nowhere when he met Massino. A student at Brooklyn’s Automotive High School on Bedford Avenue in Williamsburg, Leisenheimer was on his way to becoming an auto mechanic but could only make it through his sophomore year before dropping out. Still, he liked cars and noticed that Massino’s Oldsmobile had cracked windows, which was odd since an auto glass business where the youngster worked was around the corner from Massino’s coffee stand.
Leisenheimer liked cars so much he started stealing them. He said he was sixteen years old when he stole his first vehicle and started doing some work in a local chop shop. For those unfamiliar with the term chop shop, it is a place where stolen cars are stripped for parts that can then be resold at double or even triple the value of the complete vehicle. Leisenheimer made $150 for each stolen car. In no time, he was stealing them at the rate of fifteen vehicles a week—not bad money for a high school dropout. But it could be bad for the neighborhood to have a budding car thief hanging around, so Massino told Leisenheimer not to steal cars from the area or park them around the stand.
“I don’t want your heat,” Massino told him.
Massino also didn’t want his own heat, his own troubles, to burn the youngster. Of course, Massino had plenty of heat to worry about. Though he had a nice business with the coffee and sandwich stands he acquired, he sold more than food out of the lunch truck. The neighborhood workers who came for a bite to eat were also able to play the numbers with Massino, who used the trucks as a small gambling location. For them it was the poor man’s lottery. He undoubtedly was kicking up some of the proceeds to Rastelli.
Massino had another side job that was a natural for Maspeth. The area around Grand and Metropolitan avenues was riddled with factories, warehouses, and trucking depots. It was New York City’s loading dock. Trucks were all over the place and they were laden with consumer goods that everybody wanted and would pay good money for. Apparently, with Rastelli’s blessing Massino started hijacking trucks and needed help. He asked around about the young car thief in the neighborhood.
“He is a stand-up guy,” said one of the local toughs about Leisenheimer. In plain English that meant the kid from Brooklyn wouldn’t rat anybody out.
It was all Massino needed to hear. So even though he couldn’t steal cars from the neighborhood, Duane Leisenheimer could be a hijacker, courtesy of Joe Massino and Philip Rastelli. In just one night the car kid from Brooklyn could make up to $2,000 helping Massino move truckloads of stolen television sets, men’s suits, Huckapoo shirts, and Farberware. That was more money than Leisenheimer might make in a week of stealing cars. Maspeth was turning into a nice place for the Brooklyn high school dropout.
Leisenheimer wasn’t the only young man who gravitated to Massino. Salvatore Vitale, the younger brother of Massino’s wife, Josephine, had bonded at an early age to