King of the Godfathers:. Anthony M. DeStefano
his senior. In 1968, Vitale ended a short tour of duty in the army as a paratrooper. He tried going straight and spent two years serving as what he would later say was a job as a “narcotics correction officer,” which was ironic considering the involvement over the years of some of the Bonanno family in narcotics. When he left that job, Vitale approached Massino for work. There was plenty to do with the hijacking business, as well as with part-time work as a burglar, and Vitale was a willing recruit for both types of work.
“If you are going to do scores, do them with me,” Vitale remembered Massino telling him. It would lead him into another world of big-time break-ins, hijacks, and fur district rip-offs in Manhattan. The commodities stolen ranged from coffee to air conditioners to tennis rackets. Sometimes Vitale and Massino would become very daring and inventive. In one episode later recounted to investigators, Vitale remembered how he rented a storage vault under a fake name in Manhattan’s fur district just south of Thirty-fourth Street. During summer nights in August, Vitale said, he would get the locks off other storage vaults, remove furs, and store them in his locker. Another time, he, Massino, and a Colombo crime family member made about $34,000 in the theft of watches from a store in Livingston, New Jersey. For that job, Vitale said, they cut some telephone lines.
Inevitably, Rastelli, by virtue of his leadership role, was a high-profile target for law enforcement, and he made it easy for the cops. In July 1970, Rastelli was indicted by a Suffolk County grand jury. The secret panel met in such secrecy and with such concern for witnesses that the windows of the district attorney’s office were covered with paper and some of the hallways were closed to the public and patrolled by armed guards. Rastelli was among five men charged with usury. The indictment stated that Rastelli’s loan sharks charged interest up to 300 percent a year (25 percent was the legal limit) and terrorized nearly two dozen customers. One customer was a local Suffolk County bail bondsman who got so far into debt that he was forced to bring in extra customers to Rastelli and his crew.
Rastelli was convicted in December 1972 on loan-sharking charges and was sentenced to prison. His incarceration deprived the crime family of one part of the leadership troika, but Rastelli was still able to participate and get information through the visits of his brothers, Carmine and Marty, as well as through associates like Massino. This kept Rastelli in the loop at a time when—unbeknown to many—Natale Evola was in serious trouble.
In 1972, federal officials began a series of ambitious undercover operations in Manhattan’s garment district. Long a stronghold for the Mafia, the garment area surrounding Seventh Avenue was honeycombed with factories, cutting rooms, showrooms, and innumerable small businesses that supplied the clothing companies with everything from bolts of cloth to zippers. The mob had gained its influence over the industry through labor racketeering in which the unions used the services of mob toughs to go along with the union demands. On the other side, employers used Mafia associates to help set up shadow companies and operations that were nonunion to avoid paying workers contract wages and benefits.
Garment manufacturers also worked on extremely tight profit margins and had to be able to change their production operations to meet the shifting fashion styles and the sudden rush of orders from department stores. It was a tough business and when banks and factors (companies that lend money against a firm’s accounts receivables) were reluctant to come up with cash, Seventh Avenue executives turned to Mafia loan sharks for quick infusions of financial help. Never mind that interest rates could go over 300 percent a year. Manufacturers hoped that the orders they would be able to fill after getting mob financial help would bring in enough quick payment from retailers to have the mob debts paid off quickly. Sometimes it worked. Other times a financially stressed manufacturer had to take on the mob as a silent partner.
The trucking companies were vital to the industry because cut goods, the separate pieces that made each item of apparel, had to be shipped to contracting firms where the clothing was actually assembled. Once that was done, the finished goods had to be sent back to the manufacturer for shipment to warehouses and retailers. It was all done by trucks and it was the truckers who provided the lifeline for so much of the industry. As such, truckers like Evola had inordinate power over the garment industry because they could create transport bottlenecks through which everything passed.
Garment truckers policed themselves with a “marriage” system. As far back as any one could remember, the truckers had a cartel-like arrangement in which no one stole accounts. Sometimes separate buildings, and all the dress manufacturing firms within, were considered the territory of one trucker. The manufacturers were essentially “married” to a certain trucker. There was no “divorce” from the relationship unless the manufacturer went out of business for six months. If the trucking company closed, the manufacturer’s account was taken over by another hauler.
Evola was not the only Mafia boss involved in the garment trucking industry, but as a caretaker of the Bonanno family he was certainly the most prominent. To target the coercive marriage system among truckers and other crimes in the garment district, federal prosecutors in 1973 established two undercover companies in Manhattan: a mom-and-pop trucking firm and a coat manufacturing company. The coat company, known as the Whellan Coat Company, employed as its chief executive a veteran garment district executive who was able to lead investigators to Evola and his cronies.
The plan was to see if Evola would try to coerce the new company into using certain trucking companies. There were some tantalizing leads, particularly when one of Evola’s cronies, an elderly Austrian immigrant named Max Meyer, indicated to an undercover agent that there was indeed a trucking cartel. But as soon as the undercover operatives visited Evola at his trucking depot on West Thirty-eight Street in Manhattan they noticed he was walking with the assistance of a cane and walker. As the weeks went by, he appeared in the office less and less. The old Bonanno boss was ailing with cancer and the investigative game plan, which also called for the undercover agents to get a meeting on garment district business with Rastelli, had to be revised. Evola died on August 28, 1973, and investigators were never able to implicate him in any coercion.
Evola’s death left Rastelli as one of the powers in the Bonanno family. DiFilippi, the other part of the ruling triumvirate, did not have the stature or support to challenge Rastelli. Had he been able to stay out of trouble, Rastelli might have been able to cement his leadership with the passing of Evola and build his own dynasty, avoiding some of the strife that would follow. But while he was able to play the deadly Machiavellian game of mob politics, Rastelli had not been very astute about the cops. For much of his adult life Rastelli had been in prison and in 1974 the prospect of his seeing freedom continued to recede. The problem was the lunch truck business.
By 1974, Rastelli’s coercive racket with the lunch trucks caught the attention of federal investigators in Brooklyn. Although the Workman’s Mobile Lunch Association aspired to get its forty-eight charter members benefits like group insurance and discounts on truck repairs, nothing like that happened. Instead, with Rastelli operating in the background, the association was engaged in a classic shakedown. Suppliers of the lunch wagons were pressured for kickbacks amounting to a percentage of the dollar value of the items sold to the mobile canteens. Truck owners who were in the unfortunate circumstance of not being part of Rastelli’s association were persuaded by “implicit threats of violence,” as one federal court stated, to stop coming around to certain lucrative locations.
Rastelli was indicted in March 1975 on charges that he directed a protection racket in the lunch wagon industry. The bad luck rubbed off on Massino. All the hijacking around Maspeth had also caught the attention of federal investigators who gathered evidence that the lunch wagon vendor was trafficking in goods stolen from interstate commerce. The bad luck that hit Rastelli and Massino in 1975 came at time when the Bonanno crime family was entering another period of flux and instability. While it was true that Rastelli was considered by the Commission to be a major power in the crime family, that didn’t mean he had no rivals.
Carmine Galante, like Rastelli, might as well have been born on probation for the way his life had been going. A native-born American who grew up in East Harlem, Galante got into a life of crime at an early age. He was eleven when he got his first rap for robbery and at the age of twenty he had become enmeshed with the Castellammarese crowd of Bonanno in the Williamsburg area of Brooklyn. A fight with a policeman during a truck hijacking led to Galante