King of the Godfathers:. Anthony M. DeStefano
nine years and was released in 1939.
Galante, who became known by the moniker “Lilo” for the cigars he smoked, stayed with the Bonanno clan and rose fairly high up in the hierarchy. Police considered him a key suspect in the 1943 assassination of Italian antifascist writer Carlos Tresca. By the end of World War II Galante was an underboss. Though at the time he was not a household name among famous gangsters, Galante’s mob stature and importance in the crime family was shown by his attendance at a 1957 meeting of top mafiosi in Palermo, Sicily. The meeting was also attended by Joseph Bonanno, another family underboss named Frank Garafola, an exiled Lucky Luciano, as well as Sicilian leaders Gaetano Badalementi and Tomasso Bucetta. The latter two would come to some prominence later in heroin dealing.
The exact nature of the meeting has never been determined by officials, although Bonanno said in his autobiography that it had to do with trying to get the Sicilians to think corporate and to set up an American-style commission to govern their activities. That never happened. But it appears that during this Sicily conclave Galante developed deeper ties to his amici in the ancestral land. It wasn’t long before a number of Sicilian mobsters, young men known as “Zips,” a term believed to be referring to the speed at which they talked in their Sicilian dialect, immigrated to the United States and gravitated to the area around Knickerbocker Avenue in Brooklyn. They would prove to be a source of power and support for Galante later—as well as a cause in his eventual downfall.
But before Galante had time to begin exploiting his relationship with the Sicilians, he was caught up in a major heroin bust in 1959. It was a major investigation that nabbed not only Galante but also John Ormento of the Lucchese family and Vito Genovese. Their undoing was due to the bitterness of Nelson Cantellops, a Puerto Rican drug dealer in Manhattan who had been arrested for selling drugs and became an informant to get out from under a possible five-year prison term. Cantellops’s information proved accurate and showed how brazen top echelon mobsters had become in handling narcotics and how ignored the supposed Mafia edict against drug dealing had become.
Galante, like Ormento and Genovese, was convicted. Just at the point when he could have been developing a substantial power base and easily surpassed Rastelli, Galante was sent away to spend a twenty-year sentence in a federal penitentiary. When he was paroled in 1974, Galante immediately began trying to consolidate his power. In one signature event that is now firmly part of New York Mafia lore, Galante supposedly had the door to Frank Costello’s tomb blown open with a bomb as a way of signaling his own return from prison.
But Galante didn’t have to try anything more drastic with Rastelli or with Massino for that matter. After a two-week trial in the Brooklyn federal court, Rastelli was convicted in April 1976 of extortion and restraint of trade. Already serving time for the Suffolk gambling case, Rastelli learned that as soon as he was to be released from state prison he would be the guest of the federal government for another five to ten years in custody for being the Maspeth lunch wagon robber baron. His release date was to be in 1983. But in Mafia power struggles things are never clear-cut and even prison will not stop the politics of mob bosses. So Galante and Rastelli became locked in their own deadly game for the leadership of the family. It was a battle that would take nearly three years to play out and in which Massino would play a significant role.
CHAPTER 5
A Piece of Work
The problem with Mafia bosses is that they get an inflated sense of self-importance. Paul Castellano, the greedy boss of the Gambino crime family, was a case in point. He thought of himself as if he were the president of the United States, which is what he once told his Colombian house maid when he wasn’t trying to impress her with his virility, something that came late in his life with the help of a penile implant.
Castellano also couldn’t take a joke and that could prove deadly. One of his daughter’s boyfriends found out about that the hard way. Joseph Massino, it seems, had a hand in that.
Castellano’s legitimate businesses were in the meat and poultry industry. As a young man, Castellano had a full head of dark wavy hair and in his old police mug shots he actually looked handsome, despite his thick, pronounced nose. As Castellano aged, he lost a lot of his hair and what was left around the sides turned gray. His nose took on more of a prominence, and in 1975 he looked a bit like another poultry expert, Frank Perdue. With an aggressive television advertising campaign and a distinct, high-pitched whiney voice, Perdue became one of Madison Avenue’s darlings. His Perdue chicken ads drew instant recognition. Vito Borelli, a boyfriend of Castellano’s daughter, Connie, took a look at Perdue’s face in an ad and thought he noticed a similarity.
“He looks like Frank Perdue,” Borelli said of Castellano, who at the time was waiting for a sickly Carlo Gambino to die so he could take over the crime family.
That comment was not a good thing to say, especially when the remark got back to Castellano. A person of normal sensitivities would have laughed off the comment or even viewed it as a compliment. But Castellano took offense and according to police turned not only to his boys in the Gambino family but also to Joseph Massino to teach Borelli a lesson.
Over the years, Massino had become close to a number of up and coming stars in the Gambino family. That he also got to know Castellano is a clear indication that Massino was himself a rising power in his own right. It was those Gambino ties that appear to have led Massino at the age of thirty-two to carry out his first “piece of work”: a murder. The victim was the loose-lipped Vito Borelli.
Unlike some of the fabled mob assassinations where a victim is spectacularly gunned down on the street or in public, many Mafia homicides are handled like secret production lines with clear divisions of labor. Somebody will arrange transportation. Another will procure a murder weapon. Yet a third person might arrange to clean up the crime scene while more people may help dispose of the body. Of course, there are always those who will entice or inveigle the victim to show up at the place where he will lose his life.
In mid-1975, investigators learned, Massino turned to his trusted brother-in-law Salvatore Vitale and the fair-haired Duane Leisenheimer for help. Vitale was told by Massino to pick up a stolen car from Leisenheimer and bring it to—of all places—a cookie storage facility in Manhattan. The keys of the van, which Vitale had parked outside the storage location, were left under the seat.
The night of the killing, an exasperated Massino called Vitale to complain that the van wouldn’t start. So Vitale drove his own car back into Manhattan and pulled up to the storage location. He saw that Massino was there in some very good company. Outside the building were John Gotti, then a young soldier in the Gambino family, his friend Angelo Ruggiero, another Gambino associate, and Frank DeCicco. Vitale also recognized Dominick “Sonny Black” Napolitano, a powerful Bonanno crime family captain. A killer who also liked to raise racing pigeons, Napolitano was one of Rastelli’s allies and as such could count on Massino for help.
According to a law enforcement intelligence report, once outside the Manhattan location, Vitale was told to back up his vehicle and what appeared to be a body wrapped in a tan drop cloth was placed in the trunk. Then, Ruggiero and DeCicco got into Vitale’s car and told him to drive to a garage. When asked later about the incident by the FBI, Vitale couldn’t recall exactly where the garage was. He thought it might have been in Ozone Park. But what he did remember was that when the body was taken out of the trunk he saw it was Vito Borelli, with his head and body showing signs of repeated gunshot wounds. The corpse was clad only in its underwear.
Vitale later recalled that he didn’t see what happened to the body. Whatever transpired with poor Vito Borelli’s remains was likely nothing sacred since Vitale would also remember seeing another Gambino associate, Roy Demeo, at the garage. Demeo’s forte was that of butcher and he seemed to relish the dismemberment of bodies. Demeo did it all over the city and sometimes got so frenzied in the disembowelments that ears of his victims would fly off, only to be retrieved later by dogs who happened upon the crime scene. It was his special line of work. Borelli’s body was never found.
Vitale dropped off Ruggiero and DeCicco at Gotti’s infamous Bergin Hunt & Fish Club in Ozone Park. That was a misnomer since the girth of club patrons like Ruggiero and DeCicco showed they did very little