King of the Godfathers:. Anthony M. DeStefano
a few days after the murder that the victim was indeed Borelli. His offense had been the Frank Perdue joke that Castellano saw as an insult.
The Borelli murder and the body disposal indicated to Massino that his brother-in-law could be trusted to carry out an assignment for the mob with no questions asked. Vitale was basically a catering truck driver for Massino, but his childhood friend was connected to a world that was wild, dangerous, and exciting. He knew Massino was living a double life: as a married father with a stable business and as a Mafia associate on the rise. It was hard for Vitale to walk away from that, not only because Massino was married to his sister, Josephine, but also because his friend was the closest male companion he ever had growing up in a household filled with older women.
The Borelli killing also showed that Massino had made his bones—he killed for the mob when asked. The timing couldn’t have been better because around the time Borelli was killed the ranks of the Mafia were opening up for new members. The bosses opened up their books around 1976 to 1977 and Massino was put up for membership in the Bonanno family and made it in easily. He wasn’t just big Joe Maspeth anymore, the guy you would see in the lunch wagon to play the numbers or score some hijacked goods. Now, as police learned, Massino was a full-blown wise guy, and if Rastelli or anybody else introduced him around, they would say he was “a friend of ours,” which was a coded expression to mean he was a true-blue gangster.
From his Maspeth base, Massino developed a number of rackets. The more he did on the street, the more people Massino met. He developed ties not only to the Gambino family but also to the Colombo group through Carmine Franzese, a soldier known as “Tootie.” One of Massino’s sidelines was in the trafficking of untaxed cigarettes, always a hot commodity. Federal and state taxes could drive up the price of a carton of cigarettes by as much as 30 percent, and this was before the smoking industry was hit with the affects of the 1990s’ antismoking litigation.
Massino’s partner in the untaxed cigarette business was an associate of the Colombo crime family known as Joseph “Doo Doo” Pastore. The product was smuggled in from South Carolina without any tax stamps and when he wasn’t working that racket Pastore would hang around Massino’s deli on Fifty-eighth Avenue, which opened in the 1970s, sampling the coffee and cakes. Massino owned the small building—real estate was not overpriced in that area of Queens—and sometimes he would use the upstairs apartment for business with Pastore, who was generally flush with cash. The street was a crease in the city, a small byway barely 100 yards long that was easily overlooked by motorists passing by on the larger avenues. Any strange cars on the block would be easily noticed, although that didn’t stop the FBI from eventually setting up a surveillance post a mere twenty or thirty yards away from the shop’s front door.
The FBI was in the area a lot because Maspeth was a haven for hijackers and the bureau’s truck squad got to know the main traffickers in stolen property. Pastore was known to the agents as an “action guy,” a man who would take a truck any way he could and bring it back to the alleyways of this industrial part of Queens, where the reputed middlemen like Massino could move the goods to buyers or find a warehouse. By the early 1970s, Pastore was known to the FBI hijack experts to a greater extent than Massino. In June 1972, Pastore was arrested with two other men on charges he possessed a load of stolen trucking cargo. But the case against Pastore was slim and in February 1973 the government asked that the indictment against him be dismissed.
Massino, apparently reluctant to ask directly for a financial favor from his cigarette partner, had Vitale borrow several thousand dollars from him instead. The money Vitale borrowed in the spring of 1976 from Pastore, about $9,000, was never paid back. It was never paid because Pastore was simply no longer around to collect. While the precise reason is unclear, investigators learned that Massino had become disenchanted with his old cigarette smuggling and hijacking friend and decided to end their partnership in a less than amicable parting. It is possible, seeing that the FBI had focused on Pastore, that Massino feared that his business relationship might make him vulnerable to becoming an informant. Whatever the reasons, Massino turned to Vitale, who had already proved himself in the Borelli murder.
Like many wiseguys, Pastore was a habitué of strip clubs—“Go-Go” bars as they were known at that time. At one club on Forty-forth Street in Manhattan he met a young woman named Gloria Jean Young. An aspiring singer, Young had gravitated to the city in the hopes of advancing her career but instead began working as a Go-Go dancer. The night she met Pastore things began to happen fast. As she later told investigators, she spent the night with him at the Plaza Suite Hotel and from then on Pastore was a constant factor in her life. She explained that the mob-connected smuggler put Young up in an apartment, furnished it, and paid her rent.
But in mid-May 1976, Young remembered, things changed drastically. She drove with Pastore to a brownstone house somewhere in Queens and waited in the car while he went inside. After about ten or fifteen minutes, Pastore exited the building and returned to the car. He looked frightened.
“He didn’t feel very well and he felt bad and said something was coming down,” Young later recalled in court testimony. The young dancer said the incident also left her rattled and afraid for her own safety, so she decided to leave Pastore and the life they had together. The next day a girlfriend drove Young to the airport and she left town, never to see Pastore again.
Whatever had unsettled Pastore was a bad omen. Vitale later told investigators that he had barely a day’s notice that Carmine Franzese was going to “take care” of Pastore in the apartment above Massino’s deli on Fifty-eighth Road. Vitale was told to complete his regular rounds selling coffee and donuts from one of Massino’s mobile lunch wagons and then return to the deli.
Dutiful as ever, Vitale drove back to the deli the next day after the workday and met Massino. It was done, Massino told his brother-in-law, who then climbed the flight of stairs to the empty apartment. There was blood all over the floor of the little kitchen and the cabinets. Even the refrigerator had some spatter inside. However, there was no body in sight since it had already been moved to a dumpster a few blocks away on Rust Street. Picking up some towels that had been left in the apartment, Vitale later told the FBI he used them to soak up the blood and wipe down the cabinets. When finished, he took the blood-soaked towels, put them in a bag, walked around the corner to another dumpster, and tossed them all away. Good job, Vitale remembered Massino telling him.
It was on June 1, 1976, outside 58–77 Fifty-seventh Avenue in Maspeth, literally around the corner from Massino’s social club and deli, that Pastore’s body was found. Massino told police he had last seen his old friend on May 19. Since he said he was a family friend, Massino went with Pastore’s half-brother, Richard Dorme, to identify the decomposed body. Dormer threw up in the morgue after the body was shown.
Massino would always deny he had any role in the killings of Pastore and Borelli, although Vitale would insist his brother-in-law told him he fired two shots into Pastore’s face. So in less than a year, Vitale had graduated from Massino’s trusted gofer, by his own admission to investigators, to an accomplice in two homicides. Since the Pastore killing seemed to have been a strictly personal situation, it is doubtful Massino improved his standing with the crime family in having it arranged. But the Borelli killing was another matter since it ingratiated Massino with Castellano, the rising power and soon-to-be boss of the Gambino family, and it showed to both the Bonanno and Gambino clans that Joe Maspeth was a man who could do a piece of work. With Rastelli in prison and the Bonanno family in a state of tension over its leadership, it was not a bad time for Massino to develop alliances and to earn his stripes as a crime family member. But there is a point where gangsters, no matter how careful, get into trouble and Massino was no exception.
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