King of the Godfathers:. Anthony M. DeStefano
and command. He was the sole power in his crime family, unchallenged by any upstarts or intrigue.
CHAPTER 3
The Toughest Kid on the Block
Traveling east along Metropolitan Avenue from Williamsburg where Joseph Bonanno got his start as a criminal, you will soon cross into the area of New York City known as Maspeth. The origin of the neighborhood’s name is obscured within some mix of the old Dutch and Indian languages. It was once a swampy area, the Indian name meaning “the place of bad waters.” In the nineteenth century, it contained large trout ponds that were drained over a century ago. Today, the largest body of water in Maspeth is the Newtown Creek, an estuary officials have been gamely trying to clean up for years.
When western parts of what is today known as Queens became accessible by the railroad and ferries in the nineteenth century, industry grew and Maspeth saw a large influx of working families. Factories sprung up where workers spun hemp into rope and processed fertilizer and flooring. The neighborhood became another magnet for immigrants. The cheap housing and residential character of the place drew Italian, Irish, and Polish immigrants. Well into the twenty-first century Maspeth was one of the main residential areas for firefighters, sanitation workers, laborers, and truck drivers who traced their ancestry back to Italy.
It was immediately after World War II that an Italian immigrant family with the surname of Vitale took up residence close to Maspeth. Giuseppe and Lilli Vitale had emigrated from the village of San Giuseppe, some forty miles south of Palermo in the western part of Sicily. Life in the old country had not been easy, particularly when faced with the infant mortality rates that Sicilian families experienced. Like most Sicilian households, the Vitale family had hoped for a son. They already had a name. The boy would be called Giuseppe or “Joseph” in English.
Male offspring were favored by parents since they could guarantee the family name would be passed on. But the Vitale family was not going to be blessed with a son, certainly not while living in the hardscrabble hills of the Sicilian countryside. Two baby boys died, either in childbirth or shortly after. Twice the Vitale parents had to bury the tiny bodies as their three daughters watched.
In Maspeth, the Vitale family lived in the kind of working obscurity that immigrants found as their niche. They weren’t rich but they had by all accounts a quiet, nurturing home life where the three daughters—Anna, Betty, and the youngest Josephine—thrived. Giuseppe, also known as Joseph, and Lilli Vitale took one more chance at having a son. Seemingly cursed with bad luck with sons named Giuseppe, the parents decided that if another male child came into their lives he would be named something different. On September 22, 1947, Lilli Vitale gave birth to a son, and he was baptized as Salvatore. He survived. The family had great hopes for him.
Both employed, Giuseppe and Lilli spent a great deal of time out of their house and entrusted the care of Salvatore to their daughters. Josephine was four years older than her baby brother but even at such a young age, with her parents spending so much time out of the house making a living, she became a surrogate mother.
The Vitale girls fussed over Salvatore in ways that were certain to spoil him. He got what he wanted when he wanted it, usually from Josephine. Yet, family members would later remember that despite all the doting from his siblings, Salvatore Vitale did not respond in kind to his sisters. Sure, he may have been spoiled, but he seemed to lack affection, his relatives would later recall. He didn’t do anything terribly wrong as a child. But while the Vitale women centered their lives around the home, Salvatore seemed distant and cold. He should have been another girl, his father would say of his only son, according to one family member.
Maspeth is bisected by the Long Island Expressway, the concrete ribbon of a roadway that became over the years the crowded conduit for much of the traffic going to and from New York City. The part of Maspeth north of the expressway—where the Vitale family would buy a house on Sixty-eighth Street near Grand Avenue—retained its residential character. The same was largely true of the southern part of the community, although residential development was hemmed in by large cemeteries.
It was a few blocks from the main shopping boulevard of Grand Avenue in Maspeth that another working-class family took up residence. Like the Vitales who lived about five blocks away, Anthony and Adeline Massino were Italian Americans. But while the Massinos traced their heritage to the city of Naples and its environs, they were second-generation Americans born and raised in the United States. They had three children, Joseph, John, and Anthony. Their father worked in a neighborhood grocery store.
Joseph Massino was a boy comfortable on the streets. Big boned, trim, and muscular, he was athletic but not very good in school. Friends would later recall he became very adept in math. In a working-class neighborhood where as a kid you had to hold your own to make your mark, he earned a reputation of being one of the toughest on the block. He could kick ass with the best of them.
Joseph Massino only got to the seventh grade in what is now Intermediate School 73 on Fifty-fourth Avenue. Bored with school, Massino took a variety of jobs, including as a summer lifeguard at beach clubs in Atlantic Beach on Long Island and in Florida. In something of a Maspeth legend, which Massino himself would insist was true, he supposedly once swam from Breezy Point in the Rockaways to Manhattan Beach, a distance of over one mile. Stories also circulated that he would jump off the Cross Bay Bridge, which connected the Rockaways to the mainland, and swim for hours.
With a reputation for being a tough guy and with a full head of wavy black hair, Massino’s rugged looks caught the eye of neighborhood girl Josephine Vitale, who was seven months younger. She had been voted the best looking in her eighth grade class. The year was 1956.
Around the time Joseph Massino and Josephine Vitale were getting acquainted in working-class Maspeth, the American Mafia was on the verge of some big changes. Bonanno was shuttling back and forth between Tucson, Arizona, and New York. He made one side trip to Havana, Cuba, which in those days was a playground for the rich and infamous. As he recounted the Havana trip in his autobiography, Bonanno hooked up with the financial mob wizard Meyer Lansky, who owned a piece of the Hotel Nacional, and spent his days wandering the streets of old Havana, where he stayed in some flophouse hotel in 1924.
The way Joseph Bonanno recounted the Havana trip it was nothing more than a nostalgic trip away from home of some “Ulysses,” as he likened himself, who had his fill of adventure in life. His son, Bill, in his 1999 autobiography, put a different spin on the Havana trip on which he accompanied his father. Bill Bonanno said that his father met up with not only Lansky but also New York Mafia bosses Albert Anastasia, Frank Costello, and Joseph Profaci. “We were there for pleasure, not business, but business came up,” the younger Bonanno said. Cuba’s dictator Fulgencio Batista met with the mobsters and tried to get them to somehow influence the Eisenhower administration to take a more active role against the insurgency led by Fidel Castro. According to Bill Bonanno, Castro figured the mafiosi had an interest in the island’s drug trade, aside from the millions made in the casinos.
The conventional wisdom about the American Mafia’s stance on drugs has been that the bosses were against narcotics trafficking. But if it was a hands-off policy, it was riddled with holes like Swiss cheese. Bill Bonanno asserted that in 1947 in a clandestine Mafia Commission meeting on a yacht off Florida—and not in Havana as widely believed—the bosses argued about drugs. According to Bonanno, the “liberal” faction of the Commission, composed of Vito Genovese and Thomas Lucchese, wanted to get involved in heroin. The conservatives, led by Joseph Bonanno, thought it was a bad idea and prevailed on the Commission to pass a resolution prohibiting narcotics trafficking. The elder Bonanno, his son stated, believed drugs would destroy the families.
Despite such prohibitions, a number of New York Mafia leaders began to push harder and allowed some of their men to get involved in narcotics. The same divisiveness over drugs also split the Sicilian Mafia. When Joseph Bonanno made a trip to Sicily in early fall of 1957—again part pleasure and part business—he learned that New York Mafia families were involved in the trafficking of heroin and its opium base, according to his son. Impossible, the elder Bonanno responded when told of the New York connection. “They are up to their asses in it,” an old friend explained. “They couldn’t care less about our