Best American Crime Writing 2006 - Mark Bowden [18]
Joe Massino always was a very good swimmer. He could swim from Coney Island all the way across a wide inlet to Breezy Point, on the ocean. He taught his wife’s brother, Good-Looking Sal, how to swim. This is a very big thing; you teach a kid to swim so he never drowns. Joe Massino could do that. He taught all the strokes to Good-Looking Sal. A lot of good that did.
During the trial, from out of the past, from Jimmy Weston’s on Fifty-fourth Street and P.J. Clarke’s on Fifty-fifth, from Pep McGuire’s on Queens Boulevard, from his scungilli restaurant on Second Avenue, came Tony Café, who is called that because he was always in saloons. He arrived at my building one night with a handwritten open letter from Joe Massino’s daughter. She pointed out that Massino had been in prison and Good-Looking Sal Vitale had been running the Bonanno family when many of the murders were committed. While this was true, she was not able to cover all the murders. But she did try.
“I don’t know why the government is so mad at Joe,” Tony Café said. “He’s a nice fat guy, likes food.”
AT THIS TIME TONY WAS A BLESSED UNKNOWN, but that would change.
Tony Café’s previous experience was to make the mistake of rolling through the nights twenty-five years ago with the whole Mob and its new big hitter, Donnie Brasco.
“He is Joe DiMaggio!” everybody said one night at the old Pep McGuire’s on Queens Boulevard.
When next seen, Brasco took the witness stand in room 103, federal court, Manhattan. Tony Café (his courtroom name Anthony Rabito) sat listening with his lawyer, Paul Rao.
Q: What is your name?
A: Joseph Pistone.
Q: What is your occupation?
A: I am a special agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Tony was sentenced to eight years. Rao told the judge that Tony had served two years in the artillery in Korea, that both his brothers had served and that he deserved something for this.
THE COURT: Mr. Rabito, is there anything you would like to add to what Mr. Rao has told us on your behalf?
DEFENDANT RABITO: Judge, I think I got a fair trial. There are a couple of things I don’t like. I fought for that flag. I was in the Army. I believe in the press. I believe in you. You open up somebody’s head, you find love in my head, but in some people you find the little Italian flag.
The judge took two years off the sentence, one for each year Tony spent in the service. He did six years at Otisville federal prison in upstate New York. I didn’t see him when he came out and never heard about him, so I figured he wasn’t up to much, which I thought was good because a second sentence would run a thousand years. In court for one thing or another over several years, I would take a look at the government’s Mafia three-deep charts. The pictures of the Bonanno varsity players were mounted on cardboard. I never saw Tony’s picture nor found his name in a news story, even if it was about guys at the bottom.
Bad things now happened in the courtroom. Joe Massino was convicted and faced sentences of more years than he had to give for his country.
Right away, in Washington, Attorney General John Ashcroft directed prosecutors in Brooklyn to start a capital punishment case against Massino for another murder. They find you guilty in federal court on any charge, from stealing a postage stamp to murder. If the federals said they wanted an execution case, Massino was going to die.
No, he wasn’t. He called for a prosecutor and said he wanted to cooperate. He knows everybody and everything about the waning days of the Mafia. He is a traditional mobster. He eats until he can’t fit at the table. He had a restaurant with the best pork braciola for miles. He flicks a thumb down and somebody dies. He has a wife and daughters and several girlfriends. He lives in Howard Beach, Queens, which had an overcrowding of big gangsters. His house was a few blocks from that of John Gotti and also Vic Amuso, another boss. The first sounds