Exit John Gotti and turncoat ex-pal Salvatore “Sammy Bull” Gravano – enter alleged Bonanno top banana Joe Massino and bitter brother-in-law-turned-canary Sal Vitale.
In what the feds are hailing as the final takedown of the last of New York’s five crime families, prosecutors yesterday opened their case of seven murders and a host of hefty racketeering charges against the jowled but jovial Massino – infamously dubbed “The Last Don” – in Brooklyn federal court.
“This trial is about the vicious, violent, cunning and murderous rise to power of Joseph Massino,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Robert Henoch told anonymous jurors, huddled for their first day in what is expected to be a mind-boggling three-month trial.
Massino managed to keep the feds at bay for years with his obsessively low-key lifestyle – only eventually to be doomed by his best childhood pal, the brother of his wife, prosecutors say.
Prosecutors hope to finally nail the 61-year-old alleged crime boss – a 290-pound diabetic with a wife and three daughters from Howard Beach, Queens – with the help of Vitale, a former right-hand henchman whom Massino has known since age 13 from the local swimming hole.
It’s what the feds hope will be a mob rubout – Gravano style.
Gravano dealt the deathblows to former Gambino boss Gotti in court, landing the Dapper Don a life sentence in prison, where he eventually died of cancer.
The sensational case also features oddball tidbits of insider mob life for rabid Mafia fans, including that Massino, obsessed with keeping off the feds’ radar, began demanding that underlings tug at their ear when referring to him instead of saying his name.
It was a trick reminiscent of his counterpart in the Genovese crime family, Mafioso Vincente “Chin” Gigante, who instructed mob members to refer to him by pointing to their chins.
Massino’s high-powered lawyer, David Breitbart, yesterday tried to paint his client as the quintessential hard-working New Yorker with the devoted wife and kids.
“[He’s] lived in New York all of his life,” Breitbart said as his aging client, demurely clad in a simple blue suit and open-necked white shirt, looked on without emotion.
As for government witnesses like Vitale, the lawyer said: “They’re threatened, they’re tortured and they’ve been handed a script. All they have to say is, ‘Joe told me to do it.’ “
“The same methods that were used in Iraq were used at the [jails] in Brooklyn and . . . in Manhattan.”
Massino’s loyal and equally media-shy wife, Josephine, later insisted, “He [Breitbart] only said the truth, he just said the truth.”
But the feds claim otherwise, describing Massino as an ingenious, methodical – and diabolical – Mafioso who killed his way to the top and replaced Philip Rastelli after he died of natural causes in 1991.
Two of the murder charges facing Massino involve Joseph Pistone, a k a “Donnie Brasco,” an undercover FBI agent who infiltrated the family – with devastating effect – two decades ago. The case was made into a hit flick featuring Johnny Depp and Al Pacino.
As a result of Pistone’s probe, Massino orchestrated at least two hits, the feds say.
The 1981 killing of Dominick “Sonny Black” Napolitano, who initially welcomed “Brasco” into his crew, came about a month after details of the mob flub came to light.
Napolitano was brutally gunned down in a mobster’s basement on Staten Island, while Massino allegedly waited in a getaway car nearby. The mob underling’s decomposed body was found in a Staten Island swamp about a year later.
Bonanno soldier Anthony Mirra, who was the first of the family to befriend “Brasco,” was shot dead less than a year later in a parking garage in lower Manhattan.
His body has yet to be recovered.
Massino faces charges in five more murders, as well as racketeering crimes including loan-sharking, gambling and money-laundering. He faces up to life in prison if convicted.
Still, prosecutors hell-bent on putting the ultimate notch in their mob-busting belt apparently gave Massino and his family something to chuckle about in court yesterday.
Massino, accused of the attempted 1982 murder of former Teamsters honcho Anthony Giliberti, listened as the star witness in that case – Giliberti himself – crumbled on the stand.
Now 80 and ailing from Parkinson’s disease, Giliberti, the former corrupt vice president of Teamsters Local 814, said he couldn’t even identify Massino in the courtroom.
“If that’s Joseph Massino, it surprises me – he’s changed an awful lot,” said Giliberti after being told Massino was at the defense table.
Giliberti said the last time he saw his old foe was in 1986, before Massino – also known as “Big Joey” – really plumped out.
Giliberti was described as a mob associate who helped the Bonannos get their own people into the union.
He said Massino and his henchmen suspected him of disobeying orders at one point in the early ’80s, and that the alleged mob boss hauled him into a face-to-face meeting to grill him.
During the hot session, “Pow! Joe Massino reached out his hand and smashed me in the face,” the old man told the courtroom.
A seething Massino then warned, “I’ll kill you, and I’ll kill them [others who might be disloyal]. I’ll kill you if I find out you were involved,” Giliberti recalled.
“I knew from then on I was marked,” Giliberti said.
While he could recall little about many other events regarding his union and that time period, Giliberti said he remembered the events of July 14, 1982 – his attempted rubout – vividly.
He said he was putting his briefcase into the trunk of his car, which was parked in his driveway, before 6 a.m. that morning when “all of sudden, I thought someone threw fireworks at me.
“Then I thought, ‘My God, I’ve been hit!’ ” Giliberti said.
He was shot at nine times.
Giliberti said he believes that Massino ordered the hit on him, based on orders from Rastelli.
The feds say Massino eluded them for years by keeping an ultra-low profile, unlike the Dapper Don, who was eventually done in with the help of wiretaps.
But what Massino didn’t count on was a canary brother-in-law, whom he once taught to swim while working as a lifeguard as a teen in Astoria.
Massino and Vitale were the opposite as far as looks were concerned: The former was big and beefy, while Vitale boasted a classically suave air.
But they remained thick friends into adulthood, through Massino’s rise up the mob ranks, prosecutors said.
What caused Vitale to turn against his pal and in-law is still murky.
It could simply have stemmed from the fact that Vitale had allegedly played a major role in several of the murders that Massino has been charged with – and his deal with the feds has now turned him into a protected government witness.
Or perhaps Vitale got tired of walking in Massino’s shadow.
Either way, turning him into a canary was huge boon for the feds, experts say.
“The Bonanno family was an incredibly resilient family,” James Walden, an ex-assistant U.S. attorney, said recently. “There has never been a Bonanno soldier who has ever cooperated.”
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Sleeping with the fishes
* Capo Alphonse “Sonny Red” Indelicato, shot to death May 5, 1981
* Capo Philip “Philly Lucky” Giaccone, shot to death May 5, 1981
* Capo Dominick “Big Trin” Trinchera, shot to death May 5, 1981
* Dominick “Sonny Black” Napolitano, killed August 1981
* Anthony Mirra, killed Feb. 18, 1982
* Cesare Boneventre, killed April 1984
* Gabriel Infanti, killed between October and December 1987