Original subtitles

NARRATOR: Previously on American Godfathers:

The Five Families...

Thank God that I was born

of Italian birth.

NARRATOR: A new generation of mobsters rose to power

by breaking the rules.

Joe Colombo didn't escape from the media.

He welcomed the media.

The problem is, is that you can't really be

a media celebrity like Joey Gallo

and sort of still be in the mafia.

ANTHONY DESTEFANO: Carmine Galante was a drug dealer.

He was violent.

- [gunshot echoes] - [crowd clamoring]

NARRATOR: But one by one, they fell.

REPORTER: Joe Colombo, Sr. was lying on the ground,

badly wounded.

Shot in the head and bleeding profusely.

FRANK DIMATTEO: We got a call maybe 7:30.

And he goes, "They killed Joey."

The passing of Carmine Galante means

a new struggle for control

at the top of New York's Five Families.

NARRATOR: With blood in the streets

and its leadership in disarray...

[gunshots popping]

...the families struggled to survive.

There's no order in the ranks anymore.

That was kind of the beginning of the end for the mafia.

NARRATOR: Now, the Five Families must contend with new laws

designed to destroy them,

as one family confronts the unthinkable.

It was revealed that an FBI Agent

had infiltrated the Bonanno crime family.

REPORTER: This man, known as Donnie Brasco,

revealed his true name,

Joseph Pistone, agent of the FBI.

ANTHONY: Pistone had information about other families.

The feeling is what other shoe's going to drop?

[theme music plays]

[tense music plays]

NARRATOR: In the summer of 1981,

Dominick "Sonny Black" Napolitano,

a captain in the Bonanno family,

ran The Motion Lounge, a Bonanno hangout,

that sat on the corner of Graham Ave and Withers Street

in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

From here, Sonny and his crew ran a gambling operation,

trafficked stolen goods, planned their next scores.

In late July, it was paid a visit

by three FBI Agents.

They informed Sonny Black that a member of his crew,

an associate named Donnie Brasco,

a jewel thief from Miami, FL,

was, in fact, an undercover agent

named Joe Pistone.

A G-man from Erie, PA.

At first, Sonny Black didn't believe them.

Because in his mind, believing them may make it true.

And if it was true,

well, then Sonny Black was in quite a bit of trouble.

♪

The government says this is the best

they've ever done in their fight

to whip into organized crime from the inside out.

NARRATOR: It was true, all right.

Pistone would go on to tell all,

testifying publicly in court

for the first time in August of 1982.

And the Bonannos pay the price.

Family boss Rusty Rastelli was removed from the Commission.

The Bonannos have always kind of been

the problem children of the Five Families.

Then the knockout blow that was delivered

by Pistone's infiltration of the family.

The family was essentially being run by Rusty Rastelli

and his main man was Joseph Massino.

Well, somebody had to pay for the fact

that Pistone infiltrated the family.

The main guy who was in charge of that faction

was Sonny Black Napolitano.

And Massino orchestrated

the assassination of Sonny Black.

And Sonny Black was enticed to the house,

pushed down into the basement.

Before he was killed...

he told his assassin,

"If you're gonna do it, make it good."

[gunshot pops]

[dramatic music plays]

NARRATOR: The murder of Sonny Black Napolitano came

some 50 years after the Five Families were created.

Fifty years of extortion, taking over unions,

tax evasion, gambling operations.

The Five Families were as powerful and effective

as any criminal organization

in the history of the United States.

They had retained power for decades

through sheer force and secrecy.

And while they'd been wounded,

they were still feared.

But their world changed in the '80s.

New York didn't bounce back from the devastating

fiscal crisis that started in 1975.

The crack epidemic sent crime and violence sky-rocketing.

In response, President Reagan began to promote

"tough on crime" messaging and policies.

All forms of crime were to be targeted.

But in New York City,

organized crime, specifically the Five Families,

were to be priority number one.

If there's one single individual...

who's responsible for finally going after

the American mafia and the Five Families,

his name is Robert Blakey.

He was the architect of a law called RICO,

Racketeer-Influenced Corrupt Organizations Act.

Perhaps the most significant tool that we were provided

in waging the war on organized crime

was the RICO statute.

And generally, when prosecutors prosecute criminals,

you can only prosecute one criminal transaction at a time.

REPORTER: RICO could be used to prosecute

any individual or organization,

if certain conditions were met.

Those charged had to be engaged

in racketeering activity,

such as murder, kidnapping, extortion,

or mail, wire, or securities fraud.

What this accomplished was for the first time,

instead of going after small fry,

if you were found to be in any way connected

to an ongoing criminal organization,

especially if you were a leader,

you could face a life in prison.

LEONARD ROLLOCK: People hear "gangs" and they think,

"Oh, well, that's organized crime."

It's not what the RICO was aimed after.

They was aimed after people

that were racketeers.

And a racketeer is somebody who could set up a scenario

where you find yourself paying for protection

in some way or another.

If you wanted to convict somebody of engaging in RICO

or racketeering violation,

you had to prove that they were involved

in a racketeering enterprise, such as a mob family.

And in addition, you had to prove that they were involved

in a pattern of racketeering activity.

Now the entire enterprise was looked at as a whole,

and these people were identified and prosecuted

as arms of that organization.

It made everybody vulnerable to whatever the hierarchy

of the organized crime family was doing.

They could be charged with many more things

than just their individual actions.

So rather than just being able to convict people

and arrest them for actual individual crimes,

thanks to RICO,

being a gangster itself was a criminal act.

NARRATOR: The RICO statute was signed into law

in 1970.

But it was neglected for the better part

of the next decade.

Federal prosecutors feared

that the untested statute could be

declared unconstitutional if used in court.

They were extremely reluctant to approve

any of the RICO prosecution until the early 1980s.

If you had the goods and you put it all together,

it was very easy to convict people of racketeering

or RICO violations.

So, it was an enormous--

enormously powerful tool that we had.

NARRATOR: In the 1980s, an emerging federal prosecutor

would see the promise and incredible power of RICO,

and he would put it to use in the fight

against New York City's criminal underworld.

As the chief federal prosecutor in his area,

Giuliani comes across like the Hollywood stereotype

of the tough, dedicated crime buster.

The 1980s, you start to see

this cleanup aspect come into play

via guys like Rudolph Giuliani.

He was definitely somebody that wanted to clean up New York.

New York was still sort of feeling the hangover,

the 1970s, a hangover of high unemployment,

high poverty, thus high crime.

So, he really wanted to change the city.

GIULIANI: We have to do securities fraud,

because we have two stock markets here in New York.

If we don't do it, nobody's going to do it.

We have to do drug work, because we have

a big drug problem in this city.

And we have to do organized crime work,

because we have five organized crime families

that have decided, since the turn of the century,

to locate themselves here in New York

and have a tremendous amount

of political power, economic power, social power,

and all sorts of other kinds of power

that is very unhealthy for our society.

♪

By the early '80s,

federal prosecutions started to gather steam.

You had some Bonanno cases,

you had some Gambino drug cases.

NARRATOR: One of the biggest at the time

was the Pizza Connection case.

A joint investigation by the FBI, DEA

and Italian law enforcement that used information

from Pistone and a group of other agents,

to go after drug traffickers in the Bonanno family.

The Pizza Connection case was

a very complicated investigation,

and it was to essentially crack

a drug trafficking ring,

that was going on for years

between Sicily and North America.

And they used pizza joints as fronts

to distribute the heroin.

Pizza, heroin, and organized crime.

The biggest heroin case ever, according to the feds.

Buscetta reportedly says that he and other mafia figures

distributed heroin brought in from Sicily,

through a network of neighborhood businesses,

including this bakery in New York City,

and pizza parlors in New York, New Jersey,

Virginia, Illinois and Wisconsin.

NARRATOR: Pistone's intel on the inner workings

of the Bonanno family gave investigators a roadmap

to bring down a drug operation that imported

more than $1.6 billion worth of heroin

from 1975 to 1984.

It certainly established, beyond any doubt,

if there was any doubt,

that the mafia was involved in drug trafficking.

And it was a very long investigation.

And, in a lot of ways, crippled the Bonanno family

♪

NARRATOR: Using the RICO statute,

the Pizza Connection case resulted in the conviction

of 18 mafia players,

and disrupted a major revenue stream

in New York's criminal underworld.

It was one of the Five Families'

first major losses at the hands of RICO.

But only one of many.

In February of 1985,

the U.S. Attorneys' Office in New York's Southern District

used the RICO statute once again.

This time, to indict all the bosses

of New York's Five Families,

as well as some other top brass.

The charges?

Murder, loan-sharking,

labor pay-offs and extortion.

At the time, the families were headed by Anthony Salerno,

Carmine Persico, Paul Castellano,

Anthony Corallo, and Philip Rastelli.

Rastelli and the Bonannos were still persona non grata,

but that made no difference to Rudy Giuliani

and the U.S. Attorneys' Office, who spearheaded the effort

known as the Commission case.

The Commission case in 1985

involved federal prosecutors...

bringing RICO charges

against the five heads

of New York City's crime families.

It was unprecedented,

this was one of the first times

where the feds were able to use this...

to make cases that were very,

very difficult to beat.

And, of course, Rudy Giuliani at the time

was the federal prosecutor,

who really reveled in all the attention

and the headlines

and all the things that came out of it.

Giuliani now says

that the tide of battle is turning

and the mafia can be crushed.

This case charges more mafia bosses

in one indictment than any ever before.

NARRATOR: Among the indicted bosses,

Paul Castellano was one of the most experienced.

A cousin of Carlo Gambino,

Big Paul became boss in 1976.

He was known for bringing the Gambino family

into more white-collar rackets.

Bid-rigging, union corruption, financial fraud.

He saw himself as more of a CEO than a mob boss.

It isolated and angered factions of his own family.

Paul Castellano, you could say,

without much fear of contradiction,

that he was the most powerful mob boss

at that time of the Five Families.

He lived in a huge white mansion.

His critics would say that

he was a little above the fray.

He was regarded by some people,

as a guy who was a bit out of touch

with the family rank and file.

♪

NARRATOR: Castellano was arrested on February 25th, 1985,

along with his soon-to-be co-defendants

in the Commission case.

With the trial more than a year away,

Castellano got out on a $2 million bond.

For the next nine months, he'd take meetings

at his home in Staten Island,

or in restaurants around New York City.

He remained self-assured despite the pending trial.

Little did he know, his greatest threat

was on its way not from law enforcement,

but from within his own family.

[intense music plays]

I was working a swing shift.

We got word of this shooting

on East 46th Street outside Sparks Steakhouse.

I came running over to cover to the shooting.

When I got there, the street was closed.

And there were these two bodies lying

on either side of the Lincoln Continental

that they had arrived in.

[siren wailing]

♪

Jim Fox, who was the head

of the New York FBI at the time, was there.

He quickly confirmed for us,

"Yeah, that's Paul Castellano...

and that's his driver."

[chilling music plays]

Paul Castellano, gunned down yesterday on a public street,

before Christmas, before dinner

in front of a restaurant he reportedly owned,

and shot by killers who swore at him while

they pulled the trigger and fired a final shot in his head.

It was more than a mob hit, it was humiliation.

The same can be said for his driver

who was killed, Thomas Bilotti.

He was Castellano's right hand man.

A man that he wanted to take his place.

CLAIRE WHITE: The murder of Paul Castellano was shocking.

It was a very public affair.

And this is a continuation

of a trend in New York,

where the rules are out the window.

LARRY: It was stunning.

It was an incredible scene, and it got

a tremendous amount of attention.

♪

NARRATOR: The kind of attention that the leadership

of The Five Families would rather avoid.

But more attention was coming.

Especially when people figured out

who was behind the hit.

A man who didn't fear attention at all.

John Gotti.

[tense music plays]

NARRATOR: John Joseph Gotti Jr.

was the fifth of 13 children.

A grandson of Neopolitan immigrants,

he found his way as an adolescent

on the streets of East New York.

Car thefts, muggings.

He developed a bit of a temper,

and a penchant for violence.

By his teens, he fell in with a Gambino crew

and found a mentor in Gambino underboss

Neil Dellacroce.

Carlo Gambino, on his deathbed,

passed over Dellacroce

and named Paul Castellano his successor as boss.

Gotti was incredulous.

So, from the very beginning, there was a rift

between John Gotti and Paul Castellano.

A rift that only grew larger

as Gotti expanded his gambling and loan-sharking outfits,

while members of his crew built

a drug trafficking operation.

It was just a matter of time before one of them made a move.

And John Gotti moved first.

[tense music plays]

REPORTER: Today, authorities say

Gotti is being sought by the FBI for questioning

in the murder of the two men

who stood in his way for control of the Gambino family.

Paul Castellano, the head of the Gambino family,

was killed because he was upset with John Gotti

and his crew being involved in narcotics.

Castellano didn't want any part of narcotics.

Gotti did, because it made him money.

The killing of a mafia boss is very disruptive,

obviously, to the Cosa Nostra.

When Gotti kills Castellano...

there are rumors about who supported it and who didn't.

But as a result, Gotti was,

in a lot of ways, anathema

to a lot of the other mobsters.

We were concerned about Gotti,

but not paying that much attention to him

until December of 1985,

when he became the boss of the family.

So, he now becomes our number one target.

And with the Gambino squad, we're focusing on that.

CLAIRE: Gotti is able to evade

law enforcement for a few years.

And it's a combination of having this network,

where he's able to insulate himself

from specific crimes and specific offenses.

There's also just this reality

that he's untouchable.

NARRATOR: It had been six years since New York City

had seen a mob killing like this.

Now prosecutors were forced to reckon

with the fact that John Gotti had gotten

to Paul Castellano before law enforcement could.

And worst of all, he'd made a clean getaway.

With minimal hard evidence linking Gotti to the hit,

he took over control of the Gambino family

with little restriction.

John Gotti bursts onto the scene in the American perception.

Suddenly he's on the front page of the tabloids

and he's this persona right out of central casting.

John Gotti showed up at the right time in New York.

You have more lavish parties happening at night.

You've got bigger nightclubs.

You've got more celebrities stepping out at night,

and, again, being photographed by the media.

John Gotti is one of these guys

that likes to be photographed by the paparazzi.

He is called the Dapper Don.

REPORTER: One report said each suit costs $1,000.

Gotti supposedly got angry.

The suits cost $1,800

LARRY: Gotti was on the front page all the time

and the aura grows around him.

The Brioni suits,

and Andy Warhol does a portrait of him.

He became a star. He's a murderer.

He's a drug dealer. He's this, and he's that.

People loved him. You know what I mean?

I think there's probably still people

out in Howard Beach who still love him.

That's the best man around

and I'm 45 years old.

The best man for me.

As far as Mr. Gotti goes, I've known him as a youngster,

and always this gentleman.

Whenever I see him walking,

he always has a marvelous smile on his face.

In fact, I admire the way he dresses.

He's always been a very respectable person

in the community...

and I find it very hard to believe

what they're saying about him.

Gotti, more than anybody,

was the guy, who galvanized

that image of the mobster in the 80s.

REPORTER: While the jury began to finally deliberate his case,

John Gotti has apparently not lost his sense of humor.

NARRATOR: His contemporaries, however, knew,

that public displays of wealth and arrogance

led to indictments and violence.

It was another breach of their code.

So, while Gotti made headlines,

members of other families

watched begrudgingly from the shadows.

Namely his old ally from the Bonanno family,

underboss Joseph Massino.

[Anthony] Massino and Gotti lived close together

in the Howard Beach area.

Heavily residential, heavily Italian-American,

and not far from JFK Airport.

Which explains some of the mob activities.

It's an area

with teachers, lawyers,

and, of course, infamously known

for some of the mob characters

who've lived there, among them being

Joe Massino and John Gotti.

They helped each other.

Gotti's people helped Massino

when they took care of the three captains.

[gunshots echo]

Helped them dispose of the bodies.

But I don't think Gotti and Massino liked each other.

EDWARD: Joe Massino wanted to be the quiet don.

He did not want to have anybody know who he was.

He didn't want anybody focusing on him.

When he became the real, full-time acknowledged boss,

that's how he ran his family.

He was really the antithesis of Gotti.

Massino felt that Gotti was not doing the right thing

by the mob by being too showy.

And Gotti didn't think highly of Massino.

He thought of him as a guy that was really under his thumb.

Over time, they became antagonistic.

NARRATOR: As John Gotti's stature grew,

his predecessors were being ushered off stage.

On November 19th, 1986,

almost a year after indictments

in the Commission case were announced,

a jury found the defendants guilty on every charge.

[tense music plays]

REPORTER: One hundred years in prison

for Carmine "The Snake" Persico.

One hundred years for Anthony "Tony Ducks" Corallo,

One hundred years for Anthony "Fat Tony" Salerno.

The Commission case takes out

very high-level mobsters in New York.

Specifically bosses of families.

And we're left with a major power vacuum

NARRATOR: The Commission case successfully put away

three of the Five Family bosses.

Corallo, Salerno and Persico were old school.

Men of the code. Loyal to omertà.

So they kept their mouths shut

and were shipped off to prisons

in Missouri or Illinois

to spend their remaining years.

With this victory, law enforcement had crippled

the Lucchese, Genovese and Colombo families.

Bonanno family boss, Philip Rastelli,

had been a part of the original Commission case indictment,

but prosecutors found it difficult

to link him to the other bosses.

So he'd have to be handled separately.

I was, at the time,

the intelligence coordinator for the Bonanno family.

I went out to interview

these cooperators

specifically about the Bonanno family,

so we could get a better handle on what they were doing.

I couldn't tell you how many

different cooperators I interviewed.

But every one of them told me,

"The Bonannos weren't there.

They weren't part of the boys club

and so I can't tell you anything about them,

because I don't know what they were doing."

So as a result, since they got locked out

of the more lucrative

and the more sophisticated operations,

they became involved in other things.

It helped the Bonannos find new sources of income,

and it insulated them from law enforcement

and ultimately led to Massino

becoming the big kid on the block.

NARRATOR: 1986.

New York's Five Families

were under extreme federal scrutiny,

with three family bosses prosecuted

in The Commission case

in New York's Southern District.

The Bonanno family leadership,

still considered pariahs

in the criminal underworld,

found trouble of their own.

At this point,

Bonanno boss, Phillip "Rusty" Rastelli

was back out on the street.

But his health was bad

and his protege, Joe Massino,

was rising in stature.

When the two went to trial on RICO charges

in April of 1986,

Massino seized the moment.

In 1986, there was this massive

bid-rigging scheme that was going on

with these huge moving and storage companies.

They had to pay an enormous amount of money

in order to operate to the union,

which was run by the Bonanno crime family.

Van drivers, packers, furniture handlers,

warehousemen, an appliance home delivery union.

The government alleges that the union's leadership

is really controlled by the Bonanno crime family.

EDWARD MCDONALD: It was a seven-month trial.

It was the most important case we had,

as the entire leadership of the Bonanno crime family

and a major Teamster local.

So I was there every day.

MAN: Back it off, okay, take it easy.

Back it off, thank you, thank you.

We're okay, we're okay. All right.

The boss, Rusty Rastelli,

was really getting kind of feeble.

REPORTER: On this day, he collapsed in a courtroom.

His niece told me her uncle has cancer.

Law enforcement officials say the man running

the Bonanno family for Rastelli

is Joseph Massino.

I have to say that Massino,

in a sense, became somewhat of a folk hero.

There are all different varieties of people

who become bosses of families.

Some people are not very presupposing

or impressive looking, some people are.

Joe Massino looked like the guy

who could be the boss of an organized crime family.

He was a man of the streets.

Every day he came in wearing a black suit,

a white shirt, no tie,

looked the same way every day.

But he had a way of carrying himself

and had a real sort of charisma.

REMO FRANCESCHINI: Joe Massino is a younger,

very respected organized crime figure

and involved with members of the other families.

Every day at lunchtime,

Rastelli, who was the boss of the family,

was pretty feeble, and he'd sit with his lawyer

and have lunch in the courtroom,

whereas Joey would conduct meetings.

They would sit on park benches in front of the courthouse.

And it was absolutely a scene right out of a movie.

NARRATOR: In October of 1986,

Rusty Rastelli and Joe Massino, the Bonanno brass,

were convicted in the moving and storage racketeering case.

They were sentenced a few months later.

Rastelli got 12 years. Massino got 10.

In 1991, Rastelli died

while out on compassionate release,

and Joe Massino, while in prison,

officially became boss of the Bonanno family.

Now, sixty years since Lucky Luciano

formed The Commission,

New York's Five Families

had seen various types of mob bosses.

Frank Costello, the smooth businessman.

Vito Genovese, the ruthless killer.

Joe Colombo, the revolutionary.

Paul Castellano, the CEO.

John Gotti, the Tabloid Star.

There were others, of course. All flawed in their own way.

But Joe Massino was a new breed.

He had learned from the mistakes of his predecessors.

When rivals looked to dethrone his boss,

he remained loyal.

When infighting festered in the family,

he sought counsel from The Commission.

[gunshot echoes]

And when rats infiltrated,

he moved swiftly and with force.

When it came to omertà,

Joe Massino had as good a resume as anyone.

But he was operating in a world

far different than his predecessors.

The 1990s is definitely a period

of transition in New York for the mob.

But more than anything,

it's just a period of instability.

And that's because,

especially moving past The Commission case,

we've got a lot of bosses in prison.

♪

ANTHONY: Gotti got indicted late 1990.

So he had a very brief tenure as boss.

REPORTER: It'll be another Christmas

in the slammer for John Gotti.

The reputed Gambino Crime Family boss

was arrested last December.

He's been in federal custody ever since.

REPORTER: Prosecutors will produce witnesses

who saw Gotti giving instructions

at the scene of a hit on Paul Castellano.

ANTHONY: He was convicted in '92.

All the other families,

their leadership was in disarray.

After the series of prosecutions,

and there were many,

the mob was certainly weakened.

The Feds say that they have busted another mobster.

REPORTER: Last week, the FBI arrested Gigante

for allegedly masterminding a mob takeover

of a New York's window replacement industry.

More informants than ever are coming forth

to put the mob away.

Police say for several months,

the Colombo family has been in a civil war.

So you had this bad period for the mob,

in the 1980s and certainly into the 1990s.

The Gotti era

of showy night club life,

in your face to the FBI,

tactics wasn't going to work anymore.

All the families were impacted.

Some more so than others.

The guys do the arithmetic, and they realize

you're gonna spend the rest of your days in jail,

be it 25 years or life.

You're not gonna see your grandkids,

or children again,

you're not gonna be on the outside again.

Um, what for?

For a code of omertà that everybody else is trashing?

Why should I be the fall guy?

Why should I be the one to take all the heat?

So that's what I think changed.

The old value

of camaraderie,

omertà,

uh, loyalty, really has eroded.

What you had was a realization

that we can't be like we used to be.

We have to be more secretive. We have to be more careful.

We have to be more careful about who we deal with.

NARRATOR: Who they deal with on the outside and on the inside.

Guys were paranoid,

and with the oath of omertà

facing its greatest threat yet,

the future of the Five Families

was now in jeopardy like never before.

NARRATOR: The 1990s was a time

of economic prosperity for many Americans.

The Cold War had ended.

Tech was booming. Life was good.

But for the leadership of New York's Five Families,

who had been badly weakened by federal cases,

their way of life was dying.

Released from prison in 1992,

into this reality stepped Joe Massino.

♪

Memory serves, he got out

November of 1992,

I think it was Friday the 13th, as a matter of fact.

The world that Joe Massino was dealing with

in 1992 was very different.

All the bosses went to prison.

The only true boss

acknowledged by the Five Families

who's out on the street with power

is Joey Massino,

now running the Bonanno crime family,

wanting to get back into The Commission.

And because of Joey's stature and Joey's charisma,

he's accepted back into the five-member Commission.

JACK STUBING: Joe Massino, he had a reputation

as being a wise guy's wise guy.

He was all about omertà and honor and, you know,

all of these things that they always

pat themselves on the back as possessing.

We continued to try and develop informants,

and we weren't gaining much traction

and we were doing everything we could.

But there were other irons in the fire by this time.

There was trouble brewing in the Colombo family,

I think it was between 1990 and 1993,

which actually developed into a shooting war.

As I recall, I think there was 21 shootings

and 12 deaths.

When you have a situation like that,

when bodies are hitting the street,

it's all hands on deck.

So we diverted a lot of resources

to trying to address that problem,

in the meantime,

Joe Massino was off in the corner

doing what he does,

strengthening the family and strengthening his hand.

DOMINICK CICALE: Joe was like the king at that time.

So whatever Joe would say,

nobody griped, nobody questioned it.

It was done.

Everybody looked up to him.

EDWARD: Joe Massino forms a new hierarchy around him

in the leadership of the Bonanno crime family.

NARRATOR: As boss of the Bonannos,

Joe tapped his closest confidant,

Sal Vitale, to be his underboss.

The two men were not only tied by years of friendship

and a code of omertà, but by marriage.

Joe was married to Sal's sister, Josephine.

PAT COLGAN: They were boyhood friends.

12, 13, 14-year-old kids from Queens.

Played together, ran together.

ANTHONY: Joe taught Sal how to swim

in some of the local pools

and that was, like, something that bonded the two men.

Of course, Joe also had designs on Josephine,

Sal's sister,

and it was through that relationship

that Joe got to know Josephine much better.

And Sal came up in the family

because he was close to Joe.

He made his impression that way.

JACK: A lot of times, the hierarchy of a family

changes depending on who's up and who's down,

who's in and out, who's favored by the boss.

He had a consiglieri who had a social club

in Bath Avenue and in Brooklyn,

whose name was Anthony Spero.

Then under, then there was a series of captains.

Sometimes they would go up or down

if they were in favor or out of favor.

ANTHONY: Among the top captains for Joe Massino

were Frank Lino,

Frank Coppa, Richard Cantarella.

RICHARD CANTARELLA: They called me "Shellackhead"

because I had jet black hair,

and I always was vain about my hair.

The family wasn't very big.

When Joe then came home

and he put the whole thing back together,

and from what I understand, there was over 200 men,

made guys in the Bonanno family.

Joe Massino did everything the right way.

He was a class act.

He was, uh,

a very paranoid guy in the first place.

Very careful, a smart man,

not an educated man, but a smart man.

He, uh-- he had a fundamental understanding

of what was, at that time, in those days,

uh, primitive surveillance equipment.

EDWARD: You could never mention Joey's name.

You're supposed to touch your ear,

instead of the nose or the chin.

He was the ear.

RICHARD: They used the term

because he always had listening devices.

So he always had his ear to what was going on, so to speak.

Massino would meet with other gangsters,

usually in social clubs, but after a while that stopped.

He closed them down at one time.

He wanted all the clubs closed

because they were meeting places.

I mean, I got followed by FBI.

I did some stupid things.

And what happens is they follow you,

go right to the club, you know, and there you are.

There's a bunch of guys, before you know it,

they're sitting across the street in a--

in a van, filming everything.

Just the way it was.

So when Joe Massino

got out of jail,

he passed this edict that people weren't supposed

to meet in social clubs anymore.

And he just started to enforce stricter discipline.

If you were going to have conversations

with people of significance,

you were going to do them on the street,

in a park some place,

where you could see if there was any surveillance

and avoid surveillance.

DOMINICK: Tightening everything up,

pulling in the reins, pulling people back

from being out there in the limelight,

creating havoc,

keeping things more underground.

No funerals, no weddings.

Dress normal, don't showboat, don't be flashy.

Joe Massino didn't like to talk by telephone.

He preferred to talk to somebody

either in his house,

or near his home in Howard Beach.

And there was an area in Howard Beach known as the Weeds.

It's a federal nature preserve.

It's swampy.

But he was very, very conscious of surveillance,

of dealing with people who would turn on him.

There was a lot of murders in the '80s and early '90s

of our FBI informants.

Joey would cause people to disappear

and most likely killed.

Power was everything in the Bonanno family.

The families were powerful

because of their lethality.

He was a guy who was constantly,

what we call now, situational awareness.

He was, uh-- he was aware of who was around him

and he limited who could have direct contact with him.

And he maintained strict discipline.

He had a reputation of doing his own work,

meaning, you know,

if somebody needed to be dealt with violently,

he wasn't afraid to do it.

And that was the reputation he had.

He knew our whole bag of tricks.

He knew about wiretaps, he knew about microphones.

It wasn't working, we weren't getting what we needed.

We needed to try a different approach.

NARRATOR: Through the 1990s,

with most of The Commission leadership in prison,

New York's mob families scratched and clawed

to keep money coming in.

They worked in conjunction with one another

to bleed money out of the most lucrative targets

in New York City.

The major mob racket in New York

is extorting money from legitimate businesses,

and this is commonly called the mob tax.

The '80s and the '90s

are the height of this mob tax period.

This is really where we see that

organized crime has infiltrated

almost every industry of labor.

Every single element of the garment industry.

There is a profit of about $500 million

just from garbage hauling alone.

New Yorkers pay about 35% more

than fair market value

just to get their garbage taken away.

A 1-2% tax by the mob,

a "tax" on all windows

being installed across the city.

You're paying percentages off of every single window

in a city that probably has the most windows

of anywhere in North America.

REPORTER: In addition, it's alleged that the mob

greases the wheels of the Fulton Fish Market,

controls most of the private trash removal industry,

runs hardcore pornography, drug trafficking,

and portions of the film industry.

It's the consumers who are picking up the tab.

EDWARD: After Donnie Brasco,

infiltration of the family became public.

It wasn't as if the Bonanno family

ceased doing an operation.

They continued to control the labor unions,

bid rigging and extortion schemes.

And their stature had been diminished

in the world of organized crime.

As a result, they were not able to participate

in some of these large scale schemes

that the other four families participated in.

Since they got locked out of the more lucrative

and the more sophisticated operations,

they became involved in other things.

They accelerated their involvement

with narcotics.

They were sort of pioneers in getting into Wall Street.

They do whatever works.

The Post was the perfect example

of targets of opportunity.

NARRATOR: One of the mafia's most successful ploys

was the "no-show job."

The family would muscle control

over a union or legitimate business

and give high ranking members of the family a job.

A job with a good salary, a job with benefits,

a job that they didn't even have to show up for.

Richard Cantarella, a captain in the Bonanno family,

held one of these union jobs at the New York Post,

one of the most circulated daily tabloids in New York City.

When I got involved I had a no-show job

and nobody was going to say anything

because of who I was.

I was a tailman on a truck.

That means I didn't do the driving,

because if you are the driver,

there's no way you could not show up.

So I was the tailman,

and at the end of the week I took care of the driver.

I did very well, I was getting paid.

There's always gambling going on.

So if that was going on by somebody in the Post,

they'd have to give up a piece of that money,

or we're not gonna allow you to do it.

Any gambling, any stealing,

any lending of money, we had to get a piece of it.

And I always managed to stay on the book someplace.

Now I'm on Social Security.

And at that point, I got involved

in taking over one of the parking lots

in the Marine and Aviation.

In New York, parking is a commodity.

Parking was big.

Parking lots would be a good opportunity for organized crime,

especially back in the '80s and the '90s,

because there was less

electronic bookkeeping, as it were.

But back then it was largely a cash business.

Not all of it makes it to the accounting books

so that you don't have to pay taxes on all of it,

so a lot of it goes right into your pocket.

It's a hard thing to audit when you don't have controls

of how many cars are going in and how many cars are going out.

RICHARD: From nothing, I wound up with 22 locations.

I wound up having a home built.

Parking was very good to me.

NARRATOR: Richard Cantarella was bringing in

serious money for the Bonanno family.

And building a comfortable life for his nuclear family

out in Staten Island.

For Richard's son, Paul,

the riches that the life provided

were too good to pass up.

PAUL CANTARELLA: As a kid, they always knew

I was Richie's son, and I always got respected.

Instead of going to summer camp,

I would want to go with my father to Manhattan.

I would go with him

to the parking lot and the newsstand.

And then from there we would work

our way to Mulberry Street.

It was all business.

Restaurants, parking lots, you know,

big Mercedes, always dressed nice.

I just saw the respect on the block,

you know, and who doesn't want to be like them?

It was the greatest thing you could see.

I just was so loyal to them, and I looked up to them

that whatever they wanted me to do I would do.

And so, they decided to bring me in.

I got made.

Me and Sal became very close.

Actually, probably closer my son was to Sal Vitale.

He's the one who promoted me to make my son.

He said, "Why don't you put your son's name in?"

PAUL: It wound up being in my mother's basement.

Joe Massino was there, Sal Vitale, Franky, Lino,

my father, and a few guys that were gonna get made.

They pretty much explained that it's a brotherhood.

And then they explained a couple of the rules.

"You don't pick up your hands to any made guys.

You don't fool around with anybody's wife.

That's your father, you know, Joe Massino, now.

You know, any problems, you go to him."

Joe was the real deal.

You know who he was

and my father always taught me,

"You don't ask any questions, you do what he asks,

you don't do anything behind his back,

and you don't have to worry."

You know, people went missing, and you didn't ask a question.

NARRATOR: When Paul Cantarella took his oath of omertà in 1996,

he joined a family that was a dying breed.

And a way of life on the verge of extinction.

But Cantarella believed in Joe Massino,

and believed that omertà wasn't dead yet.

Even while all the signs around him began to say otherwise.

♪

NARRATOR: By the late '90s, the Bonanno family,

under the leadership of Joe Massino,

had become the most powerful family in New York City.

He learned from all the mistakes of his predecessors,

stay out of the press, avoid drugs,

never kill unless absolutely necessary.

His family was the only one in New York

that had yet to have a member cooperate.

In short, omertà in action.

For those looking to join the life,

the Bonanno family was the most obvious choice.

DOMINICK: Well, I grew up in the Pelham Bay

section of the Bronx.

I never really had a father figure.

He was doin' his thing.

He had step-children he was more concerned about.

So, that's, I guess, what led me to gravitate toward the streets.

And then, my twenties and a little bit of my thirties,

I spent in jail.

It's definitely, like, a recruitment center,

the prison system.

I had a 10 year sentence, and I get sent to Lewisburg

where, at that time,

you had a majority of lifers there,

people doing life sentences.

So, you had a lot of top figures

in the mafia at that facility.

And that's where I started seeing the politicking.

That's where I got a lot of proposals from different guys.

"Hey, you know, when you get out on the street,

you can come see us.

We'd love to have

a young guy like you around us."

♪

In the Bronx, it was predominantly

Bonanno and Genovese,

Bonannos had a good name.

All the other crime families you had made members

that cooperated.

They didn't.

When I got out of jail, I met Vinny Basciano

in the Bonanno crime family.

MIKE: Vinny Basciano was a captain

in the Bonanno family.

The Bronx faction, as I would call them.

We understood, Vinny, to be a drug dealer,

a heroin guy.

He was a suspect in a number of murders.

DOMINICK: I'm driving him around.

Vinny always had the number locations,

the Joker Poker machines, that was his primary business.

They tried marijuana.

We had marijuana coming in from Canada.

Ecstasy pills.

Well, Vinny asked me if I wanted part of the life.

He said, "I need you. I want you."

I accepted it.

MIKE: Cicale rose quickly.

He and Basciano became close.

DOMINICK: Joe Massino did start the change,

to name it the Massino family.

Everybody looked up to him at that point.

When he said something,

nobody griped, nobody questioned it.

It was done.

He was smart in a lot of ways,

but Joe surrounded himself,

and not in my opinion, it's a fact, with garbage,

Sal Vitale, Richie Cantarella.

This is all his hierarchy, his administration.

He put all those people into power.

ANTHONY: People didn't like Sal as much.

He didn't build bridges

with some of the capos and some of the soldiers.

And they became to not like him.

They thought he was trying to inflate his importance.

So, he was, in that sense, marginalized.

JACK: It's not at all unusual in these situations

for jealousies to develop

within the hierarchy of an organized crime family.

The history of organized crime

since the 1930s in the United States

is replete with examples of it.

Where somebody may be the number two or three guy,

starts to get big ideas,

and he wants to step up to the number one spot.

Sal had become quite comfortable in his position

as the street boss.

Word on the street was that he did not treat

the capos well.

You know, digging deeper into their pockets.

That he's not fair when he settles disputes,

he plays favorites.

And if a boss can't maintain control

over a situation like that, he's a goner.

RICHARD: Joe belittled him. He embarrassed him.

He was the underboss.

Joe kept him out of the restaurant.

He just fell out of love between brother-in-laws.

Whatever happened, happened.

He probably felt overshadowed

greatly by Joe

and probably was struggling to make his impression

in the world of the mob.

But I don't think he had the clout

or engendered the loyalty

that he needed to be a boss.

If Sal was playing fast and loose,

Joe Massino had the kind of paranoid personality,

being constantly on red alert

and sensitive to these kind of things

I think that Joe started to have notions

about he might clip him.

NARRATOR: Joe Massino knew murders led to investigations.

Which led to indictments. Which led to prison.

But his brother-in-law had become a problem.

Captains in the family were complaining

that Vitale was getting greedy.

Others had suspicions

that the underboss was a government informant.

In 2001,

Vitale was indicted on RICO charges

and worked out a plea deal with prosecutors

for a reduced sentence.

Massino wondered if the light sentence meant

he had flipped.

Word began to circulate

that Sal Vitale couldn't be trusted,

and he was not a man of their code.

DOMINICK: And there was a discussion between Joe Massino

and Vinny Basciano to kill Sal Vitale.

And Vinny pulled me up, he says,

"You're getting a piece of work for this family.

It's going to be a major piece of work.

Be ready. Beware.

And it's going to happen in about two weeks."

The story was that Sal's wife went to Joe

and pled a case

for her husband not being killed.

Joe was in a tough pickle

because if he did anything to Sal

what would that do to Joe's domestic relationship

with his wife?

Killing your wife's brother?

The little boy she used to raise

from the time they were just a growing small family?

It was a tough spot for Joe.

NARRATOR: After years of surveillance and false leads,

The FBI's Bonanno Squad

was still struggling to make a case

against the family's leadership stick.

Joe Massino had been too careful.

He had plans to kill his brother-in-law

and underboss, Sal Vitale,

but never went through with it.

With no murders to chase

and whispers that Big Joe and his crew

were skimming money through parking lots

the feds called the accountants

and began requesting bank statements.

Their case would be built from the balance sheet.

JACK: I became the supervisor of the Bonannos squad,

and I went to my boss, and I said, "Listen,

"I'm convinced that if we could get somebody

that knew the financial landscape,

that could, put the pieces of this puzzle together,

that would be the secret

to tipping the scales in our favor."

Forensic accounting is a skill

in the financial investigative world

which takes a holistic approach

at looking at the records in the financial systems,

analyzing where the money is flowing from.

It's a generator of evidence

which helps you demonstrate, in a RICO type investigation,

the relationships between people,

even though you didn't see them together

on a surveillance or hear them on a phone call.

Thankfully they sent

two fresh-faced young accountants.

I said, "Look,

I'm going to try and take everything I know

about the Bonanno family out of my head

and put it in your head.

And then I want you to mix it up

with what you know about financial investigations

and forensic accounting

and make some magic."

And boy, did they.

ANTHONY: They started looking at the businesses

of people known to be in the Bonanno crime family.

They also came upon a couple of informants

who put them in the direction

of the parking lot ventures in Lower Manhattan.

And this was like the chink in the armor

where the feds could get in

and start doing the forensic accounting

and getting people on tax charges,

extortion charges and whatnot.

So, that led to a series of dominoes falling.

I knew something was up, sure.

I leave my house, I lived on the water,

and I'd spot them following me.

Their windows were pitch black.

And it was never the car that you saw parked.

They would wire down to another car.

I knew what they were looking for.

I had over $500,000 of Bonanno money

in my house, hidden.

They came in once...

they went through my house,

and they took all the parking lot money.

Every parking lot was on my desk.

21st street, Broadway, this one, that one.

Took $52,000 of money.

And then they raided again.

[sirens blaring]

But this time, my mother,

typical old Italian mother,

gave her a couple bankers' money bags.

She never asked what was inside.

That money, you could never get it from her.

Forget about it.

NARRATOR: The FBI's Bonanno squad raided

Richard Cantarella's house

on two occasions in the summer of 2002.

They were hoping to find more money.

But in a safe, in a back room,

they found a roster of his crew members

and the unlisted telephone numbers

of Joe Massino and Sal Vitale.

The evidence was stacking up.

And it was no secret, serious charges were incoming.

On October second, 2002,

Richard Cantarella and his son Paul were arrested.

Richard was indicted on 24 racketeering counts

and was facing life in prison.

I was facing life.

My son was facing a lot of years.

PAUL: I'm getting rearrested, they are telling me

while I'm in jail.

This is the first time I've been arrested,

I'm getting recharged with some more serious crimes.

They're charging me with things

that friends of mine are doing while I'm sleeping.

So, I come out into the unit one day,

I tell my father, "Dad, after this,

whatever it is, the time I do, I'm moving away."

He looks at me, he goes, "You quit?

You can't quit the mob."

He says, "You can't quit."

I says, "Well, I'm moving away after all this."

This was just gonna be an ongoing thing.

When you come out of jail, it's gonna happen again.

And so we decided to cooperate.

[dramatic music]

I cooperated and my son cooperated

because we did not want to spend the rest of our lives in jail.

And that's only me, I only cooperated

because I wanted to.

That's the long and the short of it.

ANTHONY: Cantarella fell.

Frank Coppa, Frank Lino.

Everything came together.

All these cooperators gave the feds

enormous amounts of evidence.

And they were putting together now a critical mass

against Joe Massino.

It was like the atomic bomb was going to explode.

Massino was going to get caught up

in this blast of a prosecution.

♪

REPORTER 1: Now, Joseph Massino, the alleged head

of New York's Bonanno mob family is under arrest.

REPORTER 2: Massino is charged in the murder

of Sonny Black Napolitano.

A gangster who was whacked

for letting Donnie Brasco infiltrate the family.

REPORTER 1: The leaders of all five New York mob families,

the Gambinos, Bonannos,

Luccheses, Colombos, and Genoveses

are all either in jail or facing trial.

Prosecutors said Massino was the last official boss

of New York's five mafia families,

who wasn't already in jail.

NARRATOR: Joe Massino was arrested

in the early morning hours

of January ninth, 2003.

His brother-in-law and underboss, Sal Vitale

was arrested the same morning.

They both knew it was coming.

By then, it was common knowledge that Richard Cantarella

and a handful of captains in the family

had turned state's evidence.

Snitched. Betrayed Omertà.

The next big question on everyone's mind,

what would Sal Vitale do now?

Would he flip or hold the line?

When things got quiet

members of the family were left to wonder.

MIKE: The older guys in the Bonanno family

were very savvy.

They understood how the court system worked.

They understood that, you know,

if somebody was in jail

and nobody knew where that person was,

that that person was probably cooperating.

[gunshot]

♪

[gunshot]

Around the time

Vitale was removed

from whatever facility he was in,

certain leaders in the Bonanno family,

they talk a lot about Vitale

and whether or not he's fully cooperating,

and if he's fully cooperating,

just in how bad a spot are they in.

And you can tell when you listen to the recordings.

NARRATOR: When Vitale flipped in early 2003,

he was moved out of his cell in Manhattan.

Family members could no longer get in touch with him.

Their fears had been realized.

The family's underboss was a rat.

Wiretaps and consensual recordings

from the ongoing investigation

into other members of the Bonanno family,

namely Vinny Basciano,

picked up their concerns.

Sal Vitale decided to cooperate.

That was a big domino.

Joe's trial lasted for somewhere between eight to 10 weeks.

There was no precedent that I could recall

such a close familial relationship

testifying against a boss.

REPORTER: Testifying this week, Salvatore Vitale,

the Bonanno Crime Family underboss,

Massino's second-in-command,

oldest friend, and brother-in-law.

It was a dramatic moment at the trial.

This is his brother-in-law, testified against him.

It was unimaginable in the '90s,

and in the '80s and the '70s.

REPORTER: In the courtroom, Massino's wife, Josephine,

spends her days glaring at her brother, Sal Vitale,

whose testimony could land her husband in prison.

ANTHONY: You could see Joe's wife, Josephine,

you could see her blood boiling.

And you could see the daughters

really getting angry

REPORTER: Vitale agreeing to testify

in exchange for leniency.

Good Looking Sal saw everything, he says,

including the 1981 triple murder

of Massino's rivals at a Brooklyn social club.

He also testified that Massino ordered the murder

of the man responsible

for allowing an FBI agent to infiltrate the mafia.

REPORTER 2: Massino faces life in prison

if convicted in this trial.

Afterward, he'll be tried for a more recent murder,

which, because of a change in federal law,

carries the death penalty.

REPORTER: Vinny "The Chin" Gigante, Genovese family boss,

is serving 12 years for racketeering.

John Gotti, nicknamed "The Dapper Don,"

died in federal prison two years ago.

Joseph "Big Joey" Massino, close friend of the late Gotti,

alleged boss of the Bonanno family

is the last Don.

Now, Massino is on trial for seven counts of murder

and racketeering.

NARRATOR: The trial of Joseph Massino

ran for two months in the summer of 2004.

He'd been federally indicted on counts of gambling,

loan-sharking, arson, money-laundering,

and seven different murders.

Including the 1981 slaying of three captains...

[gunshots]

...and the killing of Sonny Black.

[gunshot]

If found guilty,

he'd be sentenced to life in prison.

But an eighth murder charge loomed

and with it the possibility of the death penalty.

MIKE: There's a verdict in July of '04.

The case agents, they're the lead agents,

but it's also an all hands on deck

type of event for the squad.

ANTHONY: Well, the day of the verdict,

the other reporters were there.

Reporters from the Daily News

and New York Post, Times.

In the end, he got convicted

of engineering a number of homicides.

Including three captains and Sonny Black.

And add the gambling,

that was almost like a sugar coating.

And had to forfeit $10 million of his assets.

Incredibly, Joe had all of those assets

either in cash

or in gold bars in his house.

But Joe had that stuff,

and he turned it over to the government.

That's a forfeiture.

But that wasn't the end of the story, as you know.

♪

I got an indication that something was up

the very day he was convicted.

We were in the courthouse,

and the press room was down the hall

from the court room.

And between the judge's chambers and the courtroom

was just a narrow hallway.

And normally the hallways open.

At some point, right after the verdict,

the doors were shut.

I said, "That's odd."

And we started thinking there's something going on.

EDWARD: After the conviction comes in,

Joe was convicted, I think, on seven murders.

So, he knew was going to get sentenced to life in prison

on the first RICO

for which he had just been convicted.

And now he's facing the death penalty on the others.

He secretly goes to the judge, to the marshals,

the night of the conviction

and says that he wants to cooperate.

Joe explains that "Look,

I'm represented by a guy who has connections

to the Bonanno crime family.

I have to have what is known as shadow counsel.

Somebody who is going to negotiate for me

with the U.S. Attorneys' Office,

but is not going to share this with anybody else."

It's all going to be done secretly.

You know, I'd been out of law enforcement

for 14 years at that point.

I was a partner in a large international law firm.

The chief of the Organized Crime Unit

calls me up and says, "You want to have some fun?"

And I said, "Representing Joe?"

I say, "I don't know if he's gonna want me

to represent him."

He says "Why don't you just come over tomorrow?"

You know, "We'll arrange to have him brought over,

make a story up that he has a problem

with his heart or something, you know,

get a medical thing to get him out of the prison."

And I go over and the judge says,

"I understand you prosecuted him several years ago."

And they produced Joe,

and he comes in, he has his handcuffs on,

and he has shackles on his feet.

And he looks at me, and he smiles,

and he goes, "It's my lucky day, I got you."

[laughs]

So, he agreed that I would represent him,

and so I did.

NARRATOR: Greg Andres was the lead prosecutor

in the case against Joe Massino.

He'd been the man leading the charge

to take down the Bonanno hierarchy.

Young, smart, and cunning.

Some might say cocky.

The Bonannos knew him, and he knew the Bonannos.

With his white whale sitting in front of him,

Andres would have to hear some truly groundbreaking intel

to get approval for Massino's cooperation.

I said, "Joe, look, you've just got to tell them everything.

You know, rehearse everything with them in advance."

I said, "They're going to know if you're holding back.

You know, they have tons of information."

I said, "The only way you're going to get out

from this is if you just tell them

the truth about everything."

He said, "I'm not going to hold back."

So, we launched into a series of,

three or four days of Joe proffering

to the FBI and to the U.S. Attorneys' office,

the information that he had.

ANTHONY: In the end, Joe didn't give as much evidence

as we thought he might.

Possibly because a lot of the main targets

had already been convicted.

Gotti was convicted and dead.

Gigante was long gone.

Castellano was out of the picture.

You had Rastelli gone.

So, Joe's big bid for cooperation involved

his underling, Vinny Basciano.

NARRATOR: Vinny Basciano, "Vinny Gorgeous,"

became acting boss of the Bonanno family

after Joe Massino's arrest.

Basciano and his crew were unaware

that Joe Massino had flipped.

As far as they were concerned,

it was still business as usual.

They had no clue that from here on out,

every move that they made, every law that they broke,

would be reported back to the federal government

by the boss himself.

Vinny took the reins of the family.

Vinny made some decisions on his own.

And Vinny told the guys, "Listen, at the end of the day,

"Joe's our boss. He's our boss.

I follow him, My loyalty's with Joe."

NARRATOR: Vinny Basciano looked up to Massino,

and as underboss, kept him in the loop

of all that went on in the street

while Joe was in prison.

Basciano had a problem, he was to let Joe know about it.

But like any other wiseguy,

Basciano was eager to prove himself.

So, when an issue arose in the ranks

in the form of Randy Pizzolo,

Basciano decided to make a move on his own.

DOMINICK: Randy Pizzolo was an associate

with the Bonanno crime family.

Young and wild guy,

who just overstepped his bounds one too many times.

He was kind of a loudmouth. He was kind of a screw up.

He had done some things that had irritated Basciano.

And Basciano was very much a guy

that you did not want to mess with.

DOMINICK: Vinny said, "Dom, take him out."

Technically, Vinny was supposed to go

to Joe Massino about that.

Vinny said, "No, I'm acting boss."

[thunder rumbles]

Anybody asks, even Joe asks,

"I don't know what you're talking about.

Wasn't us. Why would I kill somebody?"

When he was hit,

he was found in Greenpoint, Brooklyn...

lying by his car.

[eerie string music]

If you're involved with a homicide

and you get away with it,

you're supposed to act like it never happened.

And you'll never get arrested.

So, you should never talk about it.

If someone brings it to your attention,

"I don't know what you're talking about.

Are you out of your mind? I would never do that."

MIKE: I think how dumb the Pizzolo murder was.

That really was a reckless move by them.

It's sort of that paradox, like you need guys like Basciano

for people to be afraid of them.

But on the flip side,

then they go and do something like that

and it kind of undoes the leadership

and sets them back quite a bit.

That was part of my downfall.

If everybody just followed the code to begin with,

that life would've been a lot tighter.

It would have worked out if Vinny kept his big mouth shut.

NARRATOR: Just a few months after Joe Massino's

conviction in 2004,

his own acting boss Vinny Basciano,

was arrested on a RICO charge

for gambling and attempted murder.

So by early 2005,

the two Bonanno leaders were housed in the same prison,

MDC Brooklyn.

One, the Boss of the family

who was also a secret government witness.

The other, the acting boss, the second in command.

Clueless as ever

that his revered leader has switched teams.

With prosecutors still contemplating

Massino's cooperation,

and Massino aware of some big Bonanno happenings,

The Last Don saw an opening

for one final play to save himself.

EDWARD: Joe Massino says,

"Well, I got some more information I got to tell you."

I said, "What's that?"

And he said, "Vinnie Basciano,

Vinny Gorgeous is incarcerated

at the MDC.

And I get out once a day for exercise

and some days

he's in the same exercise yard as me.

And he's telling me he wants to kill Greg."

Greg Andres, who was the chief prosecutor on the case.

And I went, "You've got to be kidding me."

He's, "No, I'm serious. He wants to kill Greg."

So Joey's taken to another room,

and I meet with the boss and with Greg Andres,

and I tell him what Joe said.

And the two of them look at me and go, "That's [bleep]."

They didn't believe it for an instant.

They thought that Joe was lying.

Two weeks later, they bring Joey over again.

He said, "I'll wear a wire.

Put a wire in my boot,

I know this guy is gonna incriminate himself."

So they said, "Okay."

[machine buzzing]

SALLET:

Sure enough, Vinny Gorgeous talks about killing Greg.

It's not crystal clear, not crystal clear enough

to support his prosecution for that.

But it was clear enough to the satisfaction

of the U.S. Attorneys' Office and the FBI

that he was looking to kill Greg Andres.

And he implicates himself in the murder of Randy Pizzolo.

NARRATOR: Over the course of two meetings

with Vinny Basciano in January, 2005,

Joe Massino wore a wire

and pushed his underling to say

as many incriminating things as possible.

It was Joe's last shot at freedom.

And he knew Basciano had ordered the murder of Randy Pizzolo...

[thunder rumbling]

...so he asked him about it.

So they're talking, Joe said, "What happened here?

I see this kid, Randy, got killed."

Vinny said, "Dominick took care of it."

And I'm like...

"You gotta be kidding me.

Why are you gonna throw me under the bus?

You killed over a dozen people.

Like, I don't hear you talking about those murders.

But you're talking about me."

NARRATOR: The Massino recordings shocked the underworld.

In the aftermath,

Dominick Cicale and Vinny Basciano were charged

with the murder of Randy Pizzolo.

Cicale turned state's witness.

Basciano got a life sentence.

Both men caught in the blast

after Joe Massino betrayed his oath of Omertà and flipped.

The first boss of one of New York's Five Families

ever to do so.

DOMINICK: I would say the best way

I could justify it is,

Vinny was such in awe with Joe.

Like, Joe was this big figure,

this God of mafiosos,

that he loved the guy that much.

[Italian guitar music]

To save his own life, he became a squealer.

The person who at one point

had revived the Bonanno family

was responsible for almost destroying it.

MIKE: Massino did damage on a macro level.

That has to be a demoralizing thing for the family.

MIKE: You have all of the things the mafia preaches

about loyalty and honor

and "the life," as they call it,

and the rules that they follow.

Not cooperating is a big part of that.

But many of these guys, not all of them,

when push comes to shove,

they're going to look out for themselves.

And so I think when a boss does that,

it has to have a downstream effect

that is demoralizing.

[tense music]

NARRATOR: In 2005,

74 years after Lucky Luciano established the Commission,

Joseph Massino became the first boss

of one of New York's Five Families

to break the golden rule.

Betray his family. Betray Omertà.

It marked the end of the Bonanno's

as we knew them.

All of the families for that matter.

Those who survived the life

were now left to reckon with this new reality.

DOMINICK: Joe Massino took this family

and put it back down as the lowest family

by becoming the first mafia boss in history to cooperate.

PAUL: The prosecutor called me one day

and asked me if I would go into the program

to get out of prison to be with my family.

And I said, "Whatever gets me back to be with my family."

The marshals picked me up.

They bring me to an apartment for a month,

and they're trying to erase your life

and give you new names and identity.

♪♪

They put me in Memphis when they finally let me out.

I kept asking, "When can I get out of here?

I can't set up my life in Memphis."

And then one day I asked him, he goes, "If you want to--

if you want to move, go and move."

♪♪

I didn't realize at this point

that Joe Massino decided to cooperate

so I'm forgotten about by now.

I literally told the marshal I-- I want my name back.

We flew out to Arizona

and within seven days we bought a house,

moved everything out here, and we started our lives here.

RICHARD: I had no fear.

I was in Manhattan,

because I did the last three or four months

in the MCC.

I went to court, and the judge, "Okay, you're a free man."

I-- I wasn't free sentence wise

because they could have locked me up any time.

This FBI agent, I met him downstairs.

He took me in the car.

I couldn't wait to get on the plane.

I think the plane was five o'clock at night.

And I landed here in Phoenix.

And at that time, for some reason,

your family couldn't wait for you

when you got right off the plane.

So now I don't know where to go.

I know no phone numbers, nothing.

All of a sudden I hear on a loudspeaker--

Now, remember, I'm cooperating.

"Uh, Richard Cantarella. Richard Cantarella.

Your family is waiting for you

in such and such location."

[mellow guitar music]

NARRATOR: After cooperating with the government,

and testifying against their family,

Joe Massino and Sal Vitale

also entered the witness protection program.

Massino died in September of 2023 at 80 years old.

Vitale remains in the program as of 2023.

Look, should somebody do more than nine years in prison

for killing eight people

and running an organized crime family?

Yeah, but you have to look at the big picture.

One of the arguments I made is that

"Look, this is the guy who's the poster boy

for getting other people to cooperate."

If Joe Massino, with all these murders,

can cooperate and get out of jail in-- in 10 years,

the next guy who's thinking about is going to say,

"Hey, Joe Massino can get out.

So I can cooperate, too, and I can get out."

It was almost like PR for the Justice Department.

Does this mean that the mob as we know it is effectively dead?

No, anytime something like this happens,

you hear this is the final nail in the coffin.

And I don't think that's the case.

Kind of like Humpty Dumpty

after he fell off the wall.

You just can't put it back together again.

Massino was trying to put it back together the old way,

with Omertà, with the code of silence, with secrecy.

And the new generation of mobsters,

they want to be celebrity gangsters,

very much in that Gotti mode.

What's the point of being a gangster

if nobody knows who you are?

Massino was an old-time guy,

make money, don't make headlines.

But I think the mob is into the next generation

and it doesn't know how to do that anymore.

By that point, by the point of Joe Massino,

the whole thing was ruined.

It's a socioeconomic change as much as anything.

Once upon a time Italian-Americans

produced singers, middleweight boxers,

and they produced gangsters.

Well, today, there are not many Italian singers

and there are almost no Italian middleweights.

And really, they stopped, you know,

producing gangsters, too.

So now we're almost as boring as everybody else.

RICHARD: I wish I was back in the life,

but maybe I'm better off.

God works in strange ways. He did give me a second chance.

We all live in beautiful homes. We got businesses out here.

Would I want to be back in the life, yes.

Would I want to be confronted with the stress,

of God forbid, getting arrested, no.

So I got mixed emotions, to be honest with you.

DOMINICK: I would have to say I went in with blinders.

And I should have realized this from the guys

who I did time with in jail,

especially some of the old timers

who have forgotten about.

Because Omertà is not only

a code of silence,

it's respect, it's honoring one another.

It's being there for your brother.

That word to me is BS.

There is no code. There is no code.

MICHAEL: I knew how destructive that life could be.

I saw my mother, 33 years without her husband.

My whole family was destroyed.

My sister died young of an overdose of drugs.

My brother was a drug addict for most of his life.

He eventually went into the witness protection program,

became a-- an informant himself.

Every family of every member of this life is destroyed.

-MAN: Is that correct? -JOE VALACHI: That's right.

As the senator put it before, what did I get out of it?

-MAN: What did you get out? -Nothing but misery.

NARRATOR: It's been more than 60 years

since Joe Valachi took the stand.

Almost two decades

since Joe Massino betrayed his oath.

The families have been crippled

by a continued wave of successful prosecutions.

These days, we don't see

public mafia slayings in streets...

or mobsters on the cover of magazines.

But the Five Families still exist.

Even if their oath and their rules

haven taken a new shape.

The best way of describing the mafia

in the 21st century

is that it's wounded, but not fatally.

The mafia modeled itself on capitalism.

If you can fault America,

it's because it's desire to be wealthy.

If you want to blame anybody, you can blame capitalism...

and admiration in America for wealth.

What works for America

will work for the Five Families.