New York mob boss testifies in murder trial
Joseph Massino, one-time chef and longtime boss of the Bonanno family, is bringing a taste of mafia life to the trial of a former associate
Vincent Basciano, also known as 'Vinny Gorgeous', at whose trial Massino is testifying. Photograph: AP Photo/U.S. Attorneys Office
New York Times
It was a straightforward question, but not one usually answered by the likes of Joseph Massino. At least not with such candour.
The longtime boss of the Bonanno crime family was asked by a prosecutor, "What powers did you have?" Massino, seated at the witness stand, offered a quick, matter-of-fact reply. "Murders, responsibility for the family, made captains, break captains," he said.
And so it was that Massino, 68, the only official boss of a New York crime family ever to co-operate with federal authorities, appeared in US district court in Brooklyn on Tuesday and became the first to testify against a former confederate.
For nearly five hours, Massino catalogued his misdeeds, recounting murders and other acts of varying criminal scope.
Massino would tell the jury that the man on trial, Vincent Basciano the family's former acting boss, had spoken to him about ordering the 2004 killing of Randolph Pizzolo, a Bonanno associate, a conversation Massino secretly recorded. Basciano is charged with ordering Pizzolo's murder.
But for much of the day, Massino established his credentials and gave the jury his view from the top, his philosophy of mob management and his personal history, all larded with a steady stream of culinary metaphors and references.
"If you need somebody to kill somebody, you need workers. It takes all kinds of meat to make a good sauce," said the one-time restaurateur, catering consultant and coffee truck owner, referring to what he said were Basciano's skills both as a killer and as an earner for the family.
He recounted turning to crime as a 12-year-old, stealing some homing pigeons. By the time he was 14, he had run away from home; he said he hitchhiked to Florida, getting arrested twice for vagrancy on the way, and worked as a lifeguard in Miami. By the 1960s, he said, he had progressed to murder, and he testified that he eventually was involved in about a dozen killings, some that he ordered, some that he orchestrated and some that he helped carry out.
Massino's testimony also highlighted his underworld executive acumen in addition to his lifetime of crime, much of it in service of the Bonanno family, with which he said he had been affiliated for 33 or 34 years.
His unassuming appearance, with heavy jowls, drooping eyelids and an expansive midsection, was belied by his authoritative-sounding responses to the prosecutor, assistant US attorney Taryn Merkl, who took him through his personal and professional history.
Massino began co-operating with the authorities after he was convicted of seven murders in 2004, for which he faced life in prison, and was set to go to trial for an eighth, for which he could have faced the death penalty. In 2005, he pleaded guilty to the eighth killing, and Judge Nicholas Garaufis of US district court, who is presiding over Basciano's trial, sentenced him to two consecutive life terms.
By testifying for the government, he is seeking a sentence reduction, though he told the jury that none had been promised. In his words: "I'm hoping to see a light at the end of the tunnel."
Dressed in a black and grey jogging suit with a white T-shirt visible beneath, he alternately rested his folded hands on the edge of the witness stand or on his belly as he answered questions about his rise in the Bonanno family, and his management of hundreds of members and associates after he became boss in 1991.
The jurors at times appeared rapt, but at times seemed to fade as photograph after photograph of Bonanno crime-family figures were introduced into evidence.
He presented himself as a master of the deft bureaucratic manoeuvre, both in his dealings with internal family rifts and with other crime clans, and in his efforts to thwart law enforcement.
He described going to the bosses of the Gambino and Colombo families, Paul Castellano and Carmine Persico respectively, in 1981 before taking pre-emptive action against three senior Bonanno figures who were moving against his faction in a brewing power struggle. After securing the bosses' approval, Massino and several others shot the men dead in an ambush in the basement of a social club.
He also testified about codes that he and his confederates worked out to discuss murder plots, and in one instance to determine if a social club had been bugged without alerting law enforcement. He described some changes he put into effect after becoming boss that were meant to reduce the risk that members of his family could incriminate one another.
For example, Massino closed all the family's social clubs, saying that if crime family members hung out in these storefront establishments, they made the FBI's job easy, because one agent conducting surveillance outside could see everyone come and go. "If you close the club," he explained, "it takes 50 FBI agents to watch 50 people."
He was, he said, extremely careful about where and when he talked about mob business. "You never talk in a club, you never talk in a car, you never talk on a cellphone, you never talk on a phone, you never talk in your house," he testified, saying that so called walk-talks, where two or more crime figures would carry on a roving conversation as they strolled the streets, were safest.
Indeed, Massino said he discussed mob business in a walk-in refrigerator at a catering business where he worked to avoid electronic eavesdropping.
His efforts to thwart investigators, he said, were aided by at least four unnamed law officers: two New York Police Department detectives in the 1960s; an FBI agent who warned him of a pending arrest in the 1980s; and a Pennsylvania state trooper who destroyed copies of his fingerprints sometime later.
While most of his testimony on the first day of the trial before Judge Nicholas Garaufis focused on Massino's background and the history of the crime family, Merkl did ask a number of questions about the man on trial, Basciano.
Basciano has already been convicted in a separate case of murder and racketeering, also before Garaufis, and was sentenced to life in prison in 2008.
In this case, Basciano is charged with the murder of Pizzolo, who prosecutors said had insulted Basciano when he was the acting boss. He faces the death penalty if convicted.
Basciano's lead lawyer, George Goltzer, said in his opening statement that his client had not ordered the killing, but falsely admitted doing so to Massino to protect a friend who did order the killing, and his own business interests.
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