King of the Godfathers by Anthony M. Destefano

Author:Anthony M. Destefano [Destefano, Anthony M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: True Crime, General
ISBN: 9780806533094
Google: rJkauwXIee0C
Publisher: Kensington Publishing Corp.
Published: 2008-06-01T21:17:24+00:00

CHAPTER 16

By the Numbers

“What do you think is going on?” asked FBI Director Louis Freeh.

Though he was based in Washington, D.C., Freeh kept abreast of crime news out of New York City, where he had worked as a federal prosecutor in the 1980s. That morning, March 20, 1999, the Manhattan tabloids had reports about the killing of a Bonanno crime family captain named Gerlando “George” Sciascia on a Bronx street. His face was bloodied from three shots to the head and his left eye was shot out.

Freeh, who had led some of the big prosecutions of the crime family in the 1980s, had a meteoric rise in his career that led to his appointment by President Bill Clinton to the directorship of the FBI in 1993. But he never lost his interest in the Bonanno group. The killing of Sciascia, a major family member out of Canada, was a sign that something big had happened. So Freeh called his trusted friend, Charles Rooney, special agent in charge of the Chicago office of the FBI, to brainstorm.

Rooney had studied the Bonanno crime family for years and had an encyclopedic knowledge of the group, as well as an indelible memory. He had put together the Pizza Connection case and had known all the players in the family. He especially knew the ways of Joseph Massino. He had a quick answer for Freeh about Sciascia’s death.

“This is Joey cleaning house,” said Rooney.

What Rooney meant was that Massino was continuing what the investigator believed was a long process of killing off anyone who might be able to implicate him in the 1981 murder of the three captains or any other homicides for that matter. A surveillance picture taken on May 6, 1981, at a Bronx motel, the day after Dominick Trinchera, Philip Giaccone, and Alphonse Indelicato had been killed, showed Massino with three other men: Vito Rizzuto, a key Bonanno captain from Canada and a suspected shooter in the killing of the three captains, Gianni Liggamari, a mafioso from New Jersey, and Sciascia.

There were other theories to be sure that would emerge about the Sciascia killing. Among them would be the fact that Sciascia had spoken his mind about the drug use of Anthony Graziano, an old Bonanno captain who Massino had a soft spot for. But to Rooney’s way of thinking, a lot of high-ranked mobsters like Massino got paranoid about their crimes. Massino in particular was overly sensitive about breaches in security and tried to foresee who might be a turncoat. So it made sense, Rooney believed, that Massino was trying to cover his tracks in the three captains homicide.

“You just get a sixth sense of it,” Rooney later said. “You just learn how they think.”

The motel picture and the strange deaths of some of the mobsters depicted in it pulled it all together in Rooney’s mind about the mob homicides that had been cropping up. He felt Massino had to be involved and said as much to Freeh. After serving the majority of his ten-year sentence for labor racketeering, Massino had been paroled in 1992.

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