Mark Bowden: The Best American Crime Writing 2006

Both of us remember when it wasn't.There was a hot late afternoon in July 1979 when Carmine Galante, the boss of the Bonanno Mob at the time, was shot dead at a picnic lunch in the backyard of Joe and Mary's Restaurant on Knickerbocker Avenue in Brooklyn. Bill Clark, then a homicide detective, was the first detective on the scene. He looked at Galante and grabbed the phone and called my office at the New York Daily News.

The great A.M., secretary, took the call. She was a Catholic schoolgirl who was a true daughter of the Mafia in the Bronx.

"Tell Jimmy that Galante is down on Knickerbocker Avenue," Clark said. Then he hung up. Inspectors were barging in to grab the phone and have it for themselves the rest of the day. There was no such thing as a cell phone.

Secretary A.M. sat on the call for one hour.

"People shouldn't know about a thing like this," she said.

Today, aside from grieving showmen, the only ones rooting for the mobsters to survive-or at least for keeping some of them around-are FBI agents assigned to the squads that chase Mafia gangsters across the hard streets of the city. Each family has a squad assigned to it. The squads are numbered, such as C-16 for the Colombo squad. Each agent is assigned to watch three soldiers and one capo in the family. The work is surveillance and interviews. Agents will interview a cabdriver or a mobster's sister. It doesn't matter. Just do the interview.Then they get to their desk and fill out FD-302 forms that get piled up in the office.They must do it in order to keep the FBI way of life in New York.They earn seventy thousand dollars or so a year, live in white suburbs, and do no real heavy lifting on the job. After a five-hour day they go to a health club, then perhaps stop for a drink with other agents, and they always talk about what jobs they want when they retire. If, after interviewing, surveilling, and paying stool pigeons, they do not come in with some Mafia dimwit whose arrest makes the news, they face doing true work for their country: antiterror-ism detail in a wet alley in Amman, Jordan, or tent living in Afghanistan.

"What do you want?" Red Hot said. He is on First Avenue, in front of the great De Robertis espresso shop.

"We just want to talk to you" one of the two FBI agents said.

"You'll have to wait here until I get a lawyer to stop by," Red Hot said.

"We just wanted you to take a ride with us down to the office."

"The answer is no," Red Hot said.

"We just want to get fresh fingerprints. We haven't taken yours in a while."

"That's because I was in jail. And nothing happened to the prints you have.What are you trying to say, that they faded? They wore out?"

His friend Frankie "Biff" LoBritto cut in,"Red Hot, if you go with them, you won't come back. They'll make up a case in the car."

When the agents left, Red Hot said in a tired voice, "They'll be back. They're going to make up something and lock me up. Don't even worry about it."

Some nights later Red Hot was walking into De Robertis when he dropped dead on the sidewalk.

"He ruined the agents' schedules," Frankie Biff said. "They were going to put him away for sure without a case."

I will now take you into intensive care to observe the last of the Mafia.

The floor under them didn't even give a warning creak before opening up and causing everybody to tumble into the basement. This happened in March of this year when the United States Attorney in Brooklyn announced that, in the 1990s, two detectives, Louis Eppolito and Stephen Caracappa, had killed at least eight people for money paid by Anthony "Gaspipe" Casso, a demented killer and a boss of the Luchese Mob.

From out of the basement climbed Tony Cafe. Immediately the FBI visited him for the second time. It needed some help. If there were any shooters roaming around Brooklyn, Tony Cafe had to stop them. For if any bodies appeared on the streets or in the gutters of Brooklyn, perhaps the FBI agents, in absolutely desperate trouble for having Eppolito and Caracappa accused of shooting people practically in front of them, would be thrown like miscellaneous cargo onto transport planes bound for Kabul and Baghdad.

Politicians and the news media claimed the two detectives had committed the most treacherous and treasonous acts in the history of the police department.Would that it were true. Police officers serve wonderfully well and in these times do not even take a free cup of coffee. But there are isolated madmen who still pass the test and who have guns and could use money, and over the years the belief has been that many Mob shootings in Brooklyn have been done by cops.

Tony's favor to the FBI consisted of finding the only two Mob gunmen left in Brooklyn and ordering them to keep their fingers still.

There were other issues for the Mob. As ordered by the mandates of Christmas for Mafia captains, collections were taken up late in 2004 for traditional presents for the bosses of the five New York City Mafia families. The bosses now mainly were worried defendants and long-term prisoners. There was only one recognized boss, Joe Massino of the crime family named for the late big old mobster Joe Bonanno. I don't know what the other families did about Christmas collection money, for there was nobody worth a gift certificate.

The men in the Bonanno crime family raised two hundred thousand dollars for Massino, the last boss. His liberty, however, was as shaky as a three-legged chair. He was in jail under the Gowanus Expressway in Brooklyn, held without bail while standing trial in federal court some blocks away. There were three murders and seven or eight prosecution witnesses of the type known as rats, including his wife's brother,"Good-Looking Sal" Vitale. Seated in the first row of the courtroom one afternoon was the wife, Josephine Massino. On the witness stand her brother was telling the court how Joe Massino's people came busting out of a closet and began firing away at three Bonanno mobsters he felt were dangerous dissidents.

Joe Massino sat at the defense table with a computer. He was good and overweight. He had a round, bland face and short white hair. The heritage of great suits ended at his plain blue suit and open-collar white shirt. Glasses were perched on his nose as his pudgy fingers touched the computer keyboard. I don't know what he was looking for.What he needed was an old movie of the battle of Dien Bien Phu, where he could identify closely with the French, who lost; the brother-in-law, Good-Looking Sal, would be shooting at him from the hillside.When Massino stopped typing, his hand went to the top of his head and, with thumb and forefinger, moved the glasses.This was the style of removing eyeglasses for all those in the underworld in Queens County.

On this day he noticed a reporter who had just had a death in the family. Massino mouthed, "I'm sorry." This was probably the last time we'd see someone in the Mafia showing the old-world class it was always reputed to have but rarely did.

Watching her brother destroy her husband, Mrs. Massino wailed softly, "This is the same as a death in my family.You don't know what I am going through."

"How could Sal do this? Joe taught him how to swim," Tony Rabito, from Massino's restaurant, the Casa Blanca, complained. Sal Vitale is on his way to prison for a whole lot of years.

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 Cafe, 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.