The murder of Bonanno capo Sonny "Black" Napolitano sets the stage for Joseph Massino’s ascent as the last don, revealing the deadly consequences of betrayal in the Mafia's ranks.
You're listening to Law and Order Criminal Justice System, a production of Wolf Entertainment and iHeart podcasts.
In the criminal justice System, landmark trials transcend the courtroom to reshape the law. The brave many women who investigate and prosecute these cases are part of a select group that is defined American history. These are their stories. August seventeenth, nineteen eighty one, Eltingville, Staten Island.
The pickup was scheduled for just past nine sunny. Black Nepolitano placed his keys on the bar, along with his prize diamond pinky ring and.
A wat of cash.
He told the bartender he had a sinking feeling that he wouldn't be needing them anymore. Sonny got into a Lincoln town car which took him over with the Verizano Bridge to a small house on Staten Island. For years, he had been a good earner for the Banano family, but he made one unforgivable mistake. He vouched for someone who turned out to be the enemy.
One of the closer Austra rules is if you vouch for a guy and he turns bad, it's on you and the penalty could be death.
Sonny knew the score. As he descended the stairs to the basement, the door slam shut behind him and he was shoved to the floor.
There was a setup crew, there was a murder crew, and there was a cleanup crew, so multiple people involved.
The first shot grazed his ear, then he heard the gun jam. Sprawled on his knees, Sonny looked up at the gunman and said, hit me one more time and make it good. The second gunman fired.
You're not with the mob because you want to be. It's the gangster that decides whether you're his associated on If you like.
Your life, you will vote to acquit.
I'm aniseg and NICOLASI.
My father should have been a dead man.
From Wolf Entertainment and iHeart podcasts. This is law and order criminal justice system.
I didn't get hired as an FBI agent. What I got hired as was a grade to file coler, which was a position that doesn't even exist anymore. And my very first job in the FBI was filing fingerprint cards in alphabetical order.
Extremely exciting work, but I.
Managed to work my way up through the ranks.
You can blame it on the hardy boys or shirlofe homes, but Jack Stubing, like many of us, developed a passion for crime solving at a young age. He just happened to make a career of it, first as a file clerk and then eventually as a supervisory special agent at the FBI.
The first actual organized crime book I ever read was about the Banano family. When I became a supervisor, I tried to instill in young agents that you should know the history of these things because it's all about human relationships and how we got to where we are. And it's one of the reasons that at West Point they study battles that happened a thousand years ago, because the technology may change, but human beings remain human beings. And part of success in organized crime investigations is the ability to predict the future, basically, and you want to predict what's going to happen before it happens.
Know your history. Predict all easier said than done, especially when you're dealing with an adversary as unpredictable as the American mafia with the mobs elaborate org chart of bosses, underbosses, capos, and soldiers. Keeping track of the nicknames alone would test even the most dedicated of crime solvers. Thankfully, Special Agent Jack Steubing loved a good mystery, and he had his sight set on a big one. Throughout the second half of the twentieth century. The rise and fall of the Banano crime family had more twists and turns than an act at the Christie novel, and in the years after the Commission trial, Jack was tasked with taking them down once and for all.
The Bananas were an absolute mess. To put it bluntly, they had had problems going back to the nineteen sixties. Joe Banano was the founding member of the Banano family, but he was also the youngest member of the Commission at the time because he was a young, wise guy from the Old Country. And even though that he was on the Commission, he was trying to gather support from some of the other families to institute himself as the Boss of bosses. Despite the Commission. Commission got wished to this thing before he was able to make his move, and they chased them out of New York. The titular Boss was now living in Arizona having been chased out of New York, and they were rutorless. There were these constant factions within the family that led to the assassination actually of Carline Gallante and the rise of Joe Messino.
The rise and reign of Joe Messino, perhaps the most ruthless and resilient of the New York bosses, a man who would become known as the Last Don.
He was a hijacker. He was not an educated man, but he was a smart man. He was very clever, very street wise. Obviously, he was brutal, reputed to do his own work. In other words, he wasn't afraid to use violence as a tool against somebody personally, wouldn't just order somebody else. He would participate in acts himself if necessary.
By the time he was in his thirties, Messino had earned a coveted role as protege to Rusty Rostelli, who in nineteen seventy three had taken over the top spot in the Banano family. Messino's appetite also earned him the nickname Big Joey.
He was a good earner and he was very interested in food. He ran a catering business back in the day before there were the kind of sophisticated food trucks and stuff that they have now that go to fairs and that kind of thing. There were essentially pickup trucks with stainless steel bodies on the back of them, and they sold sandwiches to construction sites and places where people were working out in the field. And in Joe's case, these trucks were also used there's good mechanisms for taking bets and making loan shark loans, and conducting other business that generated more income for him than selling sandwiches.
After the Bananas got burned by undercover FBI agent Joe Pistone aka Donnie Brasco and were banished from the Commission, the family was forced to pivot into new illsicit markets, and during that time Joe Messino crew in status.
As the years went by, he grew in power within the family and became a captain and had his own crew. He rose through the ranks through guile violence, basically to head the family after the death of Rusty Rostelli.
A position he secured in large part thanks to the nineteen seventy nine assassination of rival Carma Galante and the triple murder of the three Capos in nineteen eighty one. And remember, the Bananos had been left largely unscathed by the Commission trial, so by the end of the eighties, as the other families were weakened by prosecutions and a revolving door of turncoats, they were poised to fill that power vacuum. As the new head of the family. Messino was becoming arguably the most powerful mafia leader in the country, not to mention the only full fledged New York boss who was not in prison or dead.
Messino, you know, I mean, he's been referred to as the last Godfather. He was the force to be reckoned with. He really was de facto the boss and bosses by this point.
And he aimed to keep it that way, determined not to make the same mistakes other bosses had made that exposed them to federal prosecution.
Messino was pretty sophisticated in a street wise way, but also he sort of had a fondness for technology. He sometimes used the walkie talkies on his operations. He would have electronic sweeps of his social club to detect bugs. There's a famous story that they had installed a bug in one of his clubs and he managed to find it within two days. So he was somebody who was constantly on guard against infiltration.
Just as Vincent Gigante was called the Chin earned a similarly descriptive nickname, he was known as the.
Ear It's like Valdemort, he who must not be named. The ear Thing was partially this myth that Messino created for himself, where he was everywhere and all seeing and would hear you know if anything was amiss within his empire.
But Messino's greatest advantage over his predecessors. After watching the government round up his rivals, he had gotten wise to their playbook.
We had a case where we had infiltrated one of their clubs. We were able to install bugs and CCTV inside the club, and we could see on the CCTV that when they were talking to each other they would be whispering in each other's ears. They just assumed that the place was bugged, and a acted accordingly.
These bugs had been the hallmark of the Commission case, but in many ways, federal law enforcement had been a victim of their own success. Decades of black bag ops and surveillance had served to strengthen those mobsters that had managed to survive.
This combination of factors that no one within the family had turned. Our informant coverage was spotty at best. They were very cautious about electronic surveillance. We just weren't making any headway.
So for this next chapter in their spy versus spy battle with the mob, the FBI needed a new game plan, a whole new type of agent. They would have to be sophisticated, fearless, and most of all, relentless. Enter the accountants.
In the mid nineties, I went to my ASAC, the Assistant Special Agent in charge of the Organized crime branch in New York, and I said, you know, everything we have tried has not worked. Now, I've been toying with this idea that maybe if we could get some forensic accountantcy in here, maybe they could make some headway where we can. My ASAC said, all right, well, let's see what I can do. He obtained for me two forensic accountants by the name of Jeff Selette and Kim McCaffrey, and they were both brand new agents. They were eager, enthusiastic, smart.
And their real superpower each was a whiz with numbers.
So my name is Kimberly McCaffrey, and I started in New York. I spent nine years there working organized crime.
Like many agents, Kim McCaffrey had grown up familiar with some of the faces and names of organized crime.
I grew up in southern New Jersey. Obviously it was on the local news all the time. I would always see John Gottie. I would always see how he walked with a swagger. Even as a kid, I never quite understood. I'm like, guys, if we know he's the head of a mob family, why can't we arrest him. I didn't understand how he could just walk around when we all knew he was such a bad guy.
But Kim's path to crime fighting was not a direct one.
I started as a phyzed major and changed my major three times till I finally graduated with an accounting major. I majored in accounting not because I thought I would have a great fulfilling career as a CPA. I majored in accounting because it actually came naturally to me. It was fun going through all the numbers every day. But I really did want to use my accounting skills. It sounds so cliche, but to change the world to make things better.
So after getting her degree, Kim stopped buy an FBI field office and filled out an application.
On my first day, one of my supervisors when I first got to the New York office, said Hey, if you had your dream career here, what would it be? And I was like, you know, I would love to use my accounting skills to combat organized crime. He said, Oh, do I have the perfect person for you to meet.
That person was Jack Steubing, who had the novel idea of recruiting CPAs to combat the mob.
At that point, I was slated to go to Squad C ten in New York to work the Banana organized crime family. Jeff and I became partners, and the rest is history. I guess.
So, how would this work? How would a few accountants accomplish what it had taken hundreds of FBI personnel to do before them.
The idea of forensic accounting isn't just crunching numbers. That's what regular accountants do. What the forensic accountants do is put those numbers into the organized crime context. What here is legitimate money, what is bad money?
And if the numbers added up, the results would prove to be even more reliable than human witnesses.
Bank records don't change. You can kill an informant, you can bribe people, you can do all manner of things, But you can't change the records that are in the banking system. They're always lurking there, and many of them you don't even know exist, And it's great evidence.
The fact is that at its heart, the mob is all about money, and who better to trace a money trail than an accountant.
One thing Jeff always said was what do financial records tell you? Well, they give you leads like cut off the numbers, and it gives you a pattern of life, Like if we look at any one of our statements, it's a financial surveillance, like, oh, you like to go to Chipotle, you shop at Target, this is where you vacation. Who are you getting money from and who are you sending money to? And why look at someone's tax returns, especially a mob boss. Why are they getting W two's from particular corporations they're clearly not working there. Look at the in and outflows of money, and then understand the people behind them, and then you look into those people and figure out who will actually talk to you, look for the weak link.
And the plan was to deploy these methods against the boss of bosses, Joe Messino. But even Jack had to admit this was a bit out of his wheelhouse.
I mean, I had taken some accounting classes in community college, but I was no forensic account and I didn't know what I was looking for when I subpoenaed bank records. Unless it said in the memo loan shark payment, I would have had no idea what it was I was looking at.
Luckily, his agents were experts in decoding the secrets in the stacks of checks, bank statements, and shady receipts that had accumulated from years of property seizures.
As I recall, Jeff was the first to arrive, and I had a box of these checks that from when I was a case agent. Well, he opens his box up and starts going through the box, and he goes, oh, this is evidence of structuring. Oh, this is evidence of money learning. Oh this is evidence of tax of asion.
Oh.
I don't, Frank, I'm looking at the same stuff he said. He is, Hakim, I don't see what he sees. I said, I'm going to take whatever's in my head about the Banano family and put it in your head, and you mix it up with your accounting skills and see what you can do.
Armed with pencils, paper and their trusty Excel spreadsheets, Kim and Jeff got to work sorting through thousands of documents in putting the pieces together. The endgame, follow the money and hit them where it hurts.
Traditionally, an organized crime, you sort of expect to go to jail at some point in your career, but what you don't expect is when the government takes your money away while you're in jail. So that was what we had planned. Not only do we want to put them in jail, but we want to take all their money, or we want to have that hanging over their head that maybe they will talk to us for the first time.
They decided to start right at the top with Joe Messino and his underboss, sal Vitali, who was also his brother in law.
They had the same CPA. So the first thing we did, as our nerdy accountant selves, was we subpoenaed their accounting records.
Not wiretaps, not stakeouts of smoke filled social clubs, receipts, stacks and stacks of receipts. Safe to say, this was a whole new side of the FBI.
I always kind of laugh because you had some old school agents on the squad who were going out on surveillance every day or doing old school type of things. And how excited were Jeff and I when we brought back nine boxes of financial records and were filling in Excel spreadsheets.
I'm shaking my head because I would have walked by your office so fast.
I was like, and that's exactly what most people did, but to us, like, we're so excited, So I don't think anyone wanted to be on our team at that point.
And the gangsters themselves weren't their only targets. It was also their facilitators, the network of people who were helping them move their money and attempt to disguise it as legitimate, which led to the uncovering of one of the more novel laundering schemes in criminal history. If you actually believe their tax returns, Messino, Vitally and their respective wives were among the luckiest people in New York. Why they were reporting thousands and thousands of dollars of lottery winnings.
Yeah, we see that on their tax returns. Joe, sal Josie, Diana, They're all winning the lottery at various points. Anyone around Joe Messino is winning the lottery all the time. We knew that really wasn't real. That was a way for him to launder his money. It would have been clever if maybe they just won it once, but with the volume of times that they and their friends or family members won it, it just obviously became a red flag for us.
Here's the scheme, as Messino and Vitally imagined it. You have a lot of cash from a legal activity, and you need to clean it to make it look like it was earned legitimately.
And in New York there's a lot of bodegas. The owners of the bodegas, these are the people selling the lottery tickets. So I have a lot of cash and I tell the owner, Hey, if someone wins the lottery, I'd like to buy their ticket. Because that legitimate person who wins the lottery, they have to claim it, they have to pay taxes on it, and that's less money for them. But if Joe Mosino buys your lottery ticket from you, you get more money. You don't have to claim it on your taxes. He doesn't care about paying the taxes on it because he has so much cash that he needs to legitimize. And that's sort of the way the scheme worked.
But their lucky streak would eventually run out, partly due to the FBI's work with an unlikely partner, Barry Weinberg. He was our first big break. Barry Weinberg was the owner of several parking lots in Lower Manhattan. His name was nowhere on the Banana Org chart, but it kept popping up on checks to and from Messino and wives.
We're just wondering why the boss and the underboss' wives are receiving income from parking lots in Lower Manhattan. In particular, we're wondering why a man by the name of Barry Weinberg is receiving checks from Messino and Vitally. Let's figure out who he is and what he's all about.
Well, it turns out that Barry was a character almost as colorful as the gangsters he was in bed with.
Barry Weinberg was a very successful businessman who was infatuated with the mob. He was an associate of Richie Cantarella.
Richie Cantrella was a Banano captain and confidant of sal Vitally.
Barry Weinberg owned parking lot leases all over Manhattan, super wealthy, and he was pretty much extored out of a portion of those leases and forced to sell to the wives of Joe Messino and Salvatally so that they could legitimize their income.
So Weinberg was a victim of the bananas, but also an accomplice who walked the fine line between the legitimate and criminal worlds of New York City.
In vision like an older, wheeling, dealing guy in Lower Manhattan, chain smoking, super nervous, always had a cigarette in his hand. He once described W two wage earners as schmucks, and then Jeff and I just looked at him, like, you do realize that we are W two wage earners And he's like, oh, sorry, sorry, you know, very fast talking.
He was just a character. And in addition, Barry had an achilles heel that Kim and Jeff were happy to exploit.
Barry's downfall was that he liked really young women, and he had a lot of ex wives, and he had a lot of children, and he didn't like to pay his taxes. I think he had evaded close to fourteen million dollars in income taxes with his various businesses.
Money that largely went right back out the door in the form of alimony and child support.
We sort of assessed that Barry Weinberg was not the type of guy who was willing to go to prison. So our plan and our hope was to arrest Barry in a covert way without anyone in the family knowing about it, and to have Barry make a decision whether he wanted to go in front of the magistrate judge that day for his tax evasion crimes, or he wanted to go along his normal daily activities but wearing a wire for the FBI.
And so Kim and Jeff partnered with the n MIPD to affect a car stop of Weinberg's Mercedes, careful to do it far from the prying eyes of Banano spies.
We were close behind in a van and then they asked him to get out of the car and they put him in the van and he met Jeff and I for the first time. He was pretty surprised to meet us that day. We just introduced ourselves and we basically gave him his options and it took him about ten seconds to decide. He said, where were you six months ago? Give me the wire for Barry Weinberg. Loyalty took a back seat to self preservation. It was the first piece in a case against the Last Dawn, one that wouldn't just lead to charges of tax evasion and money laundering, but the murder of one of his oldest friends, Sonny Black. Nepolitano. Special agent Jack Stubink's team of forensic accountants had tracked payments to and from Banano boss Joe Messino to a New York businessman named Barry Weinberg. Not one to entertain a lengthy prison term, Weinberg quickly agreed to cooperate, and he would do it the old fashioned way by.
Wearing a wire.
Part of his decision was one he was not willing to go to jail, but two because a few months prior, he was actually assaulted by Richie Kintarella. Although Barry had made the Banano family a ton of money, they felt that it wasn't enough, and he got beat.
Up because he wasn't earning enough or producing enough.
I mean that's what they thought. But he literally had made them millions of dollars. They basically said, I hate these guys, and give me the wire and I'll do whatever you need me to do. We wired him up right then and there. We didn't want to change his pattern. We didn't want anything to change, so he literally went right back out wearing.
A recording device, and just like that, the forensic accountants were back to using human intel and assuming all the risk that goes with it. After all, this was not a low stakes game. If Weinberg was suspected of working with the Feds, there was a good chance he wouldn't be left to run parking lots. He'd be buried under one.
Barry hung out with Richie Cantarella and his crew pretty much every Monday through Thursday at Deniko's. It was a restaurant in Little Italy. Our goal with Barry was to have him just wear that wire every day and just see what they talked about.
The slick haired Richie Cantarella, also known as s Lackhead, was Banano captain who had once murdered his own cousin at the behest of Joe Messino, and thanks to his extortion of Barry Weinberg, he, along with Messino and Vitali, was also the proud co owner of several parking lots in Lower Manhattan.
And what Barry did explain was when the wives of Joe and Sal purchased interests in the parking lots. They were not for what they were worth. He was told to do that and he really had no choice. So that's what those checks were for, was for their interests in the parking lots, which now they earned income from working there. And that's how Richie earned all of his money too.
It's extortion.
It's no show jobs because they're definitely not working there. They couldn't even tell you where those parking lots were. Everything that Barry made, he was supposed to give a portion to Richie, who then gave it to Joe and Salar.
Lots like windows in concrete were not sexy, but they were profitable, and they turned out to be a lynchpin in dismantling a much larger criminal enterprise. I can't stress how integral Barry was. I don't know that anyone would have.
Cared or noticed who he was if we didn't find those three checks that were written to him. Through the work that he did, we got a lot on.
Richie thanks to Weinberg's wire, the FBI collected over one hundred tapes of incriminating statements from Cantarella and his crew, and in October of two thousand and two, Richie Cantrella was arrested and charged in a twenty four count Rico indictment. Also arrested another Banano captain named Frank Copa. It became a race to see which made man would be the first to flip to Cantrella's dismay. Copa beat him to the punch.
Although Barry broke it open and Frank Copa crushed it. We thought we were arresting him on an extortion charge against Barry Weinberg that he was going to face eighteen months until Frank told us about the murder of Sunny Black Napolitano, and I will tell you the truth. We had no idea he was involved in that murder, or that fifteen other people were involved in that murder. Joe Messino was involved in that homicide. There was a setup crew, there was a murder crew, and there was a cleanup crew, so multiple people involved, and we were like, wow, okay.
The murder of Dominic Sonny Black Neapolitano was the violent finale of the most infamous chapter of Mafia. Lore Neapolitano was the Banano captain that would forever be known as the man who allowed an undercover FBI agent named Jopstone to work undetected for nearly sake years within the Banano organization. FBI agent Joseph B.
Stone was known to the underworld as Donnie Bresco, a trusted Jules thief who leaders of the Banano family promised eventual membership in the Cosa Nostra.
Unsurprisingly, the price for Napolitano's mistake was his life. It would be Sunny Black's murder that would ultimately bring the entire Banano family to its knees because, according to Frank Copa, Joe Messino, the last on himself, was directly involved in the hit, and when it came to bringing indictments against the mob, a murder charge just hits harder.
Frank Copa when he starts talking about the murders. Now people are facing life in prison, that's a different story than facing eighteen months.
But still they were a long way from the finish line. To make those charges stick, they would need the help of another unassuming star of the criminal justice system.
Mitra Hermosi. And I was an Assistant United States Attorney in the Eastern District of New York, working in the Organized Crime and Racketeering section of the Criminal Division.
Much like Jack Steubing's accounting acolytes, Mitra did not take a typical path to her career as a federal prosecutor.
Born in Brooklyn, I am the child of immigrants. But my parents were like, Okay, you have three options in life, doctor, lawyer, or professor. And I'm like, I don't love science that much, and professor who wants to get a PhD. So I ended up as a lawyer.
But what she never expected was that just a few years into her career she would be taking on the mob.
Did I think I would be in the organized crime section.
No? Never.
It seemed so in tense and stressful, and it was a lot of trial work, and you have to think on your feet, and there's these defendants from very violent people to very sophisticated business people.
And talk about baptism by fire. In two thousand and one, after the indictments of Frank Coopa and Richie Cantrella, Mietro was tasked with prosecuting a case against the most powerful mob boss in New York, Joe Messino.
So I'd been in the OC unit for just under a year. I'd been working on Columbo matter cases and the Messino case had been the brainchild like the blood, sweat and tears of a prosecutor who was a couple of years senior Greg Andres, and he really needed help. It had gotten so big, a really large racketeering case, and so I said, all right, let's bring Mitre to help you. Then the next couple of years we're just all Banano all the time.
And at the center of that case was unraveling the who, what and why of Sonny Black's murder.
One of the Coosinoustra rules is if you vouch for a guy and he turns bed, it's on you and the penalty could be death.
And as Jack Stubing explains, according to Frank Copa, it was Joe Messino himself who demanded that his close friend Sonny Black pay the ultimate price.
He was going to kill Lefty guns Gerio, the soldier in Sonny Black's crew who formed the closest friendship with Donnie Brasco. And the reason that Lefty was not killed was because the FBI came and scooped him up off the street and arrested him and play him in prison.
Sonny Black would not be so lucky. In Messino's own words, he had to end, I quote give him a receipt for the Donny Brasco situation.
Sonny Black's death was the first murder charge we had for Messino. Sonny had brought Donnie Brasco in didn't realize he was an FBI agent. They never forgave him for doing that. So Sonny Black had to be murdered.
And so while the nineteen eighty one hit may have served mob justice, it might also prove to be Messino's downfall.
The beautiful part about a racketeering case is you could go back thirty forty years. There can only be a ten year gap between crimes. But as long as you have a criminal activity every ten years and the last one being within two three years of indictment, then you can go back to their teenage years for the criminal conduct you charge.
So, despite Sonny Black's murder happening over thirty years prior, Messino could still go down. Here's Cam again on the team tasked with making those charges stick.
We had three prosecutors, Greg andres Mita, Hermosi and Robert Hennock. Greg was the lead, and then they broke it up by cooperators. Each prosecutor handled certain cooperators and witnesses.
The three pronged attack was critical in managing the cooperating witnesses, which now included Frank Coopa, Richie Cantarella, Barry Weinberg, and another Banano associate named Augustinos Gazzari. All of the men were being offered a chance to testify against their boss.
Not one is allowed to talk to, or see or hear from anyone else because you don't want them trying to coordinate stories. So they cooperate, they're plucked out, they're put somewhere, depending on who they are, a safe house, a prison, or the like, and it's a lonely life for them for a while then, because they're by themselves for the most part, and they're not allowed to talk to friends or family.
So let's talk a little about the cooperation process. If you believe what you see on TV, flipping a witness can seem to be only about using threats of jail time to coerce damning testimony from a suspect who would otherwise be prosecuted for another crime. But in reality, securing cooperation and testimony you can use in court is not so baldly transactional or so easy it can be a long process. You have to build trust and most importantly, ensure that the information you are getting is completely true.
When they decide to cooperate, we sort of go through their whole history, so they pretty much have to tell us about every crime they've committed, whether they've been indicted for it or not. We have to make sure they're truthful because you know, as a prosecutor, if they then get on the stand and they didn't tell us something, or they didn't plead guilty to something that they did, that is going to basically taint their entire testimony. And that is the job of a defense attorney to ruin their credibility.
Even when you're dealing with career criminals, their testimony can be as good as anyone's as long as the witness is believable.
What people I think don't appreciate is how much time you end up spending with a witness one to see are they being truthful? Can we give them a cooperation agreement? Because most witnesses think, oh, eighty percent of the truth is fine, right, Like maybe I can just delete myself from that murder, right, like who cares there?
Or other people?
And so there's a little bit of back and forth with them to make them realize, like, no, if you want to cooperate, you have to tell us everything right, every criminal activity that you have committed, and then we have to corroborate it, because otherwise there's no point. So it's a ton of work leading up to granting someone a cooperation agreement saying I trust them they're being truthful about every act of violence or criminal activity or everything they've said.
The most important witness so far in the government's case against Messino was Richie Cantrella. He was the one whose voice was most often captured on Weinberg's hidden wire.
Richie Canerella ended up being my cooperator, and he was very high up in the organization, acting underboss at some point. And so I go to this big meeting with Richie. There's all the agents, Kim and Jeff and Greg's there, and he's talking about a murder. He's like, oh, yep, yep. So we were in the house, we were going down the stairs and then he was dead. We all were like, he was dead, Huh, how did that happen? Did he have a heart attack, struck by lightning?
What happened?
Well, no, he was shot, and so you're just like, Okay, Ritchie, who shot him? Finally, you know, after like forty five minutes, he's like, I shot him. It was a learning experience for Richie as well, to be like, Okay, I have to be fully honest about how the murders occurred, who was there, and who did.
What, Considering how much Cantrella knew it would not be a short process, and that can lead to an unlikely familiarity between prosecutors and witnesses, which is actually a critical element of establishing trust.
For that year or two where he's now in a safe house and we're visiting him at least once or twice a week. You walk in and mitrad, did you see the view?
You know?
And he would talk to me about his favorite TV show, with the kind of clothes he bought his wife and what did I think, do you think she'll like something? So it becomes a funny rapport you have with them.
There was one story in particular that put Richie's gallows humor on full display.
I had gotten engaged before joining this case with the thought of, Okay, you'll be married within a year, let's say, But this case took so much time and it was supposed to go to trial, but then the trials kept getting delayed and my wedding kept getting delayed, which I didn't mind. But at some point I'm with Richie and he sits and goes to Meumitra, what's going on with your fiance. I'm like, what do you mean? He's like, you need me to send someone to talk to him. No, Richie, He's like, all right, you just let me know. Like, Richie, you're not supposed to be saying stuff like that anymore. You're a changed man, right, He's like, no, No, I'm just saying, you know, sometimes men need a little talking to.
Cantrella's cooperation proved to be the tipping point. Slowly, prosecutors gathered more names, which led to more arrests, which led to more cooperating witnesses.
You start out with one individual, he then has so much information. Once he cooperates, you're able to go after two, three, four, and then it was like a domino.
Effect among mobsters. The writing was on the wall, flip now or face the music.
At this point, we have multiple people talking to us, we have multiple murders. There's just so many different parts.
And Jack's plan is starting to work.
Oh gosh, yeah, it was working from like day two, but it's just exploded at this point.
For Mitrin her fellow prosecutors, it was an embarrassment of riches, but not always so glamorous.
All of them.
I had to travel. They're in prison at the time, right Like, we're not treating them to a fancy hotel. A couple were in safe houses. We would be staying at like little divy hotels. Visiting these people all throughout the country and prisons, spending hours upon hours prepping these witnesses in these locations. I'll choke. I've spent more time in prisons than people who have actually committed some crimes.
For many of these career criminals, they were not just giving up their bosses and in some cases their families. They were betraying their identity, their entire way of life. One cooperating witness was Richie Cantarella's cousin, Joey Demico.
When he first came in to cooperate, he was really struggling with cooperating and at one point he had cut his wrists. He walks in to meet us and his lawyer is like, oh, Joey, not his head's not in a good place. But he was also a very good witness for us.
And sometimes the burden of cooperating was easier for some than others, like in the case of James Tartaglioni, also known as Big Louie.
Big Louie, he ends up wearing a wire and gets really great evidence. As I'm preparing him, we're just talking about his testimony, and he says, you know, the good thing is Mitro. Whatever happens, I know I'm going to heaven. And I just looked at him and thought, Okay, murders be damned right, because he was involved in several murders. And I'm like, what about the murders. He's like, but that's work, Metro, it's work that doesn't count. I go to church, I'm really good to the grandkids.
Work is work, like okay.
But of all all the mobsters that became cooperators, none was a bigger get than Messino's second in command, sal Vitali.
Salvitally was Joe Messino's underboss, and he was also his brother in law. Josie Messino and Salvatally were brother and sister. When Joe and Josie got together. Sal was young, like seven years old. Joe was like a brother to Sal.
Messino taught him how to swim. They'd known each other since they were kids, and they were partners right they were involved in the Three Captain's murders together. As Messino rose in the organization, he took Vitally with him. Sal just was Messino's right hand all throughout Messino's career.
But in the epic saga that is the American Mafia, a proximity to power just feeds the desire for more, and Sal and Joe's relationship was destined to say, especially when Messino had to do a short stint in prison for a hijacking conviction and left Vitally in charge of the family. Here again is Jack stubing.
With the rise of Vitally as the underboss. It's my personal opinion that he probably got a little too big for his breeches. I mean it's not he won't be the first guy who was a number two guy who temporarily became the number one guy and said, Jesus pretty good, I like it. He started pressing the capos for more tribute. I have heard that he was disrespectful to some of his underlings. He started to lose support within the family and he got a little too comfortable in his acting boss slot, and Messino began to distrust him as a result.
When Messino was back on the street, tensions came to go ahead.
And then once Messino's out of prison, I think he just got so many other people saying bad things about Vitalian, claiming that Vitali isn't as loyal to Messino as he thinks. There's no honor among thieves. Then Messino's like, fine, let's kill Vitally.
Knowing his life was in danger. Made Vitali the perfect candidate to turn against Messino. It would be an act of self preservation with perhaps a side of revenge.
Next time on Law and Order Criminal Justice System.
Joe Messino practically raised Salvitally, and here he was betraying a family oath.
The tension, it was palpable, the glares, the death stairs that are coming.
When you really know what this life is. The movies portrayed of this otherhood of honorable men, hello of crap.
I couldn't tell you who the boss of the Genoese crime family was today if you asked me to bat order, because I don't even know that the.
Government knows.
Law and order criminal Justice System is a production of Wolf Entertainment and iHeart Podcasts. Our host is Anna Sega Nicolazzi. This episode was written by Walker Lamond and Anna Sega Nicolazzi. Executive produced by Dick Wolf, Elliott Wolf, and Stephen Michael at Wolf Entertainment on behalf of iHeartRadio. Executive produced by Alex Williams and Matt Frederick, with supervising producers Trevor Young and Chandler Mays and producers Jesse Funk, Noams Griffin and Riema Elkali. This season is executive produced by Anna Seagan Nicolazzi, story producer Walker Lamond, Our research are Carolyn Talmage and Luke's dance editing in sound design by Rima Alkali, original music by John O'Hara, original theme by Mike Post, additional music by Steve Moore, and additional voice over by me Steve Zernkelton. Special thanks to Fox five in New York, ABC and CBS for providing archival material for the show. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio and Wolf Entertainment, visit the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcasts or Wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Thanks for listening.