King of the Godfathers: "Big Joey" Massino and the Fall of the Bonanno Crime Family by Anthony M. DeStefano Read Free Book Online

also known as Joseph, and Lilli Vitale took one more chance at having a son. Seemingly cursed with bad luck with sons named Giuseppe, the parents decided that if another male child came into their lives he would be named something different. On September 22, 1947, Lilli Vitale gave birth to a son, and he was baptized as Salvatore. He survived. The family had great hopes for him.
    Both employed, Giuseppe and Lilli spent a great deal of time out of their house and entrusted the care of Salvatore to their daughters. Josephine was four years older than her baby brother but even at such a young age, with her parents spending so much time out of the house making a living, she became a surrogate mother.
    The Vitale girls fussed over Salvatore in ways that were certain to spoil him. He got what he wanted when he wanted it, usually from Josephine. Yet, family members would later remember that despite all the doting from his siblings, Salvatore Vitale did not respond in kind to his sisters. Sure, he may have been spoiled, but he seemed to lack affection, his relatives would later recall. He didn’t do anything terribly wrong as a child. But while the Vitale women centered their lives around the home, Salvatore seemed distant and cold. He should have been another girl, his father would say of his only son, according to one family member.
    Maspeth is bisected by the Long Island Expressway, the concrete ribbon of a roadway that became over the years the crowded conduit for much of the traffic going to and from New York City. The part of Maspeth north of the expressway—where the Vitale family would buy a house on Sixty-eighth Street near Grand Avenue—retained its residential character. The same was largely true of the southern part of the community, although residential development was hemmed in by large cemeteries.
    It was a few blocks from the main shopping boulevard of Grand Avenue in Maspeth that another working-class family took up residence. Like the Vitales who lived about five blocks away, Anthony and Adeline Massino were Italian Americans. But while the Massinos traced their heritage to the city of Naples and its environs, they were second-generation Americans born and raised in the United States. They had three children, Joseph, John, and Anthony. Their father worked in a neighborhood grocery store.
    Joseph Massino was a boy comfortable on the streets. Big boned, trim, and muscular, he was athletic but not very good in school. Friends would later recall he became very adept in math. In a working-class neighborhood where as a kid you had to hold your own to make your mark, he earned a reputation of being one of the toughest on the block. He could kick ass with the best of them.
    Joseph Massino only got to the seventh grade in what is now Intermediate School 73 on Fifty-fourth Avenue. Bored with school, Massino took a variety of jobs, including as a summer lifeguard at beach clubs in Atlantic Beach on Long Island and in Florida. In something of a Maspeth legend, which Massino himself would insist was true, he supposedly once swam from Breezy Point in the Rockaways to Manhattan Beach, a distance of over one mile. Stories also circulated that he would jump off the Cross Bay Bridge, which connected the Rockaways to the mainland, and swim for hours.
    With a reputation for being a tough guy and with a full head of wavy black hair, Massino’s rugged looks caught the eye of neighborhood girl Josephine Vitale, who was seven months younger. She had been voted the best looking in her eighth grade class. The year was 1956.
    Around the time Joseph Massino and Josephine Vitale were getting acquainted in working-class Maspeth, the American Mafia was on the verge of some big changes. Bonanno was shuttling back and forth between Tucson, Arizona, and New York. He made one side trip to Havana, Cuba, which in those days was a playground for the rich and infamous. As he recounted the Havana trip in his autobiography, Bonanno hooked up with the