Dominick Trinchera, Philip Giaccone, and Alphonse Indelicato didn’t know they were going to die when they walked into the social club on May 5, 1981. But undercover agent Joseph Pistone certainly had enough indications that at least Giaccone was a target. Benjamin “Lefty Guns” Ruggiero had told Pistone that Giaccone was the object of a hit attempt as early as April but that it had been called off. The thinking was that all the three captains should be killed together.

In later court testimony, Pistone recalled that on April 23, 1981, Ruggiero explained that it was Dominick Napolitano and Joseph Massino who had put together the planned hit. Because of that, said Ruggiero, the Commission had assured both captains that Philip “Rusty” Rastelli would be the absolute boss. On top of that, Ruggiero told Pistone, the Sicilian Zips had come over to Massino, assuring that the Rastelli loyalists would have crucial support in the coming showdown.

Ruggiero dropped some more hints, Pistone later recalled, when he told the undercover agent that the three captains (who were still alive at that point) had lost the power play for the crime family. The deal had been ratified by the Mafia Commission, Ruggiero indicated.

“They lost, and they lost nationwide. New York, Miami, Chicago, they lost nationwide,” Ruggiero told Pistone, cryptically.

“Rusty was the boss,” Ruggiero added, referring to Rastelli.

In recounting later on the witness stand and in his book of the deadly days around May 5, 1981, Pistone said that when Ruggiero suddenly went missing, another FBI agent reported that informants were saying the three captains—Trinchera, Giaccone, and Indelicato—had been assassinated. It took about ten days but Pistone got called by Napolitano for a meeting at the Motion Lounge. What he learned there would answer the questions Charles Rooney and the other FBI agents had been puzzling over ever since their pen registers went hyperactive on May 6, 1981.

Pistone remembered a calm Napolitano sitting at the bar. There were the usual associates at the club: Jimmy “Legs” Episcopia and John “Boobie” Cerasani. Pistone also noticed a tall, stocky, thick-handed guy who had been around Massino a lot. His name, Pistone would later learn, was Raymond Wean.

After some greetings, Napolitano and Pistone sat alone at a card table in the club room next to a small pool table. Napolitano told Pistone that the three captains had indeed been murdered. There had been one complication though. Indelicato’s son, Anthony Bruno, was still around and the information the mob had was that he was running around in Miami, coked up and bruising to avenge his father. If Pistone found him in Florida, Napolitano said, just have him killed.

“Be careful, because when he’s coked up, he’s crazy,” Napolitano told Pistone.

Pistone later recalled that Wean left the club shortly after Pistone entered and made a telephone call to the FBI relating how a strange guy named “Donnie” had appeared and seemed very friendly and close to Napolitano. Wean made the call to his new best friend. He was Patrick Colgan, the FBI agent who had arrested him and Joseph Massino six years earlier over a hijacked load of clothing on Grand Avenue.

The problem for Wean though was that after his 1977 federal conviction he just couldn’t stay out of trouble. Nassau County police picked him up on a felony charge and if convicted again Wean would have been a three-time loser and facing more jail time. As he cooled his heels in the county lockup, Wean’s common-law wife reached out to Colgan.

“He likes you. He trusts you,” Wean’s wife told Colgan, as she pleaded with the agent to visit her lover in jail.

Out in Nassau County Wean knew that his only ticket out of a long prison term was to cooperate. He knew a lot about the Bonanno crime family and Massino, Wean said. He also didn’t want to die in jail, a distinct possibility since Wean had already suffered from a heart attack.

“I’ll cooperate and testify,” Wean told Colgan. “I will go up against Joey.”

Wean became an informant. He did so because Joe Massino had never really taken care of him. Wean had done some serious jail time for being a part of Massino’s hijacking operations and in all of those years away from his family, one former FBI agent recalled, the lady love of the big-bodied truck robber never got anything from his Maspeth crony to ease the financial crunch. One of Massino’s failings was that he didn’t take care of the people he climbed the backs of in his steady rise as a gangster. It would be something that would come back to haunt him.

But before Wean could do anything, he had to make a $100,000 bail in the Nassau County case, a sum that he had no way of raising. To make Wean’s release possible, Colgan and an assistant U.S. attorney from Brooklyn took the unusual step of testifying at a special secret court hearing before a state court judge about Wean’s intended cooperation and the need for a lower bail. The court agreed to lower the bail to $40,000. Because the FBI wasn’t going to post the bond, Colgan suggested to Wean that perhaps his parents could raise the cash. Wean contacted his elderly mother and father, and they agreed to help him. He made bail.

With a grateful Wean on his side, Colgan said he wanted him to try to hang around Massino and see if he could secretly tape him. But as it turned out, Wean spent more of his time around the Motion Lounge because Massino had told him to make himself useful to Napolitano, Pat Colgan later recalled. It was clear to many in the FBI at this point that Massino was the up and coming power in the family and he really didn’t need to run around with a street guy like Wean. Neither Wean nor Pistone knew of their separate roles in what would soon become part of a nightmare for the mob. While the FBI had known almost immediately about the killings of the three captains, no corpses had surfaced. That changed on Sunday, May 20, 1981.

Ruby Street in eastern Brooklyn literally straddles the borough’s border with Queens. It is an area of old detached houses and surrounding vacant spaces where tomato plants grow by the roadside. There is the feel of a forgotten neighborhood, a No-Man’s Land in a city of over 8 million souls. It is also a place for secrets.

At the intersection of Ruby and Blake Avenue was a fairly large vacant lot that like most neglected spaces in the city became overgrown with weeds. Kids liked to play in it and did so on that particular Sunday in May. They were looking to amuse themselves when they noticed a peculiar object sticking up from the dry soil It was a human hand, and from the looks of things it had been hastily buried. It was as if whoever did the burial didn’t care if the corpse was found.

When the police arrived, they discovered the rest of the partly decomposed body of a man who had been buried about two feet down. The corpse was wrapped in a tufted blanket used by moving companies to protect furniture, and a police officer who responded to the scene noted there was a rope around the body’s waist. The corpse was clothed in an orange t-shirt, tan dress slacks, and brown cowboy boots. The body had two tattoos on the left arm: a heart pierced by a dagger and an inscription that read “Holland 1945 Dad.” The dead man was wearing a stainless steel Cartier watch and had in his pocket a leather Gucci key case that contained keys to a Volvo.

Three gunshot wounds were found: two in the body and one in the head. The fatal shot appeared to be one in the back that had punctured the aorta. Though the body had suffered from some decomposition, one of the forensic experts injected some fluid into the shriveled fingers—a standard practice—so that fingerprints could be taken. The medical examiner took a few days but after a relative showed up to look at the body it was quickly confirmed that the corpse in the vacant lot was that of Alphonse “Sonny Red” Indelicato. One of the dead captains had been found.