When he took the witness stand at the trial of Joseph Massino, there was one thing that Richard Cantarella wanted to be sure about: he had to be well dressed for his appearance.

On the streets of Little Italy, Cantarella had always been known as being a man fastidious about his appearance. His coiffed hair was styled so neatly that the moniker “Shellack Head” stuck to him like his styling gel. When it was his time to testify, Cantarella made sure that his wife brought him half a dozen boxes of new shirts from Neiman Marcus. Star witnesses, even if they would scramble your brains with a bullet, have to look good.

Dressed in a dark suit and a white open-necked shirt that was right out of its package, Cantarella walked into court on June 10, 2004, as the fourth major mob turncoat in the Massino trial. He also had on a pair of tinted sunglasses.

Though he was an admitted killer, Cantarella was, like Frank Coppa, a man with a head for business. He had been involved in parking lots when Salvatore Vitale approached to say that he and Massino wanted to become involved in the same business. Three parking lots became the object of partnerships with Massino’s portion being held in the name of his wife, Cantarella told the jury.

But Massino just didn’t approach Cantarella for business out of the blue. The well-dressed gangster had made a quick and steady rise through the ranks of organized crime until he had become one of Massino’s captains. Eventually, Cantarella was appointed by Massino to be part of a committee to run the family affairs, taking over a spot that had been vacated by James Tartaglione.

Cantarella had come from a personal family line that had substantial ties to the Bonanno crime clan. His uncle, Al Embarrato, had been a longtime Bonanno captain and his cousin, Joseph “Mouk” D’Amico, had been a soldier. After Cantarella was inducted in 1990 with Massino as his main backer, he began to dine with the crime boss at J&S Cake Social Club, as well as at CasaBlanca Restaurant in Maspeth, a place Massino owned with soldier Louis Restivo.

Since he had developed a good rapport with prosecutor Mitra Hormozi, she handled Cantarella’s direct examination on the witness stand. Cantarella’s real value to the prosecution was not just in his explanation of the structure of the Bonanno family and Massino’s eating schedule but in the ability to tie the defendant into the Anthony Mirra homicide. Questioned by Hormozi, Cantarella told the jury that on a trip to the northern end of Little Italy with Embarrato, Cantarella stayed outside while Embarrato entered a building. Coming back to the car, Embarrato turned to Cantarella and gave him some sober news.

According to Cantarella, his uncle stated, “‘I just got an assignment from Joe Massino to kill your cousin Tony, he is a rat.’”

Mob insiders and investigators knew that Mirra was on thin ice ever since the revelations surfaced that FBI agent Joseph Pistone had infiltrated the crime family. It had been Mirra who first met Pistone and used him as a driver. Eventually, Pistone used his entrée with Mirra to become close to others like Dominick “Sonny Black” Napolitano and Benjamin “Lefty Guns” Ruggiero. The results were disastrous for the Bonanno family.

The actual killing, Cantarella testified, was done by D’Amico, who fired into the right side of Mirra’s head in a parking lot in lower Manhattan’s West Side. A shaken D’Amico then got into a getaway car that Cantarella said he drove.

Cantarella also told of his involvement with a number of other homicides. Those killings, he said, didn’t involve Massino. But the events surrounding one murder, that of New York Post distribution supervisor Robert Perrino, revealed the depth of the penetration the mob once had at the tabloid.

The mob never had anything to do with the editorial functions of the Post or its executive offices. Instead, the Mafia was able to exploit the central weak point in any newspaper’s operation: the distribution system. If a newspaper can’t get its newspapers out to the newsstand, its circulation is dealt a fatal blow, particularly for a publication like the Post, which depended for its survival on single-copy sales on the street.

The distribution system at the Post was like a Christmas tree for the Bonanno family. On cross-examination by David Breitbart, Cantarella said he was getting paid by the Post for a no-show job for about $800 a week from 1985 to 1992. He wasn’t the only one reaping benefits. Vitale was pulling in some weekly cash and one of his sons also had a no-show job, said Cantarella. In addition, Cantarella said his cousin, Joe D’Amico, had a job at the newspaper and had clout with the union, which covered the distribution operation. A reputed Bonanno soldier named Joe Torre also had a job as a driver and loader, according to Cantarella.

But in 1992 the investigation by the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office was heating up. The prosecutors’ targets were Perrino, Al Embarrato, and officials from the union that covered the distribution system workers, said Cantarella. Vitale became concerned about Perrino and asked Cantarella if the Post supervisor was showing any signs of weakness that might lead him to cooperate. Cantarella said he told Vitale he didn’t see any indication Perrino might become a turncoat. But even that wasn’t enough to allay Vitale’s fears about Perrino, whom Cantarella said knew about the mob’s no-show jobs and that circulation was being inflated by newspapers, which were sometimes dumped in the river rather than returned as unsold.

Perrino, who was complicit in a lot of the Bonanno shenanigans at the Post, left his Long Island home on May 6, 1992, and was immediately listed as a missing person. Nothing was heard of Perrino’s whereabouts until in December 2003 FBI unearthed his remains from the floor of a warehouse in Staten Island. Frank Lino had provided information to the FBI about the murder and said Perrino’s body was taken from a bar in Brooklyn where he was killed to the construction warehouse of a Bonanno family associate. It was at the warehouse that Perrino’s corpse was put in a steel drum and covered with concrete. As Cantarella testified, Frank Lino told investigators that it had been Vitale who orchestrated Perrino’s murder.

Massino did not know of and hadn’t approved of the Perrino murder, said Cantarella. Talking after the homicide, Massino told Cantarella that he was upset with Vitale for ordering the Perrino killing. Had Massino known in advance of the murder, he would not have let it happen, said Cantarella.

Cantarella’s testimony showed that Massino was neither involved in the Perrino homicide nor that of Richard Mazzio, which also took place in 1992. But Cantarella had done his damage to Massino with the testimony about the Mirra homicide and his ascendancy to the leadership position in the Bonanno family. He also told the jury that Massino was involved in plenty of other Bonanno crime family operations including loan-sharking and gambling that involved games of baccarat and Joker Poker machines.

After Cantarella finished testifying, the prosecution called his cousin, Joseph D’Amico, to the stand. D’Amico was the fifth Bonanno family member to turn against Massino. Like his cousin, D’Amico dressed well, wearing a gray suit, a white shirt, and a rose-colored tie. While the other turncoats were uncomfortable as witnesses, it was D’Amico who expressed how distasteful his life as an informant had become.

D’Amico told the jury that his own mother had been a loan shark. But he denied a fanciful story that had been circulating among Mafia cognoscenti for years that she had paid the late Carmine Galante up to $50,000 so that her son could be inducted into the crime family.

“If that was true I would like my money back,” D’Amico quipped.

D’Amico said he liked the mob life and told the jury that his induction in 1977 into the Mafia took place in the kitchen of an apartment in Little Italy. It was during the ceremony, D’Amico recalled, that one of the participants asked him, “Would you leave your own family and protect someone in this family first?” His response was a simple “yes.”

Asked about the Mirra homicide, D’Amico confirmed what Cantarella had said earlier. Mirra had embarrassed the family and had committed an unforgivable sin when he brought undercover agent Joseph Pistone within the orbit of the Bonanno family. D’Amico admitted that he shot his cousin in the head.

Mob life was clearly what D’Amico had lived for. He seemed to revel in the excitement and danger. He told the jurors that he even had John Gotti as a wedding guest, and he submitted a picture into evidence that showed a smiling Gotti shaking the hand of a beaming D’Amico, all dressed up in a black tuxedo and sporting a white bow tie.

Cross-examined by David Breitbart about leaving Mafia life, D’Amico said he had done so reluctantly.

“I rather not be here,” D’Amico said. “I rather be where I was, living downtown.”

Any other place would suit D’Amico fine. He just would rather not be in the Brooklyn courtroom facing the stares of Joseph Massino.