Salvatore Vitale’s testimony about Joseph Massino was like the Rosetta Stone of archaeology when it came to the Bonanno crime family. He had been so close to Massino over the years and had taken part in so many crimes with him that Vitale provided prosecutors with an overview of just about everything the crime boss had done. Vitale also gave meaning and context to a lot of the power struggles and politics of the crime family. It was the kind of stuff a jury could eat up.

But while the prosecution could have finished up with Vitale, there was still about three weeks of testimony that followed him. Next to the Mafia cooperators, much of the remaining testimony was dull and uneventful. Some dealt with crime scene investigations of the arson at the office of Doctor Leifer. An FBI agent told the jury about certain wiretaps that were placed on the telephones of the late Gambino captain Angelo Ruggiero in the 1980s. A low-level Bonanno operative testified about the crime family gambling operations in the cafés and coffee shops of Queens.

About a week after Vitale had finishing testifying, another old friend of Massino’s took the witness stand. He was now forty-seven years old and looked more mature than the fuzzy surveillance photograph had depicted. Clean cut and well dressed, Duane Leisenheimer was a changed man. Once a stand-up guy who went to prison rather then testify to a grand jury about Massino, Leisenheimer was now helping the government.

As Leisenheimer settled into the witness chair, his eyes and facial expression showed both recognition and resignation as he glanced at Massino. Under questioning by prosecutor Robert Henoch, Leisenheimer said he had already distanced himself from Massino when in June 2003 he was visited by FBI agents Kimberly McCaffrey and Jeffery Sallet at his home.

The two agents were very direct in what they had to say and handed Leisenheimer a subpoena.

“You went to jail once for this guy, you don’t need to go to jail again,” McCaffrey said to him.

After retaining a lawyer, Leisenheimer said he met with prosecutor Greg Andres, who took a hard line with him, telling Massino’s old friend that he had a lot more to worry about than the contempt charge he had faced in 1984. By this time other witnesses like Salvatore Vitale and Richard Cantarella had been cooperating for months. Particularly in the case of Vitale’s cooperation, Leisenheimer was implicated in a lot of crimes.

“It doesn’t look good,” Leisenheimer said his lawyer told him. He decided to cooperate.

“I had a big decision to make,” said Leisenheimer. “I had a family to think about.”

Leisenheimer related to the jury his long relationship with Massino, which began in his teens and went on for decades. Massino had been his mentor in crime, involving him as a kind of office assistant in the three captains and Cesare Bonventre murders. It was during the killing of the three captains that Leisenheimer was given the job of sitting in a vehicle a few blooks away from the scene of the murders to monitor a walkie-talkie. Leisenheimer didn’t see the shootings but was involved in the cleaning up of the crime scene, describing for the jury Vitale’s annoyance when rigor mortis had set in with the corpses.

In the case of Bonventre’s killing, Leisenheimer described how Massino had told him while they were on the lam in Pennsylvania that Philip Rastelli was the one who put the murder plot in motion.

“‘Cesare Bonventre’s gotta go, the old man wants Cesare to go, this is at Marty’s instigating,’” Massino said, according to Leisenheimer. He explained that the “old man” was Philip Rastelli and that “Marty” referred to Rastelli’s brother, who apparently had passed along the murder message.

Leisenheimer said his job was to find a garage where Bonventre’s murder could be facilitated. He found a place that he sometimes used as an auto chop shop off Metropolitan Avenue. After Bonventre’s body was driven away in the trunk of an Oldsmobile, the dead man’s own car, a 1980s Cadillac, was cut up in the garage, said Leisenheimer. He then drove back to the Poconos.

The only other key witness to testify was FBI agent Kimberly McCaffrey. Because of her involvement in the early stages of the investigation, McCaffrey was able to detail how things got started in the forensic accounting work. Questioned by Andres, she described the discovery of extortion victim Barry Weinberg and the development of his friend, Agostino Scozzari, as witnesses who had a field day making secret tapes.

McCaffrey also gave a window into the finances of Massino and his wife. There were three parking lot businesses in lower Manhattan that she found Josephine had an interest in, along with her brother, Salvatore, and Richard Cantarella’s wife, Loretta. McCaffrey also described the compensation each received, ranging in amounts from around $18,000 in some years to as low as $7,500. McCaffrey also described for the jury the discovery of checks Josephine had written to Weinberg for amounts ranging from $16,666 to $10,000, checks that led investigators to Weinberg as a target for tax crimes. Massino’s finances weren’t the only ones detailed by McCaffrey. She told the jury how, after Vitale began to cooperate, that agents found hundreds of thousands of dollars he had stashed in safe deposit boxes, in a safe in his home, and in a secret compartment in his attic.

There was one more FBI agent who testified about Massino’s finances. Agent Dan Gill had examined the books of King and Queen Caterers. Over an eleven-year-period, said Gill, he found that Queen Caterers, the firm Vitale said was used to hold the extortion money from King Caterers, received $1,048,500 as compensation for distribution to Vitale and Massino.

Massino’s tax returns were also submitted to the jury and showed a steady growth in income. From 1992 when Massino and Josephine had shown a gross income of $121,667, the amount grew to $411,672 in 2001, with a high of $590,789 in 1998. Some of the income, McCaffrey said, came from real estate investments and occasional lottery winnings. Neither McCaffrey nor Gill said that the tax returns they examined found any criminal tax violations.

Summations began on July 21 and the government’s side was presented by Mitra Hormozi. Dressed in a black pants suit, she seemed none the worse for wear after a trial that had lasted nine weeks. She had to digest over 8,000 pages of transcript for the jury.

“All the evidence you have seen is a testament to Joseph Massino, to his ambition. To his ruthlessness and ultimately to his power,” said Hormozi. “Ironically, perhaps Mister Massino summarized it best when he told his friend Richard Cantarella in describing himself before he became boss that he was a one-man army, a one-man army for Philip Rastelli. Think about that statement, it is a powerful statement.”

Hormozi said that the trial showed that Massino orchestrated the murders of Alphonse Indelicato, Philip Giaccone, Dominick Trinchera, Dominick Napolitano, Anthony Mirra, Cesare Bonventre, and Gabriel Infante. He also tried to get Anthony Giliberti killed. On top of that, Massino amassed millions of dollars through gambling, extortion, arson, and loan-sharking.

“Every piece of evidence in this case, whether it came from the witnesses, the ballistics, the medical evidence, the crime scene evidence, photographs, every single piece points to the defendant’s guilt,” she said. “Not a single piece of credible evidence points to any other logical conclusion.”

When his turn came to speak to the jury, defense attorney David Breitbart essentially conceded again that Massino was the Bonanno boss. But he hit back with the theme he had pushed all along: that Massino didn’t have the authority to have the murders committed.

“There were no murders in the nineties,” he said about the period after Massino became crime boss. “He showed a love of life, not a love of death, because murders ceased.”

Breitbart returned to his theme from his opening statement that the cooperating witnesses were experts in the “big lie” and could deceive people to walk unwittingly to their deaths. He spewed venom at Vitale, calling him a “degenerate liar” and a jealous, vicious killer.

“If you find witnesses lied about an element in the case,” Breitbart told the jury, “you have the absolute capacity to say ‘out.’”

Since the government has the burden of proof in criminal cases, it gets a chance to rebut the defense summation and in this case the job fell to Andres. He ridiculed Breitbart’s claim that Massino was a peaceful mob boss. No handshakes cemented Massino’s rise to power, Andres said; rather, it was bullets and guns. He also noted that far from an interregnum of peace, Massino’s reign had been punctured by the murder of Gerlando Sciascia in 1999, a crime not part of the indictment but still shown by the evidence to have occurred.

After a two-hour explanation of the law by Judge Nicholas Garaufis, the jury finally began deliberations on July 26. Four days later, on July 30, the jury signaled it had reached a verdict just before lunchtime. FBI agents, courthouse personnel, news media, and Massino’s family all filled up the courtroom. The jury foreperson, a woman, handed up the long verdict sheet to court clerk Joseph Reccoppa, who in turn handed it to Garaufis. The judge glanced at the sheet and then handed it back to his clerk, who gave it back to the foreperson. Reccoppa then asked the jury to announce its verdict.

The words guilty and proven were spoken twenty-two times, once for every single count in the indictment and also for each of the racketeering acts—the murders, gambling, loan-sharking, arson, and money laundering—that Massino had been accused of.

With the first guilty finding, Josephine Massino clamped her lips ever tighter and began to shake her head. As each “guilty” was announced, Massino’s daughter, Adeline, became crestfallen, her shoulders slumping each time the word was spoken. She cradled her chin in her hands, elbows on her knees, as she stared at the floor. When the verdict was finished, Massino shot a glance at his wife and shrugged as if to say, “What can you do?” Finally turning in her seat, Adeline said to no one in particular, “Not one we won, not one,” referring to the myriad charges.

Outside the courtroom, prosecutors and FBI agents embraced and kissed. It had been a resounding victory. Breitbart and Flora Edwards were silent, preferring not to say anything. Josephine Massino and her daughter left the courthouse in silence, refusing to speak to reporters, some of whom told them how sorry they felt for them.

The news media had assembled early that morning and by the time the Massino family left the courthouse they were surrounded by photographers. Walking in silence to the Park Plaza Diner, a favorite eatery for the courthouse crowd, Josephine Massino went into a back dining room. She was accompanied by Michelle Spirito, the wife of reputed Bonanno soldier John Spirito. A cancer survivor who had lost her larynx through surgery, Michelle Spirito couldn’t speak but had tears in her eyes.

“I have nothing to say,” a distressed Josephine Massino finally said.

As if the verdict hadn’t been enough, the jury still had to decide on how much money Massino had to forfeit to the government as fruits of his crimes. Prosecutors were asking for over $10 million and wanted to take the shuttered CasaBlanca Restaurant and a rental property located on Fresh Pond Road in Queens. The government was also going after the home of Massino and his wife in Howard Beach, the home Massino’s mother, Adeline, was living in on Caldwell Avenue in Maspeth, as well as the family home Josephine had been raised in, also in Maspeth. Other properties were also in the government’s sights, including real estate Josephine received rental income from.

The forfeiture case was actually a small trial that took place immediately after the lunch break following Massino’s conviction. FBI agent Dan Gill testified again about Massino’s estimated worth and the estimated criminal proceeds he received over the years. It was no surprise that Gill’s estimate came to over $10 million. Breitbart put up a meager defense case, essentially asking the jury to have a heart and not put Josephine out on to the street. It didn’t matter. The jury ruled that Massino had to forfeit the $10 million.

It is possible that Massino could have written a check for the $10 million, turned over the restaurant property, and thus satisfied the forfeiture. But usually the government will seize what it can find. While many believed that Josephine Massino could be tossed out of her house, that wasn’t the case. Because she had the property jointly with her spouse, even if the government took over Massino’s half, it was highly unlikely that she could be evicted. She could live there until she died.

Back in Howard Beach at Josephine’s home on Eighty-fourth Street, her family gathered for what was sort of a mob family shiva. One relative railed about Vitale, saying none of this would have happened if he hadn’t cooperated, a statement that was true to some extent, because he proved to be such a pivotal witness. Yet another relative said that while Vitale was a turncoat he was still family.

Joanne Massino had not been in court when the verdict against her father was announced. She learned of it instead in a telephone call. Her own children knew in a vague way that their grandfather had been on trial since their only contact with him in recent months had been either through jail visits or letters. A few days after the verdict her daughter, obviously sensing the distress in the adults around her, asked how things were going with the trial.

“The jury didn’t believe Poppy,” answered Joanne.

“That’s what I thought,” the child said.