Word: colgan
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...spotlight in a Brooklyn federal courtroom as a jury is selected for United States of America v. Joseph Massino et al. Defendants. "He's big-time," says retired FBI agent Bruce Mouw, who nailed John Gotti and ran the bureau's Bonanno squad in the 1980s. Says Pat Colgan, a retired FBI supervisor who tailed Massino for more than a decade: "Joey didn't get the reputation he had on the street because he was Mr. Nice Guy. Everybody knew. We knew, the bad guys knew, Joey's in charge." George Hanna Jr., current head of the FBI's Bonanno...
...Maspeth, where the young man made sandwiches for catering trucks, frequently driving one himself and selling coffee and cakes to workers in a Long Island City truck yard. The wiseguy soon became a wide guy. "He'd eat half the sweets on his truck," says ex-FBI agent Colgan. Government witnesses at his '87 trial said Massino fenced merchandise, from Kodak cameras to electric appliances, that workers stole from the platforms and loaded onto his truck. By the '70s, he had allegedly expanded his operation into a truck-hijacking racket. With connections at airports and on the waterfront, say feds...
During this period Massino forged an alliance with a Howard Beach neighbor and natural rival, John Gotti, then a rising enforcer in the Gambino clan. "They were running in the same area of Queens," says Colgan, "doing the same things, hijacking trucks, selling stolen goods." Twenty years later, Gotti's recommendation helped make Massino the Bonanno boss...
...Colgan story illustrates the symbiotic relationship between mobster and fed. In '81 Colgan led a team of 40 agents who planted a microphone in the ceiling at J&S. "It lasted maybe 12, 24 hours, then it went quiet," the ex-agent recalls. "Joey repeatedly swept the place. We knew we were compromised." Colgan's boss wanted the pricey piece of equipment back. So when Colgan spotted a wiseguy entering the social club, he coattailed himself inside. The wiseguy took a swing at him, and several other men rushed him. "The next thing, I hear, I don't see, 'Relax...
...Colgan acknowledges Massino's stolid charisma, his use of power as an instrument of fear. "If Joey said something, people jumped. They wanted to be endeared to Joey," he says. "If they didn't do what he said, he'd whack them. And if he even thought you were an informant, he'd have you killed." Colgan managed to persuade Ray Wean--a Bonanno man so huge that when Colgan once arrested him, he couldn't get the cuffs around Wean's thick wrists--to be an undercover informant and later testify for the prosecution at Massino's '87 trial...