Word: massino
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...Joseph Massino, the restaurant's operator, is an important part of the family. The Family. The Mafia; the Mob; La Cosa Nostra. The FBI says--and his defense lawyer does not contest--that Massino is head of the Bonanno clan, one of the Five Families of crime incorporated by Lucky Luciano in 1931. It was Massino who revived the Bonannos after the humiliation of the Donnie Brasco caper, in which FBI agent Joseph D. Pistone infiltrated the gang and spent five years posing as a hoodlum named Brasco and, with his court testimony, helped send 200 Mob men to prison...
...Massino, 61, has other legitimate businesses (Cafe Via Vento, in Maspeth) and properties (in Queens and Palm Coast, Fla.), but his favorite is the CasaBlanca. From that neighborhood ristorante, he has allegedly run an operation that, the feds assert, includes extortion, loan sharking, illegal gambling, narcotics and murder in a vast criminal empire whose tentacles stretch up into Canada and back to the Sicilian motherland. Investigators say he certified his power in 2000, when he convened a meeting of four of the Five Families, at--where else?--the CasaBlanca...
Soon it won't be just agents who get to peek inside Massino's world. His life is about to become a media circus. He was even discussed on a recent episode of The Sopranos, when one character compared the legal troubles of the fictional Tony Soprano to the legal woes of the all-too-real Massino. On April 19, Massino will be sweltering in the 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...
...this carnival atmosphere, Massino is an anomaly, an anachronism--the Masto-Don. He does not frequent posh nightclubs, Vegas high-roller rooms, designer-clothing stores or the front page of the New York Post. He does not care to give interviews (though he seemed amused when asked for one, and told a TIME reporter, "Have a nice day"). His couture is less dapper than schlepper: jeans and T shirts (he doesn't like wearing a tie), without the usual mobster adornments of a siliconed blond on each arm. He has never been accused of swagger. About as close...