The man dubbed by federal agents as the ”Last Don”, Joseph ”Big Joey” Massino, has gone on trial in New York, with prosecutors hoping for a conviction that could deal a knockout blow to organised crime in the city.
Massino, the alleged boss of the Bonanno crime family — one of New York’s five Mafia clans — is charged with seven murders and a host of racketeering charges.
The trial, complete with requisite Mafia turncoats, is expected to last three months.
”This case is about the vicious, violent, cunning and murderous rise to power of Joseph Massino,” federal prosecutor Robert Henoch said in his opening statement on Monday.
Henoch listed the details of the murder charges in grisly detail, including one victim, pieces of whom were found stuffed into barrels in a New Jersey warehouse.
Like many leading lights of New York’s underworld, Massino fell victim to someone close to him — his wife’s brother and Bonanno underboss Sal Vitale — one of seven ”made” family members cooperating with the FBI.
Defence lawyer David Breitbart claimed that the informers had been pressured into testifying.
”What do you do if you’re a zealot and you want to make the case against the one they call the ‘Last Don’?” Breitbart said. ”Get a few people to say, ‘the devil made me do it’.”
Jury selection for the trial had been a slow process due, in part, to the wealth of potentially prejudicial cinema and television fare depicting Mafia life and death in varied degrees of authenticity.
Prospective jurors were quizzed on whether they had viewed episodes of HBO cable television’s hit series The Sopranos, depicting the day-to-day life of New Jersey don Tony Soprano, his wife and children and his broader family of mobsters and hit men.
Two of the murder charges against Massino stem from the infiltration of the Bonanno family by undercover FBI agent Joseph Pistone, also known as ”Donnie Brasco”.
Pistone’s five-year sojourn with the family — recounted in the hit film starring Johnny Depp and Al Pacino — resulted in the prosecution of about 200 mafiosi and an interfamily blood bath.
Massino is accused of ordering the murders of Dominick ”Sonny Black” Napolitano, a Bonanno lieutenant who introduced Pistone to the organisation, and Bonanno soldier Anthony Mirra, who was the first family member to befriend the undercover agent. — Sapa-AFP