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Authors: Anthony Destefano
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who were really cash cows. They had to pay off Rastelli’s crowd as well, sometimes over $900 a month, for the privilege of supplying sandwiches and drinks to the lunch wagons. If those payments weren’t made, the suppliers would see their lunch wagon customers dry up. It was classic racketeering activity, maybe not the most flashy stuff around but it suited Rastelli well.
When the great Banana War sputtered to a close in 1968 and Joseph Bonanno and his family decamped for Arizona, Joseph Massino was a strapping twenty-five-year-old man with a wife—he had married Josephine in 1960—and young daughter. For work he ran a lunch wagon, taking a cue from his mother’s side of the family, which began outfitting the trucks to carry snacks to factories. Since he lived in Maspeth, Massino didn’t have far to travel to service the factories that lined Grand and Metropolitan avenues. “Joe Maspeth” was how the lunch wagon crowd knew him. Friends remember that it was a struggle at first. Massino was strapped for cash and in the wintertime he took to standing around Grand and Metropolitan avenues selling Christmas trees to earn a few more dollars. He even had to borrow a few hundred dollars from relatives to pay the medical bills for the birth of his first child. But Rastelli liked him and that counted for something.
The lunch wagon business might have been a racket, seeing how Rastelli controlled things, but for his friends like Massino things worked out. The lunch business could be a living and for a thrifty husband and father like Massino the work was enough to get by. In 1966, records show that Joseph and Josephine Massino took out their first mortgage for $16,000 at 5.5 percent interest from the Greenpoint Savings Bank to purchase a house on Caldwell Avenue in Maspeth, just a few doors down from where his parents lived at number 71–21 Caldwell. Joseph and Josephine Massino, who had been living a few blocks away in a two-story frame house on Perry Avenue just off the Long Island Expressway, needed the extra space since they had a five-year-old daughter, Adeline, and were planning for more children. The payments for what appears to be Massino’s first tangible stake in the American dream of home ownership amounted to $98.26 a month.
Anyone connected to Philip Rastelli and his brothers, Carmine and Marty, had an easy entrée to mob life. Philip Rastelli wasn’t flashy, but his rackets were solid. Massino was close to Rastelli’s brother Carmine, who ran a depot where the lunch wagons filled up with supplies, so he was guaranteed good deals and fresh pastries. Massino’s spot for his coffee stand was on Remsen Place in Maspeth, right around the corner from the house on Perry Street and just a short walk from his new house on Caldwell Avenue. The lunch wagon Massino had was dubbed the “roach coach,” which may or may not have reflected the level of hygiene practiced in the food trade. Gradually, through the Rastelli connection, Joseph Massino, the beefy food vendor who also earned the nickname “Joe Wagons,” became intertwined with the Bonanno crime family. It would prove to be an auspicious time for Massino to build such ties.
The war for leadership of what had been the crime family of Joseph Bonanno had led to a confusing situation to say the least. By the spring of 1967, law enforcement officials in the United States and Canada believed from their surveillance reports and other investigations that Bonanno had maneuvered a comeback of sorts because of the weakness exhibited by the leadership of Gaspar DiGregorio, the man who was backed by Stefano Maggadino for the role of boss when Bonanno disappeared. But even a top NYPD inspector in charge of intelligence had to admit that in the end investigators were groping to understand what was going on in the crime family.
DiGregorio’s abdication after he suffered a heart attack only months after he was chosen as boss led the way to power plays by Bill Bonanno, which
When the great Banana War sputtered to a close in 1968 and Joseph Bonanno and his family decamped for Arizona, Joseph Massino was a strapping twenty-five-year-old man with a wife—he had married Josephine in 1960—and young daughter. For work he ran a lunch wagon, taking a cue from his mother’s side of the family, which began outfitting the trucks to carry snacks to factories. Since he lived in Maspeth, Massino didn’t have far to travel to service the factories that lined Grand and Metropolitan avenues. “Joe Maspeth” was how the lunch wagon crowd knew him. Friends remember that it was a struggle at first. Massino was strapped for cash and in the wintertime he took to standing around Grand and Metropolitan avenues selling Christmas trees to earn a few more dollars. He even had to borrow a few hundred dollars from relatives to pay the medical bills for the birth of his first child. But Rastelli liked him and that counted for something.
The lunch wagon business might have been a racket, seeing how Rastelli controlled things, but for his friends like Massino things worked out. The lunch business could be a living and for a thrifty husband and father like Massino the work was enough to get by. In 1966, records show that Joseph and Josephine Massino took out their first mortgage for $16,000 at 5.5 percent interest from the Greenpoint Savings Bank to purchase a house on Caldwell Avenue in Maspeth, just a few doors down from where his parents lived at number 71–21 Caldwell. Joseph and Josephine Massino, who had been living a few blocks away in a two-story frame house on Perry Avenue just off the Long Island Expressway, needed the extra space since they had a five-year-old daughter, Adeline, and were planning for more children. The payments for what appears to be Massino’s first tangible stake in the American dream of home ownership amounted to $98.26 a month.
Anyone connected to Philip Rastelli and his brothers, Carmine and Marty, had an easy entrée to mob life. Philip Rastelli wasn’t flashy, but his rackets were solid. Massino was close to Rastelli’s brother Carmine, who ran a depot where the lunch wagons filled up with supplies, so he was guaranteed good deals and fresh pastries. Massino’s spot for his coffee stand was on Remsen Place in Maspeth, right around the corner from the house on Perry Street and just a short walk from his new house on Caldwell Avenue. The lunch wagon Massino had was dubbed the “roach coach,” which may or may not have reflected the level of hygiene practiced in the food trade. Gradually, through the Rastelli connection, Joseph Massino, the beefy food vendor who also earned the nickname “Joe Wagons,” became intertwined with the Bonanno crime family. It would prove to be an auspicious time for Massino to build such ties.
The war for leadership of what had been the crime family of Joseph Bonanno had led to a confusing situation to say the least. By the spring of 1967, law enforcement officials in the United States and Canada believed from their surveillance reports and other investigations that Bonanno had maneuvered a comeback of sorts because of the weakness exhibited by the leadership of Gaspar DiGregorio, the man who was backed by Stefano Maggadino for the role of boss when Bonanno disappeared. But even a top NYPD inspector in charge of intelligence had to admit that in the end investigators were groping to understand what was going on in the crime family.
DiGregorio’s abdication after he suffered a heart attack only months after he was chosen as boss led the way to power plays by Bill Bonanno, which
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