Former Bonanno crime family boss Joseph “Big Joey” Massino — the first head of one of New York’s five mob families to ever turn rat — died earlier this month after battling a shor…
nypost.com
He was the last real powerful mob boss in the USA ( early 2000s.) He turned state witness and obliterated the Bonanno family
Good link here:
Massino, he was much like the top guy in my neighborhood. Growing up, most of us we respected that guy, if not all his friends. But make no mistake about it -- I always thought they were bad guys and that their 'life' was in the end -- for losers.
Massino also wasn’t the sloppy, gruff street guy he appeared to be, and was known to be soft-spoken and polite, a gentleman who never barked—even at the lawmen who surveilled, arrested, and interrogated him. (Massino, after cleanly escaping one aggressive surveillance effort, later on even apologized to the officer who had been trying to catch him.)
"He looked like a schlub, but he was sharper than you can imagine," a Bonanno source who requested anonymity recently told us of Massino, noting that during downtime, Massino showed a much lighter side. "He would tell jokes and show card tricks."
Massino apparently could gear himself to the needs of the moment.
Some very scary tough guys were very scared to talk out of school about him. Ray Wean was a six-feet-tall, 350-pound head cracker who worked for Massino. “Wean’s so big, I can’t handcuff him," an agent once said. Wean, who was not Italian and obviously not a made member, was willing to snitch on any mobster on the street. Almost any....“Ray was a monster, a psycho, not afraid of anything,” said Pat Colgan, a retired FBI supervisor who tailed Massino for more than a decade. "Yet he was scared to death of Joey for good reasons."
A blog about the American Mafia, primarily New York's Five Families.
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