Arthur L. Spada, former Connecticut State Police Commissioner
CONNECTICUT NEWS
Witness Reveals `Secret' Meeting Says Session Involved Public Safety Chief, Father Of Slain Man
June 9, 2006 By TRACY GORDON FOX And ALAINE GRIFFIN, Courant Staff Writers
MERIDEN -- A former state police commissioner went behind the backs of detectives feverishly tracking leads in the 2003 mob-style killing of a Middletown businessman, holding a "secret meeting" with the victim's father and attorney, according to testimony in the larceny trial of former state police Maj. Greg Senick.
Timothy Barry, a former commander and colonel of the state police, made the accusations against his former boss, Public Safety Commissioner Arthur Spada, during testimony Wednesday in Senick's trial in Superior Court in Meriden. The trial has become a fish bowl of the dysfunctional state police hierarchy during Spada's tenure, which ended in 2004.
Through his pointed cross-examinations, Senick's attorney, James Wade, has tried to show that Senick's arrest was fueled by politics from outside and within the department. Under Wade's questioning, Barry, a prosecution witness, disclosed the meeting Spada and Senick held in 2003 concerning one of Middletown's most notorious unsolved homicides, the slaying of Joseph Mazzotta.
It was "a secret meeting that was completely undisclosed and undocumented and after that, Mr. Wade, I told your client if he ever did anything like that again I would run him right out of the state police," Barry said.
"And I told him, don't ever do that again. If that ever occurs where the commissioner is going to do something unethical as that, you have to tell me about that," said Barry, who now works in fraud management for a Hartford insurance company.
Senick, who is accused of charging thousands of dollars in bills to the state while living in state-owned property, had been Spada's chief of staff.
Reached at home Thursday, Spada, a former Superior Court judge, acknowledged meeting with Salvatore Mazzotta, the father of Joseph Mazzotta, who had been shot in the face and neck at point-blank range in Middletown. But he vehemently denied there was anything secretive or unethical about it and said that Barry was bitter and out to get him because he drummed Barry out of the department, after he learned Barry was trying to get his job.
"It's an outrage. It's the mad ranting of a disturbed and paranoid mind," Spada said of Barry, whom he had appointed colonel.
"It was the worst appointment I ever made, and I regret it."
Spada said he frequently met with citizens who wrote to him about cases or problems.
"Mr. Mazzotta is a citizen. He lost a son in a very gruesome killing," he said.
"I conducted hundreds of these sessions when I had a complaint."
Spada said the meeting was held in the library of his office and that state police attorney Dawn Hellier was there.
"It was on the calendar," he said.
Spada said Mazzotta had asked the state police to take over the investigation of his son's death from Middletown police. He said the major crime unit had already completed its investigation and had turned over any evidence to Middletown detectives.
But according to Barry and other sources, the state police Statewide Narcotics Task Force and Organized Crime Task Force were still involved when that meeting took place.
Friends found Mazzotta's body in the offices of the family's equipment-rental business on Boston Road in Middletown on April 14, 2003. Police never determined a motive for the killing.
Mazzotta, 40, was a member of one of Middletown's wealthiest families, prominent in local construction and real estate.
Investigators have examined the family's investments in the Schaghticoke Indian tribe in Kent and Joseph Mazzotta's involvement in Cocktails on the Green, the Cromwell bar in which Mazzotta had a silent interest. The bar was in financial trouble, and police sources said low-level transactions of narcotics and stolen goods took place there. Before his son was killed, Salvatore Mazzotta had hired bodyguards to keep order at the bar. He also paid tens of thousands of dollars to settle the bar's debts so it could be sold.
About a month before the slaying, a severed pig's head was left at the bar's front stoop.
In December 2003, Middletown investigators went to Springfield, Mass., looking for possible connections between Mazzotta's slaying and the Nov. 23, 2003, killing of Adolfo "Big Al" Bruno, a reputed mobster for the New York-based Genovese crime family.
Bruno attended Mazzotta's wake and funeral and is known to have associated with Salvatore Mazzotta, sources close to the investigation have said. Last December, Frankie Roche, a Massachusetts man with reputed mob ties, was charged with murder in Bruno's death.
Salvatore Mazzotta had been meeting regularly with Middletown police for updates, police sources said, but the meetings are now less frequent. Sources have said Mazzotta's involvement has been awkward at times, partially because in 1990, Salvatore Mazzotta was charged and later acquitted in a cocaine-trafficking case.
On Thursday, Mazzotta recalled meeting with state police after his son was killed, but he could not remember meeting with Spada. He said a stroke he had four months ago has affected his memory.
Mazzotta said his greatest frustration has been police officers' insistence that he knows more about this than he is saying.
"Instead of looking for who killed my son, they were looking at me," Mazzotta said about Middletown detectives.
"They go to Springfield, they follow me. I'd be a damn fool if I know who did it and don't tell."
Mazzotta, who had asked for state police help days after the slaying, said he lacked confidence Middletown police could find his son's killer and was disheartened when state police pulled out of the case just months after the slaying. He said no one has contacted him about the investigation in 2½ years.
"They left me hanging. I don't know nothing," Mazzotta said.
"I don't have faith in nobody no more. I lost a son."
Middletown Deputy Police Chief Lynn Baldoni declined to comment on the investigation Thursday.
Spada's name had come up at a March 4, 2004, meeting between state police investigators, Drug Enforcement Administration officials and officers from the Statewide Narcotics Task Force.
At that meeting, state police Capt. Peter Terenzi, then head of the narcotics task force, voiced concern about Spada's involvement in the Mazzotta case
In a report, Terenzi said that Spada had friends and associates in the area who "were also some of the people we were looking at as possible or potential targets."
Terenzi was later transferred and disciplined after allegations surfaced that he disparaged Spada's familiarity with Italians.
In his testimony, Barry said Senick was "obligated" to disclose the 2003 meeting with Mazzotta, which occurred "while an investigation is going out and dozens of officers are trying to solve the case."
"You know, Mr. Wade, as a criminal defense attorney the consequences of actions like that," Barry said, referring to how the meeting may have affected the case.
* * * *
Is Arthur L. Spada the kingpin of a crime syndicate, The Connecticut State Police?
A letter sent to Connecticut State Police Commissioner Leonard C. Boyle
My email into CPS Loads of links.
The Grand Maul, Official, Police, Judge Post to Eat Sh*t and go F themselves Letter:
The Steven G. Erickson Mugshot
Unsolved Gangland Murder of Joseph Mazzotta Al Bruno associate
Moderator: Capos
Re: Unsolved Gangland Murder of Joseph Mazzotta Al Bruno associate
Organized crime in Springfield evolved through death and money
Updated Mar 25, 2019;
Posted Dec 11, 2011
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By Stephanie Barry | sbarry@repub.com
Republican file photo
Republican file photoThis Republican file photo from 1993 shows Francesco 'Skyball" Scibelli in downtown Springfield.
When a Roman Catholic nun dropped a dime on the late Francesco "Skyball" Scibelli for running an illegal gambling ring from the telephone booths at Providence Hospital in 1961, divine intervention and the related jail time weren't enough to dissuade him from running the rackets.
Nor was the tongue-lashing that he and co-defendant Paul “The Penman” Cardaropoli received at their Holyoke District Court sentencing a half-century ago.
Scibelli’s criminal record dated back to 1932 and included arrests for extortion, keeping liquor for sale and “gaming on the Lord’s Day,” according to historical accounts.
“We don’t want bookies. We don’t want cheap ones or prosperous ones here, and we aren’t going to have them,” Judge William E. Nolen snapped to Scibelli and Cardaropoli before sentencing each of them to 19 months in jail – a stiff penalty for the time.
Scibelli, who grew up in Springfield’s South End neighborhood, ignored the judge’s admonition and evolved into a powerful and irreverent regional boss for the New York-based Genovese crime family. His reign as a mob lieutenant spanned at least from the early 1980s until about two years before he died in 2000 of natural causes at age 87.
Scibelli became boss of the powerful Genovese family faction in Greater Springfield after his predecessor, Salvatore “Big Nose Sam” Cufari, died in 1983, also of natural causes.
About this series
This is a two-part series about the evolution of the Mafia in Greater Springfield since the early 1900s.
Sunday:
The roots of the Mafia in Western Massachusetts date back to Prohibition, and its growth mirrors the history of organized crime across the United States.
Monday:
This year’s federal prosecution of cases involving the 2003 plot to murder mob boss Adolfo “Big Al” Bruno set the stage for a dismantling of the Mafia organization in Greater Springfield.
Read Part 2 »
Mob investigators and associates say Scibelli and Cufari were among a handful of standouts in flush times for gangsters during the 1970s and ‘80s, a period marked by huge profits and spikes of unchecked violence.
Veteran organized-crime investigators say the evolution of the Mafia in Western Massachusetts mirrors that of the underworld everywhere and forever: driven by death and money.
“If the money’s flowing and the right people are happy, you find more peaceful periods,” explains Massachusetts State Police Lt. Thomas J. Murphy. “When money gets tight, you’re liable to see a more aggressive landscape.”
Murphy, an organized-crime detective for nearly two decades, leads a special investigative unit that helped win a series of indictments that culminated this year with life sentences and plea deals in connection with the 2003 contract hit on Adolfo “Big Al” Bruno. Bruno was the region’s last Mafia boss in the truest sense of the word, many say.
In terms of being crafted around finance, La Cosa Nostra in Greater Springfield began growing and developing its own complexion, so to speak, during Prohibition, as was the case in most U.S. cities.
When booze became illegal in 1919, Springfield’s Carlo Sinischalchi was labeled “King of the Bootleggers” and moved from a cold-water flat in the city’s South End to a bigger house and a lifestyle in which he was shuttled to work and outings in a chauffeur-driven limousine, historians say.
However, his kingdom was less than a year old when he was shot and killed in that very Lincoln limousine, while waiting for his driver to bring him a cigar. His widow, Pasquelina Sinischalchi, inherited the business and married Antonio Miranda, a close ally of New York crime bosses Frank Costello and Vito Genovese.
By all accounts, this marked the region’s enduring allegiance and links with the Genovese clan, reputed to be the largest, most feared and tight-lipped of New York’s five prevailing crime families.
Miranda and his new wife ran the business until 1930, when he died of blood poisoning after the couple moved to an even more lavish home. Miranda’s funeral procession included 22 flower cars, 147 limousines and a shower of rose petals dropped overhead by airplane, according to news accounts from the time.
The two-time widow then chose Joseph Fiore, 34, an Italian immigrant, to help run her flourishing enterprise. His business resume included an attempted murder in Connecticut and the knifing of a police officer in Springfield, news reports state.
However, Sinischalchi was killed and Fiore wounded by a spray of bullets from two automatic weapons and a sawed-off shotgun in a drive-by shooting on Nov. 12, 1932. Fiore’s close call became a moot point when he was shot to death in a South End barbershop the next year.
The bootlegging business also was rendered moot the next year when, on Dec. 5, 1933, Prohibition was repealed. The field opened to legitimate purveyors and alcohol ceased to be exclusively the professional lifeblood of the unsavory.
Fast-forward to the 1960s and ‘70s. Organized crime figures in Springfield had a foothold in more contemporary, traditional rackets: street lotteries, truck heists, illegal sports-betting and casino junkets, among others.
30
Gallery: The Springfield Mafia: Rise and fall of the mob in Western Massachusetts
The so-called Scibelli faction was in full swing. They included Skyball Scibelli, sometimes also called “Ski” or “Skee,” and his younger brothers Anthony “Turk” Scibelli and Albert “Baba” Scibelli.
Cufari was the boss of the Western Massachusetts operations at the time and had logged more than a dozen arrests dating back to the 1920s, when he was shot by police while trying to run a bootlegging road block in Granby, Conn.
In 1924, Cufari was arrested on Christmas Eve for stabbing an Enfield, Conn., service station attendant, who later refused to identify Cufari as his assailant. No charges were brought, and that seemed to mark a pattern for “Big Nose Sam.” He was arrested and charged with myriad Mafia-related crimes over the course of six decades, but averted a prison sentence in all cases.
His underlings over the years included the Scibellis, Adolfo (who would ultimately earn the nickname "Big Al") Bruno, Felix Tranghese and a collection of lesser-known soldiers and associates.
Cufari was known for being on the stoic side as gangsters go. He didn’t exhibit either the flair of Skyball Scibelli or Bruno or the near-elegance of Baba Scibelli, but he wielded unchallenged power nonetheless.
A native of Calabria, Italy, Cufari fought being stripped of his American citizenship in the 1950s, attended the famed "Little Apalachin" summit of leading U.S. Mafia figures in New York state in 1957 and rebuffed a summons in 1972 from a U.S. Senate Committee that was probing an organized crime monopoly of cleaning products purchased by labor groups in Boston and New Jersey. Cufari and other gangsters were purportedly pushing the widespread sale of the locally manufactured "Poly-Clean" on unions to promote "labor peace," according to witnesses.
Cufari suffered a stroke in the 1970s, but still lorded over his subordinates at Ciro’s, a well-known restaurant he ran on Main Street in the South End of Springfield, until his health plummeted.
At his funeral, a family member told mourners how Cufari had helped build a convent in Holyoke for Italian nuns – doubtful that it was to atone for Scibelli’s misstep with the nun at the nearby hospital 20 years earlier.
Skyball Scibelli, with his brothers and Bruno close at his hip, was anointed as the regional boss soon after Cufari’s “retirement.” The group ran reportedly wildly successful casino junkets from an office on Locust Street until they were federally indicted and convicted for illegal gaming in the late 1980s.
Unlike his predecessor, Skyball Scibelli spent several stints in prison as prosecutors became more aggressive with organized crime. According to published accounts, he seemed a throwback in that he would grow wide-eyed at talk of "the syndicate" or the Mafia and continually groused about his sentences and the media attention surrounding them.
Victor Bruno, 40, one of Adolfo Bruno’s five sons, remembers being told to wait at the junket office after attending grammar school each day at Our Lady of Mount Carmel, a now-defunct Catholic school across the street from where his father was ultimately gunned down on Nov. 23, 2003.
“I’ve heard someone say organized crime is better than disorganized crime,” the younger Bruno said with a grin during a recent interview at the Worthington Street restaurant, Adolfo’s, that he opened last year. “There was more of a sense of respect and honor back then. When (gangsters) greeted you with kisses on the cheek, they meant it.”
Perhaps, but there were a few wise guys in the volatile 1970s and ‘80s who were not met with kisses.
Skyball Scibelli’s son-in-law, Victor C. DeCaro, disappeared from the Agawam lounge he managed in 1972. On July 3 of that year, his bound and bullet-riddled body was found wrapped in a tarp after it was pulled from the Connecticut River. The murder remains unsolved, but organized crime figures speaking on condition of anonymity said DeCaro had been warned about a nefarious relationship with another gangster’s wife. No one was ever charged with the murder.
In 1979, Antonio Facente’s shot and similarly bound corpse was found in the trunk of a car. Facente had two years earlier had been acquitted of murdering a Springfield package store owner in a spectacular trial that had attracted national interest; his original conviction was overturned on appeal. When his body was recovered, he was wearing a diaper and had another stuffed in his head cavity, according to old state police records.
Mafia informants told police that Bruno had bragged to his colleagues that he had killed Facente to allegedly cozy up to then-Hampden District Attorney Matthew J. Ryan.
Facente and Ryan, who died in 2009, had been at odds since the William Griffin murder trial. Facente’s 1973 conviction was later overturned, partly because of ethnic slurs made by the district attorney at trial. The two had also tangled over more personal issues, according to law enforcement sources.
Bruno was never charged in connection with Facente’s death. Reports detailing informant testimony on the matter have long been sealed in Hampden Superior Court.
The run of violence in that era continued with a botched attempt at killing a New York mobster in 1981. Joseph N. Maruca was shot five times in a barn in Agawam owned by Bruno’s brother. Maruca survived, and Bruno and John “Jake” Nettis were tried twice for the shooting a decade later; the first ended in a mistrial. Bruno was acquitted after a second trial in 1992, but Nettis was convicted and sentenced to 10 years in prison. Nettis was paroled after serving three years.
At around the same time as Bruno and Nettis were being tried, East Longmeadow restaurateur Gaetano Milano was facing charges for the killing of William “Wild Guy” Grasso, of East Haven, Conn., on June 13, 1989, as they traveled in a van on Interstate 91. Grasso believed he was en route to a meeting with Worcester organized crime figure Carlo Mastrototaro to resolve a dispute about vending machine sites in Springfield, but federal court testimony in the case revealed it was a Mafia-orchestrated execution.
Grasso was the notoriously ruthless second-in-command of the Rhode Island-based Patriarca crime family. Milano, then 40, was a recently made member; in a federal court proceeding in Hartford in 1991, he wept as he renounced his life in the Mafia, admitted to Grasso’s killing and explained that the hit had come amid a power struggle in the family during which the message was: “kill or be killed.”
In a plea deal, Milano was sentenced to 33 years, but had seven years shaved off his sentence in 2008 after a series of appeals. His lawyer argued FBI informants and corrupt investigators had muddied the relationship between Grasso and Milano, among other gangsters. Milano, who has said he has been rehabilitated in prison, is expected to enter a pre-release program this spring.
Milano was convicted in a racketeering conspiracy linked to the murder along with brothers Frank Pugliano and Louis Pugliano, of West Springfield, both of whom are now in their 80s, and one of his childhood friends, Frank Colantoni Jr., 57. The Puglianos and Colantoni all played lesser roles in the murder and served less time.
During an interview, Milano said he resisted enormous pressure to cooperate against other organized crime figures because of a sense of fading values in the underworld. “There’s a special place in heaven for those people,” he said of witnesses who testified against him, without a trace of irony.
20
Gallery: Al Bruno Murder Case
The decade of the 1990s was a largely quiet time for the mob in Western Massachusetts. Rackets were steady. Bosses were satisfied. Baba Scibelli, who had succeeded his brother, is said to have quietly made millions with illegal poker machines until he was caught up in a broad federal racketeering indictment in 2000 along with a dozen other mobsters and associates.
Those indicted included two other significant figures: Anthony J. Delevo, a Bruno rival who died in prison in 2005, and Emilio Fusco, an Italian immigrant and made member of the Genovese family.
Fusco is the last defendant scheduled to be tried in April in federal court in New York in connection with the plot to murder Bruno.
Both Delevo and Fusco pleaded guilty in June 2003 to racketeering charges, netting three-year sentences.
At the time, Baba Scibelli was ailing and shocked law enforcement and the underworld by conceding his membership in the Genovese family under his plea deal. Due to age and frail health, the only surviving brother of the “Scibelli faction” escaped prison and slipped quietly into retirement.
The federal indictments in 2000 and other factors paved the way for Bruno to officially assume power of the “Springfield Crew” of the Genovese family in 2002, according to court testimony. His official sanctioning as regional boss was celebrated by a group of New York mobsters at Bruno’s old restaurant on East Columbus Avenue, the Cara Mia.
His dinner guests included a group who ultimately plotted to kill him.
Bruno was a fusion of old-school gangster with a sparkly attitude. He routinely wore large-rimmed glasses, Hawaiian shirts and chewed big cigars – almost as an accessory. But, witnesses at the trial involving the plot to murder him testified Bruno’s relationship with New York acting boss, Arthur “Artie” Nigro, grew prickly and even worse.
Nigro began demanding that greater proceeds be kicked “upstairs” to mobsters in Manhattan, and Bruno attempted to fall in line. At Nigro’s behest and under the close supervision of Nigro ally John “Big John” Bologna, Bruno introduced or upped demands for “tribute” to be paid by owners of Springfield restaurants and strip joints.
The financial tensions created fissures in the Mafia hierarchy in Western Massachusetts and made room for an ambitious trio of upstarts: Anthony J. Arillotta, of Springfield; Fotios Geas, of West Springfield; and his younger brother Ty Geas, of Westfield.
The 42-year-old Arillotta, who turned prosecution witness in 2010, saw the anti-Bruno sentiment as an opportunity, he told jurors in a federal court in Manhattan last year. The Geases and Nigro were tried, convicted of murder, racketeering, extortion and other charges and received life sentences in April.
After being “made” by Nigro in a ceremony at an apartment in the Bronx, N.Y., in the summer of 2003, Arillotta began whispering to his allies that “he was with Artie” and no longer answered to Bruno, according to his trial testimony.
It marked an unprecedented power shift in the chronicles of the Mafia in Greater Springfield, according to Murphy.
“We had never seen this before,” Murphy said. “Arillotta got picked up on wiretaps telling people that he was no longer with Bruno, that he had a better out, but we had Bruno operating on a parallel track.”
Then violence erupted with bar brawls, attempted shootings, the disappearance of a lower-level associate, Gary D. Westerman, and, ultimately, with the startling execution of Bruno. Paid gunman Frankie A. Roche admitted firing six shots into Bruno as the mobster left his regular Sunday-night card game in the South End. Bruno's familiar cigar was still smoldering near his body in a parking lot when police arrived.
Seven arrests and a series of plea deals were made and struck in connection with Bruno’s murder. Joining the ranks of witness protection would be Arillotta, Bruno’s protégé, and Tranghese, who came up with Bruno in the heady regimes of old.
What is left is a genuine power vacuum where, unlike any other time in the region’s rackets, there is no leader awaiting to fill the shoes of Cufari, the Scibellis and Bruno before them.
Murphy predicts that the irresistible lure of illegal money and the cachet that comes with leading a gang of guys will somehow resurface, though.
“It’s still a multimillion-dollar business. Someone will come along with the stomach and smarts to take a shot,” he said. “And, we’ll be watching.”
Updated Mar 25, 2019;
Posted Dec 11, 2011
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By Stephanie Barry | sbarry@repub.com
Republican file photo
Republican file photoThis Republican file photo from 1993 shows Francesco 'Skyball" Scibelli in downtown Springfield.
When a Roman Catholic nun dropped a dime on the late Francesco "Skyball" Scibelli for running an illegal gambling ring from the telephone booths at Providence Hospital in 1961, divine intervention and the related jail time weren't enough to dissuade him from running the rackets.
Nor was the tongue-lashing that he and co-defendant Paul “The Penman” Cardaropoli received at their Holyoke District Court sentencing a half-century ago.
Scibelli’s criminal record dated back to 1932 and included arrests for extortion, keeping liquor for sale and “gaming on the Lord’s Day,” according to historical accounts.
“We don’t want bookies. We don’t want cheap ones or prosperous ones here, and we aren’t going to have them,” Judge William E. Nolen snapped to Scibelli and Cardaropoli before sentencing each of them to 19 months in jail – a stiff penalty for the time.
Scibelli, who grew up in Springfield’s South End neighborhood, ignored the judge’s admonition and evolved into a powerful and irreverent regional boss for the New York-based Genovese crime family. His reign as a mob lieutenant spanned at least from the early 1980s until about two years before he died in 2000 of natural causes at age 87.
Scibelli became boss of the powerful Genovese family faction in Greater Springfield after his predecessor, Salvatore “Big Nose Sam” Cufari, died in 1983, also of natural causes.
About this series
This is a two-part series about the evolution of the Mafia in Greater Springfield since the early 1900s.
Sunday:
The roots of the Mafia in Western Massachusetts date back to Prohibition, and its growth mirrors the history of organized crime across the United States.
Monday:
This year’s federal prosecution of cases involving the 2003 plot to murder mob boss Adolfo “Big Al” Bruno set the stage for a dismantling of the Mafia organization in Greater Springfield.
Read Part 2 »
Mob investigators and associates say Scibelli and Cufari were among a handful of standouts in flush times for gangsters during the 1970s and ‘80s, a period marked by huge profits and spikes of unchecked violence.
Veteran organized-crime investigators say the evolution of the Mafia in Western Massachusetts mirrors that of the underworld everywhere and forever: driven by death and money.
“If the money’s flowing and the right people are happy, you find more peaceful periods,” explains Massachusetts State Police Lt. Thomas J. Murphy. “When money gets tight, you’re liable to see a more aggressive landscape.”
Murphy, an organized-crime detective for nearly two decades, leads a special investigative unit that helped win a series of indictments that culminated this year with life sentences and plea deals in connection with the 2003 contract hit on Adolfo “Big Al” Bruno. Bruno was the region’s last Mafia boss in the truest sense of the word, many say.
In terms of being crafted around finance, La Cosa Nostra in Greater Springfield began growing and developing its own complexion, so to speak, during Prohibition, as was the case in most U.S. cities.
When booze became illegal in 1919, Springfield’s Carlo Sinischalchi was labeled “King of the Bootleggers” and moved from a cold-water flat in the city’s South End to a bigger house and a lifestyle in which he was shuttled to work and outings in a chauffeur-driven limousine, historians say.
However, his kingdom was less than a year old when he was shot and killed in that very Lincoln limousine, while waiting for his driver to bring him a cigar. His widow, Pasquelina Sinischalchi, inherited the business and married Antonio Miranda, a close ally of New York crime bosses Frank Costello and Vito Genovese.
By all accounts, this marked the region’s enduring allegiance and links with the Genovese clan, reputed to be the largest, most feared and tight-lipped of New York’s five prevailing crime families.
Miranda and his new wife ran the business until 1930, when he died of blood poisoning after the couple moved to an even more lavish home. Miranda’s funeral procession included 22 flower cars, 147 limousines and a shower of rose petals dropped overhead by airplane, according to news accounts from the time.
The two-time widow then chose Joseph Fiore, 34, an Italian immigrant, to help run her flourishing enterprise. His business resume included an attempted murder in Connecticut and the knifing of a police officer in Springfield, news reports state.
However, Sinischalchi was killed and Fiore wounded by a spray of bullets from two automatic weapons and a sawed-off shotgun in a drive-by shooting on Nov. 12, 1932. Fiore’s close call became a moot point when he was shot to death in a South End barbershop the next year.
The bootlegging business also was rendered moot the next year when, on Dec. 5, 1933, Prohibition was repealed. The field opened to legitimate purveyors and alcohol ceased to be exclusively the professional lifeblood of the unsavory.
Fast-forward to the 1960s and ‘70s. Organized crime figures in Springfield had a foothold in more contemporary, traditional rackets: street lotteries, truck heists, illegal sports-betting and casino junkets, among others.
30
Gallery: The Springfield Mafia: Rise and fall of the mob in Western Massachusetts
The so-called Scibelli faction was in full swing. They included Skyball Scibelli, sometimes also called “Ski” or “Skee,” and his younger brothers Anthony “Turk” Scibelli and Albert “Baba” Scibelli.
Cufari was the boss of the Western Massachusetts operations at the time and had logged more than a dozen arrests dating back to the 1920s, when he was shot by police while trying to run a bootlegging road block in Granby, Conn.
In 1924, Cufari was arrested on Christmas Eve for stabbing an Enfield, Conn., service station attendant, who later refused to identify Cufari as his assailant. No charges were brought, and that seemed to mark a pattern for “Big Nose Sam.” He was arrested and charged with myriad Mafia-related crimes over the course of six decades, but averted a prison sentence in all cases.
His underlings over the years included the Scibellis, Adolfo (who would ultimately earn the nickname "Big Al") Bruno, Felix Tranghese and a collection of lesser-known soldiers and associates.
Cufari was known for being on the stoic side as gangsters go. He didn’t exhibit either the flair of Skyball Scibelli or Bruno or the near-elegance of Baba Scibelli, but he wielded unchallenged power nonetheless.
A native of Calabria, Italy, Cufari fought being stripped of his American citizenship in the 1950s, attended the famed "Little Apalachin" summit of leading U.S. Mafia figures in New York state in 1957 and rebuffed a summons in 1972 from a U.S. Senate Committee that was probing an organized crime monopoly of cleaning products purchased by labor groups in Boston and New Jersey. Cufari and other gangsters were purportedly pushing the widespread sale of the locally manufactured "Poly-Clean" on unions to promote "labor peace," according to witnesses.
Cufari suffered a stroke in the 1970s, but still lorded over his subordinates at Ciro’s, a well-known restaurant he ran on Main Street in the South End of Springfield, until his health plummeted.
At his funeral, a family member told mourners how Cufari had helped build a convent in Holyoke for Italian nuns – doubtful that it was to atone for Scibelli’s misstep with the nun at the nearby hospital 20 years earlier.
Skyball Scibelli, with his brothers and Bruno close at his hip, was anointed as the regional boss soon after Cufari’s “retirement.” The group ran reportedly wildly successful casino junkets from an office on Locust Street until they were federally indicted and convicted for illegal gaming in the late 1980s.
Unlike his predecessor, Skyball Scibelli spent several stints in prison as prosecutors became more aggressive with organized crime. According to published accounts, he seemed a throwback in that he would grow wide-eyed at talk of "the syndicate" or the Mafia and continually groused about his sentences and the media attention surrounding them.
Victor Bruno, 40, one of Adolfo Bruno’s five sons, remembers being told to wait at the junket office after attending grammar school each day at Our Lady of Mount Carmel, a now-defunct Catholic school across the street from where his father was ultimately gunned down on Nov. 23, 2003.
“I’ve heard someone say organized crime is better than disorganized crime,” the younger Bruno said with a grin during a recent interview at the Worthington Street restaurant, Adolfo’s, that he opened last year. “There was more of a sense of respect and honor back then. When (gangsters) greeted you with kisses on the cheek, they meant it.”
Perhaps, but there were a few wise guys in the volatile 1970s and ‘80s who were not met with kisses.
Skyball Scibelli’s son-in-law, Victor C. DeCaro, disappeared from the Agawam lounge he managed in 1972. On July 3 of that year, his bound and bullet-riddled body was found wrapped in a tarp after it was pulled from the Connecticut River. The murder remains unsolved, but organized crime figures speaking on condition of anonymity said DeCaro had been warned about a nefarious relationship with another gangster’s wife. No one was ever charged with the murder.
In 1979, Antonio Facente’s shot and similarly bound corpse was found in the trunk of a car. Facente had two years earlier had been acquitted of murdering a Springfield package store owner in a spectacular trial that had attracted national interest; his original conviction was overturned on appeal. When his body was recovered, he was wearing a diaper and had another stuffed in his head cavity, according to old state police records.
Mafia informants told police that Bruno had bragged to his colleagues that he had killed Facente to allegedly cozy up to then-Hampden District Attorney Matthew J. Ryan.
Facente and Ryan, who died in 2009, had been at odds since the William Griffin murder trial. Facente’s 1973 conviction was later overturned, partly because of ethnic slurs made by the district attorney at trial. The two had also tangled over more personal issues, according to law enforcement sources.
Bruno was never charged in connection with Facente’s death. Reports detailing informant testimony on the matter have long been sealed in Hampden Superior Court.
The run of violence in that era continued with a botched attempt at killing a New York mobster in 1981. Joseph N. Maruca was shot five times in a barn in Agawam owned by Bruno’s brother. Maruca survived, and Bruno and John “Jake” Nettis were tried twice for the shooting a decade later; the first ended in a mistrial. Bruno was acquitted after a second trial in 1992, but Nettis was convicted and sentenced to 10 years in prison. Nettis was paroled after serving three years.
At around the same time as Bruno and Nettis were being tried, East Longmeadow restaurateur Gaetano Milano was facing charges for the killing of William “Wild Guy” Grasso, of East Haven, Conn., on June 13, 1989, as they traveled in a van on Interstate 91. Grasso believed he was en route to a meeting with Worcester organized crime figure Carlo Mastrototaro to resolve a dispute about vending machine sites in Springfield, but federal court testimony in the case revealed it was a Mafia-orchestrated execution.
Grasso was the notoriously ruthless second-in-command of the Rhode Island-based Patriarca crime family. Milano, then 40, was a recently made member; in a federal court proceeding in Hartford in 1991, he wept as he renounced his life in the Mafia, admitted to Grasso’s killing and explained that the hit had come amid a power struggle in the family during which the message was: “kill or be killed.”
In a plea deal, Milano was sentenced to 33 years, but had seven years shaved off his sentence in 2008 after a series of appeals. His lawyer argued FBI informants and corrupt investigators had muddied the relationship between Grasso and Milano, among other gangsters. Milano, who has said he has been rehabilitated in prison, is expected to enter a pre-release program this spring.
Milano was convicted in a racketeering conspiracy linked to the murder along with brothers Frank Pugliano and Louis Pugliano, of West Springfield, both of whom are now in their 80s, and one of his childhood friends, Frank Colantoni Jr., 57. The Puglianos and Colantoni all played lesser roles in the murder and served less time.
During an interview, Milano said he resisted enormous pressure to cooperate against other organized crime figures because of a sense of fading values in the underworld. “There’s a special place in heaven for those people,” he said of witnesses who testified against him, without a trace of irony.
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Gallery: Al Bruno Murder Case
The decade of the 1990s was a largely quiet time for the mob in Western Massachusetts. Rackets were steady. Bosses were satisfied. Baba Scibelli, who had succeeded his brother, is said to have quietly made millions with illegal poker machines until he was caught up in a broad federal racketeering indictment in 2000 along with a dozen other mobsters and associates.
Those indicted included two other significant figures: Anthony J. Delevo, a Bruno rival who died in prison in 2005, and Emilio Fusco, an Italian immigrant and made member of the Genovese family.
Fusco is the last defendant scheduled to be tried in April in federal court in New York in connection with the plot to murder Bruno.
Both Delevo and Fusco pleaded guilty in June 2003 to racketeering charges, netting three-year sentences.
At the time, Baba Scibelli was ailing and shocked law enforcement and the underworld by conceding his membership in the Genovese family under his plea deal. Due to age and frail health, the only surviving brother of the “Scibelli faction” escaped prison and slipped quietly into retirement.
The federal indictments in 2000 and other factors paved the way for Bruno to officially assume power of the “Springfield Crew” of the Genovese family in 2002, according to court testimony. His official sanctioning as regional boss was celebrated by a group of New York mobsters at Bruno’s old restaurant on East Columbus Avenue, the Cara Mia.
His dinner guests included a group who ultimately plotted to kill him.
Bruno was a fusion of old-school gangster with a sparkly attitude. He routinely wore large-rimmed glasses, Hawaiian shirts and chewed big cigars – almost as an accessory. But, witnesses at the trial involving the plot to murder him testified Bruno’s relationship with New York acting boss, Arthur “Artie” Nigro, grew prickly and even worse.
Nigro began demanding that greater proceeds be kicked “upstairs” to mobsters in Manhattan, and Bruno attempted to fall in line. At Nigro’s behest and under the close supervision of Nigro ally John “Big John” Bologna, Bruno introduced or upped demands for “tribute” to be paid by owners of Springfield restaurants and strip joints.
The financial tensions created fissures in the Mafia hierarchy in Western Massachusetts and made room for an ambitious trio of upstarts: Anthony J. Arillotta, of Springfield; Fotios Geas, of West Springfield; and his younger brother Ty Geas, of Westfield.
The 42-year-old Arillotta, who turned prosecution witness in 2010, saw the anti-Bruno sentiment as an opportunity, he told jurors in a federal court in Manhattan last year. The Geases and Nigro were tried, convicted of murder, racketeering, extortion and other charges and received life sentences in April.
After being “made” by Nigro in a ceremony at an apartment in the Bronx, N.Y., in the summer of 2003, Arillotta began whispering to his allies that “he was with Artie” and no longer answered to Bruno, according to his trial testimony.
It marked an unprecedented power shift in the chronicles of the Mafia in Greater Springfield, according to Murphy.
“We had never seen this before,” Murphy said. “Arillotta got picked up on wiretaps telling people that he was no longer with Bruno, that he had a better out, but we had Bruno operating on a parallel track.”
Then violence erupted with bar brawls, attempted shootings, the disappearance of a lower-level associate, Gary D. Westerman, and, ultimately, with the startling execution of Bruno. Paid gunman Frankie A. Roche admitted firing six shots into Bruno as the mobster left his regular Sunday-night card game in the South End. Bruno's familiar cigar was still smoldering near his body in a parking lot when police arrived.
Seven arrests and a series of plea deals were made and struck in connection with Bruno’s murder. Joining the ranks of witness protection would be Arillotta, Bruno’s protégé, and Tranghese, who came up with Bruno in the heady regimes of old.
What is left is a genuine power vacuum where, unlike any other time in the region’s rackets, there is no leader awaiting to fill the shoes of Cufari, the Scibellis and Bruno before them.
Murphy predicts that the irresistible lure of illegal money and the cachet that comes with leading a gang of guys will somehow resurface, though.
“It’s still a multimillion-dollar business. Someone will come along with the stomach and smarts to take a shot,” he said. “And, we’ll be watching.”