On October 11, 2004, two backhoes began cutting slowly into a vacant lot off Ruby Street in the Hole, a sunken neighborhood on the Brooklyn-Queens border a few minutes from Kennedy Airport. FBI agents in yellow rubber boots raked through the dirt by hand while cadaver dogs worked the edges. They had been at it for a week.
Days earlier, a bone had turned up and the whole team stopped. It belonged to a dog. On this Monday morning, it did not.
It was a human leg bone. Then more bones. Then an arm still inside the sleeve of a leather jacket. A pair of eyeglasses. A muddy PJ wristwatch. Over the next day or so, a plastic City Bank card, 23 years old, with a name on it the agents already knew.
The New York police commissioner told reporters there were skeletal remains inside of shoes. The men buried in that lot had gone into the ground in May 1981, and a great many people in New York had spent 23 years making sure they stayed there.
One of them was a captain in the Bonanno crime family named Dominick Trinchera. The other was a captain in the same family named Philip Giaccone, known as Philly Lucky. The story of how they got into that lot is one of the most famous betrayals in the history of the American Mafia.
It is the story of a peace meeting that was never meant to be one, of a man shouting that it was a holdup, and of the family boss who would one day stand in a courtroom and describe it all.
Most of the account comes from federal court records, from the testimony of men who were in the room, and from the reporting of the time. Some details are still argued over, and some of what has been written about Philip Giaccone himself cannot be checked. Where that is the case, it will be said.
Very little about Giaccone's early life has been confirmed by any court or newspaper. By the account of one mob memoir repeated in later writing, he was born in July 1932 in Ridgewood, Queens, lost his father young, and grew up through the Depression in a household run by his mother. The same account describes him as an altar boy and a good student. None of that has been tested anywhere else, and it should be heard that way.
What is better documented is who he became. By the late 1970s, Philip Giaccone was a captain in the Bonanno family, one of the five Mafia families of New York. He ran his crew, by most accounts, out of a trucking business in South Ozone Park, Queens, not far from the lot where he would end up. He had a wife, a daughter, and a son. By the accounts that exist, he had never been convicted of a crime.
One detail from those years turns out to matter a great deal. A young Bonanno soldier named Joseph Massino, who would later become the boss of the entire family, is described in some accounts as having served for a time in Giaccone's crew. If that is right, the man who would plan Giaccone's death once took orders from him.
To understand why anyone would want Philip Giaccone dead, you have to understand what happened to the Bonanno family at the end of the 1970s. Its official boss was a man named Philip Rastelli, known as Rusty. In 1976, Rastelli was sentenced to 10 years for extortion and went to federal prison.
A family with its boss in a cell is a family with a vacuum at the top. The man who ran the family in those years in all but name was Carmine Galante, a ferocious veteran gangster with a long police record behind him.
On July 12, 1979, Carmine Galante was eating lunch on the back patio of an Italian restaurant on Knickerbocker Avenue in Bushwick, Brooklyn, when gunmen walked in and shot him dead along with two other men. According to FBI informants, the men who did it included Rastelli loyalists. Among the names those informants gave were Dominick Trinchera, known as Big Trin, and the son of another captain, Alphonse Indelicato. Only the son, Anthony Indelicato, was ever convicted of that murder.
If those informants were right, there is a cruel symmetry in what came next. Two of the men accused of killing Galante on behalf of the Rastelli side, Big Trin Trinchera and the son of Sonny Red Indelicato, belonged to the very faction that the Rastelli side would turn on less than two years later.
With Galante gone, the Bonanno family split. On one side were the men who stayed loyal to the jailed boss, Rusty Rastelli. Chief among them were Joseph Massino, the soldier on his way up, and a captain named Dominick Napolitano, known as Sonny Black.
On the other side were three captains who, by the accounts of the men who later testified, had decided the family should not be run from a prison cell. One was Alphonse Indelicato, known as Sonny Red. One was Dominick Trinchera, Big Trin, a heavy man said to weigh around 350 pounds. The third was Philip Giaccone, Philly Lucky.
There was one more man in the middle of all this who nobody in the family knew about. For years, an FBI agent named Joseph Pistone had been living undercover as a criminal called Donnie Brasco. By 1981, he had worked his way into Sonny Black Napolitano's crew. Whatever the Rastelli side was planning, the FBI had a man close to it.
By early 1981, according to later accounts, Massino had heard that the three captains were stockpiling automatic weapons and that they intended to wipe out the Rastelli loyalists. The other families of New York had tried to stay out of it. But when Massino went to them, by the most widely repeated account, the bosses of the Colombo and Gambino families told him to act, and to act first. That account comes from later books, not from a courtroom, and it should be heard as such.
What Massino decided to do was to call a meeting. The three captains were invited to a sit-down in Brooklyn on May 5, 1981. It was presented as a meeting to settle things between the two sides.
The accounts disagree on exactly where it was. Later writing calls it a Brooklyn nightclub. Other accounts put it in a social club in Bensonhurst or Dyker Heights. The news reports of the time and the court papers say only that it was a Brooklyn social club. What they agree on is what was waiting inside.
According to papers the United States government later filed in a Canadian court, four men were hidden in a closet. They had pistols, a submachine gun, and a shotgun. Several more of Massino's men were in the room, acting as if this were an ordinary meeting. Among the men in the closet, according to the testimony of those who later turned, were Massino's own brother-in-law, Salvatore Vitale, and a man from Montreal named Vito Rizzuto, who would one day be the most powerful Mafia figure in Canada.
Philip Giaccone, Sonny Red Indelicato, and Big Trin Trinchera walked in. With them came another Bonanno man, Frank Lino. By several accounts, Lino was there in place of Sonny Red's son, Anthony, who never showed up.
The signal had been agreed in advance. A Bonanno man from Montreal named Gerlando Sciascia, according to the court papers, was to run his hands through his hair. He did.
The men came out of the closet. Vito Rizzuto, by his own later account, had one job. He told a federal judge years afterward that his role was to shout, "It's a holdup," so that everybody would stand still.
The accounts differ on who fired first. Vitale later said Rizzuto came out shooting. Rizzuto told the court only that he was there and armed and that the others opened fire.
It was over very quickly. Philip Giaccone, Sonny Red Indelicato, and Dominick Trinchera were shot to death in that room. By some accounts, Massino himself stopped Sonny Red from getting to the door. Frank Lino, the fourth man who had walked in with them, somehow made it outside and ran away unhurt.
A year later, the undercover agent Joseph Pistone testified in federal court about what one of the Bonanno men had told him afterward, describing Big Trin's death. The man had said, according to Pistone, that 50 pounds of his stomach went flying.
The bodies were wrapped in drop cloths and taken out to a van. According to the court papers, as the bodies were loaded, one of the men joked that it would not take long for rigor mortis to set in.
Joseph Massino's family did not bury them. According to Salvatore Vitale's later testimony, that job went to a crew from the Gambino family, men close to John Gotti, as a favor. Officials later named Gotti's brother, Gene, and his associate, John Carneglia, among the men who dug the graves. The place they chose was that vacant lot off Ruby Street in the Hole.
The graves did not stay secret for long. At least one of them did not. About three weeks later, in late May 1981, children playing in the lots of the Hole noticed a terrible smell. By the story reported at the time, one of them kicked at the ground and uncovered an arm.
It was Sonny Red Indelicato. There was still a $1,500 Cartier watch on his wrist. At Massino's trial many years later, a witness remembered the reaction among the killers when they heard a soldier had come to them and said, "We might have a problem. The body is rising."
There is another version of how that grave was found. One well-known mob writer has reported that the children were a cover story and that the police had in fact been sent to the Hole by a Gambino family informant. Both stories are told.
Either way, the police had one of the three captains. The other two were still in the ground, and they would stay there for 23 years.
The killings did not end the trouble for the Bonanno family. They made it worse. In July 1981, the FBI pulled Joseph Pistone out. He had been given a contract of his own to kill Sonny Red's son, Anthony Indelicato, the man who had missed the meeting.
When the Bonanno family learned that Donnie Brasco, the man they had trusted for years, was an FBI agent, somebody had to pay for having brought him in. On August 17, 1981, Sonny Black Napolitano, the captain who had sponsored him, was lured to a house on Staten Island and shot dead. His body was found the following year with its hands cut off.
Pistone's testimony sent a series of Bonanno men to prison, and the charges in that case included the killings of the three captains. Joseph Massino was charged too with conspiracy to murder the three men. He went on the run for more than two years, and when he was finally tried in 1987, the jury convicted him of truck hijacking but cleared him of the murder conspiracy.
Before that, in the summer of 1982, Pistone's first big trial had gone ahead in Manhattan. Several of Sonny Black's men were in the dock, and the charges against them included the killings of the three captains. In August of that year, the jury convicted three of them of racketeering conspiracy, and two of them, Nicholas Santora and Benjamin Ruggiero, known as Lefty, were each sentenced to 15 years.
Massino, meanwhile, stayed out of sight. He was charged in March 1982 and did not surrender until July 1984. The prosecutor at his 1987 trial was a young federal lawyer named Michael Chertoff, who would later run the Department of Homeland Security. Even he could not make the murder charge stick.
For the next 15 years, Joseph Massino rose. When Rusty Rastelli died in 1991, Massino became the boss of the Bonanno family. The newspapers eventually called him the last don. He ran the family carefully. He kept his people quiet, and the two captains in the lot off Ruby Street stayed where they were.
Then in January 2003, Massino was arrested along with his brother-in-law Salvatore Vitale and Frank Lino, the man who had run out of that room in 1981. Both of them turned. Salvatore Vitale became a government witness within weeks. Frank Lino followed.
In May 2004, Lino became the first witness to describe the murders of the three captains in open court. At Massino's trial that summer, Vitale spent almost a week on the witness stand describing the killings, the closet, the van, and the burial.
On July 30, 2004, after five days of deliberation, the jury convicted Joseph Massino on every count. The murders he was convicted of included Philip Giaccone, Sonny Red Indelicato, and Dominick Trinchera. When the verdict was read, his daughter whispered, "Oh, God."
And the informants had told the FBI something else. They had told agents where the other two bodies were.
The lot they described was not an easy place to search. The reporters who went out there wrote about reeds taller than a man, broken slabs of concrete, patches of ground laid with rat poison, and a breeze coming in off Jamaica Bay. The FBI brought in its evidence response team, and the New York police brought in their cold case squad, and together they began to take the lot apart, a layer at a time.
On October 4, 2004, the digging began in the Hole. The agents were not only looking for the two captains. They were also searching for a man named John Favara, a neighbor of John Gotti's who had accidentally killed Gotti's 12-year-old son with his car in 1980 and who had disappeared soon afterward.
On October 11, they found the first bones. With them came the eyeglasses, the leather jacket, the shoes, lengths of duct tape, and fabric that may have been the drop cloths the witnesses had described, and then the watch and the card.
The City Bank card carried the name of Dominick Trinchera. The PJ watch was described to Philip Giaccone's widow, and according to The New York Times, she said it looked like the one her husband had worn.
The dig went on for about three weeks. Nothing of John Favara was ever found there. But on December 20, 2004, after more than two months of work, the city medical examiner confirmed through DNA from their families that the remains belonged to Philip Giaccone and Dominick Trinchera.
Philip Giaccone had been gone for 23 years. By one account, his family had him buried again, this time properly, in a cemetery on Long Island. The man who had given the order was already in a cell.
After his conviction, facing the possibility of a death sentence in another murder case, Joseph Massino did something no boss of a New York family had ever done. He offered to cooperate.
On June 23, 2005, he stood before a federal judge in Brooklyn and admitted ordering a different murder, the killing in 1999 of Gerlando Sciascia, the man who had run his hands through his hair as the signal in 1981. As the boss of the Bonanno crime family, he told the court, "I gave the order."
He was given two life sentences. The judge, Nicholas Garaufis, used the moment to say something about the way this world is usually shown. Organized crime, he said, had been deeply romanticized in the popular media of the past 30 years. The men in his courtroom, he suggested, deserved nothing of the kind.
In the courtroom that day were members of the Trinchera family. When the sentence was read, one of them shouted, "Yeah, that's right." Outside, another told reporters that Massino had got what he deserved.
Vito Rizzuto fought extradition from Canada for more than two and a half years. He was finally sent to New York in August 2006. On May 4, 2007, in Brooklyn federal court, he pleaded guilty to a racketeering conspiracy covering the three murders. He was not charged with murder itself because too much time had passed.
His job, he told the court, had been to say, "It's a holdup," so everybody would stand still. Three weeks later, he was sentenced to 10 years in prison and fined $250,000. He served his time and was released in 2012, and went home to Montreal, where his family's world had fallen apart while he was away. He died of natural causes in December 2013.
Anthony Indelicato, Sonny Red's son, the man who had missed the meeting that killed his father, survived all of it. He was convicted of Carmine Galante's murder in 1986 and sentenced to 40 years. Years later, he was convicted in another murder case. He was finally released from prison in 2022.
Salvatore Vitale, who admitted his part in 11 murders, was sentenced to time served in 2010 and disappeared into witness protection. Frank Lino, the man who ran from the room, died in witness protection in 2023.
And Joseph Massino became the first boss of a New York family to testify against his own people in open court. In 2011, explaining the rules he had lived by, he told a jury that once a bullet leaves that gun, you never talk about it. He was released from prison in 2013. He died in 2023.
The story also became a film. In the 1997 movie "Donnie Brasco," the three captains are shown being killed in a very different way, and the undercover agent is shown helping to get rid of the bodies. Neither of those things is supported by any court record. Joseph Pistone was not in that room.
Philip Giaccone was a captain in one of the most powerful criminal organizations in the country. He is remembered almost entirely for the way he died and for the watch in the mud that told his wife where he had been.
He walked into a meeting that was called to make peace. The men who called it had brought a shotgun and a submachine gun and drop cloths. The man who planned it walked free for 22 years and then told the whole story to save himself.
There is no lesson in that. It was simply the Bonanno family keeping its word for exactly as long as it needed.