Massino a "Riot Around the Water Cooler"

"Swaggering, charismatic Alphonse "Sonny Red" Indelicato had grown too strong and cocky," we wrote once.

He also made two mistakes -- one of which is known. The other we didn't know about until our source told use recently. He is a former member of the Bonanno crime family, inducted in the 1970s.

He believes Joseph "Big Joey" Massino was preparing himself ahead of time for Uncle Sam.

"He was calling guys in and asking them about old murders," our source said. This was in the mid-1990s or thereabouts....

"He wanted to know everything everybody did," he said of Massino.

Our source is not a fan of "Big Joey," calling him "the Ralph Kramden of the New York Mafia" and a "regular riot around the water cooler."

As we noted, Massino made the family as invisible as possible.

When he returned to the streets from prison in 1992, he sought to better insulating it -- and himself -- from law enforcement. He shuttered social clubs; decentralized the structure of the family, turning crews into isolated cells. Information was parceled out on a need-to-know basis.

Massino outlawed use of his name. Members of the family were told to point or tug on their ear when referring to him. 

He simplified the induction ceremony.

He banned the use of the mass card, as well as the gun and the knife (in case of a raid). No more blood trickled from a pricked finger.

At some point, the induction ceremony got additional tweaks.

"Would you wanna have to strip naked to get made?" our source asked.

As for "turncoats" -- rats, etc. -- he told use members of the Mafia routinely sound him out about flipping. 

Yes, he's still in touch with his old pals. They ask him for advice from time to time. 

He then regaled us with a story about one of his former "business" partners. 

The partner was another made member of the Bonanno family. The two routinely split the proceeds from a shared racket each week.

(We know who the partner is but won't name him, nor provide details of their shared racket.)

Turns out, his partner was screwing him over the whole time. Not by stealing money from the business.

This was even worse.

Our source characterized his partner's move as a kind of ass-kissing ploy to make himself look good in Massino's eyes -- while making our source look not so good. It was even worse though, because back when these events took place, the mob was known to actually kill people from time to time.

"What'd you tell Joe about my half?" our source queried his partner when he'd learned this.

"Nothing, he doesn't know anything about it."

"Bullshit." Our source didn't believe him. He was certain his partner was giving as much cash as he could each week to Massino, then shrugging whenever Massino asked him about where our source's money was.

So he'd have to start matching his partner's tributes.

"Fuck that," he said. He basically he discreetly yanked the plug on the business. He couldn't see the point of the thing if they were going to hand over 100 percent of the money to the already considerably wealthy Massino.

"I called him up," our source said, referring to his partner. He told the partner that the business was gone. The whole thing - gone.

"What am I gonna tell him!' the partner asked.

"Tell him it's gone."

Massino started bitching to our source's partner shortly thereafter. Where was his money?

More to come....