The Strange Fate Of Santo Giordano
One night in early May 1981, FBI agents were watching the Middle Village, Queens, home of Bonanno soldier Santo Giordano, a skilled mechanic who operated a gas station and was a licensed pilot.
Giordano belonged to the Bonanno family’s Zip faction, which at the time had been aggressively focusing on the sale of heroin. The Zip faction also included Gerlando (George from Canada) Sciascia, Sal Catalano, Cesare Bonventre, Baldo Amato, and Giovanni Ligammari (who would all variously feature in the Pizza Connection Case). Also fully with the Zips was the “Sixth Family,” members of the Bonanno-linked outpost that Carmine Galante had established in Montreal decades prior. When Galante was slain by members of his own crime family in 1979, Giordano was among the Bonannos stationed outside the restaurant. The wheelman, he stood guard by the car used to ferry the shooters to and from the scene. Giordano’s fingerprint was later discovered on a door handle, though events would preclude federal prosecutors from nailing Santo for any involvement in the murders.
As the agents watched the mobster’s house that May night in 1981, Giordano’s car, which had been sleeping quietly in the driveway, abruptly fired into life and took off at top speed—too fast for the agents to keep pursuit.
The FBI caught up with him days later, when they learned that Giordano was residing in the ICU of a Queens hospital.
FBI agents Carmine Russo and Charlie Rooney visited Giordano, who was wearing bandages around his chest.
“I heard you had some trouble,” Russo said.
“Me?” Giordano said. “Oh, this? Nah, this is nothing.”
“The doctors say you were shot.”
“An accident,” Giordano said.
“How’d it happen, Santo?” Russo asked.
“Argument over a parking spot.”
“Where?”
“I don’t remember,” Giordano said.
The agents later learned that Giordano had caught some friendly fire during the fatal strike against a trio of capos helming a dissident faction of the Bonanno family.
Alphonse (Sonny Red) Indelicato, Philip Giaccone, and Dominick (Big Trin) Trinchera were not men to be trifled with. The three had together grown increasingly disillusioned with Philip (Rusty) Rastelli's prison house leadership and had begun to make their feelings known, were in fact coming on like a freight train. Giaccone had been targeted first, but the hit was called off, possibly because the decision had been reached that the better move would be to simply wipe out the heads of the dissidents in one fell swoop.
The night of the murders, on May 5, Giordano had been in the social club in Brooklyn on 13th Avenue when, as per the prearranged plan, several loyalists to Rastelli leapt out of a closet and opened fire on the three capos. Giordano was mistakenly hit in the back. Once the massacre had ended, Montreal-based Bonanno wiseguy Vito Rizzuto and his Zip confidants grabbed Giordano and rushed him out of the club via a back exit that Bonanno powers Joe Massino and Salvatore Vitale didn't even know existed. (It was a Gambino club.)
As minutely detailed in the excellent Last Days of the Sicilians, a wounded Giordano, in severe agony, was driven to the Brooklyn basement apartment of his uncle, Gaspare Bonventre, at around 11:00 p.m.
Bonventre, who had been sleeping, went to the door and asked who was there.
“Nino, it’s Tony,” came the reply.
(Santo Giordano was often called Tony, and he referred to his uncle as Nino.)
The uncle opened the door to see his nephew, who was alone and in pain, collapsing, almost on his knees, while attempting to lean against a nearby wall.
His uncle put his arm around Giordano’s shoulders and helped him inside and down the stairs. Giordano collapsed once they reached the bottom of the staircase, and refused to move.
As Giordano lay on the floor suffering, Vito Rizzuto and his confederates, who of course had just murdered three people and couldn’t very well call an ambulance, were racing to another part of Brooklyn in an attempt to find Giordano discreet medical attention.
Dr. Edward Salerno—a Brooklyn-based doctor who had been caring for patients, including Giordano, for nearly 25 years—was relaxing in his pajamas and watching the 11 o’clock news when “(t)he bell rang and I opened the door,” Salerno would later recall, “and I saw this man that I knew by sight. He asked me if I could go with him because there was an emergency.”
Salerno did not know the name of the man but had seen him frequenting the Café del Viale on Knickerbocker Avenue, which was located near the doctor’s office. In fact, the doctor went there almost every morning for coffee before his office hours began.
He asked about the nature of the emergency.
“I’ll tell you later,” he was told.
The doctor was reluctant about the turn his evening was taking, but the visitor was insistent—and gave Salerno a wad of cash, which the doctor pocketed, not wanting to count it then and there. (He later learned it was $500.)
Salerno threw on some street clothes, grabbed his medical bag, and slipped into the back seat of a waiting car, where he found himself sitting next to Cesare Bonventre.
“(The driver) told me we’re going to Bensonhurst. That’s the only conversation I had with him,” Salerno said of the car ride.
After the doctor was finally ushered down the stairs of the basement apartment, he recognized Giordano, who was lying on the floor and screaming out in pain. Salerno checked his pulse (it was weak) and his blood pressure (it was extremely low).
Giordano was deathly pale, and the blood seemed to be freely flowing from an apparent wound in his back.
Salerno injected him with morphine.
“He had been shot. I saw there was a bullet lodged in his chest under the skin. So I turned him around to see where the entry bullet [wound] was and I noticed the entry bullet was some place around his back,” Salerno said.
“It was very fresh. I don’t know how fresh it was. There was too much blood on the floor.”
He realized Giordano’s condition was grave and that just stitching him up wouldn’t solve the problem. The doctor knew that Giordano needed major surgery—in a hospital.
Salerno told the men around him that Giordano would die if he wasn’t brought to a hospital immediately.
“I will call the ambulance,” Salerno said.
Still, Giordano protested, begging Salerno to handle the problem himself.
Giordano needed an ambulance to take him to the nearest hospital, Coney Island Hospital, for immediate surgery, the doctor said.
“I called the private ambulance myself … I also called the hospital and the surgery room, to have the operating room ready, and I went with Mr. Giordano in the ambulance,” Salerno said. “He was taken to the operating room immediately. The result of the operation was that the bleeding was stopped. The man was paralyzed and the paralysis was permanent,” he said.
While neither Salerno nor Giordano’s associates had called the police over the gunshot injury, as is required by law, an officer in the emergency room at the time noticed what was happening and approached medical staff. A report on the incident eventually reached the FBI.
In late July 1983, Giordano was taking his twin-engine Aero Commander on its maiden flight to the nearby Long Island-MacArthur Airport, where it was to have some minor repair and radio work, when it crashed in flames at Bayport-Edwards Airport in Suffolk County on Long Island.
Giordano, 40, and Ralph Wheeler, 62, of Woodbury, N.Y., died in the crash.
Giordano’s friends said he had purchased the plane eight years prior at Kennedy Airport after it was damaged in an on-ground collision with a cement truck. Giordano worked on the plane since purchasing it, getting it ready for flight and also modifying it to resemble a 1950 model plane.
John Rae of Bayport, an experienced pilot, had witnessed the plane go into a stall, apparently from a power loss, almost immediately after it was airborne. He said the plane “rolled over and came down hard.”
The wreckage was moved to Long Island-MacArthur for inspection by officials from the National Transportation Safety Board.
The previous year, testifying in court from a wheelchair, Giordano acknowledged that he had been wounded on May 5, 1981. But he maintained that he had been shot by an unknown man who started a fistfight with him on a Brooklyn street when he complained that the man's car was double-parked.
He was aggressively questioned about his testimony by the prosecution, which was seeking to bolster earlier testimony from Joseph D. Pistone, aka Donnie Brasco, the undercover FBI agent who said he had learned that an associate had been shot by mistake at the time of the murders of the three capos.
 |
| Santo Giordano, aka Tony. |
Giordano belonged to the Bonanno family’s Zip faction, which at the time had been aggressively focusing on the sale of heroin. The Zip faction also included Gerlando (George from Canada) Sciascia, Sal Catalano, Cesare Bonventre, Baldo Amato, and Giovanni Ligammari (who would all variously feature in the Pizza Connection Case). Also fully with the Zips was the “Sixth Family,” members of the Bonanno-linked outpost that Carmine Galante had established in Montreal decades prior. When Galante was slain by members of his own crime family in 1979, Giordano was among the Bonannos stationed outside the restaurant. The wheelman, he stood guard by the car used to ferry the shooters to and from the scene. Giordano’s fingerprint was later discovered on a door handle, though events would preclude federal prosecutors from nailing Santo for any involvement in the murders.
As the agents watched the mobster’s house that May night in 1981, Giordano’s car, which had been sleeping quietly in the driveway, abruptly fired into life and took off at top speed—too fast for the agents to keep pursuit.
The FBI caught up with him days later, when they learned that Giordano was residing in the ICU of a Queens hospital.
FBI agents Carmine Russo and Charlie Rooney visited Giordano, who was wearing bandages around his chest.
“I heard you had some trouble,” Russo said.
“Me?” Giordano said. “Oh, this? Nah, this is nothing.”
“The doctors say you were shot.”
“An accident,” Giordano said.
“How’d it happen, Santo?” Russo asked.
“Argument over a parking spot.”
“Where?”
“I don’t remember,” Giordano said.
The agents later learned that Giordano had caught some friendly fire during the fatal strike against a trio of capos helming a dissident faction of the Bonanno family.
Alphonse (Sonny Red) Indelicato, Philip Giaccone, and Dominick (Big Trin) Trinchera were not men to be trifled with. The three had together grown increasingly disillusioned with Philip (Rusty) Rastelli's prison house leadership and had begun to make their feelings known, were in fact coming on like a freight train. Giaccone had been targeted first, but the hit was called off, possibly because the decision had been reached that the better move would be to simply wipe out the heads of the dissidents in one fell swoop.
The night of the murders, on May 5, Giordano had been in the social club in Brooklyn on 13th Avenue when, as per the prearranged plan, several loyalists to Rastelli leapt out of a closet and opened fire on the three capos. Giordano was mistakenly hit in the back. Once the massacre had ended, Montreal-based Bonanno wiseguy Vito Rizzuto and his Zip confidants grabbed Giordano and rushed him out of the club via a back exit that Bonanno powers Joe Massino and Salvatore Vitale didn't even know existed. (It was a Gambino club.)
As minutely detailed in the excellent Last Days of the Sicilians, a wounded Giordano, in severe agony, was driven to the Brooklyn basement apartment of his uncle, Gaspare Bonventre, at around 11:00 p.m.
Bonventre, who had been sleeping, went to the door and asked who was there.
“Nino, it’s Tony,” came the reply.
(Santo Giordano was often called Tony, and he referred to his uncle as Nino.)
The uncle opened the door to see his nephew, who was alone and in pain, collapsing, almost on his knees, while attempting to lean against a nearby wall.
His uncle put his arm around Giordano’s shoulders and helped him inside and down the stairs. Giordano collapsed once they reached the bottom of the staircase, and refused to move.
As Giordano lay on the floor suffering, Vito Rizzuto and his confederates, who of course had just murdered three people and couldn’t very well call an ambulance, were racing to another part of Brooklyn in an attempt to find Giordano discreet medical attention.
Dr. Edward Salerno—a Brooklyn-based doctor who had been caring for patients, including Giordano, for nearly 25 years—was relaxing in his pajamas and watching the 11 o’clock news when “(t)he bell rang and I opened the door,” Salerno would later recall, “and I saw this man that I knew by sight. He asked me if I could go with him because there was an emergency.”
Salerno did not know the name of the man but had seen him frequenting the Café del Viale on Knickerbocker Avenue, which was located near the doctor’s office. In fact, the doctor went there almost every morning for coffee before his office hours began.
He asked about the nature of the emergency.
“I’ll tell you later,” he was told.
The doctor was reluctant about the turn his evening was taking, but the visitor was insistent—and gave Salerno a wad of cash, which the doctor pocketed, not wanting to count it then and there. (He later learned it was $500.)
Salerno threw on some street clothes, grabbed his medical bag, and slipped into the back seat of a waiting car, where he found himself sitting next to Cesare Bonventre.
“(The driver) told me we’re going to Bensonhurst. That’s the only conversation I had with him,” Salerno said of the car ride.
After the doctor was finally ushered down the stairs of the basement apartment, he recognized Giordano, who was lying on the floor and screaming out in pain. Salerno checked his pulse (it was weak) and his blood pressure (it was extremely low).
Giordano was deathly pale, and the blood seemed to be freely flowing from an apparent wound in his back.
Salerno injected him with morphine.
“He had been shot. I saw there was a bullet lodged in his chest under the skin. So I turned him around to see where the entry bullet [wound] was and I noticed the entry bullet was some place around his back,” Salerno said.
“It was very fresh. I don’t know how fresh it was. There was too much blood on the floor.”
He realized Giordano’s condition was grave and that just stitching him up wouldn’t solve the problem. The doctor knew that Giordano needed major surgery—in a hospital.
Salerno told the men around him that Giordano would die if he wasn’t brought to a hospital immediately.
“I will call the ambulance,” Salerno said.
Still, Giordano protested, begging Salerno to handle the problem himself.
Giordano needed an ambulance to take him to the nearest hospital, Coney Island Hospital, for immediate surgery, the doctor said.
“I called the private ambulance myself … I also called the hospital and the surgery room, to have the operating room ready, and I went with Mr. Giordano in the ambulance,” Salerno said. “He was taken to the operating room immediately. The result of the operation was that the bleeding was stopped. The man was paralyzed and the paralysis was permanent,” he said.
While neither Salerno nor Giordano’s associates had called the police over the gunshot injury, as is required by law, an officer in the emergency room at the time noticed what was happening and approached medical staff. A report on the incident eventually reached the FBI.
In late July 1983, Giordano was taking his twin-engine Aero Commander on its maiden flight to the nearby Long Island-MacArthur Airport, where it was to have some minor repair and radio work, when it crashed in flames at Bayport-Edwards Airport in Suffolk County on Long Island.
Giordano, 40, and Ralph Wheeler, 62, of Woodbury, N.Y., died in the crash.
Giordano’s friends said he had purchased the plane eight years prior at Kennedy Airport after it was damaged in an on-ground collision with a cement truck. Giordano worked on the plane since purchasing it, getting it ready for flight and also modifying it to resemble a 1950 model plane.
John Rae of Bayport, an experienced pilot, had witnessed the plane go into a stall, apparently from a power loss, almost immediately after it was airborne. He said the plane “rolled over and came down hard.”
The wreckage was moved to Long Island-MacArthur for inspection by officials from the National Transportation Safety Board.
The previous year, testifying in court from a wheelchair, Giordano acknowledged that he had been wounded on May 5, 1981. But he maintained that he had been shot by an unknown man who started a fistfight with him on a Brooklyn street when he complained that the man's car was double-parked.
He was aggressively questioned about his testimony by the prosecution, which was seeking to bolster earlier testimony from Joseph D. Pistone, aka Donnie Brasco, the undercover FBI agent who said he had learned that an associate had been shot by mistake at the time of the murders of the three capos.
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