Shortly after his conviction for overseeing a quarter-century's worth of murder and other crimes as head of the Bonanno organized crime family, Joseph Massino did the unthinkable for an old-school mobster: He told prosecutors he was ready to break the Mafia's code of silence.
An overweight, red-faced Massino shuffled into a Brooklyn courtroom Wednesday to hear prosecutors praise his work as the highest-ranking member of the city's five Italian organized crime families to ever become a government cooperator. At the end of a half-hour hearing, a judge gave him his reward: a reduction of a life sentence to time served, about 10 1/2 years.
