Richard Cantarella

Richard Cantarella (born 1944), also known as Shellackhead, was an American mobster who became a caporegime for the New York City-based Bonanno crime family and later a government witness.

Cantarella was born to Italian parents on the Lower East Side, Manhattan and raised in Knickerbocker Village, a public housing development that was home to many Bonanno family members.

A skinny kid with jet-black hair, Cantarella got the name "Shellackhead" from his hair pomade.

Cantarella was married to Lauretta Castelli and they had a son, Paul Cantarella.

As a young man, Cantarella was introduced to the Bonanno family by his uncle, mobster Alfred Embarrato.

Embarrato controlled the distribution center for the New York Post through local union of newspaper workers.

In 1963, Embarrato obtained a job for Cantarella at the Post as a delivery truck driver.

However, Cantarella and his cousin, Bonanno mobster Joseph D'Amico, actually served as enforcers on the newspaper's loading docks, jobs they would perform for over thirty years.

During the late 1970s, Cantarella became involved in criminal activities with Manhattan City Councilman Richard Mazzeo, the Director of Real Estate for the City of New York's Marine and Aviation Department.

Mazzeo dispensed leases for newsstands and parking lots at the Staten Island Ferry terminals in Lower Manhattan and Staten Island.

In return for granting leases to certain individuals, Mazzeo received large kickbacks.

Cantarella told Mazzeo that a newspaper vendor at the Lower Manhattan terminal was operating an illegal sportsbook operation.

This information allowed Mazzeo to break the vendor's lease and evict him.

In return, Mazzeo installed Cantarella as the vendor's replacement.

By the 1980s, Cantarella controlled newspaper stands in both terminals.

Cantarella and Mazzeo became close friends and briefly shared an apartment in Upper Manhattan.

The two men made hundreds of thousands of dollars on their lease scams.

In 1981, the Bonanno family was rocked by the revelation that one of their associates, Donnie Brasco, was actually a Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) undercover agent named Joseph Pistone.

Cantarella's cousin Anthony Mirra was among those responsible for introducing Brasco into the family.

After the family executed capo Dominick Napolitano, another Brasco friend, the terrified Mirra went into hiding.

Joseph Massino ordered Mirra's two cousins Joseph D'Amico and Cantarella, and their uncle Alfred Embarrato, to kill Mirra.

On February 18, 1982, D'Amico, lured him to a parking garage in Lower Manhattan.

Embarrato and Cantarella were waiting in a getaway car.

The pair went to the parking garage, climbed into Mirra's car, and drove up to a locked security gate.

D'Amico would later describe in a testimony, "He took out his key, put it in the box, but he didn’t get a chance to turn the box... I shot him at close range several times on the side of his head."

In 1983, Mazzeo lost his job as director, was convicted of tax evasion charges, and sent to jail for six months.

Mazzeo started using illegal drugs and Cantarella started worrying that Mazzeo might become a government witness.

After consulting with other Bonanno members, Cantarella decided to murder Mazzeo.

On the evening of Nov. 14, 1983, Cantarella, Embarrato, D'Amico, and Patrick Romanello met Mazzeo at a sanitation garage in Bushwick, Brooklyn.

Mazzeo was meeting them at the upstairs garage office about a possible job.

As the men walked down the stairs, Cantarella shot Mazzeo in the head.

After shooting and stabbing the body several times, they loaded it into a black plastic bag and dumped it.

Mazzeo's body was discovered five days later.

From 1988 until 1991, Cantarella was a so-called "tail man", a worker who rides on the back of the delivery truck and unloads the newspaper bundles.

However, Cantarella never showed up for work; he paid a laborer $20 a night to do his job while Cantarella collected his $700 a week in wages.

Beginning in 1991, Cantarella started using his son as an accomplice in many of his criminal operations.

In 1992, the State of New York started investigating allegations of racketeering and fraud at the New York Post.

In 1994, Cantarella and other mobsters kidnapped a wealthy businessman at his office, drove him home, forced him to deactivate the burglar alarm system, and robbed him of cash, jewelry and other valuables.

They also forced the victim to start paying protection money to Cantarella.

Cantarella also extorted $250,000 from another businessman, using part of the money to purchase a Pontiac convertible automobile for Lauretta.