Salvatore Vitale,As a child, he was taught how to swim; as an adult, he was instructed how to kill.

Of all the life lessons that Salvatore Vitale took from a boyhood friend he idolized, two of them became practically second nature: As a child, he was taught how to swim; as an adult, he was instructed how to kill.

The latter skill, he would later admit, was one he practised regularly on behalf of the friend, Joseph C. Massino, who would marry Vitale’s sister, become the boss of the Bonanno crime family and eventually elevate Vitale to serve as the underboss.

Vitale’s criminal life story is laid out in sharp relief in a remarkable document that federal prosecutors in Brooklyn filed under seal last month. Nearly three centimetres thick, it contains a saga that spans more than three decades and touches on 23 murders, 11 of which Vitale directly participated in, and many other crimes that he and other mob figures committed.

But the document, which was unsealed earlier this week, also tells another story: how the Bonannos were decimated, in some measure through Vitale’s betrayal in 2003 of the crime family and his own extended family, as he became a star government witness. Using his testimony, federal prosecutors and FBI agents have been able to imprison 51 mob figures, including Massino and the last four acting bosses of the Bonanno family.

Vitale, 62, was sentenced Friday to time served. He had spent about seven years behind bars.

Prosecutors have called his cooperation “groundbreaking by any measure” and filed the 122-page document to seek a more lenient sentence than the mandatory life term set forth in the advisory sentencing guidelines.

In a 10-year assault on the Bonanno family, the FBI and prosecutors have convicted 135 members and associates, making Vitale perhaps the most prolific mob turncoat since Salvatore Gravano, who testified against the Gambino boss John J. Gotti.

Prosecutors say Vitale has identified more than 500 organized crime members and associates in the United States and abroad, and information he has provided has led to prosecutions of high-ranking members of the Colombo, Genovese and Gambino families, in addition to Bonanno family figures.

He has also provided information that led investigators to uncover murder victims buried decades earlier, including in a mob graveyard in a swamp on the Brooklyn-Queens border where two men slain in 1981 were interred.

But some see his cooperation in a very different light.

David Brietbart, who defended Massino at his 2005 murder and racketeering trial, criticized the government’s handling of Vitale and its use of cooperating witnesses in general, noting that a half-dozen admitted killers who testified against his client have been released into “the population at large.”

“I don’t want them living next door to me, and I don’t see how the government justifies that,” he said. “They take someone on and they use him and they file a 120-page motion in order that the individual can go home.”

Until 2002, the Bonanno family stood out among New York’s five Mafia clans in that it had never had a “made” member cooperate with the government and testify in court. That distinction was due in part to the obsessive fear of informants and infiltrators, borne of an undercover FBI agent’s years-long penetration of the family in the 1980s, which cost two Bonanno figures their lives. (The case became the basis for the 1997 movie “Donnie Brasco.”)

But Vitale’s cooperation helped break the Bonanno family, leading to a historic event in U.S. organized crime: Massino’s own betrayal, nearly two years later, of the crime family he headed. An unprecedented act, it made Massino, an Old World stalwart known as the Last Don, the first Mafia boss in this country to cooperate with the FBI and prosecutors.

Slender, soft-spoken and polished, Vitale, who grew up in Brooklyn and Queens and attended City College for a year, made a very effective witness.

He served in the Army as a paratrooper for two years, stationed in Mainz, Germany, and worked as a UPS truck driver and a New York state correction officer before he began working for his childhood friend, Massino, driving a catering truck to sell coffee and pastries at factories and car dealerships on Long Island.

Vitale, whose silver hair always appeared carefully combed (he was known as Good Looking Sal), came to idolize Massino, who was nearly five years his senior.

During the course of his three decades with the crime family, his portfolio of crime was substantial and varied. He told agents and prosecutors of committing arson, burglary, hijacking, loan sharking, extortion, insurance fraud, illegal gambling, money laundering, obstruction of justice and securities fraud. And then there were the murders; Vitale pleaded guilty in April 2003 to racketeering conspiracy and murder-in-aid of racketeering, admitting to 11 killings between 1976 and 1999.

Posted in: As a child,he was instructed how to kill,he was taught how to swim; as an adult,Salvatore Vitale