Richard Cantarella

Richard Cantarella
Born	1944 New York City
Other names	Shellackhead

Richard Cantarella (a.k.a. "Shellackhead") (born 1944), was a New York mobster who became a caporegime for the 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. 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.

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.

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