Читать книгу King of the Godfathers: - Anthony M. DeStefano - Страница 7

Traveling east along Metropolitan Avenue from Williamsburg where Joseph Bonanno got his start as a criminal, you will soon cross into the area of New York City known as Maspeth. The origin of the neighborhood’s name is obscured within some mix of the old Dutch and Indian languages. It was once a swampy area, the Indian name meaning “the place of bad waters.” In the nineteenth century, it contained large trout ponds that were drained over a century ago. Today, the largest body of water in Maspeth is the Newtown Creek, an estuary officials have been gamely trying to clean up for years.

When western parts of what is today known as Queens became accessible by the railroad and ferries in the nineteenth century, industry grew and Maspeth saw a large influx of working families. Factories sprung up where workers spun hemp into rope and processed fertilizer and flooring. The neighborhood became another magnet for immigrants. The cheap housing and residential character of the place drew Italian, Irish, and Polish immigrants. Well into the twenty-first century Maspeth was one of the main residential areas for firefighters, sanitation workers, laborers, and truck drivers who traced their ancestry back to Italy.

It was immediately after World War II that an Italian immigrant family with the surname of Vitale took up residence close to Maspeth. Giuseppe and Lilli Vitale had emigrated from the village of San Giuseppe, some forty miles south of Palermo in the western part of Sicily. Life in the old country had not been easy, particularly when faced with the infant mortality rates that Sicilian families experienced. Like most Sicilian households, the Vitale family had hoped for a son. They already had a name. The boy would be called Giuseppe or “Joseph” in English.

Male offspring were favored by parents since they could guarantee the family name would be passed on. But the Vitale family was not going to be blessed with a son, certainly not while living in the hardscrabble hills of the Sicilian countryside. Two baby boys died, either in childbirth or shortly after. Twice the Vitale parents had to bury the tiny bodies as their three daughters watched.

In Maspeth, the Vitale family lived in the kind of working obscurity that immigrants found as their niche. They weren’t rich but they had by all accounts a quiet, nurturing home life where the three daughters—Anna, Betty, and the youngest Josephine—thrived. Giuseppe, also known as Joseph, and Lilli Vitale took one more chance at having a son. Seemingly cursed with bad luck with sons named Giuseppe, the parents decided that if another male child came into their lives he would be named something different. On September 22, 1947, Lilli Vitale gave birth to a son, and he was baptized as Salvatore. He survived. The family had great hopes for him.

Both employed, Giuseppe and Lilli spent a great deal of time out of their house and entrusted the care of Salvatore to their daughters. Josephine was four years older than her baby brother but even at such a young age, with her parents spending so much time out of the house making a living, she became a surrogate mother.

The Vitale girls fussed over Salvatore in ways that were certain to spoil him. He got what he wanted when he wanted it, usually from Josephine. Yet, family members would later remember that despite all the doting from his siblings, Salvatore Vitale did not respond in kind to his sisters. Sure, he may have been spoiled, but he seemed to lack affection, his relatives would later recall. He didn’t do anything terribly wrong as a child. But while the Vitale women centered their lives around the home, Salvatore seemed distant and cold. He should have been another girl, his father would say of his only son, according to one family member.

Maspeth is bisected by the Long Island Expressway, the concrete ribbon of a roadway that became over the years the crowded conduit for much of the traffic going to and from New York City. The part of Maspeth north of the expressway—where the Vitale family would buy a house on Sixty-eighth Street near Grand Avenue—retained its residential character. The same was largely true of the southern part of the community, although residential development was hemmed in by large cemeteries.

It was a few blocks from the main shopping boulevard of Grand Avenue in Maspeth that another working-class family took up residence. Like the Vitales who lived about five blocks away, Anthony and Adeline Massino were Italian Americans. But while the Massinos traced their heritage to the city of Naples and its environs, they were second-generation Americans born and raised in the United States. They had three children, Joseph, John, and Anthony. Their father worked in a neighborhood grocery store.

Joseph Massino was a boy comfortable on the streets. Big boned, trim, and muscular, he was athletic but not very good in school. Friends would later recall he became very adept in math. In a working-class neighborhood where as a kid you had to hold your own to make your mark, he earned a reputation of being one of the toughest on the block. He could kick ass with the best of them.

Joseph Massino only got to the seventh grade in what is now Intermediate School 73 on Fifty-fourth Avenue. Bored with school, Massino took a variety of jobs, including as a summer lifeguard at beach clubs in Atlantic Beach on Long Island and in Florida. In something of a Maspeth legend, which Massino himself would insist was true, he supposedly once swam from Breezy Point in the Rockaways to Manhattan Beach, a distance of over one mile. Stories also circulated that he would jump off the Cross Bay Bridge, which connected the Rockaways to the mainland, and swim for hours.

With a reputation for being a tough guy and with a full head of wavy black hair, Massino’s rugged looks caught the eye of neighborhood girl Josephine Vitale, who was seven months younger. She had been voted the best looking in her eighth grade class. The year was 1956.

Around the time Joseph Massino and Josephine Vitale were getting acquainted in working-class Maspeth, the American Mafia was on the verge of some big changes. Bonanno was shuttling back and forth between Tucson, Arizona, and New York. He made one side trip to Havana, Cuba, which in those days was a playground for the rich and infamous. As he recounted the Havana trip in his autobiography, Bonanno hooked up with the financial mob wizard Meyer Lansky, who owned a piece of the Hotel Nacional, and spent his days wandering the streets of old Havana, where he stayed in some flophouse hotel in 1924.

The way Joseph Bonanno recounted the Havana trip it was nothing more than a nostalgic trip away from home of some “Ulysses,” as he likened himself, who had his fill of adventure in life. His son, Bill, in his 1999 autobiography, put a different spin on the Havana trip on which he accompanied his father. Bill Bonanno said that his father met up with not only Lansky but also New York Mafia bosses Albert Anastasia, Frank Costello, and Joseph Profaci. “We were there for pleasure, not business, but business came up,” the younger Bonanno said. Cuba’s dictator Fulgencio Batista met with the mobsters and tried to get them to somehow influence the Eisenhower administration to take a more active role against the insurgency led by Fidel Castro. According to Bill Bonanno, Castro figured the mafiosi had an interest in the island’s drug trade, aside from the millions made in the casinos.

The conventional wisdom about the American Mafia’s stance on drugs has been that the bosses were against narcotics trafficking. But if it was a hands-off policy, it was riddled with holes like Swiss cheese. Bill Bonanno asserted that in 1947 in a clandestine Mafia Commission meeting on a yacht off Florida—and not in Havana as widely believed—the bosses argued about drugs. According to Bonanno, the “liberal” faction of the Commission, composed of Vito Genovese and Thomas Lucchese, wanted to get involved in heroin. The conservatives, led by Joseph Bonanno, thought it was a bad idea and prevailed on the Commission to pass a resolution prohibiting narcotics trafficking. The elder Bonanno, his son stated, believed drugs would destroy the families.

Despite such prohibitions, a number of New York Mafia leaders began to push harder and allowed some of their men to get involved in narcotics. The same divisiveness over drugs also split the Sicilian Mafia. When Joseph Bonanno made a trip to Sicily in early fall of 1957—again part pleasure and part business—he learned that New York Mafia families were involved in the trafficking of heroin and its opium base, according to his son. Impossible, the elder Bonanno responded when told of the New York connection. “They are up to their asses in it,” an old friend explained. “They couldn’t care less about our glorious tradition.”

The main violator of the Mafia drug ban was certainly Vito Genovese, who finally got Frank Costello out of the leadership role in their family by ordering an assassination attempt of his rival. The plot to kill Costello culminated in a shooting in May 1957 as the dapper Costello was returning to his apartment in Central Park West. The gunman has long been reputed to have been Vincent Gigante, whose bullet grazed Costello in the head but didn’t kill him. Getting the message, Costello retired as boss of Lucky Luciano’s old family. From then onward, Genovese pushed the narcotics connections, ultimately pushing so hard that he was arrested on narcotics charges by federal officials in 1958 and after his conviction was sent to prison where he died in 1969.

It was very soon after the Costello assassination attempt that one of the other conservative bosses, Albert Anastasia, was targeted for death. The plotters were rival Vito Genovese, who conspired with Carlo Gambino, then a rising captain in Anastasia’s family. Gambino had already arranged the murder of Anastasia’s underboss Frank Scalise, the first step to seizing control of the family. The assassination of Anastasia as he sat in a barber’s chair at the Park Sheraton Hotel on October 25, 1957, became one of the legendary mob murders in New York.

Anastasia’s murder was splashed on the front page of all of New York’s major daily newspapers—there were more than ten of them at the time—and Joseph Massino couldn’t have missed seeing the big story. But Joseph Bonanno did at least initially. He was in Sicily when Anastasia was killed and only learned of it when he returned to New York. For a startled Bonanno, the killing of one of his conservative allies on the Commission was a bad sign. “The Pax Bonanno, that I was so proud of having forged was on the verge of disintegration,” he said years later.

Immediately after Anastasia’s death, the American Mafia leaders called a massive summit conference in the town of Apalachin in upstate New York, which had been the site of a Commission meeting in 1956. The setting was the home of Joseph Barbara, a mafioso with ties to local politicians and police. Bonanno was opposed to the 1957 meeting, thinking it was ill advised and the location not the safest place for mob bosses to gather. Evidently, Barbara reported having trouble with greedy local law enforcement officials.

Nevertheless, the meeting was held on November 14, 1957, and on the agenda were three items: the ratification of Gambino’s takeover of the Anastasia family; ways to deal with the new, tough federal narcotics control law that took effect in 1956; and aggressive unionization of garment factories tied to the mob in eastern Pennsylvania.

The meeting turned into a disaster for the mafiosi who attended. Local police noticed the traffic going into Barbara’s property and set up a roadblock, checked the cars, and noted the names on the driver licenses. Bosses like Vito Genovese, Carlo Gambino, Joseph Profaci, and Joseph Magliocco were noted by police. Bonanno, who had tarried in nearby Endicott with his cousin, Stefano Maggadino, said he heard about the roadblocks on the news reports and avoided the meeting altogether. In total, about sixty members of various Mafia families were listed by police as being at Barbara’s home and while no one was immediately arrested, investigation of the meeting spawned further investigations that led to arrests for years to come.

While Mafia politics can sometimes move with the speed of a bullet, in the case of Anastasia’s murder, the full ramifications would not be felt for years. Things moved in convoluted fashion and ultimately the changes in two leadership positions in the space of a few months meant that the so-called liberal wing of the Commission, composed of Thomas Lucchese, Vito Genovese, and Carlo Gambino, who took over from Anastasia, was equal in number to the more conservative men of tradition represented by Joseph Bonanno, Joseph Profaci, and Stefano Maggadino, from Buffalo.

For Bonanno, the new alignment in the Commission was a sign that the old traditions of the Mafia were changing in ways that he found distasteful. While the Castellammarese, who shaped the American Mafia since the 1930s, were bound by Sicilian traditions of loyalty and honor, others seemed seduced by the constant chase for money. The descent into narcotics was the clearest indication that the production of capital through risky enterprises was viewed by some as worth the danger. The publicity and law enforcement interest in the Mafia after Apalachin also painted what Bonanno saw as an honorable way of life as nothing more than a conspiracy bent on destroying America.

Bonanno also believed that the Mafia was hurting its own image with the public assassinations like that of Anastasia. The year 1961 was a case in point. Upstarts in Profaci’s family, a group of young Turks led by the Gallo brothers—Joey, Albert, and Larry—revolted against the boss. The Gallos were really nothing more than mob toughs who went around strong-arming businesses to take their jukeboxes. Investigators even determined that the Gallos had set up their own union of jukebox repairmen as part of the racket. But as former New York Police Department (NYPD) detective Ralph Salerno recounted, the publicity the brothers received from a 1957 U.S. Senate hearing chaired by Senator John McClellan gave them an inflated sense of self-importance.

Salerno was part of a NYPD investigation that used wiretaps and bugs to discover that the Gallos were unhappy with the way they were being treated by their boss Profaci. According to Salerno’s account in his own book The Crime Confederation, the Gallos became angered when Profaci asked them to kill a gambler named Frank “Frankie Shots” Abbatemarco in November 1959. Abbatemarco was killed, but his gambling interests went to Profaci and his friends while the Gallo crew got nothing.

The Gallo gang engineered a bold kidnapping of five key leaders of the Profaci family and had also targeted Joe Profaci himself, although he escaped. Salerno said the kidnappings were never reported to police, although informants kept Brooklyn detectives up to date. The hostages were held for two weeks as Commission emissaries tried to broker a settlement. Joey Gallo, the hothead, didn’t want to negotiate but was ordered to take a trip to California by his older brother Larry, a move that led to a release of the hostages.

In early 1962, the Commission met to deal with the Profaci-Gallo dispute and it was Bonanno who convinced the members to allow Profaci to remain as head of the family. There had been a push by Gambino and Lucchese to get Profaci to retire. But Bonanno said the families had to trust each other to take care of their internal problems. A truce lasted for about six months, but Salerno said he and his fellow investigators discovered that Profaci was quietly working to strike back at the Gallos. After Larry Gallo escaped a strangulation attempt at the Sahara Lounge on Utica Avenue in Brooklyn, a full-fledged war broke out, unlike anything seen since the days of Masseria and Maranzano in the 1930s. The Gallo brothers went to the mattresses, barricading themselves in two apartments on President Street in Brooklyn, armed to the teeth with rifles and shotguns. In his telling of the Gallo War, Salerno counted no fewer than fourteen attempted assassinations and killings involving Profaci and Gallo loyalists. The war continued even after Profaci died in June 1962.

With the death of Profaci, his underboss and brother-in-law Joseph Magliocco tried to get the Commission to ratify him as the new boss. He had the support of Bonanno, who no doubt saw a continuation of the alliance Bonanno had with the late Profaci. The Commission, however, denied Magliocco approval. Bonanno chalked that up to the fact that the Gallos had support on the Commission from the Gambino-Lucchese faction. Still, Magliocco persisted and intrigue continued.

Both Joseph and son Bill Bonanno, in their separate accounts of Magliocco’s struggle for power, believe this was a significant episode in the Bonanno family’s growing disillusionment with the New York mob scene. Joseph Bonanno said that his son Bill, at a time when he was seeking guidance about his marital problems, stayed briefly with Magliocco, his wife’s uncle. The Magliocco estate was a walled compound on Long Island that at this time in 1963 was heavily fortified and guarded, much the way Vito Corleone’s home was depicted in the Godfather.

In a classic mob maneuver, Joseph Bonanno related that Magliocco appeared to have planted his own spy, a mobster close to Gambino and Lucchese. According to the elder Bonanno, both Magliocco and Bill Bonanno met this spy at a Long Island railroad station one particular day.

“Magliocco and the man briefly exchanged a few words,” Bonanno recalled. “Magliocco used this man to keep tabs on his enemies and to let him know what Gambino and Lucchese were saying about him.”

Sixteen years after his father’s account of that brief encounter, Bill Bonanno related a somewhat different, more sinister version of that day at the Brentwood railroad station. The man who got off the train and spoke with Magliocco was Sally Musacio, a relative by marriage to the aging Magliocco. According to Bill Bonanno, Magliocco asked, “Is everything set?” When Musacio answered yes, Magliocco said, “Okay, start.”

According to Bill Bonanno’s account, that brief exchange was a command by Magliocco that a mob war was to start, with Lucchese, Gambino, and Maggadino being the targets. But a young captain in Magliocco’s crew named Joseph Colombo tipped off Lucchese and Gambino about what Magliocco—and the Bonannos—planned. To undo the political damage, Bill Bonanno met Lucchese at his home in Long Beach, Long Island, and explained that it was sheer coincidence that he was present in Magliocco’s company. The wily Lucchese didn’t buy the explanation.

Shortly after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in November 1963, Joseph Magliocco died without ever being officially recognized by the Commission as boss of the old Profaci family. As his reward for ratting out Magliocco and the Bonannos, Joseph Colombo was blessed by the Commission with leadership of the family. But while the likelihood of serious mob warfare had been averted, the Bonanno family continued to be the object of scorn by the other New York bosses. According to Joseph Bonanno, his cousin from Buffalo, Stefano Maggadino, was leading the opposition.

Portrayed as an insecure man in the face of the elder Bonanno’s business ventures in Canada, Maggadino saw his cousin as a threatening interloper into his territory of Toronto. Joseph Bonanno, who had been expelled from Canada in a legal dustup with authorities there, insisted he had no such designs, but his relationship with his cousin continued to sour. Things did not improve when Bonanno installed his son Bill as consiglieri, a move that angered older family captains such as Gaspar DiGregorio.

For years, Joseph Bonanno had been growing increasingly disillusioned with the mob life. He felt that the old Sicilian traditions of his kind of men of honor were on the wane. He was spending more time outside of New York, mostly in Arizona. A man of intelligence, Bonanno had a curiosity about many things and felt comfortable talking about any number of subjects. But he was also arrogant and condescending, seeing old friends and relatives such as Maggadino as intellectual inferiors. Bonanno also came to view the Commission, which was firmly in the hands of the Lucchese-Gambino alliance, as illegitimate and meddling in his own family affairs. So in 1964 when Maggadino had three Commission emissaries summon Bonanno to a meeting to hear grievances against him, the elder Bonanno refused to show up.

The flouting by Bonanno of the Commission’s demand for a meeting was a cardinal sin. The severity of the repercussions were noted by Sam “the Plumber” DeCavalcante, the Mafia boss of New Jersey. Though he didn’t know it, DeCavalcante’s office in Kenilworth, New Jersey, had been bugged by the FBI for a four-year period between 1961 to 1965. DeCavalcante was picked up on the recordings telling associates just how poisoned Bonanno’s relationship with the Commission had become. It seemed to DeCavalcante that Bonanno had been the source of the problem. Among Bonanno’s sins, DeCavalcante said were his attempts to muscle in on other families and his elevating his son Bill to the role of consiglieri. But it was Bonanno’s ignoring of the Commission request for his presence at a meeting that did him in, DeCavalcante claimed.

“The Commission doesn’t recognize Joseph Bonanno as the Boss anymore,” DeCavalcante told his friend Joe Zicarelli, a Bonanno crime family member who lived in New Jersey. “They [the Commission] can’t understand why this guy is ducking them.”

DeCavalcante told an incredulous Zicarelli that neither Bonanno, nor his son Bill, would be recognized as leaders of the crime family. That rang ominous for Zicarelli, who suggested both men might be in danger. However, DeCavalcante said Bonanno wasn’t in any danger unless he made any tricky moves.

Joseph Bonanno’s challenge to the Commission and Maggadino set the stage for one of the most bizarre episodes in American Mafia history. On October 20, 1964, the day before Bonanno was to appear before a federal grand jury in Manhattan probing him on a possible conspiracy charge, he was accosted by two men on Park Avenue near Thirty-sixth Street in Manhattan.

“Come on Joe, my boss wants you,” one of the burly men said as they hustled Bonanno into a waiting car.

The grab took place around midnight outside the luxury apartment building of Bonanno’s attorney, William Maloney. Maloney tried to chase after the intruders, but one of them fired a single shot from a handgun at Maloney’s feet, sending him scurrying for protection inside the lobby of his building. Bonanno was bundled into a car that sped off toward Lexington Avenue.

The New York newspapers went into a spasm of sensational stories about Bonanno’s abduction and for months stories appeared, fed by police sources, that Bonanno had been spotted in Europe, was hiding in Arizona, or was secretly in the protective custody of the federal government. There was plenty of speculation that Bonanno had staged his own kidnapping to avoid having to testify before the grand jury. Some news headlines had Bonanno written off as dead. DeCavalcante held to the theory that Bonanno staged his own disappearance and a month after the incident FBI recordings show him saying as much to his own underboss.

“He pulled that off himself,” DeCavalcante said. “It was his own men. We figure it was his kid and Vito.”

For sixteen months Joseph Bonanno was missing, at least in the eyes of police and federal investigators who couldn’t find him. What happened? The only account of what happened to Bonanno was the one he provided in his autobiography. He recounted that his abductors were men he knew, both relatives of Maggadino. Crossing the George Washington Bridge, the car went over the Hudson River and traveled for several hours over the rain-slicked roads. The next morning at a farmhouse in the woods “somewhere in upstate New York,” he was told by his captors to make himself comfortable and wait.

“In the afternoon, I heard a car pull up to the farmhouse. This was it. My nemesis had arrived. I was summoned to the main room of the house,” Bonanno recounted. “Stefan Maggadino tromped in—an old spry and portly man with ruddy cheeks and an amiable smile.”

According to Bonanno, his cousin was alternately sardonic, angry, solicitous, concerned, and beseeching in what were weeks and weeks of conversations about their relationship and the fact that Maggadino suspected that his New York City relative had designs on his territory upstate. But more important for Bonanno, the talks revealed that Maggadino had a deep-seated envy of his cousin and feelings of insecurity and inferiority.

Bonanno later speculated about whether Maggadino had acted with the consent of Gambino and Lucchese, or the entire Commission. He never stated whether he had any answer about what support his cousin had for the kidnapping. After a few weeks, Bonanno said he was driven by the same two men who abducted him to El Paso, Texas, where he asked to be let out of the car.

How true is Bonanno’s account? No one knows, but it is likely that Bonanno staged his own kidnapping. If the snatch was real, they would have killed him. Years after Bonanno’s autobiography was published with the account of his disappearance, Bill Bonanno recounted receiving a cryptic telephone call from an unidentified man about two months after the Park Avenue kidnapping. The call was made to a public telephone Bill Bonanno said he and his father had arranged years earlier to use if either of them ran into trouble. In essence, the caller told Bonanno’s son that the Mafia boss was okay and to “just sit tight.” His father, the younger Bonanno was told, would see him in a few days.

As far as can be determined, Joseph Bonanno remained out of sight of law enforcement and his son for approximately another seventeen months. Then, on May 17, 1966, after being dropped off by a friend at Foley Square in lower Manhattan and in the company of his new attorney, Albert Kreiger, Joseph Bonanno walked into the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. Taking a side entrance to avoid being spotted, Bonanno walked into a third-floor courtroom and surrendered himself to the judge on duty. Since federal prosecutors had been notified by Kreiger, federal marshals placed Bonanno under arrest.

In the months that followed his dramatic surrender, Bonanno would have to deal with a trial on charges he willfully failed to appear before a federal grand jury. But it was quite clear that Bonanno was finished as a key New York Mafia boss. He had no backing on the Commission and his arrogant attempt to have his son step in as leader and the snubs of the other bosses destroyed his ability to lead. He made no secret in relaying a message to the Commission that everything stemmed from problems he had with Maggadino. With a gun held to his head by the Commission, Bonanno then haltingly moved into a forced retirement. He was lucky to get away with his life.

This strange period of strife between Bonanno and Maggadino led to the final distancing of Bonanno from playing any active role in what he called “our tradition.” Bonanno’s continued absence also brought on leadership instability within the crime family that saw various men attempt to assume the role of boss. Backed by Maggadino, one of Bonanno’s captains, Gaspar DiGregorio, made a brief pretense as boss and was able to profit from the defections of some crime family members and associates who didn’t want to be frozen out of rackets by being loyal to the Bonannos.

As a tool of Maggadino, DiGregorio tried to set up Bill Bonanno for assassination in January 1966 in what became known as the Troutman Street shootout in Brooklyn. The younger Bonanno escaped unscathed. An aspiring mob gunman named Frank Mari was later credited with firing some of the dozens of shots that never found a target. Ultimately, DiGregorio lost face because of the botched hit and suffered a heart attack; his role as factional leader was taken over by Paul Sciacca, a garment manufacturer who had been a Bonanno consiglieri years earlier. Sciacca, while not considered a powerful leader, was nevertheless acceptable to Maggadino and his allies on the Commission, namely Gambino, Lucchese, and Colombo, who by then was firmly set as leader of the old Profaci family.

Though considered by the Commission to be boss of the Bonanno family, Sciacca was really just the leader of a number of factions fighting for power in the clan. Out of a crime family believed in 1966 to number 400 members, Bonanno loyalists were estimated to have comprised about half that. DeCavalcante was recorded on one FBI tape saying that as soon as the Commission voted Bonanno out as boss in 1964 at least sixty members had already defected. Though he was tapped by his father to be among a group of three or four trusted aides to watch after crime family affairs, Bill Bonanno was distracted by his own legal problems and concerns about the safety of his wife and children. The Troutman Street shootout had also shown that Bill was in personal danger. Because Bill had to be absent quite often from New York during this period, it fell to Natale Evola, who had been an usher at his father’s wedding, to steer those loyal to Bonanno.

Times were dangerous, yes. The destruction of what Joseph Bonanno once called the Pax Bonanno had resulted in numerous shootings and murders. Aside from the abortive Troutman Street incident, there were a number of other mob killings and shootings during the “Banana War,” as the crime family clashes were known. Among those wounded was Frank Mari, one of the men believed to have been involved in the attempt on Bill Bonanno’s life.

Joseph Bonanno had prided himself on the decades of relative peace he had imposed on New York’s Mafia scene. In his view, it was the convincing force of his personality and the political ties he had to other Castellammarese leaders that made the Mafia thrive. The peace allowed each crime family to conduct its rackets and make money. But as Bonanno would say, it was because the individual members of the Mafia were restrained by shared values of respect, trust, loyalty, and honor that the families maintained discipline. However, toward the end of his tortured reign, Joseph Bonanno saw that change.

“Everyone likes to have money, but in the absence of a higher moral code the making of money becomes an unwholesome goal,” Bonanno said in his autobiography. As Bonanno saw it, the “individualistic orientation” encouraged disrespect for authority and family values. In many ways then, the old crime boss sounded like any conservative man who felt in the face of a changing world that he had become an anachronism.

The debacle with the Commission showed that Bonanno had lost his touch as a mob politician. The internecine warfare that erupted in Bonanno’s last years as boss—the Banana War—littered the streets of New York with bodies until well into 1968. By this time, though, the elder Bonanno had lost his taste for the battle. The fragmentation of his once-powerful family was also too much for its founder.

“There is no Bonanno Family anymore,” he bemoaned in his book. He was right—to a point.