joined Di Gregorio and became identified as top triggerman against Bonanno loyalists during Banana War in mid-1960s.
PETER MAGADDINO
First cousin of Stefano Magaddino, the boss in Buffalo; Peter Magaddino left Buffalo and supported Joseph Bonanno, his boyhood friend in Sicily, in the dispute with Di Gregorio’s faction.
SALVATORE MARANZANO
Old-time Sicilian boss from Castellammare del Golfo; friend of Joseph Bonanno’s father. In 1930, Maranzano organized group of Castellammarese immigrants in Brooklyn to fight against New York organization headed by Joe Masseria, a southern Italian who wanted to eliminate Sicilian clan. This feud, extending from 1928 until 1931, became known as the Castellammarese War and is referred to in Chapter 12.
THE MAFIA
Called by several names—and never Mafia by members—is of ancient origin in Sicily. In United States it became organized along modern business lines after completion of Castellammarese War in 1931. At that time it realigned itself into a national brotherhood of approximately 5,000 men belonging to twenty-four separate organizations (“families”) located in major cities in every region of the United States. In New York City, where an estimated 2,000 of the 5,000 members were in residence, five “families” were established, each headed by a family boss, or don. In 1931, at the age of twenty-six, Joseph Bonanno was the youngest don in the national brotherhood.
THE COMMISSION
Of the twenty-four bosses, nine take turns serving as members of the commission, which is dedicated to maintaining peace in the underworld; but it is supposed to restrain itself from interfering with the internal affairs of any one boss. Occasionally it cannot resist, and then—as with the Bonanno affair in the mid-1960s—there is trouble. Before the Bonanno affair, however, the commission members subordinated their differences and kept the nine-man membership in tact. The commission included the following:
JOSEPH BONANNO
New York
JOSEPH PROFACI
New York
VITO GENOVESE
Succeeded to leadership of New York-based organization once headed by Lucky Luciano, who, after being sentenced in 1936 to long prison term, was deported to Italy in 1946. Frank Costello, who tried to take over the Luciano organization, was discouraged when his skull was grazed with a bullet in 1957.
THOMAS LUCCHESE
New York. Took over leadership of organization headed by Gaetano Gagliano, who died of natural causes in 1953.
CARLO GAMBINO
New York. Close to Lucchese; their children intermarried. Gambino heads organization formerly controlled by Albert Anastasia, who was fatally shot in a Manhattan barbershop in 1957.
STEFANO MAGADDINO
Buffalo. Born in 1891 in Castellammare del Golfo, he is senior member of commission.
ANGELO BRUNO
Boss of organization centered in Philadelphia.
SAM GIANCANA
Boss of organization centered in Chicago.
JOSEPH ZERILLI
Boss of organization in Detroit.
ORGANIZED CRIME
It is most often assumed by newspaper readers that the Mafia is all there is to organized crime in America, when in fact the Mafia is merely a small part of the organized crime industry. There are an estimated 5,000 mafiosi belonging to twenty-four “families”; but federal investigators estimate that there are more than 100,000 organized gangsters working full-time in the crime industry—engaged in numbers racketeering, bookmaking, loan-sharking, narcotics, prostitution, hijacking, enforcing, debt collecting, and other activities. These gangs, who may work in cooperation with Mafia gangs or may be entirely independent, are composed of Jews, Irish, blacks, Wasps, Latin Americans, and every ethnic or racial type in the nation.
Because the Mafia, made up almost entirely of Sicilians and southern Italians, has since Prohibition been more ethnically tight and cohesive than most other gangs, its influence and notoriety has been considerable in organized crime circles. But during the 1960s, as old-style Mafia bosses became older and their sons lacked the interest or talent to replace them and had better options in the larger American society, the Mafia structure is now disintegrating as have the great Irish gangs of the late 1800s and the great Jewish cliques of the 1920s (of which only Meyer Lansky remains supreme today). The blacks and Latin Americans have shown signs of emerging in the 1960s as a dominant force to overthrow the last vestiges of white rule of ghetto rackets.
This book is a study of the rise and fall of the Bonanno organization, a personal history of ethnic progression and of dying traditions.
PART ONE
THE DISAPPEARANCE
1
KNOWING THAT IT IS POSSIBLE TO SEE TOO MUCH, MOST doormen in New York have developed an extraordinary sense of selective vision: they know what to see and what to ignore, when to be curious and when to be indolent; they are most often standing indoors, unaware, when there are accidents or arguments in front of their buildings; and they are usually in the street seeking taxicabs when burglars are escaping through the