Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America's Most Powerful Mafia Empires (31 page)

New York’s police headquarters simply disregarded the intelligence that investigators were compiling of the Mafia’s growing affluence and its indifference to law enforcement. A wave of frustration and cutbacks hit the CIB, the only group responsible for keeping an eye on the borgatas, as officials turned to new commitments. Duplicating the FBI’s fear of political and civil unrest by opponents of the Vietnam War, the department organized a handpicked unit, the Bureau of Special Services Investigations. Many officers assigned to the ominous sounding BOSSI (also known as the “Red Squad”) believed their main tasks were to destroy terrorist radical organizations, prevent riots in black and Hispanic neighborhoods, and investigate groups supposedly dedicated to assassinating
cops. Franceschini and other Mafia specialists were transferred to BOSSI in the mid- and late 1960s. The department’s shift in emphasis, Franceschini observed, gave the Mob “pretty much of a free ride during those years.”

Even the lowliest wannabes in New York, the Mafia’s capital, sensed the relaxation of law enforcement. Enjoying the balmy atmosphere, mafiosi and their legion of associates coined a popular slang name for themselves, “wiseguys.” The new generation of wiseguys felt they had carte blanche for every imaginable violent crime and financial scheme.

“Everyone I knew was into money schemes and almost nobody ever got caught,” Henry Hill, a Lucchese associate in that era, recounted to the writer Nicholas Pileggi. “That’s what people from the outside don’t understand. When you’re doing different schemes, and everyone you know is doing these things, and nobody is getting caught, except by accident, you begin to get the message that maybe it’s not so dangerous. And there were a million different schemes.”

Corruption also was an underlying factor in providing New York’s wiseguys a comfortable environment. Investigations later revealed that through most of the 1960s a sizable portion of the 30,000-member police department was paid off for protection by Mob-affiliated bookies and gamblers. The routine graft was known as “the pad,” in which bribes were distributed regularly to officers in units primarily responsible for enforcing gambling and vice laws, the amounts depending on their rank and status. Officers and supervisors who accepted occasional or systemic bribes, Ralph Salerno said, did not want to be told by members of his anti-Mafia squad that the bribers were organized-crime “ogres and monsters” with blood on their hands. “Very few people in the department wanted to believe they [the Mafia] existed and were as powerful as they were. They simply wanted to picture them as bookies and gamblers, not as murderers and drug dealers.”

Nevertheless, Salerno’s understaffed unit kept a watchful eye on the Mob and its digging and surveillance work was tolerated, if not encouraged, by the police brass. “Why didn’t they squash us? You got to have some guys who are honest and breaking balls. It allows the dishonest ones to say to the bad guys, ‘We will protect you from the ball breakers.’ The more balls I broke, the more money I made for them,” Salerno commented wryly.

More than one mafioso racketeer chastised Salerno for investigating fellow Italian-Americans. They complained, “Why does it have to be one of your own kind that hurts you?” Salerno would snap back, “I’m not your kind and
you’re not my kind. My manners, morals, and mores are not yours. The only thing we have in common is that we sprang from an Italian heritage and culture—and you are the traitor to that heritage and culture which I am proud to be part of.”

A native New Yorker, Salerno’s first knowledge of the Mob’s terrifying aura came from frightening events in the lives of his immigrant parents. Before his birth, they lived in Mafia-dominated East Harlem. One summer day, his mother, while buying ices for her four older children from a street vendor, witnessed the shooting murder of a hood known as “Charlie the Dude” by another neighborhood gangster called “Mickey Icebox.”

“That night,” Salerno said, “a guy, a
paisano
, from my father’s hometown in Italy, came to their apartment with a message for my father. ‘Tell your wife to keep her mouth shut. Otherwise your kids could get thrown in the East River.’ “Salerno said his mother was consumed by anxiety for months, fearful that Mickey Icebox would be arrested, and that she would be tagged as an informer and her children killed. “She was able to breathe again after eighteen months when someone killed Mickey Icebox and the threat to her family was over,” said Salerno.

About that same time, Salerno’s parents and their children were sitting down to dinner when several men burst into their apartment through an open fire-escape window. On the run from the police, they told the family to remain silent until they felt it was safe to leave. A week later, Salerno’s father stopped at a barber shop that served as a center for news about the neighborhood and the old country. A parcel was waiting for him from the men who had escaped the police through the Salemos’ apartment. Attached was a note: “You did the right thing.” The package contained a gift of a straight-edged razor and a shaving mug engraved in gilt letters with his father’s name.

Those episodes inspired Salerno to detest the Mafia and to devote his twenty-year police career to uprooting gangsters. “I kept that shaving cup on my desk for decades as a reminder how those bastards intimidated my parents. I didn’t want my children and grandchildren or anyone’s children to grow up in that kind of atmosphere.”

In 1967 Salerno, a sergeant in charge of the CIB’s detectives, left the police department, convinced he would be more effective working as a consultant on organized crime for congressional investigation committees. “Unfortunately,
when I was on the police force the Mafia was probably twenty times more powerful than they had been in my parents’ time.”

Joe Bonanno’s private 1960s sobriquet for the New York Mafia was “the Volcano.” Although outside pressure from federal and local investigators had receded, internal disturbances were seething beneath the Volcano’s surface. Running a borgata in New York was beginning to have drawbacks as each of the five money-hungry families competed for greater wealth and importance. In cities that had only one family, godfathers enjoyed long careers and died of natural causes, Bonanno later wrote about that era. “In New York City, however, where strife was almost routine, fathers led precarious lives.”

The death from cancer on June 11, 1962, of Joe Profaci, Bonanno’s fellow godfather and closest ally, suddenly undermined his position as a commanding force on the Commission and in New York’s unpredictable underworld. Bonanno was the last of the 1931 bosses still alive and active, and Profaci’s death abruptly and decisively shifted the balance of power on the Commission to the tandem of Carlo Gambino and Tommy Lucchese. The imprisoned Vito Genovese maintained de facto control of his family, and Bonanno expected that his delegates in a showdown would side with the Genovese-Lucchese alliance. In another setback for Bonanno, his powerful cousin Stefano Magaddino, the Buffalo godfather, a permanent Commission member, had grown increasingly estranged and opposed to Bonanno’s views because of a festering territorial dispute in Canada. Bonanno was maneuvering to expand his criminal empire into Magaddino’s backyard in Toronto. “He’s planting flags all over the world,” Magaddino was heard on an FBI bug, fuming about his cousin’s attempts to muscle into areas in California and Canada deemed “open” by the Commission.

Magaddino was right. After thirty years as a boss and still a relatively young fifty-eight, Bonanno had lost none of his cunning or ambition to remain on top of the Mafia pyramid. His first move was to support Joe Magliocco, Profaci’s brother-in-law and underboss, as the new head of Profaci’s borgata, although Magliocco’s claim to the title was shaky. Profaci’s last years had been troubled by a revolt led by “Crazy Joey” Gallo and his brothers, Albert “Kid Blast” and Larry, contract killers for Profaci. They considered Profaci a voracious despot and wanted a larger share of the family’s spoils for carrying out the family’s essential work of murders and beatings. The Gallos were believed to have been the core of the barbershop hit team that assassinated Albert Anastasia in 1957.

Headlined as “the Gallo Wars,” the brothers’ insurrection was the first serious
breach of discipline in a New York family since the bloody struggles in 1930 and 1931. The conflict was unresolved at the time of Profaci’s death, and the Gallos’ refusal to accept Magliocco as their boss encouraged Gambino and Lucchese to deny Magliocco—Bonanno’s candidate and ally—a seat on the Commission.

Bonanno’s solution to his and Magliocco’s roadblocks, according to most Mafia investigators at the time, was to eliminate by murder his main rivals: Gambino and Lucchese. The experts speculated that he also wanted his cousin Magaddino executed. Grateful for Bonanno’s support, Magliocco went along with the plan and gave the multiple-hit contracts to Joseph Colombo, a loyal Profaci capo with a deserved reputation for violence. By deviously using Magliocco and Colombo as fronts for removing his enemies, Bonanno thought the bloodbath would not be traced to him.

Joe Colombo was forty years old, experienced and wise enough to comprehend the futility of devising a double or a triple execution of godfathers; and he sensed which bosses had the upper hand in the internal struggle for dominance in New York. He reached out to Gambino—not to kill him but to warn him of Bonanno and Magliocco’s machinations.

Armed with Colombo’s evidence, Gambino, Lucchese, and the rest of the Commission summoned Bonanno and Magliocco for a Mob trial. Magliocco, physically ailing and betrayed by one of his own capos, readily confessed and pleaded for mercy. Instead of a bullet in the back of his head, he was banished from the Mafia for his lifetime. Acting as if the Commission were subject to audits, the godfathers fined Magliocco $43,000 to cover the costs incurred in investigating the complaints against him and Bonanno. The disgraced Magliocco assembled his loyal capos in September 1963 to announce a cease-fire in the war with the Gallos and to tell them that the Commission had deposed him as Profaci’s heir. Within a year he was dead of a heart attack. Gambino and the remaining bosses rewarded Colombo for being an ace stool pigeon, and perhaps saving some of their skins, by anointing him boss of the old Profaci family with a seat on the Commission.

Joe Bonanno never showed up for a confrontation with other Commission godfathers. He went on the lam, hiding out in California and in Canada, while exploring opportunities for poaching on rackets in those areas. He left his New York operations to trusted aides and appointed his eldest son, Salvatore “Bill” as the family’s consigliere. California loomed large in Bonanno’s plans. Tremendous wealth was being generated in Southern California, and Bonanno felt that
Frank DeSimone, the boss of the Los Angeles family, had failed to exploit it. Bonanno plotted to replace DeSimone and his crew with Bill, who would provide better leadership, and forty soldiers who would generate larger profits. As a Commission member, Bonanno already had some oversight responsibilities in California of small families operating in San Francisco and San Jose. By seizing control over Los Angeles, Bonanno believed he would dominate Mafia activities on both coasts.

Some FBI tapes were still spinning, and agents got an earful about Bonanno’s conflict with the Commission from a bug installed in the headquarters of Simone “Sam the Plumber” DeCavalcante, the boss of a New Jersey family based in Elizabeth. Talking with a capo in his family, Joseph Sferra, on August 31, 1964, DeCavalcante mentioned Bonanno’s difficulties. “It’s about Joe Bonanno’s borgata. The Commission don’t like the way he’s comporting himself.” DeCavalcante added that Bonanno had promoted Bill to consigliere, and that the son also had angered the Commission by refusing to appear before it when summoned for questioning. “Well, he made his son consigliere—and it’s been reported, the son, that he don’t show up,” DeCavalcante explained.

On September 21, 1964, DeCavalcante outlined to Joseph Zicarelli, a Bonanno soldier, why the all-powerful Commission balked at Magliocco’s attempt, with Bonanno’s backing, to become a boss. “The Commission went in there and took the family over. When Profaci died, Joe Magliocco took over as boss. They threw him right out. ‘Who the hell are you to take over a borgata?’ And Signor Bonanno knows this. When we had trouble in our outfit, they came right in. ‘You people belong to the Commission until this is straightened out.’”

Bonanno’s rival godfathers relied on the Commission as the foundation of the Mafia’s strength and structure and resented his defiance and newly spun expansionist schemes. Magaddino, speaking with one of his soldiers in Buffalo about Bonanno’s plots, without Commission approval, to control California and Canada, said, “Not even the Holy Ghost could come into my territory without authorization.”

The Genovese family hierarchy also lined up against Bonanno. On an FBI bug in September 1964, Thomas “Tommy Ryan” Eboli, a capo, told Vito Genovese’s brother Michael that Bonanno was creating a rift that could destroy the Mafia or make it as divisive as other ethnic gangs. “If one member can dispute a Commission order you can say good-bye to Cosa Nostra, because the Commission is the backbone of Cosa Nostra. It will be like the Irish mobs who fight among themselves and they [the Italians] will be having gang wars like they had
years ago.” In Chicago, an FBI bug heard Sam Giancana’s solution to Bonanno’s refusal to appear before the Commission. “Don’t send him another message. Kill him!”

Don Peppino Bonanno had another problem. He was the only major Mafia leader endangered by the antiracketeering organized-crime bills steered through Congress by Robert Kennedy before he resigned as attorney general. A grand jury impaneled by Robert M. Morgenthau, the aggressive U.S. Attorney in Manhattan, subpoenaed Bonanno for a round of questioning. On the night of October 20, 1964, the day before he was to testify or face possible imprisonment for contempt, Bonanno had dinner with three of his lawyers in Manhattan. Afterward, he and attorney William Power Maloney taxied to Maloney’s apartment building on Park Avenue and 36th Street, where he was going to spend the night. It was close to midnight and raining. Bonanno stepped out of the cab to pay the fare when, he later claimed, he was grabbed by two strong-arm men who warned, “Come on, Joe, my boss wants you,” and shoved him into the rear of a waiting car. Maloney told the police that when he ran over to intervene, shouting at the two men, one of them fired a warning shot to scare him off. In his autobiography, published two decades later, Bonanno asserted that his kidnapping was carried out by men who worked for his cousin Stefano Magaddino. Forced to crouch on the car’s floor, he was driven to a farmhouse in a rural area in upstate New York, where his cousin warned him that he had fallen into disfavor because the Commission considered him power hungry. Bonanno’s account was vague. He said his captors held him for six weeks, then drove him at his request to Texas and released him unharmed. Free again, he grew a beard to disguise his appearance and spent the ensuing nineteen months in hideaways in Tucson and in New York.