Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America's Most Powerful Mafia Empires (32 page)

What really happened to Bonanno during his disappearance is a mystery. What is clear is that without notice, he surfaced in May 1966, with his lawyer, at the federal courthouse in Manhattan’s Foley Square, with the terse explanation that he had been abducted two years previously. His long delay in complying with the subpoena led to an indictment for failing to appear before a grand jury. He challenged the legality of the indictment for five years until the accusation was dropped.

From the night Bonanno’s lawyer reported him missing, New York and federal investigators doubted that he had been abducted. The police were unable to verify Maloney’s account that a warning shot had been fired; no shell casing was found at the scene. Moreover, since Bonanno was engaged in a brewing
mortal confrontation with Gambino and Lucchese, it was uncharacteristic and foolhardy for him, an endangered boss, to roam around unescorted by bodyguards. Detective Salerno learned that after the vanishing act, it was quickly apparent from electronic eavesdropping that he was alive. “When someone of importance is killed, Mob guys refer to him as
la bon anima
, the good soul,” Salerno pointed out. “No one close to Bonanno spoke about him that way; rather, they were saying, ‘That son-of-a-bitch took off and left us here alone.’”

Two days after the Park Avenue incident, FBI agents bugging New Jersey’s Sam the Plumber DeCavalcante, obtained a clue that Bonanno had staged the kidnapping. Discussing Bonanno with one of his lieutenants, Frank Majuri, DeCavalcante said that the New York bosses were mystified and knew nothing about the disappearance. “Then he must have done it,” Majuri replied, reinforcing the suggestion that the abduction was a fake.

Most investigators theorized that Bonanno had two compelling reasons to get away from New York: he wanted time to work out a truce or a peace pact with his enemies on the Commission; and he feared an indictment by Morgen-thau’s grand jury. During his absence, Gambino and Lucchese happily incited turmoil in the Bonanno family by encouraging dissidents to oppose the surrogate leadership of Bill Bonanno. The son was resented by old-timers in the family, who believed he had not earned his spurs as a proven leader. While Bonanno was missing, there were several casualties in the conflict for control of the borgata. The battles were headlined as “the Bananas War.” The elder Bonanno’s surprise reappearance in May 1966 was probably propelled by an attempted ambush of his son five months earlier. Showing up for a nighttime meeting in Brooklyn, Bill and his bodyguards were greeted by a hail of gunfire. No one was hit, but at least twenty shots were fired, and the police recovered seven handguns tossed onto the pavement.

Soon after his return to New York, Bonanno, after thirty-five years as an indomitable boss, conceded defeat. Even one of his closest lieutenants, Gaspar “Gasparino” DiGregorio, the best man at his wedding and Bill Bonanno’s religious godfather, had defected to lead the internal opposition against him. Bonanno had overreached in his clash with the Commission, and it crushed him, retaining its prerogative to confirm the selection of bosses and its power to determine expansion rights. In a deal with the Commission, the chastened Bonanno was allowed to abdicate and retire peacefully as the head of the gang that once was the nation’s most powerful Mob organization. He sold his regal house in Hempstead, Long Island, and a fourteen-room farmhouse near Middletown,
New York. Severing all ties to New York, he exiled himself to Tucson where he had maintained a home for health reasons since the early 1940s. Although he was finished as a majestic godfather in the East, Don Peppino continued to dabble in lesser rackets in Arizona and California with his sons. The last of the original Commission members, he began planning his memoirs, a document that would lead to far-reaching complications for himself and other mafiosi.

Bonanno’s lust for power almost cost him his life. Years after the episode, Ralph Salerno learned that the Commission, after much debate, gave Bonanno “a pass” because he was one of the Mafia’s founding fathers and because he pledged never to meddle again in Mob affairs in New York or other Cosa Nostra centers of power. If he dared to return to New York, he would have faced an automatic death sentence. Salerno and other investigators believed that the Commission godfathers also realized that killing one of their own would be a precedent that endangered themselves.

In the late 1960s, with the brief and minor Bananas War over and with barely any concern about law-enforcement interference, Mafia leaders could conduct their businesses with equanimity. They might be followed and badgered occasionally by FBI agents or local detectives, but there was no longer a concerted effort to destroy their organizations. For public-relations reasons, police departments in major Mob cities like New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia periodically sprang into action against them—usually before elections for a district attorney or sheriff, or after an outrageous murder or internecine war that left too many corpses on the streets to go unnoticed. These were temporary interruptions.

Sometimes, however, there was a slipup, an unforeseen, careless Mafia blunder. For example, on the Thursday afternoon of September 22, 1966, thirteen men gathered around a banquet-size table in a private dining area of La Stella, a modest Italian restaurant in the New York borough of Queens. The middle-aged and elderly men joked and talked, sipping cocktails, awaiting the first course. Before they could taste the robust meal, plainclothes policemen trooped in and arrested the lot of them. All the diners were Mob bosses and hierarchy officials.

The arrests resulted from a routine tail of the high-ranking Genovese consigliere Mike Miranda by detectives from Salerno’s police intelligence squad. They followed Miranda to La Stella, and while staked out there, the sharp-eyed cops were astonished to see the pride of the American Mafia arriving separately
and entering the restaurant. The startled police notified their supervisors that they had stumbled onto something big and needed help. When reinforcements arrived, the plainclothesmen marched into the restaurant. None of the mobsters was in sight. Noticing a stairway, the cops descended to a secluded downstairs dining room where the group was settling in for lunch. “Don’t move,” a detective commanded. “Keep your seats.” Plainclothesmen then collected the names of the chagrined diners. They included Carlo Gambino, his underboss, Aniello Dellacroce, Joe Colombo, Tommy Eboli, the acting boss for Vito Genovese, Carlos Marcello of New Orleans, Santo Trafficante of Florida, assorted top henchmen, and the apparent host, Mike Miranda.

Uncertain what charges to lodge against the baker’s dozen of mafiosi, a supervising detective came up with an old standard harassment complaint: consorting with known criminals—each another. Hauled away in handcuffs from their aborted lunch for booking at a police station house, the thirteen prisoners were compelled, like all criminal suspects, to strip ignominiously to their underwear for a body search. Like ordinary thieves and robbers, they were fingerprinted and photographed for the rogue’s gallery mug files.

When Queens District Attorney Nat Hentel learned of the arrests, he rushed to the station house. A Republican, Hentel had been appointed as an interim district attorney by Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller, and he was an underdog candidate for election as a full-term prosecutor in a heavily Democratic borough. The bagging of celebrity mobsters in his jurisdiction was an unexpected publicity windfall. Hentel quickly rescinded the “consorting” charges. He convened a grand jury for the stated purpose of investigating organized crime in Queens and thought it wiser to hold the thirteen as material witnesses. The consorting charge was vague and judges were increasingly dismissing it as unconstitutional.

Hentel was right about the publicity bonus. The arrests were played as a major story in New York and elsewhere. Faces of the arrested mobsters were splashed on Page One and the meeting was headlined as “Little Apalachin.” Hentel milked the affair for publicity and name recognition for himself. Basking in television, radio, and newspaper attention, the prosecutor—without the slightest evidence—issued hyperbolic statements that the gangsters had assembled to chart the future course for the Mob in the entire country. He melodramatically termed the curtailed luncheon a historic gathering, more important than the Apalachin meeting nine years earlier.

Showing their disdain for the DA and the police who arrested them, the
southern bosses Carlos Marcello and Santo Trafficante, accompanied by a retinue of bodyguards and lawyers, returned a week after the raid to the same table at La Stella. This time they invited the press and posed for photographs, lifting wine glasses in merry toasts, shouting
salute.
“Why don’t they arrest us now?” Marcello asked contemptuously as reporters took notes. The dons then ordered the same banquet they had been denied by the raid: escarole in brodo, linguine in white clam sauce, and baked clams, topped off with several bottles of wine, and ending with fruit and espresso.

All of the Little Apalachin Thirteen invoked the Fifth Amendment when called before a grand jury. Hentel’s investigation fizzled into obscurity without producing a single indictment or sliver of information. Unfortunately for Hentel, the publicity generated by the arrests failed to help his election bid; he was overwhelmingly defeated. For the big-shot mobsters the arrests were a trivial inconvenience. For law-enforcement officials, the restaurant raid displayed both their ineffectiveness in combating the Mob and their ravenous appetite for publicity.

Trafficante told his attorney, Frank Ragano, that the luncheon-meeting was a sit-down to resolve a complaint by Marcello that New York mobsters were intruding on his territory in New Orleans without permission. New York detectives had different ideas. Some believed that the La Stella gathering was a “sidebar” event for several of the families, following the regular meeting of the nation’s Mafia bosses, which was then held every five years. That year, it had been conducted in the New York region, without a hitch and undetected. Other detectives theorized that the main topic for the small group at La Stella concerned enlarging the size of Marcello’s family in Louisiana. Another theory was that the principal discussion dealt with Tommy “Three-Finger Brown” Lucchese, who was incurably ill, and the question of who would succeed him.

Little Apalachin was a bigger mystery than Apalachin and another glaring example of the decline in law-enforcement’s knowledge of the Mob’s business plans and motives.

Lucchese, suffering from a brain tumor, died a few months later at age sixty-seven. His funeral was a revealing underworld and upperworld event. Despite the unconcealed surveillance cameras wielded by local detectives and federal agents, the rites were attended by hundreds of mafiosi as well as judges, politicians, and businessmen. The mobsters showed their respect for a distinguished idol while simultaneously exhibiting their scorn for the impotent lawmen. Even more disturbing was the appearance of eminent “civilians” who felt indebted to the
criminal chieftain, and who had reasons to remain on good terms with his successors.

Two years after Lucchese’s death, Vito Genovese, who had retained the title of boss during his narcotics-trafficking imprisonment, died of a heart attack in a prison hospital on Valentine’s Day in 1969. He was seventy-one. Bonanno’s forced exile and the deaths of Lucchese and Genovese catapulted Carlo Gambino to the Mafia’s Olympian heights. He emerged as the supreme figure on the Commission and exalted leader of the Mob’s largest and most influential family. While the Mafia never acknowledged the rank of “boss of bosses,” Gambino in effect assumed the power that went with it.

For New York’s unchallenged borgatas, success seemed boundless, and the decade was ending with an inexhaustible supply of wannabes competing to enlist as wiseguys in the enterprise bigger than U.S. Steel. At the time, few police commanders were knowledgeable or concerned about the Mafia’s inroads. An exception, Assistant Chief Raymond V Martin, bluntly assessed Cosa Nostra’s alluring appeal in Italian-American neighborhoods in Brooklyn and other parts of New York:

“On so many street corners in Bath Beach, in so many luncheonettes and candy stores in Bensonhurst, boys see the Mob-affiliated bookies operate. They meet the young toughs, the Mob enforcers. They hear the tales of glory recounted—who robbed what, who worked over whom, which showgirl shared which gangster’s bed, who got hit by whom, the techniques of the rackets and how easy it all is, how the money rolls in. What wonder is it that some boys look forward to being initiated into these practices with the eagerness of a college freshman hoping to be pledged by the smoothest fraternity on campus. With a little luck and guts, they feel, even they may someday belong to that splendid, high-living band, the Mob.”

The Birth of RICO

A
sked about his ethnicity, George Robert Blakey, as a boy and as an adult always had one answer: “I’m an American.”

The reply was not based on inflated patriotism. In his formative years the question of Blakey’s ancestral roots was never raised by his parents and relatives. He was born and reared in Burlington, North Carolina, in the 1930s and ‘40s—in the South an era of intractable Jim Crow racial laws and oppressive segregation of blacks. The prevailing distinctions between families in Burlington, a textile-manufacturing town of about 20,000 in the northern part of the state, was whether they were black or white, whether they were country-club gentry or hardscrabble mill hands. People in the Piedmont region never identified themselves in hyphenated terms as being Irish-American, German-American, or Polish-American. If Italian- or Sicilian-Americans lived in Burlington, young Blakey, who preferred to be called Bob, never met any of them. As for the Mafia—the subject that would dominate Blakey’s career—it was a foreign-sounding term that totally escaped his attention until adulthood.