more from the pot in generaland from one another in particular. Finally Civella and Balistrieri requested Chicago crime leaders arbitrate their dispute.
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Chicago boss Joey Aiuppa and Jackie the Lackey Cerone, his underboss, served as mediators. Their verdict, a classic, underlined the preeminence of power in the affairs of the "Honored Society." Aiuppa and Cerone decreed that henceforth Chicago itself would take 25 percent of the money skimmed. The case was closed with both Civella and Balistrieri coming out losers.
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Perhaps under the circumstances the simplest thing for Balistrieri to do in December 1985 was plead guilty and take a 10-year sentence on the skimming charges.
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Banana War: Fight for dominance in organized crime
From 1964 to about 1969, the last great war in which a leading Mafia crime family sought to take over a kingsized portion of organized crime was fought. If the aggressors had succeeded, they might have altered the underworld nearly as much as Lucky Luciano's purge of the Mustache Petes. This new conflict of the 1960s was triggered by an aging don of towering self-assurance, Joseph C. Bonanno, the head of a relatively small but efficient New York crime family, known by nickname as the "Bananas" family. The war was called the Banana War.
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In a sense the war was inevitable. Had Bonanno not struck first, other Mafia leaders would have hit him, having become upset about his "planting flags all over the world." Bonanno had established interests in the West, in Canada and in Italy where, as later related by the Italian Mafia's celebrated informer, Tommaso Buscetta, Bonanno was instrumental in getting Sicilian mafiosi to establish a commission, American style, to deal with disputes among the 30 Italian crime families. If Bonanno had been allowed to develop close contacts in Sicily with this commission, he would have been in a position to tie up the entire drug traffic out of Europe. In a broader sociological sense the Bonanno drive demonstrated that America was being polluted less by Italian criminals than Italy was being corrupted by American criminals.
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As Bonanno watched many of the older American dons fade away, he decided it was time to strike out for greater glory and more loot. He developed an attack program for eliminating in one swoop such old-time powers as New York's Carlo Gambino and Tommy Lucchese, Buffalo's Stefano Magaddino and Los Angeles's Frank DeSimone. Bonanno involved in his plot an old ally, Joe Magliocco, who had succeeded another longtime Bonanno friend, the late Joe Profaci, as head of another Brooklyn crime family. Magliocco's loyalty to Bonanno was beyond question and he went along despite misgivings and his own ill health.
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The plot began to unravel when Magliocco passed along the hit assignment on Gambino and Lucchese to an ambitious underboss named Joe Colombo, who had been a trusted hit man in the organization for Profaci. Colombo weighed the situation and, not realizing the extent of Bonanno's involvement, decided the Gambino-Lucchese forces looked the stronger. Colombo sold out to them. It did not take Gambino and Lucchese long to determine that Bonanno was behind the plot.
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The national commission treaded softly on the matter, realizing that Bonanno could put 100 gunmen on the streets of Brooklyn and Manhattan and produce a bloodbath on a level unwitnessed in this country since the Capone era. Bonanno and Magliocco were summoned to a meeting with the commission, but Bonanno contemptuously refused to attend. Magliocco showed up, confessed and begged for mercy. The syndicate leaders let him live, deciding he lacked the guts to continue the battle and was so ill he'd probably die soon anyway. He was fined $50,000 and stripped of his power, which was given to Colombo. This leniency, not typical for treachery in the Mafia, was aimed at encouraging Bonanno's surrender. Within a matter of months, Magliocco was dead of a heart attack.
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Bonanno took off for the safety of his strongholds in the West and in Canada, keeping on the move while avoiding orders from the commission to come in. In October 1964 he returned to Manhattan to appear before a grand jury. On the evening of October 21, he had dinner with his lawyers. Afterward, as he stepped from a car on Park Avenue, he was seized by two gunmen, shoved into another car and taken away. The newspapers assumed Bananas had been executed.
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While Bonanno was out of sight, war broke out within the Bonanno organization. The national commission ruled that Bonanno had forfeited his position and installed Gaspar DiGregorio to take charge of the family. This split the family in two with many members backing Bonanno's son, Bill, while still hoping that Joe Bonanno would come back. After considerable shooting, DiGregorio called for a peace meeting with Bill Bonanno. The confab was to be held in a house on Troutman Street in Brooklyn. When Bill arrived, several riflemen and shotgunners opened up on him and his men. The Bananas men returned fire but in the dark, everyone's aim was off. There were no casualties.
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Meanwhile Bonanno had been held captive by Buffalo's Magaddino, his older cousin. The rest of the commission apparently did not deal with Bonanno directly but Magaddino conferred regularly with them. It soon became clear to Bonanno that the commission did not want to kill him because that would only lead to further
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