The Sixth Family (17 page)
Authors: Lee Lamothe
The Bonanno Family had also changed drastically in Galante’s absence. There were new players on the scene, tough young imports who had immigrated—legally or not—from Sicily over the years. Their loyalty was to the clans of Agrigento, Palermo and Trapani.
It was these young cadres of Sicilian traffickers in Brooklyn who, like the Rizzutos in Canada, were bumping up against the older, established American Mafia. And, just as in Canada, here was an old-style gangster trying to stand up to them, believing that tradition would trump the allure of drug wealth. It was a dangerous position for Licata.
BROOKLYN, 1977Men like Pietro Licata would have been the first to notice the change in the underworld landscape.
As Licata surveyed his territory, he saw the influx of new Sicilian immigrants who had set up shop and burrowed into the heartland of the American Mafia. In New York, they gathered around the most Sicilian of the families, the one named after Joe Bonanno, who was in turn the most Sicilian of the New York family bosses. The new players caused a stir among American-born Mafia members, who referred to them as “Zips,” probably for the fast-paced dialect they spoke. Behind their backs, though, the Americans were as likely to refer to the Sicilians by a grossly insulting term: “greaseballs,” according to Kenneth McCabe, a former New York City police detective who died in 2006. The Knickerbocker Avenue Zips were part of the Bonanno Family. Several were “made,” and all—in theory—answered to Licata or other Bonanno captains. Most of the American-born Mafia members were leery of them: they kept to themselves, spoke an indecipherable dialect and were involved in schemes American gangsters could only speculate about. They were considered to be a breed apart.
“The Zips stood alone,” said Sal Vitale, a long-time Bonanno member and former family underboss. Frank Lino, a former Bonanno captain, echoed the sentiment: “I recognized them as Zips. You could detect a guy from Italy.” How? “The way they looked,” Lino said.
Salvatore “Toto” Catalano was the boss of the Bonanno Sicilian faction—the Zips—in Brooklyn. Born in 1941 in the Sicilian town of Ciminna, south-east of Palermo, Catalano and his two brothers, also Mafia members, had been sent to the United States in 1966 by old-country traffickers intent on expanding the Sicilian drug trade. The state crackdown on the Mafia in Italy, following the 1963 massacre of policemen in Ciaculli, south of Palermo, had sent members of the Sicilian Mafia fleeing around the world.
In Brooklyn, Catalano had relatives—including a cousin of the same name who was nicknamed “Saca”—who had been in the drug trade since the 1950s. Catalano lived a quiet, modest life, operating a shop on Knickerbocker Avenue. Capitalizing on his membership in the Sicilian Mafia, and on his family relationships, Catalano became a small businessman, with partnerships in bakeries and several pizzerias. All of his partners were mafiosi; all the businesses were fronts for the emerging heroin network that would later be known as the Pizza Connection. Those who met Catalano came away with a feeling that he was a deeply self-controlled man who wrapped himself in an aura of steel. He displayed none of the braggadocio and swagger of his contemporaries in the American Mafia—even though he was a “made” member of the Bonanno Family, like Nick and Vito Rizzuto in Montreal. His role in America, as with the Rizzutos, Caruanas and Cuntreras in Canada and Venezuela, was to conduct the Sicilian heroin franchise, although, as good mobsters, all the factions were reluctant to turn their back on any profitable opportunity that came their way. Six months after Licata’s murder, Catalano was made a captain in the Bonanno Family and handed Licata’s old turf, likely revealing his role in the slaying.
Among Catalano’s early contacts for heroin distribution was Carmine Galante, who, even though his parents were Sicilian, was thoroughly a product of the American Mafia. For many newly arrived immigrants like Catalano, Galante’s expertise and contacts were crucial in building those first bridges to American crews who were willing to get involved in the drug distribution business. Galante was tough, had spent a lifetime in the drug trade and had deep contacts in the United States, Canada and Italy. More important to the Zips, Galante was willing to let them in.
The influx of the Sicilian gangsters is often seen, from the American perspective, as an initiative on the part of Galante, who is said to have “imported” the Zips to do his heavy lifting. Evidence now suggests, however, that the Zips in fact perpetrated a quiet invasion. They were sent from Sicily, rather than called for by America. It is a significant distinction.
The American Mafia, largely the powerful Five Families of New York, had over the decades developed quite differently from its progenitor in Italy.
“Originally it was a simple franchise of the Sicilian organization, born in the rut of migratory movements from southern Italy toward the New World,” wrote Giovanni Falcone, the Italian investigative magistrate, who spent more quality time with turncoat mafiosi than perhaps any other investigator. “The two organizations have evolved their habits and their way of thinking according to the country in which they developed. This separate evolution has, in practice, caused a progressive autonomy on the part of the American Mafia which, today, is complete,” Falcone wrote.
Once a new generation of Sicilian Men of Honor had infiltrated the American Mafia in New York and Montreal, distinct differences between the Zips and American mobsters became clear to all.
“With the establishment of heroin laboratories in Sicily, there was a need to organize North American distribution capabilities,” said Tom Tripodi, a former leading agent with the old U.S. Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs and, later, with its successor, the Drug Enforcement Administration. Tripodi, a man with extensive overseas experience and a keen world view—he had previously debriefed such key Mafia informants, in both Italy and America, as Joe Valachi and Tommaso Buscetta—said it was a Sicilian Mafia overture, not an American Mafia initiative, that brought the Zips to New York and Montreal in such numbers.
“With the French traffickers on the wane, the Sicilian sphere of influence was growing, a development that appealed to mafiosi both in New York and Palermo,” Tripodi said. “The Sicilians wanted to restore order in the ranks of their American brethren, as well as reassert, through diplomatic means, the supremacy of the traditional strongholds in Sicily.”
Regardless of why the Zips arrived, one thing is certain: Carmine Galante liked them. They appealed to his ideal of all that was good and right with the Mafia—loyalty, strength, cunning and a ruthless interest in the drug trade. He personally inducted many of the Zips into the Bonanno Family, even though that role was usually reserved for the boss.
In 1977, Galante conducted an initiation ceremony in Brooklyn for Frank Coppa. Twenty-five years later, Coppa would wreak devastation on the Bonanno Family, but even his induction was something of note: Coppa was sworn in on the same day as a pair of the most aggressive and active Zips.
“They took me to an apartment in Brooklyn,” Coppa said. Waiting in the apartment were Carmine Galante and other Bonanno captains.
“We waited,” Coppa went on. “Me and the other fellow—I can’t remember his name offhand—waited in the bathroom while they were inducting two other people.” Through the thin walls, he could hear Galante in the living room leading the ancient induction rite for Cesare Bonventre and Baldassare “Baldo” Amato.
“They were speaking Italian, so I didn’t understand,” the Brooklyn-born Coppa said. “They left and we came out of the bathroom, went into the living room. And at that point they asked if you didn’t want to be inducted you had the right to leave, and if not, you join hands and you commence the meeting to be inducted into the Bonanno crime family. … We were led to believe that Carmine Galante was boss.”
The Sicilians were inducted separately from the Americans. And since Bonventre, and likely Amato, too, had been inducted into the Sicilian Mafia before emigrating, the issue of dual membership or competing loyalties was not something Galante seemed much bothered about. He appreciated the boost in power these new soldiers gave him on the street, thinking they would help to propel him to further heights. Galante felt they depended on him as well. He saw the Zips as his men; the Zips had other ideas.
Catalano’s drug organization, newly emerging in Brooklyn, consisted of a host of Sicilian-born and, more important, Sicilian-made Mafia members. Among them were men with strong ties to the Sixth Family: Bonventre, Amato, Giovanni Ligammari, Santo “Tony” Giordano, Filippo Casamento and Giuseppe Baldinucci. Bonventre and Amato arrived in New York through Canada. Much later, Casamento and Baldinucci would both return to New York after being deported to Italy, arriving after first visiting with Sixth Family associates in Canada. Ligammari had also been seen meeting and working with key Sixth Family leaders.
Not only did the Zips start flooding New York with heroin, but they supplied traffickers in Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago and Detroit. Repatriating the profits out of America to Europe and Canada, the Catalano faction utilized legitimate money-moving channels, including the Royal Bank of Canada and the Bank of Nova Scotia, both huge Canadian banking institutions with branches around the world. Other profits were channeled to the Sixth Family, who moved the bulk of the cash through Montreal’s far looser banking system and on to Switzerland and Liechtenstein.
By the mid-1970s, Catalano was being unmasked to authorities by several informants. Still a man of some mystery, he was, however, turning up in several investigations, mostly as a passing, collateral target when other Bonanno members were under surveillance. In 1975, he had been arrested while riding in a car with two other Sicilian mafiosi; an unregistered handgun had been seized and Catalano was convicted, serving three years of a five-year sentence. Around the same time, he was already in a dispute with Licata: tradition had it that the baccarat game that Licata ran “floated,” meaning that it moved once a year through a circuit of mob-controlled cafés in the area. Licata, however, was resisting the move. He did not much like the Zips and was particularly disdainful of Catalano. Licata was working to undermine the Zips any way he could.
Despite Catalano’s growing presence in Brooklyn, which was not going unnoticed by police, he was just another name in the broad Bonanno Family tree; his true role and importance in the underworld would not be revealed until after the Sixth Family completed its take-over of Montreal.
It would appear that for Catalano, membership in the Bonanno Family was a convenient formality. He had a job to do, and that was to move heroin. He seems to have had no loyalty to the Bonanno bosses, and he had little to do with fellow made members from America, who watched in envy as he amassed power and respect that seemed out of proportion to his quiet life.
“The highest American boss in the Mafia here is beneath the newest recruit in Sicily, both in stature and power,” said a trusted old associate of a major Sicilian-born mafioso drug trafficker. “Each member of a family in Sicily carries with him the weight of the entire family.” When told what Frank Coppa had said of the induction ceremony of Bonventre and Amato, during which they would have vowed to protect the Bonanno Family to the death, the man shook his head.
“If this is true, you can bet the Sicilian had his fingers crossed,” he said with a smile. “The loyalty only goes to one place: Sicily.”
As heroin profits poured in, Catalano and his crew began showing signs of unusual prosperity on the depressed strip of Knickerbocker Avenue. They drove expensive cars. They bought homes that were the envy of local mobsters who, in some cases, were living hand-to-mouth. Cesare Bonventre, in particular, caused a stir with his high fashion designer clothing in the style of the day, favoring open-necked striped dress shirts and tinted aviator glasses—outdoors and in. Along Knickerbocker Avenue, a $2,000 designer suit was difficult to ignore. What is more, at the nightly card games, the Sicilian gangsters—the Zips—were slapping down money at a dizzying rate.
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