The Sixth Family (8 page)
Authors: Lee Lamothe
Among those who quickly pledged allegiance to Greco, and who grew more and more appreciative of the new opportunities brought by Bonanno’s organizational intervention in Montreal, were Nick Rizzuto and several of his kin. The changing landscape put him at an increasingly important nexus: he was a Sicilian Man of Honor who had just become part of a major American Mafia family.
“I knew Nick. I met him in Montreal back in the 1960s,” said Bill Bonanno. “He was a young guy then. Another from the old country who had a lot of the same ideals as us and we accepted him. You can almost feel another Sicilian when you meet him—it is something that comes from the cradle.”
The Old World and the New World then came together in Nick, precisely at a time when the underworld elites on both sides of the ocean were arranging a similar intersection. It was an important time in the global development of the underworld. Decisions being made elsewhere among criminal cartels, led by the Bonanno Family, would have unimaginable consequences for crime, politics, economics, public health and social stability when mafiosi living in Sicily and America started working together. It was a partnership personified by Nick Rizzuto.
CHAPTER 5
PALERMO, SICILY, OCTOBER 1957With a four-post colonnade at the entrance and intricate Art Nouveau details in its high-ceilinged foyer, the Grand Hôtel et des Palmes in downtown Palermo, an aristocratic home that was turned into a luxury hotel at the turn of the last century, has attracted many visitors of wealth and fame. Italian prime ministers have wined and dined in its restaurant and lectured in its meeting rooms. The German composer Richard Wagner wrote his final opera,
Parsifal
, while a guest here in 1881. Today the hotel continues to put on a good show for tourists, but even by the mid-1950s it had become a bit of a cliché destination for well-to-do travelers, a bit like the Waldorf Astoria in New York—it still had the reputation but was a little tired around the edges for those seeking true luxury.
Parsifal
, while a guest here in 1881. Today the hotel continues to put on a good show for tourists, but even by the mid-1950s it had become a bit of a cliché destination for well-to-do travelers, a bit like the Waldorf Astoria in New York—it still had the reputation but was a little tired around the edges for those seeking true luxury.
The waning tastes of trendsetters meant nothing, however, to a group of visitors who filled its suites from October 10 through 14, 1957. The guests in this entourage reportedly indulged extravagantly in food and drink but their primary purpose was one of serious business, and the hotel staff were kept well away from that. From the United States and from across Sicily, this was a gathering of leading gangsters. The intricate and often delicate discussions between them continued into the night, with an adjournment that saw them pause only long enough to travel to the Spano restaurant, a chic seafood emporium on Palermo’s waterfront. The Spano, long since closed, was sheer elegance. At the Spano and the Grand Hôtel, the cream of the Sicilian underworld met with the Bonanno leadership to discuss a partnership.
None of the attendees ever fully disclosed what was discussed, but years of analysis by police intelligence agencies show that one of the major items under discussion was the heroin trade. The French Connection was coming under increasing law-enforcement pressure—an assault led by the United States, which was reeling from the flood of high-quality heroin. American mobsters and European traffickers had long had pieces of the French Connection, but no one had made an effort to bring the entire trade under control. That proposition seems to have been the focus of the talks at the Grand Hôtel et des Palmes.
The architect of the gathering, the man who brought together these American and Sicilian mafiosi, was the deported American Mafia boss Charles “Lucky” Luciano. Joining the discussions as one of the Bonanno representatives was Carmine Galante, who became the primary liaison between Montreal, New York, Sicily and mainland Europe when the Bonanno Family decided to forge ahead into drugs.
Among the notorious mafiosi from Sicily who arrived for the meetings were Gaetano Badalamenti and Tomasso Buscetta. Buscetta later denied knowing anything about meetings at the Grand Hôtel but told of the elaborate dinner party at Spano, one that went on for more than 12 hours, he said. Buscetta, who much later in life became an important
pentiti
, or “repentant” mobster who cooperated with authorities, denied until his death that he—who was clearly one of the world’s most industrious drug traffickers—had ever dealt in narcotics. Despite Buscetta’s denial, the conclave seems to have had two major achievements. The first was the creation of the Cupola, to monitor the internal affairs of Sicily’s many Mafia clans. The Cupola is the equivalent of what the American Mafia calls the Commission, and while most of the traditions that bind the Five Families are imported wholesale from their Italian homeland, the idea of an underworld oversight board was a gift the American mob gave in return.
pentiti
, or “repentant” mobster who cooperated with authorities, denied until his death that he—who was clearly one of the world’s most industrious drug traffickers—had ever dealt in narcotics. Despite Buscetta’s denial, the conclave seems to have had two major achievements. The first was the creation of the Cupola, to monitor the internal affairs of Sicily’s many Mafia clans. The Cupola is the equivalent of what the American Mafia calls the Commission, and while most of the traditions that bind the Five Families are imported wholesale from their Italian homeland, the idea of an underworld oversight board was a gift the American mob gave in return.
The second achievement was a formal transatlantic heroin accord. A transit route was being planned; supply and distribution chains were being arranged; problems were being identified and ironed out. The Men of Honor in Sicily were borrowing and buying the expertise of corrupt French chemists who had mastered
l’école française
, “the French school” of production that sent the off-white powdered morphine base through the 17-step process of turning it into the pure-white crystals of European heroin. To consistently get it right, without wasting the precious substance through over-cooking or contamination, took the knowledge of a scientist and the touch of a chef. The Mafia were building clandestine heroin production facilities directly under their control in the western portion of Sicily, bypassing entirely the raucous French port of Marseilles. They were now looking for new ways to send ever greater amounts of the world’s most valued drug into North America, particularly New York City, the largest drug market. Although often portrayed as a merger of two monolithic organizations—the American Mafia and the Sicilian Cosa Nostra—it would be more accurately described as a cabal of select gangsters from a number of clans which were hungry for the immense profits attainable through the drug trade.
l’école française
, “the French school” of production that sent the off-white powdered morphine base through the 17-step process of turning it into the pure-white crystals of European heroin. To consistently get it right, without wasting the precious substance through over-cooking or contamination, took the knowledge of a scientist and the touch of a chef. The Mafia were building clandestine heroin production facilities directly under their control in the western portion of Sicily, bypassing entirely the raucous French port of Marseilles. They were now looking for new ways to send ever greater amounts of the world’s most valued drug into North America, particularly New York City, the largest drug market. Although often portrayed as a merger of two monolithic organizations—the American Mafia and the Sicilian Cosa Nostra—it would be more accurately described as a cabal of select gangsters from a number of clans which were hungry for the immense profits attainable through the drug trade.
The two achievements—the Cupola and the heroin accord—did not stand in isolation. Both were necessary for the orderly running of a permanent narcotics pipeline. Unless some measure of peaceful cooperation existed at each end of the pipeline, the entire enterprise could collapse through rivalry and jealousy.
Such divisive emotions, however, emerged almost instantly.
Gaetano Badalamenti, a dour and brooding mafioso in Sicily, quickly recognized that the U.S. marketplace would provide unparalleled profits for the Sicilian families willing to sell heroin to the Americans. He capitalized on his own contacts in America and sought a little added action. Through family—a cousin was a member of New York’s Profaci Family, later to become the Colombo Family, and other relatives lived in Canada—and through contacts he made during an ill-fated 1946 trip to the United States that resulted in his deportation to Italy in 1950, Badalamenti directed Tomasso Buscetta to head to North America. Rather than deal strictly through the Bonanno Family receivers, Buscetta was instructed to create a parallel pipeline from Sicily to Montreal, Windsor and Toronto and, from there, into the United States. Both networks would pass through Canada en route to America.
Rivalries among the Five Families were well known in Sicily, mostly through Bonanno relatives who made up a Mafia group in Sicily’s Castellemare del Golfo, a fishing village midway between Palermo and Trapani. Joe Bonanno was seen in America as an arrogant man who considered himself an aristocrat, an offspring of Mafia royalty, which was an offensive contrast to the false humility preferred by many old-school mafiosi.
Bonanno’s inflated sense of self was not pure delusion. He had come from good Mafia stock and was an educated, cosmopolitan man who had certainly made something of himself in his adopted homeland. By comparison, the other American leaders had little family Mafia history and only modest strategic visions for the future. The contrast was never lost on Bonanno and it fed his egoist’s feelings of grandeur, which grated on and frustrated the other bosses. Bonanno caused constant strife with the other American bosses, including his cousin Stefano Magaddino, who ran the Buffalo Mafia. Magaddino had his own outpost in Canada, firmly rooted in Hamilton, a tough steel town on Ontario’s Great Lakes waterfront. Magaddino’s man in Canada was Johnny “Pops” Papalia, who also earned the nickname “The Enforcer.” Papalia himself would grab a piece of the French Connection in the late 1950s, a move that would land him in an American prison, charged alongside his partners: Joe Valachi, the future Mafia turncoat; Alberto Agueci, a Sicilian mafioso from Trapani who had moved to Toronto; and Vinnie Mauro, a Greenwich Village soldier in the Genovese Family. Clearly, while the Sicilian Men of Honor were struggling to ensure that their clans had a place in the heroin trade, so too were the other American Mafia families.
Bonanno and Galante retained a key card to play, however, in their bid to be central figures in the emerging transatlantic heroin business: they had a competent crew in Montreal ready to handle importation, and a large organization in New York ready to aid in distribution.
NEW YORK, 1960With Montreal in pocket and the Sicilian-American alliance in place, it was not long before Galante’s efforts started paying him dividends. His Montreal colleagues were proving to be prodigious smugglers and his extensive network in New York was off-loading vast amounts of heroin to a populace with a voracious appetite for the drug. As quickly as the tap had been turned on, however, its flow was restricted, temporarily, by federal agents.
On May 3, 1960, the U.S. Attorney General for the Southern District of New York announced a sweeping indictment against 29 men for a massive conspiracy to import large amounts of heroin into the United States from Canada. Among them was Carmine Galante.
“The conspiracy consisted of a group of Canadians, headed by Guiseppe ‘Pep’ Cotroni, who handled the exportation of the drugs from Canada. Couriers brought the narcotics across the Canadian-United States border and into the New York metropolitan area,” court documents say. In New York, distribution centers had been established where the high-grade heroin was received, unpacked, diluted and repackaged for further sale.
“Overall responsibility for the continuing operation rested in its ‘chief executive,’ the appellant Carmine Galante,” a New York judge ruled. During the trial, the court heard riveting testimony from a cooperating government witness. Edward Smith, until then a little-known criminal, described meetings with Galante, Vic, Pep and Frank Cotroni, and others, as far back as 1957. In a Montreal apartment Galante picked up a suitcase, put it on the coffee table and opened it, Smith said, describing an early encounter with the group. Inside were rows of clear plastic bags containing white powder. Smith’s partner counted the bags, shut the case and left with Smith for a drive south to New York City, where they took the suitcase to Frank’s Bar & Grill in Brooklyn. From there, colleagues would head out every week on a regular delivery route that took them to bars and nightclubs throughout the city.
For more than three years, the U.S. Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, working with city police and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) in Canada, burrowed their way into the conspiracy. Smith started to secretly cooperate in 1959 and introduced an undercover agent, Patrick Biase, into the group posing as a major buyer. The greedy Canadian mafiosi quickly agreed to sell him large quantities of drugs, despite it being in direct competition with their partners in Brooklyn. In June, Pep Cotroni and René “Bob” Robert, his driver and drug partner, were arrested by Canadian police in what was at that point the largest drug case in the country’s history. Pep Cotroni pleaded guilty a few days into his trial and accepted a 10-year prison sentence.
The case against Galante in New York would not be tied up so neatly. The trial against the defendants arrested in the United States began on November 21, 1960, after several delays, including a postponement when one of the defendants fled the night before the trial was scheduled to begin. For six months it staggered along, sagging under the weight of “every conceivable type of obstruction and interruption,” an appeal court judge would later rule. In May, on the eve of summations to the jury, the trial was halted after the jury foreman suffered a broken back. The judge could not help but note that the mysterious injury was the result of an unexplained fall down a flight of stairs in an abandoned building in the middle of the night. With the pool of alternate jurors already expended, a mistrial was declared.
A retrial got under way on April 2, 1962. It, too, was a mess from the start, reaching “violent and bizarre extremes,” a judge noted. The jury had not even been selected when Salvatore Panico, one of Galante’s co-accused, started shouting abuse. Panico would later climb into the jury box and walk from one end to the other, pushing the jurors in the front row and screaming angry slurs at them and the judge. Anthony Mirra, who decades later would be killed by his own kin for unwittingly introducing an FBI agent into the Bonanno organization, was also charged. He took the stand in his own defence and, under a testy cross-examination, picked up his witness chair and hurled it at the prosecutor who was grilling him. It narrowly missed the prosecutor and shattered against the jury box. Some of the defendants sat through the remainder of the trial shackled and gagged; 11 were later convicted of contempt of court.
“More abhorrent conduct in a federal court and before a federal judge would be difficult to conceive,” the appeal court judges noted. The gangsters’ disruptive efforts were in vain. Galante was sentenced to 20 years in prison.
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