Cosa Nostra (40 page)

*   *   *

During the Palermo leg of his Sicilian jaunt, at a lavish five-hour luncheon at Spanò’s sea-front restaurant, Joe Bananas met Tommaso Buscetta—or at least he did according to Buscetta’s own version of events. At that time Buscetta—the future ‘boss of two worlds’ and history-making mafia defector—was only an up-and-coming Palermo soldier. So the meeting at Spanò’s understandably made a much bigger impression on him than it did on Joe Bananas, who did not bother to record it among his holiday memories. Buscetta, by contrast, effusively expressed the ‘enchantment’ he felt as he talked intimately with a man he described as ‘distinguished, elegant, endowed with a special intelligence’. Buscetta had evidently found a role model.

Apart from the then gap in status between Buscetta and Bonanno, there are many other differences between their two accounts. By the time Buscetta came to tell his story, he was a
pentito
living under a witness protection programme; when Joe Bananas told his in 1983 he was, at most, in semi-retirement. For that simple reason Buscetta is by far the more credible of the two. (Although it should be said that the US authorities took
A Man of Honour
seriously enough to call its author before a grand jury.)

It is striking, but hardly surprising, that both mafiosi left exactly the same highly significant hole in their stories: narcotics. Joe Bananas maintained that he never had anything to do with drugs, which were, he protested, completely alien to his Tradition. Buscetta scoffed at the very idea that Bonanno’s visit to Sicily had anything to do with heroin. Both men were lying outright, but both were also lying in a more interesting way than might at first appear to be the case. This was not just a question of two criminals trying to protect themselves.

Buscetta was undoubtedly a more interesting liar than his Italian-American role model. Until his death, he continued to deny that he had ever made any money from drugs. Rather contradicting himself, Buscetta also maintained that ‘There is no one in Cosa Nostra who is unconnected with narcotics trafficking.’ These statements bear all the hallmarks of the kind of tactical lie at which Sicilian men of honour are particularly adept. In fact, the signs are
so
clear that they are probably deliberate. Buscetta was making sure that anyone who knew how to decode him—Judge Falcone, for one—would understand perfectly well
both
that he was lying
and
that he was not prepared to say any more on what was evidently an important subject. It was such a big lie that he had to throw a cordon sanitaire around it to stop it infecting the credibility of the other things he had to say.

All this lying became necessary because, by the time Joe Bananas stepped off the plane in Palermo, Cosa Nostra was at a crossroads in the United States. In a sense it had to decide just how illegal it wanted to be. The American mafia has always worked most freely in those markets—like liquor under Prohibition or numbers rackets—which are ‘only just’ illegal and therefore not a source of embarrassment to its political friends. Gambling was another case in point; the 1940s and 1950s were years when organized crime invested heavily in the rapidly expanding, desert betting Mecca of Las Vegas. The same principles of semi-illegality apply to the mafia’s intervention in labour relations. It offered its services to employers to break strikes; or it worked with trade unions to extort money from workers and employers alike. Either way, Cosa Nostra did not move too far from the protective shadow of legal institutions and powerful interest groups in the upper world.

Drugs were a different kind of business. In 1950, Tennessee Democrat Senator Estes Kefauver picked up on alarming warnings from the Federal Bureau of Narcotics about the mafia’s international drugs network. The hearings of Kefauver’s ‘Senate Special Committee to Investigate Crime in Interstate Commerce’ were televised in 1951. Americans watched dozens of mafiosi taking the Fifth Amendment in the face of Kefauver’s questioning. Frank Costello, the former bootlegger and king of New York City’s slot machines, did not allow the camera to show anything above his shoulders; but the ‘hand ballet’ that accompanied his shifty explanation of his business interests became the emblematic memory of the hearings for many viewers.

In the wake of the Kefauver hearings, the United States rediscovered its fear of the mafia—a fear that had last gripped the nation nearly half a century earlier, in the days of the ‘body in the barrel’ murder and Lieutenant Joe Petrosino. This time round, the dread and fascination aroused by the mafia was also fuelled by a drugs scare. Politically motivated hype and a minor publishing boom followed; one writer, inspired by Kefauver, called the mafia ‘history’s greatest threat to morality’ and ‘the principal fount of all crime in the world’. America’s long post-war love affair with the mafia had begun.

For all the exaggeration and plain fantasy in the new American mafia scare, and despite the fact that J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI, still refused to believe that the mafia existed, the effects of the Kefauver hearings for men of honour were severe. They led the Federal government to introduce the Narcotics Control Act in 1956; it stipulated a forty-year maximum prison sentence for drug-related offences. According to one US police estimate, by the time Joe Bananas came to Sicily to ‘unwind’, as he put it, one in every three members of the Bonanno Family had been arrested on narcotics charges. The other New York mafia Families were faring even worse; the Lucchese clan had lost a reported 60 per cent of its personnel.

As both Buscetta and Bonanno later explained, the leadership of the American mafia introduced a ban on drug-dealing in response to the crackdown. (Both of them also claim, wholly improbably, that only other mafiosi broke it.) There are many other sources that confirm that there was indeed such a policy, and each of those sources also points out that the rule was routinely transgressed. It was, in fact, a façade intended to create the impression that the organization had distanced itself from ‘junk’. But it could only be a stopgap measure.

To make matters worse, in 1956–7, Cosa Nostra’s most important offshore base for its narcotics smuggling—the Caribbean island of Cuba—was also slipping from its grasp. Fulgencio Batista y Zaldìvar’s corrupt and brutal dictatorship was already crumbling in the face of Fidel Castro and Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara’s much-publicized guerrilla war in the Sierra Maestra. The Americans finally withdrew military aid from Batista in 1958 and Castro entered Havana in January the following year.

So it does not take a very ‘special intelligence’ to work out why Joe Bananas came to unwind back in Sicily in 1957. His organization needed three things for its narcotics interests: a trustworthy source of manpower; a partner to which it could franchise out a business that had become too damaging to run hands-on; and a new transhipment base.

In Sicily, Cosa Nostra’s control of territory was far more thorough in the 1950s than it was in the United States—hence Bonanno’s delight at his red-carpet reception. But Italy’s attractions did not end with its gratifyingly ‘appalling’ government machinery; it also had a negligible rate of drug consumption, and therefore no political interest in addressing the problem. Moreover, because Sicilian men of honour moved around the Mediterranean in the course of their cigarette smuggling, it would not be much trouble for them to pick up refined heroin from the South of France while they were at it. A new wave of Sicilian emigrants was now heading west across the Atlantic too, taking their belongings in trunks that were the perfect vehicle for drug transportation. The only reason that Joe Bananas did not take his holiday any earlier is that the Kefauver hearings had caused high-level transatlantic contacts between the two mafias to be broken off.

Over four days in October 1957, Joe Bananas chaired a series of meetings between Sicilian and American mafiosi in Palermo’s Grand Hotel des Palmes. The hotel—the most splendid in the city at the time—was one of the Whitaker family’s town houses before it was converted, and Richard Wagner famously orchestrated his last opera,
Parsifal,
there in the winter of 1881–2. The Hotel des Palmes is now where most Italian journalists stay when they go down to Palermo to cover the latest mafia outrage or trial.

Although there are no first-hand accounts of those meetings, and although the police took little interest in goings-on at the hotel, the list of guests makes for instructive reading. Among those seen coming and going from Bonanno’s suite were his
consigliere,
Camillo ‘Carmine’ Galante, and other leading members of the Brooklyn-based Bonanno Family, including Giovanni ‘John’ Bonventre and the capo’s immediate deputy, Frank Garofalo, who had been in Castellammare del Golfo since the summer. The US delegation also numbered senior members of the Magaddino-run Family from Buffalo, as well as Lucky Luciano, who was living in exile in Naples after being expelled from the US in 1946. The most important Sicilian presence was the head of the Family in Castellammare del Golfo, a Magaddino like Joe Bananas’ relatives in Buffalo. The others also had strong transatlantic ties.

Some have suggested that Buscetta was there too. He flatly—and therefore suspiciously—denied that the meeting ever took place. Whether or not he was there, the names of those who certainly did attend give a pretty clear idea of what kind of meeting it was: the gathering in the Hotel des Palmes reforged a link between the most American of the Sicilian
cosche
with the most Sicilian of the American Families. In other words, this was not a conference between
the
American mafia and
the
Sicilian mafia as such. It was a business convention rather than a diplomatic summit. And drugs were the business on the agenda.

The Sicilian mafia’s involvement in the US drug trade was not a novelty in 1957. Morphine was already being smuggled through Palermo, in cases of oranges and lemons, back in the 1920s. Nick Gentile mentions how drugs would be hidden in shipments of cheese, oil, anchovies, and other Sicilian products. New York boss Joe Profaci’s Mamma Mia Importing Company was one of many commercial fronts for narcotics trafficking. But the pattern of arrests and drug seizures in the years after Joe Bananas’ holiday in Sicily show a marked increase in Sicilian involvement, and much closer cooperation between the two shores of the criminal Atlantic; the effects of the decisions taken among the red carpets and gilt-framed mirrors of the Hotel des Palmes are measurable. As a US attorney would later remark, everyone at the meeting was a ‘narcotics track star’. Heroin was to be the new transatlantic sport for men of honour.

*   *   *

There was one invitee at the Hotel des Palmes who stuck out like a toad in a tutu. It was Giuseppe Genco Russo—the ‘Gina Lollobrigida’ who had once voided his bowels in front of a young and incredulous Tommaso Buscetta. By the time of the Hotel des Palmes meeting, Genco Russo had succeded Don Calò Vizzini as the authority in central Sicily and now enjoyed the undeserved reputation of being the ‘boss of bosses’ of the whole Sicilian mafia. At the time, as Buscetta makes clear, there was no such post—and even if there had been, it would not have been occupied by a man of honour from isolated Mussomeli. Genco Russo was probably at the Hotel des Palmes only because one of the American mafiosi present was a relative. Genco Russo did not have the power in Palermo, let alone in New York, to contribute much to the discussion at the Hotel des Palmes. But from this semidetached perspective he did manage to pinpoint the political problem that came in a package with Joe Bananas’ business propositions. He was overheard in the lobby croaking, ‘Quannu ci sunu troppi cani sopra un ossu, beato chiddu chi pò stari arrassu’—‘When there are too many dogs going after one bone, it’s best to stay out of the way.’ In layman’s terms, access to the North American heroin market on the scale envisaged by Joe Bananas was bound to trigger rivalries.

It was in order to manage these business rivalries that the Commission was created. Although Tommaso Buscetta keeps an implausible silence on the matter of narcotics, he goes into detail about how the idea for a Commission evolved. He explains that, after the fall of Fascism and before 1957, communications within Cosa Nostra in Sicily were intense but compartmentalized. Small groups of particularly influential men of honour from different Families would meet to discuss things in their usual telegraphic, allusive way; decisions would only evolve slowly, after long rounds of consultation.

The decision to create the Commission evolved in just this roundabout fashion. It was at the lunch at the Spanò restaurant that Buscetta first heard Joe Bananas suggest the creation of a Commission to the three or four Sicilian men of honour sitting immediately around him; he probably aired the idea to many others during his stay. Everyone seemed to like it. Once a consensus was reached in the habitual way, Buscetta himself undertook to turn Bonanno’s suggestion into a working reality. Helping him were two young mafiosi who would play a crucial role in the coming history of Cosa Nostra: Gaetano ‘Tano’ Badalamenti, the underboss of Cinisi—where the
cosca
was closely linked to the Detroit Family; and Salvatore ‘Little Bird’ Greco—so called because of his small, delicate frame. ‘Little Bird’ was one of the Ciaculli Grecos who had survived the war of 1946–7. All three were to become major narcotics dealers.

This three-man constitutional working party—Buscetta, Badalamenti, and ‘Little Bird’ Greco—set the new ground rules for Cosa Nostra. Each province of Sicily was to have its own Commission. (It was not until 1975 that a Region or Interprovincial Commission would be created for the whole island.) In the province of Palermo, there were too many Families—around fifty—to make it feasible to have a consultative body in which all of them were represented. Thus there would be an intermediate level, the
mandamento
(district), combining three neighbouring families; together the three families would choose a single representative from their
mandamento
who would take a seat on the Commission. To avoid too much power being concentrated in the hands of a few people, it was forbidden for anyone to combine the roles of capo of their Family and representative on the Commission. And the Commission’s crucial function would be to make rulings on the murders of men of honour.