King of the Godfathers: "Big Joey" Massino and the Fall of the Bonanno Crime Family (5 page)

The Gallo gang engineered a bold kidnapping of five key leaders of the Profaci family and had also targeted Joe Profaci himself, although he escaped. Salerno said the kidnappings were never reported to police, although informants kept Brooklyn detectives up to date. The hostages were held for two weeks as Commission emissaries tried to broker a settlement. Joey Gallo, the hothead, didn’t want to negotiate but was ordered to take a trip to California by his older brother Larry, a move that led to a release of the hostages.

In early 1962, the Commission met to deal with the Profaci-Gallo dispute and it was Bonanno who convinced the members to allow Profaci to remain as head of the family. There had been a push by Gambino and Lucchese to get Profaci to retire. But Bonanno said the families had to trust each other to take care of their internal problems. A truce lasted for about six months, but Salerno said he and his fellow investigators discovered that Profaci was quietly working to strike back at the Gallos. After Larry Gallo escaped a strangulation attempt at the Sahara Lounge on Utica Avenue in Brooklyn, a full-fledged war broke out, unlike anything seen since the days of Masseria and Maranzano in the 1930s. The Gallo brothers went to the mattresses, barricading themselves in two apartments on President Street in Brooklyn, armed to the teeth with rifles and shotguns. In his telling of the Gallo War, Salerno counted no fewer than fourteen attempted assassinations and killings involving Profaci and Gallo loyalists. The war continued even after Profaci died in June 1962.

With the death of Profaci, his underboss and brother-in-law Joseph Magliocco tried to get the Commission to ratify him as the new boss. He had the support of Bonanno, who no doubt saw a continuation of the alliance Bonanno had with the late Profaci. The Commission, however, denied Magliocco approval. Bonanno chalked that up to the fact that the Gallos had support on the Commission from the Gambino-Lucchese faction. Still, Magliocco persisted and intrigue continued.

Both Joseph and son Bill Bonanno, in their separate accounts of Magliocco’s struggle for power, believe this was a significant episode in the Bonanno family’s growing disillusionment with the New York mob scene. Joseph Bonanno said that his son Bill, at a time when he was seeking guidance about his marital problems, stayed briefly with Magliocco, his wife’s uncle. The Magliocco estate was a walled compound on Long Island that at this time in 1963 was heavily fortified and guarded, much the way Vito Corleone’s home was depicted in the
Godfather.

In a classic mob maneuver, Joseph Bonanno related that Magliocco appeared to have planted his own spy, a mobster close to Gambino and Lucchese. According to the elder Bonanno, both Magliocco and Bill Bonanno met this spy at a Long Island railroad station one particular day.

“Magliocco and the man briefly exchanged a few words,” Bonanno recalled. “Magliocco used this man to keep tabs on his enemies and to let him know what Gambino and Lucchese were saying about him.”

Sixteen years after his father’s account of that brief encounter, Bill Bonanno related a somewhat different, more sinister version of that day at the Brentwood railroad station. The man who got off the train and spoke with Magliocco was Sally Musacio, a relative by marriage to the aging Magliocco. According to Bill Bonanno, Magliocco asked, “Is everything set?” When Musacio answered yes, Magliocco said, “Okay, start.”

According to Bill Bonanno’s account, that brief exchange was a command by Magliocco that a mob war was to start, with Lucchese, Gambino, and Maggadino being the targets. But a young captain in Magliocco’s crew named Joseph Colombo tipped off Lucchese and Gambino about what Magliocco—and the Bonannos—planned. To undo the political damage, Bill Bonanno met Lucchese at his home in Long Beach, Long Island, and explained that it was sheer coincidence that he was present in Magliocco’s company. The wily Lucchese didn’t buy the explanation.

Shortly after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in November 1963, Joseph Magliocco died without ever being officially recognized by the Commission as boss of the old Profaci family. As his reward for ratting out Magliocco and the Bonannos, Joseph Colombo was blessed by the Commission with leadership of the family. But while the likelihood of serious mob warfare had been averted, the Bonanno family continued to be the object of scorn by the other New York bosses. According to Joseph Bonanno, his cousin from Buffalo, Stefano Maggadino, was leading the opposition.

Portrayed as an insecure man in the face of the elder Bonanno’s business ventures in Canada, Maggadino saw his cousin as a threatening interloper into his territory of Toronto. Joseph Bonanno, who had been expelled from Canada in a legal dustup with authorities there, insisted he had no such designs, but his relationship with his cousin continued to sour. Things did not improve when Bonanno installed his son Bill as consiglieri, a move that angered older family captains such as Gaspar DiGregorio.

For years, Joseph Bonanno had been growing increasingly disillusioned with the mob life. He felt that the old Sicilian traditions of his kind of men of honor were on the wane. He was spending more time outside of New York, mostly in Arizona. A man of intelligence, Bonanno had a curiosity about many things and felt comfortable talking about any number of subjects. But he was also arrogant and condescending, seeing old friends and relatives such as Maggadino as intellectual inferiors. Bonanno also came to view the Commission, which was firmly in the hands of the Lucchese-Gambino alliance, as illegitimate and meddling in his own family affairs. So in 1964 when Maggadino had three Commission emissaries summon Bonanno to a meeting to hear grievances against him, the elder Bonanno refused to show up.

The flouting by Bonanno of the Commission’s demand for a meeting was a cardinal sin. The severity of the repercussions were noted by Sam “the Plumber” DeCavalcante, the Mafia boss of New Jersey. Though he didn’t know it, DeCavalcante’s office in Kenilworth, New Jersey, had been bugged by the FBI for a four-year period between 1961 to 1965. DeCavalcante was picked up on the recordings telling associates just how poisoned Bonanno’s relationship with the Commission had become. It seemed to DeCavalcante that Bonanno had been the source of the problem. Among Bonanno’s sins, DeCavalcante said were his attempts to muscle in on other families and his elevating his son Bill to the role of consiglieri. But it was Bonanno’s ignoring of the Commission request for his presence at a meeting that did him in, DeCavalcante claimed.

“The Commission doesn’t recognize Joseph Bonanno as the Boss anymore,” DeCavalcante told his friend Joe Zicarelli, a Bonanno crime family member who lived in New Jersey. “They [the Commission] can’t understand why this guy is ducking them.”

DeCavalcante told an incredulous Zicarelli that neither Bonanno, nor his son Bill, would be recognized as leaders of the crime family. That rang ominous for Zicarelli, who suggested both men might be in danger. However, DeCavalcante said Bonanno wasn’t in any danger unless he made any tricky moves.

Joseph Bonanno’s challenge to the Commission and Maggadino set the stage for one of the most bizarre episodes in American Mafia history. On October 20, 1964, the day before Bonanno was to appear before a federal grand jury in Manhattan probing him on a possible conspiracy charge, he was accosted by two men on Park Avenue near Thirty-sixth Street in Manhattan.

“Come on Joe, my boss wants you,” one of the burly men said as they hustled Bonanno into a waiting car.

The grab took place around midnight outside the luxury apartment building of Bonanno’s attorney, William Maloney. Maloney tried to chase after the intruders, but one of them fired a single shot from a handgun at Maloney’s feet, sending him scurrying for protection inside the lobby of his building. Bonanno was bundled into a car that sped off toward Lexington Avenue.

The New York newspapers went into a spasm of sensational stories about Bonanno’s abduction and for months stories appeared, fed by police sources, that Bonanno had been spotted in Europe, was hiding in Arizona, or was secretly in the protective custody of the federal government. There was plenty of speculation that Bonanno had staged his own kidnapping to avoid having to testify before the grand jury. Some news headlines had Bonanno written off as dead. DeCavalcante held to the theory that Bonanno staged his own disappearance and a month after the incident FBI recordings show him saying as much to his own underboss.

“He pulled that off himself,” DeCavalcante said. “It was his own men. We figure it was his kid and Vito.”

For sixteen months Joseph Bonanno was missing, at least in the eyes of police and federal investigators who couldn’t find him. What happened? The only account of what happened to Bonanno was the one he provided in his autobiography. He recounted that his abductors were men he knew, both relatives of Maggadino. Crossing the George Washington Bridge, the car went over the Hudson River and traveled for several hours over the rain-slicked roads. The next morning at a farmhouse in the woods “somewhere in upstate New York,” he was told by his captors to make himself comfortable and wait.

“In the afternoon, I heard a car pull up to the farmhouse. This was it. My nemesis had arrived. I was summoned to the main room of the house,” Bonanno recounted. “Stefan Maggadino tromped in—an old spry and portly man with ruddy cheeks and an amiable smile.”

According to Bonanno, his cousin was alternately sardonic, angry, solicitous, concerned, and beseeching in what were weeks and weeks of conversations about their relationship and the fact that Maggadino suspected that his New York City relative had designs on his territory upstate. But more important for Bonanno, the talks revealed that Maggadino had a deep-seated envy of his cousin and feelings of insecurity and inferiority.

Bonanno later speculated about whether Maggadino had acted with the consent of Gambino and Lucchese, or the entire Commission. He never stated whether he had any answer about what support his cousin had for the kidnapping. After a few weeks, Bonanno said he was driven by the same two men who abducted him to El Paso, Texas, where he asked to be let out of the car.

How true is Bonanno’s account? No one knows, but it is likely that Bonanno staged his own kidnapping. If the snatch was real, they would have killed him. Years after Bonanno’s autobiography was published with the account of his disappearance, Bill Bonanno recounted receiving a cryptic telephone call from an unidentified man about two months after the Park Avenue kidnapping. The call was made to a public telephone Bill Bonanno said he and his father had arranged years earlier to use if either of them ran into trouble. In essence, the caller told Bonanno’s son that the Mafia boss was okay and to “just sit tight.” His father, the younger Bonanno was told, would see him in a few days.

As far as can be determined, Joseph Bonanno remained out of sight of law enforcement and his son for approximately another seventeen months. Then, on May 17, 1966, after being dropped off by a friend at Foley Square in lower Manhattan and in the company of his new attorney, Albert Kreiger, Joseph Bonanno walked into the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. Taking a side entrance to avoid being spotted, Bonanno walked into a third-floor courtroom and surrendered himself to the judge on duty. Since federal prosecutors had been notified by Kreiger, federal marshals placed Bonanno under arrest.

In the months that followed his dramatic surrender, Bonanno would have to deal with a trial on charges he willfully failed to appear before a federal grand jury. But it was quite clear that Bonanno was finished as a key New York Mafia boss. He had no backing on the Commission and his arrogant attempt to have his son step in as leader and the snubs of the other bosses destroyed his ability to lead. He made no secret in relaying a message to the Commission that everything stemmed from problems he had with Maggadino. With a gun held to his head by the Commission, Bonanno then haltingly moved into a forced retirement. He was lucky to get away with his life.

This strange period of strife between Bonanno and Maggadino led to the final distancing of Bonanno from playing any active role in what he called “our tradition.” Bonanno’s continued absence also brought on leadership instability within the crime family that saw various men attempt to assume the role of boss. Backed by Maggadino, one of Bonanno’s captains, Gaspar DiGregorio, made a brief pretense as boss and was able to profit from the defections of some crime family members and associates who didn’t want to be frozen out of rackets by being loyal to the Bonannos.

As a tool of Maggadino, DiGregorio tried to set up Bill Bonanno for assassination in January 1966 in what became known as the Troutman Street shootout in Brooklyn. The younger Bonanno escaped unscathed. An aspiring mob gunman named Frank Mari was later credited with firing some of the dozens of shots that never found a target. Ultimately, DiGregorio lost face because of the botched hit and suffered a heart attack; his role as factional leader was taken over by Paul Sciacca, a garment manufacturer who had been a Bonanno consiglieri years earlier. Sciacca, while not considered a powerful leader, was nevertheless acceptable to Maggadino and his allies on the Commission, namely Gambino, Lucchese, and Colombo, who by then was firmly set as leader of the old Profaci family.

Though considered by the Commission to be boss of the Bonanno family, Sciacca was really just the leader of a number of factions fighting for power in the clan. Out of a crime family believed in 1966 to number 400 members, Bonanno loyalists were estimated to have comprised about half that. DeCavalcante was recorded on one FBI tape saying that as soon as the Commission voted Bonanno out as boss in 1964 at least sixty members had already defected. Though he was tapped by his father to be among a group of three or four trusted aides to watch after crime family affairs, Bill Bonanno was distracted by his own legal problems and concerns about the safety of his wife and children. The Troutman Street shootout had also shown that Bill was in personal danger. Because Bill had to be absent quite often from New York during this period, it fell to Natale Evola, who had been an usher at his father’s wedding, to steer those loyal to Bonanno.