The Sixth Family (23 page)
Authors: Lee Lamothe
These attitudes helped the emerging expatriate Mafia immeasurably. Strangely, even when information was shared between national police forces, it was not always given the attention it merited. The recordings secretly made at the Reggio Bar during the 1970s, for instance, which had captured Paolo Violi in secret conversation with senior mafiosi, were shared by Canadian authorities with Italy and the United States. By 1976, transcripts of the most relevant conversations had been given to Italy’s Ministry of the Interior, where they were slowly passed through government offices until they reached the courts in Agrigento, where Carmelo Cuffaro, a Sicilian mobster caught on the tapes, was on trial. Incredibly, the transcripts were simply filed away and forgotten. It was not until 1984, according to Giovanni Falcone, the famed anti-Mafia magistrate who would later be assassinated for his efforts, that a junior Agrigento magistrate stumbled across them and, realizing their significance, passed them on to Falcone’s office. In the right hands they proved explosive, helping to bring dozens of accused men to court almost a decade later in one of Italy’s famed maxi-trials. Law enforcement was finally catching on to the value of cooperation.
It started with unofficial, back-channel interaction between individual officers in one police agency talking directly to a contact they had made in another. An FBI agent would talk to an RCMP officer; an RCMP officer would talk to an officer in Rome or Milan. An investigator in Palermo would call an agent in the DEA, and everyone would feed off the street knowledge and expertise of a small cluster of New York City police officers who had been tracking organized crime figures for decades. The unofficial channels expanded as more cases netted more crooks in more countries. The value of these interactions became clear to the young FBI agents starting to probe the influx of Sicilian gangsters into Brooklyn and the movement of money out of the country.
It seemed a simple question, put to the Italian authorities by two inquisitive agents in the FBI’s Brooklyn-Queens office. All Special Agents Charles Rooney and Carmine Russo wanted to know was: Did the name Giuseppe Bono mean anything to Italian police? The question hit like a hurricane. When Italy’s anti-Mafia investigators heard that Bono had turned up in New York, they were astounded. They knew him well, as a significant Mafia boss who had disappeared when their investigations of him started to gain traction. He was considered a fugitive, whereabouts unknown, although police suspected he was hiding out in Venezuela with Nick Rizzuto and the Caruana-Cuntreras. Bono had worked with Montreal’s mobsters for decades, at least since 1964, according to Tomasso Buscetta, the Sicilian
mafioso
.
mafioso
.
The FBI then realized it needed to pay close attention to the Zips. In Italy, the probe into the Bono organization was rejuvenated. In both countries, the investigations—and criminal indictments—would prove to be expansive. But that was a long way off.
The FBI discreetly started to share the Bono wedding pictures with the DEA, New York City police, the RCMP and several Italian agencies. For those officers in the loop, it became something of a parlor game—pin the name on the mobster. The FBI wanted to know the identity of each and every attendee at Bono’s wedding. For years, the wedding photos were shown to almost every informant who agreed to cooperate with authorities, each being asked to put a name to as many people as he could.
The list that slowly emerged was incredible. Almost every adult male present at Bono’s wedding was involved in organized crime and the drug trade. Bono, it seemed, opened up his Rolodex of international drug contacts and sent each of them one of his elegant invitations. Perhaps even he was surprised by the number of positive responses. It suggests the interest they all had in maintaining a relationship with him and his colleagues. The Bono wedding photographs became an illustrated guide to the world’s Mafia-run drug trade.
“Anyone who was anyone in Italian organized crime was invited,” said Tom Tripodi, the former U.S. drug agent.
The Sixth Family was there, of course. Featured in several of the photographs was a tall man with dark hair and long face who was among the most tastefully dressed of all the guests; in a black two-piece suit, crisp white shirt and soft silver tie dotted with black was Vito Rizzuto.
In one photograph, Rizzuto stands smartly with the smiling bride, who is splaying her fingers over his arm to show off her new diamond ring and thick gold band. With her other hand, she clutches the hand of Vito’s wife, Giovanna, who in turn has her free hand draped over the shoulder of Giuseppe Bono. The portrait exudes an air of warmth and familiarity, as they stand in front of a trellis draped with fresh-cut Shasta daisies. Another photograph features a smiling groom, as if he is just at the end of enjoying a good joke, standing with Vito and his lieutenant, Joe LoPresti, a towering man who is one of the few in the room taller than Vito.
A third photograph shows Vito and his wife standing with the guests assigned to their dinner table. Standing with them is LoPresti and his wife, Rosa Lumia. Seated at the same table was Gerlando Sciascia with his second wife, Mary Elizabeth Macfadyen. Sciascia was also close to the groom, so much so that Bono had asked Sciascia’s daughter to be a flower girl in his wedding party. In Vito’s entourage was Domenico Arcuri, the Montrealer who had hosted the final sit-down between Nick Rizzuto and Violi. Another invitee from Canada was Michel Pozza, a money man who worked closely with the Cotroni organization in Montreal but quickly moved to support the Rizzutos once he saw how things were going in the power struggle. The presence of the Rizzutos was seen as evidence that Vic Cotroni was not making the same mistake as Violi and getting in the Rizzutos’ way. He was giving the Sixth Family free reign in Montreal.
“This event supports the theory that Nick Rizzuto was now directing operations for the Montreal Sicilian Faction, and that he was acting independently from the hierarchy of the Cotroni group,” an FBI report says.
Investigators studying the photographs—in particular, the group pictures of the guests at their designated dinner tables—noticed something else. A curious pattern was emerging. Seating arrangements are not an inconsequential matter at any wedding, and deciding where each mobster was to sit, and with whom, must have been a narcotics trafficker’s worst social nightmare. Eventually, the invitees seem to have been seated according to their underworld faction.
One photo shows a young Vincent Basciano at a table with Philly Lucky, Big Trinny, Frank Lino, Bruno Indelicato, his uncle Joseph “J.B.” Indelicato and Joseph Benanti. Basciano, who was nicknamed “Vinny Gorgeous,” would be named acting boss of the Bonanno Family in later and more trying times. This group would be described in court as the early distribution arm of the Sixth Family’s heroin in New York. At another table stands a smiling Sal Catalano with Santo Giordano.
The table of the leading Zips in New York was immediately beside Vito’s table, suggesting their familiarity and friendliness. A suave-as-always Cesare Bonventre, wearing his tinted aviator glasses, and one of the few men in a tuxedo, lounges at a table with his wife, Theresa, Baldo Amato and Amato’s shapely wife. Giovanni Ligammari was also present, beaming a wide smile, wearing a light gray suit and red tie at a table of mostly older men and their wives.
Seating the Zips of New York next to the Sicilian mobsters from Canada was a courteous move. Members from each group knew each other well. The same year as the wedding, Bonventre and Amato made such a mad dash from New York to Canada that New York State troopers stopped them at least three times on the same day for speeding. Each time they were driving at more than 100 miles an hour. For the early fines, the pair pulled out an enormous wad of cash and paid the fine on the spot in $100 bills. At the last stop, the trooper would not allow an on-the-spot settlement and took Bonventre’s license and issued a ticket he would have to settle in court. With Amato taking over the driving, they continued on their way. The business in Canada must have been urgent, indeed, as the pair then returned to deal with the traffic matter aboard a Canadian-registered private plane. It speaks to the unusual interaction and disposable income of the guests at Bono’s wedding.
“Bono had interested us for years,” Tripodi said. “A rising star in the Sicilian Mafia, he had been sent early in his career to Milan to oversee its interests in the banking center of Italy.” Bono’s diplomatic skills—and his warm relationship with the Sixth Family, as shown by his early meetings in Montreal—made him a good choice as the Sicilian Mafia’s emissary in New York. “Bono was the guy chosen to pull everything together. In effect, he acted as Palermo’s ambassador to the Italian crime groups in New York,” Tripodi said. News of Bono’s wedding was a wake-up call for agents probing organized crime and international drug traffickers.
“During this period it also became more apparent that within the Bonanno Family there had emerged a Sicilian faction, similar to the situation in Montreal,” an internal FBI report says about the Bono wedding. “The leader of the Bonanno Sicilian Faction, Salvatore Catalano, is heavily involved in heroin importation from Sicily. What is even more significant, however, is the fact that the Sicilian factions from Montreal and the Bonanno Family are criminally aligned. The leaders of both factions, Rizzuto in Montreal and Catalano in New York, are both documented heroin traffickers.
“There is strong evidence that individuals from these groups have met together on numerous occasions to discuss criminal activity,” the report continues. “Surveillance from Canada and the United States verify many of these meetings.” The meetings had been fast and furious and incredibly productive.
It was happy times for the mafiosi
,
a mood captured in the cheery photographs from Bono’s wedding. Appropriate for the start of a new decade, Bono’s 1980 wedding party marked a new era in the underworld. It was as if the wet and garrulous soiree was also a celebration of another achievement: a new heroin franchise had already been built and the men at Bono’s wedding at the Hotel Pierre were among its primary architects. The effort had been substantial. And sneaky. It took both police and rival criminal organizations by surprise when the seemingly unrelated events over a decade suddenly gelled into an unsurpassed global heroin enterprise. Much work had been done, though only a few men, even among the guests at Bono’s wedding, were truly aware of it all.
,
a mood captured in the cheery photographs from Bono’s wedding. Appropriate for the start of a new decade, Bono’s 1980 wedding party marked a new era in the underworld. It was as if the wet and garrulous soiree was also a celebration of another achievement: a new heroin franchise had already been built and the men at Bono’s wedding at the Hotel Pierre were among its primary architects. The effort had been substantial. And sneaky. It took both police and rival criminal organizations by surprise when the seemingly unrelated events over a decade suddenly gelled into an unsurpassed global heroin enterprise. Much work had been done, though only a few men, even among the guests at Bono’s wedding, were truly aware of it all.
The Sicilian Mafia had been busy in New York, Canada, Italy and South America. To get where they wanted to be, they needed people and product. Both had been making their way into Canada for transshipment to the United States.
CHAPTER 16
BUCKS COUNTY, PENNSYLVANIA, JANUARY 1973Tucked in the southeastern corner of Pennsylvania, Bucks County is best described in terms of its neighbors; sitting on the busy New York City-Washington corridor, it is bounded on the east by the Delaware River and Trenton, N.J., and by Philadelphia to the south. It is almost equidistant between New York City and Atlantic City. Such a place could not be immune from the mob.
It was here that a deliveryman stumbled across the body of a man lying face down in plain view behind an abandoned Red Barn Restaurant in Bristol Township, shortly before noon on January 5, 1973. His feet and legs rested awkwardly on the sidewalk and his six-foot, 190-pound body sprawled onto the first parking space. Until this discovery, the old brick building, which had been vacant for six months, had gained notoriety as a hangout for local teenagers. This, however, seemed far beyond anything mischievous kids would get into. The victim’s hands had been tied in front of him and he had been shot in the back with a .45-caliber pistol. Police found $21 in his pockets, a set of house keys and a letter from immigration officials.
The murdered man was identified as Stefano Sciarrino, a 27-year-old from Cinisi, Sicily. Police learned that Sciarrino had entered the United States in a time-honored way for illegal migrants with money: in April 1971 with a ticket from Italy to Mexico, he arrived at New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport on an Air France jet and, instead of changing planes, simply walked away into New York’s teeming streets. He had little contact with American authorities beyond his arrest later as an unregistered alien. Quickly bailed out of custody—he was only one of a hundred Sicilians picked up in the northeastern United States that year—Sciarrino had spent some time in the Bonanno Family’s Brooklyn turf before moving to Bucks County, where he took a job in a pizzeria.
Baffled police could uncover no immediate motive for the murder but a subsequent investigation led directly to the Montreal Mafia and the murky world of Sicilian immigrant smuggling.
It did not take long before police determined that Stefano Sciarrino was related to Lorenzo Sciarrino—known as “Enzo the Quarrelsome One” because of his legendary temper. Enzo Sciarrino had long been suspected of running an illegal immigrant smuggling operation, moving people out of Sicily, through Canada and into America. He had two types of customers: those with Sicilian Mafia links who were placed in key parts of the U.S. northeast, and “legitimate” illegal migrants—those who were emigrating in hopes of finding honest jobs. Most of his clients did not arrive in the way Stefano did. The preferred, and cheaper, route was to come through the unguarded border points and Native reserves along the U.S.-Canada border. Once in the United States, because of the poor cooperation and exchange of information between American and Italian authorities, some of Sicily’s most active organized crime figures were able to infiltrate the American marketplace, passing themselves off as legitimate businessmen and entrepreneurs.
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