Weak Leadership, FBI Mole Undermine the Bonannos

It was a dark January night in a quiet Brooklyn neighborhood. As Bill Bonanno left the house on Troutman Street, he kept one hand on his .38-caliber revolver.

The street was empty, desolate--”a petrified neighborhood in a city from another age,” he recalled years later. The silence was broken by an explosion of gunfire: shotgun blasts, machine-gun fire, pistol shots. Bonanno felt bullets whiz past.

When the shooting stopped--more than 200 rounds were fired--Bonanno emerged unscathed. But the January 1966 assassination attempt as he left a “peace talk” was the death knell for the Bonannos in the crime family that carried their name.

The so-called “Banana Wars” raged for the next two years, claiming more than a dozen lives from the family’s two warring factions. The murder of a veteran soldier by his own faction symbolized the family’s disarray.

When Joseph “Joe Bananas” Bonanno returned from a 17-month hiatus in May 1966, he found a damaged family. The loyal Bonanno faction numbered about 200, half its strength less than a decade earlier.

Joe Bonanno was weaker too. A third heart attack drove the 63-year-old boss into retirement in 1968. Bill Bonanno was subsequently jailed for credit card fraud; he eventually spent most of the next two decades behind bars.

After 40 years, the Bonannos were out of the “family” business. Finding a capable replacement for Joe Bonanno would prove virtually impossible.

After a pair of forgettable bosses, Carmine Galante took over in 1974. Galante, 64, was a notorious hit man whose criminal career began at age 11. He served as Joe Bonanno’s underboss in the early ‘60s until a drug-dealing conviction put him in prison for 12 years.

Galante dealt in fear rather than respect.

The new boss led a far different family than the one he left after his conviction. The old “family values” were gone, replaced by unchecked avarice.

The new attitude was summed up by Bonanno soldier Benjamin “Lefty Guns” Ruggiero:

“You can lie, you can cheat, you can steal, you can kill people--legitimately. You can do any . . . thing you want, and nobody can do anything about it.”

The Bonanno drug business was thriving, with a plan afoot to peddle Sicilian heroin through U.S. pizzerias. Bookmaking provided a steady income, as did delivery-truck hijackings.

The Bonannos were part of a lucrative arrangement that provided the Mafia with millions of dollars from concrete pouring on every major city project. There were even kickbacks from vendors at Little Italy’s annual San Gennaro festival.

But the overriding greed would soon divide the family. And so would the arrival of a small-time jewel thief with big-time aspirations: Donnie Brasco.

In March 1977, a Bonanno soldier was introduced to Brasco. Brasco clicked with the mob killer, and was soon accepted into a Bonanno crew. Bonanno veteran Ruggiero began schooling the new guy in the ways of La Cosa Nostra.

Lefty offered the wannabe two bits of advice: first, shave his facial hair--”Made guys don’t wear bushy mustaches.” Second, keep his mouth shut--”There’s agents everywhere.”

Brasco already knew. He was Joe Pistone, a veteran FBI man working undercover. Over the next five years, Brasco/Pistone became so tight with the Bonannos that an FBI surveillance squad--assuming he was just another mobster--snapped his photo as he strolled through Little Italy.

As Brasco ingratiated himself with the Mafia, his adopted mob family fell into turmoil. Galante was embroiled in a bloody war with the Genovese family over the drug trade, bringing unwanted media and law enforcement attention.

The solution, according to the other bosses: Goodbye, Galante.

On July 12, 1979, Galante ate lunch at a Brooklyn restaurant. Sitting in its backyard garden, he lit a post-meal cigar. His two bodyguards quietly disappeared, replaced by three masked gunmen.

Galante was shot dead, his cigar still clenched between his teeth. Phillip “Rusty” Rastelli, an inmate at the Lewisburg, Pa., penitentiary, was the new boss.

It was further evidence of the Bonannos’ troubled leadership. Rastelli was another reputed drug dealer, trying to rule from a prison cell 180 miles outside Brooklyn.

Rastelli’s ascension again divided the family, with two factions vying for control of its assets. A two-year internal bloodbath ensued, with the Rastelli faction winning.

It was a pyrrhic victory.

The war decimated family leadership; three top Bonanno captains were murdered inside a Brooklyn catering hall in 1981. As the war raged, Brasco was recruited for a hit on another mobster.

He wound up taking out more than one gangster. Brasco retired from the mob on July 26, 1981, and became a federal witness. His testimony in a dozen Mafia trials convicted more than 100 Mafiosi.

The discovery of Brasco’s true identity as FBI agent Pistone sparked another Bonanno bloodletting, with two of his associates murdered. A reported $500,000 contract was put out on Pistone, who was reunited with his wife and two daughters.

The threat of a hit proved baseless. The Bonannos, although adept at killing each other, never touched the FBI agent.

Among the city’s other mob families, the infiltrated Bonannos were now regarded with disdain. Their widespread involvement in the heroin trade led to the loss of their seat on the Commission, and they were booted from the concrete cabal.

The Gambino family, led by businessman “Big Paul” Castellano, was now regarded as the most powerful of New York’s five families.

The Bonannos were so dysfunctional, a senior organized crime prosecutor commented, that a typical family meeting was a collection of mobsters gathered “to sit around in a circle and shoot at each other.”

To top it off, the Bonannos were aging--and not gracefully. Rastelli turned 64 in 1982, a typical age in the family hierarchy. Finding new members of any quality was fast becoming a debilitating problem.

During his years as an honorary Bonanno, Pistone repeatedly heard made men moaning about the next generation of Mafiosi. The new guys were too greedy, they griped--too self-centered.

“They were concerned that the new members cared more about themselves than they did about the family or crew,” Pistone told a congressional hearing in 1988.

It was an accurate complaint. The new breed would eventually bring down one of the last old-time Bonanno bosses.

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NEXT WEEK: As family self-destructs, prosecutors foresee its end.