Inside The Bonanno Crime Family
NY Daily News Archive via Getty ImagesJoe Bonanno was once the youngest Mafia boss in America.
When the Five Families were first recognized, what’s now the Bonanno family was known as the Maranzano family. After Salvatore Maranzano was murdered in 1931, Lucky Luciano awarded leadership of Maranzano’s organization to Joseph Bonanno, the family’s namesake boss.
Joseph Bonanno’s father, Salvatore, and his brothers were involved in organized crime in Sicily and had close ties to Stefano Magaddino, who immigrated to New York in 1902 and became a member of the Castellammarese clan. Bonanno’s family also moved to the United States in 1908 when Bonanno was three years old. There, Salvatore continued his criminal activity, and he and Magaddino teamed up to become some of the most powerful New York Mafia mobsters of the time. However, he returned to Italy in 1911, and Magaddino fled to Buffalo, New York, a decade later when his deadly crimes started catching up with him. With the two men out of the way, Nicolo “Cola” Schirò took control of the Castellammarese clan.
Public DomainStefano “The Undertaker” Magaddino, the head of the Buffalo Mafia.
Once the Castellammarese War broke out in 1930, Salvatore Maranzano took over the family. Given how the conflict turned out, it was good to be on Maranzano’s side. Joseph Bonanno had grown to some prominence within Maranzano’s ranks alongside fellow gangster Carmine Galante.
When Maranzano established the Five Families, he installed Luciano, Vincent Mangano, Tommy Gagliano, and Joseph Profaci as the heads of their respective families while also giving himself the title of capo di tutti i capi. Of course, that move would eventually earn him the ire of Luciano, leading to Maranzano’s murder and the appointment of Joseph Bonanno as the new head of his family.
Remarkably, Bonanno was just 26 years old when he became boss, making him the youngest Mafia leader in the U.S. Despite his tender age, Bonanno maintained the Old World traditions and largely kept his family limited to Sicilians from Castellammarese del Golfo, his hometown. The result was a tight-knit family that went on to become one of the most powerful in the country. Bonanno himself was a key member of the Commission, partly due to his close relationship with fellow New York Mafia boss Joe Profaci.
Bonanno and Profaci even secured an alliance in the same way Gambino and Lucchese’s families had when Bonanno’s son married Profaci’s niece. This strong alliance essentially kept some sense of order in the Commission, as all of the Five Families tried to limit their ambitions to take over each other’s rackets in order to avoid more conflict. That changed, however, when Profaci died in 1962.
Suddenly without his strong ally and facing the combined threat of Gambino and Lucchese, Bonanno began making plans to assassinate other members of the Commission who he felt posed a threat to him. This included Gambino, Lucchese, Buffalo Mafia boss Stefano “The Undertaker” Magaddino, and Frank DeSimone, the leader of the Los Angeles Mafia. He found a new ally in Profaci’s successor, Joseph Magliocco.
Unfortunately, Magliocco turned to Joseph Colombo to carry out the hits on Lucchese and Gambino, and Colombo opportunistically turned on him and informed his targets of the plan. Realizing that Bonanno was the likely mastermind behind the plans, the Commission summoned both Bonanno and Magliocco to a meeting. Bonanno, convinced he was going to be killed, fled to Canada.
Magliocco confessed to planning the hits, but his life was spared, likely due to his failing health. However, he was forced to step down. Colombo was awarded leadership of Magliocco’s family for informing Gambino and Lucchese of the hit.
Bonanno was eventually forced to come back to New York due to mounting legal troubles. He returned to Manhattan in October 1964, more than a year after he left, to testify before a grand jury, but he never made it to the courthouse — he was allegedly abducted by members of Magaddino’s crew, as he would later claim when he reemerged in 1966. His absence left his family in disarray. His son, Salvatore “Bill” Bonanno, argued that he should take over the family while his father was gone, though not everyone agreed with this decision.
The main opponent of Bill’s takeover was Gaspar DiGregorio, who put in his own claim for the title of boss, starting what became known as the “Banana War,” based on Bonanno’s nickname, “Joe Bananas.” More than a dozen men in the New York Mafia died during this civil war, and the fighting only came to an end in 1968 when Bonanno suffered a heart attack and was granted sanctioned retirement by the Commission. Bill resigned alongside his father, and the two left New York for Arizona.
In their place, the Commission installed Paul Sciacca as boss of the Bonanno family, but he didn’t hold the position for long. After him, Natale “Joe Diamonds” Evola took over, but his reign only lasted two years, ending when he died in 1973. He was succeeded by Philip “Rusty” Rastelli, who was then convicted of extortion in 1976 and sentenced to 10 years in prison.
Public DomainJoseph Pistone, the FBI agent who infiltrated the Bonanno family under the alias “Donnie Brasco.”
That same year, the Bonanno crime family was infiltrated by undercover FBI agent Joseph Pistone, who worked under the alias Donnie Brasco. Pistone’s five-year operation would eventually lead to the conviction of more than 100 mobsters. As punishment for allowing the infiltration to occur, the Bonanno family became the first of the Five Families to be expelled from the Commission.
Meanwhile, after Rastelli was sent to prison, Carmine Galante became the de facto boss of the Bonanno family. The “Heroin Don” quickly set out to take over narcotics operations across New York. Shocked by this blatant power grab, the bosses of the other Five Families decided Galante had to go. Rastelli and Bonanno family member Joseph Massino went to the Commission for permission to kill Galante — and the Commission approved the hit. Galante was gunned down at a restaurant on July 12, 1979.
Mary DiBiase/NY Daily News Archive/Getty ImagesCarmine Galante’s dead body with a cigar still in his mouth.
In 1991, the Bonanno family regained their seat on the Commission when Massino was appointed boss following Rastelli’s death. Massino took an isolationist approach to running the family, shutting down social clubs he felt were too easy to bug and refusing to run joint rackets with other families in the New York Mafia. Ironically, Massino himself would become the first boss of one of the Five Families to become a government informant. In 2004, facing the death penalty after he was convicted of seven murders, Massino agreed to work with the authorities.
As The New York Times reported in 2011, when asked what powers he had, Massino answered, “Murders, responsibility for the family, made captains, break captains.” He also described how Mafiosos avoided getting caught by the authorities, saying, “You never talk in a club, you never talk in a car, you never talk on a cellphone, you never talk on a phone, you never talk in your house.”
FBIIn the early 2000s, Joe Massino was known as “the Last Don” because he was the only New York Mafia boss who wasn’t behind bars at the time.
After providing his testimony, Massino became part of the Witness Protection Program.
Following Massino’s arrest, Vincent Basciano became the Bonanno family boss, though he was also arrested that same year, and a series of acting bosses ruled the group in his stead. The group’s leadership remained rocky until Michael Mancuso was named the new official boss of the Bonanno family in 2013. Though he’s been in prison for the majority of his reign, he holds the title to this day.
