King of the Godfathers: "Big Joey" Massino and the Fall of the Bonanno Crime Family by Anthony M. DeStefano Read Free Book Online Page A

financial mob wizard Meyer Lansky, who owned a piece of the Hotel Nacional, and spent his days wandering the streets of old Havana, where he stayed in some flophouse hotel in 1924.
    The way Joseph Bonanno recounted the Havana trip it was nothing more than a nostalgic trip away from home of some “Ulysses,” as he likened himself, who had his fill of adventure in life. His son, Bill, in his 1999 autobiography, put a different spin on the Havana trip on which he accompanied his father. Bill Bonanno said that his father met up with not only Lansky but also New York Mafia bosses Albert Anastasia, Frank Costello, and Joseph Profaci. “We were there for pleasure, not business, but business came up,” the younger Bonanno said. Cuba’s dictator Fulgencio Batista met with the mobsters and tried to get them to somehow influence the Eisenhower administration to take a more active role against the insurgency led by Fidel Castro. According to Bill Bonanno, Castro figured the mafiosi had an interest in the island’s drug trade, aside from the millions made in the casinos.
    The conventional wisdom about the American Mafia’s stance on drugs has been that the bosses were against narcotics trafficking. But if it was a hands-off policy, it was riddled with holes like Swiss cheese. Bill Bonanno asserted that in 1947 in a clandestine Mafia Commission meeting on a yacht off Florida—and not in Havana as widely believed—the bosses argued about drugs. According to Bonanno, the “liberal” faction of the Commission, composed of Vito Genovese and Thomas Lucchese, wanted to get involved in heroin. The conservatives, led by Joseph Bonanno, thought it was a bad idea and prevailed on the Commission to pass a resolution prohibiting narcotics trafficking. The elder Bonanno, his son stated, believed drugs would destroy the families.
    Despite such prohibitions, a number of New York Mafia leaders began to push harder and allowed some of their men to get involved in narcotics. The same divisiveness over drugs also split the Sicilian Mafia. When Joseph Bonanno made a trip to Sicily in early fall of 1957—again part pleasure and part business—he learned that New York Mafia families were involved in the trafficking of heroin and its opium base, according to his son. Impossible, the elder Bonanno responded when told of the New York connection. “They are up to their asses in it,” an old friend explained. “They couldn’t care less about our glorious tradition.”
    The main violator of the Mafia drug ban was certainly Vito Genovese, who finally got Frank Costello out of the leadership role in their family by ordering an assassination attempt of his rival. The plot to kill Costello culminated in a shooting in May 1957 as the dapper Costello was returning to his apartment in Central Park West. The gunman has long been reputed to have been Vincent Gigante, whose bullet grazed Costello in the head but didn’t kill him. Getting the message, Costello retired as boss of Lucky Luciano’s old family. From then onward, Genovese pushed the narcotics connections, ultimately pushing so hard that he was arrested on narcotics charges by federal officials in 1958 and after his conviction was sent to prison where he died in 1969.
    It was very soon after the Costello assassination attempt that one of the other conservative bosses, Albert Anastasia, was targeted for death. The plotters were rival Vito Genovese, who conspired with Carlo Gambino, then a rising captain in Anastasia’s family. Gambino had already arranged the murder of Anastasia’s underboss Frank Scalise, the first step to seizing control of the family. The assassination of Anastasia as he sat in a barber’s chair at the Park Sheraton Hotel on October 25, 1957, became one of the legendary mob murders in New York.
    Anastasia’s murder was splashed on the front page of all of New York’s major daily newspapers—there were more than ten of them at the time—and Joseph Massino couldn’t have