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

missed seeing the big story. But Joseph Bonanno did at least initially. He was in Sicily when Anastasia was killed and only learned of it when he returned to New York. For a startled Bonanno, the killing of one of his conservative allies on the Commission was a bad sign. “The Pax Bonanno, that I was so proud of having forged was on the verge of disintegration,” he said years later.
    Immediately after Anastasia’s death, the American Mafia leaders called a massive summit conference in the town of Apalachin in upstate New York, which had been the site of a Commission meeting in 1956. The setting was the home of Joseph Barbara, a mafioso with ties to local politicians and police. Bonanno was opposed to the 1957 meeting, thinking it was ill advised and the location not the safest place for mob bosses to gather. Evidently, Barbara reported having trouble with greedy local law enforcement officials.
    Nevertheless, the meeting was held on November 14, 1957, and on the agenda were three items: the ratification of Gambino’s takeover of the Anastasia family; ways to deal with the new, tough federal narcotics control law that took effect in 1956; and aggressive unionization of garment factories tied to the mob in eastern Pennsylvania.
    The meeting turned into a disaster for the mafiosi who attended. Local police noticed the traffic going into Barbara’s property and set up a roadblock, checked the cars, and noted the names on the driver licenses. Bosses like Vito Genovese, Carlo Gambino, Joseph Profaci, and Joseph Magliocco were noted by police. Bonanno, who had tarried in nearby Endicott with his cousin, Stefano Maggadino, said he heard about the roadblocks on the news reports and avoided the meeting altogether. In total, about sixty members of various Mafia families were listed by police as being at Barbara’s home and while no one was immediately arrested, investigation of the meeting spawned further investigations that led to arrests for years to come.
    While Mafia politics can sometimes move with the speed of a bullet, in the case of Anastasia’s murder, the full ramifications would not be felt for years. Things moved in convoluted fashion and ultimately the changes in two leadership positions in the space of a few months meant that the so-called liberal wing of the Commission, composed of Thomas Lucchese, Vito Genovese, and Carlo Gambino, who took over from Anastasia, was equal in number to the more conservative men of tradition represented by Joseph Bonanno, Joseph Profaci, and Stefano Maggadino, from Buffalo.
    For Bonanno, the new alignment in the Commission was a sign that the old traditions of the Mafia were changing in ways that he found distasteful. While the Castellammarese, who shaped the American Mafia since the 1930s, were bound by Sicilian traditions of loyalty and honor, others seemed seduced by the constant chase for money. The descent into narcotics was the clearest indication that the production of capital through risky enterprises was viewed by some as worth the danger. The publicity and law enforcement interest in the Mafia after Apalachin also painted what Bonanno saw as an honorable way of life as nothing more than a conspiracy bent on destroying America.
    Bonanno also believed that the Mafia was hurting its own image with the public assassinations like that of Anastasia. The year 1961 was a case in point. Upstarts in Profaci’s family, a group of young Turks led by the Gallo brothers—Joey, Albert, and Larry—revolted against the boss. The Gallos were really nothing more than mob toughs who went around strong-arming businesses to take their jukeboxes. Investigators even determined that the Gallos had set up their own union of jukebox repairmen as part of the racket. But as former New York Police Department (NYPD) detective Ralph Salerno recounted, the publicity the brothers received from a 1957 U.S. Senate hearing chaired by Senator John McClellan gave them an inflated sense of