The Coffey Files by Jerry; Joseph; Schmetterer Coffey Read Free Book Online

Cesare Bonventre, a cousin of Bonanno, and Baldo Amato, one of the Bonanno family’s top earners. Both men had very close ties to the Sicilian Mafia. Although in the United States for many years, they still spoke in broken English with thick Italian accents.
    Also present for lunch were two of Galante’s closest associates, Leonardo Coppolla and Guiseppe Turano, owner of Joe and Mary’s. Coppolla was a major drug dealer. Except for Turano, none of these men had ever done an honest day’s work in their lives.
    In this group only Galante enjoyed public notoriety. The press mistakenly believed he was the godfather of the Bonanno family, thanks mainly to the fact that the real godfather, Phil Rastelli, had been constantly in and out of jail since taking over the reins from Joe Bonanno himself. He wisely allowed Galante to get the publicity and take the heat from the other families when he tried to expand his drug business against their wishes.
    Despite the fact that he had spent more than half of his sixty-eight years in prison, Galante made the most of his time on the outside. He was first arrested at age sixteen for stealing trinkets from a store counter. That sentence was suspended. When he was twenty he was charged with killing a police officer during a payroll robbery. Those charges were eventually dropped. Four months later he was caught fleeing the scene of a Brooklyn brewery robbery, and that time his luck ran out. He was sent to Sing Sing for twelve years. Behind the Big House walls he stayed in shape playing handball with other inmates who were under orders from Galante henchmen not to win the game. Carmine did not like to lose.
    In July of 1979 Galante had been out of the federal prison in Atlanta for three years after serving a fourteen-year term for drug conspiracy. The conviction grew out of his activities in Montreal, where he had established the Mafia in the early 1950s. In fact, Galante was somewhat of an international don, with hoodlums in Canada, France, and Italy following his orders. But because of his inclination to deal in drugs, he was never seriously considered to take the place of Joe Bonanno as don of the family.
    Galante was the most brazen of all the city’s capos. He spurned bodyguards, and his chauffeur, usually a job reserved for a loyal gunman, was his daughter Nina.
    He had called the luncheon meeting to discuss his plans for expanding the Bonanno family’s involvement in selling drugs on an international level. It was historically the Mafia’s strategy to contract out most of its drug dealing operations. The godfathers like Bonanno, who in 1979 had already retired to Arizona, leaving his operations in the hands of Phil Rastelli, liked to give the impression that they would not dirty their hands with narcotics profits.
    â€œThey winked at drug dealing,” Coffey says. “They wanted only their lowest-ranking soldiers involved in drug deals. Instead they allowed black organized crime gangs to deal in Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant, as long as they paid tribute to the Italian Mafia. So the upper-level mafiosi may not have been dealing directly, but they were raking in huge profits.”
    Galante, though, was bending the rules. He was personally setting up drug deals with Latin gangs. His own crew, the thieves and killers aligned with the Bonanno family that reported to him, was known to be running their own drug network. His greed regarding narcotics profits had finally put him in disfavor past the point of saving himself.
    With Joe Bonanno himself enjoying the benefits of an Arizona retirement, the family was being run by Rastelli, who, while Galante was digging into his meal at Joe and Mary’s, was taking his lunch at the Metropolitan Correction Center, the federal lockup adjacent to the Federal Court House in Manhattan. Rastelli was not only feeling the heat of the government at the time. He was also under pressure from the godfathers of the Gambino,