Gangster Sonny

The first don of what was later called the Colombo crime family, Joe Profaci, came to power upon the conclusion of the Castellammarese War. Profaci thus served with Lucky Luciano, Vince Mangano, Joe Bonanno and Tom Gagliano as head of one of the five Mafia families in New York that comprised the nucleus of the Mafia force in the national crime syndicate.

Profaci ruled for more than three decades, an amazing feat since he was regarded by other mafiosi and many of his own soldiers as the worst don in New York. Profaci’s failing - greed. Alone among the dons Profaci levied a tax of $25 a month from each member, allegedly to build a slush fund to take care of mobsters who got arrested. Of course, he pocketed the funds. And he constantly demanded tribute. Joe Valachi later quoted Carmine “the Snake” Persico as complaining: “Even if we go hijack some trucks he taxes us. I paid up to $1,800.”

Eventually Profaci was faced with revolt. A number of his soldiers, including the kill-crazy Gallo brothers, Persico and Jiggs Forlano (a capo and perhaps the biggest loan shark in New York), were rumbling for his demise. Ever cunning, Profaci was not about to cave in to all the rebels and so he divided them, promising rewards that brought Persico, Rotlano and others back into the fold, while leaving the Gallos out in the cold. (Persico and Forlano became the staunchest battlers against the Gallos for Profaci.)
Profaci died in 1962 and the power passed to his underboss Joe Magliocco. Like Profaci, Magliocco was upset the way two of the other city crime bosses, Carlo Gambino and Tommy Lucchese, had been interfering in Profaci affairs. Now they tried to undercut Magliocco. Gambino clearly had designs to dominate the Profacis. Only Joe Bonanno stood with Profaci and his successor, while the fifth boss, Vito Genovese, was in prison at the time.
It was not that Bonanno, in his own quest for supremacy, concocted a scheme to kill off Gambino and Lucchese, as well as a few other crime bosses around the country. It may be that Bonanno felt he had no options, that if Magliocco fell, Gambino would turn next on the Bonanno family.
Magliocco agreed to join Bonanno in his plot and gave out the contracts on the two New York City leaders to a dependable hit-man capo for Profaci, Joe Colombo. But Colombo was not dependable this time. Instead of carrying out the hits, he revealed the plot to the intended victims. This lead eventually to the so-called Banana War to dethrone Bonanno; but Magliocco tumbled easier. Summoned to appear before the commission of which he was a member, Magliocco, extremely ill and suddenly very tired, confessed. He was allowed to live (he was to die of a heart ailment in a matter of months) and dethroned.

The grateful Gambino installed the accommodating Joe Colombo as Profaci family chief and thus gained another firm vote in the commission. In time Gambino would rue his choice of Colombo, a man who had ambitious ideas. One idea that Gambino bought at first was that it would be smart to rally Italian Americans into an anti-defamation league to say they were being smeared by all this talk about an Italian Mafia. Actually what Colombo wanted to do was clothe the Mafia with the respectability of the vast majority of Italian Americans. (By contrast the Jewish Anti-Defamation League has never objected to stories about Meyer Lansky, Bugsy Siegel, Gurrah Shapiro, Louis Lepke, Mickey Cohen, Mendy Weiss, Arnold Rothstein or Jake Guzik and other Jewish gangsters.)
After a year of protests by Italian Americans led by Colombo, including picketing of the FBI offices in New York, Gambino had enough and ordered Colombo to cool it. He didn’t and he was assassinated.
Unlike other volumes on the Mafia, I will offer no chart listing the various Mafia crime families and their bosses and other leaders. One reason is that any such chart, given the nature of the mob, is subject to abrupt change. But more important, the chart would be inaccurate. Federal listings and those of state and local police agencies frequently vary with one another about who was or is in power when.
The post-Colombo succession was a particular special problem for law enforcement agencies. Despite the fact that hostility between Colombo and the FBI made it the most intensely watched crime family, it took the government three years to discover the new boss was Thomas DiBella. That was with four federal agencies and three local agencies maintaining 24-hour surveillance and eavesdropping on both the Colombo and Gambino families. In 1971 when Colombo was shot (he lingered in a vegetable state for seven years) DiBella was listed as only a low-ranking soldier in the Colombos. Actually DiBella, a retired tractor foreman on the docks, had been in the mob since 1932, but until 1974 no one in official circles ever suspected his importance. He had only one conviction, for bootlegging in 1932.
Because of age, DiBella eventually stepped aside for younger blood although he continued as a top adviser. The leadership passed to former rebel Carmine Persico. There would have been an era of peace for the mob - the Gallo threat had been settled with the death of Larry Gallo and the assassination of Crazy Joe Gallo - except for Persico’s constant involvement in criminal prosecutions. He was to spend a total of 10 of the 13 years prior to 1985 in various prisons. The family was in something like chaos until Jerry Langella wrested the leadership to himself, subject to some dispute from Persico at a later date. By late 1986, with both Persico and Langella facing long years in prison, authorities indicated that Victor Orena a distant Persico relative, had been named boss pro tem.

The family can only boast of about 115 members as well as few hundred more supporters, making it with today’s Lucchese crime family one of the two smallest in New York. But the roster of crimes the family is involved in is impressive: narcotics trafficking, gambling, loans-sharking, cigarette smuggling, pornography, counterfeiting, hijacking and bankruptcy frauds, to name just a few.
Murder is also in the picture, but the boys can be rather understanding about that. According to the police, one potential victim asked that he not be put in cement blocks and tossed into the Gowanus Canal, mob standard procedure. He requested that instead his body be dumped in the streets so that “my family wont have such a hassle getting my life insurance.”
The boys agreed, but for various reasons the hit was not carried out. Maybe the Colombos aren’t that bad a sort.

Although Joe Bonanno has been out of power since the mid-1960s, the family he ran for some three and a half decades is still known by his name, not because of a partilineal succession, but rather because of inept successors.

Bonanno was put in charge of his Brooklyn family on the assassination of Salvatore Maranzano in 1931. He was at the time only 26 years old, the youngest crime family boss in the country. Traditionally his was one of the smaller of the New York families, but it was for a number of years very tight-knit and extremely profitable under Bonanno. Because of its limited manpower, Bonanno over the years sought consistently to ally himself with another crime boss or two to cement his position. Until they fell out much later, he could rely on support from his cousin Stefano Magaddino, the head of the Buffalo crime family, and in Brooklyn from Joe Profaci, with whom he remained very tight until Profaci’s death in 1962. Under Bonanno the major sources of crime revenue derived from numbers, the Italian lottery, bookmaking, loan-sharking and, although he always denied it, narcotics. But when Bonanno underboss Carmine Galante went to prison in the early 1960s, it was for his involvement in drug trafficking, and to this very day the Bonanno family is regarded as one of the major suppliers of drugs to New York City.

By the time of Profaci’s death in 1962 Bonanno had become convinced that some of the other family chiefs - especially Carlo Gambino, Tommy Lucchese and even his cousin Magaddino - were plotting his downfall. Feeling isolated, Bonanno developed a counterplot to kill those three and apparently a few other crime leaders around the country. It was viewed as an effort by Bonanno to become a new “Boss of Bosses.” Allied with Bonanno was the ailing Joseph Magliocco, the successor to Profaci, and the uncle of Bonanno’s eldest son’s wife. The plot blew up when Magliocco passed the contract for the hits on Gambino and Lucchese to one of his most proficient hit men, Joe Colombo, who in turn sold out to the other side.

Called before the national commission Magliocco confessed and was allowed to retire from his crime family. (He was in extremely poor health and sure to die shortly.) Bonanno however admitted nothing and refused to appear. Instead, he disappeared and seemed to be concentrating his efforts on expanding the crime family’s interests in Arizona, Canada and elsewhere.

Advancing in age himself, Bonanno had already started boosting his son Bill to become the active head of the family, a move that brought stiff resistance within the Bonanno organization, many of whose members felt Bill was incapable of the task. By that time many of the mobsters had become disenchanted with Bonanno’s rule in general, feeling his interest in expanding elsewhere was adversely affecting their bread-and-butter - the Brooklyn operations.

Backed by the national commission or, perhaps more accurately, rammed in as family head was Gaspar DiGregorio. The commission ruled that Bonanno by his treachery had lost all rights. As a result a split developed within the family, about half the members going with DiGregorio and the test with Bill Bonanno. In October 1964 the elder Bonanno was kidnapped at gunpoint in front of a luxury apartment house on Park Avenue. It was unclear whether it was an arranged disappearance by Bonanno, who was due to go before a federal grand jury, or the work of the rival crime families. In any event, Bill Bonanno was on his own. The result was the Banana War, “Banana” being a pet journalistic corruption of the Bonanno name.

In January 1966 the DiGregorio forces lured Bill Bonanno and some of his supporters with the promise of the peace meeting into an ambush and then bungled the attempted assassination. Although well over 100 shots were fired nobody was so much as scratched. Dissatisfied by DiGregorio’s inability to handle the war, the commission forced him out in favor of Paul Sciacca, a tougher man and a close friend of Gambino.

In May, however, Joe Bonanno reappeared, refusing to say where he had been the past 19 months. It appeared he had been held by the commission and had only been released on his promise he would leave the crime family permanently and retire to Arizona. Bonanno did no such thing, instead prosecuting the Banana War. The Sciacca forces did not give anywhere near as good as they got, many more falling to Bonanno gunners than the other way around. A heart attack in 1969 finally slowed Bonanno and he shifted back to Arizona while the Banana War petered out. Bonanno held on to his western interests while the Brooklyn holding shifted to Sciacca, later to Natale Evola and finally to Phil Rastelli.

The national commission’s dream, or at least Gambino’s dream, of a subservient Bonanno crime family was shattered by the return of Carmine Galante, who quickly took over affairs. If the commission was upset with Bonanno, it was especially unhappy with Galante - all the more so after Gambino died in 1976. Newspaper talk settled on Galante becoming the new boss of bosses, but he was assassinated by the combined agreement not only of all the New York crime families but also of many the dons around the country. It was said that even the hated Bonnano was consulted before Galante was eliminated.

Returning as ruler after Galante was Philip “Rusty” Rastelli. Under him the organization’s principal activities were described as home video pornography, pizza parlors (regarded as an excellent business in which to hide illegal aliens), espresso cafes, restaurants and a very large narcotics operation. But Rastelli seemed by the mid-1980s to be in less than total control as one segment of the family pushed it deeper into drug trafficking. With Rastelli facing a long prison term in 1986, he was said by law officials to have placed Joseph Massino in charge of family affairs.

By 1998, under Massino, the Bonanno family was thriving. While the overall strength of the five New York families was said to have been declining, there was no doubt that, much to the chagrin of law enforcement, the Bonannos were clearly gaining strength. The crime family that had been in much disgrace following the Galante period and had even been booted off the National Commission made a remarkable recovery with about 100 active wise guys and was fast approaching the Gambinos under the imprisoned John Gotti as the country’s second-most-dangerous Mafia faction.