by Lamothe, Lee
“I don’t refuse to testify,” he said on the stand. “I have a lot of respect for the court but I don’t have anything to say.” Those words—and his refusal to take the oath before testifying—prompted the inquiry chairman to slap Violi with a one-year jail sentence for contempt.
Although Violi had nothing to say at the inquiry, he had plenty to say in private, and the secret police recordings were replayed for the commission in all their color. The words were shocking, not only to the public, who were riveted by media coverage of the hearings, but to Violi’s associates and rivals, who were the most astute of listeners. The scandal started to erode his respect. As would happen years later to John Gotti, the New York boss of the Gambino Family, who also made incriminating pronouncements on tape, Violi’s own words amounted to an unintentional breach of omertà. It was something his rivals did not ignore. Rizzuto supporters quickly used Violi’s lapse in security to stir up discontent. Complaints about breaches in mob etiquette suddenly shifted into reverse—Violi was now on the receiving end of the whispers.
The FBI noted the increasing “dissension from within its ranks” of the “Montreal family” in its internal reports.
“Although Nick Rizzuto had been banished to Venzuela, there remained a number of Sicilian figures in the Montreal organization,” an FBI report said. “Other organized crime groups in the Montreal area began to take more control of organized crime.”
Violi, through his own words, had suddenly made himself vulnerable, with little help from the Rizzutos. It is said that a mafioso is most at risk of attack when he is either dangerous or isolated. Violi was both.
The conversations recorded on the bugs captured an important problem that was cropping up within key Mafia centers all over the world. The issue of Sicilian Men of Honor operating criminally in the territory of the American Mafia was one that would arise wherever the expatriate mafiosi encountered an established mob presence: in New York, Montreal, Philadelphia and Toronto, in particular. It would take years for the full ramifications of the Sicilian penetration to be felt in New York. Had the situation between Violi and the Rizzutos and their Sixth Family allies properly made its way into police files and been fully understood by intelligence analysts, it might have saved investigators in New York years of confusion.
If the New York mediators from the Bonanno Family dismissed the Rizzuto-Violi dispute as a mere annoyance, or as yet another petty gangland squabble, they were not looking carefully enough. Had they paid more attention and compared the situation in Montreal to the changes on their own streets they might have been more prepared for what was to come in New York.
There is nothing to suggest that they did.
CHAPTER 12
QUEENS, NOVEMBER 4, 1976
At 11:30 p.m. on a cool autumn night, 70-year-old Pietro “Peter” Licata swung his long 1974 Cadillac to the foot of the driveway of his New York home, one of many tidy, well-kept houses in Middle Village, Queens. He and his wife, Vita, had just returned from a late meal at a restaurant. Before Licata could swing open the gates of his home, however, the tranquility and quiet were broken by the reverberating boom of a shotgun blast. Seven hot metal pellets shredded Licata’s head and upper body as his wife watched in horror from the passenger’s seat. A deeply distressed Vita told police detectives that a man had stepped out of a yellow car, possibly a Cadillac, and approached her husband before calmly firing the shotgun, aiming for his head. The gunman had jumped back into the yellow car and was driven from the murder scene by an accomplice.
Speculation abounded about the motive for the murder. Licata, ostensibly a retired businessman from the knitwear industry, was an old-time American gangster—one of the few remaining “Mustache Petes,” a term for the older, more traditional Italian gangsters. Homicide detectives and organized crime investigators wondered what was at the root of Licata’s demise. Was it the death three weeks earlier, through natural causes, of Carlo Gambino, the head of the Gambino Family? Or the distinct rise in influence and avarice of the Bonanno’s Carmine Galante? Or perhaps it was tied to the murder, four years earlier, of a Licata relative who was involved in gambling?
Later events offered more substantial clues. Licata’s murder was rooted in far wider shifts in crime than a neighborhood gambling den or even the death of an important crime boss. There was a shake-up under way in Mafia centers around the world and two of the most important New World mob outposts—New York and Montreal—were facing the same dangerous demographic shift.
Knickerbocker Avenue in Brooklyn is a long, cluttered street that runs through the Bushwick section of the borough, near the border with Queens. With Knickerbocker and its surrounding streets as his base, Pietro Licata had operated a crew of Bonanno soldiers and associates. He was the epitome of the Italian-American mob boss. The long-time turf of the Bonanno Family, Knickerbocker was Licata’s personal fiefdom, just as Montreal’s Saint-Léonard was Violi’s.
“Anything moving in there, even a tree, they got to say to him: I want to move the tree. Nobody moves nothing,” said Luigi Ronsisvalle, a former enforcer for Licata, who worked Brooklyn’s streets for years at the behest of the Bonanno organization. Ronsisvalle described Licata as an old-style street boss involved in low-key money-making ventures, loan sharking and gambling. He owned—legitimately or by hidden interest—several businesses in the area, including Italian cafés where organized card games were run, with Licata getting his “end”—a piece of each hand wagered. On a good night, a single café could make thousands of dollars in profit.
Licata stood out from other neighborhood residents because he always wore white. Legend had it that when his daughter was deathly ill, he went to church and prayed that if God spared her, he would from then on wear only white clothing as a sign of gratitude for the divine intervention. The child recovered, and thereafter Licata walked like a living ghost through Brooklyn.
Licata kept his crew busy, leaving them enough money to live on. All they had to do was to show traditional respect, obey him without question and keep away from drugs. Drugs, as many old-timers like Licata believed, were not only evil but would destroy the under-pinnings of the Mafia’s traditional breadwinners. Gambling, loan sharking and other activities were illegal, but accepted by large segments of society. No one, however, could put a good face on drug trafficking. Licata and Ronsisvalle both had a nostalgic—if delusional—view of the Mafia.
“Like an American kid falls in love with baseball, I fall in the love with Mafia,” Ronsisvalle said in halting and broken English. “A Man of Honor no go around stealing and killing for money. A Man of Honor, he kills for some reason; to help people.” He himself had murdered 13 people during his time in America, which he no doubt felt had contributed to some greater societal benefit. Ronsisvalle established himself in Brooklyn in time to see the last vestiges of his beloved Mafia evaporate—if it had ever existed. When he arrived in America in 1966, he headed straight to Knickerbocker Avenue, on the advice of a connected friend in Sicily. Ronsisvalle would join Licata on collection runs, helping to convince debtors to quickly turn their money over.
But the old routine, which had played itself out for generations, was becoming a little archaic. Licata and Ronsisvalle found their precious Mafia was undergoing slow but distinct changes. It started with Carmine Galante.
After the death in 1976 of Carlo Gambino, the powerful boss of the Gambino Family, Carmine Galante started to believe he might finally achieve his dream of being the head of a pan-national heroin enterprise, not to mention boss of bosses in the American Mafia. It is hard to tell which he wanted more, although he probably saw them as related propositions. Upon his release from prison in 1974, after serving 12 years for his heroin conspiracy with Montreal’s Pep Cotroni, Galante’s outsized dreams became dangerously well known. The Bonanno Family leadership seemed an open question. Galante, as a former consigliere and underboss, felt himself to be more qualified than anyone for the job. The police and the public braced for a new wave of viole
nce as Galante moved to regain his place as the key man in the Sicily-Montreal-New York heroin axis.
Like most theories and legends, there were kernels of truth scattered among the hyperbole and speculation. Galante did seem to have insane designs on becoming a boss without peer in the American Mafia. But he was really yesterday’s man. Internationally, the underworld had realigned in his absence: the French Connection, along with Galante’s Corsican and French colleagues in Europe and Canada, was unraveling. The European traffickers had spread through Europe and South America and formed direct alliances with the Bonanno and Gambino families in New York City—if not the other families as well—without Galante. Elsewhere, heroin laboratories in Sicily were starting to churn out product at an alarming rate. It seemed that all of the Sicilian Mafia clans were involved in the drug trade and the expatriate Mafia in Venezuela and Brazil were forming their own alliances. In Montreal, the Sixth Family was conspiring to eliminate the blockage caused by Paolo Violi, putting Galante’s long-time Cotroni connections at risk.
The Bonanno Family had also changed drastically in Galante’s absence. There were new players on the scene, tough young imports who had immigrated—legally or not—from Sicily over the years. Their loyalty was to the clans of Agrigento, Palermo and Trapani.
It was these young cadres of Sicilian traffickers in Brooklyn who, like the Rizzutos in Canada, were bumping up against the older, established American Mafia. And, just as in Canada, here was an old-style gangster trying to stand up to them, believing that tradition would trump the allure of drug wealth. It was a dangerous position for Licata.
BROOKLYN, 1977
Men like Pietro Licata would have been the first to notice the change in the underworld landscape.
As Licata surveyed his territory, he saw the influx of new Sicilian immigrants who had set up shop and burrowed into the heartland of the American Mafia. In New York, they gathered around the most Sicilian of the families, the one named after Joe Bonanno, who was in turn the most Sicilian of the New York family bosses. The new players caused a stir among American-born Mafia members, who referred to them as “Zips,” probably for the fast-paced dialect they spoke. Behind their backs, though, the Americans were as likely to refer to the Sicilians by a grossly insulting term: “greaseballs,” according to Kenneth McCabe, a former New York City police detective who died in 2006. The Knickerbocker Avenue Zips were part of the Bonanno Family. Several were “made,” and all—in theory—answered to Licata or other Bonanno captains. Most of the American-born Mafia members were leery of them: they kept to themselves, spoke an indecipherable dialect and were involved in schemes American gangsters could only speculate about. They were considered to be a breed apart.
“The Zips stood alone,” said Sal Vitale, a long-time Bonanno member and former family underboss. Frank Lino, a former Bonanno captain, echoed the sentiment: “I recognized them as Zips. You could detect a guy from Italy.” How? “The way they looked,” Lino said.
Salvatore “Toto” Catalano was the boss of the Bonanno Sicilian faction—the Zips—in Brooklyn. Born in 1941 in the Sicilian town of Ciminna, south-east of Palermo, Catalano and his two brothers, also Mafia members, had been sent to the United States in 1966 by old-country traffickers intent on expanding the Sicilian drug trade. The state crackdown on the Mafia in Italy, following the 1963 massacre of policemen in Ciaculli, south of Palermo, had sent members of the Sicilian Mafia fleeing around the world.
In Brooklyn, Catalano had relatives—including a cousin of the same name who was nicknamed “Saca”—who had been in the drug trade since the 1950s. Catalano lived a quiet, modest life, operating a shop on Knickerbocker Avenue. Capitalizing on his membership in the Sicilian Mafia, and on his family relationships, Catalano became a small businessman, with partnerships in bakeries and several pizzerias. All of his partners were mafiosi; all the businesses were fronts for the emerging heroin network that would later be known as the Pizza Connection. Those who met Catalano came away with a feeling that he was a deeply self-controlled man who wrapped himself in an aura of steel. He displayed none of the braggadocio and swagger of his contemporaries in the American Mafia—even though he was a “made” member of the Bonanno Family, like Nick and Vito Rizzuto in Montreal. His role in America, as with the Rizzutos, Caruanas and Cuntreras in Canada and Venezuela, was to conduct the Sicilian heroin franchise, although, as good mobsters, all the factions were reluctant to turn their back on any profitable opportunity that came their way. Six months after Licata’s murder, Catalano was made a captain in the Bonanno Family and handed Licata’s old turf, likely revealing his role in the slaying.
Among Catalano’s early contacts for heroin distribution was Carmine Galante, who, even though his parents were Sicilian, was thoroughly a product of the American Mafia. For many newly arrived immigrants like Catalano, Galante’s expertise and contacts were crucial in building those first bridges to American crews who were willing to get involved in the drug distribution business. Galante was tough, had spent a lifetime in the drug trade and had deep contacts in the United States, Canada and Italy. More important to the Zips, Galante was willing to let them in.
The influx of the Sicilian gangsters is often seen, from the American perspective, as an initiative on the part of Galante, who is said to have “imported” the Zips to do his heavy lifting. Evidence now suggests, however, that the Zips in fact perpetrated a quiet invasion. They were sent from Sicily, rather than called for by America. It is a significant distinction.
The American Mafia, largely the powerful Five Families of New York, had over the decades developed quite differently from its progenitor in Italy.
“Originally it was a simple franchise of the Sicilian organization, born in the rut of migratory movements from southern Italy toward the New World,” wrote Giovanni Falcone, the Italian investigative magistrate, who spent more quality time with turncoat mafiosi than perhaps any other investigator. “The two organizations have evolved their habits and their way of thinking according to the country in which they developed. This separate evolution has, in practice, caused a progressive autonomy on the part of the American Mafia which, today, is complete,” Falcone wrote.
Once a new generation of Sicilian Men of Honor had infiltrated the American Mafia in New York and Montreal, distinct differences between the Zips and American mobsters became clear to all.
“With the establishment of heroin laboratories in Sicily, there was a need to organize North American distribution capabilities,” said Tom Tripodi, a former leading agent with the old U.S. Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs and, later, with its successor, the Drug Enforcement Administration. Tripodi, a man with extensive overseas experience and a keen world view—he had previously debriefed such key Mafia informants, in both Italy and America, as Joe Valachi and Tommaso Buscetta—said it was a Sicilian Mafia overture, not an American Mafia initiative, that brought the Zips to New York and Montreal in such numbers.
“With the French traffickers on the wane, the Sicilian sphere of influence was growing, a development that appealed to mafiosi both in New York and Palermo,” Tripodi said. “The Sicilians wanted to restore order in the ranks of their American brethren, as well as reassert, through diplomatic means, the supremacy of the traditional strongholds in Sicily.”
Regardless of why the Zips arrived, one thing is certain: Carmine Galante liked them. They appealed to his ideal of all that was good and right with the Mafia—loyalty, strength, cunning and a ruthless interest in the drug trade. He personally inducted many of the Zips into the Bonanno Family, even though that role was usually reserved for the boss.
In 1977, Galante conducted an initiation ceremony in Brooklyn for Frank Coppa. Twenty-five years later, Coppa would wreak devastation on the Bonanno Family, but even his induction was something of note: Coppa was sworn in on the same day as a pair of the most aggressive and active Zips.
“They took me to an apartment in Brooklyn,” Coppa said. Waiting in the apartment were Carmine Galante
and other Bonanno captains.
“We waited,” Coppa went on. “Me and the other fellow—I can’t remember his name offhand—waited in the bathroom while they were inducting two other people.” Through the thin walls, he could hear Galante in the living room leading the ancient induction rite for Cesare Bonventre and Baldassare “Baldo” Amato.
“They were speaking Italian, so I didn’t understand,” the Brooklyn-born Coppa said. “They left and we came out of the bathroom, went into the living room. And at that point they asked if you didn’t want to be inducted you had the right to leave, and if not, you join hands and you commence the meeting to be inducted into the Bonanno crime family. … We were led to believe that Carmine Galante was boss.”
The Sicilians were inducted separately from the Americans. And since Bonventre, and likely Amato, too, had been inducted into the Sicilian Mafia before emigrating, the issue of dual membership or competing loyalties was not something Galante seemed much bothered about. He appreciated the boost in power these new soldiers gave him on the street, thinking they would help to propel him to further heights. Galante felt they depended on him as well. He saw the Zips as his men; the Zips had other ideas.
