by Lamothe, Lee
The masks covering the gunmen’s faces protected their secrets for many years. That Bonventre and Amato were in on the assassination, however, seemed obvious to police.
“Baldo Amato and Cesare Bonventre, both present in the back yard with Galante at the time of the shooting, are still prime suspects,” says a 1981 update on the case, that was sent by the FBI Special Agent-in-Charge of the Brooklyn-Queens office to federal prosecutors with the Organized Crime Strike Force. The suspiciously timed flight of Sal Catalano to Italy, where he stayed for five months, suggested that he, too, had something to hide. When the getaway car was found, police lifted prints from the middle and ring finger of Santo Giordano, another Zip, from the inside driver’s window. Years later, new technology allowed police to identify another print found in the getaway car, a palm print from Bruno Indelicato. Indelicato was already a suspect because, immediately after the murder, he had arrived at the Ravenite, a social club in Little Italy run by Aniello Dellecroce, the Gambino underboss. Waiting at the club was Stefano “Stevie Beef” Cannone, then the Bonanno consigliere. Bruno seemed to report some news and then receive a hero’s welcome—all of it caught on film by a police surveillance team investigating another matter.
The murder of Galante, U.S. federal prosecutors wrote in court documents filed in 1985, was engineered “to ensure that the Sicilians would enjoy the [narcotics] importation franchise,” which Galante had “threatened to disrupt.” Prosecutors said that Galante was “trying to control the emerging narcotics traffic from Sicily into the United States,” and that the Zips—particularly Catalano and Bonventre—conspired “to eliminate people who are obstacles to the flow of narcotics.” As proof, the government outlined how Galante had been “hoarding a large share of both power and profit,” and that after his death “the Sicilian faction succeeded to a significant portion of both his power and his profits. … So great was the dissension within the Bonanno Family resulting from Galante’s refusal to share the Sicilian drug profits with other factions of the family that the survival of the Sicilian faction and their drug business depended on their forming new alliances and killing Galante,” the government said. Could that explain the rise in power of Bruno Indelicato, Joe Massino and Sonny Black, all of whom had been bumped up to captain in the wake of Galante’s murder?
Frank Lino, a former Bonanno captain, said that these men—and others—were behind the bold assassination of Galante. Bruno Indelicato was indeed one of the masked shooters that afternoon, Lino said. Bruno shot Joe Turano and Coppola, according to what Bruno told Lino. Russell Mauro, a Bonanno soldier who was tight with Sonny Red, was another of the men pushing their way to the back patio. Mauro shot Galante; Bonventre and Amato were in on it; Big Trinny was the masked man inside the restaurant who threatened the kitchen staff with a menacing shotgun, Lino said. Joe Massino, Philly Lucky, J.B. Indelicato and Sonny Red were stationed outside the restaurant to ensure nothing went wrong.
If Lino was right, then the murder of Galante was not the work of rogue gangsters or even a vengeful Zip faction. It was an uprising. The Zips, Sonny Red, Joe Massino—the three main factions—had joined together to end Galante’s oppression. The slaying would by no means spell the end of the bloodshed in the war for the New York heroin market. Nor would it immediately restore stability at the top. For a short while, though, there seemed to be some spirit of cooperation.
With Galante out of the way, the new distributors of the heroin were waiting for the Sixth Family and their expatriate Mafia allies to turn on the tap.
CHAPTER 15
MANHATTAN, NOVEMBER 16, 1980
The wedding was set to be a splashy and memorable affair from its religious start to its debauched finish. Giuseppe Bono had booked St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan—the largest Roman Catholic church in the United States—for a solemn ceremony below the great rose window, a marvel of stained glass. The 300 invited guests would then walk behind the happy couple along the inlaid Italian marble floor and down the worn front steps beneath the cathedral’s twin spires, and travel 10 blocks northeast for a lavish reception at the Hotel Pierre. The Pierre is a refined-looking Georgian building, a grand 44-story tower topped with an octagonal copper-clad roof overlooking Central Park.
The invitations drawing the well-wishers from across New York and its surrounding suburbs and cities, and from Canada, Italy and England, were simple and elegant: “Miss Antonina Albino and Mr. Giuseppe Bono request the honor of your presence at their marriage on Sunday, the Sixteenth of November, Nineteen Hundred and Eighty at three o’clock. St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Fifth Avenue, New York, New York.”
Many of the guests skipped the ceremony entirely, however, heading straight to the reception, where the mixed drinks, hard liquor, champagne and wine were flowing freely. It was a tough crowd, after all, filled with men who had spent more time before a judge than before a priest. Brandy and Scotch were popular choices, even before dinner had been served. As a clear sign of bygone times, on each table—amid the ostentatiously oversized bouquets of tropical ruby anthuriums and white trumpet lilies—was a blown-glass cup holding piles of cigarettes for guests to help themselves. And help themselves they did, filling ashtrays in the signature Hotel Pierre china pattern, set among the bottles of San Pellegrino spring water and red wine.
Despite the formal surroundings, this was not a tuxedo-clad crowd. The men opted instead for business suits, white shirts and typically wide striped ties, and the women for evening gowns, most in conservative styles, suggesting the mobsters were accompanied by their wives, not their girlfriends.
For Giuseppe Bono, it was a full day spent with his closest friends and most important and trusted business associates. He obviously wished it to be memorable. Even with a discount, the cost of the reception—paid for in money orders—climbed to $63,120. And yet he still set aside $4,746 to pay a professional photographer to capture the event on film. The guests took turns posing with the bride and groom, mixing and matching the portrait groupings among friends, relatives and spouses. The guests posed again as the photographer moved from table to table with the guests standing or sitting stiffly while grinning for the camera.
Later, as they flipped through them, the photographs may have provided Giuseppe and Antonina Bono with many happy memories. But it is difficult to imagine that even they would have studied the images more closely than hundreds of police agents on three continents.
Giuseppe Bono, a short, weedy-looking man with black, thinning hair, large glasses and crooked front teeth, was 47 at the time of his wedding. When happy, he looked downright impish, like a good-natured college professor. When well-dressed and serious, he could easily pass as a banker. When angry or annoyed, however, he appeared oddly bloodless; his features took on an icy quality that hinted at the dangerous milieu in which he moved. Bono, it was learned by FBI agents a year after the wedding, was a prodigious, skilled and exceptionally well-connected drug trafficker, a leading Mafia boss in Italy and a major money launderer. An FBI dossier later described him as “one of the most knowledgeable men operating abroad in international drug trafficking.” His guests that fall day in New York, astonished agents would learn, were some of the most significant mafiosi and narcotics barons in the Western world. It was perhaps the largest single gathering in memory of high-level international mob-linked drug traffickers.
Even to these men, the roving photographer caused no alarm. They were thoroughly comfortable among friends. And it was not the first time most had wined and dined at the Pierre. Like many New Yorkers who enjoyed their wealth, mobsters had long used its facilities for parties, including a reception in 1975 that Carmine Galante had hosted for his daughter.
When the FBI and DEA learned that a wedding had brought the world’s drug-rich mafiosi to New York, they hunted down details of the event. And then, in an intelligence coup that is still exploited by agents to this day, they came upon the wedding photographs.
“They were obtained through a subpoena fr
om the photographer who took them,” said Charles Rooney, now the acting deputy assistant director in the FBI’s Criminal Investigative Division. In 1981, when the authorities were learning of the Bono wedding, Rooney was an agent in the Bureau’s Brooklyn-Queens office and the case agent for what would become the Pizza Connection heroin case.
“We subpoenaed the wedding photographs because we began hearing about a large wedding that took place in the New York City area with a number of different people from various countries, and that got us to start looking for the location of the wedding,” Rooney said. “We learned that Giuseppe Bono was a boss of an organized crime family in Milan, Italy. That he arrived here in the United States.”
The stack of photographs was huge.
“I think it was at least a hundred photographs, probably more than that,” Rooney said. Before the discovery, however, Bono was a man of significant mystery for FBI and DEA agents embarking on fresh investigations into a shadowy group of Sicilian gangsters who had moved into New York with friends galore and money to spare. Bono had, until recently, been listed only as “unknown male” on surveillance photos taken by agents watching the Brooklyn haunts frequented by the Zips. Shortly before his wedding, he was photographed visiting the bakery run by Sal Catalano. Agents tailed the mystery man to a newly built 14-room mansion in Pelham, a New York suburb, and they uncovered the identity of its owner. They now had a name to go with the pinched and bespectacled face: Giuseppe Bono.
It meant nothing to them.
The cross-pollination and enhanced relationships between international crime groups in several countries is one of the most important and defining developments in crime. The Mafia of New York were working with Men of Honor in Sicily who, in turn, were working with Asian overlords and corrupt Middle Eastern officials. It was globalization at its most efficient, and these gangsters were early leaders. Certainly, their links were established long before law enforcement had similar arrangements. Many police officers in the United States eyed Italian authorities with suspicion, and anything outside Western Europe was beyond the pale.
American and Canadian interaction was better, as had been shown in previous cases, but even there, some of the best and most sensitive information was jealously guarded. The suspicions went both ways. Foreign law enforcement and security agencies were uncertain how their information might be used. The Cold War, and overarching American political interests abroad, sometimes created a conflict between sound global law-enforcement priorities and the imperatives of U.S. national security interests. Foreign police forces often wondered whether the information they passed along was being used by the FBI to fight crime or by the CIA in pursuit of other interests, and they acted accordingly. Even between U.S. agencies—such as the FBI and the DEA—the trust was not deep and the sharing of information was sometimes done reluctantly, with certain pieces held back. There was always competition among the agencies.
These attitudes helped the emerging expatriate Mafia immeasurably. Strangely, even when information was shared between national police forces, it was not always given the attention it merited. The recordings secretly made at the Reggio Bar during the 1970s, for instance, which had captured Paolo Violi in secret conversation with senior mafiosi, were shared by Canadian authorities with Italy and the United States. By 1976, transcripts of the most relevant conversations had been given to Italy’s Ministry of the Interior, where they were slowly passed through government offices until they reached the courts in Agrigento, where Carmelo Cuffaro, a Sicilian mobster caught on the tapes, was on trial. Incredibly, the transcripts were simply filed away and forgotten. It was not until 1984, according to Giovanni Falcone, the famed anti-Mafia magistrate who would later be assassinated for his efforts, that a junior Agrigento magistrate stumbled across them and, realizing their significance, passed them on to Falcone’s office. In the right hands they proved explosive, helping to bring dozens of accused men to court almost a decade later in one of Italy’s famed maxi-trials. Law enforcement was finally catching on to the value of cooperation.
It started with unofficial, back-channel interaction between individual officers in one police agency talking directly to a contact they had made in another. An FBI agent would talk to an RCMP officer; an RCMP officer would talk to an officer in Rome or Milan. An investigator in Palermo would call an agent in the DEA, and everyone would feed off the street knowledge and expertise of a small cluster of New York City police officers who had been tracking organized crime figures for decades. The unofficial channels expanded as more cases netted more crooks in more countries. The value of these interactions became clear to the young FBI agents starting to probe the influx of Sicilian gangsters into Brooklyn and the movement of money out of the country.
It seemed a simple question, put to the Italian authorities by two inquisitive agents in the FBI’s Brooklyn-Queens office. All Special Agents Charles Rooney and Carmine Russo wanted to know was: Did the name Giuseppe Bono mean anything to Italian police? The question hit like a hurricane. When Italy’s anti-Mafia investigators heard that Bono had turned up in New York, they were astounded. They knew him well, as a significant Mafia boss who had disappeared when their investigations of him started to gain traction. He was considered a fugitive, whereabouts unknown, although police suspected he was hiding out in Venezuela with Nick Rizzuto and the Caruana-Cuntreras. Bono had worked with Montreal’s mobsters for decades, at least since 1964, according to Tomasso Buscetta, the Sicilian mafioso.
The FBI then realized it needed to pay close attention to the Zips. In Italy, the probe into the Bono organization was rejuvenated. In both countries, the investigations—and criminal indictments—would prove to be expansive. But that was a long way off.
The FBI discreetly started to share the Bono wedding pictures with the DEA, New York City police, the RCMP and several Italian agencies. For those officers in the loop, it became something of a parlor game—pin the name on the mobster. The FBI wanted to know the identity of each and every attendee at Bono’s wedding. For years, the wedding photos were shown to almost every informant who agreed to cooperate with authorities, each being asked to put a name to as many people as he could.
The list that slowly emerged was incredible. Almost every adult male present at Bono’s wedding was involved in organized crime and the drug trade. Bono, it seemed, opened up his Rolodex of international drug contacts and sent each of them one of his elegant invitations. Perhaps even he was surprised by the number of positive responses. It suggests the interest they all had in maintaining a relationship with him and his colleagues. The Bono wedding photographs became an illustrated guide to the world’s Mafia-run drug trade.
“Anyone who was anyone in Italian organized crime was invited,” said Tom Tripodi, the former U.S. drug agent.
The Sixth Family was there, of course. Featured in several of the photographs was a tall man with dark hair and long face who was among the most tastefully dressed of all the guests; in a black two-piece suit, crisp white shirt and soft silver tie dotted with black was Vito Rizzuto.
In one photograph, Rizzuto stands smartly with the smiling bride, who is splaying her fingers over his arm to show off her new diamond ring and thick gold band. With her other hand, she clutches the hand of Vito’s wife, Giovanna, who in turn has her free hand draped over the shoulder of Giuseppe Bono. The portrait exudes an air of warmth and familiarity, as they stand in front of a trellis draped with fresh-cut Shasta daisies. Another photograph features a smiling groom, as if he is just at the end of enjoying a good joke, standing with Vito and his lieutenant, Joe LoPresti, a towering man who is one of the few in the room taller than Vito.
A third photograph shows Vito and his wife standing with the guests assigned to their dinner table. Standing with them is LoPresti and his wife, Rosa Lumia. Seated at the same table was Gerlando Sciascia with his second wife, Mary Elizabeth Macfadyen. Sciascia was also close to the groom, so much so that Bono had asked Sciascia’s daughter to be a flower girl in his wedding pa
rty. In Vito’s entourage was Domenico Arcuri, the Montrealer who had hosted the final sit-down between Nick Rizzuto and Violi. Another invitee from Canada was Michel Pozza, a money man who worked closely with the Cotroni organization in Montreal but quickly moved to support the Rizzutos once he saw how things were going in the power struggle. The presence of the Rizzutos was seen as evidence that Vic Cotroni was not making the same mistake as Violi and getting in the Rizzutos’ way. He was giving the Sixth Family free reign in Montreal.
“This event supports the theory that Nick Rizzuto was now directing operations for the Montreal Sicilian Faction, and that he was acting independently from the hierarchy of the Cotroni group,” an FBI report says.
