by Lamothe, Lee
Investigators studying the photographs—in particular, the group pictures of the guests at their designated dinner tables—noticed something else. A curious pattern was emerging. Seating arrangements are not an inconsequential matter at any wedding, and deciding where each mobster was to sit, and with whom, must have been a narcotics trafficker’s worst social nightmare. Eventually, the invitees seem to have been seated according to their underworld faction.
One photo shows a young Vincent Basciano at a table with Philly Lucky, Big Trinny, Frank Lino, Bruno Indelicato, his uncle Joseph “J.B.” Indelicato and Joseph Benanti. Basciano, who was nicknamed “Vinny Gorgeous,” would be named acting boss of the Bonanno Family in later and more trying times. This group would be described in court as the early distribution arm of the Sixth Family’s heroin in New York. At another table stands a smiling Sal Catalano with Santo Giordano.
The table of the leading Zips in New York was immediately beside Vito’s table, suggesting their familiarity and friendliness. A suave-as-always Cesare Bonventre, wearing his tinted aviator glasses, and one of the few men in a tuxedo, lounges at a table with his wife, Theresa, Baldo Amato and Amato’s shapely wife. Giovanni Ligammari was also present, beaming a wide smile, wearing a light gray suit and red tie at a table of mostly older men and their wives.
Seating the Zips of New York next to the Sicilian mobsters from Canada was a courteous move. Members from each group knew each other well. The same year as the wedding, Bonventre and Amato made such a mad dash from New York to Canada that New York State troopers stopped them at least three times on the same day for speeding. Each time they were driving at more than 100 miles an hour. For the early fines, the pair pulled out an enormous wad of cash and paid the fine on the spot in $100 bills. At the last stop, the trooper would not allow an on-the-spot settlement and took Bonventre’s license and issued a ticket he would have to settle in court. With Amato taking over the driving, they continued on their way. The business in Canada must have been urgent, indeed, as the pair then returned to deal with the traffic matter aboard a Canadian-registered private plane. It speaks to the unusual interaction and disposable income of the guests at Bono’s wedding.
“Bono had interested us for years,” Tripodi said. “A rising star in the Sicilian Mafia, he had been sent early in his career to Milan to oversee its interests in the banking center of Italy.” Bono’s diplomatic skills—and his warm relationship with the Sixth Family, as shown by his early meetings in Montreal—made him a good choice as the Sicilian Mafia’s emissary in New York. “Bono was the guy chosen to pull everything together. In effect, he acted as Palermo’s ambassador to the Italian crime groups in New York,” Tripodi said. News of Bono’s wedding was a wake-up call for agents probing organized crime and international drug traffickers.
“During this period it also became more apparent that within the Bonanno Family there had emerged a Sicilian faction, similar to the situation in Montreal,” an internal FBI report says about the Bono wedding. “The leader of the Bonanno Sicilian Faction, Salvatore Catalano, is heavily involved in heroin importation from Sicily. What is even more significant, however, is the fact that the Sicilian factions from Montreal and the Bonanno Family are criminally aligned. The leaders of both factions, Rizzuto in Montreal and Catalano in New York, are both documented heroin traffickers.
“There is strong evidence that individuals from these groups have met together on numerous occasions to discuss criminal activity,” the report continues. “Surveillance from Canada and the United States verify many of these meetings.” The meetings had been fast and furious and incredibly productive.
It was happy times for the mafiosi, a mood captured in the cheery photographs from Bono’s wedding. Appropriate for the start of a new decade, Bono’s 1980 wedding party marked a new era in the underworld. It was as if the wet and garrulous soiree was also a celebration of another achievement: a new heroin franchise had already been built and the men at Bono’s wedding at the Hotel Pierre were among its primary architects. The effort had been substantial. And sneaky. It took both police and rival criminal organizations by surprise when the seemingly unrelated events over a decade suddenly gelled into an unsurpassed global heroin enterprise. Much work had been done, though only a few men, even among the guests at Bono’s wedding, were truly aware of it all.
The Sicilian Mafia had been busy in New York, Canada, Italy and South America. To get where they wanted to be, they needed people and product. Both had been making their way into Canada for transshipment to the United States.
CHAPTER 16
BUCKS COUNTY, PENNSYLVANIA, JANUARY 1973
Tucked in the southeastern corner of Pennsylvania, Bucks County is best described in terms of its neighbors; sitting on the busy New York City-Washington corridor, it is bounded on the east by the Delaware River and Trenton, N.J., and by Philadelphia to the south. It is almost equidistant between New York City and Atlantic City. Such a place could not be immune from the mob.
It was here that a deliveryman stumbled across the body of a man lying face down in plain view behind an abandoned Red Barn Restaurant in Bristol Township, shortly before noon on January 5, 1973. His feet and legs rested awkwardly on the sidewalk and his six-foot, 190-pound body sprawled onto the first parking space. Until this discovery, the old brick building, which had been vacant for six months, had gained notoriety as a hangout for local teenagers. This, however, seemed far beyond anything mischievous kids would get into. The victim’s hands had been tied in front of him and he had been shot in the back with a .45-caliber pistol. Police found $21 in his pockets, a set of house keys and a letter from immigration officials.
The murdered man was identified as Stefano Sciarrino, a 27-year-old from Cinisi, Sicily. Police learned that Sciarrino had entered the United States in a time-honored way for illegal migrants with money: in April 1971 with a ticket from Italy to Mexico, he arrived at New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport on an Air France jet and, instead of changing planes, simply walked away into New York’s teeming streets. He had little contact with American authorities beyond his arrest later as an unregistered alien. Quickly bailed out of custody—he was only one of a hundred Sicilians picked up in the northeastern United States that year—Sciarrino had spent some time in the Bonanno Family’s Brooklyn turf before moving to Bucks County, where he took a job in a pizzeria.
Baffled police could uncover no immediate motive for the murder but a subsequent investigation led directly to the Montreal Mafia and the murky world of Sicilian immigrant smuggling.
It did not take long before police determined that Stefano Sciarrino was related to Lorenzo Sciarrino—known as “Enzo the Quarrelsome One” because of his legendary temper. Enzo Sciarrino had long been suspected of running an illegal immigrant smuggling operation, moving people out of Sicily, through Canada and into America. He had two types of customers: those with Sicilian Mafia links who were placed in key parts of the U.S. northeast, and “legitimate” illegal migrants—those who were emigrating in hopes of finding honest jobs. Most of his clients did not arrive in the way Stefano did. The preferred, and cheaper, route was to come through the unguarded border points and Native reserves along the U.S.-Canada border. Once in the United States, because of the poor cooperation and exchange of information between American and Italian authorities, some of Sicily’s most active organized crime figures were able to infiltrate the American marketplace, passing themselves off as legitimate businessmen and entrepreneurs.
Canadian police intelligence files showed Enzo meeting with senior mobsters in Montreal, almost all of them Sicilians linked to Nick Rizzuto and Pep Cotroni. At least one meeting, in the summer of 1971, narrowly preceded Enzo’s arrest in Italy, where he was later sentenced for Mafia activity. Safe houses in Toronto and Montreal were used to harbor the smuggled mafiosi while en route—in Toronto, in particular, the family shepherding the migrants through was related by marriage to the Rizzutos. The transit route through Canada was busy. American files show
that in 1972 alone, as many as 10,000 Sicilians—most of them not part of any drug conspiracy—traveled from Canada to the United States. Those immigrants with no intention of joining the mob were charged $500 to make the crossing. However, they were preyed on at every turn. When they wanted to change their Italian lira into American dollars, they were charged a 25-percent service fee. False documents, including social security cards and driver’s licenses, were sold to them on a payment plan that often saw them handing over thousands of dollars. When they were given work—almost always in a pizzeria or construction company—the employers clawed back a portion of their salary. When they went for relaxation to gambling houses, they were cheated until they lost, then given loans at extortionate rates. Unable to pay, several agreed to travel back into Canada to pick up a shipment of heroin and return with it to the United States to pay off or reduce their debt.
For Stefano Sciarrino, who came to America with Mafia roots and a criminal record, none of this abuse was an issue. In addition to Enzo the Quarrelsome One, his connections in his hometown included Gaetano Badalamenti, one of the key participants at the Grand Hôtel heroin summit. Badalamenti would later be revealed as a major player in the Pizza Connection. But that was years away. Many of the early clues to its formation, however, emerged from the Sciarrino murder mystery.
In Bucks County, Sciarrino had found work at a pizza franchise that was a thoroughly mobbed-up enterprise, with more than two dozen stores in New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania—several of them identified later as being owned and operated by the pioneers of the Pizza Connection. As a sideline, the corporation sold basic supplies to other pizzerias. Many of the sales were used to disguise the laundering of heroin profits. The franchise outlet Sciarrino worked at in Pennsylvania was owned by the son of another franchise owner who, in turn, partnered with Frank Rappa, a Queens employee of a pizzeria in the same chain. He was a heroin smuggler whose ring, naturally, used Montreal as a way station.
Around the same time, Luigi Ronsisvalle, the mafioso who had worked for Pietro Licata, the old Knickerbocker Avenue boss, started working for the Zips, which meant dividing his time between smuggling heroin and illegal aliens out of Canada and into the United States. On at least three occasions, Ronsisvalle went to Canada.
“We have some connection to bring passports from Canada and give it to Sicilian people coming to the United States,” he said. “The first time I go, we go to Niagara Falls. There were six passports … which had, I remember, every picture [already] in [the] passport.”
By the time of the Bono wedding, the infiltration by illegal Sicilian gangsters was thorough. In a 1981 FBI status report on a probe of Gerlando Sciascia, agents said “an extensive investigation into organized crime’s influence on alien immigrants” had been initiated. The report noted that many illegal Sicilian immigrants with dubious pasts were being arrested at businesses owned and operated by a small circle of people with Mafia links. A law enforcement analyst said that background reviews of most of these people found they had first shown up as targets of interest to drug investigators in the late 1950s and 1960s and were traced back to Canada, and before that, Sicily. Sciascia and his Sixth Family kin in Montreal were clearly involved as middlemen, agents noted.
“They poured through Canada,” the analyst said of the Sicilian Mafia immigrants. “If you came from Canada you were almost automatically accepted.” Also coming through Canada to New York were several of the Zips gathering in Brooklyn, including Cesare Bonventre and Baldo Amato.
While the murder of Stefano Sciarrino was never solved, his slaying started to shed light on some of these other mysteries. It provided a glimpse into where the manpower for much of the new drug enterprises was coming from and, like the drugs, it was being linked by police to Montreal and the supportive hand of the Sixth Family.
FIUMICINO AIRPORT, ROME, 1980
Because of its highly secretive nature, the success of a drug pipeline can be judged only by its failures. Until seizures are made or people are arrested, there is little evidence to appraise its size, test its purity levels or marvel at its ingenious methods.
By 1965, eight years after the heroin summit at the Grand Hôtel, the signs of success began to appear. That year, a drug and contraband ring—Italian police called it a “supergang linking the Sicilian Mafia with the American La Cosa Nostra”—was broken up. Among those indicted were Giuseppe “Genco” Russo, the head of the Sicilian Mafia, and several American criminal deportees. The following year, police tackled a Sicilian Mafia ring run by brothers Salvatore and Ugo Caneba. Based in Trapani, a provincial neighbor of Agrigento, the Canebas gained notoriety in the closing days of the Second World War when they were caught stealing and refining shipments of opium and morphine sent from America to help injured U.S. soldiers in army field hospitals in Italy. Fat on the profits from this audacious scheme, the Caneba brothers expanded into more sophisticated ventures.
Security concerns over America’s border with Mexico have long overshadowed any problems from the long, largely unguarded border with Canada, which has always been perceived as the more gentle neighbor. Almost without exception, however, undercover operatives with the old U.S. Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs found significant Canadian connections in their cases. Following the trail even further, they often found some link to the Sixth Family.
The Canadian city of Windsor is to Detroit what Montreal was to New York—a cross-border satellite of American Mafia interests. In the case of Windsor, the strategic value is even more narrowly defined: border access to the United States. Windsor lies just across the river from Detroit and, as such, it is not only Canada’s most southerly city and busiest border crossing, but, with a nod to Motor City, the heartland of its automotive sector. Along with seamless links between auto plants on both sides of the Detroit River, Windsor has also long been used by gangsters to move contraband back and forth between the countries.
Prohibition in the U.S., starting in 1920 and stretching until 1933, a law that banned the manufacture, sale, transportation and importation of alcohol, was a gift to gangsters on both sides of the border. Perhaps coincidentally, two of the men who traveled with Nick Rizzuto’s father from Sicily to America in 1925, Mercurio Campisi from Cattolica Eraclea and Francesco Giula from Siculiana, said they had previously lived in Detroit during the early years of Prohibition. If this was an early incursion to the area by associates of the Sixth Family, then there have been others in the decades since. During a probe into the Detroit drug market in the late 1960s and early 1970s, agents stumbled across members of the Badalamenti family. In the 1980s, the patriarch of the clan, Gaetano, would be convicted as a linchpin in the Pizza Connection, forever ensuring the clan’s notoriety. Earlier, however, Gaetano’s cousin, Cesare Badalamenti, was arrested for smuggling drugs into America and, when released from prison, moved to Detroit, where he quickly met up with Giuseppe Indelicato.
Indelicato, like the Rizzutos, left Sicily’s Agrigento province to settle in Canada. In the New World he retained his Sixth Family links while settling in Windsor, with an eye on the Detroit skyline across the river. In 1964, an RCMP surveillance team monitoring a meeting in Montreal between the Cotronis and Nick Rizzuto’s father-in-law, Antonio Manno—likely an early meeting to smooth ruffled feathers between the families—noted that a vehicle used by the Sicilians was registered to Indelicato.
An early smuggling foray, however, did not go well. Stopped when disembarking in New York City from a ship arriving from Europe, Indelicato was found with a half-million-dollar load of heroin stitched into the lining of his vest. He insisted it was icing sugar to decorate a wedding cake. His inability to explain why the confection needed such secretive transport led to the obvious conclusion and subsequent indictment. It is not known whether the border agents—or the jury—laughed at his feeble explanation; the 31-year-old Indelicato was sentenced to five years in prison. After serving his time, he was deported to Canada and immediately picked up where he had left off in Wi
ndsor. With Badalamenti on one side of the Detroit River and Indelicato on the other, they established a modest heroin route.
One of the men in regular contact with both Badalamenti and Indelicato was Nick Rizzuto, who, in 1970, turned up on the telephone records of both traffickers, police said. The Rizzutos were firming up key access points to the United States. Relations with the American Mafia in Detroit and the ’Ndrangheta bosses of Ontario were quite amicable. The Sicilian mobsters were careful to spread their profits around and not to encroach on their other activities. Everywhere accommodations were being made—everywhere but in Montreal.
From each of these successes and occasional missteps, the Mafia learned, perfecting technique, routes and methods. They were not seeking perfection, but something terrifically efficient. The next-generation heroin pipeline, part of which was captured and chronicled in the Pizza Connection case, would dwarf the previous machinations.
Signs of the success of the new pipeline were getting harder to suppress. Large shipments of impeccably pure heroin, leaving Italy and arriving in the United States, were being detected with unprecedented frequency, as production in the new laboratories in western Sicily moved toward capacity. Starting in late 1977, luggage stuffed with heroin, placed aboard Alitalia flights from Palermo’s Punta Raisi Airport to New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport, was being seized with some regularity. In June 1979, a suitcase arriving for Gaetano Badalamenti in Sicily was found to contain $497,000, with the cash haphazardly wrapped in pizzeria aprons. The Pizza Connection was up, running and immediately profitable.
