King of the Godfathers:. Anthony M. DeStefano
now deceased rival he was smart enough to realize that the old ways of having one big boss were outmoded and unworkable. There was too much money to be made in the rackets and everybody could have a cut, if only they worked together. Bonanno, who had been part of Maranzano’s inner circle, was the strongest man in his particular crime family and was elected the new boss by acclamation.
“I had the choice of rejecting Luciano’s olive branch or of accepting it in good faith. If told to fight, the men in my Family would have fought,” Bonanno later said. “But what good would it have done to fight Luciano? He had claimed self-defense in the killing of Maranzano. Now he mainly wanted to be left alone to run his enterprises. He was not trying to impose himself on us as had Masseria. Lucky demanded nothing from us.”
At first, Luciano wanted to carve up territory in the garment district with Bonanno, a move that the latter rejected. According to Bonanno’s son, Salvatore or “Bill,” who later wrote his own book Bound by Honor, his father and Luciano worked out a system of consensus and settlement of disputes that involved a so-called Commizioni del Pace, or Committee of Peace. This later became known as the Commission, the governing body of the mob.
The idea was for the five Mafia families to have a representative on the Commission and eventually over time this encompassed the heads of the families. Bill Bonanno, who anointed his father with the grandiose title “Angel of Peace” because of the way he brokered the idea of a commission, said the setup kept things relatively quiet between the crime families for decades.
“The heart of it was live and let live,” Bill Bonanno explained. “Let each Family run its own business in its own way, don’t interfere, and if any disputes arise, mediate them through the Commission. When a matter came up in one Family that might have a spillover effect for all, mediation, not warfare, was the ruling word.”
There wasn’t total peace, even with the Commission set up, as mobsters got caught in disputes within the families and occasionally paid for it with their lives. However, beginning in 1931, there was relative peace and prosperity among the Mafia families in the United States, a period that lasted nearly three decades. It was during this period that Joseph Bonanno ran his family the way he saw fit, remaining one of the premier crime bosses of his time.
It was also a time when Bonanno got married. In a wedding at which many of the Mafia leaders were invited and attended, Joseph Bonanno married Fay Labruzzo on November 15, 1931. The reception was at the Knights of Columbus Hall in Prospect Park, Brooklyn. Just before the ceremony there was a bit of consternation as the ring Bonanno was to give to his bride went missing. It later turned up in the pants cuff of Natale Evola, one of Bonanno’s wedding ushers. From that day forward, Evola, a garment trucker who lived in Brooklyn, was known by the moniker of “Joe Diamond.”
Though Bonanno got married during the Depression, things were good for his businesses, both legal and illegal. Talese reports that a cash cushion, acquired during the earlier years, allowed Bonanno to buy up real estate at bargain prices. He had homes in Arizona and New York and by all accounts was a respected member of whatever community he called home. While Vito Genovese had to flee the country in 1934 to escape murder charges and Lucky Luciano was convicted in 1936 for running a prostitution business, Bonanno seemed to adroitly avoid trouble. The only rub with the law came in the late 1930s when a Brooklyn clothing factory he was a partner in was hit with a federal wage and hour violation. Bonanno was fined $50.
Despite the troubles confronting some top mafiosi in America, the period before and after World War II in New York was one of prosperity and power for the mob. It was the start of the mob’s Golden Age, when gangsters in New York held sway with politicians, judges, and prosecutors in a way that would become unthinkable—and impossible—in the twenty-first century. Bonanno, the consummate Castellammarese who combined a business acumen with a political shrewdness, did well in this halcyon time, even though he kept out of the limelight.
In its own way, World War II was a fortuitous event for the Mafia and allowed a number of American bosses a cushion of several years from legal trouble. Though it was a well-kept secret at the time, it is now well documented that U.S. officials turned to some of New York’s mob bosses for help in the war effort. The first approach came after the passenger liner Normandie burned and foundered at its mooring on the West Side of Manhattan. Anxious to combat sabotage on the waterfront—something suspected of having caused the Normandie to burn—military and government officials turned to Joseph “Socks” Lanza, a Genovese man on the waterfront along the East River, including the Fulton Fish Market. Though under indictment for extortion, Lanza was seen as the right man for the job. While it is impossible to say if his efforts thwarted any sabotage or scared away any Axis spies, nothing akin to the Normandie incident happened again during the war.
Officials also turned to Luciano, who during the early part of the war was serving his sentence for prostitution-related offenses in the tough Dannemora prison in upstate New York. Luciano agreed to help and used his influence with his associates to help security on the West Side docks. But the really important help Luciano gave the Allied war effort came when from prison he established contact with his amici in Sicily. He instructed them to serve as spies and guides for the invading U.S., British, and Canadian forces who landed on the island in the summer of 1943.
After the Allies were able to take Sicily in five weeks, they leapfrogged to the Italian mainland with the invasion of the Salerno-Naples area. Again, the Allies had the help of another New York Mafia boss, Vito Genovese. Living in Naples since he fled New York following his indictment for murder of an old business partner, Genovese had become something of a stellar citizen. He even reportedly arranged for the murder on a Manhattan street in 1943 of one of dictator Benito Mussolini’s most vocal opponents, Carlos Tresca. For the Allies, Genovese worked as a translator and, as Talese later reports, was able to provide information about the Italian black market profiteers.
Genovese’s wartime efforts didn’t insulate him from problems. The FBI had him extradicted back to New York to stand trial for the Fernando Boccia murder. But conveniently, the key witness against Genovese was poisoned to death in the Brooklyn jail cell where he was being held as a material witness. Deprived of the witness’s crucial testimony, prosecutors dropped the case against Genovese. He was free to live and work at his pleasure in New York.
The war assistance by some of the mob bosses didn’t give them carte blanche to do business as usual. Luciano had Washington’s gratitude and won his freedom from prison when New York Governor Thomas Dewey, the very man who while working as Manhattan’s district attorney secured Luciano’s conviction, signed an order commuting his sentence on February 2, 1946. But as part of the deal, Luciano had to agree to voluntarily depart the United States (he was not a naturalized citizen), which he did shortly after Dewey signed the commutation order. Before setting sail on the Laura Keene, an old Liberty ship, Luciano, in another example of how the mob guys could get one over, was able to leave the immigration station at Ellis Island and attend a farewell party in his honor at the Village Inn in Greenwich Village. Mafiosi, judges, and politicians attended and reportedly gave Luciano thick envelopes presumably stuffed with cash. After sailing back to Italy on February 9, Luciano had to work through his emissaries, chief among them being Genovese, who was out from under the yoke of his legal troubles.
The war years had emboldened the mob, having seen how its effective power on the street and the docks had worked to its advantage. Crime families, including that of Joseph Bonanno, also developed rackets by trading in rationed goods, including precious gasoline stamps. But other core (and illegal) Mafia businesses in New York such as the docks, labor unions, and the garment industry were also prospering. Despite prosecutions by Dewey, the Mafia families also enjoyed a tremendous amount of connection to New York politicians and judges.
By the end of the war, Luciano had control of his family through Genovese and was a major force. Rounding out the leadership of the New York families were four other bosses from the time Maranzano was deposed: Joseph Profaci, Vincent Mangano, Thomas Gagliano, and, of course, Joseph Bonanno. However, Genovese had an ambitious Frank Costello to contend with and that created problems. It was Costello who had cultivated friendships and allegiances at a time when Genovese had been ducking prosecution in Italy. Profaci, Mangano, and Gagliano all had aspiring and power-hungry underbosses and associates