Posted on 05/13/2002 7:58:30 AM PDT by dighton
JOSEPH 'BANANAS' BONANNO, who has died aged 97, was a megalomaniac Mafia Don; in the 1970s he aspired to become capo di tutti capi.
"Joe Bananas" was a constant frustration to both the FBI and his fellow Mafiosi. Though known to be a serious criminal since the 1930s - when he was tried and acquitted of supplying guns to Al Capone - he was convicted only once, in 1940, for refusing to pay overtime to the girls in a garment factory; and his ambition several times threatened the pax Romana of the Mafia clans.
He plotted to assassinate the Godfather Don Carlo Gambino, and plunged his own family into internecine strife, the "Banana War" in which numerous Mafiosi needlessly perished.
Having made himself unpopular on all sides, he spent many years living effectively in exile in Tucson, Arizona. Finally, in 1981 when Bonanno was 75, the FBI managed to secure his imprisonment. Incarcerated in Kentucky, he wrote his autobiography, Man of Honour, then sued his publishers because they had put a picture of a "cheap gangster" on the cover.
The book combined brutality and sentimentality in equal measures, and was described by one reviewer as exuding "moral insanity". His autobiography also attracted the attention of the district attorney for Manhattan, Robert Giuliani, because it stupidly disclosed that the Mob had a ruling commission against which legal action could be taken; previously all hoods had denied the existence of the organised Mafia.
For this blunder Bonanno incurred further odium among the Mafia. He made amends by refusing to testify, for which he did another stint in prison. Nonetheless, it was doubtless because of his indiscretions that in the early 1980s the Bonanno Family was temporarily banished from the commission, and missed out on the exploitation of the New York construction boom.
He was born Giuseppe Bonano at Castellammare del Golfo, Sicily, on January 18 1905. His family emigrated to New York via Cuba when he was a child.
The Bonanno family established itself as one of New York's foremost clans in the 1920s. It derived its income from the traditional mixture of illegal interests - gambling, alcohol, protection, blackmail and drugs - laundered through restaurants and clubs.
It had a particular line in the beef and poultry wholesale industry. A Bonanno associate, Charles Anselmo, asked whether one of his shipments consisted of horsemeat, replied: "Well, some of it moos, and some of it don't moo."
After the Second World War, Bonanno was one of the established Dons who gathered to bid farewell to Lucky Luciano, as he sailed to exile in Sicily, having been granted freedom in return for arranging that the Sicilian Mafia would co-operate with the Allied invasion forces.
Narcotics became an increasingly lucrative business. In 1963 Bonanno was one of 17 Mafiosi named in a Sicilian police investigation into the smuggling of drugs from Sicily to America, an arrangement that had been planned at a commission meeting in New York in 1957.
Emigrants had been persuaded to carry drugs in false bottomed suitcases, and heroin had been mingled with consignments of sardines. Five years later, the trial collapsed, amid rumours of fixing.
In October 1964, Bonanno was kidnapped at gunpoint in New York as he and his lawyer entered a Park Avenue apartment block. His son also disappeared. It was thought that Bonanno had been kidnapped to prevent him from giving evidence at a Federal Grand Jury investigation into racketeering; or that he had fallen victim in a power struggle for control of Brooklyn.
It was soon clear, however, that he was not in a barrel of cement, but had arranged his own abduction to avoid testifying. He did not give himself up until May 1966. For the next few years his doctors kept him supplied with affidavits claiming his heart was too weak for him to stand trial.
The background to Bonanno's disappearance thickened when it was revealed that he had named his halfwit son Salvatore `Bill' Bonanno as consigliere of the family, thus precipitating the Banana War.
The kidnappings had been an act of self preservation, and the family also claimed that they were on a list of victims for a campaign orchestrated by the FBI to foment gang warfare. The home of Bonanno senior had been bombed and at one stage maverick FBI agents were said to have plotted to kill him with a crossbow.
Bonanno had acceded his interests in Brooklyn and was ostensibly a spectator during the ferocious Mafia power struggle for the control of that region in the early 1970s, when the majority of rackets were taken under the control of Carlo Gambino; at least 25 gangsters died in the fighting.
But after Gambino died in 1976 (some claimed after being administered a poisoned inoculation against swine-flu) Bonanno was named as one of those vying again for the throne.
In 1979 the struggle culminated in the shotgun-murder of Carmine Galante, Bonanno's former henchman, in Joe and Mary's luncheonette in Knickerbocker Avenue, Brooklyn. Bonanno had lost out, and his isolation was completed when he published his story, which one Mafia Don was heard to describe as "a piece of s**t".
In person, Bonanno was said to be rather humourless; he denied the existence of the Mafia and described himself as a "venture capitalist".
He was married with two sons and a daughter.
© Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2002.
I'd love to learn more about this one.
He's not living like that any more. When God issues a subpoena, no one avoids it.
Ole!
Chiquita Leni
Leni
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