- Also called:
- Joe Bananas
Joseph Bonanno
Who was Joseph Bonanno?
What was Joseph Bonanno’s role in the Castellammarese War?
What was the Apalachin meeting?
What happened to Joseph Bonanno in the 1960s?
What did Joseph Bonanno do after retiring?
Joseph Bonanno (born January 18, 1905, Sicily, Italy—died May 11, 2002, Tucson, Arizona, U.S.) was an Italian American crime boss of the eponymous Bonanno family, one of the New York City-based Five Families of organized crime. Bonanno is considered one of the original godfathers of the American Mafia. His criminal career peaked in the 1950s, when his organization was active in drug trafficking, gambling, and loan-sharking across the United States.
Early criminal career
Bonanno hailed from a Mafia family in the Sicilian town of Castellammare del Golfo. He immigrated to New York with his parents in 1908 but returned to Sicily about 1918. In 1924 he reentered the United States illegally through Cuba, allegedly fleeing persecution from the fascist government in Italy.
Bonanno entered the bootlegging trade in the 1920s and soon began working for Salvatore Maranzano, a fellow Sicilian immigrant. Maranzano belonged to an older generation of Mafia leaders who favored traditional Sicilian customs. Several members of Maranzano’s faction had formerly served in the Sicilian Mafia and the Neapolitan Camorra. As Bonanno earned his trust, he was placed in charge of the faction’s liquor distribution network and the armed men who protected it from rival gangs.
Role in the Castellammarese War
When the Castellammarese War broke out in 1930 between Maranzano and rival crime boss Giuseppe (Joe) Masseria, Bonanno emerged as one of Maranzano’s leading lieutenants. In 1931 Masseria’s lieutenant Charles (“Lucky”) Luciano agreed to betray Masseria to end the fighting. On April 15 Masseria was killed in a Coney Island restaurant. Shortly afterward, fearing that Maranzano planned to have him killed after declaring himself capo di tutti capi (“boss of all bosses”), Luciano arranged the killing of Maranzano. Bonanno, then one of the family’s leading members, succeeded Maranzano as its head.
Seeking to avoid the conflict that had brought down his predecessors, Luciano organized New York’s nascent Mafia groups under the Commission, a governing body through which the Five Families coordinated their activities and resolved disputes. Bonanno, one of its original members, is said to have eschewed the pomp and public appearances of his contemporaries and remained a low-profile figure into the 1950s.
Apalachin meeting and decline
Bonanno’s anonymity ended after the 1957 Apalachin meeting, an upstate New York conference of organized crime leaders that was raided by police and brought national attention to the existence and leadership of the American Mafia. Although Bonanno was not arrested, he was named as the head of an organized crime family.
After his ally Joseph Profaci died in 1962, Bonanno’s influence on the Commission declined as rival bosses Carlo Gambino and Thomas Lucchese emerged as the dominant power bloc in New York. Facing increasing isolation within the Mafia leadership, Bonanno tried to reaffirm his leadership by backing a plot to kill Gambino and Lucchese. The plan was meant to be carried out through Profaci’s successor, Joseph Magliocco, but collapsed when Joseph Colombo, the lieutenant chosen to organize the killings, warned the intended targets instead. Called before the Commission to answer for the conspiracy and also subpoenaed by a grand jury, Bonanno disappeared in October 1964. He reappeared in 1966, claiming that he had been kidnapped.
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Retirement and later life
Following the “Bananas War,” in which a succession struggle weakened his control of the Bonanno crime family, Bonanno returned to the Commission and negotiated a peaceful retirement with his former rivals. He left New York to settle in Tucson, Arizona, after relinquishing leadership of the Bonanno crime family. The vacuum left by his departure and the continued succession crisis sapped the Bonanno family of its strength. Though he no longer led the New York organization, Bonanno remained involved in organized crime on a smaller scale in Arizona.
In 1980 Bonanno was convicted of conspiring to obstruct justice by interfering with a grand jury’s inquiry into money-laundering allegations involving companies run by his sons in California. Bonanno was sentenced to one year in prison for the crime.
Many have argued that his autobiography, A Man of Honor (1983), broke the Mafia’s code of silence, or omertà. However, Bonanno reasoned that the publication did not break the code valued among mafiosi because he did not testify to law enforcement nor were his confessions made under duress. In 1985 Bonanno was sentenced to 14 months in prison following his refusal to provide testimony to U.S. attorney Rudy Giuliani in relation to some of the claims in his book. In 2002 Bonanno died of heart failure in Tucson, Arizona, at the age of 97.