Word: bonanno
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Joseph Valachi told a Senate investigating subcommittee all about La Cosa Nostra, the previously secret name under which the brotherhood had operated. After the Mafia had been romanticized in books and movies like The Godfather, some mobsters became brazen about their affairs. In 1983 former New York Boss Joseph Bonanno even published an autobiography about his Mafia years...
Reading that book, A Man of Honor, helped Giuliani realize that the little understood 1970 RICO act could be used against the Mob. "Bonanno has an entire section devoted to the Commission," Giuliani recalled. "It seemed to me that if he could write about it, we could prosecute...
...Bonanno, 82, seems to have had second thoughts about what he triggered. The aged boss has left his Arizona retirement mansion to serve a contempt-of-court sentence in a Springfield, Mo., federal prison rather than give testimony in the Commission trial. The mobster turned author, says one investigator, "is hearing footsteps...
...head of the most powerful of New York's five infamous crime families (followed by the Genovese, Colombo, Lucchese and Bonanno clans), Castellano had some 400 "soldiers" under his command, as well as interests in the construction trades and the garment, meat and poultry industries. His bloody retirement may have been deemed necessary because of a series of indictments brought against him by U.S. Attorney Rudolph Giuliani. At the time of his death, the soft-spoken don was on trial in Manhattan federal court for masterminding an international car-theft ring. The day after his murder, Castellano's co-defendants...
...twin trials have brought a mob of 32 defendants to the federal courthouse on Foley Square. In the celebrated "pizza connection" trial, the Government contends that the Bonanno crime family conspired with Sicilian Mafia counterparts to bring $1.6 billion worth of heroin into the U.S. from 1977 to 1984. The case owes its spicy nickname to the pizza parlors allegedly used as fronts for heroin smuggling...