Word: gambino
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...hardly been tamped down on the grave of Mafia King Carlo Gambino last week when a motel near New York's J.F.K. Airport was the scene of an extraordinary meeting. Packed into the basement room 100 strong were the capos (captains), consiglieres (counselors), under bosses and bosses of the five New York Mafia clans that Gambino had ruled directly. Attending, too, were some honored guests from afar; for it was the patient Don Carlo who had maintained order among the 26 families of the national Mafia combine. His word was taken as final judgment on their affairs and squabbles...
...Lewisburg federal penitentiary in 1974, after serving a 15-year sentence for drug trafficking, Galente has controlled the remnants of the Joseph Bonanno family in New York. Says one Mafia source: "Lillo would shoot you in church during high Mass." Galente, it is said, had no respect for Gambino because the latter "never broke an egg in his life." Unverified Mob talk last week went so far as to suggest that Galente ordered his spies within the Gambino family to persuade the capo di tutti capi to take a swine-flu shot, knowing that a frail individual with a heart...
...there just to help. Few observers believe his intent was so benign. More probably, he wants to retake control of his old New York family-which his fellow mobsters pushed him out of twelve years ago, when he began to infringe on their turfs -and then grab Gambino's crown. Bonanno's forte is treachery-and innovation. He is credited with inventing the split-level coffin. Instead of leaving his victims for police to find, he would have them taken to a Brooklyn funeral home and put in the lower compartment of a coffin. On top would...
...Aniello Dellacroce (translation: "Little Lamb of the Cross"), 62, who was Gambino's longtime underboss. A legend even among Mafia assassins, Dellacroce relishes doing his own dirty work. Says one federal official: "He likes to peer into a victim's face, like some kind of dark angel, at the moment of death." Dellacroce is a master of disguises. Known throughout the Mob as "Mr. O'Neill," he often donned priest's garb on his troubleshooting assignments for Gambino, earning his other name, "Father O'Neill." Dellacroce's men -undisguised-were at the motel meeting...
Whoever takes over as Boss of All Bosses, dramatic departures from Gambino's style are certain. Gambino preferred peaceful solutions. He limited membership in the Mafia, ostensibly to lessen the risk that informants might join the families but actually to keep down the numbers he had to oversee. Gambino's would-be successors believe in expanding membership-in part to strengthen their own forces and provide themselves with point men for any future Mafia shootouts. For the past three years, they have brought into the country, via Montreal, a number of young, hardened, reliable Sicilian gangsters called "greenhorns...