Joseph Bonanno

• 1. Introduction

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  Joseph Bonanno, nicknamed Joe Bananas, headed a New York crime family from 1931 until 1968. He took command at just 26, which made him one of the youngest bosses any crime family has ever had. On the 21st of October 1964, the day before he was due to testify before a grand jury, his lawyers said Bonanno had been kidnapped. They said it happened as he entered an apartment house on Park Avenue and East 36th Street, after he had eaten dinner with them. Whether that story was true, and who stood to gain from it, is only one of the puzzles in his life. How did a boy born in Sicily, who arrived in America as a stowaway, rise so fast? What did he plot against the men who governed the American Mafia? And why did a man sworn to silence later put his life into a book?

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• 2. Roots and Bootlegging

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  Castellammare del Golfo, a town in Sicily, is where Giuseppe Carlo Bonanno was born on the 18th of January 1905. His parents were Salvatore Bonanno and Catherine Bonventre. Two of his uncles, Giuseppe and the older Stefano, belonged to the Sicilian Mafia and led a clan in the town. Their strongest ally was Stefano Magaddino, who headed the Magaddino clan and was the brother of Joseph's maternal grandmother.

  The clan feuded in the 1900s with Felice Buccellato, boss of the Buccellato clan. After Giuseppe and Stefano Bonanno were murdered, their younger brother Salvatore took revenge by killing Buccellato men. Magaddino reached New York in 1902 and became a powerful figure among the Castellammarese there. In 1921 he fled to Buffalo to escape murder charges.

  When Joseph was three, his family moved to Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and stayed about ten years before returning to Italy. His father went back to Sicily in 1911 and died of a heart attack in 1915.

  In 1924 Bonanno slipped back into the United States as a stowaway on a Cuban fishing boat bound for Tampa, Florida. Magaddino's son Peter travelled with him. By Bonanno's own account, immigration officers detained him at a train station in Jacksonville and freed him on $1,000 bail. Willie Moretti and an unidentified man greeted him. It later emerged that Magaddino had paid the bail, as a favour to Bonanno's uncle Giovanni Bonventre.

  Bonanno first worked in a bakery owned by that uncle and took acting classes near Union Square in Manhattan. The reason he left Italy is contested. He had been active in the Mafia in his youth, and he fled after Benito Mussolini began a crackdown. Years later Bonanno claimed he left because he was a committed anti-Fascist.

  Soon he turned to bootlegging. He ran a distillery in an apartment building basement with Gaspar DiGregorio and Giovanni Romano. Romano died there in an accidental explosion. During these years the boss Salvatore Maranzano took a liking to Bonanno and became his mentor. Maranzano's feud with a rival group in Brooklyn was about to pull his protege into open war.

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• 3. The Castellammarese War

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  Between 1930 and 1931, Maranzano and Bonanno fought a rival group in Brooklyn led by Joe Masseria and Giuseppe Morello. A secret third faction soon formed from younger mafiosi on both sides. They scorned the old-world habits of their bosses and called them "Mustache Petes."

  Lucky Luciano, Masseria's second-in-command, led these "Young Turks." On Masseria's side they included Frank Costello, Vito Genovese, Joe Adonis, Carlo Gambino and Albert Anastasia. On Maranzano's side they included Joe Profaci, Tommy Gagliano, Tommy Lucchese, Joseph Magliocco and Stefano Magaddino.

  Bonanno was more devoted to honor, tradition, respect and dignity than most men of his generation. Even so, he saw a need to modernize and joined the Young Turks.

  Luciano struck a secret bargain with Maranzano. He would arrange his own boss's death in exchange for Masseria's rackets and the post of Maranzano's second-in-command. Masseria was killed on the 15th of April 1931.

  Luciano soon decided that Maranzano was greedier and more rigid than Masseria had been. Maranzano had also named himself capo di tutti capi, the boss of all bosses. So Luciano arranged his murder on the 10th of September 1931. Bonanno then took over the bulk of Maranzano's family, and he styled himself "Father."

  His part in Maranzano's fall is disputed. His autobiography says he knew nothing of Luciano's plans and learned of them from Magaddino. He wrote that Maranzano and Luciano had quarrelled over influence in the Garment District. According to Bonanno, Maranzano had hired the Irish gangster Vincent "Mad Dog" Coll to kill Luciano. Coll was reportedly on his way to Maranzano's office on the day Maranzano died.

  Bonanno wrote that war with Luciano would have served no purpose. Luciano, he said, "demanded nothing from us." He also doubted his soldiers wanted another round of fighting so soon, so he chose what he called "the path of peace." The mob expert Anthony Bruno is unconvinced. He says it "defies mob logic" to think Luciano would have spared a Bonanno who still backed Maranzano.

  Luciano replaced the boss of all bosses with a national commission. Each family would be represented by its boss and owe the body its allegiance. The Commission would settle disputes while each family stayed largely autonomous in its own area. Three decades later, that same body would sit in judgment on Bonanno himself.

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• 4. Family and Fronts

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  Two months after Maranzano's murder, Bonanno married Fay Labruzzo, who lived from the 31st of December 1905 to the 9th of September 1980. They had three children: Salvatore, known as Bill, then Catherine, then Joseph Charles Jr. The family held property in Hempstead, New York, and later in Middletown, New York.

  When Bill was ten, a severe mastoid ear infection sent his parents looking for a dry climate. They enrolled him in a Catholic boarding school in Tucson, Arizona. From the early 1940s, Bonanno kept a home in Tucson too.

  His legitimate businesses included three coat manufacturing companies, laundries, funeral homes and a trucking company. Between 1964 and 1979 he also had cheese suppliers, through Lino Saputo. His Brooklyn funeral parlor was suspected of serving as a front for disposing of bodies. The suspicion was that it built double-decker coffins, so two bodies could be buried in one grave.

  In 1945 Bonanno became a United States citizen. Later that year he was convicted of violating wage laws and fined $450.

  In October 1957, Bonanno allegedly attended a Mafia meeting at the Grand Hotel et des Palmes in Palermo. A month later, Vito Genovese called the Apalachin Conference to discuss the future of Cosa Nostra. Bonanno was reported to be among those who attended.

  Police became curious about the many out-of-state vehicles and moved in. The meeting collapsed as mafiosi fled, and many were arrested. Those caught faced fines of up to $10,000 each and prison terms of three to five years. All the convictions were overturned on appeal in 1960. Bonanno suffered a heart attack and was excused from testifying at the trial.

  He claimed he had skipped the meeting. But the capo Gaspar DiGregorio was carrying Bonanno's recently renewed driver's license. An official police report lists Bonanno as caught fleeing on foot.

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• 5. The Commission Plot

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  In 1963, Bonanno drew up plans to assassinate four rivals on the Commission. They were the bosses Tommy Lucchese, Carlo Gambino and Stefano Magaddino, plus Frank DeSimone. He sought the backing of Joseph Magliocco, boss of the Profaci family. Magliocco agreed readily, because he still resented being denied a seat on the Commission. Bonanno's aim was bold. He wanted to take over the Commission and make Magliocco his right-hand man.

  Magliocco was given the job of killing Lucchese and Gambino. He passed the contract to one of his top hit men, Joseph Colombo. Colombo was opportunistic, and he revealed the plot to its intended victims.

  The other bosses doubted Magliocco could have devised it alone. They remembered how close Bonanno was to Magliocco and to Joe Profaci before him, and how marriages tied their families together. They concluded that Bonanno was the mastermind.

  The Commission summoned both men to explain themselves. In mid 1964 Bonanno fled to Montreal and left Magliocco to face the bosses. Badly shaken and in failing health, Magliocco confessed. The Commission spared his life but forced him to retire as Profaci boss and pay a $50,000 fine. Colombo was rewarded for betraying his boss with control of the Profaci family.

  In Canada, Bonanno's immigration papers falsely stated that he had never been convicted of a criminal offense. He was held for nearly 90 days at Bordeaux Prison, until he was forced to leave. In October 1964 he returned to Manhattan.

  FBI recordings of the New Jersey boss Sam "The Plumber" DeCavalcante showed that the other bosses were caught off guard when Bonanno vanished. Other recordings captured furious Bonanno soldiers complaining that he had run off and abandoned them.

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• 6. The Banana War

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  With Bonanno gone for two years, Gaspar DiGregorio saw his chance. Many in the family were unhappy about the role Bill Bonanno played, and DiGregorio used that discontent to claim leadership. The Commission named him boss of the Bonanno family. The revolt led to four years of strife that the media labeled the "Banana War." The family split between loyalists of Bill and loyalists of DiGregorio.

  On the 28th of January 1966, Bill and his followers walked into gunfire. DiGregorio had reportedly contacted Bill in early 1966 about a peace meeting, and Bill had suggested his grand-uncle's house on Troutman Street in Brooklyn. As they approached the house, shots rang out. Nobody was wounded.

  Foley Square is where Bonanno reappeared, on the 17th of May 1966.

  In 1968, machine gun fire wounded DiGregorio, and he later suffered a heart attack. The Commission grew dissatisfied with his failure to quell the rebellion. It dropped him and shifted its support to Paul Sciacca.

  Bonanno suffered a heart attack himself in 1968. He ended the warfare by agreeing to retire as boss and move to Arizona. The peace deal also required Bill to step down as consigliere and leave New York with his father. The family that Bonanno had ruled since 1931 passed to other hands.

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• 7. Prison and Print

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  Catalina Vista, a neighborhood of Tucson, Arizona, became the family's base in 1974, when Bonanno and his son Bill moved there with their relatives. In the late 1970s Bill and his brother Joe Jr. drew growing attention from law enforcement in Northern California. They had become involved with Lou Peters, a Cadillac-Oldsmobile dealer working in San Jose, Lodi and Stockton. Louis E. Peters became a confidential informant for the FBI, and his help led to Bonanno's indictment.

  In September 1980, a federal court in San Jose convicted Bonanno of conspiracy to obstruct justice in a grand jury investigation into organized crime money laundering. On the 12th of January 1981, U.S. District Judge William Ingram sentenced him to five years in prison and fined him $10,000. It was the first prison sentence of his underworld career. It was later reduced because of his poor health.

  Gay Talese's 1971 true crime book Honor Thy Father drew partly on interviews that Bill gave during his own trial. Joseph was furious and refused to speak to Bill for a year. By the late 1970s his attitude had changed, and he wanted to tell his own version of his life. The result was A Man of Honor: The Autobiography of Joseph Bonanno, published in 1983.

  Bonanno defended the book on the grounds of omertà. In his view it was a way of life and tradition, and not just a code of silence. Because he had never been forced to become an informant or government witness, he reasoned that he had not broken his code. His editor, the publisher Michael Korda, said of him, "In a world where most of the players were, at best, semiliterate, Bonanno read poetry, boasted of his knowledge of the classics, and gave advice to his cohorts in the form of quotes from Thucydides or Machiavelli."

  In April 1983, Bonanno and Bill sat for an interview with the correspondent Mike Wallace on the CBS News program 60 Minutes. Later that year Bonanno served eight months in prison for obstruction of justice. In 1985 he was jailed for 14 months for contempt of court after refusing to testify in a federal racketeering case. Federal inmate number 07255-008 was moved from the Federal Correctional Institution in Tucson to the U.S. Medical Center for Federal Prisoners in Springfield, Missouri, because of ill health. He was released on the 1st of November 1986.

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• 8. On Screen

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  On the 11th of May 2002, Joseph Bonanno died of heart failure in Tucson at the age of 97. He is buried at Holy Hope Cemetery and Mausoleum there. His image has outlived him in memoirs, films and television.

  In 1991 his daughter-in-law Rosalie Profaci Bonanno published the memoir Mafia Marriage: My Story. It became the 1993 Lifetime film Love, Honor & Obey: The Last Mafia Marriage, with Ben Gazzara as Bonanno. In the 1991 film Mobsters, the actor John Chappoulis played him. In 1999 Showtime made Bonanno: A Godfather's Story, released on DVD as Youngest Godfather, with Tony Nardi in the role. That same year the comedy Analyze This mentioned Bonanno during its opening credits.

  From 2004 until 2008, Rosalie Bonanno put Joseph's personal items up for auction on eBay.

  Television returned to him in 2006, in The Sopranos. In one episode, Eugene Pontecorvo wants to retire and cites Bonanno as an example of a retired mobster. In another, Tony says "Joe Bananas" went to war against Carlo Gambino for seven years.

  In 2009 Joseph's cousin Thomas Bonanno appeared as a Mafia expert on Deadliest Warrior in the episode "Mafia vs. Yakuza." He demonstrated his marksmanship with a Thompson submachine gun and talked about what he called true Sicilian Mafia philosophy and culture.

  In 2014, the Boardwalk Empire finale "Eldorado" gave Bonanno a silent cameo, played by Amadeo Fusca. He sits at the table as Lucky Luciano gathers the country's most powerful bosses to form the Commission. Chazz Palminteri played him in the 2019 series Godfather of Harlem.

  The 2019 film The Irishman has Frank Sheeran, played by Robert De Niro, compare Bonanno's alleged kidnapping to Jimmy Hoffa's disappearance, in a phone call with Hoffa's wife. Sal Landi played Bonanno in the 2022 series The Offer, and Louis Mustillo took the role in the 2025 film The Alto Knights.

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