Free King of the Godfathers: "Big Joey" Massino and the Fall of the Bonanno Crime Family by Anthony M. DeStefano

resulted in the Troutman Street shootout and the open warfare that followed. But by late 1968, police perceived a different situation in the Bonanno family, one in which Joseph Bonanno accepted Paul Sciacca as the new boss and had agreed to move permanently with his family to Arizona. MAFIA LEADERS SETTLE “BANANA WAR” was the headline of a November 24, 1968, New York Times story about the development.
    Police-organized crime investigators, like Kremlinologists of the cold war period who studied the Soviet Union, looked to social circumstances and public appearances to divine what was taking place behind the scenes in the Mafia. In terms of the Bonanno family, it was a September 14, 1968, wedding on Long Island that led police to believe that the crime family war had been settled. As police told the Times, Bonanno loyalists and Sciacca supporters who had been on hostile terms were “disported together convivially” at the wedding reception of Sciacca’s son, Anthony, to Florence Rando, a niece of Frank Mari.
    The Sciacca-Rando wedding wasn’t the nuptial of the century, but it drew a lot of attention from law enforcement because such celebrations are places where mobsters want to be seen and do business. The guest lists for such functions are studied because they provide clues to who is in and who is out in the mob hierarchy. In this case, there were 200 guests who attended a reception at the Woodbury Country Club and detectives filled nine pages of notes with their jottings of the various car license plates.
    There is no evidence that Joseph Massino, who at that stage in his life was nothing more than an associate in the crime family, attended this particular wedding. But his mentor Rastelli was spotted by police at the reception and his presence signaled that those who had once been loyal to Joseph Bonanno and his son had buried the hatchet with the Sciacca faction. Rastelli was clearly safe and in his role as captain had not lost any stature. A peace of sorts had blossomed.
    However, Sciacca suffered from a bad heart. So he wanted to stop his involvement with the crime family and was in the process of grooming Mari to become his successor. A triggerman and reputed dope dealer, Mari was elected family boss during a sitdown in a restaurant in Manhattan in May 1969. His reign was short. In September 1969, Mari, his bodyguard James Episcopia, and Sciacca loyalist Michael Adamo disappeared. There bodies were never found. Police suspected Mari had been killed as payback for having a role in the murder of Joseph Bonanno’s bodyguard Sam Perrone a year earlier. Another theory was that some mobsters simply resented the way Mari was pushed forward, particularly since he hadn’t distinguished himself.
    The Bonanno family could have lurched into another period of disarray, but the Commission took the unusual step after Mari’s disappearance of appointing a triumvirate to rule the family, at least temporarily. The three leaders who were to work as a team were Natale Evola, who had weathered a narcotics conviction to maintain his power in the garment trucking industry, an obscure crime captain named Joseph DiFilippi, and the none-too-flashy Philip Rastelli.
    As a member of the crime family’s governing committee, Rastelli’s stature within the mob had grown and those like Massino who had hitched themselves to him began to see their lives tightly intertwined with his fortunes. It would take years for the importance of this connection between Massino and Rastelli to become apparent. Much of what would later happen to Massino could be traced to Rastelli’s influence. Theirs was a mentoring relationship and the ties that developed would endure for a lifetime.
    It was also in 1970 that a Brooklyn kid with straw blond hair and a Germanic name started hanging around Massino’s Remsen Place coffee trucks. The youngster with the pale complexion stood out among the darker Italians in the neighborhood. He was barely a teenager when he