Free The Butcher by Philip Carlo Page B

family, Joe Bonanno, was in retirement. He had bought a particularly comfortable, spacious home in Arizona and lived there with his family, staying out of the daily hands-on running of the crime family. His old street capo, Carmine Galante, who had been arrested by Jim Hunt’s father, was nearly finished with twelve years of his twenty-year sentence and was soon to be released. From prison, he had been insistently ranting and raving, threatening and demanding, saying that he was going to kill Carlo Gambino. Gambino had become the boss of bosses, a very powerful man. Galante had no fear of him. Galante sent word from prison, “I’m going to make him suck my dick in Times Square.”
    Carmine Galante was an out-of-control, bona fide psychopath. He had no conscience, scruples, or reservations about blowing the brains out of either a real or an imagined foe. When his old nemesis, Frank Costello, died, Galante, from jail, ordered his mausoleum blown up. While in prison, Galante was examined by a psychiatrist, who diagnosed him with “psychopathic personality disorder”—an understatement.
    The network of dedicated thugs that Galante had put together had no compunction about selling heroin and was still viable; thefoundation he laid, at the behest of Joe Bonanno and Lucky Luciano, was so strong and well put together that it was still up and running. These were men who, at another time, might have been strikebreakers, bootleggers, killers. Interestingly, it was not only they who were at Carmine Galante’s beck and call, but it was their brothers, their cousins—relatives through marriage. In other words, in order to belong to this fraternity, you had to be a relative or go back many years.
    From jail, with a vengeance that bordered on obsession, Galante planned his comeback, the engine of which was heroin. He planned his becoming the boss of bosses. He was going to sell heroin—openly, boldly, and without reservation. Fuck the other families. Fuck the DEA. He was willing, indeed he was happy, to go against the dictates of the full Mafia Commission. He didn’t respect them. He thought they were soft. In time, he planned to kill them all. As he paced his cell in Lewisburg, as he finished his last days in prison, he plotted in his mind the deaths of all the Mafia bosses—Philip Rastelli, “Cockeyed” Philip Lombardo, Tony “Ducks” Corallo, and Carmine Persico. Fuck, he’d kill them all.
    Like this, the stage was set for a monumental, bloody war that would rock the foundations of the Mafia from Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, to Castellammare del Golfo, Sicily. True to his word, when Carmine Galante was released from prison in 1974, he immediately went about putting together his plan. Within weeks, pure heroin was coming into the United States because of his connections in Sicily and Montreal and because of his fearless, audacious belief that he could do whatever the hell he wanted. Not only did he and his faction of the Bonanno family start openly selling drugs, but they openly defied the mandates of the Commission.
    â€œFuck ’em,” Galante told anyone who would listen, his words echoing throughout Brooklyn like some kind of religious mantra.
    Additionally, Galante began having members of the Gambino family murdered. Leaving no clues as to who was committing the killings,he brazenly brought down Gambino soldiers and captains. Meanwhile Carlo Gambino died of natural causes, in his sleep, disappointing Galante to no end.
    â€œThe cocksucker wouldn’t even give me the pleasure of killing him,” Galante told confidants.
    Galante’s intention was to eliminate the competition. It was no secret in La Cosa Nostra that the Gambinos were selling drugs—Carlo’s brother Paulo was suspected of running the operation—that the Gambinos were bringing high-grade Turkish heroin from Sicily. This was, of course, all off the record.
    The acting head of the