An undercover FBI agent got the Bonanno family thrown off the Mafia Commission
From 1976 to 1981 an FBI agent named Joseph Pistone lived inside the Bonanno crime family under the alias Donnie Brasco. When the deception came out, the other New York bosses expelled the Bonannos from their ruling Commission, the first of the Five Families ever cast out. Two decades later, their own boss turned government witness.
The family's roots lie in Castellammare del Golfo, a Sicilian town in the province of Trapani, where rival clans feuded in the early 1900s. Salvatore Bonanno took his household to Williamsburg in Brooklyn when his son Joseph, born in January 1905, was three, and the Castellammarese community there became a power base. In 1930 a dispute over stolen bootleg liquor exploded into the Castellammarese War between Joe Masseria and a faction eventually led by Salvatore Maranzano.
Masseria was killed in April 1931, and Maranzano organised the American Mafia into families, with five in New York, crowning himself boss of bosses. He lasted only months. Lucky Luciano had him killed in September 1931, replaced the boss-of-bosses role with a Commission to settle disputes, and handed Maranzano's operations to Joseph Bonanno, who at 26 became the youngest Mafia leader in the country.
Under Bonanno the family moved into gambling, loansharking and narcotics, reached into California, Arizona and Canada, and held interests in the Fulton Fish Market and what became Kennedy airport. With Sicilian partners it helped bring billions of dollars of heroin into the United States. Bonanno overreached in the early 1960s by trying to topple fellow Commission bosses, vanished from 1964 to 1966, and after an internal feud known as the Banana War was pushed into retirement in Arizona in 1968.
Pistone's infiltration left the family the weakest in New York through the 1980s. Joseph Massino, boss from 1991, rebuilt it until it again sat on the Commission and ranked second only to the Genovese family. Then a wave of convictions in the early 2000s ended with Massino cooperating with prosecutors in 2004, the first boss of a New York family to do so.
Source: Bonanno crime family
