Cosa Nostra News

In September 1964, illegal bugs planted in the meeting places of high-level Mafiosi across the nation by covert teams of FBI agents started to pick up bits of related news regarding the fate of a sitting member of the Mafia Commission.



The FBI black bag operation commenced as part of J. Edgar Hoover's post-Apalachin strategic intelligence gathering efforts, and in September 1964, it captured in real-time word of a Commission ruling as it hurtled like a brushfire from New York City to the nation's 24 crime families.

Frank DeSimone, the Los Angeles Cosa Nostra boss, was heard in San Francisco telling a boss there that Joseph Bonanno was out.

Thomas (Tommy Ryan) Eboli, acting boss of the Genovese Family, and underboss Gerry Catena together had traveled to the Providence, Rhode Island, headquarters of Raymond Patriarca, boss of the New England Family, to explain that Bonanno was out.

Catena also was heard ordering members of his crew to steer clear of all Bonanno family members unt…

UPDATED
Did Joseph Bonanno plot a comeback in the 1970s, perhaps to resurrect himself as the secret power behind a newly installed boss of the Los Angeles family?



The short answer: No, he didn't... Or if he did, his plotting never succeeded. Bonanno was finito — he was out, never to regain Mafia power or standing.

But he was only partly accurate when he noted in A Man of Honor, "I'm not a Father anymore and there is no Bonanno Family anymore." There still is a Bonanno family.

In 1931, Bonanno, a top gun in the American Mafia (thanks to his cousin who was the boss of a powerful crime family in Buffalo/Niagara Falls), was named boss of his own Family, which had largely been the Maranzano family prior to his reign.








By his own admission, the naturalized Sicilian was a member of "the Commission," which acted as an organized crime board of directors in New York and other major U.S. cities.

Bonanno described himself in his autobiography as a "venture capitalis…

We post here the first part of a story, which we dedicate to a great man who we can't name but will refer to as a personal benefactor (because he is).... 



In March 1983, the Feds hid an electronic eavesdropping device in Gambino boss Paul Castellano's kitchen alcove, kicking into high gear a massive probe that resulted in 600 hours of recordings that fueled eight Mafia-related trials.

Castellano didn't live to see one of those trials, of course, but he was in the process of facing another jury (for the massive car-theft operation formerly overseen by Murder Machine Roy DeMeo) when he and underboss Thomas Bilotti were gunned down in December 1985 in front of Sparks Steakhouse on East 46th Street near Third Avenue shortly before 5:30 pm. 
Because of the FBI's penetration of Big Paul's Todt Hill White House on Staten Island, we have transcripts of some of  his private discussions with associates. (Boss of Bosses by two agents involved in the probe makes for interestin…