Cosa Nostra News

One night in early May 1981, FBI agents were watching the Middle Village, Queens, home of Bonanno soldier Santo Giordano, a skilled mechanic who operated a gas station and was a licensed pilot. Santo Giordano, aka Tony. Giordano belonged to the Bonanno family’s Zip faction, which at the time had been aggressively focusing on the sale of heroin. The Zip faction also included Gerlando (George from Canada) Sciascia, Sal Catalano, Cesare Bonventre, Baldo Amato, and Giovanni Ligammari (who would all variously feature in the Pizza Connection Case). Also fully with the Zips was the “Sixth Family,” members of the Bonanno-linked outpost that Carmine Galante had established in Montreal decades prior . When Galante was slain by members of his own crime family in 1979, Giordano was among the Bonannos stationed outside the restaurant. The wheelman, he stood guard by the car used to ferry the shooters to and from the scene. Giordano’s fingerprint was later discovered on a door handle, though even...

In May 2004, the Bonanno family’s first-ever “made” canary, former capo Frank Lino, became the first witness to describe the murders of the three Bonanno capos. The Hole -- the mob graveyard in Queens. Alphonse (Sonny Red) Indelicato, Philllip (Phil Lucky) Giaccone, and Dominic (Big Trin) Trinchera had been slain together on May 5, 1981, in Brooklyn. Lino, then-66, testified that the capos had challenged Bonanno boss Joseph Massino for control of the Bonanno family and were brought to a meeting in the basement of a Dyker Heights club run by “Sammy Bull” Gravano. Massino and other allied mobsters awaited them with bad intentions. The three capos had been unarmed, thinking they were going to a meeting to iron out difficulties, though they all knew they were taking a huge risk. They were summarily murdered, blasted with shotguns, finished with pistols to the head. While the bullet-riddled body of Sonny Red had been found in a vacant lot in Ozone Park, Queens, in May o...