Organisation file
The Bonanno Family
New York from Brooklyn Heights, c. 1911 — Library of Congress
No American crime family has been penetrated as thoroughly as this one, and it has been penetrated twice: once by an FBI agent who spent six years inside it, and once by its own boss, who became the first man to run a New York family and then testify against it.
Castellammare
The family's origin is a town. A large proportion of its founding membership came from Castellammare del Golfo in the province of Trapani, and Joseph Bonanno, who took one of the five seats in 1931 at twenty-six, came from there too.
Bonanno held the position for over thirty years. What ended it was a dispute with the rest of the Commission in the mid-1960s, his refusal to answer for it, and his disappearance from a Manhattan street in October 1964 — an episode with two irreconcilable explanations and no settled account.
The war and the exile
The fight that followed split the family and cost it its seat on the Commission.
Carmine Galante came out of prison in 1974 into that vacuum and filled it with a speed and a public appetite that alarmed the other families. He was shot dead in a Brooklyn restaurant garden in July 1979. The family spent the decade after Bonanno's fall as the weakest of the five and the one the others did not consult.
Donnie Brasco
In 1976 an FBI agent named Joseph Pistone was introduced into the family's orbit as a jewel thief called Donnie Brasco. He stayed for six years.
More than a hundred convictions, and something the convictions do not measure: the first inside account of the daily life of a crew by somebody trained to record it. Not a memoir written by a member decades later, and not the compressed picture a wiretap gives.
The operation ended in 1981 when the Bureau withdrew him. A member who had vouched for him disappeared shortly afterwards and has never been found.
Massino
Joseph Massino rebuilt the family in the 1980s and 1990s with real discipline, refusing to allow his name to be spoken and keeping the organisation earning while its rivals were dismantled.
He was convicted of racketeering and murder in 2004. He then agreed to cooperate with the government — the first official boss of a New York family to do so — and testified in a subsequent prosecution. Everything recorded here about him comes from the court record, and nothing beyond it belongs on this page.
Where it stands
The family that lost its seat on the Commission for letting an FBI agent inside is still being prosecuted alongside the families that expelled it.
In August 2022 two of its members and an associate were charged in Brooklyn in the same indictment as Genovese defendants, over racketeering and illegal gambling. Its members have appeared in joint cases with the Gambino family in the same period.
Sharing an indictment with another family is not evidence of weakness. It is evidence that the crews work together on the ground, which they have always done, and that the government now charges the activity rather than the organisation chart.
The Commission 1950–1970
Boss
- Joseph "Joe Bananas" Bonanno 1905–2002
The Decline 1970–1992
Boss
- Carmine "Lilo" Galante 1910–1979
Capo
- Dominick "Sonny Black" Napolitano 1930–1981
Soldier
- Benjamin "Lefty" Ruggiero 1926–1994
Grouped by the period each man belonged to. A family's chart changes shape from one era to the next, and reading it as a single organisation is what makes it confusing.
Members
Stories
- Six Years as Donnie Brasco An FBI agent spent six years inside the Bonanno family as a jewel thief. The operation ended because the family tried to make him a member, and the men who had vouched for him paid for it.
Sources
- Selwyn Raab — Five Families (2005)
- Joseph Bonanno — A Man of Honour (1983)
- Joseph D. Pistone — Donnie Brasco (1987)
- United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York records
- United States Department of Justice press releases
- Eastern District of New York (2022)