Angelo "The Gentle Don" Bruno

Bruno ran Philadelphia for twenty-one years and was killed for being careful. The nickname the newspapers gave him was not affectionate; it was a description of a business method, and the men who resented it are the men who arranged his death.

He was born in Villalba, Sicily, came to South Philadelphia as a child, and worked his way up through gambling. He took the family in 1959, after his predecessor fled to Italy in the wake of the Apalachin meeting.

The method

Bruno's rules were simple and he enforced them. No narcotics. No unnecessary killing. No publicity. Keep the crews small and the earning steady.

The result was a family that made money for two decades without giving federal prosecutors much to work with. He was jailed once, briefly, for refusing to answer a grand jury, and otherwise stayed out of custody entirely.

Atlantic City

New Jersey legalised casino gambling in Atlantic City in 1976. The city sat inside Philadelphia's traditional territory, and it was about to become the largest new source of construction contracts, union jobs and cash on the east coast.

Bruno took a share of the labour and the concrete and let New York into the rest rather than fight for it.

21 March 1980

Bruno was shot once behind the right ear while sitting in the passenger seat of his car outside his row house on Snyder Avenue.

The arrangement was made by his own consigliere, Antonio Caponigro, who believed he had New York's blessing and did not. Caponigro's body was found in the Bronx the following month with money stuffed into his mouth, which is not a subtle message and was not meant to be.

What followed in Philadelphia was twenty years of killings, prosecutions and cooperating witnesses. Bruno's method had looked like timidity to the men who ended it. It had in fact been the only thing holding the organisation together.