At 11:30 p.m. on a cool autumn night, 70-year-old Pietro “Peter” Licata swung his long 1974 Cadillac to the foot of the driveway of his New York home, one of many tidy, well-kept houses in Middle Village, Queens. He and his wife, Vita, had just returned from a late meal at a restaurant. Before Licata could swing open the gates of his home, however, the tranquility and quiet were broken by the reverberating boom of a shotgun blast. Seven hot metal pellets shredded Licata’s head and upper body as his wife watched in horror from the passenger’s seat. A deeply distressed Vita told police detectives that a man had stepped out of a yellow car, possibly a Cadillac, and approached her husband before calmly firing the shotgun, aiming for his head. The gunman had jumped back into the yellow car and was driven from the murder scene by an accomplice.
Speculation abounded about the motive for the murder. Licata, ostensibly a retired businessman from the knitwear industry, was an old-time American gangster—one of the few remaining “Mustache Petes,” a term for the older, more traditional Italian gangsters. Homicide detectives and organized crime investigators wondered what was at the root of Licata’s demise. Was it the death three weeks earlier, through natural causes, of Carlo Gambino, the head of the Gambino Family? Or the distinct rise in influence and avarice of the Bonanno’s Carmine Galante? Or perhaps it was tied to the murder, four years earlier, of a Licata relative who was involved in gambling?
Later events offered more substantial clues. Licata’s murder was rooted in far wider shifts in crime than a neighborhood gambling den or even the death of an important crime boss. There was a shake-up under way in Mafia centers around the world and two of the most important New World mob outposts—New York and Montreal—were facing the same dangerous demographic shift.
Knickerbocker Avenue in Brooklyn is a long, cluttered street that runs through the Bushwick section of the borough, near the border with Queens. With Knickerbocker and its surrounding streets as his base, Pietro Licata had operated a crew of Bonanno soldiers and associates. He was the epitome of the Italian-American mob boss. The longtime turf of the Bonanno Family, Knickerbocker was Licata’s personal fiefdom, just as Montreal’s Saint-Léonard was Violi’s.
“Anything moving in there, even a tree, they got to say to him: I want to move the tree. Nobody moves nothing,” said Luigi Ronsisvalle, a former enforcer for Licata, who worked Brooklyn’s streets for years at the behest of the Bonanno organization. Ronsisvalle described Licata as an old-style street boss involved in low-key money-making ventures, loan sharking and gambling. He owned—legitimately or by hidden interest—several businesses in the area, including Italian cafés where organized card games were run, with Licata getting his “end”—a piece of each hand wagered. On a good night, a single café could make thousands of dollars in profit.
Licata stood out from other neighborhood residents because he always wore white. Legend had it that when his daughter was deathly ill, he went to church and prayed that if God spared her, he would from then on wear only white clothing as a sign of gratitude for the divine intervention. The child recovered, and thereafter Licata walked like a living ghost through Brooklyn.
Licata kept his crew busy, leaving them enough money to live on. All they had to do was to show traditional respect, obey him without question and keep away from drugs. Drugs, as many old-timers like Licata believed, were not only evil but would destroy the underpinnings of the Mafia’s traditional breadwinners. Gambling, loan sharking and other activities were illegal, but accepted by large segments of society. No one, however, could put a good face on drug trafficking. Licata and Ronsisvalle both had a nostalgic—if delusional—view of the Mafia.
“Like an American kid falls in love with baseball, I fall in the love with Mafia,” Ronsisvalle said in halting and broken English. “A Man of Honor no go around stealing and killing for money. A Man of Honor, he kills for some reason; to help people.” He himself had murdered 13 people during his time in America, which he no doubt felt had contributed to some greater societal benefit. Ronsisvalle established himself in Brooklyn in time to see the last vestiges of his beloved Mafia evaporate—if it had ever existed. When he arrived in America in 1966, he headed straight to Knickerbocker Avenue, on the advice of a connected friend in Sicily. Ronsisvalle would join Licata on collection runs, helping to convince debtors to quickly turn their money over.
But the old routine, which had played itself out for generations, was becoming a little archaic. Licata and Ronsisvalle found their precious Mafia was undergoing slow but distinct changes. It started with Carmine Galante.
After the death in 1976 of Carlo Gambino, the powerful boss of the Gambino Family, Carmine Galante started to believe he might finally achieve his dream of being the head of a pan-national heroin enterprise, not to mention boss of bosses in the American Mafia. It is hard to tell which he wanted more, although he probably saw them as related propositions. Upon his release from prison in 1974, after serving 12 years for his heroin conspiracy with Montreal’s Pep Cotroni, Galante’s outsized dreams became dangerously well known. The Bonanno Family leadership seemed an open question. Galante, as a former consigliere and underboss, felt himself to be more qualified than anyone for the job. The police and the public braced for a new wave of violence as Galante moved to regain his place as the key man in the Sicily–Montreal–New York heroin axis.
Like most theories and legends, there were kernels of truth scattered among the hyperbole and speculation. Galante did seem to have insane designs on becoming a boss without peer in the American Mafia. But he was really yesterday’s man. Internationally, the underworld had realigned in his absence: the French Connection, along with Galante’s Corsican and French colleagues in Europe and Canada, was unraveling. The European traffickers had spread through Europe and South America and formed direct alliances with the Bonanno and Gambino families in New York City—if not the other families as well—without Galante. Elsewhere, heroin laboratories in Sicily were starting to churn out product at an alarming rate. It seemed that all of the Sicilian Mafia clans were involved in the drug trade and the expatriate Mafia in Venezuela and Brazil were forming their own alliances. In Montreal, the Sixth Family was conspiring to eliminate the blockage caused by Paolo Violi, putting Galante’s longtime Cotroni connections at risk.
The Bonanno Family had also changed drastically in Galante’s absence. There were new players on the scene, tough young imports who had immigrated—legally or not—from Sicily over the years. Their loyalty was to the clans of Agrigento, Palermo and Trapani.
It was these young cadres of Sicilian traffickers in Brooklyn who, like the Rizzutos in Canada, were bumping up against the older, established American Mafia. And, just as in Canada, here was an old-style gangster trying to stand up to them, believing that tradition would trump the allure of drug wealth. It was a dangerous position for Licata.
Men like Pietro Licata would have been the first to notice the change in the underworld landscape.
As Licata surveyed his territory, he saw the influx of new Sicilian immigrants who had set up shop and burrowed into the heartland of the American Mafia. In New York, they gathered around the most Sicilian of the families, the one named after Joe Bonanno, who was in turn the most Sicilian of the New York family bosses. The new players caused a stir among American-born Mafia members, who referred to them as “Zips,” probably for the fast-paced dialect they spoke. Behind their backs, though, the Americans were as likely to refer to the Sicilians by a grossly insulting term: “greaseballs,” according to Kenneth McCabe, a former New York City police detective who died in 2006. The Knickerbocker Avenue Zips were part of the Bonanno Family. Several were “made,” and all—in theory—answered to Licata or other Bonanno captains. Most of the American-born Mafia members were leery of them: they kept to themselves, spoke an indecipherable dialect and were involved in schemes American gangsters could only speculate about. They were considered to be a breed apart.
“The Zips stood alone,” said Sal Vitale, a longtime Bonanno member and former family underboss. Frank Lino, a former Bonanno captain, echoed the sentiment: “I recognized them as Zips. You could detect a guy from Italy.” How? “The way they looked,” Lino said.
Salvatore “Toto” Catalano was the boss of the Bonanno Sicilian faction—the Zips—in Brooklyn. Born in 1941 in the Sicilian town of Ciminna, south-east of Palermo, Catalano and his two brothers, also Mafia members, had been sent to the United States in 1966 by old-country traffickers intent on expanding the Sicilian drug trade. The state crackdown on the Mafia in Italy, following the 1963 massacre of policemen in Ciaculli, south of Palermo, had sent members of the Sicilian Mafia fleeing around the world.
In Brooklyn, Catalano had relatives—including a cousin of the same name who was nicknamed “Saca”—who had been in the drug trade since the 1950s. Catalano lived a quiet, modest life, operating a shop on Knickerbocker Avenue. Capitalizing on his membership in the Sicilian Mafia, and on his family relationships, Catalano became a small businessman, with partnerships in bakeries and several pizzerias. All of his partners were mafiosi; all the businesses were fronts for the emerging heroin network that would later be known as the Pizza Connection. Those who met Catalano came away with a feeling that he was a deeply self-controlled man who wrapped himself in an aura of steel. He displayed none of the braggadocio and swagger of his contemporaries in the American Mafia—even though he was a “made” member of the Bonanno Family, like Nick and Vito Rizzuto in Montreal. His role in America, as with the Rizzutos, Caruanas and Cuntreras in Canada and Venezuela, was to conduct the Sicilian heroin franchise, although, as good mobsters, all the factions were reluctant to turn their back on any profitable opportunity that came their way. Six months after Licata’s murder, Catalano was made a captain in the Bonanno Family and handed Licata’s old turf, likely revealing his role in the slaying.
Among Catalano’s early contacts for heroin distribution was Carmine Galante, who, even though his parents were Sicilian, was thoroughly a product of the American Mafia. For many newly arrived immigrants like Catalano, Galante’s expertise and contacts were crucial in building those first bridges to American crews who were willing to get involved in the drug distribution business. Galante was tough, had spent a lifetime in the drug trade and had deep contacts in the United States, Canada and Italy. More important to the Zips, Galante was willing to let them in.
The influx of the Sicilian gangsters is often seen, from the American perspective, as an initiative on the part of Galante, who is said to have “imported” the Zips to do his heavy lifting. Evidence now suggests, however, that the Zips in fact perpetrated a quiet invasion. They were sent from Sicily, rather than called for by America. It is a significant distinction.
The American Mafia, largely the powerful Five Families of New York, had over the decades developed quite differently from its progenitor in Italy.
“Originally it was a simple franchise of the Sicilian organization, born in the rut of migratory movements from southern Italy toward the New World,” wrote Giovanni Falcone, the Italian investigative magistrate, who spent more quality time with turncoat mafiosi than perhaps any other investigator. “The two organizations have evolved their habits and their way of thinking according to the country in which they developed. This separate evolution has, in practice, caused a progressive autonomy on the part of the American Mafia which, today, is complete,” Falcone wrote.
Once a new generation of Sicilian Men of Honor had infiltrated the American Mafia in New York and Montreal, distinct differences between the Zips and American mobsters became clear to all.
“With the establishment of heroin laboratories in Sicily, there was a need to organize North American distribution capabilities,” said Tom Tripodi, a former leading agent with the old U.S. Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs and, later, with its successor, the Drug Enforcement Administration. Tripodi, a man with extensive overseas experience and a keen world view—he had previously debriefed such key Mafia informants, in both Italy and America, as Joe Valachi and Tommaso Buscetta—said it was a Sicilian Mafia overture, not an American Mafia initiative, that brought the Zips to New York and Montreal in such numbers.
“With the French traffickers on the wane, the Sicilian sphere of influence was growing, a development that appealed to mafiosi both in New York and Palermo,” Tripodi said. “The Sicilians wanted to restore order in the ranks of their American brethren, as well as reassert, through diplomatic means, the supremacy of the traditional strongholds in Sicily.”
Regardless of why the Zips arrived, one thing is certain: Carmine Galante liked them. They appealed to his ideal of all that was good and right with the Mafia—loyalty, strength, cunning and a ruthless interest in the drug trade. He personally inducted many of the Zips into the Bonanno Family, even though that role was usually reserved for the boss.
In 1977, Galante conducted an initiation ceremony in Brooklyn for Frank Coppa. Twenty-five years later, Coppa would wreak devastation on the Bonanno Family, but even his induction was something of note: Coppa was sworn in on the same day as a pair of the most aggressive and active Zips.
“They took me to an apartment in Brooklyn,” Coppa said. Waiting in the apartment were Carmine Galante and other Bonanno captains.
“We waited,” Coppa went on. “Me and the other fellow—I can’t remember his name offhand—waited in the bathroom while they were inducting two other people.” Through the thin walls, he could hear Galante in the living room leading the ancient induction rite for Cesare Bonventre and Baldassare “Baldo” Amato.
“They were speaking Italian, so I didn’t understand,” the Brooklyn-born Coppa said. “They left and we came out of the bathroom, went into the living room. And at that point they asked if you didn’t want to be inducted you had the right to leave, and if not, you join hands and you commence the meeting to be inducted into the Bonanno crime family… . We were led to believe that Carmine Galante was boss.”
The Sicilians were inducted separately from the Americans. And since Bonventre, and likely Amato, too, had been inducted into the Sicilian Mafia before emigrating, the issue of dual membership or competing loyalties was not something Galante seemed much bothered about. He appreciated the boost in power these new soldiers gave him on the street, thinking they would help to propel him to further heights. Galante felt they depended on him as well. He saw the Zips as his men; the Zips had other ideas.
Catalano’s drug organization, newly emerging in Brooklyn, consisted of a host of Sicilian-born and, more important, Sicilian-made Mafia members. Among them were men with strong ties to the Sixth Family: Bonventre, Amato, Giovanni Ligammari, Santo “Tony” Giordano, Filippo Casamento and Giuseppe Baldinucci. Bonventre and Amato arrived in New York through Canada. Much later, Casamento and Baldinucci would both return to New York after being deported to Italy, arriving after first visiting with Sixth Family associates in Canada. Ligammari had also been seen meeting and working with key Sixth Family leaders.
Not only did the Zips start flooding New York with heroin, but they supplied traffickers in Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago and Detroit. Repatriating the profits out of America to Europe and Canada, the Catalano faction utilized legitimate money-moving channels, including the Royal Bank of Canada and the Bank of Nova Scotia, both huge Canadian banking institutions with branches around the world. Other profits were channeled to the Sixth Family, who moved the bulk of the cash through Montreal’s far looser banking system and on to Switzerland and Liechtenstein.
By the mid-1970s, Catalano was being unmasked to authorities by several informants. Still a man of some mystery, he was, however, turning up in several investigations, mostly as a passing, collateral target when other Bonanno members were under surveillance. In 1975, he had been arrested while riding in a car with two other Sicilian mafiosi; an unregistered handgun had been seized and Catalano was convicted, serving three years of a five-year sentence. Around the same time, he was already in a dispute with Licata: tradition had it that the baccarat game that Licata ran “floated,” meaning that it moved once a year through a circuit of mob-controlled cafés in the area. Licata, however, was resisting the move. He did not much like the Zips and was particularly disdainful of Catalano. Licata was working to undermine the Zips any way he could.
Despite Catalano’s growing presence in Brooklyn, which was not going unnoticed by police, he was just another name in the broad Bonanno Family tree; his true role and importance in the underworld would not be revealed until after the Sixth Family completed its takeover of Montreal.
It would appear that for Catalano, membership in the Bonanno Family was a convenient formality. He had a job to do, and that was to move heroin. He seems to have had no loyalty to the Bonanno bosses, and he had little to do with fellow made members from America, who watched in envy as he amassed power and respect that seemed out of proportion to his quiet life.
“The highest American boss in the Mafia here is beneath the newest recruit in Sicily, both in stature and power,” said a trusted old associate of a major Sicilian-born mafioso drug trafficker. “Each member of a family in Sicily carries with him the weight of the entire family.” When told what Frank Coppa had said of the induction ceremony of Bonventre and Amato, during which they would have vowed to protect the Bonanno Family to the death, the man shook his head.
“If this is true, you can bet the Sicilian had his fingers crossed,” he said with a smile. “The loyalty only goes to one place: Sicily.”
As heroin profits poured in, Catalano and his crew began showing signs of unusual prosperity on the depressed strip of Knickerbocker Avenue. They drove expensive cars. They bought homes that were the envy of local mobsters who, in some cases, were living hand-to-mouth. Cesare Bonventre, in particular, caused a stir with his high fashion designer clothing in the style of the day, favoring open-necked striped dress shirts and tinted aviator glasses—outdoors and in. Along Knickerbocker Avenue, a $2,000 designer suit was difficult to ignore. What is more, at the nightly card games, the Sicilian gangsters—the Zips—were slapping down money at a dizzying rate.
Money was the very thing that men such as Pietro Licata in Brooklyn and Paolo Violi in Montreal could not control, contain or suppress. And it was drug trafficking that was bringing in the cash. Licata, like Violi, tried to intervene.
“He no like drugs,” Ronsisvalle said of Licata. “He say: no, no no [to heroin] on Knickerbocker Avenue. They say, ‘Okay.’ Then they kill him.”
Licata, despite his longevity in the mob, had only the code of the American Mafia to protect him from the Zips. It was not enough. Licata was dispatched, and the Zips quickly moved in to fill the void. As would happen in several similar cases, the murders of American mobsters drew no retaliation against the Zips.
Despite Luigi Ronsisvalle’s old-school view of the Mafia, he was certainly more flexible than Licata, and he soon found himself fitting in well within the new regime. He became a heroin courier. From Knickerbocker Avenue he started making dozens of trips to Florida and Los Angeles, carrying the Zips’ drugs. One load totaled 45 kilos; another, four kilos, he said. His life was planes, trains and automobiles. He made more than a dozen trips to Chicago on Amtrak, each time carrying about 40 kilos of heroin in his luggage. Ronsisvalle detailed another 15 heroin loads he ferried from the Bonanno Family to the Gambinos. After a brief interruption in his travels owing to a shortage of supply, trafficker Felice Puma, Carmine Galante’s godson, told Ronsisvalle that the drugs were once again flowing.
“We are in business again,” Puma told him. “Do you know, Luigi, the pipe from Canada that brings oil to the U.S.? We got the same thing—with heroin.”
The tension that led to Pietro Licata’s murder mirrored in almost perfect symmetry the situation between Violi and the Sixth Family in Montreal. To the chagrin of the Sixth Family, Violi could not be eliminated as quickly or with as much ease as Licata had been in Brooklyn. While the code of the American Mafia was often trampled on by the Zips, the ‘Ndrangheta code was something entirely different. Still, the spike in large-scale heroin trafficking that arose after the Licata murder has to have impressed upon them how profitable clearing the blockage could be.
With violence on the horizon, the Sixth Family went into war mode. Their core group drew closer, and they stepped up security. Intrigue was rife, as the loyalty of underworld figures was assessed and reassessed. Weapons were secured and kept at hand. And Vito, the future of the family, was moved out of harm’s way.
In 1976, after his release from jail, when tensions in Montreal were reaching their zenith, Vito joined his father in Venezuela, where he would be shielded from rival mobsters and police. He would stay in South America for the next three years, while war drums pounded in Montreal.