Joseph Bonanno, the man for whom the crime family is named, emigrated from Castellammare del Golfo in Sicily to the United States in 1924 and quickly became a major player in the booming bootleg liquor industry. He was elected family boss in the fall of 1931, shortly after the execution of Salvatore Maranzano, a legendary Cosa Nostra figure in his own right.

After the Castellammarase War, a conflict that included families across the country, Maranzano proclaimed victory when key rival Joseph (Joe the Boss) Masseria was killed in April 1931. Maranzano had a short run, however. On September 10, 1931, he was whacked by men employed by rival Lucky Luciano.

Bonanno had a 33-year reign. His first major activity involved the formation of the Mafia Commission. As a charter member, his clout lasted for decades. When Prohibition ended in 1933, the family expanded its gambling, loan sharking, and labor rackets. Bonanno, ruthless and shrewd, invested in many legitimate businesses, which had a distinct competitive advantage over rival firms whose trucks and warehouses would burn down or whose plants would suffer from labor problems.

His lucrative reign was relatively uneventful until the 1950s, when he sent a rising star, Carmine (Lilo) Galante, (left) to Montreal to establish a Bonanno branch there. The Canadian seaport was a wide-open city with many politicians, police, and court officials on the take. Galante and his men used strong-arm methods to extort tribute from major gamblers, nightclubs, pimps, con men, and drug dealers. When a reform movement tried to gain power in a Montreal city election, hoods openly intimidated voters at polling booths. Unfortunately for Galante, the reformers won. Eventually, in 1956, political pressure forced him to leave Canada, but the Bonanno family influence remains to this day.

Bonanno’s control of his family and the Commission began unraveling in the 1950s. In 1957, longtime ally Albert Anastasia was killed and replaced by future rival Carlo Gambino. Rivals also headed the Genovese and Luchese families. In addition, his longtime support from cousin Stefano Maggadino, boss of the Buffalo family, began to wane. Bonanno

 was also being pursued by a number of jurisdictions that were conducting inquiries into a variety of matters including the disastrous Mafia conclave in Apalachin, NY in late 1957. Bonanno reacted by adopting a policy of constant movement. This only raised the suspicions of his underworld rivals, who felt that Bonanno had designs on their territories.

In the early 1960s, Bonanno's troubles worsened. He lost the support of one crime family when Joseph Profaci, another 1930s ally, died. Bonanno pushed Profaci's brother-in-law and underboss, Giuseppe Magliocco as boss. two Commission members, Gambino (right)  and Thomas Lucchese, supported capo Joe Colombo instead. An angry Bonanno plotted to whack Gambino and Lucchese. This intrigue was developing during an explosion of public interest in the Mafia because of the revelations of informer Joe Valachi, who knew Bonanno and spoke about him. When the feds tried to get Bonanno before a grand jury, he went on the lam for two years. At the same time, the Commission was looking to quiz him about plotting to kill two members.  Bonanno was deposed by the Commission, but for a time, resisted. Sporadic shootings broke out, accomplishing little but generating great publicity. Ultimately, he gave up the losing battle and, in 1968, retired to Tucson, Arizona, where he died in 2002.

The crime family endured years of instability following Bonanno’s departure from New York.

In January 1974, Galante was released from prison after serving 12 years for heroin trafficking. The family’s boss Philip (Rusty) Rastelli was tied up with his own legal problems, and Lilo moved for the top slot. He also rekindled his heroin connections, trying to make up for lost time.

Galante’s style didn’t appeal to many in his family nor to other New York leaders. With the Commission’s blessing, some capos allied themselves with Galante’s closest aides and whacked him in a storied rubout at Joe and Mary Italian-American Restaurant in Bushwick, Brooklyn on July l2, 1979.

Rastelli had the throne but spent much of his reign behind bars. That led to more disunity, the worst instance of which was the execution of three capos on the same night, May 5, 1981. It’s believed that the family lost its seat on the Commission during this period. Others say it happened during Bonanno’s last years. No matter. When word surfaced a few months later that FBI agent Joseph Pistone was able

to infiltrate the family so well that he was proposed for membership, the Commission’s belief that the family was out of control was reinforced. Pistone’s work also destroyed the ascending mob career of capo Dominick (Sonny Black) Napolitano, who had been close to Pistone. He paid for this mistake with his life. Rastelli’s bad luck also continued. Rusty was found guilty of federal racketeering charges and died of liver cancer on June 26, 1991, while serving a 12-year prison sentence.

Out of this mess emerged Joseph Massino, a Rastelli (right) ally who had orchestrated the three capos murders in 1981 and surrounded himself with loyalists, when he got out of prison in 1992. He shut down the family social clubs and tried to adopt a more secretive manner of doing business. Under his leadership, the Bonannos regained their seat on the Commission and reasserted themselves in narcotics, labor racketeering, and other criminal enterprises.

After an 11-year-run, the bubble burst for him, and the crime family, in 2003, on the day before Massino’s 60^th birthday.

On January 9, 2003, Massino was arrested on a racketeering indictment, and charged with the 1981 murder of Sonny Black. Detained without bail, he faced life if convicted.

Things got worse for Massino (left) and the entire family during the next 16 months.

By time he went to trial in 2004, the indictment was expanded to include six additional murders between 1981 and 1987, and a litany of lesser charges. Massino was also accused of arson, loan sharking, and running a variety of illegal gambling businesses – a baccarat game, a sports betting operation, and the distribution of joker poker machines in Metropolitan area bars and restaurants. On top of that, Massino faced the death penalty for a 1998 murder of a capo who had fallen out of favor.

The crime family, which despite all the chaos of the Bonanno

 years had never had a defector among its members, was also reeling. Eight made men had spilled their guts to the feds and were prepared to testify against their boss and other family members. In a separate case, more than two dozen Massino loyalists had also been hit with racketeering charges, with most facing at least one murder charge.

The circumstances surrounding the plight of the family's long time consigliere, Anthony Spero, didn't bode well for Massino Two years earlier, Spero, (right) was sentenced to die in prison for three 1990s murders for which he had been convicted on the testimony of a few low level associates who had neither heard nor seen Spero order the slaying of any of the three victims.

Against Massino, the feds had much more. They had six made men who were prepared to testify about the seven murders he was charged with.

Prosecutors also had a myriad of financial records that linked Massino to several companies involved in shady dealings that dovetailed nicely with the testimony of the turncoats. The records tied Massino to a bakery, a parking lot, and a restaurant where Massino often held court with family members.

In late 2002, capo Frank Coppa Sr., who was doing a three-year stretch for securities fraud, was the first to roll over. Coppa, (left) then 61, had been hit with three extortion counts around the same time he was incarcerated, and, in the words of one source, “was not looking to add any more time to his stay.”

His defection made him the first Bonanno mobster to agree to publicly break the Mafia vow of silence that has been breached dozens of times by wiseguys from New York’s other four families since 1962, when Genovese soldier Joe Valachi paved the way.

In short order, Coppa had an avalanche of followers. Two months after Massino’s 2003 arrest, he got the worst possible news. His underboss, his brother-in-law, Salvatore (Good Looking Sal) Vitale, had defected.

With Vitale leading the way, Massino was buried at trial.

Vitale (right) gave chapter and verse about the May 5, 1981 murders of capos Alphonse (Sonny Red) Indelicato, Philip (Philly Lucky) Giaccone, and Dominick (Big Trin) Trinchera at a Brooklyn social club. Vitale wielded a submachine gun during the bloody coup.

For decades, the details remained a closely guarded secret shared, amazingly, by dozens of Bonanno family members and a select group of Gambino mobsters, who somehow managed to keep the specifics from becoming common knowledge. Indeed, for weeks, until Sonny Red’s body was found in a shallow grave in a lot on the Brooklyn-Queens border, there was no physical evidence confirming that the three capos had been eliminated.

The murders were carried out with an official sanction from the Commission, Vitale testified.

The Commission, which had okayed the execution of cigar-chomping Galante two years earlier, initially vetoed the bloodshed. But with Gambino boss Paul Castellano taking the lead, the ruling body reversed itself after learning that the rebel capos were planning an all out assault against Rastelli’s supporters.

Several Gambino mobsters, including underboss Aniello (Neil) Dellacroce, and future boss and longtime Massino pal, John Gotti, (left) were in on the plan and helped dispose of the bodies, according to Vitale and other Bonanno turncoats.

The triple slaying ran into a few snafus. One was the accidental wounding of Santo Giordano, a member of the Sicilian faction that threw in with Massino. Giordano was hit by mistake in the wild shootout that began when the three capos entered the club for what they believed were peace negotiations.

The other was Vitale’s own screw-up. He was handed a submachine gun and told to position himself in a closet. He was unfamiliar with the weapon, however, and precipitated chaos and a near crisis when he “accidentally discharged the weapon before the three capos arrived.”

Key players in the plot were gunmen from the family's Sicilian faction – including Vito Rizzuto, (right) whom Canadian authorities would later call the Mafia Godfather of Canada – who were imported from Montreal and were hiding with Vitale when the capos arrived.

Rizzuto jumped out and launched the carnage, shouting, “This is a stickup.”

The shooters then fled, with Vitale remaining to escort Massino and the other plotters to a waiting car. Vitale did double duty as part of the cleanup crew headed by Sonny Black

Napolitano. The bodies of the three capos were wrapped in painter’s drop cloths and brought by van for burial at “The Hole,” a debris-strewn lot on Ruby Street in Brooklyn.

Twenty four years later, as reporters and curious area residents looked on for weeks, FBI agents using backhoes and shovels unearthed the remains of Big Trin and the inaptly nicknamed Philly Lucky from their unmarked grave. 

The FBI was directed there by Massino, who defected and became the first New York mob boss to publicly violate omerta, the Mafia vow of silence following his conviction. Ironically, his initial efforts to cooperate – only days after his conviction – were rebuffed by the feds. 

Six months later, however, Massino tape recorded his hand-picked acting boss, Vincent (Vinny Gorgeous) Basciano (left) discussing mob murders and an alleged plot to whack a federal prosecutor in two jailhouse talks in January of 2005, and his status as a cooperating witness was assured. 

So, in February 2005, the feds closed the book on the three capos murders, and with Massino spilling his guts on his old pals, ramped up the pressure on the remains of a bedraggled Bonanno family. 

In addition to indicting Basciano for murder, and subsequently convicting him, the feds also obtained a racketeering indictment against his successor as acting boss, Michael (Mikey Nose) Mancuso, who is slated for trial in early 2008.

Meanwhile, in an effort to stymie the feds, the family decided to go back their roots, and chose a little-known Sicilian-born wiseguy, Salvatore (Sal the Ironworker) Montagna with few ties to the previous leaders, as acting boss.