bloodshed. Instead, negotiations were carried on while at the same time Bonanno's foes tried to wipe out Bill Bonanno and his loyalists.
Bonanno offered a deal. He would retire from the rackets, give up control of his crime family and move to Arizona. He wanted his son Bill and his brother-in-law Frank Labruzzo to take charge. The commission would not buy this, realizing they would just be puppets and Bonanno would remain in control. Instead, they said they would name the new family head. Bonanno was in no position to hold out and finally agreed.
Bonanno was released and then surprised the commission by not returning to New York but disappearing again. He was still out of sight when DiGregorio was named and the Troutman Street ambush was attempted.
In May 1966—19 months after he had been kidnapped—Bonanno reappeared. It soon became obvious to the other Mafia leaders that Bonanno had no intention of sticking to their arrangement. Upset with DiGregorio's failure to prosecute the war successfully, they dumped him and brought in a tougher man, Paul Sciacca. However, Sciacca could not handle a Joe Bonanno-led opposition. Several of his men were badly shot up in gun battles and in the most spectacular incident in the war three Sciacca henchmen were machine-gunned to death in a Queens restaurant. In short order five others on each side died.
Then in 1968 Bonanno, felled by a severe heart attack, flew off to his Tucson, Arizona, home. He sent word now that he was retiring, a statement the commission not surprisingly greeted skeptically. They continued to wage war in Brooklyn and appeared to make some moves against Bonanno and his followers in Arizona. A bomb went off at the Bonanno home, and, in a bizarre development a number of other bombs were exploded at other homes; some or perhaps all of these were planted by a rogue FBI agent.
Finally the conflict petered out and an arrangement was made. The Bonannos kept control of their Western interests but Sciacca (and later Natale Evola) was accepted as the boss of New York. The war was over and with it Bonanno's dreams of vast new powers.
It may be the Banana War made a valuable object lesson for the other Mafia leaders. When Bonanno's long-imprisoned underboss Carmine Galante emerged from prison in the 1970s, took command of the family and started a violent drive to extend his power, he was summarily executed. Galante was accorded no opportunity to come before the board and explain his actions.
Bank Manipulation by Mafia The mob's interest in the banking system was undoubtedly triggered by its laundering problems—the need to move safely its huge profits from gambling operations (especially casino skimming) and narcotics and other heavy cash-flow enterprises. With Mafia-financed banks, especially in Florida, this laundering requirement was fulfilled, as was the need for a stolen securities repository against which good-money loans could be written.
As the Mafia became more accustomed to the intricacies of banking, the mobsters began to see the banks as something worth robbing. As Slick Willie Sutton had maintained, they were "where the money is."
Many crime families engage in bank looting on a straight and simple basis. Operating through front men, mafiosi buy up enough shares in a bank to gain effective control and either install their own management or make existing management totally compliant to their wishes. Loans are then made to Mafia applicants and businesses. These loans are never repaid. If the banks have insufficient insurance and supervision, the depositors will take the loss.
Another even more sophisticated manipulation involves keeping the bank healthy and viable and using it to furnish phony statements of worth for mob figures who, in turn, are able to obtain loans from other banks. By scattering the loans to many banks around the country, it can be a long time before the original bank comes under suspicion.
The mob has also found it worthwhile to use a captive bank as an intelligence resource, since a bank can get financial information from other banks regarding any individual or company in the country. Banks share information with each other on a level financial reporting firms are unable to match. With such intelligence the mobster can zero in on logical victims or even check up on individuals ostensibly cooperating with them to make sure they are not enjoying more revenue than the criminals want them to have.
Bankruptcy Scams The discovery of the bankruptcy laws must have been to the Mafia what the wheel was to early man. Bankruptcies are used by legitimate businessmen as protection from the collection of debts. Organized crime, having seen how easy it was to pull a bankruptcy scam, moved its operators in. According to one estimate by U.S. Justice Department sources, crime syndicates pull off at least 250 such scams or "bustouts" annually, all netting anywhere from a quarter of a million dollars up to several million.
The bustout is worked either by taking over an established company with a good credit reputation, the preferred method, or by setting up a new firm. To accomplish the latter, the New York crime families use a
