Forty-five years ago this month, Philadelphia mob boss Angelo Bruno was killed. The local crime family has never recovered.
Bruno was smoking a cigarette as he sat in the passenger seat of his car parked in front of his row home just off the corner of 10th Street and Snyder Avenue in South Philadelphia. It was a rainy Friday night, March 21, 1980. Bruno had had dinner at Cous Little Italy, a favorite restaurant, earlier that evening. He had the chicken Sicilian, chicken breasts swimming in a spicy blend of olive oil, peppers, mushrooms and olives. It would be his last supper.
He was then driven home by a newcomer to his organization, a Sicilian named John who had come to Philadelphia several years earlier with a letter of introduction from Bruno’s good friend Carlo Gambino, the powerful New York mob boss.
Gambino died of natural causes in 1975. Bruno wouldn’t be as fortunate.
As Bruno smoked, Stanfa pushed the remote-control button, lowering the passenger side window. To this day there is uncertainty about the significance of that move. To those who believe that Stanfa was part of the conspiracy to kill Bruno (something Stanfa has always denied) lowering the window literally opened the way for what happened next. For those who say Stanfa was not involved, it was simply a move to allow the smoke from the cigarette to drift out of the parked car, a random act that took on significance because of what happened next.
It was shortly before 10 p.m. As the mob boss savored his cigarette, a man wearing a raincoat stepped out of the shadows just off the corner and approached the car from the rear.
When he reached the open window, he pulled a shotgun out from under his coat, leveled it at the back of Bruno’s head and fired.
Bruno died instantly.
But what has lived on is an image of the mob boss – The Gentle Don, the Docile Don.
And that, it should be noted as we look back on history, has very little to do with reality. Bruno was, indeed, a gentleman. And those who knew and dealt with him in the neighborhood saw him as an avuncular, almost benign crime boss.
That was the soft image he projected, a curtain that hid a gangster.
Bruno got his start as a young man in the bootlegging business at the end of Prohibition and then moved up the ladder in what the FBI – long before political correctness had taken hold – referred to as the “Greaser Gang.” This was a group of Italian immigrants, primarily from Sicily, Calabria and Abruzzo, who were part of the Philadelphia underworld, an underworld dominated at the time by Jewish gangsters like Willie Weisberg and Harry Stromberg.
Bruno saw the advantage of aligning with those in power and eventually used his connections both with the Jewish mob in Philadelphia and more powerful Cosa Nostra figures in New York (like Gambino) to enhance his standing. He was also a prolific money-maker, generating tens of thousands of dollars through the numbers racket (now legitimate state-run lotteries), bookmaking, loansharking and the vending machine business. But there was another side of him.
One FBI report from the 1950s identified Bruno as a “trigger man” and listed him as a suspect in at least one gangland murder. This was back in 1954. The victim was described by federal investigators as a fellow bootlegger who had been running illegal stills in the Philadelphia area for years but, suspiciously, had never been arrested. Those in the underworld suspected he was a cooperator and Bruno, an up-and-comer at the time, was assigned the hit.
The bootlegger’s body was later discovered in the trunk of a car parked on a South Philadelphia street He had been shot to death. Subsequent FBI reports on Bruno included the warning that he was considered “armed and dangerous.” Hardly the Docile Don, but that is the image that has persisted through the years.
So had the misconception that Bruno wanted nothing to do with drug dealing.
Bruno realized drugs created problems both with law enforcement and with the public.
But that did not stop him from taking a piece of the action when it was available. Several high- ranking members of the crime family did time for narcotics trafficking. These included PeteCasella, Harry Riccobene, Phil Testa and Bruno’s long-time business associate Raymond “Long John” Martorano who became a major player in the highly lucrative methamphetamine business.
Bruno listed his occupation as a commissioned salesman for the vending machine company owned by Martorano and his brother. The company was big in the cigarette business and later would branch out to video poker machines as well. Bruno was receiving about $60,000 a year in commission salary from the vending machine company at the time he was killed (a figure that today would be about $230,000). Cynics scoffed at Bruno’s “salesmanship” and privately whispered that his income included a take from Martorano’s drug business, neatly laundered through the vending machine company.
In fact, many believe Bruno’s murder was directly linked to his two-faced approach to drug dealing. The critical moment came in 1979 when he allowed members of the Gambino crime family to set up shop in Cherry Hill. They opened a restaurant near the Garden State Racetrack called Valentino’s, a swank supper club where Bruno occasionally had dinner and on one occasion met with Paul Castellano, who had taken over after Carlo Gambino died.
Castellano was in many ways cut from the same cloth as Bruno. Both took a position within their organizations banning drug dealing. But both were willing to look the other way
when the cash was flowing in their direction. The operators of Valentino’s were later linked to an infamous international heroin ring known as the Pizza Connection run by the Sicilian Mafia.
Everyone in the underworld, including Bruno’s consigliere, Antonio “Tony Bananas” Caponigro, knew of the drug connections. And when Bruno invited the young Gambino restaurateurs to his home for Easter dinner, Caponigro and others saw it as the ultimate hypocrisy.
Caponigro had been dealing heroin in the Newark area where he was based but did it secretly because of Bruno’s supposed ban on drug dealing for any members of the family. But here was the mob boss inviting international drug dealers to his house for dinner on a special and important feast day. Everyone knew when the Gambino’s showed up for dinner they would be carrying envelopes stuff with cash and gifts for Bruno as a sign of respect. And everyone
knew that cash was drug money.
“Ange shot himself in the foot when he let the Gambino’s come down to Cherry Hill,” recalled Willard Moran Jr., a mob associate and hitman who would later become a federal cooperator. “It put everybody’s nose out of joint. It was do as I say, not as I do.”
Caponigro began plotting Bruno’s demise. One of his co-conspirators was Bruno’s lieutenant Frank Sindone, a major player in the loan shark business. Among other things, Moran said, Bruno had prohibited Sindone from lending money to a major South Philadelphia drug dealer. For Sindone, the dealer was a dependable customer, always paying off the loan with interest, so he continued to secretly do business with him. Like Caponigro, he saw Bruno as a hypocrite.
There are those who believe Caponigro himself was the shooter on the night Bruno was killed. No one was ever arrested, but a different kind of justice quickly came into play.
Caponigro, Sindone and two other suspected conspirators were killed on the orders of the Mafia Commission whose leaders determined that Caponigro had not received its okay to kill a sitting mob boss.
Caponigro thought he had. It was a classic underworld double-cross orchestrated by the New Jersey leaders of the Genovese crime family who wanted to take over his $2 million gambling operation in Newark.
Greed and treachery, not honor and loyalty, were the cornerstones of the American Mafia in the 1970s and 1980s. That’s why Bruno was killed.
The Godfather book and movies and many other stories in the media have tried to paint a noble picture of Cosa Nostra. Bruno as the “Gentle Don” is a part of that distortion of reality.
In fact, nobody made Angelo Bruno an offer he couldn’t refuse.
They just pointed a shotgun to the back of his head and pulled the trigger.
EDITOR’S NOTE: George Anastasia is currently at work on a book about Angelo Bruno.
