The Bonanno crime family is one of the "Five Families" that dominates organized crime activities in New York City, United States, within the nationwide criminal phenomenon known as the Mafia (or Cosa Nostra).
Founded and named after Joseph Bonanno, the Bonanno family was the first of the New York families to be kicked off the Commission (a council of the bosses that helps to maintain order in the Mafia), due to allegations that the family was actively dealing heroin and the inner family fighting for control of the leadership. Later, the family faced shaky leadership, with acting boss Carmine Galante being murdered in 1979 on the order of imprisoned boss Philip Rastelli, as well as two major setbacks: in 1981, they learned that an FBI agent calling himself Donnie Brasco had infiltrated their ranks; in 2004, boss Joseph Massino, who previously brought the family back to respectable stature among the families and back on the Commission, became a government informant.
Read more about Bonanno Crime Family: Allied Criminal Organization, Government Informants and Witnesses, In Popular Culture
Famous quotes containing the words crime and/or family:
“The crime of book purging is that it involves a rejection of the word. For the word is never absolute truth, but only man’s frail and human effort to approach the truth. To reject the word is to reject the human search.”
—Max Lerner (b. 1902)
“Happy or unhappy, families are all mysterious. We have only to imagine how differently we would be described—and will be, after our deaths—by each of the family members who believe they know us.”
—Gloria Steinem (b. 1934)