King of the Godfathers by Anthony Destefano Page A

family was entering another period of flux and instability. While it was true that Rastelli was considered by the Commission to be a major power in the crime family, that didn’t mean he had no rivals.
    Carmine Galante, like Rastelli, might as well have been born on probation for the way his life had been going. A native-born American who grew up in East Harlem, Galante got into a life of crime at an early age. He was eleven when he got his first rap for robbery and at the age of twenty he had become enmeshed with the Castellammarese crowd of Bonanno in the Williamsburg area of Brooklyn. A fight with a policeman during a truck hijacking led to Galante earning a twelve-year sentence to state prison. He served about nine years and was released in 1939.
    Galante, who became known by the moniker “Lilo” for the cigars he smoked, stayed with the Bonanno clan and rose fairly high up in the hierarchy. Police considered him a key suspect in the 1943 assassination of Italian antifascist writer Carlos Tresca. By the end of World War II Galante was an underboss. Though at the time he was not a household name among famous gangsters, Galante’s mob stature and importance in the crime family was shown by his attendance at a 1957 meeting of top mafiosi in Palermo, Sicily. The meeting was also attended by Joseph Bonanno, another family underboss named Frank Garafola, an exiled Lucky Luciano, as well as Sicilian leaders Gaetano Badalementi and Tomasso Bucetta. The latter two would come to some prominence later in heroin dealing.
    The exact nature of the meeting has never been determined by officials, although Bonanno said in his autobiography that it had to do with trying to get the Sicilians to think corporate and to set up an American-style commission to govern their activities. That never happened. But it appears that during this Sicily conclave Galante developed deeper ties to his amici in the ancestral land. It wasn’t long before a number of Sicilian mobsters, young men known as “Zips,” a term believed to be referring to the speed at which they talked in their Sicilian dialect, immigrated to the United States and gravitated to the area around Knickerbocker Avenue in Brooklyn. They would prove to be a source of power and support for Galante later—as well as a cause in his eventual downfall.
    But before Galante had time to begin exploiting his relationship with the Sicilians, he was caught up in a major heroin bust in 1959. It was a major investigation that nabbed not only Galante but also John Ormento of the Lucchese family and Vito Genovese. Their undoing was due to the bitterness of Nelson Cantellops, a Puerto Rican drug dealer in Manhattan who had been arrested for selling drugs and became an informant to get out from under a possible five-year prison term. Cantellops’s information proved accurate and showed how brazen top echelon mobsters had become in handling narcotics and how ignored the supposed Mafia edict against drug dealing had become.
    Galante, like Ormento and Genovese, was convicted. Just at the point when he could have been developing a substantial power base and easily surpassed Rastelli, Galante was sent away to spend a twenty-year sentence in a federal penitentiary. When he was paroled in 1974, Galante immediately began trying to consolidate his power. In one signature event that is now firmly part of New York Mafia lore, Galante supposedly had the door to Frank Costello’s tomb blown open with a bomb as a way of signaling his own return from prison.
    But Galante didn’t have to try anything more drastic with Rastelli or with Massino for that matter. After a two-week trial in the Brooklyn federal court, Rastelli was convicted in April 1976 of extortion and restraint of trade. Already serving time for the Suffolk gambling case, Rastelli learned that as soon as he was to be released from state prison he would be the guest of the federal government for another five to ten years in custody for being the