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Authors: Anthony Destefano
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scene. In his view, it was the convincing force of his personality and the political ties he had to other Castellammarese leaders that made the Mafia thrive. The peace allowed each crime family to conduct its rackets and make money. But as Bonanno would say, it was because the individual members of the Mafia were restrained by shared values of respect, trust, loyalty, and honor that the families maintained discipline. However, toward the end of his tortured reign, Joseph Bonanno saw that change.
“Everyone likes to have money, but in the absence of a higher moral code the making of money becomes an unwholesome goal,” Bonanno said in his autobiography. As Bonanno saw it, the “individualistic orientation” encouraged disrespect for authority and family values. In many ways then, the old crime boss sounded like any conservative man who felt in the face of a changing world that he had become an anachronism.
The debacle with the Commission showed that Bonanno had lost his touch as a mob politician. The internecine warfare that erupted in Bonanno’s last years as boss—the Banana War—littered the streets of New York with bodies until well into 1968. By this time, though, the elder Bonanno had lost his taste for the battle. The fragmentation of his once-powerful family was also too much for its founder.
“There is no Bonanno Family anymore,” he bemoaned in his book. He was right—to a point.
CHAPTER 4
Maspeth Joe
Those old enough to remember can recall what they were doing and where they were when they heard that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963. Bill Bonanno certainly did. He said he was in a Manhattan steak house with a number of mafiosi. Among them was Philip “Rusty” Rastelli, one of a stable of Bonanno loyalists from Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
Destined for a life of crime, Rastell: had the credentials at an early age. A juvenile delinquent by the age of eight, Rastelli had his first big arrest in 1936 at the age of seventeen for homicide. It was later reduced to assault and he was sent away for a term in a reformatory school. The time upstate didn’t help him since it was only four years later that he drew a full-fledged adult prison term of five to ten years for assault and robbery. Through the 1940s and 1950s, Rastelli was arrested a few more times but saw those charges dismissed.
The eldest of three brothers who all would go on to be criminals, Rastelli, when he wasn’t in jail, was busy developing an interesting business niche. Williamsburg and its environs like Greenpoint and Maspeth were filled with trucking terminals, warehouses, and factories. The workers needed to eat but never had the time—particularly with thirty-minute lunch breaks—to do anything adventuresome. So, a service industry of food wagons developed to fill the need. Loaded with drinks, sandwiches, pastries, and coffee, the silver-bodied lunch wagons were vital to industrial New York. It would become Rastelli’s calling and his own racket.
In the 1920s and 1930s, mobster Ciro Terranova wasn’t subtle in his extortion of the pushcart vendors in Manhattan’s East Harlem and elsewhere. He would shake them down for payoffs and those who didn’t comply found themselves the object of a good beating while their pushcarts were trashed. Rastelli had a more intricate form of extortion. Beginning in 1966 he founded the Workmen’s Mobile Lunch Association. Among the benefits offered the food vendors who operated the lunch wagons was the guarantee of a daily route with no competition. Business could be so good that even some of the association officers took over routes.
Rastelli kept some routes in reserve and doled them out as favors for friends. Of course, there was a catch for such a guarantee of livelihood. The vendors had to pay $10 to $15 a week—not an insignificant sum in the 1960s—for membership (protection) to Rastelli’s association. But it was the wholesale suppliers of the lunch wagons
“Everyone likes to have money, but in the absence of a higher moral code the making of money becomes an unwholesome goal,” Bonanno said in his autobiography. As Bonanno saw it, the “individualistic orientation” encouraged disrespect for authority and family values. In many ways then, the old crime boss sounded like any conservative man who felt in the face of a changing world that he had become an anachronism.
The debacle with the Commission showed that Bonanno had lost his touch as a mob politician. The internecine warfare that erupted in Bonanno’s last years as boss—the Banana War—littered the streets of New York with bodies until well into 1968. By this time, though, the elder Bonanno had lost his taste for the battle. The fragmentation of his once-powerful family was also too much for its founder.
“There is no Bonanno Family anymore,” he bemoaned in his book. He was right—to a point.
CHAPTER 4
Maspeth Joe
Those old enough to remember can recall what they were doing and where they were when they heard that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963. Bill Bonanno certainly did. He said he was in a Manhattan steak house with a number of mafiosi. Among them was Philip “Rusty” Rastelli, one of a stable of Bonanno loyalists from Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
Destined for a life of crime, Rastell: had the credentials at an early age. A juvenile delinquent by the age of eight, Rastelli had his first big arrest in 1936 at the age of seventeen for homicide. It was later reduced to assault and he was sent away for a term in a reformatory school. The time upstate didn’t help him since it was only four years later that he drew a full-fledged adult prison term of five to ten years for assault and robbery. Through the 1940s and 1950s, Rastelli was arrested a few more times but saw those charges dismissed.
The eldest of three brothers who all would go on to be criminals, Rastelli, when he wasn’t in jail, was busy developing an interesting business niche. Williamsburg and its environs like Greenpoint and Maspeth were filled with trucking terminals, warehouses, and factories. The workers needed to eat but never had the time—particularly with thirty-minute lunch breaks—to do anything adventuresome. So, a service industry of food wagons developed to fill the need. Loaded with drinks, sandwiches, pastries, and coffee, the silver-bodied lunch wagons were vital to industrial New York. It would become Rastelli’s calling and his own racket.
In the 1920s and 1930s, mobster Ciro Terranova wasn’t subtle in his extortion of the pushcart vendors in Manhattan’s East Harlem and elsewhere. He would shake them down for payoffs and those who didn’t comply found themselves the object of a good beating while their pushcarts were trashed. Rastelli had a more intricate form of extortion. Beginning in 1966 he founded the Workmen’s Mobile Lunch Association. Among the benefits offered the food vendors who operated the lunch wagons was the guarantee of a daily route with no competition. Business could be so good that even some of the association officers took over routes.
Rastelli kept some routes in reserve and doled them out as favors for friends. Of course, there was a catch for such a guarantee of livelihood. The vendors had to pay $10 to $15 a week—not an insignificant sum in the 1960s—for membership (protection) to Rastelli’s association. But it was the wholesale suppliers of the lunch wagons
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