families.
Bonanno and Galante retained a key card to play, however, in their bid to be central figures in the emerging transatlantic heroin business: they had a competent crew in Montreal ready to handle importation, and a large organization in New York ready to aid in distribution.
NEW YORK, 1960
With Montreal in pocket and the Sicilian-American alliance in place, it was not long before Galante’s efforts started paying him dividends. His Montreal colleagues were proving to be prodigious smugglers and his extensive network in New York was off-loading vast amounts of heroin to a populace with a voracious appetite for the drug. As quickly as the tap had been turned on, however, its flow was restricted, temporarily, by federal agents.
On May 3, 1960, the U.S. Attorney General for the Southern District of New York announced a sweeping indictment against 29 men for a massive conspiracy to import large amounts of heroin into the United States from Canada. Among them was Carmine Galante.
“The conspiracy consisted of a group of Canadians, headed by Guiseppe ‘Pep’ Cotroni, who handled the exportation of the drugs from Canada. Couriers brought the narcotics across the Canadian-United States border and into the New York metropolitan area,” court documents say. In New York, distribution centers had been established where the high-grade heroin was received, unpacked, diluted and repackaged for further sale.
“Overall responsibility for the continuing operation rested in its ‘chief executive,’ the appellant Carmine Galante,” a New York judge ruled. During the trial, the court heard riveting testimony from a cooperating government witness. Edward Smith, until then a little-known criminal, described meetings with Galante, Vic, Pep and Frank Cotroni, and others, as far back as 1957. In a Montreal apartment Galante picked up a suitcase, put it on the coffee table and opened it, Smith said, describing an early encounter with the group. Inside were rows of clear plastic bags containing white powder. Smith’s partner counted the bags, shut the case and left with Smith for a drive south to New York City, where they took the suitcase to Frank’s Bar & Grill in Brooklyn. From there, colleagues would head out every week on a regular delivery route that took them to bars and nightclubs throughout the city.
For more than three years, the U.S. Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, working with city police and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) in Canada, burrowed their way into the conspiracy. Smith started to secretly cooperate in 1959 and introduced an undercover agent, Patrick Biase, into the group posing as a major buyer. The greedy Canadian mafiosi quickly agreed to sell him large quantities of drugs, despite it being in direct competition with their partners in Brooklyn. In June, Pep Cotroni and René “Bob” Robert, his driver and drug partner, were arrested by Canadian police in what was at that point the largest drug case in the country’s history. Pep Cotroni pleaded guilty a few days into his trial and accepted a 10-year prison sentence.
The case against Galante in New York would not be tied up so neatly. The trial against the defendants arrested in the United States began on November 21, 1960, after several delays, including a postponement when one of the defendants fled the night before the trial was scheduled to begin. For six months it staggered along, sagging under the weight of “every conceivable type of obstruction and interruption,” an appeal court judge would later rule. In May, on the eve of summations to the jury, the trial was halted after the jury foreman suffered a broken back. The judge could not help but note that the mysterious injury was the result of an unexplained fall down a flight of stairs in an abandoned building in the middle of the night. With the pool of alternate jurors already expended, a mistrial was declared.
A retrial got under way on April 2, 1962. It, too,
Bonanno and Galante retained a key card to play, however, in their bid to be central figures in the emerging transatlantic heroin business: they had a competent crew in Montreal ready to handle importation, and a large organization in New York ready to aid in distribution.
NEW YORK, 1960
With Montreal in pocket and the Sicilian-American alliance in place, it was not long before Galante’s efforts started paying him dividends. His Montreal colleagues were proving to be prodigious smugglers and his extensive network in New York was off-loading vast amounts of heroin to a populace with a voracious appetite for the drug. As quickly as the tap had been turned on, however, its flow was restricted, temporarily, by federal agents.
On May 3, 1960, the U.S. Attorney General for the Southern District of New York announced a sweeping indictment against 29 men for a massive conspiracy to import large amounts of heroin into the United States from Canada. Among them was Carmine Galante.
“The conspiracy consisted of a group of Canadians, headed by Guiseppe ‘Pep’ Cotroni, who handled the exportation of the drugs from Canada. Couriers brought the narcotics across the Canadian-United States border and into the New York metropolitan area,” court documents say. In New York, distribution centers had been established where the high-grade heroin was received, unpacked, diluted and repackaged for further sale.
“Overall responsibility for the continuing operation rested in its ‘chief executive,’ the appellant Carmine Galante,” a New York judge ruled. During the trial, the court heard riveting testimony from a cooperating government witness. Edward Smith, until then a little-known criminal, described meetings with Galante, Vic, Pep and Frank Cotroni, and others, as far back as 1957. In a Montreal apartment Galante picked up a suitcase, put it on the coffee table and opened it, Smith said, describing an early encounter with the group. Inside were rows of clear plastic bags containing white powder. Smith’s partner counted the bags, shut the case and left with Smith for a drive south to New York City, where they took the suitcase to Frank’s Bar & Grill in Brooklyn. From there, colleagues would head out every week on a regular delivery route that took them to bars and nightclubs throughout the city.
For more than three years, the U.S. Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, working with city police and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) in Canada, burrowed their way into the conspiracy. Smith started to secretly cooperate in 1959 and introduced an undercover agent, Patrick Biase, into the group posing as a major buyer. The greedy Canadian mafiosi quickly agreed to sell him large quantities of drugs, despite it being in direct competition with their partners in Brooklyn. In June, Pep Cotroni and René “Bob” Robert, his driver and drug partner, were arrested by Canadian police in what was at that point the largest drug case in the country’s history. Pep Cotroni pleaded guilty a few days into his trial and accepted a 10-year prison sentence.
The case against Galante in New York would not be tied up so neatly. The trial against the defendants arrested in the United States began on November 21, 1960, after several delays, including a postponement when one of the defendants fled the night before the trial was scheduled to begin. For six months it staggered along, sagging under the weight of “every conceivable type of obstruction and interruption,” an appeal court judge would later rule. In May, on the eve of summations to the jury, the trial was halted after the jury foreman suffered a broken back. The judge could not help but note that the mysterious injury was the result of an unexplained fall down a flight of stairs in an abandoned building in the middle of the night. With the pool of alternate jurors already expended, a mistrial was declared.
A retrial got under way on April 2, 1962. It, too,
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