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:
“There is no society known where a more or less developed criminality is not found under different forms. No people exists whose morality is not daily infringed upon. We must therefore call crime necessary and declare that it cannot be non-existent, that the fundamental conditions of social organization, as they are understood, logically imply it.”
—Emile Durkheim (1858–1917)
“... what a family is without a steward, a ship without a pilot, a flock without a shepherd, a body without a head, the same, I think, is a kingdom without the health and safety of a good monarch.”
—Elizabeth I (1533–1603)