Salvatore Inzerillo - Heroin Trafficking

Heroin Trafficking

In the 1970s, like many Sicilian mafiosi, Inzerillo got involved in heroin trafficking. The Inzerillo-clan allied with relatives in Sicily such as the Spatola and Di Maggio families and other Mafia clans like the one ruled by Stefano Bontade. The Inzerillo-Spatola-Di Maggio-Gambino network and other Sicilian suppliers dominated heroin trafficking since the mid-1970s until the mid-1980s when US and Italian law enforcement were able to significantly reduce the heroin supply of the Sicilian Mafia (the so-called Pizza Connection).

According to the Palermo prosecuting office:

These four families, living partly in Sicily and partly in New York, form a single clan unlike anything in Italy or the United States – the most potent family in Cosa Nostra. John Gambino is the converging point in the United States for all of the group’s activities in Italy, and the final destination for its drug shipments. Salvatore Inzerillo has emerged as the Gambino brothers’ principal interlocutor, the central personage in Sicily, with myriad interests and heavy capital investments. … Rosario Spatola is just below them in structure.

Salvatore Inzerillo coordinated most of the heroin trafficking to the US for the Mafia families involved. They supplied the Sicilian faction of Gambino crime family – the so-called Cherry Hill Gambino’s who were related to the Inzerillo’s – in New York through Inzerillo’s cousins John, Giuseppe and Rosario Gambino with heroin that was refined in laboratories on Sicily from Turkish morphine base.

According to Giovanni Falcone, the investigating magistrate who was assigned the investigation into heroin trafficking case, estimated that by the late 1970s the Inzerillo-Gambino-Spatola network was smuggling US$600 million worth of heroin into the US each year. The proceeds were re-invested in real estate. Inzerillo's brother-in-law, Rosario Spatola, who in his youth peddled watered milk in the streets of Palermo, became Palermo’s largest building contractor and biggest taxpayer of Sicily, thanks to his close relationship with Christian Democrat politician Vito Ciancimino. By 1982, their holdings in Palermo alone were estimated to be worth around US$ 1 billion.