- 8 months ago
Documentary, National Geographic Inside The Mafia Going Global - The Pizza Connection
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00:00In the 1960s, the history of the Mafia changed forever when the Sicilian mob began flooding the United States with an illicit and lethal narcotic, heroin.
00:18Heroin would turn the Mafia into a global organization and make them more money than they had ever made before, but it would also sow the seeds of their own destruction.
00:30A battle would rage on the streets between a new breed of ruthless mafioso and a new kind of policeman, prepared to risk everything to infiltrate the Mafia for the first time.
00:45This was a war over billions of dollars, millions of lives, and the future of America itself.
01:00In the late 1960s, drug addiction in American cities was on the increase, and crime was rising. The government was forced to take action.
01:14In 1971, President Nixon declared war on drugs.
01:17Just a year later, law enforcement won a major battle by breaking up the Marseille-based heroin racket known as the French Connection.
01:19These French laboratories were supplying the U.S. to the U.S. to the U.S. to the U.S. to the U.S. to the U.S. to the U.S.
01:48with so much of the drug that the bust led to a heroin famine on the streets.
01:57What nobody knew was that this success would lead to disaster.
02:01Shutting down the French Connection was indirectly opening the door to something every bit as dangerous.
02:07The Sicilian Mafia.
02:11In the coming years, they would fill the gap in the market and forge a relationship with the most feared Mafioso in America, Carmine Galante.
02:20In 1974, two years after the French Connection was busted, Carmine Galante walked out of prison, ready to flood America with a new source of heroin, and turned the Mafia into a global drugs corporation.
02:36Galante Galante was a member of the Mafia family known as the Bonanos.
02:43He had a long history of drug trafficking, and even longer history as a tough guy.
02:48His personality could be summed up in an incident at Lewisburg Prison, where he was serving a sentence for drug trafficking.
02:55During telephone days, when inmates line up to use the telephone, he was in a section which had some of the toughest black inmates you've ever seen, murderers, strong-arm artists, you name it.
03:09And he would simply walk to the head of the line, grab the phone out of some black inmates hand and said, get off the phone, this surrounded by 200 black guys.
03:25No one dared touch a hair on his head.
03:28When he got out of prison, the rumblings that, you know, that you heard on the street, because a lot of people were scared of him.
03:40And he was a real tough guy, little office rocker, and always known as a, you know, as a, as a heroin man. That's what he did.
03:52When Galante got out of prison, the Bonanos were in crisis. Their leadership, either exiled or in prison.
04:02Joe Bonano's son, Bill, is a convicted mobster. He remembers Galante only too well.
04:10He had a short fuse. He was abrasive. He had a manner about him that he would never win any popularity contest.
04:19And constantly, constantly had a cigar in his mouth. And that's where he got his nickname, The Cigar.
04:29With no challengers prepared to take on this dangerous man, the Bonanos had their new boss.
04:36Galante's top priority was to kickstart the heroin trade.
04:40In five short years, he transformed the fortunes of the U.S. Mafia by leading it into an era of multi-billion dollar profits and unparalleled violence.
04:53In the seventies, the Bonano family was known in this, in, in, in the mafia circles, basically as being the heroin family. I mean, you know, everybody knew they would deal in heroin.
05:08Galante was now in the perfect position to build a heroin business even bigger than the French connection.
05:19He was head of the Bonano family. And now the heroin trade was moving to Sicily, where Galante had his own roots.
05:26Galante was born in New York, but his family came from the town of Castellamare del Gaffo in the northwest of Sicily.
05:41Sicilians have been immigrating to America for a hundred years, but many of their descendants kept strong links with their homeland.
05:48Galante was no exception.
05:50His plan was to exploit his close ties with the Sicilian Mafia to dominate the American heroin trade.
06:00This was the beginning of a whole new era in the history of the Mafia.
06:09Until now, the Sicilian and American Mafia had mainly operated as separate organizations.
06:16With the French connection broken, the Sicilian Mafia decided to fill the gap in the market.
06:23And there was no bigger market than America.
06:27The Sicilians set up a sophisticated smuggling system.
06:31Pakistani suppliers shipped partially refined opium from Asia via Turkey to a rendezvous point off the coast of Sicily.
06:39A transmitter on the seabed alerted the Sicilians when the drug ships had arrived.
06:45Then a power boat would speed out to meet it, returning with the drugs under cover of darkness.
06:51The opium base was processed into heroin in laboratories on the west of the island.
07:01Three Sicilian bosses ran this growing trade.
07:05But one of them was far more ambitious, far more greedy, and far more dangerous than the others.
07:11Toto Riina.
07:14Riina planned to shake up the Sicilian Mafia just as Galante was making waves in America.
07:21The Sicilian Mafia always claimed they adhered to a code of honor.
07:27Murdering only when necessary and avoiding the killing of innocents.
07:32Women and children.
07:33But Riina shunned these old guard rules.
07:38Toto Riina had always been a loud person, very, very noisy.
07:48He was an extremely violent person and someone who had founded his empire by terror.
07:55He never gave a second thought to killing his adversaries or killing his friends when they became slightly less friends.
08:06He had no hesitation in ordering the killing of children.
08:12Rina relentlessly carried out a strategy of terror against his enemies and the state.
08:21Reina was as ambitious as he was ruthless.
08:31He was determined to become the boss of bosses, head of the Sicilian Mafia.
08:38To achieve this, he would commit so many atrocities that he became known as the beast.
08:51Toto Riina, known as the beast, was putting Sicily on the heroin map.
09:02In the early 70s, his factories were producing ton after ton of pure heroin.
09:08All of it needed to be sold.
09:10On the other side of the Atlantic, Carmine Galante and the American Mafia could see that there were huge sums to be made selling Sicilian heroin.
09:24But there was also a problem.
09:27Throughout its history, the U.S. Mafia had vowed never to be associated with drugs.
09:31The Chicago mob, known as the outfit, was one of the most vocal opponents of the drug trade.
09:39We always knew that if you dealt with drugs, it was a dirty business.
09:43And it would be like you're feeding your own kid narcotics.
09:48So it was like taboo.
09:50And if you got involved with it, you're definitely going to get whacked.
09:53As far as the outfit was concerned, there was no need to deal drugs when money could be made in more acceptable ways.
10:04In the 1970s, Frank Culatta was sent to Las Vegas to make sure nobody messed with the outfit's highly profitable casinos.
10:12My main job was the casinos, to make sure that everything ran smooth in there, there was no stealing going on, that they knew our presence was there, that if they did mess around, that they would get hit in the head.
10:32For Culatta and his crew, running casinos earned them respect in a way drugs never would.
10:40Actually, it was great. It was beautiful.
10:45I mean, you had everything you needed out there.
10:47You had anything you wanted to do.
10:49You had movie stars.
10:51They wanted to be involved with you.
10:53You wanted to be involved with them.
10:55Anywhere you went, you got the red carpet treatment.
10:59It was like you were respected.
11:02I think you were respected.
11:03I'm hoping that I wasn't feared, but in some cases you were feared.
11:06And if that brought respect, well then it brought respect.
11:11But for others, the huge profits of heroin dealing was hard to resist.
11:16From his beginnings in suburban Brooklyn, Dominic Montiglio grew up to be a member of the notorious New York family, the Gambinos.
11:24He dealt drugs for the mafia for many years.
11:29The word that filtered down just saying, you know, if you got caught, you know, dealing drugs, you know, is an immediate death sentence.
11:38But the real message that came down was just don't get caught.
11:43At that time, I couldn't think of one crew that I knew that wasn't involved in it.
11:49Because the money was too lucrative to pass up.
11:52The street crews that were involved in it weren't going to give it up, either which way.
11:59You know, there was guys that weren't making a real good living that all of a sudden were taking, you know, 150 large a week down.
12:07The mob didn't want to be seen as drug peddlers, but they were happy to take the money.
12:15I mean, the reason, there was no great moral reasons why they didn't want you dealing in heroin.
12:21It was just that it would bring out much more heat on the family.
12:25But the bottom line is the cash, you know, and that's a cash business.
12:32And the amounts are staggering, the amounts of money that can be made.
12:37The New York families knew that dealing drugs would attract attention from the authorities.
12:42But it was a risk they were prepared to take.
12:46The U.S. Mafia secretly embraced the heroin trade and were soon making more money than they knew what to do with.
12:53The unpleasant fact is that there is a new epidemic of heroin use in the United States.
13:00As Sicilian heroin began to flow, addiction rates in America soared.
13:06At the end of World War II, the U.S. had an estimated 20,000 heroin users.
13:12By the mid-70s, there were more than half a million.
13:16The FBI had little idea how such large quantities of drugs were getting into the country or who was bringing it in.
13:24But that was about to change.
13:26In the 50s and 60s, the FBI agents were mostly white males.
13:33Now, the FBI was recruiting from a much wider pool.
13:38Finally, they had young ambitious agents who came from the communities that were home to the Mafia.
13:43And could speak the Sicilian dialect.
13:47One young recruit was Joe Pistone, better known as Donnie Brasco.
13:54What he was about to attempt would transform the FBI's fight against organized crime.
14:00The Stone's job was to work his way into a Mafia family.
14:06The risks were great.
14:08But if he pulled it off, he had the chance to expose the secret world of crime.
14:15One wrong move, and he faced almost certain death.
14:18In order to do this job, undercover work, you have to have two things.
14:27You've got to have a lot of nerve, and you've got to have a lot of mental toughness.
14:32I'm not a person that sweats, you know.
14:34When I get into a jam, I don't sweat.
14:35So you don't know if you're scaring me or not, you know.
14:39And, you know, there's not much that can be done to you.
14:41The worst thing that can happen is they can kill you.
14:43That's about it.
14:44The FBI wanted the inside story on the Mafia.
14:50The Bonanno boss, Carmen Galante, was their first target.
14:55Pistone used the FBI's diamonds and the Sicilian roots
14:59to gradually infiltrate Galante's Mafia family.
15:05Being of Italian ancestry and knowing the streets
15:10and knowing how the Mafia operates,
15:13you know, you speak when you're spoken to.
15:17You mind your own business.
15:18You don't get involved in conversations that don't concern you.
15:22They don't just, you know, embrace you and take you in.
15:25And you have to just lay back, be patient, and work your way.
15:29You know, and it's the first impression that's going to carry you through.
15:39And if you do things, certain things that they pick you out,
15:43that you have street smarts and you aren't street guy,
15:46that's what's going to make you.
15:47That's what's going to make you.
15:50The puzzle is right on the table.
15:52It's ready to take you.
15:54In March, 1977, Pistone began to hang around in known Bonanno territory.
16:01He soon got noticed by Mafia foot soldiers.
16:04One of the wise guys Pistone met was Lefty Ruggiero.
16:14Pistone would later discover that Lefty was a known hitman for the mob.
16:18Lefty approached Pistone, asking him to sell some stolen jewelry.
16:24I was introduced to a fellow by the name of Lefty Ruggiero,
16:30and Lefty was a 24-hour gangster.
16:34I mean, he knew the mob.
16:37He knew everything about the Mafia.
16:40If you need a teacher in the Mafia, Lefty was the guy that you wanted.
16:44I used my street smarts and my knowledge of the Mafia.
16:48And I didn't push with him as far as questions and, you know,
16:54trying to get information.
16:56And he liked that.
16:58He saw that I was a street guy, that I knew the streets.
17:01And also, you know, being a jewel thief and bringing around some precious stones,
17:06he liked that too because it was money, you know.
17:09As his undercover operation stretched into months and years,
17:17Pistone gradually became an accepted face within the mob.
17:21But the risks remained high.
17:24Former gangster Henry Hill knows all about the dangers that Pistone faced.
17:30I mean, he was susceptible to get figured out at any time, you know.
17:37I mean, it took balls. Believe me, it took balls.
17:39But he also enjoyed it.
17:41You know, he became a member.
17:43Or as close as you can come as a member.
17:47Pistone was so convincing,
17:49an almost father and son relationship developed between him and Lefty.
17:53He did have an affection for me, I think, because he saw me, you know,
18:01something that he might have wanted to have been or his son, you know, to have been.
18:07And he introduced me to his family and his wife.
18:11And, you know, I spent a lot of times at his house having dinner.
18:15So it became more than just a, you know, gangster-on-gangster relationship.
18:27By the summer of 1977, Pistone had won Lefty's trust.
18:32But would he ever get any closer to heroin boss Carmine Galante?
18:37I was with, I was a Lefty one night and I said,
18:42we got to go, we got to go somewhere.
18:45And I said, well, where are we going?
18:46And he said, well, I'll tell you when we get there.
18:51Galante was having a meeting in there.
18:53And it was our job to stand outside and make sure that the meeting went smooth and nothing happened.
19:00Basically, we were outside guarding them.
19:02This was a big opportunity for Pistone.
19:07And I asked him, I said, you know, Left, can't we go inside?
19:10And he says, what are you, crazy?
19:13You can't go in there and sit down when the boss is meeting.
19:16You can't even meet the boss.
19:18You know, he doesn't meet anybody on your level.
19:22He says, we got to stand out here until we're told to lay releases,
19:26until we're told we can go.
19:27You know, it was kind of an adrenaline rush.
19:31A lot of things go through your mind.
19:32But the main thing was, is that if I get killed, I'm going to get killed as a wise guy,
19:36not as an FBI agent here.
19:40You know, here, I'm an FBI agent working undercover.
19:44And, you know, nobody ever got to be close to a boss, let alone guard him.
19:50Pistone did not get as close to Galante as he wanted,
19:54but he learned important facts about his operation.
19:58Before Pistone went undercover, the FBI had some idea about the inner workings of the mob.
20:04Now, for the first time, an agent was able to confirm the way the mafia was organized from the inside.
20:11Pistone told the FBI how each family was structured into a military formation.
20:19At the top was the head of the family.
20:23Working directly for him was an underboss and an advisor, known as a consigliere.
20:28Beneath them were the capos, each of whom ran a crew of five to ten foot soldiers.
20:37This structure meant the boss was always several layers away from the foot soldiers and the crimes they committed.
20:43Making it almost impossible to convict the head of the family.
20:49This was vital intelligence in the war against the mob, but it was just the beginning.
20:54Pistone also managed to find out the secret of Galante's meteoric rise within the New York Mafia.
21:01Joe came back to us telling us about the Sicilians whom the American Mafia figures were referring to as ZIPS.
21:13And to him, this meant that these Sicilian Mafia figures within the Bonanno family were actually being used to commit murder, dealing in drugs, heroin.
21:26That was just an unbelievable revelation.
21:28I met some Sicilian that were members of the Mafia.
21:36And these guys were made guys over in Sicily and then brought over here.
21:44But the Sicilians had their own clique over here in the US.
21:51Galante had imported his own private army of ruthless Sicilian Mafiosi.
21:56Galante's two key guys that he brought over were Cesar Bonaventuri and Baldo Amato.
22:05And he brought them over from Sicily and they were with him constantly.
22:11And I think one of the reasons why he did bring them over is that he felt a better sense of security with the Sicilians because I guess he felt they were still loyal to the tradition.
22:25They weren't Americanized yet.
22:30Galante's new bodyguards made waves in the Bonanno family.
22:34There was a lot of friction I found between the American Mafia and the Sicilians.
22:39Even though they were married up into one family.
22:43I mean, anyway, Lefty and Sonny and the other Americans thought that they were looking to take over the family.
22:50And that the other American Mafia guys didn't trust them and didn't like them.
22:56The Sicilian and American Mafia were cut from a very different cloth.
23:04In the past, the Sicilians had embraced rules and traditions, but that was changing.
23:11They'd kill anyone, you know, where we had certain rules.
23:18You know, it sounds strange, but there were rules as to, you know, who you had to get permission from to go do a piece of work or you couldn't kill a guy in front of his family.
23:32And they didn't have those rules.
23:34These new, ruthless Sicilians were from a Mafia clan based in Corleone, a remote rural town deep in the mountains of Sicily.
23:47Corleone mafiosi are made of different stuff.
23:52They're tough, very hard.
23:54Probably their peasant lifestyle trained them to withstand anything thrown at them.
23:57Jail doesn't scare the Corleone'si. They aren't frightened of death. They're always faithful to their boss.
24:07The Corleone'si had reached the top of the Sicilian Mafia by breaking rules and killing without permission from anyone.
24:16In the American Mafia, obedience to your superiors was deeply ingrained.
24:29The godfather of the American Mafia, Charlie Lucky Luciano, had formed an organization known as the Commission back in 1931.
24:38This was like the board of directors of the Mafia. All the heads of the families would meet to settle disputes and decide on strategy.
24:48The Commission imposed discipline on the warring families.
24:51They agreed to certain rules which changed little over decades.
24:55One of the rules was that you didn't kill someone without permission from the head of your family.
25:10Las Vegas mobster Frank Culatta nearly paid the ultimate price when he broke this rule.
25:23I grew up with this stony guy. He was a very good friend. And as I said, you know, very good friends that are the ones that are going to get you killed.
25:33And when he had ordered me to whack some guy out here, I asked him, did you get the okay from back home? And he said, yeah. And he promised me he did.
25:46Well, he never did get the okay from home. And he got a call from one of the bosses back there and they said, what are you guys doing out there?
25:56Killing someone without authorization from Chicago was breaking the rules. The punishment was death. Tony Spolotra decided to blame his best friend, Frank Culatta.
26:09He was lying. He was taking the weight off himself. Because he knew that if he didn't, and said he readily ordered me to do these things, that they would whack him in the head. So he shifted everything over to me. That was my best friend.
26:28We shined shoes together when we were 12, 13 years old. So all my life. He's the guy that actually was the guy that told me when I get to be a big man, you're my right hand man. And I was. But that's the same guy that was going to sell me out to save his ass and get me whacked.
26:49It wasn't long before Tony Spolotra and his mobster brother received deadly punishment at the hands of the mob.
26:59Believe it or not, I felt a little bad for him. Because that's, I mean, they were both beaten to death. They weren't shot, they weren't strangled, they weren't knifed.
27:10They were physically punched to death, or beaten with bats to death, however, you know. And each one was to watch one die, you know. And I felt bad. They were two brothers at the same time.
27:24I grew up with the guy. Even though the guy tried to kill me, I still felt bad.
27:30For all American mafiosi, the rules of the commission were a fact of life and death.
27:37You really never know who they trust. I don't care how close you are with them, if you grew up with them or what.
27:43If, uh, that's going to be the one that's going to kill you usually. It's your best friend.
27:49You do worry about it, because, you know, nobody wants to die, you know. And you just have to be a little one step ahead.
27:58Well, let me put it like this. You know, most people grow up with only four or five friends in their lifetime.
28:05One day I made a list, and I think I counted up to 56 early. And some were killed by the police. But I, the majority of them, like 36 or better, were killed by the outfit, the syndicate.
28:20Carmine Galanti didn't care about the commission or its rules. He believed the American mafia was soft, and that his connections with the ruthless Sicilian
28:39Sicilians made him invincible. But there was more than one advantage of having an alliance with the old country.
28:57At first, nobody thought much about it. But then the rest of the mafia began to get really nervous, because they began to ask themselves, now, why is he bringing in so many of these zips?
29:11And everybody put two and two together. These guys are running heroin. This is a Sicilian connection at work here. We don't need this. For one thing, the organization felt, we can't control the zips.
29:24Sicilians made and smuggled in the heroin. By hiring them into his own crew, Galanti was making sure he would stay at the heart of the heroin business.
29:39For what he was trying to do in the heroin business, it would have been, you know, good for him to be aligned with the more Sicilians, the better. Because that's where, you know, the pipeline came from.
29:54In the late 70s, the Sicilian mafia dominated the heroin trade. On the streets of America, the profits from the drug trade were reaching 20 billion a year. Galanti was trying to keep the profits to himself.
30:09Something had to be done.
30:12He was greedy. He wasn't, you know, the Bananos may have been involved in this, the profits from this drug trade, but Galanti wasn't sharing it even with his own people and the family. Because he was, you know, an egomaniac. You know, he wanted to be the boss. And nobody was going to tell him what to do. And he was going to run his family and he wanted to run the other families too.
30:37And during this time, Galanti was making deadly enemies. The other bosses didn't like him because of this attitude that he had, that he was the top boss in the city.
30:47Everyone knew, everyone knew on the street, that the clouds of war right there. I mean, if this guy stayed loose, what he was plotting would have definitely caused major, major, you know, war to happen between the families.
31:06For mob bosses, the Galanti problem was growing. Only the commission had the authority to act. Their solution would be violent. Galanti had to go.
31:25The question was, how would they get past his ruthless Sicilian bodyguards?
31:32On July 12th, 1979, Carmine Galanti paid a visit to Joe and Mary's restaurant on Knickerbocker Avenue in Brooklyn. It was one of his favorite haunts. Run by his cousin, he felt safe there. He was joined by his two loyal Sicilian bodyguards.
31:57There's a courtyard that you go into and, uh, uh, is an open, uh, open air courtyard. And, uh, they were sitting down having, uh, getting ready to have lunch. And, uh, Galanti was sitting there and he had his, uh, cigar in his mouth.
32:16The three guys pull up outside, jump out of a car. They, uh, run in the restaurant and, uh, start blasting away.
32:23The three guys pull up outside, jump out of a car. They, uh, run in the restaurant and, uh, start blasting away.
32:30You, keep your back shot!
32:42Galanti ends up getting shot, falls off his chair, sprawls out on the ground, face up, and he still has his cigar clenched in his mouth. And, uh, that's, that's how they got Galanti.
32:55This is the famous front page the morning after the murder.
33:02Galanti's meteoric rise to the top had ended in a pool of blood.
33:12Carmine Galanti was rubbed out today as he sat in a Brooklyn luncheonette, a gangland execution of a man believed to be the most important organized crime figure in the country.
33:22After the murder, the killers fled the scene. But in an amazing coincidence, one of them walked right into a club that was under police surveillance.
33:35This incredible footage shows him reporting back to the commission bosses after the successful hit.
33:42But the feds were about to get an even bigger surprise.
33:47Well, when the police came on the scene, they had immediately identified, uh, Carmine Galanti's body.
33:52An old man, had a cigar stuck in his mouth, totally lifeless.
33:58As the police pieced everything together, they were told that two other individuals who were in the backyard with Galanti later identified as the so-called bodyguards.
34:10They were the ones who miraculously got out of there without any, uh, wounds whatsoever.
34:15The forensics found, uh, uh, five different caliber slugs in Galanti, and, uh, there were only three gunmen.
34:27So that leads you to believe that there were two guns someplace else.
34:30And the only other two guys there were, uh, Bonaventuri and Amato.
34:34Bonaventuri and Amato were the two key Sicilians Galanti had brought over for his own protection.
34:39The police deduced from what they saw at the scene that Bonaventuri and Amato were not there to protect Galanti.
34:50They were there to ensure that his assassination was carried out without a hitch.
34:56The ultimate treachery was performed by his own men.
35:00The men who were supposed to protect him from any harm, they were the ones who actually helped carry out the assassination.
35:07The Sicilians had turned on Galanti.
35:12It seemed his greed had upset others besides the commission.
35:16The Sicilians who had arrived in America in the sixties and seventies,
35:21who were helping bring in the heroin from Sicily, wanted full control in their hands.
35:26The message was, we are bringing it in.
35:29We are going to be involved in the distribution network.
35:32Therefore we want a bigger share in the proceeds.
35:35And that was the message of the new Sicilians.
35:38We are the ones doing it.
35:39We want a bigger share.
35:41Not what Galanti was doing, keeping most of the share for himself.
35:44Galanti's murder made the FBI even more suspicious about the Bonanno family.
35:50For the commission to whack a boss meant there were big things going on.
35:55Two young agents, Charlie Rooney and Carmine Russo, were given the job of watching the Bonanno Sicilians.
36:02This is the area where myself and my partner Charlie Rooney spent a lot of time conducting surveillance.
36:09And we needed to find intelligence that could only be found on the street.
36:15And that meant being out here, being the eyes and ears basically of the FBI,
36:20trying to determine who these Sicilians were and what they were doing.
36:23One Bonanno member, who soon came to their attention, was Sal Catalano.
36:28He ran an Italian bakery in Queens.
36:30The FBI started seeing things that made them realize that Catalano was a key figure in the heroin trade.
36:39Suspicious packages were constantly being exchanged, probably containing heroin or money.
36:45The FBI decided to play a waiting game in the hope that they could break open the whole operation.
36:52One of the things that we in the FBI, and of course all of them of course wanted to know,
36:59was how were they bringing the heroin into the United States at that time.
37:03Over the next five years, Russo and Rooney's surveillance operation evolved into the largest investigation the FBI had ever undertaken.
37:15Finally, after recording and translating more than 55,000 wiretaps,
37:22the team of 400 agents figured out how the Mafia smuggled heroin into America.
37:33They used their businesses, furniture businesses, construction businesses, marble, things of that nature.
37:43In particular, the pizzeria business, they needed tomatoes for the sauce.
37:50The Mafia had taken over pizzerias across the country and given them to immigrant Sicilians to manage.
37:59The operation was controlled by Sal Catalano from his bakery in Queens.
38:08This footage shows some of the actual restaurants implicated in the Pizza Connection trial.
38:13Restaurants just like these were used to distribute heroin around the country.
38:18The heroin arrived in the U.S. through all kinds of routes.
38:24Their methods were often ingenious.
38:27Cases of canned tomatoes or boxes of cheese arrived from Sicily stuffed with heroin worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.
38:35But the Pizza Network was not a retail operation.
38:38Mafia dealers never sold the heroin directly on the streets.
38:42Instead, the imported narcotics were divided up and sold to smaller street dealers.
38:48That way, the bosses stayed well away from the dirty end of the business.
38:54The pizza restaurants had another use as well.
38:57Catalano and his crew could hide their profits by passing them off as restaurant earnings.
39:03Pretty ingenious cover. I mean, you know, who figures a pizza place?
39:08You know, you figure you see some guy slinging dough around making a pizza.
39:12What's he going to be involved in?
39:15Mafia dealer Henry Hill regularly used pizza restaurants for his drug drop-offs.
39:21It wasn't difficult for me. I used to go to a pizza joint in a shopping center, leave my car there and take a different car home.
39:31You know, and I go back four days later, you know, and put the money in the trunk.
39:37The evidence the FBI found led to the very top of the Mafia and all the way back to Sicily.
39:43Salvatore Catalano was aligned with the Corleonesi in Sicily.
39:50That's where the power came from.
39:52It was Salvatore Ina, the boss of the Corleonesi.
39:59Salvatore Catalano came here with a purpose.
40:01The purpose was the Sicilian Mafia had a commodity that was being sent to the United States.
40:06They needed people here whom they could trust and carry on that activity.
40:11The power of the Corleonesi Mafia and their ruthless boss, Toto Riina, stretched all the way to America.
40:18Who knows how long they had been doing this before we stumbled onto them.
40:22And we basically stumbled onto them.
40:24And I believe what did it for them and for us was the Galante murder.
40:29Without that murder, I don't think we would have set our eyes on them at the time that we did.
40:36Meanwhile, FBI agent Joe Pistone still had a problem.
40:44How to escape alive from his undercover role inside the Mafia.
40:49Despite Galante's murder, Joe Pistone's dangerous undercover operation continued for two more years.
40:57But in 1981, his mission came to a dramatic climax.
41:04The head of Pistone's Mafia crew was a hard man named Sonny Black.
41:08Over the years, Black had been impressed with Pistone.
41:11Now, Sonny decided to honor Pistone by making him a made man.
41:17A full member of the Mafia.
41:19But there was one big catch.
41:21Pistone would have to kill someone.
41:24When Sonny Black gave me the contract to do the hit, I mean, you can't refuse it.
41:32You have to take the contract.
41:34Otherwise, you're the next guy that's going to get killed.
41:36Because, you know, that's just part of being a mob guy, a Mafia guy.
41:40Because you don't do hits on a fee basis.
41:46You just do it because you're part of that crew.
41:50I accepted the hit.
41:52Luckily, the guy that I had the contract down was on the lam because he knew he was going to get killed.
42:02But I went looking for him.
42:03I went to Florida and back to New York and couldn't find him because he was in hiding.
42:11In a twist of fate, Pistone was asked to whack one of the men who had assassinated Carmine Galante.
42:20But it was not to be.
42:23The FBI could not allow an agent to commit murder.
42:27On July 26, 1981, Pistone was pulled out.
42:32The FBI decided to tell Pistone's Mafia contacts that he was an undercover agent.
42:37These photographs show FBI agents leaving a Bonanno family hangout.
42:44They have just told Lefty Ruggiero that his friend Donnie Brasco was an agent.
42:54The consequences of this news for the Mafia crew were deadly.
42:58In this photo, Sonny Black discusses the FBI's bombshell with his crew.
43:04A few days later, he disappeared.
43:08The following year, his body was discovered washed up off Staten Island.
43:12He was in a body bag, and they had chopped off his hands.
43:18And that was an indication that he had brought me around to shake hands with mob guys that were of, you know, of status.
43:29These photos of Lefty were taken just after he found out Pistone was an FBI agent.
43:36He knew he was in big trouble.
43:39The Mafia would never forgive such a mistake.
43:43The Bonannos put out a contract on Lefty Ruggiero.
43:46But the FBI found out and snatched him into custody before the killers got to him.
43:53Pistone gave evidence against Lefty, and he was sentenced to 20 years.
43:59He died of cancer on Thanksgiving Day, 1995.
44:07At least Lefty didn't get clipped, you know.
44:09He lived his life in jail.
44:11You know, he got what he deserved.
44:13I mean, you know, I didn't make Lefty a gangster.
44:16I didn't make Sonny a gangster.
44:17I didn't make any of these guys gangsters.
44:18They were gangsters before I got there.
44:21They were gangsters while I was there, and they were gangsters after I left.
44:31Joe Pistone had survived undercover for six years.
44:35But I mean, you know, that's a long time to spend undercover with that, you know, with a crew that's, you know, more than capable of killing.
44:43And taking your part.
44:44You know, dumping your body parts somewhere.
44:47And to have those guys trust you to a point.
44:50I mean, I never heard an FBI guy come in close to getting made.
44:54You know what I mean?
44:55They were looking to make them.
44:56Bullshit is his way through it.
45:01And then he got addicted to it.
45:03And it took the government a lot of years.
45:06You know, I mean, they got a lot of cases out of it.
45:08But it almost destroyed his life, you know.
45:11And he thought he was a wise guy, you know.
45:13And he thought he was an FBI agent.
45:15After being pulled out, Pistone spent the next five years testifying against his Mafia buddies.
45:25Then in 1986, he left the FBI to write a book about his experiences.
45:30But his life would never be the same again.
45:34Even now, he lives under an assumed name, under constant threat of assassination.
45:40The Mafia put a contract out on me when the operation terminated and I surfaced.
45:46My identity showed up.
45:50Am I worried about it?
45:52I don't think about it every day.
45:55Just take precautions and go about living the way I live.
45:59And if it happens, it happens.
46:04And the best man will win.
46:06But thanks to the efforts of law enforcement agents like Joe Pistone and Carmine Russo,
46:13the Pizza Connection investigation seriously weakened the American Mafia.
46:18After years of making vast profits from narcotics, it would take much more than that to stop them.
46:26No one could have predicted that in the coming years, the actions of one Mafia boss would change everything
46:32and bring the American and Sicilian Mafia to their knees.
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