The FBI released the below:
Thirty-five years ago, in early April 1984, the FBI closed in on a
real-life Mafia godfather.
His name was Gaetano Badalamenti (seen in the above photo), and he was the former top boss of the
Sicilian Mafia. Though banished from Sicily by rival mobsters in 1978,
Badalamenti had continued to secretly lead one of the world’s most prolific
drug cartels. Frequently on the move, he ultimately traveled with his wife and
oldest son to Madrid. Pietro Alfano, a nephew who was his top operative in the
American Midwest, took a flight from Chicago to meet them.
Little did Badalamenti know that Spanish authorities, acting on information
from the FBI, were watching closely. On April 8, Badalamenti and Alfano
ventured out onto the streets of Madrid and were quickly taken into custody.
His son was arrested soon after.
The next day, the FBI conducted a carefully coordinated roundup of nearly
30 Mafia members and associates who worked with Badalamenti in the United
States. Under the leadership of FBI New York, agents in six Bureau offices made
arrests and carried out search warrants, seizing drug paraphernalia, large
amounts of cash and weapons, and a trove of documents.
Among those swept up in the dragnet was Salvatore “Toto” Catalano, the
owner of a bakery in Queens and a major figure in the Bonanno Mafia family
based in New York. Catalano served as Badalamenti’s primary nexus to the
American Mafia and the leader of his U.S. crew, a group of Sicilian immigrants
known as the “Zips.”
The trial began on October 24, 1985, with 22 total defendants, all
Sicilian-born men. As the government made its case over 16 grueling
months—giving rise to the longest criminal jury trial in U.S. history to this
day—two men pleaded guilty to lesser charges. One was brutally murdered, likely
a victim of friction between Catalano and Badalamenti (Alfano was later shot
and nearly killed in retaliation). That left 19 defendants by the time the jury
delivered its verdict on March 2, 1987.
Federal prosecutors—including Louis Freeh, who would later become Director
of the FBI—argued that the men were part of a vast, long-running drug
conspiracy that touched four continents. The scheme involved purchasing
morphine base from suppliers in Turkey, processing it into heroin in Sicily,
smuggling it into the U.S., and then selling it through pizza shops and other
Mafia-run businesses stretching from New York to Illinois and Wisconsin.
Cocaine was also being imported from South America as part of the operation.
It was a lucrative business. From January 1975 until April 1984, an
estimated $1.6 billion worth of heroin was shipped to this country in the plot.
The cash profits were then illegally laundered through a web of banks and
brokerages in the U.S. and overseas.
Gaetano Badalamenti
The case, dubbed “The Pizza Connection” by the news media because of the
frequent use of pizza parlors as fronts for drug sales, was enormously complex
and laborious. Undercover FBI agent Joe Pistone, who had infiltrated the
Bonanno crime family in 1976, delivered crucial intelligence that helped set
the case in motion. Over time, the investigation snowballed into a massive
multi-agency and multi-national effort, with key contributions coming from the
New York Police Department, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), U.S.
Customs, and international authorities (including FBI international legal
attaché offices) in Italy, Sicily, Spain, Switzerland, Turkey, Brazil, Canada,
Great Britain, Germany, and Mexico.
Over more than four years, the FBI and its partners gathered a mountain of
records and evidence and utilized an array of investigative capabilities. They
conducted surveillance on multiple players on multiple continents, sometimes
around the clock. They traced and analyzed thousands of telephone calls, often
from remote pay phones. Since the conspirators mostly spoke Sicilian and used
coded phrases to conceal their true activities, turning their many covert
conversations into plain English was especially challenging, requiring a team
of expert translators from the FBI and elsewhere.
In the end, the painstaking efforts paid off. All but one of the final 19
defendants were convicted, with Gaetano Badalamenti and Catalano receiving
hefty prison sentences.
The case has had some lasting downstream benefits as well. By fortifying
partnerships, it helped pave the way for the expansion of the FBI’s network of
legal attaché offices, so vital today in addressing global threats
like terrorism and cybercrime. The first major drug bust after the Bureau was
given concurrent jurisdiction with the DEA over narcotics violations in 1982,
the probe also set an investigative standard for similar cases by employing the
same suite of tools and approaches used by the FBI to address organized
crime—most notably, the use of Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations
Act, or RICO, to take down larger illicit groups and not just isolated actors.
Director Freeh would later put the case’s importance in perspective,
calling it “the FBI’s first major, transnational criminal enterprise
investigation and prosecution” and “a historic turning point for international
police cooperation and coordinated enforcement action.”
The Pizza Connection was clearly a watershed, and 35 years later, it
continues to pay dividends for policing and public safety.
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