Joe Joe Bananas Bonanno, a founding member of the American Mafia who was never indicted during the decades he headed one of the five families of organized crime, died on Saturday. He was 97.
Officials at St. Mary's Hospital in Tucson, Arizona, declined to comment on published reports that Bonanno died there after being admitted early last week. But a source inside the hospital on Sunday confirmed the report.
Calls to Bonanno's lawyer, Alfred Donau, were not immediately returned.
Bonanno, who once said he was simply a venture capitalist, ran the Brooklyn crime family that still bears his name from 1931 until the late 1960s. He retired from mob life after the Bananas War, a battle between New York crime gangs sparked by Bonanno's failed bid to kill rival bosses.
He was the last survivor of an era that made history in this country, and now he's gone, too, his son, Salvatore Bill Bonanno, told the Arizona Daily Star.
A native of Sicily, Bonanno was a founding member of The Commission, a ruling body not only for the original five families of New York but also for crime rings across the United States.
The future mob boss had come to the United States as a toddler but his family eventually returned to Sicily, where Bonanno learned the way of the Mafiosi. Returning in the mid-1920s, he quickly established himself with New York mobster Salvatore Maranzano.
When Maranzano and rival Joe The Boss Masseria went to war over New York's crime world late in that decade, a younger generation of gangsters, including Bonanno and Charlie Lucky Luciano, emerged and were able to step in and take power.
Under Bonanno, the family prospered, spreading out into clothing, cheese factories and funeral homes. But gambling, labor racketeering and drug trafficking were also mainstays of the Bonanno empire.
Bonanno is reported to have created the double coffin, a contraption that held the body of a loved one, and underneath, a second body in need of secret disposal.
Bonanno admitted being an original member of The Commission in his 1983 autobiography, A Man of Honor. He said he chaired the body in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The main participants in The Commission were the Bonanno, Gambino, Genovese, Lucchese and Colombo families.
Throughout his nearly 40-year reign as the head of the Bonanno family, he was never indicted for a crime.
In the 1980s, long after his retirement, Bonanno was convicted of obstruction of justice related to a grand jury probe into alleged money-laundering by his sons. He was sentenced to five years in prison but served just eight months.
He later served about 14 months on a civil contempt charge stemming from his refusal to testify about The Commission in front of investigators that included then-U.S. Attorney Rudolph Giuliani.
Bonanno said in his book that he had retired voluntarily in 1968, although it was widely believed at the time that the then 63-year old Bonanno was being exiled to Tucson by The Commission because of the failed plot to kill his rivals.