For more than 30 years Joseph Bonanno, who died on May 11th aged 97, headed one of the most powerful Mafia groups in the US, running narcotics, gambling and pornography rackets, and ordering the murder of an old friend of his father.
Yet he always insisted he was a "man of honour" and "a venture capitalist".
He was supposedly the model for Marlon Brando's Vito Corleone in the Godfather films. He was known to the public as "Joe Bananas" - a nickname he hated - and as the patriarch of one of New York's five organised crime families. Law officials described him as "one of those present at the creation of the whole thing - the American Mafia", but his own, more startling description was that he was "the most respected man in New York and all over the country".
His mendacity worked well, for during his reign over a criminal empire, which began with Brooklyn in 1931, and extended to California, Arizona and Canada by the mid-1960s, he was never convicted of a serious crime. In his 70s, he served a total of 22 months in prison over two terms, the first in 1983 for obstruction of justice, and the second in 1985 for contempt of court. Both sentences came after he had officially retired in 1968 to Tucson, Arizona. Again the authorities had a different version of his "retirement": that he had chosen exile rather than risk assassination by rival gangsters.
His most preposterous act was to sue the publisher of his 1983 autobiography, A Man Of Honour, over the paperback version the following year. He claimed damages of $18 million over what he said was his depiction on the cover as a cheap gangster when he had described himself in its pages as a venture capitalist. He did indeed run legitimate businesses: garment factories in New York City and a dairy farm upstate, cheese companies in Wisconsin and Canada, property investments in New York and Arizona and funeral parlours (through these he pioneered the double coffin, in which a Mafia victim could depart this world in the company of a more legitimate corpse).
Joseph Bonanno was born on January 18th, 1905, in Castellammare del Golfo in Sicily to a prosperous farmer and traditional mother, and christened Giuseppe. They took him to the US when he was three years old and lived in Brooklyn for 10 years, but he returned with his mother to Sicily. Soon he began to throw his weight around, running a gang of belligerent teenagers. His father had died when he was 10 and his mother died five years later.
At 19 he returned to New York illegally. He later claimed he had fled Sicily because he was opposed to Fascism, but the alternative version was that Benito Mussolini's police were after him for Mafia activities.
He joined a Brooklyn Mafia faction run by Salvatore Maranzano, his father's friend, in the early days of prohibition, and quickly built up his employer's illicit liquor business, alarming gangster Giuseppe "Joe the Boss" Masseria, then chief of the entire mob in New York.
Masseria decided to stop the growth of the rival gang. The Castellammarese war broke out in 1931 with street killings by Masseria's men, but they began to suffer losses too.
Joseph Bonanno proved an able tactician and eventually Masseria's two lieutenants, Charles "Lucky" Luciano and Vito Gambino - later to become notorious in their own right - arranged to murder their boss and join the Castellammare group.
After that, it took Joseph Bonanno just three months to arrange to have the elderly Maranzano shot and stabbed to death. His reward was to become head of one of the five New York Mafia families.
Now that he had a Mafia family he decided to found a domestic family, and married Fay Labruzzo. They had a son Salvatore, known as Bill, and outwardly Joseph Bonanno began behaving as a modest paterfamilias with no gangster flamboyances, except a taste in exotic rings and expensive cigars. Several of his Mafiosi colleagues fled the country during the Depression or landed in prison, but he prospered quite unharmed, his sole conviction a $450 fine for violating wage laws in 1945.
His downfall came in the inter-gang "banana wars" of the 1960s in which 13 mobsters died. He had a narrow escape from assassination in 1964 when he disappeared, allegedly kidnapped by a cousin and rival gangster the day before he was to testify before a grand jury in New York, an act that would have resulted in his murder. He turned up in Canada but disappeared again just before another hearing; this time he was gone for 19 months.
Joseph Bonanno is survived by two sons and a daughter.
Joseph Bonanno: born 1905; died, May 2002