Grand Hotel et des Palmes Mafia meeting
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A series of meetings between Sicilian Mafia and American Mafia members were allegedly held at the Grand Hotel et des Palmes in Palermo, Sicily, between October 12–16, 1957. Also called the 1957 Palermo Mafia summit, the summit discussed the international illegal heroin trade in the French Connection. The FBI believed it was this meeting that established the Bonanno crime family in the heroin trade.[1]


Contents
1 Origins of reputed purpose
2 No first-hand accounts
3 Trial against participants
4 References
Origins of reputed purpose
The protagonist of this "heroin summit" legend is journalist Claire Sterling: "Although there is no firsthand evidence of what went on at the four-day summit itself, what followed over the next thirty years has made the substance clear. Authorities on both sides of the Atlantic are persuaded by now that the American delegation asked the Sicilians to take over the import and distribution of heroin in the United States, and the Sicilians agreed."[2] However, she fails to back this claim with solid evidence. Sterling even has the dates of the alleged meeting wrong.

At the time, although the Sicilian Mafia was involved to some extent in the heroin business all through the 1950s and 1960s, it never had anything more than a secondary role in the world drugs system. According to the McClellan Hearings, Sicily was no more than a staging-post in the shipment of French-produced heroin to the USA. Until the 1970s, Sicilian mafiosi were prevented from acquiring any oligopoly on the heroin market because they were not competitive in comparison with other European criminal groups, in particular the French Connection by Corsican groups in Marseille.[3]

The first mention of the "summit" in the United States was during the McClellan Hearings on October 10–16, 1963. Among the American mafiosi present were Joe Bonanno, his underbosses and advisors Carmine Galante, John Bonventre and Frank Garofalo, as well as Lucky Luciano, Santo Sorge, John Di Bella, Vito Vitale and Gaspare Magaddino. While among the Sicilian side there were Salvatore "Little Bird" Greco and his cousin Salvatore Greco, also known as "l'ingegnere" or "Totò il lungo", Giuseppe Genco Russo, Angelo La Barbera, Gaetano Badalamenti, Calcedonio Di Pisa, Cesare Manzella and Tommaso Buscetta.[4][5]

No first-hand accounts
There are no first-hand accounts of the meeting, except for the version of Mafia turncoat Tommaso Buscetta, who denied a summit ever took place at all. According to Buscetta, Bonanno did stay at the Grand Hotel des Palmes and received many guests all the time, but there was no summit as such.[6] In his memoirs, Joe Bonanno mentions his trip to Palermo, but says nothing about a summit.[7]

According to Buscetta a gathering took place in a private room at the Spanò seafood restaurant on the evening of October 12, 1957, where Bonanno was fêted as the guest of honour by his old friend Lucky Luciano. Among the other guests were Bonanno’s underboss Carmine Galante, the brothers Salvatore and Angelo La Barbera, Salvatore "Little Bird" Greco, Gaetano Badalamenti, Gioacchino Pennino, Cesare Manzella, Rosario Mancino, Filippo and Vincenzo Rimi, and Tommaso Buscetta. According to Buscetta, it was at this dinner that Bonanno suggested to form a Sicilian Mafia Commission to avoid violent disputes, following the example of the American Mafia that had formed their Commission in the 1930s.

The Italian police had been following Luciano and in so doing found out about the meetings. They observed the gatherings. However, the report was buried in some filing cabinet in Palermo. A copy was sent to the Federal Bureau of Narcotics in Washington. Only eight years later the report was used to indict the participants and some of their associates in Palermo.[8]

Trial against participants
In August 1965, the Palermo public prosecutors indicted 17 main participants associated with the Sicilian and American Mafia by judge Aldo Vigneri for criminal conspiracy and narcotics and currency rackets that allegedly started with the 1957 Palermo summit.[9] Among the indicted were Bonanno, Bonventre, Galante, Sorge, Magaddino, John Priziola, Raffaele Quasarano, Frank Coppola and Joe Adonis. The Court of Palermo dismissed the charges in June 1968 because of lack of evidence.[10]

What can be said about the events in October 1957 in Palermo is that the gatherings reforged the links between the most Sicilian of the American Five Families, the Bonanno Crime Family, and the most American of the Sicilian Mafia families. It was not a conference between "the" Sicilian Mafia and "the" American Cosa Nostra as such.[11]

Heroin trafficking between these two groups might have been discussed, but there certainly was not a general agreement on the heroin trade between "the" Sicilian Mafia and "the" American Cosa Nostra.[citation needed] The important result of 1957 Palermo gatherings was that the Sicilian Mafia composed its first Sicilian Mafia Commission and appointed "Little Bird" Greco as its first "primus inter pares".[12]

After his deportation Luciano spent the rest of his life under close Italian police scrutiny.

I personally think that in order for LCN to survive in the USA, they will eventually need to RE-CONNECT to the umbilical cord of the mother land.

Each family will be directly linked up with a family in Italy and Canada.

Some sort of merger/alliance like what’s happening with the Gambino’s

America can bring recruits from Canada and/or italy.

If LE is onto them in America send them to Italy where they aren’t known, if they are known in Italy, ship them to Canada.

The hand writing is clearly on the wall in America, the pool has dried up.

Like in the old days we need Italians to fill the ranks not Italian americans

If I'm not mistaken, the Colombo Family has its origins in Villabate, Sicily. Surely there's some Mafiosi there that they could become allied with and share resources.

The Bonanno Family has its origins in Castellammare del Golfo, Sicily, and still has ties there.

The original Lucchese bosses were rooted in Corleone, Sicily.

Anyway, the potential is there, they just need to tap into it.

The Colombo/Profaci family has indeed their roots in Villabate and was the last of New York's 5 families to be created.

The NY Bonannos still maintain ties to CDG mainly because there have always been little splinter families from there who connected to Brooklyn but they didn't necessarily have connection to the "bloodline" Bonannos.

I'm not sure how much the Colombos have maintain ties to Villabate. You really don't hear much about that after Profaci dies. Certainly by the time Persico get the throne, it took on more of the "gang style" that Carmine brought to the table and not the "Traditional Sicilian Mafia Family", that maintain ties to the old country as a modus operandi rather then just having some soldiers who maintain personal relations back home.

Yes, the Colombos operates more like a Camorra clan, they need to revert back to their traditional Mafia roots.

The thing about zips is that the only ones truly worth something are the well-connected drug brokers and launderers.

Zip enforcers, on the other hand, are nothing special.

First off, to settle here legally, they must be unknown, young, with no criminal history. The more "experienced" ones most certainly have a record so they won’t make it past immigration.

Second of all, either way the come here legally or illegally, they won’t even be able do their “job” freely because of the constant threat of deportation looming over their heads. Even a simple assault charge can get them kicked out of the country (ex. Walter Samperi) or make them cooperate (ex. Biagio Adornetto, Sergio Battaglia, Enzo Morena, etc). We tend to glorify guys from the other side but they are as likely to flip as our own.

Same thing applies to Canada, plenty have been deported in the last two decades.

It seems that the strategy the American LCN has taken is this: do business with the zips that "count" on the global drug market and use your own as muscle. Recent indictments prove that there’s always an abundance of leg-breakers around with vowel-ending last names. Groom the ones that stand out among the many meatheads.