Thursday, March 21, 2019

Dominick Napolitano, An American Mafia Caporegime in the Bonanno Crime Family

Dominick Napolitano (June 16, 1930 – August 17, 1981), also known as Sonny Black, was an American Mafia caporegime in the Bonanno crime family. He is well known for unwittingly allowing Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agent Joseph D. Pistone to become an associate in his crew and nearly getting him made.[1]

Biography[edit]

Napolitano's grandparents were immigrants from Naples, Italy. Napolitano was born with blond hair, but by his forties it had turned a gunmetal white-silver color. To hide the color, he dyed it black, earning him the nickname "Sonny Black". He was a close friend of future Bonanno crime family boss Joseph Massino; incarcerated boss Philip Rastelli knew Napolitano before he went to prison. He was close to Carmine Napolitano (May 30, 1943 - February 15, 1999), a cousin and fellow Bonanno mobster. Like his sons Peter Napolitano (November 17, 1957 – June 29, 1994), Aniello Napolitano and Rocco Napolitano who were born and raised in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, he was raised there too.[2]
As described by FBI Agent Joseph D. Pistone: "Napolitano was a sturdy 5'7" man who weighed about 170 pounds, with powerfully developed chest and arms. On his right forearm was a tattoo of a black panther. He was swarthy, with hair dyed jet black. His face was fleshy, with rings under his brown eyes that made him look (depending on the mood) either tired or menacing." [3] He was not a heavy drinker and only indulged at times with fine French liquor. He had dead straight hair, a square jaw and a Roman nose. Napolitano controlled Williamsburg, Brooklyn and from 1979–80, he operated in Pasco County, Florida and out of Holiday, Florida after negotiating control of the territory with Santo Trafficante, Jr.. At that time, Napolitano set his sights on operating a major bookmaking operation in Orlando.
Napolitano was an avid homing pigeon enthusiast. He kept his pigeons on the rooftop of his apartment building and social club The Motion Lounge. The brilliantly colored pigeons had pedigree bloodlines that descended from prize pigeons in France, Germany and Russia. Napolitano would win as much as $3000 racing his pigeons. Pistone said that Napolitano loved going to his pigeon coop to think: "Sometimes when we were up on the roof with the pigeons, Sonny would lean on the railing and look out over the rooftops of the neighborhood where he had lived all his life. I wondered what he was thinking about."
Napolitano would say to Pistone, "The whole thing is how strong you are and how much power you got and how fucking mean you are—that's what makes you rise in the mob. Every day's a fucking struggle, because you don't know who's looking to knock you off, especially when you become a captain or boss. Every day, somebody's looking to dispose of you and take your position. You always got to be on your toes. Every fucking day is a scam day to keep your power and position." Napolitano would repeat this theme over and over again to Pistone in conversations up on the roof with his pigeons.

Caporegime[edit]

Napolitano rose to prominence in 1973 as a soldier for Michael Sabella and was promoted to capo, replacing his mentor after the gangland execution of the powerful rival capo Carmine "The Cigar" Galante. Sabella was demoted and Napolitano took over the crew. He became a trusted confidante of the imprisoned mobster Phillip "Rusty" Rastelli who took over leadership permanently again. But when Rastelli took over, it caused the Bonannos to split into two factions, one loyal to Rastelli, the other attempting to overthrow him in favor of the Sicilian faction, led by Alphonse "Sonny Red" Indelicato.
Napolitano and Joseph Massino, who were loyal to Rastelli, were chiefly responsible for helping to end the struggle by killing three capos opposed to Rastelli: Alphonse Indelicato, Dominick Trinchera and Philip Giaccone. Napolitano owned the Wither's Italian-American War Veterans Club at 415 Graham Avenue in Williamsburg, Brooklyn and also The Motion Lounge at 420 Graham Avenue. He later ran an illegal casino in Pasco County, Florida and owned a tennis club and night club called The King's Court Bottle Club in Holiday, Florida.
When in Holiday, Florida, Napolitano took up the sport of tennis with Joseph Pistone and was a doubles partner of Bonanno mobster John Cersani. Although he was a lousy tennis player, he enjoyed playing at King's Court. Pistone would later say, "On the court he would run around and yell, 'I'm going to kill you' between strokes". Napolitano would arm wrestlePistone, but always lost. He was a weight lifter and constantly challenged Pistone, who was the only guy that Napolitano could not beat. Napolitano was once able to beat Pistone by spitting in his face to surprise him, showing his competitive nature.
Napolitano's headquarters were in the heart of Williamsburg's Italian neighborhood. His crew, involved in burglary, extortion, robbery, bank robbery, loansharking, hijacking, bookmaking, casino operations and drug trafficking, were one of the most successful crews in the Bonanno family. Napolitano's crew included Bonanno street soldiers Benjamin "Lefty" Ruggiero, Nicholas Santora, Louis Attanasio, John Cersani, Jerome Asaro, Anthony Francomano, Sandro Asaro, John Faraci, Daniel Mangelli, Robert Lino, Frank Lino, Richard Riccardi, Joseph Grimaldi, Nicholas Accardi, Peter Rosa, Patrick DeFilippo, Michael Mancuso, Vito Grimaldi, Anthony Urso, James Tartaglione, Joseph Cammarano, John Zancocchio, Edward Barberra, Frankie Fish, Bobby Badheart, Bobby Smash and his previous capo Michael Sabella, Joseph Puma, Steven Maruca, Salvatore Farrugia, Anthony Pesiri, Antonio Tomasulo, Anthony Rabito, Raymond Wean, Frank DiStefano, Salvatore D'Ottavio, James Episcopa and Donnie Brasco.

Reputation[edit]

Napolitano was unusually tough and savvy, even for a Mafia capo. Although he was a stone-cold gangster, he ran his crew in a laid-back style. Pistone would say, "Dominick was more observant and disciplined than his old capo Michael Sabella and had a watchful eye. In mob circles, he had an excellent reputation for personal loyalty to his sidewalk soldiers. He would kill you in a minute if you crossed him." Napolitano was a fine marksman with small-caliber pistols, which made him an efficient killer.
In restaurants or in public, he was a gentleman and never flamboyant or brazen. He always carried his own suitcases when traveling, which was not traditionally done by other capos. Pistone said that Napolitano was not a 24-hour gangster, meaning that you could talk to him about other things besides the Mafia, unlike other mobsters who only wanted to talk about illegal activities and Mafia business. When working, Napolitano was respected and feared, but when hanging out with Pistone, they would go out to dinner, have coffee and just "shoot the breeze" like two friends.

Operation Donnie Brasco[edit]

When Joseph Pistone infiltrated the Mafia, he became attached to Napolitano's crew and the two developed a close relationship. Pistone was one of the few people that Napolitano trusted and relied upon; Pistone even spent nights sleeping over at Napolitano's apartment. He regarded Pistone so highly that he planned to nominate him to be "made" (inducted into the Mafia). By becoming Napolitano's right-hand man, Pistone gained respect in the Bonanno family.
Pistone's undercover operation ended after six years, when Napolitano ordered Pistone to murder another mobster, Philip Giaccone, while he was in Miami. When the decision was made to kill Giaccone at the same time as Indelicato and Trinchera were to be killed, Pistone was instead given the task of killing Indelicato's son, Bruno. The operation officially ended July 26, 1981. Two days later, FBI agents came to the Motion Lounge to inform Napolitano that his trusted friend and associate of six years was an agent. In the hours after the shocking disclosure of Donnie Brasco, Napolitano went to his pigeon coop to think. FBI surveillance photos showed a very worried-looking man.[4]

Death[edit]

Napolitano was ordered to be killed in retribution for Pistone's infiltration. On August 17, 1981, he was summoned to a meeting in the basement of Bonanno associate Ron Filocomo's home in Flatlands, Brooklyn. Knowing that he would be killed, Napolitano gave his jewelry to his favorite bartender, who worked below his apartment at the Motion Lounge, along with the keys to his apartment so that his pet pigeons could be cared for. Bonanno capo Frank Lino and Steven Cannone drove Napolitano to the house of Filocomo and Frank Coppa, who was also present. Napolitano was pushed down the staircase in Filocomo's basement and shot to death by Filocomo and Lino with .38 caliber revolvers. When the first shot misfired, Napolitano told them, "Hit me one more time and make it good".
Napolitano's girlfriend Judy later contacted Pistone and told him that, shortly before his death, Napolitano had told her that he bore no ill will towards Pistone, knowing that Pistone was only doing his job, and that if anyone was responsible for taking him down, he was glad it was Pistone. She said that Napolitano really loved Pistone and was broken up when he found out he was an agent. Napolitano could not believe that Pistone was an agent because of the "things we had done together, the conversations we'd had, the feelings we'd had."
In August, FBI surveillance noticed workmen dismantling Napolitano's pigeon coops atop the Motion Lounge. On August 12, 1982, a body was found at South Avenue and Bridge Street in Arlington, Staten Island; the corpse's hands were severed and the face was so badly decomposed that dental records were required to verify the identity. The FBI announced that it had found the corpse of Dominick Napolitano. In 2000, however, they publicly revealed doubts about whether the corpse was correctly identified.
In 2003, Bonanno boss Joseph Massino was arrested and charged with a variety of crimes, with the case centering on the murder of Napolitano. At Massino's trial, prosecutors claimed that Napolitano was killed by his associates for allowing his crew to be compromised, and that his hands had been removed as a warning to other mobsters to follow the rule about proper introductions (the association of shaking hands when being introduced to someone). Massino was convicted in 2004.
In 2006, Frank Lino and Frank Coppa turned state's evidence, providing authorities with the details of Napolitano's murder.[5] Although the FBI were reasonably sure that the body found in Staten Island was Napolitano, one discrepancy existed: Lino claimed that he and Filocomo shot Napolitano with .38 caliber revolvers and that he himself had fired more than once. But the corpse only had one bullet wound, apparently made by a .45 caliber pistol. Coppa later said that Napolitano "died like a man".[6] Dominick "Sonny Black" Napolitano was buried in Calvary Cemetery, Queens. Pistone expressed some regret over Napolitano's fate; "My intention in all of this was to put people in jail, not get them killed."[7]

Popular culture[edit]

The 1997 film Donnie Brasco features "Sonny Black", played by Michael Madsen. Many of Sonny Black's character traits, and relationship with Pistone, were combined with other Bonanno mobsters like Anthony Mirra and Benjamin Ruggiero, who in the film is played by Al Pacino. A notable parallel occurs when Ruggiero is summoned to what he knows will be his execution for allowing Pistone into the Mafia (in reality, Ruggiero was arrested by the FBI). He leaves behind his personal effects, echoing Napolitano's final actions shortly before he was murdered. Ruggiero's sentiments of how if it was going to be anyone that sunk him, he was glad it was Pistone, is a direct paraphrase of Napolitano's words.
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Louisa Napaljarri, Waripari-speaking Indigenous Artist

Louisa Lawson Napaljarri (Pupiya) (c. 1930–2001) was a Warlpiri-speaking Indigenous artist from Australia's Western Desert region. Louisa commenced painting at Lajamanu, Northern Territory in 1986. Her work is held by the National Gallery of Victoria.

Life[edit]

Louisa Lawson Napaljarri was born circa 1926[1] or 1931.[2] The ambiguity around the year of birth is in part because Indigenous Australians operate using a different conception of time, often estimating dates through comparisons with the occurrence of other events.[3]
'Napaljarri' (in Warlpiri) or 'Napaltjarri' (in Western Desert dialects) is a skin name, one of sixteen used to denote the subsections or subgroups in the kinship system of central Australian Indigenous people. These names define kinship relationships that influence preferred marriage partners and may be associated with particular totems. Although they may be used as terms of address, they are not surnames in the sense used by Europeans.[4][5] Thus 'Louisa Lawson' is the element of the artist's name that is specifically hers.
As a child, Louisa lived around Ngarrupalya,[2] west of Yuendumu and over three hundred kilometres north-west of Alice Springs.[6] Her first contact with white Australians was at Alice Springs. She worked as a cook at Granites, a Northern Territory goldmine, and her daughter by one of the miners, Robyn Napurrula Green, is also an artist. Louisa herself was the sister of prominent Yuendumu artist Paddy Japaljarri Sims.[2]
Louisa was a "senior woman in the ceremonial life of the Lajamanu community".[2] She died in 2001.[1]

Art[edit]

Background[edit]

Contemporary Indigenous art of the western desert began when Indigenous men at Papunya began painting in 1971, assisted by teacher Geoffrey Bardon.[7] Their work, which used acrylic paints to create designs representing body painting and ground sculptures, rapidly spread across Indigenous communities of central Australia, particularly following the commencement of a government-sanctioned art program in central Australia in 1983.[8] By the 1980s and 1990s, such work was being exhibited internationally.[9] The first artists, including all of the founders of the Papunya Tula artists' company, had been men, and there was resistance amongst the Pintupi men of central Australia to women painting.[10]However, there was also a desire amongst many of the women to participate, and in the 1990s large numbers of them began to create paintings. In the western desert communities such as Kintore, Yuendumu, Balgo, and on the outstations, people were beginning to create art works expressly for exhibition and sale.[9]

Career[edit]

Louisa Lawson was one of a number of artists who first learned painting through a course run in 1986 at Lajamanu, Northern Territory by an adult education officer, John Quinn, associated with the local Technical and Further Education unit.[11][12] The course, initially attended only by men, eventually enrolled over a hundred community members.[13] Others who began their careers through that course include Mona Napaljarri and Peggy Rockman Napaljarri. In the 1990s she was "one of the best known painters at Lajamanu".[2]
Works by Louisa are held by the National Gallery of Victoria,[1] which included her works in its 1989 Mythscapes and 1991 Paint Up Big exhibitions.[2]
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Ian Douglas Nairn, British Architectural Critic

Ian Douglas Nairn (24 August 1930 – 14 August 1983) was a British architectural critic who coined the word ‘Subtopia’ to indicate drab suburbs that look identical through unimaginative town-planning. He published two strongly personalised critiques of London and Paris, and collaborated with Sir Nikolaus Pevsner, who considered his reports to be too subjective, but acknowledged him as the better writer.

Early life[edit]

Ian Nairn was born at 4 Milton Road, Bedford, England. Nairn's father was a draughtsman on the R101 airship programme based at Shortstown.[1] The family moved in 1932 when the airship programme was terminated, and Nairn was brought up in Surrey. It was the balancing-act nature of this essentially suburban environment which he stated "produced a deep hatred of characterless buildings and places".[2] Nairn had no formal architecture qualifications; he was a mathematics graduate (University of Birmingham) and a Royal Air Force pilot, flying Gloster Meteor aircraft.[3]

The Architectural Review and "Subtopia"[edit]

In 1955, Nairn established his reputation with a special issue of the Architectural Review called "Outrage" (later as a book in 1956), in which he coined the term "Subtopia" for the areas around cities that had in his view been failed by urban planning, losing their individuality and spirit of place. The book was based around a nightmarish road trip that Nairn took from the south to the north of the country – the trip gave propulsion to his fears that we were heading for a drab new world where the whole of Britain would look like the fringes of a town, every view exactly the same. He also praised modernist urban developments such as the Bull Ring shopping centre in Birmingham, which eventually became increasingly unpopular due to the subjugation of pedestrians to cars and was demolished in the early 21st century.[4] Jonathan Glancey has compared Nairn's opinions with those of the town planner Thomas Sharp, as well as with earlier writers such as William Cobbett and John Ruskin, all of whom shared a vision of potentially invidious urbanization needing to be mitigated by clearly delineated rural space, "compact towns co-existing with a truly green countryside of which we are stewards, not consumers or despoilers".[5] "Outrage" was followed by "Counter-Attack Against Subtopia" in 1956 (published as a book in 1957). Both books were influential on Jane Jacobs, who was then working at Architectural Forum, the most widely read US architectural magazine.[6] Jacobs cited "Outrage" and "Counter-Attack" in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, and she recommended Nairn to her contacts at the Rockefeller Foundation, which funded Nairn's book The American Landscape: A Critical View (1965).[6]

The Buildings of England[edit]

Nairn admired Nikolaus Pevsner's work (if not his methodology) on the then fledgling Buildings of England series, and had approached Pevsner in the early 1960s as a potential co-author. Pevsner, who wrote about "Visual Planning and the Picturesque", was influential on the formation of the Architectural Review's "Townscape" series of columns, which evolved into the movement to which Gordon Cullen and Nairn were key contributors.[7] In common with several architectural writers and academics at the time, Nairn had already made small contributions to the series – in his case the volumes on Essex and Northumberland. And Pevsner had already been influenced by Nairn in earlier volumes: Rutland, for example, Pevsner described as having "no 'subtopia'".[8] Nonetheless Pevsner was initially reluctant, having thus far written the guidebooks alone. He was also aware of Nairn's views on the 'house style' of the series from reviews Nairn had written on earlier volumes.[9] However the scale of the project began to demand assistance and Pevsner eventually handed almost all responsibility for writing the Surrey volume to Nairn, whose text ultimately constituted almost four-fifths of the finished volume.
Pevsner was content to give sole authorship to Nairn for the volume on Sussex, however as work progressed Nairn felt that his approach was increasingly at odds with the relative objectivity Pevsner required. Nairn began to feel that this was acting as a constraint on his writing, and ceased work on the Sussex volume before it was completed. According to Pevsner, in the Foreword to the Sussex book, "When he (Nairn) had completed West Sussex, he found that he could no longer bear to write the detailed descriptions which are essential in The Buildings of England. His decision filled me with sadness...."[10] Consequently, the guide was published with Nairn being given credit for the West Sussex section and Pevsner East Sussex.
In the Foreword to Sussex, Pevsner paid Nairn the compliment of acknowledging that "he writes better than I could ever hope to write." However, he continues: "On the other hand, those who want something a little more cataloguey and are fervently interested in mouldings and such like, may find my descriptions more to their liking."[11]
This contrast between exhaustive description (Pevsner) and passionate, sometimes emotional, enthusiasm (Nairn) is noted by Alec Clifton-Taylor in his review of Sussex in the Listener on 15 July 1965. "Dr. Pevsner... is inclined to tell us everything about a building except whether it is worth going to see. Mr Nairn, more subjective, occasionally perverse...never leaves us in any doubt about this aspect."[12]
Despite these differences, Nairn remained enthusiastic about the series after his association with it had ended. He later wrote, "[f]or architectural information, there is nothing to beat The Buildings of England".[13]

Later career[edit]

Nairn's style was more easily accommodated in his own architectural guidebooks, which he prefaced as being subjective and personal. Ultimately only two were ever published: Nairn's London (1966) and Nairn's Paris (1968). Planned guides to London's Countryside, The Industrial North, and Rome and Florence were announced but never appeared.[14]
Nairn's writing style is concise, and often humorous, and he describes both his loves and hates, sometimes describing a passage between buildings rather than the buildings themselves, or a single detail. An example of the former is Cardinal Cap Alley on London's South Bank: he remarked of its vista of a tower of St. Paul's, "an accident, but the kind of accident that tends to bestow if you design well in the first place."[15] And of the latter: an elephant on the Albert Memorial "has a backside just like a businessman scrambling under a restaurant table for his cheque-book".[16]
In addition to his journalism, Nairn became for a time a familiar face on television, producing various series called for the BBC, starting with Nairn's North in 1967 and concluding with Nairn's Journeys in 1978.
He was fond of pubs and beer, and both his architectural guides and television journalism are full of descriptions of pubs, and recommendations of which beers to drink. He said in 1972 of a recently disused signal box in Longtown, Cumbria, that he could imagine it being turned into a house, with the lever frames left in place and converted to beer pumps.[17]This was part of his love of local and regional distinctiveness, the "ordinary" places which attracted him as much as the locations of noteworthy buildings. In Nairn's Paris, for example, he lovingly describes the village of Quevauvillers, near Amiens, whose few features are "all lying around waiting for nothing to happen".[18] In a similar vein, in the small town of Prėcy-sur-Oise near Beauvais, he notes "a collection of ordinary things ('wobbly suspension bridge...grain silo...a sign saying Ruberoid') transformed into uniqueness".[19](The reissued 2017 edition of Nairn's Paris omits these descriptions which appear in the chapters describing buildings in the wider Ile-de-France area such as Chartres, Reims and Beauvais Cathedrals, the abbey church of Saint Martin des Bois, the town of Provins, several châteaux, and numerous hamlets and villages which Nairn deemed to be noteworthy, often, as in the case of Quevauvillers, because of their – for him – charming ordinariness.)
When he did the Yorkshire section of Nairn's Journeys, he, in his own words, "bumped into" the great bluesman Champion Jack Dupree whilst doing a section of the programme in Halifax. The two got on rather well and maintained a close correspondence almost right up to his own death. In his concerns about the encroaching blandness of modern design, he was the heir of literary men who had similarly been critics of the spread of an Edwardian suburbia, such as E.M. Forster ("success was indistinguishable from failure" there), and John Betjeman ("red-brick rashes"), and which fed into the Campaign to Protect Rural England among others. This strain of thinking was, however, to become largely concerned with conservation of the heritage in affluent areas, rather than with Nairn's urban fringe. And like Betjeman, Nairn fought against the forces of subtopia, the obliteration of British heritage – though the forces of subtopia invariably prevailed; one example, his defence of Northampton's Emporium Arcade – "if they do pull this place down it'll be a diabolical shame." It was demolished in June 1972.
He died on 14 August 1983, aged 52, from cirrhosis of the liver and chronic alcoholism.[20] Consumed with a sense of failure, he sought refuge in drink and in his later years wrote almost nothing. He is buried in the Victorian Hanwell cemetery in west London.[20] It is now in one of Ealing's conservation areas. Speaking in The Man who Fought the Planners – The Story of Ian Nairn, Gillian Darley reveals that Nairn's death certificate erroneously gave the place of his birth as Newcastle upon Tyne. Although it is not known who supplied this information to the authorities, Darley reflects that it shows Nairn's wish to be considered a man of the North, a "Newcastle man by desire if not reality".[3]

Influence[edit]

Writers and critics influenced by Nairn include J.G. Ballard, Will Self, Patrick Wright, Michael Bracewell, Jonathan Glancey, Iain Sinclair, Gavin Stamp, Owen Hatherley and Jonathan Meades,[21] who said of his account of Surrey:
Mere architectural description could not suffice for that land of joke-oak and real rhododendron; what it demands is an acute sense of place and the gift to render that sense. Nairn possessed both, and in his London book he showed a third gift, that of the realization of the emotional power of townscape. That trinity of gifts made him a great poet of the metropolis.[22]
In 1997 Michael Bracewell toured some of Nairn's subjects in Surrey for the Travels with Pevsner TV series. In the 2005 film Three Hours From Here Andrew Cross retraced the extensive journey across England that Nairn took to research and write Outrage in 1955. Jonathan Glancey undertook a similar odyssey for The Guardian in 2010.
Fourteen of the buildings mentioned in Nairn's London, "one of the most strange and stirring books ever written about the city", form the basis of the "Building London" chapter in Henry Eliot and Matt Lloyd-Rose's Curiocity (2016). Nairn's own descriptions of buildings such as St Mary Woolnoth, Battersea Power Station and the Gala Bingo Club, Tooting are incorporated into short paragraphs which update Nairn and invite contemporary readers to see the buildings for themselves. The chapter forms an affectionate homage to the "cantankerous architecture critic".[23]
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