1954 in organized crime

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1 Events
2 Arts and literature
3 Births
4 Deaths

[edit] Events

With a low amount of "soldiers" and other low level members, many of New York's Five Families begin actively recruiting members after more than twenty years.
Salvatore Bonanno, the son of mafia boss Joseph Bonanno, becomes a "made man"; an official member of the Bonanno crime family.
February 9 - In Sicily the bandit Gaspare Pisciotta dies in his cell while on trial. He was poisoned with strychnine. Pisciotta claimed to have killed his companion and separatist Salvatore Giuliano on the instruction of Mario Scelba, then Minister of the Interior.
March 25 - Joe Adonis is convicted of perjury and sentenced to serve two years in a federal penitentiary as well as facing a deportation order from the previous year. While he attempts to appeal the decision, Adonis offers to leave the country voluntarily as an alternative to serve the two year jail term.
April 11 - The Roman daily newspaper Avanti! publishes a photograph of a candy factory in Palermo – set up by Calogero Vizzini and Italo-American gangster Lucky Luciano in 1949 – under the headline "Textiles and Sweets on the Drug Route." That evening the factory was closed, and the laboratory's chemists were reportedly smuggled out of the country. Police suspected that it was a cover for heroin trafficking. ^[1]
July 10 - Calogero Vizzini the Mafia boss of Villalba in Sicily dies. Vizzini was considered to be one of the most influential Mafia bosses of Sicily after World War II. Thousands of peasants dressed in black, politicians and priests took part in his funeral, including Mussomeli boss Giuseppe Genco Russo and the powerful boss Don Francesco Paolo Bontade from Palermo (the father of future Mafia boss Stefano Bontade) – who was one of the pallbearers. An elegy for Vizzini was pinned to the church door. It read: "Humble with the humble. Great with the great. He showed with words and deeds that his Mafia was not criminal. It stood for respect for the law, defence of all rights, greatness of character: it was love."
July-December - According to FBI reports, several meetings between Mafia leadership were observed in Los Angeles, California, Chicago, Illinois and Mountainside, New Jersey.