1. Don Tano Badalamenti was the capofamiglia of his hometown Cinisi, Sicily, and headed the Sicilian Mafia Commission in the 1970s.
20 Facts About Gaetano Badalamenti
1. 2.
Gaetano Badalamenti was sentenced in Italy to life imprisonment in 2002 for the 1978 murder of Peppino Impastato.
3.
Tano Gaetano Badalamenti was the youngest of a family with five boys and four girls.
4.
Gaetano Badalamenti had minimal schooling, attending school for only four years, before he was put to work as a field hand at age ten.
5.
In 1946 Gaetano Badalamenti was named in an arrest warrant on charges of conspiracy and kidnapping.
6.
Gaetano Badalamenti was arrested in 1950 and deported back to Italy.
7.
Gaetano Badalamenti married Theresa Vitale and set up a business on the family land as a lemon grower.
8.
Gaetano Badalamenti founded a successful construction business that supplied the crushed rock for Palermo's Punta Raisi Airport which fell within the Cinisi family's sphere of influence.
9.
Gaetano Badalamenti assumed leadership of the Mafia in Cinisi in 1963 after a car bomb killed Cesare Manzella during the First Mafia War.
10.
Gaetano Badalamenti would become one of the major heroin traffickers of the Sicilian Mafia.
11.
In 1951, the American police identified a 50 kilogram shipment of heroin to Gaetano Badalamenti who was then living in Detroit as an illegal immigrant.
12.
In 1953 Gaetano Badalamenti was arrested for cigarette smuggling in Italy for the first time.
13.
Di Cristina and Gaetano Badalamenti wanted to kill Francesco Madonia, the boss of Vallelunga Mafia family and an ally of the Corleonesi in the province of Caltanissetta.
14.
Later in 1978, Gaetano Badalamenti was expelled from the Commission, and Michele Greco replaced him.
15.
Gaetano Badalamenti was replaced as head of the Cinisi Mafia family by his cousin Antonio Gaetano Badalamenti.
16.
Gaetano Badalamenti fled to Brazil through Spain and settled in Sao Paulo.
17.
In 1984, again through telephone interceptions, the FBI discovered that Gaetano Badalamenti had planned a meeting in Madrid with his nephew Pietro "Pete" Alfano, owner of a pizzeria in Oregon, Illinois, and considered him the "main point of contact in the United States" for heroin trafficking.
18.
Gaetano Badalamenti was fined $125,000, and since he was extradited from Spain with the provision that he serve no more than 30 years, he was ordered to be released after 30 years should he live that long.
19.
Buscetta testified that Gaetano Badalamenti told him that the murder had been commissioned by the Salvo cousins as a favor to Andreotti.
20.
On 29 April 2004, Gaetano Badalamenti died from heart failure, at the age of 80, at the Devens Federal Medical Center in Ayer, Massachusetts.