Narco Wars

My brother. Wassup?

Wassup, wassup?

Dope Boy Papi, El Jefe, the big boss.

Dominican Republic is mine.

Anything that comes and leaves outta here,

it needs to come through me.

I distribute to New York and to Miami.

I use mules, and I use boats.

Do you ever feel guilty about selling drugs?

You never feel guilty about making money.

Do you think drugs should be legalized?

It will never be legalized.

That's how we make money.

So, you prefer it to be illegal, or?

Illegal.

Shake this square world and blast off for Kicksville.

(over PA) America's public enemy number one is drug abuse.

Just say no.

The mafia is a major player in the

international drug underworld.

But at the end of the day,

it's all about the dollar.

It's all about the dollar.

(over PA) The American people want the mob and its

associates brought to justice and their power broken.

(over PA) There's now an understanding that the

war on drugs was an abject failure.

You have to stop and ask yourself,

"How did we get here?"

Brought to you by Sailor420 !!! Hope you enjoy the film !!!

We were so excited every time daddy came home,

because daddy wasn't really home a lot.

I was under the impression that he worked for the CIA or the FBI,

and he was on these missions.

He wasn't tall, he was stocky.

But it wasn't fat, he was all muscle,

and he had a punch that you wouldn't believe.

He put up one of those punching bags in the basement,

and I used to watch him,

and it would just blow my mind.

How does the bag even get back to him, he's so fast?

He was very strong.

Very strong.

When he hit you, he hit you.

My name is Angela Tucceri,

and I am the daughter of Carmine Galante,

also known as "The Cigar".

Carmine Galante was, far and away, the biggest

heroin kingpin in the world.

He developed a whole system of smuggling tons of

heroin into the country.

Heroin trafficking turned out to be the most

profitable venture that the mafia went into.

He saw drugs as his opportunity to almost

take over the world.

The apprentice to the Bonanno family,

which is one of the five main crime families in New York.

He was particularly close to Joseph Bonanno,

who was the boss.

Carmine Galante was a street thug for the mob,

and he was ruthless, which helped him rise in

the mafia organization.

He was just the kind of guy they were looking for.

I do have to say this, what he did might be wrong,

but he excelled in it.

In the 50s,

Joe Bonanno sent him to Montreal to organize

the rackets there.

It's not really that well known,

but Canada became a big nurturing place for the mafia,

and for organized crime and drug trafficking.

Border controls were relaxed,

and it was easy to bring in shipments of

drugs from Europe,

particularly the French speaking parts, like Montreal.

Montreal is the largest city in Canada.

Its great seaport and industry gives the city a

transcontinental economy.

The fact that Bonanno dispatched him to Canada

showed the trust that they had in him.

Galante was termed the "Foreign Minister" of Bonanno.

He headed Bonanno's operation of drug trafficking, gambling,

loan sharking, etc. and from there,

he made a lot of money for Bonanno.

Montreal, to me, was a very glamorous city

at the time.

It never felt anything but a vacation to me.

He had in his passport "occupation", and it said,

"restaurant owner".

So, even when I was younger,

I knew that daddy owned a restaurant in Canada.

It never dawned on me that,

"Oh, this is a great place for dad to start bringing in his drugs."

It just, you know, I didn't know any of that.

The French Connection really grew out of World War II,

because the French would arrange shipments through Turkey,

where opium was prevalent,

to processing plants in Marseille.

From there, French organized crime brought it

into the US, through Canada.

Whose stuff is it? Is it any good?

It's very good.

The commodity of this marketplace is the narcotic drug, heroin,

packaged in small white bags.

There are $3 bags and $5 bags.

What is happening on this street corner is part

of an international multimillion dollar

a year business.

The United States was a pure market for heroin,

and the Mafia saw that this was the fast way of making

a lot of money.

Take it now. Take it down, that's all.

Present at this meeting were members of the

American Mafia, including Joe Bonnano, Carmine Galante.

On the Sicilian side,

among others, there was Lucky Luciano,

Tommaso Buscetta.

They put a plan together to make a lot of money.

The way to make a lot of money was through drugs.

That meeting established the contours of

the drug trafficking between Italy and the US,

how it would be divided up,

and laid out the groundwork of cooperation

between the Sicilian Mafia and the American Mafia.

The Sicilians had no criminal records in America,

and they were an unknown quantity to

American law enforcement.

As the underboss of the Bonanno family,

Galante took it upon himself to mention to the

young mafiosi in Sicily,

"You guys can come to America.

You can form your own crews.

You'll be under my direction,

and you're gonna make a lot of money with me."

He knew that this was gonna be his big shot.

But they wanted him put away and they succeeded.

Carmine Galante's been in jail for nearly

a third of his life.

There's a Sicilian term that says,

"He was a dog that had no leash."

My name is Fransesco Fiordilino,

and in 2003, in federal court,

I pled out to arson, gambling,

distribution of drugs,

murder, attempted murder, conspiracy to murder,

all while being part of Bonanno crime family.

Carmine Galante's ego was bigger than all of New York,

and he wants to be the top.

He wants to be the guy.

While in jail, Galante thought a lot about

his greatest ambition to become a boss,

to become somebody that he wasn't.

At the time he went to jail,

he was the underboss of the Bonanno family.

But, being the way he was,

that wasn't good enough for him.

Carmine Galante had problems from an early age,

and he had a long history of run‐ins with the law,

which ended up sending him to Sing Sing,

where his psychology was evaluated for the first time.

And they found he had an IQ of 90,

which is below average, a psychopathic personality.

Even then, he was known to fly into unaccountable rages.

So, the warning signs were clearly there.

My dad told me this story once,

that his father tried to sell him.

He was so appalled.

I'm sure that that made him get in with the wrong company.

Even at the early stages, he feared nothing,

and I think that that was a big part of him

becoming who he was.

In '62, jail offered many opportunities to keep up

with other mobsters in prison who he could consult with,

so it was not a huge impediment to

his criminal business.

But he had to bide his time, and he couldn't be thinking

anything except that it was his rightful due to

be the next boss.

Galante got out after 12 years of

his 20‐year sentence.

He was obviously on parole.

He had to abide by certain conditions,

such as not associating with criminal cohorts.

But he was hungry to get back into the game and

enforce his authority.

He wanted to come out and make more money and be the

king of the heroin trafficking activities between

Sicily and the United States.

In 1972, in New York, the French Connection,

based out of Marseille, gets broken up.

New York in the 70s was really downtrodden.

The city was in terrible financial shape,

a lot of hopelessness in the streets.

And that, of course, fostered drug addiction.

And a lot of people felt helpless and were

driven to drugs.

Well, I shoot, maybe, ten bags a day, three,

three times a day.

And how much does that cost you?

Well, it varies from 20 to $25 a day.