REPUTED MOB BOSS TO BE DEPORTED


The feds last week secretly busted the reputed acting boss of the Bonanno organized crime family --- Salvatore "Sal the Ironworker" Montagna -- and are on the verge of deporting him to Canada for an immigration violation, The Post has learned.

"He is in ICE [US Immigration and Customs Enforcement] custody," said ICE spokesman Luis Martinez.

The 38-year-old Montagna's lawyer said the purported mobster is being booted from the US for a 2003 contempt conviction only because federal authorities are frustrated at being unable to indict him for any crimes after investigating him for years.

"It is sour grapes on the part of the FBI," said Montagna's lawyer, George Stavropoulos, who denies his client is in the Mafia. "They brought in [immigration authorities] into the case a year ago in the event they could not indict him on anything."

"This was the ace up their sleeve. They always knew they could get him on the immigration thing," Stavropoulos said. "It is quite shameful that after a three-year investigation by the feds, the best they can do is get him deported."

"Basically the government has uprooted him from his family," said the lawyer of Montagna, an Elmont, LI, resident with a wife and three young daughters, who has lived in the US since he was 15. "He's going to lose his business."

Montagna, who was born in Canada and raised in Sicily, was identified by authorities three years ago as the acting head of the Bonanno family. His purported ascension raised eyebrows because he was just 35 years old at the time, but was chalked up to the fact that a series of prosecutions had decimated the upper ranks of the Cosa Nostra clan.

Montagna was busted April 6 at his company, Matrix Steel, in Bushwick, Brooklyn and since then has been held in an immigration detention center in lower Manhattan, his lawyer said.

Stavropoulos said immigration authorities have detained him since then on the grounds that he pleaded guilty in 2003 to criminal contempt charges for refusing to answer questions in front of a Manhattan grand jury.

Immigration officials told Stavropoulos today that they will send Montagna to Canada within the week, the lawyer said. Martinez, the ICE spokesman, declined to comment on the schedule for Montagna's deportation.

Stavropoulous blasted authorities for arresting Montagna at this point in time, when his company is providing steel for two large construction projects, one in Manhattan, and the other in Queens.

"They did this despite the fact that they knew that his daughter's First Communion was in two weeks, which is more important to him than the two massive [building] contracts he has outstanding," Stavropoulos said. "He never ran, he never fled, never tried to go anywhere, so there's no real explanation at this point other than they just couldn't indict him on anything."

"Ultimately, they strong-armed him into leaving the country, because they couldn't prove a single allegation."

http://www.nypost.com/seven/04142009/news/regionalnews/reputed_mob_boss_to_be_extridicted_164410.htm

This could be the end of Montagna!

The Bonannos have been a mess for decades. When will these guys get a grip?

From the mid-1990's to the early 2000's the Bonannos were actually considered quite strong by law enforcement. They had not been an investigative priority for quite a while, which helped them to grow in power. Also, ironically, the fact that they were cut out of the other families' joint labor rackets spared them from a lot of scrutiny. But of course, things came crashing down once the top guys started getting indicted and then flipping.

If Massino had said no to Gotti about the Commission reinstatement, then who knows how things would have ended up.

The Bonanno's don't need to be on a Commission to be successful and with things nowadays without a Commission its still very bad.

The only way for the 5 families to be how they were would be to kill everyone that exists in American LCN and start all over again. That way there would be no rats or even the knowledge of past rats, like Valachi and Massino.

The Bonannos have always had strong ties to both Canada and Sicily. But those ties were part of their undoing. Joe Bonanno's attempts to expand into Canada brought him into conflict with his cousin, Stefano Magaddino, the Don of Buffalo, and was a factor in the Commission's 1964 order to Bonanno to step down in favor of Magaddino's brother-in-law, Gaspar DiGregorio. That set off a long, bloody, inconclusive law that wrecked the Bonannos for decades. Carmine Galante's close ties to Sicily to develop a heroin pipeline led to another bloody struggle between the Sicilian "zips" and the American-born Bonannos. More recently, Vito Rizzuto, a Sicilian-born mobster whose family settled in Montreal, developed the heroin pipeline in Canada and was instrumental in helping the Bonannos with the dope trade in the US. He participated in the killing of the three Bonanno capos killed in 1981. Massino later ratted him out.