The Pizza Connection

By: Emily Eade

It’s 1984 in New York City, and it was the peak of the mob scene. The radio was on in your house and you overheard that the long-awaited manhunt was over. They had finally caught Gaetano Badalamenti, someone on the FBI’s most wanted list for the last decade. This was the end of what was known as the Pizza Connection. 

The Pizza Connection would get its name from what was considered the “front” of the crime, mob-owned pizza shops, stretching from New York to Illinois. These pizza shops were fronts to distribute the drugs and launder through multiple banks and brokers. The drugs would be bought and distributed through pizza boxes. 

This notorious crime started in the early months of 1975. Badalamenti, at the time, would be the boss of the Sicily mafia and a key player in this trafficking scheme. He would have ties around the world, specifically the United States and Turkey. The conspiracy consisted of buying a morphine base from Turkey, bringing it to Sicily and processing it into heroin, then smuggling it into the United States. They would also import cocaine from South America to the United States. It is estimated that they imported $1.6 billion in heroin alone.

From the years 1976 to 1982, Joe Pistone, an undercover FBI agent, infiltrated the Bonanno crime family. This would cause Pistone to know the whereabouts and have insider information about Badalamenti’s next moves. This let the FBI know that Badalamenti was on the move, only to find him in Madrid, Spain. 

In April of 1984, the FBI arrested thirty people, but most importantly Gaetano Badalamenti, who they consider the real-life Mafia Godfather. This would be the end of one of the world's most prolific drug cartels.