Subject: The Sicilian Mafia heroin-importation and money-laundering network that moved roughly US$1.65 billion of heroin into the United States between 1975 and 1984, using independently owned American pizzerias as retail fronts and cash-collection points — and the record-breaking federal prosecution that dismantled it, United States v. Badalamenti et al. (S.D.N.Y., 1985–87).
Part 1: Origins
The men who “zipped”
To understand the Pizza Connection you first have to understand a sneer. By the mid-twentieth century the established Italian-American crime families of New York — the Five Families — had a derisive name for the newer Sicilian immigrants who began filtering into their orbit: Zips. The slang, in use especially around mid-century, was “often used as a derogatory slur by Italian-American mobsters in reference to newer immigrant Sicilian mafiosi.” The leading folk-etymology is linguistic: the American mobsters “were said to have difficulty understanding the Sicilian dialects of the new immigrants, in which words appeared to ‘zip’ by.” Competing theories trace it to the Sicilians’ fondness for homemade “zip guns,” or to a Sicilian slang term for “hicks” or “primitives.”
The contempt ran both ways. The Americans found the Sicilians frightening. As Bonanno soldier Benjamin “Lefty” Ruggiero told the undercover FBI agent Joseph “Donnie Brasco” Pistone, in a remark later entered into the record: “You can’t trust those bastard Zips. Nobody can.” Another Bonanno soldier, Anthony Mirra, told Pistone: “The Zips are clannish and secretive. They are the meanest killers in the business.” The Sicilians, for their part, regarded the American “wiseguys” as soft, Americanized, and indiscreet. Ruggiero again: “They hate the American people. They hate the American wiseguys.”
What made the Zips invaluable, and ultimately dangerous, was precisely their newness. “The Zips were effective because they were unknown in the United States and had no police records,” and they “generally congregated in the Knickerbocker Avenue area” of Brooklyn’s Bushwick — the spine of the operation. They were also, by the standards of the American Mafia, recklessly violent. They “had no qualms about murdering people who had been considered off-limits by the American Mafia, such as police officers, judges, and women and children,” and they favored bombs — a Sicilian signature the American families avoided out of fear of collateral casualties and heat. They were even known to kill enemies already on their deathbeds, because in Cosa Nostra “when someone is marked for death, that person cannot be allowed to die of natural causes.”
The American families tolerated them for one reason: money. “The group was tolerated because they earned millions of dollars for the families, specifically the Bonanno and Gambino families. Both Carmine Galante and Carlo Gambino used Zips for drug-running and contract killing.”
Don Tano of Cinisi
The Sicilian half of the network had a patriarch: Gaetano “Don Tano” Badalamenti (1923–2004), capofamiglia of the small lemon-growing town of Cinisi, on the coast west of Palermo, and at the head of the Sicilian Mafia Commission in the 1970s.
Badalamenti’s life is a near-perfect compression of the Sicilian Mafia’s twentieth-century arc. The youngest of nine children of a Cinisi dairy-farming family, he had only four years of schooling and was a field hand by ten. Conscripted into the Royal Italian Army in 1941, he deserted during the 1943 Allied invasion. Wanted on conspiracy and kidnapping charges (1946) and then murder (1947), he fled to a brother who ran a supermarket and gas station in Monroe, Michigan — an early, telling link between the Cinisi clan and the American Midwest that would later become the spine of the pizzeria network. American police identified a 50-kilogram heroin shipment to Badalamenti, then living illegally in Detroit, as early as 1951. He was deported to Italy in 1950, and “his judicial difficulties were all resolved because of insufficient evidence.”
Back home he built the model of Mafia power: a construction empire. He bribed officials to site Palermo’s Punta Raisi Airport near Cinisi despite its “inconvenient geographical position,” then supplied the crushed rock and gravel for it from his family’s land, running two construction firms, a concrete plant, and a truck fleet. In the 1950s his real money came from smuggling foreign cigarettes into Italy — he was arrested for it in 1953 and caught in 1957 with 3,000 kilograms of foreign-made cigarettes. Cigarette smuggling was the training school of an entire generation of Sicilian traffickers; the same routes, financiers, and trust networks were later repurposed for heroin.
Badalamenti assumed leadership of the Cinisi family in 1963 after a car bomb killed his predecessor, Cesare Manzella, during the First Mafia War. That same year the Ciaculli Massacre (June 30, 1963) — in which seven police and military officers were killed defusing a car bomb meant for mafioso Salvatore Greco — turned a Mafia war into a war against the Mafia, triggering the first concerted post-war state crackdown: roughly 1,200 mafiosi arrested within ten weeks and the dissolution of the Mafia Commission.
That crackdown is the hinge that created the Pizza Connection. By disrupting and scattering the Sicilian heroin trade, the Ciaculli repression pushed control “into the hands of a few fugitives”: the Greco cousins, Pietro Davì, Tommaso Buscetta, and Gaetano Badalamenti. When the Commission was revived in 1970, it was ruled by a triumvirate of Badalamenti, Stefano Bontade, and the Corleonesi boss Luciano Leggio. By 1974 the full Commission was reconstituted under Badalamenti’s leadership. He was, briefly, near the apex of the Sicilian underworld.
The Brooklyn anchor: Salvatore “Toto” Catalano
The network’s American center of gravity was Salvatore “Toto” Catalano, a Sicilian-born capo in New York’s Bonanno crime family who led the family’s Sicilian “Zips” faction out of Knickerbocker Avenue. Catalano is the indispensable bridge: an old-country mafioso operating inside an American family, trusted on both sides of the Atlantic. As the Badalamenti article puts it, “After 1975, Badalamenti joined forces with Salvatore Catalano of the Sicilian faction in the Bonanno family in New York and was involved with the ‘Pizza Connection’ case, where the mafia smuggled millions worth of heroin… to the United States using mafia-owned pizzerias as distribution points.”
Catalano did not run the Brooklyn Sicilians alone. His co-leader of the Zip faction was Cesare “The Tall Guy” Bonventre (1951–1984), born in Castellammare del Golfo, a cousin of the original family boss Joseph Bonanno and of fellow Zip Baldassare “Baldo” Amato. Bonventre had been brought to New York by the brutal Bonanno power Carmine Galante to serve as his bodyguard; at 28 he became “the youngest capo in Bonanno family history” after Galante’s murder, and he and Catalano together “led the Sicilian ‘Zips’ faction” and were “key members of the Pizza Connection.” Bonventre is the network’s most striking figure — six feet seven inches tall, “lean and handsome,” in aviator sunglasses and European man-purses, who once described himself to police as simply “a pizza man from Brooklyn.” His grotesque end is described in Part 2.
Why pizza?
The genius of the scheme was its banality. A pizzeria is a legitimate, cash-intensive small business that can plausibly absorb large amounts of currency, employ recently arrived Sicilian men with no documented histories, and sit unremarkably in any American town — including the Midwestern towns where the Cinisi clan had family ties going back to the 1940s. The trial centered, in the words of the case record, “on a number of independently owned pizza parlor fronts used to distribute drugs.” The parlors served two functions at once: as distribution points for heroin moving down the chain, and as collection-and-laundering nodes for the cash moving back up it. Don Tano’s own nephew, Pietro “Pete” Alfano, owned a pizzeria in Oregon, Illinois, and was considered by the FBI the network’s “main point of contact in the United States” for heroin trafficking.
Part 2: The Operation at Scale
The supply chain: from Anatolian poppies to Brooklyn
The Pizza Connection was a vertically integrated narcotics enterprise that, at trial, was described as processing “heroin from Sicily, morphine purchased from Turkey and Southwest Asia, and cocaine from South America, for final distribution of the drugs in the United States through independently owned pizza parlor fronts as the money was laundered through several banks and brokerages in the United States and overseas.”
The chain began in the opium fields of the Middle East and Southwest Asia. In the second half of the 1970s, the case record states, Palermo mafiosi Nunzio La Mattina, Tommaso Spadaro, and Giuseppe Savoca “purchased large quantities of morphine in Switzerland from the Turkish trafficker Yasar Avni Musullulu on behalf of the other Mafia families and transported it, by sea or by land, to Palermo and the surrounding area, where numerous illegal heroin refineries common to all the families were active.” The phrase common to all the families is important: the refineries were a shared utility of Cosa Nostra, not the property of any single clan — which is precisely why the prosecution could later frame the whole apparatus as a single criminal enterprise.
The refineries
Sicily in this era was not just a transit point; it had become a manufacturing center, converting raw morphine base into finished heroin. Italian investigators began surfacing the refineries at the turn of the 1980s:
- 1980 — two refineries discovered: one in the Piraineto district of Punta Raisi, and another in Trabia, the latter run by mafioso Gerlando Alberti, who was arrested with three chemists from Marseille working for him. The Marseille link is historically resonant: it marks the transfer of refining know-how from the collapsing “French Connection” of Corsican Marseille labs into Sicilian hands.
- 1982 — a third refinery found in Palermo, on Via Messina Marine, run by mafioso Pietro Vernengo.
This is the production heart of the network: Sicilian families buying morphine base abroad, refining it locally at industrial scale, and shipping finished heroin west.
The Atlantic crossing and the Bonanno gateway
On the American end, the heroin came ashore and into distribution through the Bonanno family’s Sicilian wing. The lineage of that gateway runs straight through Carmine Galante, the de facto Bonanno boss who had imported a cohort of young Sicilians from Castellammare del Golfo “to work as bodyguards, contract killers and drug traffickers,” and who built a smuggling route bringing “heroin by ship into Montreal and then sending it into the United States.” The Canadian leg matters: it ties the New York operation to the Cuntrera-Caruana clan, the Mafia’s financial and logistical specialists, who “extended their interests from Italy to Canada and Venezuela” and were “the trusted buyers who supplied the market in North America.” The Italian press dubbed them “The Rothschilds of the Mafia” and “The Bankers of Cosa Nostra.” In one documented load, the Caruana clan “received half of the load, while John Gambino of the Gambino Family in New York City took care of the other 200 kilograms” — illustrating both the scale (400-kilogram loads) and the cross-family cooperation.
After Galante was assassinated in 1979 (see “Turning point: the Galante hit”), his Sicilian crew passed to Catalano and Bonventre, who folded the heroin importation into the pizzeria distribution model. Bonventre “became involved in the importation and drug trafficking of heroin from Sicily into New York pizza parlors, known as the ‘Pizza Connection’.”
Distribution: the pizzeria web
The retail and mid-level distribution layer was the pizzerias themselves — a constellation of independently owned parlors across the Northeast and Midwest. Each was a node that could receive heroin, push it into local markets, and convert street proceeds back into bankable cash under the cover of a legitimate food business. Trial testimony tied named defendants directly to the parlor model: pentito Salvatore Contorno “testified that defendant Frank Castronovo, cousin of Carlo Castronovo in Sicily, used pizza parlors as fronts in the United States,” and described a 1980 meeting in Bagheria about heroin at which he saw Castronovo alongside defendants Salvatore Catalano, Gaetano Mazzara, and Salvatore Greco.
Laundering: cash out, money home
The financial half of the operation moved street cash back to Sicily and Switzerland, “laundered through several banks and brokerages in the United States and overseas.” The Cuntrera-Caruana clan’s specialty was exactly this: they “held a key position in the illicit drug trade and money laundering for Cosa Nostra in the 1980s and 1990s,” operating what Italian police characterized as an “international holding” with Venezuela as a key hideout and Canada as an operational base.
Structure and command
The enterprise sat astride two organizations that the trial, for the first time in an American courtroom, effectively treated as interlocking:
- The Sicilian side — the supply, refining, and wholesale apparatus, governed by the Sicilian Mafia Commission. Badalamenti chaired that Commission in the mid-1970s before his fall.
- The American side — the Bonanno family’s Sicilian “Zip” faction, led by Catalano and Bonventre out of Knickerbocker Avenue, handling importation, distribution, and collection.
The connective tissue was kinship and dialect: men from the same handful of western-Sicilian towns (Cinisi, Castellammare del Golfo, Siculiana), bound by blood and omertà, operating on both continents.
Turning point: the Galante hit (July 12, 1979)
The single most important pre-trial event in the American narrative is the murder of Carmine Galante. On July 12, 1979, Galante “was killed just as he finished eating lunch on an open patio at Joe and Mary’s Italian-American Restaurant at 205 Knickerbocker Avenue in Bushwick, Brooklyn,” alongside his cousin Giuseppe Turano and associate Leonardo Coppola. The hit was sanctioned at the highest level: it “required Philip ‘Rusty’ Rastelli to get approval from the Zips, Gambino crime family boss Paul Castellano and the other Commission bosses,” and the Commission “arranged for Bonventre and Baldo, Galante’s bodyguards, to betray him.” The two bodyguards “allegedly joined in the attack” wearing leather jackets on a hot July day — presumably as protection against stray bullets — then vanished with the three masked shooters. Galante was killed for refusing to share his heroin profits with the family. His death cleared the way for the Catalano–Bonventre faction to consolidate the heroin pipeline that became the Pizza Connection.
The hit was a pure mob killing — Galante assassinated mid-afternoon on the patio of Joe and Mary’s, his bodyguards in leather jackets in the July heat.
Turning point: the Sicilian Mafia wars
While the American end consolidated, the Sicilian end tore itself apart — and that civil war is what eventually broke the omertà the entire enterprise depended on.
Badalamenti’s fall was the first tremor. In 1978 he was expelled from the Commission and replaced by Michele Greco; the Maxi Trial record dates this to 1977 and attributes it to “trumped-up charges of hiding drug revenue” engineered by the rising Corleonesi. Badalamenti’s cousin Antonio took over Cinisi; Don Tano fled, eventually settling in São Paulo, Brazil, via Spain.
Then came the bloodbath. The Corleonesi, under the imprisoned Luciano Leggio and his deputy Salvatore Riina, “initiated a campaign to dominate Cosa Nostra and its narcotics trade.” In **April 1981 the Corleonesi murdered rival Commission member Stefano Bontade, and the Second Mafia War began in earnest," with “hundreds of enemy mafiosi and their relatives… murdered, sometimes by traitors in their own clans.” Riina emerged as the de facto “boss of bosses,” and the Corleonesi simultaneously “waged a campaign of murder against journalists, officials, and policemen.”
This is the crucial irony of the whole case: the same Corleonesi savagery that won the war also created the witnesses who would lose it. Tommaso Buscetta, an old Badalamenti ally and one of the few fugitives who had controlled the post-Ciaculli heroin trade, fled to Brazil in 1980 “to escape the brewing Second Mafia War.” Then the Corleonesi came for his family. On **September 11, 1982, his two sons Benedetto and Antonio “disappeared, never to be found again”; the war went on to claim “his brother Vincenzo, son-in-law Giuseppe Genova, brother-in-law Pietro and four of his nephews,” along with his ally Stefano Bontade. It was this annihilation of his family that would turn Buscetta into the most consequential informant in Mafia history.
Corruption and political shelter
The network operated under a canopy of political protection that the case only partly exposed. Years later, Italy’s highest court found that former Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti had “friendly and even direct ties” with the moderate wing of Cosa Nostra, naming Badalamenti and Bontade and the connection through politician Salvo Lima and the Salvo cousins. Buscetta later described to prosecutors the precise grammar of Mafia–political patronage:
“It is not Cosa Nostra that contacts the politician; instead a member of the Cosa Nostra says, that president is mine (è cosa mia), and if you need a favor, you must go through me… You tell him, ‘We need this, will you do it or not?’. The politician understands immediately and acts always.” — Tommaso Buscetta, court testimony
These political threads belong mostly to the Italian prosecutions (the Maxi Trial and the later Andreotti trials), not the American Pizza Connection trial: Andreotti was ultimately acquitted of the most serious charges. But they establish the world the traffickers moved in.
Part 3: The Unraveling
The investigation closes in
By the early 1980s the network was under simultaneous pressure on both sides of the Atlantic. In Sicily, investigators were surfacing the refineries (1980–82) and the Cuntrera-Caruana clan was being probed “in 1982–83 when they investigated the Italian end of what later was called the Pizza Connection.” In the United States, the FBI and DEA had spent years building toward the case that prosecutor Louis Freeh would later call, in the words of the record, “at the time, the most complex criminal investigation ever undertaken by the U.S.”
The prosecution team was formidable: lead trial counsel Richard A. Martin, with Louis J. Freeh, Robert Stewart, Robert B. Bucknam, and Andrew C. McCarthy. “For about a year, the prosecution… gathered hundreds of witnesses, wiretaps, and thousands of documents, which cost several million dollars to complete.” Freeh — who would go on to become FBI Director — was the lead prosecutor on the case.
Two intelligence streams were decisive. First, wiretaps and telephone interception: “again through telephone interceptions, the FBI discovered that Badalamenti had planned a meeting in Madrid with his nephew Pietro ‘Pete’ Alfano,” and identified Alfano, the Illinois pizzeria owner, as the U.S. point of contact. Second, the long undercover penetration of the Bonanno family by FBI agent Joseph D. Pistone — “Donnie Brasco” — who had infiltrated the family between 1976 and 1981 and who testified at the trial that “a Bonanno faction headed by Dominick Napolitano had formed an alliance with a Sicilian faction, which involved Salvatore Catalano.”
The arrests (April 1984)
The takedown was internationally coordinated. On April 8, 1984, in Madrid, Spain, FBI agents working with Italian and Spanish police arrested Gaetano Badalamenti, his son Vito Badalamenti, and Pietro Alfano as they converged for the planned meeting. The next day, April 9, 1984, a federal grand jury indicted thirteen men — including, unknowingly, the already-dead Cesare Bonventre — “on charges of distributing narcotics through the pizza restaurants.” Roughly a day after the Madrid arrests, “the Federal Bureau of Investigation arrested nearly 30 people in New York City, seizing weapons and drugs.” The Madrid defendants were extradited to the United States on November 15, 1984.
Buscetta defects
The case’s keystone was a man already in custody an ocean away. Tommaso Buscetta — “Don Masino,” “the Boss of Two Worlds” — had been arrested in São Paulo on October 23, 1983, and extradited to Italy on June 28, 1984. He attempted suicide by barbiturate overdose; when it failed, “he decided that he was utterly disillusioned with the Mafia,” and asked to speak to the anti-Mafia magistrate Giovanni Falcone.
Over 45 days, Buscetta explained to Falcone “the inner workings and hierarchical structures of Cosa Nostra including the Sicilian Mafia Commission, that, until then, were unclear because of the strict code of silence” — the framework that became known as the “Buscetta theorem.” Crucially, he distinguished what he would and would not say: he refused, at this stage, to detail Cosa Nostra’s political ties, “because, in his opinion, the state was not ready for statements of that magnitude.”
In **December 1984, Buscetta “was extradited to the United States where he received a new identity from the government and American citizenship and was placed in the Witness Protection Program in exchange for new revelations against the American Mafia” — and he testified at the Pizza Connection trial. A second pentito, Salvatore Contorno, “followed the example of Buscetta,” began cooperating in October 1984, and testified at both the Pizza Connection trial and the Maxi Trial.
Buscetta’s American testimony was foundational but not forensic. “Buscetta provided no direct connection between the defendants and drugs.” His value was to explain the system — to make a jury understand that a web of pizzerias and Sicilian cousins could be a single criminal enterprise. The granular, defendant-specific links came from Contorno (the Bagheria meeting, the Castronovo parlors) and from Pistone.
The marathon trial (September 30, 1985 – March 2, 1987)
United States v. Badalamenti et al. opened in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York on September 30, 1985, with 22 Sicilian-born defendants in the dock (the indictment had originally named more, several of whom were dead or severed). It ran until March 2, 1987 — about 17 months — making it “the longest trial in the judicial history of the United States at the time.” The presiding judge was Pierre N. Leval.
The sheer logistics — hundreds of witnesses, thousands of documents, wiretaps in Sicilian dialect requiring translation, a jury sequestered in attention for nearly a year and a half — are themselves a story. The case cost “several million dollars to complete” just to assemble.
The courtroom-era shooting of Pietro Alfano
The trial’s most violent interruption came while it was still underway. “Over the course of the trial, Gaetano Mazzara was murdered and Pietro Alfano was seriously wounded.” Alfano — Badalamenti’s nephew, the Illinois pizzeria owner and alleged U.S. point man, who was out on bail during the trial — was shot on a Manhattan street and gravely injured but survived; co-defendant Gaetano Mazzara was killed. These attacks, occurring against defendants in the middle of the longest trial in American history, underscored the lethal stakes of omertà and the reach of the organization the prosecution was trying to prove existed.
Part 4: The Aftermath
The verdict (March 2, 1987)
On March 2, 1987, the jury returned its verdicts. Of the 22 men who went to trial, “two… pleaded guilty to lesser currency violations, while 18 of the remaining 19 defendants were convicted of running an international drug ring.” The lone acquittal was Vito Badalamenti, Don Tano’s son.
The sentences (June 22, 1987)
Judge Pierre Leval handed down sentences on June 22, 1987:
- Five defendants received 45 years; the other thirteen faced maximum sentences of between 15 and 40 years on the drug-conspiracy convictions.
- Gaetano Badalamenti — 45 years and a $125,000 fine. Because his Spanish extradition came with a condition that he serve no more than 30 years, the court ordered that he be released after 30 years “should he live that long.”
- Salvatore “Toto” Catalano — 45 years, a $1.15 million fine, and $1 million in restitution.
- Salvatore Mazzurco — 35 years, $50,000 fine, $500,000 restitution.
- Giuseppe Lamberti — 35 years, $150,000 fine, $500,000 restitution.
- Salvatore Lamberti — 20 years, $50,000 fine, $500,000 restitution.
The trial was reviewed on appeal in United States v. Casamento, 887 F.2d 1141 (2d Cir. 1989), and the convictions broadly stood.
Badalamenti’s end
Don Tano never saw freedom again. He was also prosecuted in Italy: in **April 2002 an Italian court convicted him of the 1978 murder of the anti-Mafia radio broadcaster Giuseppe “Peppino” Impastato, the young activist who had mocked “Tano Seduto” (“Sitting Tano”) on his radio show Onda Pazza, and sentenced him to life imprisonment. He died of heart failure on April 29, 2004, aged 80, at the Devens Federal Medical Center in Ayer, Massachusetts.
His two chroniclers drew opposite portraits. Ralph Blumenthal called him “a manipulator who would do anything to regain leadership of the Sicilian mob”; Shana Alexander portrayed him as “a man of unusual dignity.”
Buscetta’s afterlife
Buscetta went on to become the most important Mafia witness of the century. His testimony to Falcone underpinned the Maxi Trial in Palermo (February 10, 1986 – January 30, 1992), the largest organized-crime trial in history: 475 mafiosi indicted, 338 convicted, with sentences totaling 2,665 years plus 19 life terms, upheld by Italy’s Supreme Court of Cassation in 1992 — the verdict that “finally judicially confirmed” the very existence of Cosa Nostra. After Falcone and Paolo Borsellino were assassinated in 1992, Buscetta finally broke his silence on politics and testified against Andreotti.
He died of cancer on **April 2, 2000, aged 71, in Florida, under a false name; he was buried under a false name in North Miami. One episode from his later life is striking: when mafioso Salvatore Cancemi confessed in a 1993 trial that he had strangled two of Buscetta’s sons, Buscetta embraced him and said, “You could not refuse the order. I forgive you because I know what it means to be in Cosa Nostra.”
Bonventre’s end — and the slow reckoning
Cesare Bonventre never made it to indictment alive. In April 1984 — within days of the grand jury indicting him — Massino had him killed. Picked up by Salvatore Vitale and Louis Attanasio ostensibly for a meeting, Bonventre was shot twice in the head inside a car at a New Jersey glue factory; astonishingly, “Bonventre still struggled, grabbing the steering wheel,” and had to be finished with two more shots on the garage floor. His body “was hacked to pieces and dumped into three 55-gallon glue drums,” discovered on April 16, 1984. Nearly twenty years later, in 2004, the killers were finally charged on Vitale’s cooperation; Attanasio and Peter Calabrese were sentenced in 2006 to 15 years.
Legacy
The Pizza Connection case had layered consequences:
- On the U.S. heroin trade. It dismantled the dominant Sicilian-Mafia heroin importation channel into the American Northeast and Midwest, the single biggest such pipeline of its era.
- On the American Mafia. Combined with the contemporaneous Commission Case and the Donnie Brasco penetration, it gutted the Bonanno family’s Sicilian wing and accelerated the broader 1980s collapse of the Five Families’ insulation.
- On the Sicilian Mafia. The trial fed, and fed off, the larger Italian reckoning. Buscetta’s cooperation bridged the American and Italian prosecutions; the Pizza Connection and the Maxi Trial together represent the moment the state proved Cosa Nostra was a single, hierarchical organization.
- Legal legacy. The case demonstrated that a sprawling, multi-defendant, transnational narcotics enterprise could be tried as one — and survived appeal in Casamento — establishing a template (and a cautionary tale about length and complexity) for mega-conspiracy prosecutions. It also made the reputations of prosecutors like Louis Freeh, future FBI Director.
Power and Pelf 