Pizza Penance

The trial in the notorious "pizza connection" case ended last week after nearly 17 months, but the eleven-member jury needed only six days to deliver its verdict. A former Sicilian Mafia chief and 16 other men, said the exhausted jurors in New York City last week, were guilty of conspiring to distribute heroin and cocaine through a network of pizza parlors.

The case involved an intricate $1.6 billion drug-smuggling operation, partly planned in obscure places like a Queens, N.Y., pizzeria. The Government presented hundreds of witnesses, hours of bugged conversations and thousands of documents. Actors were brought in to read dialogue from the wiretaps, and interpreters translated proceedings into Italian for some of the defendants.

What emerged was a complicated tale of cooperation between the Sicilian Mafia and its American counterpart, the Cosa Nostra. Tons of morphine base were smuggled from Turkey to Sicily, processed into 1,650 lbs. of heroin, then sneaked through airports and distributed by pizza parlors in the Northeast and Midwest. More than $40 million in profits went back to Sicily in a laundering scheme involving banks in New York, Switzerland, Bermuda and the Bahamas.

Fear shrouded the proceedings, and jurors' names were kept secret. Even so, a juror was excused two weeks ago after revealing that a relative had received a threatening phone call. Earlier, one defendant was found in a trash bag in Brooklyn, shot and bludgeoned to death. Another was paralyzed by gunfire on a crowded Greenwich Village street.

It took 45 minutes for the shirt-sleeved foreman just to read the 59-page list of verdicts. The most infamous defendant was Gaetano ("the Uncle") Badalamenti, 63, former chief of the Sicilian Mafia, who faces up to 30 years in prison, and Salvatore ("the Baker") Catalano, 46, a Queens bakery owner who prosecutors say is a powerful capo in the Bonanno family. He could get life imprisonment. Fifteen other defendants were found guilty of conspiracy. Badalamenti's son Vito was found innocent of his only charge of conspiracy, $ and another defendant was convicted of federal currency violations. To U.S. Attorney Rudolph Giuliani it was a "tremendous victory." Said he: "No one case can result in a massive destruction of the Mafia. However, the momentum is now building."