FBI unveils transcript of a Mafia initiation

You're going to be in our regime. You answer only to the Bonanno family." Mafia boss Damiano Zummo swears in an FBI undercover agent

UNITED STATES: Midway through the secret ceremony, a man identified as a mafia captain congratulated someone named John. ‘‘You’re going to be in our regime,’’ Damiano Zummo said. ‘‘You answer only to the Bonanno family.’’

However, John was working for the FBI. He was wearing a wire and helping investigators to make what are said to be the first audio and video recordings of a Mafia induction by one of New York’s five Italian-american crime families.

The FBI has released a transcript of the meeting, said to have taken place in Canada, in court papers filed after the arrest of Zummo with another alleged member of the Bonanno family and two associates.

They were charged with crimes including selling cocaine in a Manhattan icecream shop, money laundering, loansharking and weapons offences. They were arrested in raids in the US and Canada, where nine men were held in the same investigation. Among them were alleged members of a Buffalo Mafia, once led by Stefano ‘‘The Undertaker’’ Magaddino and Joseph Todaro Sr, known as ‘‘Lead Pipe Joe’’.

Two years ago Zummo, 44, from Long Island, travelled to Canada to conduct the ceremony, prosecutors say in a memo to a judge asking that he be detained pending trial. Prosecutors identifed the man who was to be ‘‘made’’ as a co-operating witness.

‘‘The reason why we’re here is from this day forward, you’re gonna be an official member of the Bonnano family,’’ Zummo said, according to the memo. ‘‘From this guy, this guy, this guy, everybody approved it. Congratulations.’’

There is no mention in the papers of blood drawn from the finger of the initiate or the burning of an image of a saint. The gangster Joseph Valachi, who broke the Sicilian mafia’s code of silence to testify in the 1960s, recalled being handed the burning paper and reciting in Italian: ‘‘This is the way I will burn if I betray the secret of the Cosa Nostra.’’

John apparently continued to co-operate with the FBI, allegedly recording a conversation in June in which he asked Zummo about an assault he is said to have ordered on a rival family for ‘‘badmouthing’’ a Bonanno captain.

‘‘He try to defend himself?’’ John asked. ‘‘No,’’ Zummo said, ‘‘he was screaming like a girl.’’

– The Times