Natale "Joe Diamond" Evola was a New York mobster who briefly became boss of the Bonanno crime family.
Background
He was born the second child of Francesca and Fillipo Evola. His parents, both immigrants from Italy, lived in New York City's Lower East Side tenement district; the boy's father described himself as a laborer on his son's birth certificate. Evola lived with his parents throughout his life, never marrying, and eventually bought a house in Brooklyn where he cared for his mother until his death.
Career
Evola's association with the criminal underworld apparently began early. He was first arrested when he was twenty-three for possession of a gun, but the charge was dropped.
In 1931 he appeared as an usher in the lavish wedding of Joseph Bonanno, who at this time was busy organizing localized bootlegging operations into a national crime syndicate which, over the next decades, became increasingly involved in gambling operations, loan sharking, extortion, and murder.
A year after Bonanno's wedding, Evola was charged with coercion for using strong-arm tactics to settle a dispute in the New York Garment Truckers Association; the charges were subsequently dismissed. Evola spent the rest of his life consolidating his power within the Bonanno family and the garment district.
In the 1930's and 1940's, most Americans who were not directly affected by organized crime remained unaware of its existence. Then, in 1950, Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee chaired a dramatic series of televised congressional hearings. The American public watched as a colorful cast of underworld figures evaded questions and as Harry Anslinger of the Bureau of Narcotics and other officials described what was variously called the Syndicate, the Combination, or the Mafia. These hearings spurred law enforcement agencies, both federal and local, into action, and Evola was among the many caught in their slowly tightening net.
On November 14, 1957, New York State troopers arrested sixty-two persons including Evola at what police claimed was a Mafia conference in Apalachin, New York. Just as people were settling in at the hilltop estate of Joseph Barbara, an alleged mobster, someone spotted a roadblock and the meeting broke up in a panic; men reputed to be underworld bosses, many middle-aged and older, in hand-tailored suits, fled through the woods in a desperate attempt to escape.
Most were picked up by state police, bedraggled and exhausted, but carrying large amounts of cash--a suspicious total of more than $300, 000. The majority refused to answer police questions; those who did, claimed that they had just dropped by to pay their respects to their friend Barbara, who had recently been ill.
All were released after questioning. Evola's troubles were compounded when just six months after the Apalachin incident, a small-time drug pusher, Nelson Cantellops, became a star witness for the federal government. Though some claimed that he had been coached by federal agents, Cantellops convinced a federal jury that he had witnessed Evola, Vito Genovese, and others plan to take over narcotics distribution in the East Bronx.
Evola's lawyer, Maurice Edelbaum, defended his client as an innocent man, a devoted son, who had never in his fifty-two years been convicted of a crime; Edelbaum also gave proof that Evola had been involved in legitimate businesses for the last sixteen years. Nevertheless, on April 17, 1959, Evola was convicted of conspiring to violate federal narcotics laws, sentenced to ten years in prison and a fine of $20, 000, and freed on $50, 000 bail pending appeal.
Then one month later, on May 21, 1959, Evola found himself posting an additional $2, 500 bail after being indicted along with twenty-seven other men on charges of conspiring to obstruct justice by refusing to reveal the true purpose of the Apalachin conference.
On December 18, a federal jury found each of the defendants guilty. Attorney General William P. Rogers hailed the convictions as a "landmark in the Government's fight against organized crime. "
In January, Judge Irving R. Kaufman sentenced Evola, whom he characterized as "a most important member of the underworld, " to five years in prison and a $10, 000 fine.
On November 28, 1960, the United States Court of Appeals overturned the lower court's verdict on the grounds that the government admittedly did not know the purpose of the meeting and thus could not prove that the defendants were lying about it; Chief Judge J. Edward Lumbard commented that the prosecution had never produced "a shred of legal evidence that the Apalachin gathering was illegal or even improper in either purpose or fact. "
Though freed of one conspiracy charge, Evola was not so lucky in appealing the narcotics case and his conviction was sustained.
His time in prison was a lesson to some in the Mafia that dealing in narcotics should be avoided. In the mid-1960's, the aging Joseph Bonanno failed in an attempt to have his rivals killed and was forced out of power by the Mafia National Commission, the loosely organized group of local bosses who together guided national policy.
A violent battle known as the "Banana War" broke out between factions within the Bonanno organization. Around 1970, the Mafia National Commission appointed Evola as head of the Bonanno family after several other men had turned down the job or failed as effective leaders.
From the Garment District offices of the Amity Trucking Company, owned by his brother Joseph, Evola allegedly rebuilt the Bonanno family's rackets and healed factional splits by pleasing both the elder Bonanno, now living as a recluse in Tucson, Arizona, and Carlo Gambino, Bonanno's traditional enemy who had become powerful in New York City.
In 1970, the Joint Legislative Committee on Crime summoned Evola, but he refused to answer any questions, including whether or not he had obtained control of legitimate businesses by loaning them money at rates they were unable to pay. At the time, Evola allegedly had an interest in at least eight garment and trucking companies.
In 1972, after Mayor John Lindsay demanded that the mob be "run out of town, " New York City police cracked down on truck parking in the garment district, accusing Evola, Gambino, and others of controlling business by monopolizing curb space. When Evola died of cancer at his Brooklyn home, the Mafia was being forced into a period of transition, squeezed from above by vigorous law enforcement and from below by the growing wealth of Latino and black gangs who dominated the narcotics trade.
Membership
He was a member of the Joint Legislative Committee.