In November 1957, roughly 50 of the most powerful Mafia bosses in America fled through the woods of upstate New York to escape state police. One of them was from San Jose, California, and almost nobody noticed.
It was the most embarrassing day in American mob history. And somewhere in that chaos, a man named Joseph Cerrito jumped a fence, hid in the weeds, and made his way home to California by way of New Orleans.
His name was somehow missing from nearly every newspaper that covered the disaster.
Cerrito was the rising force in the San Jose family, a small but fully legitimate branch of La Cosa Nostra that had been operating in the Santa Clara Valley since at least the late 1920s. His boss had sent him east with $650 in travel money. His boss had not come himself.
That caution told you everything about how this family survived.
This is the story of the family hiding in the orchards. The one you have never heard of, but there was such a family. It sat between San Francisco and the coast, in a valley of pruned trees and cannery smoke, in a city that in the middle of the 20th century had barely 100,000 people in it.
It had a boss, an underboss, a council, capos, soldiers, an initiation ceremony with a burning saint card and a pricked finger, and a seat at the table with the biggest names in La Cosa Nostra.
It murdered almost no one. It extorted men who laughed at it. It plotted killings that failed, sued magazines that destroyed it, and produced a caper so incompetent that one of the two men shot in the back climbed out of the trunk of his own Cadillac in downtown San Francisco and banged on the lid until strangers let him out.
The earliest years of the San Jose family are shrouded in obscurity, and historians of organized crime are honest about it. There are no ledgers. There are no wiretapped transcripts.
There is only the memory of one old gangster, decades later, sitting across from an FBI agent and trying to reconstruct who was who when he first stepped off a train in the Bay Area in 1929. His name was Anthony Lima, and he would eventually become the boss of the San Francisco family himself.
According to Lima, in 1929 the boss in San Jose was a man named Alfonso Canto. Canto ran a small market on Vine Street. He was thought to have been born in Sicily, to have passed through New York, and to have drifted west like so many others chasing the fruit trade.
His brother up in the ranchland near Modesto was a made man in the San Francisco family and, in the American way of the era, a bootlegger on the side. Canto died sometime in the 1940s. The record does not say exactly when.
In his place rose Onofrio Sciortino, a fruit buyer, an unshowy man who quietly ran the family until 1959. Sciortino was the kind of boss the modern imagination refuses to accept as a boss. He did not order slaughter. He did not seize territory in blood. He bought fruit. He counted crates.
And when the Mafia's national commission called a summit of its bosses in November 1957 at a hunting lodge in the tiny hamlet of Apalachin, New York, Sciortino did not go. He was old and perhaps cautious, and he sent a younger man in his place.
That younger man was a capo named Joseph Cerrito. Sciortino, along with four other members of the little family, chipped in $650 for his travel.
On November 10, 1957, Cerrito flew east with James Lanza, a soldier and future boss of San Francisco. Three days later, they checked into a hotel in Scranton, Pennsylvania, alongside Joseph Civello of Dallas, Frank DeSimone of Los Angeles, and Simone Scozzari, the underboss of Los Angeles. Every room was paid for by Russell Bufalino, the boss of northeastern Pennsylvania.
When the state police descended on Apalachin on November 14 and the greatest gathering of American Mafia leadership in history collapsed into 50 men running through the woods in silk suits, Cerrito was among the runners. He jumped a fence. He hid in weeds. He worked his way home to San Jose by way of New Orleans.
He made it back with his name unattached to the fiasco in almost every newspaper that mattered. That was the beginning of Joseph Cerrito's luck, and the beginning of the strangeness.
When Sciortino died of natural causes in 1959, it was Cerrito who took over. And Cerrito did not fit any of the shapes America expected of a mob boss.
He was born in Sicily in 1911 and brought to Manhattan at the age of nine. He had worked as a photographer, as a salesman, and finally as a butcher in his father's meat shop. He was distantly related to Joseph Profaci, the future boss of the Colombo family, but associates would later tell the FBI they had never known him to be involved in any illegal activity of consequence.
In 1938, his parents moved west. In 1941, Joe followed, and he opened his own butcher shop in San Jose. Right as wartime meat shortages hit the West Coast, he had connections to the Denver Meat Company. He made a fortune.
When the war ended, he rolled the money into used cars, driving back to New York personally to buy inventory. Within a few years, he had a luxury Lincoln-Mercury dealership in Los Gatos and a second lot selling Edsels.
He was, by every outward measure, a legitimate immigrant success story. That was the point.
The organizing rule of the San Jose family from the day Cerrito took over can be stated in a single sentence: in this town, the boss was supposed to look like nothing at all.
The Los Angeles family had elected Frank DeSimone in 1956 for exactly this reason. DeSimone was a licensed attorney with no criminal record. The membership believed a clean-looking boss would draw less heat and require less violence. Apalachin ruined that idea for Los Angeles. In San Jose, it did not.
Cerrito had escaped the raid. Cerrito had no rap sheet. Cerrito sold Mercurys. And so the family under him kept doing what it had always done, which was almost nothing that anyone outside the fruit belt would notice.
The structure they built was orthodox on paper and eccentric in practice. At the top was the boss. Above him, in the sense of national politics, was the commission. San Jose's link to it ran through the Northern California district head Joe Bonanno of New York.
When Bonanno fell out with the commission in the mid-1960s in the internal war that came to be called the Banana War, that channel of communication broke. For a while, a Colombo family capo named John Misuraca stepped into the same role. By 1967, the orders were coming through Stefano Magaddino, the boss of Buffalo.
Beneath Cerrito was the underboss, a man named Charles Carboni, until Carboni died in 1967, at which point the position simply lapsed. His brother-in-law, Emanuel Figlia, known as Manny, effectively took the job without ever being given the title. Every complaint, every problem, every request ran through Manny.
Beneath them all was a council, an elected group of respected older members with real say in the running of the family. When soldier Salvatore Costanza was inducted, the council's authority was explained to him plainly. No member could raise a hand against another member without its permission.
In 1963, the FBI estimated the family at 30 made men split between two capos, Manny Figlia and Angelo Marino, each running not crews in the New York sense but circles of soldiers. There was a subgroup out in Modesto under a soldier named Frank Buffa. There was a secretary within the council. There was even a gunsmith and an associate machinist who made silencers. A full meeting of the organization, associates included, might draw 75 men.
This was a real Mafia family. It had bylaws. It had ceremonies.
In 1956, inside the California Cheese Company factory in San Jose, one of those ceremonies inducted Salvatore Costanza, Pete Misuraca, and Alex Camarada. Each man was taken into a room alone. Manny Figlia and Charles Carboni delivered the words.
Costanza would later tell the FBI he did not understand most of what was said, but he remembered the word "baptize." He remembered swearing to have nothing to do with law enforcement. He remembered swearing to put the organization above his family and above his religion.
He remembered a picture of a saint being burned in his hands, and he remembered his godfather pricking his finger to draw a bead of blood. It was, he told agents, like a wedding.
Then the rules were spelled out. Report to your capo. Commit any crime you are ordered to commit. You cannot leave. Five dollars a month to the family. Ten percent of every illegal dollar up to your capo.
They were, one member said, selected because they were shrewd in many ways and stupid in others. Shrewd enough to handle a situation, stupid enough to follow orders blindly. That was the theory. In San Jose, the practice would prove otherwise.
Consider the first great problem of Joseph Cerrito's reign. It was a debt.
In 1954, a man named Harold Smith Sr., the wealthy owner of Harold's Club in Reno, had reached out to a member of the San Jose family and put a contract on his own stepmother for $100,000, a sum worth more than a million today. Smith changed his mind. He called it off.
But the San Jose family had accepted the job, and the San Jose family still wanted its money. A series of shakedown attempts followed, involving three prospective members: Alex Camarada, Pete Misuraca, and Salvatore Costanza. None of them worked. Smith would not pay.
And yet all three men were inducted anyway, because the family needed bodies more than it needed successes.
By 1962, Cerrito had lost patience. He gave the order. If Smith would not pay, Smith would die. His worry, he told his men, was that the San Jose family was becoming a laughingstock and that another crime family might swoop in and collect the money for itself.
He was right to worry. In 1965, he was called to Detroit and had to sit at a table with men from New York and from Michigan and explain what progress had been made. The answer was none.
The following year, John Misuraca of the Colombo family relocated to California to personally supervise the collection, because the three men involved in the plot were his brother, his son-in-law, and Costanza, all of whom he had personally sponsored into the life.
Misuraca was furious. He told an associate the leadership of both San Francisco and San Jose were too fat and satisfied to do anything. He decided the $100,000 no longer mattered. Smith would simply be killed to restore honor.
"When you are going to do a job like this," he said, "you don't tell anybody ahead of time. Not even God."
His men told the FBI. Two of them, at least, were talking to agents. Costanza was one. Pete Misuraca, John's own brother, was very likely the other.
Pete was a fascinating and troubling figure, a man discharged from the Army in 1942 as a psychotic, living on a disability pension, complaining constantly of poor circulation in his legs, hospitalized in 1962 in a delirious state during which he began shouting family business at nurses and patients. Cerrito, when told, quipped that Pete had poor circulation in the head.
The council convened. They tried to reach John. John, disgusted, told them to solve it themselves. Manny Figlia and his brother and Costanza went to the hospital to deal with Pete. Pete had already been discharged. A week later, he showed up on his own and apologized, blaming stress and the fear of amputation.
And astonishingly, Cerrito and the council accepted it. The matter was closed. John Misuraca wanted his brother dead for months afterward. It did not happen.
When the FBI, armed with what Costanza and Pete were telling them, sat Cerrito and Manny and John down and let them know they knew about the plan to kill Harold Smith, John Misuraca went back to New York. The murder did not happen. The money never came in. The debt simply hung in the air like weather.
And that was only the beginning of the failed murders.
In 1962, the capo Angelo Marino accepted a contract from the Sicilian Mafia to kill a man named Giuseppe Palamini, known in America as John Rapeppi, in retaliation for a killing in Italy. Palamini was hiding in plain sight at a pizza parlor in Vacaville.
Marino teamed up with a San Francisco soldier and dispatched four San Jose men to scout the target. Then Marino inexplicably went to Vacaville himself and actually spoke to Palamini in the pizza parlor. A Los Angeles soldier later concluded Marino must have tipped the FBI himself, hoping Palamini would be arrested before anyone had to kill him.
Whoever tipped them, the FBI came, and Palamini was picked up and eventually deported, and the contract dissolved.
Then in 1967, Marino gave Costanza a contract on a caterer named Joe Valencia over a $4,000 debt and unspecified personal reasons. Marino had already called Valencia's aunt and told her that if she did not pay, Valencia would be taken care of. She said she could not care less.
Costanza went through the motions. He got a gun from Camarada. He told the FBI everything. Manny Figlia had to step in and cancel the contract because the surveillance heat was too high.
Three murder plots, three failures, and through all of them, no one suspected Costanza. The leadership was worried about listening devices, not informants. Angelo Marino, of all people, suspected Pete Misuraca. A soldier named Gerald Gallo moved to Los Gatos to avoid stool pigeons but could not name one.
This was a family that could not kill and could not catch its own leak. Joseph Cerrito, through all of it, kept his distance and kept selling cars.
But in 1967, a magazine came for him, and everything he had built on invisibility began to burn.
Life magazine ran a two-part series on organized crime that year. Buried in it was a small photograph of Joseph Cerrito, identified as the boss of the San Jose family. He was barely mentioned in the text, but the identification alone shattered the entire premise of his tenure, which had been that the boss should look like nothing.
He went to the other bosses. He asked for permission to sue. Stefano Magaddino of Buffalo consulted the commission. They agreed. Cerrito was the perfect man to run a test case against Life because Cerrito had no criminal record and was perhaps the least known Mafia boss in the country. If anyone could force Life to reveal its sources, it was him.
It was a catastrophic misjudgment.
In 1968, Life responded to Cerrito's lawsuit by publishing a full-length article about him and his family, aided by information from the FBI that ridiculed both. It detailed the failed murder of Palamini. It detailed the extortion of Harold Smith. It detailed Cerrito's connections to the commission and to the Sicilian Mafia.
In Tampa, the Mafia boss Santo Trafficante Jr. read the article and concluded that the leadership of Northern California needed changing.
In San Jose itself, the magazine sold out. Pete Misuraca sent his daughter to buy a copy. The shopkeeper laughed at her. "Are you kidding?" he said. "There is hardly a copy left in San Jose. Don't you know it features an article about our very own Mafia in San Jose?"
When Pete finally got one and found himself named in connection with the Smith affair, he announced he would sue Life for $20 million.
Cerrito's wife and daughter were furious. Ford revoked his franchise. He lost the Lincoln-Mercury dealership that had been his cover and his fortune. His health began to slip.
By 1972, he was so paranoid about law enforcement that he stopped meeting with his own capos, and his capos began to grumble. By 1974, Joe Bonanno Sr. and his son Bill were planning to move to San Jose and take the family over. Jimmy Fratianno of Los Angeles, who had said as early as 1962 that the men of San Francisco and San Jose would not last two minutes if real workers moved in, was maneuvering to seize Northern California for himself.
On February 26, 1975, the FBI's San Francisco office received an anonymous call. "I am calling from LA. Figlia and Lanza are going to be hit. The hit will be in San Francisco and San Jose. That's it, man. You're not tracing this call."
The FBI took the threat seriously and warned Manny Figlia the next day. Lanza took eight more days to reach. Both men concluded, correctly or not, that Fratianno was behind it, trying to scare them into surrendering Northern California. Fratianno denied it. The evidence never closed.
By 1975, the membership wanted an election. Cerrito had been stalling meetings for years by invoking surveillance. He confided to Lanza that if any election were held, Manny Figlia would replace him, and rather than face the humiliation, he intended to resign.
There is no evidence he ever did. He died of natural causes in 1978, and no one is quite sure who, if anyone, replaced him.
Angelo Marino has been named in some reports as the successor, but Marino by that year was tangled in the case that would finish the San Jose family as a serious enterprise.
It began in 1977, when a 24-year-old named Peter Catelli applied for a job at the California Cheese Company, which Angelo's father had founded and Angelo now ran. He was rejected. He decided, in the reasoning of a 24-year-old with gambling debts, to extort Angelo Marino, a Mafia capo, for $100,000.
Peter's father, Orlando, was summoned to the factory to talk. He apologized. His son kept threatening on the phone. Eventually, Orlando convinced Peter to come in for a sitdown. Peter was searched, questioned, and beaten.
Then Orlando was walked into an adjoining room where a plan had been devised to fire a shot into a box of cheese and let Peter think his father had been executed, so that he would be frightened into silence.
Accounts differ on what happened next. Either Peter, hearing the shot, lunged for the gun and was shot dead for real by Angelo, or Angelo's son Salvatore Jr., who had not been told of the fake execution, believed his father had killed Orlando and shot Peter to avenge him.
Either way, Orlando, alive, rushed into the room and fell over his dead son's body, and Salvatore Jr., in a panic, shot him once in the back of the head.
Both bodies were packed into the trunk of Orlando's Cadillac. An unidentified driver known only as Andy was told to dump the car at Oakland Airport. Andy got lost. He abandoned the Cadillac in the middle of San Francisco, and Orlando Catelli, who was not actually dead, began banging on the inside of the trunk until strangers heard him and pried it open.
The case dragged through the courts for 14 years. Angelo Marino died in 1983 during the second trial. His son served nine years. A soldier served three. As one historian put it, the San Jose family had finally done some work, and true to form, they had botched it.
By 1987, Manny Figlia was listed as the family's senior member, and the boss position was recorded as vacant. Figlia lived until 2009 and died at 91, long retired.
A 1992 FBI report described the San Jose family as continuing to operate loosely with no one acting as its head, committing bank fraud and loansharking, and investing quietly in legitimate businesses. It could not even clearly tell where the Cerrito family ended and where the Bonanno faction moving into the same valley began.
Look again at how it began. A fruit buyer named Sciortino. A car salesman named Cerrito who jumped a fence at Apalachin and slipped home through New Orleans. A ceremony inside a cheese factory where a soldier compared his own initiation to a wedding.
Every other American Mafia family understood itself through violence. San Jose understood itself through camouflage. That was its organizing rule, and in the end, its undoing.
The invisibility that carried Cerrito through Apalachin was the same invisibility that broke him when Life magazine put his photograph in print.
The membership was drawn from men who were shrewd in some ways and stupid in others. And the family's history is a long ledger of contracts accepted and never fulfilled, debts owed and never collected, murders planned and leaked before the car keys were in the ignition.
Their most famous crime ended with one of their two victims banging on the lid of a trunk in downtown San Francisco.
You have walked past the buildings. You have driven the streets. You have almost certainly eaten cheese from a factory their capo owned. And you have almost certainly never heard their names.
That is the strangest thing of all about the Mafia in San Jose. Not that it was violent, not that it was rich, but that it managed for nearly half a century to be a real American crime family while looking to almost everyone who ever met it like nothing at all.