FBI history: "Pizza Connection"

The FBI’s history page says that on April 8, 1984 Gaetano Badalamenti and a second man “were quickly taken into custody” in Madrid by Spanish authorities “acting on information from the FBI,” and that the next day agents in six Bureau offices arrested nearly 30 people in the United States. It says that “From January 1975 until April 1984, an estimated $1.6 billion worth of heroin was shipped to this country in the plot,” and that the trial was “the longest criminal jury trial in U.S. history,” ending with a verdict on March 2, 1987. It explains the name: “The case, dubbed "The Pizza Connection" by the news media because of the frequent use of pizza parlors as fronts for drug sales, was enormously complex and laborious.”

It calls the case “The first major drug bust after the Bureau was given concurrent jurisdiction with the DEA over narcotics violations in 1982,” and says it used the RICO statute. The 1982 House hearing on that change in jurisdiction is filed here.

This is the FBI’s retelling, and it differs from the court record. It gives the trial start as October 24, 1985 with “22 total defendants”; the Second Circuit’s Casamento opinion gives September 30, 1985 and an indictment of thirty-five. The page also describes people’s places in Mafia families in its own words; where the opinion states the same matters only as the government’s contentions, this archive follows the opinion and copies no role from this page.