Mob FilesPublic-domain archive of American organized crime

Record

Hearing

1988-04-22

National Criminal Justice Reference Service, scan of S. Hrg. 100-906 (NCJ 125163)

Testimony of FBI supervisor James Kossler on the GENUS project, 1988 (S. Hrg. 100-906, pp. 190-191)

James Kossler of the FBI's New York division tells the Senate subcommittee that in 1981 the office chose to attack "the hierarchy and the infrastructure of the Bonanno LCN family." "This project was called the Genus Project."

Date
1988-04-22
Kind
hearing
Source
National Criminal Justice Reference Service, scan of S. Hrg. 100-906 (NCJ 125163)
Retrieved
2026-10-12
Docket
S. Hrg. 100-906
Rights
A work of the United States Congress, printed by the Government Printing Office. Public domain in the United States. 17 U.S.C. § 105. The text was read in the NCJRS scan.

Printed pages 190 and 191 (NCJRS PDF pages 198 and 199) of S. Hrg. 100-906, “Organized Crime: 25 Years After Valachi.” The witness is James Kossler, a supervisory special agent in the FBI’s New York division. The volume is filed as the hearing record; this record covers his account of the Bonanno investigation.

Kossler said: “As Mr. Sheer mentioned, in 1981 we began a concerted effort to attack the LCN and its power base. We had very few resources at that time and because of various analyses that was done of the information at our disposal, we chose to use those resources to attack the hierarchy and the infrastructure of the Bonanno LCN family.” “This project was called the Genus Project, and what we did was through a detailed planning process we deployed our resources almost totally against the Bonanno family.”

“As a result of that, one of the areas of interest was the Sicilian faction of the Bonanno family which we called Genus Cattails. Genus, of course, is Latin for family. Cattails was the code name that represented the Catalano faction of the Bonanno family. We have all come to know that investigation as the Pizza Case.” He added that “Mr. Pistone I am sure will talk to you later on about it,” and that the office then turned “the similar undercover operation we used in the Bonanno family” toward the Colombo family.

This is FBI testimony about the Bureau’s own program. It matches the June 1981 GENUS teletype in the Vault.

itemFBI Vault, Operation Donnie Brasco, Part 01, viewer pp. 148-154 (June 1981): the GENUS casesA two-section New York teletype of June 1981: "The GENUS code name encompasses several major cases targeted against various factions of the Bonanno LCN family." It lists the undercover operation, the Catalano investigation and the file opened on the May 1981 murders.itemOrganized Crime: 25 Years After Valachi (S. Hrg. 100-906, 1988)Hearings of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, April 1988, in which FBI officials compared the 1963 Valachi charts with the Bureau's 1987 charts of the families. FBI testimony about its own intelligence, not court findings.itemJoseph D. Pistone, answers to the subcommittee, April 22, 1988 (S. Hrg. 100-906, pp. 207-217)Pistone's answers to Senators Nunn and Roth after his opening statement, testifying behind a screen. He describes the 1979-1981 struggle "within the Bonanno family," the contract he was given to find Bruno Indelicato, and the end of the operation, "I think it was July 27."