Anthony Spero was consigliere to mob clan

Published 5:00 am Sunday, October 5, 2008

Anthony Spero, long a high-ranking member of the Bonanno crime family, died Monday at the Federal Medical Center, part of the Butner Federal Correctional Complex in Butner, N.C. He was 79.

Greg Norton, a medical center spokesman, confirmed the death but would not give the cause. He said Spero was transferred to Butner on Aug. 28 from a federal prison in Coleman, Fla., where he was serving a life sentence for racketeering, including ordering three murders. Before he went to prison, Spero lived on Staten Island.

For more than three decades, Spero served the Bonanno family, one of five Mafia clans in New York City, in a variety of roles, rising to consigliere and taking over as acting family boss when his superiors, Philip Rastelli and Joseph Massino, were in prison. He was a reserved man often described as an old-time gangster, the antithesis of the flashy celebrity don personified by John Gotti of the Gambino family. Spero was known not for his wardrobe or his conspicuous presence in society but for his hobby, breeding racing pigeons.

For much of his life he lived in Brooklyn, operating in the Bensonhurst neighborhood, where he tended his birds on the roof of a building on Bath Avenue; he held meetings with mob associates, not only at the West End Social Club on the same street, but among the rooftop pigeon coops. Next to the club, Spero ran a livery business, the Big Apple Car Service, described by crime experts as a cover for illegal enterprises like forcing the owners of stores and restaurants to accept video gambling machines on which the Bonannos would share heartily in the profits.

The West End Social Club was a hangout for a group of young thugs known as “the Bath Avenue crew,” who admired Spero and did his bidding. In 2001, Spero was convicted of ordering three murders — including that of Vincent Bickelman, a burglar who had made the mistake of robbing Spero’s daughter Jill; and Paul Gulino, the leader of the Bath Avenue crew who was said to have received Spero’s instructions to kill Bickelman and subsequently hatched a plot to kill Spero.