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Maranzano out of the picture, Luciano was the top mobster in New York City, but unlike his now deceased rival he was smart enough to realize that the old ways of having one big boss were outmoded and unworkable. There was too much money to be made in the rackets and everybody could have a cut, if only they worked together. Bonanno, who had been part of Maranzano’s inner circle, was the strongest man in his particular crime family and was elected the new boss by acclamation.
    “I had the choice of rejecting Luciano’s olive branch or of accepting it in good faith. If told to fight, the men in my Family would have fought,” Bonanno later said. “But what good would it have done to fight Luciano? He had claimed self-defense in the killing of Maranzano. Now he mainly wanted to be left alone to run his enterprises. He was not trying to impose himself on us as had Masseria. Lucky demanded nothing from us.”
    At first, Luciano wanted to carve up territory in the garment district with Bonanno, a move that the latter rejected. According to Bonanno’s son, Salvatore or “Bill,” who later wrote his own book Bound by Honor, his father and Luciano worked out a system of consensus and settlement of disputes that involved a so-called Commizioni del Pace, or Committee of Peace. This later became known as the Commission, the governing body of the mob.
    The idea was for the five Mafia families to have a representative on the Commission and eventually over time this encompassed the heads of the families. Bill Bonanno, who anointed his father with the grandiose title “Angel of Peace” because of the way he brokered the idea of a commission, said the setup kept things relatively quiet between the crime families for decades.
    “The heart of it was live and let live,” Bill Bonanno explained. “Let each Family run its own business in its own way, don’t interfere, and if any disputes arise, mediate them through the Commission. When a matter came up in one Family that might have a spillover effect for all, mediation, not warfare, was the ruling word.”
    There wasn’t total peace, even with the Commission set up, as mobsters got caught in disputes within the families and occasionally paid for it with their lives. However, beginning in 1931, there was relative peace and prosperity among the Mafia families in the United States, a period that lasted nearly three decades. It was during this period that Joseph Bonanno ran his family the way he saw fit, remaining one of the premier crime bosses of his time.
    It was also a time when Bonanno got married. In a wedding at which many of the Mafia leaders were invited and attended, Joseph Bonanno married Fay Labruzzo on November 15, 1931. The reception was at the Knights of Columbus Hall in Prospect Park, Brooklyn. Just before the ceremony there was a bit of consternation as the ring Bonanno was to give to his bride went missing. It later turned up in the pants cuff of Natale Evola, one of Bonanno’s wedding ushers. From that day forward, Evola, a garment trucker who lived in Brooklyn, was known by the moniker of “Joe Diamond.”
    Though Bonanno got married during the Depression, things were good for his businesses, both legal and illegal. Talese reports that a cash cushion, acquired during the earlier years, allowed Bonanno to buy up real estate at bargain prices. He had homes in Arizona and New York and by all accounts was a respected member of whatever community he called home. While Vito Genovese had to flee the country in 1934 to escape murder charges and Lucky Luciano was convicted in 1936 for running a prostitution business, Bonanno seemed to adroitly avoid trouble. The only rub with the law came in the late 1930s when a Brooklyn clothing factory he was a partner in was hit with a federal wage and hour violation. Bonanno was fined $50.
    Despite the troubles confronting some top mafiosi in America, the period before and after World War II in New York was one of prosperity and power