http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/03/nyregion/03spero.html?ref=obituaries

Anthony Spero, a Name in the Bonanno Crime Family, Is Dead at 79

By BRUCE WEBER [New York Times]

Anthony Spero, long a high-ranking member of the Bonanno crime family, died
on Monday [September 29, 2008] at the Federal Medical Center, part of the
Butner Federal Correctional Complex in Butner, Norht Carolina. He was 79.

Greg Norton, a medical center spokesman, confirmed the death but would not
give the cause. He said Mr. Spero was transferred to Butner on August 28
[2008] from a federal prison in Coleman, Fliruda., where he was serving a
life sentence for racketeering, including ordering three murders. Before he
went to prison, Mr. Spero lived on Staten Island [New York].

For more than three decades, Mr. Spero served the Bonanno family, one of
five Mafia clans in New York City [New York], 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 J. Gotti of the Gambino family. Mr. 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 [New York], 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, Mr. 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 Mr. Spero and did his bidding. In 2001,
Mr. Spero was convicted of ordering three murders - including that of
Vincent Bickelman, a burglar who had made the mistake of robbing Mr. Spero's
daughter Jill; and Paul Gulino, the leader of the Bath Avenue crew who was
said to have received Mr. Spero's instructions to kill Mr. Bickelman and
subsequently hatched a plot to kill Mr. Spero.

The case against him was largely circumstantial, but Mr. Spero was undone by
the testimony of other criminals - including the killer of Mr. Gulino,
Joseph Calco - who cooperated with the district attorney in the hope of
receiving lighter punishments for their own crimes.