We expect the architects of the American underworld to die in a blaze of gunfire, but Joseph Bonanno passed peacefully at 97 in suburban Arizona, quoting Greek philosophers in his memoir. The man the press called Joe Bananas ruled one of New York's most formidable crime families for three decades and outlived nearly all his peers.

Born into a Sicilian crime family, Bonanno stowed away to America, rose to become one of the youngest bosses in history at 26, and helped build the Commission that governed the mafia. His paranoid 1963 plot against fellow bosses triggered the Banana War, and his tell-all book A Man of Honor may have damaged the mafia's mystique more than any prosecutor.

• His Sicilian roots and the self-mythologizing that reframed his flight to America
• Surviving the Castellammarese War by aligning with the young T ...