Angelo Bruno (1911 - March 21, 1980) was a member of the US Mafia who ran the Mafia's faction in Philadelphia.
He was born in Sicily and emigrated to the USA in his teens, settling in Philadelphia. He was friends with New York City boss Carlo Gambino. He became the boss of the Philly Mob, as the city's Mafia faction in that city was known, in 1959.
Bruno was known as The Gentle Don because he rarely resorted to violence and his leadership was regarded as successful in that his crime family was not plagued by the wars that others were. Bruno himself avoided lengthy prison terms, despite numerous arrests, his longest term of imprisonment being two-years for refusing to testify to a Grand Jury.
To avoid getting too much attention from the FBI, Bruno did not allow his Mafia Family to deal in narcotics and instead preferred to concentrate on loansharking and skimming the profits at the casinos in Atlantic City.
Before long, however, the younger mobsters soon became eager to take over the Philly Mob by launching a mutiny against their aging boss. On March 12, 1980, sixty-nine-year-old Angelo Bruno was blasted in the face with a shotgun as he sat in his car. He died instantly. It is believed the killing was ordered by Anthony Caponigro , one of Bruno's captains.
Caponigro was himself murdered just a few weeks later and eventually Nicodemo Scarfo, a vicious, upcoming mobster, took over Bruno's crime organization. However, with the death of The Gentle Don, the Philly Mob soon began to fall apart thanks to informants, infighting and successful prosecutions of high-profile mobsters like Scarfo.
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