On this day in 1918 Philip Rastelli was born. He was a former boss of the Bonanno Crime Family, having become boss in the fall of 1973. Despite becoming boss he only spent two years as a free man, as in 1975 he was indicted for extortion and spent the rest of his life behind bars.

Born on this day in 1918, Philip "Rusty" Rastelli would go on to become one of the most embattled bosses in the long and turbulent history of the Bonanno Crime Family, spending the majority of his leadership years fighting legal battles from behind prison walls rather than ruling the streets of New York with any real authority.

Rastelli grew up in Brooklyn during the era when the foundations of organised crime in America were being cemented by figures such as Lucky Luciano, whose restructuring of the Italian-American underworld in the early 1930s gave birth to the Commission and the Five Families framework that would shape mob governance for decades. The Bonanno family, one of those original five, became Rastelli's criminal home, and he proved himself a capable and ruthless earner through loan sharking, labour racketeering, and other illicit enterprises that made him a respected figure within the organisation.

His ascent to the top came in the autumn of 1973 when he assumed the role of boss of the Bonanno family, taking the reins of an outfit that had never quite recovered its prestige following the chaos surrounding the family's founder, Joseph Bonanno, and his various conflicts with the Commission throughout the 1960s. Rastelli's tenure was almost immediately undermined by his own legal troubles. In 1975, just two years into his leadership, he was indicted on extortion charges and subsequently imprisoned, leaving the family in a state of perpetual instability.

What followed was an extraordinary, if deeply dysfunctional, period in Bonanno history. Rastelli attempted to manage affairs from prison, a difficult proposition under any circumstances, but made all the more complicated by internal power struggles and the infamous infiltration of the family by FBI undercover agent Joseph Pistone, better known by his alias Donnie Brasco. The Pistone operation, which ran from 1976 to 1981, devastated the Bonanno family and embarrassed the broader New York mob world. Rastelli was eventually released briefly but found himself back behind bars following further convictions related to labour racketeering in the garment industry and involvement with the Teamsters union. He died in July 1991 while still serving his sentence, never having truly enjoyed the fruits of his position as boss.

Rastelli's life stands as a cautionary tale about power without freedom, and his legacy is one of a family pushed to the margins of organised crime's inner circle, a status the Bonannos struggled to shake for years after his death.