Anthony Spero; was consigliere to Bonanno clan; 79

NEW YORK - Anthony Spero, long a high-ranking member of the Bonanno crime family, died last Monday at the Federal Medical Center, part of the Butner Federal Correctional Complex in Butner, N.C. 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 Aug. 28 from a federal prison in Coleman, Fla., where he was serving a life sentence for racketeering, including ordering three murders.

Before he went to prison, Mr. Spero lived on Staten Island.

For more than three decades, Mr. Spero served the Bonanno family, one of five Mafia clans in New York City, 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, 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.

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 Bickelman and subsequently hatched a plot to kill Mr. Spero.

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

Besides his daughter Jill, Mr. Spero leaves another daughter, Diana Clemente, and a brother.