The Grand Avenue Social Club

This is the former Grand Avenue Social Club.

It is located at 6964 Grand Avenue in Queens, New York.

The club served as a hangout for the Bonanno mafia family during the 1980s and 1990s.

At the time, it was common to see groups of mobsters standing outside and chatting in the adjoining alley.

A Bonanno capo named Vincent Asaro (pictured above, bottom left) reportedly owned the property. Asaro was charged and later found not guilty of taking part in the infamous Lufthansa heist.

In December 2017, he was sentenced to eight years in prison for ordering his men to torch the car of a motorist who had cut him off in traffic. However, he was released on compassionate grounds in April 2020 due to his age and poor health.

During the early 1990s, the FBI put this building under surveillance as part of "the Grand Finale", which was the name given to an operation that aimed to take down the Bonanno family.

Federal agents spent months photographing senior mob figures coming and going. These included Asaro, Salvatore Vitale, James "Louie" Tartaglione, Patrick DeFilippo, and Vincent Basciano.

The surveillance team was situated in a rented apartment across the street, overlooking the alley to the left. To avoid raising any suspicions, the agents parked their cars a few blocks away and entered the building via a side door.

The operation failed to take down the hierarchy of the Bonanno family, as its members were extremely mindful about wiretaps. The mobsters used a nearby payphone instead of the phone inside the club. Although the FBI immediately bugged the payphone in question, none of their main targets made any damaging calls on it.

At the time, the authorities were far more concerned about a bloody internal war that had erupted inside the Colombo crime family. As a result, the surveillance team on Grand Avenue was stretched pretty thin.