- Everyone goes running out of the house,
and you have like 75 mobsters just running into the woods,
running into the hills, trying to get out,
throwing money clips, throwing their guns.
It was just pure chaos.
It's November 14th, 1957.
"Jailhouse Rock" by Elvis Presley just came out,
so it was probably playing on the radios everywhere.
The Cold War between the United States
and Soviet Union is heating up.
Also, on this particular day,
in the small town of Appalachin, New York,
you have a meeting taking place with arguably the biggest,
baddest Mafia bosses in the country.
This is by far the greatest story
in the history of the Mafia and law enforcement,
and almost nobody knows about it.
I'm Jon Carlo, screenwriter
of the Hollywood film "Mob Town",
and this is the story of the day America met the Mafia.
Now you have to understand that in 1957,
it's very different from today.
Today we have references of the Mafia and organized crime
in movies and it's common knowledge.
But back then, the Mafia was almost never discussed.
It was truly a secretive underground organization.
Even J. Edgar Hoover, the head of the FBI,
refused to publicly acknowledge the existence of the Mafia.
But in reality, there's a war happening on the streets
of New York and Chicago.
So Lucky Luciano was, at the time, the boss of bosses.
He ran all of organized crime in New York City,
and he gets busted.
And because of that, they deport him back to Italy,
which creates a vacuum of power.
Now, Vito Genovese, being Lucky Luciano's right hand man,
decides it's his time to step up.
But, he needs to take out his rivals
from the other families in New York City.
Frank Costello's one of them.
Takes him out.
Albert Anastasia from a different family, takes him out.
And with those guys gone, Vito Genovese can now
step in and become the boss of bosses.
Now in order to solidify this claim,
he decides, against the beliefs of all of his peers
in the underworld, that he wants to hold a meeting,
a conference, with all the bosses of all the families
in the whole country.
This has never been done before
because you don't meet in broad daylight all together.
But Vito is hard set on holding this meeting.
And they decide to do it in a small little remote town
in upstate New York called Appalachin.
But on this particular day, a local state trooper
by the name of Edgar Croswell, the quintessential lawman,
he's a tall guy, broad shoulders.
He's on his way to a routine call.
One of the local motels had a case of a fraudulent check.
So him and his partner, Vincent Vasisko,
they head over to the motel, just to fill out a report.
And Edgar Croswell notices something.
He's a big car guy, he's obsessed with cars.
And he sees, parked right out front,
is a really fancy Cadillac.
And he knows the car, because the town is a very small town.
And he knows that the car belongs
to a guy by the name of Joseph Barbara.
And he goes in, and coming out of the motel
is the son of Joseph Barbara, Joe Junior.
So Edgar Croswell, he asks the woman working at the motel,
"What's this guy doing?"
And she tells him that they just booked
every single room in the motel.
And Croswell thinks, "Okay, that's odd."
Edgar Croswell asks the woman,
"Well what name was put under the rooms?"
She tells him that it was paid for by Joe the Barber,
but the name that they put on all the rooms
is Carmine Galante, which rings a bell for Croswell
because a couple years before that,
Croswell pulled over Carmine Galante
driving out of Appalachin in this same Cadillac.
And he had a fake ID on him at the time.
And so they take him in,
they try to book him for having a fake ID and speeding,
and all of a sudden, some big hotshot lawyer from New York
comes and bails him out.
Now Croswell remembered that moment.
Being, you know, stationed in the small town of Appalachin,
just a town of 200 people, they don't see much action,
or any activity, but he's been keeping track
of certain things that have been happening.
He's keeping clippings of all these Mafia headlines
that are starting to pop up.
He went out to dinner a couple nights before
and there was no steak, no pork chops.
Everything in town was bought up.
There's been an influx of expensive cars in town.
So Croswell, his head's exploding right now.
He starts piecing things together.
They finish the report, they go back to the station,
and he goes to the captain and says,
"Listen, Captain.
Something big is about to go down, I know it."
And shows him all this evidence.
But the captain, you know, he could care less, really.
The Mafia, that's, you know,
not even in the realm of reality at the time.
And so the captain says to Croswell,
"Just do your job and just forget all this Mafia crap."
They were told specifically by the captain
to leave Joe the Barber alone.
He's an upstanding citizen in the community, blah blah blah.
But Croswell, being the guy that he is,
he takes it upon himself to keep investigating.
And so him and his partner,
they drive up to the Barbara estate,
which is this beautiful house out in the outskirts of town.
And they see 40 to 50 cars,
Cadillacs and Oldsmobiles and Pontiacs.
Like the most expensive, newest cars on the market,
all parked around this house.
And right there he's kinda taken aback.
He realizes that his hunch was right.
Something big is happening.
And so he radios into the captain.
The captain's like, "What do you want me to do?
You're the only cops in town."
So they're able to call two patrolmen
who arrive at the property, they all meet up.
And they're trying to figure out
what exactly they're gonna do.
The good news is that Barbara's property,
the geography of it is, it's this one long
kind of very narrow dirt road
from the main road to the house.
So Croswell, thinking on his feet,
decides to create a roadblock.
Now, right as they're about to assemble,
he gets a call on the radio from his captain
saying that he'd been able to get in contact with the Feds
and that reinforcements are on the way.
So Croswell is over the moon, he's rejoicing, he's excited.
Finally people are listening to him,
they're acknowledging that he was right all along.
But then one car shows up with two agents
of the Alcohol and Tax Unit.
These guys are looking at this house
and they're, you know, calculating
that there's probably 60 to 70 people in the house.
And they're thinking, "What are we gonna do?
How are we gonna take these guys in?
How are we gonna arrest all these people?"
But Croswell comes up with a plan.
The two patrolmen block the road.
The Feds go back around and they flank the woods.
And Croswell decides to kinda walk down the hill
and start writing down license plate numbers.
Now what Croswell doesn't know is inside the house,
you have Vito Genovese sitting at the head of the table.
You have all the bosses of all the families
from all over the country sitting around,
and he is essentially pledging his allegiance
to the Cosa Nostra, and he is asking,
not really asking, he's more of, he's telling these guys
that he's now the boss of bosses.
Vito Genovese is the Capo dei Capi.
And he wants their blessing.
Everyone kind of agrees
that he is the right man for the job.
So they're all about to toast in favor of Vito Genovese,
when through the window they see Croswell in their driveway.
And that's when panic erupts.
"The cops are outside!
Everyone make a run for it!"
And so everyone just gets up
and they just, like, burst out of the house.
There's gangsters in three-piece suits
running through the woods and getting all muddy.
And they're tossing their money clips
and they're throwing their guns
and they're jumping in their cars
and they're just gonna make a clean getaway, but,
thanks to Croswell's quick thinking, there's a roadblock.
So now this bottleneck happens
and the cars are backed up all the way to the house.
And, plus on the other side of the property
where the Feds are, they were rounding up these goons
just kinda like coming out of the woods.
So now, there's a problem.
You got four, maybe five police officers,
and 62 gangsters, just standing there.
Now, in a small town like Appalachin,
what, their jail probably holds five, six people.
So now they're thinking, "What are we gonna do,
how are we gonna bust these guys?"
So they basically, over the course
of like six to eight hours, two by two, three at a time,
they're pulling in these guys, they're fingerprinting them,
they're booking them,
putting them in whatever space they can.
Now it becomes a very serious matter.
The reason why this is significant
and the reason why this is the most important moment
in not only law enforcement history but also the Mafia is,
at this time, J. Edgar Hoover, the head of the FBI,
he keeps saying that this is something
that's happening overseas.
But now, it's obvious that he can no longer deny
that this is even happening.
So, we can flash forward a couple days, maybe a week,
where you have 62 indictments.
Now Croswell thinks he is a hero, he, you know,
changed the world, he saved the day.
Unfortunately for Croswell,
it's not illegal to have a barbecue.
And so not a single conviction stuck.
Everyone gets released, all the cases get thrown out,
and Croswell essentially feels like it was all for nothing.
What Croswell doesn't know is,
this made every headline across the country.
Huge Mafia summit busted.
Gangsters, this, that, running through the woods.
And so now it's in the public opinion.
And J. Edgar Hoover can no longer deny
the existence of the Mafia.
So he comes out and he makes a public statement saying
that there is an organized crime syndicate in America.
And in order to combat this,
they create this organized crime task force.
And Croswell actually gets appointed to the task force.
So Richard Nixon eventually enacts
this thing called the RICO Act,
which is an anti-racketeering charge,
which we use to this day
to charge members of organized crime,
gangsters, Mafia, drug dealers.
And it's, even today,
the most powerful tool law enforcement has
to take down organized crime in America.