August 2022.
The FBI is kicking down doors, slamming men to the ground in front of screaming wives
and children.
On paper, these guys have legitimate businesses: a coffee bar, a soccer club, and “Sal the
Shoemaker” well, he repairs shoes.
But what they’re really good at is violence, making people offers they can’t refuse,
just as a message on one of the men’s phones revealed:
“Tell him I’m going to put him under the BLEEPING bridge.”
And you thought that kind of thing didn’t happen anymore…
It does.
Today you’ll see how one simple law destroyed the mafia.
As some of you might know, in the 19th century, Sicilian men whose families had lived as peasants
for many years decided it was time to get equal with the rich landowners.
These men formed clans whose main enterprise was demanding protection money from the landowners,
people often working in the lucrative citrus business.
If the cash wasn’t forthcoming, that usually meant the appearance of knives or shotguns.
A simple business plan but very, very effective.
It’s called extortion.
You create a threat, which is you, and then you tell people they have to pay you to protect
them from the threat.
Genius!
These Mafiosi guys were a mystery to most people.
Behind closed doors, they swore to secrecy and to act like men of honor.
Never, ever, was their enterprise to be spoken of.
Yep, like Fight Club, with guns.
They paid off cops and corrupt politicians and were soon a force to be reckoned with.
But these Sicilians wanted to branch out, and what better place than the United States
of America?
The US had been going through a rapid change in terms of industrialization.
It was becoming the powerhouse it is today, and where there’s plenty of money, there’s
always plenty of opportunities to steal it.
During the period from about 1880 to 1920, the US opened its doors to Europeans.
In the 1890s alone, about 600,000 Italians made the trip to America.
About four million of them had migrated to the US by 1920.
Most of them came to make an honest living, but for others, the US was a pot of gold that
was ripe for exploitation.
These men of honor arrived in droves to New York, New Orleans, and Chicago with the explicit
intention of milking America.
They weren’t yet the very organized crime group we now call the Italian-American mafia,
but it wouldn’t be long until they made crime more formal, until they agreed there
should be certain rules to the game.
Looking at American newspapers in the early 20th century, you can find many articles talking
about a new crime wave.
Some stories mention the Black Hand gangs, noting that Sicilian immigrants were now extorting
people, just as they’d done back home.
In 1909, the New York Times reported about some of these dastardly Sicilians, assassins,
according to the Times, who’d shot down Lieut.
Joseph Petrosino, who before his demise had been head of the Italian Squad for the New
York police.
He was really the first-ever mafia cop in America.
He knew all about the Sicilian gangs and their extortion rackets, so, being incorruptible,
he had to go.
Negative stories about cold-blooded Italian immigrants became quite common, causing a
whole lot of discrimination, sometimes violent discrimination, against Italians in the US.
This was how the mafia got going and given that so many immigrants lived in squalor,
it wasn’t hard finding new recruits.
New York became a crime hub for the new Italians, although the gangs also spread out to other
cities.
They extorted other immigrants for protection money, just as they’d done in Italy, embracing
business plan 1.
They also expanded into the heroin business.
Just as the Federal Bureau of Narcotics chief Harry Anslinger was warning about this grave
new threat to good white folks (he was extremely racist), his men were being paid off by the
gangs.
Business plan part 2: Pay off your enemies, the police.
If they don’t abide, shoot them.
This is also really effective at the fundamental business level.
The mafia was now more than just a bunch of former peasants turned petty extorters; it
was a mega-dollar drug importation business, and it was about to get even bigger.
When the US made the immeasurable mistake of banning alcohol in 1920 under the Prohibition
laws, the gangsters really got going.
Business plan part 3: Hope stuff gets banned that everyone wants and then sell it to them
at high rates because it’s illegal.
Use in conjunction with business plan 2.
They expanded further, spreading like a deadly virus, using “Tommy” guns to mow down
anyone in their way and paying officials off to ensure they didn’t end up behind bars.
In the mid-1920s, it’s estimated that 1,300 gangs plagued the city of Chicago alone.
The FBI says at that time, the US saw about 12,000 murders a year, many of them mobster-related.
A cancer had metastasized in America, and law enforcement was not equipped to stop its
spread.
People like Al Capone, who’d grown up on the tough streets of New York City watching
the first generation of Italian gangsters, became incredibly rich under Prohibition.
As a teenager, Capone had been part of the Five Points Gang in New York, as had Charles
“Lucky” Luciano, the man who made organized crime more organized, forming a kind of corporation
after seeing various crime groups killing each other.
Luciano created the Commission, which was supposed to oversee matters pertaining to
business and violence when it involved different alliances.
Now that cancer was in the bones, the heart, and the brain.
It was in all the major organs of American society after only a couple of decades of
simple men following simple business plans.
In New York, there were the Five Families: Bonanno, Colombo, Gambino, Genovese, and Lucchese,
and there were also the Chicago Outfit and the Buffalo crime family.
As you’ll see soon, there still are five main families, but they’re nothing today
like they were back in the 1930s.
Under the rules of the Commission, the families were supposed to toe the line, act like men
of honor should, and help each other when it came to taking out enemies or paying politicians.
Even with an organizing body, there were regular turf wars, when blood painted the streets
of the US’s cities, which was never good for business in the long run as it compelled
the cops, even if as crooked as a barrel of fish hooks, to take action.
It wasn’t just the Italian mafia; the Jewish Mafia and the Irish mobs all wanted a bigger
piece of that massive American pie.
They were everywhere, involved in extortion, construction, gambling, and lots of murder.
In the 30s, the Italian and Jewish mobs even formed a contract killing company, brazenly
naming it Murder Inc.
For anywhere from $1,000 to $5,000 (about $20,000 to $100,000 today), they’d take
someone out, more money for high-profile folks, such as officials.
Albert “The Mad Hatter” Anastasia, who ran Murder Inc. for a time, was given the
title “Lord High Executioner.”
What does that tell you about their confidence, giving each other funny titles like that?
These men thought they could do what they wanted.
They believed they were untouchable.
Even when the cops did arrest a mobster, witnesses would either sometimes go missing or suddenly
decide it was not in their best interests to testify.
The authorities were fighting a losing battle, and no matter how many special units they
dedicated to organized crime, they barely ever made a dent in it.
Through the 40s, 50s, and 60s, the mafia seeped like saltwater into the steel foundations
of the US.
They corroded and corrupted the structures there to protect people from people like them,
running casinos in Las Vegas and infiltrating the unions that were supposed to be the backbone
of the American worker.
They were so big that law enforcement struggled to keep up and so powerful that they had significant
political clout.
Even if the police did see positive results in their investigations and witnesses were
willing to testify, connecting the bosses to those crimes was close to impossible.
The authorities needed a much bigger net they could cast over this powerful organization.
They needed a giant web that mobsters couldn’t easily wriggle out of.
This is when the government became a spider, spinning the biggest web it had ever spun
in the history of US law enforcement in 1970.
They introduced the RICO Act, aka, the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act.
If it sounds vague, that was the point; it was meant to be vague.
What it meant is that an underling, a mere street guy, could be arrested, but then the
government could arrest the boss or bosses of a family by proving they were connected
to this guy.
They could say they were all part of one “criminal enterprise” even if the boss’s footprints
had been nowhere near any crime.
Now all the authorities had to do was prove the boss had gained an income from this enterprise
or that he’d somehow been part of its operation.
The law stated that he might only have to be found guilty of “showing interest”
in the running of a criminal enterprise, which, let’s face it, is a pretty big web.
Catching someone red-handed didn’t come into it anymore, not if the cops could prove
there had been a conspiracy among men to make money through illicit means.
Dominos were about to fall, but the authorities needed time to work their cases.
To charge someone under the RICO Act, they had to connect them to racketeering, and 35
crimes could be linked with this.
Some of them were bribery, murder, gambling, drug dealing/trafficking, and, importantly,
mail and wire fraud, which further expanded the net.
Just using the phone to communicate about crimes in the vaguest way could get a man
arrested, which is why the mafia became so damn distrustful of phones.
They were so often bugged!
Now the old business plans didn’t work so well.
They had to create a new one: Don’t talk business on the phone.
To charge someone under the RICO Act, investigators had to prove two of these 35 crimes had been
committed within a span of 10 years, and then they could accuse the person of being part
of a criminal enterprise.
In 1979, it’s how they would have got Carmine Galante.
He was a high-ranking member of the Bonanno crime family, but before the cops could seal
his fate with RICO, he was shot down in the street in Brooklyn, a cigar still held between
his dead lips as he slumped down.
His nickname was “The Cigar” due to his fondness for those big fat Cubans.
His executioners might well have stuck the cigar in his mouth, since a less formal business
strategy of the mafia was always keep a sense of humor and, whenever it was warranted, symbolize
the death.
After all, greedy Galante had gotten too big for his boots.
For that, he got a cigar.
The Genovese crime family boss Frank Tieri with some other bosses, had decided Galante
was trying to take over the narcotics business, and that was that, it was time for him to
go.
Galante was eating with two other mobsters and his Sicilian bodyguards when three men
in ski masks armed with handguns and shotguns filled the three men’s bodies with bullets.
As for Tieri, it seems his fate was also sealed, but not with bullets.
This guy was already an old-timer in 1980.
He’d made the trip to the US from Naples with his family back in 1911, and by the time
the 70s arrived, he’d worked his way up to acting boss of the Genovese family.
If you’ve ever heard the high-earning former mafia capo, Michael Franzese, talk about his
old life; you’ll know that there are two kinds of mobsters: the thinkers/earners and
the outright violent hoodlums.
Tieri was the former, a great earner for families and a man who preferred diplomacy to violence.
This wily mobster survived so long because of his intelligence, but when the RICO Act
came into effect, brains didn’t matter so much.
In 1980, the 76-year-old Tieri became the first mobster to be convicted under the RICO
Act, showing up to his day in court in a wheelchair while huffing on an oxygen tank.
He was told he was “the boss of a family of La Cosa Nostra,” and as he listened to
Judge Thomas P. Griesa in a New York City court, he shook his head as the murders he
was supposedly involved in were listed.
When the judge asked him if he had anything to say about that, he replied, “I'm a sick
man, very sick.”
He wasn’t lying.
He was only two months into his 10-year prison sentence when he gave up the ghost, apparently
from natural causes.
Was he really involved in those murders the judge had mentioned?
Maybe, maybe not.
It didn’t matter.
They had enough evidence to get him on racketeering.
The New York Times wrote at the time that two of the predicate crimes Tieri had committed
were “threats to a restaurant owner and fraud at the Westchester Premier Theater.”
The alleged murders didn’t matter.
Being part of a criminal enterprise that murdered people did.
As Franzese has said on his YouTube channel, once RICO came into effect, they could connect
mafia guys to anything.
Many guys went down for crimes they had no part in, including Franzese’s own father,
who he says had no part whatsoever in a bank robbery he’d been accused of orchestrating.
Now everyone was paranoid.
The bosses felt like prey in a system they’d navigated with success for many years.
The trusty business plans they’d relied on for decades no longer worked, or not as
well.
In 1985, Paul Castellano, the boss of the Gambino crime family, another guy that had
arrived in the US during that mass immigration period, got his day in court.
Again, because of the RICO Act.
This was another mobster that preferred using his intelligence over his fists and guns,
and oh boy, did he have his fingers in many pies – legitimate and criminal.
He was head of the Gambino family when they got him on racketeering charges.
He paid $3 million bail and was shot down outside a Manhattan steak house about ten
months later.
The Commission never sanctioned the hit, but it seems John Gotti, also of the Gambino family,
had gone behind the Commission’s back to do it.
That was a VERY risky thing to do, but Gotti knew he needed Castellano out of the way if
he was to carry on his lucrative drugs business that Castellano had unequivocally banned.
The two never got along, anyway, and Gotti thought Castellano was a weak boss.
Castellano would have gotten life in prison, even so, Gotti had taken a major risk whacking
a boss without approval.
Gotti had some balls on him, but then he did get the nickname “Teflon Don.”
This wasn’t so much because he got away with killing another boss, but that every
time the cops thought they had him, he somehow managed to avoid prison.
Gotti enjoyed acting like the movie star gangster, but make no mistake, behind that dapper appeal,
he was cunning and ruthless and hard to pin down even with RICO.
As Gotti enjoyed his freedom and wealth, the dominoes fell one by one.
Genovese boss Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno, said to be the most powerful boss of them
all, was sentenced to 100 years in 1986.
In the same trial, called the Mafia Commission Trial, Anthony “Tony Ducks” Corallo, boss
of the Lucchese crime family, was also hit with 100 years.
Bonanno crime family boss, Philip "Rusty" Rastelli, was also charged, but since he’d
been kicked off the Commission after Donnie Brasco had infiltrated his outfit, he was
convicted of racketeering charges, but not as part of the same trial.
They all came tumbling down, not just the bosses but underbosses, too, and at least
one capo and one consigliere.
All thanks to RICO.
It was as if someone had spent close to eight decades weaving a tapestry of criminality,
and almost overnight, its very fabric was being ripped to shreds.
Nicodemo Scarfo – the boss of the Philadelphia crime family, was convicted on RICO charges
in 1988.
Salvatore “Sammy the Bull” Gravano, another guy with a YouTube channel now, who was once
a ruthless killer and underboss of the Gambino family, was convicted of racketeering in 1991.
These days he’s more likely to tell you that if you like his content, “please share
and subscribe”, rather than make you an offer you can’t refuse.
Gravano turned state's witness, which is partly how the most powerful boss at the time, Gotti,
was hit with a whole bunch of charges and sentenced to life.
RICO is still used today, with its web now expanded to biker gangs, street gangs, or
when organized crime from abroad enters America, such as the Russian Mafia, the Japanese Yakuza,
the Chinese Triads, or the many gangs south and far south of the American border.
Not long ago, the Justice Department proudly announced it had arrested 27 guys on RICO
charges, all linked to the Russian Crime Syndicate.
And as we told you at the start, nine guys belonging to the Italian-American mafia were
just arrested under RICO charges.
They all worked together but belonged to two families, Genovese and Bonanno.
People old enough read the headlines in newspapers and thought, “Ah, it’s just like the old
days.”
They were all captains and soldiers working in New York and Florida, who, according to
the Department of Justice, were polluting “communities with illegal gambling, extortion,
and violence while using our financial system in service to their criminal schemes.”
So, the next time you get your shoes repaired, or grab a coffee at a quiet place famed for
its Italian pastries and gelato, or perhaps join a soccer team with an Italian name, open
your eyes because what you see in front of you might just be something else.
Just make sure you don’t get in debt there, ‘cos there’s a bridge somewhere in America
just right for your final resting place.
And whatever you do, don’t say the word RICO.
They hate that.
Now you need to see what’s happening these days in “What Does the Mafia Even Do Anymore?”
Or, have a look at “New York Mafia Families Today.”