As he’s sitting on his luxury yacht smoking the finest cigars known to man, his children
are riding the horses he’s just bought them.
At precisely the same time, in his West Avenue apartment in Manhattan, his wife is stacking
shoeboxes from floor to ceiling that are stuffed with cash.
The man we’re talking about was mob boss, Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno, one of many
mobsters who made many millions from a life of crime.
Like with most mobsters, though, things turned very dark for him in the end.
We’ll come back to Salerno later, but first let’s look at some people who also earned
a ton of cash from criminal enterprises.
Michael Franzese It’s hard to know just how much mob bosses
earned or had stashed away for the simple fact that they didn’t exactly do their tax
returns.
Also, the authorities and the media have from time-to-time exaggerated how much cash gangsters
have made from crime.
We know this because some of them have talked about this exaggerating.
One of those folks is Michael Franzese, who since retiring from a life of crime has talked
on his podcast and other people’s podcasts about how things in the American mafia really
went down.
Franzese was certainly good at making money, but while many other mob guys throughout history
might have made a bit more, not many of them have been so open about their life of crime.
So, Franzese is a good guy to start this list with.
We also like the fact that in a video he once gave the Infographics Show a complement for
a story we we did on him.
Shout out to Michael.
Thank you!
In that video he said, “I never thought they’d be telling my life story, in an animated
version.”
He also said there were some inconsistencies with the facts, but he was mostly complementary
in regard to the research we did.
We said he made a staggering $8 million a week, but he corrected us and said that was
the gross, not what his outfit pocketed.
He explained that a week’s take could have been as much as $12 million, but, “I probably
was putting a million dollars a week in my pocket at that point in time which was pretty
good money.”
No kidding, Michael.
He said he didn’t have a personal plane and helicopter, but he and his partner bought
those things together.
Talking about the helicopter, he said, “We used it for business and just to get around
town.”
So, while the money he earned might not be as much as some media articles have stated,
there’s no doubt that Mr. Franzese was one of the wealthiest modern mob guys.
“I knew how to use the life,” he said, relating to how to make the most money and
not get caught.
That made him a “significant amount of money”, but how much exactly, he didn't say.
We’re going to come back to him later, only because in terms of the facts, he rights a
lot of wrongs.
One thing you’ll often hear Franzses saying is, crime doesn’t pay in the end.
That’s usually true, but it often pays well for a while.
This next guy did seem to live with obscene wealth and not get too punished for it.
Anthony Joseph Accardo
Tony Accardo went from being a street criminal in his teens to become one of the most powerful
mob bosses in mafia history.
He was good at crime, and he stayed good at it for many decades.
He was also ruthless, getting the nickname “Joe Batters” after he joined the Chicago
Outfit for the reason he beat three guys to death with a baseball bat.
Apparently, the boss, Al Capone, said, “Boy, this kid's a real Joe Batters.”
After Accardo took control of the Chicago Outfit he made a ton of money from such enterprises
as drug smuggling, slot machines, and the odd bit of counterfeiting.
It’s said he changed the business model of the outfit which led to the “Golden Era”
under his command.
A fellow gangster once said of him, “Accardo had more brains for breakfast than Capone
had in a lifetime.”
That’s why back in 1986, when Fortune magazine put together a list of the 50 most powerful
mob bosses, Accardo was second on the list.
Number one we’ll talk about soon.
For a while, Accardo lived a life of luxury, but once there was too much heat on him, he
decided to tone it down a bit.
Still, with his money, he bought stores, newspapers, restaurants, travel agencies, trucking companies,
paper factories, commercial office buildings, farms, hotels and cars, and all kinds of other
things, with the cops believing he had hidden millions.
How many millions we’ll never know, but most mafia pundits put this man as one of
the most successful mafia bosses of all time.
More so because unlike most other mob guys, he managed to stay out of prison.
He died aged 86 a free man.
Ok, so crime might have paid for this guy, but what about his former boss, Mr. Capone?
Al Capone
Public Enemy No. 1, Al Capone, aka, Scarface, doesn’t need much of an introduction.
You could say he’s the face of American mobsterism, but his run at the top didn’t
last long.
He was imprisoned when he was just 33 and he died from neurosyphilis in his late forties.
He can’t be compared to Accardo in terms of business acumen and knowing how to take
your money out of crime and into legitimate business, which is the way to go if you really
want to be a success.
Still, in Capone’s short time as America’s biggest gangster, he made a ton of cash.
In the 1920s when he was at the top of his game he was bringing in insane amounts of
money from bootlegging.
As you all know, when the prohibition gets tough, the gangsters get going.
Some sources say he was making $60 million a year in his prime.
If we use a currency inflation calculator, that would mean that during the height of
prohibition in the mid-1920s, Capone was making around one billion dollars a year.
Other sources say at one point his net worth was over $100 million, which would have made
him over a billionaire.
He didn’t hide his wealth, in spite of the risks of not doing so.
In 1928, he bought himself a luxury mansion on Palm Island in Florida.
He paid $40,000 for it, which is $646,000 in today’s money.
Still, in 2021, there were news reports saying it had just sold for $15.5 million.
As you probably know, he was convicted of tax evasion, and he served his time.
He died a very sick man in that luxury house aged just 48.
But what happened to all his cash?
The book “Uncle Al Capone: The Untold Story from Inside His Family” explains where some
of it might have gone.
That book says he once had a chat with his great-niece, Deirdre Marie.
He told her, “I put it in a bunch of different banks and had the safety deposit box keys
and the names I used in a strong box.
I buried the box, but when I went to dig it up after I got out of prison, I couldn’t
find it.
Then I thought I had buried it in another place but when I looked, it wasn’t there
either.”
We have to remember, the syphilis by this point was affecting his mental health.
Still today, the media talks about the mystery of Capone’s missing millions.
In an interview with Vanity Fair not long ago, that niece of his said, “There is a
lot of money missing.”
So, we can’t say exactly just how rich this man was.
Maybe there wasn’t as much money as people thought there was.
As we said, things can get exaggerated when it comes to the wealth of gangsters, which
might be the case for this next man.
Meyer Lansky
Sometimes called the “mob’s accountant”, if there was a gangster that knew how to handle
money, it was Mr. Lansky.
He was actually a part of the Jewish mob, but his ties were so close to the Italian-American
mob that we can still add him to this list.
Lansky made most of his cash from gambling, something in which he was an expert.
He shouldn’t be confused with another Jewish mobster who made tons of money from gambling,
Arnold Rothstein.
Rothstein, nicknamed “The Brain”, also amassed great wealth, possibly as much as
$150 million in today’s money.
Still, it’s said Lansky earned more than that.
He also lived a lot longer than Rothstein, who was shot and killed when he was just 46.
He’d apparently got himself into debt over a card game, a debt that in today’s money
was something like $4.8 million.
After he died, other gangsters took over many of his illegal enterprises and one of them
was Mr. Lansky.
Lansky went on to earn a lot of money, which he managed to hide from the authorities by
putting it in Swiss banks and offshore shell companies.
The FBI never managed to get much of it, although Lansky always said he made his money legitimately.
When he died in Florida in 1980 at 80 years old, the FBI said he had close to $300 million
in earnings.
Today that would be closer to $700 million.
Ok, so that would make him one of the richest mobsters ever.
The trouble is, it seems he didn’t have anything close to that.
One of his granddaughters came forward after his death and said he’d only left behind
$57,000, which today would only be about $130,000.
His biographer later said that near to the end of his life he barely had enough cash
to pay for certain bills, never mind have a fortune.
That same biographer said there was no evidence “to sustain the notion of Lansky as king
of all evil, the brains, the secret mover, the inspirer and controller of American organized
crime.”
It was said, though, that even though he didn’t have cash in the bank or even have expensive
properties, he did have money in other people’s names.
Still, it is very likely the FBI was wrong about his mass wealth.
Ok, so what about one of his partners, the man called the “father of modern organized
crime” in the USA.
Charles “Lucky” Luciano
Back in 1925, this man was said to be making in the region of $12 million a year from bootlegging
and illegal gambling, with that working out at $4 million in what he took home.
In today’s money, that would be around $63 million a year.
But yet again, there is what they say you have and what you actually have.
Luciano died in his 60s while living in Italy and he didn’t have any kids to leave money
to.
In fact, we don’t think he had a great deal of money to leave.
Luciano had another partner back then, a man who is now said to have amassed more cash
than most mobsters.
Frank Costello
Word on media street is that Castello at one point had a net worth of one billion dollars,
which would indeed put him right at the top of this list.
He made cash bootlegging liquor, but the brunt of his money came via prostitution and gambling
rackets, and later, legitimate business operations.
Known as the “The Prime Minister of the Underworld”, he certainly had a lot of power.
He had a lot of respect, too, with a biographer once telling the New York Times, “He was
a man who would go way out of his way to avoid violence.
He believed that, with serious effort, there are few things that can't be worked out peacefully.”
He also lived a long time (82) and always kept a few fingers in criminal pies, but where
do people get the one billion number from?
It’s hard to say because he kept his wealth well hidden.
In 1964, he was arrested for vagrancy while eating lunch with a business acquaintance
in a New York City restaurant.
The cops at the time believed Costello was a multi-millionaire who’d made all his cash
from crime.
The reason they got him on vagrancy was the simple fact he didn’t have a job or proof
of income, to which his lawyers said was the cops acting out of hand.
At the time, Costello had $6 in his pocket, although his suit was worth $300 – quite
a bit of money back then.
But a billion!?
If he had that much, where did it go?
Not only that, it is said his enterprises amassed around $60 billion for all those involved.
Unfortunately, while many sources say that was what he was worth, we got somewhat lost
on the money trail.
But with this next guy, the trail wasn’t too hard to follow.
Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno Mr. Salerno was said to be a billionaire and
his wealth was more evident, so we think we can put him at the top of the richest gangsters
list.
When Fortune put that list together in 1986 of the richest mobsters in the USA that were
still alive, he came top.
He could be the only bonafide billionaire on this list, but still, you can’t underestimate
the media and authority’s readiness to exaggerate criminal wealth.
In the 1960s, it is said the numbers racket was bringing him in around $50 million a year.
If we use a currency calculator, in 1965 if he earned $50 million that would be worth
$439 million today.
That’s a lot of cash and it’s said he also made money from loan-sharking.
But did he really have all that money?
In 1977, Time magazine said he was indicted for running a numbers operation from Manhattan
that netted him $10 million a year.
That same article said he kept tons of money packed in shoeboxes in one of his houses and
apartments.
The article described his lifestyle, saying: “His lifestyle was typical; so, too, was
the rigid insulation of his family from his life in the rackets.
At home, a Mafioso cultivates the image of a solid, churchgoing, charity-supporting citizen.
On the job, he keeps up a flashy front by wining and dining associates at expensive
restaurants and resorts.”
He had a place at Miami Beach, a 100-acre estate in upstate Rhinebeck, New York, and
he had a luxury apartment in the high-cost neighborhood of Gramercy Park in Manhattan.
He had lots of cars, a yacht, and he even built an indoor horse-riding arena where his
kids could practice on the horses he’d bought them.
He’s certainly starting to sound like a billionaire, if not a multi-millionaire.
Straight-talking Michael Franzese once talked about Salerno, saying with respect, that he
was a “chubby” kind of fella that “talked like a tough guy” but was actually “really
good guy.”
He only meant him once, which ended with Franzese agreeing to help Salerno out by employing
a few of his guys.
As for that Fortune magazine list with Salerno at the top, Franzese once did a video about
that.
He called the list “silly” and said he didn’t agree with it, stating as always,
there was misinformation about the mafia.
He said it is impossible to know how much mobsters earned, or still earn.
He also stated that Vincent “the chin” Gigante was a very powerful mobster and perhaps
number one, but we can’t find any evidence that he earned more than Salerno.
Still, Franzese called Gigante “the most powerful guy in the country.”
Maybe the media and the authorities just never discovered what kind of wealth Gigante had.
If Salerno was behind in terms of wealth, it can’t have been by a long way.
With all that money, authorities were hot on Salerno’s tail.
One time he was being wiretapped and he told another mobster he was upset about some young
upstart actually calling him “fat” Tony to his face.
Angrily, he said down the phone, “If it wasn't for me, there wouldn't be no mob left.
I made all the guys.”
That was one reason he was arrested in 1986.
The cops figured he was number one in the country, which he wasn’t, but he was still
very high.
Sometime after that arrest one of the prosecution team went over to him and offered him a granola
bar.
He said to Salerno, “They're really much better for you, Mr. Salerno.
Better than all that chocolate.”
Salerno, looking grumpy as always, replied, “Who the BLEEP cares.
I'm gonna die in the BLEEPING can, anyway.”
He did, and he was just five years into his 100-year sentence.
He was 80 years old.
As Franzese says, “The life always catches up with you.”
By looking at the history of the mafia you could say that for everything they earned,
they paid back in pain and lost happiness.
Now you need to watch the full video on Franzese “Mafia Boss Reveals How He Stole $8 Million
A Week.”
Or, have a look at how the Italians did things in “How the 'Great Mafia War' Killed Thousands.”