Mafia boss- there's few positions of power more feared than this one,
but sometimes all it takes to bring you down is ordering too much meat.
Al Capone
Who could be more infamous than the legendary mob boss Al Capone himself?
Well, this feared mob boss's downfall would start with faking a cough.
Born in 1899 to poor immigrant parents, Capone was a good student as a kid, but quickly began to fall
behind the other kids as he played hooky. Forced to repeat the sixth grade, Capone got into a fight
with a teacher, and then with his principal, after which he vowed never to return to school again.
That principal inadvertently created the most infamous mob boss in American history.
Capone hooked up with a local gang and in 1917 he earned his nickname of “scarface”. One night
he made a rude remark to a woman at a bar where he worked as a bartender and bouncer, and her
brother punched him and slashed him across the face with a knife. Soon, the name Scarface stuck.
Capone made the move to Chicago where he hooked up with longtime friend Johnny Torrio again.
About this time prohibition had gone into effect in the United States, and there was a
bundle to be made selling illegal booze. Capone was quickly amassing a small fortune, but a new
Chicago mayor vowed to crack down on crime and corruption. Capone and his associates responded
by launching a voter intimidation campaign that ended up with several voters shot and beat up.
Chicago police tracked down Capone and company and ended up killing Capone's brother in a shootout.
In 1925, Torrio decided to do the smart thing and retire from a life of crime
and move back to Italy. He left Capone in charge and the rest is basically history.
At the height of his smuggling Capone was earning about $60 million in today's money a year.
And then it all started to fall apart because of one dumb lie.
In 1929 Capone was subpoenaed to appear as a witness before a federal grand jury in Chicago
for a case involving prohibition laws. Capone, who was at his summer home in Florida at the time
responded by telling the authorities that he couldn't make it due to a bad case of pneumonia.
The Chicago police contacted the FBI, asking them to check out Capone's story for them.
As FBI agents began secret surveillance on Capone, they discovered that he was in perfect health,
making frequent trips to the local race track, going on vacations to the Bahamas,
and going about his life like it was 2020's hot-girl-summer.
The FBI arrested Capone for contempt of court and though he was released on bond, he was now
officially under the FBI's crosshairs. Working with the Treasury Department, Philadelphia,
and Chicago police, the FBI helped send Capone to jail- though it would be his failure to pay income
taxes that landed him the 11 year sentence that finally finished off his reign as top mob boss.
Our next crime boss’s own family got him permanently put behind bars.
Willem 'The Nose' Holleeder
One of the most notorious crime bosses in The Netherlands's history,
Willem 'The Nose' Holleeder was born in 1958 in Amsterdam. His criminal career began early,
joining a gang that worked under the table for property owners looking to
permanently get rid of squatters on their property. While never arrested for it,
it's also suspected that he partook in several robberies during his formative years as well.
The Nose's father was an employee with Heineken, which may have led to
his plan to kidnap the Heineken heir, Freddy Heineken, and hold him for ransom. In 1983,
Holleeder and his gang executed their plan and kidnapped Heinken and his driver,
demanding 35 million guilders – or approximately 16 million euros or 19.5 million dollars. The
police warned the Heineken family not to agree to the ransom, but the distraught family paid it out
anyways. Inevitably, Holleeder and his accomplices were caught and imprisoned for the kidnapping.
The police never recovered several million of the ransom money though, and it's believed that
Holleeder had managed to hide it away. Upon his release from prison for the kidnapping, Holleeder
used this money to fund a new criminal campaign. He managed to lay low until 2004, when confidant
Willem Endstra secretly testified against him to the police. Catching wind of the betrayal,
Holleeder had Endstra killed, along with another police informant while on a vacation to Thailand.
Holleeder was suspected in as many as 25 murders, but the police could only bring extortion charges
against him. A man that testified at his trial would later be found dead of a drug overdose,
and despite the obvious link to Holleeder, police still
couldn't pin him for any of the dozens of murders he'd either committed or ordered.
Holleeder would end up getting sentenced to nine years in prison for extortion charges
before being released early in 2013. However, he was quickly re-arrested for extortion once more,
and this would be his undoing. Holleeder's criminal empire would
come crashing down because he decided to get chatty.
Believing her brother to be a mass murderer, Holleeder's sister, Astrid,
began to visit him in prison while working as a police informant. She wore a wire and secretly
recorded Holleeder completely confessing to many of the suspected murders, never
once suspecting that his own sister was working for the fuzz. With this new evidence in hand,
police were finally able to bring murder charges against Holleeder, sealing his fate. However,
Holleeder's outrage at being betrayed would lead to fresh criminal charges while he was already in
prison after it was discovered he had attempted to hire two hitmen to kill both his sisters.
Today Astrid Holleeder lives in fear of her brother's retaliation, and takes great pains
to conceal her identity as she goes about her life- even going so far as to wear disguises.
Our next mob boss would have avoided jail if he had simply been a vegetarian.
Vito Genovese
Vito Genovese was a rising star in the mafia underworld-
who would be brought down by one huge order of meat.
Born in 1897 in Italy, Vito's family made the move to America in 1913.
Almost immediately upon arriving to Little Italy in Manhattan,
Vito began to get involved with the local mob. His pure Italian blood lent him an air
of legitimacy to the largely xenophobic italian mob that practically guaranteed membership.
His criminal career began with stealing items from pushcart vendors on the street,
but soon he had moved up to be an errand boy for local mobsters. Then he got a major promotion,
and a sign of trust by the local mob- Vito was allowed to go collect money
from bookies setting up illegal lotteries. His criminal career would be briefly interrupted
when at 19 he went to jail for a year for illegal possession of a firearm.
In the early 1920s, Vito began to work for Giuseppe “Joe the Boss” Masseria, who had formed
a Manhattan gang that would one day evolve into the very family that Vito himself would eventually
lead. Working alongside Charlie Luciano and Frank Costello, Vito set up a lucrative bootlegging
operation supplying and selling illegal liquor to buyers and underground bars across the east coast.
Rather than end the scourge of bad behavior prohibitionists feared so much,
the only thing making alcohol illegal did was enrich an entire generation of criminals.
Vito would go on to become boss after Luciano was sentenced to 50 years in prison for various
charges. However, as pressure mounted on Vito due to several high profile murders he had
either committed or ordered, he decided to flee the country and set up shop in Italy. There he
became close personal friends with Mussolini's son, and received several honorary awards from
Mussolini's government. He even set up the murder of an anti-Mussolinin journalist back in New York.
As soon as the Allies invaded Italy though, Vito switched sides and began to work with the Allied
forces. He gifted former New York governor Charles Poletti- now attached to the US Army-
a 1938 Packard Sedan and earned his trust enough to be made an interpreter and liaison officer in
the US Army's headquarters in Naples. Soon, he was one of the Allied Military Government for
Occupied Territories' most trusted employees, with nobody having a clue who he really was.
Vito used the opportunity to set up a massive black market right under the noses of the Allies,
earning him great wealth. However, US military police caught on to the operation and arrested
Vito a year later. Discovering who he really was, the US government ordered he be returned
to New York to face charges for a 1934 murder, but upon returning Vito had the
prosecution's witnesses killed. With nobody to testify against him, Vito was released.
Vito would go on to secure himself as one of the US's top mobsters,
and managed to evade the authorities' attempts to pinch him until 1957.
In November of that year Vito called for a massive meeting of mob bosses from both
the US and Italy- amongst the many topics on the agenda was hashing out gambling and
narcotic interests in Cuba as well as various criminal projects across the eastern seaboard.
The meeting took place in an estate in Apalachin, New York.
There, state trooper Edgar D. Croswell became suspicious after observing Pennsylvania crime
boss Joseph Barbara's son reserving a great number of rooms in local hotels,
as well as ordering a huge quantity of meat from a local butcher. Following his hunch, he reported
these findings and state police investigated the criminal gathering, discovering hoards of
luxury automobiles all belonging to known crime bosses. Setting up a roadblock, the mobsters
realized they were being encircled and many fled on foot, but police nabbed a total of 60 mobsters.
While Vito was let go, he was soon arrested with the help of various informants and sentenced to
15 years in federal prison, though he would die of a heart attack on Valentine's Day in 1969.
Our next mob boss’s ego not only led to his downfall, but the downfall of many mob associates.
John Gotti
He was known as 'the dapper don',
a title that would help cement his inevitable downfall at the hands of the FBI.
Gotti was born in the Brox in 1940, becoming involved with mob
activity by age 12. At age 14 he attempted to steal a cement mixer from a construction site
but accidentally caused it to fall, crushing his toes and leaving him with a permanent limp.
As he moved into early adulthood, Gotti got involved in various mob schemes and scams
such as hijacking truck shipments coming out of what would become John F. Kennedy
International Airport. This gave Gotti the opportunity to rub shoulders and form bonds
with many future big names in the mafia business, such as Joseph Massino.
What followed was a whirlwind rise to power for the young Gotti,
eventually leading to his takeover of the Gambino crime family. However, while other
capos had chosen to remain in the shadows and not draw public attention to themselves,
Gotti was different. Hopelessly vain, Gotti loved expensive clothing and toys, and relished showing
off his wealth and power whenever he could. He even set up an elaborate ritual of sorts at
the Ravenite social club in Manhattan, where he would arrive to a pre-planned crowd of admirers
and made men looking to gain favor, or summoned there directly by Gotti. Then, Gotti would wave
to the present cameras and lookers on, creating one big spectacle for the world to see.
Some mafiosos however did not like the spotlight that Gotti was putting on them-
this mattered little to the mob's most vain capo,
and if you didn't show up when summoned, you ran the risk of getting killed.
However, Gotti's biggest fans weren't the crowds of admirers gathered outside the
club on his frequent outings, all struggling to catch a glimpse of the dapper don. It was the
Federal Bureau of Investigation, who absolutely relished the opportunity Gotti gave them every
week to gather intelligence on mob activities. Thanks to Gotti's demand that summoned mafiosos
attend the gala-style public gatherings, the FBI was able to photograph and track even extremely
elusive figures in the mob family. Eventually the treasure trove of intelligence that this led to
would lead to Gotti's downfall, and the god-awful reality tv series Growing Up
Gotti that the world would be forced to suffer through briefly in the early 2000s.
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