Hey Thoughty2 here. As far back as I can remember,
I always wanted to tell you about gangsters.
Like it or not, mafia mythology is murderously melded with the history of modern America. To
some, the Mob represents an aspirational way of life full of girls, guns, and glamour.
But there is of course a much darker side. This
is after all an organisation that relies on fear to get what it wants and is more
likely to resolve disputes with a bullet behind the ear than a quiet word in it.
Whatever your take on la Cosa Nostra, they’ve played an undeniable role in shaping our
culture. After all, which of us doesn’t have a favourite Mob movie and who can’t mis-quote
a piece of iconic dialogue on command (see the opening of this video for an example.)
But where did it all begin, this obsession of ours? Well,
when it comes to the extraordinary rise, and fall, of the Mafia in America,
it can all be traced back to the so-called Five Families.
These powerful clans ran New York City for decades making money from legitimate businesses
while also profiting from illegal gambling, protection rackets and contract murder.
In doing so they established the blueprint which would see organised crime spread
across America and perhaps even have a hand in the death of a President.
Trust me, if you think your family is bad, wait until you get a load of this lot.
The origins of the Mafia can be traced back to the 18th century and the Italian island of Sicily,
if Italy is a boot, Sicily is it’s amputated toe. Over the years Sicily has been ruled by many
different foreign invaders - everyone from the Romans to the French - but eventually,
boot or no boot, the people grew sick and tired of being kicked about and so they banded together.
The groups they formed slowly evolved into private armies, who in time grew so powerful
they could extort money from the very landowners who were supposed to be controlling them.
These armies became known as families, each of which had its own secret codes
and ways of meting out rough justice. In the late 19th and early 20th century,
a great many Italians emigrated to the United States in search of a better life. This included a
large number from Sicily, where poor economic and social conditions made the treacherous trip across
the Atlantic seem like an attractive option. Many of these new arrivals settled in New York,
particularly in a spot on the Lower East side of Manhattan that came to be known as Little
Italy (for obvious reasons). Of course, it wasn’t long before criminals from the old
country began to exploit this burgeoning immigrant population across the pond.
The notorious Five Points Gang, founded by former boxer Paolo Vaccarelli,
emerged in 1890 and terrorized New York for thirty years. Meanwhile spawning gangsters who would go
on to be some of the most feared crime bosses ever, including Meyer Lansky, Bugsy Siegel and
even old Scarface himself, Al Capone. In 1920 Prohibition hit America. And,
surprisingly, telling people they could no longer drink alcohol went down about as well as turning
up to a high school fancy dress party as Jimmy Saville. The U.S. government might have believed
it was a brilliant idea, but the general public most certainly did not, and it was boom time
for anyone who could supply bootleg booze. This was the iconic era of trench coats and
Tommy guns, as upstanding crime fighters like Elliot Ness battled the Mob on the
mean streets of New York and Chicago. Prohibition in the U.S. coincided with
the rise of fascism in Italy as Benito Mussolini came to power. A tolerant attitude towards crime,
or indeed anything really, is not in the brief of a dictator,
and Mussolini came down hard on the Mafia, causing a large number of its members to head to America.
This perfect storm of a major business opportunity and lots of new recruits saw
the American Mafia grow in size and strength throughout the 1920s. For the most part,
a man by the name of Joe ‘The Boss’ Masseria was running things in those days,
but a powerful Sicilian Mafia Don wanted to take over, so he sent his protégé, Salvatore Maranzano,
to make a big bid for power in the Big Apple. Maranzano gradually built up his own criminal
empire before declaring all-out war on Masseria in 1930.
For over a year the two New York Mafia clans openly fought one another,
with gang members on both sides gunned down in the streets on a number of occasions.
Eventually, on April 15th, 1931, Masseria himself was killed in a restaurant by four gunmen. The
person who’d arranged this mealtime murder was his own right-hand-man, Charles ‘Lucky’ Luciano.
Lucky was a gangster to his very core; as a teenager he cut his teeth in the Five Points Gang,
before making his fortune in bootlegging, and got his nickname after surviving a knife
attack that left him with a drooping eye and distinctive scars across his face.
When Luciano realised the war was going badly he switched sides, betraying his boss on the
condition that, if Maranzano emerged victorious, Luciano himself would be made second-in-command.
Upon winning, Marazano promptly re-organised the Mafia gangs of New York into the so-called Five
Families. In a bid to consolidate his new-found power, he then named himself ‘Capo dei capi,’
‘the boss of all the bosses.’ But the snazzy title didn’t go down all that well with the
heads of the Five Families. They already disliked Maranzano, who they saw as greedy, arrogant and
old fashioned, and the attempted power-grab proved to be the literal last nail in his coffin.
Four hitmen posing as government agents went to Maranzano’s office, disarmed his bodyguards,
then made sure that he too would be sleeping with the fishes. Once again it was ‘Lucky’
Luciano who set up the hit; you know I’m beginning to think that he can’t
be trusted at all. What’s the world coming to when a Mafia boss can’t be taken at his word?
Anyway, with both of the old-school bosses now out of the way, it was time for the Mafia
modernisers to have their turn. Given that he’d so ably got rid of the two previous big dogs,
it would have been reasonable to assume ‘Lucky’ Luciano would take the throne and declare himself
the new Boss of Bosses. But he didn’t.
In fairness, having personally ordered the murders of the previous two incumbents he
knew all too well how dangerous it was to be the Mafia’s head honcho. So instead,
he established something called The Commission, which was made up of seven Mafia leaders,
including the heads of all of the Five Families, and would be responsible for overseeing the
activities of the Mob and mediating disputes between rival gangs. They met every five years
to iron out major problems and just generally put the organisation into organised crime.
Now, if there’s one you don’t expect from the Mafia it’s high-level admin. Putting horse’s heads
in people’s beds, sure, we’re all onboard with that, but a HR department, that’s just weird..
With a solid structure in place and war behind them for now, the Five Families
started to move to a whole ‘nother level. But as alcohol was decriminalised once again, they
needed to look for new avenues to make money. The traditional money spinners like robbery,
extortion, loan sharking, and money laundering all continued as normal,
but it was time to diversify the family business. So, they infiltrated the labour unions, which
allowed them to establish themselves in industries like construction, trucking and, the career of
choice of Tony Soprano, waste management. In the 1940s, the city of Las Vegas was starting
its meteoric rise to become the greatest centre of vice on God’s green earth. Despite being on the
opposite coast to the Five Families’ traditional stomping grounds, the promise of profits proved
too pretty to pass up. They bankrolled a number of casinos as Sin City swelled and
would skim money from the huge sums of cash taken on the floors every night, a scam thought to have
netted them hundreds of millions of dollars. For decades it seemed as if the Mafia was
untouchable. Their code of silence, known as omerta, meant that members
were sworn to secrecy and forbidden to cooperate with police under fear of death.
Infiltrating the Families was practically impossible, because allegiances often went back
generations to the same small towns in Italy. The US government seemed woefully behind
the curve as the Mob continued to grow in both power and numbers. But then, slowly,
law enforcement started to fight back. In 1950 a special committee was set up to
investigate the existence of organised crime and it held hearings in fourteen cities across
the country, including testimonies from over six hundred witnesses.
The hearings were televised at a time when TV was just starting to become massive,
and it was the first time most Americans had even heard anything about this shadowy
organisation which seemed to exert influence over huge swathes of their country.
All of this attention was obviously bad news for the Mob,
but if the ‘50s started poorly for the Mafia, it was nothing compared to how they ended.
In 1957, a meeting was arranged in the small town of Apalachin in upstate New
York. It took place at the house of a man known as Joe The Barber.
This coming together of the clans was a national Mafia meeting with more than one hundred important
crime bosses and assorted henchmen in attendance to discuss all kinds of nefarious activities and,
one can only assume, have a bloody good catch-up while they were at it.
The problem was that Apalachin was little more than a hamlet, the sort of place where
big news would usually be the mom and pop store on Main Street running out of milk.
When numerous flash cars arrived and deposited a large number of extremely well-dressed,
severe looking gentlemen in the middle of town,
the local police force couldn’t help but wonder just what the hell was going on.
They raided the property, causing the highly unusual, and not a little humiliating scene of
dozens of gangsters running away to hide in the nearby woods. Amazingly
this shrub-based counterintelligence tactic didn’t work and sixty of them were arrested.
Not only was this a very embarrassing incident for the Mafia, but it once again shed light
on what was supposed to be a top-secret organisation. Although any sense of secrecy
would completely disappear just two years later. In 1959 a mobster called Joe Valachi was convicted
of drug trafficking and sentenced to fifteen years in prison. While inside he murdered a fellow
inmate, a move that saw his sentence extended to life behind bars with no chance of parole. Clearly
the prospect of eating slop from a tray and trying really bloody hard not to drop his soap in the
shower didn’t thrill Valachi, because in 1963 he agreed to testify about his time in the Mob.
This was the first time a Made Man had ever taken the stand and publicly admitted the Mafia existed,
let alone gone into details about its structure and activities. Valachi even went so far as to
name many current and former gangsters, including bosses of the major families.
Valachi’s hearing was part of a crusade by Attorney General Robert Kennedy,
who’d made it his personal mission to target organised crime. He did a brilliant job of it,
too, with mobster convictions rising eight hundred percent during his time in office.
That’s one of the reasons some people believe the Mafia played a
major role in the assassination of his brother, President John F. Kennedy, in November 1963.
Seismic though the killing of President Kennedy was, it couldn’t stop the events
that Valachi’s confession had set in motion. Several laws were subsequently passed by Congress
to give the FBI greater powers to tackle the Mafia head-on, the most ground-breaking being
the so-called RICO Act of 1970. The Act essentially made it illegal
to be a part of a quote ‘ongoing criminal enterprise,’ regardless of whether or not you were
actually caught committing any crimes. That made it significantly easier to convict known mobsters,
but more importantly it suddenly made it possible to go after mob bosses who were unlikely to ever
get directly involved in the dirty work their organisations were built on. The thinking was
that this would mean more convictions and longer sentences, and boy did it work.
The man at the spearhead of this revolution was US Attorney Rudy Giuliani,
and he wasted no time wreaking RICO havoc. In 1985 he brought the heads of three of the Five
Families to trial using the RICO statute in what was dubbed the ‘case of cases.’
And it turned out to be a case of Giuliani 1 – Five Families 0,
as all three mob bosses were sentenced to one hundred years in prison.
It set a precedent for the next thirty years, with Mafia bosses frequently given major jail time when
brought to court as part of a RICO investigation. And as surveillance became more sophisticated,
the FBI also increasingly used wiretaps to ensnare mobsters.
Faced with huge sentences and often having incriminated themselves on tape,
more and more gangsters conveniently forgot about their oath of silence and
happily sang like canaries in order to spend less time behind bars.
Even those in the Mafia who seemed untouchable were eventually, well, touched.
John Gotti was nicknamed the Teflon Don because nothing ever seemed to stick to him; a flashy
dresser who actively courted publicity, when he took over as head of the Gambino family in the
mid-80s it was the richest of the Five Families, with an annual income of half a billion dollars.
But after years as the most flamboyant and famous gangster in New York,
his best friend and underboss Sammy ‘The Bull’ Gravano testified against him and in
1992 Gotti was sent to prison for life with no possibility of parole. He died in jail in 2002.
With the balance of power having now tipped firmly in favour of the federal government,
the influence of the Mafia continued to dwindle, and the decline was only compounded by increased
competition from other gangs, including the Russian Mafia. Same name, furrier hats.
But that doesn’t mean that America is now Cosa Nostra free. In fact, far from it. The attacks
on 9/11 saw a huge switch in the FBI’s focus from organized crime to terrorism,
with some Mafia task forces dropping from around four hundred agents to as few as twenty.
As recently as 2019 the FBI estimated there were still as many as three thousand active
members of the Mafia in the US, and the legendary Five Families continue to operate to this day. So
while it’s fair to say that the glory days of the American Mafia are far behind them,
when it comes to the Mob only a fool would say that you should ‘fugget-about-it.’
Thanks for watching.