Curated playlist

American crime bosses

Russell BufalinoRussell Bufalino was born Rosario Alfredo Bufalino on the 29th of October 1903 in Montedoro, Sicily. He grew up to be an Italian-American mobster, and he led the Northeastern Pennsylvania crime family for decades. People came to call it…
James Burke (gangster)James Burke, nicknamed Jimmy the Gent, spent his criminal life beside the Lucchese crime family without ever being allowed to join it. He was born on the 5th of July 1931. He is believed to have organized the 1978 Lufthansa heist. His…
Bugsy SiegelBenjamin Siegel, the American mobster the world remembers as Bugsy, despised that name. It came from slang for crazy, and he told people to call him Ben or Mr. Siegel. During his murder trial in 1941, some reporters wrote that his eyes…
Meyer LanskyShortly after The Godfather Part II reached theaters in 1974, Meyer Lansky picked up the telephone and called the actor Lee Strasberg. Strasberg had played Hyman Roth, a gangster based on Lansky, and had earned an Oscar nomination for it.…
Arnold RothsteinArnold Rothstein, a New York gambler nicknamed The Brain, lay wounded in a hospital while police asked who had shot him. He refused to help. "You stick to your trade," he told the officers. "I'll stick to mine." Pressed again, he answered…
Larry HooverLarry Hoover Sr., born on the 30th of November 1950, is an American former gangster who founded the Gangster Disciples, a street gang from Chicago. On the 28th of May 2025, President Donald Trump commuted his federal prison sentences. Yet…
Frank LucasFrank Lucas liked to ask one question when he explained how he moved heroin. "Who the hell is gonna look in a dead soldier's coffin?" He put it that way in an interview for a New York magazine article published in 2000. Lucas operated in…
Frank Matthews (drug trafficker)Frank Matthews, who went by Black Caesar and Mark IV, was an American drug trafficker whose reach covered much of the eastern United States. From 1965 to 1972 he sold heroin and cocaine, and his dealers worked in 21 states. The Drug…
Bumpy JohnsonBumpy Johnson, a crime boss of Harlem in New York City, died shortly before 2 a.m. on the 7th of July 1968 at Wells Restaurant. A waitress had just set down his coffee, a chicken leg and a plate of hominy grits. Then he fell over,…
Joey MerlinoJoseph Salvatore Merlino, known as Skinny Joey, was born on the 13th of March 1962 and rose to become the reputed boss of the Philadelphia crime family. His reign ran from the 1990s until 2024. Once, a television reporter asked him about a…
Freeway Ricky RossRicky Donnell Ross, better known as Freeway Ricky Ross, was born on the 26th of January 1960 and learned to read at the age of 28. That happened during his first stint in prison. He then spent much of his time behind bars studying law. The…
Whitey BulgerOn the 22nd of June 2011, agents in Santa Monica, California, used a ruse to lure an 81-year-old man out of his apartment. They arrested him without incident. He was James Joseph "Whitey" Bulger Jr., who had once led the Winter Hill Gang,…
Dutch SchultzDutch Schultz, born Arthur Simon Flegenheimer, lay in an ambulance in Newark, New Jersey, with gunshot wounds, when he pushed $3,000 in cash into an intern's hand. He told the young man the money would do him no good where he was going.…
Stanley WilliamsStanley Tookie Williams III was seventeen when a juvenile review board asked what he planned to do once he was released. By his own account, he replied with "being the leader of the biggest gang in the world." He was a teenager with a…