American Mafia

• 1. Introduction

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  The American Mafia traces its name back to a Sicilian adjective, mafiusu, which a 19th-century scholar named Diego Gambetta translated as meaning "fearless," "enterprising," and "proud." That word traveled across the Atlantic inside the pockets of immigrants, and what arrived in New York's East Harlem, the Lower East Side, and Brooklyn was not just a culture but a criminal infrastructure that would eventually span at least 26 cities. The organization its members called Cosa Nostra would go on to infiltrate labor unions, skim hundreds of millions of dollars from Las Vegas casinos, broker deals with U.S. intelligence, and shape American popular culture for more than a century. How did a collection of neighborhood gangs become the dominant criminal force in the United States? And what happened when the government finally found a tool capable of striking back?

• 2. Roots in the Immigrant City

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  New Orleans newspapers in the late 1860s carried reports of a war between Sicilian gangs whose names corresponded to the Sicilian cities their members came from: Palermo, Trapani, and Messina. Those early dispatches mark the first published account of what became the American Mafia. The first known Mafia member to immigrate to the United States was a man named Giuseppe Esposito, who had fled Sicily after murdering eleven wealthy landowners along with the chancellor and vice-chancellor of a Sicilian province. He was arrested in New Orleans in 1881 and extradited to Italy.

  In New York, the Five Points Gang founded by Paul Kelly became very powerful in the Little Italy of the Lower East Side from the 1890s through 1920. Kelly's recruits included young street hoodlums who would later become some of the most prominent crime bosses of the era: Johnny Torrio, Al Capone, Lucky Luciano, and Frankie Yale. Across town, in the 19th Ward of Chicago, an Italian neighborhood had acquired the nickname "the Bloody Nineteenth" because of the frequency of Mafia-related violence, feuds, and vendettas.

  The event that drew national and international attention to the emerging organization arrived on the 15th of October, 1890, when New Orleans Police Superintendent David Hennessy was murdered execution-style. Hundreds of Sicilians were arrested, nineteen were indicted, and an acquittal followed amid rumors of bribed and intimidated witnesses. On the 14th of March, 1891, outraged citizens organized a lynch mob that killed eleven of the nineteen defendants: two were hanged, nine were shot, and the remaining eight escaped. The violence made headlines on two continents and forced the public to confront questions about Italian immigrants that would not be resolved for generations.

• 3. Prohibition and the Rise of Families

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  On the 16th of January, 1919, the 18th Amendment to the United States Constitution made it illegal to manufacture, transport, or sell alcohol. The murder rate during Prohibition rose over 40 percent, climbing from 6.8 per 100,000 individuals to 9.7. Within the first three months after the Amendment took effect, a half a million dollars in bonded whiskey was stolen from government warehouses. Over 900,000 cases of liquor were shipped to the borders of U.S. cities, the majority imported from Canada, the Caribbean, and the American Midwest.

  In the early 1920s, fascist Benito Mussolini took control of Italy and Sicilian Mafia members fled to the United States as he cracked down on their activities at home. The profits from bootlegging far exceeded what the traditional crimes of protection, extortion, gambling, and prostitution had ever returned. Gangs hijacked each other's alcohol shipments, forcing rivals to pay for "protection," and armed guards almost invariably accompanied the caravans that delivered the liquor.

  By the end of the 1920s, two factions of organized crime in New York City had emerged to fight for control: one led by Joe Masseria and the other by Salvatore Maranzano. The conflict became known as the Castellammarese War, which ended with Masseria's murder in 1931. Maranzano then divided New York City into five families and named himself boss of all bosses, requiring all families to pay tribute to him. That arrangement lasted less than six months. Charles "Lucky" Luciano, a former Masseria underling who had switched sides to orchestrate Masseria's killing, ordered Maranzano's murder and introduced a replacement that would define the organization for decades.

• 4. The Commission and Its Rules

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  Luciano created The Commission in 1931 as an alternative to the despotic model of a single boss of all bosses. The bosses of the most powerful families would have equal say and vote on disputes, overseeing what became known as the National Crime Syndicate. By mid-century there were 26 official Commission-sanctioned Mafia crime families, each based in a different city, except for the Five Families in New York.

  The older generation of leaders, called "Mustache Petes," had usually worked only with fellow Italians. The younger group led by Luciano was more open to working with Jewish-American criminal syndicates to achieve greater profits. The Mafia thrived by following a strict set of rules originally from Sicily: an organized hierarchical structure and a code of silence, known as Omerta, that forbade cooperation with authorities. Failure to follow these rules was punishable by death.

  The initiation ceremony that created a "made man" drew from Roman Catholic confraternities and Masonic Lodges in mid-19th century Sicily. At the ceremony, the inductee's finger was pricked with a needle; drops of blood were spilled on a card bearing the likeness of a saint; the card was set on fire and passed rapidly from hand to hand while the novice took an oath of loyalty. This ritual was confirmed in 1986 by the pentito Tommaso Buscetta. A Commission meeting in 2000, according to Salvatore Vitale, voted to restore the rule requiring both parents of a new member to be of Italian descent.

• 5. Economic Reach

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  When alcohol ceased to be prohibited in 1933, the Mafia diversified into illegal gambling, loansharking, extortion, protection rackets, drug trafficking, fencing, and labor racketeering through control of unions. By the mid-20th century the organization had infiltrated many labor unions, most notably the Teamsters and International Longshoremen's Association. In New York City, most construction projects could not be performed without the Five Families' approval.

  Meyer Lansky made inroads into the casino industry in Cuba during the 1930s, and when Fulgencio Batista became president of Cuba in 1952, several Mafia bosses made legitimate investments in legalized casinos, owning no fewer than 19 by one estimate. Las Vegas was treated as an "open city" where any family could work; since the 1940s, families from New York, Cleveland, Kansas City, Milwaukee, and Chicago had interests there. They obtained loans from the Teamsters' pension fund and used front men to build casinos. The cash skimmed before it was recorded in counting rooms is estimated to have totaled hundreds of millions of dollars.

  Michael Franzese, known as the Yuppie Don, ran a gas tax fraud scheme that stole over $290 million in gasoline taxes by evading the Internal Revenue Service and shutting down gas stations before government officials could collect what was owed. He was caught in 1985. From 1985 to 1987, Sicilian Mafiosi operating in the United States imported an estimated $1.65 billion worth of heroin through pizzerias, hiding the cargo in various food products. Several members associated with the Lucchese crime family also manipulated the results of Boston College basketball games during the 1978-1979 season, bribing and intimidating team members to control the point spread.

• 6. Exposure and the Valachi Hearings

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  In 1951, a U.S. Senate special committee chaired by Democratic Tennessee Senator Estes Kefauver broadcast its televised hearings to a national audience. The hearings determined that a "sinister criminal organization" known as the Mafia operated across the United States. Two years later, in 1953, the FBI initiated what it called the Top Hoodlum Program, directing agents to collect information on mobsters in their territories and report it to Washington.

  The most dramatic blow to secrecy came from a Genovese crime family soldier named Joe Valachi. Convicted of narcotics violations in 1959 and sentenced to 15 years, Valachi grew fearful while in prison. On the 22nd of June, 1962, using a pipe left near some construction work, he bludgeoned an inmate to death whom he had mistaken for a Mafia member he believed had been contracted to kill him. A $100,000 bounty had been placed on Valachi's head by Vito Genovese.

  In October 1963, Valachi testified before Arkansas Senator John L. McClellan's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, stating publicly for the first time that the Italian-American Mafia actually existed. He is credited with popularizing the term cosa nostra. Although his disclosures never led directly to the prosecution of any Mafia leaders, he named many members and major crime families, aided in the solution of several unsolved murders, and exposed the organization to the world through televised testimony. The Apalachin meeting of the 14th of November, 1957, at 625 McFall Road in Apalachin, New York, had already forced J. Edgar Hoover to acknowledge organized crime's existence; Valachi's testimony gave investigators the internal vocabulary to pursue it.

• 7. RICO and the Federal Assault

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  The Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act became federal law in 1970. Violation carries up to 20 years in prison per count, fines up to $25,000, and mandatory forfeiture of all properties obtained while violating the law. Its power lay in attacking the entire criminal organization rather than individuals who could easily be replaced. Between 1981 and 1992-23 bosses from around the country were convicted under the law; between 1981 and 1988-13 underbosses and 43 captains were convicted; over 1,000 crime family figures were convicted by 1990.

  On the 25th of February, 1985, nine New York Mafia leaders were indicted for narcotics trafficking, loansharking, gambling, labor racketeering, and extortion against construction companies. Gambino family underboss Neil Dellacroce died of cancer on the 2nd of December, 1985, and Gambino boss Paul Castellano was murdered on the 16th of December, 1985. Eight of the nine defendants were convicted of racketeering on the 19th of November, 1986, and all were sentenced on the 13th of January, 1987.

  A high-profile RICO case sentenced John Gotti and Frank Locascio to life in prison in 1992, aided by informant Sammy Gravano in exchange for immunity. On the 9th of January, 2003, Bonanno crime family boss Joseph Massino was arrested. His trial began on the 24th of May, 2004, before judge Nicholas Garaufis. The jury found Massino guilty on all 11 counts on the 30th of July, 2004, and also approved a $10 million forfeiture of the proceeds of his reign. Massino subsequently became the first sitting boss of a New York crime family to turn state's evidence, a decision driven partly by the prospect of facing the death penalty, which would have made him the first Mafia boss executed since Lepke Buchalter in 1944.

• 8. The Mafia in Culture and Memory

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  The 1932 film Scarface was loosely based on Al Capone. Paramount Pictures released The Brotherhood in 1968, a financial flop, yet Paramount's production chief Robert Evans used that experience to subsidize the completion of a Mario Puzo novel with similar themes. Directed by Francis Ford Coppola, The Godfather won the Best Picture Oscar and for a year was the highest-grossing film ever made. It immediately inspired a direct sequel, The Godfather Part II in 1974, along with films based on real Mafiosi including Honor Thy Father, Lucky Luciano, Lepke, and Capone, all released in 1973 and 1975.

  The HBO television series The Sopranos depicted modern Italian-American mob culture in New Jersey, with creator David Chase drawing on his own experiences growing up and interacting with New Jersey crime families. A 13-part NBC miniseries, The Gangster Chronicles, aired in 1981, covering the rise of major crime bosses of the 1920s and 1930s.

  Within music, the subgenre known as mafioso rap emerged from the East Coast hip-hop scene, pioneered by Kool G Rap in the 1980s and expanded through the 1990s and 2000s by releases including Raekwon's Only Built 4 Cuban Linx, Jay-Z's Reasonable Doubt, Nas's It Was Written, and Sean Combs's No Way Out, among others. On the 20th of January, 2011, the Justice Department issued 16 indictments against Northeast American Mafia families, resulting in 127 charged defendants and more than 110 arrests on charges including murder, arson, and labor racketeering, described at the time as the largest operation against the Mafia in U.S. history.