Anthony Salerno

• 1. Introduction

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  Anthony Salerno, known to everyone as Fat Tony, was 75 years old in October 1986 when Fortune magazine named him the most powerful, wealthy and influential gangster in America. It was an odd honor for a man whose health was failing. He had suffered a stroke earlier in the decade and would suffer more. Inside the New York Mafia, plenty of people treated the title as a joke. Some observers said police and prosecutors had inflated his importance on purpose. So who was Salerno really, and what did he actually control? How does a man from a single Harlem block end up billed as the face of American organized crime? And what happens when the law builds its biggest case around someone who may have been standing in for somebody else?

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• 2. East Harlem Beginnings

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  Salerno was born on the 15th of August 1911 at 115 East 116th Street in East Harlem, Manhattan. His parents, Alfio Salerno and Maria Carroccio, were immigrants from San Fratello, in the Messina province of Sicily.

  As a young man he drifted into gambling, numbers, loansharking and protection rackets. His employer was the Luciano family, the organization that would later be known as the Genovese family.

  He belonged to the 116th Street Crew, which was led by Michael "Trigger Mike" Coppola. In 1948, Coppola fled to Florida to escape murder charges. Salerno took over the crew his boss had abandoned.

  Leading the crew put the neighborhood's gambling and lending operations in his hands, and those operations would carry him a long way up the family.

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• 3. Numbers And Horses

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  In 1959, American boxer Floyd Patterson met Sweden's Ingemar Johansson for the heavyweight title at Yankee Stadium, and Salerno was one of the fight's secret financial backers. No charges were ever filed against him over it.

  His climb through the Genovese ranks rested on a Harlem numbers racket, possibly worth a million dollars a year, and on a major loansharking operation. By the 1960s he controlled the largest numbers racket in New York, which grossed up to $50 million per year. He ran it from the Palma Boys Social Club in East Harlem. Over time he served the family as consigliere, underboss and acting boss.

  His homes reflected the money. He split his time between a house in Miami Beach, Florida, and a 100 acre estate and horse farm in Rhinebeck, upstate New York. He also kept the Palma Boys Club in East Harlem and an apartment in the upscale Gramercy Park section of Manhattan.

  The law caught up with him unevenly. The FBI indicted him for heading a bookie and loan shark network that grossed $1 million annually. He hired Roy Cohn as his attorney. On the 20th of April 1978, he was sentenced to six months in federal prison on illegal gambling and tax evasion charges.

  After his release in early 1981, he suffered a mild stroke and retreated to Rhinebeck to recover. He was the Genovese underboss at the time, and a death at the top of the family would change his position that same year.

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• 4. The Front Man

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  On the 31st of March 1981, Frank Tieri, the Genovese front boss, died. Salerno, having recovered from his stroke, took his place. Over the following years he suffered many more strokes, some small and some severe.

  Law enforcement at the time believed Salerno truly ran the family. In Mafia circles, however, it was an open secret that he was a front for Vincent "Chin" Gigante. Alphonse "Little Al" D'Arco later became acting boss of the Lucchese family and then an informer. He told investigators that when he was made in 1982, he was told Gigante was the Genovese boss.

  The arrangement was older than Gigante. After Vito Genovese died in 1969, the real leader had been Philip "Benny Squint" Lombardo. Lombardo used a series of front bosses to hide his status from the police. Gigante kept the practice going when he took over after Lombardo retired in 1981.

  An FBI bug caught Salerno in the act. He and capo Matthew "Matty the Horse" Ianniello were going through a list of candidates to be made in another family. Salerno was annoyed that the list left out the candidates' nicknames. Then he said, "I'll leave this up to the boss." It was a plain sign that he was not the one deciding.

  In 1986, after the verdict in his big trial that year, his longtime right-hand man Vincent "The Fish" Cafaro became an informant. Cafaro told the FBI that Salerno had never been the real boss. Prosecutors, however, had already built a major case on the opposite assumption.

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• 5. The Commission Trial

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  On the 25th of February 1985, Salerno and eight other New York bosses on the so-called Mafia Commission were indicted in what became the Mafia Commission Trial. Salerno was nominally the lead defendant. Many observers disputed his top billing and claimed that law enforcement overstated his importance to draw attention to the case.

  His bail request was denied. His attorneys pursued the matter all the way to the United States Supreme Court. In United States v. Salerno, the Court ruled that he could be held without bail because he posed a potential danger to the community.

  The prosecution of the defendants was led by Rudy Giuliani, then U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. On the 1st of July 1985, Salerno and his co-defendants pleaded not guilty.

  The verdict came on the 19th of November 1986, when Salerno was convicted on RICO charges. On the 13th of January 1987, he and six other defendants were sentenced to 100 years in prison without parole. Salerno was also fined $240,000.

  Selwyn Raab, the organized-crime reporter for The New York Times, argued in his book Five Families that the label made little legal difference. Prosecutors erred in calling Salerno the real boss, Raab wrote, but the error would not have changed the conviction or the 100-year term. Salerno was tried for specific criminal acts, not for holding a title.

  A second federal racketeering case was already waiting for him, and it involved concrete.

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• 6. Concrete And Teamsters

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  On the 21st of March 1986, while he was still awaiting the Commission trial, Salerno was indicted in a second federal racketeering case. Prosecutors accused him of hiding controlling interests in two firms, the S & A Concrete Company and the Transit-Mix Concrete Corporation.

  Those companies were involved in building some of Manhattan's best-known projects. The list included the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and the Trump Tower.

  The indictment also charged him with illegally helping Roy Lee Williams win election as national president of the Teamsters Union. Salerno pleaded not guilty to all of it.

  In October 1988, he was convicted on every charge. The sentence was 70 years in prison and a fine of $376,000. He was also ordered to forfeit half of the racketeering proceeds, which were estimated at $30 million.

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• 7. Prison And Screen

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  Salerno's health declined in prison. He suffered from diabetes and was suspected to have prostate cancer. On the 27th of July 1992, he died at the US Medical Center for Federal Prisoners in Springfield, Missouri, from complications of a stroke.

  He was buried at Saint Raymond's Cemetery in the Throggs Neck section of the Bronx, in New York City.

  Filmmakers have returned to him several times. Paul Sorvino played Salerno in Kill the Irishman, released in 2011. Domenick Lombardozzi took the role in Martin Scorsese's The Irishman in 2019.

  Joe Pingue played him in The Apprentice, released in 2024. That is more than three decades after Salerno died in Missouri, and his name still draws casting.

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