Cosa Nostra News

Is the structure of the New York Mafia somehow based on the Roman legions? (We recently received an email posing that question.) It all started about 100 years ago with a Sicilian mobster named Salvatore Maranzano, who was the capo of all the clans in Sicily’s Castellammare del Golfo region, the birthplace of many powerful Sicilian American gangsters. Salvatore Maranzano on September 10, 1931. The Fascist government of Benito Mussolini kicked Maranzano out of Italy in the 1920s. He came to America, settling in Brooklyn. Maranzano built a legitimate real estate brokerage business, which he used as cover for his criminal operations, which included a growing bootlegging business. Eventually, Maranzano was atop an immense criminal organization sprawled across the Northeast United States. He took to mentoring a young man named Joseph Bonanno. Maranzano enjoyed talking about himself and was known to spend an inordinate amount of time telling everyone around him that he had studied for the pr...

Carlo Gambino, the Gambino crime family boss whom the FBI identified as the "boss of bosses" of the entire American Mafia , was cuffed and hauled to court in March 1970. Gambino was arrested in 1970 by the FBI. He'd been driving with his wife, Catherine, when the couple was pulled over at 14th Ave. and 48th Street in Brooklyn. Gambino was "bagged by federal agents... on charges of masterminding a daring plot to pull off a multimillion-dollar armored car robbery," the Daily News reported in a story  originally published on Tuesday, March 24, 1970, written by Edward Kirkman and Harry Schlegel. The agents first brought Gambino to FBI headquarters at 201 E. 69th St. for questioning. Next, he was taken to Federal Court in Foley Square for the arraignment. Gambino's specific charge was conspiracy to violate a federal statute against the interstate transportation of stolen goods. We next learn that Gambino allegedly was already sitting on $3 m...

“Carl wants to swallow up everybody." -- Unnamed Mafia boss via surveillance recording At the end of 1972, Carlo Gambino, boss of the Gambino crime family, was working on a "dramatic reorganization" of New York's Five Families, the likes of which had not been seen since 1931. As radical as this sounds, it is not unbelievable considering some events leading up to it. Gambino Gambino wanted to rid New York of hundreds of Mafia members, then rebuild by inducting only select men who'd proved their loyalty. (He was preparing to open the books in 1973.) Gambino, 70 at the time, believed the "Mafia must retreat to the past in order to survive," law enforcement officials said. The first two crime families on the block were to be the Luchese and Colombo crime families. Then the Bonanno crime family. "Twenty percent of known Mafia members in New York are currently under indictment in cases developed by the Federal Bureau of In...