By the mid-20th century, New York's Five Families were so deeply ingrained in the business world that it seemed like they were invincible.
In part two of this mini-series on New York's organised criminal empire, we'll look at how they managed it, the businesses these criminals operated, and how it eventually all came crashing down.
[00:00:00] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today is part two of our mini-series on the Five Families of New York City.
[00:00:28] In part one we looked at the different Italian-American crime gangs that roamed New York’s streets and warred with one another in those early days, and how one man betrayed his boss and then united the competing groups into one criminal network.
[00:00:44] In today’s episode, we’ll look a little more closely at what the Five Families actually did: their businesses and how they made their money, their roles in politics and trade unionism, and how things started to take a turn for the worse.
[00:00:59] So, let’s get right into it and talk about the Five Families of New York, part two.
[00:01:06] It was April 1992, in New York City.
[00:01:11] Down in Brooklyn, the streets were abuzz with activity and anticipation.
[00:01:17] Hundreds of reporters, TV crews, passersby and police officers crammed around the courthouse doors.
[00:01:26] Inside, the courtroom was stuffed full of lawyers, reporters, guards, and in the middle of it, a silver-haired man with an expensive suit, a smirk on his face.
[00:01:39] His name was John Gotti - the Dapper Don - he was boss of the Gambino crime family and the most powerful man in New York’s criminal underworld.
[00:01:52] Gotti was on trial for multiple murders, racketeering, tax evasion, extortion, loansharking, and illegal gambling.
[00:02:02] It had been, as you might imagine, a very high profile case, and Gotti had lived up to his persona by waving to the crowds and television cameras, even making comments to prison guards about how he had attracted celebrities to the courtroom.
[00:02:20] It had also been a dramatic trial, with interruptions for bomb scares, an attempted hit, or assassination, of the sister of a witness, and even a woman bursting into the courtroom screaming that someone called ‘Gravano’ had killed her sons.
[00:02:38] Sammy ‘The Bull’ Gravano, one of Gotti’s associates in the Gambino family, was on trial for 19 murders and had agreed to testify against him, claiming that Gotti had ordered some of the hits.
[00:02:53] Gotti, despite the severity of the charges against him, didn’t seem to take any of it very seriously.
[00:03:01] He smirked and dismissed Gravano, mocked the prosecutor’s hairstyle, and even muttered comments towards the judge, who threatened to throw him out the courtroom.
[00:03:14] As you might imagine, Gotti was no stranger to criminal trials. That’s how he earned his other nickname - ‘The Teflon Don’ - because nothing ever ‘stuck’ to him.
[00:03:26] Teflon, by the way, is the material used on saucepans and cooking material to stop food sticking to it.
[00:03:34] But this time, things were different - Gotti’s luck was running out.
[00:03:40] Due to Gotti’s profile, the jury were kept anonymous during the trial so they couldn’t be intimidated or killed, with the prosecutor telling them that they shouldn't be frightened to convict a man like Gotti.
[00:03:55] It worked.
[00:03:57] On April the 2nd, Gotti was found guilty of all charges and sentenced to life in prison.
[00:04:05] In a press conference shortly after, the assistant director of the FBI's New York Field Office proudly told the American people: "The Teflon is gone. The don is covered with Velcro, and all the charges stuck."
[00:04:21] As we learned in part one of this mini-series, by the mid-1930s the rival factions within New York’s Italian-American underworld had been carefully, and rather professionally organised.
[00:04:34] Instead of being constantly at war with each other and not only attracting the attention of law enforcement but damaging business, Lucky Luciano called together the bosses of crime families from across the country and established something called ‘The Commission’.
[00:04:52] Instead of being rivals, the Commission put the various Italian-American criminal families into one group, known as La Cosa Nostra, which was run like a business, even having an official board and a chairman.
[00:05:07] As New York dominated the criminal underworld at the time, this meeting in 1931, also officially created New York’s Five Families.
[00:05:18] They were then the Luciano, Bonanno, Profaci, Mangano, and Gagliano crime families.
[00:05:26] These Five Families are, in fact, still in operation today, although their names are slightly different - they’re known today as the Genovese, Bonanno, Colombo, Gambino, and Lucchese crime families.
[00:05:39] So if these Five Families were so strong that they lasted almost a century and counting, how did they manage it, what did they actually do?
[00:05:50] Well, as a general rule, the more illegal the product, the more likely the Five Families were to be involved in its production, distribution and sale.
[00:06:01] And, as you may know, or remember from episode number 261, the US government handed organised criminals a bonanza, a huge money-making opportunity, when alcohol was made illegal in 1920.
[00:06:18] In fact, bootlegged alcohol was the first business of the criminal gangs that became the Five Families, and it is how the original gangsters like Masseria, Maranzano, Al Capone and Lucky Luciano, who we heard plenty about in the last episode, it's how they all made their names in the 1920s.
[00:06:38] These smugglers, or bootleggers, as they were known, used all sorts of ingenious ways to transport alcohol from Canada and from the Caribbean islands into the United States.
[00:06:51] Think fake deliveries, empty trucks to confuse the authorities, barrels with secret bottoms, and all sorts of other creative hiding places.
[00:07:02] Once in the United States, the Five Families organised transportation along rivers to avoid the authorities and they smuggled booze between states.
[00:07:13] In those early years, some of the five families’ other businesses included prostitution - which was the thing that Lucky Luciano would eventually be arrested for - as well as pornography, fraud, and loan-sharking - which is the practice of offering loans at incredibly high interest rates and getting the money back through violence and intimidation.
[00:07:35] Another of their major businesses was illegal gambling.
[00:07:39] In fact, in 1967 a commission designed to investigate organised crime concluded that gambling was the main source of income for the Five Families.
[00:07:50] Some estimates suggest that over half of their revenue came from their ‘bookmakers’, that is, their employees who oversaw the bets.
[00:08:00] They mainly took bets on sporting events such as American football, baseball and basketball, but also horse racing - which is something that was very popular, particularly among the Irish community.
[00:08:13] They also ‘fixed’ sporting events, meaning bribing players to ensure an outcome favourable for their bookies.
[00:08:22] And it’s impossible to talk about the Five Families and their gambling without talking about one place in particular.
[00:08:29] And I don’t mean New York.
[00:08:31] I am talking about a city on the other side of the country, a city in the middle of the desert: I’m sure you’ve guessed it, it’s Las Vegas.
[00:08:40] A quick side note is that we have an entire episode on Las Vegas, it’s episode number 154, so if you haven’t listened to that one yet, I’d definitely encourage you to do so.
[00:08:52] Bringing it back to the story at hand, though, the growth and expansion of Las Vegas as the home of American gambling is critical to the success of the Five Families.
[00:09:03] They worked closely with Jewish mobsters like Bugsy Siegel and Meyer Lensky, and financed, or paid for, the construction of some of the biggest hotels and casinos in Las Vegas.
[00:09:15] They also ran them, which was particularly profitable as it allowed them to take money - known as ‘skimming from the top’ - before it was declared for taxes.
[00:09:26] Back in New York, the Five Families dominated certain sectors, sectors that were, on the face of it at least, perfectly legal.
[00:09:36] To give you just some idea of how dominant the Five Families were in certain industries, in 1987 a court case concluded that four of the five families ran a concrete contractors firm together, in conjunction with each other.
[00:09:53] This company, S&A Concrete, was made up of firms connected to the Gambino and Genovese families, and it was so powerful that it was effectively the only concrete company in New York that could get contracts for jobs worth $5 million or more.
[00:10:11] But even that wasn’t enough.
[00:10:14] The smaller contracts, those between $2 million and $5 million, were given to contractors that the Five Families had connections, and often financial interests, in.
[00:10:26] Any company that won a concrete construction contract was forced to pay a tax of 2%, known as a ‘kick back’, to the Five Families.
[00:10:37] Essentially, if you wanted to use concrete in New York, and clearly using concrete is a fundamental part of building anything in a city, then some if not all of the money involved flowed directly to organised criminals.
[00:10:53] And it wasn’t just concrete.
[00:10:55] This system was common in countless different sectors, including dry cleaning and of course waste disposal - which is what the fictional mafia boss Tony Soprano claimed he did for a living.
[00:11:09] Many Five Families members, ‘made men’, as they were called, also ran seemingly legitimate, or legal, businesses alongside their criminal activity.
[00:11:21] Often these were restaurants, bars, and nightclubs, and would become hangouts not only for New York City’s underworld but also its celebrities and politicians.
[00:11:31] If you’ve seen any gangster films like the Godfather or Goodfellas, you’ll have an idea of what I’m talking about here.
[00:11:39] Think champagne, women in beautiful dresses, men in expensive suits, famous singers and celebrities.
[00:11:47] Perhaps the most famous of all these singers was, of course, Frank Sinatra, whose father was Sicilian and ran a bar during the Prohibition era.
[00:11:57] His uncle, many believe, was a ‘made man’ in the Genovese crime family.
[00:12:03] But despite all the glitz and glamour of the Five Families’ bars and restaurants, these were the exception, not the rule.
[00:12:11] For the most part, they were involved in more boring businesses.
[00:12:16] They owned or controlled supermarkets, petrol stations, trucking companies, waste disposal, or trash collection, as they would say, and delivery companies.
[00:12:27] Often these were simply ways of cleaning, or laundering their ‘dirty money’, that's to say, taking their illegal profits and ‘cleaning’ them by putting them into legal, or supposedly legal, business fronts.
[00:12:42] So, how did the Five Families get away with all this, you might be thinking?
[00:12:47] Well, clearly there was the threat of violence and murder, but they were also so deeply embedded in so much of American society that they became part of the furniture, they greased the wheels of industry and society.
[00:13:03] From trade unions to local government, the Five Families had their fingers in practically everything.
[00:13:10] By the post-war years the Five Families had grown so powerful that bosses often acted as fixers, or middlemen, to settle disputes between politicians, trade unions, police and other criminal gangs.
[00:13:26] They were like the criminal underbelly of society that bound, or held, all the different parts together.
[00:13:34] What’s more, they held great political influence, bribing and corrupting politicians and police officers, and threatening those who didn’t to fall in line.
[00:13:45] Frank Costello, for example, the boss of the Genovese family, was closely connected to figures in the Democratic party in New York, and is believed to have played a pivotal role in helping William O’Dwyer become the city’s mayor in 1945.
[00:14:01] But the connection between the mafia and politics wasn’t just a local, or New York, thing.
[00:14:08] Incredibly, the Five Families also played a role in the Second World War. In fact it was Lucky Luciano himself, the man who created the Commission and established the Five Family structure.
[00:14:21] During the war, the U.S government requested the help of mafia bosses like Luciano to identify potential Italian spies working on American soil, to use their trade union connections to maintain order in the factories and docks, and also, amazingly, to provide Sicilian mafia contacts to the US Navy in order to help produce maps of Sicily in preparation for the Allied invasion in 1943.
[00:14:49] Luciano was released from prison as part of this deal, which is known as ‘Operation Underworld’, and it’s such a good story that it probably needs its own episode.
[00:15:00] So from local politics all the way up to wartime operations, politicians and mafia members have always had a rather uncomfortably close relationship.
[00:15:12] And, what did the Five Families want in return for all of this?
[00:15:16] Well, of course it was a case of “you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours”.
[00:15:22] In return for cash payments or political support, the Five Families were allowed to go about their business without fear of interference.
[00:15:32] But it wasn’t to last, and as so often happens, they got too successful and too confident…
[00:15:40] Whereas in the past, the original bosses and ‘made men’ were more subtle, more secretive about who they were, in the post-war years mafia men started to become more like local celebrities.
[00:15:55] Like Gotti years later, mobsters began to show off their wealth, drive the best cars, and wear expensive suits.
[00:16:05] Mafia men increasingly enjoyed the status that came with being a member of the Five Families - of being ‘made men’.
[00:16:12] All of this was hard for the authorities to ignore.
[00:16:16] Government and law enforcement took notice, and began to crack down on organised crime.
[00:16:24] In 1968, the US Congress passed something called the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act.
[00:16:31] This allowed the use of electric wire taps and meant law enforcement could listen to the mafia’s conversations.
[00:16:38] And crucially, in 1970, Congress passed the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act.
[00:16:46] This became known as RICO, which you might’ve heard of if you’re into mafia movies because it was something that wise guys were always worried about.
[00:16:56] And with good reason.
[00:16:58] RICO essentially put into law very strict punishments for mafia-type criminal activities, and was intended not only to put organised criminals behind bars, but to frighten others into cooperating with the police to avoid serious jail time.
[00:17:15] And it worked.
[00:17:17] That same year, in 1970, the Witness Security Program, which relocated and created new identities for former mob members who cooperated with the government, was created.
[00:17:29] From 1976 to 1982, the undercover FBI agent Joe Pistone managed to infiltrate the and Colombo families using the alias ‘Donnie Brasco’.
[00:17:42] If that name sounds familiar it’s because it’s another iconic mafia movie, and an extremely good one, if you haven’t seen it, with Johnny Depp as the FBI agent and Al Pacino as a member of the Bonnano crime family.
[00:17:56] Based on Pistone’s, or rather, Donnie Brasco’s undercover operation, dozens of Five Family members were arrested and convicted.
[00:18:06] Another major blow to the Five Families was the legalisation of casinos outside Nevada which happened in 1978, and was something that removed the mafia’s firm hold over the gambling industry.
[00:18:19] As the 1980s rolled along, practically every Five Family boss and capo was in jail or awaiting trial.
[00:18:28] And as law enforcement tightened its grip on the mob, the mafia began to turn on one another and Omertà, their code of silence, began to break down.
[00:18:41] In 1991, Alphonse D’Arco, the acting boss of the Lucchese family, became the highest-ranking member to break the code, and his evidence put dozens of Five Family members in prison.
[00:18:55] By the mid-1990s, hundreds of Five Family members and associates began giving each other up, that is to say, giving evidence against one another, including a Colombo family capo and consigliere, and a Lucchese family capo and underboss - high ranking, made men.
[00:19:14] This was an important step, as for anyone found, or even suspected, to be talking to the police, the punishment was swift.
[00:19:23] In 1990 the acting boss of the Lucchese family, a man known as ‘Louie Bagels’, had murdered a man called Bruno Facciolo in Brooklyn.
[00:19:33] Facciolo, it would transpire, was a member of the Lucchese family who was cooperating with the authorities, breaking the strict code of silence, of omertà.
[00:19:44] Just like the death card was placed in Joe ‘The Boss’ Masseria’s dead hand back in 1931, as you might remember from the introduction to episode one, Louie Bagels stuffed a dead bird into Facciolo’s mouth to send a message: “you sing to the feds, you’re going to get your head blown off,” as it was described in the trial.
[00:20:07] But the authorities were winning, the Five Families were shrinking.
[00:20:12] By the early 21st century, the Italian-American mob was a fraction of the size it used to be, and the FBI even began to cut funding from the organised crime task forces that were investigating the Five Families to instead focus on anti-terrorism.
[00:20:29] And as the 2000s became the 2010s, the Families were down but not completely out.
[00:20:36] They remained active in New York, mostly in their traditional businesses like loan-sharking and illegal gambling, but their power bases in trade unions and politics, and their monopoly of industries, was all but gone.
[00:20:51] Whereas in the past each family would have had hundreds or even thousands of associates, in 2019 the FBI estimated that there were just 3,000 members and affiliates of Italian-American organised crime in the entire country.
[00:21:07] Changing police tactics and technology, and the imprisonment of hundreds of ‘made men’ in the 1980s and 1990s, along with the legalisation of gambling, the decline of trade union power, the shrinking of traditional Italian neighbourhoods and the arrival of new waves of migrant groups - and their criminal gangs - this all squeezed the original “Five Families” out.
[00:21:30] So, today, this stereotyped idea of the Italian-American gangster, it has been largely relegated to our imaginations, and to the big screen.
[00:21:41] When the going was good, it was very good. But it wasn't to last forever.
[00:21:48] As the head of the Gambino family, Paul Castellano, once put it, “this life of ours, this is a wonderful life. If you can get through life like this and get away with it, hey, that’s great. But it’s very, very unpredictable. There are so many ways you can screw it up.”
[00:22:05] That is to say, Castellano and other members of the Five Families knew the type of life they were signing up for, and that, for most of them, it would never last.
[00:22:18] OK then, that’s it for part two of this mini series, and this exploration into the Five Families.
[00:22:25] I hope it was an interesting one, and whether you knew a lot about the Five Families or the New York mafia, or this was the first time you’d heard anything about it, well I hope you learned something new.
[00:22:36] As always, I would love to know what you thought about this episode, and about this mini-series in general.
[00:22:42] How many Italian-American mafia movies have you seen? Have you watched them in the original?
[00:22:48] How many of the characters in today’s episode had you heard about?
[00:22:51] Why do you think we have such a fascination with this part of New York history and culture?
[00:22:56] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:23:00] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:23:08] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:23:12] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
[00:00:00] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today is part two of our mini-series on the Five Families of New York City.
[00:00:28] In part one we looked at the different Italian-American crime gangs that roamed New York’s streets and warred with one another in those early days, and how one man betrayed his boss and then united the competing groups into one criminal network.
[00:00:44] In today’s episode, we’ll look a little more closely at what the Five Families actually did: their businesses and how they made their money, their roles in politics and trade unionism, and how things started to take a turn for the worse.
[00:00:59] So, let’s get right into it and talk about the Five Families of New York, part two.
[00:01:06] It was April 1992, in New York City.
[00:01:11] Down in Brooklyn, the streets were abuzz with activity and anticipation.
[00:01:17] Hundreds of reporters, TV crews, passersby and police officers crammed around the courthouse doors.
[00:01:26] Inside, the courtroom was stuffed full of lawyers, reporters, guards, and in the middle of it, a silver-haired man with an expensive suit, a smirk on his face.
[00:01:39] His name was John Gotti - the Dapper Don - he was boss of the Gambino crime family and the most powerful man in New York’s criminal underworld.
[00:01:52] Gotti was on trial for multiple murders, racketeering, tax evasion, extortion, loansharking, and illegal gambling.
[00:02:02] It had been, as you might imagine, a very high profile case, and Gotti had lived up to his persona by waving to the crowds and television cameras, even making comments to prison guards about how he had attracted celebrities to the courtroom.
[00:02:20] It had also been a dramatic trial, with interruptions for bomb scares, an attempted hit, or assassination, of the sister of a witness, and even a woman bursting into the courtroom screaming that someone called ‘Gravano’ had killed her sons.
[00:02:38] Sammy ‘The Bull’ Gravano, one of Gotti’s associates in the Gambino family, was on trial for 19 murders and had agreed to testify against him, claiming that Gotti had ordered some of the hits.
[00:02:53] Gotti, despite the severity of the charges against him, didn’t seem to take any of it very seriously.
[00:03:01] He smirked and dismissed Gravano, mocked the prosecutor’s hairstyle, and even muttered comments towards the judge, who threatened to throw him out the courtroom.
[00:03:14] As you might imagine, Gotti was no stranger to criminal trials. That’s how he earned his other nickname - ‘The Teflon Don’ - because nothing ever ‘stuck’ to him.
[00:03:26] Teflon, by the way, is the material used on saucepans and cooking material to stop food sticking to it.
[00:03:34] But this time, things were different - Gotti’s luck was running out.
[00:03:40] Due to Gotti’s profile, the jury were kept anonymous during the trial so they couldn’t be intimidated or killed, with the prosecutor telling them that they shouldn't be frightened to convict a man like Gotti.
[00:03:55] It worked.
[00:03:57] On April the 2nd, Gotti was found guilty of all charges and sentenced to life in prison.
[00:04:05] In a press conference shortly after, the assistant director of the FBI's New York Field Office proudly told the American people: "The Teflon is gone. The don is covered with Velcro, and all the charges stuck."
[00:04:21] As we learned in part one of this mini-series, by the mid-1930s the rival factions within New York’s Italian-American underworld had been carefully, and rather professionally organised.
[00:04:34] Instead of being constantly at war with each other and not only attracting the attention of law enforcement but damaging business, Lucky Luciano called together the bosses of crime families from across the country and established something called ‘The Commission’.
[00:04:52] Instead of being rivals, the Commission put the various Italian-American criminal families into one group, known as La Cosa Nostra, which was run like a business, even having an official board and a chairman.
[00:05:07] As New York dominated the criminal underworld at the time, this meeting in 1931, also officially created New York’s Five Families.
[00:05:18] They were then the Luciano, Bonanno, Profaci, Mangano, and Gagliano crime families.
[00:05:26] These Five Families are, in fact, still in operation today, although their names are slightly different - they’re known today as the Genovese, Bonanno, Colombo, Gambino, and Lucchese crime families.
[00:05:39] So if these Five Families were so strong that they lasted almost a century and counting, how did they manage it, what did they actually do?
[00:05:50] Well, as a general rule, the more illegal the product, the more likely the Five Families were to be involved in its production, distribution and sale.
[00:06:01] And, as you may know, or remember from episode number 261, the US government handed organised criminals a bonanza, a huge money-making opportunity, when alcohol was made illegal in 1920.
[00:06:18] In fact, bootlegged alcohol was the first business of the criminal gangs that became the Five Families, and it is how the original gangsters like Masseria, Maranzano, Al Capone and Lucky Luciano, who we heard plenty about in the last episode, it's how they all made their names in the 1920s.
[00:06:38] These smugglers, or bootleggers, as they were known, used all sorts of ingenious ways to transport alcohol from Canada and from the Caribbean islands into the United States.
[00:06:51] Think fake deliveries, empty trucks to confuse the authorities, barrels with secret bottoms, and all sorts of other creative hiding places.
[00:07:02] Once in the United States, the Five Families organised transportation along rivers to avoid the authorities and they smuggled booze between states.
[00:07:13] In those early years, some of the five families’ other businesses included prostitution - which was the thing that Lucky Luciano would eventually be arrested for - as well as pornography, fraud, and loan-sharking - which is the practice of offering loans at incredibly high interest rates and getting the money back through violence and intimidation.
[00:07:35] Another of their major businesses was illegal gambling.
[00:07:39] In fact, in 1967 a commission designed to investigate organised crime concluded that gambling was the main source of income for the Five Families.
[00:07:50] Some estimates suggest that over half of their revenue came from their ‘bookmakers’, that is, their employees who oversaw the bets.
[00:08:00] They mainly took bets on sporting events such as American football, baseball and basketball, but also horse racing - which is something that was very popular, particularly among the Irish community.
[00:08:13] They also ‘fixed’ sporting events, meaning bribing players to ensure an outcome favourable for their bookies.
[00:08:22] And it’s impossible to talk about the Five Families and their gambling without talking about one place in particular.
[00:08:29] And I don’t mean New York.
[00:08:31] I am talking about a city on the other side of the country, a city in the middle of the desert: I’m sure you’ve guessed it, it’s Las Vegas.
[00:08:40] A quick side note is that we have an entire episode on Las Vegas, it’s episode number 154, so if you haven’t listened to that one yet, I’d definitely encourage you to do so.
[00:08:52] Bringing it back to the story at hand, though, the growth and expansion of Las Vegas as the home of American gambling is critical to the success of the Five Families.
[00:09:03] They worked closely with Jewish mobsters like Bugsy Siegel and Meyer Lensky, and financed, or paid for, the construction of some of the biggest hotels and casinos in Las Vegas.
[00:09:15] They also ran them, which was particularly profitable as it allowed them to take money - known as ‘skimming from the top’ - before it was declared for taxes.
[00:09:26] Back in New York, the Five Families dominated certain sectors, sectors that were, on the face of it at least, perfectly legal.
[00:09:36] To give you just some idea of how dominant the Five Families were in certain industries, in 1987 a court case concluded that four of the five families ran a concrete contractors firm together, in conjunction with each other.
[00:09:53] This company, S&A Concrete, was made up of firms connected to the Gambino and Genovese families, and it was so powerful that it was effectively the only concrete company in New York that could get contracts for jobs worth $5 million or more.
[00:10:11] But even that wasn’t enough.
[00:10:14] The smaller contracts, those between $2 million and $5 million, were given to contractors that the Five Families had connections, and often financial interests, in.
[00:10:26] Any company that won a concrete construction contract was forced to pay a tax of 2%, known as a ‘kick back’, to the Five Families.
[00:10:37] Essentially, if you wanted to use concrete in New York, and clearly using concrete is a fundamental part of building anything in a city, then some if not all of the money involved flowed directly to organised criminals.
[00:10:53] And it wasn’t just concrete.
[00:10:55] This system was common in countless different sectors, including dry cleaning and of course waste disposal - which is what the fictional mafia boss Tony Soprano claimed he did for a living.
[00:11:09] Many Five Families members, ‘made men’, as they were called, also ran seemingly legitimate, or legal, businesses alongside their criminal activity.
[00:11:21] Often these were restaurants, bars, and nightclubs, and would become hangouts not only for New York City’s underworld but also its celebrities and politicians.
[00:11:31] If you’ve seen any gangster films like the Godfather or Goodfellas, you’ll have an idea of what I’m talking about here.
[00:11:39] Think champagne, women in beautiful dresses, men in expensive suits, famous singers and celebrities.
[00:11:47] Perhaps the most famous of all these singers was, of course, Frank Sinatra, whose father was Sicilian and ran a bar during the Prohibition era.
[00:11:57] His uncle, many believe, was a ‘made man’ in the Genovese crime family.
[00:12:03] But despite all the glitz and glamour of the Five Families’ bars and restaurants, these were the exception, not the rule.
[00:12:11] For the most part, they were involved in more boring businesses.
[00:12:16] They owned or controlled supermarkets, petrol stations, trucking companies, waste disposal, or trash collection, as they would say, and delivery companies.
[00:12:27] Often these were simply ways of cleaning, or laundering their ‘dirty money’, that's to say, taking their illegal profits and ‘cleaning’ them by putting them into legal, or supposedly legal, business fronts.
[00:12:42] So, how did the Five Families get away with all this, you might be thinking?
[00:12:47] Well, clearly there was the threat of violence and murder, but they were also so deeply embedded in so much of American society that they became part of the furniture, they greased the wheels of industry and society.
[00:13:03] From trade unions to local government, the Five Families had their fingers in practically everything.
[00:13:10] By the post-war years the Five Families had grown so powerful that bosses often acted as fixers, or middlemen, to settle disputes between politicians, trade unions, police and other criminal gangs.
[00:13:26] They were like the criminal underbelly of society that bound, or held, all the different parts together.
[00:13:34] What’s more, they held great political influence, bribing and corrupting politicians and police officers, and threatening those who didn’t to fall in line.
[00:13:45] Frank Costello, for example, the boss of the Genovese family, was closely connected to figures in the Democratic party in New York, and is believed to have played a pivotal role in helping William O’Dwyer become the city’s mayor in 1945.
[00:14:01] But the connection between the mafia and politics wasn’t just a local, or New York, thing.
[00:14:08] Incredibly, the Five Families also played a role in the Second World War. In fact it was Lucky Luciano himself, the man who created the Commission and established the Five Family structure.
[00:14:21] During the war, the U.S government requested the help of mafia bosses like Luciano to identify potential Italian spies working on American soil, to use their trade union connections to maintain order in the factories and docks, and also, amazingly, to provide Sicilian mafia contacts to the US Navy in order to help produce maps of Sicily in preparation for the Allied invasion in 1943.
[00:14:49] Luciano was released from prison as part of this deal, which is known as ‘Operation Underworld’, and it’s such a good story that it probably needs its own episode.
[00:15:00] So from local politics all the way up to wartime operations, politicians and mafia members have always had a rather uncomfortably close relationship.
[00:15:12] And, what did the Five Families want in return for all of this?
[00:15:16] Well, of course it was a case of “you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours”.
[00:15:22] In return for cash payments or political support, the Five Families were allowed to go about their business without fear of interference.
[00:15:32] But it wasn’t to last, and as so often happens, they got too successful and too confident…
[00:15:40] Whereas in the past, the original bosses and ‘made men’ were more subtle, more secretive about who they were, in the post-war years mafia men started to become more like local celebrities.
[00:15:55] Like Gotti years later, mobsters began to show off their wealth, drive the best cars, and wear expensive suits.
[00:16:05] Mafia men increasingly enjoyed the status that came with being a member of the Five Families - of being ‘made men’.
[00:16:12] All of this was hard for the authorities to ignore.
[00:16:16] Government and law enforcement took notice, and began to crack down on organised crime.
[00:16:24] In 1968, the US Congress passed something called the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act.
[00:16:31] This allowed the use of electric wire taps and meant law enforcement could listen to the mafia’s conversations.
[00:16:38] And crucially, in 1970, Congress passed the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act.
[00:16:46] This became known as RICO, which you might’ve heard of if you’re into mafia movies because it was something that wise guys were always worried about.
[00:16:56] And with good reason.
[00:16:58] RICO essentially put into law very strict punishments for mafia-type criminal activities, and was intended not only to put organised criminals behind bars, but to frighten others into cooperating with the police to avoid serious jail time.
[00:17:15] And it worked.
[00:17:17] That same year, in 1970, the Witness Security Program, which relocated and created new identities for former mob members who cooperated with the government, was created.
[00:17:29] From 1976 to 1982, the undercover FBI agent Joe Pistone managed to infiltrate the and Colombo families using the alias ‘Donnie Brasco’.
[00:17:42] If that name sounds familiar it’s because it’s another iconic mafia movie, and an extremely good one, if you haven’t seen it, with Johnny Depp as the FBI agent and Al Pacino as a member of the Bonnano crime family.
[00:17:56] Based on Pistone’s, or rather, Donnie Brasco’s undercover operation, dozens of Five Family members were arrested and convicted.
[00:18:06] Another major blow to the Five Families was the legalisation of casinos outside Nevada which happened in 1978, and was something that removed the mafia’s firm hold over the gambling industry.
[00:18:19] As the 1980s rolled along, practically every Five Family boss and capo was in jail or awaiting trial.
[00:18:28] And as law enforcement tightened its grip on the mob, the mafia began to turn on one another and Omertà, their code of silence, began to break down.
[00:18:41] In 1991, Alphonse D’Arco, the acting boss of the Lucchese family, became the highest-ranking member to break the code, and his evidence put dozens of Five Family members in prison.
[00:18:55] By the mid-1990s, hundreds of Five Family members and associates began giving each other up, that is to say, giving evidence against one another, including a Colombo family capo and consigliere, and a Lucchese family capo and underboss - high ranking, made men.
[00:19:14] This was an important step, as for anyone found, or even suspected, to be talking to the police, the punishment was swift.
[00:19:23] In 1990 the acting boss of the Lucchese family, a man known as ‘Louie Bagels’, had murdered a man called Bruno Facciolo in Brooklyn.
[00:19:33] Facciolo, it would transpire, was a member of the Lucchese family who was cooperating with the authorities, breaking the strict code of silence, of omertà.
[00:19:44] Just like the death card was placed in Joe ‘The Boss’ Masseria’s dead hand back in 1931, as you might remember from the introduction to episode one, Louie Bagels stuffed a dead bird into Facciolo’s mouth to send a message: “you sing to the feds, you’re going to get your head blown off,” as it was described in the trial.
[00:20:07] But the authorities were winning, the Five Families were shrinking.
[00:20:12] By the early 21st century, the Italian-American mob was a fraction of the size it used to be, and the FBI even began to cut funding from the organised crime task forces that were investigating the Five Families to instead focus on anti-terrorism.
[00:20:29] And as the 2000s became the 2010s, the Families were down but not completely out.
[00:20:36] They remained active in New York, mostly in their traditional businesses like loan-sharking and illegal gambling, but their power bases in trade unions and politics, and their monopoly of industries, was all but gone.
[00:20:51] Whereas in the past each family would have had hundreds or even thousands of associates, in 2019 the FBI estimated that there were just 3,000 members and affiliates of Italian-American organised crime in the entire country.
[00:21:07] Changing police tactics and technology, and the imprisonment of hundreds of ‘made men’ in the 1980s and 1990s, along with the legalisation of gambling, the decline of trade union power, the shrinking of traditional Italian neighbourhoods and the arrival of new waves of migrant groups - and their criminal gangs - this all squeezed the original “Five Families” out.
[00:21:30] So, today, this stereotyped idea of the Italian-American gangster, it has been largely relegated to our imaginations, and to the big screen.
[00:21:41] When the going was good, it was very good. But it wasn't to last forever.
[00:21:48] As the head of the Gambino family, Paul Castellano, once put it, “this life of ours, this is a wonderful life. If you can get through life like this and get away with it, hey, that’s great. But it’s very, very unpredictable. There are so many ways you can screw it up.”
[00:22:05] That is to say, Castellano and other members of the Five Families knew the type of life they were signing up for, and that, for most of them, it would never last.
[00:22:18] OK then, that’s it for part two of this mini series, and this exploration into the Five Families.
[00:22:25] I hope it was an interesting one, and whether you knew a lot about the Five Families or the New York mafia, or this was the first time you’d heard anything about it, well I hope you learned something new.
[00:22:36] As always, I would love to know what you thought about this episode, and about this mini-series in general.
[00:22:42] How many Italian-American mafia movies have you seen? Have you watched them in the original?
[00:22:48] How many of the characters in today’s episode had you heard about?
[00:22:51] Why do you think we have such a fascination with this part of New York history and culture?
[00:22:56] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:23:00] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:23:08] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:23:12] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
[00:00:00] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today is part two of our mini-series on the Five Families of New York City.
[00:00:28] In part one we looked at the different Italian-American crime gangs that roamed New York’s streets and warred with one another in those early days, and how one man betrayed his boss and then united the competing groups into one criminal network.
[00:00:44] In today’s episode, we’ll look a little more closely at what the Five Families actually did: their businesses and how they made their money, their roles in politics and trade unionism, and how things started to take a turn for the worse.
[00:00:59] So, let’s get right into it and talk about the Five Families of New York, part two.
[00:01:06] It was April 1992, in New York City.
[00:01:11] Down in Brooklyn, the streets were abuzz with activity and anticipation.
[00:01:17] Hundreds of reporters, TV crews, passersby and police officers crammed around the courthouse doors.
[00:01:26] Inside, the courtroom was stuffed full of lawyers, reporters, guards, and in the middle of it, a silver-haired man with an expensive suit, a smirk on his face.
[00:01:39] His name was John Gotti - the Dapper Don - he was boss of the Gambino crime family and the most powerful man in New York’s criminal underworld.
[00:01:52] Gotti was on trial for multiple murders, racketeering, tax evasion, extortion, loansharking, and illegal gambling.
[00:02:02] It had been, as you might imagine, a very high profile case, and Gotti had lived up to his persona by waving to the crowds and television cameras, even making comments to prison guards about how he had attracted celebrities to the courtroom.
[00:02:20] It had also been a dramatic trial, with interruptions for bomb scares, an attempted hit, or assassination, of the sister of a witness, and even a woman bursting into the courtroom screaming that someone called ‘Gravano’ had killed her sons.
[00:02:38] Sammy ‘The Bull’ Gravano, one of Gotti’s associates in the Gambino family, was on trial for 19 murders and had agreed to testify against him, claiming that Gotti had ordered some of the hits.
[00:02:53] Gotti, despite the severity of the charges against him, didn’t seem to take any of it very seriously.
[00:03:01] He smirked and dismissed Gravano, mocked the prosecutor’s hairstyle, and even muttered comments towards the judge, who threatened to throw him out the courtroom.
[00:03:14] As you might imagine, Gotti was no stranger to criminal trials. That’s how he earned his other nickname - ‘The Teflon Don’ - because nothing ever ‘stuck’ to him.
[00:03:26] Teflon, by the way, is the material used on saucepans and cooking material to stop food sticking to it.
[00:03:34] But this time, things were different - Gotti’s luck was running out.
[00:03:40] Due to Gotti’s profile, the jury were kept anonymous during the trial so they couldn’t be intimidated or killed, with the prosecutor telling them that they shouldn't be frightened to convict a man like Gotti.
[00:03:55] It worked.
[00:03:57] On April the 2nd, Gotti was found guilty of all charges and sentenced to life in prison.
[00:04:05] In a press conference shortly after, the assistant director of the FBI's New York Field Office proudly told the American people: "The Teflon is gone. The don is covered with Velcro, and all the charges stuck."
[00:04:21] As we learned in part one of this mini-series, by the mid-1930s the rival factions within New York’s Italian-American underworld had been carefully, and rather professionally organised.
[00:04:34] Instead of being constantly at war with each other and not only attracting the attention of law enforcement but damaging business, Lucky Luciano called together the bosses of crime families from across the country and established something called ‘The Commission’.
[00:04:52] Instead of being rivals, the Commission put the various Italian-American criminal families into one group, known as La Cosa Nostra, which was run like a business, even having an official board and a chairman.
[00:05:07] As New York dominated the criminal underworld at the time, this meeting in 1931, also officially created New York’s Five Families.
[00:05:18] They were then the Luciano, Bonanno, Profaci, Mangano, and Gagliano crime families.
[00:05:26] These Five Families are, in fact, still in operation today, although their names are slightly different - they’re known today as the Genovese, Bonanno, Colombo, Gambino, and Lucchese crime families.
[00:05:39] So if these Five Families were so strong that they lasted almost a century and counting, how did they manage it, what did they actually do?
[00:05:50] Well, as a general rule, the more illegal the product, the more likely the Five Families were to be involved in its production, distribution and sale.
[00:06:01] And, as you may know, or remember from episode number 261, the US government handed organised criminals a bonanza, a huge money-making opportunity, when alcohol was made illegal in 1920.
[00:06:18] In fact, bootlegged alcohol was the first business of the criminal gangs that became the Five Families, and it is how the original gangsters like Masseria, Maranzano, Al Capone and Lucky Luciano, who we heard plenty about in the last episode, it's how they all made their names in the 1920s.
[00:06:38] These smugglers, or bootleggers, as they were known, used all sorts of ingenious ways to transport alcohol from Canada and from the Caribbean islands into the United States.
[00:06:51] Think fake deliveries, empty trucks to confuse the authorities, barrels with secret bottoms, and all sorts of other creative hiding places.
[00:07:02] Once in the United States, the Five Families organised transportation along rivers to avoid the authorities and they smuggled booze between states.
[00:07:13] In those early years, some of the five families’ other businesses included prostitution - which was the thing that Lucky Luciano would eventually be arrested for - as well as pornography, fraud, and loan-sharking - which is the practice of offering loans at incredibly high interest rates and getting the money back through violence and intimidation.
[00:07:35] Another of their major businesses was illegal gambling.
[00:07:39] In fact, in 1967 a commission designed to investigate organised crime concluded that gambling was the main source of income for the Five Families.
[00:07:50] Some estimates suggest that over half of their revenue came from their ‘bookmakers’, that is, their employees who oversaw the bets.
[00:08:00] They mainly took bets on sporting events such as American football, baseball and basketball, but also horse racing - which is something that was very popular, particularly among the Irish community.
[00:08:13] They also ‘fixed’ sporting events, meaning bribing players to ensure an outcome favourable for their bookies.
[00:08:22] And it’s impossible to talk about the Five Families and their gambling without talking about one place in particular.
[00:08:29] And I don’t mean New York.
[00:08:31] I am talking about a city on the other side of the country, a city in the middle of the desert: I’m sure you’ve guessed it, it’s Las Vegas.
[00:08:40] A quick side note is that we have an entire episode on Las Vegas, it’s episode number 154, so if you haven’t listened to that one yet, I’d definitely encourage you to do so.
[00:08:52] Bringing it back to the story at hand, though, the growth and expansion of Las Vegas as the home of American gambling is critical to the success of the Five Families.
[00:09:03] They worked closely with Jewish mobsters like Bugsy Siegel and Meyer Lensky, and financed, or paid for, the construction of some of the biggest hotels and casinos in Las Vegas.
[00:09:15] They also ran them, which was particularly profitable as it allowed them to take money - known as ‘skimming from the top’ - before it was declared for taxes.
[00:09:26] Back in New York, the Five Families dominated certain sectors, sectors that were, on the face of it at least, perfectly legal.
[00:09:36] To give you just some idea of how dominant the Five Families were in certain industries, in 1987 a court case concluded that four of the five families ran a concrete contractors firm together, in conjunction with each other.
[00:09:53] This company, S&A Concrete, was made up of firms connected to the Gambino and Genovese families, and it was so powerful that it was effectively the only concrete company in New York that could get contracts for jobs worth $5 million or more.
[00:10:11] But even that wasn’t enough.
[00:10:14] The smaller contracts, those between $2 million and $5 million, were given to contractors that the Five Families had connections, and often financial interests, in.
[00:10:26] Any company that won a concrete construction contract was forced to pay a tax of 2%, known as a ‘kick back’, to the Five Families.
[00:10:37] Essentially, if you wanted to use concrete in New York, and clearly using concrete is a fundamental part of building anything in a city, then some if not all of the money involved flowed directly to organised criminals.
[00:10:53] And it wasn’t just concrete.
[00:10:55] This system was common in countless different sectors, including dry cleaning and of course waste disposal - which is what the fictional mafia boss Tony Soprano claimed he did for a living.
[00:11:09] Many Five Families members, ‘made men’, as they were called, also ran seemingly legitimate, or legal, businesses alongside their criminal activity.
[00:11:21] Often these were restaurants, bars, and nightclubs, and would become hangouts not only for New York City’s underworld but also its celebrities and politicians.
[00:11:31] If you’ve seen any gangster films like the Godfather or Goodfellas, you’ll have an idea of what I’m talking about here.
[00:11:39] Think champagne, women in beautiful dresses, men in expensive suits, famous singers and celebrities.
[00:11:47] Perhaps the most famous of all these singers was, of course, Frank Sinatra, whose father was Sicilian and ran a bar during the Prohibition era.
[00:11:57] His uncle, many believe, was a ‘made man’ in the Genovese crime family.
[00:12:03] But despite all the glitz and glamour of the Five Families’ bars and restaurants, these were the exception, not the rule.
[00:12:11] For the most part, they were involved in more boring businesses.
[00:12:16] They owned or controlled supermarkets, petrol stations, trucking companies, waste disposal, or trash collection, as they would say, and delivery companies.
[00:12:27] Often these were simply ways of cleaning, or laundering their ‘dirty money’, that's to say, taking their illegal profits and ‘cleaning’ them by putting them into legal, or supposedly legal, business fronts.
[00:12:42] So, how did the Five Families get away with all this, you might be thinking?
[00:12:47] Well, clearly there was the threat of violence and murder, but they were also so deeply embedded in so much of American society that they became part of the furniture, they greased the wheels of industry and society.
[00:13:03] From trade unions to local government, the Five Families had their fingers in practically everything.
[00:13:10] By the post-war years the Five Families had grown so powerful that bosses often acted as fixers, or middlemen, to settle disputes between politicians, trade unions, police and other criminal gangs.
[00:13:26] They were like the criminal underbelly of society that bound, or held, all the different parts together.
[00:13:34] What’s more, they held great political influence, bribing and corrupting politicians and police officers, and threatening those who didn’t to fall in line.
[00:13:45] Frank Costello, for example, the boss of the Genovese family, was closely connected to figures in the Democratic party in New York, and is believed to have played a pivotal role in helping William O’Dwyer become the city’s mayor in 1945.
[00:14:01] But the connection between the mafia and politics wasn’t just a local, or New York, thing.
[00:14:08] Incredibly, the Five Families also played a role in the Second World War. In fact it was Lucky Luciano himself, the man who created the Commission and established the Five Family structure.
[00:14:21] During the war, the U.S government requested the help of mafia bosses like Luciano to identify potential Italian spies working on American soil, to use their trade union connections to maintain order in the factories and docks, and also, amazingly, to provide Sicilian mafia contacts to the US Navy in order to help produce maps of Sicily in preparation for the Allied invasion in 1943.
[00:14:49] Luciano was released from prison as part of this deal, which is known as ‘Operation Underworld’, and it’s such a good story that it probably needs its own episode.
[00:15:00] So from local politics all the way up to wartime operations, politicians and mafia members have always had a rather uncomfortably close relationship.
[00:15:12] And, what did the Five Families want in return for all of this?
[00:15:16] Well, of course it was a case of “you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours”.
[00:15:22] In return for cash payments or political support, the Five Families were allowed to go about their business without fear of interference.
[00:15:32] But it wasn’t to last, and as so often happens, they got too successful and too confident…
[00:15:40] Whereas in the past, the original bosses and ‘made men’ were more subtle, more secretive about who they were, in the post-war years mafia men started to become more like local celebrities.
[00:15:55] Like Gotti years later, mobsters began to show off their wealth, drive the best cars, and wear expensive suits.
[00:16:05] Mafia men increasingly enjoyed the status that came with being a member of the Five Families - of being ‘made men’.
[00:16:12] All of this was hard for the authorities to ignore.
[00:16:16] Government and law enforcement took notice, and began to crack down on organised crime.
[00:16:24] In 1968, the US Congress passed something called the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act.
[00:16:31] This allowed the use of electric wire taps and meant law enforcement could listen to the mafia’s conversations.
[00:16:38] And crucially, in 1970, Congress passed the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act.
[00:16:46] This became known as RICO, which you might’ve heard of if you’re into mafia movies because it was something that wise guys were always worried about.
[00:16:56] And with good reason.
[00:16:58] RICO essentially put into law very strict punishments for mafia-type criminal activities, and was intended not only to put organised criminals behind bars, but to frighten others into cooperating with the police to avoid serious jail time.
[00:17:15] And it worked.
[00:17:17] That same year, in 1970, the Witness Security Program, which relocated and created new identities for former mob members who cooperated with the government, was created.
[00:17:29] From 1976 to 1982, the undercover FBI agent Joe Pistone managed to infiltrate the and Colombo families using the alias ‘Donnie Brasco’.
[00:17:42] If that name sounds familiar it’s because it’s another iconic mafia movie, and an extremely good one, if you haven’t seen it, with Johnny Depp as the FBI agent and Al Pacino as a member of the Bonnano crime family.
[00:17:56] Based on Pistone’s, or rather, Donnie Brasco’s undercover operation, dozens of Five Family members were arrested and convicted.
[00:18:06] Another major blow to the Five Families was the legalisation of casinos outside Nevada which happened in 1978, and was something that removed the mafia’s firm hold over the gambling industry.
[00:18:19] As the 1980s rolled along, practically every Five Family boss and capo was in jail or awaiting trial.
[00:18:28] And as law enforcement tightened its grip on the mob, the mafia began to turn on one another and Omertà, their code of silence, began to break down.
[00:18:41] In 1991, Alphonse D’Arco, the acting boss of the Lucchese family, became the highest-ranking member to break the code, and his evidence put dozens of Five Family members in prison.
[00:18:55] By the mid-1990s, hundreds of Five Family members and associates began giving each other up, that is to say, giving evidence against one another, including a Colombo family capo and consigliere, and a Lucchese family capo and underboss - high ranking, made men.
[00:19:14] This was an important step, as for anyone found, or even suspected, to be talking to the police, the punishment was swift.
[00:19:23] In 1990 the acting boss of the Lucchese family, a man known as ‘Louie Bagels’, had murdered a man called Bruno Facciolo in Brooklyn.
[00:19:33] Facciolo, it would transpire, was a member of the Lucchese family who was cooperating with the authorities, breaking the strict code of silence, of omertà.
[00:19:44] Just like the death card was placed in Joe ‘The Boss’ Masseria’s dead hand back in 1931, as you might remember from the introduction to episode one, Louie Bagels stuffed a dead bird into Facciolo’s mouth to send a message: “you sing to the feds, you’re going to get your head blown off,” as it was described in the trial.
[00:20:07] But the authorities were winning, the Five Families were shrinking.
[00:20:12] By the early 21st century, the Italian-American mob was a fraction of the size it used to be, and the FBI even began to cut funding from the organised crime task forces that were investigating the Five Families to instead focus on anti-terrorism.
[00:20:29] And as the 2000s became the 2010s, the Families were down but not completely out.
[00:20:36] They remained active in New York, mostly in their traditional businesses like loan-sharking and illegal gambling, but their power bases in trade unions and politics, and their monopoly of industries, was all but gone.
[00:20:51] Whereas in the past each family would have had hundreds or even thousands of associates, in 2019 the FBI estimated that there were just 3,000 members and affiliates of Italian-American organised crime in the entire country.
[00:21:07] Changing police tactics and technology, and the imprisonment of hundreds of ‘made men’ in the 1980s and 1990s, along with the legalisation of gambling, the decline of trade union power, the shrinking of traditional Italian neighbourhoods and the arrival of new waves of migrant groups - and their criminal gangs - this all squeezed the original “Five Families” out.
[00:21:30] So, today, this stereotyped idea of the Italian-American gangster, it has been largely relegated to our imaginations, and to the big screen.
[00:21:41] When the going was good, it was very good. But it wasn't to last forever.
[00:21:48] As the head of the Gambino family, Paul Castellano, once put it, “this life of ours, this is a wonderful life. If you can get through life like this and get away with it, hey, that’s great. But it’s very, very unpredictable. There are so many ways you can screw it up.”
[00:22:05] That is to say, Castellano and other members of the Five Families knew the type of life they were signing up for, and that, for most of them, it would never last.
[00:22:18] OK then, that’s it for part two of this mini series, and this exploration into the Five Families.
[00:22:25] I hope it was an interesting one, and whether you knew a lot about the Five Families or the New York mafia, or this was the first time you’d heard anything about it, well I hope you learned something new.
[00:22:36] As always, I would love to know what you thought about this episode, and about this mini-series in general.
[00:22:42] How many Italian-American mafia movies have you seen? Have you watched them in the original?
[00:22:48] How many of the characters in today’s episode had you heard about?
[00:22:51] Why do you think we have such a fascination with this part of New York history and culture?
[00:22:56] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:23:00] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:23:08] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:23:12] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
