For much of the last century, the American mafia controlled industries, kept police, judges, and politicians on its payroll and literally got away with murder. But somewhere in between Don Corleone’s version of La Cosa Nostra and Tony Soprano’s, the once-powerful organized crime syndicate lost its grip on power. In a three-part investigation, The Daily Wire looks at what the mob once was, how it was brought down, and how it may be back on the rise.
When a group of boaters went to Lake Mead near Las Vegas on a sunny Sunday last month, they couldn’t have known they were about to muddy the waters around the most enduring of all mafia mysteries: What happened to Jimmy Hoffa?
On a sandbar newly exposed due to a drought dropping water levels to all-time lows, they spied a man’s decomposed body stuffed in a barrel. It had all the hallmarks of an old-fashioned mob hit, and when police said the man’s shoes indicated he had likely been shot sometime between the mid-’70s and early ‘80s, mob mavens did the math: Hoffa disappeared in July, 1975.
“I’m relatively sure it was not Jimmy Hoffa,” laughed former Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman, 82, who represented mobsters as a defense attorney before serving three terms running Sin City.
While the gruesome discovery, which is being investigated as a homicide, may not shed light on the fate of the legendary Teamsters union boss, the drama and subsequent speculation underscored America’s fascination with La Cosa Nostra, even if the glory days of the mob have receded like the waters of Lake Mead.
But when was the mafia’s golden age?
Bobby Luisi was a made man, a caporegime, in the Philadelphia mafia. In 1999, Luisi was arrested and charged with cocaine distribution and served 14 years in federal prison. Luisi recalls growing up in Boston’s Little Italy in the 1960s, when the mafia ruled the streets and being part of it meant power, money, and responsibility. It stayed that way in the 1970s, as he joined the life and was eventually tapped to lead the Boston crew of the City of Brotherly Love’s Bruno-Scarfo family.
Bobby Luisi, Philadelphia mob capo (YouTube screenshot)
But the mafia began to crumble in the 1980s, he said, when the feds finally broke the spell of the oath of omertà.
“When the government came out with witness protection, that ruined the mob,” Luisi told The Daily Wire. “You know, look at me. I was getting indicted for three murders. Wiseguys, guys that I come up with, they were all ratting on me. They turned me into a rat.”
Michael Franzese, who was once a powerful capo in the Colombo family before serving time and renouncing the life in his 1992 autobiography, “Quitting the Mob,” said the mafia’s zenith lasted from the 1950s through the mid-1980s.
“That’s when we exercised the most control and when we had the biggest presence and the most success in this country,” Franzese told The Daily Wire.
Michael Franzese in a Manhattan office, 1985. (Jim Cummins/Newsday RM via Getty Images)
Michael Franzese arrives at federal court. (Dennis Caruso/NY Daily News via Getty Images)
The groundwork for that gilded age was lain during the 1920s and 1930s, and bought with blood and bribery, added Franzese, who was a pre-med student when his father, John “Sonny” Franzese was an underboss in the Colombo crime family. He joined the mob in 1971, four years after his father was sentenced to 50 years in prison for bank robbery.
“During the days of Prohibition, you had massive corruption among law enforcement and politicians,” said Franzese. “Go back to the days of Al Capone. There was massive corruption and it was massive money that came into mob coffers. That’s how the organization got built.”
Franzese proved his worth to the family by excelling at sophisticated fraud schemes, and knew future Gambino boss John Gotti in the 1970s, when both were making their mafia bones. Franzese estimated he earned $8 million a week in his prime, before going to prison on conspiracy charges in 1986. He was released in 1994.
Michael Franzese mugshot, 1993. (Oklahoma County Sheriff’s Department/Getty Images)
One of the men who got Franzese locked up is Edward McDonald, who led the Federal Organized Crime Strike Force in Brooklyn in the 1980s. McDonald investigated some of the most high-profile organized crime cases in the country and even played himself in the seminal mob movie “Goodfellas.”
“Don’t give me the babe in the woods routine, Karen,” was the iconic line McDonald delivered, speaking to the wife of mobster Henry Hill, played by Ray Liotta.
In 1985, McDonald and other law enforcement officials helped prosecutors bring an indictment of Franzese.
“Michael was a significant, significant target because of the amount of money that he earned,” McDonald told The Daily Wire. “And he was very different because he was far more sophisticated than the others. His crimes were looting insurance companies and automobile dealerships. He had very fraudulent schemes that he used. And the threat of force was always behind what he was doing.”
While “The Godfather” trilogy tended to glorify the old world aspects of the mafia and convey some sense of honor among bad men, by the 1990s, dark films like “Goodfellas,” “Carlito’s Way” and “Donnie Brasco” captured the dysfunction and psychosis of the mob. Art was imitating life, according to Scott Burnstein, author of several books on the mob including “Motor City Mafia: A Century of Organized Crime in Detroit.” The heyday of Mario Puzo’s fictitious Don Corleone had seemingly run its course.
“The ‘70s and ‘80s was the last vestige of the glory era,” Burnstein said. “But ‘50s and ‘60s was the epicenter of the golden era,” Burnstein told The Daily Wire. “They got someone elected president of the United States. That’s all you need to know.”
Burnstein was referring to the Chicago mob, known as the “Outfit,” which is often credited with installing John F. Kennedy in the White House in the closely contested 1960 presidential election.
Christian Cipollini, an organized crime historian and author of several mafia books about legendary Genovese crime boss Lucky Luciano, said the early American mafia thrived when it worked with Jewish and Irish crime syndicates.
“The Italian mafia was at its height in the 1930s and early ‘40s because there were guys involved who weren’t all about this thing of ours,” Cipollini said. “The Italians then took it back to what I call this traditionalism or whatever they did in the forties and fifties and sixties. I think it backfired. I think they were better off when it was the Luciano, Capone era of ‘I don’t care who you are or what color you are. It’s all about green.’”
The 1950s, when organized crime tightened its grip on the Las Vegas Strip, get a lot of hype, and the seventies were “possibly one of the dirtiest, violent” eras, Cipollini said. Then in the late eighties and nineties, the mafia had a resurgence, at least in the public consciousness, thanks to the flamboyant and publicity-conscious Gotti, the “Dapper Don” who Cipollini says “put them back on the map.”
The days of brazen mob hits in broad daylight and wiseguys in suits pulling up in Cadillacs are over at least for now, but all it takes is a grisly discovery at the bottom of a lake to fire the imaginations of amateur mafia enthusiasts. But Goodman said there was a dead giveaway that the body discovered last month in Lake Mead wasn’t a true gangster, much less Hoffa: His clothing was Kmart-issue, circa 1970s.
“Well, it can’t be a mobster then,” Goodman said.