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 soon be back on the rise.
It was Christmas time in New York City, but the crisp December air had just been shattered by the sound of bullets outside a midtown Manhattan steak house. Bystanders swarmed the area, craning their necks to stare aghast at a well-dressed man lying dead on the sidewalk.
The brazen public murder of 70-year-old Gambino boss Paul Castellano on that December evening in 1985 was shocking, but old-style executions of mob bosses were familiar to Americans.
This one would turn out to be the last.
The hit was orchestrated by the infamously flashy and charismatic John Gotti, who took over the Gambino family after Castellano’s death. Gotti watched the murder from a car across the street before driving off.
John Gotti leaves Manhattan Supreme Court (Robert Rosamilio/NY Daily News Archive via Getty Images)
These days, some former made men blame Gotti’s ego and penchant for the spotlight for delivering one of the final blows to the glory days of the mafia, known as La Cosa Nostra in the U.S., which was already reeling from federal investigations and rats turning in their fellow wiseguys. The factors combined to largely end the mob’s decades-long rein of terror, a rubout commissioned by the feds and unwittingly aided by vain and volatile men unable to maintain the underworld life into which they were born.
Bobby Luisi was a made man, a caporegime, in the Philadelphia mafia at the time of the hit on Castellano. He grew up in Boston’s Little Italy and was eventually tapped to lead the Boston crew of the City of Brotherly Love’s Bruno-Scarfo family. In 1999, Luisi was arrested and charged with cocaine distribution and served 14 years in federal prison. He has since renounced the life of a mobster.
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“Terrible, terrible, terrible. Nicky Scarfo, John Gotti, ‘Gaspipe,’ there’s a list of them that shouldn’t have been there,” Luisi told The Daily Wire. “John was that typical street tough guy, you know, good capo, but he should have never been a boss. … Look what John did. He wanted to be a celebrity.”
“I thought I was a good boss. I was fair with everybody. I did the right things. But I was a little flamboyant myself. I can’t lie about that,” Luisi said. “I had the nice house. I had the cars. You know, in our life we say, ‘Ah, we’re either going to be dead by 40 or doing life in prison. Let’s enjoy it now.’”
Michael Franzese was once a powerful capo in the Colombo family and knew Gotti in the 1970s. Franzese was a pre-med student but joined the mob in 1971, four years after his father was sentenced to 50 years in prison for bank robbery. Franzese became fluent in sophisticated fraud schemes and estimated he earned $8 million a week in his prime, before going to prison on conspiracy charges in 1986. He was released in 1994 and has renounced the mafia.
Young Michael Franzese (Courtesy of Michael Franzese)
Michael Franzese (Courtesy of Michael Franzese)
Franzese said that while Gotti may have “played for the camera a little bit,” the media “just didn’t let it go.”
“To an extent, I think John gets a bad rap,” Franzese told The Daily Wire. “They say that John Gotti is responsible for the downfall of the mafia in New York. That’s not true. It was the RICO Act that’s responsible for the downfall.”
Franzese was referring to the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, which was passed in 1970, back when Gotti was a low level soldier known as “Crazy Horse” and was serving a three- year stint in federal prison for hijacking goods from a Northwest Airlines flight into what is now JFK Airport.
John Gotti 1968 mugshot (Getty Images)
John Gotti 1990 mugshot (Donaldson Collection/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)
One of the men who put Franzese behind bars was 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.”
For the first few years after RICO was passed, the Department of Justice balked at deploying the law against the mob because they were worried it was too powerful of a weapon, McDonald said.
“The officials in Washington were so concerned that they would be seen by the courts as abusing the weapon that Congress had given us, so they were very, very cautious in approving RICO prosecutions at the outset,” McDonald told The Daily Wire. “It took a few years for people to really just come to grips with what it meant.”
Meanwhile, the FBI was wasting its time on things like bugging social clubs because agents wanted the overtime pay, the former prosecutor said.
“I said look, we’ve done this before. It’s a complete and total waste of time to put a bug in a social club because [there are] 40 people in there talking,” McDonald said. “You can’t understand anything.”
Eventually the FBI became more sophisticated in its use of electronic surveillance. They planted bugs in the inner sanctums where mob bosses were having significant conversations, including private rooms frequented by the likes of Castellano and Genovese underboss Tony “Fat Tony” Salerno, as well as the offices of labor unions that were controlled by the mob.
“We really began to get great conversations and that’s what led to the downfall of these people,” McDonald said.
Another crippling blow was the Witness Protection Program, which protected mafia turncoats from being killed by the associates they betrayed. Then in 1987, new federal sentencing guidelines began mandating daunting prison sentences of decades or hundreds of years without parole for mafia members. Faced with dying in prison, and given the protection of a new identity, wiseguys started to crack.
By the late 1980s, “big fish started to cooperate, and that went a long way in further destroying this veneer of a monolithic organization with no cracks in their armor,” said Scott Burnstein, author of several books on the mob including “Motor City Mafia: A Century of Organized Crime in Detroit.”
“And you had mob boss after mob boss, underboss after underboss, capo after capo running into the open arms of the government. And you had never had that before,” Burnstein told The Daily Wire.
One of the most colorful characters the feds nailed in the twilight of the glory days was Vincent “The Chin” Gigante, dubbed “The Oddfather” because for decades he could be seen wandering around Greenwich Village in his bathrobe and slippers, muttering to himself. Many assumed he had a screw loose, and he was initially judged mentally unfit to stand trial, but Gigante was ultimately sentenced to prison on racketeering and conspiracy charges in 1997. He later admitted that his bizarre behavior was a ploy to avoid prosecution.
Vincent “The Chin” Gigante 1957 arrest (Getty Images)
Vincent “The Chin” Gigante is arrested. (Getty Images)
After Gotti was sentenced to prison in 1992, Gigante was considered the most powerful mafia boss in the country until he was locked up too. At the same time, the mafia was retreating into the shadows.
“They said, ‘No more. No more social clubs, no more guys hanging around the corner. That’s got to stop.’ So they went totally underground,” said Nick Christophers, a mafia expert who co-authored “Prison Rules” with ex-mobster John Alite.
“I mean wiseguys used to be on the corners all the time. I remember, I used to see them in my neighborhood. I was attracted to that life when I was young myself,” Christophers told The Daily Wire.
Franzese said the mafia has gone back to where it should have been all along, adding that many people misunderstand that a low profile is what the oath of omertà demands in the first place.
“They think when you take that oath, like the night I was made, that it’s an oath to lie, steal, cheat, and kill,” Franzese said. “That’s not the oath. The oath is silence. We’re never supposed to admit that we belong to the life. We’re never supposed to say the life even exists.”
Now, flashy mob headlines in the New York tabloids are scarce, mobsters wear sneakers and jeans instead of Armani suits, and midtown sidewalks have fewer bloodstains. The mafia still hums along quietly, but as a shadow of its former self.
“The government destroyed Cosa Nostra. They set out to do it, and they did it,” Luisi said.