American Mafia

Did You Know?

• The word mafia derives from the Sicilian adjective mafiusu, meaning "swagger," "boldness," or "bravado."
• The Mafia initiation ritual involves pricking the inductee's finger, spilling blood on a card bearing a saint's likeness, burning the card, and taking an oath of loyalty called Omerta.
• The Bonanno crime family and the Buffalo crime family have had influence in several factions in Canada.

History

The first published account of what became the Mafia in the United States dates to the late 1860s, when New Orleans newspapers reported a war between Sicilian gangs named after their members' home cities of Palermo, Trapani, and Messina. Sicilian crime groups first became influential in the New York metropolitan area, progressing from small neighborhood operations to national organizations. The Black Hand, an extortion method used in Italian neighborhoods at the turn of the 20th century, was sometimes mistaken for the Mafia itself but was a separate criminal society with many small gangs.

Giuseppe Esposito, the first known Mafia member to immigrate to the United States, fled to New York with six other Sicilians after murdering eleven wealthy landowners, a chancellor, and a vice-chancellor of a Sicilian province; he was arrested in New Orleans in 1881 and extradited to Italy. From the 1890s to 1920 in New York City, the Five Points Gang, founded by Paul Kelly, was powerful in the Little Italy of the Lower East Side, recruiting street hoodlums who later became famous crime bosses such as Johnny Torrio, Al Capone, Lucky Luciano, and Frankie Yale.

The Neapolitan Camorra was very active in Brooklyn, and in Chicago, the 19th Ward became known as the "Bloody Nineteenth" due to frequent Mafia-related violence.

Structure

The American Mafia operates on a strict hierarchical structure created by Salvatore Maranzano in 1931. He established the Five Families, each with a boss, underboss, capos, and soldiers—all of full-blooded Italian origin—while associates could come from any background. Inducted members are called "made" men, signifying they are untouchable in the criminal underworld. The three highest positions make up the administration; below them, factions are headed by a caporegime (captain) who leads a crew of soldiers and associates.

When a boss makes a decision, instructions pass down through the chain of command to provide plausible deniability. Occasionally, ruling panels of three or five members are set up when a boss goes to jail to divide responsibility. The family messenger and street boss were positions created by former Genovese family leader Vincent Gigante. The boss, sometimes called the Don or "Godfather," receives a cut of every operation and may be chosen by a vote from the caporegimes, with the underboss voting in case of a tie.

By the late 1950s, gatherings for such votes attracted too much attention, and many elections were seen as having inevitable results, such as John Gotti's in 1986, where a meeting was held in a basement with all capos searched and Gotti's men standing ominously behind them before he was proclaimed boss.

Law enforcement and the Mafia

Across different Mafia families, there was a rule against killing government officials, since it could bring massive police crackdowns. In the most severe cases, even plotting such a murder could get you killed. The Jewish gangster Dutch Schultz, who worked with the Mafia, was supposedly murdered by his Italian associates because they feared he would go through with a plan to assassinate New York prosecutor Thomas Dewey. Still, the Mafia did sometimes target law enforcement, especially in the early days.

New York cop Joe Petrosino was gunned down by Sicilian mobsters while working in Sicily, and a statue of him was later put up across the street from a Lucchese crime family hangout. In 1951, a Senate committee led by Tennessee Senator Estes Kefauver concluded that a nationwide "sinister criminal organization" called the Mafia existed. The televised Kefauver Hearings gripped the country and pushed the FBI to finally admit organized crime was real.

Two years later, the FBI started the Top Hoodlum Program, where agents gathered information on local mobsters and sent regular reports to Washington to build a central file on racketeers. The Apalachin meeting on November 14, 1957, was a major Mafia summit at the home of Joseph "Joe the Barber" Barbara in upstate New York. Around 100 mobsters from the U.S., Italy, and Cuba showed up to talk about loansharking, drugs, gambling, and how to split up the operations of the recently killed Albert Anastasia. After that meeting, the Mafia closed its membership books for new made men, and they stayed shut until 1976.

In popular culture

The film Scarface (1932) is loosely based on the story of Al Capone. In 1968, Paramount Pictures released The Brotherhood starring Kirk Douglas as a Mafia don, which was a financial flop, but Paramount's production chief Robert Evans subsidized the completion of a Mario Puzo novel with similar themes and bought the screen rights. Directed by Francis Ford Coppola, The Godfather became a huge success, winning the Best Picture Oscar and becoming the highest-grossing film ever made for a year, significantly romanticising the Mafia.

It inspired a direct sequel, The Godfather Part II (1974), also based on Puzo's novel, and other films based on real Mafiosi. The Sopranos was an award-winning HBO television show depicting modern American-Italian mob culture in New Jersey, based on creator David Chase's experiences. Netflix true crime docuseries Fear City: New York vs the Mafia and Mob War: Philadelphia vs. the Mafia chronicle various mafia families, while animated sitcoms Futurama and The Simpsons portray fictional mafioso characters.