August 2022. The FBI is kicking down doors, slamming men
to the ground in front of screaming wives and children. On paper, these guys have legitimate businesses:
a coffee bar, a soccer club, and “Sal the Shoemaker” well, he repairs shoes. But what they’re really good at is violence,
making people offers they can’t refuse, just as a message on one of the men’s phones
revealed: “Tell him I’m going to put him under the
BLEEPING bridge.” And you thought that kind of thing didn’t
happen anymore… It does. Today you’ll see how one simple law destroyed
the mafia. As some of you might know, in the 19th century,
Sicilian men whose families had lived as peasants for many years decided it was time to get
equal with the rich landowners. These men formed clans whose main enterprise
was demanding protection money from the landowners, people often working in the lucrative citrus
business. If the cash wasn’t forthcoming, that usually
meant the appearance of knives or shotguns. A simple business plan but very, very effective. It’s called extortion. You create a threat, which is you, and then
you tell people they have to pay you to protect them from the threat. Genius! These Mafiosi guys were a mystery to most
people. Behind closed doors, they swore to secrecy
and to act like men of honor. Never, ever, was their enterprise to be spoken
of. Yep, like Fight Club, with guns. They paid off cops and corrupt politicians
and were soon a force to be reckoned with. But these Sicilians wanted to branch out,
and what better place than the United States of America? The US had been going through a rapid change
in terms of industrialization. It was becoming the powerhouse it is today,
and where there’s plenty of money, there’s always plenty of opportunities to steal it. During the period from about 1880 to 1920,
the US opened its doors to Europeans. In the 1890s alone, about 600,000 Italians
made the trip to America. About four million of them had migrated to
the US by 1920. Most of them came to make an honest living,
but for others, the US was a pot of gold that was ripe for exploitation. These men of honor arrived in droves to New
York, New Orleans, and Chicago with the explicit intention of milking America. They weren’t yet the very organized crime
group we now call the Italian-American mafia, but it wouldn’t be long until they made
crime more formal, until they agreed there should be certain rules to the game. Looking at American newspapers in the early
20th century, you can find many articles talking about a new crime wave. Some stories mention the Black Hand gangs,
noting that Sicilian immigrants were now extorting people, just as they’d done back home. In 1909, the New York Times reported about
some of these dastardly Sicilians, assassins, according to the Times, who’d shot down
Lieut. Joseph Petrosino, who before his demise had
been head of the Italian Squad for the New York police. He was really the first-ever mafia cop in
America. He knew all about the Sicilian gangs and their
extortion rackets, so, being incorruptible, he had to go. Negative stories about cold-blooded Italian
immigrants became quite common, causing a whole lot of discrimination, sometimes violent
discrimination, against Italians in the US. This was how the mafia got going and given
that so many immigrants lived in squalor, it wasn’t hard finding new recruits. New York became a crime hub for the new Italians,
although the gangs also spread out to other cities. They extorted other immigrants for protection
money, just as they’d done in Italy, embracing business plan 1. They also expanded into the heroin business. Just as the Federal Bureau of Narcotics chief
Harry Anslinger was warning about this grave new threat to good white folks (he was extremely
racist), his men were being paid off by the gangs. Business plan part 2: Pay off your enemies,
the police. If they don’t abide, shoot them. This is also really effective at the fundamental
business level. The mafia was now more than just a bunch of
former peasants turned petty extorters; it was a mega-dollar drug importation business,
and it was about to get even bigger. When the US made the immeasurable mistake
of banning alcohol in 1920 under the Prohibition laws, the gangsters really got going. Business plan part 3: Hope stuff gets banned
that everyone wants and then sell it to them at high rates because it’s illegal. Use in conjunction with business plan 2. They expanded further, spreading like a deadly
virus, using “Tommy” guns to mow down anyone in their way and paying officials off
to ensure they didn’t end up behind bars. In the mid-1920s, it’s estimated that 1,300
gangs plagued the city of Chicago alone. The FBI says at that time, the US saw about
12,000 murders a year, many of them mobster-related. A cancer had metastasized in America, and
law enforcement was not equipped to stop its spread. People like Al Capone, who’d grown up on
the tough streets of New York City watching the first generation of Italian gangsters,
became incredibly rich under Prohibition. As a teenager, Capone had been part of the
Five Points Gang in New York, as had Charles “Lucky” Luciano, the man who made organized
crime more organized, forming a kind of corporation after seeing various crime groups killing
each other. Luciano created the Commission, which was
supposed to oversee matters pertaining to business and violence when it involved different
alliances. Now that cancer was in the bones, the heart,
and the brain. It was in all the major organs of American
society after only a couple of decades of simple men following simple business plans. In New York, there were the Five Families:
Bonanno, Colombo, Gambino, Genovese, and Lucchese, and there were also the Chicago Outfit and
the Buffalo crime family. As you’ll see soon, there still are five
main families, but they’re nothing today like they were back in the 1930s. Under the rules of the Commission, the families
were supposed to toe the line, act like men of honor should, and help each other when
it came to taking out enemies or paying politicians. Even with an organizing body, there were regular
turf wars, when blood painted the streets of the US’s cities, which was never good
for business in the long run as it compelled the cops, even if as crooked as a barrel of
fish hooks, to take action. It wasn’t just the Italian mafia; the Jewish
Mafia and the Irish mobs all wanted a bigger piece of that massive American pie. They were everywhere, involved in extortion,
construction, gambling, and lots of murder. In the 30s, the Italian and Jewish mobs even
formed a contract killing company, brazenly naming it Murder Inc. For anywhere from $1,000 to $5,000 (about
$20,000 to $100,000 today), they’d take someone out, more money for high-profile folks,
such as officials. Albert “The Mad Hatter” Anastasia, who
ran Murder Inc. for a time, was given the title “Lord High Executioner.” What does that tell you about their confidence,
giving each other funny titles like that? These men thought they could do what they
wanted. They believed they were untouchable. Even when the cops did arrest a mobster, witnesses
would either sometimes go missing or suddenly decide it was not in their best interests
to testify. The authorities were fighting a losing battle,
and no matter how many special units they dedicated to organized crime, they barely
ever made a dent in it. Through the 40s, 50s, and 60s, the mafia seeped
like saltwater into the steel foundations of the US. They corroded and corrupted the structures
there to protect people from people like them, running casinos in Las Vegas and infiltrating
the unions that were supposed to be the backbone of the American worker. They were so big that law enforcement struggled
to keep up and so powerful that they had significant political clout. Even if the police did see positive results
in their investigations and witnesses were willing to testify, connecting the bosses
to those crimes was close to impossible. The authorities needed a much bigger net they
could cast over this powerful organization. They needed a giant web that mobsters couldn’t
easily wriggle out of. This is when the government became a spider,
spinning the biggest web it had ever spun in the history of US law enforcement in 1970. They introduced the RICO Act, aka, the Racketeer
Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. If it sounds vague, that was the point; it
was meant to be vague. What it meant is that an underling, a mere
street guy, could be arrested, but then the government could arrest the boss or bosses
of a family by proving they were connected to this guy. They could say they were all part of one “criminal
enterprise” even if the boss’s footprints had been nowhere near any crime. Now all the authorities had to do was prove
the boss had gained an income from this enterprise or that he’d somehow been part of its operation. The law stated that he might only have to
be found guilty of “showing interest” in the running of a criminal enterprise, which,
let’s face it, is a pretty big web. Catching someone red-handed didn’t come
into it anymore, not if the cops could prove there had been a conspiracy among men to make
money through illicit means. Dominos were about to fall, but the authorities
needed time to work their cases. To charge someone under the RICO Act, they
had to connect them to racketeering, and 35 crimes could be linked with this. Some of them were bribery, murder, gambling,
drug dealing/trafficking, and, importantly, mail and wire fraud, which further expanded
the net. Just using the phone to communicate about
crimes in the vaguest way could get a man arrested, which is why the mafia became so
damn distrustful of phones. They were so often bugged! Now the old business plans didn’t work so
well. They had to create a new one: Don’t talk
business on the phone. To charge someone under the RICO Act, investigators
had to prove two of these 35 crimes had been committed within a span of 10 years, and then
they could accuse the person of being part of a criminal enterprise. In 1979, it’s how they would have got Carmine
Galante. He was a high-ranking member of the Bonanno
crime family, but before the cops could seal his fate with RICO, he was shot down in the
street in Brooklyn, a cigar still held between his dead lips as he slumped down. His nickname was “The Cigar” due to his
fondness for those big fat Cubans. His executioners might well have stuck the
cigar in his mouth, since a less formal business strategy of the mafia was always keep a sense
of humor and, whenever it was warranted, symbolize the death. After all, greedy Galante had gotten too big
for his boots. For that, he got a cigar. The Genovese crime family boss Frank Tieri
with some other bosses, had decided Galante was trying to take over the narcotics business,
and that was that, it was time for him to go. Galante was eating with two other mobsters
and his Sicilian bodyguards when three men in ski masks armed with handguns and shotguns
filled the three men’s bodies with bullets. As for Tieri, it seems his fate was also sealed,
but not with bullets. This guy was already an old-timer in 1980. He’d made the trip to the US from Naples
with his family back in 1911, and by the time the 70s arrived, he’d worked his way up
to acting boss of the Genovese family. If you’ve ever heard the high-earning former
mafia capo, Michael Franzese, talk about his old life; you’ll know that there are two
kinds of mobsters: the thinkers/earners and the outright violent hoodlums. Tieri was the former, a great earner for families
and a man who preferred diplomacy to violence. This wily mobster survived so long because
of his intelligence, but when the RICO Act came into effect, brains didn’t matter so
much. In 1980, the 76-year-old Tieri became the
first mobster to be convicted under the RICO Act, showing up to his day in court in a wheelchair
while huffing on an oxygen tank. He was told he was “the boss of a family
of La Cosa Nostra,” and as he listened to Judge Thomas P. Griesa in a New York City
court, he shook his head as the murders he was supposedly involved in were listed. When the judge asked him if he had anything
to say about that, he replied, “I'm a sick man, very sick.” He wasn’t lying. He was only two months into his 10-year prison
sentence when he gave up the ghost, apparently from natural causes. Was he really involved in those murders the
judge had mentioned? Maybe, maybe not. It didn’t matter. They had enough evidence to get him on racketeering. The New York Times wrote at the time that
two of the predicate crimes Tieri had committed were “threats to a restaurant owner and
fraud at the Westchester Premier Theater.” The alleged murders didn’t matter. Being part of a criminal enterprise that murdered
people did. As Franzese has said on his YouTube channel,
once RICO came into effect, they could connect mafia guys to anything. Many guys went down for crimes they had no
part in, including Franzese’s own father, who he says had no part whatsoever in a bank
robbery he’d been accused of orchestrating. Now everyone was paranoid. The bosses felt like prey in a system they’d
navigated with success for many years. The trusty business plans they’d relied
on for decades no longer worked, or not as well. In 1985, Paul Castellano, the boss of the
Gambino crime family, another guy that had arrived in the US during that mass immigration
period, got his day in court. Again, because of the RICO Act. This was another mobster that preferred using
his intelligence over his fists and guns, and oh boy, did he have his fingers in many
pies – legitimate and criminal. He was head of the Gambino family when they
got him on racketeering charges. He paid $3 million bail and was shot down
outside a Manhattan steak house about ten months later. The Commission never sanctioned the hit, but
it seems John Gotti, also of the Gambino family, had gone behind the Commission’s back to
do it. That was a VERY risky thing to do, but Gotti
knew he needed Castellano out of the way if he was to carry on his lucrative drugs business
that Castellano had unequivocally banned. The two never got along, anyway, and Gotti
thought Castellano was a weak boss. Castellano would have gotten life in prison,
even so, Gotti had taken a major risk whacking a boss without approval. Gotti had some balls on him, but then he did
get the nickname “Teflon Don.” This wasn’t so much because he got away
with killing another boss, but that every time the cops thought they had him, he somehow
managed to avoid prison. Gotti enjoyed acting like the movie star gangster,
but make no mistake, behind that dapper appeal, he was cunning and ruthless and hard to pin
down even with RICO. As Gotti enjoyed his freedom and wealth, the
dominoes fell one by one. Genovese boss Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno,
said to be the most powerful boss of them all, was sentenced to 100 years in 1986. In the same trial, called the Mafia Commission
Trial, Anthony “Tony Ducks” Corallo, boss of the Lucchese crime family, was also hit
with 100 years. Bonanno crime family boss, Philip "Rusty"
Rastelli, was also charged, but since he’d been kicked off the Commission after Donnie
Brasco had infiltrated his outfit, he was convicted of racketeering charges, but not
as part of the same trial. They all came tumbling down, not just the
bosses but underbosses, too, and at least one capo and one consigliere. All thanks to RICO. It was as if someone had spent close to eight
decades weaving a tapestry of criminality, and almost overnight, its very fabric was
being ripped to shreds. Nicodemo Scarfo – the boss of the Philadelphia
crime family, was convicted on RICO charges in 1988. Salvatore “Sammy the Bull” Gravano, another
guy with a YouTube channel now, who was once a ruthless killer and underboss of the Gambino
family, was convicted of racketeering in 1991. These days he’s more likely to tell you
that if you like his content, “please share and subscribe”, rather than make you an
offer you can’t refuse. Gravano turned state's witness, which is partly
how the most powerful boss at the time, Gotti, was hit with a whole bunch of charges and
sentenced to life. RICO is still used today, with its web now
expanded to biker gangs, street gangs, or when organized crime from abroad enters America,
such as the Russian Mafia, the Japanese Yakuza, the Chinese Triads, or the many gangs south
and far south of the American border. Not long ago, the Justice Department proudly
announced it had arrested 27 guys on RICO charges, all linked to the Russian Crime Syndicate. And as we told you at the start, nine guys
belonging to the Italian-American mafia were just arrested under RICO charges. They all worked together but belonged to two
families, Genovese and Bonanno. People old enough read the headlines in newspapers
and thought, “Ah, it’s just like the old days.” They were all captains and soldiers working
in New York and Florida, who, according to the Department of Justice, were polluting
“communities with illegal gambling, extortion, and violence while using our financial system
in service to their criminal schemes.” So, the next time you get your shoes repaired,
or grab a coffee at a quiet place famed for its Italian pastries and gelato, or perhaps
join a soccer team with an Italian name, open your eyes because what you see in front of
you might just be something else. Just make sure you don’t get in debt there,
‘cos there’s a bridge somewhere in America just right for your final resting place. And whatever you do, don’t say the word
RICO. They hate that. Now you need to see what’s happening these
days in “What Does the Mafia Even Do Anymore?” Or, have a look at “New York Mafia Families
Today.”
