The American underworld, on file
Who they were, what they actually did, and how badly the movies got it wrong.
45 dossiers · 9 families · 9 films · 25 terms
Selected dossiers
Long reads
December 1990 · New York
The Apartment Above the Club
A social club everyone knew was watched, a flat upstairs that nobody thought about, and the eighteen months in which the most famous boss in America talked himself and his underboss into a federal courtroom.
John "The Dapper Don" Gotti · Salvatore "Sammy the Bull" Gravano · The Gambino Family
September 1976 · New York and Florida
Six Years as Donnie Brasco
An FBI agent spent six years inside the Bonanno family as a jewel thief. The operation ended because the family tried to make him a member, and the men who had vouched for him paid for it.
Benjamin "Lefty" Ruggiero · Dominick "Sonny Black" Napolitano · The Bonanno Family
January 1998 · New York and New Jersey
The Man Who Took Off His Mask
A robbery at the World Trade Center, three men who forgot about the lift camera, and the informant the DeCavalcante family spent two years trying to make.
Vincent "Vinny Ocean" Palermo · Anthony "Tony" Rotondo · The DeCavalcante Family
The farm team
The DeCavalcante Family
Elizabeth, New Jersey
Every other organisation in this archive is a New York story. This one ran out of Elizabeth, with 60 made members against several hundred across the Hudson, and New York called it the farm team.
Then the FBI bugged four of its locations. Roughly two thousand pages of transcript reached the public docket in 1969 — not an informer's recollection but the organisation talking to itself, at length, believing nobody was listening. It is why the smallest family in the country is one of the best-documented criminal organisations in American history. Thirty years later its acting boss became a government witness too.
What Las Vegas was actually for
Four organisations held an interest in Nevada casinos that no regulator would have let them hold, and drew cash out of the counting rooms every week for nine years. It was not a robbery. It was a shareholding, paid in suitcases.
Nothing in Las Vegas broke it. A federal wiretap in Kansas City, placed in an unrelated case, recorded men dividing money from casinos two states away, and four family leaderships went to prison in 1986.
In the file
- The Counting Room How the skim worked
- Casino The verdict on the film
- Frank Rosenthal Ran four casinos, licensed for none
- Las Vegas on the map Four addresses
The End of the Castellammarese War
Salvatore Maranzano was killed in his own office five months after declaring himself boss of all bosses. His death closed the war and opened the way for a governing commission instead of a crown.
Case closed
