The Bonanno Family
New York
No American crime family has been penetrated as thoroughly as this one, and it has been penetrated twice: once by an FBI agent who spent six years inside it, and once by its own…
The organisations
Crime families
Who held which city, when, and who they were fighting while they held it.
The Bufalino Family
Pittston, Pennsylvania
Photograph withheld
The smallest organisation in this archive with national reach ran out of a Pennsylvania coal town of ten thousand people. Its influence came from what the coal region connected…
The Chicago Outfit
Chicago
Chicago never divided its underworld the way New York did. Where the east coast settled into five separate families, the city on the lake produced a single organisation, and the…
The Colombo Family
New York
The Colombo family has fought three civil wars in fifty years. No other American crime family has managed one. Whatever the organisation was built to do, what it has done more…
The DeCavalcante Family
Elizabeth, New Jersey
The DeCavalcante family is the only Cosa Nostra family headquartered in New Jersey rather than in one of the five boroughs, and for most of its existence that has defined it. It…
The Gambino Family
New York
The organisation that took Carlo Gambino's name in 1957 had already been through three leaderships and two murders by the time he reached the top of it. Its earliest recognisable…
The Genovese Family
New York
The family that now carries Vito Genovese's name was not built by him. It was assembled by Charles Luciano out of the wreckage of the Castellammarese War, and for its first…
The Lucchese Family
New York
The Lucchese family made its money from things that move: garments through the Manhattan garment district, freight through the Brooklyn piers, and cargo through the airport at…
The Philadelphia Family
Philadelphia
For twenty-one years the Philadelphia family was the quietest organisation in American organised crime, and for the twenty years after that it was the most violent. The same city…
Standing
- 1 The Genovese Family First rank · Seat from 1931 300made members at peak
- 2 The Gambino Family First rank · Seat from 1931 250made members at peak
- 3 The Bonanno Family Second rank · Seat from 1931 150made members at peak
- 4 The Colombo Family Second rank · Seat from 1931 120made members at peak Tied on the estimates
- 5 The Lucchese Family Second rank · Seat from 1931 120made members at peak Tied on the estimates
- 6 The Chicago Outfit Second rank · Seat from 1931 100made members at peak
- 7 The Philadelphia Family Third rank · No seat 80made members at peak
- 8 The DeCavalcante Family Third rank · No seat 60made members at peak
- 9 The Bufalino Family Third rank · No seat 50made members at peak
Ordered by the number of made members each family is estimated to have held at its height, which is the only measure of strength the record supports comparing across organisations. The figures are law enforcement estimates rather than counts, they vary between sources, and the families tied on the same number cannot be separated on this evidence. Nothing here measures how dangerous, wealthy or effective a family was.