The Colombo Family

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 reliably than anything else is turn on itself.

Profaci's levy

Joseph Profaci held the family from 1928 until his death in 1962 and took a fixed monthly payment from every member regardless of earnings.

A share of what a man makes is the normal arrangement and it moves with his luck. A flat levy does not, and in a bad month it comes out of his own pocket. Thirty years of that produced the first war, when the Gallo brothers of Brooklyn — who had done the family's hardest work at the same flat rate as everyone else — took four of Profaci's senior men hostage in 1961.

The name

Joseph Colombo was given the family in 1963 as payment for informing his elders of a plot against them.

He then did something no boss had done before or has done since: he took the organisation public, founding a civil rights league that picketed the FBI and argued that the word Mafia was an ethnic slander. It worked well enough to change how a government department and a film studio used the word, and it made him the most visible criminal in America. He was shot in the head at his own rally in June 1971 and lived seven more years without speaking.

Persico

Carmine Persico took the family in the early 1970s, was sentenced to a hundred years in the Commission case in 1986, and did not give up the title for the thirty-three years that followed.

The third war

Between 1991 and 1993 the family divided between Persico loyalists and the acting boss Victor Orena, and roughly a dozen men were killed.

The government prosecuted both factions and the war produced a generation of cooperating witnesses. The family survived on paper and is still charged periodically. Of the five New York families it is the one whose history is most completely a history of its own internal fights.

Where it stands

On 14 September 2021 federal prosecutors in Brooklyn unsealed a nineteen-count indictment charging the family's entire administration — the boss Andrew Russo, the underboss Benjamin Castellazzo and the consigliere Ralph DiMatteo — along with captains, a soldier and associates.

The conduct charged was a twenty-year effort to control a Queens labour union and direct the spending of its health fund. The defendants pleaded guilty over the following two years.

This is the most complete recent answer to whether the New York families still exist as organisations rather than as leftovers. In 2021 the government could name the top three men in this one and say what each was doing that month.