The Genovese Family

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 quarter century it was run by men who preferred quiet arrangements to open violence.

The war that ended in September 1931 had pitted Joe Masseria against Salvatore Maranzano. Luciano, who had served under Masseria, arranged for both to be removed and then declined to take the crown Maranzano had designed for himself. In place of a single boss of bosses he proposed a governing body — the Commission — on which each family held a seat.

The quiet years

Luciano's conviction in 1936 left the family to Frank Costello, who ran it for two decades through political influence rather than force. He was known in the press as the prime minister of the underworld, a description he did not discourage.

That arrangement ended in May 1957, when a gunman shot at Costello in the lobby of his apartment building and missed. Costello retired. Vito Genovese took the family and gave it his name, though he held it for only two years before a narcotics conviction sent him to prison for the rest of his life.

It was a soldier of this family, Joseph Valachi, who in 1963 became the first member to describe its structure in public.

Where it stands

The Genovese family is the one that never gave the government a boss to photograph, and the recent record reads accordingly: no leadership case, and a steady procession of captains and soldiers.

In August 2022 federal prosecutors in Brooklyn and Manhattan charged two sets of its members in overlapping cases — an acting captain and a soldier alongside Bonanno defendants in one, two captains, two soldiers and two associates in the other — over gambling and extortion. Most pleaded guilty through 2023. Four more members and associates pleaded guilty in April 2024 to running gambling operations in Brooklyn and Queens.

None of it is dramatic and none of it is a collapse. Gambling, extortion, a guilty plea, a sentence, and the next name up. That is what an organisation looks like when it has spent seventy years arranging not to be interesting.