Carlo "Don Carlo" Gambino

Carlo Gambino was born in Palermo in 1902 and entered the United States illegally in 1921, arriving as a stowaway. He remained an undocumented immigrant for the whole of his career, which the government spent two decades unsuccessfully trying to convert into a deportation.

He was a physically unimposing man who avoided newspapers, avoided narcotics, and avoided giving anyone a reason to move against him until he was ready to move first. Through the 1940s and early 1950s he ran rackets on the Brooklyn waterfront under Vincent Mangano and then Albert Anastasia.

1957

Gambino's rise came in a single year. In May, Vito Genovese's move against Frank Costello removed the head of another family. In October, Anastasia was shot dead in a barber's chair at the Park Sheraton Hotel, and Gambino took his place. In November he attended the meeting at Apalachin that was supposed to ratify the new arrangement, and escaped through the woods when the state police arrived.

Nineteen years

He held the family until 1976, which no boss of comparable standing managed before or after. He kept it out of heroin, concentrated on the airports, the docks and the construction unions, and married his daughter into an alliance that steadied relations with the other families.

He died of a heart attack at his home on Long Island in October 1976, in bed, having never served a substantial prison sentence.