Subject file
Carmine "The Snake" Persico
Known as The SnakeJunior
Persico was sentenced to a hundred years in 1986 and ran the Colombo family from prison for most of the thirty-three years he had left, which tells you something about how little a sentence settles.
He came up in the Gallo crew during the revolt against Profaci and changed sides during it, which is where the nickname came from and which he objected to for the rest of his life.
Boss from a cell
He took the family in the early 1970s and was in federal custody for most of the period in which he held it.
The arrangement was the same one the DeCavalcante family used under John Riggi: authority exercised through relatives and acting bosses reporting to a man who could not be present. Persico ran it longer than anyone, and his insistence on retaining the title through a third of a century of imprisonment is the direct cause of the family's third war.
Persico represented himself at the Commission trial in 1986 and cross-examined the government's witnesses personally.
It is remembered as a piece of theatre and it was not a success — he was convicted with everyone else and received the same hundred years. But it is a reasonable illustration of the man's estimate of himself, and of why the family he ran was never going to be handed to somebody else while he was alive.
The third war
Between 1991 and 1993 the family split between men loyal to Persico and men behind the acting boss Victor Orena, and roughly a dozen people were killed.
The government prosecuted both sides. Persico's faction held the name. He died in federal custody on 7 March 2019 at eighty-five, still the boss of record, having spent the overwhelming majority of his tenure in prison.
Sources
- Selwyn Raab — Five Families (2005)
- United States v. Salerno and others
- Southern District of New York (1986)
- United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York records