Frank Majuri — Mob Ledger

Frank Majuri was underboss of the DeCavalcante family through the years the FBI was listening to it, which is the reason anything is known about him at all.

He was an Elizabeth man in a family that was essentially an Elizabeth institution, and he held the second chair under Simone Rizzo DeCavalcante during a period when that chair meant something: the family was small, the boss was accessible, and the underboss was in the room for most of what mattered.

What the transcripts show

Majuri appears throughout the two thousand pages of surveillance transcript that became public in June 1969, and the picture they give is unglamorous in a way that fiction never quite manages.

He argued about money. He relayed decisions. He worried about members who were drawing attention, and about members who were not earning, and about what New York would think. A great deal of the recorded conversation of a Cosa Nostra underboss turns out to be administration conducted by men who could not write any of it down.

What the second chair actually did

Membership questions and who was proposing whom. Disputes between crews that had to be settled before they reached the boss. Complaints from members about other members. Relations with the New York families, which consumed an amount of attention out of all proportion to the family's size.

None of it is what the word underboss suggests. All of it is in the record.

Why he matters here

Because the DeCavalcante transcripts are the closest thing American law enforcement ever got to a Cosa Nostra family explaining itself at length, and Majuri is one of the voices doing the explaining.

The men in those pages were not performing for anyone. They believed the conversation was private, and what they produced under that belief is the foundation of what is now understood about how a family of this kind actually ran. His son Charles was still being named in DeCavalcante prosecutions three decades later.