John "Johnny Boy" Riggi

Giovanni Riggi was born on 1 February 1925 and spent his working life in Elizabeth, where the family had always been. For twenty-five years, until 1988, he was the business agent of Laborers' International Union Local 394. That job was not a cover for the other one. It was the other one.

Control of a construction local means control of who works. It produces no-show jobs for members, payments from contractors who want a site to stay open, and a say in which firms get labour at all. Riggi ran the family's Elizabeth crew as a capo on that basis and took the family itself around 1982.

Conviction

He was convicted of extortion and labour law violations on 20 July 1990. In 2003 he pleaded guilty to a conspiracy charge connected to the 1989 killing of Fred Weiss, a Staten Island developer, and drew further time.

He did not resign the title at any point. From federal custody he continued to be the family's boss, with acting bosses running the day-to-day and carrying messages back. That arrangement held for most of two decades, and it is the single largest reason the family was in the state it was in by 1999: an organisation whose leader cannot meet anyone loses the ability to check what is being done in his name.

He was released on 27 November 2012 and died at home in Edison, New Jersey, on 3 August 2015, at ninety. He had held the title for thirty-three years and spent twenty-two of them in custody.