Stefano Badami

Stefano Badami is the first man the record names as head of the New Jersey family, and almost everything else about him is thin. His birth year is not established here with enough confidence to print. He was leading the Elizabeth and Newark organisation by the 1930s and he held it, with difficulty, for roughly two decades.

The difficulty was structural. The family drew on two centres — the Sicilian community in Elizabeth, largely out of Ribera, and a separate faction in Newark — and the two did not get on. Badami spent his tenure managing a split rather than closing it.

1955

He was shot dead in a Newark restaurant in 1955. Nobody was convicted of it. The killing is generally read as the Newark faction settling the argument, and the succession that followed did not go to a Newark man either, which suggests the argument was not settled so much as suspended.

Filippo Amari took the family briefly, then Nicholas Delmore. Within a decade it would be run from a plumbing supply office in Kenilworth and recorded from end to end by the FBI, and the era in which a New Jersey boss could be shot in a restaurant and leave no paper behind would be over.