Vito "Don Vito" Genovese

The family carries his name, which is a strange memorial for a man who ran it from a prison cell for the last decade of his life and lost it to the testimony of someone he had frightened badly enough to talk.

Genovese was born in Tufo, near Naples, in 1897 and came to New York as a boy. He rose beside Charles Luciano through the Castellammarese War and took the underboss position when Luciano reorganised the family in 1931.

The years away

In 1937 he left for Italy ahead of a murder prosecution and stayed for eight years, which is the detail that separates his career from every other boss of his generation.

He returned in 1945 in American military custody. The murder case collapsed when the principal witness died in protective custody, and Genovese walked out of a Brooklyn courtroom in 1946 a free man with a decade of absence to make up.

Taking the family

What followed was a decade of manoeuvring against Frank Costello, who had run the family in his absence and ran it in a manner Genovese regarded as soft.

Costello was shot in the lobby of his apartment building in May 1957 and survived. He retired. Albert Anastasia was killed in a barber's chair five months later. By the time the bosses gathered at Apalachin in November 1957, Genovese was the most powerful man in American organised crime, and the raid on that meeting made him the most conspicuous.

The cell

In 1959 he was convicted of conspiracy to import heroin and sentenced to fifteen years. He kept the family from prison and died there on 14 February 1969.

He also shared a wing with Joseph Valachi, who became convinced Genovese had marked him for death. Valachi killed a man he mistook for his assigned executioner, and in 1963 he sat in front of a Senate subcommittee and described the structure of an organisation nobody had publicly named. Genovese's last significant act as a boss was frightening the wrong man.