Files on the American underworld
Long reads
Single episodes told in order, drawn from the court record. The files say who a man was; these say what happened.
January 1998 · New York and New Jersey
A robbery at the World Trade Center, three men who forgot about the lift camera, and the informant the DeCavalcante family spent two years trying to make.
Vincent "Vinny Ocean" Palermo · Anthony "Tony" Rotondo · The DeCavalcante Family
January 1992 · New Jersey
An acting boss of the DeCavalcante family was killed in 1992 for a reason nobody wrote down at the time. What replaced him was a committee, and the committee lasted the rest of the decade.
John D'Amato · Vincent "Vinny Ocean" Palermo · The DeCavalcante Family
December 1990 · New York
A social club everyone knew was watched, a flat upstairs that nobody thought about, and the eighteen months in which the most famous boss in America talked himself and his underboss into a federal courtroom.
John "The Dapper Don" Gotti · Salvatore "Sammy the Bull" Gravano · The Gambino Family
June 1989 · Philadelphia and Atlantic City
Nicodemo Scarfo raised Philip Leonetti, made him underboss at thirty-three, and gave him a decade of orders. In 1989 Leonetti sat down with federal prosecutors and went through all of them.