In order
Timeline
The days the business changed shape.
1920–1933
Prohibition
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14 February 1929
The Saint Valentine's Day Massacre
Chicago
Seven men of Chicago's North Side gang were lined up against a garage wall and shot dead. Nobody was ever convicted, and the killings turned Prohibition violence into a national political problem.
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13 May 1929
The Atlantic City Conference
Atlantic City
Gang leaders from several cities met on the New Jersey shore to divide territory and cool a war that was drawing federal attention. It was the first meeting of its kind and the model for everything organised later.
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10 September 1931
The End of the Castellammarese War
New York
Salvatore Maranzano was killed in his own office five months after declaring himself boss of all bosses. His death closed the war and opened the way for a governing commission instead of a crown.
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17 October 1931
Capone Convicted of Tax Evasion
Chicago
A federal jury convicted Alphonse Capone on five counts of income tax evasion. No murder, extortion or bootlegging charge had ever held against him; arithmetic did what the police could not.
1933–1950
The Golden Age
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7 June 1936
Luciano Convicted
New York
Charles Luciano was convicted on sixty-two counts of compulsory prostitution and sentenced to thirty to fifty years. The most powerful man in American organised crime was removed by a prosecution that had nothing to do with the rackets he actually ran.
1950–1970
The Commission
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14 November 1957
The Apalachin Meeting
Apalachin
A state trooper noticed too many out-of-state cars at a house in rural New York and interrupted a national gathering of crime family leaders. The raid destroyed the official position that no such organisation existed.
Carlo Gambino The Genovese Family Russell Bufalino The Bufalino Family
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27 September 1963
The Valachi Hearings
Washington
A soldier of the Genovese family testified on television about the organisation he belonged to, naming it and describing how it worked. It was the first account from inside, and it reached an audience of millions.
1970–1992
The Decline
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28 June 1971
Colombo is Shot at Columbus Circle
New York
A man with press credentials shot Joseph Colombo three times in the head at a rally of the Italian-American Civil Rights League, and was immediately shot dead by someone who has never been identified.
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19 June 1975
Giancana is Shot in His Basement
Chicago
The former boss of the Chicago Outfit was shot seven times in the basement kitchen of his own house, a week before he was due to answer a Senate committee's questions about the CIA and Cuba.
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30 July 1975
Hoffa Disappears
Detroit
The former president of the Teamsters left a restaurant car park in suburban Detroit, having told his wife he was meeting two men, and was never seen again. Nobody has been charged in fifty years.
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11 December 1978
The Lufthansa Heist
New York
A crew from a Lucchese capo's territory took roughly five million dollars in cash from a cargo building at Kennedy Airport, and over the following year most of the people who could describe how it was done were killed.
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12 July 1979
Galante is Killed in Brooklyn
New York
Carmine Galante was shot dead in the garden of a Brooklyn restaurant five years after leaving prison, having spent them making himself the most feared and least protected man in New York.
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21 March 1980
Angelo Bruno is Killed
Philadelphia
The boss who had kept Philadelphia quiet for twenty-one years was shot in his car outside his own house, by an arrangement his consigliere made without asking New York.
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15 March 1981
A Bomb on Philip Testa's Porch
Philadelphia
Eleven months after succeeding Angelo Bruno, the new boss of the Philadelphia family was killed by a nail bomb detonated under his front steps as he came home.
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4 October 1982
A Bomb Under the Cadillac
Las Vegas
The man running four Las Vegas casinos for the Chicago Outfit turned the key in his car outside a restaurant and survived the explosion because of a steel plate the factory had fitted under the driver's seat.
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16 December 1985
Paul Castellano is Shot Outside Sparks
New York
The boss of the largest Cosa Nostra family in America was shot dead on East 46th Street at the height of the evening rush, six weeks before he was due to stand trial with the heads of three other families.
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23 June 1986
The Spilotro Brothers Are Found
Chicago
A farmer's field in Indiana gave up the bodies of the Outfit's man in Las Vegas and his brother, and the account of how they died stood for twenty-one years before a trial in Chicago corrected it.
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19 November 1986
The Commission Trial
New York
A federal jury convicted the heads of three New York families and five other men of running the Commission itself as a criminal enterprise. It was the first prosecution to treat the governing body of American Cosa Nostra as a racketeering organisation, and it worked.
Anthony Corallo Carmine Persico The Lucchese Family The Colombo Family The Genovese Family
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20 July 1990
The Union Boss Goes Down
Newark
John Riggi was convicted of extortion and labour law violations, removing the DeCavalcante family's boss from circulation for most of the next two decades. He kept the title from prison, and the family spent the 1990s being run by proxies.
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11 December 1990
The Arrests at the Ravenite
New York
Federal agents took the boss, the underboss and the acting consigliere of the Gambino family out of a Mulberry Street social club, using recordings made in an apartment upstairs that the men in the club believed was empty.
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2 April 1992
Gotti Convicted
New York
After three acquittals in five years, the boss of the Gambino family was convicted on thirteen counts in a Brooklyn courtroom, largely on the testimony of the man who had been standing beside him when he was arrested.
1992–present
Modern
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3 March 1999
The Wiseguys Review The Sopranos
New Jersey
Eight weeks after the series premiered, an FBI recording device caught two DeCavalcante members discussing whether the show on HBO was supposed to be about them. It is the only documented case of a Cosa Nostra family reviewing its own dramatisation.
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2 December 1999
The December Arrests
Newark
Federal agents arrested more than thirty members and associates of the DeCavalcante family on racketeering and murder charges. Within weeks the acting boss agreed to cooperate, and the only Cosa Nostra family in New Jersey stopped functioning as one.
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12 March 2015
Ten Arrests in New Jersey
Elizabeth, New Jersey
Sixteen years after the case that produced two cooperating witnesses at the top of the family, the FBI arrested ten more members and associates of the DeCavalcante organisation in New Jersey.
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14 September 2021
The Colombo Administration is Indicted
New York
Federal prosecutors in Brooklyn charged the boss, the underboss and the consigliere of the Colombo family in one indictment, over a twenty-year effort to take control of a Queens labour union and its health fund.