Real-life mafia wars were far more complex and devastating than depicted in films like Goodfellas, involving shifting alliances, long-term strategic planning, and power struggles that lasted for years rather than weeks. The Castellammarese War (1930-1931) established the five-family structure that persists today, while the Matanza (1981-1984) in Sicily killed over 400 people and targeted law enforcement, demonstrating that organized crime conflicts often escalate into widespread violence that affects innocent civilians and requires state intervention to resolve.
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The Real Mafia Wars Are Worse Than GoodfellasAdded:
Most people's understanding of organized crime comes from a single film, Goodfellas.
3 hours long, 25 years of the American mob, nine people taken out across the entire story.
It feels like a lot until you look at what was happening in Sicily while that story was unfolding, where nine was the kind of number that might not even make the evening news.
Every organized crime film ever made draws from the same well, the suits, the restaurants, the codes, the betrayals.
What they almost never do is show you the actual scale of what these organizations were capable of when the rules broke down.
Not one man turning on his crew, not a turf dispute ending badly, the full machinery of coordinated mass violence directed by men who had spent years preparing for exactly this.
10 conflicts, three continents, 130 years.
The research behind what you are about to hear comes entirely from court records, law enforcement documentation, and testimony given under oath by the people who were inside these events.
Section one, >> [music] >> the Castellammarese War.
New York City, 1930.
Prohibition was still running.
Bootlegging was making fortunes for anyone bold enough to move product across state lines.
And two men were about to turn the American underworld into a war zone over a question that sounds almost boring on the surface, who is in charge?
>> [music] >> The two sides were led by Joe Masseria and Salvatore Maranzano.
Both were Sicilian-born bosses who had built serious criminal operations in New York throughout the 1920s.
Masseria had come up through the streets of lower Manhattan and controlled the most profitable underworld rackets in the city.
Maranzano came from Castellammare del Golfo, a small coastal town in Sicily, and arrived in America with one goal: build something bigger than what Masseria had, and then take what Masseria already owned.
The conflict between them had been building for years before the first man went down.
Masseria was powerful, but aggressive in a way that made his own allies uneasy.
He demanded tributes from other gangs, pushed rivals out of their territories, and made enemies faster than he made friends.
His reach extended across the country, but his approach, dominate everything, tolerate nothing, was creating a problem that money alone could not fix.
Maranzano, on the surface, looked like the same type. Old world values, old world methods.
But he had something Masseria lacked, a loyal network of Sicilian-born gangsters across New York and Buffalo who shared his regional background and deeply resented Masseria's stranglehold on the city.
They were known as the Castellammarese faction.
>> [music] >> They were ready for someone to lead them.
The conflict officially began on February 26th, 1930, when Masseria ordered the removal of Gaetano Reina, one of his own lieutenants who had quietly switched his loyalty to Maranzano.
That single decision triggered a chain of events that would not stop for over a year.
Throughout 1930, both sides moved against each other across New York.
Masseria's enforcer, Giuseppe Morello, was taken out in his East Harlem office in August.
Two of Masseria's top men, Al Mineo and Steve Ferrigno, were removed on November 5th.
Each hit was answered with another. The city became a tracking operation with men from both factions moving through the streets looking for openings.
But underneath the visible conflict, something else was developing.
Not everyone in Masseria's own camp wanted him to win.
A group of younger American-raised men, Charles Luciano, Vito Genovese, Frank Costello, Joe Adonis, had grown up watching the old Sicilian bosses run things with absolute authority and a closed mind toward anyone outside their circle.
These men were different.
>> [music] >> They worked with non-Italians when it made business sense. They thought in terms of profit, not tradition.
And they looked at this war and saw exactly what it was, a drain on money, a spotlight from law enforcement, and a problem that could be solved. Just not the way either boss was trying to solve it.
Luciano, in particular, had a plan. It involved betraying his own boss.
By early 1931, the war had shifted heavily against Masseria.
Defections were mounting. His position was weakening by the month.
Luciano quietly opened a line of communication with Maranzano and made a deal.
Luciano would arrange for Masseria to be removed, and in return, Luciano would take control of Masseria's operation and serve as Maranzano's second in command.
On April 15th, 1931, Luciano invited Masseria to lunch at the Nuova Villa Tammaro restaurant on Coney Island.
They ate. They played cards.
At some point during the meal, Luciano excused himself to use the bathroom.
Moments later, four men entered the restaurant and did what they came to do.
Masseria, the self-styled boss of all bosses, went down at the card table.
The Castellammarese War was over.
Maranzano had won.
He immediately declared himself capo di tutti capi, boss of all bosses, and restructured New York's entire criminal landscape into five distinct families, each with a clear chain of command.
The system he laid out, a boss, an underboss, captains and soldiers below them, became the architecture of the American Mafia as it still exists today.
He called a meeting, laid down the rules, and expected everyone to fall in line behind him.
He lasted five months.
Luciano had no intention of serving anyone for long.
Maranzano, it turned out, was as hungry for control as the men he had replaced.
He repositioned rackets in his own favor, demanded tributes, and, critically, placed a contract on Luciano and Genovese, correctly identifying them as the next threat to his position.
Luciano found out.
He moved first.
On September 10th, 1931, four men entered Maranzano's office on the ninth floor of 230 Park Avenue in Manhattan, posing as government agents conducting a raid.
They disarmed his guards. Then they took Maranzano out in his own office in the middle of the day.
The building still stands. It is now known as the Helmsley Building.
What followed across the next 48 hours became known as the Night of the Sicilian Vespers.
In New York, in Buffalo, in Chicago, in Philadelphia, the remaining old guard bosses aligned with Maranzano's vision were systematically removed.
Some bodies turned up over the following days. Others were never found.
Luciano came out of all of it as the most powerful criminal figure in the country.
Rather than crown himself boss of all bosses, a title that had twice over proven to be a target, he created the Commission, a governing board made up of the heads of the most powerful families across the country.
Power shared, conflicts settled at a table, not on the street.
The structure he built in 1931 is still the basic structure of the American Mafia today.
Luciano did not pick a side and fight his way to the top. He let two bosses drain each other, remove them both in sequence, and then built the system designed to make sure nothing like the Castellammarese War could happen again.
The man who ended the first great American mob conflict did it by engineering both sides of it.
That structure, the Commission, the five families, the rules, held for decades.
But rules only work when everyone agrees to follow them.
And as the 1980s arrived, a clan from a small rural town in Sicily looked at every rule the Mafia had ever written and decided none of them applied to themselves.
What followed made the Castellammarese War look like a disagreement between neighbors.
Section two, the second Sicilian Mafia War, the Matanza.
The Commission that Lucky Luciano built in 1931 was designed to prevent exactly what happened in Sicily 50 years later.
A set of rules, a governing body, a process for settling disputes without bodies piling up in the streets.
For decades, it mostly worked. Not perfectly, but well enough to keep the peace between the most powerful criminal organizations in the Western world.
Then came Corleone.
Not the fictional version, the actual town. A small rural farming community in the interior of Sicily, about 60 km south of Palermo.
The Corleonesi, the mafia family that took its name from that town, had been a minor player in Sicilian organized crime for years.
>> [music] >> The powerful families were in Palermo.
They ran the port, the construction industry, the heroin trade.
The Corleonesi were from the countryside. Palermo's bosses looked down on them openly, calling them [music] Iヴィ Dani, the peasants, muddy feet, not worth serious concern.
That contempt would cost every single one of them everything.
The Corleonesi's rise began with Luciano Leggio, a boss whose brutality, even by Sicilian mafia standards, was considered extreme.
When Leggio was imprisoned in 1974, control passed to his deputy, a soft-spoken, barely educated man named Salvatore Riina, who had been living as a fugitive for years.
Riina had no public profile, no legitimate business front, no mansion.
He moved quietly, met rarely, and trusted almost no one.
While Palermo's bosses attended public functions and built reputations as men of standing in their communities, Riina was essentially invisible.
He spent that invisibility building something.
Throughout the late 1970s, Riina and his underboss, Bernardo Provenzano, quietly recruited allies inside other Sicilian Mafia families.
They did not announce these alliances.
Members of powerful Palermo clans, men [music] who attended commission meetings alongside the families Riina intended to destroy, were secretly aligned with him.
They went to meetings, shook hands, reported back.
The Palermo bosses had no idea they were already surrounded.
The opening move came in 1981.
On the evening of April 23rd, Stefano Bontade, one of the most powerful bosses in Palermo, a man known as the Prince of Villagrazia, was returning home in his car when he was taken out.
The same weapon that removed Bontade was used 3 weeks later on Salvatore Inzerillo, [music] another senior Palermo boss. Both men had believed themselves to be in a position of strength. Neither had understood what was already in motion around them.
What followed was called the Matanza, the Italian word for slaughter, specifically the traditional method of netting and taking bluefin tuna in Sicilian waters.
The name was not applied ironically. It was accurate.
From 1981 to 1984, at least 400 people were taken out in Palermo alone. Across the rest of Sicily, the number was comparable.
On top of those confirmed cases, at least 160 more people simply vanished, victims of what the Sicilians call lupara bianca, the white shotgun.
No body, no evidence, no trace.
The person was there and then they were not.
The Corleonesi and their hidden allies suffered almost no losses. Their secrecy protected them.
Their enemies, accustomed to a mafia that operated through negotiation and commission approval, were not equipped for what was being done to them.
By the time the scale of the campaign became clear, the losing side had already lost.
The violence did not stay internal.
Riina made a decision that broke every rule the Sicilian mafia had ever operated under.
He went directly after the Italian state.
>> [music] >> Judges, prosecutors, senior law enforcement officers, politicians, anyone building a serious case against Cosa Nostra became a target. Between 1979 and 1983, roughly 15 law enforcement and judicial figures were systematically removed. A regional president, [music] a communist party leader, senior Carabinieri captains, anti-mafia investigators.
The press began referring to these victims as >> [music] >> the cadaveri eccellenti, the excellent corpses.
The most audacious single act came in September 1982. [music] General Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa was the Italian government's own high commissioner against the mafia.
The state had sent its most capable officer to deal with what was happening in Sicily.
He was taken out along with his wife less than 5 months after arriving in Palermo. The mafia had eliminated the man Rome sent to stop it.
On November 30th of that same year, 12 people connected to rival factions were taken out across Palermo in 12 separate incidents in a single day.
The death squad responsible for much of this activity was led by Giuseppe Greco, a man who, according to testimony later given by informants, personally carried out over 80 eliminations on Riina's behalf.
The war broke the Mafia's code of silence from the inside. Men who had lost brothers, [music] sons, and nephews to the Corleonesi began talking. Tommaso Buscetta, a senior Palermo figure who had fled to Brazil, lost two [music] sons, a brother, a son-in-law, a brother-in-law, and four nephews to the Corleonesi during the conflict. When he was arrested and extradited to Italy in 1984, he made a decision that no major Sicilian Mafia figure had ever made before. He asked to speak to the anti-mafia judge Giovanni Falcone.
And he told him everything. Buscetta's testimony formed the foundation of the Maxi Trial, held in a purpose-built bunker courthouse in Palermo beginning in 1986.
475 people were tried. 338 were convicted.
Italy's Supreme Court confirmed those convictions in 1992.
It remains the largest criminal trial in recorded history. Riina himself was not arrested until January 1993, when he was found living quietly in a Palermo apartment.
>> [music] >> He had been a fugitive for 30 years.
He was convicted of hundreds of crimes and died in prison in 2017, serving 26 life sentences.
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The Matanza reshaped the entire Sicilian Mafia and triggered a state response that the organization has never fully recovered from.
But while Riina was operating in Sicily, an ocean away, the American families were running wars of their own, quieter in scale, but no less vicious in method, [music] and in one case, fought entirely over who was owed what.
Section [music] 3, the Gallo-Profaci War.
Brooklyn, 1960.
No foreign faction, no rival family moving in on territory, no outside threat of any kind.
>> [music] >> This war started entirely from within, over money that was already being made, split in a way that certain men had decided was no longer acceptable.
Joe Profaci had run his family since 1928.
He was one of the original five family bosses that Lucky Luciano set up after the Castellammarese War, and in the decades since, he had built himself into a wealthy man. His legitimate front was olive oil and tomato paste importing, which earned him the nickname the olive oil king. His actual wealth came from the full range of underworld operations across Brooklyn, numbers, loan sharking, gambling, and more. He lived on a 328-acre estate on Long Island with a hunting lodge on the property. By any measure, he had done well.
His soldiers had not done as well, and they knew it. Profaci ran his family with a level of financial control that his own men found suffocating. Every soldier in the family was required to pay him a monthly tribute of $25.
Not a percentage of earnings, not a cut of specific rackets, but a flat fee simply for the privilege of being in his family. On top of that, when Profaci ordered someone removed, he expected his men to carry it out and hand over whatever rackets that person had been running. The reward, if any, was at his discretion.
Frank Abbatemarco ran a numbers operation out of Red Hook that brought in nearly two and a half million dollars a year, roughly $7,000 a day. He began refusing to pay Profaci his tribute. The debt accumulated. When it reached $50,000, Profaci's patience ran out. He went to the Gallo brothers, Larry, Albert, and Joey, [music] and offered them a deal.
"Remove Abbatemarco and his numbers operation passes to you."
The Gallos accepted. Abbatemarco was removed in November 1959.
Profaci did not hand over the operation.
He kept the numbers business for himself, gave the Gallos nothing, and apparently expected that to be the end of it.
It was not. Joey Gallo, the youngest and most volatile of the three brothers, had a reputation for being genuinely unpredictable, [music] the kind of man who unsettled people even within an industry built on intimidation.
He was not going to absorb this quietly.
By early 1961, the Gallos had decided that talking would not resolve anything. [music] On February 27th, they took four of Profaci's most senior men off the street simultaneously.
Underboss Joseph Magliocco, Profaci's own brother Frank, Captain Salvatore Musacchia, and soldier John Simone were all taken and held. Profaci himself got warning and fled to Florida. The Gallos made their demands clear. A fairer arrangement, control of the Abbatemarco operation they had been promised, a restructuring of how money moved through the family. Profaci sent his consigliere to negotiate. After several weeks of back and forth, a deal was reached and all four men were released without being harmed. Profaci had no intention of keeping his word.
Six months passed. The Gallos waited for the arrangement to be [music] honored.
It was not. Then, on August 20th, 1961, Profaci made his response. He sent men after Larry Gallo and after a Gallo loyalist named Joseph Gioielli. Gioielli was approached by men he knew, invited to go out on a fishing trip, and did not return. Larry Gallo was lured to a bar called the Sahara Club in East Flatbush, where Carmine Persico and another man put a rope around his neck and began strangling him. A police officer walked through the door mid-attack. Both men released Gallo and walked out. The officer initially had no idea what he had just interrupted. Persico had, until that point, been considered an ally of the Gallo brothers. He had sided with Profaci. From that day forward, the Gallos had a name for him. The snake. It followed him for the rest of his life.
With the war now fully open, the Gallo crew fell back to their base at 51 President Street in Red Hook, right along the Gowanus Canal docks.
What they built there was less a headquarters and more a fortified position. An entire city block was sealed off with cars used as barriers.
Chicken wire was stretched across the windows, [music] not to keep people out, but specifically to prevent anyone from lobbing a device through the glass from a passing vehicle. Armed men with high-powered rifles rotated through rooftop positions around the clock.
Everyone inside slept there, ate there, and did not leave without a plan. They called it hitting the mattresses.
From inside that compound and from whatever street corners [music] they could safely reach, both sides ran operations against each other throughout 1961, 1962, and into 1963.
Nine men were confirmed taken out during the conflict. Three more disappeared entirely and were never found.
Profaci died of cancer on June 6th, 1962 before either side had secured a clear outcome.
His long-time underboss, Joseph Magliocco, one of the men the Gallos had held hostage the previous year, took over and inherited the ongoing conflict.
The following year, Carmine Persico survived a car device attack. His enforcer, Hugh McIntosh, was wounded in a separate incident while attempting to get to Larry Gallo.
In late 1961, Joey Gallo had been sentenced to 7 to 14 years in prison on extortion charges, which removed the most combustible element from the street-level fighting.
With Gallo imprisoned and Profaci dead, the war gradually lost momentum without ever being formally resolved.
It ended not because anyone won, but because the conditions that fueled it shifted enough that open fighting became impractical for both [music] sides.
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>> [music] >> The grudge, however, did not end. Joey Gallo would eventually be released from prison in 1971, and within a very short time the same family would be at war again. This time in a way that played out astonishingly in front of thousands of people in broad daylight.
Section 4, The Banana War.
Joseph Bonanno had been one of the most powerful men in the American underworld for over 30 years.
He had survived the Castellammarese War.
He had sat at Lucky Luciano's table when the Commission was formed in 1931.
He was one of the original five family bosses, and by the early 1960s, he had built his family into a tight, well-run operation [music] with interests in New York, Canada, and Arizona.
He was disciplined, respected, and by all outward appearances, content with what he had.
He was not content. Bonanno had come to believe that the other Commission bosses, men he had worked alongside for decades, [music] were no longer true to the old Sicilian values he considered the foundation of the entire organization.
He saw himself as the last genuine man of honor in the American Mafia. And somewhere in that belief, ambition and delusion became difficult to separate.
By 1963, he had developed a plan to remove several of his fellow Commission bosses and consolidate power over the entire organization for himself.
The targets included Carlo Gambino, Tommy Lucchese, and Stefano Magaddino, Bonanno's own cousin.
To carry out the removals against Gambino and Lucchese specifically, Bonanno went to his ally Joseph Magliocco, who had just taken over the Colombo family after Profaci's passing.
Magliocco agreed to assist and assigned the contracts to one of his most capable men, a captain named Joseph Colombo.
Colombo went directly to Gambino and told him everything.
Gambino and Lucchese brought the information to the Commission.
The other bosses quickly worked out that Magliocco could not have conceived this plan on his own. The ambition and the reach of it pointed clearly back to Bonanno.
Magliocco was summoned to answer for his role. He confessed, was stripped of his position, and was allowed to retire rather than face consequences, reportedly due to his failing health.
He passed away not long after.
Bonanno, understanding what was coming, made himself scarce. The Commission formally removed Bonanno as boss of his own family in 1964, and appointed a capo named Gaspar Di Gregorio to replace him. Di Gregorio had his own long-running grievance with Bonanno, who had years earlier denied him the position of family consigliere, and given the role to his own son Bill instead. Then, on October 21st, 1964, the very day Bonanno was scheduled to testify before a federal grand jury, he vanished.
He was allegedly taken off the street as he entered an apartment building on Park Avenue in Manhattan, where one [clears throat] of his lawyers lived.
The kidnapping, he later claimed, was carried out by men working for his cousin Magaddino, acting on behalf of the Commission.
He was reportedly held at a farmhouse in upstate New York for approximately 6 weeks before being released and driven to El Paso, Texas, where he arranged his own pickup.
He resurfaced 19 months after disappearing.
Whether the kidnapping was real or staged by Bonanno himself to buy time has never been definitively settled.
FBI recordings captured his own soldiers expressing anger and confusion during his absence. Men saying they had been left alone on the street with no direction.
That reaction does not easily fit with a staged disappearance. [music] But neither does the fact that Bonanno emerged from the whole episode in reasonably good health after nearly 2 years, having apparently suffered no serious harm from men who had every reason to want him permanently gone.
What is not disputed is what his disappearance triggered.
The family fractured immediately.
Those loyal to Bonanno, led in the streets by his son Bill and his brother-in-law Frank Labruzzo, refused to recognize De Gregorio's authority.
The Commission-backed faction, led by De Gregorio, claimed legitimate leadership.
Roughly 175 to 200 active members and associates of the family had to choose a side, and many of them spent the next several years moving through the city trying not to be found by the other faction while hunting for openings against them.
For the better part of 3 years, the streets of New York had two versions of the same family operating simultaneously, each treating the other as the enemy.
There was no major open battle until January 1966, when De Gregorio arranged what was presented as a peace meeting, a sit-down at a private house on Troutman Street in Brooklyn.
Representatives of the Bonanno loyalist faction, including Bill Bonanno, arrived expecting negotiations.
De Gregorio's men were already positioned inside and around the building.
When Bill Bonanno and his group approached, they opened fire.
Nobody on either side was taken out in the exchange.
The ambush, despite the planning behind it, failed completely.
Bill Bonanno was unhurt.
The incident accomplished nothing except confirming that any remaining possibility of a peaceful resolution was finished.
De Gregorio was replaced by the commission shortly after, seen as ineffective, and Paul Sciacca was put in his place.
The fighting continued.
Three of Sciacca's men were taken out by machine gunfire inside a restaurant in Queens.
Each side lost additional men over the following months, with the final count across the entire conflict reaching approximately 13 people.
In 1968, Joe Bonanno suffered a serious heart attack and informed the commission that he was stepping down for good.
He moved to Arizona.
The commission, having [music] spent four years trying to manage the fallout from his scheming, accepted the retirement with a degree of relief and allowed the family to stabilize under new leadership.
Bonanno lived in Tucson for the rest of his life.
In 1983, he published a memoir in which he described himself as a man of honor who had always acted according to a code.
Federal prosecutors later used portions of the book in legal proceedings against him.
He passed away in 2002 at the age of 97, >> [music] >> outliving almost everyone who had ever crossed him, opposed him, or cleaned up after him.
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The Bonanno war burned out eventually, but what was building in Philadelphia at almost the same time did not burn out.
It simply consumed everything it touched, >> [music] >> including the men who lit it.
Section five, the Philadelphia mob wars.
For 21 years, the Philadelphia family had been one of the quietest in the country.
That was entirely due to one man, Angelo Bruno, who took over as boss in 1959 and ran the organization with a deliberate calmness that earned him the nickname the Docile Don.
Bruno was not soft. He was strategic. He understood that visibility was a liability, that unnecessary conflict attracted law enforcement, [music] and that a criminal organization running smoothly in the background made far more money than one constantly at war with itself or with rivals.
Under Bruno, Philadelphia prospered.
On March 21st, 1980, Bruno was sitting in a car outside his home on Snyder Avenue in South Philadelphia, when a single shot from a shotgun ended his [music] life.
He was 69 years old.
The man behind the removal was Antonio Caponigro, Bruno's own consigliere.
Caponigro believed that with Bruno gone, [music] he could step into the top position.
He had not asked the Commission for approval before acting, a rule that had existed since Lucky Luciano established it nearly 50 years earlier.
No boss of a family could be removed without the Commission's sanction.
Caponigro had simply decided the rule did not apply to him.
Weeks later, Caponigro's body was found in the trunk of a car in New York.
He had been shot multiple times.
$300 in cash had been stuffed into his mouth and his body.
A deliberate message about greed placed there by the men who handled the commission's response to his unauthorized move.
His brother-in-law, Alfred Salerno, was found the same way, the same day.
The commission installed Philip Testa as Bruno's replacement.
Testa chose Nicodemo Scarfo, a compact, volatile man who had spent years running operations in Atlantic City as his consigliere.
Less than a year later, on March 15th, 1981, a nail bomb planted beneath the front porch of Testa's home detonated as he returned late at night, taking his life.
The device had been constructed by Testa's own underboss, Peter Casella, working with a captain named Frank Narducci.
Casella fled to Florida. Narducci was later taken out.
Three bosses in under 12 months.
Scarfo moved into the top position.
What followed over the next 8 years [music] was described by law enforcement and by the family's own members as the most sustained period of internal bloodshed any American organized crime family had ever produced.
Scarfo operated on the principle that loyalty was everything and that any doubt about a man's loyalty was sufficient reason to remove him.
This was not a principle applied selectively. It was applied constantly to soldiers, to captains, and eventually to men who had served him faithfully for years.
>> [music] >> Between 1981 and 1989, Scarfo's organization was connected to more than 25 confirmed acts of fatal violence.
Federal investigators put broader estimates higher.
The family averaged roughly six gang-related fatalities per year during the early part of the decade, a figure that shocked even experienced law enforcement in the city.
The first major internal conflict of Scarfo's reign was the Riccobene war, which ran from 1982 to 1984.
Harry Riccobene was an older member of the family who refused to accept Scarfo's authority.
Scarfo assembled lists of targets connected to Riccobene and began working through them.
Riccobene's faction responded in kind.
Shootings took place on the streets of South Philadelphia, some in the middle of the day in full view of the public.
A Scarfo hitman shot Riccobene himself, but Riccobene survived the attack.
The war ground on until Riccobene was eventually imprisoned and his faction was broken apart.
With the Riccobene conflict settled, Scarfo turned on people within his own inner circle.
Salvatore Testa had been one of Scarfo's most reliable and capable men.
He was the son of Philip Testa, the boss whose removal had opened the door for Scarfo in the first place.
And he had personally carried out multiple acts of violence on Scarfo's behalf throughout the early 1980s.
He was respected across the family in a way that very few men were.
That respect was precisely the problem.
Scarfo had come to believe that Testa was becoming too prominent, too popular, that his standing in the organization was beginning to rival Scarfo's own.
There was also a personal element. Testa had broken off an engagement to the daughter of Scarfo's underboss, Salvatore Merlino, and Merlino wanted satisfaction.
Scarfo gave him permission.
On September 14th, 1984, Testa was lured into an ambush by his closest friend, a man who had been instructed to set him up and complied.
His body was found the same day, bound with rope and wrapped in a blanket on a roadside in Gloucester Township, New Jersey.
Two gunshot wounds to the back of the head.
He was 28 years old.
The Testa removal changed the internal atmosphere of the entire family.
If a man like Salvatore Testa, loyal, effective, the son of a former boss, could be taken out on a personal grievance, then nobody was safe.
That realization began moving through the organization quietly, >> [music] >> and it started converting some of Scarfo's most trusted men into potential informants.
Scarfo's downfall came from multiple directions simultaneously.
In 1985, he attempted to extort a million dollars from a major commercial developer named Willard Rouse.
Rouse refused and went directly to the FBI.
An undercover agent was inserted into the situation.
The resulting case gave federal investigators exactly the kind of documented evidence they needed.
Scarfo's own soldier, Nicholas Caramandi, facing serious charges, became a cooperating witness and began providing detailed testimony about years of the family's activity.
In 1988, Scarfo was convicted on racketeering charges and sentenced to 14 years.
In 1989, he was convicted again. This time for the 1985 taking out of bookmaker Frank D'Alfonso and received a life sentence on top of the existing term.
He became the first mob boss in American history to be personally convicted of carrying out a fatal act.
His nephew, Philip Leonetti, who had served as his underboss and stood at his side for 25 years, became a government witness in 1989 to avoid a 45-year sentence >> [music] >> and provided testimony that damaged what remained of the family.
Scarfo passed away in a federal medical facility in January 2017.
The Philadelphia family never recovered the position it held before 1980.
Philadelphia's wars were brutal and self-contained, a family destroying itself from the inside over a decade.
But across the Atlantic, a conflict was building in the streets of Naples that operated on an entirely different scale of public violence, one that would pull in innocent people and shock an entire country.
Section six, the Scampia feud.
Naples, Italy, northern suburbs, an area of concrete tower blocks built in the 1960s and 1970s as public housing, now known internationally under one name, Scampia.
The towers were enormous structures with open walkways and connecting bridges that made them almost impossible for outside law enforcement to move through effectively.
Residents called them the vele, >> [music] >> the sails.
For decades, they were, among other things, the physical infrastructure of the largest open-air narcotics market in Europe.
The organization that controlled Scampia was the Di Lauro clan, led by Paolo Di Lauro, known in the neighborhood as Ciruzzo the Millionaire.
Di Lauro had built a distribution network across the northern suburbs of Naples that operated with the discipline and structure of a legitimate business.
Suppliers brought product in from South America through Spain.
Street-level distributors, known locally as the Spaniards because of those constant trips, moved it through fixed points across Scampia and the surrounding neighborhoods of Secondigliano, Miano, and Piscinola.
At its height, the organization was bringing in more than 500,000 euros per day from narcotics alone.
That figure comes from Italian law enforcement estimates, not [music] speculation.
Di Lauro managed this empire through a system of controlled autonomy.
Local bosses had operational independence within their own zones, but the overall structure, supply chain, pricing, territory, [music] remained under Di Lauro's oversight.
As long as everyone respected the framework, the money moved and the peace held.
The framework broke in 2004.
Italian authorities had been building cases against the Di Lauro organization throughout the early 2000s.
A major operation in 2002 resulted in the imprisonment of several senior figures.
Di Lauro himself remained free, but his son, Cosimo, who had taken on significant operational responsibilities, was arrested.
The arrests disrupted the internal hierarchy and created a power vacuum that certain senior members decided to fill for themselves.
Raffaele Amato, a senior figure who had been one of Di Lauro's most trusted allies, led the breakaway faction.
He and his associates, later referred to as the Scissionisti, the secessionists, had their own established connections to narcotic suppliers in Spain, >> [music] >> independent of the Di Lauro network.
They had decided that those connections, combined with the disruption caused by the arrests, gave them enough leverage to operate independently.
They began taking over distribution points across Scampia without authorization.
Di Lauro's son, Cosimo, >> [music] >> even from inside custody, moved to reassert control.
On October 28th, 2004, two men closely associated with Cosimo, Fulvio Montanino and Claudio Salierno, were shot and fatally wounded by the secessionist faction.
The feud had its first confirmed casualties.
Three days later, at the funeral of Montanino and Salierno, police arrested two men in the crowd who were carrying concealed automatic weapons. They had come to open fire on the funeral procession.
The attack did not happen only because law enforcement happened to be present in sufficient numbers to intercept them before it began.
From that point, [music] the conflict escalated with a speed and ferocity that overwhelmed the local authorities and shocked the country.
Gunmen on motorbikes moved through residential streets targeting members of the opposing faction wherever they could be found. Automatic weapons were used openly. In the first month and a half of fighting, [music] at least 28 people were fatally wounded. Five people were taken out in a single weekend ambush.
The violence spread from Scampia and Secondigliano into neighboring districts as both factions pulled in allied clans from across the northern suburbs.
The Italian government deployed hundreds of additional law enforcement officers to the area. They made arrests. The fighting continued anyway.
On November 21st, 2004, a 21-year-old woman named Gelsomina Verde was abducted. Verde had no involvement in the conflict. She had previously had a relationship with a secessionist member named Gennaro Notturno, from which she had separated weeks earlier.
Members of the Di Lauro faction took her in an attempt to extract information about Notturno's location.
She could not or would not provide it.
She was shot three times in the neck.
Her body was placed in a car that was then set on fire. Her remains were discovered shortly afterward. Verde's case produced a level of public reaction across Italy that was different from the response to the other casualties. She was young, entirely uninvolved, and had simply once known the wrong person.
The governor of the Campania region, the administrative territory in which Naples sits, made a direct public statement in [music] response to her case, calling it a challenge to the state that could not go unanswered. The feud produced over 100 confirmed fatalities by the time it wound down. The circumstances around several of those cases, which later emerged through testimony from former participants who became cooperating witnesses, >> [music] >> went beyond what had been publicly known. One cooperating witness described the decapitation of a rival, after [music] which the faction leader who ordered it reportedly used the severed head as a prop to demonstrate to his men the seriousness of what they were engaged in. While members of his own crew reportedly reacted with visible horror.
The witness stated that the leader then told them directly, "This is a conflict.
Are you ready?"
Paolo Di Lauro was arrested in September 2005, found in a modest apartment in Secondigliano.
He was later sentenced to 30 years.
Two weeks after his arrest at a court hearing, Di Lauro publicly embraced Vincenzo Pariante, one of the secessionist bosses, >> [music] >> in what investigators interpreted as a signal that the feud had formally ended.
Isolated acts of fatal violence continued into 2008, but the main conflict was over.
The Scampia feud took place between 2004 and 2005 in a major European city. It killed over 100 people, consumed an innocent young woman who had no part in it whatsoever, and was later documented in Roberto Saviano's book Gomorrah, for which Saviano has lived under police protection ever since.
Before we move on, if you're enjoying this analysis, please consider subscribing. It helps the channel tremendously. Everything that happened in Scampia was rooted in the present day. The next case goes back to the 19th century, to the very beginning of the American Mafia, and to a conflict that set a rule the entire organization followed for the next 100 years.
Section seven, the New Orleans Mafia War.
New Orleans, 1880s.
Decades before Lucky Luciano organized the five families, decades before there was a commission or a formal structure of any kind governing Italian organized crime in America, what existed in New Orleans during this period was something raw and less [music] defined. Two factions of Sicilian immigrants fighting over the same ground, the same contracts, and the same money with no governing body above them to call a halt. The conflict between the Matranga and Provenzano factions was, at its surface, a labor dispute. Both groups controlled the unloading of fruit cargo from ships arriving at the New Orleans waterfront.
>> [music] >> This was not a small operation. New Orleans in the late 19th century was one of the busiest ports in the country, and the contracts to provide dock workers for incoming vessels were worth serious money. The Provenzanos had held those contracts for years. Then, in 1885, Charles Matranga, who operated a saloon and other enterprises in the French Quarter, moved in on the fruit unloading business, and through a combination of negotiation and pressure, displaced the Provenzanos from the contract they had built their operation around. The Provenzanos did not accept this quietly.
Through the late 1880s, both factions accumulated allies drawn from the Sicilian immigrant community, and the hostility between them moved from a business rivalry into something with consistent violence attached to it.
By 1890, the situation had reached the attention of New Orleans Police Chief David Hennessy, who began investigating both organizations. Hennessy had a personal history with the Provenzanos.
He had worked alongside them in various capacities during his career, and was considered sympathetic to their position. He had helped send a previous Italian crime figure to deportation, and saw the Matranga operation specifically as the more dangerous of the two factions. In May 1890, a group of Matranga workers were ambushed at night on Esplanade Street while traveling home from the docks.
Tony Matranga, Charles' brother, was among the wounded and lost a leg in the attack.
The Provenzanos were charged. Six of them were convicted. Hennessey disagreed with the outcome, believed perjury had contaminated the trial, and was openly working to assist their appeal. A new trial was scheduled for late October 1890.
On the night of October 15th, 1890, 4 days before the retrial was due to begin, Hennessey was walking home along Basin Street when a group of attackers with sawed-off shotguns ambushed him from a shoemaker's shop across the street.
He returned fire and chased his attackers before collapsing. He was taken to a hospital where friends gathered at his bedside.
He remained conscious for several hours, but did not name anyone specifically.
According to witnesses present, [music] his only statement about who had attacked him was the word "Dagos", a derogatory slang term for Italians.
He passed away the following day.
The response from the city was immediate and unrestrained.
Mayor Joseph Shakespeare instructed police to arrest any Italian in the city who appeared remotely suspicious. Within 24 hours, 45 people had been taken into custody. Estimates of the total number of Italians detained in the days following range up to 250.
Most were released without charge. 19 men were ultimately indicted, including Charles Matranga himself, for either carrying out or organizing the attack on Hennessey.
The trial began in February 1891 and concluded in March. Of the nine defendants tried in the first group, six were acquitted outright.
>> [music] >> The jury could not reach a verdict on the remaining three.
Not a single conviction was returned.
The city did not accept the outcome.
A prominent [music] local figure named William Parkerson organized a public meeting the morning after the verdicts were announced and addressed a crowd estimated in the thousands. He told them that the justice system had failed and that the citizens of New Orleans would have to act for themselves.
The crowd formed into a mob and marched to the Orleans Parish Prison where the 19 indicted men, including those who had just been acquitted, were still being held on related charges or technicalities.
The mob forced its way inside without significant resistance from the guards.
What followed was the largest mass lynching in American history. Eleven men were fatally shot or hanged inside or immediately outside the prison.
>> [music] >> One of the victims was reportedly struck by over 40 rounds. Two men were dragged outside and hanged from lamp posts in the street for the crowd to see.
Charles Matranga, despite being one of the most prominent named targets, survived by concealing himself beneath a mattress in a cell during the attack.
Eight other prisoners also escaped the mob by hiding. When the crowd dispersed, Matranga emerged and within a short period resumed his position at the head of the New Orleans operation.
The Provenzano faction, having watched 11 of Matranga's associates taken from the prison and publicly destroyed by a crowd their own complaints had partly inflamed, lost whatever remaining influence they had in the city and faded out entirely over the following years.
The acquittals and the subsequent mob response became an international incident. Italy recalled its ambassador to the United States in protest.
Diplomatic negotiations over the following months resulted in the American government eventually paying an indemnity to the families of [music] the three victims who held Italian citizenship. The identity of Hennessy's actual attackers was never legally established. No one was ever convicted for it.
What the New Orleans conflict produced, beyond its immediate carnage, was a rule.
The backlash, the mass arrests, [music] the mob response, the diplomatic fallout, demonstrated what happened when organized crime drew that specific kind of public attention. The American Mafia took the lesson seriously. From that point forward, law enforcement figures were not to be targeted. The rule held, with rare exceptions, for the better part of a century.
That rule, along with nearly every other principle the American Mafia had built itself around, would be directly tested in New York just a few years after the Sicilian Matanza, when a single act of public violence at a civil rights rally turned a simmering family conflict into open warfare on the streets of Manhattan.
Section 8, the Second Colombo War.
Joey Gallo walked out of prison in the spring of 1971 after serving approximately 10 years on extortion charges.
>> [music] >> He was 42 years old and he had spent a decade inside thinking about how things had been left. The Gallo-Profaci conflict of the early 1960s had never been formally resolved. The men who had tried to strangle his brother in a Brooklyn bar were still operating and the family he had gone to war against had since changed names. It was now the Colombo family, run by Joseph Colombo, a man who had been one of the hostages the Gallos held back in 1961, >> [music] >> and who had been handed the leadership of the family specifically because he betrayed the previous bosses plot [music] to the commission.
None of that history had gone away simply because Gallo had been in prison for it. Joseph Colombo had spent the years of Gallos incarceration building something unusual for a sitting mob boss, a public profile. In 1970, he founded the Italian American Civil Rights League, an organization that staged demonstrations outside the FBI's New York offices and argued that law enforcement was unfairly targeting Italian Americans through its pursuit of organized crime investigations. [music] The league held its first major public rally in June 1970 at Columbus Circle in Manhattan >> [music] >> drawing an estimated crowd of around 50,000 people. It was a remarkable thing for a man of his position to have organized. A mob boss standing at the center of a public civil liberties movement arguing that the concept of the mafia was essentially a slander against an entire ethnic community. The second Italian Unity Day rally was scheduled for June 28th, 1971 at the same location. Shortly after Gallos release, Colombo arranged a meeting and offered him $1,000 as a gesture toward reconciliation. Gallo refused it and reportedly demanded 100,000.
>> [music] >> The number itself was almost certainly not the point. Gallo was not looking for a payoff. He was establishing from his first week out that he did not consider the old grievances settled and that he would not be managed quietly. The second Colombo war effectively started at that meeting.
On June 28th, 1971, Joseph Colombo arrived at Columbus Circle for the second Italian Unity Day rally. The crowd was large. Colombo was visible, accessible, at the center of an event he had built around his own public persona. A man named Jerome Johnson approached him in the crowd, produced a handgun, and shot Colombo three times at close range. Johnson was shot and fatally wounded immediately by one of Colombo's bodyguards and [music] died at the scene. Colombo did not pass away from his wounds that day. He was taken to hospital in a critical condition, remained in a coma, and never returned to any meaningful level of consciousness. He lingered in that state for nearly 7 years before passing away on May 22nd, 1978 from cardiac arrest resulting from his injuries. For the purposes of the family and the conflict, however, his effective leadership ended the moment Johnson's shots landed in June 1971.
Jerome Johnson's true employers were never established through any legal proceeding.
No one was ever charged in connection with the shooting of Joseph Colombo.
What was widely believed within the family, and has been reported extensively in the decades since, was that Gallo's connections and his known hostility toward Colombo made him the most logical source of the contract.
Gallo himself publicly denied any involvement.
He attended a public vigil for Colombo after the shooting, a move that struck many observers as either genuinely provocative or a calculated display of innocence, depending on their reading of him.
One detail about Jerome Johnson has been noted repeatedly in accounts of this period. Gallo, during his 10 years in prison, had deliberately cultivated relationships with African-American organized crime figures, an unusual step for a member of the Italian-American Mafia, which maintained strict ethnic boundaries around its formal membership.
Gallo emerged from prison with genuine alliances that crossed those lines.
Johnson was African-American.
The connection has never been legally proven, but it has never been satisfactorily explained away, either.
Less than a year after the Columbus Circle shooting, Gallo was celebrating his 43rd birthday in the early hours of April 7th, 1972.
He was at Umberto's Clam House, a restaurant on the corner of Hester and Mulberry Streets in the Little Italy neighborhood of Lower Manhattan.
With him were his wife, Sina, whom he had recently married, his stepdaughter, Lisa, his sister, Carmela, and his associate, Pete Diapoulos.
It was past 4:00 in the morning.
A gunman entered the restaurant and opened fire.
Gallo was struck multiple times.
>> [music] >> He made it out of the restaurant and onto the street before collapsing.
He was pronounced dead shortly after.
He had been out of prison for less than a year.
No one was ever convicted for the shooting of Joey Gallo.
The second Colombo War produced two of the most publicly visible acts of underworld violence in the entire history of the American Mafia.
A boss shot in front of thousands of people at his own civil rights rally.
>> [music] >> His opponent shot at a birthday dinner at 4:00 in the morning in the middle of Little Italy.
Both shooters, in different ways, were never definitively connected through the courts to the men who sent them.
Both cases remain, in the technical legal sense, unsolved.
What the war demonstrated was something the families already knew, but rarely had demonstrated so plainly in public.
That the rules about where violence could happen and when were ultimately only as strong as the discipline of the men choosing to ignore them.
Before we move on, if you're enjoying this analysis, please consider subscribing. It helps the channel tremendously.
That lesson was driven home even more brutally the following year, when three senior members of the Bonanno family walked into what they believed was a routine meeting and never walked out. In what remains one of the most coldly executed internal power plays in American mob history.
Section nine, the three capos massacre.
The Bonanno family had never fully stabilized after the Banana War.
The years that followed Joe Bonanno's forced retirement in 1968 produced a rapid succession of leaders, none of whom managed to hold the organization together with any real authority.
Natale Evola took over and passed away from illness in 1973.
Carmine Galante, a former top lieutenant known for extreme personal violence, effectively seized control in the mid-1970s and immediately began pushing into narcotics territory in ways that alarmed the other families.
In 1979, with commission approval, Galante was shot and fatally wounded while eating lunch at a restaurant in Bushwick, Brooklyn. A cigar still reportedly in his mouth when his body was photographed at the scene.
Philip Rastelli eventually assumed leadership. What he inherited was a family divided into competing factions with no settled loyalty to any single leader, actively being eaten away from the inside by an FBI undercover operation that none of them knew was running.
That operation had begun in 1976 when an FBI agent named Joseph Pistone was inserted into the New York underworld under the assumed name Donnie Brasco.
Working without any established cover story beyond his own ability to sustain a false identity over years, Pistone built relationships inside the Bonanno family. By presenting himself as a jewel thief with the right connections and the right temperament. [music] He moved steadily through the associate level and toward formal membership over the course of nearly 6 years. The men around him trusted him.
The evidence he gathered during that period ultimately contributed to more than 100 convictions.
In 1981, three of his closest contacts were about to carry out one of the most significant internal power moves in Bonanno family history. And Pistone, embedded as he was in their operation, was closer to it than federal law enforcement had ever been to an event of this kind while it was happening.
The Bonanno family in 1981 was split between two broad factions. On one side was the Rastelli leadership and the crews aligned with it. On the other were three senior captains, Philip Giaccone, Dominick Trinchera, and Alphonse Indelicato, who opposed Rastelli's position and had been maneuvering against it. The three men commanded their own crews, had their own loyalties within the family, >> [music] >> and represented a genuine threat to Rastelli's ability to run the organization. All three were experienced, capable, and not the kind of men who could be managed through conversation.
On May 5th, 1981, all three were invited to a meeting.
>> [music] >> The invitation came through channels they trusted, framed as a legitimate sit-down to address the internal tensions that had been building within the family. All three accepted and arrived at the designated location in Brooklyn that evening.
The meeting was an ambush.
None of the three men left it alive. The operation to remove all three in a single evening had been planned and sanctioned at the highest level.
It required coordination across multiple crews and the active participation of men who had presented themselves as neutral or even friendly to the targets up until the moment the trap closed.
Among those involved in executing the plan was Dominick Napolitano, a captain known as Sonny Black, who was himself one of the men Pistone had grown closest to during his undercover years.
Benjamin Ruggiero, known as Lefty Guns, another figure central to Pistone's infiltration of the family, was also connected to the events of that evening.
The body of Alphonse Indelicato was recovered relatively quickly. He was found in a lot in Ozone Park, Queens.
The discovery gave law enforcement an immediate concrete connection to the event, though the full picture of what had happened that night took years to emerge. Philip Giaccone and Dominick Trinchera did not turn up. Their remains were not located for more than two decades.
The men who carried out the removals and disposed of the bodies did so with enough care that neither set of remains surfaced through any investigation during the 1980s or 1990s.
They were found in 2004, buried in Queens, after Joseph Massino, who by that point had become the boss of the Bonanno family and was facing federal charges that carried potential capital punishment, made the decision to cooperate with the government. Massino was the first sitting boss of one of New York's five families to become a government witness. As part of his cooperation, he directed investigators to the burial sites of Giaccone and Trinchera, more than 23 years after they had been placed there.
The triple removal of May 5th, 1981, effectively ended the internal opposition to Rastelli's leadership and consolidated the family's command structure under a single authority.
[music] It was precise, it was sanctioned, and it worked, at least in terms of the immediate objective. The longer-term damage to the family came from a different direction entirely.
When Pistone's undercover operation concluded in 1981, the evidence he had accumulated began working its way through the federal court system. The convictions that followed, combined with the ongoing RICO prosecutions targeting all five families through the mid-1980s, hit the Bonannos harder than almost any other organization. They lost their seat on the commission as punishment for having allowed an FBI agent to penetrate their ranks undetected for 6 years. The three capos who died on May 5th, 1981, >> [music] >> were experienced, senior members of one of the most established criminal organizations in the country. They walked into a room they had been specifically invited to enter and did not walk out. Their bodies were hidden successfully for longer than some of the men involved in hiding them remained alive.
That kind [music] of internal surgical removal, clean, commission-sanctioned, carried out in private, represents one end of the spectrum of mob conflict.
What happened in the Colombo family between 1991 and 1993 was the opposite.
A war fought almost entirely in the open between men who should have been on the same side while the entire structure around them was collapsing under federal prosecution.
Section 10, the third Colombo war.
By 1991, the Colombo family had already been through more internal conflict than any other American organized crime organization of the modern era.
The Gallo-Profaci war of the early 1960s, the second Colombo war and its two very public shootings in 1971 and 1972, decades of federal prosecution, RICO indictments, and the slow erosion that came from informants turning government witness throughout the 1980s.
What the family needed entering the final decade of the 20th century >> [music] >> was stability.
What it got was its bloodiest war yet.
Carmine Persico had been the boss of the Colombo family since 1973.
His path to that position ran directly through the conflicts covered earlier in this video.
He was the man who attempted to strangle Larry Gallo in the Sahara Club in 1961, earning the nickname the Snake, and he had spent the following two decades consolidating his hold over the family through a combination of patience, intelligence, and a willingness to remove anyone who threatened his position.
As a criminal organizer, he was considered among the most capable of his generation by both his peers and the law enforcement agencies that spent years trying to bring him down.
They eventually succeeded.
In 1986, Persico was convicted on federal racketeering and extortion charges.
The sentences stacked against him across multiple proceedings totaled 139 years.
He was never leaving prison. He knew it.
Everyone around him knew it.
What Persico refused to accept was that imprisonment meant he had lost his authority over the family.
From his federal cell, he continued to issue directives, managed disputes, and make decisions about the organization's direction.
This was not unusual for mob bosses of his era. Several ran their families from custody with reasonable effectiveness.
What made Persico's situation complicated was the question of succession.
He wanted power to pass to his son Alphonse, known as Little Ally Boy, who was also serving a prison sentence at the time.
With both father and son unavailable, Persico appointed Victor Orena as acting boss, a position explicitly framed as temporary, a caretaker role until the Persico line could reassert direct control.
Orena had other ideas.
By 1991, Orena had been running the family's street-level operations for several years.
He had built relationships with captains and soldiers, managed the day-to-day business, and developed his own sense of the organization's direction.
He petitioned the commission, or what remained of it, given that most of the other family bosses were also either imprisoned or under indictment by this point, for permission to be officially recognized as boss in his own [music] right, rather than as a placeholder for the Persico family.
The request was denied.
Persico, from prison, made clear that his position on succession had not changed.
Orena decided to take what he had been refused.
In the summer of 1991, Orena's faction attempted to have Persico loyalist Andrew Russo taken out.
The attempt failed, but it made the conflict impossible to contain or negotiate away.
The family split into two armed camps.
>> [music] >> Orena's faction and the Persico loyalists.
And the shooting began in earnest [music] through the second half of 1991 and into 1992.
What made this war different from the previous Colombo conflicts was the context in which it was being fought.
The federal government's application of RICO legislation through the 1980s had already significantly degraded the family's leadership structure and financial base.
Men who might have served as experienced mediators or stabilizing forces were in prison or had become government witnesses.
The commission itself, the body that had historically intervened in exactly these kinds of internal disputes and imposed resolutions, was effectively non-functional as a governing entity by this period.
There was no authority above the conflict capable of calling a halt.
Both factions operated under the constant pressure of ongoing federal surveillance.
>> [music] >> They were fighting each other while simultaneously trying to avoid generating the kind of evidence that would accelerate their own prosecutions.
In practice, this proved impossible to manage.
The war produced fresh crime scenes, fresh witnesses, and fresh material for federal investigators at a time when the Justice Department was already deeply embedded in the family's operations.
12 people were fatally shot over the course of the conflict.
The dead came from both factions.
Several of the incidents took place in public locations in Brooklyn, echoing the brazen street-level violence that had characterized the Scarfo years in Philadelphia a decade earlier.
Law enforcement tracked the shootings in real time, building cases as the bodies accumulated.
The war ended in 1993, not through any negotiated peace or commission intervention, but through federal prosecution removing the men driving it.
Victor Arena was convicted on racketeering charges that included conspiracy to commit multiple acts of fatal violence.
He was sentenced [music] to three consecutive life terms plus 80 years.
He has maintained his innocence in relation to the war-related charges throughout the decades since, and his legal team has pursued various avenues of appeal without success.
The Persico faction was considered the technical victor in the sense that their line retained nominal control of the family's leadership.
It was a hollow outcome.
The organization that emerged from the third Colombo war was a fraction of what it had been at the start of Persico's tenure.
The membership was depleted, the finances were disrupted, the leadership structure had been exposed and prosecuted extensively, and the family's ability to operate as a meaningful criminal enterprise in New York had been severely and permanently reduced.
The Colombo family had now fought three internal wars in the space of 30 years.
Each one left it weaker than the one before.
The third left it barely functional.
Carmine Persico, the man [music] whose imprisonment had provided the trigger for the whole conflict, remained in federal custody for the rest of his life.
He passed away in prison in March 2019 at the age of 85, having spent the final 33 years of his life incarcerated.
10 wars, 10 families, 10 different ways organized crime turns on itself.
What connects all of them is simpler than any of the specific details.
And it points towards something about this entire world that the films and the television series rarely say plainly.
If you enjoyed this breakdown, make sure to subscribe. Thanks for watching, and I'll see you in the next one.
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