For decades, five Mafia families operated at the center of organized crime in New York City. They were not simply street gangs fighting over territory. By the 1930s, they had developed a system for dividing power, settling disputes and making money from illegal gambling, loan-sharking, extortion, drug trafficking and infiltration of legitimate businesses. Their influence reached into labor unions, construction, transportation and other industries. But the system that made them powerful also created vulnerabilities. As federal investigators developed stronger laws and Mafia members began breaking their famous code of silence, the Five Families faced a new kind of enemy—one that could attack the organization itself.
Prohibition Created the Opportunity
The rise of the American Mafia cannot be separated from Prohibition. Beginning in January 1920, the United States prohibited the manufacture and sale of alcohol. Instead of eliminating demand, the policy created a huge illegal market that criminal organizations were eager to supply.
Bootlegging became enormously profitable. Criminal groups learned that controlling illegal alcohol required more than selling bottles. They needed transportation, distribution networks, protection and people willing to intimidate competitors or corrupt officials. The enormous profits helped street gangs develop into increasingly sophisticated criminal organizations.
Many of the Italian-American mobsters who became part of New York’s Mafia had connections to Sicily and carried traditions associated with Sicilian organized crime. One of the most important was omertà, a code of silence that discouraged members from cooperating with authorities or revealing information about fellow criminals.
But money also created competition.
By the late 1920s, rival factions in New York were fighting for control. The conflict became known as the Castellammarese War, named after the Sicilian hometown of Salvatore Maranzano, one of the major figures involved. The violence demonstrated the weakness of a system in which competing bosses constantly fought for supremacy.
Someone eventually realized that there might be a better way to organize the underworld.
Lucky Luciano Changed the Rules
Charles “Lucky” Luciano emerged from the violence as one of the most influential figures in New York’s underworld. In 1931, after arranging the assassination of Joe Masseria and later eliminating Salvatore Maranzano, Luciano helped end the old struggle for dominance. Instead of declaring himself an all-powerful “boss of bosses,” he supported a system based on cooperation between several powerful families.
The result was the Commission, a governing body designed to help regulate disputes and coordinate the interests of major Mafia families.
New York’s Mafia was divided into five principal families. They eventually became known by the names Genovese, Bonanno, Lucchese, Gambino and Colombo. Each family had its own leadership and operations, while the Commission provided a mechanism for resolving conflicts between them.
This was an important change in organized crime.
The Mafia did not become powerful simply because its members were willing to use violence. It became more resilient because its leaders developed a structure that allowed competing groups to cooperate when cooperation was more profitable than war.
The Commission was not a government in any legitimate sense, of course. It was an internal mechanism for criminal organizations.
But the principle was remarkably effective.
Instead of constantly fighting over who would control New York, the families could negotiate, divide opportunities and maintain a degree of stability.
Want to take a closer look at the rise and fall of New York’s Mafia? Watch the video to explore how the Five Families built their power, operated for decades and eventually faced the forces that brought their most powerful era to an end.
Five Families, Five Paths to Power
The five families did not operate in exactly the same way. Each developed relationships and sources of income that helped establish its position within New York’s criminal underworld.
The Genovese family traces its Commission-era leadership to Luciano, although it later took the name of Vito Genovese. The family became associated with operations including control and influence around the Fulton Fish Market. Its history also produced one of the most important breaks in Mafia secrecy when Joseph Valachi became the first “made man” of the Five Families to publicly reveal information about the organization in 1963.
The Bonanno family was led for decades by Joseph “Joe Bananas” Bonanno. Its history became particularly famous because of FBI agent Joseph Pistone, who infiltrated the organization under the name Donnie Brasco between 1976 and 1981. The operation produced information that, according to the FBI, contributed to more than 100 federal convictions.
The Lucchese family became associated with transportation and airport-related activity. Its history includes the notorious 1978 Lufthansa heist at John F. Kennedy International Airport, when approximately $5 million in cash and $800,000 in jewelry were stolen. Henry Hill, one of the people involved, later became an informant, and his life became the basis for Nicholas Pileggi’s Wiseguy and Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas.
The Gambino family became one of the most recognizable names in American organized crime. Carlo Gambino controlled the family for years, while John Gotti later became its most famous public figure. Gotti’s reputation as the “Teflon Don” ended when he was convicted in 1992 on racketeering and murder charges, with testimony from his underboss Salvatore “Sammy the Bull” Gravano playing an important role.
The Colombo family had perhaps one of the strangest histories. Joseph Profaci was its original Commission boss, followed briefly by Joseph Magliocco. Magliocco became involved in a plot against Carlo Gambino and Tommy Lucchese, but Joseph Colombo, who was supposed to participate in the plot, instead revealed it to Gambino. Colombo subsequently became boss and gave the family its name.
Together, these organizations formed the most famous concentration of Mafia power in New York.
But their influence extended far beyond traditional street crime.
The Mafia Moved Into Legitimate Business
The Five Families did not need to control every business directly to profit from New York’s economy.
Their influence reached into labor unions and industries such as construction, trucking, garbage collection, restaurants, nightclubs and the garment industry. Criminal organizations could use extortion, kickbacks, corruption and control over labor to extract money from businesses that were otherwise legitimate.
This made the Mafia particularly difficult to fight.
A street criminal committing a visible offense could be arrested and prosecuted. A criminal organization influencing a union, manipulating contracts or intimidating witnesses presented a much more complicated problem.
The Mafia’s strength came partly from its ability to keep the people at the top insulated from the crimes committed by lower-ranking members.
A boss could give orders indirectly. Associates could carry out crimes without necessarily exposing the person who ultimately benefited. And members were expected to remain silent.
For years, this combination of hierarchy, money and secrecy helped the Five Families maintain their position. Then the government began changing the rules.
The Code of Silence Started to Break
One of the earliest major cracks in the Mafia’s secrecy appeared in 1963.
Joseph Valachi, a member of the Genovese family, became the first “made man” from the Five Families to publicly break omertà. After believing that Vito Genovese had ordered his death, Valachi killed another inmate whom he suspected of being his intended assassin. He subsequently agreed to testify before the U.S. Senate about the Mafia.
His testimony was important because it gave the government and the public an unprecedented look at how the organization operated.
But the real transformation came later.
In 1970, Congress passed the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, better known as RICO. The law gave federal prosecutors powerful new tools for pursuing organized criminal activity and allowed them to target criminal organizations rather than treating each offense as an isolated incident.
That changed the balance of power.
The Mafia had spent decades building organizations designed to insulate leaders from individual crimes. RICO made the structure itself a potential target.
Suddenly, investigators did not have to prove only that a particular boss personally committed a particular violent act.
They could build cases around patterns of organized criminal activity.
The walls protecting the leadership were beginning to weaken.
The Commission Trial Hit the Mafia at the Top
The government’s new approach reached one of its most dramatic moments in the 1980s.
Rather than pursuing individual mobsters one at a time, federal prosecutors sought to attack the leadership structure connecting the Five Families.
In 1985, federal prosecutors led by Rudy Giuliani indicted 11 Mafia leaders, including the heads of New York’s five dominant families. Investigators had spent years gathering evidence, including conversations recorded through electronic surveillance.
The case became known as the Mafia Commission Trial.
Eight of the original defendants were eventually convicted in November 1986. The significance went beyond the individual sentences. Prosecutors had demonstrated that the leadership of the Mafia could be targeted collectively.
For decades, removing one boss had rarely been enough. Another person could simply take his place. The Commission case attacked the system above the individual boss. That was a fundamentally different strategy.
Even Mafia Bosses Eventually Started Talking
The decline of omertà accelerated as individual mobsters realized that cooperation with prosecutors could sometimes be their best chance of avoiding the harshest consequences.
Joseph “The Ear” Massino, a former Bonanno boss, became the first New York City Mafia boss to cooperate with federal authorities after his 2004 conviction. He provided testimony about fellow mobsters, demonstrating just how dramatically the old code of silence had changed.
Other famous informants had already shown the same pattern.
Henry Hill cooperated with the FBI after his involvement with the Lucchese family.
Salvatore Gravano testified against John Gotti.
Joseph Pistone’s undercover work exposed the internal workings of the Bonanno family.
Each case weakened the idea that Mafia membership guaranteed absolute loyalty.
The organization had depended on secrecy.
Now secrecy itself had become unreliable.
The Five Families Never Simply Disappeared
The decline of the Five Families does not mean that organized crime suddenly vanished from New York.
The Mafia was weakened by prosecutions, informants, surveillance and anti-racketeering laws, but criminal organizations did not simply cease to exist. HISTORY notes that the American Mafia was significantly weakened by the late 20th century, although it was not completely eliminated.
What changed was the scale and nature of its power.
The era in which Mafia families could operate with relatively little effective federal interference became much harder to sustain. Government agencies developed better investigative tools, prosecutors became more willing to target entire organizations and former members increasingly became sources of evidence.
The Five Families remain an important part of New York’s criminal history, but their image as untouchable organizations belongs largely to an earlier era.
Their greatest achievement was not simply surviving individual power struggles.
It was creating a system that allowed rival criminal organizations to coexist while protecting their shared interests.
Their greatest weakness was eventually the same system.
Once prosecutors learned how to attack the organization rather than just the individual, and once members began breaking their promises of silence, the structure that had protected the Mafia became much more vulnerable.
For decades, New York’s Five Families built an extraordinary criminal network through secrecy, loyalty and control over profitable illegal and legitimate industries. But their power gradually weakened as federal investigators developed stronger tools, RICO prosecutions targeted the organization itself, and former members began breaking the code of silence. The Five Families never completely disappeared, but the era when they seemed almost untouchable was over. Their history remains a remarkable chapter in the story of organized crime in America.
