Original subtitles

The Lucchese family was involved

in every aspect of New York's economic system.

They were not educated in the academic sense,

but they understood business.

Treachery ruled supreme in that family.

The treachery that was orchestrated enabled the government

to effectively prosecute the leadership of that family.

Not long ago,

the question of whether the Mafia existed at all

was a valid topic of debate.

Many people, including FBI Director, J. Edgar Hoover,

for years denied the very existence of organized crime.

And for years, the country's top racketeers were able

to elude the justice system.

With the exception of post-communist Russia,

the US has long led the world

with the most pervasive

organized criminal presence anywhere.

And while the Mob flourished

under Hoover's hands-off policy,

recent decades has seen significant inroads

by law enforcement.

Some say the Mafia has now come full circle,

returning to its roots as a loose association

of disparate street gangs.

None illustrates this reversal of fortune better

than the Lucchese crime family of New York.

Named after the second boss of the family,

this organized crime dynasty traces its origins

back to the streets of New York City

early in the 20th century.

New York was a port of entry

for most of America's European immigrants,

and it became the breeding ground

for some of organized crime's most notorious members,

Al Capone, Lucky Luciano,

Meyer Lansky all came from immigrant families

who settled in the Five Points Area,

a crowded ghetto with a long history of Irish, Jewish,

and Italian gang activity.

It was here that a diverse bunch

of these ethnic gangs coalesced in the early 1930s.

Five large criminal groups of families emerged

as a central core of a vast nationwide crime syndicate

we generally to as the Mob.

The top gangsters of the Prohibition

also formed a commission

consisting of the heads of the Five Families

and a few others.

And it is here in New York

where The Commission members still meet in secret,

still discuss business, still order hits,

and still control the rackets

that have made these Mafia bosses filthy rich.

Are you member of any secret organization?

Yes, I am.

What is the name of it?

Cosa Nostra in Italian.

Cosa Nostra in Italian.

Our thing and our family in English.

In 1963, Joseph Valachi became one

of the first members of the Mafia

to break omerta code of silence,

and to reveal the secret rituals

and inner workings of the Mob.

For the first time,

the public learned of the five Cosa Nostra families

and the unique hierarchy of these organizations.

At the top is the boss, his underboss, and consigliere,

the Mafia equivalent of president, vice president

and attorney general.

Next, the family has a number of capos,

and each had a crew made up of soldiers,

the lowest ranking made members,

who along with non-mid associates usually work

at the street level.

The name at the top of one of those family charts

was Gaetano Lucchese,

who had long ago Americanized his first name to Tommy.

From then on, his became known as the Lucchese crime family.

A gangster organization

that would later bear his name was already evolving

when young Gaetano Lucchese first arrived in America

with his parents in 1905.

The Luccheses who had come from Palermo, Sicily,

were among hundreds of thousands of immigrants

who came to this country in search of a better life.

Instead of streets paved with gold, however,

many found themselves on the fringes of society,

performing backbreaking work for meager wages.

The Lucchese family,

like all the other Italian immigrant families,

they were determined that their sons

and daughters would make it in the New World.

And they would very often say to their sons,

"I don't want you to be a donkey like me.

I wanted to see you study.

You do your homework, you go to school.

I don't want to hear there's any problems in school.

I don't want to hear that you are a truant.

I want you to get an education

and I want you to do better than me."

Early on, though,

Lucchese felt the lure of the streets.

Every block in an Italian neighborhood had a social club,

and when they walked past the social club,

they saw something very different.

Guys in suits, beautiful suits,

with fedoras, Italian handmade shoes,

big, beautiful cars, women.

Kids like Lucchese, they wanted to hang around

'cause what did they see?

They saw the American dream, money, power.

Nobody bothered these guys.

When Tommy Lucchese was a teenager,

his father disowned the son he was unable

to save from the streets.

Lucchese came from a family

where he was the only criminal.

All the rest of the people in his family

were quite straight, ordinary,

and for the rest of days were very sensitive

and very ashamed over the fact

that they were even related to this guy.

Tommy became roommates with a boyhood friend,

Salvatore Lucania, who would later be known

as Charles "Lucky" Luciano

credited as the founder of The Syndicate.

His arrest record started when he was 10 years old.

He moved out of the neighborhood

and he settled in East Harlem

and changed his name to Luciano,

so as not to shame his family any further.

Along with Lucky Luciano,

Tommy Lucchese's rise in the underworld came quickly.

He developed a reputation as being a stone cold killer.

By the end of World War I, he was working

as Luciano's bodyguard and favorite hitman.

Carl Sifakis researched Tommy Lucchese

for "The Mafia Encyclopedia".

By that time, he was already active with Luciano,

and the others, and Albert Anastasia.

Now Albert Anastasia was considered

the worst killer of them all.

He was the Lord High Executioner, Murder, Inc.

Luciano always thought

Lucchese was a better killer than him.

He could trust him more, he was cool,

he followed orders.

Really, the modern American Mafia,

as we know it, was born up on those streets

in the boyhood rumbles of guys like Luciano, and Lucchese,

and Frank Costello, and Vito Genovese,

they all knew each other and they were all in the same

what was called a borgata.

Borgata means like a gang, a gang of delinquent boys.

East Harlem was a really tough immigrant neighborhood.

I mean, it was poor, it was violent, it was squalid,

it was crowded,

but it also produced Fiorello La Guardia,

and it produced judges

and it produced distinguished businessmen.

Why in an immigrant neighborhood,

why do some go into the Borgata

and some go to college?

We don't know.

Lucchese, Luciano and many

of their friends eventually became members

of the large gang run by Joe The Boss, Masseria Sicilian

who operated out of the Italian neighborhood of East Harlem.

Bootlegging was their main source

of illegal profit made possible

by the national ban on the sale of alcohol.

While supporters of Prohibition

had hoped it would cure America's social problems,

in reality, it provided gangsters

with the opportunity of a lifetime.

Lucky Luciano and his criminal associates

worked out an elaborate system to import

and distribute alcohol all over the United States.

Meyer Lansky masterminded the finances.

Tommy Lucchese organized the transportation system.

Frank Costello handled the bribery

of law enforcement and politicians.

These were guys who were innovative thinkers.

They were smart, they were shrewd.

They were not educated in the academic sense,

but they understood business.

They understood markets.

They had all the requisite talents

to become great businessmen,

but for reasons that we don't quite yet understand,

they went in another direction.

By the mid thirties, the business

of bootlegging had become highly competitive and dangerous

with violent turf wars breaking out all over America.

In New York, Joe the Boss, found his supremacy threatened

by a new Sicilian arrival,

the power hungry Salvatore Maranzano.

Maranzano came over

and he tried to purify the Mobs

that would be all coming from one part of Sicily,

and they would knock off everybody else

and control everything.

Maranzano trusted only Sicilians

from the same hometown as his, Castellammare del Golfo.

And the feud between Masseria

and Maranzano became known as the Castellammarese War.

As the war escalated, younger Americanized Italians

and their Jewish gangster partners plotted to rid themselves

of what they called the old Mustache Petes

whose rivalry, they viewed as an obstacle to true wealth.

Meyer Lansky summed it up best.

He said, "Look,

Chevrolet salesmen don't shoot Ford salesmen, do they?"

He had made his point.

Why are you shooting each other?

There's plenty for everybody.

An ambitious and cunning

Lucky Luciano pretended to defect to the Maranzano camp.

He then lured his old boss, Masseria,

to a Coney Island restaurant where Masseria was executed,

reportedly by Vito Genovese, Joe Adonis, Albert Anastasia,

and Bugsy Siegel.

Maranzano claimed victory

and called a meeting of all the Italian gangsters,

proclaiming himself, Boss of Bosses.

He then divided up the business

amongst those most loyal to him.

This was the beginning of the Mafia crime families

as we know them today.

Maranzano formed five specific organizations, okay?

And he set them up along the lines of a Roman Legion.

He didn't call them families.

It was set up just like Roman legions.

And they were to control strictly the crime

within their very specific organized territories.

But there were those who found fault

with a new system.

Luciano and Genovese were under him,

but they saw that he was opposed to working

with the Jewish Mobsters.

And if you were in bootleg at the time, you had

to be involved with the Jewish gangsters

like the Purple Gang

that dominated the bringing over liquor through Detroit.

Meanwhile, Maranzano knew we'd have to get rid

of the fast rising Luciano,

but Luciano would send over Tom Gagliano

and Tommy Lucchese as spies in the Maranzano camp.

Maranzano was no fool.

He knew he had to get rid of Luciano

and the whole bunch and Costello and the others,

so he was planning to kill them all.

However, the two spies

that he trusted very much was Gagliano and Lucchese.

Lucchese warned Luciano of the plot.

Luciano loyalists then counter plotted

and sent Lucchese to Maranzano's office on the pretense

of having urgent business to discuss.

Within moments, four Jewish gangsters posing

as treasury agents burst into the office

and lined Maranzano's men up against the wall.

Lucchese fingered the victim

and the assassins carried out the hit on Maranzano.

Lucchese ran out,

and when the police came,

there was nobody there except a dead man.

And that cleared the way for the American Mafia

to be established.

With great criminal vision,

Luciano, together with his Jewish Mobster partner,

Meyer Lansky established a national syndicate

of organized crime and The Commission

to act as governing body.

In New York, the Five Families set up

by Maranzano were reorganized,

and Tom Gagliano was given leadership of one of them

with Tommy Lucchese as his underboss.

After Gagliano died from natural causes,

Lucchese took command,

and led the family to its most prosperous and peaceful era.

Though his main occupation was Mob Boss,

Lucchese kept a low profile

and maintained a front in the garment business

to camouflage his criminal activity,

He controlled one of the big dress companies there,

and at the same time shook down all the others.

They were taking like 30, 40 grand a year

for you to stay in business.

The real money, of course, was in the rackets

Lucchese had come to learn so well.

Along with loan sharking,

the Lucchese family ran another traditional big money maker,

gambling.

It was a time honored business for gangsters,

Italian, Jewish, or others.

Now Bugsy Siegel would walk down a street,

and what first attracted him was gambling.

There were gambling games out on the street, crack games,

people rolling dice up against the brick wall.

And he'd look down,

there'd be piles of money laying around,

people betting money.

They can set up dice rooms

and it may not sound like much,

but when you have six dice rooms going 24 hours a day

with high rollers, you're taking in thousands

and thousands of dollars an hour.

The Mob didn't always agree on business.

One of the rackets

that caused the greatest dissent was heroin dealing.

Tommy Lucchese opposed drug trafficking

as it left the family too exposed

to scrutiny on the streets.

Others, unable to ignore the enormous profits embraced it.

All took their share of the profits from the illegal trade.

Lucchese got his cut, you know.

He kept away from it, but he expected his cut.

But organized criminal groups have always made money

with such favors as gambling, prostitution, and extortion.

It was mostly after Prohibition,

The Mob began looking for new rackets to exploit.

Tommy Lucchese's outfit was particularly adept at coming up

with lucrative new schemes to bring in piles of cash.

They were involved primarily in crimes

such as murder, loan sharking, gambling,

labor racketeering, obstruction of justice,

political corruption, you name it.

The Lucchese family was involved in every aspect

of New York's economic system.

Lucchese learned that the secret

to a successful industry racket is

to seize control of a key union

then put the squeeze on the business owners.

This tactic was especially effective

in the garment and construction trades.

In the case of the garment center,

organized crime, Lucchese family specifically discovered

that there's one key to trucking,

that's Teamsters Union.

There's one Teamsters Union local,

which represents virtually all the truck drivers

and the garment center.

Now, if you take control of that local

as they did, now you've got power.

Why is it power?

Because if the Teamsters Union suddenly goes

on strike, nothing moves.

The same was true in construction.

As an assistant US attorney, Michael Chertoff learned

how the Mob operated.

They had the ability through the labor unions

to stop a job, to delay a job,

to make sure that the concrete was delivered in a manner

that would be disruptive to the progress of the job.

And they knew that by creating these kinds of problems,

they could cost the companies millions of dollars.

Now we're talking here about hundreds

of millions of dollars.

We're talking about four families,

primarily the Colombo family, the Genovese family,

the Gambino family, and the Lucchese family.

But the bosses of these four families

had six general contractors, six construction companies

that only these companies were allowed

to bid on major projects in New York City.

For every job that was over $2 million, the contractor

that got the contract had to kickback to the families 2%.

The Lucchese leaders

took the construction racket a step further

than the other families.

Lucchese family had one little specialty

that everybody had overlooked, but they found it.

They realized something, which is that

if you're making construction grade concrete,

you need stone.

Now it turns out they discovered

that almost all the stone comes

from quarries in Connecticut.

Well, they ship it by water and it comes into Long Island,

but there's only one port in Long Island that handles it

and then processes it for construction purposes.

Perfect scenario. They got control of the stone business.

The Luccheses lent new meaning

to the old saying,

one man's trash is another man's treasure.

They gained control of the carting industry

and hauled in millions.

The World Trade Center at one point,

their garbage bill was $1.1 million a year.

That's a lot of garbage,

but not a million dollars worth of garbage.

What could the World Trade Center do?

They found out there was only one garbage hauler,

which would pick up their garbage.

Some business owners rebelled against the Mob,

but found themselves fighting a dangerous battle.

There was always the threat of violence.

You know, we had tapes where Mobsters would sit

with contractors and tell them stories about people

who had disappeared or people who had gotten beaten.

And all this was designed to send the message

that it could happen to you.

So let me get this straight.

You guys want me to go with your carting company,

even though it'll cost me three times as much

as I was paying at my old location?

That would be the smart thing to do.

What if I say no?

What if I don't want to use you guys?

You can't force me.

Hey, it's a free country, pal.

We ain't gonna make you do nothing you don't want to do.

That's right.

This is a business decision that you've gotta make.

You familiar with Alden Supply Company?

Yeah, they're across the street.

That's right. Ken Strauss, the owner.

What, he's been missing for about a month now?

One day he just didn't come home from work.

The problem was that

Kenny made some bad business decisions.

They divvied up private businesses

such as the carting business

or concrete business for themselves.

They ran their businesses contrary to the American way.

They ran their way.

They enforced their control over the businesses

and industries through fear.

For over three decades,

Tommy Lucchese ran his criminal empire a great success,

without getting knocked off or imprisoned.

He also successfully kept his personal family

well insulated from his Mafia family.

He died of natural causes.

And after his death, his surviving relatives

actually changed the spelling on his tombstone

to keep outsiders away.

Before he died, Lucchese had one last bit

of underworld business to attend to,

picking a successor to run the organization.

His choice with approval

by The Commission was a protege

from the old neighborhood in East Harlem, Anthony Corallo.

Even more than his predecessor and mentor,

Anthony Corallo's background was pure hoodlum

as former prosecutor, Ronald Goldstock learned,

Corallo was an individual

who came up through the family through violence.

People understood that. People were afraid of him.

He was a person that was respected

and so for him to head the family was not surprising.

There was only one thing standing in the way

of a smooth transition of power.

Corallo was heading to a prison sentence

on a bribery conviction, an unusual event

for the Mobster nicknamed Tony Ducks

for his ability to duck the law.

Corallo was a person who believed in murder

as a means of accomplishing their ends.

He was an individual who grew up understanding

what power meant and physical violence could do,

and he practiced that from the time

that he began criminal activities

through his years as a labor racketeer

into controlling the family.

Corallo began his Mafia career

in the Lucchese family stronghold, the Garment District.

By the 1950s, he was one of the biggest labor racketeers

in the country.

He and an associate allegedly put into power

the most infamous union boss of all time, James Hoffa.

It is a complex area and a lot

of traditional organized crime groups really didn't know

how to exploit it.

Tony Ducks Corallo, Johnny Dioguardi did.

Johnny Dio was the individual

who created the Pope paper locals in the Teamsters Union,

which enabled Jimmy Hoffa to become the president.

Tony Ducks Corallo played a menacing role within the area

of labor racketeering.

For decades, gangsters operated

with virtual impunity.

On the local level, law enforcement was corrupt

from top to bottom.

At the national level, a limited war was fought

by the Federal Bureau of Narcotics.

While the FBI, under the rule

of J. Edgar Hoover officially said there was no Mob.

For a long time, until he was embarrassed

into admitting the existence of organized crime,

Mr. Hoover refused to admit even the existence

of organized crime.

Various explanations for Hoover's position

include persistent rumors of a secret personal life.

Mob threatened to expose his lifestyle.

The idea of charging a person with being a member

of a Mafia family was unheard of

because of the difficulty the government would have

in trying to prove that.

They didn't have the inside witnesses.

They didn't have the tape recordings

of discussions between members of the Mafia

who would recite the names of the families

or the leadership or who they might be

or the positions held by this guy and that guy.

That came later.

Hard jail time was the furthest thing

from the minds of the wise guys,

but that too was about to change.

After years of operating independently, local, state

and federal law enforcement agencies began cooperating.

Ronald Goldstock headed the New York State

organized crime task force in the eighties.

For a period of time, law enforcement had been

fighting a war of attrition.

Individuals were arrested and invited for specific crimes.

They may be put in prison.

Generally, they were out

after a relatively short period of time.

The FBI found it a frustrating experience.

We would find a witness.

We would develop evidence about the crime.

We would arrest the extortionist and we'd put them in jail.

No matter how many we arrested, as we like to say,

there was always a hundred in line to take their place.

One thing law enforcement knew was

that often Mob related murders occurred with no witnesses

or with witnesses who were themselves Mobsters

and not likely to speak to the authorities.

But a member of a gang was killed

that usually sent a message to the others to keep quiet.

That all changed with the RICO statute

and electronic surveillance in 1968 and 1970,

and other methods of dealing with problems

of organized crime, where you could look at them

as groups of individuals committing patterns

of criminal activity.

Greg O'Connell and other prosecutors

recognized the importance of the RICO statute.

The racketeering statute was a brilliant invention,

which enabled the government

to charge not just a specific isolated offense

of larceny or an arson or a payoff or a bribe

or a murder in isolation,

which is the way the country operated up until that time.

What this offense allowed was the prosecution

of an actual organization.

You really can't catch the leaders

of organized crime on the streets.

That's not where they are.

Where they are is in social clubs

or in restaurants planning the activities

that the soldiers and the captains are gonna carry out.

We would plant mics in clubs and bars

and restaurants, in homes in different rooms.

We would book telephones, all by court order.

One of the things were looking to do was

to use the RICO statute to indict The Commission,

the heads of the five New York crime families.

The organized crime task force had extraordinary information

as to the Lucchese family

and some evidence as to the heads of one or two others.

The FBI had bugs in on the heads

of three families at the time.

And so if you combine the two,

there was a mountain of evidence

that could be used to indict

and convict all of the family bosses.

The New York City Police Department

and the FBI began working together with a common goal.

Rich Seta was a New York detective on Mob duty.

At this point, the marriage was made,

if you will, between the FBI

and the New York City Police Department

Organized Crime Investigation Division,

where a commitment of detectives were assigned

to FBI squads.

And those squads were dedicated to investigations,

proactive investigations into organized crime families

in the New York City area.

I personally don't believe we could have done the job

that we did without the help

and assistance of the New York City Police Department.

They had an ability to do things from their days

on the street as cops and their experience

that we could not do, we as agents, could not do.

We complimented each other beautifully

and it couldn't have been a better match.

And without them, as I say, we would've never succeeded

as well as we did.

One of the most significant achievements

of the joint effort was the planting of a bug

in the Jaguar belonging to Lucchese Capo, Sal Avellino.

Investigators learned that Tony Ducks routinely rode

with Avellino to discuss Mafia business.

Why we only got 150 trucks running

when we used to have 300 trucks running, Sal?

They got half of that on the other side.

Tony, come on. We're doing the best we can.

You're busting my chops here.

Well, this is our bread and butter. You know that.

- I understand. - I want to keep it that way.

- I understand. - This is the business

that brings in most of the money.

They knew the car would be the key

to their investigation,

but planting a bug

in the Mobile Lucchese headquarters was not going

to be easy.

The car was constantly garaged at Sal Avellino's home.

When parked away from home, it was never left unattended.

And when being driven,

Avellino drove deliberately circuitous route

to throw off any would-be tailers.

Members of the task force waited for the right moment.

Meanwhile, the team practiced the bugging procedure,

working with an identical car

and hoping for a break.

In under 15, ready? Go.

That opportunity presented itself

one rainy March night

when Avellino drove to a catering hall in Long Island

for a garbage industry function.

Avellino turned the Jaguar over to two of his hoods,

whose job it was to stand watch over the car

while their boss was inside.

Meanwhile, the team of bugging experts were watching

from the far end of the parking lot.

With rain pouring down on them,

the two guards finally decided it was safe

to leave the car briefly

and ducked inside the hall.

That's when the task force men made their move.

They scaled the fence

and dashed towards Avellino's car.

In one motion, they opened the door,

and went to work on the dashboard

while one of the team kept watch

with a walkie talkie in back

in case anyone approached the car.

Within minutes, he had planted the bug

and just as quickly as they got in, the team exited the car

and closed the doors, being careful not

to leave any telltale drops of water inside.

When Avellino left the catering hall later,

his two bodyguards helped him into the car,

none of them suspecting even remotely

that the Jaguar had been tampered with.

Here, Tony Ducks

and Avellino can be heard discussing the merits

of inducting their sons into the Mafia.

Andy Russo just made his other son,

the youngest one boy.

When?

I guess on the last...

Recently, I don't know when.

I mean, you know, in the last year.

They make all their kids.

Yeah, he made his two sons.

Would you make your kids?

No, not now.

I mean not. My thinking right now is no.

It might change five years from now,

10 years from now,

but right now my thinking is no.

The original objective of the investigation was

to capture evidence, collect as much evidence

about the carting industry.

Well, what do you know?

They caught conversations of the boss

of the Lucchese crime family speaking about a variety

of crime family interests, including the concrete case.

And those tapes were the foundation

for what was later known as The Commission Case.

This was the effort by the US Attorney's Office

to bring down the heads of all the New York crime families.

Michael Chertoff was the lead prosecutor.

What the case did was

that we essentially proved the activities of The Commission

over a 50 year period.

We had evidence about the famous 1957 meeting

of the bosses in Apalachin, New York.

We had evidence of other Commission meetings,

and we actually demonstrated members of The Commission

engaged in dividing up the proceeds

of extortion in the construction industry

in the city of Manhattan.

Bosses and their lieutenants sitting down

and talking about how to cut up the money

that they were receiving from concrete companies

that were paying off on every contract

that they engaged in in Manhattan.

Basically what The Commission did

was divide up every contract involving the pouring

of concrete that was over $2 million in value

among the four families.

The Bonanno family was cut out of that conspiracy.

And every job would result in a payment

of 2% of the contract price to the bosses

who would then divided them up among the various families

as their share of this extortion operation.

We also proved that The Commission had authorized the murder

of Carmine Galante, who was the boss

of the Bonanno family in 1979

and we did that in the old fashioned way.

We used fingerprint evidence, we used eyewitness evidence,

and we used circumstantial evidence

from videotapes and photographs.

And with that evidence, the wiretaps, the physical evidence,

the fingerprints, we were able to put together a picture

of the activities of The Commission

really going back to the early 1930s.

When the case ended, the top ranks

of the New York Mafia were off to prison.

Tony Ducks was sent away for the rest of his life.

It was a milestone in the war against organized crime.

All of us who worked

on the case knew it was gonna be a legendary case.

This was the top echelon of the Mafia.

For the first time we were gonna prove the existence

of a Commission, that there was a nationwide syndicate.

We were gonna prove events

that had occurred 30, 40, 50 years ago

that one had read about,

but that had never actually been established in court.

We knew that to take down the bosses who were long viewed

as the most secretive and the most hidden

and the most powerful members

of organized crime would be a devastating blow.

And at the end of the case,

when every single defendant was convicted

on every single count, I think we felt

we'd achieved a victory that was really remarkable.

Subsequent to his conviction,

along with other top Mobsters,

Tony Ducks Corallo was handed a 100 year prison sentence.

His two decade term as boss of the family was finished.

When he turned over the reigns of power to Vicar Amuso,

Corallo probably didn't know

that he was indirectly contributing to the downfall

of his own crime family

and to a certain extent, the entire New York Mafia.

Former assistant US attorney, Greg O'Connell,

believes the assumption of leadership

by Amuso and his chief eight,

Anthony Gaspipe Casso was a major turning point.

I think that once Tony Ducks Corallo picked Vic Amuso

to run the family along with Gaspipe,

that was the death null of the Lucchese crime family.

It was a reign of terror in the Lucchese crime family

where treachery ruled supreme in that family

and where the treachery that was orchestrated by Amuso

and Casso enabled the government

to effectively prosecute the leadership of that family.

One event that led to trouble

for the Lucchese family was when the new family leaders went

into a window replacement racket with the Genovese family

through a mutual associate, Peter Savino.

What happened was Peter Savino as a Genovese associate

who was directly associated with a guy named Jerry Pappa,

who was then a soldier in the Genovese crime family

were looking for a business to enter, not just any business,

but some profitable business

they might know something about

and they were experienced in construction.

And Peter Savino had met someone

who was involved in the window replacement business

and thought that might be a lucrative industry

for him there.

In the seventies, we all experienced the oil shortage

and the dramatic rise in pricing

in fuel, oil and gasoline.

And it became readily apparent that it was cost effective

to replace windows in your home and in businesses

to offset the price of heating.

The New York City Housing Authority,

if you looked at New York City, you saw the number

of housing projects, housing developments that they had,

had a tremendous amount of windows

and a tremendous amount of money

that they were pouring into heating.

It all came as a part of a program

to better insulate the buildings and reduce energy costs.

So these many, many buildings in New York City

and elsewhere in the country

didn't have thermo pane windows.

They had windows that had been there for 40 years

that let a whole lot of heat out and a whole lot of cold in

It didn't take the LCN very long to figure out an angle

and the angle was to have selective installers

bid rig, get the bid

and then assess them a price

of $2 per window for labor piece.

So if you multiplied the number of housing developments

by the number of windows in place that have been replaced,

you could see the significance of this windows case.

While Vic Amuso and Tony Casso waited

for profits to pull in from the window racket,

the law began to catch up with them.

A murder investigation led authorities

to victims buried under Peter Savino's factory.

Upon digging up those bodies,

as we were standing there watching this evidence come to us,

we realized that we had what we needed to roll

and to confront and roll yet another very influential

and knowledgeable person in the Genovese family

and that was Peter Savino.

And he ran around for 18 months,

wired up in a secret undercover investigation

against numerous members and captains and an underboss

and consiglieres of various crime families

until finally we pulled the plug.

The windows case was successfully prosecuted

through a cooperating witness, Peter Savino.

He had the inside knowledge, if you will,

of the machinations that occurred

that allowed this case to proceed.

How the bids were rigged,

how the payments were extorted and distributed.

When we indicted the windows case,

Vic Amuso and Anthony Gaspipe Casso,

who were then the boss and underboss,

the two highest ranking members

of the Lucchese crime family fled.

And while they were on the lamb,

they began a series of contracts

on their own leadership

which we later prosecuted Vic Amuso for

and Gaspipe Casso.

And they knocked off captains

who they thought might be treacherous.

They labeled them as rats

and ordered their own soldiers to kill their own

and it happened half a dozen times.

The murderous actions

of Gaspipe Casso led authorities

to believe he was either insane or just plain stupid.

Stupid to a degree that is almost breathtaking.

It is almost inconceivable

that in an organization originally founded by a guy

who was so low key,

you would never guess this man was a Mafia leader

to be replaced ultimately by a psychopath.

Amuso and Casso became increasingly paranoid.

They even turned on their own chief executioner Peter Chiodo

when he failed to carry out a hit.

After an attempt was made on his life,

Chiodo flipped and became a witness,

so did acting underboss, Little Al D'Arco.

In 1993, D'Arco walked into the FBI's office

in White Plains, New York after being falsely labeled a rat.

It was an event law enforcement was waiting for

in their ongoing war against one

of the world's most successful criminal dynasties ever.

This is it. Let's hear it.

Okay.

I'm gonna tell you what I know

and I'm gonna tell you how I know it.

For the Lucchese family,

the curtain was closing.

Prosecutors were able once again

to strip away the top layers of the family leadership.

Vic Amuso was still the boss of the Lucchese crime family.

I think the government's view

of the situation based on the evidence,

and their current understanding is

that he hasn't relinquished control, but he could.

Former FBI agent, Bonavolonta

believes the Lucchese family is in serious trouble.

The new leaders, the leaders of today,

the second and third team as I have always called them,

they're tied not by honor, respect and family,

they're tied by the economy.

They're tied by money, they're tied by greed.

And greed and money, those ties are much easier

to break than honor, respect and family.

So what we're finding is a much less competent

Mafia leader today, La Cosa Nostra leader today than we had

in the seventies and eighties.

You know, you ever see those charts,

you know, the original Neanderthal

or the Lucy, wherever it is, the earliest men that kind of,

they look sort of apelike,

but as the time goes on, they get smarter,

their brain cases get bigger,

and now they're erect homo sapiens in business suits.

It's the opposite way here.

Though Thomas Dewey promised

to rid the country of the Mob

and Robert Kennedy made the same promise decades later,

it has only been in recent years

that new laws and new approaches

to fighting organized crime have started to pay off.

Federal, state and local police have finally figured out

how to work together effectively.

Legislators have at last given prosecutors laws with teeth.

The once powerful dynasty

that was the Lucchese family has also been affected

by cultural changes since the early 1900s.

Old world traditions transplanted

in the land of opportunity,

provided just the fertile conditions needed

to produce criminal masterminds

as Lucky Luciano, Meyer Lansky and Gaetano Lucchese.

Later replacements for the founders

of the national crime syndicate seemed

to have taken a Darwinian step backward.

If people think the battle is over,

if they walk away from from the constant need

to fight organized crime,

then in 10 years or 20 years organized crime will come back.

Though many have proclaimed the death of the old Mob,

especially the dynasty once ruled by Tommy Lucchese,

law enforcement officers caution

that the Mafia is down, but not out.

They remind us of the amazing power

of criminal enterprises to regenerate.

And while the Lucchese

and other crime families may never regain the power

of decades past, they continue to operate in the shadows.

They're constantly devising new rackets

and new ways to allude prosecution.

Perhaps a final chapter will unfold

as law enforcement further refines its efforts

to stay one step ahead of the wise guys.

I'm Robert Stack. Thanks for joining us.