When the cell doors clanged shut on Giuseppe Morello, Ignazio Lupo, and dozens of their men in the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary in 1910, their gang should have just dissolved into the streets of New York City. The Morello Family was just another struggling band of rogues, its modest numbers cut in half by convictions for a reckless counterfeiting scheme that had drawn the ire of the United States Secret Service.1 The Sicilians were small fish in New York's underworld. The Irish mob enjoyed natural ties to the docks and police force; African-American gangsters held sway in black Harlem and San Juan Hill; and Jewish organized crime was far stronger throughout the city.

Then, improbably, the mafiosi reconstituted themselves and returned with a vengeance. By the late 1930s, they evolved into the Cosa Nostra (“Our Thing”), the top syndicate in Gotham. By the 1950s, the Mafia families had grown to include two thousand “made men” and thousands more criminal associates entrenched throughout the economy, neighborhoods, and nightlife of New York.²

The remarkable story of how the modern Mafia actually took power on the streets of New York remains largely hidden. Mob books gloss over this formative era with superficial “rise of” chapters that rehash dubious anecdotes from secondhand sources about the purported machinations of the bosses. Telling the Cosa Nostra's early history, however, requires digging up primary sources in archives. Moreover, the narrow obsession with the bosses (the “godfathers”) neglects the soldiers (the “button men”) who ran the rackets on the streets.

Mob history has been blurred by eighty years of Mafia mythology as well. America's greatest filmmakers have created indelible images of the mob, from Howard Hawks's Scarface to Martin Scorsese's gangster epics to Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather trilogy. They have been joined by “prestige dramas” such as The Sopranos and Boardwalk Empire. Mafiosi themselves have influenced the narrative. Al Capone in the 1920s, Joey Gallo in the 1970s, and John Gotti in the 1980s all manipulated the media. In his 1983 autobiography A Man of Honor (a bestseller that's still in print), Joseph Bonanno painted a romanticized portrait of himself as a benevolent “Father” who fought Americanized mobsters trying to pervert his noble “Tradition.”3

This is the first full-length book devoted specifically to uncovering the hidden history of how the street soldiers of the modern Mafia captured New York City during the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. While discussing the Prohibition era of the 1920s, this book argues that the key formative decade for the Mafia was actually the 1930s. The book covers such hot topics as: Who actually founded the modern Mafia? Who shot Albert Anastasia at the Park Sheraton barbershop? And who exactly was present at the 1957 meeting of the Mafia in the town of Apalachin, New York? At the same time, the book goes beyond traditional mob topics as well. It not only documents who shot who, but explores how and why the Cosa Nostra emerged in Gotham.⁴

This revisionist history cuts through thickets of Mafia mythology with a machete of primary sources. It draws on the deepest collection of primary sources—many newly discovered—of any history of the modern Mafia. The primary sources include, among others, trial transcripts, investigative hearings, mayoral papers, personal memoirs, labor union records, and surveillance reports of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. These are complimented by internal files of the Federal Bureau of Investigation from the National Archives or obtained via the Freedom of Information Act. All of the quoted conversations in these pages are real and taken directly from primary sources. I supply extensive endnotes that allow readers to see the evidence for each chapter. This is an authentic history.⁵

Contrary to its image, the Mafia was not primarily the product of Sicilian intrigue among the godfathers. As we will see, mob bosses had limited control over these lucrative crime franchises. Rather, the Cosa Nostra was forged by the street soldiers as they adapted to the unique conditions of twentieth-century Gotham. They captured New York City by becoming part of it.

This approach places the Mafia squarely back into New York history. It shows how the infamous “French Connection” heroin case was merely an offshoot of Mafia narcotics trafficking dating back to the dawn of America's drug war. It describes how the Cosa Nostra rode labor unions and business cartels to power during the New Deal. It shows why the Stonewall riots of 1969 were the culmination of the mob-run system of gay bars that dated to the 1930s. By replacing gauzy myths with historical evidence, we can see this extraordinary crime syndicate in a whole new light.