On January 26, 1962, Charles “Lucky” Luciano meets with American film producer Martin Gosch to discuss a motion picture based on his life. The conference takes place at the airport in Naples, Italy. Italian police, suspecting that Luciano is actually there to smuggle narcotics, are on hand to monitor his activities. So they are stunned when the mobster suddenly collapses from a heart attack and dies. A funeral attended by three hundred mourners is held in Naples three days later, but after U.S. authorities allow the return of Luciano’s remains to American soil, the actual burial takes place at St. John’s Cemetery in Queens, New York, two weeks later.
Ironically, given their profound hatred for each other, Luciano’s grave site is very close to the tomb of Vito Genovese. The mobster continued to run his crime family from inside the Atlanta federal penitentiary for ten years. After suffering bouts of ill health, Genovese was transferred to the United States Medical Center for Federal Prisoners in Springfield, Missouri, where he died of a heart attack on Valentine’s Day 1969, at age seventy-one. Despite his passing, the Genovese crime family lives on to this day, controlling Manhattan and the Bronx, with extended ties to organized crime in Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Florida.
Meyer Lansky is acquitted on charges of federal tax evasion in 1974. Lansky died in Miami of lung cancer at the age of eighty and is buried at Mount Nebo Miami Memorial Gardens. Lansky left behind an estate of just $57,000, but the FBI believes the Mob’s most accomplished accountant stashed an estimated $300 million in secret bank accounts around the world. That money has still not been found
Joseph Valachi, the former Genovese family soldier and infamous cellmate of Vito, remained in prison the rest of his life. As FBI special agent Flynn once encouraged him, Joseph Valachi took up an exercise regimen and lost forty pounds. However, he did not quit his habit of smoking sixty cigarettes a day. Valachi suffered a heart attack and died on April 3, 1971, while serving his sentence at the Federal Correctional Facility in La Tuna, Texas. He was sixty-seven. Valachi is buried at the Gate of Heaven Cemetery in Lewiston, New York.
Tampa crime boss Santo Trafficante, New Orleans don Carlos Marcello, New York family leader Joe Bonanno, and former head of the Luciano crime family Frank Costello—all longtime cohorts in the nationwide crime syndicate—lived long enough to die of natural causes. Trafficante passed at the age of seventy-two after undergoing unsuccessful heart surgery in Houston. He is buried at the L’Unione Italiana Cemetery in Ybor City, Florida. Though he’s been dead since 1987, his crime family exists to this day.
Marcello suffered a series of strokes in 1989 and lived out his days as a retired capo at his home in Louisiana before passing away. He is buried at the Metairie Cemetery north of downtown New Orleans.
Joe Bonanno spent his retirement in Arizona, where he wrote his autobiography, A Man of Honor. Bonanno died in 2002, one year before its publication. He is buried at Holy Hope Cemetery in Tucson, Arizona.
Frank Costello lived to the age of eighty-two, enjoying sixteen years of senior citizen activity in Manhattan. Although officially retired, he remained in touch with New York’s crime bosses and was consulted on many activities. Costello suffered a heart attack and died on February 18, 1973. He is interred in a mausoleum at St. Michael’s Cemetery in Queens, New York.
The death of Sonny Liston was just as tumultuous as his life. He passed on January 30, 1970, alone in his Las Vegas home. It is only when his wife, Geraldine, returned from a long trip that Liston’s decomposing body was discovered. The former world heavyweight boxing champion, thought to be thirty-eight years old, had been dead six days. The official ruling was natural causes, specifically poor circulation. But a balloon of heroin was found in his bedroom, leading some to suspect he received a Mafia “hot shot,” in which a lethal injection is given to a target. The truth will never be known.
Muhammad Ali, Liston’s opponent in two of boxing’s most famous matches, fought professionally until 1981. By the end of his career, having absorbed an estimated tens of thousands punches, the champ began suffering from palsy and speech difficulties. This was later diagnosed as Parkinson’s disease, from which Ali died on June 3, 2016, at the age of seventy-four. He is buried in his hometown of Louisville, Kentucky.
The passing of Judith Campbell Exner went almost unnoticed. She was promised confidentiality in exchange for appearing before the Church Committee. But when her identity was leaked to the media in 1975, Campbell retreated from the public eye, wounded by the criticism over her extramarital affair with John F. Kennedy and fearful that a Mafia hit was imminent. Judy eventually married golf pro Dan Exner in 1975 but was long divorced when she died of cancer in 1999 at age sixty-five. Her ashes were scattered at sea.
As for the Rat Pack, actor and former Kennedy brother-in-law Peter Lawford died of a heart attack in 1984. Sammy Davis Jr. died of lung cancer in 1990. Dean Martin succumbed to the same cancer in 1995. And Joey Bishop suffered multiple organ failure in 2007. But it was the passing of Frank Sinatra that received the most attention. Many, including Sinatra himself, believed that he was the inspiration for the Johnny Fontane character in The Godfather, written by Mario Puzo. When the two accidentally met at Chasen’s restaurant in Hollywood, Sinatra berated the author as a “pimp.”
The legendary crooner first retired from singing in 1971, only to resume his career almost immediately thereafter. Sinatra continued performing until 1995, when the onset of undiagnosed mental health issues and use of various narcotics caused him to forget song lyrics while onstage. Frank Sinatra died of a heart attack on May 14, 1998, at age eighty-two. He is buried with a bottle of Jack Daniels and pack of Camel cigarettes in the Desert Memorial Park in Cathedral City, California.
Over the decades, a number of laws have been passed to crack down on organized crime. But it was the RICO statute in 1970 that forever altered the balance of power between law enforcement and the Mob. The Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act makes it illegal to run a criminal enterprise, allowing prosecution of a crime family boss for actions he authorized but did not personally commit. In essence, RICO is the first act outlawing organized crime rather than specific Mob activities. It has since been applied to a wide-ranging number of groups and individuals such as the Hells Angels, financier Michael Milken, and even the Key West, Florida, Police Department, which ran a protection racket in exchange for cocaine in the 1980s.
In February 1985, United States attorney Rudolph Giuliani indicted nine Mafiosi, including leaders of New York’s five families, for labor racketeering, extortion, and murder for hire. The Commission, the crime syndicate first formed by Lucky Luciano in 1931, was dealt a severe blow when nine bosses were convicted. Anthony “Bruno” Indelicato, capo of the Bonanno crime family and the man Donnie Brasco was asked to execute in 1981, was sentenced to forty years in prison and fined $55,000—the most lenient of the sentences. All the other mobsters were sentenced to one hundred years and fined a minimum of $240,000. With the exception of Indelicato, all have since died in prison. Bruno was released in 1998, only to be arrested again for parole violations. He was subsequently charged with murder and sentenced to twenty years in prison. Anthony Indelicato is due to be released in 2023.
During the course of the Mafia Commission Trial, as the proceedings would become known, a new boss took over the Gambino family. John Gotti, forty-five at the time, brutally assassinated acting leader Paul Castellano to take control. Gotti quickly consolidated power, taking over an empire raking in an estimated $500 million each year. Rather than hide from publicity, Gotti courted it—wearing expensive suits and affecting a public persona that earned him the nickname the Dapper Don.
This was revised to the Teflon Don after three indictments against Gotti failed to result in convictions. Later, it was revealed that jury tampering played a role in his acquittals. On June 23, 1992, Gotti was finally convicted on five counts of murder, as well as loan-sharking, obstruction of justice, bribery, and tax evasion. His sentence was life imprisonment without possibility of parole. Gotti died in prison of throat cancer on June 10, 2002, at the age of sixty-one. His crypt is at St. John Cemetery in New York, near the graves of Lucky Luciano and Vito Genovese.
Joseph Pistone, whose years undercover as Donnie Brasco presented a major coup for the FBI, still lives in seclusion with his wife, Maggie. Their daughters are grown. Pistone has written three books based on his experiences, one of which was made into the 1997 movie Donnie Brasco, starring Al Pacino and Johnny Depp. Pistone is still active in law enforcement, serving as a consultant to agencies around the world, as well as testifying before the U.S. Senate on organized crime.
Benjamin “Lefty Guns” Ruggiero, the Mafioso with whom Pistone was most closely associated during his time inside the Mob, was released from prison in April 1993 after serving a little more than ten years of his sentence. Ruggiero died of cancer on November 24, 1994, at the age of sixty-eight. He is buried in Calvary Cemetery in Queens, New York.
To this day, the Mafia in New York City is still powerful. The September 11, 2001, terror attacks played a key role, shifting FBI manpower away from organized crime in order to surveil possible terrorists. The number of agents on the bureau’s organized crime task force was reduced from four hundred to fewer than thirty. Since then, the American Mafia has become more international, forging links with Mexican and Colombian drug cartels, as well as organized crime elements in Italy’s Calabria region. In 2008, Operation Old Bridge, a joint FBI–Italian operation, confirmed this connection, leading to dozens of arrests in both countries.
Today, the FBI estimates there are currently three thousand members of the Mafia in America. But organized crime is under siege from other criminals. Russian, Chinese, and Vietnamese organizations, Mexican cartels, and homegrown African American drug gangs have encroached on the Mob’s turf. However, none have succeeded on the same level as La Cosa Nostra. This is due, in part, to the tight hierarchical structure and constant recruitment of new soldiers who are threatened with death should they inform.
The Mafia has also prospered by outsourcing much of its illegal activity, a recent development that would never have occurred in the days of Lucky Luciano and Vito Genovese.
Also, the Mob has now become high-tech savvy. The Internet is a major source of revenue, using offshore shell corporations as a front for illicit gambling. The same is true of identity theft. Stealing credit card numbers and personal information from Internet porn and wagering sites is big business for organized crime.
As they have for decades, Mob-linked companies still control some of the nation’s major construction projects, particularly in New York City. In Bill O’Reilly’s book, The United States of Trump, the president openly discusses the Mafia’s power. Mr. Trump needed concrete and waste management to build the Trump Tower in Manhattan. So he had to deal directly with the Mob.
Gone are the days when crime families used restaurants and clubs to socialize publicly. Today, Mafia meetings are much more clandestine, and cell phones are never allowed, eliminating the risk of taping or filming the proceedings.
And so the fight against organized crime continues.
And, sadly, the war will never be won.
Very simply, there is too much money in criminal activity, especially narcotics.
And too many bad people willing to harvest it.