Paul Castellano
‘Big Paul’ Castellano inherited his role as head of the Gambino crime family following the death of his cousin Carlo Gambino in 1976.
The borgata had by then split in two, with one side led by Castellano and the other loyal to Gambino’s underboss Aniello Dellacroce, who kept a rein on his younger, more aggressive soldiers.
But when Dellacroce died of a heart attack those soldiers, led by Gotti, plotted to overthrow Castellano after growing increasingly resentful of the boss’s greed and aloofness.
That resent turned to hatred when Castellano failed to attend Dellacroce’s wake.
Two weeks later, he and underboss Thomas Bilotti were ambushed and shot dead by a hit team under the command of Gotti and Gravano as they arrived at Sparks Steak House in Manhattan.
Incensed by the unsanctioned whacking of a boss, fellow Commission members Gigante and Anthony Corallo, head of the Lucchese family, tried to kill Gotti in a revenge car bombing that blew up his underboss instead.
Anthony Salerno
Anthony ‘Fat Tony’ Salerno served as consigliere, underboss, and acting boss of the Genovese family.
Law enforcement believed Salerno took control of the gang in 1981. But he was merely the front boss for Gigante.
Five years later, prosecutors still believed him to be head of the family and indicted him as the lead defendant in the Commission trial.
Also in 1986, that same Fortune Magazine article listed Salerno as America’s top gangster in power, wealth and influence.
Salerno was convicted in the Commission trial and handed a 100-year sentence.
But it later emerged they and FBI agents bugging his conversations had missed clues from the mouths of wiseguys themselves as to who really wielded control.
As Selwyn Raab notes in his magisterial Mafia history ‘Five Families’, agents overhead a conversation between Gotti and Angelo ‘Fat Ange’ Ruggiero about Gigante being equal in power to Castellano.
On the Commission imposing the death penalty on any members caught dealing drugs, Ruggiero explained: ‘Paul and Chin made a pact.’
Another bugged conversation caught Salerno complaining that the nicknames of soldiers proposed to be inducted into another family had not been included on the list.
‘I don’t know none of them. They don’t put the nicknames down there,’ he moaned. ‘But anyway, I’ll leave this up to the boss.’
Anthony Accardo
Anthony ‘Joe Batters’ Accardo’s career as a mobster spanned eight decades, taking him from a small-time hoodlum to head of the ‘Chicago Outfit’.
He got his nickname after using a baseball bat to beat three mobsters to death for betraying the gang, prompting the legendary Al Capone to remark: ‘Boy, this kid’s a real Joe Batters.’
Accardo was given his own crew when Frank Nitti became boss and was named Paul Ricca’s underboss when he took control of the Outfit in the 1940s.
The two men ran the Outfit for the next 30 years until Ricca died in 1972, leaving Accardo in power. He died in 1992 aged 86.
Santo Trafficante
Florida boss Santo Trafficante Jr was one of the last of the old-time Mafia dons.
He ran mob operations in Tampa and Miami and was the dominant US Mafiosi in Cuba before revolution brought Fidel Castro to power in 1959.
His hatred of the new dictator attracted the attention of the CIA, which had begun hatching plans to topple the leftist regime.
Trafficante was enlisted alongside Los Angeles’ John Roselli and Chicago big shot Sam Giancana.
In a declassified CIA report from 1975, Trafficante was stated to have been persuaded to poison Castro, an allegation he denied.
Trafficante is also suspected to have been one of the key figures in an alleged mob plot to kill President John F Kennedy.
Jose Aleman, a Cuban exile leader, relayed to investigators that Trafficante had told him Kennedy was ‘going to be hit’.
He later shied away from that claim when called to give evidence by the House Assassination Committee.
The committee’s chief counsel and principal drafter of its final report, G Robert Blakey, asserted that ‘organised crime had a hand’ in the assassination.
It also said there was ample evidence the mob was at least thinking about removing Kennedy and named Trafficante and Carlos Marcello as the Mafia leaders most like to have conspired against him.
