5 Industries That Are Allegedly Under Mafia Control

Extortion, shake-downs and bribery — all Mafia methods when it comes to increasing cash flow and getting strongholds within organisations. The Mafia have always invested an interest in legitimate businesses, whether as fronts for laundering money from rackets and scams, or through infiltrating unions and enterprises to get in on the action.

Don’t be fooled into thinking that the mob is no longer an entity. While traditional criminal activities have declined and the digital age has made many old scams harder to pull off, the Mafia has adapted — and a new wave of tactics are in place to help it thrive.

Look around. You will see the evidence in waste management businesses and in the construction industry. You will be surprised by some of the businesses the mob have controlled in the past and still may control today.

Waste Management & Garbage Industry

One of the first businesses that the Mafia got involved with in the US was garbage disposal and waste management. Back in the 1950s they found their way into the industry through the Teamsters Union, which by 1951 had grown to over a million members. Jimmy Hoffa played a major role in helping the mob infiltrate this sector, eventually becoming president of the union in 1957.

The system worked through a cartel — mob-connected firms divided up the city’s private garbage routes among themselves, eliminating competition and fixing prices. Business owners had no real choice about which company collected their waste. The arrangement cost New York businesses and consumers hundreds of millions of dollars over the decades. Over the following years the mob maintained a strong hold over the garbage industry, particularly in New York City.

A spanner was thrown in the works during the 1990s when Rudy Giuliani was elected mayor in 1994. Giuliani embarked on a campaign to clean up the city, and in the mid-to-late 90s indictments were brought against mobsters connected to all five families. The industry was opened up to genuine competition for the first time in decades.

Are the mob still controlling waste management? As recently as January 2013, 30 people were indicted for extortion in New York City connected to the sector. Make up your own minds.

“Waste Management” is often a slang term for ‘disposing of a body.’

Gambling Industry

After Prohibition came to an end and the days of bootlegging were a distant memory, the mob needed a new major income stream. That came in the form of gambling. During the infamous 1929 mob summit in Atlantic City it was decided that investing in casinos, floating casinos, gambling joints and nightclubs was the way forward. The Mafia could control the odds and make huge profits for the house.

One of the first major results was the Flamingo Hotel and Casino, built during 1945 and opened in December 1946. The men behind it included Bugsy Siegel, Meyer Lansky and Lucky Luciano. It was mob owned, mob controlled, and you could reasonably say that Las Vegas is what it is today because of the American Mafia. Several subsequent Strip casinos — the Stardust, the Desert Inn, the Sands — were also under mob influence throughout the 1950s, 60s and 70s.

The mob’s Las Vegas empire was dismantled through RICO prosecutions in the 1980s, most famously documented in the FBI’s investigation of Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal — the story told in Martin Scorsese’s film Casino. Are the mob still involved in gambling? These days criminal activity has taken to the internet. Illegal online gambling operations are rife and within the last decade mobsters have been charged with laundering money through offshore gaming sites.

Construction Industry

Another early racket that the Mafia enjoyed getting into was the construction industry — and again, it was union infiltration that got their foot under the table. The method was clever but simple. Construction companies would make bids for jobs that include union crews. Mafia-run construction companies would include union rates in the bids to win contracts — then pay far less to their workers, pocketing the difference.

Mobsters filtered into the unions in senior positions and then shook down legitimate crews, selling jobs to the highest bidders. Over the years they also invested in their own companies, selling cement and steel to other construction firms at inflated prices — guaranteed by the threat of labour disruption for anyone who bought elsewhere. The concrete industry in New York City was entirely mob-controlled for decades, meaning every skyscraper built in Manhattan required payment to the Mafia.

In 1990, the five families were charged in Brooklyn for receiving kickbacks and fixing bids on a $150 million job with the New York City Housing Authority — one of the most significant Commission Case prosecutions of the post-Giuliani era. Are the mob still involved in construction? Where there is easy money and limited public oversight, the answer is almost certainly yes.

Restaurants & Pizzerias

You only need to look through our article on 9 Restaurants Where Mobsters Were Whacked to realise that restaurants all over the country are connected to the Mafia in some way. Whether that’s Umberto’s Clam House, made famous by the Gallo hit in 1972, Colosimo’s Restaurant owned by Big Jim Colosimo who was gunned down there in 1920, or even La Donna Rosa which was owned by Lucchese acting boss Al D’Arco. Even restaurants not mob-owned were surrounded by mob activity — just look at Sparks Steakhouse, put on the map by the Castellano hit in 1985.

Then there was the infamous Pizza Connection — one of the most extraordinary drug trafficking operations in American history. The Sicilian Mafia used Mafia-controlled pizzerias across the United States as distribution points for heroin and cocaine, shipping drugs hidden inside cans of San Marzano tomatoes. The operation was uncovered in the early 1980s and led to a landmark 1987 federal trial — at the time the longest and most complex prosecution in American legal history.

Does the mob still operate in the food industry? In the US it remains clear that the mob invests money in restaurants and food supply industries — some legitimate fronts, some active money laundering operations. In 2014, 27 mob-run restaurants were seized in Rome, including Pizza Ciro — a household name that had been operating for decades.

Music Industry

When it comes to the music industry one name screams out above all others: Morris Levy. Levy was a music producer convicted of extortion in 1990 following an FBI investigation into organised crime’s infiltration of the record business. An intimidating character, Levy used violence as a way of extorting his artists — but the strings were always being pulled from higher up, most notably by Vincent Gigante, boss of the Genovese Crime Family.

Frank Sinatra is another prime example of how the mob infiltrated the music industry. Mob figures would lend a helping hand to get artists to the top — the focus initially being protection and promotion deals. However, as soon as stars reached the peak of their careers, the mob would turn on them using intimidation and extortion. Sinatra’s associations with Sam Giancana and other Chicago Outfit figures have been extensively documented, though Sinatra always denied any criminal involvement.

When vinyl was the dominant format, it wasn’t hard for the mob to duplicate master recordings and sell counterfeit copies at a profit. The digital age has transformed the landscape — but as recently as 10 to 15 years ago, illegal downloading networks provided a new avenue for mob-connected figures to profit from music without paying a cent to the artists. Are the mob still running rackets through the music industry today? Hard to tell. But where there is money to be made and limited oversight, the mob has historically found a way in.

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