On this day in 1949 Craig Anthony Fiato who went by the name Tony Rome or The Animal, was born. He is a former Los Angeles Crime Family mobster who later went on to become an FBI informant in which he testified against some 70 other mobsters.

On this day in 1949, Craig Anthony Fiato was born, a man who would carve out one of the more colourful and ultimately consequential careers in the history of the American underworld. Known on the streets by two names — Tony Rome and The Animal — Fiato rose through the ranks of the Los Angeles Crime Family, the westernmost outpost of organised crime in the United States and an operation that had long maintained ties to the powerful East Coast syndicates descended from the era of Lucky Luciano's national crime commission.

Growing up with a hunger for the respect and power that the mob lifestyle promised, Fiato gravitated toward the Los Angeles underworld at a time when the family was navigating the complicated politics of a crime organisation operating far from the traditional power centres of New York's Five Families. The LA family, sometimes referred to as the Mickey Mouse Mafia by East Coast mobsters who viewed it with a mixture of amusement and disdain, was nonetheless a serious criminal enterprise involved in loan sharking, extortion, gambling, and connections to the entertainment industry. Fiato proved himself a capable and at times ferocious earner and enforcer, a reputation that earned him the nickname The Animal and cemented his standing within the organisation.

His other alias, Tony Rome, carried a certain cinematic swagger fitting for a man operating in the shadow of Hollywood, and Fiato was indeed a larger than life figure whose exploits reflected the contradictions of mob life — loyalty and betrayal, ambition and consequence. His activities brought him into contact with associates and figures connected to the broader American underworld, and he accumulated both influence and enemies in roughly equal measure.

The most dramatic chapter of Fiato's story, however, came not through violence or criminal enterprise but through cooperation. After his arrest, Fiato made the decision to flip, becoming a federal informant and working closely with the FBI in a collaboration that proved enormously damaging to the mob. Over the course of his cooperation, he provided testimony that contributed to the prosecution of approximately 70 mobsters, dismantling networks and friendships built over decades with a thoroughness that left a lasting mark on organised crime in America.

His legacy is a complicated one, simultaneously a testament to how deeply embedded he was in the underworld and how effectively a single well-placed insider could unravel it. Anthony Fiato remains one of the most significant mob turncoats of the late twentieth century, a man whose life on both sides of the law ensured his permanent place in the history of American organised crime.