On this day in 1992, Tony Salerno passed away at the age of 80. Tony was was the acting boss of the Genovese crime family from 1981 until 1986 when he was indicted with several other mobsters in the Mafia Commission Trial.

In 1988 he was convicted and given a 70 year sentence.

His nickname was Fat Tony due to his size, and he would always be seen chomping on a cigar.

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On this day in 1992, one of the most powerful figures in American organised crime drew his last breath. Anthony "Fat Tony" Salerno, the formidable acting boss of the Genovese crime family, died on 27th July 1992 at the age of 80, serving out the final years of a devastating 70-year prison sentence at the Federal Medical Centre in Springfield, Missouri. His death marked the end of an era for what was widely considered the most powerful of New York's Five Families.

Born in East Harlem in 1911, Salerno rose through the ranks of the Genovese family over several decades, accumulating extraordinary influence in the worlds of illegal gambling, loan sharking, and labour racketeering. His Palma Boys Social Club on East 115th Street in Manhattan served as his unofficial headquarters, where he could regularly be found holding court, a fat cigar clamped between his teeth — a trademark image that made him one of the most recognisable mob figures of his generation. The cigar and his considerable physical stature earned him his enduring nickname, Fat Tony, though few who knew his reputation would have dared utter it to his face.

Following the death of Frank Tieri in 1981, Salerno stepped forward as acting boss of the Genovese family, though many investigators and insiders later believed he may have been something of a front, with the more elusive Vincent "The Chin" Gigante operating as the true power behind the throne. Regardless of the internal power structure, Salerno remained a commanding presence at the highest levels of the American mob, taking a seat at the table of the Mafia Commission — the governing body of the major crime families, a concept rooted in the organisational vision of Lucky Luciano back in the 1930s.

It was that very Commission that proved to be his undoing. In 1985, federal prosecutors under Rudolph Giuliani brought the landmark Mafia Commission Trial, targeting the bosses of all Five Families simultaneously. Salerno stood alongside the likes of Carmine Persico and Anthony Corallo as the full weight of the RICO statutes came crashing down. Convicted in 1988, he received a 70-year sentence — effectively a life sentence for a man of his age — and would never again walk free.

Fat Tony Salerno's legacy is that of a cautionary tale written at the very peak of mob power. His conviction helped shatter the public myth of untouchable organised crime bosses and demonstrated that even the most entrenched figures in the American underworld were not beyond the reach of the law.