Top 10 Mobsters of All Time
Quick Answer
The ten most powerful mobsters of all time, as voted by NCS readers, are: 1. Lucky Luciano (founder of the modern American Mafia), 2. Carlo Gambino (the Boss of Bosses who earned $500M a year and spent only 22 months in prison), 3. Frank Costello (the Prime Minister of the Underworld), 4. Meyer Lansky (the mob’s financial genius), 5. Tony Accardo (one night in jail across eight decades of crime), 6. Al Capone (Public Enemy Number One), 7. Vito Genovese (the most feared boss of the post-war era), 8. Albert Anastasia (the Lord High Executioner), 9. Vincent Gigante (the Oddfather who faked insanity for decades) and 10. John Gotti (the Dapper Don, the Teflon Don).
We put it to public vote and asked NCS readers who they thought were the top 10 mobsters of all time. Nearly 200 votes were cast, with each voter able to pick 10 mobsters from our list. Here are the results — and the reasons why each man earned his place.
1. Lucky Luciano
Top 3 Reasons
1. He restructured the Mafia after planning the assassinations of Sal Maranzano and Joe Masseria — bosses of the old Mustache Pete era. Lucky implemented fundamental changes to how organised crime operated, creating a businesslike approach that ended the costly gang warfare drawing law enforcement attention.
2. He set up the Commission to act as governing body for organised crime on a nationwide scale, splitting New York into the Five Families and creating the structure that would govern American organised crime for decades.
3. Luciano also offered to assist the Allied war effort during World War II using his criminal connections in Sicily to advance the invasion — an act that contributed to his sentence being commuted and his deportation to Italy in 1946.
Luciano is the undisputed architect of the modern American Mafia. No other figure comes close in terms of structural influence on organised crime. Read about Lucky Luciano’s net worth →
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Play free in your browser →No download. Works on phone and desktop.or get the app: App Store · Google Play2. Carlo Gambino
Top 3 Reasons
1. Carlo earned the Gambino family over $500 million a year, gave the nod for many contracted hits, and ran the family with an iron fist for almost twenty years.
2. In fifty years of crime he served only 22 months in prison — in 1937–38. No other boss of his stature maintained such a clean record for so long.
3. He was deliberately low-profile but ruthlessly effective — a mob boss who came up through the ranks from the Commission’s earliest days. During his entire reign, not a single assassination attempt was ever made against him.
The man who inspired The Godfather. Read about Carlo Gambino’s net worth →
3. Frank Costello
Top 3 Reasons
1. He started life as a destitute immigrant kid and rose to lead what is today known as the Genovese Crime Family — the most powerful of the Five Families for much of the 20th century.
2. Frank had connections throughout New York’s political establishment. By the 1940s he had virtually taken control of the city’s Democratic Party machine through his influence at Tammany Hall — making him arguably the most politically connected mob boss in American history.
3. Despite nearly being killed in a 1957 assassination attempt ordered by Vito Genovese, Costello always preferred to swap the gun for a handshake. His preference for diplomacy over violence made him a uniquely effective power broker in the cutthroat world of organised crime.
Read about Frank Costello’s net worth →
4. Meyer Lansky
Top 3 Reasons
1. Despite being Jewish in an era when Italian-Americans dominated organised crime, his extraordinary knowledge of business, finance and money laundering made him an indispensable partner to the Mafia’s Italian leadership for over fifty years.
2. Between 1932 and 1934 Lansky joined Luciano and Johnny Torrio in forming the national crime syndicate and became one of its chief overseers and bankers — laundering funds through foreign accounts decades before the practice became common knowledge.
3. By 1970 his total estimated holdings were $300 million. The FBI spent decades trying to convict him and failed. He died peacefully in Miami in 1983.
Read about Meyer Lansky’s net worth →
5. Tony Accardo
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Top 3 Reasons
1. Accardo controlled one family that spanned the entirety of Chicago — a single unified organisation where New York required five separate families to cover the same territory.
2. From 1906 until his death in 1992, he spent only one night in jail — across a criminal career spanning eight extraordinary decades. No other mob boss comes close to this record of evasion.
3. Accardo came to prominence as a hitman for Al Capone and allegedly participated in the St Valentine’s Day Massacre and the Frankie Yale hit. He received the nickname “Joe Batters” from Capone himself after demonstrating exceptional skill with a baseball bat on two traitorous Outfit members at a dinner table.
6. Al Capone
Top 3 Reasons
1. During the height of Prohibition in the 1920s, Capone’s Chicago operation in bootlegging, prostitution and gambling dominated the organised crime scene nationally. His empire was run with military efficiency and generated staggering sums.
2. Newspapers of the era estimated Capone’s operations generated $100 million in annual revenue — equivalent to over $1.5 billion today. He was the most profitable criminal in American history at the time.
3. The St Valentine’s Day Massacre of 1929 — a plot by Capone and Jack McGurn to eliminate seven North Side Gang members — made him Public Enemy Number One and the most famous criminal on earth, a status he has never really lost nearly a century later.
Read about Al Capone’s net worth →
7. Vito Genovese
Top 3 Reasons
1. Vito rose to power during Prohibition as one of the mob’s most feared enforcers and would eventually lead his own family — the Genovese Crime Family, which he built into the most powerful of the Five Families.
2. His commanding presence and willingness to use extreme violence saw Genovese seize control of New York’s underworld in 1957 after the Apalachin Meeting, having engineered the removal of Lucky Luciano’s remaining allies over years of careful manoeuvring.
3. In 1937, facing a murder charge, he fled to Italy where he became a friend of Benito Mussolini — financing Fascist operations while running narcotics smuggling routes back to the United States. Even in exile, he remained dangerous.
8. Albert Anastasia
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Top 3 Reasons
1. One of the most feared mobsters of all time, Anastasia ran Murder Incorporated alongside Louis Lepke Buchalter — the enforcement arm of the national crime syndicate responsible for hundreds of contract killings. His violent temper and personal participation in murders earned him the nickname The Lord High Executioner.
2. After the mysterious “disappearance” of his boss Vincent Mangano in 1951, Anastasia moved quickly to take control of what would later become known as the Gambino crime family — establishing himself through sheer force of will and the threat of lethal violence.
3. His brutal murder in the barbershop of the Park Sheraton Hotel in 1957 — shot while sitting in the barber’s chair, his bodyguard having conveniently vanished — remains one of the most dramatic and iconic mob killings in history.
9. Vincent Gigante
Top 3 Reasons
1. Despite failing to kill Frank Costello in a 1957 assassination attempt ordered by Vito Genovese, Gigante continued his criminal career and eventually took control of the Genovese family in the early 1980s — becoming boss of the most powerful crime family in America.
2. To avoid prosecution, Gigante faked severe mental illness for over a decade — shuffling through the streets of Greenwich Village in his bathrobe and pyjamas, muttering to himself, convincing courts and psychiatrists that he was incompetent to stand trial. The media dubbed him The Oddfather. He finally admitted it had all been an act shortly before his death in 2003.
3. A genuinely shrewd mob leader despite his eccentric public persona, Gigante demanded that members refer to him only by touching their chin — never speaking his name — to defeat FBI wiretaps. The Chin, as he became known, ran the Genovese family with extraordinary discipline from behind his facade of madness.
10. John Gotti
Top 3 Reasons
1. Gotti worked his way up to lead the Gambino Crime Family after orchestrating the assassination of Paul Castellano outside Sparks Steakhouse in December 1985 — an audacious hit carried out without Commission approval. He was subsequently acquitted three times, earning the nickname the Teflon Don, before finally being convicted in 1992 on the testimony of Sammy “The Bull” Gravano.
2. During Gotti’s reign the Gambino family generated an estimated $500 million from gambling, drug trafficking, extortion and stock fraud — making it the most profitable criminal organisation in America during that period.
3. Unlike the deliberately low-profile bosses who preceded him, Gotti embraced public attention — his tailored suits, media profile and defiance of law enforcement made him a larger-than-life figure who brought the Godfather to life in the public eye. He died in prison in 2002.
Runners Up — #11 to #20
The original top 10 were decided by public vote. These are the mobsters who came closest — and in many cases, their case for inclusion is just as strong.
11. Bugsy Siegel
Top 3 Reasons
1. Before he became the vision behind Las Vegas, Siegel was one of the most active and feared killers in the early American Mafia — a founding member of Murder Incorporated who personally participated in the murders of Joe Masseria and Salvatore Maranzano in 1931, the hits that ended the Castellammarese War and gave Lucky Luciano control of the American underworld.
2. Siegel built the Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas almost entirely on force of will — and in doing so, created the template for the mob’s casino empire that would generate billions over the following three decades. The idea that organised crime could build a legitimate entertainment empire in the desert was his.
3. He was shot dead in Beverly Hills on 20 June 1947 while sitting in Virginia Hill’s living room. The murder was never officially solved. Meyer Lansky, his closest friend since childhood, is widely believed to have ordered it. If true, it says everything about the world Siegel inhabited. Read Bugsy Siegel’s net worth →
12. Sam Giancana
Top 3 Reasons
1. Giancana ran the Chicago Outfit from 1957 to 1966 — the most powerful criminal organisation outside New York — and at his peak controlled rackets across Illinois, Nevada, Cuba and Latin America simultaneously. He had political connections that extended to the White House, reportedly sharing a girlfriend with President Kennedy while simultaneously working with the CIA on plots to assassinate Fidel Castro.
2. He rose from a teenage getaway driver for Al Capone’s crew to the boss of the entire Chicago operation in under three decades — a career trajectory that required extraordinary intelligence, ruthlessness and political skill in equal measure.
3. In 1975, the day before he was due to testify before a Senate committee investigating the CIA-Mafia Castro assassination plots, Giancana was shot seven times in his Oak Park kitchen — once in the back of the head, six more times around the mouth. A professional job. No one was ever charged.
13. Joe Bonanno
Top 3 Reasons
1. Joe Bonanno was one of the original five family bosses created by Lucky Luciano’s reorganisation of 1931, and he remained a figure of power and influence in American organised crime for over fifty years — outlasting virtually every other boss of his generation by decades.
2. At 26 he became one of the youngest bosses of a major crime family in history. He ran the Bonanno family with a combination of old-world Sicilian discipline and genuine strategic intelligence, surviving multiple internal power struggles and a kidnapping plot that kept him missing for 19 months.
3. He was arrested for the first time at age 75 — having spent half a century as one of the most powerful men in American organised crime without a single conviction. He later wrote his autobiography, died in 2002 aged 97, and is believed to have died a free man because, unlike John Gotti, he never made himself a target.
14. Carmine Persico
Top 3 Reasons
1. Carmine “The Snake” Persico led the Colombo crime family for decades — first from the streets, then from prison, where he continued running the family’s operations for years after his conviction. He was sentenced to 139 years in 1987 and died behind bars in 2019, never having relinquished control.
2. His criminal career began at 17, when he participated in the murder of a rival gang member in Brooklyn. By his mid-twenties he was one of the most feared figures in New York organised crime — a man equally comfortable using violence personally or directing others.
3. The fact that he ran a major New York crime family from a federal prison for over thirty years — issuing orders, settling disputes, making appointments — stands as one of the most remarkable demonstrations of mob authority in American criminal history.
15. Raymond Patriarca Sr.
Top 3 Reasons
1. Raymond Patriarca controlled organised crime across the entire New England region — Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont — from a small office above a vending machine company in Providence. The scope of his territory relative to his low profile was extraordinary.
2. He was one of the most feared bosses in America at his peak, maintaining his grip through a combination of calculated violence, political corruption and an iron discipline that brooked no disloyalty. He ordered the murder of his own associates when he felt it was necessary, without hesitation.
3. FBI bugs planted in his Providence office in the 1960s captured some of the most revealing recordings of mob operations ever made — confirming the existence and structure of the Commission at a time when the government was still publicly uncertain the Mafia existed. He was convicted of conspiracy to murder in 1970, continued running operations from prison, and died of a heart attack in 1984 still in command.
16. Tommy Lucchese
Top 3 Reasons
1. Tommy “Three Finger Brown” Lucchese ran the Lucchese crime family for over twenty years — one of the longest uninterrupted reigns of any New York boss — and managed the extraordinary feat of never once being convicted of a crime across a criminal career spanning four decades.
2. He built the family’s operations into one of the most profitable in New York, with particular strength in the garment district, airport cargo operations at JFK (the seeds of the later Lufthansa heist), and construction industry rackets.
3. Lucchese was a Commission member from its founding in 1931 and remained one of its most respected voices until his death from a brain tumour in 1967 — never indicted, never convicted, never arrested for a violent crime. In the world of New York organised crime, that record is close to miraculous.
17. Whitey Bulger
Top 3 Reasons
1. James “Whitey” Bulger ran organised crime in South Boston for over two decades and was simultaneously a secret FBI informant — a double life that allowed him to use the Bureau to eliminate his Italian Mafia rivals while the FBI looked the other way on his own crimes. It remains one of the most extraordinary corruption scandals in American law enforcement history.
2. When tipped off in 1994 that he was about to be indicted, Bulger disappeared and evaded capture for 16 years — one of the longest fugitive runs in FBI history. He was eventually found living quietly in Santa Monica, California in 2011.
3. He was convicted of involvement in 11 murders in 2013 and sentenced to two consecutive life terms. In 2018, at age 89, he was murdered by fellow inmates at a West Virginia federal prison within hours of his arrival — beaten with a padlock stuffed in a sock. The mob’s reach, it seemed, was longer than even the justice system’s.
18. Santo Trafficante Jr.
Top 3 Reasons
1. Santo Trafficante Jr. was the most powerful mob boss in the American South, controlling Florida and operating across Cuba, the Caribbean and Latin America. At a time when most mob bosses were focused on New York and Chicago, Trafficante was building an international criminal operation decades ahead of its time.
2. He was recruited by the CIA in the early 1960s to participate in plots to assassinate Fidel Castro — one of the most bizarre chapters in organised crime history, bringing the American government and the Mafia together in a shared political objective.
3. Despite being one of the most powerful and well-connected mob figures in America, Trafficante was never convicted of a major crime. He died of heart failure in 1987, still in command, still at large, still largely unknown to the general public — which was exactly how he preferred it.
19. Frank Nitti
Top 3 Reasons
1. Frank “The Enforcer” Nitti was Al Capone’s most trusted lieutenant and effectively ran the Chicago Outfit’s day-to-day operations during Capone’s imprisonment — keeping the organisation intact and profitable through the most dangerous period in its history.
2. He oversaw the Outfit’s expansion into Hollywood in the 1940s through the systematic extortion of major film studios — a racket that generated enormous profits and demonstrated the mob’s ability to penetrate legitimate American industry at the highest level.
3. Faced with a federal indictment in 1943 that would almost certainly have resulted in a lengthy prison sentence, Nitti chose to shoot himself in a Chicago rail yard rather than face trial. He was 57. The gesture was widely interpreted as the act of a man who knew too much to survive prison — and knew it.
20. Louis “Lepke” Buchalter
Top 3 Reasons
1. Lepke Buchalter was the commander of Murder Incorporated — the national crime syndicate’s contract killing arm — and through it wielded a power over life and death that no other mob figure could match. Hundreds of murders were carried out on his orders between 1929 and 1941.
2. He controlled New York’s garment and trucking industries through labour racketeering, generating enormous legitimate-seeming income streams that made him one of the wealthiest criminal figures of his era — and extraordinarily difficult to prosecute.
3. He holds the unique distinction of being the only major American organised crime boss ever executed by the state — sent to the electric chair at Sing Sing Prison on 4 March 1944 after a legal battle that lasted years and involved his surrender directly to FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. The mob never forgave those who testified against him.
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