On this day in 1969 the mob world would lose one of its most feared leaders. Vito Genovese was 71 and died from a heart attack. To this day, the crime family he took over in 1957 is still named after him, and he served as a mentor to future boss Vincent Gigante.

On this day in 1969, the American underworld lost one of its most calculating and ruthless figures. Vito Genovese died of a heart attack at the Federal Medical Centre in Springfield, Missouri, where he had been serving a fifteen-year prison sentence on narcotics conspiracy charges. He was 71 years old. Even behind bars, Genovese had continued to command fear and respect in equal measure, a testament to the iron grip he had maintained over organised crime for decades.

Born in Naples, Italy, in 1897, Genovese emigrated to the United States as a teenager and quickly fell in with the criminal elements of New York's Lower East Side. He came of age alongside some of the most formidable figures in mob history, building a close alliance with Charles "Lucky" Luciano, the visionary gangster who would go on to reshape the American Mafia entirely. Genovese served as one of Luciano's most trusted lieutenants and was deeply involved in the 1931 murders that wiped out the old Sicilian guard — the so-called "Moustache Petes" — and gave birth to the modern Five Families structure that governs New York organised crime to this day.

Genovese's ambitions, however, were never far from the surface. Facing a murder charge in 1937, he fled to Italy, where he reportedly cultivated connections with Benito Mussolini's regime before returning to America after the Second World War. Back in New York, he wasted little time in manoeuvring for power. In 1957, following the imprisonment of Frank Costello — who had been running the family in Luciano's absence — Genovese seized control of what had previously been known as the Luciano family. It was renamed the Genovese family, and that name endures to this day, making it one of the longest-standing legacies in American organised crime.

His reign at the top was not to last in freedom. Convicted in 1959 on charges of conspiring to violate federal narcotics laws, he was sentenced to fifteen years and never walked free again. Yet even from his prison cell, Genovese remained a power broker, and his influence over the family continued to be felt throughout the 1960s. Among those he mentored during his years of dominance was Vincent "The Chin" Gigante, who would go on to lead the Genovese family himself and become one of the most eccentric and elusive mob bosses of the twentieth century.

Vito Genovese may have died a prisoner, but his shadow stretched far beyond those walls. The family bearing his name remains one of the most powerful and secretive of the Five Families, a lasting monument to a man who was as dangerous in defeat as he ever was in victory.