What Happened to the Five Families?

Lucky Luciano created the Five Families in 1931 to govern New York’s organised crime through structure rather than violence. For half a century they generated billions, corrupted institutions at every level, and appeared untouchable. Then came RICO — and the world changed. Here is what happened to each family, how they fell, and where they stand today.

How RICO Changed Everything

To understand what happened to the Five Families, you first have to understand RICO. Before the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act was passed in 1970, mob bosses were structurally untouchable. They gave orders through layers of intermediaries, never touched money directly, and rarely left a legal trail connecting them to crimes they had ordered. The law was designed to prosecute individuals — and the Mafia was not built around individuals.

RICO changed the equation fundamentally. It allowed prosecutors to charge entire organisations and their leadership for crimes committed anywhere within the enterprise — even crimes the boss had never personally committed. The penalties were catastrophic: each RICO count carried up to 20 years, with forfeiture of all assets. A single RICO indictment could produce sentences that meant life imprisonment.

The first major test came in 1980, when Genovese boss Frank Tieri became the first mob boss convicted specifically as the head of a criminal enterprise. Then came the case that broke the system open entirely. Read the full story of RICO →

The 1986 Commission Case

On 19 November 1986, US Attorney Rudy Giuliani delivered the most devastating single blow in the history of American law enforcement against organised crime. Using FBI bugs planted inside social clubs and cars, and the testimony of informants, he prosecuted the bosses and senior figures of all five New York families as members of a single criminal enterprise — the Commission itself.

The defendants included Tony Corallo of the Lucchese family, Anthony Salerno of the Genovese family, and Carmine Persico of the Colombo family. All were convicted. All received 100-year sentences. The Commission as a functioning governing body was effectively destroyed. Its last known meeting had taken place just months earlier, in the aftermath of the murder of Paul Castellano.

The Gambino Family — From the Pinnacle to the Abyss

The Gambino family was the most powerful of the Five Families for most of the 20th century — generating over $500 million a year under Carlo Gambino‘s nineteen-year reign. Its collapse was correspondingly spectacular.

John Gotti took over in 1985 after ordering the murder of Paul Castellano outside Sparks Steakhouse — a hit conducted without Commission approval, signalling the breakdown of the old order. Gotti’s reign was flashy, media-hungry and ultimately self-destructive. He was acquitted three times in what prosecutors later confirmed were rigged trials — jury tampering and witness intimidation on a systematic scale. The fourth time, his own underboss betrayed him.

In 1991, Sammy “The Bull” Gravano agreed to testify against Gotti — confessing to 19 murders in exchange for a five-year sentence. His testimony was devastating: a sitting underboss describing the inner workings of the organisation, the Commission, and Gotti’s personal involvement in murders. Gotti was convicted on all counts in 1992 and died in prison in 2002.

What followed was a decade of paralysis. Peter Gotti — John’s brother, widely known as the Dumbest Don — was arrested days after taking nominal control and spent his leadership running operations from prison through a series of acting bosses. The family limped through the 2000s and 2010s under successively lower-profile leadership. In March 2019, boss Frank Cali was shot dead outside his Staten Island home by a 24-year-old man with no apparent mob connections, acting over a personal grievance. It was the first assassination of a New York mob boss in over thirty years — and a symbol of how far the family had fallen. Full Gambino leadership timeline →

The Genovese Family — The Last Standing

The Genovese family is the closest thing to a success story that the Five Families can offer in the post-RICO era. Founded as the Luciano family under Lucky Luciano and later reorganised under Vito Genovese, it emerged from the 1986 Commission Case battered but structurally intact — primarily because its leadership had maintained a discipline and secrecy that the other families had abandoned.

Vincent “The Chin” Gigante ran the family through the 1980s and 1990s from behind an extraordinary facade of feigned mental illness — shuffling through Greenwich Village in his bathrobe and pyjamas, mumbling to himself, convincing courts and psychiatrists for over a decade that he was incompetent to stand trial. He finally admitted the ruse in 1997 and was convicted of racketeering. He died in prison in 2003.

Unlike the Gambino family, the Genovese family never suffered a catastrophic informant betrayal at the underboss level. Its culture of secrecy — members were forbidden from even speaking Gigante’s name, pointing to their chin instead — insulated it from the kind of top-down collapse that destroyed the Gambinos. It remains, by most law enforcement assessments, the most powerful surviving New York family. Federal indictments against Genovese members continued into the 2020s. Full Genovese leadership timeline →

The Lucchese Family — Goodfellas and the End of an Era

The Lucchese family was for decades one of the most quietly effective of the Five Families — earning enormous sums from construction racketeering, airport cargo theft at JFK, and labour union infiltration without attracting the kind of media attention that destroyed the Gambinos. Its undoing came from within.

The family’s downfall accelerated through the testimony of multiple informants in the late 1980s and 1990s. Henry Hill — the informant whose story became Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas — had already exposed the family’s operations in devastating detail. Further cooperation followed. The family’s construction rackets were dismantled. Its airport operations were destroyed. By the mid-1990s its leadership had been hollowed out by a combination of prosecution and defection.

Anthony “Gaspipe” Casso, who had served as underboss, became one of the most damaging informants in the family’s history after his arrest in 1993 — though his credibility was eventually destroyed by his own admitted dishonesty, limiting the legal use of his testimony. The family continued to operate through the 2000s and 2010s under a series of acting bosses and was the subject of major federal indictments in 2017, when eleven alleged leaders and members were charged with racketeering. Full Lucchese leadership timeline →

The Colombo Family — The War That Nearly Finished It

The Colombo family — founded by Joe Profaci and later led by Carmine “The Snake” Persico — nearly destroyed itself in the 1990s through an internal war that claimed the lives of dozens of its own members.

Carmine Persico had led the family since the 1970s, conducting operations from prison for most of his reign after his 1987 conviction and 139-year sentence. His insistence on controlling the family from behind bars created a power vacuum that led to a catastrophic split. From 1991 to 1993, the family fought a bloody internal war between factions loyal to Persico and those supporting acting boss Victor Orena, who wanted to take formal control. The war killed at least twelve people and resulted in dozens more convictions as law enforcement exploited the chaos.

Persico died in prison in 2019, still nominally in command. His son Alphonse had also been convicted and sentenced to life. The family that emerged from the Colombo War was a shadow of what it had been — reduced in membership, financially weakened, and structurally fragmented. It continues to exist but is considered the weakest of the Five Families in the current era. Full Colombo leadership timeline →

The Bonanno Family — Expelled from the Commission

The Bonanno family holds the distinction of being the only one of the Five Families ever expelled from the Commission — the governing body that Lucky Luciano created to maintain order among the New York families. It was expelled in the 1980s after the FBI’s Donnie Brasco operation revealed the extent to which the family had been penetrated by law enforcement, making it a security risk to the other families.

FBI agent Joseph Pistone had spent six years undercover inside the Bonanno family — from 1976 to 1981 — under the identity of jewel thief Donnie Brasco. His infiltration was so successful that he was on the verge of being made — formally inducted into the family — when the FBI withdrew him. His testimony and evidence led to over 200 convictions. The family never fully recovered from the psychological damage: if a federal agent could get that close, how could anyone be trusted?

The family was readmitted to the Commission after cleaning house. In the 2000s, boss Joseph Massino became the highest-ranking mob boss in American history to turn government informant — providing testimony against his own family and friends in exchange for leniency. The family continues to operate today but is considered significantly weakened. Recent indictments in 2017 against acting boss Joseph Cammarano Jr and multiple other members confirmed its ongoing activity. Full Bonanno leadership timeline →

Where Do the Five Families Stand Today?

All five families are still active — but the world they operate in is unrecognisable from the one Carlo Gambino and Vito Genovese dominated in the 1960s. The differences are structural, not cosmetic.

The omertà code has effectively collapsed. From Joe Valachi in 1963 to Henry Hill, Sammy Gravano, Joe Massino and dozens of others, the code of silence that made the American Mafia nearly impenetrable has been systematically broken. RICO sentences so severe that no rational calculus supports silence have produced a steady stream of cooperating witnesses at every level of every family. The organisation that depended on omertà for its survival no longer has it. Read about the code of omertà →

The Commission no longer functions. The governing body that Lucky Luciano created has not met formally since 1985. Without the Commission, disputes between families cannot be resolved peacefully, and the disciplined structure that made the Five Families so effective for fifty years has fragmented into something closer to five separate, weakened organisations operating in parallel rather than a coherent system.

Recruitment has declined sharply. Younger generations of Italian-Americans have largely chosen legitimate careers. The pool of potential recruits — men willing to take the oath, operate under omertà, and accept the risk of decades in federal prison — has shrunk dramatically. The FBI estimates current membership across all five families at approximately 3,000 made members and associates, down from peak estimates of over 5,000 in New York alone.

The rackets have adapted. Construction, waste management and labour union infiltration continue. Online gambling operations, healthcare fraud and cybercrime have added new revenue streams. But the scale is incomparable to the golden era — and the legal exposure is greater than ever.

The Five Families are not dead. But the empire that Lucky Luciano built, that Carlo Gambino ran at its height, that RICO dismantled piece by piece — that is gone. What remains is something smaller, more cautious, and perpetually on the back foot. Whether it will survive another generation is an open question.

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