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On 25th October 1957, two hired assassins dressed in business suits walked into a barber shop on Fifty-Fifth Street in New York as a hairdresser was attending to his client with a hot towel wrapped around his face. The murmur of conversation was suddenly interrupted when one of the hitmen quietly moved the hairdresser aside with the muzzle of his gun. Sensing something was not quite right, the client, New York mob boss Albert Anastasia, tore the towel off his face to see two men with gloved hands and guns staring back at him through the mirror. The target only got as far as raising his left hand before two bullets tore through it.
Then the gunmen sprayed him with 10 more shots and he dropped to the ground back first, so his punctured head was level with the shiny, polished shoes of his killers, who ran to their getaway vehicle. The murder was the culmination of one man's decades-long effort to get to the top by any means necessary. After 35 years of scheming, conspiring and backstabbing, Carlo Gambino was finally the boss. The man known to history as Carlo Gambino was born on 24th August, 1902 in Palermo, Sicily. His father was Tommaso Gambino, a mafia member who raised his sons in the Passo di Rigano neighbourhood in Sicily,
and his mother was Felice Castellano whose family was deeply rooted in organised crime. His brothers were Gaspare Gambino who was not involved in the mafia, and Paulo Gambino who was one of Carlo's most reliable advisors and captains. Carlo's wife was Catherine Castellano who was the daughter of his uncle, Giuseppe "Joseph" Castellano and Gambino's first cousin. While Catherine was never directly involved in illegal activities, she did play her part as a gracious and accommodating host for the many visitors who stopped by their home to discuss business with her husband. Even
if it was an FBI agent knocking on her door, she treated everyone with equal respect and was always on hand to offer hospitality. With Catherine, Carlo fathered a daughter, Phyllis, and three sons called Thomas, Joseph, and Carl. In personality, Gambino was softly spoken and surprisingly shy for a mafia boss yet his mild-mannered way of speaking, and the fact that he never publicly showed anger, disguised how dangerous he was. Behind closed doors he was a different animal who raised his voice and would shout when he needed to, for instance when a hidden, FBI bug picked him up threatening to cut his wife's tongue out for
talking too much. Behind the timid exterior lay a ruthless mobster with no regard for human life, who ordered countless murders even for the smallest perceived slight. Mobster Dominick Scialo for example, was never seen again after disrespecting Carlo at a Christmas party in 1973 with an offhand remark, calling Gambino "The Godfather". In business matters Gambino was truly remorseless, yet he could also display sympathy and understanding for people he did not consider enemies. On one occasion the mother of a drug addict pleaded with him to help her son,
so the next day Gambino shut down the store he was getting the drugs from despite Gambino himself being New York's biggest narcotics dealer at the time. To others he was a grandfatherly, mentor figure always on hand to give advice on how to survive life to the younger generation of mobsters coming up through the ranks. In appearance, Carlo Gambino had a large nose underneath which was a mouth set in a near-permanent smile that made friends, and even enemies, feel at ease in his presence. He was lean and around five-feet seven tall, meaning he was not physically intimidating, yet just like his quiet personality this helped him
camouflage his brutality and ambition and it also kept attention away from him. When he was about 50 years old Gambino was diagnosed with heart disease which he struggled with throughout his later years. Yet paradoxically, his condition helped him survive as a boss for longer because every time he was questioned by authorities he would complain of heart trouble, which usually put an end to interviews before they got too uncomfortable. Carlo Gambino was born at a time when the Italian authorities were actively targeting and arresting mafia members around
Palermo, a place of dirt tracks and donkey-pulled carts where mafiosos were viewed as folk heroes by the island's youngsters. As a child, Gambino and his best friend and future head of the Lucchese crime family, Gaetano Lucchese, idolized the mafia bosses who ran the Sicilian underworld and none more so than Don Vito Cascio Ferro. Wanted for murder in Sicily, as a boy Don Vito had fled to New York and joined the Mob, which back then was known as the Black Hand, climbing up the ranks to become the over boss. During his time in the USA, Ferro and his crew
were hunted by an Italian-American policeman called Detective Lieutenant Joseph Petrosini who travelled to Sicily when Gambino was around 7 years old to destroy the Mafia from the roots up, but within hours of his arrival, Petrosini had been gunned down and killed by Don Vito himself, who had arrived at and escaped the crime scene in a horse-drawn carriage. Spellbound by such a brutal display of power, both Gambino and Lucchese had shouted for joy when they had heard how their role model was personally responsible for the policeman's demise.
Don Vito was the type of man they both looked up to, but it would be Lucchese who would be the first to follow in his footsteps when at aged nine he left his best friend to move to New York City. In the meantime, while attending the Italian version of high school, Gambino become increasingly involved in organized crime until one day he dedicated his life to it. When he was about 20 years old, he officially became a member of the mafia after going through a special initiation ceremony to become a 'made man', but with all the top jobs
in the Sicilian mafia already taken, he decided to try his luck in the USA where there were more opportunities for young criminals to make their mark. On 23rd December 1921 Carlo Gambino arrived illegally in America in Norfolk, Virginia as an undocumented passenger on the SS Vincenzo Florio, after which he made his way to New York where he took a job at his uncle's trucking company. There, he reunited with his childhood pal Lucchese who only weeks later was sentenced to three years in prison for stealing cars. With his only friend locked away, he joined the crew of Alfredo
'Al Mineo' Manfredi which operated exclusively in Brooklyn and which reported to the first boss of what would later become known as the Gambino crime family, Salvatore "Toto" D'Aquila. Having secured his first job, Gambino's attention turned to a peculiar tradition that was very common among the great crime families of the day, who were obsessed with keeping their wealth and reputation within the family. On 5th December 1926 he married his first cousin Catherine Castellano and the newlyweds moved to a property on Ocean Parkway in Midwood, Brooklyn that would become
their lifelong home. In the meantime, as a new recruit with an uncanny ability to coordinate complex operations extremely well, Gambino impressed so much, that he was soon directly reporting to Manfredi and hanging out with senior leadership until a change in the balance of power forced him to reconsider his position. In 1928, D'Aquila was ambushed and killed by three gunmen while fixing his car's engine on the street, on the orders of 'Joe the Boss' Masseria, a rival boss who was muscling into Brooklyn at the time. Gambino wisely swore loyalty to 'Joe
the Boss' who sent him to Boston to manage the distribution and sale of alcohol which was illegal at the time under Prohibition laws. It was there that he proved himself a capable and intelligent criminal mastermind who could remember important details without needing to write anything incriminating down on paper. Throughout, Gambino displayed the type of consistent, organizational ability that was rare and highly prized in the chaotic world of criminal gangs. In contrast, his loyalties were much less consistent. The Castellammarese War was a
bloody one-year struggle for domination of the Mafia fought between 'Joe the Boss' Masseria and Salvatore Maranzano between 1930 and 1931. When Gambino realized that Masseria was going to lose the war, he switched sides and made friends with his former enemies easily enough. However, Maranzano's ascendancy didn't last very long because after declaring himself boss of bosses he was assassinated on 10th September 1931. Vincenzo Giovanni Mangano, who had connections the Sicilian Mafia, became the head of the family in New York, while Albert 'Mad Hatter' Anastasia
became the underboss, the second-in-command, and the man Gambino answered to for the next twenty-six years. Following the end of the bloody Castellammarese War, New York gangsters made an organizational change that would be maintained for close to a century. For the purposes of stability and to avoid another gangland civil war, each agreed to become part of a system whereby power in New York City was split equally between the five major crime families. Importantly, if one family wanted to murder a 'made man' then they now had to get approval from the five heads of family, on the Commission. In the meantime, Gambino continued to excel
in Boston until the end of Prohibition in 1933 when the government made alcohol legal, but despite this there was still illicit money to be made because people were not willing to pay the high taxes placed on legal alcohol and so, using several fake companies that used alcohol commercially, such as a varnish business, he expanded his distillery so that by 1935, he owned all the illicit alcohol operations within a 100 mile radius of New York City. In the summer of 1936 however, the police began to catch up with him, when they seized 650 gallons
of bootleg alcohol, then the next year, Gambino was caught red-handed with a couple of his men trying to hijack a tank full of grain alcohol that had been sitting on a railroad in Port Richmond. Boasting they had dismantled the largest bootleg liquor ring in history, the federal police charged 35 conspirators including Gambino with cheating the government of 300,000 dollars of tax revenue from illegal alcohol sales. In the end, Gambino was convicted and spent 22 months at the United States Penitentiary in Lewisburg, Philadelphia. After he was released in 1939,
Gambino was arrested at Christmas the following year for being an illegal immigrant for the first time in his 19 years in America but he was saved from facing justice when the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour in December 1941 prompted the United States to enter World War Two. With his case shelved for the time being, Gambino looked around for opportunities to profit from the conflict his country had become embroiled in, and that came in the form of the rationing system. During World War Two, Americans were forced to contend with shortages of basic goods like sugar,
groceries, gasoline, and rubber, and so as a result, a rationing system was created to deal with this which involved exchanging stamps for supplies. Gambino made money by hiring robbers to steal stamps that were deposited in safes from government offices, prompting officials to move them into the vaults of banks that were more secure. Undeterred, he recruited corrupt bank workers to give them to him at a discounted price so he could sell them at a profit to customers. With the proceeds, he made outside investments in nightclubs, restaurants, construction, oil and other businesses that made him so rich by the end of World War Two,
that the American newspaper media considered him one of the nation's top gangsters. In 1948, Gambino and his brother Paolo flashed fake passports that allowed them to take a boat back to Palermo, where a major meeting of the Mafia was to take place. Speaking on behalf of their chapter in New York, Gambino, Paolo and the other bosses discussed the logistics of importing massive quantities of narcotics from Europe to the USA, which could make them significantly more money than illicit alcohol. It was the only time in his life that Carlo Gambino returned to Europe,
a place that would eventually become his main source of illicit drugs which was why later on, he preferred to send lieutenants there to conduct business on his behalf. While the Mob elite in Sicily mulled over the logistics of importing the drugs, all was not right back in New York with Gambino's ambitious underboss, Anastasia, who had been looking to replace Mangano for years. In order to provide a justification for his death, Anastasia presented the Five Family Commission with forged tape recording that convinced them to give approval of the hit on Mangano. On
18th April 1951, as Mangano went to greet his second-in-command at a warehouse, Anastasia pulled out a pistol, shot him dead, then threw his body into the sea with concrete shoes so he sank to the bottom. With Anastasia the new boss, Carlo Gambino was promoted to the capo crimine position, the third in command, leaving only two degrees of separation between him and the top job. Only 5 years later Gambino, a man who preferred to plot, scheme and turn enemies against each other, orchestrated the downfall of Anastasia when he presented the Five Family Commission with
a list of reasons why Albert had to go. The main objection was that Anastasia was attempting to muscle into the casino business in Havana, Cuba operated by the Miami boss, which could potentially start an all-out gang war that the Five Families system was meant to prevent. Another point of contention was that Anastasia had ordered the assassination of a man called Arnold Shuster without the permission of the Commission, who were also afraid he was going to become an informer because the FBI were closing in on him, and so as was the custom, the Commission ordered
an outside crew to bump off the troublemaker. On 25th October 1957 with two men acting as lookouts, two gunmen entered the barber shop where Anastasia was having his hair cut and shot him three times in the head, once in the hip, and twice in the hands. Having gone through the proper procedure, Carlo Gambino was promoted to boss with the approval of the Five Family Commission and without any opposition, his first act was to rename the Mangano family after himself. With a man of intelligence and cunning now calling the shots, the newly rebranded
Gambino family underwent a significant shift in strategy. At the same time as maintaining their criminal enterprises, the Gambino family were to get involved in legitimate business for the first time. In the words of Carlo Gambino himself: "We no longer skim. We control". On 14th November 1957 Carlo and four of his lieutenants travelled to an isolated country estate in Apalachin, New York, where he expected to be formally inaugurated as the new boss of the old Mangano family but the main agenda of the meeting was, in light of the death of Anastasia which had ruffled some
feathers, to evaluate the effectiveness of the Five Family system in preventing gang war. With convoys of luxury cars parked outside, the meeting was suddenly cut short by police, who stormed in and raided the gathering after receiving a tip-off. As well-dressed gangsters dirtied their outfits fleeing into the nearby woods, Gambino sat quietly and waited to be arrested feeding false rumours that it had been him that had called the police. When he was later questioned by the FBI, he took advantage of his heart disease diagnosis, warning his interviewers that he was going to have
a heart attack which was cause enough to let him go. It was a trick that he would pull every time he was forced to speak to the authorities. The Apalachin raid was a game changer for law enforcement because they learned many valuable things about the structure and operations of the Mob, which up until then, had been shrouded in mystery but even worse, the scale of the bust led to closer, interdepartmental cooperation between the FBI, state, and local police as well as much more interest in the figures who had attended the meeting, meaning from that point on Gambino and his associates were permanently on the police's radar. After
the Apalachin disaster a more low-key meeting of the Five Commissioners was held in Greenwich Village in New York, where matters were finally put to rest without any unwanted interruptions. One of the topics they debated was Class A drugs, substances that were proving so destructive and addictive that even some Italian gangsters felt it was morally wrong to sell them, especially since they had the potential to infiltrate the Italian-American community. Pointing to the Narcotics Control Act of 1956 which dealt out harsh punishment for drug traffickers, the Mob prohibition on selling narcotics continued, despite the fact that
many were making money this way unofficially at the time. The second order of business related to recruitment and more specifically about who should be accepted into the Mafia since under Anastasia it had been possible to buy your membership, referred to in the slang of the time as 'your button'. Those who had bought their buttons were ordered to return them, and new recruitment was suspended indefinitely while they sorted out the genuine members from the paid ones. The penultimate outstanding issue brought to the table was the New York waterfront, a territory
that Gambino had inherited from Anastasia which the commissioners now believed should be split up between the 5 families. Following this veiled threat to take over his territory, the commissioners officially inaugurated Gambino as the boss of his crime family which now consisted of Joseph 'Banty' Biondo as underboss, Joseph 'Staten Island Joe' Riccobono as 'consigliere' or chief advisor, and Paolo Gambino and Paul Castello as the top 'capos' or captains. The late fifties was a nerve-racking and stressful period for Gambino because he was being constantly
shadowed, monitored and questioned by American law enforcement. Investigations focused on every aspect of his personal and work life, from his family history, bloodline, and personal assets to the way he laundered illicit earnings through legitimate businesses. Yet despite these ongoing headaches he was still laser-focused on his ultimate ambition of becoming boss of bosses. His main rival was Vito Genovese of the Genovese family, and so he orchestrated a series of conspiracies that left his main competitor with no room to manoeuver. For such dangerous figures
it was surprisingly easy to remove Genovese from the picture. He was locked away in prison until his death by natural causes after a Puerto Rican man was bribed $100,000 to testify under oath that he was the head of an international drug smuggling outfit. In 1962 following the death of the Boss of Bosses, 'Lucky' Luciano, from a heart attack in Naples airport, Gambino, who was now the most powerful boss with 500 soldiers and 1000 associates, was unanimously elected as his replacement by the other commissioners. However, his ascension to the top did not sit well with Joseph Bonanno, head of the Bonanno crime family
who believed his seniority should put him ahead. And so, to correct the situation Bonnano hired a gunman from the Profaci crime family to assassinate Don Carlo as he was now known, but the plot never came to anything because Gambino's strongest line of defence moved into action. Carlo Gambino had a habit of placing trusted friends in the top positions of other families rather than his own, the advantage being that if anyone tried to make a move against him, he would be informed beforehand. This is exactly what happened in this case because the gunman
in question was a close associate called Joe Colombo, who proceeded to warn Gambino about the hit. After bringing news of this to the Commission, Bonnano was banished from 'the Life' in 1964 and forced to handover all of his rackets to the other families. In this instance the Five Family system worked just as designed, but it was at this moment that the general public were becoming more aware of the mafia when in 1963 mid-level gangster Joseph Valachi, who was wanted dead by the Mob, revealed the inner workings of the New York underworld, during a televised federal hearing to save himself from being murdered in prison. For the first time
ordinary Americans learned about the hierarchical system of bosses, underbosses, capos and soldiers, how tribute was made, and how men were killed and made into 'stiffs' if they got too big for their boots. Combined with John F Kennedy's vow to destroy the Mob following his election as American president, by the early 60s the Mafia was no longer in the shadows, exposure which threatened its very existence. Nevertheless, there was still money to be made and most of that was now coming from a well-oiled, narcotics moving operation that enjoyed astronomical success.
Throughout the early 1960s, the police attempted to understand its structure and layout with multiple investigations but all they could find were tantalizing clues that only gave them a partial picture, such as the discovery that the Guatemalan ambassador to the Netherlands was transporting illicit product into the USA. And so in 1964, the police went one step further when they bugged the Big S Service Center on Coney Island Avenue, a safe house for Gambino henchmen, with microphones. From idle chitchat they were able to confirm that Gambino was indeed the boss
while sixty of his men were arrested, throwing his usually orderly operations into disarray. Despite all of this, authorities still didn't obtain any smoking-gun evidence that could lead to a conviction and so the operation continued unaffected. On 22nd September 1966, Gambino attended a meeting at an Italian restaurant called La Stella where the territories of his childhood friend and the boss of the Lucchese crime family, Tommy Lucchese, who was terminally ill with a brain tumour, were split between the other families. Once again, the Commission
leadership were caught up in a surprise police ambush that led to the arrests of all participants including Gambino, who was thrown into a jail cell with 13 other top-level commanders for the night. Making sure to only speak Sicilian so the guards didn't understand, the group were sprung from jail after paying a $100,000 bail, marking the end of Gambino's latest close shave with the law which had left him convinced there was an informant in his organization, who he needed to uncover. To add to his list of woes, the Immigration and Naturalisation Service, or INS, was investigating
his immigration status again, prompting Gambino to do the usual thing and check into hospital complaining of heart irregularities. When federal prosecutors turned up to his hospital ward, he answered two or three questions in a quiet voice before complaining he had a chest pain, putting an end to the interview just as planned. Yet this didn't halt the legal process at all because on 30th December 1966 the INS ordered his deportation, a directive that he would fight for the next 5 years with an army of lawyers who argued that the journey across the Atlantic
back to Sicily was too much for the ailing 64 year old crime boss's weak heart. While his lawyers were busy painting him as a sickly man, Gambino was involved in another deadly feud with the exiled Joe Bonanno who had tried to arrange his murder after being passed over for the 'boss of bosses' position. Bonanno was furious that Gambino had appointed an unknown called Paul Sciacca as head of his former crime family, so he struck back and killed three of Sciacca's men, starting a street war that left twenty of Bonanno's men dead. The real threat however
came from gangsters not affiliated with the Mob and more specifically an outfit called Kidnap Inc, which made half of its $1 million earnings solely from the ransoms the 'boss of bosses' paid them to recover his employees, and which ceased to function soon after Gambino put out a $50,000 reward for names. As his enemies disappeared, Gambino expanded his business into the lucrative construction sector on Long Island, where he assigned two henchmen to coerce developers into giving him a piece of the pie, and as the elders on the Council of the Five Families passed away he hoovered up their territories and influence.
When his friend Lucchese died, Gambino essentially took over the family without consulting the council, allowing him to make millions from an operation that stole valuable cargo from JFK Airport amongst others. Another hustle he ran involved the New York garment industry, which was dominated by one of Lucchese's former capos James 'Jimmy Doyle' Plumeri who forced clothes manufacturers and delivery companies to pay tribute money. Because he was a stubborn man who wouldn't budge, in 1969 Gambino initiated a year-long hijacking spree of Plumeri's trucks
that persuaded drivers to switch to Carlo's fleet. Then to send a message to any other potential competitors he ordered the murder of Plumeri, whose corpse was dumped onto the curb of a street with his silk necktie still tightly wrapped around his throat. In 1970, after years of surveillance, the police finally believed they had busted Gambino when his name was given by a hijacker who was caught trying to steal $30 million from an armoured truck in the Bronx. After being arrested with his wife, he was formally accused of having a hand in it, but the case never went to trial because apart from the testimony of a single street thug,
there was nothing to link him to the scene of the crime. In addition, the Manhattan Judge Marvin Frankel was sufficiently convinced to rule that Gambino was too unhealthy to stand trial which put the case on temporary pause. With his immigration problems at bay temporarily, Gambino turned his attention to another issue that was nagging him involving Joe Colombo, the man who had once saved his life by warning him about Joe Bonanno's hit and who had been made leader of the Profaci family as a reward. Colombo had been stirring up trouble with his
Italian-American Civil Rights League, which on 28th June 1971 held the second ever Italian Unity Day to protest against racism towards the Italian community. A lot of mobsters heavily disliked the activist work of Bonanno, a hypocrite who complained about Italians being unfairly labelled 'mafia' when at the same time he was one of the biggest mafiosos in New York. Colombo made more alarm bells ring when during an interview before the event he claimed he was being targeted by the FBI, breaking the Gambino rule to never unnecessarily provoke
law enforcement. As head of the old Profaci family, Colombo sat on the commissioners' board, but he had now become a liability that was attracting unwanted attention, which is why most historians agree that it was Carlo Gambino who ordered his execution. As he was making his speech on the podium 24-year-old Jerome Johnson, a man posing as a journalist, shot him three times in the head leaving him almost completely paralysed and wheelchair bound until his death 7 years later. At the time because Joe Colombo had been a close friend of Gambino, most people suspected the leader of the Gallo crime family, Joey Gallo. He disliked the victim
because in the late 50s, Gallo had rebelled against the Profaci family, which Colombo had later taken over as boss, yet Joey himself always denied involvement and famously asserted that the crime had been designed to make it look like he had orchestrated it. Interestingly in another example of how the 'boss of bosses' benefited, he sold weapons to both sides after the murder of Joey Gallo sparked off a war between the Colombo and Gallo crime syndicates. While all that was going on, Gambino was in personal turmoil because his wife, Catherine,
who had been beside him every step of the way on his journey to the top, died in August 1971 after a long illness. With his rock gone, her sister Providencia and husband Phil Villano moved into the downstairs apartment of his Ocean Parkway residence to help Gambino host and look after visitors. Three months after the tragedy, the pending immigration case against him took another twist when the authorities ordered Gambino's immediate deportation but two days before his scheduled flight, the boss took a trip to Victory Memorial Hospital, making a public statement
declaring that the recent passing of his beloved wife had exacerbated his heart condition. However, this wasn't the same as the old excuse he had used to get out of sticky situations with authority before, because this time government cardiologists confirmed that he really was telling the truth, and it ended the legal battle to deport him forever. By the early 70s, Carlo Gambino's health had started to noticeably deteriorate to the point where he was so sickly he had a lift installed at his home to avoid climbing the stairs. With rumours of his frailty flying around,
an opportunistic gangster called Thomas Eboli, one of the last to oppose Gambino domination, viewed it as a perfect opportunity to get rid of him. In the end though, Eboli would massively underestimate his target, because on 15th July 1972, an assassin fired 5 rounds into his head and neck that took him out of the game forever, illustrating the lengths that the feeble Don Carlo was still willing to go to. Maintaining the image of power was also equally as important, and something he had to address when on 19th May 1972 his nephew, Manny Gambino, was kidnapped,
with his safe release guaranteed for $350,000. However, when Manny's bullet-ridden body was discovered on 2nd June 1972, Don Carlo was left with no choice but to send a message. Around a year later on 22nd May 1973 and on Gambino's word, a hit squad held suspected kidnapper Jimmy McBratney, who it transpired, had nothing to do with Manny's killing, against the wall of a restaurant before shooting him in the head with a pistol. By the 70s more and more mobsters were being killed without having actually committed an offence. The belief that someone might snitch in the future was now all the justification needed
for their execution in the present, a line of thinking that Gambino also adopted. An example of this is the fate of Charles 'Charlie Bear' Calise who oversaw the Gambino gambling rackets and was arrested while on probation by the FBI, who wanted him to talk about the details of the operation in exchange for reduced prison time. The very possibility that he could reveal secrets was enough for Gambino to have him murdered. Part of the problem was that the makeup of gangsters had changed so much in the many decades he had been in the USA. When Gambino had first arrived in New
York, the American Mafia was full of tough, Sicilian-born gangsters who respected their elders and the chain of command, by the end of his career most of them were gone only to be replaced by either their American-born sons who, lacking a Sicilian upbringing were too soft and disrespectful, or with vicious American thugs who had absolutely no discipline. In Gambino's mind a fresh injection of Sicilian blood into the American chapter of the Mafia was sorely needed, so he sent a team of recruiters to Sicily to put this into action. Orchestrated from a command
centre hidden in a barber shop on Mulberry Street in Little Italy, hundreds of Sicilian recruits were smuggled into the country and given new identities if they were being hunted by police in Sicily or other countries, which most of them were. Gambino now had an army of undocumented immigrants doing his bidding whose true identity could never be ascertained by police. This would be his last major decision as boss because in 1976 Gambino's health took a turn for the worse when his heart began to give out. Bed bound and dying at his home on Ocean Parkway,
Gambino named his cousin, Big Paulie Castellano, the first person he had met in the USA and the man he trusted most, as his successor. With considerable foresight he decided not to name his sons as heirs because he correctly predicted the severity of the sentences that were soon to come with the new RICO laws which had been passed by the US government. The RICO laws meant that defendants could be charged for being part of a criminal enterprise rather than committing a specific crime, meaning that mob bosses were no longer untouchable, and Gambino did not want his
sons to spend the rest of their lives behind bars. Surrounded by his sons and their wives, Big Paulie, his brother Paolo and Catherine's sister and husband, Carlo Gambino, covered up to the chin by a bedsheet, slipped away peacefully at 1:45 am on 15th October 1976, dying of natural causes at the age of 74 having survived as 'boss of bosses' against all the odds. Born in the cradle of the Mafia in Palermo, Sicily, Carlo Gambino grew up idolising gangsters, before becoming one at 20 years old when he officially became a 'made' man. With
few opportunities available to him in Sicily he took a ship to the United States to start his criminal career which took off when his eye for detail and organisational abilities were noticed by his superiors. After surviving the Castellammarese War by astutely switching allegiances to the winning side, he spent the next 20 years brewing, distributing, and selling illegal alcohol on behalf of his boss Vincenzo Mangano, making him one of America's richest gangsters by the end of World War Two. By 1957 Gambino had accrued enough power to persuade
the Five Families Commission to allow him to organise the murder of Mangano's successor, Albert Anastasia, after which he became head of the newly renamed Gambino crime family. Having become boss, he set his sights on becoming the 'boss of bosses' so he removed his main rival for the position, Vito Genovese, who died in prison after Gambino bribed someone to testify against him. With the death of 'Lucky' Luciano from natural causes, he became the undisputed leader of the New York mafia. For the first few years, Gambino consolidated his
position by either exiling or executing his rivals while the FBI were constantly investigating him. In the meantime, he expanded his extortion rackets into the construction and clothing sectors of New York while continuing to make millions from a lucrative, narcotics smuggling operation and gambling. In the early 70s Gambino played puppet master by most likely ordering the assassination of Joe Colombo and making it look like the Gallo family was responsible, setting off a Gallo-Colombo street war in which he sold weapons to both sides. In the early 70s following
the death of his wife Catherine, Gambino's health and underlying heart condition, which had got him out of hot water countless times, worsened. As he weakened Don Carlo became even more determined to protect his interests so he began bumping off anyone who might even potentially talk to authorities. He did not completely trust American-born Sicilian gangsters or pure-blooded American hoods by this point because in his view, they had bad discipline and didn't respect their elders. And so in one of his last acts as boss, he began recruiting directly from Sicily and giving the recruits fake IDs so their true identities could never be
established by police. In the early morning hours of 15th October 1976, Carlo Gambino died of heart failure surrounded by his family having only ever served 22 months in prison for tax evasion. What do you think of Carlo Gambino? Do you think his heart disease helped him more than it hindered him? Please let us know in the comment section, and in the meantime, thank you very much for watching.
