La Cosa Nostra

La Cosa Nostra - "this thing of ours" in Sicilian Italian - is the term used by the Federal Bureau of Investigation to designate Italian-American organized crime in the United States. The organization traces its origins to the Sicilian Mafia, which established a presence in New Orleans in the nineteenth century and in New York City by the 1920s.¹

Structure and Origins

Salvatore Maranzano emerged as the dominant figure in American Italian-American crime in the early 1930s following the Castellammarese War. He established the foundational organizational structure: distinct territorial "families," each headed by a boss (the supreme authority within the family), an underboss (second in command), a consigliere (senior advisor), capos (lieutenants), and soldiers (made members). Non-member associates operated in support roles. Maranzano was assassinated in September 1931, but his structural model survived him and governed the organization for decades.¹

Twenty-six geographic families historically composed the American LCN, concentrated in New York City (the Five Families: Gambino, Genovese, Lucchese, Colombo, Bonanno), and in Chicago, New England, Philadelphia, Detroit, and other cities. The New York families maintained the greatest wealth and influence throughout the organization's peak period.²

Public Exposure: Valachi and Appalachin

The existence of LCN as a formal organization with a name, membership rituals, and national coordination was publicly unknown until 1963, when Joseph Valachi, a Genovese family soldier serving a federal prison sentence, appeared before the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. Valachi disclosed the organization's name, internal hierarchy, membership oath, and structure, contradicting FBI director J. Edgar Hoover's long-standing public position that no national organized crime network existed. The 1957 Appalachian meeting, at which more than sixty organized crime figures from across the country were discovered by New York state police at a rural estate, had already undermined Hoover's position; Valachi's testimony confirmed it.¹

Intelligence and Government Connections

LCN families, particularly in Chicago and New York, developed documented relationships with elements of U.S. intelligence and law enforcement during the Cold War period. The Central Intelligence Agency and the Mafia cooperated in at least one documented operation: a series of Agency-funded plots in the early 1960s aimed at assassinating Cuban leader Fidel Castro, using LCN intermediaries including Santos Trafficante, Jr., Sam Giancana, and John Roselli. The Church Committee investigation in 1975-1976 examined this relationship in detail.³

LCN's primary criminal activities include drug trafficking, money laundering, labor racketeering, illegal gambling, extortion, and the infiltration of legitimate businesses. By the late twentieth century, federal prosecutorial use of the RICO Act had produced convictions against multiple family leadership structures, diminishing but not eliminating LCN's operational capacity.²