The life and death of Joe Colombo
Three rounds from an assassin’s gun all but silenced Joseph Colombo, one of the Mafia’s most publicly vocal bosses. Although…
Joe Friday tackled the Los Angeles crime syndicate
William H. Parker, a hardnosed police chief in midcentury Los Angeles, did not want organized crime in his city. In…
A Mob boss sings, incognito
Cleveland Mafia boss Angelo “Big Angie” Lonardo was the first sitting American Mafia don to become a witness for the…
Eighty years ago, Ciro ‘The Artichoke King’ Terranova ‘died of a broken heart’
Eighty years ago last month, one of Mob history’s oddball characters crossed into the great gangland netherworld. Ciro “The Artichoke…
Scorsese movie, Merlino trial highlight Philadelphia’s Mob past
The City of Brotherly Love is generating Mob-related headlines again. The city’s Mob history has popped up in stories about…
Forty years ago, Jimmy “The Weasel” Fratianno turned on his Mob family
Some mobsters left their legacy by the gun, some by the knife, but Jimmy “the Weasel” Fratianno is best known…
Excerpts from “The Chronicles of The Last Jewish Gangster” by Myron Sugerman
The history of the Mob and the history of Jews in America are intertwined, and it’s a history that Myron…
Don’t dare call him ‘Three Finger Brown’
The 1960s marked the end of an era for some of America’s underworld leaders. The forward-thinking, Prohibition-era architects of New…
Seventy years ago today, Bugsy Siegel’s storied Mob life came to an abrupt end
It is important to our Museum and to me as the resident historian that criminals and their criminal acts are…
The hit that could have sunk Las Vegas
On May 2, 1957, Frank Costello thought he had problems, but he had no idea. He was appealing a five-year…