The Commission: How the Mafia Organized Itself

In 1931, Lucky Luciano convened a meeting of organized crime leadership from across the country and established a governing body — with no enforcement power beyond the credible threat of collective violence — that managed disputes between criminal organizations for over fifty years.^1^ It was ultimately convicted as a criminal enterprise in 1986, when prosecutors used RICO to charge it as the conspiracy that organized American crime. Understanding how it worked requires separating it from the mythologized version.

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What the Commission Actually Was, Stripped of the Mythology

The Commission, formally established in 1931, was not a government. It had no charter, no permanent staff, no enforcement mechanism independent of the member organizations themselves. It was closer to a cartel agreement with a dispute resolution function, backed by the implicit threat that member families would collectively respond to violations of the agreed rules.

The founding members were the bosses of the major American organized crime families: Luciano representing what became the Genovese family; Vincent Mangano of the Gambino family; Joseph Profaci of the Colombo family; Joseph Bonanno; Luciano’s allies in other cities including Al Capone’s successor organization in Chicago, represented by Frank Nitti; and representatives from Buffalo, Cleveland, and Detroit. The specific membership evolved as bosses changed and families merged or collapsed.

The Commission’s functions were limited but important. It arbitrated territorial disputes between families — which family had the right to operate in a given city, which rackets were exclusive to which organization. It set rules governing the conduct of member families, including a prohibition on murdering law enforcement officials and public figures (the Dutch Schultz veto), rules on the killing of made members, and standards for membership itself. It served as an appeals court when a member believed he had been treated unjustly by his own boss, and it made collective decisions about actions — like the Anastasia murder in 1957 — that affected the whole structure.^1^

What it could not do was enforce its decisions directly. If a boss defied a Commission ruling, the Commission’s only remedy was to organize the member families to act collectively against him, which required consensus among organizations with competing interests. The Commission’s history is partly a history of its own limitations.

The Apalachin Disaster Forced the FBI to Admit Organized Crime Existed

The Apalachin Meeting of November 14, 1957, was the Commission’s most significant public failure. Called by Vito Genovese following his orchestration of Albert Anastasia’s murder, the meeting was held at the estate of Joseph Barbara in rural Apalachin, New York, with approximately sixty senior organized crime figures from across the country in attendance. State trooper Edgar Croswell, who had been periodically surveilling the Barbara property, noticed the unusual number of cars and called for backup. The resulting roadblocks and identification of the attendees destroyed the federal government’s official position — maintained by J. Edgar Hoover for decades — that no national organized crime conspiracy existed.^2^

The consequences were significant. Congress held hearings. The FBI was forced to acknowledge what it had been denying and created the Top Hoodlum Program in 1957, ordering field offices to begin systematic investigation of organized crime for the first time. The McClellan Committee hearings of 1957 to 1959, with Robert Kennedy as chief counsel, produced extensive public testimony about the Commission’s structure, culminating in Joseph Valachi’s 1963 Senate testimony — the first made member of the American Mafia to testify publicly about its inner workings. He confirmed the Commission’s existence, the five-family structure, and the rituals of Mafia membership to a television audience of millions.

The RICO Prosecution That Turned Membership Into the Crime

The decisive legal challenge came not from any individual prosecution of the 1970s and early 1980s but from the Commission Case of 1985 to 1986. United States v. Salerno, tried in the Southern District of New York under lead prosecutor Michael Chertoff — later Secretary of Homeland Security — charged the bosses of four of the five New York families with a single RICO conspiracy on the theory that membership in the Commission itself constituted participation in a criminal enterprise.

The defendants were: Fat Tony Salerno, acting boss of the Genovese family in the Commission indictment; Carmine Persico of the Colombo family; Anthony Corallo of the Lucchese family; Philip Rastelli of the Bonanno family; and Gennaro Langella, acting for the Colombo family. The evidence included surveillance recordings of Commission discussions about labor racketeering in the concrete industry and testimony from cooperating witnesses about Commission functions.^1^

All defendants were convicted on November 19, 1986. Corallo, Persico, and Salerno received 100-year sentences. The verdict effectively ended the Commission as a functioning institution. The bosses who had constituted its membership were imprisoned, and their successors were aware that Commission membership itself was now a prosecutable act.

What Organized Crime Looks Like Without a Governing Body

The absence of a functioning Commission created predictable problems. Without a neutral arbitration mechanism, disputes between families that would previously have been resolved through Commission ruling were resolved through direct negotiation, standoff, or violence. The Colombo family’s internal war of 1991 to 1993, which killed over a dozen people and devastated the organization, was exactly the kind of conflict the Commission had been designed to prevent.

Individual families continued operating. The Genovese family remained the most functional of the five through the 1990s and 2000s, maintaining the operational discipline that had characterized it throughout its history. The Gambino family declined after Gotti’s 1992 conviction. The Lucchese, Colombo, and Bonanno families faced sustained prosecution that reduced their membership and revenue across the same period.

The Commission’s rise and fall tracks the arc of a particular form of organized crime: the ethnically specific, territorially defined, hierarchically organized criminal enterprise that the Italian-American Mafia represented. Its fifty-year run demonstrated that even organizations operating entirely outside the law can develop functional institutions for managing collective action problems. Its conviction demonstrated that those institutions, once identified and documented, are as prosecutable as the specific crimes they coordinate. The Commission’s mistake was persistence in a structure that had become too well-documented to hide.

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Sources:

1. Raab, Selwyn. Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America’s Most Powerful Mafia Empires. St. Martin’s Press, 2005.
2. Jacobs, James B., Christopher Panarella, and Jay Worthington. Busting the Mob: United States v. Cosa Nostra. NYU Press, 1994.
3. Critchley, David. The Origin of Organized Crime in America: The New York City Mafia, 1891–1931. Routledge, 2009.
4. Chertoff, Michael, and John Gleeson. Trial records, United States v. Salerno, SDNY, 1986.