America’s Cosa Nostra - The rise, reign, and fall of the five families

There are few institutions in the American imagination as enduring or as misunderstood as the Mafia. It is a word that conjures fear, fascination, and an air of mystery. For over a century, the Five Families of New York — Bonanno, Colombo, Gambino, Genovese, and Lucchese — operated not as mere gangs, but as a shadow government of the underworld. They influenced business, politics, labor unions, and even entertainment, blending crime with capitalism in ways that forever altered the landscape of America. This is their story — the story of America’s Cosa Nostra.

The seeds of this empire were planted long before the first Sicilian immigrants arrived in New York. To understand the Mafia’s American saga, we must look first to Sicily — a land marked by centuries of foreign rule, poverty, and mistrust of outside authority. There, the Cosa Nostra became not simply a criminal fraternity, but a social institution born out of survival. Its code, Omertà, celebrated honour, loyalty, and silence as the pillars of discipline. When Italians arrived in New York’s Lower East Side and Brooklyn in the late nineteenth century, they brought those same values — and the social structures that had sustained them for generations.

In America, however, those traditions adapted. The Five Families did not emerge overnight; they evolved out of street gangs and neighborhood protectors who saw in America’s bustling immigrant neighbourhoods a fertile ground for opportunity — sometimes lawful, sometimes not. By the early twentieth century, these families had learned to navigate both sides of the American dream: the legitimate hustle of small business, and the lucrative chaos of vice, extortion, and the black market.