1950s in organized crime

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This is a list of organized crime in the 1950s, arranged chronologically.

List of years in organized crime
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1950

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  • Boston mobster Philip Buccola flees the country to escape indictment for tax evasion. Before leaving the U.S., he turns over his criminal operations to mobster Raymond Patriarca, Sr. Patriarca would eventually transform this confederation of Italian street gangs into the Patriarca crime family.
  • February 28 – Abraham Davidian is shot to death in Fresno, California while waiting to testify in a major West Coast narcotics investigation.
  • April 6 – Kansas City, Missouri mob boss Charles Binaggio and his bodyguard, Charles Gargotta, are found shot to death. Binaggio would be succeeded by Anthony Gizzo.
  • May 26 – The Senate Special Committee to Investigate Organized Crime in Interstate Commerce (later to be known as the Kefauver Committee) opens hearings in Miami, Florida. Committee hearings would continue in major cities throughout the country until August 17, 1951.
  • June 5 – James Lumia, Florida organized crime figure, is gunned down on a street corner. The hit is believed to be ordered by Santo Trafficante, Sr.
  • July 5 – The bandit and separatist Salvatore Giuliano is killed in Castelvetrano, Sicily. According to police, carabinieri captain Antonio Perenze shot and killed Guilano as he was resisting arrest. However, Gaspare Pisciotta, Giuliano's lieutenant, would later claim that he killed Giuliano on orders from Mario Scelba, then Italian Minister of the Interior. Pisciotta would say that police promised him a pardon and a reward if he killed Giuliano.
  • September 25 – William Drury, a former acting police captain in Chicago, and Marvin Bas, attorney for the Republican nominee for Cook County Sheriff, are shot to death at separate locations in Chicago. Police believe the two men were murdered due to information they provided the Kefauver Committee on organized crime activities in Chicago. Chicago Outfit mobsters Paul Ricca and Louis Campagna would be held for questioning in the murder, but due to lack of evidence are never formally charged.[1]

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1951

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1952

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1953

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  • Kansas City mobster Joseph Benintende is imprisoned after being convicted for his role in the NCAA point shaving scandal.
  • May 2 – Meyer Lansky is convicted of illegal gambling, after pleading guilty to five of the total twenty one charges,[5] and serves three months in a New York prison. He is additionally fined $2,500 and, after his release, receives three years probation.
  • June 19 – Stephen Franse, a police informant, is murdered by Genovese crime family hitman Joe Valachi.
  • July 16 – Shortly after his release from prison, Joe Adonis is faced with perjury charges.
  • August 5 – U.S. Attorney General Herbert Brownell Jr. orders the deportation of Joe Adonis after it is found Adonis had lied of his birthplace in Passaic, New Jersey and found to have immigrated from Naples, Italy.
  • October 29 – New York mobster Frank Costello is released from prison, following his arrest for contempt of court during the Kefauver Committee the previous year.
  • December 9 - Dominick Petrilli, sneaking into the United States shortly after being deported, is killed by rival gunman. Petrilli had brought Joe Valachi, later a government informant, into the Genovese crime family.[6]

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1954

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  • Facing a shortage of "soldiers" and other low level members, New York's Five Families begin actively recruiting members after a twenty-year hiatus.
  • Salvatore Bonanno, the son of mafia boss Joseph Bonanno, becomes a "made man" and an official member of the Bonanno crime family.
  • February 9 – In Sicily, the bandit Gaspare Pisciotta dies in his cell from strychnine poisoning while on trial. Pisciotta had claimed that he killed his companion and separatist Salvatore Giuliano on orders from Mario Scelba, then Italian Minister of the Interior.
  • March 25 – Joe Adonis is convicted of perjury and sentenced to two years in a federal penitentiary. Facing a deportation order from 1954, Adonis offers to leave the country voluntarily while the verdict is under appeal as an alternative to jail time.
  • March 27 – Johnny Dio is convicted on charges of evading New York state income taxes, and sentenced to 60 days in prison.[7]
  • April 11 – The Rome daily newspaper Avanti! publishes a photograph of a candy factory in Palermo under the headline "Textiles and Sweets on the Drug Route." The factory was reportedly set up by Calogero Vizzini and Italian-American gangster Lucky Luciano in 1949. In the evening after the story is published, the factory closes and the laboratory's chemists are reportedly smuggled out of the country. Police suspected that the factory was a cover for heroin trafficking.[8]
  • July 10 – Calogero Vizzini the Mafia boss of Villalba in Sicily, dies. Vizzini was considered to be one of the most influential Mafia bosses of Sicily after World War II. Thousands of peasants dressed in black, politicians, and priests would take part in his funeral. Attendees would include Mussomeli boss Giuseppe Genco Russo and the powerful boss Don Francesco Paolo Bontade from Palermo (the father of future Mafia boss Stefano Bontade) – who was one of the pallbearers. An elegy for Vizzini would be pinned to the church door. It read: "Humble with the humble. Great with the great. He showed with words and deeds that his Mafia was not criminal. It stood for respect for the law, defence of all rights, greatness of character: it was love."
  • July–December – According to FBI reports, several meetings between Mafia leaders are observed in Los Angeles, California, Chicago, Illinois and Mountainside, New Jersey.

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1955

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  • In 1955, the bosses of the Acquasanta Mafia clan, Gaetano Galatolo and Nicola D’Alessandro were killed in a dispute over the protection rackets when the Palermo fruit and vegetable wholesale market moved from the Zisa area to Acquasanta, disturbing the delicate power balances within Cosa Nostra. The killer of Galatolo was never identified, but Michele Cavataio was suspected. Cavataio became the new boss of the clan and had to agree to split the profits of the wholesale market racket with the Greco Mafia clan of Ciaculli, who traditionally controlled fruit and vegetable supply to Palermo wholesale market.
  • March 31 – Stefano Bedami, New Jersey Family Boss is stabbed to death in a Newark, New Jersey restaurant.
  • Nicolo Impastato, a Sicilian mafiosi and drug trafficker, is deported to Italy by the Mexican government.
  • August 25 – Meyer Lansky's Casino Internacional, the earliest of Havana's syndicate casinos, is taken over by Moe Dalitz and Sam Tucker. It would eventually be sold to Mike McLaney, only six months before the Cuban Revolution and seized by the Castro regime.
  • November 4 - Willie Bioff, a former pimp, labor racketeer and Chicago Outfit associate who had testified against his fellow conspirators in the extortion of Hollywood movie studios in the 1930s and early 1940s, is killed when a bomb planted on his pickup truck explodes outside his home in Phoenix, Arizona. Bioff, who had been living under an assumed name, had recently begun working at the Outfit-controlled Riviera Casino in Las Vegas, which tipped off the Outfit mobsters as to his whereabouts.[9]

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1956

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1957

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1958

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1959

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References

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  1. ^ "Chicago Crime Study Linked to 2 Murders". (September 27, 1950). The New York Times
  2. ^ "Mickey Cohen Biography". Biography.com. Archived from the original on 16 November 2018. Retrieved 2 February 2015.
  3. ^ a b Maeder, Jay (September 11, 1998). "Public Duty, Arnold Schuster, 1952". Daily News.
  4. ^ Sifakis, Carl (2006). The Mafia Encyclopedia (3rd ed.). Infobase Publishing. p. 241. ISBN 978-0-8160-6989-7.
  5. ^ "Meyer Lansky Pleads Guilty To 5 Charges". Miami Daily News. No. 280. Associated Press. February 18, 1953. p. 1.
  6. ^ Dillon, Edward; Lee, Henry (December 10, 1953). "Deported Luciano Pal Sneaks Back, Is Slain". Daily News. p. 3.
  7. ^ "Tax Evasion Laid to Union Official." New York Times. April 28, 1953; "Union Aide Sentenced." New York Times. March 27, 1954.
  8. ^ Luciano Organizes the Postwar Heroin Trade Archived 2011-04-17 at the Wayback Machine, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, Alfred W. McCoy.
  9. ^ "Willie Bioff Killed by Dynamite Bomb," The Chicago Tribune, November 5, 1955.
  10. ^ Raskin, A.H. "Thug Hurls Acid on Labor Writer." New York Times. April 6, 1956; "Riesel Loses Sight From Burns of Acid." New York Times. May 5, 1956; Frankel, Max. "Johnny Dio and 4 Others Held As Masterminds in Riesel Attack." New York Times. August 29, 1956; Ranzal, Edward. "Jury Indicts Dio in Riesel Attack." New York Times. September 8, 1956; Ranzal, Edward. "Dio Directed Attack On Riesel, Trial Told." New York Times. November 28, 1956; Becker, Bill. "Key Dio Witness Refuses to Talk." New York Times. May 21, 1957; Ranzal, Edward. "Dio Case Dropped From Court Docket." New York Times. May 28, 1957; "Judge Continues Diio's Indictment." New York Times. September 24, 1957.
  11. ^ "Dio and Two Found Guilty of Plot to Seal Labor Peace." New York Times. July 26, 1957; Roth, Jack. "Dio and 2 Others in Conspiracy Sentenced to 2-Year Jail Terms." New York Times. September 6, 1957.
  12. ^ Gambetta, The Sicilian Mafia, p. 112
  13. ^ "Moretti Suspect Gets His: 4 Slugs in Head," by Joseph George and William Neugebauer, Daily News, September 8, 1958.
  14. ^ "Sam Giancana Quizzed on Vice Payoffs" by William Moore, the Chicago Daily Tribune, June 10, 1959.