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began to cultivate a perception of Costello as an ineffectual boss and made it very clear that he was now top of the heap and if anyone was found trying to contact Costello he would be considered a traitor and dealt with accordingly. He made Jerry Catena underboss and Michael Miranda became his consigliere. Probably wisely, Costello decided to retire, but only after being demoted to the position of soldier in the Family.
    Being head of the Luciano Family was still not enough for Genovese. He wanted the position of capo di tutti capi , boss of bosses. To do that he would have to whack the ‘Mad Hatter’, Albert Anastasia, a dangerous and violent individual who had been prominent in the legendary Murder Inc. in its heyday. Genovese persuaded Carlo Gambino that it would be beneficial to both of them if Anastasia was not around any more and the Mad Hatter was sensationally shot dead in a barber’s chair in the Manhattan Park Sheraton Hotel on 25 October 1957.
    Some three weeks later, Genovese organized the Apalachin Conference in the rural town of Apalachin, New York. It was at this meeting, attended by 58 top Mafiosi, that he hoped he would be enthroned as boss of bosses. But, it all went badly wrong. An eagle-eyed New York State Trooper, Edgar Croswell, had been observing the meeting house, which belonged to mobster Joseph ‘Joe the Barber’ Barbara, head of the Bufalino Crime Family. Croswell saw large numbers of mobsters arriving at the house, radioed in for reinforcements and they surrounded the farm. When the mobsters were alerted to the police presence, chaos erupted and they tried to flee. Some even ran off into the neighbouring woods. A number of men were arrested, amongst them Carlo Gambino and Vito Genovese. Aside from derailing Genovese’s power plan, the most important consequence of the Apalachin Meeting was that J. Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI, had to admit to the power of organised crime in the States and declared war on it. Genovese had, unwittingly, brought Cosa Nostra out of the shadows and into the view of the public and law enforcement. More importantly for Don Vitole, he was not going to be boss of bosses.
    In April 1959, it ceased to matter when he was convicted of selling a large quantity of heroin. He was fined $20,000 and sentenced to 15 years in the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary in Georgia. It was widely believed that he was set up by the authorities, especially as the Mafia had banned dealing in drugs as a part of its business. But another theory has it that Lucky Luciano, Meyer Lansky and Frank Costello were behind it, knowing that it would not be long before Genovese would come after them. They set up a drug deal that they knew Genovese could not resist and Puerto Rican drug dealer Nelson ‘Melon’ Cantellops, was paid $100,000 to stand up in court and testify against Genovese. When he told a Grand Jury that he had attended a meeting in which Genovese spoke of taking over the drugs trade in the Bronx, the game was up for Vito.
    Prior to sentencing, he summoned his men and claimed that he would continue to run his empire from behind bars, as other bosses had done. His brother Mike would be the conduit for his orders and Tommy Eboli would be acting boss. He appointed a team of caretakers to oversee day-to-day matters.
    He ruled the Genovese Family in this way until he finally succumbed to heart failure in the federal prison medical centre in Springfield, Missouri, on Valentine’s Day 1969, aged 72.

Joe Colombo

     
    Jo Colombo, boss of one of America’s five crime families from 1964 to 1971, did not start out as a hood. Instead, he began his working life in the American Coast Guard, but was never really cut out for it and was soon getting into trouble. At one point he was diagnosed in a naval hospital as suffering from psychoneurosis, was given a medical discharge and started collecting disability allowance. By the end of the war, his real career path was becoming clear and he could be found