The Mafia Commission Trial was a federal racketeering prosecution in Manhattan that ended on November 19, 1986, with the conviction of eight leaders of the American Mafia’s national governing council. Seven defendants received 100-year prison sentences. It was the first time the U.S. government had gone after the Mafia’s ruling body as a single criminal enterprise rather than chasing individual crimes, and it rewrote how organized crime would be prosecuted in the decades that followed.
The Commission the Case Was Built Around
The Commission was a governing council for the American Mafia, created in 1931 by Charles “Lucky” Luciano to replace the older “boss of all bosses” arrangement that kept setting off gang wars. It was made up primarily of the heads of New York’s Five Families — Genovese, Gambino, Lucchese, Colombo, and Bonanno — along with the leader of the Chicago Outfit and, at various points, bosses from Philadelphia, Detroit, and Buffalo. The council mediated disputes between families, approved changes in leadership, and coordinated major criminal operations so rival groups did not collide.
Law enforcement had known about the Commission for decades but had never managed to reach it. Investigations focused on specific crimes, and the bosses insulated themselves with layers of underlings who carried out the actual work. Proving that a family leader had ordered a particular murder or shakedown through conventional evidence was nearly impossible. The Commission case took a different approach entirely.
Who Was on Trial
The indictments came down in February 1985 and named the highest-ranking figures in the Five Families. Three of the defendants were sitting bosses: Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno of the Genovese family, Anthony “Tony Ducks” Corallo of the Lucchese family, and Carmine “Junior” Persico of the Colombo family. Each was alleged to hold a Commission seat and to have used it to oversee extortion, labor racketeering, and murder.
The remaining five defendants filled out the leadership beneath the bosses. Gennaro “Gerry Lang” Langella was acting boss of the Colombo family. Christopher “Christie Tick” Furnari was the Lucchese consigliere. Ralph Scopo, a Colombo associate who ran a concrete workers’ union local, was central to the construction industry schemes at the heart of the case. Anthony “Bruno” Indelicato, a Bonanno soldier, was charged in part for his role in the 1979 murder of Bonanno boss Carmine Galante, a hit the Commission had allegedly approved. Salvatore Santoro, the Lucchese underboss, rounded out the group.
Persico, who had been running the Colombo family largely from prison since 1973, represented himself. He did not appear in any of the government’s surveillance photos or recordings, and he handled his own cross-examinations and closing argument. It did not change the outcome.
How RICO Made the Case Possible
The legal foundation was the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. The key provision, 18 U.S.C. § 1962, makes it a federal crime to conduct or participate in the affairs of an enterprise through a pattern of racketeering activity.1Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 18 U.S.C. 1962 – Prohibited Activities A pattern requires at least two racketeering acts within a ten-year window, and the list of qualifying offenses is broad — extortion, bribery, murder, fraud, and dozens more.2Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 18 U.S. Code 1961 – Definitions
Under this framework, prosecutors did not need to prove that Salerno personally broke anyone’s legs or that Corallo pulled a trigger. They needed to prove that the Commission was an enterprise and that each defendant participated in running it through a pattern of criminal activity. The underlying acts could be carried out by subordinates. What mattered was that the men on trial directed the organization behind them.
The case was led by Rudolph Giuliani, then the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York.3House of Representatives. Rudolph W. Giuliani Biography His theory treated the Commission itself as a distinct criminal enterprise, not simply a collection of individual families. If the jury accepted that framing, every crime committed to serve the Commission’s goals could be attributed to the men who sat on the council. The bosses’ deliberate distance from street-level crime became irrelevant instead of protective.
The Evidence That Won It
The government’s case rested on an extensive electronic surveillance campaign. The FBI operated roughly 25 bugs and wiretaps during the investigation. The single most valuable one was a listening device planted inside the dashboard of a 1982 Jaguar belonging to Salvatore Avellino, a Lucchese soldier who served as Corallo’s personal driver. Agents installed the bug while the car sat in the parking lot of the Huntington Town House, a Long Island catering hall, during a private sanitation industry dinner.
The Jaguar recordings captured hours of candid conversation as Corallo and Avellino drove around Long Island. Corallo spoke openly about Commission business, including how the families divided territory, settled disputes, and managed profits. There was no code, no oblique phrasing. It was a boss talking shop with a trusted driver, never imagining anyone else was listening. The jury got to hear a Mafia boss describe how his world worked in his own voice.
The recordings were paired with testimony from cooperating witnesses. Angelo Lonardo, a former underboss of the Cleveland crime family, became one of the highest-ranking Mafia figures ever to testify for the government. He walked jurors through the Commission’s structure, its rules, and how decisions were made. Joseph Pistone, the undercover FBI agent who had spent six years inside the Bonanno family as “Donnie Brasco,” also testified. Together, these witnesses identified voices on the tapes, translated coded language, and described initiation rituals and internal governance that would otherwise have been invisible.
The Concrete Club
One of the most compelling threads at trial involved the New York construction industry. Through what investigators called the “Concrete Club,” the Commission had built a stranglehold on the city’s concrete business. The families controlled which contractors won bids on major projects and extracted a two-percent cut of every concrete contract worth $2 million or more.
The Concrete Club also monopolized the ready-mix concrete supply in the city. Because ready-mix suppliers combined cement, water, sand, and aggregates before delivery, controlling them meant controlling which contractors could build anything on schedule. Ralph Scopo, through his union local, was the enforcement mechanism on the ground. Contractors who did not play along could not get workers or materials. The scheme inflated costs on public works and private high-rises alike during the early 1980s, and for prosecutors it was a near-perfect illustration of RICO’s purpose: multiple families cooperating through the Commission to run a criminal cartel embedded inside a legitimate industry.
Verdicts and Sentences
On November 19, 1986, after a ten-week trial, the jury convicted all eight defendants on charges including racketeering, racketeering conspiracy, and extortion. The convictions covered the full range of Commission operations, from construction bid-rigging and labor union corruption to loansharking and the approval of murders.
Judge Richard Owen imposed the sentences on January 13, 1987. Seven of the eight defendants received 100-year prison terms, the maximum available. Indelicato, whose role was narrower, received 40 years with a judicial recommendation against parole. Fines ranged from $50,000 to $250,000. For the bosses, 100 years was functionally life without parole; none of them would live long enough for the difference to matter.
What the Case Changed
The trial did not destroy the Mafia, and Giuliani said so at the time, describing the prosecution as a first step that would open the door for more cases nationwide. That prediction held up. The Commission Trial proved that RICO could reach the top of an organized crime hierarchy, and federal prosecutors across the country used the same approach in the years that followed.
The consequences for the defendants were permanent. Six of the eight convicted men died in federal prison, including Salerno, Corallo, and Persico. Indelicato was paroled in 1998, and Furnari was released in 2014. The families themselves survived, and the Commission technically still exists, but the trial broke a generation of leadership and made the job of boss far more dangerous than it had been. Every successor understood that the federal government now had the tools, and the will, to prosecute the people giving orders rather than only the ones carrying them out.