“There’s people that go out there, just have a knack for earning money,” Mr. Tartaglione said at the trial of Bonanno boss Joseph Massino, an earner in his own right who was forced to give up more than $9 million in ill-gotten gains after he was convicted of murder and racketeering, and then agreed to cooperate with prosecutors. “They know how to put businesses together, and they are just good at what they do, as far as business. Then you got those tough guys that could go out and kill somebody and do whatever they have to do.”

It is not easy to gauge the real net worth or earning capacity of an organized-crime figure. Most are constantly scheming to hide their assets and income  and not only from taxing authorities and federal prosecutors eager to seize them.

They often deceive their own crime families about schemes that are “off the books” and unknown to their superiors.

In New York’s crime families, money generally flows up, from associates to soldiers to their captains to the administration and ultimately to the family’s boss. But few procedures are set in stone.

The families do not have auditors. They rely on harsh punishment as a deterrent. In many mob murders, the victims were killed because they failed to pay tribute, or so the bosses thought, according to prosecutors and investigators.

Organized crime has many rules. Drug-dealing and prostitution are taboo; one cannot strike a fellow made man, or sleep with his wife or daughters; soldiers cannot borrow from a loan shark without approval; killing a boss is forbidden. But these rules are for people who revel in breaking rules.

Money flows into organized-crime families from almost as many sources as there are schemes in the heads of mobsters, from traditional staples like loan sharking, gambling, labor racketeering, cargo theft and bank robbery to skimming from industries that the mob once controlled and still influences in some cases: garbage hauling, construction, the piers, the garment district and the commercial linen business. Modern innovations include stock manipulation, Internet fraud, identity theft, health care schemes and everything from importing contaminated fish to counterfeiting designer blue jeans.