Anthony Arillotta swapped out his black Ford Expedition SUV for his mother’s Nissan Maxima – less conspicuous, he thought – then started out on the two-hour journey to New York City. It was 11 August, early in the morning, but the sun was shining and it was already warm.

He’d been instructed to meet at a restaurant called Nebraska Steakhouse near Arthur Avenue, better known as Little Italy, in the heart of the Bronx. Arillotta, a small, good-looking man with thinning hair and piercing eyes, stepped out of the car into the sunshine wearing black trousers, a black dress shirt and smart black shoes. Although he didn’t wear it every day, he’d also put on his platinum Rolex – the one with diamonds around the dial that was given to him as a gift by his boss.

The restaurant was closed when Arillotta arrived, but the door was unlocked. Inside, he recognised the four men at the table, all of them captains, a senior rank in the club he was about to join. They offered him a coffee. He took a shot of espresso and the men waited for three more people to arrive.

Then, it was time.

‘I will never break this oath. If I do, it’ll be death on me. I will be destroyed’

Part one: All roads lead to New York

Under instructions from one of the captains, Arillotta and the three other initiates began to remove their jewellery and place it on the table. They took their mobile phones from their jacket pockets and placed them alongside. Arillotta took off his watch and the gold chain with a cross that hung round his neck. Then they climbed into a black Cadillac Fleetwood parked outside.

The journey was short, just a few city blocks. The Cadillac pulled up in front of an old Bronx apartment building and the men, some in suits, others in smart trousers and shirts, began to walk up a narrow set of concrete stairs to the third floor.

The inside of the apartment looked more like a social club. Dimly lit, with old wooden tables and chairs, it reminded Arillotta of a Twenties gambling den. One of the captains, Stevie, told him to get undressed in the tiny bathroom down the hallway and put on a white bath robe.

Then he was led into a back room where the other three captains were waiting. There was another man in the room too, someone Arillotta knew well. Arthur Nigro (pronounced Ny-row) who went by “Artie”. He was the acting boss of this club and he stood there wearing a grey suit and button-up dress shirt.

“Do you know why you’re here?” Nigro asked Arillotta.

“No. I don’t know why I’m here,” he said. He knew the responses expected of him. It was an age-old script.

“We are part of a secret, honoured society. It’s exclusive and the reason you’re here today is because we’d like you to be part of this brotherhood of ours. Is that something you would want to be part of?”

“Yes,” replied Arillotta.

“If your wife was giving birth to your child and the boss called for you, would you leave her bedside and come?”

This resonated particularly strongly with Arillotta. His daughter would be born the next day.

“Yes,” he said.

On the small wooden table beside Nigro there was a .38 revolver and a marble-handled knife with a six-inch blade. “You see this gun and knife,” Nigro asked him. “Would you use the knife that’s on this table to kill someone if your bosses asked you to do it?”

“Yes,” said Arillotta.

“If your brother did something to harm a member of our family and we asked you to take this gun and kill him, would you do that?”

“Yes.”

He asked Arillotta to point to his trigger finger and Nigro took the knife and made a small incision. A bead of blood appeared. Nigro took a small piece of cloth, wiped the blood away and placed the cloth in the palm of Arillotta’s hand. He then struck a match, lit the corner of the cotton and Arillotta tossed the burning linen from one hand to the other.

“Non romperò mai questo giuramento,” Nigro said then asked Arillotta to repeat in English: “I will never break this oath. If I do, it’ll be death on me. I will be destroyed like this cloth in my hand.”

Nigro kissed him on both cheeks then shook his hand. “Hello, friend,” he said.

What looked like a scene from The Godfather or a snapshot from the annals of American crime history was in fact happening in present-day America. Arillotta had just been “made”, inducted into the Genovese crime family, the largest and most powerful of New York’s infamous Italian-American mafia dynasties.

The modern mob was looking a hell of a lot like the old mob.

Asked what soldiers do, ‘Big Anthony’ Russo said, ‘You know, break legs... stuff like that’

At around 9.20pm on 13 March 2019, Francesco Cali, known as “Franky Boy”, was shot dead outside his home in Staten Island, New York. His killer apparently first crashed his blue pickup truck into Cali’s car before emptying his 9mm handgun into the 53-year-old’s body.

Headlines across the world called it a gangland hit. Cali, who was the supposed head of the Gambino crime family, one of New York’s notorious five mafia clans, was the first New York mob boss to be killed since 1985, when a young John Gotti ordered the murder of then Gambino head, Paul Castellano, outside a Manhattan steak restaurant.

Media speculation was rife that Cali’s was another ordered hit, demonstrating that the Italian-American mafia was still active. But Cali’s death, it turned out, did nothing of the sort. The New York Post called his killer a “Staten Island knucklehead with a personal beef over a woman”. The murder of the reported head of one of America’s biggest crime families wasn’t looking like a mob “hit” after all.

Despite that, business has been booming for the American mafia. Anyone with any real knowledge of the mob knew that and Cali’s death didn’t prove anything. Just six days before Cali’s murder, the death from old age of Carmine Persico, head of the Colombo crime family who was serving a 139-year prison sentence for racketeering, itself made headline news, but even then some media outlets spoke about Persico as if he was a relic of a bygone age, discussing the organisation he had been a part of in the past tense.

Before Persico’s death in prison – and Cali’s death on the streets – I’d wanted to find out just how big the American mafia was today. I knew from a cursory reading of news reports, particularly those coming out of New York, that there had been numerous arrests and trials over the years, some recent. But those reports didn’t seem to have reverberated much beyond the city, giving the impression to anyone who didn’t read the New York Post or New York Daily News that the mafia was dead.

I wanted to know how it operated. Did it still control the same businesses it always had? Had it been succeeded by the Russian mob as the real power brokers of organised crime in New York?

Howard Abadinksy, a criminal justice professor at St John’s University in New York, told me that the mafia today was having a recruitment problem. The Sopranos may have romanticised organised crime, he said, but actually persuading someone to sign up for life was another thing altogether.

Former FBI agent Lindley “Lin” DeVecchio had told me that while organised crime wasn’t going away, he didn’t think the mafia had the same clout as they once did. “But,” he said, “it’d be naive to think they weren’t still in business.”

In order to qualify for membership of the Genovese crime organisation, the largest and most powerful of New York’s five families, Anthony Arillotta and a friend pumped nine bullets into the body of the boss of a local cement union, under orders from the top. Later, he helped orchestrate the murder of his one-time boss, ‘Big Al’ Bruno. After that, he was promoted to captain, a powerful rank in the crime family © James Breeden

I wanted to see how close I could get to the mafia, to find out how it made its money in 21st-century America. It was a journey that would take me to New York, Massachusetts and Florida, to meetings with men who had murdered rivals in cold blood and who wouldn’t have hesitated to kill their own father to honour a century-old fraternity.

Cali’s death aside, it turned out there had been numerous mob murders in recent years. In 2009, an apparent member of the Bonanno crime family, Anthony Seccafico, was gunned down on Staten Island in what was believed to be a mafia hit.

In November 2013, gang leader Michael Meldish was found with a bullet in his head inside a parked car on a Bronx street, a hit supposedly directed by the Lucchese family – as was a plot to kill a Bonanno associate the year before.

In June 2016, a Brooklyn pizzeria owner called Louis Barbati was shot to death in his back yard in what was probably a mob hit. Just last October, a reputed associate of the Bonanno crime family was killed while waiting at a drive-through window of a Bronx McDonald’s in his SUV. Police described it as a “mafia-style assassination”, but that assassin is still at large.

The mob was still a New York-sized problem for law enforcement. Billed as the largest coordinated arrest in FBI history, almost 130 members of New York and New England mafia families were arrested in 2011 in what became known as “Mafia Takedown Day”.

To illustrate just how active the mob are today, you need only look at recent court filings. During the 2016 trial of Carmine Persico’s son, Michael, described as an “associate” of the Colombo crime family, the government called their star witness, “Big Anthony” Russo, a former soldier in the family turned informant.

Asked to name New York’s five crime families, Russo responded: Genovese, Gambino, Bonanno, Colombo, Lucchese.

“Do they have a common structure?” prosecutors asked. “Yes. The boss, underboss, consigliere, captains [or capos], soldiers, associates,” he said.

Asked what soldiers do, Russo said, “You know, break legs and stuff like that.”

Street gangs such as MS-13 post their crimes on Facebook. That’s not the mafia’s style

The American mafia – or La Cosa Nostra – formed in the late 19th century in the Italian immigrant ghettos of New York. By the Twenties they’d moved into the illegal alcohol trade, taking advantage of Prohibition. When that ended, mafia groups expanded into the construction industry, sanitation and drugs. A gangster named Charles “Lucky” Luciano started to bring structure to the mob – a structure that would endure to this day. He established The Commission, consisting of the bosses of each of the five families, to solve disputes, vote on issues and apportion business. By the late Eighties, the era of machine guns and fedoras had been replaced by the designer suits, jewellery and pearly white smile of John Gotti. Known as the “Dapper Don”, Gotti became the brash head of the Gambino family after ordering the hit on Paul Castellano. He was eventually imprisoned in 1992 and died of throat cancer ten years later. Since then, the mafia seemed to have quietened down – or at least the media coverage had.

Today, wherever in the US the mafia happens to be operating, all roads, ultimately, lead to New York. One morning this spring I met with two lawyers from the US Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York at a café in Brooklyn. The city had just endured a brief winter storm and snow was piled two-feet high on the kerb and snowmelt dripped from green steel railway arches.

Allon Lifshitz is the perfectly coiffed deputy chief of the office’s criminal division. His colleague Kristin Mace is the gutsy chief of the Organized Crime And Gangs Section, tasked with prosecuting the mob.

Forget the Russian mafia, the Albanians, the Japanese Yakuza or Chinese Triads: the Italian-American mafia still rules the roost in New York. “It’s a significant presence and no less than in the past,” Mace told me. “I don’t think there’s any other organised crime group that has surpassed it in influence in New York City.”

All five families exist and are thriving. Every time one boss is convicted, another steps in, they said. So what’s changed?

Allon Lifshitz is deputy chief of the criminal division of the US Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York. Together with his colleague Kristin Mace, the current chief of the Organized Crime And Gangs Section, Lifshitz is responsible for prosecuting the mob. ‘The mafia today is a significant presence,’ he told GQ, ‘no less than in the past’ © James Breeden

Lifshitz said their drug operations are probably more formalised today. “There’s always been a rule against selling drugs in the mob, but more of our big cases involving the big moneymakers involve drugs, including importing drugs, such as heroin and cocaine, from overseas or selling opioids domestically.

“What you think of as their traditional bread and butter – loan-sharking and extortion – are,” he said, “going on every day in New York City.”

What has changed is the way those in the upper echelons of the mob comport themselves in public. Gone is the era of the camera-loving Gotti, who courted headlines (his name appeared in the gossip columns almost as often as in the news sections, one journalist wrote) and wore bespoke suits costing thousands of dollars, often finished off with a cashmere scarf and pocket handkerchief. Down too is the number of brazen executions in broad daylight. Today’s mob flies under the radar.

The famous code of silence (omertà) also makes it harder to investigate and prosecute mob activity than other types of gang crime. Street gangs such as MS-13 in Los Angeles might post evidence of their crimes (guns, drugs or money) on Facebook. That’s not the American mafia’s style.

Lifshitz and Mace told me one only needed to look at the court records of various trials involving mob defectors detailing their inductions into the mafia to see that this was no movie – inductions such as that of Anthony Arillotta.

So how close could I get to the mob for this story, I wondered. Both Lifshitz and Mace looked incredulous. Nobody in the mafia would talk to me, they insisted.

‘It’s a mega, mega million-dollar enterprise. There’s a lot of money in being the boss’

Part two: The shooter

John Alite knew instinctively that Frank Cali wasn’t the subject of a mob hit. He knew it because he’d carried out enough of them himself as an associate in the Gambino family and as the right-hand man of John Gotti’s son, John Gotti Jr, who temporarily took over control of the family when his father first went to prison.

Alite knew that if you were going to carry out a hit you’d have a minimum of two cars; preferably three at the scene – one on each corner so your target can’t escape and the hit man’s vehicle. And if you’re hitting a boss, you bring two gunmen in case one of the weapons jams.

When he was on the streets, Alite, who couldn’t get made in the mafia because he wasn’t of Italian heritage (his parents were Albanian), was known as a tough guy; he estimates he shot 30 to 40 people, baseball batted 100 more and murdered six people – at least, those are the ones he confessed to.

We meet at the Club A Steakhouse, a former mob haunt in Manhattan. It’s closed when we arrive, but Alite is friends with the owner, Bruno, who has owned an eatery in this spot for four decades. Alite saunters in wearing Dolce & Gabbana sunglasses, snakeskin black and white Louis Vuitton shoes, a Hugo Boss jacket and a mink overcoat. We sit in a booth upstairs so we can chat in private.

He grew up in poverty in Queens and his baptism into the world of organised crime came when, as a child working at a local delicatessen, he was asked to run errands for some made members of the Lucchese family who ran a bookmaking business from the back of a nearby store.

A kingpin of mid-century mafiosi, Albert Anastasia was shot dead in New York on 25 October 1957 © Getty Images

Eventually, Alite met Gotti Sr. At first he looked up to him, wanted to be like him. He found it easy to make good money on the street and as his status rose in the family he also became known for the levels of violence he was willing to inflict on anyone that crossed him or his family.

In 2003, he went on the run after getting word that he was about to be indicted. He was eventually arrested in Brazil on murder and racketeering charges under an Interpol warrant and spent two years in what he says was a Brazilian dungeon, “where you shit on the floor and it’s raining inside”, before being extradited to the US in 2006.

When he was in Brazil, Alite says he heard rumours that Gotti Jr was an informant and that several of his old cohort had flipped. “You can’t beat this case,” his attorney told him. “You’ve got dozens of wise guys giving you up, saying you’re a killer.”

“That’s the reason I testified,” Alite tells me. He made a deal with prosecutors: he’d plead guilty to various crimes, including murder and robbery, and testify against members of the Gambino family, including Gotti Jr. In return, he hoped for a lenient sentence. One of those members, Charles Carneglia, was sentenced to life; Gotti Jr’s case resulted in a mistrial. For his crimes, Alite got a ten-year sentence. When we met he’d been off parole for a year.

Family ‘godfather’ Carlo Gambino died of heart failure at home. His funeral was attended by top mafia lieutenants, 18 October 1976 © Getty Images

It’s no secret that Alite is not a fan of the Gottis. He thinks Gotti Sr’s shameless preening and brazen knack for self-publicity damaged the American mafia’s brand (he co-wrote a book, Gotti’s Rules, about this and his relationship with Gotti Jr). What’s happened to the mob since Gotti Sr’s death in prison in 2002, though, is a return to its roots, Alite says. “The mob went back to the Sicilian ways. It’s gone back underground.”

Alite says the mob is being restructured. “If you want structure you can’t allow certain things to go on. You don’t kill prosecutors, you don’t kill policeman, you don’t kill journalists. You don’t kill women. All those rules were put in place for a reason: to keep the structure and keep the fear. It’s like a building. The concrete crumbles and it falls. Are they trying to build it from the bottom up again? Yeah.”

They’re embedded in construction, the sea ports, they’re still on Wall Street, they’re in the food industry. And in that respect nothing’s changed, he tells me. But there are fewer murders and that’s achieved two things: less heat from law enforcement, but also less fear of retribution if they’re crossed.

That could change though, Alite says, if Frank Cali’s killer is convicted and sent to prison: he thinks it’s only a matter of time before the shooter is killed for what he did. “If he’s put in general population you’ll see the sleeping giant that is the mob wake up. You’ll see that the mob still exists in the United States.”

Charles Carneglia threw a man’s finger into his boss’ soup as proof he had killed someone

Part three: The associate

John Alite introduces me to Stevie Newell – someone who could give me an example, he says, of just how active the mob still is. When we meet, Newell is a few weeks away from going to prison for illegally possessing weapons because he thought someone connected with the mafia was going to kill him.

We chat over lunch at the Lindenwood Diner in Ozone Park, Brooklyn, a joint that has cemented its own place in New York mob folklore. It was here, according to a federal court filing, that reputed mob hit man Charles Carneglia (who Alite testified against) threw a man’s finger into his boss’ soup as proof he had killed someone on John Gotti Sr’s orders.

I order the soup. Newell opts for a cheeseburger. Newell looks tough, like an enforcer. He’s solidly built, has a shaved head, sports a cross tattoo on the middle finger of his right hand and a small scar on his nose. He also has a glint in his eye.

Carmine Galante, the then boss of the Bonanno family, was assassinated in Brooklyn aged 69, 12 July 1979 © Getty Images

Newell was born a few miles west of here in Bushwick and grew up on the streets of Queens. His father played bocce ball with members of the Bonanno family. In his teens, he started knocking around with a made man in the Genovese family who he met through his girlfriend. Newell started selling drugs, making $300 a night and was able to buy his parents new clothes for the first time.

Although he could never get made – Newell has Irish blood – he tells me not to believe the hype. “There are more tough guys that can’t get made than there are made guys. The saying goes: we do the work; they take the credit.”

Eventually, Newell worked under Gotti Sr’s son-in-law, Carmine Agnello, and it wasn’t long before the heat was on him. Newell was charged with the 1991 murder of Bruce Gotterup, a mobster accused of falling behind on payments to sell drugs in Queens. Gotterup was shot five times in the back of the head.

The feds offered Newell a deal, but he denied the crime and refused to wear a wire. Instead, he spent two years in jail awaiting trial, at which he was eventually found not guilty.

In 2009, Newell agreed to testify for the defence at Gotti’s trial for racketeering and murder. The feds alleged that Gotti approved Gotterup’s murder, but Newell told the court he’d seen no evidence for that.

Newell says that after Gotti’s case resulted in a mistrial, Gotti wrote a book accusing him of being a law enforcement cooperator – “And yet I was the one on the stand trying to help him.”

John Gotti Sr, the head of the Gambino family, died of cancer on 10 June 2002. His son, John Gotti Jr, led the family in the Nineties while his father spent time in prison © Getty Images

He tells me he’s been waiting for Gotti to provide proof of this for more than two years. (Gotti declined to talk to me for this story.) In the meantime, this happened: “After Junior was acquitted I had about three or four run-ins with local guys in the neighbourhood,” Newell says, “not pleasant, of course, and after a while you start feeling like you might get one of these young guys trying to make a name for themselves.”

One day, a car pulled up beside Newell and a guy told him, “I should fucking kill you.” Newell says, “I started thinking that sooner or later someone’s going to try to pop a shot off at me.” So he armed himself. “On the streets you can jump in your car or run into a crowded area and nothing’s going to happen. At night you’re alone, so I purchased two firearms, a .40 calibre automatic handgun, 15 shots in each clip, and a .38 special revolver.”

But Newell is a felon and therefore forbidden from possessing guns. One night in March 2018, he got a knock at the door. “It was a couple of plain-clothes detectives and they had a warrant. Someone had apparently made a complaint that Newell had firearms.

I ask if he knew who it was.

“I have an idea,” he says.

A few weeks after we talk, Newell knows he’s heading for a cell in Rikers Island to serve four months. He’s going to prison because he illegally kept guns for fear of an assassination attempt by the mob in America today. He knows the mafia code of retribution is alive and well. Also, he knows what happened to Whitey Bulger.

‘I felt like I would do anything for these people. I would die for them’

Part four: Retribution

It was 8.20am on a Tuesday in October 2018 that they found him, an 89-year-old man lying on the floor of a West Virginia prison cell. The official press release from the Federal Bureau Of Prisons said he’d been found “unresponsive”, but leaks to newspapers revealed a much more gruesome picture. When corrections officers reached him, the man, James Bulger – better known as “Whitey” – was almost unrecognisable. His eyes were nearly gouged out and he’d been bludgeoned repeatedly with a makeshift club, fashioned by placing a lock inside a sock.

After viewing surveillance video, officials discovered that two inmates had entered Bulger’s cell earlier that morning, one of them apparently a convicted hit man.

Bulger’s murder would have come as little surprise to anyone in the mob world or on its fringes. Bulger was the Irish mob boss of Boston’s notorious Winter Hill Gang. At his trial in 2013, a jury convicted him of extortion and racketeering and found him culpable in eleven murders between 1973 and 1985. But Bulger was also a rat, an informer who turned in rivals in return for protection from corrupt law enforcement agents, inexcusable in the mafia world.

What nobody could understand was why authorities had decided to transfer Bulger from a Florida prison to one in West Virginia and put him with other inmates in general population. He didn’t last long. And what Bulger’s death meant (rather than Cali’s) was that the mafia code was still alive and well today. It didn’t matter how long it took; justice would always come, even if it came late.

What was really telling, though, was who had killed Bulger. All signs pointed to Fotios “Freddy” Geas, a fiftysomething mobster from Springfield, Massachusetts who was an associate of the Genovese crime family. If Bulger’s death had been ordered, those orders came from New York.

Geas, who according to reports had a fearsome reputation as a ruthless killer and enforcer, was serving multiple life sentences for murder. Although he was offered a chance to reduce his sentence by turning informant, he told prosecutors he’d rather spend the rest of his life in prison; his attorney said his client loathed “rats”.

Anthony Arillotta knew as soon as Bulger was sent to the same prison as his old friend Freddy Geas that Geas was probably responsible. If anyone knows what Geas is capable of it’s Arillotta. Geas and his brother Ty used to work as enforcers for Arillotta when he was a capo in the Genovese family.

‘He wasn’t dead, so I started hitting him with the shovel. I didn’t want to see the guy buried alive’

Part five: The capo

The journey by car to Springfield from Queens takes a little more than two hours. You take the coast road up through Connecticut before joining I-91, which shoots north through Hartford up into Massachusetts. This was all Arillotta’s turf back then and this is the same journey he made countless times to meet his bosses in New York and the same journey he made in reverse in 2003 when he came to the Bronx to take part in the ceremony that formally inducted him into the mafia.

Traditionally, in order to become a made member of the mob, you had to have killed someone. Today, that’s not essential, but violence is mandatory, Arillotta says.

I meet Arillotta at a small café on the edge of town and he explains what he had to do in order to join. At the time, Artie Nigro was the acting boss of the Genovese family and he asked Arillotta to shoot someone in New York. That man’s name was Frank Dadabo, a local cement union boss who hadn’t consulted Nigro when he dished out contracts. “It was over a union issue,” Arillotta says. “He disrespected Artie somehow and Artie just wanted to give him a beating.”

John Gotti Sr ordered the death of Paul Castellano, then the Gambino boss, before taking control of the family himself, 16 December 1985 © Getty Images

Arillotta asked the Geas brothers to join him and one afternoon in May 2003 the three men drove the two hours I’d just driven, but with guns and silencers in their car and stolen licence plates from New Haven. They parked in front of Dadabo’s apartment on a busy Bronx street and waited for him to emerge.

After the 65-year-old Dadabo climbed into his car, Arillotta and Ty Geas ran to the vehicle and emptied nine bullets through the window.

“[Dadabo] is sitting in his car, his head is back and his mouth wide open,” Arillotta says. “Freddy, who was our getaway driver, tells me, ‘He’s dead,’ so we go back to Springfield, go about our business. The government thought the Albanians did it. They never had a clue it was us.”

But Dadabo did not die – and he did not report the shooting to police either. Arillotta would later testify that Nigro had advised him afterwards to “get better at head shots”.

Soon after, Arillotta was inducted into the Genovese family. “The moment I did that I felt like I would do anything for these people,” Arillotta tells me. “There’s nothing I wouldn’t do. I would die for them.”

One well-connected mob source told me Arillotta could have been Al Capone – if he hadn’t got caught.

That day came in 2010, when he was arrested for orchestrating the murder of his one-time boss Adolfo “Big Al” Bruno, who had preceded Arillotta as captain of the Genovese family in Springfield and who’d given him the diamond-studded Rolex he’d worn the day he was made.

Bruno was 57 when he was shot in the chin, neck, elbow, cheek and groin one Sunday night in November 2003, as he walked into the parking lot of Our Lady Of Mount Carmel Society, a social club in Springfield. He was still clutching his cigar when he died. Arillotta had paid an associate, Frankie Roche, $10,000 to carry out the assassination.

When Salvatore Romano was an associate of the Gambino crime family he probably made more cash than any other mobster in America. He was the Gambinos’ man on Wall Street. He estimates he made ‘north of three million bucks’ for the family, which at the time was run by the ‘Dapper Don’, John Gotti © James Breeden

At his trial, Arillotta pleaded guilty to the murder, the attempted murder of Dadabo and to various other offences, including drug dealing and extortion. In addition, he told authorities he’d murdered his brother-in-law, Gary Westerman, also a mob associate, and helped bury his body.

It was because of Arillotta’s testimony that Nigro (who he said had sanctioned the hit on Bruno) and the Geas brothers all got life in prison. Arillotta would serve just eight years.

When he got out, Arillotta opted out of witness protection and moved back to Springfield. Some thought the move brazen; the FBI reckons he still has a target on his head today.

Arillotta jumps in my car and we drive around his old haunts in Springfield. He explains why he decided to cooperate with prosecutors. “I’m indicted for Bruno’s death, heartbroken for my kids cos I’m facing life in prison and my lawyer comes to see me, says all these people are cooperating against me, and I said, ‘I’m done. If they’re going to cooperate I’m never going to get out of this place.’”

He says he tried to get the Geas brothers to cooperate too, but without success. “They didn’t jump on board. By now it’s too late.”

We arrive at a suburb called Agawam and Arillotta points me towards a small, steep entrance to a now-vacant plot of land. We drive up, park the car and walk 50 feet to the corner of the plot, now owned by the local electricity board.

“I murdered Gary Westerman here,” he says, pointing to the frozen ground. “There used to be a house here.”

After his confession, Arillotta accompanied investigators here and showed them the spot where he and the Geas brothers buried Westerman’s body.

Westerman had married Arillotta’s sister, 30 years his junior. He had a string of robbery and drug convictions, as well as ties to the mob, and even now Arillotta has no regrets about killing him. “I warned him to stay away,” he says. “He was giving her drugs and we’d had enough of this guy, so I just said bring him here and I was waiting in the garage. He came in and that’s when Ty shot him seven times. But he wasn’t dead, so I started hitting him with the shovel. Then we dragged him over there by that track. There were more trees here back then.

“As sick as it sounds, because we’re killing him, I still don’t want to see the guy buried alive, so I told Freddy to shoot him in the head.”

Arillotta knows exactly what Freddy Geas is capable of. He also knows that in the mafia retribution always comes – eventually.

‘You front companies the cash, take them public, then bribe the brokers to sell the stock to their clients’

Part six: The banker

When Sal Romano was an associate of the Gambino family, he possibly made more money than any mafioso in America. Romano was the Gambinos’ man on Wall Street when Gotti Sr was boss. In 2003, he was indicted in a $100 million stock fraud and decided to turn state’s evidence in exchange for a reduced prison sentence and entry into the witness protection programme. If there’s one person who can tell me how La Cosa Nostra lines its pockets, it’s Romano.

He still lives and works under an assumed name today and asks that I not identify exactly where we meet: a nondescript, tall glass office building off a Florida highway. Romano had also instructed me and GQ’s photographer not to ask for him at the reception desk, as his employees don’t know his real identity.

Instead, Romano appears at the back door of the building wearing a baggy brown suit and navy-blue shirt with an oversized collar. He finishes a cigarette as he leads us to his offices.

Born in Brooklyn to an Italian-American family, Romano grew up on Staten Island and took his cues from his father, who he described as a “knock-around guy” who made his money loan-sharking, bookmaking and from casino and bank scams and insurance fraud.

In the mid-Eighties, Romano got a job on Wall Street working for Lehman Brothers, when he was 18. “And once I’d learned true investment banking I also learned a million ways to cut corners and how to make an enormous amount of money doing that,” he tells me across a walnut conference table in his large, dimly lit office.

“Stocks 101 says you buy something that you hope will go higher. We just tried to take the mystery out of knowing it would go higher,” he says.

To do that you don’t mess with the big blue-chip companies such as AT&T, IBM, Amazon or Apple, Romano tells me. Instead, you find smaller companies that want to become publicly traded. Romano would finance them ahead of their floatation: “front them the cash – say $5m – by pooling investors’ money and take them public with legal paperwork”. Then, Romano would bribe brokers to recommend that stock to their clients and then sell his stock. “It’s a classic pump and dump scheme,” he says.

But that wasn’t enough; he also felt the pull of the street. “When a movie like The Godfather comes out, that’s going to influence you,” he says. I’m young and there’s no reason on earth why I don’t want to be like those guys – the cars, the women, the money, the power.”

By working with the Gambino family, Romano suddenly found he had a seemingly never-ending supply of bent brokers to play ball with. “We’ve corrupted and tainted this entire Wall Street pool and we weren’t the only family doing it,” he says. “But nobody was as successful as I was at it.”

Romano estimates he made “north of three million bucks” for the family. “I was the golden goose,” he says. This is how it worked: Romano would “kick up” 20 per cent of what he earned to his capo; he says his captain would kick up 20 per cent to his boss (the underboss of the Gambino crime family) and that he in turn would kick up 20 per cent to John Gotti. “That’s the standard formula,” Romano tells me. “But it’s got to be green. You’re not writing cheques to these people.”

And this, Romano told me, is how the mafia still operates today. “If there are 300 soldiers on the street, each one of them will have 20 or 30 civilians that they’re doing business with or that they’ve lent money to at a high rate of interest. And as they earn, they’re giving money to their respective capos, or skippers as we call them, and as the capos earn, they’re kicking money upstairs to the boss. It’s a mega, mega million-dollar enterprise and there’s a lot of money in being the boss.”

John Alite had told me there was no standard formula for kicking money up the chain of command. When he was on the streets and he put someone in a particular position – running a nightclub, for example – he may have asked for 50 per cent of the takings. If it was a friend who opened up a nightclub without his help, he may not ask for anything. Instead, he may put cigarette machines, poker machines and pool tables in there and make money that way. “If you’re around a good guy, he’ll be good to you. If you’re around a shitty guy, he’ll choke you to death,” Alite said. “It’s like the manager of a football team. They’ll protect their guys and tell their boss you only made $200,000 when you made $500,000.”

Romano was released from prison at the end of 2009 and is now working on a book about his exploits.

“In a way, the mob may be more powerful than they were in the Nineties,” he says. “We’re in a robust economy. The markets are at all-time highs. Wall Street is up. Stress capital is up. The mob does better when the economy’s good. Think Wall Street, construction, the unions. On the outside looking in, things are probably very, very good back home.”

The number one reason for the mafia’s existence is to make money. Still today, part of their core street business is gambling and loan-sharking. And those loans are recouped at anywhere from one to six per cent a week. Worst case scenario: if you borrow $30,000, you need to pay back $1,800 in interest alone per week or you’ll get your legs broken.

In Italy if the mafia discovers you’ve given them up, they’ll kill you, your wife and your kids... Today’s mob in America is returning to those old ways

Part seven: Follow the money

Phil Scala says the idea that Sal Romano kicked up 20 per cent of his takings to his capo sounds accurate. Romano was a big earner. The mob knew he could make big money from the con games that the brokers controlled. And Romano’s income was steady.

But Scala says there are a number of streams that flow into the main river of organised crime. As a 29-year veteran of the FBI, before his retirement a few years back Scala was head of the squad investigating the Gambino family. He helped put away John Gotti Sr. Today he runs a private investigation firm.

On the street there are the low-level associates selling counterfeit goods, cigarettes or committing robberies. Then there are the earners, the guys who were connected with the unions or involved in construction and who today are involved in anything that makes money. “They learn their lessons from prosecutions and they’ll be in areas where they know law enforcement aren’t looking or where they don’t have sources,” Scala tells me. “Organised crime in America and Italy continually morphs into new areas.”

Scala worked a case a few years back that was described as the largest consumer fraud in US history, the details of which, he says, offer an insight into the financial dealings of the modern-day mob.

The scam involved reputed Gambino capo Salvatore Locascio and two soldiers, Richard Martino and Andrew Campos, people that Scala says Gotti had marked out as the future of the crime family.

Locascio, Martino and Campos ran an adult phone line and internet porn business that swindled $650m from consumers they duped. In the first case, people would call what they believed was a freephone number and were charged without their knowledge. In the second, they were asked to provide their credit card information purportedly to verify their age, but were then billed between $25 and $75 anyway. With the phone sex scam, the amounts were small, showing up on the bill as something innocuous. “The average person wouldn’t even notice when they looked,” Scala says.

According to Scala, the men – working for the Gambino family – owned the business providing the pornographic videos, the telecoms company and a bank (in Missouri) that processed the credit card payments. He says the scams made “intuitive use of vertical integration”, combining the various stages of production normally operated by separate businesses into one company.

By doing so, “They were able to combine three major industries and make millions and millions of dollars for themselves and the family,” Scala says. Journalist Jerry Capeci said the swindle represented “the new wave of gangsterism”.

Although Stevie Newell couldn’t ‘get made’ into the Gambino crime family (he’s of Irish stock, not Italian) he says, ‘There are more tough guys that can’t get made than there are made guys. The saying goes, “We do the work, they take the credit.”’ Just after GQ interviewed him, Newell went to prison on gun charges © James Breeden

And the mafia continues to do this in different industries today. Scala says people lose sight of it because they’re not killing people on the streets in the same numbers they have in the past. “They’re not taking over businesses in the style of Al Capone. So they’ve learned their lessons. Instead, they’re using this model of vertical integration – whether it’s through an investment company, construction, groceries or an events company (in which they’d own the bakery, food concessions and the reception hall). They control everything so they don’t have to pay anything on top. And then they have a second set of books whereby they can give money, cash, checks and wire transfers to different accounts to basically legitimise their games.”

Scala doesn’t believe the mob controls the unions in the same way it used to. Instead you’ll see capos buying up 17 houses in areas, such as Williamsburg, that are undergoing gentrification, using millions they’ve earned from narcotics and they’ll subcontract the refurbishment work to guys they know in the cement business or plumbing or electrical and pay a lot less for their services. If the unions ask questions – “Why aren’t you using unionised labour?” – they’ll be told, “Do you know who owns these houses? Walk away.”

The drug trade is a huge revenue source for the American mafia, but the levels of secrecy they adhere to are probably the highest of any of their businesses. “In America, the Sicilians will only tell a few people in the family what they’re doing,” Scala says, “and if the FBI finds a connection between the drug trade and La Cosa Nostra, those in the family involved will stop for six months or a year – however long it takes. And then when they see the coast is clear they’ll reactivate it. It’s very sophisticated.”

The money from drug transactions then needs to be washed. “Again, [it’s] vertical integration,” Scala says. “They create brand-new companies in new areas and funnel money through those or through small businesses they have connections with: restaurants, pizzerias, cash businesses. It’s easy to throw in $10,000 or $20,000 and wash it.”

The United Nations estimated that of the $1.6 trillion laundered through legitimate banks globally in 2009, around $580 billion was related to organised crime and drug trafficking.

Anthony Arillotta tells me that the mafia also sets up front companies, some of which lose money, specifically to wash the drug money. The mob was traditionally against drugs, he tells me. “I got told in my initiation if you deal in drugs you forfeit your life, so it was always very secretive among members that were involved.”

Today, it’s too much of a money spinner for it to be considered an immoral source of revenue. Today, the American mafia, through its ties with the Sicilians and other Italian organised crime networks, such as the powerful ’Ndrangheta of Calabria, the Camorra of Naples and the Sacra Corona Unita of Puglia, is shipping cocaine to Europe and receiving shipments of heroin from those sources back to the US.

Secrecy is key. Scala says that in Italy if the mafia discovers you’ve given them up, “They’ll kill you, your wife, your kids and your relatives. That’s why there are no informants in Italy. No cooperating witnesses.”

Today’s mob in America is returning to those old ways.

‘In this life there are three choices: you can rat, you can go to jail or you can die’

Part eight: No way out

“Once upon a time, in a land far away, there was this thing called the mafia... Once upon a time. Not now.”

The mafia is history. That’s according to attorney Jennifer Louis-Jeune, who told the jury this at the opening of the racketeering trial of her client, alleged Bonanno crime boss Joseph Cammarano Jr, in February. (Cammarano Jr and his co-accused, John “Porky” Zancocchio, were acquitted of all charges.)

Louis-Jeune’s contention that the mafia was dead was laughable. Not only is that most definitely not the case, law enforcement officials in New York today are anxious about other Italian organised crime groups gaining a foothold in the city, too. “’Ndrangheta has a strong presence in Canada,” one law enforcement source told me. “And in New York we’ve had two recent public prosecutions that showed they were trying to start a cell here. I think it’s fair to say we’re being vigilant.”

The day I am due to leave New York, I get a phone call. A current captain in one of New York’s five crime families has agreed to meet me – but there’s no interview, no questions and it’s going to be brief.

The short tête-à-tête takes place somewhere on the East Coast. I’m told to keep the location secret. As I pull up outside the safe house, he appears wearing a woolly hat and puffer jacket. He’s middle-aged, smiling and has a firm handshake. He hugs both me and GQ’s photographer and invites us inside for a coffee: a shot of espresso mixed with a shot of sambuca.

Inside, it’s sparse – just a handful of tables and chairs – and Italian pop music is playing on the stereo. He makes a joke about “showing us the body in the basement” then tells me, “In this life there are three choices: you can rat, you can go to jail or you can die. That’s the only way you get out. There is no quitting.”

A muscle-bound man wearing a vest appears and walks up to his skipper, agitated. “They didn’t have the fucking bags,” he says. “I should have beaten ’em.”

The captain ushers him out and then it’s time for us to leave too. “You’re welcome here anytime,” he says. “Anytime.”

A former mob prosecutor told me the East Coast is the last bastion of Italian organised crime and it’s the same five families running the show.

The Italian-American mafia are still here, same as they always were. But they’re wising up, keeping quiet. And still today, wherever they happen to be in America, all roads lead to New York.

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