First, the Genovese family has always been the richest family in the U.S. Even when the Gambinos surpassed them in size, the Genovese were considered by most law enforcement and mob experts to be wealthier.
Second, this is a good article on the subject...
But where are the dons' yachts?
Forbes
October 21, 1991
Why are there no Mafia chieftains among The Forbes Four Hundred? Because, as the case of mob boss John Gotti Jr. shows, life does not imitate "The Godfather."
John Joseph Gotti Jr.
Mafia boss, NYC, 50. Married, 3 children (1 killed accidentally). Son of day laborer; high school dropout. Led street gang into notorious Gambino mob, NYC's biggest, 1966. Advanced via loan-sharking, hijacking; proved mettle by doing time (5 years altogether; hijacking, manslaughter). Released, became family member 1977. Rose fast; capitalized on mob's resentment of then-boss Paul Castellano. After Castellano's murder in 1986, was named successor to improve, redistribute mob wealth. Kept promise. Now jailed, awaiting trial (racketeering, tax evasion, murder), but still boss, widely feared. Powerful: controls much NYC gambling, loan-sharking; also key New York labor unions involving airport, garment, trucking, construction, garbage. Violent, profane; compulsive gambler. "A thug, not a racketeer." Net worth: whatever he wants.
Altogether, the five New York Mafia families, with some 900 members and 9,000 associates, are said to rake in over $ 1 billion a year in operating profits. The figure is based on a formula designed by Wharton Econometrics for the President's Commission on Organized Crime. Based on its size, Gotti's Gambino family could be expected to take in more than half of that, with roughly half of the family's income -- perhaps $ 300 million a year -- going to John Gotti.
Why, then, is this dominant force in the crime industry not among. The Forbes Four Hundred? Simple. That $ 300 million figure is a myth, based upon a flawed understanding of how the Mafia families make and distribute their money. If Gotti's net worth is even a fraction of the $ 275 million threshold to The Forbes Four Hundred, we'd be surprised.
For the record, Gotti, who did not file a tax return, at least between 1984 and 1989, claims to have been a $ 36,000-a-year plumbing supplies salesman for Arc Plumbing & Heating. At one time he sold construction services for a construction company, and these days he claims to sell zippers to the garment industry, where the family controls several important unions. According to his biographers, Gene Mustain and Jerry Capeci (Mob Star) and John Cummings and Ernest Volkman (Goombata), he is involved in two or three bars, a disco, a motel, a Chinese restaurant, a school busing service. His wife Victoria owns the couple's middle-class house in Queen's Howard Beach section; his son and son-in-law own the family vacation home in the Poconos. Gotti used to spend time at a condominium at Gurney's son Montauk Point, at Long Island's eastern tip, and he keeps a speedboat -- the Acquittal. But he owns neither the boat nor the condo. The Gambino family's Manhattan headquarters, the Ravenite Social Club at 247 Mulberry Street, is owned by somebody else.
"I'd be a billionaire if I was a selfish boss, but that's not me," Gotti, bugged by government agents, boasted to an associate a year or so back. Populism pays -- in the Mafia as almost everywhere else -- and Gotti came to power by promising to share the wealth with the membership.
Gotti contrasts sharply with Colombia's billionaire cocaine lords -- or even American mobsters like Moe Dalitz and Meyer Lansky, both of whom evidently accumulated $ 100 million fortunes and therefore made The Forbes Four Hundred in 1982. Lansky and Dalitz created real business organizations with a hierarchy of managers and operators. But as head of a Mafia crime family, Gotti runs an enterprise utterly different from conventional business organizations -- indeed, utterly different from the business as portrayed in the Godfather movies, in which Michael Corleone could easily swing a $ 600 million cash takeover deal.
As retired Mafia boss Joseph Bonanno put it in his autobiography, A Man of Honor: "Family membership does not entitle one to a monetary stipend, it simply places the family member in a society of friends who can help each other through a network of connections."
The structure of a Mafia family reflects a feudal organism devised in Sicily a thousand years ago to protect its members from foreign conquerors. Today, in the U.S., the members of a Mafia family still must be of Italian blood. Their only earthly allegiance is to the boss who heads the family -- the "don," the father, who gives it focus, direction and shape.
Yet the boss ultimately serves at the pleasure of the independent operators who have chosen to follow him. If he tries to exact too much tribute from them, he winds up without a following, or splattered on the sidewalk in front of a posh Manhattan restaurant. While a John Gotti might do business with a Meyer Lansky, he would never admit Lansky to the family. And a Lansky would exercise more control over his organization -- and extract a bigger share of its earnings -- than Gotti could ever receive.
Below the boss in a Mafia family is his underboss, a kind of chief administrative officer, and his consigliere, an in-house counselor who provides legal or other advice and serves as a sort of family ombudsman. But the real business is done by the various working crews (regimes). The crews are headed by captains (caporegimes, or capos) and made up both "made" -- that is, initiated -- members or soldiers (soldati), and nonmember associates. The working stiffs of the crews are the wiseguys -- the street toughs with few employable skills, less inclination to acquire them and a considerable thirst for violence.
These crews are much more than a crime family's operating divisions. They are made up the independent businessmen who pledge fidelity to a particular crime family's boss. "They [the wiseguys] spent every waking hour thinking about how they were going to make money," recalls one-time FBI man Joe Pistone, who as Donnie Brasco spent six years underground in the Mafia. "They did not think or talk much about their wives, girlfriends, families, hobbies. The mob was their job as well as their whole life . . . far more than it is with ordinary 'straight' citizens."
The boss provides the crews with protection, sets policy and allocates territory, resolves disputes among the crews and in the end licenses everything they do. If the boss gets implicated in a wiseguy's crime, the boss tells the wiseguy how to plead, provides lawyers and bail money, bribes judges or law enforcement officers, decides whether and how to intimidate jurors and damaging witnesses.
In exchange for these executive services, a portion of the crews' revenues percolates up through the family's ranks. The crews' soldiers and their associates give up part of whatever they make to their captains; the captains tithe to the boss, underboss and consigliere. Gotti's Gambino family even has a house tax: Each captain has to kick in $ 10,000 a quarter to the family, or altogether nearly $ 1 million a year, to fund various family services.
"In effect," says Ronald Goldstock, director of the New York State Organized Crime Task Force, "what the members give is essentially a tax; what they get in exchange is government services."
Like legitimate businessmen, the crews struggle to keep their profits up and their costs down, including the cost of the services provided by the boss and his captains. When it comes to forking over money to the family, each mobster is "supposed to do the right thing," says Martin Light, a onetime mob lawyer. "If you make ten thousand and you pass up five, that's very nice. That's doing the right thing." But everybody chisels. Says former FBI undercover agent Joe Pistone: "If the score is, say $ 200,000, they [the captains] will say the score was $ 150,000 . . . so they will pocket $ 50,000 and split $ 150,000 [with the higher-ups]."
The money comes pouring in from all over, from the wiseguys and their associates, from hijacking, extortion and gasoline bootlegging, from businessmen, corporations and labor unions, from the garment industry, construction, the docks, in dribs and drabs, in chunks and gobs, from tens of thousands of sources. And it goes on no matter what happens. Goes on when the boss dies or is killed, decides to retire or goes to jail. It's a veritable money machine, self-starting and self-perpetuating.
But there is a hazard in doing business with the kinds of people attracted to the mob. As one wiseguy once put it to Pistone: "You can lie, you can steal, you can cheat, you can kill, and it's all legitimate. You can do anything you want, and nobody can say anything about it. Who wouldn't want to be a wiseguy?"
In their propensities to maximize revenues, bosses differ. Gotti's predecessor, Paul Castellano, was greedy and squeezed his captains until the cost of Castellano's services outran their value. Then Gotti was able to drum up rank-and-file support for killing him.
The captains' businesses -- gambling, loan-sharking, narcotics distribution and the like -- are mainly service businesses with high operating costs and low operating margins. They are businesses that cannot easily be capitalized with commercial bank debt; they cannot be taken public at a multiple of cash flow. Some of these criminal revenues re reinvested in maintaining the businesses -- financing loan sharks, for example. But most go to supporting the thousands of bookies, numbers runners and assorted hangers-on who keep the Mafia money machine humming.
Gotti and the other mob bosses have their expenses, too. Gotti reportedly pays his lawyers a minimum of $ 300,000 a year. There are bills for gambling, and partying, high-priced clothes, jewelry and cars, women and booze, tips for bartenders and waiters, luxury hotel suites in Las Vegas, drugs. Gotti is a compulsive and rather irrational gambler who has often been known to blow $ 100,000 a weekend betting on what anyone else would consider sure losers. Easy take, easy go.
Vincent Cafaro was asked by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations what happened to all the money he'd taken in as a Genovese family soldier. "I spent it," Cafaro cheerfully replied. "Just gave it away. As I was making it I was spending it. . . . If I had it to spend, I'd spend $ 3 million."
Even when there is some extra money lying around, it can't be invested in big houses or luxury yachts. A Mafia boss must adjust his lifestyle to the visible source of his income -- the trucking or garbage, vending machine or linen supply business he pays taxes on to keep the Internal Revenue Service at bay.
Some mob money undoubtedly is laundered through numbered accounts in the Bahamas, the Caymans or Switzerland. But not much. "The five families live in New York," says one investigator. "So they reinvest the money in the local community for their own purposes."
Or simply bury it. A former bookmaker recalls borrowing $ 150,000 from Genovese boss Anthony Salerno, and receiving a shopping bag full of cash wrapped up in newspapers 30 years old. One retired FBI agent still remembers how the bail money one Mafioso posted smelled musty from long-term burial.
But then, Gotti and his ilk don't keep score with money. What Mafia chieftains really want is power and control -- the power to tell which companies what to buy from which suppliers; the power to take workers out on strike; the power to tell politicians how to vote. "Men of my tradition," wrote Mafia don Joseph Bonanno in A Man of Honor, "have always considered wealth a by-product of power."
In the currency he values, Gotti is indeed a rich man: Many fear him. But in terms of money and tangible assets -- let alone morality -- he is a piker, and worse.
The heads of the five New York crime families and their home addresses were identified by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations in 1988 and 1990 reports.
