Gennaro Langella, a high-ranking member of the US mafia, has died while serving a 100-year prison sentence for racketeering and extortion.

The 74-year-old, widely known as ‘Gerry Lang’ by investigators, mafia experts and his fellow gangsters, died on Sunday at the US Medical Center for Prisons in Missouri – a hospital designed for federal inmates.

Already in prison for mafia crimes, Langella was convicted as the underboss of New York’s notorious Colombo crime family in 1986, during a trial that has gone done as one of the most important in the history of American organised crime.