The American Mafia
Mngt 337: Assignment #1
Brandon Scheck
For this assignment I chose to do research on the American Mafia. I am very interested in finding out more about the history of the American Mafia. This is something I have always been interested in learning more about.
The search engines I used for this assignment are:
1) MSN
2) Google
3) Yahoo
4) AlltheWeb
5) Alexa
6) Lycos
7) Ask.com
8) WebCrawler
9) Excite
10) Dogpile
Final Results
The search engines with the highest ranking as far as number of results and level of relevance goes provided me with a lot of the same links. I consider most of the links to have been very useful. Personally, I believe MSN, Yahoo!, Google, and AlltheWeb are best search engines because they provided me with pages of relevant sites. For the most part, the first pages of link were enough to satisfy my search on those search engines. However, a downfall of my search results was the number of irrelevant links I was provided with. Too often I was provided with many websites to purchase dvd’s and books on the topic.
The Five Families are the major crime families of the Italian-American mafia in NYC. They consist of the Bonanno, Gambino, Colombo, Genovese, and Lucchese families.
Some major names in the American Mafia:
Alphonse Gabriel Capone (1899-1947)
Nickname: "Snorky," "Scarface"
Moved from New York to Chicago after murdering a man in an argument
Became the head of the Chicago mafia after it's boss was wounded.
Capone is widely believed to have been responsible for the St. Valentine's Day Massacre of rival gangsters in February 1929
Served 7 years in prison for tax evasion.
Joseph Bonanno (1905-2002)
Nickname:
"Joe Bananas"
Boss of the Bonanno family, one of the five families.
Although the family was smaller than the other NY families, it was more efficiently operated.
Illegal activities consisted of loan sharking, bookmaking, numbers running and control of prostitution.
John Joseph Gotti, Jr.(1940-2002)
Known
as: John Gotti
Member of the Gambino family
Gotti organized the successful hit on Castellano and his driver Thomas Bilotti n Manhattan in December of 1985.
Became boss of the Gambino family.
He was convicted of murder, racketeering and numerous other charges in 1992.
Salvatore Gravano (1945-)
Nickname:
"Sammy Bull"
Teamed with John Gotti in 1985 to kill Castellano (the Gambino family boss)
Became the first Mafia underboss to testify against his boss.
He is also known as "The King Rat" because of his testimony against John Gotti.
The majority of the American mafia consisted of Italian-Americans.
Alot of the Mafia activity occured in New York City and started in the early years of 1900-1910.
Interesting Links
2) Gang Rule