Articles on Lucchese Crime Family, Including: James Burke (Gangster), the Tanglewood Boys, Thomas Desimone, Paul Vario, Louis Eppolito and Stephen Caracappa, Leroy Barnes, Martin Krugman, Henry Hill, Anthony Senter, Tommy Lucchese

Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. Hephaestus Books represents a new publishing paradigm, allowing disparate content sources to be curated into cohesive, relevant, and informative books. To date, this content has been curated from Wikipedia articles and images under Creative Commons licensing, although as Hephaestus Books continues to increase in scope and dimension, more licensed and public domain content is being added. We believe books such as this represent a new and exciting lexicon in the sharing of human knowledge. This particular book is a collaboration focused on Lucchese crime family.More info: The Lucchese crime family is one of the "Five Families" that controls organized crime activities in New York City, U.S., within the nationwide criminal phenomenon known as the Mafia (or Cosa Nostra). Originally put together by Gaetano "Tommy" Reina in the early 1920s up until his murder in 1930, their illicit activities include profiting from labor and construction racketeering, illegal gambling, loansharking, extortion, drug trafficking, money laundering, hijacking, fraud, fencing and murder for hire. There would be 24 organizations (to be known as "families") throughout the country who would elect their own bosses. Maranzano also reorganized all the Italian-American gangs in New York City into five New York families to be headed by Maranzano, Lucky Luciano, Vincent Mangano, Tommy Gagliano and Joseph Profaci. Gagliano became the boss of the old Reina gang, to be later known as the Lucchese family, with Lucchese as his underboss and Stefano Ronnelli as his consigliere. The final element of Maranzano's peace plan was that he would become the supreme leader of all the families, the Boss of all Bosses. However, Luciano and other mob members did not want another top leader. When Maranzano learned about Luciano's disaffection, he hired a gunman to kill him. However, in September 1931 Luciano struck first. Several Jewish assassins provided by Luciano associate Meyer Lansky murdered Maranzano in his office. Luciano now became the most powerful mobster in New York.