In the mid-1980s, the American Mafia faced something it had never encountered before: a federal prosecutor who understood its internal architecture well enough to dismantle it from the top down. Rudy Giuliani's RICO prosecutions did not just send men to prison — they reshaped the entire power structure of organized crime in America, and the aftershocks ran straight through the Italian-American communities where families like the ones in the Luna Strega saga had built their quiet, complicated lives.
What RICO Actually Was — and Why It Mattered
The Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act was passed in 1970, but for more than a decade prosecutors used it timidly. The law allowed the government to charge not just individuals for specific crimes but entire organizations for patterns of criminal behavior. If you could prove that a group of people operated as a continuing criminal enterprise — and that each member participated in that enterprise — you could try them together, stack their sentences, and seize their assets.
The problem was that most prosecutors treated RICO as a blunt instrument, applying it to relatively small operations. Giuliani, then U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, saw it differently. He understood that the Five Families of New York were not a collection of independent criminal actors. They were a confederation — governed by a ruling body called the Commission — and RICO was precisely the tool designed to reach that level.
The Commission Trial: Putting the Structure Itself on Trial
The centerpiece of Giuliani's strategy was the 1985–1986 Commission Trial, formally known as United States v. Salerno. For the first time in American legal history, the government did not target individual bosses for individual crimes. It targeted the Commission itself — the governing council of the American Mafia — as a criminal enterprise.
The defendants included the bosses of four of the Five Families: Anthony "Fat Tony" Salerno of the Genovese family, Carmine Persico of the Colombo family, Anthony Corallo of the Lucchese family, and others. The evidence drew heavily on FBI surveillance, including recordings made inside the home of Castellano's underboss and inside Corallo's car. The jury heard the bosses speak, plan, and conspire in their own voices.
All eight defendants were convicted in November 1986. The sentences were crushing — most received 100 years. The men who walked into that courtroom as untouchable patriarchs walked out as federal prisoners who would die behind bars.
The Mafia Commission Was Not a Secret — It Was a System
What the trial revealed to the public, and what historians of organized crime had understood for years, was that La Cosa Nostra operated with genuine institutional structure. The Commission had been established by Charles "Lucky" Luciano in 1931 as a mechanism for resolving disputes between families and preventing the kind of open warfare that had bloodied the streets in the Castellammarese War.
It arbitrated conflicts over territory. It approved the execution of made members. It managed the national hierarchy of recognized families. This was not street-corner criminality — it was governance, conducted through a parallel system of authority that had run alongside legitimate American institutions for half a century.
That parallel system is precisely what animates the world of the Luna Strega Trilogy. Book Two — set in 1940s America — follows the Di Luna sisters as they become entangled with these structures at the moment of their greatest confidence, decades before Giuliani's prosecutions would begin their unraveling. Understanding the Commission's power in 1940 makes its collapse in 1986 feel like the end of something genuinely vast.
The Pizza Connection and the Narcotics Dimension
Running parallel to the Commission Trial was an equally significant prosecution: the Pizza Connection case, which concluded in 1987. This trial targeted a transatlantic heroin-smuggling network that ran from Sicilian Mafia producers through a chain of American pizza restaurants used as distribution and money-laundering fronts.
The case involved defendants on two continents and required coordination between American, Italian, and Swiss authorities. It was one of the longest and most complex criminal trials in U.S. history, ultimately resulting in convictions for 18 of the 22 defendants. More than that, it exposed the degree to which the American and Sicilian Mafias remained operationally connected — not merely culturally linked, but running criminal infrastructure together across the Atlantic.
For readers of Sicilian history and heritage, the Pizza Connection case is a reminder that the Sicilian roots of American organized crime were never purely symbolic. The networks, the loyalties, and the methods traveled across the ocean intact.
What the Prosecutions Did — and Did Not — Destroy
The conventional narrative holds that Giuliani broke the Mafia. The truth is more nuanced. The Commission prosecutions decapitated the leadership structure of the Five Families at a specific moment in time. They sent the bosses, underbosses, and consiglieri of an entire generation to federal penitentiaries. They created a vacuum that subsequent years filled with younger, less disciplined leadership — and in some respects, with more chaotic and more violent criminal activity.
What Giuliani's prosecutions genuinely destroyed was the Mafia's aura of invulnerability. For fifty years, the Commission had operated in relative confidence that its upper tier was unreachable. The 1986 convictions ended that confidence permanently. Informants became more willing to cooperate — the Witness Protection Program began to fill with men who had once taken oaths of silence unto death — and the institutional coherence that had made the Five Families so durable began to erode from within.
The Italian-American Community and the Long Shadow of These Trials
For Italian-Americans who had no connection to organized crime — and that was, of course, the overwhelming majority — the Giuliani prosecutions were a complicated public moment. The trials dominated national news coverage and fixed the image of Mafia criminality firmly onto Italian identity in the American imagination, regardless of how unfair that conflation was.
The Italian-American experience in the twentieth century was never monolithic. It included the Di Luna sisters navigating a world where their Sicilian heritage was simultaneously a source of power, community, and suspicion. It included the women who carried folk traditions — the malocchio, the Cimaruta, the blood magic of stregoneria — across the Atlantic and kept them alive in American kitchens and back bedrooms, far outside the attention of federal prosecutors and newspaper photographers.
Those two worlds — the visible world of the Commission and the invisible world of the old women who knew the old things — existed side by side. The Luna Strega blog explores both, because neither can be understood fully without the other.
The RICO prosecutions of the 1980s mark one of the genuine turning points in Italian-American history — not because they defined the community, but because they closed a chapter that had been written over half a century. What replaced it, in law and in culture, is still being sorted out. The deeper histories — the ones carried in bloodlines and in the folk memory of women who never appeared in any courtroom — those are longer, stranger, and considerably harder to prosecute.
The world the Di Luna family inhabits in the Luna Strega Trilogy is woven through with exactly this tension: the visible power of men who run organizations, and the invisible power of women who carry something older. 1099: Blood of the Lupa begins the saga at its roots — Norman Sicily, a blood pact, and the mark that would follow the Di Luna women across a thousand years. Explore the full series and more at the Luna Strega store.