Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel was an American mobster who was a driving force behind the development of the Las Vegas Strip. Siegel was influential within the Jewish Mob, along with his childhood friend and fellow gangster Meyer Lansky, and he also held significant influence within the Italian-American Mafia and the largely Italian-Jewish National Crime Syndicate. Described as "handsome" and "charismatic", Siegel became one of the first front-page celebrity gangsters.
The National Crime Syndicate was a multi-ethnic, closely connected, American confederation of several criminal organizations. It mostly consisted of and was led by the closely interconnected Italian American Mafia and Jewish Mob. It also involved, to a lesser extent, other ethnic criminal organizations such as the Irish Mob and African-American crime groups. Hundreds of murders were committed by Murder, Inc. on behalf of the National Crime Syndicate during the 1930s and 1940s.
The Havana Conference of 1946 was a historic meeting of United States Mafia and Cosa Nostra leaders in Havana, Cuba. Supposedly arranged by Charles "Lucky" Luciano, the conference was held to discuss important mob policies, rules, and business interests. The Havana Conference was attended by delegations representing crime families throughout the United States. The conference was held during the week of December 22, 1946, at the Hotel Nacional. The Havana Conference is considered to have been the most important mob summit since the Atlantic City Conference of 1929. Decisions made in Havana resonated throughout US crime families during the ensuing decades.
John"Handsome Johnny"Roselli, sometimes spelled Rosselli, was a mobster for the Chicago Outfit who helped that organization exert influence over Hollywood and the Las Vegas Strip. Roselli was recruited by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in a plot to assassinate Cuban leader Fidel Castro.
Frederick Napoleon Howser was an American politician and attorney. From 1947 to 1951, he was the 22nd Attorney General of California.
Frank A. DeSimone was an American mobster who was boss of the Los Angeles crime family from 1956 to 1967. DeSimone was the son of former don Rosario DeSimone. He was sometime referred to as "One Eye" because one of his eyes drooped. Frank DeSimone's nephew, Thomas DeSimone, was an enforcer for the Lucchese crime family in New York City. He was also related to Simone Scozzari and Joseph Civello.
Anthony Brancato was an American criminal who served as a freelance gunman to various Mafia and syndicate organizations.
Jewish-American organized crime initially emerged within the American Jewish community during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In media and popular culture, it has variously been referred to as the Jewish Mob, the Jewish Mafia, the Kosher Mob, the Kosher Mafia, the Yiddish Connection, and Kosher Nostra or Undzer Shtik. The last two of these terms are direct references to the Italian Cosa Nostra; the former is a play on the word for kosher, referring to Jewish dietary laws, while the latter is a calque of the Italian phrase 'cosa nostra' into Yiddish, which was at the time the predominant language of the Jewish diaspora in the United States.
The Atlantic City Conference held between 13–16 May 1929 was a historic summit of leaders of organized crime in the United States. It is considered by most crime historians to be the earliest organized crime summit held in the US. The conference had a major impact on the future direction of the criminal underworld and it held more importance and significance than the Havana Conference of 1946 and the Apalachin meeting of 1957. It also represented the first concrete move toward a National Crime Syndicate.
Aladena James Fratianno, also known as "Jimmy the Weasel", was an Italian-born American mobster who was acting boss of the Los Angeles crime family. After his arrest in 1977, Fratianno became an informant and entered the Witness Protection Program in 1980. He admitted to having killed five people. Later in life, he became a writer.
Underworld U.S.A. is a 1961 American neo-noir crime film produced, written, and directed by Samuel Fuller. It tells the story of a 14-year-old boy who goes to enormous lengths to get revenge against the mobsters who beat his father to death. It stars Cliff Robertson, Dolores Dorn, and Beatrice Kay.
The Abergil Organization is an Israeli organized crime syndicate that has been active since the late 20th and early 21st centuries. The organization was founded by brothers Yaakov, Avi and Itzhak Abergil, of Moroccan Jewish origin, in the city of Ramat Gan, Israel, in the 1990s. The Abergil Organization is involved in a wide range of criminal activities, including drug trafficking, money laundering, and extortion.
The Los Angeles crime family, also known as the Dragna crime family, the Southern California crime family or the L.A. Mafia, and dubbed "the Mickey Mouse Mafia" by former Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl Gates, is an Italian-American Mafia crime family based in Los Angeles, California as part of the larger Italian-American Mafia. Since its inception in the early 20th century, the family has spread throughout Southern California. Like most Mafia families in the United States, the Los Angeles crime family gained wealth and power through bootlegging alcohol during the Prohibition era. The L.A. family reached its peak strength in the 1940s and early 1950s under Jack Dragna, although the family was never larger than the New York or Chicago families. The Los Angeles crime family itself has been on a gradual decline, with the Chicago Outfit representing them on The Commission since the death of boss Jack Dragna in 1956.
Nick "Old Man" Licata was an Italian American mobster who was the boss of the Los Angeles crime family from 1967 until his death in 1974.
Barnett "Barney" P. Ruditsky was a British-born American police officer and private detective.
The Company, also called the Hawaiian Syndicate, is the name given to an organized crime syndicate based in Hawaii that controlled criminal activities in the state from the late 1960s to the mid-1990s.
Mob Town is a 2019 American crime film written by Jon Carlo and directed by Danny A. Abeckaser starring David Arquette, Jamie-Lynn Sigler, Jennifer Esposito, Nick Cordero, Robert Davi and Abeckaser.
Robert Joseph "Bob" Gans was the "slot-machine king" of the Los Angeles underworld during the interwar period, and later a philanthropist and civic leader. For many years, he ran the board of Mt. Sinai Hospital, now Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. Gans was one of the most circumspect figures in the history of organized crime in southern California, but he was associated with both Charlie Crawford's City Hall Gang of the 1920s and Guy McAfee's Combination in the 1930s.
Samuel Louis Rummel was an American attorney and murder victim. Rummel's clients included Gardena, California poker clubs, gambling ship operator Tony Cornero, and reputed mobster and convicted income-tax evader Mickey Cohen. A shotgun blast killed Rummel outside his home in Laurel Canyon in 1950. No one was ever charged with Rummel's murder but a 2021 history of the Los Angeles underworld states that Rummel was killed on orders from Jack Dragna.
Sam Lazes was an alleged bookmaker who worked in southern California, United States. He was a suspect in the murder of "the two Tonys" in 1951. In 1974 he was arrested by an organized-crime task force investigating bookmaking at Del Mar Racetrack.
