Mafia

Mafia is an Audioboom true crime series about the people who ran crime families and the damage they did on the way up. The narration is measured and documentary in style, and the fourth season moves from New England to Chicago to Biloxi, Mississippi. Raymond Patriarca gets two parts of his own. The story goes back before Prohibition, when separate families formed in Boston and Providence, and follows them until they became a single organization by 1932. One speaker calls the New England mob a secondary government and insists that is not an exaggeration. Police and judges were in its pocket. Businesses paid protection just to operate. After Filippo Buccola retired to Sicily in 1952, Patriarca became boss, with an underboss from the Bonanno family, Enrico Tamaleo, known as 'the referee'. New York is part of the picture too: the five families, the commission, Frank Costello as acting boss of the Luciano family, and a Genovese family that held Patriarca in high regard. The show gets most specific about money. On the Bonded Vault robbery, a speaker citing their own reporting puts the haul in the tens of millions, then follows the cash up the family pyramid to Patriarca. He was never charged and denied involvement to reporters. The show also notes that people took their problems to the boss rather than the police because they expected faster results, until a hidden FBI microphone exposed his secrets. In the Chicago story, Frank Nitti is introduced with the point that nobody simply becomes a boss: you climb from the bottom, know the right people and survive. His story includes a killing method he is believed to have used again against Joe Aiello, the outfit's move into extortion, labor racketeering and dog racing tracks, and a Chicago mayor who paid a man named Lange to kill Nitti. Kirksey Nix is a different kind of subject. Serving life for murder, he kept running his gang from prison, arranged a hit on a local judge and his wife, and ran phone scams against gay men. The show also covers the killing that put him away: a robbery at Frank Corso's house, shots fired on both sides, and a bullet Nix kept in his chest rather than give up as evidence. Moral comments are brief and plain, such as calling a reputation for clever killing nothing to be proud of. The credits on the Patriarca episodes thank Gary Jenkins of the true crime podcast Gangland Wire, author Joe Broadmeadow, and Tim White, an investigative reporter and co-author of The Last Good Heist. The second part also thanks former Rhode Island State Police Superintendent Brendan P. Doherty. The first Patriarca episode is a good place to start, since its opening explains the regional history in plain terms.