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The first of a four-part series on the American mafia reveals how the FBI ignored their existence until a meeting in a sleepy upstate New York hollow showed them something they couldn't deny. In the 1950s, America was booming. The economy was flourishing and the population was basking in post-war prosperity. Capitalising on all this prosperity was organized crime, run by Italian mobsters known as the Mafia. Run from the top by a board of directors, it had its fingers in many pies - including the unions, gambling, prostitution, the building industry and the waterside. ...

The heroin trade boosted the fortunes of the Mafia in America during the 1960s but the fortunes it brought and the divisions it caused among the Italian mobster families ultimately sowed the seeds of their own destruction. Masterminding the trade was the ruthless and greedy Carmine Galante, head of the Bonanno family and his band of Sicilian killers, assassins who operated under the radar of law enforcement. The Sicilian Mafia were smuggling vast amounts of heroin into New York inside foodstuffs, distributed via Sicilian-owned restaurants in Brooklyn, hence it was ...

Reveals details of the vicious war between the two that emerged, unleashing a terror that drove one Godfather to break 'omerta', the mobsters' sacred vow of silence. The Sicilian mafia were distributing billions of dollars worth of heroin into the US each year via Mafiosi-owned pizzerias across the country. The crime fighting authorities in the US and a virtual one man band in Palermo, Sicily, Giovanni Falcone, waged war against them. But they needed first-hand evidence, like a highly placed informer prepared to spill the beans, to make a big dent in the operation. ...

They were two very different godfathers. John Gotti was "dapper Don, the streetwise, publicity-loving head of the Gambino family in New York. Toto Riina was the psychopathic head of the Sicilian Mafia. As revealed in this fourth and final episode of The Mafia, between them they would bring the Mafia to crisis point. Gotti blasted his way to power, brazenly murdering his rival, Paul Castellano, during the Manhattan rush hour. He defied the law to come after him. But rising to his challenge proved tough for law enforcers as Gotti beat the rap in thee separate trials by intimidating witnesses and bribing jury members. In Sicily, Mafia don Toto Riina ('the beast') seemed equally untouchable, particularly after dispensing with his determined opponent, magistrate Giovanni Falcone.