On this day, Nov. 19, in 1986, the heads of the Mafia’s Five Families were convicted in New York on RICO charges, a prosecutorial tool that has since been called the atomic bomb of organized crime. Before then, the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act of 1970 hadn’t really been used because prosecutors hadn’t understood it. But the FBI’s New York office decided RICO could be the hammer to smash the Mafia on the theory that the Five Families were linked by a commission that worked as a criminal organization.
With tape recordings of the bosses describing how the enterprise worked, then-U.S. Attorney Rudy Giuliani got convictions of three of the five bosses, who were sentenced to more than 100 years in prison. A fourth had been gunned down in front of a steakhouse.
