In the annals of organized crime, Carmine Persico’s celebrity was somewhere in the middle rank. He wasn’t a household name like Al Capone or John Gotti, and he wasn’t quite as important or powerful as Meyer Lansky or Lucky Luciano. But he had a good nickname — the Snake — which he reportedly disliked and fought his way to the top of one of the famous Five Families of the New York Mafia. And he stayed there: For some years between the late 1980s and the turn of this century, he ran the Columbo family while incarcerated in successive federal prisons.

When he died last week, at 85, he was one of the last of his kind.