The Gambino Family: The Start of the Commission
The Gambino family has been a longtime rival to the Genovese family (one of the five) as the dominant entity of the Commission. The Gambinos boast some of the more colorful figures in the history of the mob. One of them was a bloodthirsty man named Albert Anastasia, who supposedly engineered the 1951 disappearance of the family’s original leader, Vincent Mangano.
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That is, before he met his own brutal end in a barber’s chair in 1957. With these men gone, there was room for the extremely powerful Carlo Gambino, and later the notorious John Gotti. Gotti was the one who orchestrated the 1985 hit on Gambino’s successor, Paul Castellano. The Gambinos reappeared over two decades later, in 2008, when at least five dozen members were arrested on federal racketeering charges. And again, in 2019, with Cali’s assassination.