Following the Apalachin Meeting in 1957, and the imprisonment of Vito Genovese in 1959, Gambino took over the Commission of the American Mafia and played a powerful role in organized crime until his death from a heart attack in 1976.
During a criminal career that spanned over fifty years, Gambino served only twenty-two months in prison for a tax evasion charge in 1937.
Carlo Gambino was born in Palermo, Sicily, Italy, on August 24, 1902,[nb 1] to a family that belonged to a Sicilian Mafia gang from Passo di Rigano.
Gambino entered the United States on December 23, 1921, at Norfolk, Virginia, as a stowaway on the SS Vincenzo Florio.
[4] He made his way to New York City to join his cousins, the Castellanos, and worked for a small trucking firm owned by their family.
The two-story brick house, surrounded by a low fence with marble statues on the front lawn, was at the end of a cul-de-sac in Harbor Green Estates, overlooking the South Oyster Bay.
[8] When the war began turning poorly for Masseria, his second-in-command, Charles "Lucky" Luciano, saw an opportunity to switch allegiances.
[9] On April 15, 1931, Masseria was killed at Nuova Villa Tammaro, a restaurant on Coney Island, ending the Castellammarese War.
[10][11][12][9] With Masseria gone, Maranzano reorganized the Italian gangs of New York into Five Families headed by Luciano, Joe Profaci, Tommy Gagliano, Vincent Mangano and himself.
[9] By September 1931, Maranzano, realizing the threat Luciano posed, hired Irish hitman Vincent "Mad Dog" Coll to eliminate him.
[13][14][15] Later in 1931, Luciano called a meeting in Chicago with various bosses, where he proposed the creation of a governing body for organized crime that would later evolve into The Commission.
[16] Designed to settle all disputes and decide which families controlled which territories, the Commission has been called Luciano's greatest innovation.
He served twenty-two months in prison at the United States Penitentiary in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, the only period in his long criminal career during which he was incarcerated.
[22] Vincent's body was never found and he was declared dead by the Surrogate's Court in Brooklyn on October 30, 1961, ten years after he had disappeared.
Gambino gave the contract to Profaci, who then allegedly assigned the hit to Joseph "Crazy Joe" Gallo.
Seeking to legitimize his new power, he called a meeting in which leaders of both the American and Sicilian crime syndicates would be in attendance.
[39] When the State Police found numerous luxury cars parked at the estate, they took down the license plate numbers and discovered the vehicles were registered to known criminals.
Many mafiosi escaped through the woods surrounding the Barbara estate; Gambino is thought to have attended the meeting, but was not one of the mobsters apprehended.
[40][7] The police stopped a car driven by Pennsylvania boss Russell Bufalino, whose passengers included Genovese and three other men.
[47] Three days later, 300 people attended a funeral service for Luciano in Naples, during which his body was conveyed along the streets in a horse-drawn black hearse.
[48] With the permission of the U.S. government, Luciano's relatives took his body back to New York for burial at St. John's Cemetery in Middle Village, Queens.
[57] Magliocco was assigned with killing Lucchese and Gambino, and he gave the contract to Joseph Colombo, one of his top hit men.
[57] Deportation proceedings against Gambino were started by the Immigration and Naturalization Service as early as 1953, but made no headway for several years because of his heart condition and constant hospitalizations.
However, Eboli wanted to run the family for real and borrowed $4 million from Gambino to finance a new drug trafficking operation.
Castellano arranged for Dellacroce to remain as underboss while directly running traditional Mafia activities such as extortion, robbery and loansharking.