Most Powerful

• #1 Carmine Galante
  New York CityUnited States CriminalCriminal Enterprise Cold War and Globalization Illicit Networks Power: 67
  Carmine Galante (1910–1979) was an American Mafia figure who became a dominant force within the Bonanno crime family in New York City and was widely associated with narcotics trafficking. Known by nicknames such as “Lilo” and “The Cigar,” Galante built influence through enforcement, reputation, and control over profitable illicit markets. citeturn0search3turn1search9 After years of arrests and a long prison sentence for drug trafficking, he returned to New York in the 1970s and sought to consolidate authority and expand narcotics revenues.Galante’s career illustrates a recurring dynamic in organized crime: when a leader attempts to centralize profits too aggressively, he can threaten the balance of power among allied factions. By the late 1970s, other Mafia leaders viewed his narcotics ambitions and his use of loyal armed protection as destabilizing. In July 1979, Galante was murdered in a highly public setting at a Brooklyn restaurant patio after Commission approval, an episode often cited as a decisive intervention to reassert collective control over a volatile figure. citeturn0search3turn0search14
• #2 Anthony Salerno
  New York CityUnited States CriminalCriminal Enterprise Cold War and Globalization Illicit Networks Power: 62
  Anthony Salerno (1911–986) was an organized crime leader (Genovese crime family) associated with United States and New York City. Anthony Salerno is best known for serving as a front boss for the Genovese crime family and being convicted in the Mafia Commission Trial. This profile belongs to the site’s study of criminal enterprise and illicit networks, where influence depends on controlling systems rather than possessing money alone. In the modern and globalized world, concentrated influence is often exercised through finance, media, regulation, infrastructure, corporate governance, and cross-border market access.
• #3 Frank Costello
  New York CityUnited States CriminalCriminal EnterpriseFinancial Cold War and Globalization Finance and WealthIllicit Networks Power: 62
  Frank Costello (1891–1973), born Francesco Castiglia, was an Italian American organized crime leader who became one of the most influential figures in New York underworld life in the middle decades of the twentieth century. Unlike more theatrical gangsters, Costello built authority through brokerage, discretion, and political access. He is most closely associated with gambling, with the Luciano crime family, and with the use of corruption and personal relationships to turn criminal revenue into durable influence over police, politicians, and illicit markets. His career illustrates how criminal enterprise could function less as street spectacle than as a hidden system of governance sustained by money, protection, and negotiated power.
• #4 John Gotti
  New York CityUnited States CriminalCriminal Enterprise Cold War and Globalization Illicit Networks Power: 62
  John Gotti (1940–2002) was an American mafia boss who became the public face of the Gambino crime family and the most famous organized crime leader in the United States during the late 1980s. Unlike predecessors who preferred relative anonymity, Gotti combined traditional underworld methods with showmanship. He used violence, internal loyalty, and racketeering power to seize control of one of New York’s Five Families, while his expensive suits, courtroom smiles, and willingness to court attention turned him into a media spectacle. His career is important because it shows both the durability of Mafia structures and the danger of visibility: public charisma can temporarily reinforce criminal authority, but it can also intensify institutional determination to destroy it.
• #5 Nicky Barnes
  HarlemNew York CityUnited States CriminalCriminal EnterpriseFinancial Cold War and Globalization Finance and WealthIllicit Networks Power: 62
  Nicky Barnes (1933–2012), born Leroy Nicholas Barnes, was an American heroin trafficker who became one of the most infamous drug figures in New York City during the 1970s. Centered in Harlem, his network thrived during a period when heroin devastated neighborhoods, generated large pools of cash, and exposed the limits of conventional policing. Barnes was important not only because of the scale of his operation, but because he represented a shift in urban criminal power: the rise of highly visible narcotics entrepreneurs whose authority rested on supply, street discipline, corruption, and public image rather than on the older ethnic hierarchies associated with traditional organized crime. His later transformation into a cooperating witness only deepened the symbolic weight of his story. Barnes’s career is therefore a study in both the construction and the collapse of drug-market prestige.
• #6 Paul Castellano
  New York CityUnited States CriminalCriminal Enterprise Cold War and Globalization Illicit Networks Power: 62
  Paul Castellano (1915–1985) was an American mafia boss who led the Gambino crime family from 1976 until his murder in 1985. Unlike many underworld figures whose authority rested mainly on street visibility, Castellano became identified with a more managerial form of organized crime leadership. He preferred higher-value commercial rackets to impulsive public violence and tried to turn one of New York’s Five Families toward construction, trucking, labor influence, food distribution, and other businesses where extortion and infiltration could generate steady income. His significance lies in the attempt to run a criminal syndicate with something closer to executive discipline, even while depending on the same underlying machinery of intimidation, loyalty, and murder that sustained Mafia power. His death outside Sparks Steak House, arranged by rivals within his own family, marked both the collapse of his model and the beginning of John Gotti’s reign.