Produced by Propagate and the Barnicle Brothers, this six-hour docuseries explores the inception, rise, and fall of New York City’s five Mafia families, who—over a fifty-plus-year period—had a hand in every facet of organized crime in America from bootlegging and drug trafficking to extortion and gambling.
Based upon Selwyn Raab’s New York Times best-seller “Five Families: The Rise, Decline and Resurgence of America’s Most Powerful Mafia Empires,” “American Godfathers: The Five Families” traces the extensive history of the Mafia beginning with its early ties to Sicily. In 1931, Charles “Lucky” Luciano, a Sicilian-born gangster, created The Commission which acted as the governing body for the American Mafia and appointed the original “New York Five”–the Bonanno, Gagliano, Luciano, Mangano, and Profaci families. They lived by an honor code or set of rules; the most important was omertá meaning “silence.” For a generation, omertá, the key to the Mafia’s success, kept the families safe from law enforcement and public view as they made millions through wartime, depression, and changes in legislation to seamlessly move from one racket to the next.
Over time, the uniquely American values of greed and celebrity, coupled with the relentless pursuit by federal law enforcement, proved too great a match. From the heyday of Lucky Luciano, the 1963 Valachi hearings and the brutal and public slayings of Albert Anastasia, Joey “Crazy Joe” Gallo, Paul Castellano, and Carmine Galante, to name a few, to the media storm that ensued when Joseph “Big Joey” Massino flipped on his own family in 2005, the history and subsequent breakdown of the code coupled with the ever-changing violent power struggles within each of the five families is vividly chronicled throughout each two-hour episode. Through investigative archival images, footage, audio recordings, and recreation as well as new, candid on-camera interviews with authors including Raab himself, historians, experts, law enforcement, witnesses, and former mafia affiliates, viewers will get an inside look at the inner workings of the most powerful criminal organization of the twentieth century.
