The five New York Mafia families - Genovese, Bonanno, Gambino, Lucchese and Colombo - have occupied the beady attention of generations of US policemen, agents and prosecutors; sustained an industry of novelists and film-makers; and more generally established themselves as a recurrent and deadly theme in the history of 20th-century America. Their century-old reign over the naked city has been one of bloodshed, shadowy dealings and blatant extortion, all hingeing on the Sicilian code of Omerta (vow of silence). Now, however, the Mafia's fearsome empire is showing unmistakable signs of decline and their grip over New York's criminal world is dissipating.
The old mobster hangouts on Mulberry Street in Little Italy have largely closed down, replaced by trendy shops and restaurants or overwhelmed by the spread of Chinatown; their traditional grip on the labour unions and industries such as construction, rubbish collection and the rag trade has weakened; and their control over the city's Fulton fish market, exhibition centre and drug trade has been broken.
In the past decade, powerful legal and social forces have hit the Mob hard. According to city officials, they have been reduced to old stand-bys such as gambling, loan-sharking and stealing cars to order for parts re-sale. Where new scams have emerged they have largely been low-rent, such as passing bogus phone cards, running crude extortion schemes on Wall Street brokerage houses, muscling strip joints and, symbolically, attempting to move in on the funeral trade.
Just last week, federal investigators announced that the six-decade old alliance of Mafia bosses called the Commission, that once gathered periodically to resolve internal disputes and co-ordinate major criminal ventures, had not met in two years.
"You can't say we've eliminated them, but. . . their control is not as pervasive as it once was," says New York FBI director Louis Schiliro. About 100 members - an estimated 10 per cent of the city's Mafiosi - are behind bars and the number of "made" men, or hoodlums promoted into the family, has plummeted. Where the city was once home to 3,000 "made" members and 10,000 associates, there are now estimated to be about 750 members and 7,000 associates. The largest family, the Genovese, has 230-250 members; the Gambino 200-210; and the Bonanno and Lucchese only about 100 each.
Some have suggested that the decline is largely the result of the "Americanisation" of the Mafia - the demise of old values of loyalty to the family and the increasing greed and self-centredness of members. Certainly the code of La Cosa Nostra is virtually extinct and gangsters are informing on each other in unprecedented numbers. In New York alone, 14 senior mobsters have betrayed their oaths and turned evidence. The younger generation seems to have neither the organisation, criminal guile nor discretion of their elders. They live in the suburbs, hang-out in strip malls and get up to any scam going. They are about as far from the suave, selfconfident figures evoked in Goodfellas and The Godfather as one could get.
This fall in standards is illustrated by the pending racketeering case against John Gotti Jr., 33year-old son of the imprisoned Gambino boss "Dapper Don" John Gotti, who was convicted of murder and racketeering in 1992 on the turncoat evidence of his hitman, Sammy "The Bull" Gervano. With the apparent witness co-operation of a Gambino family enforcer and a self-described "two-bit leg-breaker" named Willie Marshall, the tracksuit-wearing, steroid-enhanced Gotti Jr. is charged with shaking down Scores, a Manhattan strip club popular with some Hollywood types, by demanding a percentage from the parking valets and bartenders. The charges carry a life sentence if proved.
Gotti has not helped his cause by displaying an astonishing lack of judgment: federal agents say they have a ledger found in the safe of a Harlem meeting house in which he is alleged to have written the names of all the members of the Cosa Nostra and the cash amounts they gave in a traditional rite of deference at his wedding. With such brains at work, authorities doubt that the new leaders have the knowledge or experience to re-establish the sophisticated cartels their forebears developed.
What is clear is that the Mafia is a service business like any other and its decline is as much its own responsibility as it is the success of the law enforcement agencies arrayed against them.
One crucial factor in the Mafia's decline has been its failure to retain control of the drug trade. In the early 1970s, it failed to stem the importation of Mexican heroin which gradually reduced the importance of the Mafia-controlled "French Connection" whereby south-east Asian heroin was imported via France or Sicily. By the late 1980s, the route had been supplanted by direct importation, via America's west coast, by Chinese and Vietnamese gangs. Today, Colombian, Dominican and Jamaican gangs import the drug directly from new manufacturing areas in South America in addition to cocaine, a trade in which the Mafia, surprisingly, has never played a role.
There is no clear answer why the Mob is unable to provide its services to cocaine dealers but some suggest that because the Latin gangs have their own code of violence and reprisal that does not follow even the moderately restrictive rules of Mafia murders, they have been unable to gain a foothold. In other words, the Latinos are simply too ruthless and neither fear nor revere the Mob.