The Italian mafia is alive and well in New York City—and they’re operating in places you might never suspect. Take this café behind me. From May 2012 until just this past January, it was coffee and ice cream up front, and, according to the feds, illegal poker games in the back. These games were allegedly run by the Genovese crime family, one of New York’s five major mafia families.

The players weren’t movie gangsters; they were everyday residents of Lynbrook, New York, an ordinary suburb. Some were likely just down on their luck. Others wanted a break from their home lives. Still others probably struggled with gambling addiction. To an outsider, it may have looked like just a few guys playing cards. But this wasn’t the only game in town.

At South Shoe Repair in Merrick, Long Island, illegal poker games were held in the back room three nights a week. Then there was the Centro Calcio Italian club—on the surface, a legitimate community center, but inside, another front for illegal gambling. Middle‑aged and elderly men with nicknames like Joe Fish, Sal the Shoemaker, Joe Box, and Little Anthony were all out on bail, all tied to the Genovese family, and all facing organized crime charges.

The truth is, the mafia doesn’t look like it used to. They used to run the streets. Now, they’re running spreadsheets. “The mob runs all the unions—that’s their bread and butter,” former NYPD officer Tony Hernandez told me. Certain locals within New York City are still deeply connected to organized crime. If you go in there and start pushing people around, you’ll quickly find out how active those connections still are.

To better understand how the Italian mafia operates today, I spoke with Tony, who now runs the YouTube channel *Corruption Connection*. I asked him what people get wrong about the mob and what it actually looks like behind the scenes. He described the old social clubs where mob business was conducted: illegal card games, joker‑poker machines, slot machines in the corner that didn’t spit out cash—but if you won, the bartender paid you.

These social clubs, backroom card games, and labor unions are just pieces of a much larger puzzle. The mafia isn’t just a handful of old Italians running poker nights. It’s a structured, organized system. And in New York, that system has a name: the Five Families. Since the early 20th century, five powerful crime families have dominated organized crime in the city—the Genovese, Gambino, Lucchese, Bonanno, and Colombo families.

Each family follows a strict chain of command. At the top is the boss, the undisputed leader. Below him is the underboss, acting as second‑in‑command. Beneath them are the capos or captains, each overseeing a crew of soldiers. The soldiers do most of the dirty work: running gambling rings, trafficking drugs, and, in the past, carrying out violence.

Alongside the soldiers are associates—criminal partners who participate in the schemes but are not official members of the family. The guys at the top keep their hands relatively clean and rake in the profits. Meanwhile, soldiers and associates at the bottom do the heavy lifting, hoping one day to move up and enjoy the rewards. Each of New York’s Five Families has members at all of these levels.

“At their height, I believe the Gambinos were about 1,500 strong,” Tony said. “The Genovese, maybe around a thousand. A few hundred here and there for others.” But as law enforcement pressure mounted, the families realized expanding was risky. To keep informants and undercover agents out, they “closed the books”—shutting down new membership. This happened as the FBI cracked down hard in the 1970s and ’80s.

Fewer new recruits meant fewer risks. At the same time, the mafia shifted away from flashy public violence and open‑air rackets. Instead, they moved into quieter, low‑profile white‑collar crime. “They’re no longer killing people,” Tony said. “They’re operating from the shadows, concentrating more on white‑collar crime. They’ve legitimized themselves.”

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Back in New York, the Five Families now operate in more places than you might think. One major revenue stream is loan‑sharking. This is where the mafia lends money at extremely high interest rates to people who can’t get loans from a bank. For example, a $10,000 personal loan from a bank might carry an 8% annual interest rate—about $800 in interest per year.

From a loan shark, that same $10,000 might come with a 10% weekly interest rate. That’s $1,000 a week in interest alone. Miss a week, and your debt becomes $11,000, with the new weekly interest now $1,100. The interest snowballs if you can’t pay off the principal. From the outside, it looks like an insane deal. So who would ever take it?

“Honestly, anybody,” Tony said. “It could be a guy who’s down on his luck, a gambler, a local businessman who just needs to make payroll—a pizzeria, a deli. It’s also people with bad credit. Sometimes it’s not broke people; it’s guys looking to expand.” Tony shared a story about an Italian bread distributor who needed a million dollars to scale his business. He had the clients and purchase orders, but when he walked into a bank wearing a baseball cap and shorts, they treated him like a joke.

Rejected by traditional lenders, he went to the mob instead. They knew who he was, saw the potential, and loaned him the million. So it’s not always a desperate gambler; sometimes it’s a legitimate businessman shut out by the system. Still, a lot of people borrowing from the mafia are gambling. For them, the loan is just the first bet.

Gambling has always been one of the mob’s most reliable, profitable businesses. The backbone of organized crime, Tony says, “has been and always will be gambling.” One of their favorite methods: high‑stakes poker games in the back rooms of bars, social clubs, and storefronts. These games are never advertised. They operate on word of mouth and personal invitations.

They’re run discreetly out of businesses that appear legitimate. But “discreet” doesn’t mean invisible. New Jersey State Police recently broke up a mafia‑run gambling ring across North Jersey. “This was not a backyard betting pool,” one official said. “This was a highly structured, highly profitable criminal enterprise run by people who believed they were above the law.”

A two‑year investigation led to 39 people being charged. Every one of them was either a direct member of the Lucchese crime family or an associate working on their behalf. The head of the family was George “Georgie Neck” Zappola, the boss. Beneath him was a network of underbosses, capos, soldiers, and associates, all indicted in the case.

These gambling rings, operating from the back of legitimate businesses in North Jersey, were carefully structured. Underbosses directed capos, who directed managers, who directed store operators, who supervised hosts and agents running the games. Among the businesses with illegal gambling rooms were Café San Gennaro in Woodland Park, the Italian‑American Soccer Club in Totowa, Garden State Pinball in Paterson, and an unnamed restaurant in Garfield.

Altogether, the Lucchese family pulled in over $3 million from these backroom gambling operations. They did so with the help of a city councilman. “Think about how far this infiltrated—into local government, into appointed and elected officials,” one official said. Of the 39 arrested, one was Anand Shah, a councilman from Prospect Park.

Shah, an elected public official, worked alongside the Lucchese family to manage illegal poker games in back‑room clubs across Totowa, Garfield, and Woodland Park. He also oversaw an offshore online sportsbook—an illegal platform where users placed sports bets. Shah wasn’t a made member, but he was an associate who reported to higher‑ups in the Lucchese ruling panel, including boss Georgie Neck and Joseph “Big Joe” Perna.

Prosecutors say Shah used one of his Subway franchises to launder roughly $570,000 in gambling‑related transactions. This shows just how deeply the mafia has penetrated local politics and business. “From my experience, cops and mobsters work hand in hand,” Tony said. “They work together. It’s always been like that. It always will be.”

It’s unfortunately common for law enforcement officers and elected officials to take bribes from the mob so operations can continue smoothly. In March 2025, a Brooklyn federal jury convicted Hector Rosario, a detective with the Nassau County Police Department, of conspiring with the mafia. Prosecutors revealed that Rosario received monthly payoffs ranging from $1,000 to $5,000 from the Bonanno crime family.

In return, he protected their illegal gambling operations on Long Island and in Queens. Rosario allegedly staged fake police raids at Genevese‑run gambling dens like South Shoe Shop and the Grand Café—not to shut them down, but to scare off regular players. Once word spread of these raids, gamblers stopped visiting the Genovese spots and instead frequented Bonanno‑run poker games.

Rosario would also feed tips to fellow detectives about Genovese gambling operations, ensuring that Genovese sites were targeted while Bonanno locations stayed under the radar. “I read a bombshell lawsuit from former police commissioner Tom Dearing,” the narrator adds, “who says the NYPD is criminal at its core. It’s operating like a mafia family.”

“In my days in the restaurant business,” Tony said, “before I was on the job, I’d see a wiseguy sitting next to a deputy inspector.” “Wiseguy” is mob slang for a made man, an official member of a crime family. But who, exactly, is walking into these back rooms to gamble—and why risk it?

One reason is simple convenience. “Say you’re a neighborhood guy,” Tony explained. “You don’t have money for a bus to Atlantic City. Resorts World in Queens doesn’t have table games; for those, you’d have to go up to the Catskills. Meanwhile, the guy at the local deli has a card game going. If you don’t have money, you can still gamble—you just take a loan from the loan shark, as long as he knows who you are.”

Compulsive gamblers often take out loans they know they can’t repay. They gamble the borrowed money hoping for a big win. Many end up losing tens of thousands of dollars they never truly had. The mafia keeps extending credit because they know these gamblers are hooked. Some eventually rack up over $100,000 in debt—between gambling losses and loan interest.

At that point, the mob knows the debtor may never fully pay them back. But that’s not the only value they see. Once someone owes that much, they’re no longer just a client; they’re an asset. The mob might run bets and operations through the debtor’s name so their own names stay clean. The deeper the gambler sinks into debt, the more control the mafia gains over his life.

Even for more sophisticated gamblers, there’s a reason to play with the mob. Some big‑time players prefer mob‑run games to legal casinos. “I’ve never been in those huge games where guys are betting six figures up to a million,” Tony said. “For me, $50,000 on the table was a lot. But I recently saw that Caesars refused to pay out a bettor who hit a legitimate parlay for several million.”

The video shows clips of furious bettors complaining that big casinos refused to pay large wins. “You invite somebody into your business,” Tony said. “They pay money. They win. You’re supposed to pay. Could that happen with mob guys? Sure. But 99% of the time, they’ll pay you what they owe you. If they don’t, that reputation spreads fast.”

“If people hear Tommy or Blake went into a game, won legitimately, and didn’t get paid, that kills business,” he continued. “Big‑time gamblers care about that. Your word is your bond. You don’t have to deal with corporate fine print like, ‘We can refuse to pay if we feel like it.’ You don’t deal with that when you deal with the mob. Everything is usually above board. You’re dealing with serious men. You could lose your life at any second—but no one’s trying to scam you.”

Major casino companies like Caesars are heavily regulated by federal, state, and local governments. They also share a portion of their earnings with governments through revenue‑sharing arrangements. While legal casinos are generally less corrupt than mob operations, there is a case to be made that some aspects of mob‑run gambling worked better.

For one, many mob figures were prosecuted for running underground casinos, only to see the government adopt similar models and rake in billions. Second, the mob often reinvested its profits locally into neighborhood restaurants, clubs, and delis—many owned by wiseguys. Today, state‑sanctioned casinos tend to send profits to state budgets, corporate headquarters, and Wall Street investors, widening the gap between rich and poor.

Government‑partnered casinos aggressively market to vulnerable populations, especially in economically depressed areas. The mob ran table games and sports books, but not banks of flashy slot machines and always‑on digital sportsbooks designed to maximize dopamine hits. “If you went to a wiseguy and kept gambling and losing,” Tony said, “and he saw you mortgaging your house, he might say, ‘You have a family. I’m not taking your bets anymore. You’re not allowed to gamble here or anywhere until you pay this back.’”

He added, “They’d put pressure on you to stop. Go to Caesars and tell them, ‘I just liquidated my house. My kids will be in the street.’ They’ll let you gamble until the last penny and then have security throw you out.” To some degree, people felt safer—and more connected to their neighborhoods—when the mafia ran the streets.

Disputes over rent, business conflicts, and even domestic problems were sometimes handled by mob‑connected figures instead of police or courts. This created a strong sense of internal order, though based more on fear and loyalty than on democracy and justice. In a world where legal casinos can deny payouts and aggressively push addiction, wiseguys sometimes offered a different kind of gamble—one where a handshake meant more than fine print.

Special thanks, the narrator says, go to Tony Hernandez for explaining the modern mafia. You can find more of his stories on his *Corruption Connection* YouTube channel. And speaking of hidden operations and shocking betrayals, the video then teases another story—about Humam Khalil al‑Balawi, a man who completely fooled the CIA into thinking he was working for them. Viewers are invited to watch that story next, and once again, DeleteMe is thanked for sponsoring the video and helping people remove their data from the internet.