What You're Actually Looking For
Most people search for this book wanting a straightforward crime history they can read cover to cover over a weekend. The reality is heavier. Selwyn Raab spent eight years tracking down sources, court documents, and former associates across five families. The result is exhaustive but occasionally dense. It covers Gambino, Colombo, Genovese, Lucchese, and Bonanno from their post-WWII peak through the 1990s racketeering cases and into the quiet resupply era that followed. I picked it up because I needed context on how the Commission actually functioned after the early nineties collapses. What I found was less a gangster novel and more a forensic accounting of power structures. The writing doesn't glamorize anyone. Raab lets the indictments and wiretaps do the talking. That means the narrative sometimes stalls when multiple defendants share identical names across different counties. I learned to stop trying to track every movement and focus instead on the organizational shifts.
Five Families The Rise Decline And Resurgence Of Americas Most Powerful Mafia Empires Selwyn Raab
The book is available through major retailers, libraries, and used-book channels. I bought a used hardcover off eBay for twenty dollars because the Penguin paperback edition has a few more marginalia-friendly pages. If you are looking for a digital copy, the ISBN is 9780805056756 for the standard trade edition. Library copy availability varies. My local branch had one on hold with a six-month queue. Here is what most summaries leave out. The five families did not operate as a single unified organization despite popular fiction. They competed constantly. Raab shows this clearly in the Colombo war section, where internal factionalism actually mattered more than external pressure from the other families. The war lasted roughly four years and cost an estimated thirty to forty lives, mostly from within the Colombo ranks. That detail reshapes how you understand organized crime hierarchies. It was not always a top-down command structure. It was often a messy collection of regional crews arguing over territory and percentage splits.
How to Approach the Book
Do not attempt to memorize every name. Raab includes hundreds. Instead, focus on the timeline around three key periods: the Kefauver hearings aftermath in the late 1950s, the Commission trials and RICO wave starting in 1985, and the mid-nineties plea deal cascade. Those three moments account for roughly seventy percent of the book's structural weight. Everything between them is background noise that fills in details you already know from documentaries. When I hit the Genovese chapter around page two hundred, I hit a wall. The book shifts into dense operational detail about labor unions, concrete corruption, and waste management rackets. I skipped forward to the summary sections first, then came back to the specific cases that interested me. This saved me about an hour of reading time and kept the narrative thread intact. Most readers do not need the full union corruption breakdown unless they are researching white-collar crime specifically.
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Common Misunderstandings
People assume the book argues the mafia declined and then fully recovered. It does not. Raab titles it "resurgence" but the evidence shows something closer to adaptation. The families survived because they stopped trying to rebuild pre-1990 power structures and instead became quieter, more decentralized, and more focused on low-profile financial crimes. The resurgence is not a return to glory. It is a shift in operating model. The book makes this point but some readers gloss over it because the title sounds more dramatic than the text supports. Another frequent error is treating the Bonanno family as the weakest throughout. Raab shows they were actually one of the most volatile. Internal purges happened repeatedly. The family lost more members to internal conflict than to law enforcement during the period covered. That volatility makes them unpredictable in ways the other families were not. If you are using this for research purposes, pay attention to Bonanno sections differently than the rest.
What the Book Does Not Cover
The publication date matters here. Raab's work ends around 2000, give or take a few years depending on which edition you read. There is no information about the later 2000s and beyond. No analysis of how the pandemic affected crew operations or how modern surveillance technology changed traditional collection methods. If you need post-2000 material, you will need supplementary sources. The book is still the baseline reference, but it is not comprehensive past its cutoff. I ran into this gap when a colleague asked me about post-2010 shifts in the Gambino family leadership. The book does not address it. I had to point him toward FBI press releases and later investigative journalism from the New York Times and the Intercept. Raab's work remains essential for the foundational period, but it is not a living document. Treat it as a historical record, not a current events report.
Who Should Read It
This is not casual reading for someone who wants action scenes and mob drama. It is dense, legalistic, and occasionally repetitive. If you want a story-driven account, try David Grann's work or even the old Puzo novels for entertainment value. But if you want to understand how these organizations actually functioned, how the Commission arbitrated disputes, how RICO cases dismantled them, and what happened after the verdicts landed, this is the definitive single-volume source. I keep it on my shelf because I return to it when people ask me why certain families disappeared faster than others or why some crews survived indictments that should have ended them. The appendix and index are surprisingly useful. Cross-referencing defendant names with their family affiliations takes about fifteen minutes and gives you a clearer picture than any documentary I have seen. Do not skip the notes section if you are doing serious research. Raab cites court transcripts, FBI files, and firsthand interviews that are not always easy to locate elsewhere.
