(Image via Netflix)
Bonanno. Colombo. Gambino. Genovese. Lucchese. The names of these five Italian “families” will forever be ingrained in the minds of those familiar with the New York City Mafia, a criminal enterprise that had controlled key industries within the city since the days of Prohibition. Chertoff, Savarese, and Childers are names that aren’t as easily recognizable, but perhaps they should be, because they’re the prosecutors who successfully brought down the mob using the then arcane Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO). Fear City: New York vs. The Mafia, Netflix’s new three-part documentary, tells the tale of how it happened.
Time and time again, federal authorities investigating the New York Mafia in the 1970s and 1980s found themselves unsatisfied with prosecuting low-level foot soldiers, unable to find a way to make crime stick or even connect it to the bosses in charge. All that changed when the FBI and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, led at the time by Rudy Giuliani, decided to use RICO to prosecute “the Commission” — a secret sect of the five families’ leaders — as a single criminal organization whose members were all involved in the same conspiracy.
“This was an opportunity to tell a panoramic tale of New York, from the wiseguys on the streets all the way up to the lawmakers in City Hall, at the most dramatic point in its history,” Fear City director Sam Hobkinson tells Above the Law. The series includes previously unheard surveillance recordings and archival material alongside new interviews and reenactments that paint a shocking portrait of the time when New York was under mob rule. “All the agents, prosecutors, and even the mobsters were really proud of what they achieved during this period — they were excited and enthusiastic to discuss it with us, and to go in front of the camera to tell their story.”
(Image via Netflix)
With interviews from the agents who played crucial roles in the investigation as well as from Giuliani and Michael Chertoff, John Savarese, and Gil Childers — the three young lawyers who were tasked with handling the Commission trial, lawyers who had never done anything like this before — Fear City provides a fascinating inside look at exactly what it took to put New York’s most notorious crime families out of business.
“Could I have ended up a wiseguy? Sure, I could have, but in the 70s I became a U.S. attorney.” — Rudy Giuliani
Giuliani got much of the publicity from the veritable media circus that the Commission trial created, and the lawyers on the case acknowledged this in the series. “Rudy did rather love being in front of the cameras. Did we tease him a little bit? Sure,” Savarese said. “It was a running joke among all the assistant U.S. attorneys. Being the ‘mob buster’ was a big part of his persona.”
“For me, coming from an Italian-American heritage, the dark side of that immigrant history that the Mafia represents was a horrible stain,” Savarese said in the series. “It was definitely part of my own personal motivation for wanting to work on this case.”
“This clearly was the biggest thing I would ever do professionally. So there was a certain amount of pressure. I had just turned 29. John had also just turned 29. Mike was 30,” Childers said. “I’m sure in some quarters there were people questioning, ‘Really? These three kids are going to try this case?’”
Savarese echoed those thoughts, noting, “None of us had ever tried a case of this magnitude before. When you think about it, it’s a little crazy, right? The United States is entrusting essentially three novices with this momentous case.”
Jury deliberations in the case took a little longer than expected, and everyone started to get nervous about what could be going on behind closed doors — even Giuliani. “I was 100 percent confident when it started,” he said. “By the fifth day, I was less sure of the verdict. If we fail at this, oof, it’ll set us back 30 years.”
As the prosecutors awaited a verdict, Chertoff recalled being told he needed to write two statements for the press, one if there was a conviction and one if there was an acquittal. He remembers saying, “I can’t do that. I’m going to jinx myself.” Childers, anxious about the pending verdict, commented, “You don’t want to screw this up. You don’t want to be the guy who’s known as the person who let the mob bosses off.”
And then a landmark verdict was reached.
“And it was guilty, guilty, guilty. My god, we did it. After all this work, all those sleepless nights, all those ruined weekends, we were finally getting what we had fought for.” — John Savarese
The Commission trial led to eight convictions of top mob figures, including the bosses of three families (Anthony Salerno of the Genovese family, Antonio Corallo of the Lucchese family, and Carmine Persico of the Colombo family). Gambino family boss Paul Castellano was murdered before he could face justice through the court system.
Chertoff was confirmed to the Third Circuit in 2003, before leaving the bench in 2005 to become the Secretary of Homeland Security under President George W. Bush. He is currently senior of counsel at Covington & Burling. Savarese joined Wachtell Lipton after his stint at the U.S. Attorney’s Office, where he’s worked for 25 years as a partner in the firm’s litigation department. Childers worked in the Southern District for about a decade, and then joined Orrick as counsel. Since 2000, he’s worked as associate general counsel at Goldman Sachs. Giuliani went on to become the mayor of New York City, and currently has a role as President Donald Trump’s personal attorney.
Executive producer Jon Liebman, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Brillstein Entertainment, is a graduate of Yale Law School who clerked for Judge Leonard B. Sand (S.D.N.Y.) and later worked as an Assistant United States Attorney in the Southern District before being appointed as Deputy Chief of the Criminal Division. “I was fortunate to work with incredible people, including some of the prosecutors in the case,” Liebman told Above the Law. “Gil Childers and John Savarese were colleagues of mine at the time. Some of the cases I got involved in were a number of organized crime “clean up” cases after the Commission case.” He continued:
What interested me was to be able to tell the inside story of how a complex criminal prosecution like this gets put together. The intensity of it, the bravery of it, the challenges of it, and ultimately the architecture of it, so that people could see how these cases and trials are built. What I wanted people to see is the pressure that the FBI agents and the prosecutors endured as they mounted this investigation and this case.
What fascinated me when I was a young lawyer is understanding how the house gets built and what people go through in in building these kind of complex cases. It was great to be able to participate in helping get that across.
The Mafia’s stranglehold on New York City significantly dissipated after the Commission trial, but it wasn’t completely wiped out. John Gotti, the mobster who ordered Castellano’s killing, is seen at the end of the third episode of the series, and his subsequent reign and conviction would make for a wonderful sequel.
“When you see the outcome of a trial, sometimes it looks easy. And, of course, the job of the prosecutors is to make it look a little bit easy,” Liebman said. “But as you can see from Fear City, constructing this case and mounting it was not easy at all.”
Fear City: New York vs. The Mafia begins streaming on Netflix today.
Staci Zaretsky is a senior editor at Above the Law, where she’s worked since 2011. She’d love to hear from you, so please feel free to email her with any tips, questions, comments, or critiques. You can follow her on Twitter or connect with her on LinkedIn.