At the height of his underworld power, Gaetano (Toddo Marino) Maiorana was viewed as a highly respected “original” member of the Luciano/Genovese family who had pivotal control over many underworld operations in Brooklyn for the hierarchy. Since at least the 1930s, he always played a key role in this borgata. He primarily operated in the Downtown Brooklyn, Williamsburg, South Brooklyn, Red Hook, Fort Greene, and Bay Ridge sections of the county.
His presence was felt to one degree or another in nearly every type of racket activity run in Kings County, including liquor bootlegging during Prohibition, bookmaking, policy numbers, the Italian lottery, floating dice games and card games, slot machines, cargo theft off the South Brooklyn docks, truck hijacking, stolen automobiles, labor union racketeering, shakedown and extortion rackets, jukebox and vending machine rackets, and business infiltration. He and his minions seemed to be into everything!
Marino controlled large swaths of territory for the family and was arguably one of several top figures in control of those areas. In fact, he was well known to be the “capo di decina” of one of the largest regimes for many decades.
By the 1960s, it could have been well argued that Toddo Marino actually oversaw “the” largest Brooklyn regime. The FBI felt the same way about him. A known power on the South Brooklyn docks often working in tandem with members of the Profaci family such as capo Harry Fontana, Marino’s crew controlled a sizable portion of the waterfront rackets such as container pilferage, embezzlement from the treasury of the International Longshoreman’s Union, and drug smuggling onto the piers.
