The Civello Family Leadership Chart lists the known members of the Dallas Crime Family for the sixty-year period from approximately 1920 through 1980.
Based in the City of Dallas, Texas this small Mafia clan started to take form by the early 1920s.
Brothers Carlo and Giuseppe Piranio are generally credited with having been the founding fathers of what would later become the Civello Family of Dallas, Texas.
Carlo and Giuseppe Piranio were born in the infamous town of Corleone in Sicily, and by the early-1900s, the brothers had immigrated to the United States.
Within a few years’ time after establishing themselves with mafiosi elements in Upper Manhattan, Carlo Piranio was said to have received the help and backing of notorious New York Mafia boss Giuseppe (The Clutch Hand) Morello in setting up a Texas-based borgata.
As a fellow native of Corleone, Morello agreed to install his fellow “amici” down in Texas as pointmen to help expand the Corleone clan’s power and influence to other parts of the United States.
Carlo Piranio was elected the first “Capo Famiglia” for the State of Texas. His brother Joe was installed as his underboss.
The Dallas Family was never thought to have more than two to three dozen ‘official’ inducted members at any given period.
But the soldiers operated successfully throughout The Lone Star State with help from a small network of mob associates of various ethnicities who ran criminal activities along with them.
With Carlo Piranio’s death in late 1930, his brother Joe ascended to the throne. Joe had a twenty-five-year run at the top until he died from natural causes in 1956.
That was when former caporegime Joseph Civello was elevated to be the next boss of the Dallas Family.
