At the turn of the century, from about 1900 forward, most European immigrants from Italy and elsewhere who landed at Ellis Island first settled into the teeming tenements of New York City’s Manhattan (New York County), Brooklyn, or Bronx counties. Some of them later began traveling to other states where they had family and ‘amici’ such as New England, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and elsewhere.
By the 1920s, many of those who’d initially chosen to settle in Manhattan and other local counties began to migrant a bit further east toward the more spacious Queens County and the rural Long Island areas which was more reminiscent of the countryside they remembered back in their homeland of Sicily, Calabria, and Campania.
And just as they had done in East Harlem, Downtown’s Mulberry Street section, Bensonhurst, Belmont in the Bronx, and elsewhere throughout the city, Italian strongholds soon developed with particularly heavy concentrations in key northern Queens neighborhoods such as Astoria, Ridgewood, Maspeth, and Corona. In the southern part of the county, heavily Italian populated towns began to develop in Jamaica, Ozone Park, and Howard Beach.
By the mid-1950s, the Italians had also pushed into the eastern part of Queens by Malba, Bayside, and Little Neck, as those mostly newer residential ‘bedroom’ communities, were built. In those early years, most business commerce was still conducted closer toward the city and in the older areas of Western Queens.
What follows is a town-by-town breakdown of the known underworld presence in each of the Queens neighborhoods known to have once been home to clusters of various wiseguys and their associates – especially those areas known to have been large Italian strongholds. The names listed under each town are the mob figures and the crime families they represented that either had grown up there or later resided and/or operated businesses and rackets in that given area.
