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.
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.
