Button Guys is proud to release our latest piece of underworld research. What you are about to read is a unique story about a top-ranked New York racketeer, and coming next week: the only known hierarchy chart ever researched that identifies and details the vast multimillion-dollar-a-year Puerto Rican-based organized crime network headed by storied Harlem-based gangster Raymond (Spanish Ray) Marquez.
We provide the most comprehensive overview of the “Marquez Family” membership ever assembled. From the top hierarchy, right on down to their rank-and-file foot soldiers and lower-echelon street hoods. These were the men who handled Marquez’s massive gambling businesses, including policy-numbers, the Puerto Rican lottery and Cuban Bolita, horse and sports bookmaking, and a narcotics smuggling network that distributed untold quantities of heroin and cocaine in New York, New Jersey, and other eastern seaboard states.
Note: Please visit The Raymond Marquez “Family” Chart to view our Button Guys signature chart for the Marquez Family.
By the mid-late 1960s, Marquez’s superior management skills and his fastidious attention to detail had enabled “Spanish Raymond” and his brothers and their key lieutenants to become multimillionaires. By the 1970s, he and the organization he led had become almost unrivaled in underworld power and wealth, to the point that he was respected by and often worked in league with — and were sometimes viewed as rivals of — top members of New York’s Cosa Nostra, especially the Genovese Family’s legendary Acting Boss, Anthony (Fat Tony) Salerno.
The FBI and New York Police Department estimated that at the height of their power, Marquez’s criminal organization numbered over 300 members. They included a vast array of policy runners and controllers, bookmakers and other gamblers, after-hours club operators, money collectors, strong-arm men and killers, international drug smugglers, as well as wholesale and retail street-level dope dealers.
He successfully ran his crime Family for a half-century — from the early 1950s through the late 1990s — quite an impressive accomplishment, to say the least. And sitting atop it all like the underworld potentate that he became was “Spanish Ray” Marquez.
And now — without further ado — Button Guys proudly presents to our readers the life story of this legendary gangster.
