With an eye toward the quiet but vibrant midwestern City of Madison, Wisconsin, by the early 1920s, a tiny and very untraditional, “traditional” type Mafia clan started to take form within the city by a small group of mafiosi who immigrated from Bagheria, Sicily.
The City of Madison, whose total population in 1950 was just shy of 100,000 residents, would serve as the backdrop and hometown for what has been described by the Federal Bureau of Investigation as the smallest known Cosa Nostra Family to ever exist within the United States.
The city’s original founding “Capo” was thought to have been Benedetto (Benny) DiSalvo, who led the borgata from the 1920s Prohibition era through the early 1940s. By the mid-1940s, DiSalvo stepped down from leadership in favor of a quiet and demure mafioso named Carlo Caputo, who then assumed the top spot. Now reputedly headed by “Capo Familia” Carlo Caputo, this tiny Mafia clan was never thought to have had a formal family membership of more than a dozen or so “officially” inducted soldiers.
