Dating to their first fledgling days as an underworld entity, what would arguably become one of the smallest Mafia clans in America, the Dallas Crime Family was said to have been formed by Carlo Piranio and his brother Joe during the early 1920s.
With the help of mob elements back in the mafia’s “lion’s den” and headquarters of New York City (believed to have been the infamous Giuseppe Morello,) the Corleone-born Piranio brothers gathered up what few fellow Sicilians and Southern Italian hoodlums had settled in Texas and attempted to form their own small criminal network and borgata.
The Civello Family of Dallas, Texas was thought to have been moderately active in the cities of Houston, Galveston, Fort Worth, Austin, and Dallas itself as well as other surrounding territories.
At their peak in the 1940s and early 1950s, the Civello Family — or Dallas Crime Family — was never thought to have exceeded a dozen fully inducted mafia members.
They operated with several dozen additional mob “associates” who worked together with the members to operate limited illicit liquor, gambling, and narcotics rackets as well as a few stolen goods-fencing rings.
The entire borgata was essentially the size of one small “regime” of what a normal-sized mafia Family was. There was a good reason for this.
