Throughout its history, the State of Connecticut has always been a haven for the underworld. Through the years, they’ve played host to hundreds of gamblers, racketeers, and mobsters from a variety of different crime families. Yet, oddly enough, Connecticut never had a “homegrown” resident Mafia Family to call its own.
Instead, at least five different crime families, including New England’s Raymond Patriarca Family, three of New York CIty’s notorious Five Families (the Genovese, Gambino, and Colombo,) as well as New Jersey’s Simone DeCavalcante Family, all competed to grab various pieces of its territory, thereby carving up The Nutmeg State like a pizza pie.
But despite Connecticut technically being one of the six states that make up the greater New England area, arguably, the two strongest underworld organizations to ever ply their nefarious trade there were the Gambino and Genovese Families out of New York. And depending upon which particular decade we discussed, it was a tossup as to which was the largest and most powerful of the two. But for certain, each Family had a very significant presence within the state.
The Family headed by Carlo Gambino has always been a major presence there. Over the years, this Mafia network controlled a major regime that was based in the City of Bridgeport and headed by a resident “capo di decina” they appointed to oversee a formal rank-and-file membership of both inducted soldiers and numerous crew associates.
The Family ran far-flung horse and sports bookmaking operations and a policy-numbers lottery that spanned a good portion of the state. In addition, this crew dabbled in all the other usual organized crime pursuits like high-stakes floating dice and card games, loansharking, truck hijacking, restaurant and nightclub extortion, business infiltration, strong-arm work, and murder.
And although the crew’s home base was Bridgeport, through the years, the Gambino Family’s Connecticut faction also operated to varying degrees in many other cities and towns like Fairfield, Stratford, Danbury, Ansonia, Darien, Derby, Trumbull, New Haven, East Haven, West Haven, Milford, Shelton, and Hartford.
The Gambino Family’s best-known and most notorious leader arguably was a young mafioso by the name of Frank Louis Piccolo. Born and bred in the East Harlem section of New York City, by the time he reached his mid-twenties, the Piccolo family had relocated up to Bridgeport. There, he started what would later become a lengthy police record, logging his first arrest with the Bridgeport Police Department. By the mid-1950s, Piccolo had become a very notorious presence around town.
