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: 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 discuss, 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.
