One of the most powerful figures in organized crime was a diminutive mafioso by the name of Giovanni Priziola. Born in Partinico, Sicily (Palermo Province) back on January 12, 1893, after immigrating to the United States, he made his way to Michigan, where he set down permanent roots in the City of Detroit. The Motor City was to become Priziola’s new home, criminal playground, and power base for the next half-century or so.
Already a card-carrying mafioso back in his homeland of Sicily, after coming to America, he quickly reestablished himself within the city’s criminal underworld and among his fellow Sicilian mafiosi as a capable and serious hoodlum — and a man not to be trifled with.
During those early years in Detroit, he and his associates engaged in various heists and robberies, blackmail, counterfeiting, strong-arm extortion, and murder. They also fought a seemingly never-ending series of gangland wars with several rivals as they attempted to gain more racket territory and power within the city’s underworld.
By 1920, with the advent of the National Prohibition Act, he and his growing band of subordinates and followers were well poised to cash in on what would become the multimillion-dollar liquor bootlegging racket.
Over the next decade, Priziola and his gang set up “alky stills” to manufacture their own alcoholic beverages and smuggled in boatloads and truckloads of branded liquors from Canada and other states to help quench the thirst of their fellow Detroiters.
The Ruling Council
After much internecine underworld warfare, by the late 1920s and early 1930s, one single blended Mafia clan began to emerge from the bloody carnage that had engulfed the streets of Detroit for over twenty years. This blended amalgamation of mafiosi can be considered the true embryo and the start of what would become known as the “Detroit Partnership” of Cosa Nostra.
The leaders of the most powerful of Detroit’s Italian gangs agreed to close ranks to become one single entity under an overarching Cosa Nostra umbrella led by five men, with Giuseppe (Joe Uno) Zerilli and his brother-in-law and partner, Guglielmo (Black Bill) Tocco, leading the pack.
Aside from Zerilli and Tocco, rounding out this newly established Detroit Family were three other top powers of their clan: Giovanni (Papa John) Priziola, Angelo Meli, and Peter (Horseface) Licavoli.
These five men would become the “Dons” and “ruling council” sitting atop the Detroit underworld and would control Michigan’s criminal rackets for the next fifty or so years.
