In the history of organized crime in New York, the most feared men were rarely the ones whose names appeared in headlines. They were the specialists who worked in quiet rooms and on empty streets, leaving behind reputations that outlasted them. What follows are the stories of five such men, drawn from the records, the rumors, and the fragments that survived them.
Willie "Two Knife" Altieri moved through New York in the 1920s like a shadow with a pulse. Men spoke his name in back rooms and alleys, usually in lowered voices, because Willie worked as the chief enforcer for Frankie Yale, the Brooklyn racketeer whose Italian-American Black Hand outfit controlled neighborhoods the way a storm controls a coastline.
Yale had soldiers, hustlers, and collectors. But Altieri was the one he trusted when something needed to be settled for good. The strange thing about Willie is how little the world kept on paper about him. There is no clear date of birth, no family history that traveled through official files, and no confirmed place or manner of death.
He stepped in and out of the record like a man who understood the advantage of not leaving footprints. What survives are fragments: a description of a compact man, about 5-foot-7 and around 170 pounds, with blonde hair, blue eyes, and a quiet, unsettling way of keeping his hands clean. Those hands were smooth enough that people compared them to a woman's.
Yet they carried two knives in leather scabbards strapped to his waist. He cleaned his nails with those blades, and he slept with them on his body as if the weapons were part of his bloodstream. Stories from the street said Willie handled killings in only a few ways. He strangled, he stabbed, or he used a gun close enough that powder marks scarred the victim's skin.
The bodies ended up across the river in New Jersey, buried in places where the only witnesses were trees and silent ground. That pattern stayed the same for years. By 1919, Yale was dealing with an informer inside his own circle. Trust mattered in his world, and betrayal did not get second chances. He sent Altieri to handle the problem.
Willie went in with both knives, drove them into the man's torso, and snapped the blades off in the body. When he walked back out, he carried only the handles. Yale mounted those handles on a plaque and hung it in the office where he did his business. It was a message about loyalty, discipline, and the cost of breaking either.
Willie had enemies of his own. The White Hand Gang, an Irish outfit based along the Brooklyn waterfront, believed he had a hand in killing one of their men, Patsy Behan. They came after him with gunmen led by Peg Leg Lonergan. Willie escaped by crashing through a window, half diving and half falling his way out of the kill zone.
The White Hand shooters hit the wrong target. They killed Angelo Gabbardi, father of Vincenzo Gabbardi. The son would later find criminal fame under a different name: Machine Gun Jack McGurn, a Capone gunman who helped shape the St. Valentine's Day Massacre.
Everything changed on July 1, 1928. Frankie Yale was driving through Brooklyn when shotgun blasts tore into his car. The official story pointed toward Chicago. Al Capone had once worked under Yale unloading trucks in New York. The relationship later soured, and by the time Yale died in a hail of buckshot, the rumor was that Capone had ordered it.
The moment Yale was gone, the structure around him began to collapse. His crews scattered, his rackets changed hands, and the men who once lived by his word drifted into the fog of the underworld. Willie "Two Knife" Altieri was one of them. After that day, he left almost no trace.
There was no confirmed arrest, no death certificate, no newspaper clipping tying him to a final job or a last address. In a city full of men trying to be remembered, Willie became someone who vanished. Only his reputation stayed behind, tucked into old police files and the dim recollections of an era when knives flashed in alleyways and the Black Hand ruled parts of Brooklyn like an empire built on fear.
Joseph "Mad Dog" Sullivan came into the world on March 31, 1939, in Queens, New York. He was the son of a city detective named Joseph Sullivan Sr. and one of six children in a home that tried to hold itself together. When his father died, he was only 13. Grief hit the family like a slow collapse.
His mother turned to alcohol, and the house that once had rules and routines became unpredictable. By 1953, he ran. Reform school in Warwick took him in, and he pushed back against its walls every chance he had. He kept escaping, kept getting caught, and kept winding up in new institutions with new guards and new rules.
The years blurred until he aged out at 19 with no money and nowhere steady to go. He enlisted in the U.S. Army. Even that did not hold him. He walked off base without permission, was sent to Governor's Island, and then pulled off another escape by swimming back to Manhattan. The Army found him again, but he feigned mental illness and avoided a court-martial. They sent him to Valley Forge Army Hospital instead.
His first crimes had started long before. There were small robberies at 12, a climb into increasingly dangerous jobs, and then a killing during a bar fight that led to a manslaughter conviction. In 1967, he was given a sentence of 20 to 30 years. They sent him to Attica, a prison everyone considered escape proof.
Inmates there gave him the name "Mad Dog," not for any violent outbursts, but for a salivary gland disorder he had had since childhood. It was a cruel nickname in a place built on cruelty. He stayed inside those walls for four years, planning and watching, moving through the routines of the facility with a kind of studied patience.
Then came April 7, 1971. Sullivan found a way past the perimeter, made it outside, and crossed into the parking lot. A driver waited there. Sullivan climbed in, got dropped near a bus station, and vanished into the world. Attica had been breached. For the first time anyone could remember, someone had beaten it.
The escape did not last. Weeks later, NYPD officers spotted him walking through Greenwich Village with a sawed-off rifle. The moment ended with handcuffs and another trip back behind bars. A few years passed. His lawyer at the time was former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark, and Clark helped him win parole in December 1975.
Freedom did not soften him. He drifted back into the criminal world and worked with the Genovese crime family. In the summer of 1976, he carried out a contract on two members of an Irish gang loyal to Mickey Spillane. Trouble between the Italian and Irish crews was rising, and Sullivan became a weapon for the Genovese side.
In 1977, he married a woman named Gail. They had two sons, Ramsay and Kelly. For a moment, he looked like a man who might have wanted to hold on to something normal, but he never stepped away from the life. That same year, Spillane was murdered. Though police treated Sullivan as a suspect, he was never charged. He was also tied to the killing of Tom "the Greek" Capos.
Another target he pursued was Bonanno boss Carmine "Cigar" Galante. Sullivan spent much of the summer of 1978 trying to complete that contract, waiting for the right moment, but the opportunity never lined up. A year later, a separate team of gunmen walked into a Bushwick restaurant and shot Galante dead in broad daylight.
By then, Sullivan had a reputation as a disciplined hitman. He spoke openly years later about how he prepared for a job, running in a park, clearing his mind, and rehearsing the steps in his head until the killing felt like something inevitable. Investigators believed he had taken the lives of 20 to 30 people.
His final contract came in 1981. The target was John Cody, a Teamsters vice president with reported Mafia ties. Sullivan waited outside a restaurant near Rochester with a shotgun. When Cody appeared, Sullivan fired. The blast tore through the quiet street. He and his associate tried to escape, but their car lodged in a snowbank.
The driver was caught. Sullivan burrowed into the snow and hid for nearly eight hours before slipping away. Eventually, the police caught up with him. Once he was in custody, they tied him to two other Long Island murders. In 1982, he stood trial for the Cody killing and the additional homicides. He was convicted and handed three life sentences.
Fallsburg, New York, is where he ended up, inside Sullivan Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison built for men who are not meant to walk free again. His next chance at parole will come long after his time on this earth is expected to run out.
Anthony Bruno Indelicato was born on March 4, 1947, into a world where loyalty could be the difference between power and a bullet, where a handshake could launch a fortune or end a life. His name was Anthony Indelicato, son of Alphonse "Sonny Red" Indelicato, one of the Bonanno family's heavyweight capos.
In the neighborhoods that fed the mob, that lineage opened doors and created expectations. Anthony carried both. His world widened even more when he married Catherine Burke, the daughter of Jimmy Burke from the Lucchese family's orbit. It was the kind of union that tied two criminal bloodlines together the way old families in Europe once married for territory and influence.
By the late 1970s, Anthony was already moving in the shadows of Bonanno politics. Philip Rastelli, the official boss, was in prison. Carmine Galante had seized control on the street, taking over rackets and pushing men aside with a confidence that frightened even other bosses. Galante had created more enemies than allies, and the Commission eventually gave its approval for him to be removed.
On July 12, 1979, Galante walked into Joe and Mary's Italian-American restaurant in Bushwick for lunch, unaware that the next hour of his life had already been decided. Three gunmen entered the patio and opened fire. Galante died where he sat, still wearing the cigar that had become his trademark. Two men at the table with him were killed as well.
Anthony Indelicato played a role in that hit, and afterward, he was rewarded with a promotion to capo. For a young man raised in the world of the Bonannos, it was the kind of advancement that defined a career. The years that followed were marked by violence inside the family.
A split formed between two factions. One was loyal to Rastelli under the guidance of Dominick Napolitano and Joseph Massino. The other consisted of three powerful captains: Alphonse "Sonny Red" Indelicato, Philip Giaccone, and Dominick Trinchera. These men wanted the top seat for themselves.
When word reached Massino, he went to the Commission and received permission to eliminate them before they could strike first. On May 5, 1981, the three captains walked into a meeting in Brooklyn. None of them walked out. Sonny Red, Giaccone, and Trinchera were shot to death.
Anthony was meant to be killed as well, but he did not attend the meeting. His absence saved his life. Not long after, Napolitano turned to a man he believed was ready to earn his bones, Donnie Brasco, to take out Anthony. What Napolitano did not know was that Brasco was actually FBI agent Joseph Pistone.
When the bureau pulled Pistone from undercover duty, Napolitano's world collapsed, and the attempt on Anthony's life faded into the files of an operation that would become one of the most famous infiltrations in FBI history. In November 1986, federal prosecutors put the Mafia Commission on trial. Anthony Indelicato stood among the defendants charged with the Galante murder.
On November 19, he was convicted. Two months later, on January 13, 1987, he was sentenced to 40 years in federal prison and fined $50,000. In 1998, he walked out of prison on parole, older, quieter, and still part of the Bonanno orbit. But the life never lets go easily.
In February 2001, a Bonanno associate named Frank Santoro threatened to kidnap the child of rising capo Vincent "Vinny Gorgeous" Basciano. Within that world, a threat like that sealed a man's fate. Indelicato took part in the murder that followed. In February 2006, he was charged with racketeering and the killing of Santoro.
Two years later, in August 2008, he pleaded guilty. On December 16, 2008, he was sentenced to 20 years. On May 20, 2022, he walked out once again. The Bonanno family welcomed him back. And sometime around 2023, he was elevated to consigliere, a position reserved for the man who advises the boss, settles disputes, and carries the weight of decades of history on his shoulders.
Anthony Indelicato's life has been shaped by loyalty, bloodshed, and the quiet negotiations that guide a crime family through each passing era. He grew up in the shadow of a powerful father, survived a massacre that rewrote the family's future, and returned from prison not as a relic, but as a counselor, one of the last men from that earlier generation still standing.
Samuel "Red" Levine came into the world as Samuel Levine, born in either 1902 or 1903, far from the streets where his name would eventually carry weight. Toledo, Ohio, was his starting point, but the Lower East Side of Manhattan became the place that shaped him. His family struggled, and by the time he was eight, he was hauling blocks of ice for a few dollars a week, weaving through crowded tenements and narrow stairwells to keep food on the table.
School never took. He drifted through truancy programs until he finally lied about his age and joined the United States Navy at 15. Life aboard ship was a fight in every sense. He said the other sailors taunted him for his red hair and his Jewish background, and more than once he let his fists do the answering. At some point, he abandoned the uniform entirely, jumping ship in Panama and finding his own way back to New York.
When he stepped onto the docks again, he was not the same kid who had left. The underworld of the city in the late 1920s and early 1930s was shifting, violent, and hungry for men who could handle themselves. Levine moved into those circles quietly, slipping into the ranks of the killers who became known as Murder Incorporated, a collection of Jewish and Italian hitmen who took orders from mob bosses with ambitions that stretched beyond the boroughs.
By 1931, the Castellammarese War had torn the old Mafia apart. At the height of that conflict, Levine was credited as the gunman who stood alongside Dutch Schultz's lieutenant, Abraham "Bo" Weinberg, during the murder of Joe "the Boss" Masseria inside a Coney Island restaurant. That killing helped clear the path for a new order led by Charles "Lucky" Luciano.
Later that same year, Levine took part in another strike that would rewrite American organized crime. Luciano had grown tired of Salvatore Maranzano and his plans to crown himself the undisputed king of the Mafia. Meyer Lansky assembled a team of Jewish gunmen, Levine, Bo Weinberg, and others, to walk into Maranzano's office in the old Helmsley Building.
They posed as government agents, rode the elevator to the ninth floor, disarmed the guards, and then shot and stabbed Maranzano to death. It was the end of the old Sicilian hierarchy and the beginning of the Commission system that shaped the mob for generations. Then around 1940, Murder Incorporated began to fall apart.
Detectives and prosecutors, driven by Abe Reles's cooperation, rounded up scores of hitmen, racketeers, and middlemen. Many were executed or went to prison. Levine's name barely surfaced. He did not testify. He was not indicted. And he did not wind up in a lineup. He simply stepped out of sight.
For decades, no one could say for certain where he had gone. Occasional details surfaced later. According to the son of a Lower East Side funeral home owner, Levine was still alive and on their payroll into the mid-1960s. They gave him a weekly $200 check so he could show legitimate income, a quiet arrangement that kept him off law enforcement's radar.
Another glimpse came from a Village Voice article in 2001. It placed Levine in the Newspaper and Mail Deliverers Union during the 1970s, well into his 70s, helping manage the delicate balance of mob influence inside the industry. The union had long been dominated by Irish, Italian, and Jewish crews, and Levine was known for making sure each of the five families kept a piece of the action.
In the last years of his life, he was said to spend time in Little Italy. He visited social clubs and moved through those rooms like a man who had earned the right to sit in a corner and watch the younger generation hustle for relevance. Samuel "Red" Levine died on April 7, 1972.
In the end, he left behind a career that had been violent, secretive, and strangely durable. He lived through the rise of Lucky Luciano, watched the old world fall, and walked away from Murder Incorporated when almost no one else managed to do the same. He slipped into old age with no headlines, no trials, and no final reckoning, one of the quiet survivors of a bloody era.
Tommy "Karate" Patera started on the streets of Gravesend, Brooklyn, where the subway rattled overhead and kids learned early how to defend themselves or disappear into the background. Thomas Patera was born there on December 2, 1954, the son of Joseph Patera, a candy salesman who hauled boxes to neighborhood concession stands, and Katherine Bogowski, who came from German and Polish family lines.
Tommy had a thin voice, a restless imagination, and not much luck with the other kids. Teachers at David A. Boody Junior High School remembered him for staring out the window more than anything he said in class. He wanted to play baseball, but the bullying kept him off the team. Around that time, he walked into a dojo in Sheepshead Bay.
The quiet of the mats and the discipline of the training pulled at him in a way nothing else had. He lifted weights, studied Kyokushin karate, watched kung fu films late into the night, and treated martial arts like a blueprint for becoming someone new. His talent became hard to ignore.
After winning a kumite tournament, he earned a chance to train in Tokyo under Shihan Hiroshi Masumi. He spent 27 months there learning the ways of Koryu ninjutsu, practicing with tonfa, nunchucks, and katanas, and shaping his body and mind to match the image he had carried since childhood. When he returned to Brooklyn, the discipline and the training had hardened into something else.
He was drawn into the Bonanno crime family, a world that rewarded precision, loyalty, and the ability to handle violence without flinching. During the 1980s, he was formally inducted, becoming a made man. By then, he had gained a reputation for being effective, quiet, and utterly committed.
On August 29, 1988, law enforcement later alleged that Patera and Vincent "Kojak" Giattino had carried out an ambush on Wilfred "Willie Boy" Johnson, a driver and longtime associate of John Gotti. Gotti had learned Johnson had been informing since the mid-1960s. Johnson was shot dead on his way to a car. Prosecutors charged Patera with the murder, but the jury acquitted him.
Investigators would later say that Patera murdered a Middle Eastern drug dealer named Talal Siks inside a Brooklyn apartment. They accused him of shooting Siks four times in the back, dismembering the remains, and burying the parts in a hidden dumping ground. Years later, police found six of Patera's alleged victims in a Staten Island graveyard near the William T. Davis Wildlife Refuge.
The bodies had been decapitated and the heads placed in separate graves. Detectives believed he did that to slow down any attempt to identify the dead through dental records. The stories that emerged about his methods painted a portrait of a man who approached killing like a kind of grisly craft.
He studied decomposition, chose Staten Island's damp soil because he believed it would break down remains faster, and buried his victims deep to defeat police dogs. On June 4, 1990, federal authorities indicted him on charges of running a drug crew and carrying out seven murders, including the Johnson case. Investigators believe the real number could be far higher.
They said his organization moved more than 220 pounds of cocaine a year, multiple kilos of heroin, and large quantities of marijuana. When they searched his apartment in Gravesend, they found a stockpile of automatic weapons, knives, swords, and a small library filled with titles like The Hitman's Handbook.
A shift came from inside his own crew. Frank Gangi, the nephew of Genovese capo Rosario Gangi, had been arrested for driving under the influence. While sitting in a cell, he began to unravel. One confession led to another, and soon he was telling investigators about murders he had committed with Patera.
At trial, prosecutor David W. Shapiro laid out each killing in stark detail. He described torture, slow shootings, and a pattern of barbaric behavior meant to send messages no one could misunderstand. The government sought the death penalty. On June 25, 1992, the jury convicted him of six murders and a major drug conspiracy. They rejected the death sentence.
Judge Reena Raggi looked directly at him when she sentenced him in October, reminding him of the way his victims had died before handing down life in prison. Patera smiled and gave a thumbs-up to reporters, relieved at the outcome. As of 2017, he was held at the United States Penitentiary McCreary in Kentucky.
That is where Tommy Patera's story sits now. Far from the streets of Gravesend, far from the quiet dojos he once studied in, and far from the hidden burial grounds that haunted the investigations, the man who built himself through discipline and then reshaped that discipline into violence will spend the rest of his days behind the walls of a federal penitentiary.