In the 1960s, tensions between New York’s Genovese and Gambino crime families boiled over into insults that hinted at deeply personal practices. Members of the Genovese organization reportedly branded their rivals sexual degenerates, an accusation widely believed to refer to the Gambinos’ habit of marrying their first cousins. . That specific slur has often been attributed to Thomas “Tommy Ryan” Eboli, a Genovese mobster of Neapolitan heritage who served as the family’s acting underboss during that period.
The insult was recorded and is frequently cited as evidence of the contempt the Genovese felt toward the heavily Sicilian Gambino ranks. . Federal records from the same era echo the accusation. In 1969, an FBI informant described the Gambino family in unflattering terms, reportedly calling it “full of degenerates” while also noting that it was perhaps the least feared organization in New York.
The same informant contrasted the Gambinos with the Genovese family, which he described as highly feared because nearly all of its members had to commit murder to gain admission. The reality behind the smear lay in deeply ingrained cultural traditions. Carlo Gambino, who ruled his family for decades, married his first cousin, Catherine Castellano, who was also the sister of future boss Paul Castellano. The marriage strengthened ties between two powerful Sicilian clans: Carlo’s father had already wed a Castellano sister, cementing a family web that spanned generations.
Carlo’s brother, Paolo Gambino, a captain in the same crime family, followed suit by marrying another Castellano cousin, Caterina, whose father was a sibling of both Carlo’s mother and Catherine’s father. These unions were not isolated anomalies among the Gambino elite. Frank Scalise, who briefly led the family around 1930 to 1931 and later served as Albert Anastasia’s underboss in the 1950s, also married his own first cousin, Mary. FBI files noted that Scalise’s brothers were all identified Cosa Nostra members and that the couple’s marriage, described in bureau records as incestuous, produced a child who was deaf-mute and reportedly mentally disabled.
These marital practices were rooted in southern Italy, particularly Sicily, where marrying cousins was a long-standing tradition. In regions like Calabria and Sicily around the turn of the 20th century, first-cousin marriages accounted for close to half of all unions. A study examining data from 1930 to 1964 found that cousin marriage remained common across southern Italy during that period, though such unions are now restricted in many jurisdictions, including 24 U. S.
states. Academic research has linked these practices directly to Mafia culture. One study focused on Corleone, Sicily, a town famous for its Mafia connections, examined 105 mafiosi, including the notorious Giuseppe Morello, and compared 35 of their marriages against a randomly selected control group. The findings showed that Mafia members and their wives were, on average, twice as closely related as the control group, and they were twice as likely to share third cousins or closer as common ancestors—a concept researchers term “marital consanguinity.
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The study’s authors argued that such closely knit marriages served to consolidate power and loyalty within crime dynasties, strengthening the families’ grip on their communities. They also suggested that the Catholic Church, which officially condemns Mafia membership, could undermine these power structures by withholding dispensations for consanguineous marriages involving Mafia families, thereby destabilizing the dynastic alliances that have terrorized parts of Italy for over a century. While the two studies approached the question from different angles, both pointed to the same conclusion: cousin marriage was a regular occurrence among Sicilian mobsters.
It was precisely this cultural practice that led the Genovese, led by figures like Eboli of Neapolitan background, to view the Gambinos—particularly their Sicilian members—as sexual degenerates during the heated rivalries of the 1960s.