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If I Had A Hammer - Peter, Paul, and Mary

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If I Had A Hammer - Peter, Paul, and Mary

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The song that Kendra accidentally taped over the evidence incriminating Vincent's mom.

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A Mazda Protege - the  car that Vincent buys after telling his family "no more stolen cars." 

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A Mazda Protege - the  car that Vincent buys after telling his family "no more stolen cars." 

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A Porsche - The stolen car that Vincent's family originally gave him for his 16th birthday...

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A Porsche - The stolen car that Vincent's family originally gave him for his 16th birthday...

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Cuban-American Is Only Second FBI Agent In History To Be Offered Mafia Membership

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Few institutions protect their secrets as passionately - and more violently - than the Mafia. Being accepted into the inner sanctum of the mob demands from its members a blood oath of loyalty, known as "omerta."

Imagine then what it was like when a Cuban-American FBI agent infiltrated the most feared crime family in America, posing as an Italian gangster.

Now that agent, Jack Garcia, comes out from undercover for the first time and tells CBS News correspondent Armen Keteyian how he did it, and how he was able to fool the wisest of the wiseguys by delivering an acting performance that was more believable than anything Hollywood could produce.

"I always played the big role. I mean my mantra was, you know, 'Think big, be big,'" Joaquin "Jack" Garcia tells Keteyian. "And I was able to be the type of guy that never in a million years would somebody suspect that I was an agent."

Garcia may be the most unlikely law enforcement figure in history - all 390 pounds of him - whose performance was so convincing that he was offered the Mafia's highest honor: to become a "made man" in the mob.

"In the mob world, in the mob culture, that is the holy grail. For an associate to be proposed for membership into La Cosa Nostra is what these criminals aspire to do," Garcia explains. "To become a made man. The fact that they allowed an FBI agent to infiltrate their organization, and add to that the fact that I'm Cuban born playing an Italian who was able to fool them, it's an amazing insult to them."

For Garcia, his invitation to become a sworn-member of the mob capped a career working a staggering 100 major undercover cases. But none compared with "Jack Falcone," the character he created in 2002 to get inside the Gambino crime family, playing the role of an investor in a strip club that the Gambinos, and one of their ruthless leaders, Greg DePalma, were muscling in on.

"Jack Falcone entered the scene in the Bronx, New York. He was a guy who was a jewel thief, and he was a guy who was an extortionist and a hijacker. I drove a fancy car at the time. I had the Rolex Presidents watch. I had the obligatory three-carat diamond pinky. I had the cross," Garcia remembers. "Then of, course, the suits. All gotta be Italian. You gotta get your Brionis, you gotta get your Zegna. Look, you got my size. There aren't too many Zegnas or Brionis in my size. It's this package that you wanna create. You don't play the role of this big money launderer, and then show up in a Yugo."

Garcia was the complete package: more than 20 years experience as an FBI agent, combined with a style and charm that mobsters could not resist. "I was this big guy with a lot of cash who everybody wanted to be around. I would disarm the person by always being nice. 'Hey, you're looking great today. Where did you get those nice threads, man? Look at you. You look like a million dollars.' 'Oh yeah, I look good. Oh yeah, I love those blue shoes.' Everybody loves a happy guy," he says.

New York FBI agent Nat Parisi handpicked Garcia for the job, becoming his "handler" in the case, his sole lifeline to the outside world during the two and a half year investigation. "When he enters a room full of wise guys, they're all gonna want to know, who is that man?" Parisi says.

Asked how he trains a Cuban-American to become an Italian-American and pass the "wiseguy test," Parisi tells Keteyian, "A lot of meetings with Big Jack. I'm an Italian-American and I shared with Jack my experiences growing up, but he and I were convinced that he could pull it off."

Garcia says they came up with a school that they called "mob school," a form of higher education that included, of all things, a trip to the grocery store, where Garcia learned one of the mob's golden rules: never carry your cash in a wallet. Wrap it in a rubber band, pulled from a head of broccoli.

"You would take this off, as you can see. And then you would just wrap it up, and there you are. This is the way you operated with your money. Everybody just simply carries a wad of cash," Garcia explains, demonstrating how to bundle bills with a broccoli band. "That was one of those little things that could be big things down the line if you didn't prepare right for your role. Because unlike, like I said, 'The Sopranos' were multiple takes. There was only one take. And that was it. And it had to be a good one."

The training also required Garcia to spend countless hours in front of the television, watching food programs for example.

"You pick up little phrases there, you know, 'Tuto bene,' because a lot of conversations all dealt with 'Eh, how's your food? How's your Pasta e fagioli?' 'Eh, it's good, you could add a little more of this a little bit of that.' And it was always like, everyone's a food critic in the mob. 'Forget about this. Go down the block this guy makes it better than this guy,'" Garcia says. "Being Cuban, I get caught up sometimes. Like I would say maniccoti. It's not manicotti, it's 'manigot.' You know, Parmigiano-Reggiano. I would, could make a mistake and say, yeah, give me a ham san... - give me some ham. Well, there's no ham. You know, Italians don't say ham. It's prosciut, you know."

Garcia says a single misstep or mispronunciation could set off alarm bells. "And I couldn't afford having alarm bells going off. I wanted things to constantly be without any suspicion."

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Few institutions protect their secrets as passionately - and more violently - than the Mafia. Being accepted into the inner sanctum of the mob demands from its members a blood oath of loyalty, known as "omerta." Imagine then what it was like when a Cuban-American FBI agent infiltrated the most feared crime family in America, posing as an Italian gangster.

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Are FBI special agents permitted to install wiretaps at their own discretion?

No. Wiretapping is one of the FBI’s most sensitive techniques and is strictly controlled by federal statutes. It is used infrequently and only to combat terrorism and the most serious crimes. Title 18, U.S. Code, Section 2516, contains the protocol requiring all law enforcement officers to establish probable cause that the wiretaps may provide evidence of a felony violation of federal law. After determining if a sufficient showing of probable cause has been made, impartial federal judges approve or disapprove wiretaps. The approving judge then must continue to monitor how the wiretap is being conducted. Wiretapping without meeting these stringent requirements and obtaining the necessary court orders is a serious felony under the law.

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How accurately is the FBI portrayed in books, television shows, and motion pictures?
Any author, television script writer, or producer may consult with the FBI about closed cases or our operations, services, or history. However, there is no requirement that they do so, and the FBI does not edit or approve their work. Some authors, television programs, or motion picture producers offer reasonably accurate presentations of our responsibilities, investigations, and procedures in their story lines, while others present their own interpretations or introduce fictional events, persons, or places for dramatic effect. (Taken from the FBI's FAQ found at http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/faqs

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The FBI has dual responsibilities as a law enforcement and intelligence agency. Learn about our vision, mission, priorities, core values, budget, and more.

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The History of the American Mob (in photos) 

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The History of the American Mob (in photos) 

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The History of the American Mob: A Chronology

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A timeline in photos of the history of the American Mob

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Real-life "made guys" reveal the secret initiation ceremony for officially joining a mafia family.

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Real-life "made guys" reveal the secret initiation ceremony for officially joining a mafia family.

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Contents

1. The Mafia on the Rise

2. Declaring War on the Mafia, The 1950s & 1960s

3. Taking Down the Mafia, The 1970s & Beyond

Based in Italy and the U.S., the Mafia is a network of organized-crime groups active in a range of underworld ventures, from drug trafficking to murder. The Mafia evolved over centuries in Sicily, an island off the southern tip of Italy that until 1861 was ruled by a line of foreign invaders. Sicilians banded into groups to protect themselves; by the 19th century, some of these groups emerged as private armies that extorted protection money from landowners and evolved into the criminal enterprise known today as the Sicilian Mafia. The American Mafia, a separate entity, rose to power in the Prohibition era of the 1920s and soon flourished. By the late 20th century, however, anti-racketeering laws and other techniques brought down high-ranking mobsters both in Italy and the United States. By the early 21st century, the Mafia had been weakened but it still has not been driven out of business.

The Mafia on the Rise

By the later part of the 19th century in Sicily, Italy, criminal gangs who had become known as the Mafia flourished by using violence and intimidation to extract protection money from landowners and merchants. By the 1920s, the Sicilian Mafia was facing a challenge from Prime Minister Benito Mussolini (1883-1945), who came to power in 1922. Mussolini viewed the Mafia as a threat to his Fascist regime and launched a brutal crackdown in which more than a thousand suspected Mafiosi were convicted and thrown in prison. (Some Italian mobsters escaped to the United States, where they became involved in the bootleg liquor business and the burgeoning American Mafia.) Following World War II, the Mafia rose again as mob-backed building companies worked to dominate the 1950s construction boom in Sicily.

Did you know? Al Capone, head of organized crime in Chicago in the 1920s and involved in everything from illegal gambling to murder, was ultimately brought down by a 1931 conviction for income-tax evasion. Capone emerged from prison in 1939, too sick to return to his criminal life. He died in 1947 at age 48.

In the United States, the Mafia developed as a separate entity during the Prohibition era of the 1920s, as Italian-American neighborhood gangs morphed into sophisticated criminal enterprises through their success in the illicit liquor trade. In 1931, mobster Lucky Luciano (1897-1962) masterminded the establishment of the Commission, which would serve as a central governing body for the more than 20 Italian-American crime groups, or families, then operating in the United States.

After Prohibition was repealed in 1933, the American Mafia moved beyond bootlegging and entrenched itself in a range of illegal ventures, from drug trafficking to loan-sharking, while also infiltrating labor unions and legitimate businesses such as construction, waterfront commerce and the New York garment industry. By the mid-20th century, there were 24 known crime families operating in cities across the country, comprised of some 5,000 "made," or inducted, members and thousands of associates. America's capital of organized crime was New York City, which had five major Mafia families. Even though the illegal activities of these crime families were known to law-enforcement agencies, they were ineffectual at stopping the Mafia's growth, in part because mobsters frequently paid off public officials and business leaders and bribed or intimidated witnesses and juries.

Declaring War on the Mafia, The 1950s & 1960s

In the early 1950s, Estes Kefauver (1903-1963), a U.S. senator from Tennessee, launched an investigation into organized crime and held televised public hearings that represented the first time any part of the federal government publicly recognized the existence of the American Mafia. However, citing a lack of specific evidence, the FBI and other law-enforcement agencies, along with Congress, failed to take any substantial action. Then, in 1957, police in the small upstate New York town of Apalachin raided a gathering of more than 60 mobsters from around the country. In the aftermath of the raid, the government could no longer ignore the Mafia's existence or insist that Italian-American crime gangs operated only on a local level.

In the early 1960s, U.S. Attorney Robert Kennedy (1925-1968) stepped up government efforts to fight organized crime and corruption in labor unions. One of Kennedy's top targets was Jimmy Hoffa (1913-1975), the head of the million-plus-member Teamsters union. Kennedy also pressured FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, who had been slow to pursue the Mafia, to intensify his agency's efforts against mobsters. The FBI, whose investigators up to that time had scant knowledge about the Mafia's operations, began an electronic spying program that netted valuable information. Another important development came in 1963, when convicted New York mobster Joseph Valachi broke the Mafia's sacred code of silence, or omerta, and became a government informant, revealing and confirming details about the Mafia's structure and customs for the first time.

Taking Down the Mafia, The 1970s & Beyond

Starting in the later part of the 20th century, the government began winning its war against the Mafia. In 1970, Congress passed the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act, which proved to be one of the most powerful tools used to take down mobsters, as it allowed the government to "attack criminal enterprises on a broad front, stripping them of their leadership and sources of both illicit and legitimate revenue in one massive prosecution," according to a 1992 report in Congressional Quarterly. During the 1980s and 1990s, RICO laws were used to convict high-ranking mobsters, who in the past had been able to avoid prosecution. (Similar laws were effective in producing mass convictions in Italy during this time.) Some Mafiosi, faced with long prison sentences, opted to testify against fellow mobsters in exchange for a place in the witness-protection program. Additionally, Mafia membership in the U.S. declined as insular Italian-American neighborhoods, once a traditional recruiting ground for mobsters, underwent demographic shifts and became more assimilated into society.

By the early 21st century, the American Mafia was a shadow of its former self and the FBI had begun cutting resources devoted to investigating organized crime. While crime families in New York and Chicago, the longstanding centers of Mafia activity, had been battered but not driven out of business, many crime clans around the rest of the U.S. were in disarray or on the verge of extinction, according to New York Times journalist and organized crime researcher Selwyn Raab. In Italy, law-enforcement agencies continued to make progress against organized crime as well. However, the Mafia remains active there and in the United States, where it continues to be involved in some of its traditional activities, including loan-sharking and illegal gambling. At the same time, its hold on labor unions and industries such as construction has been weakened but not eliminated. Contributing to the Mafia's ongoing survival may be the fact that following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on America, significant organized-crime resources were shifted to counter-terrorism work.

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The Mafia on the Rise Declaring War on the Mafia, The 1950s & 1960s Taking Down the Mafia, The 1970s & Beyond Based in Italy and the U.S., the Mafia is a network of organized-crime groups active in a range of underworld ventures, from drug trafficking to murder.

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The Mafia in Popular Culture - Facts & Summary - HISTORY.com

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Find out more about the history of The Mafia in Popular Culture, including videos, interesting articles, pictures, historical features and more. Get all the facts on HISTORY.com

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Origins of the Mafia Exclusive Videos & Features - HISTORY.com

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Check out exclusive Origins of the Mafia videos and features. Browse the latest Origins of the Mafia videos and more on HISTORY.com.