Early underworld bosses in Tampa During the early 1920s,
Charlie Wall created an organized crime syndicate in Tampa, where he controlled a large number of illegal gambling rackets and corrupted many Tampa government officials through bribery. Wall controlled his organization from the Tampa neighborhood of
Ybor City, and employed Italians, Cubans and men of other ethnicities in his organization. His only rival for criminal rackets in the
Tampa Bay area was Italian Mafia boss
Ignacio Antinori. Ignacio Antinori, a
Sicilian-born immigrant, became a well-known drug kingpin and the Italian crime boss during the late 1920s. But there was also a smaller independent Italian gang led by
Santo Trafficante Sr. that was operating in the Tampa area. Trafficante had lived in Tampa since the age of 18, and had already set up
Bolita games throughout the city and was becoming a powerful mobster. Antinori took notice of Santo Trafficante and invited him into his organization and together they expanded the Bolita games across the state of Florida. By the 1930s, Antinori and Wall were in a bloody decade-long war, which would later be known as "Era of Blood". On March 8, 1938, Wall's closest associate,
Evaristo "Tito" Rubio, was shot on his porch. The war between the two continued on for years, until October 23, 1940, when Ignacio Antinori was shot and killed by a shotgun blast to the head at the Palm Garden Inn in Tampa. In 1943, Antinori's two sons, Paul and Joseph, were convicted in Kansas City for drug dealing and sentenced to four years in prison finally ending the decade long war. During the late 1940s, Trafficante Sr. came under constant police surveillance and attempted to avoid the unwanted attention by making Salvatore "Red" Italiano his acting boss. In 1950, Senator
Kefauver began an investigation into organized crime, founding what would become known as the
Kefauver Committee. The Committee called on Tampa mobster Charlie Wall to testify about organized crime in Tampa and Florida as a whole. To avoid testifying, both Trafficante Sr. and his son fled to
Cuba. Trafficante Sr. had always wanted to enlarge his illegal activities in Cuba and dispatched his son, Santo Jr., to
Havana in 1946 to help operate a mob-owned
casino. The Tampa mob made a considerable amount of money in Cuba, but never achieved its ambition of making the island part of its territory. After the hearings ended, the Trafficante's returned to Tampa to find out that Italiano had fled to Mexico, leaving Jimmy Lumia the biggest mobster in the city. Santo Sr. had Lumia killed after finding out that Lumia had disparaged him while he was in Cuba. With Lumia eliminated, Trafficante was once again the primary organized crime figure in Tampa. In 1953 Santo Jr. survived a shooting. The family suspected the perpetrator was Charlie Wall and had him killed in 1955. Trafficante remained the boss of Tampa until he died of natural causes in 1954.
Trafficante Jr. era , 1955
Santo Trafficante Jr. was born in the United States on November 15, 1914, as one of five sons of Mafia boss Santo Trafficante. Santo Jr. succeeded his father as the boss of Tampa upon his death. Despite numerous unrealized ambitions, he was regarded as one of the most powerful mob bosses of the
American Mafia and ruled his family with an iron fist. Trafficante Jr. had known Lucchese since the 1940s, when his father and Lucchese had trained him in the Mafia traditions. Santo Jr. was deeply involved in the
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) efforts to involve the underworld in assassination attempts on Cuban head of state
Fidel Castro. Santo Jr. never spent a day in jail, and he died of natural causes in March 1987. As the new boss LoScalzo maintained control of criminal interests in illegal
gambling,
prostitution,
narcotics,
union racketeering,
hijacking and
fencing stolen goods. He also controlled a few bars, lounges, restaurants, night clubs and liquor stores across Florida. Loscalzo maintained ties to Mafia families in
California,
New Jersey, and
New York as well as being connected to the
Sicilian Mafia. LoScalzo sought to increase the already close ties between his family and the
New Orleans crime family in Louisiana. He used
Joseph Campisi of Dallas, who was close with both families, to this end, and was seen in the company of New Orleans underboss
Joseph Marcello on multiple occasions. As boss LoScalzo inducted a group of new members that included Joseph DiGerlando, James J. Valenti and Salvatore Carollo which would focus on white-collar fraud. On July 1, 1989, LoScalzo was indicted on racketeering charges, including grand theft. The charges were later dropped and then reinstated. LoScalzo pleaded
no contest on October 7, 1997, and received three months of probation. In 1992, LoScalzo was arrested at the
Tampa International Airport for carrying a loaded .38-caliber pistol in his briefcase after it was detected by an X-ray scanner. He later convicted in 1999 and was sentenced to 60 days in prison. Raffa, the leader of the family’s Miami faction, committed suicide on November 16, 2000. On August 5, 2008, the Tampa and New York FBI indicted
John A. "Junior" Gotti, along with John A. Burke, James V. Cadicamo, David D'Arpino, Michael D. Finnerty and Guy T. Peden on charges of racketeering,
kidnapping, conspiracy to commit murder and
drug trafficking. The indictment stated that Gotti Jr. along with the other men had been involved in various criminal activities in Tampa and New York during the early 2000s. == Historical leadership ==