The Apalachin Meeting: When the Mob Came to Upstate New York

A few miles off the highway near the town of Apalachin, on a fifty-three-acre estate along the south shore of the Susquehanna River, something happened on November fourteenth, nineteen fifty-seven, that changed the history of American law enforcement.

The property belonged to Joseph Barbara, a local beverage distributor who also carried a police record that included murder charges. Barbara worked under Buffalo crime boss Stefano Magaddino, and in the fall of nineteen fifty-seven, Magaddino suggested Barbara's secluded property as the site for a national summit of organized crime leaders.

The meeting had been called by Vito Genovese, who had recently engineered the murder of rival Albert Anastasia and now wanted the assembled bosses of American organized crime to formally acknowledge him as their supreme leader. Agenda items also included the future of Anastasia's territory, policy toward federal drug enforcement, and the question of whether mob families should involve themselves in the narcotics trade at all.

Around one hundred senior organized crime figures converged on the Barbara estate from across the country, including Carlo Gambino, Joseph Profaci, and bosses representing families from Tampa, Los Angeles, Kansas City, and Chicago. They arrived in expensive cars with out-of-state license plates, and that is exactly what caught the attention of the New York State Police.

Trooper Edgar Croswell had been watching Barbara for years. When he spotted the fleet of luxury vehicles descending on the country property, he quietly set up roadblocks on every road leading out. As word of the police presence spread through the estate, the country's most powerful gangsters scattered into the woods in their suits and dress shoes. More than sixty of them were detained.

The most significant casualty of the afternoon was not criminal. For decades, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had insisted there was no such thing as a national organized crime syndicate, directing bureau resources toward communists instead. The Apalachin raid made that position publicly untenable. Hoover soon created the Top Hoodlum Program to go after organized crime.