Un-gangster-like mafiosi and their function in Mafia families

The Mafia is not just the part we can see.

Two Los Angeles Mafia members have been singled out as being among the least “gangster-like” of gangsters in Mafia history. Tommy Palermo (1903-1983) and his brother-in-law John Cascio (1919-1996) were not as criminally active as their colleagues, and yet they embodied essential values of the secret fraternity. By understanding the functions Palermo and Cascio performed for the Los Angeles Family, we can better understand the deep organization of the Mafia which has held it together for generations.

The Mafia has two forms of currency: trust and violence. Individual mafiosi excel in one or the other, and the most successful mafiosi employ them synergistically. But even the lowest gangster has to be capable of both inspiring trust and causing violence. An untrustworthy person in any profession soon runs out of people who will employ him or work with him. But it was also true that a gangster would never amount to anything if his colleagues didn’t fear him. He couldn’t lead killers or have their confidence without doing what they did, endangering his soul and his freedom in the name of the Family.

The Mafia’s values select for a particular psychological profile, of a man who can walk the line between sociopathic violence and normal psychology. He has to be able to dehumanize his enemy so he can kill him without becoming, in his own view, a bad man. The mafioso must not become a bad man—this is intolerable, because he must also be who he is to his family and community: a husband, father, and leader. He doesn’t call himself a criminal; he considers himself part of an Honorable Society. Therefore, the mafioso has to resolve the moral conflict of dehumanization with cultish precision: who is in his clan and who is out. 

People in the mafioso’s world occupy a Venn diagram with no overlap between sets. Members are entitled to due process when accused, but that privilege is not extended to everyone. Ironically, this black and white view of insiders and outsiders is what allows the mentee to murder his patron, and the father, his son. In the mafioso’s belief system, the victim’s actions took him outside the protected circle of membership; now an outsider, he could be dispassionately destroyed.

Why trust and violence? Why not just the latter? Violence is an expensive tool. It destroys, and the chasms cannot always be healed. Trust is cheaper and longer lasting. It’s why mafiosi prefer to work with their close kin and if necessary, to cement the ties to a really profitable and long-term criminal relationship with marriage.

Friendships, business contacts, neighbors, in-laws, cousins—all these relationships are the veins and arteries in an uncentralized network of every kind of activity in southern Italy. Known as manutengolismo, or clientelism, it is crucial to success for southern Italians to have friends who are more powerful, who have different kinds of social contacts, and are able to get things done that they cannot. 

As a matter of long tradition and pragmatism, this huge network of patrons and clients do favors for one another: not in a tit-for-tat exchange, but as an expression of their lifetime relationship. These networks are the strongest social force, stronger than law, safer than banks for storing, building, and borrowing against goodwill. 

John Cascio owned a winery where the Los Angeles Mafia held some of its meetings and initiations. His brother-in-law, Antonino “Tommy” Palermo, was the Family’s consigliere in the early 1970s. Nick Licata was the boss and it seemed as though the position would pass seamlessly to his underboss, Salvatore “Charlie Dip” Dippolito. But both men died in 1974 from natural causes. Power changed hands a couple of times before landing with Jimmy Fratianno and Louis Tom Dragna.

Our source for much of this chapter of Los Angeles Mafia history is Fratianno. The turncoat who was one of the first people banned by the Nevada Gaming Commission, he co-led the Family with one of Jack’s nephews from 1975 until he was implicated in a murder in 1977 and turned state’s witness. Fratianno claimed that he’d never heard of Tommy Palermo, who was the consigliere before Bompensiero, but he considered him a nepotism placement: a no-show. 

Fratianno didn’t have close family ties linking him to the Mafia Family he once led. If he had, he might have better understood the importance of those relationships in maintaining the organization’s core activities, values, and membership. What Fratianno disregarded as damaging bias—nepotism—is a feature of the Mafia, not a bug.

Tommy Palermo and John Cascio had close family in Louisiana, Texas, and Sicily who were powerful gangsters. (Patreon Members can read about some of them in a post scheduled for 17 May 2025. Become a Member to have the story of my Louisiana cousins sent to you as soon as it is published.) 

It made them good friends to have when you needed to bring in a stranger for a job, or hide someone away. Either of them had a dozen ways to get a private message through their family networks to important mafiosi. Through blood and marriage, they connected pools of organized criminals who might collaborate, and wouldn’t otherwise know or trust one another. They were steeped in the same values and relationships as their more visible peers: their legitimacy and importance to the continuity of the organization would have been felt and appreciated by anyone who could see the big picture, not just their selfish interests. Even those without vision, who simply belonged to the southern Italian culture, would naturally understand the benefits of friends like John and Tommy. You didn’t just throw away connectors like them, because you didn’t think they kicked enough money up to the boss this quarter. It damages trust throughout the network when friendships are no longer respected. What made friends like these irreplaceable was that when everything else was burned to the ground, they were the most likely to still be there afterward.

In Fratianno’s world, fortunes rose and fell with stunning precipitancy. People killed and were murdered, enterprises were crushed. But the Mafia endures. 

John Cascio is my second cousin, twice removed, through the Cascio line. Giuseppe Morello (1867-1930), the boss of bosses in New York City, is John’s first cousin, once removed. John has paternal aunts and an uncle who went to live with the Morello-Terranova family when they emigrated. My first post to Mafia Genealogy was about my family’s connection through marriage to John Cascio’s aunts and uncles, and to Morello. John’s uncle Giuseppe married my twice-great aunt Biagia Cascio: they were first cousins who stayed in Corleone and produced olive oil while most of their siblings emigrated to New York City.

The Mafia’s boss in Corleone, half a century later, was Dr. Michele Navarra (1905-1958), John Cascio’s second cousin. John’s uncle by marriage, Pietro Majuri, and two of Pietro’s sons—John’s cousins—were loyalists of Dr. Navarra in the 1950s war with Luciano Leggio.

John Cascio left Sicily as a young man in 1924 and went to Los Angeles. His wife, Elizabeth Palermo, was born in Brazos, Texas, and her mother’s name was Rizzotto. One of the witnesses at their wedding in 1946 was Frank P. Dragna, the son of Jack Dragna. This trio of clues—the son of a Los Angeles Mafia boss, Bryan being a Corleone Mafia family stronghold in Texas, and Rizzotto a surname in the Dragna family—suggested Elizabeth was related somehow to Jack Dragna. However, they are only distantly related, and not through the Rizzotto line. 

Elizabeth’s mother, Rosalia Rizzotto, was also born in Bryan, the daughter of a couple from Roccamena. Elizabeth’s father, Leoluca Palermo’s family was from Corleone. Rosalia and Leoluca Palermo’s oldest child, Elizabeth’s brother, was named Antonino, after his paternal grandfather, in 1903, but he came to be called Tommy.

There are rumored first cousin relationships among Tommy Palermo, Joe Civello, and Frank DeSimone. The FBI thought Palermo and DeSimone were cousins, even though their grandparents are from four different comuni. None of them are first cousins, but there is a seed of truth in the rumor. Palermo’s wife, Mary Lucy Benedetto, and Joe Civello are first cousins, and Benedetto and Civello are both second cousins of Frank DeSimone. 

Palermo and Cascio didn’t take the kind of visible roles that would have brought attention to them in Los Angeles. That low profile was part of their power. They provided essential services and were important connectors, through their close kinship ties, to the Mafia in other cities. Not everyone was positioned to understand that.

Criminal networks tend to emerge ad hoc rather than be constructed, like a corporation or a military, and they’re more likely to use people who aren’t technically part of the organization, like family members and the all-encompassing “associates.” All organizations depend upon long-term, trusting bonds to operate efficiently, and in the Mediterranean culture where the Mafia was born, family naturally emerged as a built-in way for the criminal brotherhood to draw upon the intimate, sacred, lifetime relationships of its members to achieve its goals. It’s why I always say that the family is at the heart of the Mafia.