It is the summer of 1987 in the Bronx and a man named Vic Amuso is about to become the most powerful Italian mobster in the borough. The Lucchese crime family with roots stretching back to the 1920s when Gaetano Reina ran ice distribution rackets from East Harlem controls an empire that few outsiders can even see.
Their territory runs from the Pelham Bay neighborhood in the Northeast Bronx all the way through Pelham Parkway, Morris Park, and Arthur Avenue. That sloping stretch of Italian restaurants and butcher shops that people call the real Little Italy of New York. The Luccheses do not deal in headlines.
They deal in video poker machines installed in the back rooms of bars, in bookmaking operations that function with the regularity of a payroll office, in construction kickbacks so deep inside the industry that federal prosecutors would spend a decade unraveling them. Businessmen in Pelham Bay pay tribute without being asked twice.
Nobody in the neighborhood needs to wonder who runs things. Everyone already knows. But something is beginning to rot inside the walls. To understand how a group of Albanian immigrants from a country most Americans couldn’t locate on a map ended up taking the Bronx gambling trade away from one of the most entrenched crime families in American history, you first have to understand what happened to the Luccheses in the decade before those Albanians arrived.
The beginning of the end started in February 1985 when the federal government indicted the bosses of all five New York crime families simultaneously in what became known as the Mafia Commission Trial. Lucchese boss Anthony Corallo, underboss Salvatore Santoro, and consigliere Christopher Furnari were all swept up in the case together.
Federal prosecutors used FBI bugs planted inside Corallo’s own Jaguar sedan to capture him discussing murders, labor racketeering, and construction bid rigging on tape. The case was built by a young Rudolph Giuliani, who was then the United States Attorney for the Southern District is on District of New York.
And it was designed to do one thing, decapitate Italian organized crime in America in a single coordinated blow. By 1986, the verdicts were in. Corallo got 100 years. The Lucchese family’s entire top leadership was gone, imprisoned for the rest of their natural lives. If you’re enjoying this, hit subscribe.
We cover organized crime history every week, and your subscription is what keeps us making these videos. What came next inside the Luccheses was almost as destructive as the prosecution itself. New boss Vic Amuso and his underboss Anthony Casso took over the family and immediately launched a paranoid purge of anyone they suspected of cooperating with federal investigators.
Amuso and Casso ordered hit after hit on their own members. A soldier named Peter Chiodo survived 12 gunshot wounds in a 1991 assassination attempt and then flipped. Acting boss Alphonse D’Arco flipped in 1991 after fearing he was next on the kill list. D’Arco would go on to testify in over a dozen federal trials detailing more than 30 murders he had personal knowledge of.
Amuso himself was arrested in 1991 and sentenced to life in 1992. By the time the smoke cleared, the Lucchese family had been hollowed out from the inside by its own leaders and from the outside by federal simultaneously. By the early 1990s, the family that once ran the Bronx like a private fiefdom had roughly 80 soldiers left and a boss running things from a prison cell.
That vacuum left a lot of uncollected money sitting on tables in the back rooms of bars across the Bronx. And a man named Alex Rudaj was paying very close attention. Rudaj was born in Ulcinj, Montenegro from an ethnic Albanian family. He arrived in the United States in 1987, the same year Vic Amuso took over the Luccheses and settled in Westchester County just north of the Bronx.
He was not, on paper, what you would picture when you imagine an organized crime boss. No inherited title. No American Mafia family to sponsor him. No decades-old reputation on the streets. What he had instead was something the old guard Italian bosses had stopped valuing. A willingness to do whatever was necessary without hesitation and without asking anyone’s permission first.
By the early 1990s, Albanians had been arriving in the Bronx in significant waves for almost three decades. The first arrivals came in the 1960s and 1970s, filling the neighborhoods that Jewish and Italian families were leaving behind. They settled around Pelham Parkway, Morris Park, and Belmont.
Lydig Avenue in Morris Park became so thoroughly Albanian that locals started calling it Little Albania. Then, in 1991, Albania’s communist government collapsed after nearly five decades of isolationist rule under Enver Hoxha. The political and economic chaos that followed sent another massive wave of Albanians fleeing west.
Six years later, in 1997, a catastrophic pyramid scheme scam consumed two-thirds of the Albanian population’s savings, triggered nation-wide rioting that killed 2,000 people and pushed even more immigrants toward New York. By the time Rudaj was building his organization in the early 1990s, the Bronx had one of the largest Albanian-American communities anywhere in the United States, and many of those men were young, desperate, and willing to work for someone who could offer them a way up.
Rudaj saw the same thing that the Colombian cartels had seen in Washington Heights a decade earlier. A desperate immigrant community with tight ethnic bonds that federal informants couldn’t easily penetrate, sitting in a city where the old power structure was crumbling. He called his organization the Corporation.
The Corporation started in Westchester County, running illegal gambling operations in small Albanian and Italian enclaves where the Luccheses had once collected tribute without anyone questioning the arrangement. Rudaj partnered with a man named Nardino Collotti, an Italian-American from the Bronx who had connections to the Gambino family through a soldier named Phil Loscalzo.
The Gambino connection gave the Corporation a thin layer of protection in the early years, a kind of borrowed credibility while they were still too small to defend themselves. But when Loscalzo died, the promised territory and Gambino sponsorship evaporated. Rudaj and Collotti were left out in the cold.
What they did next defined everything that followed. Instead of looking for another Italian sponsor, they decided they didn’t need one at all. Throughout the 1990s, the Corporation expanded steadily. Video poker machines appeared in the Bronx bars that had previously paid the Luccheses. Gambling parlors in the Albanian neighborhoods of Morris Park and Arthur Avenue shifted their tribute payments from Italian collectors to Albanian ones.
Anyone who pushed back dealt with Rudaj’s crew directly, and Rudaj’s crew was not interested in negotiation as a first step. In 1996, Rudaj personally opened fire on a rival crime figure named Guy Peduto during a high-speed chase through the Bronx, hanging out the sunroof of a moving car to shoot at a vehicle trying to flee him.
This is not, generally speaking, how men who are afraid of consequences behave. Subscribe to the channel if you are not already. We are building something here, and every subscriber makes it possible to keep going. By the late 1990s, the corporation had muscle, territory, and a reputation in the Bronx that the Luccheses and Gambinos had to acknowledge whether they wanted to or not.
Rudaj and his crew were showing up at places where Italian mobsters had long expected deference, and demanding it themselves instead. There is a story, confirmed in federal court testimony, that Rudaj once arrived at Rao’s, the impossibly exclusive East Harlem Italian restaurant, where John Gotti had famously held court, with 20 men, and demanded Gotti’s old table.
The staff gave it to him. Then came the summer of 2001, and everything accelerated. The Lucchese family had, for decades, operated a lucrative gambling network through Greek associates in Astoria, Queens. The arrangement was straightforward. The Greek-American Valenzas’ organization ran the actual gambling parlors and social clubs in the Astoria neighborhood, and the Luccheses collected a percentage of the profits in exchange for protection and commission approval. It worked for years. Then,
Spiro Valenzas, the Greek cruise leader, was convicted of murder and sentenced to over 20 years in 1992. Without their primary operator, the Greek network weakened, and the gambling operations became thinner and more vulnerable. The Luccheses still collected, but their ability to protect the operation had diminished considerably.
In June 2001, Alex Rudaj and over a dozen members of the Corporation walked into a Lucchese-affiliated gambling parlor in Astoria with weapons showing. They did not ask for a meeting. They did not request a sit-down. They informed the Greek operators that the Corporation was now running gambling in Astoria, installed their own machines, and started collecting the money that had previously gone to the Lucchese family.
The Luccheses, with their leadership depleted and their street soldiers under continuous federal surveillance, could not mount an effective response. Then came August 3rd, 2001. A Greek social club called Soccer Fever at in Astoria, Queens, was one of the remaining Lucchese-linked gambling operations in the area.
Rudaj and at least six armed men entered the club that morning. They beat one of the Greek associates running the operation in the head with a pistol. They chased everyone else out of the building. Then they threatened to demolish the entire structure if anyone tried to come back and reclaim it. The message was not subtle.
The Lucchese family’s gambling operations in Astoria, Queens, were finished. This is where the story gets to a confrontation that sounds like something written for a movie. Arnold Squitieri, the acting boss of the Gambino crime family, had been watching the Corporation’s expansion with growing alarm. Squitieri was a veteran of the New York underworld, a former heroin smuggler who had survived multiple RICO investigations and clawed his way to the top of one of the most powerful criminal organizations in the country.
He was not the kind of man who tolerated being ignored. And the Corporation, by the summer of 2001, was very publicly ignoring every traditional boundary the five families had established over half a century. Squitieri called a sit-down. The meeting took place at a gas station in a rest area along the New Jersey Turnpike because apparently nobody thought through the logistics of hosting a tension-filled mob meeting surrounded by thousands of gallons of flammable fuel.
Squitieri brought 20 armed Gambino soldiers with him. Alex Rudaj brought six men. By any rational calculation, the Albanians were walking into something they could not win. Squiteri told Rudaj directly that the expansion was over, that the corporation could keep what it had already taken, but could not move further into five families territory.
Rudaj’s response, according to undercover FBI agent Joaquin Garcia, who had infiltrated the Gambino family and was present for accounts of this meeting, was to have his crew pull their weapons. 20 Gambino soldiers pulled theirs. 30 men in a gas station in New Jersey, all pointing guns at each other. And then the Albanians, outnumbered more than three to one, told the Gambino family that if anyone fired a shot, they would blow up the entire gas station with everyone inside it.
The sit-down ended. Both sides walked away. Think about what that moment actually means. The Gambino family, at that point, still one of the most feared criminal organizations in the world, had called a meeting specifically to tell a small Albanian crew to stop expanding. And the Albanian crew responded by threatening mutual destruction rather than backing down.
The five families had not encountered that kind of response from anyone in living memory. This is the kind of story we cover every week on this channel. If you haven’t subscribed yet, now is the time. Hit the subscribe button and the notification bell so you don’t miss what comes next.
The corporation spent the next 3 years consolidating what it had seized. Gambling operations across the Bronx, Astoria, Westchester, and into Port Chester and Mount Vernon all flowed tribute to Rudaj. Extortion rackets targeting Albanian owned businesses in Morris Park, Arthur Avenue, and Pelham Parkway expanded alongside the gambling income.
Bar owners who refused to install Corporation video poker machines were beaten. A bar owner named Salvatore Missale in Mount Vernon had his ear sliced off by a Corporation member named Lamaj after he refused to hand over the keys to his establishment. Federal investigators monitoring the Corporation during this period noted that the organization had effectively replaced the Lucchese family as the dominant criminal power across a significant portion of the Bronx and adjacent territories.
In October 2004, the FBI and the Manhattan US Attorney’s Office moved in. Alex Rudaj and 21 other members of the Corporation were arrested in a coordinated sweep. Most were native Albanians or first generation Albanian Americans. During the bail hearing, Assistant US Attorney Timothy Trainer stated plainly what the government had concluded.
The Albanian mob had taken over gambling operations from the Lucchese family. It was the first federal racketeering case in United States history brought against an Albanian American organized crime enterprise. After trial, six top leaders of the Corporation were convicted. 10 more pleaded guilty. On June the 16th, 2006, Alex Rudaj, then 38 years old, was sentenced to 27 years in federal prison for racketeering, extortion, and gambling offenses.
Prosecutors, journalists, and federal law enforcement agents covering the case all reached the same conclusion. They called the Rudaj organization the sixth family of New York. The 2001 campaign was not a traditional mob war. There were no bodies piling up in the streets. There were no public shootouts between rival crews the way there had been during the Colombo family wars of the early 1990s.
What it was, instead, was something more precise. A weakened institution that had blurred its own leadership through paranoia, lost its top figures to federal prosecution, and found itself unable to project force on its home turf, had created a gap that a younger, hungrier, and profoundly fearless organization was ready to fill.
The Albanians did not ask for permission. They moved into the space the Luccheses could no longer defend, and they held it until the federal government came for them, too. Pelham Parkway and Morris Park today still have an Albanian commercial presence. Lydig Avenue is still called Little Albania by people who know the neighborhood.
The gambling parlors are gone, or at least the ones operating under Rudaj’s name are. But the men who run the streets of the Bronx’s eastern neighborhoods today understand something that the old Lucchese Capos learned too late. The rules of the commission only apply to people who agree to follow them.
Alex Rudaj is currently serving his sentence in federal prison. The Lucchese family still nominally controlled by boss Vic Amuso from inside a federal facility has never fully reclaimed the territory it lost to the corporation in 2001. That story is not over. Not even close. If you made it this far, you already know this channel is worth your time.
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