January 19th, 1981. 4:00 a.m. South Street, Lower Manhattan. The temperature is 22° and the East River wind cuts through wool coats like a knife. FBI agents in unmarked sedans line the cobblestones outside the Fulton Fish Market. Inside, under buzzing fluorescent lights, Carmine Romano is checking unloading manifests when the doors slam open.
43 federal agents pour in. Boots on wet concrete, fish guts under their heels. Romano doesn’t run. He doesn’t even look surprised. He sets down his clipboard, lights a cigarette, and waits for the handcuffs. By sunrise, he’s in federal lockup. By noon, the indictment is unsealed. 23 counts. RICO. The first time in American history, federal prosecutors use the racketeering statute to seize an entire industry.
This wasn’t just another mob bust. Carmine Romano was the gatekeeper of every wholesale fish transaction in the United States. Every shrimp eaten in Kansas. Every flounder served in Chicago. Every lobster on a Beverly Hills plate if it swam and it ended up on an American table. The Genevese crime family took a piece of it.
And they had been doing it since 1923. This is the story of how one Manhattan dock, four city blocks of slime soaked pavement, became the longest running protection racket in the history of organized crime. 58 years of uninterrupted control. Five generations of capos, one murder that started it all, and one cold January morning when the federal government finally pulled the plug.
But here’s what the history books leave out. The Fulton Fish Market wasn’t taken by force. The mob didn’t shoot its way in. They were invited by the union, by the dealers, by the fishermen themselves. And once they were inside, nobody, not the NYPD, not the FBI, not even the United States Attorney’s Office, could pry them loose for almost six decades.
To understand how this happened, you have to go back to the docks of the Lower East Side at the turn of the 20th century. The Fulton Fish Market had been operating since 1822. Sitting right where South Street meets the East River, a sprawling open air bazaar where fishermen from Long Island, New Jersey, and as far as North Carolina hauled in catches before dawn.
By 1900, it was the largest seafood distribution center in the Western Hemisphere. 300 million pounds of fish passed through it every year, and every pound of it required muscle to unload. ice to preserve and trucks to move. That muscle came from a young Sicilian-born hustler named Joseph Lanza.
They called him socks. Nobody remembers exactly why. Some say it was because he wore expensive silk hosery in an era when most duck workers couldn’t afford shoes. Others say it was because he socked people. Both versions are probably true. Lanza was born in 1904 in Polmo, came through Ellis Island as a child, and by the time he was 19, he was running the most feared crew on the Fulton waterfront.
Sox Lanza wasn’t a flashy gangster. He wasn’t a killer in the Murder Incorporated tradition. He was something rarer, a businessman who happened to carry a gun. By 1923, at the age of 19, he took control of United Seafood Workers Local 359, the union representing every loader, lumper, and icehauler at the market.
He didn’t take it through an election. He took it the way the mob always took unions. He showed up at the meeting hall with 12 men and a message. The previous business agent didn’t argue. He just stopped coming to work. For the next 10 years, Lanza built what federal investigators would later call the most sophisticated extortion operation in the country.
The scheme was beautiful in its simplicity. If you wanted to unload your fish at Fulton, you paid Lens’s Union for the labor. The official rate was 50 cents per box, but there was also an unofficial rate. $2 per box cash paid directly to the loading boss who kicked back $1.50. 50 to Lanza.
A trwler coming in with 2,000 boxes of cod from the Grand Banks paid $3,000 under the table just to get its fish off the boat. If a fisherman refused, his boxes sat in the sun. By noon, his entire catch was rotten. By the next morning, he was bankrupt. Lanza didn’t stop there. He owned the ice.
Every wholesaler needed ice to keep fish fresh. And Lensa controlled the supply through a company called Mid City Ice. He charged twice the market rate. He owned the watchmen who guarded the trucks overnight. If you didn’t pay for the watchmen, your trucks were stripped by dawn. He owned the loaders who moved the boxes from boat to stall.
He owned the trucks that hold the fish to restaurants in Brooklyn, the Bronx, and as far as Philadelphia. By 1930, Joseph Sox Lanza was pulling in an estimated $20 million a year in extortion payments in $130. Adjusted for inflation, that’s over $300 million annually from one dock from dead fish. And here’s where it gets interesting.
Lanza was so powerful that during World War II, the United States Navy came to him. In 1942, after the SS Normandy burned in New York Harbor under suspicious circumstances, naval intelligence was terrified of Nazi saboturs infiltrating the waterfront. They needed eyes on every dock. They needed informants among the fishermen who often crossed paths with German hubot off the Atlantic coast.
So, Commander Charles Hffendon of Naval Intelligence sat down with Lanza in a Manhattan hotel room and asked for his help. Lanza agreed on one condition. The Navy had to talk to his boss. His boss was Lucky Luciano, sitting in Danamura prison serving 30 to 50 years for compulsory prostitution.
The deal became known as Operation Underworld. Luciano through Lensa ordered every Sicilian fisherman and dock worker on the east coast to cooperate with the Navy. Not a single act of sabotage occurred at the Fulton Fish Market for the duration of the war. In 1946, in exchange for his cooperation, Luchiano had his sentence commuted and was deported to Italy.
Lenzo walked away from his own prosecution with a reduced sentence. The federal government had just legitimized the mob’s control of the waterfront in writing. But Sak Lanza had a problem. He couldn’t extort his way out of the IRS. In 1938, before the war, Lanza was convicted of conspiracy to extort and sentenced to 7 and 1/2 years.
He served part of it, came home, and went right back to the docks. In 1957, he was convicted again, this time for parole violations tied to fresh extortion. He went back inside. Lens died in 1968, but by then he’d already passed the operation to the next generation. The Genevese family under Veto Genevese and then Frank Thierry had absorbed the Fulton operation into its formal structure.
The fish market wasn’t Lens’s racket anymore. It was a corporate asset of the most powerful Kosanostra family in America. The men who took over were colder, smarter, and far more dangerous. Their names were Carmine Romano and his brother Peter Romano. They were Genevie soldiers who’d grown up watching Lanza operate.
And they understood something Lanza never had. The real money wasn’t in extortion. The real money was in ownership. By 1970, Carmine Romano was the business agent of Local 359, the same union Lanza had taken over in 1923. He was 42 years old, stocky with thick black hair combed straight back and a permanent 5:00 shadow.
He lived in a modest house in Howard Beach, Queens. He drove a Buick, not a Cadillac. He attended mass every Sunday at Our Lady of Grace. His wife thought he was a long shoreman. His daughters thought he worked in seafood distribution. In a sense, he did. Romano restructured the entire racket.
Instead of just shaking down fishermen for unloading fees, he took ownership stakes in the wholesale companies themselves through silent partners and frontmen. The Genevese family owned pieces of more than half the major dealers at Fulton, including some of the largest names in American seafood at the time.
If a dealer didn’t accept a Genevese partner, the dealer’s trucks broke down. His ice melted. His employees suddenly went on strike. Within a year, he sold out at 30 cents on the dollar to a buyer who turned out to be connected to Carmine Romano. The unloading scam was modernized, too. Every wholesaler at Fulton was required to use a company called Fulton Patrol Service for overnight security.
Fulton Patrol Service was owned by a Romano cousin. It charged $800 per dealer per month. There were 112 dealers. That was $89,600 a month, over a million a year in protection money for security that wasn’t actually provided. The same crews that ran Fulton Patrol were the crews that would rob the trucks if you didn’t pay. Then there was the loading scheme.
To get your fish unloaded from a boat and into your stall, you had to pay the official union rate, which by 1978 was about $3 per crate. But there was a second mandatory fee, an unloading tax of $1 per crate paid to a shell company called Sealand Dockb Builders. Sealand Dock Builders existed only on paper.
It did no actual work. The dollar per crate multiplied by roughly 1 million crates a year generated $1 million annually for the Genevese family. Cash untaxed, untraceable. But what made Romano truly dangerous wasn’t the money. It was his patience. Unlike the hotheaded killers of the previous generation, Romano almost never resorted to violence.
He didn’t have to. The system he inherited was so deeply embedded that nobody at the market even imagined resisting. The dealers paid because their fathers had paid. The fishermen paid because they couldn’t sell their catch anywhere else. The truckers paid because if they didn’t, their families got phone calls in the middle of the night.
Almost never. That word matters because when violence was necessary, Romano made sure it was unforgettable. The murder that nobody talks about happened on August 20th, 1977. A man named Francis Joseph Festa, a 51-year-old wholesale dealer who’d been operating at Fulton for 20 years, started complaining loudly.
He’d had enough of the unloading fees, enough of the security tax, enough of being told which trucks to use. He talked to a friend who knew a lawyer who knew an investigator at the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office. Word got back to South Street within a week. On the morning of August 20th, Fesa left his home
in Sheep’s Head Bay at 3:45 a.m. to drive to the market like he had every weekday for two decades. His car was found at 4:30 a.m., engine running, driver’s door open on a side street two blocks from Fulton. Fesa was inside, slumped over the steering wheel. He’d been shot three times in the back of the head with a 22 caliber pistol.
The murder was never officially solved, but every dealer at the market got the message. After Fesa, no one talked again. By 1979, the federal government had finally had enough. A new United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York. A young prosecutor named Robert Fisk assigned a team led by an assistant US attorney named Ed Corman to take on the Fulton Fish Market.
The investigation was cenamed Operation Seafood. It would last almost 2 years. 23 FBI agents worked the case full-time. They tapped phones. They turned a low-level union officer named Vincent Romano, no relation to Carmine, who’d been skimming union dues and was facing his own indictment. They put a wire on him for 14 months.
They recorded over 600 conversations. What they heard was a master class in rakateeering. Carmine Romano didn’t use code words. He didn’t need to. On tape, he explained to a new dealer exactly how the system worked. The unloading fees, the security tax, the required vendors for ice, for trucks, for boxes, the required silent partners.
He named name names. He laid out the structure of the Genevese family’s control with the calm precision of a man explaining a tax form. He had no idea he was being recorded. The wire also captured something the FBI hadn’t expected. The night Fesa was murdered, Carmine Romano was on the phone with his brother Peter for 11 minutes.
They didn’t discuss the killing directly, but Peter said one sentence that prosecutors would later quote in court. He said, “The problem is solved.” Carmine said, “Good.” On January 19th, 1981, the indictment came down. United States versus Carmine Romano at all. 23 counts, including RICO conspiracy, extortion, mail fraud, and tax evasion. 15 co-defendants.
Among them were Peter Romano, three other local 359 officials, six wholesale dealers who’d been informants for the racket, and four members of the Genevies family who’d been collecting tribute directly from Carmine. The trial began in October 1981 in federal court at Foley Square. It lasted 4 months.
The prosecution played hundreds of hours of wiretap recordings. Federal agents testified about cash drops at restaurants in Little Italy. dealers testified terrified with federal marshals stationed inside the courtroom. The defense argued that everything was legitimate union business. The jury didn’t buy it.
On February 4th, 1982, Carmine Romano was convicted on 12 counts. He was sentenced to 12 years in federal prison and fined $150,000. Peter Romano got eight years. The wholesale dealers who’d cooperated with the racket got probation. The Genevese soldiers got between 5 and 10 years each. But here’s the part the news coverage missed.
The convictions didn’t end the Genevese family’s control of the Fulton Fish Market. Not even close. While Carmine Romano was in Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary, his replacement was already in place. A capo named Vincent Anthony Esposito, known as Vinnie the Fish, took over Local 359 within 30 days of the conviction. The unloading fees continued.
The security tax continued. The required partnerships continued. The only change was that Espazito was more careful. He didn’t use the phone. He didn’t meet in restaurants that might be wired. He communicated through messengers and face-to-face conversations on the sidewalk outside Fulton.
The federal government had won the case. The Genevese family had kept the racket. It took another 14 years and three more federal investigations before the government finally broke the family’s grip. In 1995, then Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who as US attorney in the 80s had prosecuted the second wave of Fulton cases, used his executive authority as mayor to place the market under a city-controlled regulatory board, the Organized Crime Control Commission.
He installed a court-appointed trustee. He banned every individual with mob ties from setting foot on the premises. He required every dealer, every trucker, every loader to obtain a city license. The cost was brutal. Over 40 dealers shut down rather than submit to background checks. Prices for seafood in New York rose by an estimated 15% in the first year, but it worked.
By 1997, for the first time in 74 years, there was no mob control at the Fulton Fish Market. In 2005, the market itself was moved from South Street to a new facility in Hunts Point in the Bronx, partly to break the last cultural ties to the old waterfront. The cobblestones, where Socks Lanza had walked, where Fesa had been murdered, where Carmine Romano had been arrested, became a tourist district.
Today, there’s a J Crew where the loading docks used to be. So, what did all those decades of mob rule actually mean? Federal prosecutors estimated that between 1923 and 1995, the Genevese family extracted between three and4 billion dollars from the Fulton fish market alone. Not from any one scheme, from the cumulative grind.
Pennies on every pound of fish, multiplied by hundreds of millions of pounds, multiplied by 72 years. American consumers paid every cent of it. Baked invisibly into the price of every shrimp cocktail, every fried calamari plate, every Friday night fish fry from Maine to California. Carmine Romano served 8 years of his 12-ear sentence and was released in 1989.
He died in 2007 in Howard Beach, Queens of natural causes. He was 79 years old. He never spoke publicly about the case. His obituary in the local paper described him as a retired union representative. His daughters still believe their father worked in seafood distribution. Peter Romano died in prison in 1986 of a heart attack.
Vincent Espazito, the cappo who replaced Carmine, was indicted in 2000 and convicted in 2003. He died in federal custody. Vincent Romano, the informant whose wire brought down the entire operation, entered witness protection and was relocated to the Pacific Northwest. He’s believed to still be alive. The Fulton Fish Market case became the model for every major RICO prosecution that followed.
The commission case in 1985, which decapitated the heads of all five New York families, used the Fulton playbook, the Mafia Commission trial, the Windows case, the Garbage Industry case, the Concrete Club case. All of them traced their legal DNA back to one cold January morning when 43 federal agents walked into a fish market and arrested a man who’d been running America’s seafood supply for almost two decades.
And that’s the real lesson of the Fulton Fish Market. The mafia didn’t fall because they got greedy. They got greedy from the day they walked in. They fell because they got comfortable. For 58 years, nobody could touch them. They forgot that someone eventually would try. Carmine Romano forgot.
He talked on a phone he should have known was tapped. He trusted a man he should have killed. And on a January morning in 1981, the longest running racket in American organized crime history ended the way every racket ends. Not in a hail of bullets, not in a dramatic escape, just a man putting down a clipboard, lighting a cigarette, and waiting for the cuffs.
That’s the truth of the mafia. They never lose because of the FBI. They lose because of themselves every single time. If you found this story fascinating, hit subscribe. We drop a new mob documentary every week. And drop a comment below. What mafia racket should we break down next?
