Frank Costello & Jeffrey Epstein: Prime Ministers of the Criminal Underworld
And what we can learn from the only nation that has ever successfully eradicated the mob.
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I watched a Netflix documentary last night, about the Italian American Mafia, and it hit me: Mob boss Frank Costello and child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein were a lot alike, in terms of how they ran their operations and, in a way, what those operations did.
Frank Costello was born in Calabria, Italy in 1891 and came to New York as a child. He rose through the streets of East Harlem to become, by the late 1930s, the official Boss of what is today known as the Luciano crime family — one of the five dominant organized crime families that controlled New York's waterfront unions, construction industry, garment district, garbage collection, prostitution and gambling operations, and through those industries, the economic nervous system of the entire city. Costello took over from Lucky Luciano after Luciano was imprisoned and deported to Italy.
Where other men in Costello’s world had risen to power on brute violence, Costello tried a different approach, and rose on building relationships with powerful people outside the mafia. His instrument was the gathering. The dinner. The introduction. The favor extended without explicit conditions attached — because explicit conditions were for amateurs. Costello dealt in unspoken obligation. You came to his table knowing what he was and what he could give you. You accepted his hospitality and generosity because you needed it, and gave back what you were able. You understood, without anything being said, what the texture of that relationship meant: Keep quiet about me, I keep quite about you, we all get rich.
Costello’s nickname was “the Prime Minister of the Underworld.” In a world of thugs, he was the first crime syndicate diplomat. He made it possible for organized crime's interests to be represented in Tammany Hall, in the New York judiciary, and in the back rooms of the United States Senate. He held that power for roughly two decades, until a rival named Vito Genovese — hungrier, cruder, and tired of waiting — had him shot in the lobby of his Manhattan apartment building in 1957. Costello survived the bullet and took the hint. He stepped down, retired, and died in his bed in 1973 at the age of 82, which in his world counted as a victory.
The genius of Costello was that almost nobody outside the mafia was explicitly corrupted. As I dig into the many powerful people here in New Mexico who protected Epstein, it’s clear that Epstein was running the same kind of operation as Costello. The political, military, scientific and social elites of New Mexico were socialized by Epstein into a vast network whose criminal logic they absorbed slowly, without ever having to consciously agree to it. Like Costello, Epstein’s power derived from what people eventually believed he knew about them. The ambient awareness that Epstein was watching, that Epstein remembered, that Epstein kept records — that awareness rather than outright blackmail is what made powerful people self-regulate towards his aims in his presence without any threat being uttered. You can see it in the simpering subservient tone powerful men take with him in their juvenile emails. They want Epstein to like them — the Steve Bannons, the Elon Musks. But Epstein never quite gives them what they want. His responses are short, arrogant. In control. He keeps them nervous, and obsequious.
Epstein was a high-tech Costello, gone global.
Just as Costello answered to a governing body more powerful than himself, so, too, did Epstein. And just as the mafia did not disappear with Costello’s death, neither has the Epstein Class.
In Costello’s case, he answered to the governing body of the American Mafia that Lucky Luciano himself had created in 1931, called The Commission.
The Commission was essentially a board of directors made up of the bosses of the most powerful mafia families, designed to mediate disputes and prevent the kind of chaotic violence that had characterized the earlier Castellammarese War.
In practice, the two figures whose judgment Costello most deferred to were: Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lanksky.
Even from prison, even from exile in Italy, Luciano remained a presence whose opinion carried enormous weight. Costello considered himself a steward of Luciano’s organization, not its independent owner. They maintained regular communication.
Meanwhile, Lansky and Costello had a relationship of mutual dependence that functioned almost as a partnership above the formal family structure. Lansky controlled the money — the offshore banking, the casino operations, the international financial architecture — and Costello controlled the political relationships. Neither could function as effectively without the other.
There is undoubtedly a “commission” type organization for Epstein, but we are unsure who’s at the top.
Ghislaine Maxwell was Epstein’s Lanksy. Actually, both Epstein and Maxwell each possess a bit of Costello, a bit of Lanksy. Either way, later, as Maxwell faced prison time, she was replaced by their commission, I believe by Karyna Shuliak.
And just as Costello and Lansky had penetrated U.S. intelligence through J. Edgar Hoover, Epstein and Maxwell had their guy in two-time U.S. Attorney General William Barr and his father, Donald, a veteran of the CIA precursor, the OSS. Hoover got sweetheart deals for Costello. Barr pressured Alex Acosta to give him a sweetheart deal in Florida.
In 1950, a Democratic senator from Tennessee named Estes Kefauver did something that had never been done before: he hauled the leadership of the American Mafia before a nationally televised congressional committee and made them answer questions in front of the entire country. The Kefauver Committee, formally the Senate Special Committee to Investigate Crime in Interstate Commerce, held hearings in fourteen cities over fifteen months. An estimated thirty million Americans watched some portion of the proceedings — at the time one of the largest television audiences in history. For the first time, ordinary people could see with their own eyes that the men running organized crime in America were not exotic foreign villains but fixtures of legitimate society, men who knew politicians and judges and businessmen on a first name basis, men who had been hiding in plain sight for decades.
We see a similar approach to the Epstein Class now, at the national level in the Senate Judiciary Committee’s endless hearings, in which they interview notorious liars under oath and expect to get something meaningful from it. Locally in New Mexico, the same thing on a smaller scale, in the New Mexico Truth Commission.
Then, as now, the ruling class of the nation has little to gain by exposing the network’s innermost workings, as most people in power are tied in one way or another to it.
When U.S. law finally caught up to Costello, they prosecuted him for tax evasion, the Capone maneuver, the charge you deploy when the real crimes are too embedded in the system to touch lest they expose the “respectable” people in bed with him.
When Epstein was finally arrested in 2019, after Alexander Acosta had delivered one of the most scandalous non-prosecution agreements in federal legal history, the response was again to arrest one man alone. Acosta, asked about the sweetheart deal, said he had been told Epstein “belonged to intelligence.” Then Epstein died in federal custody under conditions that a surprising number of serious people with relevant expertise do not believe were suicide.
In both cases, an example was made of one or two people in the criminal organization, on a lesser charge than was likely warranted. The public, lulled into thinking it was always just about a guy or two guys or maybe three guys, breathed a sigh of relief that the bad guys got what they deserved.
Then the business of the syndicate carried on, as usual.
If what we are dealing with in the Epstein Class is a global, transnational capital-and-military-intelligence mafia that used child sex trafficking as a tool rather than the end goal — and the evidence increasingly suggests that is exactly what it is — then how do you destroy it?
American reformers reach for the Kefauver model. Sunlight. Hearings. Exposure. Sunlight matters — this journalism exists because sunlight matters. But Kefauver left the Syndicate intact. It weakened Costello and handed the apparatus to Genovese. The infrastructure survived. (We’ll get to who I think the new Vito Genovese is, in a moment.)
I suggest we look instead at the one nation on earth that actually toppled the New York Mafia, the one country that took a society whose banks, businesses, casinos, and government had been thoroughly captured by organized crime that also profited from trafficking their women and children — Meyer Lansky’s organized crime, the same network whose institutional descendants we are tracing here — and dismantled that capture completely.
Cuba.
Argue about the revolution’s politics as long as you like. These operations are not about politics.
They’re about money.
The economics are singular and largely uncontested: when Fidel Castro took power in 1959, he nationalized the banks, seized and nationalized all private assets, closed the casinos, cracked down on sex trafficking, expelled the operators, and made it structurally impossible for Lansky’s class to function on the island. The Mafia simply could not adapt and survive with any great benefit to themselves in Cuba. Cuba made it harder to financially exploit the working people and the poor, and the mafia was eradicated — because the financial blueprints of predatory capitalism that sustained it were demolished.
Lansky’s Havana operation was arguably the most sophisticated money laundering and political capture network in the Western Hemisphere. After the Cuban Revolution, it was gone within two years.
The mechanism was straightforward: a Mafia — an Epstein Class, if you will — requires specific conditions to exist. Greed, mostly. And unregulated access to capital. Highly concentrated private wealth. Capturable state institutions. Unregulated cross-border money flows. Sex trafficking and child sex trafficking ignored by police. Dismantle those conditions and the Prime Minister of the Underworld has no table to sit at, no room to gather in, no leverage to accumulate, no underworld at all. Notably, the cartels are also absent from Cuba, for the same reasons.
The Epstein class exists because extreme wealth concentration and enormous wealth inequality in largely unregulated Western “democracies” under neoliberal economics makes it possible and profitable for criminal white-collar cabals to thrive. Epstein was a symptom of an economic system in which enough money insulates a person from every consequence, purchases every protection, and makes the construction of a private shadow government logical rather than exceptional.
Destroying the Epstein class therefore requires making it impossible for the Epstein class to exist. You don’t need full-on Cuban Communism to do that, but you do need strict regulations on capitalism.
Criminal prosecutions and holding individuals accountable for sex trafficking or even espionage will never dismantle the beast that spawned such offspring as Jeffrey Epstein. What would? Wealth redistribution aggressive enough to eliminate the financial conditions that produce and enable the sociopathic and predatory men who believe themselves ungovernable and exceptional. Getting rid of Citizens United. Returning to a regulated news and entertainment media that forbids monopolies. Taxing the hell out of the very rich, and big corporations. Taking money out of politics. Making political leadership a job from which no one gets rich.
And return the wealth of the people to the people who earned it.
The taxes being stolen by The Epstein class from working people — through offshore networks, through corrupt government contracts, through captured regulatory apparatus, through the political protection networks that only a handful of journalists are documenting in real time because all the news outlets have been bought by the oligarchs — belongs to the public. It is OUR money. Not theirs.
Returning it to the people is simple arithmetic and human decency, not revolution.
The Epstein Class would like us all to believe it is unAmerican to demand such things. They bought the news media and social media platforms, so they could brainwash us 24 hours a day into thinking it is patriotic to support the corrupt economic system that empowers them and disempowers all of us. They have largely succeeded. Most Americans will proudly agree it is unAmerican to challenge a system that siphons all the money from the working class upwards, to the very rich.
Motherfuckers, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Che Guevara and I all assure you: it most certainly is not.
Now, as for who I think the new Vito Genovese is? That’s easy. Donald Trump.
Trump learned everything he needed to know about operating inside a criminal power network from Roy Cohn — Costello’s own lawyer and fixer, the man who served as the living transmission belt between the Syndicate era and our own. Cohn taught Trump three things, and Trump has never forgotten a single one: never admit wrongdoing, always counter-attack, and claim victory regardless of facts. These are simple Mafia operating principles, handed from the Costello era directly into the Oval Office.
Trump and Epstein ran in the same circles for decades, as did Costello and Genovese — the same Manhattan parties, the same Mar-a-Lago social orbit, the same appetite for young women and the men who could supply them. Trump called Epstein a “terrific guy” who liked beautiful women “on the younger side.” He knew. They weren’t friends so much as competitors operating in overlapping territory, even bidding on the same Palm Beach estate at one point — two men who understood each other’s methods because they shared the same teachers and desires.
One of them is dead.
The other is president again.
And in case the symbolism were not clear enough, Trump’s Justice Department — on his watch, with his appointments, under his explicit authority — has repeatedly resisted the full release of the Epstein files. The man who spent years implying he alone would expose the deep state has become its most aggressive guardian the moment the files in question might illuminate his own world.
Vito Genovese did not replace the Costello network; he seized it. He didn’t build anything — he simply made his move when the Prime Minister was weakened and the apparatus was there for the taking.
History, in this case, has not been subtle.
We don’t need to entirety of the Epstein files released to make an educated guess about what’s in them. Just as criminal trials and even convictions are not the permanent solution to the problem of the Epstein Class.
I offer these posts freely, but your support is necessary and appreciated. Please subscribe, paid if you can, and share my work if it moves you. You may also leave a one-time or recurring tip in any amount. Just four $25 tips a day keep me in business. Thanks! A.
It’s all going to crumble and collapse onto itself. We must unite and be the outside pressure that makes that happen in real time!
Epstein’s power derived from what people eventually “believed” he knew about them. (italics mine) 👍