The Commission (mafia) in the context of "Lucky Luciano"

Thomas Edmund Dewey (March 24, 1902 – March 16, 1971) was an American lawyer and politician who served as the 47th governor of New York from 1943 to 1954. He was the Republican Party's nominee for president of the United States in 1944 and 1948, losing the former election to Franklin D. Roosevelt and the latter election to Harry S. Truman in a major upset.

As a New York City prosecutor and District Attorney in the 1930s and early 1940s, Dewey was relentless in his effort to curb the power of the American Mafia and of organized crime in general. Most famously, he successfully prosecuted Mafia boss Charles "Lucky" Luciano on charges of forced prostitution in 1936. Luciano was given a 30- to 50-year prison sentence. He also prosecuted and convicted Waxey Gordon, another prominent New York City gangster and bootlegger, on charges of tax evasion. Dewey almost succeeded in apprehending mobster Dutch Schultz as well, but Schultz was murdered in 1935, in a hit ordered by the Commission.

The Five Families are the five Italian American Mafia crime families who operate in New York City. In 1931, the five families were organized by Salvatore Maranzano following his victory in the Castellammarese War. Maranzano reorganized the Italian American gangs in New York City into the Maranzano, Profaci, Mangano, Luciano, and Gagliano families, which are now known as the Bonanno, Colombo, Gambino, Genovese, and Lucchese families, respectively. Each family had a demarcated territory and a hierarchy and reported to the same overarching governing entity.

Initially, Maranzano intended each family's boss to report to him as the capo dei capi ("boss of all the bosses"). This led to his assassination that September, and that role was abolished for the Commission, a ruling committee established by Lucky Luciano to oversee all Mafia activities in the United States and to mediate conflicts between families. It consisted of the bosses of the Five Families as well as the bosses of the Chicago Outfit and the Buffalo crime family. In 1963, Joseph Valachi publicly disclosed the existence of New York City's Five Families at the Valachi hearings. Since then, a few other crime families have been able to become powerful or notable enough to rise to a level comparable to that of the Five Families, holding or sharing the unofficial designation of Sixth Family.

The Valachi hearings, also known as the McClellan hearings, investigated organized crime activities across the United States. The hearings were initiated by Arkansas Senator John L. McClellan in 1963. Named after the major government witness against the American Mafia, foot soldier and made man Joseph Valachi, the trial exposed American organized crime to the world through Valachi's televised testimony. At the trial, Valachi was the first member of the Italian-American Mafia to acknowledge its existence publicly, and is credited with popularization of the term cosa nostra. The trial also exposed the hierarchy of the American Mafia, including the Five Families and The Commission.