The HISTORY® Channel will premiere its new nonfiction documentary series “American Godfathers: The Five Families,” executive produced and narrated by Emmy Award®-winning actor Michael Imperioli (“White Lotus,” “This Fool”), across three consecutive nights beginning Sunday, August 11 @ 8PM ET/PT. Produced by Propagate and the Barnicle Brothers, this six-hour docuseries explores the inception, rise, and fall of New York City’s five Mafia families who over a fifty-plus-year period had a hand in every facet of organized crime in America from bootlegging and drug trafficking to extortion and gambling.
Based upon Selwyn Raab’s New York Times best-seller “Five Families: The Rise, Decline and Resurgence of America’s Most Powerful Mafia Empires,” “American Godfathers: The Five Families” traces the extensive history of the Mafia beginning with its early ties to Sicily. In 1931, Charles “Lucky” Luciano, a Sicilian-born gangster, created The Commission which acted as the governing body for the American Mafia and appointed the original “New York Five” – the Bonanno, Gagliano, Luciano, Mangano, and Profaci families. They lived by an honor code or set of rules; the most important was omertá meaning “silence.” For a generation, omertá, the key to the Mafia’s success, kept the families safe from law enforcement and public view as they made millions through wartime, depression, and changes in legislation to seamlessly move from one racket to the next.
Over time, the uniquely American values of greed and celebrity, coupled with the relentless pursuit by federal law enforcement, proved too great a match. From the heyday of Lucky Luciano, the 1963 Valachi hearings and the brutal and public slayings of Albert Anastasia, Joey “Crazy Joe” Gallo, Paul Castellano, and Carmine Galante, to name a few, to the media storm that ensued when Joseph “Big Joey” Massino flipped on his own family in 2005, the history and subsequent breakdown of the code coupled with the ever-changing violent power struggles within each of the five families is vividly chronicled throughout each two-hour episode. Through investigative archival images, footage, audio recordings, and recreation as well as new, candid on-camera interviews with authors including Raab himself, historians, experts, law enforcement, witnesses, and former mafia affiliates, viewers will get an inside look at the inner workings of the most powerful criminal organization of the twentieth century.
For more information, please visit: www.history.com/shows/american-godfathers-the-five-families
A+E Networks holds worldwide distribution rights to “American Godfathers: The Five Families.” Each episode will stream the next day on The HISTORY® Channel app, history.com, and across major TV providers’ VOD platforms. You can also watch it ad-free by downloading to own on Amazon Prime Video or wherever you purchase your favorite series.
“American Godfathers: The Five Families” is produced for The HISTORY® Channel by Propagate and the Barnicle Brothers. Ben Silverman, Howard T. Owens, and Chelsea Friedland serve as executive producers for Propagate. Nick Barnicle and Colin Barnicle serve as executive producers for Barnicle Brothers. Michael Imperioli is executive producer. Matthew Davis Walker is co-executive producer. Mary E. Donahue and Zachary Behr are executive producers for The HISTORY® Channel. Imperioli is represented by Anonymous Content and Gersh.
