The Commission

The Commission is portrayed as a high-level authority within organized crime: it could approve major operations, weigh territorial interests, and entrust consequential work to a trusted intermediary such as Russell Bufalino. Its power is visible less through a formal description of its offices than through the network of permissions, alliances, and reports surrounding it—and, most starkly, through the account of the aftermath of Jimmy Hoffa’s disappearance.

Authority and reach

The book gives The Commission a role beyond that of a gathering of powerful individuals. It knew that Russell Bufalino was unusually willing to work with non-Italians, and that flexibility made him useful to the New York families, described as intensely Italian. The narrator says The Commission entrusted Bufalino with its most important matters and would give him anything truly big. In this account, authority rests partly on confidence in a particular broker: Bufalino could connect people and undertake work that other bosses would not want tied to their own families.

That authority also had a territorial dimension. Recalling the operation against Hoffa, the narrator says it could not have proceeded without Detroit’s approval because Detroit was the relevant territory, and that Chicago’s proximity and connections made its position important as well. New York had not sanctioned the operation, but had not opposed it; those who proceeded were on their own. The account therefore distinguishes among active authorization, non-opposition, and the absence of protection. The Commission’s power appears as a system of boundaries and permissions, not as a claim that every family acted under a single, uniform command.

Bufalino as intermediary

The narrative establishes Bufalino’s standing through repeated personal and business connections. Frank Sheeran drove him to meetings and errands across several states, including a 1957 trip to Apalachin. After police arrested roughly fifty gangsters there, the meeting’s national reach became public to Sheeran, who understood more clearly why Bufalino had traveled to conduct business in person and in cash. The episode demonstrates Bufalino’s access to a wide criminal network; it does not identify The Commission as the organizer of that particular gathering.

Bufalino’s connections extended to meetings at Joe Sonken’s Gold Coast Lounge in Hollywood, Florida. Sheeran says he frequently drove there with him, where people from around the country gathered and Bufalino met with Santo Trafficante and Carlos Marcello. These encounters show the practical reach of Bufalino’s network across regions. The account does not establish that every Gold Coast meeting was a Commission session; rather, it depicts a setting in which alliances and business links could be maintained across jurisdictions.

The narrator’s account of the Gallo matter makes the relationship between Bufalino and The Commission more explicit. He says that Bufalino was trusted with important errands, that the New York families would not want a major killing connected to their own families, and that The Commission gave Bufalino the largest assignments. Bufalino’s willingness to rely on experienced non-Italian associates is presented as an advantage within that arrangement. His relationship with Joseph Colombo and support for the Italian American Civil Rights League are also offered as parts of his standing among the families, not as proof that the league itself was an arm of The Commission.

The Hoffa disappearance and reporting upward

Five days after Hoffa disappeared, an FBI note recorded a meeting at Vesuvio Restaurant in New York City attended by Anthony Salerno, Bufalino, Sheeran, Tony Provenzano, and Salvatore Briguglio. Sheeran’s explanation is that those involved went to report to Salerno on how the disappearance had been carried out and to identify any loose ends. He says Salerno was satisfied. In this telling, the meeting was a report to a senior figure after the fact—not evidence that New York had sanctioned the operation beforehand. The distinction matches the account’s earlier insistence that New York had not approved it, even if it had not objected.

The book sets this narrative beside the FBI’s investigation. The bureau assigned two hundred agents to the disappearance and compiled seventy volumes, totaling more than 16,000 pages, in the HOFFEX file. An early memorandum identified seven men, including Bufalino and Sheeran; adding Tony Giacalone and Chuckie O’Brien brought the number of suspects to nine. The FBI’s focus on this group establishes the investigative significance of Bufalino’s network, but a suspect list is not proof that The Commission as an institution ordered the crime.

Clues, limits, and narrative significance

The prologue supplies a compressed clue to the closeness of the people later under suspicion: in a room with Hoffa’s anxious family, investigators found his yellow pad beside the phone, with Russ and Frank written on it. The book identifies those names as Bufalino and Sheeran, close friends and allies whom Hoffa’s family regarded as trusted. The notation makes their intimacy consequential in retrospect, but it does not itself document a Commission decision or establish what happened to Hoffa.

Taken together, these episodes present The Commission through relationships and procedures rather than a complete institutional portrait. Its influence is conveyed through Bufalino’s trusted position, the need to respect local territory, the difference between approval and non-opposition, and the later transmission of information to a senior figure. The account’s structure keeps two levels of evidence distinct: the narrator’s description of Commission authority and criminal coordination, and the FBI’s identification of individual suspects. That distinction is essential to understanding both the organization’s narrated reach and what the available clues do—and do not—prove.