Early Life
Born in 1929, Thomas Gambino is the oldest son of Carlo and Catherine Gambino. Carlo Gambino joined the original Mangano crime family during the 1930s, rose to capo and later to Underboss. In 1957, Carlo Gambino became boss of what is now called the Gambino crime family. Carlo Gambino became one of the most powerful mobsters in Cosa Nostra history.
Thomas Gambino graduated from Manhattan College in the Bronx and then started working for the Gambino family. In 1962, Thomas Gambino married Frances Lucchese, the daughter of Gaetano "Tommy Brown" Lucchese, the boss of the Lucchese crime family. Carlo Gambino welcomed this marriage as a chance to build ties between the Gambino and Lucchese families. Sometime during the 1950s, Carlo Gambino procured a job for Thomas Gambino at Consolidated Carriers Corporation as payment for handling union problems. After the owners of Consolidated retired, the Gambinos took over the company. When Tommy Lucchese died in 1967, his interests in the garment industry were passed to Thomas Gambino, forming the basis of Gambino's wealth.
By the 1990s, Thomas Gambino owned three homes; one in Florida, another in Lido Beach, New York, and a third on Manhattan's exclusive Upper East Side. Thomas Gambino also headed the Gambino Medical and Science Foundation, which in 1991 financed a $2 million pediatric bone marrow transplant unit at Long Island Jewish Medical Center. Estimates of Thomas Gambino's personal wealth go up to $75 million.
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Famous quotes related to early life:
“Many a woman shudders ... at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians ...”
—Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)