Jul 7, 2024

The HISTORY® Channel's new nonfiction series “American Godfathers: The Five Families,” executive produced and narrated by Emmy Award®-winning actor Michael Imperioli (“White Lotus,” “This Fool”), premieres across three consecutive nights beginning Sunday, August 11 at 8pm ET/PT. Produced by Propagate and the Barnicle Brothers, this six-hour documentary series 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. The history and subsequent breakdown of the "omerta" 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.