With the introduction of the Maceo family, Taylor Sheridan’s Yellowstone prequel is crossing paths with real history.
The Italian mafia is now part of the Sheridan-verse. You read that correctly. After Spencer Dutton (Brandon Sklenar) saves an Italian immigrant named Luca during their perilous voyage across the Atlantic in 1923, the hero is introduced to Luca’s family and forced into their illegal bootlegging business. As it turns out, Luca’s family runs one of the most famous Italian-American crime organizations of all time: the Maceo Syndicate.
The crossover between Western heroes and the Italian mafia feels like the perfect multiverse for the Taylor Sheridan crowd. That’s likely why Sheridan didn’t take the easy road and just write some stereotypical Italian mobsters into his Yellowstone prequel. Instead, the creator and writer of the Yellowstone franchise included fictionalized versions of the Maceo Organization from Galveston, Texas.
When Spencer arrives in Galveston with Luca in episode 2, he’s introduced to Salvatore “Sal” Maceo (played by Ultimate Beastmaster co-host Gilles Marini). True to his real-life counterpart, Maceo is a powerful bootlegger and owner of a dancehall and illegal casino known as the Balinese Room. Galveston was the perfect place for the family’s operations during the Roaring Twenties. According to the Texas State Historical Association, the popular resort town was lauded as a “free state” due to how much unregulated gambling and illegal liquor poured through the area daily.
At the end of 1923’s latest episode, Sal Maceo offers to gift Spencer a car if he helps him deliver liquor to his establishments along the way. We’ll see how much the Maceo family plays a part in the drama moving forward, but their fictionalization in 1923 is far from their family’s only lasting legacy.
Following the end of 1923, Sheridan reported plans to add to his lineup of Yellowstone prequels with 1944. Although there’s very little information available outside of Paramount’s original announcement of 1944, the Maceo family ended up moving to Las Vegas around that time. Gambling was legalized in the state of Las Vegas, so Savatore and his brother, Rosario, invested a lot of their money into the Desert Inn. Today, the Wynn Las Vegas resort operates where the Desert Inn once stood. Coincidentally, that’s also where 1923 held its premiere.
In 1937, Salvatore faced federal narcotics charges—and even though he was acquitted in 1942, most of the family’s controlling interest in Vegas transferred to the Fertitta clan. The Fertitta’s descendants remain very wealthy today. Lorenzo Fertitta is the former CEO of the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC). Meanwhile, his cousin Tillman Fertitta, is the current owner of the Houston Rockets. He’s also the owner of Landry’s Inc., which operates Mastro’s Stakehouse, Del Frisco’s, Rainforest Café, and many more well-known restaurants. Tillman was even recently nominated to serve as President Donald Trump’s United States Ambassador to Italy. I could go on all day about these guys, but let’s get back to the 1970s.
At the time, many of the casinos in Vegas were controlled by the Italian mafia. Frank Rosenthal, a professional sports gambler, worked with the Chicago outfit of the Italian mafia to take control of the Stardust, the Hacienda, the Fremont, and the Marina. Rosenthal’s story was famously dramatized in Martin Scorsese’s Casino (1995) starring Robert De Niro.
I would love to see Scorsese’s films connect with the Sheridan-verse, but that might be too powerful for TV. For now, it’s enough knowing that before John Dutton defended his Yellowstone ranch—and before De Niro’s Casino character owned nearly all of Las Vegas—their ancestors shook hands in 1923.
