As one of the founding figures of the Banda della Magliana, he helped shape what became Rome's most powerful criminal organization of the late twentieth century, one whose reach extended into politics, terrorism, and the Vatican Bank scandal. The group operated with unusual sophistication for a street-level outfit, forging alliances with the Sicilian Mafia, the Camorra, and elements of the Italian far right. His eventual decision to cooperate with prosecutors after his 1992 arrest made him a significant source for investigators untangling the organization's long history of violence and institutional corruption.

A career Chicago Outfit enforcer whose name surfaced repeatedly in connection with unsolved killings spanning three decades, Caifano operated at the intersection of organized crime's expansion into Las Vegas and its brutal suppression of competition in Chicago. He was never convicted of any homicide, yet witnesses and rivals in his orbit had a way of disappearing or dying violently — a pattern that investigators noted without ever successfully prosecuting. His extortion convictions and repeated prison terms did little to interrupt a criminal career that stretched from Prohibition-era Chicago to the mob's consolidation of Nevada gambling.

Few American criminal cases of the nineteenth century have proven as durably unresolved as the Fall River axe murders of 1892, and Borden's name has remained inseparable from them despite her acquittal. The circumstantial weight of suspicion, combined with the brutal nature of the killings and her proximity to the victims, kept public interest alive long after the verdict. That no one else was ever charged has left the case in a permanent state of legal ambiguity — neither solved nor fully closed.