The Sabini Family

The Sabini Family, which was formerly the most powerful gang in London but had been largely forgotten for almost a century, is now once again well-known thanks to it being portrayed on the TV show Peaky Blinders, but more on them later. Charles "Darby" Sabini, the son of an Italian father and an English mother, served as the head of the Sabini Family. Sabini, a London native who was up in Clerkenwell Green, first made his living as a brawling hoodlum before putting together a team primarily responsible for racketeering and fencing. When he took over the very lucrative protection and extortion rackets for racetracks in the 1920s, his authority increased.

In the TV show, Sabini fought with the Jewish gang commanded by Alfie Solomons and the Peaky Blinders. His principal adversaries in real life were the Billy Kimber-led Birmingham Boys and the McDonald brothers-led Elephant and Castle Mob. Even though his rivals banded together to oppose him, Sabini prevailed. In 1927, on Waterloo Road, their conflict came to a head in a bloody brawl that left eight men dead. The McDonalds and Billy Kimber both decided to flee to America after the altercation because it attracted too much police attention, leaving the Sabini Gang in charge.

During the 1930s, as their influence gradually waned, Darby stepped aside while his brother Harry Sabini took over as head. Both brothers were detained and imprisoned as "enemy aliens" during World War II, but they were later freed since their mother was English. Naturally, the Sabini Gang was already a shell of what it had once been, and other London crime families like Billy Hill and the White Family were more than prepared to take over.