NEW YORK — It was a novel defense for two men federal prosecutors had accused of being in control of one of New York’s oldest crime families: They claimed the Mafia had long ago been dismantled and they were being unfairly profiled as gangsters because of their Italian ethnicity.

But the strategy seemed to work. On Tuesday, a jury in federal court in Manhattan acquitted the men, Joseph Cammarano Jr. and John Zancocchio, of racketeering and conspiracy to commit extortion charges, after a colorful two-week trial.

Prosecutors had presented evidence that Cammarano and Zancocchio were the boss and consigliere, respectively, of the infamous Bonanno crime family, one of the five families that once controlled organized crime in New York.

Gina Castellano, the lead prosecutor, had said in her opening statement that Cammarano, 59, of Long Island, and Zancocchio, 61, of Staten Island, had “worked together and with other members of the mob to commit crime after crime — extortion, loan-sharking, drug dealing, assault and fraud.”

“These two men led a sophisticated criminal organization that took whatever they wanted from whoever they wanted through intimidation,” she said.

But defense lawyers had argued that the Mafia no longer existed and that their clients merely looked and sounded like Italian mobsters portrayed in film. “Looking like he stepped out of central casting in a mob movie doesn’t make you part of one of these groups,” said Jennifer Louis-Jeune, one of Cammarano’s lawyers, during her opening statement.

During the trial, the defense several times suggested that the police had stereotyped the defendants. John Meringolo, one of Zancocchio’s lawyers, for instance, pressed a New York Police Department detective on whether cultural differences in body language led to an incorrect analysis of a surveillance videotape.

“It wasn’t angry, but there was a lot of — there was some hand movements and physical touching,” Detective Anthony Votino had testified. “Not fighting. Just making sure that they got their point across.”

“And that’s because people like us, we talk with our hands, and he was talking with his hands, right?” Meringolo said during his cross-examination, prompting an objection from prosecutors. “And did they kiss each other when they departed?” Meringolo also asked, to which Votino responded “I don’t recall.”

The verdict was a setback for the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan, which declined to comment on the verdict.

Prosecutors had presented evidence that Cammarano and Zancocchio profited from a mob-controlled dump on Staten Island, supervising underlings who strong-armed victims to exact payments and instill fear. One witness also said Zancocchio had beaten him at a strip club.

Aggressive prosecutions in the 1980s and 1990s decimated the leadership of the Bonanno, Lucchese, Gambino, Genovese and Colombo families in New York. The Bonanno family was particularly hard hit by a rash of convictions and defections in the early 2000s. Even the family’s longtime boss, Joseph Massino, decided to cooperate with the authorities after his murder conviction in 2004. His successors — Vincent Basciano and Michael Mancuso — were also convicted.

But jurors rejected the prosecution’s contention that Cammarano, known to his friends as Joe C, was the current acting boss.

Elizabeth Macedonio, another of Cammarano’s lawyers, said “the verdict is apparently the result of the government bringing a case without any credible evidence.”

“We believe this is a just verdict and the jury was one of the most attentive juries that I’ve ever seen,” Meringolo said. “From the opening and to the summation, they took very diligent notes, and we’re just very satisfied.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.