I don’t think it’d be surprising that a criminal organization would at times and probably more times than any of us would possibly know, take the extreme action of killing regular, normal, civilians. For many years a major part of the business was shaking down innocent, regular business owners. Committing robberies and burglaries of business owners and others.
I can only imagine the number of innocent people caught in killings back in the 20s, 30s, 40s, etc. The news articles of violence back then read similar to the mayhem one reads about happening today in parts of the Bronx (Tremont, Hunts Point, University and Morris Heights) and other parts of city seeing plague of gang violence and shoot outs in the streets.
They could not get away with killing innocents back then. They did not do drive bys, they would go right up to a target and shoot them. It was different times. As far as killing innocents they shook down, that is a myth. First off, most people they shook down were others in rackets like theirs. Second, they could not go around killing innocents as you think, if they had they would have been wiped out by law enforcement right away. Vincent Coll did kill a child in a drive by, one of the rare exceptions.
