I'm finishing up the book The Last Godfather by Anthony DeStefano, which details the penetration and near destruction of the Bonanno Crime Family, particularly under Joey Massino.

Reading that book and also reading the posts here in the Crown Witness and Chicago Outfit Family Secrets threads raised a few other questions.

1) With the combined threat of a) lengthy prison sentences, b) constant audio, visual and electronic surveillance, c) witness protection program available to even the most heinous murderers who inform or testify, d) laws that provide prosecutors multiple bites at the apple for the same crime, e) laws and prosecutors that aggressively pursue the wealth or freedom of the relatives of Mafia members,
is it all just a matter of time before the US Cosa Nostra collapses?

2) If the remedies in #1 above were available in the twenties and thirties would the US Families been able to reach the levels of power they enjoyed until the mid seventies? Or were mafiosi back then just made of sterner stuff. In the Massino case, one person turned and then a multitude of people turned because no one wanted to be the last one left.

3) Despite the aggressive attack on the US Mafia, and the resultant grandstanding by federal prosecutors/agencies it is still possible and even easy in most US areas to purchase narcotics, place a bet, get an unlicensed loan, purchase items that "fell off a truck", or buy intimate time with a friendly woman. There are other things the Mafia does which are not reliant on a "paying customer", i.e. extortion, labor racketeering, robbery but one could argue that other groups or corporations have taken up the slack. So ultimately has anything really changed?

4) As I mentioned elsewhere I've also been doing a lot of reading on La Eme (Mexican Mafia variant). Despite the fact that almost all of its membership will spend some time in prison and at any given time most of its formal membership might be incarcerated, it has maintained structure and enforced discipline to a far greater extent than the traditional Mafia, even going so far as to exert unchallenged control from the prison to the streets. It's only had a few turncoats, nothing like the Mafia. Why is that? Is it just that the Feds have not made it a high priority as yet?


5) Why has the US Mafia generally avoided the more violent tactics of the Sicilian Mafia or Mexican crime groups?
There have been relatively few threats or attacks against family members of turncoats and certainly no recent high profile assassinations of judges, prosecutors, police or jurors. I can understand accepting 10-20 year prison sentences with no problem. But in today's world of multiple decade sentences, Supermax prisons and federal attempts to go after personal family assets, you might think that a criminal with nothing left to lose would risk more violent responses.