Even if they claimed it was a 60 million dollar gambling ring, they are still exaggerating badly.
You say they are exaggerating like it's an established fact. Once again, that $60 million figure is the total amount of money wagered in bets over a 2 1/2 year period. That's not the amount of profit the operation made. If we were to average that out, that comes to about $24 million in bets wagered a year. Or about $2 million a month. Assuming the standard 10% profit in your typical bookmaking operation, you're looking at a profit of about $6 million over the 2 1/2 years. Very believable in my opinion.
The bust in New York could be of a bookie with 10 customers betting for all we know. There is no doubt in my mind the way NYC has changed over the last 20 years has hurt the mafia. There are not as many people to take bets, not as many potential extortion targets.
Many things about both New York City and the Mafia have changed over the past few decades. That's certainly true. But how closely do you follow cases involving the mob there? I could show you example after example of multimillion dollar mob-related gambling cases over that past decade. I could also show you plenty of examples of the mob extorting various types of businesses in New York over the past decade; including restaurants, delicatessans, bakeries, nightclubs, adult businesses like strip clubs and porn shops, vending machine distributors, lunch truck vendors, garages and scrap yards, bus companies, as well as companies in the waterfront, construction, trucking, and carting industries.
The NYPD shut down all the peep shows and porn shops that were lucrative for the mafia. The mafia no longer has a large pool of potential members to recruit from, and these recruits were much less likely to grow up around it like guys in the past.
Well, for the record, it was the Giuliani administration that changed Times Square and removed all the sex businesses. But the trade was becoming somewhat passe for the mob by that time anyway and the mob actually made quite a bit of money from the sale of the real estate. The pool of recruits has certainly declined in New York, in terms of both quality and quantity, but there is evidently still enough of one to keep the size of the families stable. They are still able to replace guys that have died.
