as far as detroit goes, as i said i'm not very familiar with them. my hypothesis would be that they are a small tight-knit family that is active but not even on the level of say philly or new england. sometimes on here i think secrecy gets confused with powerful. if a family is into many different rackets and make tons of money, that means exposure. are some families better at keeping things under the radar? yeah, but only to an extent.

im not in any way comparing detroit to the genovese family but everyone always talks about the secretive nature of that family, and that is true as compared to the other ny families to an extent but the fact remains there are a constant stream of cases involving them. my point being, that while you can certainly operate in a low key way, if you are involved in massive amounts of criminal activity there will be cases made against you. now i'm not saying the feds know everything, but the amount of cases brought against a family is generally a good barometer of the amount of activity that they are involved in.

again this is mostly speculation on my part so hopefully scott can help shed some light on detoit.