Show your cards! I dont buy it! That was the tail end of it all. If they said it, pull your file and prove me wrong.
First, would I be wrong to assume you won't care how many cards I show you?
Second, I don't think either the Genovese or Gambino families ever had as many as 500 members. The highest I've seen was 450 and 400, respectively, and those were the numbers Joe Bonanno cited. And this was back in the 1950's and 1960's when the same close tabs weren't keep on the families.
In 1988, the "25 years after Valachi" report cited approximately 200 members for both the Genovese and Gambino families.
https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/Digitization/125163NCJRS.pdfIn 1989, the New Jersey OC report cited 300 members for the Genovese family and 250 for the Gambinos.
http://www.state.nj.us/sci/pdf/annual21.pdfEven the rather inflated figures Selwyn Raab cited for that time period in his otherwise very good book, Five Families, weren't that high - 400 for the Gambinos and at least 300 for the Genovese.
If you look back, the NY families seem to have had a set amount of members each of them can have. For, say, the last 25 years or so the average estimates have been relatively consistent. Of course, there were always be extreme estimates one way or the other. But one thing is for sure, neither family had anywhere close to 500 made members in the 1980's; if ever.
