OK I exaggerated by saying thousands but prob over 1,000. I heard the Gambinos alone had close to 500 made guys at one point. Ivy could prob come up with a pretty accurate #. Nonetheless, how many made guys has the outfit had in its history?? 100 or so?? If that? I know they rely alot on associates.
Estimates prior to the 1980's are very sketchy but one estimate put the Gambinos at around 400 members at their peak. But that was back in the 50's/60's. Still, think about how many NYC mob members have lived in the 50 years since Valachi first testified in 1963. Right now there's at least 700 or so. And that's not counting everyone else who died between now and then. It would be well over 1,000. Maybe twice that many. Needless to say, the number of members who have flipped constitute a very small fraction; though even one guy can do a lot of damage.
Of course, there's also an unknown number of secret informants - guys who feed info to the feds but never openly flipped, testified in court, went into witness protection, etc. But it doesn't do much good to theorize on how many because there's no way to know.
