It's the same thing with New Orleans. Few people out of the area can name influential capos or soldiers and only know the head names like Marcello and Trafficante.

Personally I believe NY and Chicago gets so much attention because they were more involved in a wider spread of things accompanied with the amount of people involved. You have guys getting into altercations from different factions and families where as New Orleans and Tampa were smaller and unified. You throw in another family or two in our two smaller cities and there would have been more names mentioned when paths were crossed.

We have to take into account that both families probably had no more than 40-50 made guys at it's peak, if that. These guys were probably a lot closer with blood ties and detailed planning than say a family with 200-300 made guys where not everyone is familiar with each other.

Like I said from the variety of rackets aside from illicit gambling and narcotics importation that was very big on the gulf coast, the union infiltration is virtually non existent in Louisiana. To my knowledge there is no huge garment industry or Fish market in Louisiana to send guys to get your hooks into.

Bid rigging for certain projects wasn't uncommon, but given how the south was I think it was more of Marcello himself using the politicians to say "hey help this guy out with this contract". I assume it was the same with Trafficante.