@ Blackfam

I think his territory was a little more extensive, there was a reason a few mob historians actually had Marcello as a top three Boss in the entire country. (Along with Gambino and Giancana) one of these I read was Mafia Dynasty. Here's an excerpt from Mobb Summit....

“In another sense, the choice of Apalachin was simply an accident of mob geography, an alternate reality determined not by distance but by family connections, a world quite unlike that which is portrayed in conventional atlases. Mob America was a landscape where Dallas functioned as a suburb of New Orleans, Los Angeles as well as Kansas City were fiefdoms of Chicago, and Chicago itself was not the second city but the first”

And not just that, Marcello had control over the whole gulf coast, like Texas was HIS territory, kinda like Chicago had oversight on the west coast, all kinds of smuggling, and just legit shipping routes, I think this is also overlooked....

I tried explaining this to I think Ivey before, that Marcello was no small fish, and that the 20 made guys, or whatever it was down there maybe wasn't the best indicator of his actual strength.


Same situation with a family like Buffalo ( Good lord, I am NOT trying to reopen that can of worms...) Buffalo, actually meant a lot more than just Buffalo. You had to include what, Ontario, and other cities like Hamliton right?


Edit: A couple more excerpts....

“Mob geography divided New York City by family, not borough. Cleveland and Pittsburgh both claimed Youngstown, Ohio, as their own. Cuba lost its status as an independent sovereign state to become an imperial colony of the mob. Las Vegas and Miami were both “open” cities, belonging to no one single family.
Like the famed Saul Steinberg cartoon map of Manhattan, showing the distortion through which New Yorkers view the world, the mob map of America displays an outsized layout springing from the obsessions and misrepresentations of a single isolated tribe. Organized crime challenged conventions in the national economy, yes, but it also twisted borders and topography.”


“Buffalo, in this scheme of things, possessed an importance all out of proportion to its size. The Buffalo mob sprawled into Rochester and Utica, reaching tentacles into Canada, Ohio and, most germane in terms of the Apalachin summit, penetrating into northwest Pennsylvania, the Pittston-Scranton-Wilkes-Barre area.”

“When Charles Luciano and his cohorts formalized the hegemony of the modern mob in 1931, the Mafia’s first ruling Commission seated seven bosses. These included representatives from New York and Chicago, which could only be expected, but also the boss of another, smaller city, one which you might not necessarily suspect would warrant the honor. Steven Magaddino of Buffalo”
“Magaddino’s name stands out on that debut Mafia Commission among such worthies as Al Capone, Charlie Luciano, Joe Bonanno, and Joe Profaci. What was a humble lakeside cousin doing in this august company? But Magaddino of Buffalo controlled the smuggling routes from Canada, and that lent him enormous weight. Within the organization schema of organized crime” , the Queen City, the City of Good Neighbors, the City of Light—all chamber of commerce nicknames for Buffalo—possessed a surprising primacy.
In this sense, strictly in terms of the 1950s mob geography, the choice of Apalachin had a logic all its own. Dope was becoming more and more the new reality of the mob, and Apalachin fell squarely within the territory of Magaddino, one of the country’s” “leading dope smugglers. Concealed in trucks and cars rattling down from Buffalo, headed to New York City on Route 17, shipments of heroin completed the last leg of their long international journey.”


( I know a lot of this stuff is off topic, but I felt compelled to add, a lot of this is why I had interest in the Buffalo threads, I feel like it's kinda, unexplored? Any way.....)

Excerpt From: Reavill, Gil. “Mafia Summit.” St. Martin’s Press. iBooks.
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