LCN in California

anybody have any info on the connection between these california families , where they all part of the new york commission or was their a california commission...or was it just chaos between the families

San Francisco
Sacramento
San Jose
Oakland
Los Angeles
??????

The California fams were basically independent although they damn well didn't do anything major without Chicago's say-so. Chicago even sent their own guys over there (Pinelli to LA and Frank Buccieri to San Diego) to keep tabs on them.

WOW, thats pretty fascinating do you now why chicago sent guys out there? and was there ever any major meeting or sit downs between the families @Snakes

Well, Chicago basically held sway over most of the families west of the Mississippi. Same as NYC held sway over a lot of the East Coast families. I don't think it was ever officially laid down that way, it's just that the western families knew that Chicago had the most muscle and the most cash so if they wanted to send somebody to oversee some rackets in California it was more like "We're not asking you, we're telling you."

I don't know a whole lot about the Cali families themselves. All of them are virtually non-existent except for a couple of old-timers still kicking around. Maybe read Jimmy Fratianno's book, he was a rat from the L.A. family.

Thank you very much for the info

Oh yeah,one last question?
how did these small cali families start ,was their italian enclaves or neighborhoods?
i presume that these families were weak and did not control neighborhoods or charge protection from small business owners was being a gangster in cali as glamorous as it was on the east coast??? @Snakes

They were definitely weak and small compared to the families in the Northeast and Midwest where there were more Italians and the LCN had a much larger presence. Well, the chart below does show the LA family having around 70 members back around the 1960's but I have a hard time believing all of them were actually made. Anyway, they were involved in many of the same street rackets other families were. And members had interests in various legitimate or quasi-legitimate businesses. Even though the feds still listed them as late as 1988, the San Francisco and San Jose families were, for all intents and purposes, finished by the early 1980's. A much smaller and weakened (compared to the past) LA family lasted into the 1990's but was basically finished off with "Operation Thin Crust."

Thanks , this is great info was there any other ethnic organized crime groups that weren't mafia(camorra or maybe a german organized crime groups)i know that there was and still is a huge presence of germans or germanic people in northern california, but i don't think that were was any OC groups what do you think @IvyLeague

The California families were small. San Francisco had the larges presence of Italian OC in California from the 1890's till the late 1910's, then it shifted to Los Angeles. From about 1919 till about 1928, San Francisco was fighting the gangs from Santa Clara(which would later merge with the Alum Rock gang, to form one of the San Jose crews) and Goosetown gang (downtown San Jose crew, better known as the Marino crew decades later) when those gangs stopped paying tribute after the San Francisco boss died and those gangs did not like the new boss. By 1928 San Francisco had its own internal war in the city which did not end till about 1932. From 1928 till 1931, the two San Jose gangs fought each other. There is a ton of history on the Los Angeles and San Diego families fighting each other before the Matranga's from San Diego merged into the Los Angeles family, Rosario DeSimone (father of Frank DeSimone future boss of Los Angeles) Jack and Tom Dragna were key members in ending that mob war with the help of Tony Mirabile from San Diego. For the record Gaspare Matranga is related to those Matranga, but he was from the Chicago family and did not move to San Diego until after Frank Mangano was killed in Chicago. Fast forward about a century later and there is no families left, just old members from those families that have retired, with the expection of members from other families outside California, or from Sicily and Italy who have some things going on, but not much.