If those membership estimates by the FBI are accurate, and considering that there are now possibly no more than 25 made members left, the Outfit will probably be gone entirely within twenty years.

I would imagine so.

I've read that Anthony Spilotro was "made" in the early 1960s.

I don't really know when they started making guys.

Definitely Michael and Anthony were lured to their deaths with the promise of Michael being made, but that was obviously in the mid-80s.

So you can safely assume Anthony was made long before then.

Now that is an interesting statement which might be true, considering the Camorra apparantly also doesn't really have traditional initiation ceremonies.

the syndicate started making people in the 1920s

I don't know what a Camora is.

Most accounts have the Outfit starting when Johnny Torio had Jim Colisimo killed subsequently brought in Capone for muscle. Torrio barely survived an assasination attempt, retired and turned the beginnings over to Capone.

I think they actually recreated that on Boarwalk Empire a couple years ago.

Didn't Capone say something to Accardo like, "okay son, Jack (McGurn) says you're okay so you're in, or one of us," something like that?

These things are confusing. I always wondered what status Humphries held. I can't recall a specific title, but he was very powerful and Ricca, Accardo and Giancana all relied heavily on "The Hump." Plus, he answered only to the top guys.

Not sure about that quote; I did read Accardo started out as McGurn's (real name Vincenzo Ribaldi) driver. McGurn of course was eventually gunned down himself, likely on Nitti's orders. He didn't have much to offer the Outfit after Capone went to prison, his only real skill was killing people, and he was apparently putting up a stink about being tossed out to the point of saying stuff like "I know a lot of things about you people." He was gunned down in a building that was then a bowling alley and is still standing on Chicago and Milwaukee. Then of course Geraldo famously interviewed his then-girlfiriend, Louise Rolfe, aka, the Blond Alibi, in the 90s, and she maintained McGurn had nothing to do with the massacre while conceding that he might have planned it. But she maintained they really had been holed up in a hotel when it went down.

In Russo's book he basically writes 500 pages on Humphries without ever mentioning if he had a title.

I would guess he was below only Ricca and Accardo in terms of formal status and in terms of actual power, probably their equal or superior, if Russo was in fact correct of his characterization of Humphreys as being the operator responsible for nearly every notable thing they did post-Capone.

What I am saying is, the way Russo characterized it was like saying well, there's one guy on this plane who knows how to fly it. It really doesn't matter if you call the flight attendant the captain, there is still only one person who can fly it and that is all anyone cares about.

But Russo's book might have gone a little over the top in its admiration of Humphreys.

There is also a lot of information on Humphreys in the FBI files. He was an interesting character.

Some of the info. in the FBI files supports what Russo says in his book. The files are sometimes difficult to read and there is a lot of information "blacked-out."

Cool... that is probably where I will go next if I keep reading about this stuff... the raw files. The Family Secrets files someone posted a while ago were pretty interesting but only half of them downloaded.

Although sometimes I remember thinking "I am sitting here wasting my time reading a telephone conversation between two morons."

I can post the url's on the FBI files if you decide to go that route.

I followed the Family Secrets trial and actually got hooked on that case. I pretty much stopped last May when the 7th Court of Appeals upheld the convictions by a 2-1 vote with Judge Diane Wood dissenting. I also emailed Jeff Coen with questions about the trial. And guess what? He answered every email ! Seems like a really nice guy.

BTW - any word about another trial related to FS ? I just knew there would be more indictments, but nothing happened. Also, I would like to know more about John DiFronzo.

I may need to start a new topic.

Thanks

Yeah, Family Secrets was really exciting. Coen's book was awesome; one of my favorites, if not my favorite. That is really cool he wrote you back. I've read that book about 3 times.

I was actually considering writing Steve Warmiber regarding this "60 made guys" issue; maybe I will.

I haven't heard anything about a new trial in a couple years. There were a few article after FS that alluded to it, and John Kass alluded to a "tsunami" of indictments in 2010, but it never happened.

Yeah, DiFronzo is a bit of a mysterious character... there is some good info on him over on ANP, and a small section on him in When Corruption Was King. (If you liked Coen's book you'll probably like that one too if you haven't read it.)

In one of those articles, or in the comments, someone mentioned who it was who brought him in, and maybe how... I forget.

He's married and lives in River Grove in a modest apartment complex that he owns. One of his sons died of a drug overdose. He used to own a car dealership, or dealerships (probably still does).

And he was reportedly identified by Nick Calabrese as being at the Spilotro murders but the feds did not have enough evidence, is the story, to go after him. Other theories on that exist, because they did not have much more evidence to go after Marcello for the same thing except a voice ID, or, with Lombardo for the Seifert murder, basically just a fingerprint, but still went after them. So some people think there's some funny business why they didn't go after DiFronzo too.

There are some good articles on DiFronzo on ANP if you do a search over there.

But nothing that would come close to a really good bio.

He used to meet at the old Loon with all his pals, later converted into another restaurant called the My Way, owned by Bobby Abinatti, but it's since closed completely I believe.

Kind of funny that was the Outfit meeting spot, it was pretty lame.

Thanks for the info. I'll do some homework.

http://www.maryferrell.org/mffweb/archive/viewer/showDoc.do?docId=139578&relPageId=2

Would someone please let me know if this opens. It's an FBI file on Sam Giancana.

Yes it did; pretty interesting.

And here's how the Chicago Tribune described "The Last Supper" picture.

http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1986-...uppa-mob-trials

Read and make your own decisions relative to who is who !

Thanks John.

Sure, he was put in charge of some video poker operations but Szflarski wasn't running all the video poker for the entire Outfit. And he wasn't running his own crew or in the administration.

Chicago's power would be similar to the Bonannos/Luchesse

Bonanno's and Lucchese's both have around or over 100 made members while Chicago has only 30 made members and the Bonanno's and Lucchese's have had more indictments meaning there more active and involved in more crimes than the outfit so I don't see how thats plausible. Chicago is more on the level of new england and philly

Exactly. Decades ago Chicago could be compared to some of those families but certainly not today.

Chicago isn't like NYC like you said they don't "make" as many people. They certainly have more influence than Colombos and New England

The modern day Outfit is behind all the of the NY families, including the Colombos.

Ivy, if it makes you feel better, I believe that all the available evidence suggests that:

1) The Outfit is less active than Philly. Italian-American assimilation did in the Outfit; Philly seems to still have a pool of youngish Italian-American guys willing to get involved. (And yes guys I am aware of the existence of Nick Ferriola.)

2) The Outfit seems to be more on par with New England, and maybe even somewhat less so.

3) The Outfit is beginning to turn into what Detroit is like now, and in a decade or so will be like what Buffalo is like now.

4) The Sarno case probably shows a good example of what the remaining Outfit street rackets are like. Or were like a few years ago. Look at the case, and consider the fact that people were speculating that he was the boss at the time; it speaks volumes.

I'm going to keep saying this stuff until someone comes along with something REAL to prove me wrong. I will cheerfully admit I'm wrong if someone actually proves it - I always do!

I agree with the above, but not so sure about the reason. I think the Outfit is crumbling due to, one, the feds have crushed it, two, there are really no concentrated areas of utterly impoverished Italians anymore, and Italian immigration started petering out around 1920. So what we see now are basically the sons of the last wave of first generation Italian immigrants.

The sons of Outfit members have gone on to do very well for themselves in many cases in legitimate professions. Meaning, in many cases, the fathers were just doing what they thought they had to do to support their families, and didn't let their kids get anywhere near it. And the more succesful members have been disinvesting themselves from illegal activities for a long time, transfering those assets into legal ventures.

In that sense, I would consider the Outfit extraordinarily succesful and sophisticated.

Part of the equation is being able to recognize when it's over.

Well first, I think New England and Philadelphia are very comparable. In terms of both size and activity. The only difference is that Philadelphia has more younger guys. But if you look at the cases over the past decade, the families more or less mirror one another.

Second, if you look at the quantity of cases in Chicago over the last decade, it's actually comparable to New England or Philadelphia. But Chicago can be a little harder to read, as the LCN connection isn't always as clear. By that I mean, while there aren't that many "Family Secret" type indictments where it clearly involves the Outfit, there are a lot of cases that have Outfit "trappings," for lack of a better word. And, according to the estimates, the total manpower in the Chicago mob is the same as New England or Philadelphia but the member-to-associate ratio is a little different.

Beyond that, there does seem to be more involvement in legitimate businesses in Chicago. Some would argue that makes the Outfit more powerful than New England or Philadelphia. But it could also be argued that the Outfit is simply closer to merging into legitimate society, which will ultimately coincide with the crime family disappearing. After all, once you no longer have that core of made guys who do all the criminal stuff, in addition to the legit stuff, all you really have left is legit businesses owned by guys (or the children of guys) who used to belong to a viable mob family.

Bridgeport, Elmwood, Melrose, River Grove, Norridge are all still very Italian

True Nicky, but with the Outfits smaller size and shrinking influence how many of those kids want to be in the mob? The Five Families will exist for many more years in the future because they have a large pool to recruit from, plus family connections, and some young kid is going to be enticed by the lifestyle. But with DiFronzo doing virtually nothing other than counting his money, you won't see the same level of persistence you see in the tri state area.