Were they more active before the war or did that actually bring people to the streets?
Was Gotti just using Orena?
Did they lock Persico up to stop him for sending messages to the street?
Would it be fair to say that they were at peak in terms of number of members? Or was the 70s?

you can read the scarpa files he was super informant during them yrs. in 1987 the Colombo were making aton of guys. scarpa even said snake told them even if the other familys wont open the books make them anyway. for the smallest family they had aton of shooters. and they were the concrete club even after the commission case.

During that period they were as they always were, "the gang that couldn't shoot straight", but even more so.
Persico lost his mind and had delusions of LCN domination.
It was during this period that the crew I was associated with had contact and conflict with the Colombos.
Their upstate NY crew at the time consisted of a Capo, two made guys and a crew of about 10 associates and 5 more fringe associates. From top to bottom they were mooks who couldn't find their ass with both hands.
They took us to war over Utica/Rome/Syracuse and the sum of their gains was whacking Al Marrone two days after he got out of prison, killing two women and beating another to within an inch of her life in Florida, and in the process bringing down so much heat on themselves they manged to get the Feds to do the work of eliminating them for us.

The Scarpa files are crazy....

Did Persico personally oversee the upstate NY crew?

I know we all laugh at how incompetent a family the Columbis are and to some extent that is accurate however from what I hear these guys are still very ingrained in many quasi legit businesses in Brooklyn and still have quite a bit of earners .

Now this info I got is 2nd and 3rd hand gossip but figure I would share that money wise this family is not as broke as some would think , I hear many still do very well in some unions and in construction in general and they have no qualms about killing .

It will be interesting to see what happens when Persico dies

Don't get me wrong, there are sereous guys in the Colombo family, always have been, it's just that Persioco is bufoon and they so over extended by making every news stand shake down mook who came down the pike, and trying to claim territory they had no business chasing, they ended up with crews full of rats and an internal war.

I wonder how somebody like scarpa slept at night, killing guys for being "rats" when he is the biggest rat of all.

I was always facinated by who ended up with which family in NY. A lot of it was association going back to high school, but still Its interesting how each of the families have their own feel and character.
It's a little known fact that Pistone had one foot in the Colombo camp before the Bonannos took him in...I would love to see how it would have played out if the investigation had gone that way to the end.

A little known fact?

His time with Jilly Greca and the Colombos took up about a hundred pages of his first book.

Understood, but the majority of the people out there (and I dare say in these Fora) got their info from the movie, and even though it was touched on, and 60% of the move was either a composites or completly false, I bet if you asked 100 people who saw the movie what family the guy was from in the Barber shop scene was from, 2 might be able to tell you.
A quote is a running joke in my house...anyime we are talking about someone, we throw in ..."He keeps to himslf, he's a jewel guy"
(It's a lot funnier than it sounds, trust me)
Anyway my point was it would be interesting to speculate the damage he could have done to the Colombos

They were a lighthearted and jovial. They would all join in together at the wimpy boys social Tuesday was trivia night and Thursdays was song night around the piano Greg would play all the favorites

Can you just hear them all " buffalo girls go round the outside"

Exactly and what's interesting is 2 guys in that crew were highly suspicious of him and wouldn't talk around him or do any scores. There name escapes me. The books down stairs and I don't feel like getting it