Didn't closing the books for twenty years damage the American mafia in the long run?

Closing the books at the end of the 1950s when the mafia was unknown to the majority of Americans and even after Valachi, thanks to Hoover who refused to investigate, didn't it bring any damage to the mafia?
Some small families arrived in 1976 with a few men of honor and a series of arrests was enough to decimate them.
Maybe if after Apalachin the Commission would prefer to allow the inductions or even cancelled the limit on small family membership the US mafia would be the shelf of itself today

Hoover didn't investigate the Mafia you know why? Because he knew he didn't have any fucking room to talk he was even worse than the Mafia. Him and the entire FBI.

Anyway, back to the question, yes it hurt the mob look at how many Families just went extinct due to not inducting new members. People talk about how successful and low-key the smaller Families were, but what good was it if they no longer exist? The proof is in the pudding, Families that continued recruiting are still here today. How strong or weak they are is completely beside the point, as long as there's still a presence they can always regain strength.

From what Valachi said they inducted hundreds of guys in the 50s prior to the "closing". In his memoirs he was moaning about the calibre of a lot of the guys they made, he was also the one who spoke about Frank Scalise making guys for money around that same time period (can't remember exactly when he got killed, 1957?). I'm not clear though on whether they made a ton of guys because they knew they were closing the books or that they closed the books because they made so many

Closing the book did not hurt them at all. Opening them in the 1970's hurt them.

If they didn’t ever reopen the books, the 5 Families of NYC and the other remaining existing Families would be extinct right now, as we speak! Of course they let several undesirables in who did damage to LCN, but hey sometimes that's the price they pay in order to continue existing.

If the book would not be closed they can easly be more seletive on who made and who not.

Some families were still making guys even with the alleged books being closed at the time.

They barley exist in the way they did back in the 1950's. So what if they stopped existing by now? They let in too many unqualified men when they reopened the books.

I see it as strange for Valachi to criticize the quality of guys being made after what he did. He ratted openly. made quite a bit of stuff up, or the feds made it up for him. He went nuts doing time, and it turned out afterwards that his family had a big history of mental illness which apparently was passed on genetically to him.

No Jace, I say fuck that. No LCN in a world where other groups continue to thrive in worse ways? No, fuck that. I'm glad they reopened the books and are still here in some capacity.

He went nut bexause despite started his 15 years sentence for drug traffick,Genovese thinked that he was a rat and ordered to whack him,despite that Valachi doesnt flip but after killed a guy and risking the death penalty he agreed to flipped.
Without Genovese paranoia,Valachi would be out in 1974,maybe first and would return to the borgata.

Vito Genovese helped destroy La Cosa Nostra in so many ways. First in 1957 with the attempted hit on Frank Costello, then the same year with the Apalachin Meeting, if he in fact was the mastermind behind it. Then when he forced Joseph Valachi to flip in 1963, who for the first time identified the entire structure of the American Mafia to the world, including all the Families and their administrations. If not for those events, we would most likely be talking about a very different LCN today. I still blame the bosses at Apalachin for running though, if not for that I really don't think that law enforcement could've done shit at that time. Unless you're on parole, they can't tell you who you can and can't meet. It was them running that caused the mass arrests and front page coverage.

As a side note, for a lowly soldier like Valachi to be able to identify the administrations of Families from all over the country tells you how interconnected they all were.

It's a pretty crazy read when he talks about how paranoid he was, how he wasn't eating, how he felt guys being hot and cold with him and then ultimately murdering a guy he thought was someone else when he thought he was on the verge of being killed

Get it straight, especially Furio: Genovese never had any plan to kill Valachi! Joe Valachi went nuts. All reports especially the psychiatric ones show he was out of his mind. He also tried to commit suicide while ratting. Maybe Valachi heard voices telling him to put a hit on himself.


Liggio: Valachi couldn't have known all the bosses and members across the country. Most of that was fed to him by the feds who handled him.