Contacts, contacts, contacts...
i need me a few of those. Reliable ones like.
Cool. Ive come to appreciate the fact that there's heaps of hyperbole and only a handful of reliable sources in regards to accurate information on present day Mob Families. We all know how dated 90% of the info available is. Of course we follow the articles by the authors, like Capeci, Anastasia, Deitch etc, and regularly check out our favourite sites, but i personally have managed to learn more, to further my own research devoloping leads & discovering new keywords to search with, scouring for articles on mobsters id previously never heard of, etc, etc - this through following & interacting with the posters on this organised crime/mafia message board.
Having said that, one sorta has to appreciate that with such few reliable sources, most if not all the accurate information comes from the same handful of sites sources. I mean, I live in bloody Australia! I'll never gonna be out there, investigating the families, in a trenchcoat & fedora, surveilling, staking out, building up my charts. Hell, even if i could, what am i, an idiot? Where the hell else am i gonna get information on a subject that interests me but from sources on the internet?
Still, id love like an ex-cop or author source like that. How sick would that be? That would be the shit.
As far as the family charts go, at least for the five New York families, Buffalo, New England, New Jersey, Philadelphia, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh, have all come from a well known poster who has posted on several OC forums over many years. He gets his information for organized crime reports, indictments, press releases, articles, etc. Each time a guy is identified as a member, including what his position is, he is added to the chart. Others help with this, of course, if they come across new information.
There are also charts of Chicago, Detroit, Tampa, and Los Angeles have come from others sources, including authors and former law enforcement.
