Thanks for that ivy league.Do you think that some of the low level guys were perhaps just normal people running their own little gambling rings and then were shaken down by the gambino soldiers and forced to work for them making them apart of the much larger consopiracy?
The mob certainly still does shake down unaffiliated bookies but, in this case, officials allege it was overseen directly by the Gambinos.
I only mentioned sex trafficking because of the arrests last year of gambino family members and also because they seemed to be from several articles heavily involved with both prostitution and pornogaphry during the seventies and perhaps into the eighties.
The prostitution charges in the Marino case surprised a lot of people because at least one of the girls was technically underage. The press talked about the mob "sinking to a new low." Given the mob's past, it wasn't really a new low. In the early years, they were very much into the prostitution rackets. But it became more passe as time went on. There's still some mob involvement but not much. In the 2008 Corozzo bust, there was prostitution charges at a Gambino controlled strip club.
The mob was more recently involved in porn - the 1970's and 1980's, as you said. It was when the business was easier to control through the production and distribution companies from the east coast to the west coast. Robert DiBernardo of the Gambinos being the most well known involved in the business. But there were several others. Things started to change when video cassette came around. Porn films that once sold for a lot of money could now be mass produced and sold for $5 or $10 a piece. And, like pizzaboy said, the internet changed things even more. There are still some LA mob guys involved in the business. And several cases over the past decade of the mob shaking down porn shops. And, of course, the Locascio crew using porn sites to run their credit card scams.
