That 12 full functioning crews was an exaggeration by rabb and the feds looking for there headlines
They weren't saying the Gambinos were down to 10 or 12 crews. They said 10 or 12 crews out of the 21 in the family were fully functioning in the years immediately following Gotti's conviction. Gravano did a lot of damage, including help convict 7 Gambino captains. Those other crews didn't vanish but they were in a state of disarray and not functioning fully for a time.
I'll ask again, did these numbers include the Montreal crew? It's stated in either the Sixth Family or Mafia Inc. (probably both) that the Bonannos had 150 members including Montreal in the early 80s. I'm not sure what sources were used for these figures and perhaps these were simply based on the 15 capos they had at the time (a capo originally being in charge of ten soldiers). I'll also have to add to my previous statement that another guy with Sciacca said the Bonannos had 100 members after which Sciacca said 180. Sciacca was the current acting boss at the time.
I'm fairly conservative when it comes to total numbers for the families and think that they may have always had pretty much the same numbers. A number cap of 300 for the Genoveses and Gambinos and 150 for the three smaller families sounds believable to me. Yet the 180 members statement by Sciacca doesn't sound like being pulled out of thin air. Also I find it quite odd that according to D'Arco the Colombos were allowed to have more members than the Luchesses and Bonanno.
Like I said before, 180 members in the 1950s and 1960's is believable if you go with the higher end estimates.
150 in the early 1980s seems high for that time period. You'll notice that the figures I posted above were after the death of Sciascia when the Rizzutos were said to have broken off from the Bonannos. But even if that break never actually happened, or even if we do not include the Montreal crew in the figures above but add them now, it still doesn't come to 150.
