Every Chicago case ad-hoc, Check. Too funny, like I said before, in New York they have to give a lot more people a taste of everything. In Chicago they only involve who they need to because they are not the size of New York. Spano,Sarno,Family Secrets, and the Panozzo crew had real police gear including badges, now they could have stole them out of a house but I doubt they where given the OK to rob a cops house.
I didn't say everything with Chicago is ad-hoc. But I'm talking about the overall state of the Outfit so I'm looking at overall trends.
And going by your "the Outfit has all of Chicago to itself" thinking, one could argue the handful of guys left in LA must really be rolling in the money. That's a huge territory and there's only a few of them.
If you are talking about number of made men in the weakest New York family then your right. If you are talking about the actual power in the city they live in you are wrong. I don't see anyone in the upper echelon of the Outfit living in trailers and their wives on food stamps. Numbers don't always equal power. I don't underestimate New York like you do Chicago. New York has a huge numbers, and that helps with muscle but it also leads to more rats and longer sentences,and turnover in members. Is the Outfit huge, no not by any means, but its bigger than you are giving it credit for. Not to mention in Chicago almost anyone in politics is corruptible. That goes for a lot of police in the suburbs also.
Bigger than who is giving it credit for? We have the most recent estimates by the feds, which nobody here is on a position to argue with. Even if you want to differentiate when it comes to the importance of made guys in Chicago, whether they're still making members, etc, all you have to do is add the members and associates to get an overall picture of the Outfit's size and manpower. 25-30 members and a little over 100 associates. So perhaps 150 or so. Once again, to put that in perspective, that's similar to the other small families remaining outside NY.
Numbers can very much equal power. Would anyone argue there's no difference between a 200 member family and a 20 members family. Even more so, numbers provide durability and longevity. Carlos Marcello may have been very powerful in his day but where is the New Orleans mob now? Gone. And it's because they didn't have the numbers.
Also, we should be looking at overall trends and not one Colombo guy to make a point. I'm not bringing up Magnafichi being caught shoplifting four times in recent years.
The political corruption in Chicago is so deep-rooted and ingrained with bloodlines and nepotism it will take years and years to dilute it.
When other posters say that Chicago "isn't like" the other LCN groups they are telling the truth. Think about Frank Schweihs, a German-Italian who basically ran the Grand Avenue crew on the street after Louie Eboli died and told other made guys (Mike Glitta) to "fuck themselves". Albeit on behalf of Joey Lombardo but I can't imagine that happening anywhere else but Chicago. In that sense, yes, it is very different than the other families.
I agree that there is still a lot of corruption in Chicago. It just doesn't all revolve around or is even connected to the mob like some seem to insinuate.
Also, while one can find certain unique things about the Outfit, there are more that make Chicago similar to other mob families. Much of what made it different is in the past. Sometimes I think people exaggerate the differences in order to judge Chicago by another set of criteria in order to make it look stronger than it is.
