A. - Ronald Fino cannot possibly have any inside knowledge above, for example, the FBI on the Buffalo crime family considering he publicly flipped in 1989/1990. I have said this various times, even when the consensus was that he was on "my side," if you will. B. - You've taken Fino's comment out of context. The very sentence before Fino is quoted, the article writes: "Today, both Cohen and Coppola estimate that there are no more than a handful of surviving mob members in the area, with no viable organization to unite them, and no leader." So what Fino appears to be saying, in relation to the rest of the article, is that there are remnants of the mob left but no viable organization. I have never disputed that. I have always maintained that there are probably multiple members of the family that are still active in crime. You can choose to take Fino's comment out of context, but I am choosing to read it in relation to the previous statements leading up to that, and to the article as a whole, which is definitive in its explanation that the family, as a viable entity, is dead.
We can argue until we're blue in the face what Fino truly believes. But the fact remains that he is not only contradictory, but he is really not in a legitimate position to know whether the family is active. He does not decide whether the family is active. He is not a true authority on the matter. His opinion, I'll concede, is definitely important, but it does not compete with actual investigators, agents and prosecutors, which is where the bulk of my argument lies. We should also take into account that he is currently promoting his own book if I recall correctly, so it is in his best interests to inflate the Buffalo Mafia to fit his narrative. I am not saying that he is outright lying, nor that he has any real ill intentions behind what he's been saying recently, but a culmination of all these things means that it's hard for anybody to take Fino as a foremost decider on whether the family is active.
