I haven’t visited this forum in a long time because there is almost nothing to talk about. There hasn’t been a major scam uncovered in almost decades now.

They had a video poker thing going in the early-mid 2000s but I can’t imagine that was enough to power an elite criminal organization then, or now.

It’s most likely completely dunzo.

If you have no major rackets, don’t use violence and don’t have any coherent structure, what makes you the mob?

People on here will argue the Outfit is so subversive no one really knows blah blah blah...phooey. They were powered by alcohol, then gambling and corruption, but evidence of their criminality bubbled up in various ways since it was founded, Now it’s near radio silence.

This generation’s Accardo likely owns something like a storage space empire in Elgin.

It’s over.

To believe the Outfit exists in anything more than myth you have to believe that it’s so subversive nobody knows what it’s doing and, concurrently, it never gets caught.

Historically it never functioned without putting people in trunks. Now it just doesn’t? How does it control anything? How does it protect itself?

It’s absurd. It’s a criminal organization. Even at its height when it was a legitimately terrifying entity, it had to kill people all the time to keep them in line. Now no one flips, no one rips them off and everyone on the street respects them because... why?

If you read the stuff from the late 90s/Family Secrets — much of the original reporting which took place over the precedfing 50 years — it’s clear it was almost finished then, and was actually fascinating as a relic of another era circa 2000..

An organization can’t function without being an organization. A couple hundred Ford employees can’t go off and start Ford 2; similarly a half dozen 75 year olds can’t carry out the activities of a “mob” in any meaningful sense.

I used to think it was on its last legs. At this point I would imagine it’s complely gone. Some of the old guys may still run a couple brothels or something as “sole proprietors” but I’d guess that’s the extent of it.

There aren’t even neighborhoods left where these guys came from. Not a single one.