@ Furio - thanks for that list but it’s quite outdated. Tony Dote and Rudy Fratto are allegedly made but don’t appear. Vito D. Spillone and Gino Martin passed away a few years ago.
I still don't get the whole “Southern Italian organized crime principles†statement by Johnson. And how does having higher up associates of non-Italian descent fit into that?
@ jonnynonos - my thoughts exactly. I forgot to mention the 28 members argument in my opening post but we all got the picture. What is available online about them doesn't make it look like a cohesive organization at all.
@ Moscone - typical government sensationalism. With the impact of black and Hispanic crime groups all over Chicagoland, bringing up the Outfit as a major point of focus for LE agencies is ridiculous.
Like I was saying in the OP, the mob in Chicago has scattered into small independent crews...at best. Similarly to the “Irish mob†in today’s Boston, today’s “Outfit†should be understood as a general term for a spread out criminal subculture made of smaller cliques of mostly Italian-last named crooks criminally unrelated to one another.
That 28 members thing is ancient and has been debated on here extensively. If I remember correctly, the posters who I considered more rational all ended up coming to a kind of consensus that it was the last time the FBI had given any real insight into membership and if you parce it up now — and now another 5 years later — probably half-to-three quarters are dead, in jail or like 90.
One of the interesting takeaways though — again, for people who display some kind of objectivity — was that virtually everyone on the list was a known gangster who had been arrested multiple times for high profile cases.
So in order to believe that the Outfit still has a fraction of the vitality it once had, you have to believe that a lot of new people have moved into those roles but no one knows who they are, really what they’re doing, and they never get caught. Which is obviously silly.
