THE BLACK HAND FORUM

This would explain why there could have been families in areas we never would have thought.... Birmingham, Indiana, Nebraska, etc. Some survived, some didn't.

[quote=Antiliar post_id=136531 time=1579980593 user_id=77]
The Families probably did not become large until Prohibition.
[/quote]

Where there's smoke, there's fire. I don't think it's a coincidence that many sources believed organizational changes took place around Prohibition. While those changes have been mythologized. distorted, and misinterpreted, I do believe changes took place during that time and probably centered more on growth and merging of smaller groups under larger territories, as we know the organizational structure itself didn't change much.

The Families probably did not become large until Prohibition.

Makes sense.

I think that very numerically locked hierarchal paramilitary Roman structure of Boss Underboss Consiglierie and each Capo haveing at least 10 soldiers is something the public came to understand post Valachi.

It was probably far more fluid and even with the commission in place different territories did things in different ways.

In the Midwest you had soldiers and even associates being the bosses of certain territories especially in rural areas. And they had a lot of power there.

When you're below someone he's your boss. A lotta guys saw the soldiers who had their three block radius as absolute gods in terms of power and thought the Capo was the boss of the entire world. Cause their world was small and isolated.

The boss of Utica or Johnstown or Madison or Galveston had a lotta power regardless of their rank.

[img]https://i.ibb.co/0Kjdykz/riccobene.jpg[/img]

It is hard to say without hard evidence, but in my opinion there is reason to believe this. It was also closer to how Sicilian mafia families were set up, would match the way colonies developed, and there are comments from Bonanno and Gentile about many more bosses attending national meetings early on (even if we use the term "boss" to include other family leaders). My research into Utica in particular gave me reason to suspect they were a small, separate family who later became part of Buffalo.

The US families at their peak were more like mandamenti in Sicily with the way they covered larger territories within a region. Sicilian mafia families don't typically control such a wide territory unless they are the seat of the capomandamento, which gives that family leadership over the whole territory. While the US didn't use the mandamento system, our idea of what a mafia family is in the US is much closer to that. On the other hand, there were a few US families that did operate more like Sicilian mafia families, being small and mostly centered in one city.

It would make sense that the early US groups would match the Sicilian model that created them, and that model is to have more groups of a smaller size. Leonardo Messina said the establishment of a family in Sicily requires ten members and these rules rarely change, so we can see where this would make it easy for small groups to be established, break apart, and/or be absorbed, especially at a time where there was more immigration, travel, and colonies came and went.