by CabriniGreen » Tue Jul 04, 2023 11:46 pm
B. wrote: ↑Tue Jul 04, 2023 8:08 pm
CabriniGreen wrote: ↑Sat Jul 01, 2023 1:56 am
antimafia wrote: ↑Fri Jun 30, 2023 9:52 am
Ah, okay. Having interacted in the Greater Toronto Area with many
pachinesi and
termitani in Italian-Canadian and Sicilian-Canadian cultural and business-professional organizations, I haven't encountered individuals with ancestry from either
comune expressing contempt for the other group or for Sicilians with provenance from elsewhere, nor have I witnessed individuals putting on airs because of their particular ancestry. An antimafia stance comes through loud and clear from everyone I've met.
Below is part of what Lee Lamothe posted back on Dec. 1, 2006, 1:17 am, on Rick Porrello's old crime forum on AmericanMafia.com. Lamothe is referring to the Project Colisée bust that happened 9 days earlier.
The thirty in Toronto weren't touched by the Montreal project yet. The "crews" are actually relationships bound either by blood and marriage -- in the case of the Cammileris -- or by drug trafficking associations -- in the case of the Genua/Arcuris. In spite of what's been said recently in the media Toronto does have at least four Sicilian cells -- there seems to be a great effort on the part of people -- including so-called journalists -- to suggest Toronto isn't up to the task. Actually the Toronto Sicilians -- many of them from Trapani and Cattolica -- were deeply into the French and Pizza Connection cases and these guys are still around and are, I can tell you, tough old bastards.
Original link (no longer operational, nor archived on Wayback Machine):
http://cybermessageboard.fatcow.com/rpo ... .php?t=155
Given that Lamothe was such a mob groupie and was obsessed with determining a criminal's formal mafia affilation -- this was before he started tending more and more to his wheelchair-bound wife, who was also a journalist -- I wonder whether today he would admit or clarify that individuals like Giacinto Arcuri, Peter Scarcella, and Antonino Cammalleri were "freelancers," as Anna Sergi was told in the last year by law enforcement here in Canada. One of my interpretations of this term "freelancer" -- maybe posters can reach out to her for her take -- is that 1. there have been Italian-Canadians in the Greater Toronto Area who have indicated they are part of the mafia when in fact they aren't (this behaviour is possible in Quebec too); and 2. law-enforcement agencies, true-crime writers, and organized-crime reporters have sometimes asserted that individuals are in the mafia who are not.
The relationships that individuals like Arcuri, Scarcella, and Cammalleri had to actual mafia members need to be carefully scrutinized but not embellished for the purpose of ascribing mafia membership to the former as well. In the case of Scarcella, you also have to look at how he seemed at times to be collaborating more often with the GTA-based Commissos of the Siderno Group than with Sicilian-Canadians or Sicilians in Ontario and Quebec.
This is a highly interesting post. I just recently replied to a post by Stubbs, that the Sicilians are a network of families, not just rackets. That it's based on families from Catollica and Siculiana, and the primary economic activity was narcotics.
Also interesting these Toronto Sicilians. Caruana people? Rizzuto people? A combo of both? Are they extensions of an existing group in Sicily? Or do they just have origins in Sicily, but a wholly newly formed thing?
Sergi wrote a paper that B. went into a little on mafia hybridization and Mafia " Brands" being appropriated by Italian criminals in certain territories where no mafia group established an absence of competition. In fact I forget exactly all of her reasons for this type of criminal behavior, I gotta go back and read..
Outside of the 'ndrangheta, the members in Canada are made members of mafia Families headquartered elsewhere. The mafia at its traditional core is a network of families and not just rackets, you are 100% right, but its primary activity isn't narcotics, it's everything they do. To mafiosi, there is no separation between who they are in the mafia and who they are in life. It's why an accountant / politician like Gagliano can be a member of the Bonanno Family -- he has to keep it quiet because he's part of a corrupt secret society, but there is no true "double life" in the mind of a mafia member, everything he does makes him what he is and is internally consistent.
I'm one of the cynics when it comes to "new organizations" and "mafia hybrids". What gets called a hybrid organization from the outside is just the network -- Calabrians, Sicilians, and others with their own groups co-mingle and it doesn't mean their individual groups change or become one. Members of the 'ndrangheta and Camorra can become Cosa Nostra members but their groups don't hybridize, they just become Cosa Nostra members and the network expands. Same for the idea of "new" Families forming -- if the "sixth Family" idea was true, then who recognized them? Rarely do mafia members try to form their own Families without permission and when they do, they are often left unrecognized and their place in the network weakens. We know recognition is still a factor in modern Canada with membership, as Todaro and the Luppinos agreed they didn't have to recognize a couple of Caruana-Cuntreras even though they had been formally introduced as "friends of ours", so you can infer the formation of a Family is still subject to this.
Something that gets lost in the Canada discussions is how small the membership is in Cattolica Eraclea and Siculiana. Sicilian Families, especially in Agrigento, are extremely small by North American standards. In 1993, Italian authorities said there were six affiliati of the Cattolica Eraclea Family and thirteen affiliati of Siculiana. This may not have been all of the members but it wasn't a fraction either and membership is by no means a given even for well-connected relatives. Some of the Cattolicensi and Siculianesi in Canada have been made with the Bonannos, Caracas, or the original Sicilian Families but I believe a lot of the mafia figures in this circle in Canada may be associates of those groups and it takes nothing away from them as participants in the network, it's just a detail worth mentioning if you're interested in the formalities of Cosa Nostra.
There is an assumption sometimes that many of the Sicilians in Canada who weren't members of an American group must be members of the Sicilian mafia but there isn't supporting evidence for it in most cases and they are still beholden to the mafia regardless.
I can't remember offhand, but I don't think she meant hybrid organization, like a half mafia, half Ndrangheta family.
She meant American Bonnanos, reaching out to Canadian Buffalo guys plugged into a Ndrangheta network. She meant Pagliarelli guys being supplied by Naples based guys. Or the Corso Di Millie people doing business with the Barbaros. I think she meant a greater permeability amongst the mafias to better facilitate new business opportunities. She insinuated this occurs much more in basically what we would call "open" territories, where no one group "owns" the land, so to speak.
On the Sixth family thing.... yall just will beat a dead horse to death, resurrect it, and beat it some more....
They are not a recognized family. But they are most certainly an OC group that would qualify as a Mafia association in Italy. I mean Nigerians got charged with mafia association, and they obviously are not members of the mafia.To me, They actually are very much like an Agrigento Stiddari clan...
Canadas criminal landscape is similar to Rome, or Messina.
Also, many of these families are very similar in structure. I doubt the Nuvolettas were ever more than 10 guys...
On the part I bolded, it seems this is exactly what Antimafia is saying about these Termitani you pegged as early mafiosi...and they are NOT beholden to the mafia... if I'm wrong holler at me and let me know...
[quote=B. post_id=264118 time=1688526519 user_id=127]
[quote=CabriniGreen post_id=263986 time=1688201776 user_id=5378]
[quote=antimafia post_id=263944 time=1688143962 user_id=113]
Ah, okay. Having interacted in the Greater Toronto Area with many [i]pachinesi[/i] and [i]termitani[/i] in Italian-Canadian and Sicilian-Canadian cultural and business-professional organizations, I haven't encountered individuals with ancestry from either [i]comune[/i] expressing contempt for the other group or for Sicilians with provenance from elsewhere, nor have I witnessed individuals putting on airs because of their particular ancestry. An antimafia stance comes through loud and clear from everyone I've met.
Below is part of what Lee Lamothe posted back on Dec. 1, 2006, 1:17 am, on Rick Porrello's old crime forum on AmericanMafia.com. Lamothe is referring to the Project Colisée bust that happened 9 days earlier.
[i]The thirty in Toronto weren't touched by the Montreal project yet. The "crews" are actually relationships bound either by blood and marriage -- in the case of the Cammileris -- or by drug trafficking associations -- in the case of the Genua/Arcuris. In spite of what's been said recently in the media Toronto does have at least four Sicilian cells -- there seems to be a great effort on the part of people -- including so-called journalists -- to suggest Toronto isn't up to the task. Actually the Toronto Sicilians -- many of them from Trapani and Cattolica -- were deeply into the French and Pizza Connection cases and these guys are still around and are, I can tell you, tough old bastards.[/i]
Original link (no longer operational, nor archived on Wayback Machine): http://cybermessageboard.fatcow.com/rporrello/viewtopic.php?t=155
Given that Lamothe was such a mob groupie and was obsessed with determining a criminal's formal mafia affilation -- this was before he started tending more and more to his wheelchair-bound wife, who was also a journalist -- I wonder whether today he would admit or clarify that individuals like Giacinto Arcuri, Peter Scarcella, and Antonino Cammalleri were "freelancers," as Anna Sergi was told in the last year by law enforcement here in Canada. One of my interpretations of this term "freelancer" -- maybe posters can reach out to her for her take -- is that 1. there have been Italian-Canadians in the Greater Toronto Area who have indicated they are part of the mafia when in fact they aren't (this behaviour is possible in Quebec too); and 2. law-enforcement agencies, true-crime writers, and organized-crime reporters have sometimes asserted that individuals are in the mafia who are not.
The relationships that individuals like Arcuri, Scarcella, and Cammalleri had to actual mafia members need to be carefully scrutinized but not embellished for the purpose of ascribing mafia membership to the former as well. In the case of Scarcella, you also have to look at how he seemed at times to be collaborating more often with the GTA-based Commissos of the Siderno Group than with Sicilian-Canadians or Sicilians in Ontario and Quebec.
[/quote]
This is a highly interesting post. I just recently replied to a post by Stubbs, that the Sicilians are a network of families, not just rackets. That it's based on families from Catollica and Siculiana, and the primary economic activity was narcotics.
Also interesting these Toronto Sicilians. Caruana people? Rizzuto people? A combo of both? Are they extensions of an existing group in Sicily? Or do they just have origins in Sicily, but a wholly newly formed thing?
Sergi wrote a paper that B. went into a little on mafia hybridization and Mafia " Brands" being appropriated by Italian criminals in certain territories where no mafia group established an absence of competition. In fact I forget exactly all of her reasons for this type of criminal behavior, I gotta go back and read..
[/quote]
Outside of the 'ndrangheta, the members in Canada are made members of mafia Families headquartered elsewhere. The mafia at its traditional core is a network of families and not just rackets, you are 100% right, but its primary activity isn't narcotics, it's everything they do. To mafiosi, there is no separation between who they are in the mafia and who they are in life. It's why an accountant / politician like Gagliano can be a member of the Bonanno Family -- he has to keep it quiet because he's part of a corrupt secret society, but there is no true "double life" in the mind of a mafia member, everything he does makes him what he is and is internally consistent.
I'm one of the cynics when it comes to "new organizations" and "mafia hybrids". What gets called a hybrid organization from the outside is just the network -- Calabrians, Sicilians, and others with their own groups co-mingle and it doesn't mean their individual groups change or become one. Members of the 'ndrangheta and Camorra can become Cosa Nostra members but their groups don't hybridize, they just become Cosa Nostra members and the network expands. Same for the idea of "new" Families forming -- if the "sixth Family" idea was true, then who recognized them? Rarely do mafia members try to form their own Families without permission and when they do, they are often left unrecognized and their place in the network weakens. We know recognition is still a factor in modern Canada with membership, as Todaro and the Luppinos agreed they didn't have to recognize a couple of Caruana-Cuntreras even though they had been formally introduced as "friends of ours", so you can infer the formation of a Family is still subject to this.
Something that gets lost in the Canada discussions is how small the membership is in Cattolica Eraclea and Siculiana. Sicilian Families, especially in Agrigento, are extremely small by North American standards. In 1993, Italian authorities said there were six affiliati of the Cattolica Eraclea Family and thirteen affiliati of Siculiana. This may not have been all of the members but it wasn't a fraction either and membership is by no means a given even for well-connected relatives. Some of the Cattolicensi and Siculianesi in Canada have been made with the Bonannos, Caracas, or the original Sicilian Families but I believe a lot of the mafia figures in this circle in Canada may be associates of those groups and it takes nothing away from them as participants in the network, it's just a detail worth mentioning if you're interested in the formalities of Cosa Nostra. [b]There is an assumption sometimes that many of the Sicilians in Canada who weren't members of an American group must be members of the Sicilian mafia but there isn't supporting evidence for it in most cases and they are still beholden to the mafia regardless.[/b]
[/quote]
I can't remember offhand, but I don't think she meant hybrid organization, like a half mafia, half Ndrangheta family.
She meant American Bonnanos, reaching out to Canadian Buffalo guys plugged into a Ndrangheta network. She meant Pagliarelli guys being supplied by Naples based guys. Or the Corso Di Millie people doing business with the Barbaros. I think she meant a greater permeability amongst the mafias to better facilitate new business opportunities. She insinuated this occurs much more in basically what we would call "open" territories, where no one group "owns" the land, so to speak.
On the Sixth family thing.... yall just will beat a dead horse to death, resurrect it, and beat it some more....
They are not a recognized family. But they are most certainly an OC group that would qualify as a Mafia association in Italy. I mean Nigerians got charged with mafia association, and they obviously are not members of the mafia.To me, They actually are very much like an Agrigento Stiddari clan...
Canadas criminal landscape is similar to Rome, or Messina.
Also, many of these families are very similar in structure. I doubt the Nuvolettas were ever more than 10 guys...
On the part I bolded, it seems this is exactly what Antimafia is saying about these Termitani you pegged as early mafiosi...and they are NOT beholden to the mafia... if I'm wrong holler at me and let me know...