by PolackTony » Fri Sep 20, 2024 11:23 am
Snakes wrote: ↑Fri Sep 20, 2024 10:57 am
PolackTony wrote: ↑Fri Sep 20, 2024 10:34 am
pat_marcy wrote: ↑Fri Sep 20, 2024 5:48 am
So when you say members this is just Italians yes? Cause over the years they’ve had people like gus Alex, humphries etc who are not Italian obviously but you’d say they were members of the outfit
“The outfit” is just a synonym for “Cosa Nostra”/mafia (used all over the country also, not at all unique or particular to Chicago). Alex, Humphreys, et al., were *not* members, they were valuable and highly respected associates, as every Family had. *Members* doesn’t mean “Italians” — it means “made guys”, i.e., inducted members of the mafia. There were always Italian guys who were associates and not made guys (all members are Italian, or at least half-Italian in a couple of cases, but not all Italians are members).
I do get what he is saying, as I think guys like Schweihs were considered part of the Outfit from a certain point of view. I don't want to get too much into previously (well) trod territory, but I think it was slightly different in Chicago as they were rarely referred to (internally or externally) as a "family," so I think it was easier for a non-made member to be considered "part" of the Outfit than it would be for a non-made member to be considered "part" of the Gambino Family (as opposed to "with" the Gambino Family). The Outfit is certainly an LCN organization, but I think the terminology does kind of blur the line at times.
As you know, we only have one made guy in Chicago to testify about the organization, Nick C, and he certainly understood “member” to mean an inducted member of the mafia.
Given that we don’t even know what DeLaurentis actually said, I’m not going to get too far into speculating as to what *he* may have meant by whatever he actually said. Some earlier FBI informant sources seem to have used “member” the loose way that you indicate here, but then typically these sources were not LCN members themselves. To outsiders or low-level affiliates, they might have mis/understood any guy with clout to have been a “member”, with little to no understanding of what the actual mafia organization consisted of or what membership in this organization really meant and entailed. As is very often the case with these questions, we also have the ever-present issue of the problem of “attributed speech” — in most cases, we don’t know what these sources actually said verbatim, rather than the way that an FBI agent parsed or summarized their statements, which were almost never reproduced in full (we also don’t know the context of how the agent interviewing them phrased the question and this can also be a vital element of contextualizing someone’s statements and making sense of them).
What we mainly get is “The Blind Men and the Elephant”/“The Outsider Looking In”, so I am very hesitant to make any strong claims as to how nomenclature and local organizational culture may or may not have differed between Chicago and other Families. But when we do get these little peeks from behind the curtain from members or highly trusted associates (by which I mean guys like Frank Schweihs or Teddy DeRose, and not some guy who ran a wire room or whatever that the FBI may have talked to in 1959 etc., of course), we see that they absolutely used terms like “Family”, “capodecina”, “the Life”, “wiseguy”, “made guy”, “avvocato”, “sottocapo”, “Consiglio”. We just have so few/fragmented accounts from sources of this level of quality and validity, as opposed to the Blind Men that the FBI relied so heavily on. Obviously, DeLaurentis does not fall into this category.
To go back to my post above, it wasn’t in response to the DeLaurentis thing, as we still don’t actually know what he even said anyway. It was to “Pat_Marcy”, who was asking about what “you” would say. I can’t answer for anyone else, but when the “you” is *me*, then no, I would not say that any of these associates were “members of the outfit” and I have little doubt that made guys in Chicago saw things any differently (again, going back to Nick C who was made before DeLaurentis and who was specifically queried about this matter on the stand and denied that non-Italian associates had any particular organizational status equivalent to being a made member).
[quote=Snakes post_id=283958 time=1726855073 user_id=66]
[quote=PolackTony post_id=283956 time=1726853657 user_id=6658]
[quote=pat_marcy post_id=283936 time=1726836531 user_id=8498]
So when you say members this is just Italians yes? Cause over the years they’ve had people like gus Alex, humphries etc who are not Italian obviously but you’d say they were members of the outfit
[/quote]
“The outfit” is just a synonym for “Cosa Nostra”/mafia (used all over the country also, not at all unique or particular to Chicago). Alex, Humphreys, et al., were *not* members, they were valuable and highly respected associates, as every Family had. *Members* doesn’t mean “Italians” — it means “made guys”, i.e., inducted members of the mafia. There were always Italian guys who were associates and not made guys (all members are Italian, or at least half-Italian in a couple of cases, but not all Italians are members).
[/quote]
I do get what he is saying, as I think guys like Schweihs were considered part of the Outfit from a certain point of view. I don't want to get too much into previously (well) trod territory, but I think it was slightly different in Chicago as they were rarely referred to (internally or externally) as a "family," so I think it was easier for a non-made member to be considered "part" of the Outfit than it would be for a non-made member to be considered "part" of the Gambino Family (as opposed to "with" the Gambino Family). The Outfit is certainly an LCN organization, but I think the terminology does kind of blur the line at times.
[/quote]
As you know, we only have one made guy in Chicago to testify about the organization, Nick C, and he certainly understood “member” to mean an inducted member of the mafia.
Given that we don’t even know what DeLaurentis actually said, I’m not going to get too far into speculating as to what *he* may have meant by whatever he actually said. Some earlier FBI informant sources seem to have used “member” the loose way that you indicate here, but then typically these sources were not LCN members themselves. To outsiders or low-level affiliates, they might have mis/understood any guy with clout to have been a “member”, with little to no understanding of what the actual mafia organization consisted of or what membership in this organization really meant and entailed. As is very often the case with these questions, we also have the ever-present issue of the problem of “attributed speech” — in most cases, we don’t know what these sources actually said verbatim, rather than the way that an FBI agent parsed or summarized their statements, which were almost never reproduced in full (we also don’t know the context of how the agent interviewing them phrased the question and this can also be a vital element of contextualizing someone’s statements and making sense of them).
What we mainly get is “The Blind Men and the Elephant”/“The Outsider Looking In”, so I am very hesitant to make any strong claims as to how nomenclature and local organizational culture may or may not have differed between Chicago and other Families. But when we do get these little peeks from behind the curtain from members or highly trusted associates (by which I mean guys like Frank Schweihs or Teddy DeRose, and not some guy who ran a wire room or whatever that the FBI may have talked to in 1959 etc., of course), we see that they absolutely used terms like “Family”, “capodecina”, “the Life”, “wiseguy”, “made guy”, “avvocato”, “sottocapo”, “Consiglio”. We just have so few/fragmented accounts from sources of this level of quality and validity, as opposed to the Blind Men that the FBI relied so heavily on. Obviously, DeLaurentis does not fall into this category.
To go back to my post above, it wasn’t in response to the DeLaurentis thing, as we still don’t actually know what he even said anyway. It was to “Pat_Marcy”, who was asking about what “you” would say. I can’t answer for anyone else, but when the “you” is *me*, then no, I would not say that any of these associates were “members of the outfit” and I have little doubt that made guys in Chicago saw things any differently (again, going back to Nick C who was made before DeLaurentis and who was specifically queried about this matter on the stand and denied that non-Italian associates had any particular organizational status equivalent to being a made member).