by PolackTony » Sat Mar 08, 2025 11:30 pm
Coloboy wrote: ↑Sat Mar 08, 2025 9:02 pm
PolackTony wrote: ↑Sat Mar 08, 2025 4:49 pm
Interestingly, Rainone also told the feds that:
"he had been told by Leonard Patrick [...] and by Joseph 'Singing Joe' Vento (also associated with the Outfit) that a made member went through an initiation ceremony and had to be sponsored by another made member. Patrick and Vento also told Rainone that being made gave an individual the right to run his own crew and to share in the profits of the Outfit. He was told to avoid made members and was told by Patrick and Vento that Matassa was a made member".
It’s interesting, you laid it out here and I’ve seen reference to it before, but it does seem that at least historically, one of the big aspects of becoming made was that you were entitled to some kind of stake of the overall outfit profits in some way. That alone would make that designation a pretty big deal. A “shareholder” if you will.
One of you guys will know, but I recall a made guy in a family outside of Chicago (nyc?) , sometime in the 1960s maybe, talking about how he liked the way that they ran things, even including having older retired members on some type of “pension” plan for lack of a better word.
One has to wonder if any of these types of anrrangements exist to this day.
Not in the position right now to give a fully detailed response, but this is one of those questions that IMO can lend itself to exaggeration or confusion.
A made guy is granted certain rights, privileges, and prerogatives that accrue to members — one of which is access to a type of social capital that has serious value in that world (and this was by no means limited just to the immediate criminal subculture, as we know).
Another benefit that accrued was a general prerogative to make claims on operators of specific black/gray market activities, or to enter into extortionate relationships with legitimate business operators — so long as they hadn’t already been claimed by another made guy (in other words, various “street tax”‘arrangements). And, as Patrick told Rainone, a made guy can have his own “crew” of associates, who engage in various remunerative illegal activities, essentially under his “license”. A made guy in this position is of course expected to hand over a portion of the revenues that he collects through the exercise of these prerogatives to his captain (this could be, say, a flat 10%, though I believe it could also vary depending on specific arrangements or the racket involved, if his captain was bankrolling his operations and thus entitled to a specific ROI, etc).
The latter is what I read “share in the profits of the Outfit” to refer to (also worth attending to the fact that this was itself not a verbatim quote from Rainone, who was himself relaying things told to him by other — more knowledgeable — non-members. We don’t know what Rainone actually said, or what Patrick in turn verbatim told him, just O’Rourke’s summary of Rainone’s statements). And of course this isn’t any different than how things were typically handled in any other Family.
And of course they all share in the benefits that the Family as a whole collectively enjoys (access to specific remunerative opportunities in a partnership with your captain, social capital/prestige which can translate into all sorts of licit and illicit opportunities for you and your friends/relatives, protection/representation under the mafia’s quasi-state like sphere of influence). Rather than, say, the soldiers actually receive some periodic dividend of the net proceeds of a centralized, joint venture in the way that the shareholders of an actual joint stock corporation would. Maybe people online have tried to claim that Chicago did something like this, but as with a lot of these things, there just isn’t good evidence for it, IMO (and of course I’m not talking about some old, possibly apocryphal, claim about how Capone in the 1920s paid his men salaries or whatever).
In this light it’s worth emphasizing that when Nick Calabrese testified, he didn’t attest to any sort of explicit “profit sharing” program or anything of the sort. Just that one was afforded enhanced opportunities to earn (along the lines of what I noted above). And Nick, of course, was talking about the exact same time period as the Rainone statement.
And this is pretty much all Nick said about the subject. You join the mafia, you are now all “brothers”, you are part of this highly selective secret society (“that whatever you want to call it”), this affords you more opportunities to earn money and also an enhanced degree of protection under the mafia’s own legal-juridical system.
The informant you’re thinking of might have been a Lucchese associate who was a CI in the 1960s (his name escapes me at the moment). He said something along the lines of Chicago paying something like a pension to retired members, IIRC, and a few other things that may have reflected what guys in NYC *thought about* Chicago rather than substantive intel (in that I don’t believe there was any reason to think this guy had any personal knowledge or direct ties to Chicago himself; he also wasn’t even a member in NYC either).
Some Chicago CIs made some vague statements to this effect as well, but nothing substantive. Hard to say based on this how common such things, if done, might’ve been (the mafia’s origins are very much along the lines of a mutual aid society, so such things wouldn’t be far from that model). I’m inclined to read it as like when a member’s family gets taken care of when he’s in prison (as Nick C said Marcello made sure to have happen for him). In other words, a lot more ad hoc and personal rather than a systematic entitlement. These guys weren’t running the Social Security Administration by any means.
[quote=Coloboy post_id=290640 time=1741492977 user_id=6473]
[quote=PolackTony post_id=290631 time=1741477775 user_id=6658]
Interestingly, Rainone also told the feds that:
[quote] "he had been told by Leonard Patrick [...] and by Joseph 'Singing Joe' Vento (also associated with the Outfit) that a made member went through an initiation ceremony and had to be sponsored by another made member. Patrick and Vento also told Rainone that being made gave an individual the right to run his own crew and to share in the profits of the Outfit. He was told to avoid made members and was told by Patrick and Vento that Matassa was a made member".[/quote]
[/quote]
It’s interesting, you laid it out here and I’ve seen reference to it before, but it does seem that at least historically, one of the big aspects of becoming made was that you were entitled to some kind of stake of the overall outfit profits in some way. That alone would make that designation a pretty big deal. A “shareholder” if you will.
One of you guys will know, but I recall a made guy in a family outside of Chicago (nyc?) , sometime in the 1960s maybe, talking about how he liked the way that they ran things, even including having older retired members on some type of “pension” plan for lack of a better word.
One has to wonder if any of these types of anrrangements exist to this day.
[/quote]
Not in the position right now to give a fully detailed response, but this is one of those questions that IMO can lend itself to exaggeration or confusion.
A made guy is granted certain rights, privileges, and prerogatives that accrue to members — one of which is access to a type of social capital that has serious value in that world (and this was by no means limited just to the immediate criminal subculture, as we know).
Another benefit that accrued was a general prerogative to make claims on operators of specific black/gray market activities, or to enter into extortionate relationships with legitimate business operators — so long as they hadn’t already been claimed by another made guy (in other words, various “street tax”‘arrangements). And, as Patrick told Rainone, a made guy can have his own “crew” of associates, who engage in various remunerative illegal activities, essentially under his “license”. A made guy in this position is of course expected to hand over a portion of the revenues that he collects through the exercise of these prerogatives to his captain (this could be, say, a flat 10%, though I believe it could also vary depending on specific arrangements or the racket involved, if his captain was bankrolling his operations and thus entitled to a specific ROI, etc).
The latter is what I read “share in the profits of the Outfit” to refer to (also worth attending to the fact that this was itself not a verbatim quote from Rainone, who was himself relaying things told to him by other — more knowledgeable — non-members. We don’t know what Rainone actually said, or what Patrick in turn verbatim told him, just O’Rourke’s summary of Rainone’s statements). And of course this isn’t any different than how things were typically handled in any other Family.
And of course they all share in the benefits that the Family as a whole collectively enjoys (access to specific remunerative opportunities in a partnership with your captain, social capital/prestige which can translate into all sorts of licit and illicit opportunities for you and your friends/relatives, protection/representation under the mafia’s quasi-state like sphere of influence). Rather than, say, the soldiers actually receive some periodic dividend of the net proceeds of a centralized, joint venture in the way that the shareholders of an actual joint stock corporation would. Maybe people online have tried to claim that Chicago did something like this, but as with a lot of these things, there just isn’t good evidence for it, IMO (and of course I’m not talking about some old, possibly apocryphal, claim about how Capone in the 1920s paid his men salaries or whatever).
In this light it’s worth emphasizing that when Nick Calabrese testified, he didn’t attest to any sort of explicit “profit sharing” program or anything of the sort. Just that one was afforded enhanced opportunities to earn (along the lines of what I noted above). And Nick, of course, was talking about the exact same time period as the Rainone statement.
[img]https://theblackhand.club/forum/ext/dmzx/imageupload/files/e5d6c6577335236d990ef6c99a2ac0d5.jpeg[/img]
[img]https://theblackhand.club/forum/ext/dmzx/imageupload/files/8ebcb2f0fa9924b8ac680324af401e1c.jpeg[/img]
And this is pretty much all Nick said about the subject. You join the mafia, you are now all “brothers”, you are part of this highly selective secret society (“that whatever you want to call it”), this affords you more opportunities to earn money and also an enhanced degree of protection under the mafia’s own legal-juridical system.
The informant you’re thinking of might have been a Lucchese associate who was a CI in the 1960s (his name escapes me at the moment). He said something along the lines of Chicago paying something like a pension to retired members, IIRC, and a few other things that may have reflected what guys in NYC *thought about* Chicago rather than substantive intel (in that I don’t believe there was any reason to think this guy had any personal knowledge or direct ties to Chicago himself; he also wasn’t even a member in NYC either).
Some Chicago CIs made some vague statements to this effect as well, but nothing substantive. Hard to say based on this how common such things, if done, might’ve been (the mafia’s origins are very much along the lines of a mutual aid society, so such things wouldn’t be far from that model). I’m inclined to read it as like when a member’s family gets taken care of when he’s in prison (as Nick C said Marcello made sure to have happen for him). In other words, a lot more ad hoc and personal rather than a systematic entitlement. These guys weren’t running the Social Security Administration by any means.