by Ivan » Fri Feb 16, 2018 7:41 pm
Chris Christie wrote: ↑Fri Feb 16, 2018 5:58 pm
Sounds like The Life sucks, remarkably similar to Joe Pistone's tale of undercover entry into the Colombo and Bonanno underworld.
Currently I'm going through my own 1910's archive, viewing it from a different angle and The Life wasn't much to brag about then either. If you were a boss maybe you rented out a saloon and had people run it or was even a moderately successful businessman. But underneath this so-called top tier, is just grunt work. Saloons are congregating areas for scams and scores ranging from counterfeiting, extortion, kidnaping, robbery, murder. When Pistone laid it out 60 years later, he more or less stated the same with Jilly's store where people go there and plan scores. Seems like 70% of it never really goes anywhere.
And something we all take for granted today are smartphones, mapquest etc. Consider the Italo-criminal and the language barrier in NYC and being able to find their way around. Majority of the time they couldn't even locate each other, the address was wrong or the guy left town. He's known to hang around this club so let's go wait. It's alot of waiting. And when they finally do connect it's more fucking waiting, for materials, for some other party to appear. Always "there's a guy in Hoboken" or "as soon as so and so gets back from Rochester." It took these guys all fucking week to do what we can do in 2 mins in 2018. Seriously, I couldn't do this shit, better off just working a regular job.
I bring this up because it seems unless you're at the top or you've got good rackets going, it's not very rewarding, at all.
Yeah. Having read all about these guys for 25 years now, my current "unified field theory" about the mob is that the main reason organized crime is viable is because a certain type of person is
EXTREMELY averse to doing a "boring" 9 to 5 job. A corollary of this is that the same type of person probably doesn't really mind being in jail all that much, because they don't have to do anything in there. Which, in turn, makes it easier for them to commit crimes in the first place, because they don't care all that much if they end up in jail. Just a theory!
Brings to mind a conversation from Murder Machine...
Dominick: This life is ours, it's a dead end.
Henry: Maybe, but it beats workin'.
Dominick: Yeah, you're right.
Henry: Here, have some toot.
You
can get rich being a gangster, but that's not the main draw. The main draw is that it beats workin'.
I freely admit that I could be totally full of crap with this idea.
[quote="Chris Christie" post_id=69692 time=1518829082 user_id=69]
Sounds like The Life sucks, remarkably similar to Joe Pistone's tale of undercover entry into the Colombo and Bonanno underworld.
Currently I'm going through my own 1910's archive, viewing it from a different angle and The Life wasn't much to brag about then either. If you were a boss maybe you rented out a saloon and had people run it or was even a moderately successful businessman. But underneath this so-called top tier, is just grunt work. Saloons are congregating areas for scams and scores ranging from counterfeiting, extortion, kidnaping, robbery, murder. When Pistone laid it out 60 years later, he more or less stated the same with Jilly's store where people go there and plan scores. Seems like 70% of it never really goes anywhere.
And something we all take for granted today are smartphones, mapquest etc. Consider the Italo-criminal and the language barrier in NYC and being able to find their way around. Majority of the time they couldn't even locate each other, the address was wrong or the guy left town. He's known to hang around this club so let's go wait. It's alot of waiting. And when they finally do connect it's more fucking waiting, for materials, for some other party to appear. Always "there's a guy in Hoboken" or "as soon as so and so gets back from Rochester." It took these guys all fucking week to do what we can do in 2 mins in 2018. Seriously, I couldn't do this shit, better off just working a regular job.
I bring this up because it seems unless you're at the top or you've got good rackets going, it's not very rewarding, at all.
[/quote]
Yeah. Having read all about these guys for 25 years now, my current "unified field theory" about the mob is that the main reason organized crime is viable is because a certain type of person is [b][u]EXTREMELY[/u][/b] averse to doing a "boring" 9 to 5 job. A corollary of this is that the same type of person probably doesn't really mind being in jail all that much, because they don't have to do anything in there. Which, in turn, makes it easier for them to commit crimes in the first place, because they don't care all that much if they end up in jail. Just a theory!
Brings to mind a conversation from Murder Machine...
Dominick: This life is ours, it's a dead end.
Henry: Maybe, but it beats workin'.
Dominick: Yeah, you're right.
Henry: Here, have some toot.
You [i]can[/i] get rich being a gangster, but that's not the main draw. The main draw is that it beats workin'.
I freely admit that I could be totally full of crap with this idea. :lol: