Chris Christie wrote: ↑Sat Mar 14, 2020 7:08 pm
Another thing however is outside of Palermo, we don't know the set up. Did Corleone stop at Corleone or did it include Villafrati or Baucina in a way that the Fratellanza is described- a boss in Favara and sub bosses in different towns? We don't have examples of smaller/rural Sicilian Families and the territory they control. At least I don't. Without that I'm apprehensive to draw a conclusion. Tree falls in the woods type of thing.
One example might be Vallelunga / Villalba / surrounding towns. It appears they were one family, at least at one point, as Calogero Sinatra of Vallelunga was the boss of an area that included Villalba and his cousin Angelo Bruno was recorded talking about how small Sinatra's group was. Italian LE reported a dinner attended by Bruno and Sinatra in that area that included a total of like 5 mafia members. It wouldn't surprise me if that was most of the family at the time. We know Villalba had members living there and produced Calogero Vizzini as boss at one point, so if these towns were always under one family it appears anyone from one of those towns could be boss, they just had few members even when they included multiple towns.
Giuffre's account of the Caccaco mandamento includes towns/villages that don't appear to have had their own family, either, but did have members who reported to the closest family. A couple of the members he identified as members of the Caccamo family lived in other nearby towns, so that's another example.
Not every village had its own family, so there was some amount of consolidation of nearby towns if they weren't significant enough to support a family. But the above two examples were small towns very close to each other -- closer than say, Buffalo and Rochester.
With the exception of Chicago, Newark and maybe upstate NY (the argument you presented which makes sense) I've seen very little in the way of consolidation or merging of groups. Had that been the case, the DeCavs would have been ripe for the picking. Why have this little pygmy in Jersey when they can be a Gambino decine?
The DeCavalcantes had a cap of 75 members according to acting boss Vinnie Palermo and at the time of his cooperation had 50+ members with many proposed, plus members who died in the preceding years. Is that a pygmy family ripe for the picking? Because we have such little information on their size and position in the 1920s/30s I'm not comfortable making a real judgment, but if they had anywhere near 75 members that would be a significant group that would be nipping at the heels of groups like the Profaci and Lucchese families, especially since they were focused in NJ.
A better question might be why San Francisco and San Jose were both created and allowed to coexist so close to each other in an area with few organic recruits. That def challenges the idea I'm suggesting of regional consolidation, but going back to the recent Schiro thread again, there is reason to believe they had political backing from different powers in NYC (Schiro / D'Aquila). Might not be that different from the reason D'Aquila / Mineo became separate, on a smaller scale.
It would have to make political as well as regional sense to combine people into one group. Erie PA and Rochester were part of Buffalo and both had a population from Caltanissetta which fit perfectly with Buffalo's membership in addition to being regionally close. Yet Endicott / SWNY fell under Pittston even though they also had men from Caltanissetta and Castellammare, like Buffalo, and weren't far away.
Celeste Morello, for what it's worth, thinks Endicott was originally its own family but I don't know what her basis is and it's tainted by her belief that the Pittston family didn't exist. Joe Barbara was a capodecina over SWNY for the Pittston family but why he joined them and not Buffalo where he had ties is a mystery.
The Capomandamento just makes it easier. It reduces 23 talking heads to 8. There's also more members in Sicily than there are in America and a 3rd tier was required. The Mafia is conservative in its ranks, if it doesn't need them they don't have them. We've seen cases where there's no underboss or captains or consigliere at one point in time or another in different instances. With the exception of Messenger and informal treasurer we don't see alot of added ranks/positions. I think in America there wasn't as big a need for more organization. The 5 year annual assembies and the Commission in NY took care of things until the 60's when Chicago overseen the west and NY the east.
At the time the US mafia established the territory associated with certain families there was apparently no mandamento system in Sicily, so they wouldn't have had that on their brains. Instead, to simplify mafia politics it would have made more sense to combine the groups into larger regional families under one boss.
I think we both agree that the goal, whether in Sicily or the US, has been simplification. Without a mandamento system in Sicily to pull from during those formative US years (that I know of), not to mention a much different landscape, they would have simply made someone the boss over a sprawling region that was geographically and politically connected.
By the time Sicily established the modern mandamento system, the US wasn't going to retrace its steps and adapt that because they were thriving and had a system that worked for all of the reasons you outlined above.
If Sicily did have a mandamento system earlier on and I just don't know it, that kicks what I'm saying right in the balls.
B. wrote: ↑Sat Mar 14, 2020 11:28 am
Now is that unique to the mafia? No. It's the nature of human beings, geography, and politics. But the point is, both the US and Sicilian mafia used a similar system for political representation and authority. The decision to use this kind of structure was not an arbitrary decision but something that allowed the mafia to be more cohesive and controlled on a national scale. If the mandamento system wasn't put into place until the 1950s/60s that's interesting, as wasn't the US mafia credited with helping the Sicilian mafia re-organize itself during that period? I recall some reliable source (Buscetta?) saying that US mafia leaders including Joe Bonanno helped set up a new Sicilian Commission.
He did. But in America there were 7-9 bosses overseeing 24-6 groups, in Sicily there's 20+ groups in Palermo alone. For every boss to be on it would e like one of Gentile's 300 member meetings he described.
Not just members, but apparently leaders/rappresentanti. He might have been exaggerating or misremembering, but his and Bonanno's accounts of those meetings are one of the reasons I suspect there were more families earlier on. If that's the case, it makes total sense why they would eventually consolidate the families into larger regional families opposed to tons of colonies with their own rappresentanti attending national assemblies by the hundreds.
One question is, what did Sicily do when they didn't have the mandamento system? This might play into one of those Italian reports about Agrigento I referenced earlier, where the authorities said the early rural mafia groups in Agrigento were more disconnected and autonomous than those in Palermo. Maybe those families were less involved/concerned with politics in Palermo and aside from being mafia members and part of the network just weren't involved in the finer details of island-wide politics as long as they could manage their own affairs, which is exactly what one of those reports suggests. Later, the mandamento / provincia Commissions allowed those families to become more involved but as we know Palermo still reigned supreme.
B. wrote: ↑Sat Mar 14, 2020 11:28 am
I am specifically comparing these larger US territorial families to the mandamento system and not the provincial system, which had its own Commission made up of capiprovincia. You could make a comparison between the provincial groups in the Sicilian mafia and larger regions of the US, i.e. midwest, west coast, east coast. The families in these larger regions did have subtle unique qualities within their region and certainly some families had more influence in their region (i.e. Chicago), but there was no high-level "west coast", "midwest", "south", or "east coast" representative and we can see where Chicago, Detroit, and Cleveland all had seats on the Commission, meanwhile the west coast relied on east coast families for Commission representation.
I'm still not seeing it. Are we discussing commission representation and how maybe Philly was represented by the Gambinos due to the Belmonte connection while LA was repped by the Gen due to the Corleonese connection? The big difference is the mandamenti were local affiliations alongside eachother merged into one entity whereas in America those affiliations could change as we seen with Philly and the Gambinos/Genovese.
I am talking about Commission representation (i.e. Philly->Gambinos, San Jose->Profaci, Los Angeles->Lucchese, etc.), but I'm comparing it to a disconnected version of the provincial Commission in Sicily, not the mandamenti Commission. In Sicily you have boss, capomandamento, and capoprovincia. The capimandamenti had their own Commission meeting overseen by their capoprovincia (for capomandamento Giuffre, this was Toto Riina, who represented all of Palermo province). The capiprovince then had their own Commission above that. The capoprovincia of Palermo was then the unofficial boss of bosses.
In the US, I am comparing the sprawling regional families to mandamenti in the way that these territories are organized for political convenience, while the Commission members representing other families are more like disconnected capiprovince.
None of this directly translates because the US is huge, has fewer members/families, and most importantly never had the official roles of capomandento and capoprovincia. However, I believe there were similar layers to the way the mafia was organized for both geographic and political reasons even if they're not a straight up mirror of each other.
Great points all around, my brother... a fun braintwister for these long hours of national "lockdown".
