B. wrote: ↑Sun Mar 07, 2021 4:14 pm
I want Wiseguy to answer the question this time instead of evading it like last time.
What can Pogo do to improve his charts? You seem to think they're inaccurate and I'm sure Pogo won't take offense if you use your critical thinking skills to let us know how he can improve the charts section given that we all value them immensely on here and contribute to them when possible.
Pogo has greatly refined how he compiles those charts over the years and I myself have found no flaws in the standards he uses for including names. As civilians, it is the best resource we currently have on membership in the five families.
I mentioned it because you specifically said
soldiers and not just
members.
I look forward to your feedback on how to improve the charts section because we're going to use it when we add names to the Buffalo chart.
Lol! Don't hold your breath. I don't think you'll be adding names anytime soon. More likely we'll be taking names off given their ages.
Pogo The Clown wrote: ↑Sun Mar 07, 2021 4:18 pmBut isn't that what you are doing? Buffalo has X amount of Italians so the local LCN must therefore be able to recruit X amout of members from it. The reverse argument works as well. Chicago and NY have X amount of Italians so they to should be able to recruits X amount of Italians like Buffalo.
And it is a largely faulty argument anyway. Pittsburgh and LA have one of the largest numbers of Italians in the country, much more than Buffalo and only behind places like NY, Philly, Boston and Chicago and yet Pittsburgh only has 1 living member and LA not much more. Places like Scranton, Youngstown, New Haven and Atlantic City have some of the highest proportions of Italians in the country but yet LCN is practically non-existent there. Why couldn't enough recruits be found among these populations to keep LCN going?
https://www.realtor.com/news/trends/hol ... americans/
Pogo
Exactly. It was SonnyB's math. I took the data he used to argue Buffalo could have 30 members and simply plugged into the Italian populations of other cities, and their respective mob families, to show the problem with it. Of course, once it showed that thinking doesn't really work, now it's "my math."
B. wrote: ↑Sun Mar 07, 2021 4:27 pm
Yep, and Scarpa amended his estimate when Joe Colombo told him in 1964 that he conducted a family census and they had 114 members.
The difference is, we have information from other member sources that directly contradicts what those members once estimated and by looking at a large set of sources, patterns become evident that help us get better estimates.
This argument boils down to two points:
- You think Violi was lying.
- You think 30 is an absurdly high number for the modern WNY-Ontario family.
We have no other member sources who confirm nor deny Violi's statements, so we're left to interpret it on our own.
- While Violi may have been rounding up or down for convenience, I don't think he was outright lying.
- I don't think 30 is an absurdly high number of members for the WNY-Ontario family.
That's what we're arguing about.
The "30 isn't an absurdly high number for the area" argument conveniently ignores all the evidence against it that we've repeated ad nauseum. Sure, 30 doesn't sound like all that much when taken out of context.
Of course, when one considers the clear, documented membership decline over the past 30 years, the relative lack of activity over the past 20+ years, what law enforcement is on the record as saying about the state of the Buffalo LCN, how no other family has two-thirds of its membership unidentified, and so on, 30 does begin to look problematic. Especially when it's coming from a single source.
But that single source holds more weight for you guys than everything else. And you're left scrambling to justify it, i.e. equating media hype with a change of view on the part of law enforcement, arguing the entire region of upstate New York and Ontario is in play here, etc.
Old man Todaro, who's up to his elbows in pizza dough all day, has suddenly become this mastermind criminal who's active but the FBI can't touch, working with the Ndrangheta have hits carried out in Canada, owning billion dollar hotels in Florida (his HQ apparently), etc.
All roads lead to New York.