I'm wondering how Plumeri and the DioGuardis fit in.
- The DioGuardis' father Domenico arrived from Baucina to the same block of Prince and Elizabeth street where the Citranos, Giampaolos, Nuccios, and DiPalermos would all live. Domenico DioGuardi would raise his sons, the infamous DioGuardi brothers, on Forsyth two blocks away from Prince and Elizabeth. Along with the Baucina connection, Frank DioGuardi's FBN file lists the LoCascio brothers as associates. John DioGuardi's FBN file notes that he still spends time in Lower Manhattan after moving to Long Island.
- Given Plumeri's relation to the DioGuardis and his close early association with Dominic Didato, Plumeri also operated in these circles. As of the 1940s, he was living at Delancey and Forsyth, near the DioGuardis' home and just a few blocks from the Prince and Elizabeth base. Plumeri also brings to mind Joe Pinzolo, as Plumeri was from Enna province, further east like Pinzolo from Caltanissetta, but more than that, Plumeri had close ties to Pittston and the Bufalino family. When Pinzolo came to the US he initially arrived to Pittston, where he had relatives, and where the local mafia group was made up of men from his region. Could be a coincidence, but Plumeri and Pinzolo were both Lower Manhattan Reina/Lucchese figures with ties to Pittston.
- Between the FBI's 1960 and 1969 comparison charts (which sometimes have errors), one of the differences is that Plumeri is listed as a captain in 1960 but no longer listed in 1969 and Joe Lagano is by then a new addition. The other changes are to East Harlem and Brooklyn crews, so if the chart is at all accurate, it would imply a connection between Plumeri and Lagano crews given they were both active in Lower Manhattan and there is no other obvious explanation. One possibility is that Plumeri took over for Frank Citrano sometime before or upon Citrano's 1960 death and was replaced by Lagano before 1969.
- There has also been some speculation John DioGuardi was a captain before his legal trouble. Along with the reference to Plumeri being a captain, it's hard to know exactly how this would fit in. It seems possible if not likely that Plumeri and the DioGuardis were at one point part of what's now known as the Prince street crew, assuming it wasn't split up and mixed/matched with other crews at some point. The Lucchese family tends to do that far less than families like the Colombos and Bonannos, but is still known to have done it on occasion. Adding to this is that Willie LoCascio later shows up as a captain until his death and could not have been the Prince street captain. With so many of these guys moving to Queens and Long Island, it makes it more difficult to know what role geography played in their crew assignments. It's possible LoCascio became captain of a crew that dates back to his compaesano John DioGuardi, who knows.
- If all of these guys were originally with the same Lower Manhattan crew, which I'm leaning toward, it would have been a large crew. John Pennisi said the Truscello (Prince street) crew had something like 30 members at one point, which sounds crazy, but maybe there was precedent for the Lower Manhattan crew being large.
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- Still haven't been able to confirm if Frank Citrano and Ciro Giampaolo were from metro Palermo or one of the smaller villages. Both of them originally lived on the same block of Prince and Elizabeth as most of the other crew members, which makes me suspect they were from the same villages that keep coming up on that block.
Just to give a visual, you can practically draw a straight line between San Giuseppe Iato/San Cipirello, Marineo, and Baucina. It's crazy to look at this and think: this row of little Sicilian villages created the Lucchese family's Lower Manhattan faction, a crew that still exists today in some form
