Snakes wrote: ↑Sun Jul 23, 2023 4:50 pm
Chicago not doing the formal ceremony has somehow turned from conjecture into a fact. The truth is, we don't know the exact details of any ceremony aside from the 1983 ceremony with Calabrese. We don't know what exactly happened in the 1956 ceremony, except that a banquet was held and the prospective members had to "swear an oath." Other than that, we really don't know what else they did.
To underscore the ways that conjecture and fraught evidence have been turned into "fact", the below excerpt from 1963 was posted a while back on this forum and trumpeted as the gospel truth regarding Chicago's induction practices (it can be easily found by searching on Mary Ferrell, and was thus low hanging fruit). The FBI had very poor sources in Chicago at this point, and following Valachi's revelations were seeking to confirm his account of "La Cosa Nostra" in other cities. So, they asked some guy who was informing in Chicago about it, and he said that he was totally unaware of any ceremony or oath, or even that new members were sponsored by someone. In fact, the CI in question here (CG 6512) was not only apparently not a Chicago member, it's not even clear that he was an associate or had any formal affiliation with the mafia at all (in this period in Chicago, without strong member or even associate sources, the FBI leaned heavily on all sorts of randos who claimed to be in the know, from gamblers and restaurant owners to local cops and reporters, as confidential informants -- just because they assigned someone a CI code and referenced them in a report, doesn't mean that this person had any idea of what was actually going on). CG 6512 talked to the FBI for several years, giving sparse intel of a mainly anecdotal nature and nothing at all concerning the actual organization, and was never identified as a Chicago LCN member or associate in any report that I have read.
In 1964, after he was pinched on heroin trafficking charges, Teddy DeRose began talking to the FBI (thanks to Ed Valin for uncovering that CG 6690 was Teddy DeRose). DeRose was a longtime associate of the mafia in Chicago and gave a detailed account of the organization and its history (going back to Mike Merlo and Tony Lombardo in the 1920s) from his perspective as an associate (excerpt below from Sam Battaglia's file). Unfortunately, we don't have an equally detailed account from a made member in Chicago during this period, as the member CIs that the FBI developed in Chicago typically gave much less intel. While not having gone through the ceremony himself (and DeRose was in fact of French Jewish ancestry but had successfully passed himself off as Italian in Chicago in order to advance his "career"), DeRose was aware that it at least entailed a formal ceremony where initiates had to swear an oath, and used the term "made" to denote membership status in "The Family" (unlike some other Chicago CIs, it is very clear that DeRose knew the difference between an associate and a made member). Unlike the guy who the FBI asked in 1963, DeRose was also aware that new members were proposed by a sponsor.
If anyone is unfamiliar with this history, it should be stressed that a made member of the Chicago Family did not testify about the organization until 2007, when Nick Calabrese gave a detailed recounting of his traditional
punciuta ceremony conducted in October of 1983. Other accounts on this matter for Chicago are vague and sparse. For example, in 1976, Chicago/Tampa informant Vic "Popeye" Arrigo told the FBI that he had been proposed for membership by Chicago member Joey DiVarco and was to be inducted at an upcoming ceremony officiated by Accardo (Arrigo testified in a case in Tampa and thus may not have wound up getting made).
