cavita wrote: ↑Fri Aug 11, 2017 10:22 am
Vincenzo Troia is another that intrigues the hell out of me since it seems almost impossible that he was active in the Midwest since he was so influential on the east coast and even Sicily before that. Why he was active with the smaller Midwest families is beyond me.
From the Sicilian docs Rick posted in the Troia thread we know he was the boss of San Giuseppe Iato in the 1920s before he fled to the US, so like Maranzano and many other guys he must have brought that credibility with him. Gentile identifies Troia as a boss at one point during the Castellammarese War so either he was still the San Giuseppe Iato boss in absentia and that was recognized in the US, or he was boss of a place like Springfield. Some of these guys, Gentile and Troia both being good examples, bounced around to different cities/families who were "in network" and seemed to be able to write their own ticket wherever they went... until one of them got gunned to death and the other flipped.
That bit Cavita posted is very interesting. It came from a San Diego source? What stands out is that Gary is mentioned with other cities that did have their own small families. The explanation for how families are set up is simple but accurate, too. Let's say the rule about needing 10 members to establish a family is true. You don't need a strong Italian community or thriving underworld to be a mafia family. A respected mafioso just needs a couple relatives, a few paesans with their relatives, and some kind of opportunity for everyone to work, then has to get official approval. The top guy obviously needs to be an established Sicilian mafioso in good standing with the right connections to other powerful mafia members who can vouch for him, maybe some kind of small enclave of other Italians/Sicilians.
These guys, especially the ones who weren't from wealthy families, didn't necessarily go to places where they thrived or had great economic opportunities. Giuseppe Morello was a migrant worker who bounced around doing labor when he came to the US but he was still a rising mafioso who would become the boss of bosses a relative short time later. While he was doing labor and living a peasant's life he was still deeply tapped in, which is what seems to have counted most. I wouldn't be surprised if some more "rural" areas of the US had their own small families for a time. We think of the Sicilians all going to big cities with stars in their eyes, but most Sicilian mafiosi coming to the US wouldn't have been afraid of rural environments, farm work, labor, etc. since that was their background in Sicily.
So the environment and quality of life not stopping him, this guy becomes boss of some small family in some random hole in the midwest or south, maybe running a few rackets or maybe going semi-legitimate, playing some small role in national/international mob politics. The city/town the family is based in never really took off for Italians and by this time most of them have congregated in large cities, especially on the east coast. Maybe some members of this small family have even left for other cities, which was common pre-1930s. Because this boss was an established mafioso already when he became boss, he is now probably getting up there in age and by the time he dies/retires there isn't much left to pass on and the family is dissolved or absorbed. Just a completely hypothetical scenario but I can see something like that playing out.
Alabama is the best example we have of what I'm talking about, of a family that faded away much like families today fade away, only way earlier. Until Bill Bonanno threw it out there I don't think anyone had mentioned it, had they? Maybe a footnote in some FBI file? Either way this info came out of nowhere and some other info has started to turn up that slowly backs it up. There could have easily been other "Birmingham" type families in the southern US, especially when New Orleans was the nucleus.
In mafia HQ New Jersey the DeCavalcante family was barely known by other mafia families until the 1960s. NYC informants knew very little and Angelo DeCarlo a top Genovese captain with strong ties to Union county was recorded saying he didn't know the names of more than a few members. Louis LaRasso explained to him that they intentionally didn't introduce most of their guys to other families. Side note, but a Lucchese informant (Taglialatella) said something similar about the Lucchese family not introducing their members to other families.
Going back to the DeCavalcantes -- if they could fly under the radar as much as they did right next to NYC as an active family, you have to wonder if some defunct families in other parts of the US could have existed but were never brought up, or were absorbed by another family or families like Newark or the other Chicago groups. There is reason to believe there were multiple families operating in the Philadelphia / South Jersey area, too, before being consolidated into one at some point, so that's a situation that could have played out in different places. You have to wonder if some of these satellite crews we see were actually small families originally, i.e. Baltimore.
Gentile at one point talks about one of the assembly type meetings and I swear he talks about some huge number of "capi" being there, way more than the typical ~25 families given for the US mafia at its peak. He may have been including a bunch of other random leaders who weren't bosses. All of those assembly meetings seem to have been huge.
If there were more families early on, maybe there was a reason. Maybe the first mafiosi to enter the US were resistant to being considered part of the same family as other US mafiosi who were from different families / regions of Sicily in the same way that they were later resistant to Calabrians/Neapolitans before ultimately letting them join, followed by other Italians, then half-Italians for a time. I'm just riffing off speculation but it's fun to think about.
