CabriniGreen wrote: ↑Mon Jun 18, 2018 7:58 pm
@B.
I forgot to mention this, but Catalano might not be the best example to illustrate your point, as I'm pretty sure the ONLY reason he was qualified to be considered for boss WAS the narcotics operations, he could barely talk to the American guys.
@ wiseguy
Didnt the Violis indictment mention this syndicate too?
Not too interested in debating Catalano's qualifications as acting boss, especially in the midst of this "is the Buffalo family active?" dead end discussion. Catalano is an example of someone who had a formal role in a specific mafia family but a separate, though intersecting role in a large-scale drug trafficking network. No doubt his position in one influenced the other and vice versa, but a better way to literally illustrate this point would be to look at the charts they drafted for the Pizza Connection trial vs. a Bonanno hierarchy chart from the same period. With the Pizza charts, you see Catalano at the center of the network and he was no doubt a top leader of the operation but it's not a formal hierarchy, whereas the Bonanno family chart would is a more traditional pyramid hierarchy. Catalano fits into both charts in some similar ways, but you wouldn't call the drug network a "mafia family" or a formal organization, or try to say they are the same organization, whereas you would call the Bonanno family a formal mafia family distinct from the network. The same logic can be applied to other groups, like the ones discussed in this thread.
To bring this back to Montreal, look at someone like Giuseppe Cotroni, who doesn't get talked about much but is a fascinating guy -- he wasn't only at the center of the Bonanno family's drug trafficking in the 1950s and 60s, but was possibly THE key figure in a network that included countless international figures and major NYC mafia members of different ranks from different families. From his FBN file:
"Head of the largest and most notorious narcotic syndicate on the North American continent." Yet he was a Bonanno soldier, and even if you include his brother who was of a higher rank in the Bonanno family, you still wouldn't say that the "largest and most notorious narcotic syndicate" was a formal mafia family with the Cotronis as "bosses". Meanwhile there is plenty of evidence that despite their power and independence in that so-called "syndicate", the Cotronis followed protocol when it came to their mafia membership in the Bonanno family. And that doesn't take anything away from the level of influence they had in the network, but it's a good example of what I'm talking about.