You're going round and round with keeping firmly focused on the American side of the family, which is where the feds are basing their info on. Which FBI list that we know of actually contained all the members of the Montreal Bonanno crew? At best they only listed a handful, meaning that they hardly keep track of members outside their jurisdiction.Pogo The Clown wrote:SonnyBlackstein wrote: ↑Sun Jan 06, 2019 2:06 pm Personally I’m not advocating a vast, sprawling, unknown to LE, LCN family with multiple tentacles and operations.
But it’s clearly the probability that there is an active family, with a hierarchy and around 30 odd members. We have almost irrefutable proof, ie recorded statements of precisely this by the family’s underboss.
I don’t see why this is contentious.
And again I go back to what I said about all of this info being known to LE and yet they still considered the Buffalo family to be dead. Again it goes back to how one chooses to interpret the info. LE views it one way and people on the forums the other way.
Case in point the membership talk. What Humphries actually quoted was "30 candidates". People turned that into at least 30 members plus Violi and Todaro Jr. But what does it actually mean? Were there really 30 guy's in contention for the position? Or is it more likely just an off handed remark containing standard exaggeration rather than an accurate count of the remaining members?
We know that LE had the family at 45 members in 1989, 40 in 1996, 23 in 2006 and 20 in 2013. Factoring in deaths since then they would have had to have inducted over a dozen new members since 2013 to reach this 30 number that people are talking about. Now is that really believable considering that it doesn't look like they made many, if any, members from the late 80s-early 2010s? At a time when we are seeing places like Chicago, NE, NJ and evidently Philly starting to wind down as organizations is it really believable that Buffalo is actually growing and resurging as is being written?
Pogo
If the feds had Buffalo at 20 members in 2013, it is quite possible they did not include all or any of the members on the Canadian side. So 30 members including Canada, with replacing a few who passed away, really doesn't seem far-fetched.
Fact is whatever is left of Buffalo is certainly active in Canada. And Violi is either lying or not, with lying being highly unlikely. It would also be interesting to know whether Morena contested the "30 candidates" statement if it was an exaggeration. Such an exaggeration could be considered a violation of Mafia protocol too.