We discussed Perella’s ties to the Chicago area in relation to the issue with Bruno in the ‘60s a couple years back in a Philly thread:
viewtopic.php?p=230406#p230406
Given that his parents were from Misilmeri, I’ve suspected that he likely had familial/compaesani ties to Chicago, which likely were part of the background of why he wound up marrying a girl from Gary and moving there.
With respect to the Gary Family, not much is known, really, beyond Palazzolo. We know even less about it than we do the Chicago Heights Family. It’s not even clear to me that Alo/Agrusa/Abbate was *necessarily* a Gary member. He was also in Cal City and STL at various times, so it’s hard to say exactly what his affiliation was as of the time of the Statler meeting (Palazzolo also had ties to STL, and we can presume to paesani from Cinisi in Chicago proper, with Joe Giunta probably having occupied some position of importance in the Chicago Family prior to his 1930 murder). We sort of assume that Gary was formally absorbed into Chicago around the time of Palazzolo’s murder in 1935, but this isn’t known for a fact and we know no details about what exactly happened and how it played out from an organizational perspective anyway. We don’t really know how the mafia in Gary fit into the Chicago Family in later decades either. The mob in Gary was dominated following the 1930s by guys who relocated from the City of Chicago: Tony Pinelli, Gaetano Morgano, Johnny Formusa, Ernesto Sansone. I think that it was a formal decina, perhaps up to the early 60s, when Pinelli transferred his membership to the LA outfit in his later years, but beyond this it’s hard to say anything with surety. Following the 60s, remaining LCN activity in Lake County IN seems to have been under the control of the LaPorte/Pilotto crew until Snooky Morgano was busted in the early 90s.
