General Chicago Outfit Info Dumping Ground

[NorthBuffalo]

Just to note. People online have been calling Pietro LaBalestra a "Sicilian zip" for some years now, but he isn't Sicilian. He's from Mola di Bari.

Another thing you see is people who were born in Sicily but moved here when they were like three with their parents and are basically fully American being called "Zips."

"Zip" to my mind always meant "Sicilian deliberately imported to the USA to facilitate organized crime activity" but that might be too narrow given how it's apparently used more broadly now (by others, not me).

Yeah, "zip" in its strict sense really should denote guys who already had some affiliation with Cosa Nostra in Sicily before arriving in the US. And even the assumption that all of these types were "sent" or "imported" in a deliberate, instrumental fashion is overstated, as there were many of them who surely arrived in the US for various personal reasons as part of the "second wave" of Italian immigration. They navigated this dynamic, in part, via their ties to Cosa Nostra, but it wasn't like they were all called in to some backroom in Palermo and told "Pino, you're going to NYC; Mimmu, you're going to Chicago; Enzu, you're part of a batch of 5 zips requested in Philly. You all ship out tomorrow... ", or whatever (there are, I'm certain, people who really think things worked like this).

There were Sicilians with ties to Sicilian Cosa Nostra in Chicago when the height of the "zip" stuff was going on in NYC/NJ, we just know much less about what they were up to. There were also a bunch of other Sicilians who arrived in Chicago/IL in this period, some of whom we can presume had familial and social connections to people in the mafia network, though they weren't "zips" in any meaningful way. There's a continuum here, as, again, all of these things were embedded in a broader demographic and social context that doesn't reduce in any simple way to mafia stuff alone.

Importantly, there were also a bunch of guys from mainland southern Italy with ties to the "mafias" in those regions in Chicago during the same period. These organizations also intersected to some extent with Chicago LCN and with each other (I think it's also very much worth noting that these intersections were happening during a period where the leadership strata of these organizations back in Italy were, as recounted by pentiti like Leonardo Messina and others, coming to think of themselves as all manifestations of the same "thing"). It's now been 50-60 years with these ties taking root and evolving locally, so they are by now deeply embedded in the local OC landscape. These "second wave" families, while retaining close ties back to Italy in the age of the internet and cheap travel, are at the same time thoroughly Americanized by now and many have intermarried with longstanding "first Wave" Ital-Americans, including families with deep connection to the Chicago LCN network.

I think most these mob guys were uneducated and not strict about much - I think zip was thrown around to everyone who was from Italy - even in the Sopranos they called Furio a zip. Fairly certain in the 80s and 90s all those Puglia guys were being referred to as zips.