Cosa Nostra News

As powerful as the mob  was historically (and it was pretty damn powerful), today it is only a fraction of what it once was. Operation Dirty Thirds, May 2018. ( Photo by Keith Durflinger for SCNG) The Italian-American Mafia 's ability to organize, infiltrate and control labor unions, run entire industries as monopolies, not to mention protect itself from law enforcement and politicians (think of major mob fixers like Chicago's Curly Humphreys and New York's Frank Costello ), will likely never be outmatched. The mob was such a force in major cities across the country -- New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, Cleveland, Kansas City, etc. -- it made corruption a fact of daily life to the extent that those in fields such as law enforcement and journalism had to keep a steady eye on it to simply do their jobs. Today, the scrutiny the mob faces is so piddling, a resurgence is  almost guaranteed. In any event, in terms of sheer size, meaning numbers of "bodies...

Vito Genovese in the mid 1940s. The Mafia has always recruited from the streets. Both Vito Genovese and Carlo Gambino in the 1950s enlisted soldiers in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn from a Brooklyn street gang called the Jackson Gents. Interestingly these street gangs are still around today, while groups like the Purple Gang and the Bath Avenue Crew, Italian mob-affiliated gangs that more closely resemble the Mafia and were considered farm teams, seem to have died out. Overall, however, the street gangs today are working as partners with the Mafia, which is more strict about recruitment, having the mindset that blood trumps everything else. The Colombo family, in particular, was ahead of the curve in that they have long relied on blood-family relations for members more than anything else. But it wasn't always that way. Used to be the Mafia recruited from street gangs -- teenagers running around in leather jackets, their hair greased back into a duck's a...

Mara Salvatrucha (MS, Mara, and MS-13) is a transnational criminal gang that originated in Los Angeles. This post is a reworking of an actual story I found on the Internet with the above headline.  I have to say I honestly think it is the most irresponsible and dangerous act of  "content creation" in the infamous format of a "list" on the Internet. The five steps to "acting like a gangster" can easily get you killed if you're foolish enough to try them. It only depends on how far you are willing to take your "acting."