Like the title says.
For example, have you ever known a business owner who had to pay off people? Ever known someone in school who knows little of what their father does except he’s very scary?
Ever been asked as a kid to deliver a package?
When I was in college, I tended bar at a place that I’m almost positive was owned and operated by the Dixie Mafia. I was very naive at the time, but things I’ve learned since I worked there have convinced me that there was a lot more going on there than a juke joint and amusement company. (And both of those, in the late eighties, were mostly-cash businesses, so very good choices for moving money through without a lot of paper trails…)
A couple of the kids I went to school with had a father who went up the river, one of the fathers got whacked.
My father worked at a place that was essentially a money laundering scheme for the mob. The FBI came in and shut everything down and locked the accounts. He was out about two grand in back pay.
Curious, what kind of business was it and did he have any clue?
Way back in the good ol’ days when my father was a lad he did what industrious boys were supposed to do and delivered papers. One of his clients was Jake Lansky, brother of Meyer Lansky. And one day Lansky’s wife made him an offer he couldn’t refuse–she invited him in for a soda.
He grew up in a town in Florida that seemed to have been built by the mafia–years later we would visit and he would point out various houses and tell us which mobster had lived in them. We thought it must have been an interesting neighborhood back then.
I knew a guy who owned a small auto parts store that didn’t do much business; the store was more of a hangout. I knew, but I was discrete, as was he. One time we were talking and I complained about a situation. He subtly steered the conversation to get some details. A few days later the situation changed dramatically in my favor. I didn’t ask.
I’m a foreign aid worker, when I’m building a project in the developing world, it’s not unusual to have the entrenched crime systems to try to get a piece of the construction contracts. In Afghanistan, I took over a project that the previous manager had completely lost control of, there were ghost employees, fake projects and shootings at project sites.
One of my aunts moved to Sicily a while back. She loved it there; when she came back for a visit she said the whole Mafia thing was massively overstated, she’d been there about 3 years and never even come across more than old rumours about them, at least outside of a few areas which were easy enough to avoid.
Then she opened a business (a riding centre I think).
She was back in the UK a few months later, jittery as hell.
I worked at a marina during the summer while in high school, and it was well known that if you took good care of certain boats, the owners would take good care of you.
Most of the time that just meant keeping your mouth shut around the owner’s wife, but that also applied to guys that weren’t “connected” I suppose.
When I was 16 I dated a guy for a very short time who spoke often about his “godfather”. He made the man sound like a rich, mysterious figure. One day he said to me “You know my godfather that I talk about? Welllll, he’s not the type of godfather that your parents pick out for you.”
I stopped dating him right there.
Eastern European friend at uni (had recently opened up to the West but pre-EU integration) dad’s business was ‘agricultural machinery’… Made enough to send both daughters to EU universities (fees today are about £16,000 pa before board, lodging, expenses and travel) and that was before her MBA from a top business school… we were/still are highly suspicious of where the money came from…
Many years ago, I was working for a company that was doing business with a company in Chicago. One of the partners was the grandson of Frank Nitti, one of Al Capone’s lieutenants, and the guy Kevin Costner threw off the roof in “The Untouchables”. It was just a bit of odd trivia until after a trade show we did with them in Chicago, we mentioned to them that one of our racks didn’t come back from the show and our shipping company had reported it stolen. It showed up at our loading dock the very next morning, delivered by an unmarked truck.
My brother and I went to middle school with the grandkids of a caporegime from the Chicago Outfit. It was a very hush-hush thing. While most parents at the school knew of the connection I don’t think many kids did. The grandkids never talked about it. I remember my brother getting an invite to their “vacation” home in Wisconsin. He came back raving about the huge “dining room” with a table that could sit 20.
I met him once at some school event. He didn’t seem like a Tony Soprano kind of guy.
Yes
Yes
No
I was once asked to deliver a message but I never got the opportunity
I was told at a young age that you keep your nose clean and your mouth shut
Way back in high school, my big brother’s girlfriend’s best-friend’s father was said to have mob ties.
In grade school me and a friend went to another friends of our’s home who was very Italian and he though it was cool to show us massive stashes of cash his dad had hid around the house.
Personally, when I was in college, for a summer job, I drove delivery trucks for a company that almost certainly was delivering more than just VeryFine juice and cigarettes. On several memorable occasions I was given extremely light routes, and asked to make ‘special deliveries’ upon returning to the depot early in the afternoon. A typical ‘special delivery’ would be a single delivery (one stop) of a few non-descript boxes, already loaded into a rented box truck (Ryder, U-Haul, etc.) to a small, independent market or grocer in one of Greater Boston’s many Italian neighborhoods.
I had a friend who was a bookie. He wasn’t in the ‘mob’ per se, but was certainly a member of the Greater Boston Organized Crime Family.
Another friend: when I was in college a very good friend of mine was tending bar in an establishment that was a sort of ‘front’ organization. The ‘owner’ (Dennis) offered to loan my friend the money he needed to open his own bar, as a ‘favor’, but my friend refused. He figured (correctly) that while the money could be paid back, the ‘favor’ was not easily paid back. Dennis later was found dead in a dumpster with a couple bullet holes in his face.
Another friend: his father ‘invested’ some money with a local ‘businessman’. Said ‘businessman’ ran off with the money of my friend’s dad as well as many, many other people, and shortly thereafter was found dead in his Florida hotel room, of ‘natural causes’, though the money was never recovered. Fortunately, my friend’s dad was the beneficiary of a substantial life insurance policy held by said ‘businessman’ (held as ‘collateral’ for the ‘investment’) and was able to retire (at 44, from the two-pump, two-bay service station he owned). My friend and his brother stand to inherit a substantial fortune when the old man dies.
Yes.
I work across the street from a menswear (strange word, that!) shop. There is very little online presence for the business. The proprietor is nearly always hanging around out front, smoking cigarettes, talking on the phone or texting. My co-workers and I have never seen anyone come out of the shop with a purchase, nor seen a transaction take place, though every once in a while I have seen him get out the measuring tape to measure someone’s size(s). It doesn’t help that the guy does seem straight out of Central Casting for a gangster role.
There are at least two other shops just a block or two away that also seem like fronts, e.g. one is perpetually having a “going out of business” sale, and it seems to be an open secret as to what they really are.