Listening to a politics podcast about angry people sending threats to election officials and their families, and one of the hosts made the long winded claim that “This really shows how sick these people are, not even the Italian mafia targeted the families of people they hated. They made a point of not targeting women and children. When the Italian mob has more scruples than you that’s a problem”.
Now, that clearly isn’t true right? I’m using movies as an example (though it’s based on a book), but Goodfellas they clearly were targeting the wives and children of mobsters in that.
The mob had rules like that, but being criminals, their members weren’t very good at following rules. The women killed were usually in the company of a male target.
They generally didn’t as long as they were innocent. I’m assuming you mean wives and children of mafia guys. A female crook or someone they did business with would be a different matter, and collateral damage can happen too, but they usually didn’t go after family directly. Most of the top guys were traditional and it was supposed to be forbidden to go after other mafia guy’s families.
Roy DeMeo was one of the sickest mafia killers there was and looking at the list of his known murders (which may only be 1/4 of the real number) I only spot one female, and she was probably collateral damage.
In Goodfellas, Liotta’s wife felt threatened by De Niro’s character in the movie, but that was just her felling, no one actually knows if he was going to do something. And, remember, neither Liotta or De Niro’s characters were in the mafia, they were only associates. .
There was also one guy and his wife who were killed, and she was killed because they believed he probably shared the things he did with her, making her a loose end. It was business, a “had to be done” kind of thing. And that guy wasn’t in the mafia either.
The Luchese family under Amuso and Casso broke new ground by targeting female relatives of enemies. They actively targeted the wife and sister of an associate who cut a deal with the DA. The sister was shot several times but survived.
Members of the early 20th century Mafia in the U.S. (also referred to as the Black Hand) targeted fellow Italian immigrants and their families in extortion and kidnapping schemes. Sometimes children were taken and disappeared permanently.
If you have all history to sort through, you can always find examples of anything.
Mostly, though, mobsters did indeed refrain from targeting women and children. Some aspects of that came from a warped sense of honor and some from wanting to prevent retaliation against their own families.
There’s a third reason that is equal to or larger than those. Neither the police nor the public got very upset when mobsters killed each other. Good riddance to bad rubbish was a general attitude. Killing of bystanders and presumed innocents pushed buttons. The men in the mobs were fair game, but killing women and children brought extreme pressure on the police to do something. Doing something didn’t always mean catching the killers - it sometimes did but witnesses could be intimidated or disappear. But stepped-up police activity disrupted the money-making operations. Raids and arrests made for headlines even if they were only temporary gains.
In sum, killing women and children were bad business decisions. The bosses themselves dissuaded their underlings from doing so. Internet death threats can be made at no cost at all. (Other than the extremely small chance of arrest.) They live in a different realm.
Not exactly the same thing, but I recall news about some murder that happened in NYC about 20 or 30 years ago in a parking garage. There was also a witness that was killed who happened to just be in the wrong place at the wrong time. A local crime reporter suggested the hit man would never be found and that his own mob would “take care of him” for being sloppy, that they really disliked the sort of activity that brought unnecessary attention by killing innocent people.
Arnold Schuster, a Brooklyn clothing salesman was shot dead outside his home in 1952, allegedly on the order of mob boss Albert Anastasia. Anastasia was said to have viewed Schuster as a “squealer” for having recognized bank robber Willie Sutton on the subway and alerting police, leading to Sutton’s arrest.