My dad was a cop in Kansas City during the heyday of the Kansas City Mob, so I met a bunch of them, primarily informants.
My best story is about Ben Asner. He was Ed Asner’s older, crankier brother. He owned a record store called Caper’s Corner, and it was the best place to buy tickets. One of his competitors was a thug named Anthony J. “Tiger” Cardarella, whose Tiger’s Records was able to sell records at a substantial discount, as they had been stolen from delivery trucks to other locations. Tiger tried to have Ed killed, and he survived - and by KC Mob tradition at the time, Ed was there after untouchable.
Tiger later was discovered dead in the trunk of his car - which in his line of work qualified as “natural causes.”
Not exactly, but one of my Great-Aunts moved to Sicily. At first, she loved the place, everyone was so friendly and welcoming. She lived there 5 years or so, and kept trying to encourage the family to come out and join her.
Then she started a business; a horse riding stable aimed at tourists. Suddenly lots of guys started showing up saying stuff along the lines of ‘Nice horses, shame if something were to… happen to them’. I’m not quite sure what happened next, as I was only a young teenager at the time and people wouldn’t tell me, but she was back in England with no money shortly afterwards, and hasn’t returned to Sicily since.
My grandmother claimed we were some how related to Joe Colombo but the evidence for that is lacking. A relative by marriage ran a speakeasy during prohibition and after that he did some sort of work for one of the families that allowed him to be a drunken asshole sitting on a couch 99% of the time.
The Italian side of Mrs. Shark’s family were involved with the Red Hook (Brooklyn) mafia in the 50s-60s. For the most part it appears to have been low-level stuff like numbers running and truck heists. Her dad owned a bar in which stuff . . . happened.
One uncle was a higher-up and reputed to be involved in the hardcore stuff. He disappeared in 1963. The story was that he retired to Florida, but after a few calls and letters he was never heard from nor seen again.
A classmate of mine in grade school on Long Island was Carmine ‘The Snake’ Persico’s son. A recent news article says he’s now a pizza delivery guy after serving time for relatively minor mob related stuff himself. A junior high classmate in NJ was the daughter of the then ‘Tony Soprano’ of the area, forget his name. This was '60’s/70’s. The show ‘The Soprano’s’ seemed to me to present these people they way they were back then. It had a superficial theme of how things had changed for them by ca. 2000 but largely I think it was kind of hypothetical as to how 70’s mobsters would have dealt with the 2000’s. Like for example all the Mafia hits in the NY area in the early 2000’s I must have missed in the news. But an entertaining show.
Not that I know of, but there’s one person we’ve wondered about. He married into the same family I married into. He is Italian and now 80. What got our attention was that he changed his last name long ago, and none of us know what it was, and nobody is supposed to ask him about it. Also, nobody we know today has ever met any of his original family or relatives (that I know of). It’s not so much that we necessarily think he was himself in the Mafia, but that we wonder if his family was.
I had actual family members that were small timers. 2 great aunts were involved with numbers after their husbands passed away. No details though except they were a nasty pair of old ladies. My cousin on the the other side married an extra stupid guy that was mafia and died a few years later of lead poisoning. I don’t details on that either as I never wanted to know.
Meanwhile my Irish-German 1st cousin once removed was NYPD and died in what was believed to be Mafia action. He was moonlighting as a delivery guy for a bakery and in a truck robbery gone very bad he was killed.
My non-Italian grandmother talked about knowing many connected men. But she was also a pathological liar so I never know where the truth and lies were. She was suppose to be friends with Sinatra and probably did meet him but I would guess friend was way too strong of a word.
I’ve met others over the years, I think it would be odd not to living in NY/NJ.
It used to be common for Irish kids with IRA contacts to come to Aus on working holidays, to avoid trouble after becoming too well known at home.
And for Irish kids to come to Aus on working holidays because they’d been dealing a little pot at college, and had a visit from a couple of IRA hard men telling them that was a restricted occupation…
Supposedly, one of my great-aunts married a mobster, although I have no personal memories of either of them (she died when I was about two, and I believe the marriage had ended long before that).
My Dad’s side, including a great uncle who did time in prison in the 60s. And that family made a lot of money during prohibition - but that was ages ago.
I was friends with a guy in HS whose dad appeared to be a low-level mob guy. This was in the Jersey suburbs, so this was not uncommon. My parent often ate at the Seven Hills restaurant in Bloomfield, which was totally a mob operation.
Lots of mob activity in my neighborhood growing up. I had an Uncle who was a prohibition era bootlegger. There were a few families in my neighborhood that were often in the news. I posted this in another thread, but I had a direct brush with the mob:
The neighborhood where I grew up has a rich ethnic history, and illegal gambling and such things were just an accepted part of the landscape.
When I was in about 3rd grade, I was walking home from school. As I passed the barber shop, the barber knocked on the window and motioned me inside. He handed me an envelope and said: “Take this down to the pool hall and give it to Tony. He will give you a quarter.”
When I was 8, a quarter had about the same purchasing power as $20.00 does today. I stopped at the barber shop a few days a week after than and picked up the envelope. On delivery, Tony would give me a quarter. For a while, I was the richest kid in the neighborhood.
When the pool hall suddenly closed, i went back to my former occupation of hunting up old pop bottles to return for the deposit.
Later on, I realized that I was transporting the bets the barber had taken and delivering them to a pool hall that fronted for a gambling joint.
We had an old-style Italian Don who lived a few blocks over from me. The house itself was simple post-war middle class, not at all opulent. You’d never suspect anything, except for the big, fancy cars loaded with people in dark business suits who showed up during the day, and the police car parked in front of the house all night, every night.
Years later, I worked with his niece who always said, “My uncle was a kind, wonderful man!”
Reminds me of circa 1988 when I lived in the Uptown neighborhood of Minneapolis. There was this tiny little shithole of a house on the corner about two blocks from where I lived.
One day there’s this big Cadillac in the drive and this large (as in tall and muscular) guy looking every bit the 70’s pimp getting out of the car, helped by three smaller men. I mean, this guy had the whole outfit. Suit, sharp shoes, cape, straight cane.