Eh, I just rewatched the Sopranos a few years ago and I think that first scene of the series was one of the most egregious because it was in the middle of an office park and in broad daylight.
But something to also keep in mind is the vast majority of victims of these sort of things, were themselves involved in shit they shouldn’t be involved in. They would likely refuse to give information to the police. An uncooperative victim usually results in the police moving on to crimes where the victim wants their help.
The sense I always got, when I lived in New York, was that Mob violence was widely ignored by law enforcement so long as the victims were themselves mobsters and assorted lowlives. If John Gotti had a rival whacked, the cops generally didn’t care.
It doesn’t follow that Gotti could beat or kill just ANYBODY with impunity.
I grew up in the northeast Bronx in the 1950s and 1960s. There definitely was a mob presence (and still is today). I never saw or heard of a public beating or shooting that was attributed to the mob. But you certainly heard of things that were carried out out of sight.
When my younger brother was about 17 he was hanging out a few blocks from our house with a couple of friends. He went home at midnight because he had a curfew. Not long after he left his friends got into some kind of altercation with a guy who was driving by and were both shot dead. There was insufficient evidence for the cops to go after the guy, but the rumor was that he was whacked a few months later because the family of one of the kids he killed had mob connections.
In the 1970s a body was dumped on the next street to my house. The guy had had his genitals cut off and stuffed into his mouth. The word on the street was that he had been messing around with the girlfriend of some mob guy and wouldn’t lay off after having been warned.
A small-time mob guy who lived in my brother’s apartment building, known as Louie Lump-lump, actually did commit a murder in public, at Rao’s restaurant in Manhattan. But he was kind of nuts.
Well this just happened in a neighborhood in Brooklyn. An owner of a famous pizzeria in the area was shot in his driveway on a residential street. There is speculation that it was a mob hit, but it also could have been someone who just wanted the $10,000 in cash the guy was carrying.
I work near a storefront where a bunch of unsavory Armenian people congregate. Once, a group of them attacked a guy in front of the store. A traffic cop was nearby and he didn’t do anything. My coworkers saw the event from our office window, but no one reported it. We don’t need the extra trouble.
TV shows cannot be 100% realistic, but I think The Sopranos tried really hard to be as realistic as possible. Even if witnesses reported the beatings that happened in public, the victim would probably play down the violence to the police out of fear that other members of the mob would retaliate against him.
most Mafia hits are not done in public. And as stated above many are one mob guy killing another mobster. As they said in Goodfellas, your killer could very well be your friend or even a relative.
But as I’ve indicated all along, this is not run of the mill stuff, not like The Sopranos or any other TV show makes it appear. And the Feds did care about Gotti whacking a rival. Took a number of years, but Gotti died in prison because he whacked John Castellano (and others). They should have dumped his body in the ocean, OBL-style; instead he got a hero’s send-off, much to the disgust of many.
Yeah, I still have to call bullshit. No offense, but I know lots of people in New Jersey and Long Island who come from “mob towns” and always talk up all the gang stuff that supposedly goes on. It’s always “rumors of this” and “supposed mob connections”.
Beatings, I can see no one really caring about. Particularly in communities with high crime rates.
Committing flagrant Sopranos style felonies publically with no repercussions? I don’t think so.
a lot of mobsters who get sent to prison are there due to the RICO law and the FBI. The local cops are not involved in those cases. Of course there have been local cops on the take from the mob and even 2 NYC cops who were doing hits for the mob.
I remember renting the video after hearing how great the show was and seeing this scene in the very first episode, thinking it was bullshit (which it was) because they would never attack a guy like that in a place like that. (which they wouldn’t)
I quit watching because of that nonsensical scene BUT started watching it again, realizing that like every show, they over dramatize incidents to make it compelling (even though I and I think most people enjoy subtlety.)
Anyway, my answer to the OP is much of the OPEN violence is fake, would not happen like the show portrays it.
He was also just a gambling debt guy, there was no reason to attack him there and real mobsters wouldn’t–they knew where the guy lived. But without rewatching it again, I really do think that’s one of the most egregious examples of the DiMeo family doing violence in public. Most of their other violence occurs in places where they had a reasonable expectation of not being caught.
One of the other notable public acts of violence was when Corrado’s two hired hitmen try to kill Tony. But that one actually makes sense–those guys are pure hired guns, not even “associates” of the crime family (because Corrado doesn’t want them linked back to him), and killing a mob boss like Tony is a lot easier when he’s driving around doing day to day chores than it would be in private–at his clubs, work sites, or home he has access to a lot of guns and usually associates to help him defend himself.
Sure, but that would presumably happen after the fact. That is, I can imagine that Tony sees some guy in the middle of a random office park, starts beating him up, some shocked office workers call the cops, and then a few weeks later all the charges are dropped, no one is willing to testify, etc. But (a) it seems awfully stupid of Tony to do that in the first place, and (b) unless Tony has literally pre-intimidated everyone in the entire state of New Jersey, it doesn’t make sense that there would be no 911 calls, no cops showing up, etc.
Agree fully, MaxTheVool. In addition to exaggerating life, TV shows also tend to greatly compress timelines. Not necessarily a bad thing, as real timelines would not make interesting TV.
