Yeah welcome to the Mob archaeologist we are back I’m here with Tony Angelo and I’m just some guy wandered in off the street but I’m happy to be here and we’re going to be getting into a topic we’ve been meaning to go in depth on for some time this has been a
Topic that we’ve discussed privately for many years Angelo’s been researching it deeply going back a decade he has some stuff in the works Tony knows a great deal about it um and it’s going to be the topic of mainlanders in kostra and not just mainlanders but the influence and direct links to the
Kamur and not just the Neapolitan kamur but also the calabrian Cur um there’s evidence that early inetta organizations were actually referred to as kamora and we’ll get into that maybe in more detail um but calabrians and And Men from CA entered kostra um looks like it started around the
1910s and then really uh escalated in the 1920s and those influences continued these guys entered kostra um these weren’t just random italian-americans you know they did begin to recruit random Italian Americans but there were these other guys from Southern Italy who had their own traditions and roots in formal organizations that paralleled the
Mafia uh so you know with the American kostra it is a distinctly Sicilian phenomenon you know there’s information going back to the 1800s that show nearly identical rules structure positions you know everything we see today in American kostra more or less existed in Sicily going back to the
1800s uh so even though there were these influences and specifically members who had roots in the Cur uh they didn’t kamora you know as Angelo said they didn’t kamora eyes kostra but they did bring in influences and so we’re going to discuss that a little bit we’re going
To discuss specific people and places that relate to this and uh we’ll just roll from there do you guys have anything you want to add any introductory comments yeah I think that just to sort of very quickly ground what we’re talking about historically because depending on you know people’s level of
Interest um and exposure to this topic right when they hear kamora they think of the modern day phenomenon in in urban you know Naples and in surrounding areas mainly in uh the region of compan and this is something that’s an historical offshoot right of the phenomenon that
We’re talking about so the modern day since World War II Gamora that’s you know sort of recorded by Roberto saviano that’s known from like the movie and the the series Gamora right this is a sort of Amorphis um shifting set of loosely organized gangs and criminal syndicates that wield
Tremendous power um in parts of Italy uh have connections overseas because of uh narcotics trafficking and other operations it’s a very serious criminal phenomenon but it’s not an organized society which is what makes it different than its origins in an old kamoda that was an organized as it was called the
Honored Society right and uh this is important it’s not the phenomenon you see today all right is quite different than the phenomenon we’re talking about which had a very strictly organized heavily ritualized organization with its own set of like Rich mythology and that has been preserved in Calabria even
Though it was lost in Naples absolutely that’s what they call the indang today yeah so the these all all these share Roots these Mainland Mafia share roots in this older kamora phenomenon which like the Sicilian Mafia comes to the US in the late you know 19th century with immigrants that are flooding into
The country right um at that time and then uh those networks get transplanted in this country and as Eric I think uh suly set up for us they over decades intertwine to the point where these cisti the MTAR members in the US are essentially merged into the mafia and
They don’t create a hybrid organization it’s not a sicilian Mafia Mainland Mafia hybrid they come into kostra under the rules and organization of kostra but they bring their own sort of experiences and viewpoints to it yeah and and even part of this history is is those members
Coming in right yeah and even the American kostra families that had significant Mainland influence and specifically from calabrians and neapolitans they didn’t change the structure of their their families they were still a reflection of their Sicilian Mafia Roots um so it’s fascinating that these guys were able to not only become members but
Rise into influential positions within kostra a primarily Sicilian phenomenon while also maintaining those networks and uh you know adding their own benefits to kostra without dismissing k NOA without trying to dismantle it or anything like that you know it wasn’t like we’re going to enter this organization and change it from the
Inside they did you know there were influences from them which we can see but it wasn’t an attempt to like sneak in and uh you know change what the mafia was which is interesting yeah and I would I would add right because the primary point of the show is we’re interested in exploring
The sort of History sociology anthropology even of the American model Mafia goes in elra America right so it points back to Italy but there’s also different phases in the history of the US Mafia right and we always you know sort of Center all these different families that existed at one point in
The US they’re all lodges right or cells of a larger phenomenon a member made into any of these families is a member of the Brotherhood anywhere right but at the same time these organizations also took on local characteristics not in the structure not in the organization itself
Right but in terms of who got recruited as membership and the sort of almost corporate character of each family reflects its membership which is also Downstream of immigration patterns in different cities so some American mafia families uh remained entirely or mainly Sicilian in their membership composition other families were profoundly impacted
By the entrance of people primarily from the southern part of the Meto joural of southern Italy right and uh I think we’re mainly going to focus on those families today because they’re they play a big role in this story right so different family but all of these all of
These different members were still part of the same Brotherhood interacted with each other and saw each other as being equivalent Brothers right even though some families remain very Sicilian because their communities were Sicilian other other families reflected the incorporation of Italians from different parts of Italy into a new Italian
American identity living next to each other working with each other not always amicably but more or less right yeah and one of the best most well-known examples of this is the genovesi family of New York and uh with the New York families we can see that the bonanos had roots in
Tropon uh Western palmo you know I recommend Angelo’s 2014 May May 2014 and former article if you want to really dig into the the ancestry of the New York families um but the bonanos know they had an identity linked to castellari Del goo and some other nearby areas the
Gambinos it was polaro to some degree EG rento uh the gambinos did seem to bring in more mainlanders early on which we’ll probably touch on but poo EG rento was a core part of their ancestry their identity uh the lucases we see corleon some other areas of poo columbos poo
Vate um but then you get to the genovesi family where there were significantly more mainlanders uh by the time we really become aware of who the members were and what they were doing it’s under Joe Masseria and uh he brought in a significant number of influential main mainlanders who already seemed to have
Been somebody you know the these weren’t low-level hoodlums he recruited and elevated but some of these guys there’s reason to believe they had significant stature and the family took on that identity you know you see some of these guys rise to influential positions you know veto genovesi from ca he becomes
Under bossed by 1931 many of the Capo dein dinin um you know they become influential um and we actually have confirmation that some of these big names in the genovesi family were karisi and the evidence of that aside from just circumstantial links and relationships is a recording from the
Early 60s of New Jersey Captain Ray De Carlo uh he operated in Newark uh highly respected figure and the FBI had an excellent bug in his headquarters that recorded many great conversations uh one that’s been discussed a lot not just by us but by many researchers is a discussion between
Him and some new york-based geneves members where they discussed something that was transcribed by the FBI as the combines and this has led to a lot of speculation you know they refer to seemingly an organization called the Comon that you know may have predated these guys membership in kostra and we
Now know that’s the case uh but there’s been a lot of question about exactly what that was and uh you know on the recording and I’ll just uh read the how Dar Carlo brings it up here but uh D Carlo saysi remember years ago 1931 32 we used to Rob Stills what did
We know that these guy what what did we know that these guys were all Wheels we used to say the hell with them someone named Benny who I believe to be Benny Lombardo Benny squint says you were lucky the Carlo says that’s right Benny says you were lucky don’t worry about
That they were the breaks you got in life so they’re saying we used to Rob important guys what they call Wheels we’ve seen some recordings where they refer to guys as wheels and big wheels Big Shots um so Benny’s saying you know you were lucky like you robbed these guys
And you know Got Away With It Dar Carlo then says well we were with the combines at the time Benny says combination what combination Ray corrects him and says combines we were with the combines they were no babies either veto was a combines Richie and all them guys were
Comines before they got in here most of these guys Upstate and in Reno got sneaked in Willie Moore Willie Moretti got sneaked in they got sneaked in veto got sneaked in I think he told me in 1923 he brings up an Al amiji and then
Uh we’ll get into who that is in a second but that that sets the stage the Carlo saying that early on you know 1920s early 30s they were affiliated with guys who were referred to as the comines and uh some people have speculated that this was referring to some sort of quote unquote
Combination uh Dave critchley for example and I respect Dave a lot you know Dave published an excellent book in 2009 he covered a lot of stuff we’ve learned more since then so you know I mean no disrespect to Dave um when I uh you know we’re dialoguing with other
Researchers here you know uh so I mean no disrespect to Dave when I when we correct this but he refers to the quote unquote combination he says until mainland were accorded membership status in New York City mafia families some appear to have belonged to a quote unquote halfway house composed of those
Ineligible because of their backgrounds to access Mafia membership the FBI in that context overheard geneves family member Angelo De Carlo referring to a combines which Dave clarifies as a combination those in the combination included the calabrian and Neapolitan Willie Moretti Richie board and Richie Bardo they later joined the mafia in
Bardo’s case in about 1944 uh the likes of veto genovesi Bardo and Moretti were sneaked into the combination Dar Carlo argued before they got in here according to DAR Carlo Willie Moretti got sneaked in they got sneaked in veto got sneaked in I think he told me in
1923 so Dave and some other researchers you know believe that this was some sort of you know in between organization you know sort of a Maverick outfit uh that you know was these guys were brought into before they could be brought into Kosen norra well Angelo said it straight you
Know I had already read through this and I suspected they were referring to the kamora somehow you know Angelo knows much more about the Cur than I do but I you know from looking at the names these are mainlanders these are southern Italians I suspected there was a kamora
Element to this discussion but Angelo he pointed out that konish was actually a phonetic transcription of Kamar you know it it was said in a way you know we know from FBI transcriptions of wiretaps they often get words specifically Italian words and names very wrong in this case it’s not even
That egregious I mean it’s pretty easy to to see that konish was simply a phonetic transcription of kist you Kamar eist you know and uh you know the proper term is karista but we know the A is often dropped we’ve seen term Kamar used
And you know this is said by a guy an an Italian American you know it’s not hard to it’s not hard to link that and when Angelo said that a light bulb went off um the whole transcript um basically tied itself together after he pointed that
Out and so what I’m going to do here is I’m going to read a version of this the whole transcript um unless you guys have anything to add first but I’d like to go ahead and read read this whole transcript with the correct terms applied and then we’ll discuss what
They’re talking about does that sound good yeah one thing the only thing I would add is just to be clear um you know they’re not saying combination right this is I mean past researchers given the sort of tools and the viewpoints that they had uh to you know
Come to conclusions right were trying to fit it with what they knew and understood about the mafia at the time to them it made sense to you know perhaps see this as something like a halfway house even though the term halfway house is not used on this
Transcript right um and if you look at the actual FBI file remember there’s agents sitting there in a room who are transcribing these tapes this is the early 1960s um you know think you know people complain sometimes about YouTube sound quality you know so imagine what the the
Fidelity was like and again as you pointed out this is an Italian-American guy Angelo Ray the Carlo right um speaking whatever Italian he’s going to speak is going to be heavily influenced by an older form of of naan dialect he’s saying something like right and the uh it’s a phonetic transcription they put
Comines in quotes because they don’t actually know what he’s saying they’re just trying to render it so and then when the person we believe is Benny Lombardo even says combination what do you mean combination he’s like no right so they’re not saying combination or anything similar to combination yeah
It’s kind of funny that uh people really because it’s not just Dave yeah um you know a number of researchers really believe they’re saying combination but it’s right there in the transcript J Carlo corrects him you know I’m I’m not saying combination I’m saying n comish you know yeah and uh you
Know so it’s they lay they say explicitly you know Dar Carlo says explicitly that’s not what he’s saying but you know people can only you know people only have so many points of reference you know and I myself you know after Angelo pointed out that he’s
Saying K re I was like duh how did I not how did I not see that like you know I’ve G gone through so many transcripts and made sense of some not made sense of others and after he said that I was like that was so obvious but once he said
That it made a lot of sense and there’s another part too where they there’s an Italian word that’s redacted and they’re discussing uh the degrees of membership in this combines and the Italian words redacted and then they they discuss what the meaning of that word is and they say that means
Kids or recruits and I’ll get into that when I read the transcript um but we know it’s obvious that word was pitote um which was a rank in the kamora and does translate to young boy kid recruit you know so the whole thing fit together um and I I really credit Angelo
With that with really putting that together where I went from being like it sounds like they’re talking about the kamur to being like no they are absolutely discussing the kamur yeah and I’m gonna go and read it and we can you know if you guys want to jump in
And comment on anything while I’m talking just let me know um but uh I’m going to start out here and so Raa Carlo says well we were with the karisi at the time Benny says combination what combination Ray says karisi we were with the karisi they were no babies either
Veto was a karista Richie and all them guys were Kamari before they got in here most of those guys Upstate and en Reno got sneaked in Willie Moore got sneaked in they got sneaked in veto got sneaked in I think he told me in 1923 Alami someone named Frank says Al guy
Named Fred says yeah Ray says he got sneaked in Fred says over there and we would say he’s working when he was there for years maybe 10 years pretty obvious they’re referring to Al Capone who had been working in Chicago for about 10 years before he was made into Co kostra
Fred says Al was a neighborhood karista and something I want to point out too is you know with people thinking that combination was a reference to the organization you know it makes a lot more sense that they were saying karista yeah because veto was a combination Richie and all them guys were were
Combination you know that doesn’t make sense so it makes much more sense that they were referring to the actual rank of karista um so anyway he says Fred says Al was a neighborhood karista you see we taught all these fellows how to talk Italian the Sicilians when two
Fellows would meet and they wanted to introduce themselves one would say and there’s an Italian phrase that’s redacted Ray says what would he ask for a match so he had to cut it in half and give him the head part that was the Kamari yeah so swatz Mulligan who was
Very a guy very a genovesi member very close to funi tier in Brooklyn he says them was the people that got the pig language and then with us you can’t introduce ourselves but uh the guy wants to knock on the door the guy with the there’s some Italian words that aren’t
Included he could talk the pig language and the more you knew about talking it the bigger the bigger guy you was of course that’s all he says it’s like the first second and third degree so and in parenthesis the M itth Compares that to the Masons you see they got what they
Call pitote Ray says them are the kids Benny says recruits Ray says the karisi and the mafia is the same swatz Mulligan says sure but I’m telling you this Ray says they joined up and got together Richie was a karista veto was a karista PO was a karista SWAT says that’s right
And it was the same ritual don’t think it was any different as far as the same thing Ray says and they all got sneaked in the karisi and that was when it was a good thing when they had when they had it all by themselves nobody knew them
Who the hell they were and and when they started letting Americanized guys in this guy a button guy that guy a button guy he’s a button guy introduced then SWAT says do you know what unatura means Ray says that’s a bad guy the boss and under boss that’s how they got the game
Bachi boss and underboss so uh once we put this in proper context it’s utterly fascinating because we have geneves members from both New York and uh New Jersey explicitly identifying key genovesi leaders as former karisi uh these guys were obviously around it you know Ray De Carlo uh you
Know he says he was with the Kamari you know when he was young coming up uh he wasn’t made until the 1940s but he was active in New Jersey by the 1920s you know so he’s not just identifying these important leaders as former members of the kamora but he’s
Saying that he himself was affiliated with it SWAT Mulligan based on his knowledge of kamora rituals and protocol he was clearly around it as well or close to somebody who told him about it um I think it’s interesting that Benny who I believe is Benny squint Lombardo
That he’s he doesn’t jump in you know the other guys are all mainlanders Benny Lombardo was actually he had Sicilian Heritage and he came up with the6th Street crew um you know they no doubt probably had their own links to some of these figures uh to kamora circles but
It’s interesting that he is confused about the term he’s like are you saying combination and then he doesn’t add any of his own knowledge of so I think that’s telling to me that Benny squint who I believe to be Benny squint doesn’t seem to have his own knowledge whereas
All of the other guys who talk do and they happen to be mainlanders yeah yeah chopon is uh swatz Mulligan his actual surname was chiffon right he was he was from uh his family is from Penza Province actually from the the same town Muro loano that some important Chicago
Leaders including Jackie Cerrone that was their Hometown also so it’s interesting to see people from some of these same towns popping up you know in these uh these circles in different cities right which could be related to again the ways that people from some of these Mainland uh areas of southern
Italy you know were already becoming inserted into the you know Mafia system in the US Angelo do you want to uh shed a little light on what he means when he says it’s like the first second and third degree like the Masons and they got what they call
Pitote when it comes to the Society of the Mainland it’s very different from the Sicilians because the Sicilians go going into the the Sicilians first they got one degree of membership you join you are a member it doesn’t matter if you’re a soldier whether you’re a boss
Boss of bosses whatever you are a you know a member of one degree of membership when it comes to the mainlanders they had three different degrees of membership like the Freemasons um it would start out with um Gio venata onorati that was the bottom one honored youths then you had piotti
Which was the second grade and then you had the third grade which was comista so basically people that joined this not everyone that joined this was necessarily A comista some of these guys in the 60s they might have been younger you know back when it was around they
Might not have reached that full grade so these degrees of membership they cannot be internalized or viewed through the prism of you know what most Sicilian Mafia experts look at it is because it just doesn’t correlate um people tried to make you know pichot comedies to on
Up is like ranks or office positions like you know caen or underboss it doesn’t it doesn’t correlate um like you can’t be demoted from being a karista if you have that degree right you can be killed for committing an infraction yeah you can’t be demoted just
Like you can’t be demoted to a lower degree of Freemasonry it’s Kara is exactly like the Master Mason right the third degree where even though they have these honorary degrees and so forth and Freemasonry like Scottish right and you know different sorts of honorary degrees those in terms of actual membership in
In in in masonry which happens through a lodge which is kind of equivalent to a family or a society right um all of the guys who are at the third degree Master Mason are all full members the ones before that are sort of uh neop fites right uh you know they’re initiates
Acolytes right they’re being trained because the you know the model goes back originally to um stonemason guilds right so it’s like appr princesses versus Masters right and this is exactly what we see in theora right where we see these grades of membership from neoy to Apprentice essentially to master the
Master would be the kamor allow this real quick when it the reason for these degrees of membership is you know the mafia sees itself as an exclusive men’s club they you know even though okay they bring in people that people later on conclude aren’t deserving it is kind of
Written in their thing that they want to bring in the best of the best even if that’s not always practiced when it comes to you know this other Society though they want to bring everybody in I mean it is like a union they want as many people as they can they bring them
In they keep them at the lower level you know the ones that are you know promising or looking to move up they become the pitote and then after doing things for a while then they become the karista so they kind of get the best of both worlds you
Know as opposed to Mafia go ahead and and it’s important to point out too that these were referred to as the minor and major Society you know the kamur was divided into two societies the minor and the major Angelo laid out the degrees um jovano dor um you know my Italian’s
Terrible everyone knows that um as well as picoto and those were the minor Society the karisi was the major Society so even though you know you can’t directly compare I mean you can compare it to kostra um but they don’t directly correlate um but I would say like the Kamari were
Closer to what we would call a made member of kostra it was you know you’re officially a man essentially and it’s no coincidence that picoto means boy you know it means a young a young man or a boy so you become a man when you become a karista and so when when he’s
Discussing these names like veto Richie Bardo Toto as and Willie Moore as karista he’s not just saying they were affiliated with the kamur they were associated with the kamora he’s actually saying they were with the major society and he was in a position to know as they elaborate it’s clear that these guys
Knew how it worked they knew about the different degrees and you know he mentions uh swatz Mulligan mentions there was the first second and third degree like the Masons well as Angelo said there were three degrees in the kamora at that time so you know you know if you needed further confirmation that
That’s what they’re discussing it’s right there and uh you know there’s there’s a lot of jumping off points within this transcript um you know it’s it’s hard to tell what they were saying at the end uh Tony I know you had some thoughts on the the what was transcribed as you know
Unur right it says it says batura B- a t a I believe is how it’s transcribed as a phonetic transcription in the tape um um we’re not sure exactly what and that’s that’s swatz Mulligan that says this right if I recall correctly right now what there is is there’s um there’s a
Phenomenon called batuta or bati bati and um this was something that in the earlier 20th century was recorded in the prisons in Italy as uh a sort of primitive kind of Morse code the koristi and other prisoners in the the Italian prisons would essentially tap out uh on the walls of their cell
Letters right like one tap for a two Taps for B so this was a sort of uh you know you know again like primitive sort of Morse code to to transmit messages from cell to cell that was called batuta so it was a form of uh you know a form of
Communication um and it’s interesting because it’s brought up after the the reference to the pig language you know so they’re likening it’s a pig latin like a sort of coded language that only insiders would know and they’re saying unlike us unlike the mafia Goan norra right the Sicilian
Deriv Mafia you know we’re not allowed to introduce ourselves to each other we know that by the you know 1900 roughly right the Sicilian Mafia both in Sicily and the US members had to be introduced by a third party as a me NO3 right as friends of ours um even if you knew
Another guy was a member and he knew you were a member because someone had told him you couldn’t walk up and say hey I’m in the mafia you know I know you are too right now the the cisti had coded a coded jargon right um that they could
Use and as uh I believe it’s shapon again right there that one of the other conversants and the tape says the more you spoke of it like the more they would know right so this is a way it’s like a shith it’s a way that you can identify
Yourself as a member because these the kamora was originally a prison organization going back to the 19th century in Italy right so these are ways that guys could be able to you know uh identify fellow Affiliates of their society right and they can do it through these communicative measures and uh yeah
They so they had a they actually had they had a coded language which was recorded in in the prisons in Italy called Bo I want to hit on something real quick too you mentioned the pig language um that’s another thing that we can that we know we know that kamur had
This sort of jargon they used when introducing each other what is interesting you know I mentioned in the introduction that the mafia kostra and you know that’s a term the term kostra evolved later but it’s one continuous entity going back to Sicily we know that um and I mentioned that you know there’s
Been very little change to the rules the protocol the structure it’s very much you know an analog to what we see in these 1800s investigations in poo and ento uh but one thing that did change that we know is kostra used to have its own jargon for introduction you know now
It’s well known you have to what they’re saying they say it in the transcript but the way a mafia member introduces himself he can’t introduce himself to another Mafia member he has to have a third party who’s already been formally introduced to both of them as a member
He says Joe you know meet John he’s a friend of ours vice versa um however in the 1800s sicilan kostra did have a way to introduce each other without a third party and it was a it was sort of a pig language jargon it was uh there was a a
Reference to a toothache it was uh oh my you know I have a toothache and then based on how that other person responded and answered in this very bizarre exchange you would communicate that you are a member of the mafia they got rid of that though that’s one thing that we
Know has changed about kostra protocol so it is interesting that both kostra and the kamur once had a version of that yeah I mean we know they got rid of that in the late 19th century in Sicily because of uh you know worries about infiltration from law enforcement because already by the
1880s and so forth there’s already a significant law enforcement pressure that happens intermittently in poo and other places so they changed that one thing I would note though is it wasn’t at least from anything I’ve ever seen it wasn’t a pig language that they Ed specifically right it wasn’t a coded
Language it was it was questions that seemed absurd right but using you know regular everyday words right um so there’s coded questions that could be given about a toothache and so forth and as they go back and forth eventually both of them can then kind of realize oh
Yeah this other guy is also a member of the fraternity right whereas this Bayo that they have in or had in in um the prisons in in in Mainland Italy was uh you know actually had words that were be you know entire phrases vocabulary that was impenetrable to Outsiders well
Here’s another thing when it came to these question and answer sessions in you know prison in the mainland is they would the the answers had to be very specific you would walk up to somebody that you suspected of being a member and you would you would talk in a very
Colorful language you know with Grace and humility I bring you know respect to the society like something like that if they say one wrong thing they’re going to know it’s not true there was one example where not to go into not to go too deep into it but there was one guy
Who was approached by somebody and then they had a question and answer and he asked him you know where’s your um PCH where where’s your P de jata and then the guy says oh we don’t have one our captain our our Copo just takes care of everything and from that alone the guy
Knew that he was full of it so he just knew that you know these guys were faking so the it was you know there were there later on there were examples of pig language but at least in the 1860s 7s and 80s you know these were just
Coded questions and you know what you said had to be very very precise if you didn’t go up and Greek the society that way with Grace and humility like if you didn’t say those terms they knew that you were not authentic little things like that inter the kamora UN likee the mafia
Also I mean they both have mythology and legends they tell both of them um we can compare them to the Freemasons also in this right like to posit in their own uh mythology right that they’re much older and more exotic than they actually are in terms of anything that’s uh been able
To be substantiated by documentary evidence right so both the mafia and Sicily and then the mainland you know kamora societies um date back to sometime between the 1820s to 1850s roughly in terms of when we’re able to start identifying actual documents and phenomena right Freemason is a little
Bit older right but you know Freemasons will tell you and some of them genuinely believe this other ones they know it’s a myth that it goes all the way back to the uh the building of the temple in Jerusalem and so forth right whereas um
You know the the kamora had a a robust but compared to the mafia which likes to ground itself in sort of being a resistance movement to foreign occupation in Sicily right um the kamora likes to ground itself in all sorts of Arcane rituals right and that’s another thing that’s important about these
Different grades of membership which uh at least by the early 20th century referred to as asult endowments or gifts right these grades of membership or degrees of membership each one has its own complex ritual involving different ritual actions and different ritual speeches that have to be memorized that’s very similar to
Freemasonry also where each degree is its own sort of ritual right um Mafia too just since people will be interested in like you know comparing the kamur to the mafia when we discussed this yeah you know when a member is promoted to let’s say Capo to China or underboss
There’s no ritual that goes along with it there is a formal aspect some guys have discussed where often a third party is supposed to be there and that’s functional too because one you want a witness but it also a lot of people don’t know this but when a guy is
Promoted to a new position in kostra he has to be reintroduced by a third party with his new rank so he I’m sure that this is this rule is not strictly followed but if a guy gets promoted to underboss he can’t go another member and say I’m the underboss now technically another member
Has to be there who has already been introduced to him as underboss to say you know meet Joe he’s our new Soko so there’s no ritual though there is there is protocol but that’s different from ritual with the kamora these different degrees do have ritual um almost another
Another ceremony am I correct yeah each one is a distinct ceremony that’s again that’s like you know the different degrees of Freemasonry where there uh it’s a you know there’s a whole sort of symbolic process that’s encoded in the the actions and the the words of the participants right um anybody who’s
Familiar with the modern indran and Calabria you know the way I explain it is the modern andanga as the koron steroids so this this love of not just protocol but of almost PR like almost pedantic legal uh discussions uh memorizing of tired basically tracks of sort of Mythology
And ritual language and poetry and so forth later on they added more degrees on top of the the original degrees and they made they made it even more ornate and sort of baroke was Angelo what did uh Nino Calderon say about that oh he just thought the whole thing
Was um bewildering um he said nobody wants to serve time in a jail cell with a you know andreti because because all they do is talk about their colds and their rituals all day long in colorful languages and um you know the mafia just has a much more watered down a much more
Basic you know system in place people try to compare the mafia to an AR to like based on the Army I don’t see it like that with the exception of coneri you know it seems more like a government than it does like an army it doesn’t really take take on also much secret
Society tra you know um elements like you know president vice president accountant stuff like that the different degrees of membership whereas the kamur did you know the I’m sorry I agree 100% you know I’ve been saying for a long time you know the mafia strives to not just create its own
Government but fully synthesize with the government of whatever area it’s based in we see that in Sicily where many uh Town Mayors were also the kostra boss or at least a member we see where you know there was an investigation into San josep in palmo where it was just full symbiosis it was
You couldn’t three successive bosses of the sanpi family were also the town mayor the entire city council this is in the 1920 and 30s the entire city council was comprised of kostra members so it wasn’t just that the mafia in that you know commun was you know pulling the
Strings behind government they had completely taken over the government and there were there was really no differentiation between them and that’s not the only place that happened or where they tried to make it happen and we can also see within kostra it’s representational it’s people are elected to as represent
Representatives um and uh you know it’s a legal system they have their own legal system a maid member is essentially someone who is allowed to practice Mafia law he can sit down he can Advocate and we see legal language in it we see we see political language and legal
Language um avocado you know uh representante you know and there is there is distinction there between the mafia and the kamora in terms of how they see themselves and to some degree their goals yeah the uh I mean the the Gamora did have what they called you know
Tribunali they had these sorts of courts that they would convene in order to try Affiliates who were um accused of infractions right and and like the Mafia the the infractions mainly revolve around problems of of uh of um which is the original so another sort of side
Note right is we keep referring to the organization itself as k right the DAR car tape he says these guys were cist he was aista he doesn’t say the name of the organization right um you know calling the organization theora was typically not the practice of actual insiders in
These organizations uh the most common term used was onor the honored society which the Sicilian Mafia before it called itself kostra despite all these differences with the Gamora also use the same term or they call themselves um um the Society of humility and variations like this and humility in
Italian is actually the root of om that people will use today and they use it to today people say om means like the Code of Silence of the mafia or whatever right but this notion of um which was an essential value of both the mainland kamora and the Sicilian Mafia right what
It really means humility in the sense of subordinating yourself to the commands and the interests of the or organization as a collective right you humble yourself before it it’s worth pointing out too like you’re saying about the name you know Joe Banos L it out best with kostra where he said you know
There’s no you know Universal name for it we’re all referring to the same thing he said Vincenzo mangana would call it kostra I didn’t call it that I called it our tradition uh you know he he refers to some other terms that were used but he says I believe we’re all referring to
The same thing you know obviously they are yeah and so the Cur itself is subject to the same thing people you know even though the what’s interesting about all of these un these Italian underworld secret societies is the terms used for the ranks and structure yeah they have euphamisms and they change
They you know in America they get um anglicized but they stay very static like the actual the the internal terminology stays static the organizational names don’t where you know as you mentioned like you know this this was the case with the kamora you know I think that happens
With the andran where it’s like oh well you know because it’s called something different to us today it means it was fundamentally different that there isn’t some sort of shared route um and with uh something I want to point out too is that all of these organizations at some
Point called themselves the honored Society you know even though they were different organiz ations they all at some point in their history referred to they referred to themselves as the honored Society we know Nica Gentile that was his term for the Sicilian Mafia the honored Society um we’ve seen that
Show up in these early Mainland groups as well even though they weren’t you know Essa kosa the same thing like I want to point that out before we get further just that there’s no evidence of mutual recognition even though there was overlap and Association close relationships um we’ll even get into
Dual membership probably before this is over we’ll touch on that at least but in terms of actual Mutual recognition a kostra member in any part of the world if he’s properly introduced recognizes another guy as the same thing a friend of ours um there’s no evidence that the
Kamur and the mafia ever did that between each other um yet there are these similarities they they all called themselves the Society there’s references to omera uh many of their beliefs are the same you know many of their fundamental principles are the same one thing I will say that is
Different along with the mafia being kind of more of a government legal system at least the way they view themselves is the criminal component was and to some degree still is I’d say it’s become less so in America for sure but the criminal component was almost like an
Inconvenient fact act for the mafia it’s it’s something that they were always involved in crime and Corruption but it didn’t really Define them whereas with the kamur it was much more of a defining characteristic and we can see that with their uh you know relationship to prison
Uh even some of the terminology they use you know today the andran has a position uh capotin you know it’s a title it’s it’s you know a figurehead who presides over these Summits and you would never and that literally translates to crime you know like we would never see
Kostra within its own formal lexicon refer to it refer to anybody as the Crime Boss yeah even if somebody is a Crime Boss they would never use that language amongst themselves they would use representante you know they would use something else well two things one when
It comes to um the term kamora just to draw back on that real quick the by the 1880s you know into the 1900s kamora became a euphan ISM for tax if you know someone went up to somebody and says you got to pay kamora that meant you got to
Pay the tax now Street tax yeah and to touch on the differentiation of how yeah the mafia doesn’t have doesn’t designate terms like Crime Boss and stuff like that well really with the exception of you know consiglieri everything else is you know part of a representative system
When you go into you know what we call the kamora you know they had kto k or cont you know which down in Calabria and that really means accountant so there was you know it’s even in their articles there was a strong emphasis on generating um activity through gambling
And also taking that money and kicking it up to the point where every seven or eight days there was going to be like a Payday so this was much more criminally you know than the Sicilians it’s a good point um you guys you know as I said at
The intro like you guys everything I know about the kamur I’ve learned from both of you you know I I have my own interest in the mainlanders and The kamur Roots but in terms of the the nitty-gritty details you guys have schooled me um and something you you
Guys Shar with me was yeah there was an actual rule about members having to participate in gambling am I correct and Tony found this in the 1889 body case this was in body so we should also note real quick right so we’re primarily talking about the Neapolitan SL provincial companion
Gamora and then the caban Gamora which is what evolves into what people start calling the andanga in the 1950s right these are branches of the same tree that where guys are who are initiated in prison in the over the course of the 19th century are released from prison
And then start these societies these cells back in their hometowns and the and the regions that they come from this also occurred in other parts of the uh you know of the Meto joural including in puya so they in the 1890s through 1900s there was a series of cases of what was
Called Malita and it you know the under the evil life society which is one of the best names but um you know means in Cally means the underworld malavita right and and um in Italian right and but what they describe of course is the same you know joavan picotti cisti the
Major Society the minor Society all the initiation rituals and so forth right this is being described by by Witnesses who are Affiliates who flip when the authorities cracked down in these societies and puya so in the 1890s through 1900s there’s a series of cases in body and in the vicinity of body in
In uh Tran as well as in taranto and leche so there’s a number of it’s clearly something which even though most of the documentation has captured the phenomenon in in urban napoi in the city of Naples it was present in sections of provincial CA outside of urban Naples
Where it was less visible to people who would leave records for us right people who wrote newspaper articles people that wrote books primarily focused on you know the original gamor and the prison and then the societies that were established outside the prison in the city of Napoli this is a major city
Right it’s less legible it’s less visible to us outside of those spheres including in cabia there’s a bunch of Trials from the 1880s it’s like a virus in cabia it starts spreading all over you know uh reio and then you know what was katanzaro Province and also into
Kenza but yeah there’s there there’s there’s um documents as well as uh accounts right um verbal accounts right and testimony that were taken from these trials in bua and in different parts of Calabria and and you know there’s at that station the one of the rules of
Initiates is that they are required and these are the these are the members of the so the minor Society these are the junior it’s like the junior Wing like the the frost soft versus The Varsity right these are this is the junior Wing these guys are basically lackies and
Servants almost to the CODIS the CODIS have the major Society they’re the full members they would that major Society the so so major would be like the equivalent of the mafia family right they had the societ in this town or this neighborhood if it’s in urban Naples and then they have these
Affiliates that they initiate through these separate rituals into this sort of uh you know B league right um you know like a like a summer league or something right these young kids teenagers and so forth and guys in their early 20s who are initiated some by force some were
Forced to join other ones were lied to they forced them to pay dues and initiation fees which is a source of revenue for the guys in the major society and they also give them rules like we have we’re going to give you packs of playing cards you have to go
Out to the public squares in the town or the neighborhood you have to actually induce people to gambling zakin Neta and some of these other games you know like gambling games that were popular in southern Italy right you’re going to go out there you’re going to induce people
And then you’re going to collect the kamora the T the street tax on it if people don’t do that and they resist you you’re going to use violence against them if you don’t do this we’re going to slash your face which is one of their
You know and and the reason I asked that the reason I asked that question or brought that up is because there’s no evidence of that in kostra there’s no evidence that when a member is initiated and you know trust me i’ I’ve read every account available I’ve scoured you know
Kostra there’s I’ve never found a single example of a member who’s inducted who’s told you know you have to go commit these crimes or you have to you know uh you know force people to gamble and then take a tax from them them the mafia does
That you know the mafia does control and tax gambling but I’ve never seen it as a rule I’ve never even heard even even outside of you know the formal rules I’ve never heard of a member forced to do that or told he has to do that if he’s already doing that there’s certain
Protocol and rules right but uh that’s a different side of it and what we do see with kostra is you’re forbidden from these certain activities you we know that at some point they outlawed counterfeiting and even members spanning decades have said when I was inducted I was told I can’t get involved in
Counterfeiting or government bonds I can’t get involved in prostitution but they didn’t say you can’t do those you have to get involved in gambling lone sharking this or that we’ve seen where a member’s inducted and let’s say he was working for another member’s bookmaking operation we’ve seen where he’s inducted
And the member is like it’s now yours you know you now control that operation but it’s not part of you know if he didn’t want to do that he wouldn’t have to you know it’s initiation ritual it’s not part of the actual um you know those things are sort of subsidiary to the
Organization right your captain might tell you well now you’re going to start working for me and doing this because he’s your captain you do listen to him right and you have to do what he says right in the mafia right but yeah you’re not initiated and told that one of the
Rules of the organization is you have to go out and collect Street tax and if you don’t we’re going to slash you in the face and Co noer will also induct members who are not involved in those activities you know especially the tradition Mafia we see it extensively in
Sicily and the early American Mafia where they inducted members who were professionals they brought their services to the mafia they were corrupt but they weren’t Street criminals they weren’t involved in the quote unquote rackets and you know we know of politicians being inducted lawyers doctors they wouldn’t induct a doctor
And say now you got to go collect gambling tax you know uh but you know if a guy was already that type of member you know he would now have to you know subscribe to certain protocol within the organization related to those activities but they’re not going to induct a guy
Who’s never done that stuff and then say hey time to do this you know it’s it’s more varied in that way even though the mafia you can’t you know I know that I’ve personally been accused before of uh kind of whitewashing the Mafia When I point this
Stuff out that I’m trying to kind of like separate the criminal side of the mafia like I’m always un adamant these these guys have been involved in crime going back to the earliest known cases I do make a distinction between corruption and Street crime um but I don’t separate
The mafia from crime I only point out that there were members that weren’t explicitly involved in crime and there were once a significant number of them because the mafia strive to accumulate as many resources in as many different Avenues of life as possible it’s a government they’re trying to to control
As many different aspects of life as possible um to serve their own interests so it’s inherently corrupt but the mafia isn’t um at its core it’s not simply you know a glorified Street criminal operation yeah whereas sometimes the kamur does come across that way well what I would say um you know it’s
Important to also if you go back to the the deeper history of these organizations um they reflect fundamentally different class backgrounds in terms of the the original uh sort of membership and uh you know ethos of the organizations right so again the Sicilian Mafia what we now
Call Co norra which becomes the American Mafia also right its Origins are in middle class strata we don’t mean middle class like they drove a you know a Subaru right we mean middle class where they were the strata of society between the peasantry and the agricultural laborers at the bottom and the nobility
And land owners right and sort of emerging capitalist class in the 19th century in Sicily at the top they were people that were able to exploit certain Advantage positions by being able to sort of play off people from both the lower and the upper strata and then over time right these guys who
Are sort of managers guards leases uh you know uh labor gang controllers and so forth that occupy these kinds of middle strata they’re the core of the mafia and there they then Embrace men from the upper strata as well as men from the lower strata from The Peasants
And even the sort of Outlaw briging gangs and bring them into their orbit right but it’s a very different class composition right it has to do with the abolition of feudalism the sort of uh kind of retrograded birth of capitalism that happens in the 19th century in
Sicily right that creates these new sort of opportunities changes land ownership changes government and so forth what we see with a kamora and we know for a fact it exists by like the 1850s right there’s some disputes as to how far back it goes that’s sort of not really a an
Important question for here right what we know is by the 1860s it’s well recorded as basically a cancer in the prison system across the south of Italy in the mainland and it’s also in in Sicily right because there’s in the prisons people from different regions were put into different places up until
1860 all of the Mainland metso Joo and Sicily was part of the same country Italy didn’t exist yet there was a kingdom called the kingdom of two sicilies it its capitals were in Naples and in palmo right so men who were criminals who were incarcerated in this
Prison system which was horrific a very brutal really bad uh really nasty you know uh uh system right were subject to these extortion rackets that existed in the prison they may have existed for Centuries by that point but they form until what we would call the kamora at some point in the
1800s as these extortion rackets right these networks of of extortionists in the prison right who were given basically control they were allowed to run the prisons by the wardens because they’re like it’s better to have these guys run the prison they can deal with all the issues we don’t really care
Right we’ll just interface with the leaders right so the prisons were basically turned over to the inmates and they formed the sort of secret society by adopting uh elements related to sort of Freemasonry and Masonic like societies to create this sort of ornate structure it’s an explicitly criminal
It’s it’s based in the bottom sections of society right not even I mean not just workers but the sort of what people will call the lumping proletarian right the sort of marginalized uh strata that form the vagrants and the criminals and so forth for the most part right and then when it
Comes out right so like I mentioned earlier it comes out into Calabria all of a sudden 1880s and 1890s and parts of cabria it’s springing up left and right there’s these court cases and trials people are running around slashing people’s faces extorting people they’re running prostitution rackets it’s people
Are scared to go outside you know like normal citizens and stuff right cuz what’s happening is these guys are getting released from prison and they’re coming out they’re founding these Societies in their hometowns recruiting a bunch of young guys to run around as their Lackey and their soldiers
Basically right and they’re creating you know these these kamora societies it’s explicitly criminal and we mentioned prostitution so the mafia has we know that in the US right there was a lot of mafios and this kind of goes back some of these guys who were involved in
Prostitution who are who are hen oer members some of them were former koristi right um or you know we’re Americanized guys who may have picked up different values the Sicilian Mafia right has always paid at least very strong lip service to the principle that it’s it’s uh it’s immoral and dishonorable to make
Money off a prostitution for a man to live off a of a woman essentially right the kisti they did have a rule that you couldn’t induct a guy if his female relatives were prostitutes but they broke that rule all the time because almost all of them some of them were
Pimping their own wives and sisters right I say in Calabria they they were heavily involved in extortion gambling prostitution highway robbery trafficking of stolen goods essentially like a fullon multifaceted crime syndicate something I wantan to something I want to say with that in mind is and you
Mentioned the mafia being more of a middle class entity but we know even the Sicilian nobility like actual capital N nobles were members we have Dr melor algra he was a practicing doctor inducted in the mafia in the 1910s he flipped in the 1930s provided incredible information on the Sicilian Mafia during
That period you know he identified quite in addition to professionals like doctors members of the upper class lawyers he identified actual members of the nobility as kostra members and it goes back to what I was saying about how the mafia it’s all avenues of life just because they induct Ed Nobles doesn’t
Mean we know they inducted Bandits and Street criminals as well um but it was uh you know entire Spectrum it goes it’s what I was saying about all of the available resources it wasn’t Noble saying we don’t want anything to do with those Bandits and those thieves it was
No this organization controls all avenues of life from the lowest levels to the top levels and this you know Segways back to the DAR Carlo tape which we haven’t forgotten um where I think this is an important part of it where D Carlo says the karisi and the mafia is
The same and swatz Mulligan says sure and then he says but I’m telling you this and then Ry says they joined up and got together Richie was a karista veto was a karista etc and swatz says that’s right and it was the same ritual don’t think it was any different so you
Know that’s that’s an interesting thing you know you could take that very literally and be like oh it was the exact same thing we know it wasn’t you know we know the kamur and the mafia was not identical they were not you know the same exact organization the point
They’re making is that these were very similar Traditions these were very formal organized entities and when they overlapped and eventually merged to some degree uh you know it made sense it was you know they they were able to harmonize even though there was push back about the mainlanders which we’ll get into
Uh when he says that the mafia and the kamora was the same he doesn’t mean that literally he’s he’s saying that you know they they come from a a very similar tradition um and uh you know I think we should get back into like some of the individuals that they mention um you
Know we’ve come we’ve laid a foundation for what the kamora is and you can see too you know if you read this transcript without knowing much about the kamora it’s easy to understand why people were like what are they talking about what’s the combination what are these other details the mafia and the
Kamora is the same um knowing what we know about the Cur there’s no real questions about most of the transcript you know the only thing is the very end where they start talking about the boss and under boss and the game aachi which I’m sure was some sort of analogy uh you
Know but almost the entire transcript makes total sense when you actually understand the kamora the degrees the the ranks um where it comes from but I want to get into some of the people yeah um we’ll talk about the or you know the people in the organizations are
Inseparable from each other but I want to get into some of the names they mention and we’ll be getting outside of New York when we go into this we’ll be talking about some different areas of the United States um but starting with the genovesi guys you know veto I don’t
Think needs any introduction Vito genovesi Neapolitan uh you know in Dave critchley’s book and I believe this comes from an older book uh there’s a reference to him visiting Tony Paretti when he was on death row uh Peretti was was Peretti a confirmed karista himself
Do you guys know he was beli at least he’s a very strong suspect of not confirmed I would say I think we can just conclude that he was um you know and and sort of derived from you know these what were once very robust you know kamora societies that were active
In and around New York City and I think the only probably the one that people who know about sort of American mob and organized crime history will know about the Navy Street what people call the Navy Street gang right um that was a kod society there was there was you know
There were kod in Brooklyn that had you know these organized societies we don’t really know how many were in New York right exactly right but there were multiple societies as far as we can tell containing both uh companion and calabrian members right and so you have
Uh a cluster of companion guys um based in the you know the Navy yard section in Northern Brooklyn right and they’re connected closely connected to a a network of of K also based in in Coney Island right pel Cony Island he’s from certa yeah now what came out in that
Trial someone testified there were 11 districts in New York at that time in 1916 now they never touched up on it they never asked them to specify more but I got my suspicions makes me wonder if there were um 11 different districts in New York that had this this going on
It’s possible yeah there could have been there could have been 11 different societies like formally organized uh you know like societies the equivalent of of of families in the mafia right um so the basic unit but keep in mind if we’re talking about the kamora we can also
Assume that they they were organized each one of these into a major Division and a minor division right of full-on members and then sort of initiates and neop fites that were uh sort of sent out to do crimes and to uh commit violence right the P but yeah so so we have some
Indication that there’s you know people know about the Navy Street gang right but that is one of the more visible manifestations of what was a more widespread phenomenon they were not the only cisti in New York let alone the US yeah and with veto in particular you
Know he’s he’s confirmed here by someone who would know as a karista we have the link to Tony Peretti um you know veto genovesi needs no introduction but he’s a guy who became underboss in 1931 uh he became the boss later he’s one of the most well-known names the
Entire family you know it’s taken on his name as far as the public is concerned um so I mean he doesn’t really need much much explanation you know the Greenwich Village crew those were his guys um the guy who took over that crew when veto became the under boss was Tony Bender
Strollo Who I believe was calabrian and vachi said that Tony Bender had only just been inducted as a kostra member uh and we can see that crew another guy from that crew who was important was alesandro pulo who Vach refers to as sandino he was consiliary or acting
Consiliary for a time before he died he was Neapolitan um and he actually spent time in Pittsburgh he came to the us as an adult spent time in Pittsburgh which veto genovesi was very closely tied to the Pittsburgh family particularly Frank Amato who was the longtime underboss
There and uh kitley even says Frank Amato was one of the people who visited Paretti as well in prison I haven’t seen the original documentation of this but this is a network of people and we know too that there was a a conflict between calabrians and and neapolitans in
Pittsburgh and we’ll talk about Pittsburgh but just to briefly touch on some of veto’s connections uh you know the vulpe brothers were killed by the calabrian Pittsburgh boss John Bano and the vulpes were Neapolitan and close to veto genovesi so there was this tension where uh veto who was close to these
Neapolitan vulpe brothers who were murdered was at odds with Albert Anastasia a calabrian underboss in the Gambino family who in turn was close to his fellow calabrian uh B Bano um so there’s a lot of relationships there it’s interesting that alesandro pandolfo came from Naples as an adult his uh there’s a believe
It’s a naturalization document that places him in Pittsburgh in in the 1920s um so some of these guys who were around veto very likely were karisi or you know pitote maybe part of the minor Society you know we can only infer so much about who was formerly involved
With that but here we have you know the most important Neapolitan in the history of the American Mafia next to Al Capone maybe uh and he’s identified as a karista um it moves on to Richie Bardo if I could say something real quick and this goes into Bardo and it goes into
Capone it goes more directly into Bardo but this goes so one of the things we we do a lot people who know us or are aware of us like on the blackand Forum um maybe some people are less interested in this they might find some of this stuff
Tedious but if you’re watching this show you probably like our brand and what we do right so you probably you probably dig it for the most part uh one of the things we do with Sicilians right and going back to the sort of the beginning of the episode Eric you brought up uh
The importance of compani networks as forming the foundation for the early Mafia in the US right we mean kazani people that come from the same py from the same town or from neighboring towns in the in the same Province right so if we go to Sicily we’re interested to know even if
We don’t know 100% whether somebody somebody’s family has a lineage in the mafia if we see them popping up in the US and we see a lot of guys from the same town or from neighboring towns right we know that these things weren’t incidental outside of the mafia with
Immigration to the US and formation of Italian-American communities a major Dynamic of this was was kmore right people that were from the same town or from you know neighboring towns would form solidarities with each other Mutual Aid societies they strongly identified with uh people from their from their
Same p and this was the sort of from that layer that first generation they start building up these ties and networks to become an Italian American identity right soon after but this is the building block of it they’re arriving on ships together they’re being sent by cousins they’re arriving to
People they come to this city or that City because they already know somebody there this is based on their Hometown and this is is super important in the early history of the mafia because we know what we later call the bonano family is basic basically the Castell
Mares family right it’s the as you noted parts of tropon and adjacent parts of poo province in the west of poo by the the tropon Border uh form the backbone the nucleus of of membership of this family and then up until today you still see the ways I mean vinas just died
Recently his family is celma raay right this is something that’s important you brought up the gambine as having a a very strong uh basis in the city of poo and adjacent parts of poo Province we can refer to the early Gambino family right as uh as the patano family and
People did and to this day they still maintain strong links back to poo other parts of Sicily also but especially to polmo into adjacent suburbs and nearby towns the uh what we knew as the morelo family right it was the uh Prime arily right it was called the coroni family
And it included men from coron and some adjacent areas in poo Province also a slightly different part of poo Province a lot of them wind up going into the lucazi family some of them and from other parts of Eastern polmo were also in the geneves family not all of their
Members by any means are mainlanders they also had Sicilians in the geneves family interesting as a side note in the 1960s there was a confidential informant that told the FBI that the geneves were called the Neapolitan family in yeah he broke it down that that informant said the gambinos were called the poano
The bananas were called the Castell morace the Columbo family was the vill betesi they were from V you know Joe Pachi was from vate and then the interesting one is he refers to the lucases as the cilano family and the genovesi as the nap the napalitano family which is interesting because you
Know again read Angelo’s May 2014 and former article the geneves and lucasi families were originally one when M was around and uh it indicates that you know perhaps you know the the more diverse side of the family we know the lucases did in Duc mainlanders but it seems like most of
The coroni for example ended up at the lucases and it’s interesting they weren’t referred to as the coroni they were referred to as the cilano while the genovesi were referred to as the napalitano you know I’m inferring a little bit in that it’s not stated explicitly but it is telling that that’s
How somebody referred to me I read it the same way this original you know caroni family splits and by the early 1920s we’re already talking about under jeppe Masia right who’s a sicilian Boss family from from agento and tropon but he starts bringing in large numbers of mainlanders and mainlanders that we
Either know for a fact or can reasonably surmise were affiliated with the kamod like you said Eric these are guys who are somebody already they’re not just random criminals or something these are people that are already important nodes within networks that are interacting with the mafia before they’re brought
Into the mafia that mind too with that in mind like going through this list of names the guys who are mentioned by Dar Carlo as you know karisi who joined kostra they weren’t all made at the night at the same time you know he says veto genovesi told him so he got this
From veto in 1923 um Dave kitley says and he’s right about this Bardo wasn’t made into T Kenra until 1943 or 44 and he was already in his 50s at that point he was a veteran and he was somebody who would be considered you know a lowercase b
Boss up to that point like he wasn’t a nobody you know to call Richie Bardo an associate is true in the formal sense but he was already somebody and you know it was well known that he was a major Bootlegger an underworld leader in the
First Ward of Newark um but here we have Dar Carlo who I should mention started as an associate of Bardo and I’ll give a quick summary of that because I think it is important that we give a foundation for these names U Bardo is from avalino correct Tony this just to finish the
Point about veto genov and I have to apologize to that went off on something of a tangent I don’t want to provide too much info but I also don’t to throw something out there if the context is not obvious to people because they don’t know what we’ve been talking about
Amongst ourselves voo geneves technically was not Neapolitan not in a strict sense he wasn’t his family was not from Napoli the city right there’s a people often you will conflate Neapolitan as an identity with the entire Pro you know region of C he was from one of the provinces so he was from
An area around Viano andola and this is an area that was at the time part of the original cassa Province it was called also ter laor Rola what’s that frad is from Ro was this is important exactly so yeah I believe that from his birth records Vito
Geneves was born in reano which is right next to ranola it’s the same place later on when he returns to Italy he actually he’s a sponsor of the fascist party of Rola which is funny because the fascists had just previously smashed the kamur in this area of uh of C but so technically
He was he was keran also so you brought a Paretti being from this is the original Certo province which back until the 1920s was much larger than the modern Certo Province and you know we look at these mainlanders we argue that they’re they warrant the same sort of
Scrutiny and Analysis that the that the Sicilians do right we want to know when people in the US pop up and they share Hometown Origins because we think that might be an important clue as to how these people were connected and got Affiliated into the mafia Network we
Also want to know are they coming from a place that has a history of these or organizations because then members of those organizations will come as part of the larger immigration and they’ll be part of those pisani Dynamics in their neighborhoods right are part of their pisani Dynamics koristi were also part
Of the Dynamics they’re coming into these neighborhoods in the US and they’re big important people whose influence extends to their compani so Vito geneves is from ter Lao from The okera Province you just mentioned Frank we already talked about Tony Peretti uh Richie Bardo rerio Bardo his
Family is actually from Marano which was also part of the same Province and was in the same district as uh Roa Rola so the Richie boo Vito genev are immediate Pani not from the exact same town but from a cluster of towns surrounding a town called Nola which is very very
Important a lot of the guys that we would talk about as part of this network in New York and in Chicago and some other places go back to that exact same section of comp well one thing one one thing sorry and that was an absolute kamora hot bed
Up until the late 1920s it was one of the principal areas of intense Kora activity dozens of kamora societies recorded there by the fascist regime in the late 1920s um highway robbery trafficking and stolen goods extortion loone sharking and Corruption of local political officials so the fascist in 1927 actually launched
An offensive against the kamora in this district for that reason it was it was uh considered the threats of their control of Italy in the 19th century um people that were from you know the pro the city of Nai they those were naadan they were different from everyone else they called
People that were like Inland the provincials now fast forward a 100 years you know into America that’s changed a lot of the guys that were you know in the 80 60s to 80s that were quote unquote naadan be it in the genevas be it in the gambinos a lot of them were
Actually from Salo yeah Sero or the old certa Province and some or you know these other places now those guys a hundred years later they’re gonna call they’re gonna say they’re naadan you never hear anybody say you know when when one of you ever
Heard oh he s in a time you hear it very rarely most do yeah but usually if you ask them specifically you know yeah but of the time people from this whole CA area they’re going to identify as naadan you know today 100 years later watered
Down very few people that we talk about actually came from the city of Naples itself you know that’s important to know that again that the kamora as an organized honored Society was not at all limited to the city of Naples it was just best recorded because Naples was a
Major city and there was a lot of you know attention law enforcement scrutiny and so forth right but the uh areas of the old Cera Province areas of aino and areas of Salerno all of which are networks of hometowns for guys who wind up becoming Affiliates of the American
Goen ostra were identified in the 1910s and 20s as the principal areas of intense Gamora Society activity you know so it’s unsurprising that we’re going to see uh people who with ancestry from some of these places popping up over and over again as important in the American yeah
The you know we have less evidence of like the sort of Clan relationships where when we look into you know when we find a new name you know we love that you know we we love when a new name surfaces that we can look into um but
When we find like a new Sicilian guy will find out oh he was from Vita oh it turns out he was related to this member he was you know it’s not simply the hometown it’s also the relations uh you know we have less of that we have less
Of like the blood relation to other members we know that was part of it but you know maybe less so than the Sicilian Mafia but the regional history you know the relationship to the kamur like you’re saying and the networks of these guys who were former karisi or are
Believed to have been karisi suspected karisi the fact that these networks um can be mapped out much like the Sicilians is an important point and uh you with Bardo in particular it goes back to his his roots in the First Ward in Newark where in the 1920s he was
Closely involved he was working under a group of brothers from Loro in avalino uh the mokis and they were major Bootleggers um you know from you know a region that can be linked to the kamur and some of these other guys like Ray De Carlo a lot of the guys who were later
Made into bardo’s crew were active in these circles so they some of these guys who were later made into the genevi probably were pitote they probably were um uh jovano dinor and uh you know but Bardo we have him confirmed as a karista we’ve never had the Moki Brothers
Confirmed but they seem to have even been maybe a step higher based on coverage of them in the 1920s and early 30s they seem to have been a step higher than Bardo um I think we can at least infer that they were possibly the leaders of a Kamura Society or branch in
Newark at the time Bardo actually goes to war with the MZ Brothers um he’s believed to have been responsible for several murders linked to this some guys who later surface in the genovesi family like the Russo Brothers I think [ __ ] Russo was too young but his older
Brothers uh John and Ralph were part of this group uh John Russo was actually um convicted of a murder during this conflict and obviously was later released and inducted into the genevese um the older brother Ralph Russo was heavily involved and some of these other guys who were inducted later um were
Part of this so I I think we can safely presume that this was a kamora society you know we don’t have details we don’t have an Insider who could tell us exactly what was going on in Newark um but you know Richie Bardo you know he
You know you mapped out where he was from in CA um he he spends some time living in Chicago he comes to Newark uh we know that he was linked to Al Capone some of these disputes that Bardo was having uh Al Capone reportedly tried to mediate
There was a dispute between Bardo and longi Wilman who was closely involved with mafiosi he was involved with Sicilian mafiosi as well as some of these guys Capone allegedly you know I don’t know you know some of these are newspaper reports but Capone allegedly sent an emissary to help mediate that um
Later uh Capone Bardo suspected of killing Tommy to who was referred to as a Capone cousin I don’t believe he actually was a lot of guys were called that exactly yeah but he’s he’s murdered he’s definitely linked to Capone he’s linked to boardi he’s murdered allegedly by
Bardo um you know so Bardo went to war with the Moki Brothers you know leading up to this so that you know I I don’t think it’s too out there to believe that was an internal kamora conflict but Bardo is also in conflict with the Sicilians we know from Vach that during
The Castell moresi war that Marzano sent him to Newark to help quote unquote Don Steve who’s badami the boss of the Newark family in a war with Richie Bardo um I have Richie bardo’s FBI file which has a lot of just phenomenal information you know not all the questions we want
Are answered but there’s a lot of General stuff that we can link to these things and uh boo uh Willie Moretti who by that time was already a member of kostra he tried to you know settle these problems and and mediate them and he’s referred to on this tape as a karista um
Boo turns him down so even though the genovesi family was inducting many of these guys like veto genovesi was already a member Willie Moretti was already a member Bardo was resistant he didn’t you know whether we whether it was rooted in ethnicity or not boo refused to get along with the Sicilian
Mafiosi he had problems with the New York family out sort of until the 1940s a long time much longer than right contemporaries right he goes he goes to prison in the 1930s while he’s in prison many of his associates these guys who were likely part of the minor Society are actually
Recruited as genevas Associates by Willie Moretti Bardo gets out of prison I Believe by the late 1930s and I I know he was arrested for bootlegging with some uh Newark figures so he seems to have made some peace with the Sicilians um the books are closed during
That time then the books reopen in around 1943 44 I believe it was an informant um said that Bardo Jerry CA and Nick Delmore of the Daval kantes were inducted together in a ceremony I believe it was December 1943 so I point that out not just because I want to go into bardo’s
Background but also because not all these guys were inducted at the same time even though these guys are all confirmed on the DAR Carlo tape to have been karisi they didn’t just say oh we’re bringing in the karisi now and the Kamari said okay you
Have guys who you know veto was an under boss for over a decade by the time Bardo was made um they weren’t all of One mind and that’s something we say with the Sicilians with factionalism with these conflicts it’s easy to look at pisani or guys from the same background even
Relative and say oh they all must have been of the same mind that’s not the case you know Bardo wasn’t made until significantly later he he then became a capo to China many of the guys in his crew um had roots with him in the 1920s
When he was a karista um it’s one of the few examples we have of what was essentially a kamora group that just that became a dinina in a New York mafia fan yeah go ahead yeah that’s important um you know what’s another thing too we kind of just kind of danced around this
Right but two of the other guys were mentioned under the caral tape who were former cisti who are inducted into kostra are alleged to represent board when he has conflicts with other um you know with other organizations or or other networks even though he’s not made in clo Andra at
This time point right so let’s assume for the sake of argument those reports are correct and at one point Al Capone at another point Willam meret step in to sort of represent vardo and attempt to uh you know smooth over some of these conflicts he has with other local
Networks and organizations he’s not made into Coen norri yet but they’re still they’re looking at him as somebody who they’re sort of representing they’re stepping into to mediate for using their position as as powerful members of Goen orra even though he’s not made yet so they’re not they’re not representing him
As a fellow member of the kostra fraternity right but this once you understand that these were all members of the kamora there are lingering I’m sure affiliations lingering senses of solidarity and identification that happened and that persists so even though this guy is not actually a member
Of LCN quote unquote until later you have guys who were made into that who are rep attempting to help him at least ostensively by these reports that we get from newspapers that’s that tells us something also I think two other guys that are kind of interesting in all this
Are going to be Roco pelino of Westchester and Albert Anastasia of Brooklyn Albert Anastasia he got his start under Angelo jordano who in 1903 was made the case for one of the first um quote unquote blackand cases in New York City it can be alleged that um jordano from galico and Regio Calabria
Was most likely an early member so Anastasia’s affiliation might have went that way when it comes to Roco pelino up in West he was from skilla or Katona one of those one of those towns are right next to each other he occupied the the dorata position within
The that kamora up there it was called kamora soad Luc um the kamora Society of riches in the 1910s they had a big case um at some point this guy who was you know the third or fourth ranking member of that Society ends up becoming a captain in the geneves now we fast
Forward to the 1960s where we’re starting to get lists of members they not comprehensive but you know we know a lot more than we did you know back in the 50s or the 40s or the 30s looking at that list of quote unquote peligros to China in the 1960s
Comparing it to the list of the kamur and Westchester in the 1910s he’s the only name that comes up I can’t find any correlation of anybody else the MAV veros nothing like that but you know a lot can change in you know 40 you know 40 50 years a long time period elapsed
Yeah sorry go ahead Eric I don’t mean to cut you off I think good timing on bringing up pelo because I was actually gonna prompt you with that because when uh because after mentioning Richie Bardo um Dar Carlo says most of those guys Upstate and in Reno got sneaked in uh
You know people in New York City Tony you can maybe speak to this but when he says Upstate I think he’s actually referring to the Westchester group that Angelo just referenced um I believe that’s what he’s referring to and that was pelo Angelo just laid out that pelino was explicitly identified not
Just as a karista but holding a specific rank in this West Chester kamora Society we know that he was a genovesi captain for decades um he was referred to as the old man he he headed you know this Westchester faction um Angelo mentioned the name mavo um
Mo SAR mavo Rosario mavo was a genevi member later a captain interestingly he was from Eastern Sicily his family was from Eastern Sicily but they intermarried with the peligros um and he may have taken over pelegrino’s crew there’s sort of some questions over the exact succession um but it is
Interesting like Angelo said that the names in this Westchester case don’t later surface in pelegrino’s crew that we know of however you know D Carlos has most of those guys Upstate so it does imply maybe there was more than pelo um we just don’t know we don’t have that
Information uh interestingly you know pelo he was part of this much wider Network um for example the yanis of the Dallas family they were calibrace uh there’s informants who refer to them as cousins of pelino and two of pel’s sons were made members of the genovesi family
And they would go to Dallas and they Partners in a gambling operation there with the ianis so he’s connected to these calibra in Dallas of all places uh you know we don’t need to go too deep into Dallas but you know the the yanis had lived in New Orleans they moved to
Dallas they were very important members of this very small primarily Sicilian family but this calabrian network does go there and they had a relationship of some kind to pelino whether they were actually cousins you know in a true sense or whether it was just these close relationships through
Involvement with the kamur you know similar background is hard to say you know Houston had some figures um we believe were likely karisi uh but still pelo is in there and then pelo 2 was identified by an informant as having close ties to calibrace members in Pittsburgh and
Cleveland James Trot yeah he was there’s there’s a report that says um there was a network that you know included trapote Stephano Zoli who was a Pittsburgh member that later transferred to San Jose and became head of their consiglio the Milanos of Cleveland all calibra and
So pelo is in with them he’s in Westchester these other guys are in the midwest they’re in the Ohio Pittsburgh area but still pelo he it wasn’t just that he was identified as a karista in Westchester it’s that he remained connected to calib in Texas and
Ohio in Pennsylvania so this is a very important Guy this is this is not just a a random criminal this is a guy who who was someone of stature within this network yeah he’s a node within this network and then whether I get to it or
Not if it comes up now or later the West the white PLS uh Gamora Society phenomenon also connects to calabia and Chicago so that’s uh you know get Chicago a little one of these major nodes major you know large Italian popul and a lot of people from some of these
Specific areas that had heavy Koda activity right Dallas seems like Chicago’s obvious right people are like Dallas where’s Dallas come in but it has to do with you know this sort of immigrant diaspora and as you knowe there there was uh you know small colonies of caliy that wound up in parts
Of Texas so even though we have the Dallas family this very sort of traditional kind of old school small declining Mafia Family in the 20th century mostly Sicilian all it bosses are Sicilian right it you know we do have the yanis and the yanis directly
Tie into what seems to be a vestage or a legacy of what was once a larger Mainland kamora Network in different cities of the US and it’s not just it’s not just communication right it’s also that Pino’s Sons were going to Texas and they were Partners in Texas gambling
Operations which is pretty crazy um but yeah just uh going through some of these names you know Willie Moore um Willie Willie Moretti never been able to confirm his hometown I’ve never seen records of it we do have a coule we do have a couple references um one is that he was called
To testify in a senate hearing and he was asked how he knew Frank Milano you know one of the most important calabrians in the country uh at one time the boss of Cleveland uh and they asked him how he knew Frank Milano and he and
Merti says we came from the same part of Italy so we we’re friends um you know that suggests to me that meret is identifying himself as calabrian we also have Joe banano explicitly identifying Moretti as a calabrian in his book Joe Bano talks about the relationship between Moretti and Albert Anastasia and
How they were funny to watch because they were both calabrians and they would butt heads but they also had this sort of like boyish camaraderie at times so those two references indicate to me that Moretti was likely a collaborate uh you know I mentioned that he acted something
Of a middleman with Bardo who resisted kostra uh Moretti was in with kostra you know before he was the Willie Moretti we knew in New Jersey he uh spent time in Buffalo you know he spent time in New York and then he he was in Niagara Falls Buffalo where Joe Bano says Willie
Moretti was sent to greet him in Florida when he snuck into the country Bono’s cousin Stephano magadino sent Moretti down there with some girls you know some prostitutes and uh that’s pretty telling to me that magadino a sicilian traditionalist from a clan that goes way back in castal Mari Del goo sent Willie
Moretti to greet his own cousin when he arrived in the country uh there’s a a reference on the magadino FBI tapes where he actually says that his brother Stephano’s brother taught Moretti how to speak Italian so this seems to be a guy who was welcomed in with the Sicilians
In Buffalo for all we know he was originally made into to kostra in Buffalo transferred I don’t know um but then he goes to New Jersey he becomes a very important member of the Masseria family um possibly their their first captain in Jersey but he seems to have
Been something of a middleman um he had a very close relationship to Frank Costello a fellow calabrian uh he was had a apparently a hot and cold relationship to Albert Anastasia and Frank Costello was very close to Albert Anastasia you know when they were both in power uh they represented something
Of a faction on the commission so we have this calabrian element between Costello Moretti and Anastasia that was you know influencing New York and arguably the country for a period um so you know Moretti there’s a lot of questions there as far as like when he officially became a member you know what
Exactly transpired but uh sounds like he was probably calabrian and here He’s listed with a bunch of other geneves guys as a karista well let’s let’s kind of also so let’s let’s remind everybody of the fact that again we’re talking about if you haven’t caught on the collabor sort of network
Within the American Koda and within American kostra that derives from from some of those connections um so shifting again from the companions to the calabrians this is another important really important Network and Angelo you brought up that uh that Roco pelo was from Galo right which is a suburb
Or Katona all theila one of these towns right there yeah these are like in the immediate periphery of the city of Regio cabria which is all the way at the tip of the toe of of the Mainland Italy facing over to Messina and Sicily um you know there was an interesting group of
People because you mentioned jordano Albert Anastasia’s um you know reputed boss initially before he becomes bajio jordano yeah bajio jordano was also from Galo there was an Angelo and a Biagio I think they were related maybe I’m mistaken as far as I know but he’s also
From galigo this is an important it’s a subb sort cab there wasn’t Angelo jordano who was connected to Peretti I believe Tony Peretti I believe that there was an Angelo jordano connected to him but Biagio jordano was the calibra Brooklyn guy who okay I me yeah we know you meant and then uh
Biagio jordano when he was killed Albert Anastasia was in the car and was wounded and that whole Brooklyn collaborate Group which I I feel like we should uh you know I don’t know clarify was is could be evidence that a calabrian kamur group entered the Gambino family you know we’ve been
Talking about the jany but a lot of these guys were from Katona Galo Reggie oer you know there was Johnny dustra who was from he was from either Galo or Katona 2 there was another member Vincenzo Cali who became a Gambino member he was from one of those two
Towns so these guys you know even though Anastasia was from uh Trope Trope you know these the guys that he was around were largely from Regio and specifically just this set of a couple towns um you also have Carmelo lanti who he and Biagio jordano in 1920 lived not just in
The same apartment building but they lived in adjoining rooms like next right next door to each other lante though was also the suspect in Jordano’s murder which is so they were close but it’s jordano or it’s lante who may have killed him yeah there was a series of
Murders in 1922 and 1923 in Brooklyn that involved calabrians and some polar matani uh Sicilians that the local police and newspapers chopped up as a bootlegging Feud well we can assume I mean that might have been part of it you know control of bootlegging territory and so forth but they’re uh see that
Have been elements tied to both the kamod and the mafia that were involved in this but it’s also possible we don’t know by 1922 or 1923 to what degree the group assuming for the sake of argument that the jordano group was a calabrian kamora organization to what degree it
Had already become affiliated with the patano gambino Mafia Family if it was still distinct or if they were just alied with each other or had connections or if it was already in the process of being basically absorbed into it cuz this is happening the backdrop to this anything in the
1920s is that you have this process where for the most part with a couple of exceptional kind of quasy holdouts in places like New York Chicago Pittsburgh we know for a fact that the that the mainland kamod groups were absorbed into the mafia we discussed board hold out
Right this conflict is going on too coverage we don’t have any insid or accounts that I’m aware of of this calabrian potin conflict in Brooklyn however there’s some crossover some possible crossover because this is while daila at that time the gambino boss boss of bosses he’s at
War with the Melo Lupo faction who just got out of prison and one of the members of this calabrian group in Brooklyn actually was the suspect in the murder of Diamond Joe viser a Neapolitan who was um involved with the Melos and he may have well been a karista
Himself and the guy who I know you’ll have some stuff to add here uh Tony but the guy who allegedly killed Diamond Joe V certi was Anibal um Ste anal steo he was from yeah he was from Galo yep and he was part and then he fled to Boston
Where he was murdered uh I can talk about that at length if people are interested in it because it that’s actually a key part of the the The Saga of Johnny roselli you know future Los Angeles and Chicago LCN member so I can talk about that because it’s it it kind
Of ties in a few different things so you know his name wasn’t Johnny roselli his name was was filipo Sao but as with a number of people that we see who were from Italy originally some of them were involved in criminal activities and used uh aliases or you know fake identities
To conceal their true identity and citizenship ship status from the federal government in the US and phelip oaka was one of these he adopts the name Johnny roselli he winds up in Los Angeles we know that he’s made in I believe the 1930s I forget the exact year right into
The uh into the Los Angeles outfit of kostra later transfers to the Chicago outfit of Ken ostra which he has a long-standing uh reputed uh tie to and this goes in his story he does and uh is sort of a remote uh Chicago remember meddling in the the
Politics of uh of Los Angeles very you know famous uh mafios so anybody listening to the show will know who Johnny roselli is so Johnny roselli is actually he’s born in a town called espia which was in the old C Lao Province so he was a pan also of
Some of the people that we’ve already talked about from the same Province as VTO geneves as uh you know Richie Bardo and some other people the are important he comes he comes to the US his family settles in Boston and he apparently gets involved in you know criminal activities in Boston this guy
Anaro goes to Boston and his murdered in December of 1922 according to investigators in Massachusetts and there’s you know they’re sharing information with the feds and with people in Chicago they believe that well actually later on in 1934 A guy admits to the murder and his
Name is Tanki Tora and he’s from aera which is a town also it’s right by Marano and some of these other towns that you know were Bardo is from also in the old Certo Province and it’s a very important town in Chicago a lot of uh you know Chicagoans Trace their ancestry
Back there and a number of Affiliates of the mafia in Chicago Trace their ancestry to aeta it’s an important place this guy is believed by investigators that have been sent in 1922 by the quote unquote Blackhand society which was uh used very Loosely back in the 1900s
1910s and 1920s but we also have accounts even from insiders that it was used specifically to refer to the the American kamora they often sometimes even they themselves refer to it as the blackand society or monoma so it’s it’s difficult because the way the newspapers and the police can use it very Loosely
But black hand was used the same way that honored Society or Society of the malavita was used by insiders in some cases that we know about but but this guy tortora is is is believed by investigators he admits later to shooting and killing Anibal steo in um
In 1922 in Boston is convicted of it in the early 1960s another compion member actually of the um of the LA outfit of of Goen ostra South pcoo is uh he becomes an FBI confidential informant and he has a long-standing close relationship with Johnny Rell and he tells the feds who are very
Interested to try to find out what Johnny relli’s actual identity is that Johnny roelli had once confided in him that this guy toora an old friend of his was one one of only five people left in the world who could identify his true identity and according to P
Scopo roselli had over the years confided a number of stories about his his Origins and background and that him and toora were like a Duo that had fled from Boston in 1922 to Chicago and Tora had been living in Chicago already with where a lot of his pisani were he was
Actually living in exactly the same neighborhood that uh Richie Bardo lived in before he moved to Newark because a lot of people from that part of C Liv this is the Taylor Street major major Italian Community historically in Chicago and a major node of the mafia in
Kamora and had killed a guy there and then apparently was sent according to what investigators believed to Boston to eliminate Stilo who we know had killed a a prominent uh presumed cist from CA vti who actually from Salo Province Diamond Joe bererti right and uh whether it’s from the other killings that were
Happening in Brooklyn or on the same time there was a a palatano bootlegger named I think Vincenzo busardo that was killed also in 1922 that steo and Jordan on these people I think there’s some relation it’s unclear sometimes who was on what side of some of this violence
Stilo goes to Boston gets killed the story is apparently toror and roselli eliminate Stilo then they have to flee Boston because of the heat they go to Chicago they go to Buffalo first then they go to Chicago for some time and then from Chicago they’re given assistance by somebody um who I believe
Is another companion that was a boot leer in the meris Park area to go to Los Angeles in the 1920s they’re giving train tickets they go to Los Angeles and according to Piscopo uh what Piscopo told the uh the FBI they worked for this guy Antonio Tony
Duno who was from Sorento and you know just south of of Napoli proper and according to the newspapers this guy duno in Los Angeles he had lived in Chicago initially then moved to California he was a major Bootlegger but also claimed that he was a a baron from
A title nobility family in Sorento I don’t know if that’s actually true or not but that’s what he told people and he was the initial boss of Johnny you know actually fipo Sak and his his partner in crime T Tora now piso also tells the FBI that according to
Roselli and I mentioned that Tora is admits to shooting and killing steo later in 1934 and he’s convicted and in prisoned for this pulo says that he was told to turn himself in by veto geneves in 1934 so again these sort of network now this is a national network it’s sort of
Suers ceeds American kostra Family affiliations right we have connections to the geneves family to the Los Angeles family to the Chicago family and uh you know it’s a indications too like I mentioned the Pittsburgh connection with genevi and the vulpe Bano Affair how this e ethnic component was there not that ethnicity
Was the reason for the conflict it’s not the reason why batso killed the vulpes necessarily but because he did kill them it became this national issue between calibra and Neapolitan representatives and that and then what you just said about genovesi telling him to turn himself in indicates veto genasi was
Probably the the highest level representative within the national Neapolitan Network or the national companion Network yeah and that would make sense I mean then going back to the unknown CI in the 1960s who who at that time still considered the uh the geneves family to be the quote unquote Neapolitan
Family right um you know interesting to piece these things together we don’t really know we don’t know that this guy Tony akun duno in in um Los Angeles we never see him mentioned as a member of the Los Angeles you know kostra family it I think a very strong chance that he
Was part of the kamorta network and gave Refuge so these were guys who you know if I had to bet money talking about roselli Sako right and his buddy tortora they were probably pichot they were probably Junior Affiliates of the were sent to Boston to eliminate Stilo
And then had to be given safe passages to Chicago were sheltered there but there was too much heat because uh toor was already he actually wanted for a previous murder in Chicago on Taylor Street they wound up sending them out to Los Angeles where they found work and
Support and patronage by this guy duno who styled himself to be a a titled nobility and who roselli and to referred to as their zo as their Uncle even though he had no relation to them so that it could be indicated that there was a you know we can assume that
There’s this network was National whether there was an entire Society in Los Angeles we have no idea kamorta Society or there were just individuals affiliated with that Network nationally were doing bootlegging and prostitution involved in bootlegging and prostitution and um and what this tells us is that in addition to just being
Like fascinating information on Johnny roselli that isn’t that well known you know he’s a very well-known figure the JFK thing all this uh connect La member who transferred to Chicago very influential you know Jimmy Fran’s book deals a lot with him um you know aside from just shedding light on his
Background his likely links what what created the Johnny roselli we’ve all heard about it also tells us that this Brooklyn calabrian platano conflict platani conflict um had implications or you know Echoes all throughout the country because we see just in this you know what started all that you know this
Angle is that I mentioned that selo who was from that Brooklyn calabrian group killed Diamond joov certi a meloc connected guy I believe he was in East Harlem or somewhere East Harlem which kind of points back to whether or not that group of the geneves family had connections to the kamora they almost
Certainly were and and this is going on while Melo and his faction are in conflict with daula um these Brooklyn calabrians end up joining the doila family like lante he’s never been confirmed as a Gambino member but his son was later made into the Gambino
Family all of the guys he was around end up gambinos um you know just in that we can see there was a Boston connection a Chicago Connection a Los Angeles Connection this Brooklyn collaborating group was also close to Philadelphia and Pittsburgh um one of the guys in this faction this this Brooklyn calabrian
Faction was Jack paresi he came to the United States as an adult from Beno calabra in Regio um he lives in Brooklyn where he’s convicted of some crimes uh he’s close to Anastasia he’s linked to Murder Inc uh he later gets charged with some murders and he flees New York he
Goes to Philadelphia and then Hazelton we talked about him I think briefly in the Philadelphia episode um but he goes there he’s living under an alias he’s eventually discovered um he tells authorities that he ended up in Hazelton because his friend Joe Perino in the Philadelphia
Area you know set him up and Joe Perino there’s a great LC and bios write up on him he was from katenzaro he was a leader in the Chester crew of the Philadelphia family and the Chester crew was 100% calibrace um they were from Mostly from Regio um but he he told
Authorities he testified in his own deportation hearing that perago was his cousin well I don’t know again we see this references to cousins that can’t be substantiated where paresi like I said he’s from banaro in Regio and Perino is from katenzaro so they’re not next to each other but he
Says that this cousin this Philadelphia member who’s part of the huge calibra faction in Philadelphia helped him flee to Hazelton where he became a member of the Philadelphia family Harry rabini was asked about you know pes’s membership and he said if he was made it was probably in Europe before coming here
Yeah now I don’t know you know Rick aini was a sicilian uh I I don’t know if he really knew any details about paresi he doesn’t seem to have known him well um but if paresi was made in quote unquote Europe that would mean that he was
Originally a karista I know that he originally arrived to Central New York as an adult and that was an area with there’s definitely implications there was calabrian kamora activity that later fed into the udica crew of the Buffalo family there were several important calabrian members of that crew um some
Of those outlying towns around central New York uh amster I think paresi originally went to Amsterdam but some of those towns like Rome um there was an important uh early calabrian member in UDA Nino trumpia born in the 1880s confirmed member of the Buffalo family
In udica he was linked to a guy jeppi datino in Rome New York who was calabrian looks to have been a leader of some kind so just you know we go off on these tangents but it’s hard not to because just with these individuals and
Where they went and who they knew we can see that there’s a calabrian network that wasn’t just guys from their Hometown but it was guys from other provinces in Calabria and we know that Albert Anastasia was close to Joe Ida and Joe rugnetta you know to a boss and
A consiliary of the Philly family um so and those guys heads of the collab faction yeah so uh there’s a network there um another guy another Brooklyn calabrian under Anastasia was Jimmy MRE Mac he and his brother were Gambino members uh from this same group um Jimmy
Mock’s daughter married the son of Tony rppe calabrian Pittsburgh Captain who I think Angela would probably agree had roots in the kamur um so you know we could go off for days really about some of these relationships um in different places uh you know it’s just phenomenal
One thing I wanted to touch on is a couple times we said and this was just wording but when we talk about how these groups they merged um that’s not 100% accurate in the literal sense because there was no merger between Mafia and kamora we’re going to get into that with
Chicago Chicago’s coming up they were subsumed into the mafia under it but when they were you know absorbed they absorbed key members the leaders of these groups because you know they didn’t bring in you know the entire Society because again you know comist there could have been 20 to 30 P per
Cell pitote there could have been you know to 100 when it comes to that lower R rank it could have been you know 200 into the thousands they’re not going to bring all them in they’re just going to bring in the top guys and then you bring
In the top guys you know it you are expanding the network it gives you access to this wider Network when Mia brought in Al Capone you know he didn’t just bring in Al Capone he brought in almost an entire network now we don’t have much evidence of how this thing
Worked out we have a few examples of it in Pittsburgh and then we got Al Capone according to you know Nick Gentile you know Mia brought El Capone back to New York who had been in Chicago for a number of years made him a member instantly promoted them the cop aen and
Says go back to Chicago you can bring in 10 members of your choosing we don’t know if that’s what MIA was doing all the time that could have Capone could have been a special case we don’t know if that how that happened with um Roco
Pelino it could have or it could not we just do not have that information I will say when it comes to Cleveland and Pittsburgh and we’ll get to that after Chicago they seem to have brought in just the top people and then okay they’re members of whatever rank within
The Pittsburgh family Soldier Captain whatever but that doesn’t mean that those top people that were brought in still didn’t have this entire Society under them you know of comist pitot Giovani denor one of the other names mentioned is Toto and on the transcript it’s
T um our friend Joel you know a guy we like he knows a lot about New Jersey yeah he’s great um he was wondering if Toto based on the spelling as a reference to Tommy Toto I think his true name was Teta um but he was referred to as Tommy tto
T or dominoa I forgot his exact name we narrowed it down and the transcript spells it t a yeah and T was a guy like I said Bardo was suspected in his murder Tommy T was connected to Al Capone we don’t know that Toto was a kostra member
At any point before he was killed but he seems to have been a figure of significance in this uh kamora Network um specifically from C I don’t think it’s a reference to him I think it’s a reference to Toto deluka yeah P DDO other transcripts where deluka
Referenced spell his name t a also he was from the same town as the mokis Loro in avalino who Bardo came up under uh deluka was a brooklyn-based genevi captain he was someone of great importance until he died I I believe it’s a reference to him based on the
Other names referred to because these are all guys that level of importance to be mentioning a lot reference to Tommy to would be referring to a guy who was murdered 30 years earlier and while these guys at least to Carlo would have known him um they’re referring to guys who I think
Del Dua might have been dead by this point a few years earlier um but they’re referring to guys who were relevant to the Contemporary genovesi family and deluka he was connected to Al Capone um you know the whole Brooklyn faction of the genovesi family was closely tied to
Him a lot of those guys had roots in uh you these Navy Street groups so I think it’s a reference to deluka it would make more sense I just I just wanted to generoso Toto Deo people call him Toto or t yeah so yeah and you know we haven’t gotten into
Al Capone yet um I think it’s a good time to bridge into that you know there’s the reference Al amichi Al yeah he got sneaked in he was working there for 10 years Al was in neighborhood Kamara we have these other references um to Al Capone being involved with the
Kamur we have ai manchi uh longtime Milwaukee member who cooperated he specifically said he he conf irms gen’s account he told the FBI that uh Capone was a karista who was inducted by Masseria during his conflict with Joe aello and he says he was offered the
Position of Capo to China um we also have teddy DeRose uh a well-connected Chicago associate who cooperated he referred to Capone as a quote unquote kamora man so that’s three that’s three different accounts three different sources one a recording of important members of the genovesi family one a
Milwaukee member and three a a well-connected Chicago associate who all say that Capone was a karista yeah yeah even without the transcript we would have already had an excellent basis to to come to that conclusion right we have multiple uh accounts that aren’t tied to each other that are saying the same
Thing about him he’s a figure of note in theora who becomes initiated into Kenra initially with the geneves family and then shortly thereafter at the ending of the costella mes War becomes the boss of the Chicago family um now let’s go back a little bit because there’s some other
Chicago names that are very interesting for people so in 1988 at the uh the 20 was it 25 years after Bach’s Senate hearings that the uh you know Department of Justice and FBI did like these exhibits for uh for Congress and they had a timeline of American Goen Ultra history very
Interesting timeline that’s basically basically a summary of uh info that you know doj and FBI have from all sorts of different sources over the years and in this timeline it’s interesting because it says 1920 Chicago kamora boss Jim kosimo killed and 19 was it 1926 uh Johnny Toro kamur leader of
Chicago you know Advocates basically Al Capone takes over 1928 Tony Lombardo the boss Anon Lombardo who was a Eastern Sicilian from mesina Province um who had been the boss of the Chicago family was murdered in 1928 and they say at this point this is significant for LCN history because the kamur and the
Mafia in Chicago are they cease to be separate at that point they were told this specifically we we know who some of their sources are because we’ve read the the primary sources so we know where the FBI was getting this from they got that last part about Tony Lombardo in 1928
From Teddy D Rose who Eric just brought up Theodore doose who was a longtime Chicago associate going back to the 1920s he got caught up in uh heroin trafficking charges in the early 60s I think we brought him up in some of the Chicago uh episodes because he’s he they
There was not a Chicago member CI at this point 1964 1965 and as a longtime associate he was privy to certain historical and even organizational information so he was the the best source that we have for Chicago at that point given the lack of of Insider sources that the FBI had they were
Running around talking to guys at Sho shine stands in restaurants because they didn’t have actual inside sources as confidential informance so d r Ro says that there was the mafia and there was the kamora in Chicago and that uh around 1928 the kamur and the mafia and Chicago
Were merged together that’s how he explains it right and he says this happens under the tenure of Tony Lombardo and he describes Tony Lombardo as also a kamora man that’s a lot to get into about that but let’s for the just for the sake of Simplicity we’ll say
There’s some basis for that people might say well he’s Sicilian I thought he was a member of the mafia well he was a member of the mafia he was Sicilian he was the boss of Chicago um until he was murdered in 1928 and but he was from Eastern Sicily
And Messina as I noted earlier is right across he wasn’t from the city of Messina he was from a different town but the province of missina is across a narrow straight facing uh the city of Regio cabria and you know the toe of uh of Mainland Italy and uh there’s longstanding very
Close cultural other ties between mesina and Regio Calabria and the kamora was very much you know kostra is a phenomenon of Western Sicily and to some degree Central Sicily but it’s Locust historically it’s epicenter even to today you’ll see where the families are distributed it’s a very much a western
Profile and in terms of the earliest mafia families centers of activity they’re in palmo and agento Province and then secondarily also in tropon then going into Katan seta but once you get East Messina Kat places like this what was actually reported there up until the early 1900s was the kamora and you have
Accounts that you know the the kamora that were considered equivalent of the neopal and Kora in terms of the phenomenon were very much present in Messina and Kat which is unsurprising because again their proximity to Calabria about this mess in Ace group that’s a whole other Canon worms but
Just a Luigi corant who was Philadelphia who scared a room from or a building one of something like that he actually got his start in Chester the people that co-signed for him those guys were calibra I don’t remember their names but they’re names that show up in the quote
Unquote calabrian wing of Philadelphia so there’s example Angelo and I talked about this for those curious we talked about this a little bit in the Philadelphia episode where Philadelphia had a huge mess in a population some of which filtered into the family and many of the messes guys seem to have
Associated with the calabrians um yeah which makes sense culturally the the dial the dialects you know language the local languages that are spoken between Messina and Regio Calabria are are close variants of the same dialeto you know they speak uh very close cousins of the same language essentially the same thing so there’s
Long-standing cultural connections trade ties migration and so forth and you know up until today the modern andanga is very much present in mesina and Kat Eastern Sicily so this is a long-standing thing that actually goes back before the modern andanga but leaving Tony Lombardo at the table we
Can go back farther there’s some very famous names that get involved here I already brought up colosimo Johnny Toro everybody knows about them everybody knows they had this sort of organization that was partnered with the Sicilian Mafia in Chicago but was separate from it Capone comes up under it uh you know
Capone gets made into the mafia eventually and that group is joined into the Chicago Mafia and there’s no longer an organizational distinction guys that used to be in that Toro Capone group or now under the you know LCN kostra right well you know so the feds were saying in
1988 this was the kamora and there’s a much longer history to it so if we go back to 1914 there was actually let’s go back to 1906 because this goes back to Brooklyn also as well as Lower Manhattan again you can’t talk about any of these places without talking about other places
Because they’re all they all connect to each other there was um in 1906 Antonio musolino from Santo Stephano Deon long-standing hotbed cradle sort of of the uh of the andanga in in Calabria he he his older brother JPI musolino people still sing folk songs about him in cabria he’s a folk hero he
Was considered a head of a brigand you know a bandit organization and was sort of seen as a you know a folk hero as like a Robin Hood Type figure um it’s actually known from various sources that he was an inducted member of the Honor Society and in uh in Santo stano and
Actually their father was credited as being the guy who founded it sometime around the 1880s so founding what became the andanga and Santo stano that specific Society so this is a guy from a direct you know kamora andang lineage his brother is very very famous you know
Dristi and then he comes in 1906 because his brother you know had gotten captured by the authorities and so forth he’s sent to America by his father who may have still been the boss in in Santo stano I’m not sure at that point he was the founding boss though he sent and
Then he arrives in in New York in 1906 within a couple years he’s taken under the wing of some of his musolino and other relatives from Santo stano who have a cluster of people in in New York City and a guy named Franchesco Pasto who in the newspapers and so forth they
All call him Frank fasro but his name was Franchesco filo and uh Fasto I believe was also from Galo I could be wrong about that he’s from Galo though I think possibly I was thinking San Roberto but I could be mistaken I know he’s not from San Roberto but but
You know you know and and thank you to the the audience for putting up with this right but it’s an interesting story because it ties in a lot of things and it connects to some people that are very famous and anybody even not listening to the show will know these names um
He he’s inducted into what he calls an Italian he was interviewed in the 1930s by uh authorities um in the Italian government about the 1909 murder of NYPD detective uh Jill Petrino who was sent to investigate the quote unquote blackand and Mafia he was he went to polaro and was murdered there in
1909 um later in the 19 like I said early 1930s Antonio mosolino um from the extremely important you know Drang kamur family in in Santo Stephano was interviewed he says it so he goes in 1906 to to New York he starts working in a factory at a certain point he’s taken
Under The Wing by some of his cousins who are already in the what he calls manona or he he calls it manona and they translated his English as the black hand so this is an an example of an actual affiliate saying that the society was called blackand in New York he was
Initiated in Elizabeth Street in Little Italy in a ceremony um attended by people like like like Frank festo and then he says that in Brooklyn they had a Tavern that they used for meetings so this is a calabrian kamur group right that’s being initiated and he specifically even gave the names of the
Uh the Doty the ranks of the men who were president and so forth he said that there was a meeting and that it it revolved around something related to Joe Petrino on his murder which is why he was being interviewed about it right but we know that there was this calabrian
Kamur group in lower Manhattan and in Brooklyn um some of the leaders were from Santo stano other people could have been from galigo and some other places in cabria he also said that there were Sicilians present too but we don’t know if these were Eastern Sicilians or
Western Sicilians so we don’t know their background and why they were clearly members they were cisti too they were you know full members of a of a calabrian kamora society now Frank filosto in 1914 is busted as a partner of Jim kosimo Joo kosimo they called him Diamond Jim extremely important person
He’s the original sort of boss in Chicago of of Johnny Toro and Al Capone right this is the story of how people like Toro and Capone who are in New York go to Chicago to work for him as muscle and as enforcers you know kosimo was
From um the province of cenza and um in Calabria so he was a calabrian but from a different Province he’s based for a long time as a major labor leader and prostitution Overlord um running a red light district really notorious red light district called The Levy on the near south side
Of Chicago and in 1914 him and Frank Fasto who was a leader in the caban kamora in New York City were busted for having this huge white slavery ring you know human trafficking they were they were taking girls a talion from New York and shipping them to Chicago to be
Forced into work as prostitutes they were taking girls from like country areas I don’t Arkansas or someplace shipping them up they had connections all over the country um they were making like $2 million a year at that time according to the you know the investigators uh major major white
Slavery prostitution ring and the Department of Justice the Federal Department of Justice in 1914 referred to their organization as the quote American Koda so this is uh a leader of the calabrian Koda in New York and a leader of the calabrian Koda in Chicago the latter being Diamond Jim kosimo so as we
Know he gets murdered in 1920 you know allegedly as far as we believe it was a internal coup by Johnny Toro who’s actually of B you know you know pula’s ancestry was born in basila because his his father was working on a railroad but his parents are actually from pya he
Moves to New York as a kid after his father his biological father dies his mother marries a calabra guy calabrian named salvator Caputo so he already has a familiar connection he’s called still to this day you’ll see sources referring to him as as Jim Kimo’s nephew they’re not even from the
Same region let alone town let alone family right but fictive kinships this guy’s myene this guy’s my zo right right because it it signifies a a closeness of relationship right and and you know very very likely formal affiliation within the kamora also um Toro winds up you know again the
Feds decades later refer to him as the leader of of the kamora in Chicago he leaves Chicago in the mid 1920s amidst of you know Warfare within the Mafia Family there and warfare between different bootlegging factions so a lot of violence is happening he gets shot up
And survives and winds up leaving and going to New York we never see Johnny Toro 100% confirmed as a ghost and noer member but Bill bonano in one of his books talks about him as if he was he mentions him as an example of a a guy
From that life right he gives Toro as an example to illustrate something so we don’t know 100% the way we do with Capone that he becomes initiated into the mafia I think it’s a very very strong bet the Toro was an affiliate of the geneves family formerly yeah he
Continued to yeah he Toro continued to associate with high ranking geneves members after he left Chicago I’ve seen an informant who talks about he lists um uh Tony REI Tony you know Gobles um genevas member closely linked to Navy Street as well as Chicago veto genev also the way that Toro informant placed
Toro with all of them in later decades before he died you know we don’t have confirmation of it I think it’s fairly likely if he he wasn’t made into kostra there was a reason either he turned it down or there was a reason I think we can presume we have Gano RI
Considered like the the meso or liaison between the geneves family and Chicago he’s an important member we don’t know that he ever holds an office in the family um mes jetto is not an actual office the way Capo China is or something it’s just sort of a role um at
The least he was an important Soldier and we know in the 19 mid1 1950s uh he was surveilled with Johnny Toro meeting at a restaurant in Chicago with uh with Paul ra and and uh Antonio cardo and it appears to have been an genm family involvement in mediating an internal
Succession conflict in the Chicago family yeah you steps down and then Gian becomes boss Yeah you mentioned Bill bonano referring to you know implying it’s heavily implied in what he says about Toro and he says that it’s not just that this is a big name that bonano
Name drops he specifically says that he was he met Toro at a wedding I believe it was a proach wedding so Toro’s attendance at a proach connected wedding shows that whatever he was he was in with these guys not just within the geneves in Chicago but also
Elsewhere Bill Bano saying in his last book and there’s reason to you know question some of these claims but he says that kosimo and Toro were with Masseria he says like they were part of the quote unquote Masia group however he also says daa was part of the Masseria
Group so you know I think we have reason to question some of Bill Bono’s historical anecdotes but the fact that he met Toro at a wedding and implied that he was somebody from the life who stepped away from it the life being the mafia that bill Bano knew you know I I
Wouldn’t go out there and say Johnny Toro was 100% a kostra member but then we also have this account from a Chicago informant that we’ve discussed um he’s somebody who seems to you know there’s some like with any PE any informant especially when you don’t know their identity there’s certainly room to
Question or criticize some of their info um but this guy said that um Al Capone actually had the same connections to New York or something to that effect as coloso and Toro right and we know that uh Cap’s connections to New York were to the Masseria family Frankie Yale um so
It’s possible these these are a couple indications that maybe there was a relationship there that goes back further but we don’t know if here’s the thing too it’s interesting he doesn’t you know he doesn’t talk in organizational formalities about that we don’t know if the connection in New York
Is to Kenra at that point or if he’s referring to the Kota because it’s clear that the komota was a national network um kosimo since the you know the 1900s was involved in major you know Partnerships with leading calabrian kisti in um in New York uh I think it’s
A good bet that there was something akin to the you know the gr conio that used to exist in the mafia or the later commission it might not have been as formalized or as centralized but there would have been bosses nationally within the kamoda that were available to hold
Tribunals immediate conflicts because we later have some we’ll get into Pittsburgh shortly right but that we have some evidence from uh from Western Pennsylvania that comora bosses from different states would come in to mediate internal conflicts within families larger structure these are not just disorganized yeah it’s like Angelo said before you
Know it’s like these guys don’t exist in a vacuum yeah and then real quick we can also before moving to Pittsburgh we can talk about another really important figure Paul R and as is Comon like with Johnny Elli this is a guy who’s living under a stolen assumed identity for
Decades and then and you know the feds eventually become aware of this and become very uh interested and Keen to find out what Paul Ra’s actual identity and background is because they want to Deport him so in the 1950s now Paul R is an interesting person because we don’t
Know much um about formal inside organizational details about the Chicago family from we know that Capone became boss in 1930 but then from there until decades later there’s a lot of gaps which have been mostly filled over the decades by things that range from partial truths to outright mythologies
The Chicago family is always Frau with this kind of web of Legend and sort of myth and Distortion wrapped around it we we have several Chicago confidential informance that later claim Teddy the rose is one of them and I believe that the one you just referenced that we
Don’t know about but we don’t know the identity of was another one claimed that uh that Paul Rico was never the official boss of Chicago um he by all accounts is an extremely powerful figure we believe that at certain points he was the official cons and he was also on the
Conal the uh the sort of you know administrative uh uh Council of the Chicago we know for a fact he was on the cons yeah we know that for a fact and we believe that most likely he was probably the chairman of that body which would
Have made him the official cons right um you know he may have been acting boss and Never official one of those informant says that he was never uh basically was never formally installed as Boss by the G there’s there’s a vague reference from genal where he says Paul
He implies Paul R was in trouble with the national Mafia leadership around the mid1 1930s and it’s very vague but it connected to Cleveland JPI Romano’s murder and and Al pitti who was a one-time boss of Cleveland Gentile says that pitti was in some sort of trouble himself for supporting ra yeah that
Could have played if he was never official boss that could play into it whatever whatever ra did that got him in trouble in Cleveland was attested by some Chicago CIS as being very closely related to uh you know closely connected to to the Chicago family also so there’s
There’s reason to believe that there was some close ties between Chicago and bitzy yeah we think that there could be something that could have happened politically that might have prevented him from becoming official boss as far as we know and this is there’s a lot of uncertainty that surrounds this
Franchesco Neo what people called Frank NTI in the paper his name was Franchesco Neo um succeeded Capone as boss when Capone is locked up in 1931 um until he kills himself in the 40s we don’t know that for we don’t know if he was acting for Capone initially when Capone was
Imprisoned a lot of details we don’t know but he was a pison of Capone Capone’s parents and Franchesco Nito were both from the town of angri in Salo um another major sort of part of a major Kora Hub in the 1910s and 20s which shows up over and over again in um
Especially in you know New York both in Brooklyn and East Harlem a lot of people from the same areas of Salo Province wind up getting made into kostra the geneves gambino Columbo families absorb a lot of guys from that area in Chicago so you know he’s from Brooklyn Capone
Goes to Chicago his pisan possibly rels in that case he actually might be his relative even though I never found a connection chasing them back but their families are from the same little town um and then Paul Rico remains someone of sort of some mystery shrouding him but he’s an important guy late
1950s um you know the feds find out that he falsified his citizenship documents and they want to deport him so until he dies in the early 1970s they they don’t succeed in doing so but the the sort of you know a sword of deportation as an
Old man hangs above his head the entire time and what they uncover is very interesting and I’ve you know done some of my own work on this and some other people that we talked to have uh you know his name was was feliche Del Lucha he was born in Napoli he assumed an
Identity of a guy from a different town in CA and called himself Paul R he stole an identity of a guy from Boston or something and and uh falsified his documents his actual name was felicha Del Lucha he was born in the city of Napoli but it’s very clear to me his
Parents were not actually from naoi because within a year or two he’s living in the town which is now calledo which was also part of the same cero Province as so many of these other guys were talking about it’s major still to this day a major Hub of the modern
Kamora also um his father was Antonio the Lucha and we have good reason to believe that Antonio the Lucha was actually the boss of the kamur society Circa 1910 1920 inano because there’s references that uh that I found in some uh you know Italian sources referring to
Antonio Del Lucha and it’s uh to me very very likely that’s actually Paul Ric’s father um as that the boss of otaviano in the head of an important kamora Network that was inv allegedly involved in smuggling uh Affiliates from CA to America to serve in the quote unquote black hand like recruits
And and according to Italian authorities he ordered his son Paul R to and to to kill two men so we can assume that Paul R was probably picho or maybe even initiated Kamar at this point but he’s ordered by his father who’s apparently someone of stature probably the boss to
Kill two men The Fallout from this killing is Paul Ric fle justice has to use a false name in papers in the US he goes to New York initially and then quickly in the 1920s is living in Chicago on Taylor Street that I mentioned earlier with uh under under
The patronage of a major figure um named Diamond Joe esposo jepp esposo these guys Diamond Joe Diamond Joe Diamond Jim you yeah no my theory is if you had the nickname Diamond Joe Diamond Jim if you have diamond in your name you’re probably a karista goes back to some of the
Cultural differences you know um when you go back in calabrio or Naples in the you know late 19th uh Century early 20th century the kodis were known for being extremely flashy I mean Angelo you know has talked about this quite a bit right they were they were flared trousers and
Bright colors and they had their hair poofed up and these yeah butterfly hairstyles because they wanted everybody to know CU at that point they were criminals you know they weren’t you know they were a mafia of criminals of outright Thugs and they wanted everybody in their town or their prison block to
Know who they were so they had tattoos they had all kinds of visual signifiers right which sort of fits in also with the the kind of Capone image right this very snazzy dresser um very sort of flashy guy flaunts his wealth uh even to some degree courts uh you know publicity
With the media and so forth very even though we know for a fact he becomes an important member of the of Ken ostra and a boss right he he clearly his larger cultural ethos is not like these older Sicilian members right who uh yeah there’s but they usually right they they
They carry themselves in a much more conservative fashion they dress more conservatively right Capone of course was started out as a pimp because he worked for colosimo’s kamora prostitution Empire right and uh yeah so this is uh this is something that you know so the diamond thing right flashy guys they
Let to show their wealth off they want everybody to know that they’re somebody they’re a big shot so Diamond Joe who gets killed in 1928 because of some conflicts happening on Taylor Street involving local politics and you know splits and tensions within the local Mafia we know from Nia Gentile that he
Was already a made member of Ken ostra during the time that Antonino Deandrea was boss in Chicago so we’re talking about the 1910s until the early 1920s right um so he’s the the earliest one of the earliest known mainlanders that we know of for a fact that was made
Into the mafia kostra in the US and the earliest mainlander that we know for a fact was made into the mafia which I should point out goes against the idea that this was this developed later you know there’s a perception I’ve seen it said that you know mainlanders and these
Guys didn’t join the Chicago family until basically Capone you know was a member and took over uh when clearly If Diamond Joe was a made member by the early 1920s clearly this process had already started and it had started elsewhere too we’ll get into that a little more when
We get into Pittsburgh but yeah so yeah I think we never have anybody specifically saying that Diamond Jo boso was was the boss of the kamur in Chicago but he’s one of these people that I mean that you know you wouldn’t lose a bet if
You made that bet and you had the the fact that ra worked for him yeah after initially arriving Ric who’s one of the few people that we know almost basically for a fact I consider it a fact right that he was the the the son of a major
You know kamur boss in provincial compa so he’s one of the few people we know actually has a sort of family lineage because again this is another difference between the kamora and the Sicilian Mafia the modern and Danga is different there’s lot I mean it’s it’s completely
Bound up with blood and marriage ties this was not the case in Calabria in the 1880s 1890s 1900s this was not the case in the old prison and Neapolitan or companion kamod they weren’t I mean they were based on primarily criminal recruitment patterns because they were outright you know explicit thugs um they
Weren’t sort of embedded within kinship networks the way the mafia has been from the very beginning and the way that eventually the modern andanga becomes so it’s not surprising we don’t see quite as many of these familial lineages at least that we haven’t discovered yet because a lot of their patterns of
Recruitment were probably based on criminal affiliations and affiliation interestingly though you know with with ra seeming to come from a lineage of it and working for Diamond Joe Esposito you know these guys are kind of the Ala Mafia the upper class Mafia of the Cur or what we presume
Are Mayors when he K the Ulta kamora so to speak and you know with ra too with him working for for uh Diamond Joe early on and us having direct confirmation from nicoa jentile that Diamond Joe was already a Chicago member close to Mero who was photographed with both kosimo
And espacito in uh years earlier yeah um so they were clearly close to a prominent Sicilian leader of the family but with finding that out about Diamond Joe it raises questions about Ra’s entry into the Chicago family where you know there’s been speculation because we don’t actually know whether Ra was
Originally made with the Chicago family or whether he was originally made into Capon de China I suspect it’s the former one because he was already associated with Diamond Joe the other reason is there’s a magadino tape where magadino is discussing a national meeting in Chicago during the Castell Mori war and
He discusses how the Chicago family was represented by Toto lde a poer matano um you know he says he represented the gree balls we know he was the boss of Chicago at that time but then he says the Americanized was represented by Paul ra at this meeting and so he’s he’s making
A distinction between the gree balls the Sicilians under lde and the quote unquote Americanized which I should clarify doesn’t just mean Americanized in that they were you know a product of American culture yeah I think it could also be presumed you know Joe Bano he discusses Americanization in his book not as as
You know becoming acclimated to American culture like becoming a mainstream American but as like the diversification of the mafia to include other ethnicities so I supect networks and pattern I mean magadino is Bono’s cousin so they might well have both shared that perception that Americanized meant you
Know multi ethnic and one uh you know point that could point to ra having been made into Capone’s genovesi to China is that there’s one point where Nica Gentile discusses talking to Paul ra around that same time and says that Ra was Capone’s Lieutenant yeah um but Gentile usually uses organizational
Language when he’s referring to like formal matters like he’ll say Capo to China Capo de to China whatever um so Capone’s Lieutenant that could play into him being part of Capon din China starting with the genevese or it could have just been sort of a a deao relationship you know he was
Representing Al Capone and personally I’m of the theory that R was already made with Chicago and represented Capone’s interest in that family before a Capone joined the whole point of of Masia making Capone a c China and his family was he couldn’t do that he couldn’t pull the strings yet to make
Capone boss of Chicago right the whole deal was Capone once the sort of conflict um in the National Mafia as well as its subc conflicts in New York and Chicago shook out you this is what becomes the Casta laes War right once this shakes out the idea is that is that
Masad is going to have acolytes loyal to him essentially right guys that he brings up and puts in the positions of power as bosses of other important families you want to have the boss of Chicago as one of your guys right and you know things don’t work out that way
Actually what winds up working out is that V genev sorry uh lucky luchano and Al Capone team up to to kill Masia and then make the peace themselves because they’re dissatisfied with his leadership but this is the the plan right is is he’s only making him as
Sort of a a stop Gap measure into the geneves family the idea is he’s going to get him in as the boss of Chicago and have him as a loyalist and describes Capone he says too lde was the the formal boss at the representante but that Capone was the you know was
Something to the effect of the deao boss he was the real power I suspect I suspect that R represented Capone’s interest within the Chicago family that that to me is most likely based on some of the references um something that all of this speaks to as well I’m sure you
Have other things you want to say about this but something that speaks to as well that I want to point out is that you know we’re obviously at odds with a lot of the descriptions of the Chicago family through all eras um but you know especially the idea that the outfit was
Like a a non- mafia entity that Capone had this outfit of his own before he joined kostra I mean there’s some people who don’t even believe he joined kostra which we know for a fact told us he did I mean what more do you want you know you know you know we
Know it’s confirmed but uh but you know there’s this idea though that Capone had this multiethnic outfit before he joined kostra or before he took over Chicago officially um well we’re finding out that Capone’s outfit before this was the kamora you know or that that was the
Formal group he was involved with he was also a genevas associate um you know Joe Bano says you know he was with Frankie Yale we know there was a close relationship there so it’s not that Al Capone moved to Chicago and just somehow got connected to Masseria and was made
Into that family it’s that he came from this same Brooklyn element that connects back to the DAR Carlo tapes these guys like Del Dua um the same element that uh swatz Mulligan was around like neighborhood karista as they say neighborhood karista and and he took his not just his kamora affiliation with him
To Chicago but he took his association with the Future genovesi Family however you know one thing Joe banano is wrong about and Joe banano wasn’t even in the US yet is bonano says that you know Frankie Yale and presumably Masia backed Capone’s move to Chicago well Masia
Wasn’t even a boss yet yeah um Frankie Yale however you know Angelo has the Secret Service report we discussed in another episode but there’s a reference to Frankie Yale being part of the Mel organization and so Frankie Yale was was a calabrian probably already inducted into the future gen probably inducted
Into the Melo family and then and we know there were some relationships developing there and and so Capone was possibly an associate of the Mel family before it split up he moved to Chicago Frankie Yale continues on the genevas family uh bonano confirms that Frankie y
Was a genevas cappo um and then Capone is living in Chicago as an associate of Frankie Yale and therefore Masseria so hopefully that made sense but uh you know Capone’s association with Masia and the genevese goes back to his time in Brooklyn and he brought that with him
Yeah and he could I mean you know people might think this is strange cuz we’ve brought this up before you know associate can do a lot of work right people might think associate they think oh you’re saying the Capone was Lackey how could he be an associate of of the
Masia family when he was the boss of this huge organization in Chicago right which at its core it seems evident was a kamora society though it also included uh employees and partners from different ethnic backgrounds who worked with Capone and bootlegging and other criminal operations so it was a sort of
A you know sort of Empire of of different types of criminal operations at the core of which we can was a commod organization but you know you have to think about people also like later much later you have people um you know like Myer Lansky who is the
De facto head of a sort of major Jewish network of mobsters around the country not as formally organized as either the mafia or the kamod right but a deao sort of uh Jewish mob around the country and represents them as a top Echelon associate to the kostra system system to
The point where Tony ardo you know we don’t know if it’s jokingly or not refers to him as an Abu God as if he’s like the facto equivalent of commission rep even though we know he’s not a member of the mafia and thus and as well as New York and for and
I don’t know the identity of both said similar if not the same thing you yeah not a lot of people were made into the mafia you know espe 19 and 20s the membership was very restrictive we don’t know when the books were open and closed so someone like could be both that the
Boss of a powerful organization in Chicago that has a major standing in the national network and also within kostra terms at the time formally an associate of the geneves family until he’s actually made into and the point you’re making is that the term associate is not
A pejorative meant to place a guy say a guy’s a nobody an associate is a a wide spectrum of on an operational level there’s a wide spectrum to what that means I was making that point with Richie Bardo who I said you resisted the mafia for many years but by the time he
Gets out of prison in the late 1930s he’s associating with the mafia and he’s probably on record with the genoves he’s probably on record with Willie Moretti he’s not made for several years you wouldn’t say Richie Bardo was an associate to knock him down a peg it’s
Just a formal fact he’s not made as a member of the mafia but he has a formal affiliation where he’s represented by a member right that’s that’s what that means means now that can mean anybody from a lowlevel sort of you know gopher to somebody at the level of Myer Lansky
And other people that we’re talking about so that it does a lot of work right we don’t mean that these people were not important so yeah we just mean they weren’t members yet now I think maybe you know there’s a lot we can talk about with Chicago and New York uh again
Any any thread you pull it winds up pulling out a bird’s nest of other threads that go off in every direction but we’ve kind of danced around Pittsburgh so I I brought up the Molinos from Santo stano diasp Mon and this is a town that pops up over and over again in
Different parts of the American kamoda Network we already at different points brought up Frank you know chichu Milano who even before Capone was a Mainland uh boss representante in the American CL and ostra system the boss of the Cleveland outfit or family and uh you know he’s from Santo Stephano the as
Monte this is Network yeah of peoplein Milano is from San Roberto which is right right Santo stepan yeah’s that Angelo they’re both towns are pretty close though they’re not that within like walking distance of each other yeah that whole area on the western side of the Astro mon mountains
Is just filled filled with today and drada activity but a lot of these early guys had roots there and yeah you mentioned uh you know we’ll get into the already sort of danced around this we’ also established that there’s this National calabrian kamora Network that has there’s an interesting Chicago
There’s an interesting connection here that I haven’t really uh pursued as far as I want but I plan to which is that Stephano Zoli was from Santos Stephano diaspora Monte right um he lived in Youngstown and then Midland Pennsylvania so right on the border between uh
Pittsburgh and you know Ohio and uh Zoli was a figure of some importance in the Pittsburgh family for decades uh he moves to San Jose where he transfers membership and becomes chairman of their Coniglio a position we think ra had in Chicago at one point zoli’s mother though was a
Musolino and jeppi musolino this Infamous figure in Santo Stephano um he associated with another guy named Stephano Zoli as well as another zoki and I I don’t know I assume there’s a relation of some kind and then given the stature that Zoli had because I mean San
Jose the San Jose family was primarily Sicilian they were heavily connected to the columbos um but yet they had these important calabrians who left Pittsburgh and joined them another one was um uh Charles Carbone who became the under boss of San Jose he was from is it how do you have you pronounced
That yeah he was from there he arrived to West Virginia he went he ended up in Johnsonburg uh which is two hours outside of Pittsburgh but he was another one who was an important Pittsburgh member um he was accused of a murder in oen New York which I know Angelo has
Something to say about um so these are later guys and then I mentioned the the informant who linked Roco pelino to some of these guys to Milano to Zoli to uh trapote and Stubenville and uh zoli’s daughter ended up marrying Pete Milano he later became
The Los Angeles boss but he was the son of Tony Milano the brother of Frank Milano so um just kind of setting the stage that this is almost Sicilian likee as far as Clan relationships are concerned it’s something we don’t have as much information on with the mainlanders um but this inter marriage
This national network this link to hometowns the possibility that zoki was a relative of jeppi musolino based on his mom’s name and z and jeppi Molino’s involvement with some zoki in this same Santo Stefano so something there and uh yeah with Antonio musolino the the the brother of the the famous jeppe Molino
And their father is uh you know credited as the founder of the the kamora society in uh in Santo Stephano is sent to New York and is then initiated into what he calls the black hand into the calabrian kamora in New York uh he said several of
His cousins were involved in it right as well as other you know pisani they were from Santo Stephano it’s interesting as a side note but he actually had several sisters that were initiated because early on in the cabri and Kora they could initiate women I they didn’t have the same roles
And responsibilities as men but they were considered women of Honor interesting so some of these later Pittsburgh guys you know show you know based on their relationships you know where they came from you know we could infer based on that that there were kamora links however Pittsburgh’s a
Place where we know Kamari joined kostra before I get into that we were discussing Capone and Milano they’re coming on to the scene as bosses at the you know end of the 1920s beginning of the 1930s so at this point by you know by the mid 20s by the you know 1930s you
Had Main Landers who were members of these other societies that were brought in you know and then they ended up rising to certain you know levels of prominence you know representatives and whatnot when they joined this they took their shoes off at the door meaning they respected the Society of the mafia they
Did what was supposed to be done they weren’t you know I don’t think Paul R um malano a model were sitting back thinking hm how can we turn this into the kamora there’s no evidence for that there might have been a a different approach to the life in terms of they
Might have had more of a criminal inclination but they still followed the rules there’s you know when it comes to the rules of the mafia they are kind of very basic they’re very elastic they can be you know seen through different lights and we see that later on with you know Gotan
Scarel both of whom have no connection to the you know what we’re talking about right now but they just had a different approach to it they kind of almost viewed it as more like an army you know more like being in the military whereas you really need to
Follow this as opposed to the Sicilians who well in some cases they were maybe a little bit even more LAX than these mainlanders that were brought in but so going on to Milano in the 1910s there was you know a hot better of kamur activity going on in Cleveland akan and
Kent you know all these H towns and they were all connected the Milanos and others were kind of at the epicenter of it um we know as early as 1912 though that the Milanos and Joel lonardo who was you know the Sicilian boss of Cleveland they maintained a very good
Relationship and I would say almost at the early 1920s it’s likely Milano the Milanos became a member but the Milanos are one of the few calabrians to actually joined Cleveland there were probably others but at a certain point there are really few and far in between um Cleveland also just
Stopped making people for decades for the most part yeah but when we jumped to the 60s Tony Milano had a Protegé which was Frank brancato who was you look at his lineage he goes back to Lata so even though the malanos were calibrace if we if we were charting out this war that
Was going on back in you know the end of the 1920s it would have been impossible not to put him into lonardo’s faction because he for all intents and purposes they were honorary lick aase you know and agento being you know the hometown of the lonardos you know
Leading family in the you know in the Cleveland uh outfit for decades you know later on Joe lonardo who had been the boss was killed his son Angela lonardo becomes the under boss and then flips in the 80s and becomes an important you witness for the government yeah speaking
To that angel sorry sorry Tony um speaking to that though is that um Gentile references a visit to Cleveland around 1925 where it confirms Frank it pretty much confirms Frank Milano was already a member and he discusses like some of the tensions between salvator todero and Joe
Lonardo who were pizons um and there’s an episode where Gentile Milano and somebody else confront todero about some of these issues going on with lonardo and I want to say you know correct me if I’m wrong but I want to say they even rough him up a little bit just kind of
They at least confront him and you know Milano is involved in that he’s involved in this confrontation with a maid guy a sicilian um I think I’m sure Milano was you know probably among the first mainlanders made in Cleveland well jino had a very low opinion of uh Joe lonardo
Also I believe at another point he described him as like an idiot basically or Mor he said he was literate and you know was was not very bright um as a way of illustrating of course that you know he was bright gential always likes to
Show that you know he was this wise Sage sort of mafioso yeah but he didn’t have good things to say about lonardo and despite Milano being calibr he may have had a lot more respect for him especially if you saw that he was a leader in his own right apart from his
Membership and Goen ostra so Gentile is an important um source so Nicole gtii goes to Pittsburgh in the 1910s we’ve talked about him before there’s a great Informer Journal uh issue from a couple years ago about the you know the Memoirs and the life of nicoa jili important
Because he travels around the country he’s a member an Administration member in the mafia families in several cities in the US and also has uh close you know ties and uh connections and you know stories about uh people like Capone and Lombardo and Chicago and so forth sheds
A lot of light on things that otherwise we wouldn’t necessarily know know much about and one of the things he specifically talks about is of key interest here because during his time in Pittsburgh Gentile is sort of outraged at least decades later he says he’s outraged to find out that the uh the
Then boss of the Pittsburgh Mafia was in League with the calabrian kamora and were extorting Sicilian businessmen so do you want to talk about that Angelo because this is uh Pittsburgh and western Pennsylvania and so forth is a key area you’ve done a lot of research not just on this question
But on some of the known or suspected calabrian kamora Societies or cells that were present throughout Western Pennsylvania well going into this area um you had three main hubs of Italian immigration you know in the in America by this point New York Chicago number three is Pittsburgh but it’s hard to
Talk about Pittsburgh you know without talking about Western Pennsylvania as a whole because it’s all connected you even get books today non-related to the subject of Pittsburgh they’re going to talk about Western Pennsylvania I mean spread all the way out I mean East to you know Johnstown North to Ay West all
The way to Hillsville and then into you know across the state lines in you know Ohio and then West Virginia too even that part that finger of West Virginia that sticks up you know this these are coal mining areas manufacturing areas railroad areas other types of industries that attract lots of immigrants from
Southern and Eastern Europe yeah lots of Italians polish and other people pour into these places because of the huge amount of jobs so even though we tend to think of Italian Americans right as being qu essentially an urban uh phenomenon right Urban ethnic group you think of you know New York Chicago
Philly Boston there are parts of the country several of them but Pennsylvania is really a hardcore area where there’s just people distributed even in tiny towns all over the place because they come to work in quaries they come to work in mines they work in the railroads they’re working in whatever Factory that
Town has and there huge huge number of Italians pouring into these places this this sector of the country though Western Pennsylvania was primarily you know heavily calibred they probably numbered the Sicilian faction maybe three to one may four to one perhaps even so but in was sticking to
Pittsburgh you did have Mafia you did have kamora and going back to the relationship there it seemed to be they seem to get along just like they did in Cleveland um the boss Gregorio he signed for um Fernando Morrow the boss of the kamora I believe he was on his
Immigration papers and they also he worked at his store later on so there was a deep connection there now Gentile talks about coming in and this would have been between 1915 and 1919 where he describes what is a major war between the mafia and the kamora and he says
Some number like 500 of them were wiped out um going through the murder records there is nothing to substantiate that there is nothing between that that era to describe anything of what he’s describing yeah he says he says that when he moved to Pittsburgh like this extortion relationship was going on
Between kti the boss of Pittsburgh and he was partnered with Morrow the Pittsburgh uh kamora boss as well as Calabro the head of the Johnstown kamora these guys calibra and then I think Jal says he himself kicked off the war right he said it because he was like as an
Outsider he form he formed like a secret faction of Sicilians who were picking off calabra but as Angelo said there’s no confirmation of that yeah it’s there is something that that went on close to what he described but it’s in 1923 1924 when he’s already off the scene Morrow
He’s still alive but he’s going to die to 2 years later from syphilis um there’s a lot we don’t know there but we just know that the relationship was symbiotic so when it comes to members that joined the American Mafia we have moral being one um another guy is Frank
A model like we said from Roco renola he came there he was in um Toronto for a while under Joel M melino’s group the cousin up there before coming down into um bradic the boss down in bradock which is a suburb of Pittsburgh would have
Been um a George or janino Dar Caro this guy is very important he goes back to Verano I’ll be getting into him much later at some point but Frank aad came up under him and then come to 19 in the early 1930s Frank Amato is then the
Under boss we jump forward to the 1960s he’s either under boss or conier one or the other the under boss underboss okay we have three references to it just real quick like J identifies him as the under boss in 1932 but says he’s the real power but he’s backed by
Veto geny who we know kitley published I don’t haven’t like I said I haven’t seen the records myself but kitley said both aato and J aesi visited Paretti on death row so he’s identifi as underboss in 1932 um Tony Lima said that when he’s a former San Francisco boss originally
From Johnstown in Pittsburgh he says that when laka became Pittsburgh boss that Amato was under boss he became the under boss and then we have a wiretap of Philadelphia members in the early 60s saying he’s still under boss so Amato is often said by sources there was a source
Who thought he was the boss but we have three high with three solid sources there who say over a span of 30 years he was the under boss just one of those little details but he was obviously powerful you know there’s there’s a gap in our knowledge after the mid 1930s
Until the mid until the early 1960s we don’t know I’ve heard people speculate that he went from under boss to boss back to under to con I don’t know I don’t know what he was there in that era but when it comes to um John laka it’s
Been said that he was actually a Mod’s Protege and that a mod was kind of pushing for him to take over Loro was Sicilian so again it just kind of goes back to these guys they took their shoes off at the door when they entered this
Society and by you know by this point by you know the 1920s 40s onto the 60s there’s these guys are still you know they still got their compo but there’s a there is a relative degree of Americanization people are now living in these cities you know in these American
Cities and they’re taking on you know certain characteristics so you know there was a halflife to this to a certain extent yeah yeah there The Wire tap of Stephano magadino talking about meeting a Pittsburgh capina I don’t think he says who it is but he says you
Know when I was like visiting Pittsburgh this guy told me I’m the I’m a calabrian capucina in Pittsburgh and it offended magadino who was like you know calabrian whatever you are you know basically you’re with us he didn’t like that this guy referred to himself as a calabrian
Capo to China we’re all one system yeah even though magadino constantly points out ethnicities and disparages calabrians and well that’s offand also it’s not in a formal context he’s a dirty calibra you know he says stuff like that all the time but yet when this guy presented himself as a calabrian
Capo deina it seemed to it seemed to indicate to magadino you know I’m obviously offering my own analysis um but it seemed to indicate to magadino that this guy kind of saw himself as separate um we also have a t this the same tape where aot is referred
To underboss still in the 60s and Angelo Bruno and a couple high ranking members of his family talk about how in Pittsburgh it’s funny because John laka when he introduces people he’ll say like my this is my under boss he’s he’s Neapolitan this is this guy’s a capina
He’s calabra and they’re just saying how that’s kind of funny because in Philadelphia and Chicago you don’t really have that even though Philadelphia had this massive calabrian faction that’s referred to over and over and over again as a distinct political entity based on calabrian Heritage it’s similar to the magadino tape where they
They they seem to if not take issue at least like offer commentary on it like seem is distinctive because they make a point of noting that the Chicago bosses Tony Ardo and Gian kanana right were both Sicilian like Bruno but then they’re like Chicago like us they
Basically take they take guys as they come like we don’t really care so much me tape and this Philadelphia tape point to like in Pittsburgh like they they seem to have constant referenc those it doesn’t seem to have caused like any real issues in the family the
Family was very small by that point guys were spread out all over too so guys kind of had their own little Thoms um you know the Pittsburgh family is interesting because it really wasn’t just the Pittsburgh family it’s like you had many guys in Ohio not just Youngstown but Stubenville you had guys
In Sharon Pennsylvania I mentioned Charles Carbone before he moved to San Jose lived in Johnsonburg two hours away you had guys all around the area you had guys in Altuna you know Johnstown later um you know Johnstown according to Lio was originally its own family and he would know being from Johnstown having
Relatives who are members there but it’s just it’s just interesting that Pittsburgh was very widely spread out on that yeah state area and then they just continued to reference their Heritage when meeting other members um there’s even a tape uh just to hammer the point home here uh there was an associate of
The geneves capin uh salvator chelino and he talked about a trip they took to Pittsburgh where they met the entire leadership and laka came in and was like this guy’s a calibrace like you yeah part of that’s just normal conversation they cared about Heritage but it’s funny
It’s just funny to me personally that there’s these like three references to Heritage Lorac likes to point out Heritage it seems to have been a thing with Pittsburgh that they really highlighted this even to the point that when they did introductions of members formally magad might have talked a lot
Of stuff about about Regional Heritage and background and so forth but presumably his issue was when you’re introducing yourself there’s no such thing as a c kyab bra K China you’re a cap China we’re all part of the same system so off you know off the Record he
Might he might have said this that and the other but you know his issue was we don’t walk around talking like that and clearly like Philly saw it the same way like we don’t walk around even though we have this big political faction of calabrians that have a consti that
Serves as their own deao boss within the family we don’t walk around in introducing ourselves to members of other families as I’m part of the calabrian faction affiliate right so like you guys were saying a second ago you know there’s Decades of close association between the calabrians and
The Sicilians there um you know we have genti’s account of like coming to Pittsburgh and GTI you know he he pretty much places himself as a conservative Sicilian sees the mafia as primarily a sicilian phenomenon you know and he doesn’t like this one because Sicilians are being extorted in this uh you know
Cross ethnic partnership but he comes in and allegedly wages a war whether he actually did or not or whether he exaggerated it is a question um but then he he talks about tensions growing with Morrow and I’d like Angelo in a second to you know elaborate a little more on
Morrow’s background but there’s this these tensions growing and ultimately there’s a meeting of you know I can’t remember if he I think he says the national leadership was there of the mafia and that there was this formal meeting and the kamur it was decided would join kostra on you know Morrow’s
Group would actually join kostra and he says the kamora was dissolved um he said the kamor in Pittsburgh after that ceased to exist yeah he ceased to exist and Gena had an extremely negative opinion of the kamora he he calls them a disease yeah and he seems to see them as
You know on a far lower rung far lower strata than the mafia um but these guys who was ultimately decided would join kostra um like you guys kind of hit on a little while ago it’s very unlikely the entire Pittsburgh pamora just became kostra members man
Family yeah because GTI says in in 1932 he says Pittsburgh had 70 members so you know that was this this induction of karti in Pittsburgh occurred in the the mid to late 1910s so that would mean 15 years later there were 70 members in Pittsburgh many
Of which were no doubt Sicilians so you know obviously they didn’t induct all of the karisi probably the maybe the the guys who had the degree of karista and maybe not even all of them no not all of them we know that moral was still boss after 1919 of the kamur
The kamur in Pittsburgh and the surrounding areas that absolutely Ely 100% was not dissolved um I don’t know he’s mistaken he’s misremembering maybe he thought nobody would never know and he just kind of wanted to you know puff his chest out we don’t know but it was still going on in many
Different places Johnstown Youngstown Hillsville Sharon Fairmont Clarksburg um Stubenville Pittsburgh you know there was still this activity Cannonsburg still going on all around and jump to the 60s and you look at the Pittsburgh family the way it’s structured again same structure you know same Mafia structure you know we’re all going to
Expect but what they they the Chas are kind of spread out based on city like you had Johnstown you had Youngstown you know other places and you might have had a captain and maybe one or two soldiers under them that’s it but that doesn’t that doesn’t account for their entire
Powership if you uh Johnstown you look at Joel Regina I think his name was okay he might have he was a captain he might have had one or two guys under him but this guy he was in involved with cigarette machines with the police commissioner he’s going down to Florida
With the senator he’s got his sons his relatives that are involved in certain things around the city so it you know uh a a captain with two Crews it’s it’s not doing it justice explaining the type of power that these guys had at the you know at the local level but Frank BMP
Andero you know Frank BMP andero the LA member from San Diego I talk about constantly um his FBI files are really kind of like the second Gentile in terms of his travels and the extent of his knowledge the Decades of membership uh all that but Frank bom andero was told
That Jimmy trapote of Stubenville was a Pittsburgh cap China with three members under him yeah so it speaks to what you’re saying where like had a captain with several members and not all these towns had captains you know Aluna I don’t know that the guys who were there were captains they may
Have Altuna I don’t I don’t know if it was actually 100% confirmed that any of the guys there were were capina if they were just so were part of the Johnstone crew yeah they were right but they functioned as the def facto bosses of Altuna and there was 1960s CI whose
Identity I don’t know from from from uh you know from Pennsylvania that told the FBI that you know this is from his point of view this is what’s unique about the Pittsburgh outfit because this is another city another area where they they called Kenra the outfit and he said
The outfit in Pittsburgh is different from some other cities because they has very few maid members uh the maid members are basically distanced from criminal activities they stay away from that stuff they don’t handle any of the criminal stuff themselves but they have large numbers of Associates who are not
Members who handle the criminal activities for them which you know in general that’s the model for Co right some members are more or less directly involved in actual criminal nitty-gritty but they tend to have crews even a soldier has a crew of workers who work under him as Associates now Pittsburgh
They could have had one or two members not even a captain in a in a you know small City like a major industrial town that had you know significant revenue from numbers from coin operated machines um in some cases some of these guys may have been involved in Narcotics and
Other stuff extortion Street tax collection other types of gambling um a lot of things could be going on and they may have dozens of Associates working under these guys who we don’t you know our view into some of these things is pretty opaque yeah but it’s clear that
That just because there was a very small number of made members and many of them were distributed Across The Wider sort of region uh they were nodes again in the network of the of the Pittsburgh mafia they would represent you know any number of Associates that were working under them what
Oh go ahead finish sorry well I don’t know if we want to talk about Youngstown because then this becomes a very interesting question as to what could have been happening over time in the Pittsburgh Western Pennsylvania Ohio River Valley Mahoning BG River Valley area that whole sort of you know Eastern
Ohio Western Pennsylvania Northern West Virginia area that was the Pittsburgh family’s uh you know orbit yeah well the the one thing I’ll say about Western Pennsylvania is there’s no evidence that the early Mafia way back when had access to all these different places um I’m talking Fairmont
Clarksburg the handle Sharon even up in Youngstown so if the mafia of Pittsburgh inherited anything from the kamora it would have been their territory because we know way back then that the kamur was you know already spread out into all these areas and takes us to Young in
Hillsville Youngstown started out as an outgrowth of Hillsville in 1904 and then we jumped to the 1960s and it’s Youngstown formerly had a lot of members from Cleveland me you know Cleveland members who were there but they were dying out they were starting to retire they were starting to move so you
Basically had Cleveland Associates representing Cleveland and Youngstown meanwhile in Youngstown you had um Dominic malamoo the the Romeos who were retired um malamoo was considered the captain that at that time in the 1960s but he seemed to have had a separate organization under him that an informant talked about whereas he was
Brought in he was given a ceremony not a mafia ceremony um but then he was told he had to pay his um monthly or weekly dues you probably remember this a little bit more than I so you probably might want to go into it Tony yeah there’s a
We don’t know the I don’t think I don’t believe we know the identity of this inform he was a calabrian um in Youngstown he is in the sort of orbit of this you know malamo Paul Romeo Group which is in in Kenra terms right if you
Put our Kenra hat on this these guys are made members of the Pittsburgh outfit in they in Youngstown Ohio um calabrians they had have according to this account from this informant in the 60s their own what he calls calabrian organization and he doesn’t talk anything about kostra he
Doesn’t talk anything about outfit or LCN any of this kind of stuff he’s talking about the collaborating organization he’s brought to a house in Youngstown and under the uh leadership of Don malamo and Paul Romeo were both uh you know ancestry I believe goes back to Reggio cabria but off hand I forget
Which towns in Regio uh these are calib guys who are leaders of their own organization which is you know clearly even though they’re mafia members is independent of the mafia he’s initiated into this organization as you say he pays an entrance fee like a dues which is
Another you know feature of the of the kamora we know that was not a feature of of Kenra right um he’s initiated into this in this house in a ceremony that as he recounts it involves like kneeling in front of a statue of the Madonna the
Virgin Mary and uh involves uh wine and holy water and the statue of the Virgin Mary of the madona is very interesting because there’s a sort of shrine that’s the uh the site of pilgrimage sense around you know the 1890s as far as we know of the andanga of the calabrian
Kamora Calabria right in in the the mountain Nas mon you knowon and this is where these sort of pilgrimages uh you know historically from for decades and decades would take place there where the K you know the the sort of grand tribunal or Council of different indang uh societies around
Regio Kari would meet there you know for their annual Summits and they would elect what Eric brought up earlier the the cap right the grand cre Al this is the sort of body that was historically above the uh you know the calabrian andang or kamora and you know Anna sergy
Who uh whose family well she’s from uh a nearby area area around you know s LCA and py herself she’s a researcher you know criminologist and so forth in from Italy and she’s written about the connections between this part of Regio cabria and uh Australia as well as some
Other things um because these things also extend into Australia they extend into Canada which is sort of beyond the purview of our show but these uh over the 20th century especially later in the 20th century some of these calabrians through migration patterns go to places
Outside of the US and set up uh you know kamora and Drang societies which remain till to today and are important parts of the organized crime landscape in those countries but they uh you know people would you know there was like a local Museum in this part of Australia and uh
They had a statue of the Madonna and people broke it and took it so like these like these statues in the Madonna were used because the indang has these sort of very elaborate baroke rituals and they have saints not just like in the mafia where you have a picture of a
Saint and then you know you you know you burn it during your initiation ceremony they have like patron saints for the different Dy patron saints for the different societies um not because any sort of deeply felt spiritual or religious impulse they’re they just serve purely ceremonial purposes to sort
Of knit together the solidarity and identity of people as as members of the society right they just serve sort of ritual purposes but they incorporate lots of sort of f Catholic uh symbolism so the this guy in the 1960s in Youngstown Ohio this gritty Urban uh you know industrial sort of landscape is
Brought to a house and kneels before a statue of the Madonna and is initiated into a collaborate organization with with wine and holy water he doesn’t belong to the outfit quote unquote he doesn’t belong to Ken ostra um even though the guys who initiate him do but
They’re not wearing their clo and lra hats they’re wearing their calabrian hats right they have their own thing and then it’s interesting because this guy says that the caban organization in Youngstown answers to the bosses of The Wider calabrian organization who he says are the Milanos in Cleveland now the
Milanos as we go going back to you know Frank Milano Tony Tony Milano they’re calabrian leaders within the Cleveland Ken ostra outfit so when they wear their Coen ostra hats they represent I mean they’re all part of the same Brotherhood of any other you know Mafia member but they
Represent the Cleveland outfit right Mal and Romeo when they wear their Mafia kostra hat they represent the Pittsburgh outfit but according to this guy when they take that hat off now they’re all part of a different system that coexists with this Mafia system that’s the account giving us and in that system the
Calabrian system Mal doesn’t answer to Pittsburgh he answers to the Milanos in Cleveland it doesn’t mean he he’s not formally affiliated with the Pittsburgh I sorry with the Cleveland LCN right this is a different organization that’s over the decades clearly has sort of become intertwined with Goen osra been separate from it
There’s Dimension you know there was an informant in Youngstown it might have been a different guy it’s kind of hard to to tell there may have been two or three informants in Youngstown but there was yeah yeah who referred to the calabrian organization and the sicilan organization and he didn’t seem to
Realize there was overlap and the guys he says were part of the Sicilian organization included guys who were affiliated with Pittsburgh Cleveland and possibly even Detroit at various points um but his perception was that these were two different entities um we know the calabrians I mean there’s there’s a wire
T or an informant report because Paul Romeo was the captain before malamo right as my understanding Paul Romeo is explicitly identified um as a captain on I think it’s a magadino tape or one of those it’s some wir tap but uh this informant says that uh what was I gonna
Say uh this this report says that what’s his name uh God he was the guy the Sicilian guy who transferred to the gambinos with Gen Cavo yeah he got killed with a A Car Bomb with his son Charlie cavalero is said he said to have gotten called to a
Meeting when they were having like the the war with the Naples brothers and all that he was Paul Romeo called a meeting and everybody there was a Pittsburgh member most of them calabrian and they voted together on whether to kill this one particular guy indicates to me that
Cavalero was probably a member of Romeo’s din China so even though this one informant had this perception that the calabrian organization and the Sicilian organization were separate it seems that the C the Pittsburgh capina over Youngstown had Sicilians as well as calabrians in it there was another
Possibly another informant like I said I can’t remember if these are separate guys I’m not sure but there was another one he was the son of a calabrian Pittsburgh member I want to say pendeli or pend denelli something to that effect he the son was was a pimp he was
Involved in prostitution he got into a dispute over prostitution and he he was called to essentially a sit down chaired by Tony Milano and a bunch of other guys you know in kostra you’re not gonna have Tony Milano was the under boss for a time his brother had been a former boss
Tony Milano was an underboss his son became the la boss and you’re not going to see Sicilian kostra members chair a sit down about prostitution so it makes me wonder if that was you know more of an internal kamora you know because we have evidence that this kamora this
Andanga whatever name you want to give it continued on not just in Youngstown but Western Pennsylvania because one of these informants who discussed the calabrian organization also said that he had a cousin who was part of the calabrian organization in a in a Pennsylvania city Way east of Pittsburgh
I want to say in the Altuna area so it indicates that this collaborating organization was not just Youngstown Ohio the border between them but that it also extended into Pennsylvania which also draws back to Gentile having the perception that as he said the kamur was no more in Pittsburg well maybe they
Didn’t tell you Nick you know C were like yeah sure we’ll join kostra uh but they obviously continued their own thing not just in the immediate years but we’re talking into the 1960s so Paul Romeo was was was a was a capitalina in the Pittsburgh outfit right formally
Again he’s wearing his clothes and Ultra head he’s he he he you know as he gets older he’s he’s succeeded in that position by Dominic malamoo this Youngstown informant that I referred to then said that Paul Romeo had been the leader of the collabor organization in Youngstown he was still
Like a senior like a Meritus leader and then Dominic malamoo was the one presiding over it but again he and he made it clear that the Youngstown calabrian organization was part of a larger organization and that its ultimate bosses above malamo and Romeo were the Milanos in Cleveland now if you
Have a guy in Pennsylvania whose father is you know an affiliate of the Pittsburgh outfit right Goen norra why would his sitdown be you know be chaired by by guys from who are formerly affiliated with Cleveland see they weren’t they weren’t ex you know these are like parallel Dimensions these guys
Walked into two worlds right depending on the nature of the situation and what formal organizational stuff was happening they were part of the mafia Network and at the same time they were also part of their own organization that had its own hierarchy which didn’t neatly fit into or correspond with the
Structure of the of the regional mafia families this is really fascinating I think right it really tells us something interesting it’s a question of like where this existed because there’s even though we know there were karisi in New York City New Jersey we don’t have any evidence that the kamur continued in any
Truly functional capacity there where the mafia was just dominant I mean no I don’t even need to yeah clarify that but you know you said you know we might not get into Canada but there’s some important points to get into there and one is a a magadino tape that we’ve
Discussed where magadino refers to calabrian karisi in Canada yeah and he says that they reached out to a member of the Buffalo family um about inducting a guy Charlie Longo yeah and meino says you know Buffalo can’t vouch for this guy like our family uh he says you know that’s a violation
Of protocol um you have to go to San Georgio moretto which is a important calabrian Hometown that produced Canadian karisi and so magadino is saying you know we you have to check with their societies about Charlie Longo and Longo was related to Dominic Longo who became
An La member he was originally from you know that Canada Western New York area but meino is saying that you know you can’t we can’t vouch for the induction of a karista he’s saying you have to go you have to consult with Calabria possibly he references the hometown many
Of these guys came from you have to check with your own societies and that’s it’s important too though because some of these guys were members of the Buffalo family and that’s probably why going to magadino right connection Joo Lupino um was uh almost certainly a buffalo member based in Hamilton you
Know Hamilton had some Sicilian Buffalo members but it also had and today it has an andanga you know we all everybody has heard of the presence of the indroda in Ontario it’s it’s got a huge presence um we know still today that the lupinos and violis in Canada are affiliated with
Buffalo you know Dominico violi was identified as the latest Buffalo underboss his uncle one of the lupinos was identified as a captain um I don’t think there’s any evidence they part of the and drag but their the grandfather was Joo lupina Lupino seems to have had dual membership there are a couple other
Names who we believe had dual membership um so similar arrangement to what we see in Youngstown and Pennsylvania where guys had dual membership what’s interesting in the that magadino tape is that they were Consulting the Buffalo family about bringing someone into their own organization because the way it
Works as I said you know the mafia is a representational organization these guys had their own kamora and and I should point out magadino refers to them as calabrian karisi he doesn’t say and dranga at that point in the 1960s he’s saying karisi and uh he’s saying though
That they’re Consulting him well since some of these guys are members and Associates of buffalo buffalo represents them within the kostra world and at that point Buffalo was a big deal magadino had been a boss for decades Mission member not just boss yeah member boss he
Was you know one of the most powerful men in the country um there’s one of the books on Canada that talks about Joo Lupino seeing magadino at a wedding and just gushing over him you know there’s again there’s this perception that like oh you know we’re karisi we’re and drti
We don’t care about kostra well at least at that point they sure did and you have them Consulting the mafia about inducting some in their orbit and magadino is saying no we can’t be involved with that that’s that’s not how this works but they’re probably going to magadino because he’s their
Representative in kostra they’re probably like the you know it’s not that magadino was necessarily barking orders like telling the this adjacent organization what to do in Canada but there’s a relationship there and he needed to clarify that yeah this isn’t that isn’t a function of our relationship yeah and it should be also
Noted that Ontario since the period after World War II at least is not a Backwater when it comes to the modern andanga it’s it’s intimately involved in what is now you know transnational transatlantic more than Atlantic because it’s in Australia too right but this you know transnational uh indang Network that you
Know in complex ways goes back to Geographic uh divisions and uh structures that go back to Regio Calabria and in different ways are sort of under the authority of uh of leadership and Leadership structures in Regio as well as uh you know Ontario in the 60s and 70s then we have evidence
For the sort of resurgence of of the andan in the US as part of the you know what’s called the sidero group often because they you know these are intis and Canada a sort of modern andanga and Canada uh which had been there this whole time going back to the early 1900s
So again as it’s developing in cabria it’s also developing in Canada and they’re all sort of linked to each other and they have projections into the US by the 60s and 70s we know this because documents were retrieved from members in Toronto and so forth and uh uh some
People talked about it right they had some witnesses but um by the 60s and 70s there were locali which without getting into the structure of the modern andanga those are like you know a regional super society that the little you know the local societies called andr
Sort of belong to I know it’s kind of complicated not that makes any sense to people people might already know about this a little bit but these local um affiliated with the sedo group of the andanga in in Ontario they have local established according to Witnesses in Chicago
Detroit uh the area around Albany and Upstate New York New York City and Long Island and uh I believe Connecticut was another place that was named and we have very we know very little overall about their relation ship to to ostra at the same time it’s hard to believe that in
The 1960s and 7s anybody Italian you know group is going into Chicago and they don’t know we do you mentioned Connecticut and that connects to Canada obviously which you were connecting it to um LCN bios you know one of the best researchers ever to ever to you know
Contribute to this subject he wrote a bio on Cosmo sandalo who I believe he was from is it aito mamertina it’s one of those places near the asomante um he said that Cosmo sandalo was affiliated with the calabrian kamora or and dranga like sources identified him as affiliated with them he was
Seemingly a Gambino associate later made into the gambinos possibly in the 70s indications are the 70s he had guys from Canada come to a wedding he was also the the uncle of uh Tony megal who was I think an acting under boss of the gambinos so there’s something there
Where he’s a guy who’s with the the calabrian kamora the andrada who joins The Gambino family a bit later and he’s connected to Canada and all that so that’s there but yeah these these adjacent organizations because you know as Angelo pointed out there wasn’t a merger where these two organizations
Joined we have Canada where there’s a separate calabrian organization we have Youngstown in Pennsylvania where there’s a separate collabor organization and just before we stop talking about Pennsylvania then we also have Johnstown which we already hit on Tony Lima says and he’s as good of a source as you’re
Ever gonna find he says that Johnstown was its own kostra family that was later merged with Pittsburgh you know we’ve talked on the show about evidence of more small families that aren’t on like the list of 26 that are typically considered the the original families um so he identifies a Johnstown
Family there was also a Johnstown kamor organization which Angelo could probably clarify whether that was distinct from Morrow’s organization I think Gentile kind of implies it was but so Johnstown this town that most people have never heard of has both uh its own Mafia Family and its own kamora Society
They’re interacting you know Gentile talks about Calabro of Johnstown having a sicilian under him he talks about a meeting they had with him about the extortions where a sicilian came who was apparently under uh Calabro um at some point they both just end up with the Pittsburgh family but uh you know
Speaking of LCN bios he did a write up on San Jose recently yeah where he cites Lima as saying that there was actually a guy who joined the San Jose family was it was his last name mesina yeah uh s San vsini and his his father was named Jo Vini in Johnstown
And he says that that this guy’s father was the head of the calabrian kamora in Johnstown until like he died in the 1930s I think he says Y and so you looked into it Tony it turns out the vinis were originally Sicilian oh yeah no they were Sicilian they were from
They were from V Roa which at the time was in Keta province which is also where John laka see this goes back to everything everything connects to everything you start getting into this that was where John Loro who became the boss of the Pittsburgh family and seems
To have come up under the the sort of guidance of Frank Amato or at least it’s you know even when Frank Amato was his under boss forly Frank Amato is perceived by a lot of people as being as powerful if not more powerful than than
Laka right yeah John laka is from V Roa Vini is from from V Roa Tony Lima says that this guy Jak vsini who’s from V Roa was the boss of the cisti in Johnstown up until he died in the 1930s when I looked into him yeah I I would I
Confirmed that they’re from V Roa but before arriving in Pennsylvania they had lived what’s now coton Province at the time it was katanzaro Province so they had actually lived and two of their kids including the S V scening that later on went out to San Jose was uh they were
Born in cabria you know the mother and father were both Sicilians from Villa Roa so there’s this interesting connection again and you have haani links between some of the Sicilians involved in this in Western Pennsylvania haani links between some of the you know calabrians who were involved uh you know
Very interesting things they intersect in interesting ways so yeah we have an account that Calabro has a sicilian under him and then if we piece that together with what Tony Lima said about Jak moini it would seem that probably that could have been vsini himself and either way a sicilian seems to have
Succeeded Calabro as the boss of the kamur in in Johnstown yeah Sicilian by way of Calabria which you don’t see very often to in from Messina or from Kat where we know that there was you know the kamora existed in that Eastern very far eastern
Part of Sicily but from V Roa which is a place that pops up in a number of other cases in the US Mafia Network Kenra um including uh you know Tony penelli who was a powerful cap China in the Chicago family and something that Tony Lima told the FBI in the
70s sorry from kala but from the same area what’s now in our Province and what uh and the boss before laka capit was from V Roa too there were some other members but something else Lima told the FBI in the 70s is that when he was boss of the San Francisco
Family Lima was a former San Francisco boss his older Rel his uncle was one the one time consiliary of San Francisco he was in the banana Society case um but Lima told the FBI that at one point when he was boss of San Francisco which was between the 1930s and
1950s uh a camarista moved to San San Francisco and he wanted to induct him he considered inducting him into the San Francisco family so he consulted a redacted name it could have been his uncle could have been someone else about how to go about this and this redacted
Name told him like induct him because the reason he was inducting him is they were going into business together I think it was an olive oil business and he was told like induct him but if it doesn’t work out shove him and that’s he did that after a short time like he and
This unnamed karista went into business together he made him into the mafia then he shelved him no idea who it is but um you know and that opens up the whole banana Society we’ll be here 10 hours with that but Lima’s older relatives including his uncle who became the the
San Francisco consiliary Sam Lima they were in this banana Society case in Ohio connected to Pennsylvania all around the country where there indications of kamur links with them and that’s a lot was reported it was a major uh extortion ring that was being operated out of Central and Southern
Ohio so between central Ohio and then down into Cincinnati um this phenomenon this group called themselves the Society of the banana and faithful friends and without maybe getting too much into it we can do a follow-up episode that touches on some of these things uh they
Were all the members that we know of that were named as members of this organization were Sicilian almost all from pmo Province Thia uh M some really core Mafia towns that pop up in Pittsburgh Chicago and some other you know Cleveland and some other places and uh you know not the
Fringes of of Eastern Sicily right but core core core as core Mafia as it gets and they seem to have been operating what looks by all intents and purposes to have been a kamora society and we’re and were because of they were sending you know Blackhand letters to extort
Guys all over the place uh the US Postal Service investigated it and they found that they were m maing they had people mailing letters from Chicago Chicago Heights which we haven’t touched on yet that’s another interesting case um from Western Pennsylvania and they supposedly had Affiliates from Chicago all the way
Up into Western New York Buffalo and down into Cincinnati so uh you know were these Affiliates affiliated with kosan osra were they affiliated with the kamur were they both were these wearing two hats right yeah they were definitely involved with kostra because the lias went back to Trabia
Like Tony Lima told the FBI that one of his uh father and uncle’s cousins jeppi Lima was originally made in Trabia before joining the San Jose family so there were lias getting made in Sicily before all this yeah and Trabia again it says Mafia as you get that’s the area
That you know in Chicago episodes we call the Chicago triangle between like bagaria you know chimina th M and nearby towns it’s I mean hardcore and has a really important um history both in the Sicilian side and also in a number of American cities and mafia families yeah
We have these guys with we have these guys with dual membership in Youngstown Canada um we know that dual membership is possible even in Italy um we know that members of the the kamora in the 1970s our friend Fabian in France wrote a good article about this but they
Actually inducted karisi into kostra in Naples um I know I’ve seen references to it I I don’t want to say for sure but I I swear I read somewhere that even some Sicilians may have been made into the kamora sort of this Mutual it allows for Mutual recognition not just Sicilians
Made into the kamora but like powerful po matani we’re talking about we’re talking about the modern post World War II kamora which is a different phenomenon than the old one we’re talking about now the old one that we’re talking about you know that relates to
The phenomenon in the US back in the day absolutely had Sicilians so yeah they had actual you know kamora societies operating all over Eastern Sicily um you know they do till today in the form of the indang right but they also in the prison system there were attestations
That Sicilians were also part of it we don’t know what part of Sicily they were from if they were Eastern or Western but again any if you go back in the day violent criminals that were locked up in different regions got mixed together in the same prisons and were part of the
Same prison you know Society system and then when they go back out into the world they take that with them so even though the mafia was already you know by the late 19th century was already you know well ascon in Western and Central Sicily we can also assume that there were already
Guys back in in those core Mafia areas that might have gone to prison and could have been initiated in the kamora that we have a guy like Gano Costa who was an andrada leader in missina so he was a sicilian Eastern Sicilian um higher ranking leader of the inrang
There and then he ended up in prison with Leo Lua Bella of the Corleone family family Toto Rena’s brother-in-law and beella inducted him into the Corleone family in prison so Costa was a member of both kostra as well as the andanga and I think you found a
Reference that said he may have even been a member of the nvo kamora no that was kogo maroo Maro was from Calo in in cetta modern cetta Province and uh he was a a criminal he wound up incarcerated and then was living I guess in Freedom in up in the north lombardia
I forgot what the exact town is off hand but up in the north you know of Italy and this is during the time period like in the 70s when the uh you know since the since the’ 60s and 70s there’s been a tremendous spread of the different Mafia organizations from the metso up
Into Northern Italy as well as across Europe but uh you know the the andanga at this time they were by now called that were establishing locali and uh you know other Footprints in Northern Italy and he was this guy a sicilian guy um not from a kamora part of Sicily right
Not from missena was initiated into the andanga by the sponsorship of another guy from sanalo and uh yeah and was also apparently initiated into the mafia I believe and was and then was in 1983 there was a a statement from the Italian authorities that he was a member of the
Nova koraa or organ which was possible triple membership yeah which was a sort of like a revivalist uh attempt from Rafael kuto to refound the old honored Society of ca he same Hometown as Paul R by the way otaviano oh interesting yeah when you get into this idea of dual memberships
You know it’s important to clarify that you know you can’t transfer from the kamora into kostra and vice versa but what this does do is it enables Mutual recognition and I think this concept is very confusing for some people where it’s like you know how could you belong
To multiple organizations you know and the I I think the idea is not that oh now you’re taking orders like how can you take orders from the Sicilian Mafia and also take orders from the comora or the andanga it’s not about taking orders it’s about Mutual recognition it’s in
Some cases almost like an honorary title like leaders from organizations when the Sicilians inducted uh neapolitans into kostra amarist neapolitans into kostra in the 70s it was almost like an honorary thing they had gone almost like lima inducting one in San Francisco they were partnering they were partnering with the neapolitans and cigarette
Trafficking and this United them you know and it allowed them to recognize each other so uh you know that’s an important part of this is that it’s not about giving orders to them or like shifting around the pecking order it’s you know it’s different than like a guy simply belonging to multiple fraternal
Orders like being a Freemason and a member of the Eagles or whatever but it’s not totally dissimilar either where um that’s how they would have viewed it like yeah you know we see this being navigated in Youngstown where these guys were Pittsburgh members but also presiding over their own organization
There’s no evidence that these groups came into conflict you know there’s no reason to believe this have interesting accounts we have interesting accounts also from Sicilian B right from from those who turn States witness government’s witness um they call them repentance in in Italy uh they repented and are not
Helping the government uh Leonardo Messina who was the under boss of San catalo so we see yet another interesting mention of San catalo and so around the same time that uh you know the little bit after uh you know andang like like Gano Costa and and kjo Marano uh turn
Penti right Leonardo MSA flips and he testifies and uh as a Administration member and a high ranking mafios in Sicily he has an interesting Viewpoint because he’s being interviewed by the uh you know the head of the anti-mafia uh you know uh uh was he Bureau organization whatever in Rome
Right the you sort of Italian government anti-mafia organization uh you know he’s telling them he’s telling this guy basically you know you don’t really understand how these things fit together like from the Viewpoint of PE the leadership strata of all of these organizations we view each other is the
Same thing that doesn’t mean again that doesn’t mean they can transfer membership or that some guy who’s made as a low-level member or regular member in one organization can just is considered part of the other one it means the leadership strata right the elite groups within these organizations
All view each other fraternally they view each each of these as manifestations of some larger sort of Mafia umbrella it’s like over time they came to recognize each other as being you know cognate groups like cousins yeah and Dr jaino Panino who was a a surgeon a politician and a member of
The uh branchio family his uncle and grandfather had both been bosses of branchio he ended up flipping in the 90s his his other uncle was Toto lde who we mentioned early Chicago boss we can go in depth about that another time he he said something similar about these
Upper levels being kind of their one common entity and you know I try to be very careful with that because you know you you say that and people might be like oh well the kamur the andanga and the mafia are all one organization and I don’t think that’s
What’s being said but it’s at the upper at the upper levels there is this commonality and there’s this merging and sometimes they formalize it they might induct somebody on an honorary level y them formally within their within their own fraternity but they yeah I think they the point is that they see
Themselves as being manifestations of of the same core phenomenon even though they’re not the same organization you know structurally and this is interesting maybe we could wrap it up we can go back to we talk about the mythology and the uh the sort of Arcane rituals and symbolism of the kamora and
The andanga being like the the kamora and steroids and taking all this to an level and really sort of uh uh you know kind of wallowing it you know uh sort of Arcane symbolism and Flowery talk but the uh this goes back to the 1890s there’s the 1897 case I believe in in
Pal me I want to say in in Regio cabria um when there was a bunch of cases happening in the 1880s and 1890s in cabria again the kamora was coming out of the prisons they were establishing Societies in different parts of Calabria in their hometowns and they were running
A muck and terrorizing people so there was a bunch of cases and uh you know they had some people that testified were Affiliates and flipped so the first example of this this is the uh the three Spanish Knights and this is a a way like how the
Freemasons say they go back to uh the Temple of Solomon and so forth right you know the the indang and the old this comes from directly from the old prison kamora has this uh mythology about itself that it goes back to Knights from Spain there’s no evidence of this
Whatsoever of course historically this organization comes out in the 19th century from the prisons right that’s where it’s organized uh but this is how they ground themselves we’re part of something deeper right uh uh you know sort of mystical almost right and so there these three Spanish Knights that
In sevia and Spain um of course you know they say that they’re Noble because a a nobleman an aristocrat killed or raped their sister right and then they they kill him in retribution um so it’s almost like the little you know like they’re standing up against the uh the
Corrupt nobility kind of how the mafia in Sicily has portrayed itself also right and they’re imprisoned for I forget if it’s 21 or 29 years on the island of favignana which is an island off the coast of of tropon in Sicily but it this is one of those major prisons
That we were talking about you know so even while they’re saying well we’re part of this ancient Spanish Knighthood right they’re actually also saying they’re recognizing the fact that they started in the prison system in the 19th century and you know they were in prison
There for 20 or 29 years or whatever and then when they get out one goes to Naples one goes to Calabria and one goes to Sicily one founds the Neapolitan Honor Society one founds the calabrian Honor Society and one founds you know kosa the uh the Sicilian Honor Society
So you know the kamora and then later the andanga have long uh wrapped themselves in this Mythos that all these honored societies are are the same they’re all Brothers literally we know of course the Sicilian Mafia actually even though the calabrian and neapolitans do have the same origin
And the same organization cecilian Mafia comes from a different route but it does come to call itself and have many of the same values even despite some of the differen we talked about so it’s interesting it’s almost like in more recent decades as these have become you know large sort of
Transnational organizations involved in Narcotics trafficking and all sorts of corruption and uh you know diverting of public funds and so forth and hobnobbing with uh you knowl big wigs and so forth that they’ve sort of almost made that a reality right yeah no I mean yeah and and the
Funny thing about this topic is you know how many questions it opens up you know and that’s true for the subject in general like the deeper you go the more questions come up and this is one that you know we we pulled the top off of something here and there’s there’s more
We would have loved to go into I mean there was so much to say and there there is more that will be gone into um Angelo has a lot more we all do but uh you know you mentioned like Chicago Heights you know that’s a topic you know there’s
Kenosha Wisconsin you know there’s reason to think there was still a kamora society there as late as the early 80s the FBI hints at it right they provided some evidence to to to to think that that’s a a likely case but we don’t have the Insiders to to Really clarify a lot
Of these things this conversation is we’ve been having the pretty much this exact conversation for years I mean Angelo you know has been digging into this for a decade he and I have been talking to it talking about it amongst ourselves for over five years you know you almost just as long
Um we have as many questions as anybody you know while we’ve uncovered a lot we have as many questions as anybody listening to this does and uh you know the smallest little piece of information adds to this and uh you know I’m sure people will have many questions
You know I know some people in in the comments have asked more about the mainlanders um there’s there’s plenty of stuff listening back that I’ll think oh I wish we we would have gone into that um but it it goes deep and when you open up the idea of the mainlanders yeah a
Lot of guys were just italian-americans they were ordinary criminals but we can see that during this transition period between the turn of the century and the 1930s there was one the inclusion of these other members of these other groups those guys rose up quickly you know Frank Milano who we talked about
Appears to have been the first non-s Sicilian kostra boss in America probably in the world he’s B according to Gentile he’s bossed by 1930 but then from there it’s like 1931 Capone Bano in Pittsburgh you know veto genovesi becomes under boss in 1931 Anastasia’s underboss in
1931 so you know once that door opened we see these guys taking influential positions it didn’t change the Sicilian character um you know as we said you know throughout this you know this looks to have started around the mid 1910s um you have uh the Pittsburgh situation where Morrow and the the
Calibra kamora they get brought in by the mid to late 1910s uh there’s a a report in Richie bardo’s FBI file that says it looks like the kamur merged with kostra between 19 195 and 1931 which seems to be accurate um you know goes back to the to Carlo
Tape there’s a reference on another De Carlo tape the guy Fred who was in this conversation was likely Fred pogy toriello um he was from CA there’s another conversation they have where he says he was made in 1916 or 1917 which is further confirmation that in New York mainlanders were getting
Made that early he seems to know a little bit about the Mora himself in this conversation he was older than the other guys I believe he was born in 1892 so uh he may have been affilia with the kamur you know we didn’t even get into vachi and
Valero um but uh you know there’s this conflict between Valero’s group the Navy Street group and uh Melo the Melo family um there’s a war but as Valero says you know you can be close to a sicilian for 20 years and then they’ll turn on you in favor of another Sicilian which
Indicates that even though Valero himself was in favor of fighting the Sicilians he had relationships to them too and some of his comrades were against the war you know as we know um but this is this transition period where everything was kind of funneling into Kosen norra yeah it didn’t happen
Uniformly it didn’t happen um the same way in different places and as we can see with the Youngstown thing and some of these other indications it’s evident that it didn’t happen thoroughly everywhere um I think you know the most well-known studied sort of visible cities being New York and Chicago we can
See that you know essentially Yeah by 1931 uh it does look like that the kamora Societies in those cities were fully absorbed into the KRA families there this this seems you know very evident but you know you have kosha on the periphery of Chicago um then you have whatever’s going on in Youngstown
In Western Pennsylvania and so forth uh whatever’s happening in Buffalo andt IO but some of these families are also much more shaped by this so we see the the geneves Chicago the gambinos also right less thoroughly um you know we suspect we know much less about Philly we see
This large group of calabrians and mzazi and the family um you know we don’t know 100% we really don’t know anything about the kamora in Philadelphia there certainly would have been one there um and we know that the Navy Street kamora group had ties and would tra some of
Them would travel to Philadelphia so clearly that that represents some connection there um you know it could be surmised that that’s something similar would have happened in Philadelphia around the same period um we didn’t talk about New England that’s another family that’s heavily shaped by the participation of
Mainlanders um we know also little about the formal you know organization that could have existed but again we have people like you know roseli going back to Boston and so forth um you know the MLL Providence yeah Providence and then you have of course Springfield Massachusetts which we haven’t T touched
On yet but that that’s uh you know gets absorbed as a dinina into the geneves family and I think we have you know Good Grounds to believe that that was a kamora society prior to that was connected to ton it was connected to Mike Miranda whose brother Tony lived
There and uh you know Mike Miranda’s nephew they were from Naples Mike Miranda’s nephew Barney Miranda came to uh New York I think he was like 17 or 18 but he was recorded referring to like the agabo as an organization in active in prisons and they would give a yearbook
Essentially with the the pictures and names of members to the warden so that these guys would get preferential treatment you know so the mirandas were very likely Affiliated in some way the mirandas had a presence in Springfield um I believe they were from San jeppe vlano right which is next door
To otaviano where R and Rafael Coto are from so it’s another one of these again right in the middle of this hot bed area right yes Springfield was also connected to Navy Street and Coney Island yeah okay yeah there’s evidence where we’re not just saying oh because there’s a
Bunch of mainlanders and they get you know brought into the the geneves family we know that happened with the kamoda and some in Westchester and in Chicago and in New York and in Newark right that seems it’s pretty clear that’s what happened in Springfield also you I Ed
This word at the beginning influence you know influence of this over the generations and uh you know with Ray patriarcha you know he was recorded saying that he was originally made into the genevi family which isn’t widely known um but he says that Frank Costello there’s two different reports from the
Same informant in one they say Frank Costello and another they say veto genovesi maybe it was both of them but Ray patriarcha apparently was pushed as the as the new boss by Costello or genovesi specifically because he was Neapolitan Costello or genovesi wanted the previous boss you know bua out uh
You know he was a sicilian from palmo but they they were specifically pushing patriarcha because he was Neapolitan uh so you know we have stuff too like uh I think it’s mentioned in one of Anna sergey’s books I know Fabian mentioned it on his blog but there’s a
Reference too from an Italian police report to Antonio MO you know an important and Drang boss Consulting with try he’s trying to consult with Albert Anastasia and Frank Costello two fellow calabrians about um expanding was it expanding the andrada in Canada or somewhere well the claim is that they
That they were part of uh you know Summits that were held in in uh in in Canada that involved uh the leadership of you know we can call it the indang because in the ‘ 50s is when it starts being used as a term in in Italy um you
Know that you know that the had implications for Italy for North America and for Australia yeah sort of this when I talked about the this kind of transatlantic and dranga that we see in more recent decades a lot of people would point back to uh the 1950s as
Being the formative period for that and there’s at least from Italian law enforcement we don’t have a lot of details but they Italian law enforcement absolutely believe that Albert Anastasia and Frank Costello both Cali bosses of New York you know cling oer families were uh in a part of
This and uh you know there’s there’s a reference somewhere too to funzy tiari possibly having ties to the kamur he was as I mentioned at the beginning he was swatz Mulligan chapon’s you know guy like he was under TI and then we see the influence he had ties he had ties to
Antonio spavone who also had very close ties to uh to uh Jax rone in Chicago and lived in Chicago for a period he had to leave he had to leave Naples after getting hit in the face of the shotgun blast he actually owned a restaurant in Chicago his uh uh anybody from Chicago
Will know the name spavone and enough said it’s the same spon and we also have indications that this influenced commission relationships because we know the geneves family represented New England Pittsburgh you know and these are all families that we’re talking about here who show these you know some sort of residue of these
Mainland networks that likely went back to the kamora um you know so it goes to the highest levels veto jev goes back to ca and people say he goes back to Naples right well what he does is he goes back to Roar Rola and Nola you know this the
Same area that’s that I’ve talked about over and over again and I I keep bringing it up because it’s very important historically um you know he’s actually he actually uh is the like a patron for the fascist party in the 1930s and uh in in hola and then he also
Builds he contributes to the building of the um the headquarters of the f party in Nola for that District which is sort of ironic because just a few years before that the fascists in Nola were involved in a major assault and Crackdown on the kamora in that area but
It’s possible by that point they had you know maybe some of these uh you know cist tied the to veto genes may have made amends with some of the local fascist officials that’s possible but uh today that building still stands my understanding is that ironically uh veto jev’s uh fascist
Party headquarters is now hous as a a campus of the law school the University of Naples yeah and so we see too is it’s not that these guys joined and they tried to revolutionize what the mafia fundamentally is you know they brought in a different culture um but they they
Didn’t try to change the mafia like when I say that the geneves family represented New England Pittsburgh some of these other networks and relationships existed um it’s not that they were like we’re the kamora you know they were they they kind of made k their
Own but they molded to it and you know we see we see that later we see where some of these guys you know Scarfo telling leonetti we calabrians are different we have to be Shooters the Sicilians are businessmen they can get in their own way we have to prove
Ourselves on the street it’s the John Gotti mentality where John Gotti was a True Believer in kostra but he also had that bravado that I’m a Gangster what are you g to do about it I’m gonna I’m GNA dress like a gangster act like like a gangster I’m not Carlo Gambino you
Know but he still fundamentally believed in kosan norra you know our buddy Michael dionardo has said as much yeah you know to the point where almost ironically one would think he forces the sort of uh much more traditionalist much more heavily Sicilian Centric the Cavo con family to uh to reinitiate a bunch
Of members because they had been making guys for a long time without the full ceremony they were just you know telling you know they were just giving guys a you know a verbal ceremony doing the whole you know punch the blood and fire you know thing and then you have this
Guy John Gotti companion American Street tough guy from Brooklyn right comes in and tells them you got to remake all these guys because you didn’t do it the right way Coen o has to mean something right scarfi was that way too Scarfo was kind of by the letter rules guy yep used
That as an excuse to kill people and that kind of thing but by all accounts Scarfo you know truly believed in kostra even though he was a product of this calabrian faction um and there there’s an old newspaper article I think I referenced it in the Philadelphia
Episode but it says there were actually Scarfo cousins who were part of the sedero group in Calabria and you know we don’t know if that’s confirmed but this newspaper article this old newspaper article says that they had the surname Scarfo as well these inrang affiliates with the surname Scarfo were said to
Be because the scaros were from mamola yep same with the katronis of Canada um I don’t know where the violi were from but somewhere around there and uh you know Paulo violi the bonano captain his dad was allegedly an important uh in dragotti um who later was not allowed to
Settle in Canada so he settled outside of Cleveland you know so uh interesting stuff yeah well m is you know Scaro we call him Scaro cuz they got Americanized but that’s the surname of Scaro that’s a that’s a surname from that same part of Eastern Regio cabria Province you know
The the ionic you know sea sort of Coast you have see there no locy places like that mamola is just in the interior of that so this is all you know in Regio the inanga is sort of organized by by you know by sort of subprovince within Regio Cabrio there like three sections
Of it and that’s uh yeah um you know those things reflect uh family and pisani ties and they’re also reflected in some of the organizational structures of the actual you know indang and ways to permute back and forth across the Atlantic so this is it’s a big topic right we we covered a
Lot of stuff it’s been four plus hours I think we should we should also again um we noted that Angelo has been really plugging away on this we we owe tremendous debt to him because um you know in 2014 you and uh Leonard van Reed and uh and Rick Warner who’s also you
Know with the the mob archaeologists um is you know you all published that you know that 2014 article in uh the Informer Journal that really sort of cemented the the framework of of of of analyzing the early Mafia in the US Sicilian Mafia through the lens of of
The importance of these pisani ties not that every single thing goes back to that right but that this was an important formative principle in how the mafia was first implanted in the communities of the US and uh in many ways I think what we’ve been able to do
Based on you opening up the you know the sort of focus on the American kamod right it’s not just this sort of Side Story it’s not just this weird thing that happened in Navy Street and they had a war in 1915 and then we don’t hear
Anything about it after that I mean you were you know one of the very first people if not the first person to really sort of focus on the fact that you had you know both companion and C Brian branches of this phenomenon that came to the US you know took root in different
Communities in the US and then eventually intersected or you know many cases got absorbed by the mafia over over decades um so we’re able to sort of you know analyze some of this stuff using the a similar framework to what the 2014 Informer Journal did firstan you know Mafia
Right yeah absolutely when you look at it through those lens of you know chain migration and you know whose relatives people were related to and stuff like that it it opens up a you know a whole different can of worms and it allows people to look at things from a you know
Different perspective that people don’t normally see because you know we’re kind of the first ones to bring genealogy and when I say first I mean all of us to bring genealogy family and history all that research into it because you know you go back you know 10 20 years before
That everyone’s just looking up crimes and rackets you know that’s the big thing the rackets the crime this and this I mean these groups have existed for the better part of 200 years and you know they you know like Eric said they are tied to Crime
That cannot be that’s not up for dispute but what the glue that holds them together is not just crime I mean you know we see this where you know for instance okay let’s go back to Regio in the 1880s you know you had a lot of
Stuff going on in the 1880s 1890s but the Cur was documented in Regio City back in the 1860s it’s kind of like you know jump forward to the United States you know the 1920s with bootlegging and all that people are assuming okay well the mafia started around then they you
Know filled in take this void of bootlegging and you know took it from there but when you research and take it back you know that these groups were already formed and operational in America at the turn of the century just because they weren’t making you know a
Lot of noise like they were in the 20s uh isn’t really indicative of of existence people think that you know okay we don’t hear we don’t hear anything about these groups then there’s nothing there and that’s just not always the case yeah and there was then you
Know in the early part of the 20th century in a number of towns in the US there were these cases right they just haven’t been properly Contex Iz or tied in um you know we have David chit’s book earlier and kitley picked up on some of
These things right so we we talked about the you know sort of rereading the the DAR Carlo uh bug transcript at you know once you understand that they’re talking about cisti right how everything opens up chy also talked about the Navy Street and uh you know Cony Island kamora
Groups and also discussed the Westchester group associate takam L that we brought up earlier right and this is uh uh you know these things popped up because there was extortion cases there were murder cases uh they had witnesses that flipped you know uh you know long before there were uh Affiliates in involved
With Ken ostra necessarily testifying in court there were Affiliates of the kamora you know quote unquote blackand that were testifying in court cases in 1909 in Hillsville Pennsylvania 1915 in Westchester um this is important because it gives us insight into what these groups are uh you have to go back and
Get court documents and you’ve done quite a bit of this sometimes stuff comes out in local newspapers and you know some people who’ve done organized crime history know about some of these things they you know that won’t be news to them but understanding them as part of a broader phenomenon is a different
Well you know I just want to add a little aside here that I I meant to mention in this episode is that you know speaking of newspapers I I came across a newspaper article from Birmingham Alabama and you know I’ve written about Birmingham very little is known about
The Birmingham family outside of uh you know Bill bonano confirming that it once existed and disbanded early on you know we don’t have any you know we don’t have FBI informant anybody who can really confirm and I I did my best to try to find who was there and what connections
Existed obviously someone could read that and be like I thought this was about Alabama you’re talking about all about the dcal kantes and gambinos and all this just what I do but uh the thing is I found this article there was a guy in I believe 1925 who flipped he
Cooperated with the police and he told them his name was Jimmy Rosana he was from Syracuse Province so Eastern Sicilian Southeastern Sicily he flipped he told them I was initiated into what I thought was a fraternal Society in Alabama um it was a Blackhand or kamora
Society and I had to pay a series of initiatory fees and it had degrees and he he identified 16 members unfortunately we don’t have the names of them um but one of the members was identified because he wrote a letter to Rosana and this guy’s name was Jim MSA
And he was from uh jalina in tropon Province and they referred to each other as dear friend and brother mayfer and you know he says that when you join the organization you can never leave which is you know Mafia like but it’s true for all these or
Organizations and you know when I first read it I was like oh he must be talking about the Birmingham family Birmingham was 90% the Italian Community was at 1 Point 90% Sicilian yeah but his reference to a series of fees a series of degrees and that he explicitly said
It was the kamora yeah raises a lot of questions where kind of like Johnstown where in this place where we barely know about the formal Mafia Family that existed there there may have been an adjacent kamora organization and based on this it would have included an Eastern Sicilian and a guy from tropy
Which is you know Prime Mafia territory you know so there’s this this thing might have been so widespread and it might have existed in extremely unlikely places and you know getting back to you know something Angelo said a second ago about you know in in decades past and
Even in the recent past you’ll read articles about mafiosi and it’ll be like he was born in Italy yeah and I read that it’s one of my I laugh at it because it’s like well where like yeah most they’ll say he was Sicilian or he was you know whatever Neapolitan and I
Used to be that way with the mainlanders as well like it was it took so much work to try to get a comprehensive understanding of the Sicilian Mafia the sicil the Sicilian branches of the American Mafia it it was too much work to really dig into the mainland side and I also didn’t
Really think there was that much to it I was like yeah there’s some calabrian guys you know obviously being interested in Philadelphia I was aware of that there are Neapolitan guys you know theon’s Neapolitan Heritage is referenced by a number of sources there were some controversies around his
Induction um but you know talking to you guys really open the door to the specific locations the regions the hometowns of the main Landers and that’s something I’m still familiarizing myself with like you talk about Western Sicily and I can tell you exactly where even obscure towns are but with this I still
Really have to to look and you know this subject has a tendency to stagnate at times you know I can always find something interesting I’m just an obsessed freak you know just never gets enough of it but it’s like it does stagnate research stagnates you know you’re always waiting for those new
Developments and Revelations um this is a big one and as you said Angelo really opened the door for this he’s done a lot of work he’s doing a lot of work um I hope that this episode does that for a lot of people I hope that people find things I hope that
People share things with us yeah yeah this is this is a new frontier with the subject you know kitley wrote a little bit about it just some some examples you know he didn’t necessarily know how to contextualize it but he did he did reference it there’s something to the
Mainlanders some other people have as well but this is a newbi was aware of it from the 60s already right and and this was presented to you know the Senate um in the 1980s as part of a major presentation on the history of Clen ostra this was uh it warranted the you
Know the FBI including it as a part of their timeline you know sort of milestones in the history of of Glen Ultra so it’s almost like these sort of earlier moments where it gets you know picked up and then just sort of doesn’t go anywhere right and then we see the
The term karisi continued on even though some of these guys joined the mafia and became respected and important figures we see that term used as a pejorative we see there’s a description of Frank ballisty from a Milwaukee informant where it said you know he operates like a
Karti they it comes up on the DAR Carlo tapes again they’re talking about I believe Bobby Mana you know and they’re like you know the way he’s operating down there is like a Kamari and uh you know genti had a you know disparaging take on them they’re like a disease Joe
Bonano goes on a a little tangent about the kamur he says that they were Ruffians Highway robbers they had nothing to do with our tradition um you know so there was not just you know ethnic difference like other calabrians were Sicilians but there were cultural difference like cultural even within the
Underworld subculture they were all a part of but yet these guys joined and we know there was probably push back but ultimately you know the Sicilian Mafia is a fundamentally conservative organization but they did allow these guys to join they did allow them to attain rank um
They might have made their little asides you know they might have you know oh he’s he’s a hard-headed calib but he’s also a respected member of their secret society as well you know it’s interesting because by the sorry Angela I’m sorry real quick um growing up Michael De Leonardo he
Never heard Andrea he only heard about that online um you know after you know his story was pretty much concluded on the street but growing up you know in that bath beach Benson hurse you know part of Brooklyn he says that they referred to the Italians downtown you know up in Northern
Brooklyn as GES now he referring to an organization he was referring to somebody that was you know they were low class that’s what that’s what he that’s what he equated comrades to be Red Hook you know Red Hook kobble Hill you know these sorts of areas Navy you know Navy
Yard yeah yeah oh and also sorry real quick if you ever seen PR’s honor with Jack Nicholson there’s one line in that film where he’s threatening a calibrace guy or a some guy from Naples and he says you’re this right do you remember the kamora the guy says yeah and Jack
Nicholson says we’re bigger funny little pops up in an American popular culture Yeah couple times well just to talk you know I guess we’ll have to wrap this up but just because the the topic of later accounts from from mafosi you know who referred to koristi in sort of uh
Disparaging ways right marking them as being distinct as being Ruffians as not being part of our tradition so earlier we brought up the 60s Chicago confidential informan Teddy D Rose associate in Chicago and he had an interesting account because again he said there was a there used to be a
Mafia and there used to be a kamora the mafia was from Sicily and the kamod was from Naples as you put it and they had different origins in Italy and then in Chicago after 1928 they became merg into the same organization so they weren’t separate anymore and but then he says
That after that members whose Origins stem from those two different organizations remain somewhat distinct not in any organizational sense but in terms of the sorts of rackets they would be involved in he said things like prostitution and drugs for example were examp were examples of this so the guys
Who used to be koristi before becoming mafiosi still by the 1960s in Chicago had a somewhat different uh character or personality that was ascribed to them by an associate and he broke down what do you call the board of directors which we know otherwise was called the conio in
Chicago the council and and he broke it down by who he identified as being part of those ancestral factions so he said that you know Tony Ardo Jan kanana Ross prio and uh and Jackie Cerrone as he put it were Mafia or Sicilian and all of those men are Sicilian except for Jackie
Cerrone but he comes up under Ricardo and the sort of a protege of his from the Grand Avenue neighborhood which has an old Sicilian Mafia imprint going back to the 1890s so that makes sense even though Jackie sonone was actually Lucano was from Penza but then he interestingly says then on the council
You had Paul R and uh fii bueri and he referred to bueri and and Paul R as as kamur and those are guys from Taylor Street again the sort of orbit of uh you know Diamond Joe Esposito going back to the 1910s and 20s we know that ra almost
Certainly was kamora and then he puts guier a calabrian powerful calabrian captain in Chicago is kamota also so even by the 60s in Chicago in a city that you know as far as we know this family doesn’t make a lot out of the ethnic or Regional differences in the
Membership you know they don’t have a calabrian or you know faction the way the the Philly does even let alone like what we see some of these hints from Pittsburgh but an associate who wasn’t even Italian was aware of these things and picked up on it so clearly this was
Part of what guys talked about this is part of the sort of culture that surrounded the mafia and we only get bits and pieces of it because we have very few accounts yeah and just to kind of you know wind this down like I think vat’s account really highlights the
Diminishing formal influence of the kamur where he goes to prison he’s taken under the wing of alesandro Valero who we know is a confirmed karista leader of Navy Street um Valero’s schooling him in the Italian underworld he’s he’s kind of hinting he says at one point he was
Asking questions and Valero was like slow down kid um but uh you know he’s schooling him in some of these things he’s telling him you know there’s differences between the Sicilians and the neapolitans um Vach is aware of Navy Street he refers to the them as the
Leaders of the Navy street mob he was aware of the war with the Melos the murder of Nick teranova um but vachi is under his wing he’s he’s being taught you know Vach is a street criminal but he’s being taught for the first time that there’s more to it than just crime
There’s there there’s politics there’s organizational elements um he’s not being told everything you know Vach is there with Carmine Clemente and Valero tells him oh you know Clement I knew I knew your brother because Clement’s brother had been killed they were Neapolitan I knew your brother he was
Killed by a sicilian be careful of the Sicilians you can be friends with them for 20 years and then they’ll turn on you in favor of another Sicilian and then you know so vachi gets this schooling he he’s under this guy but then vachi gets released from prison he
Gravitates toward uh Dominic petrilli who’s from a Brut so and he says he wears yellow suits with you know flowers you know on the breast and vachi ends up becoming a lucazi associate he ends up you know proposed for membership he’s made by Marzano and then he says you
Know alesandro Valero gets released from prison he reaches out to valachi and he’s like you know can you make sure nothing happens to me you know can you can you protect me and vachi goes to veto genovesi who says like that’s old history he’s like sure but that’s that’s
Ancient history wasn’t that 20 years ago but you have this guy who was somewhat of importance within the kamora for you know during these formative Years in New York you know he schools this kid who under other circumstances he probably would have recruited him as a a member
Of the minor Society you know Vach says nothing about he valaro didn’t tell him like oh you know you’re now a part of something he just kind of there’s things I can’t tell you yeah I can’t tell you but you know V’s experience 10 years earlier might have been
More of the standard prison kamora experience but Valero’s clearly losing his grip Valero’s never made into kostra he gets out of prison he reaches out to vachi a fellow Neapolitan who’s been inducted into kostra vachi agrees to protect him Bachi goes to J aesi who we
Know had a history in the kamur may have even known definitely knew of Valero and jovas is just like that’s old history you know he doesn’t have to worry are looking to to gun him down or anything also real quick before before Bachi was released from prison Valero had told him
When you get out I’m going to send you to somebody he send yeah he like I’m gonna send you to Al Capone yeah that’s true so he was he was kind of trying to still you know utilize those networks yeah that still obviously meant something to Valero but during those
Years 1920s to early 30s it was a different story you know kostra had kind of absorbed everything yeah Val was like a dinosaur or coming out from prison still thinking he needs to have protection from his pisani or else the Sicilians are going to get him for a
Vendetta or something yeah and genev is like oh wow that guy that’s old history yep y That’s a good wrapup I think I think so I think we can also um we should also give another plug to uh to Angela’s project which uh is abely titled American kamora so Angelo has a
You know this is the sort of uh you know fruition of of years of painstaking work he’s done digging into the Kora contextualizing it in terms of its Italian Origins its origins in the prison system in Italy and then you know the court cases and other uh sources
That we have to uh to document and map it out here in the United States so uh people definitely need to uh check that out that’s uh a lot more content will be coming out from say so thank you both yeah I also want to give a thanks to you know people
Who watch this you know we’re Maniacs who dig into these details that most people who are even even people who are interested in this subject aren’t going to care about the way we talk about this or what we cover um but we really do appreciate anybody who gets something
Out of this you know some people have t contacted me privately and you know told me they appreciate it they listen at work they don’t have anybody you know to rap with about this stuff and it’s nice to hear people have conversations and go
In depth and I I just want to make it clear that to me it’s one of those things that goes without saying but I do want to say it that you know we really appreciate anybody who gets anything out of this anybody who watches it um anybody who recommends it you know
That’s something that means something to us uh this is what we do privately but you know we did want to share this when we started doing this show this is a topic we’ve been talking about doing from the beginning you know it needed to be the right time uh we’re really happy
To to share some of these thoughts and ideas it’s it’s been a lot of research a lot of conversation there’s more to come there’s a lot more to learn about this specific aspect of kostra as it relates to the kamur as it relates to the history of the andrada uh
So yeah we’re always appreciative and I would like to formally invite everybody to join the Blackhand Forum if you’re interested in continuing these type of discussions it’s a great Forum there’s a lot of people on there discussing many different elements and aspects of this stuff you know external to the stuff
That we talk about so please consider that it’s free
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