Possible Mafia War Has Started
- Thread starter yung_dood
- Start date
It has been going on for decades and decades. And while two or three in a row seem to be some some sort of escalation when we absorb the news personally, it is not a sign of a start of any gang/mafia war nor escalation.
As ceiling cat said, these rivalries, conflicts and settling of scores have been going on in all organized crime for decades and will continue to do so.
Whomever takes out one guy, soon becomes the target of being taken out at some time in the future. And the cycle self-perpetuates.
canada-man
Well-known member
canada-man
Well-known member
the way I see it there will always be bad guys but there are two types
1 good bad guys (Marlon Brando )
2 bad bad guys
cops should just go after bad bad guys
1 good bad guys (Marlon Brando )
2 bad bad guys
cops should just go after bad bad guys
True.
But consider also that that while life may inspire art , artistic license often results in an inaccurate portrayal of the life it appears to imitate.
While the Godfather movies may be well produced and popular entertainment, it glamourizes a criminal culture that continues to have deep and profound adverse effects on society.
Here is a short read on how Italians in Italy view the mafia. Not so glamourous...
https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2015/09/20/why-the-mafia-continues-to-fascinate.html
Why the Mafia continues to fascinate
By JENNIFER HUNTERThe Reader
Sun., Sept. 20, 2015
Italians have a different perspective on the Cosa Nostra than North Americans who love The Godfather and The Sopranos, explains Roberto Dainotto, author of The Mafia: A Cultural History.
North Americans love films, television shows and books about the Mafia. We love Las Vegas, despite its Mob origins. The Italians are a bit more jaded about this crime group that arose in Sicily in the 19th century and became a powerful force in the country’s economy and politics. What is it about the Mafia that so engrosses us North Americans? Roberto Dainotto, a professor of Roman studies and literature at Duke University and a native Sicilian, investigates our obsession with the Cosa Nostra in The Mafia: A Cultural History.
Americans and Canadians are interested in the Mafia and the gangster genre in general. We love Bogart, Cagney and Robinson movies. We are fascinated by Al Capone, devoted to The Sopranos and remain fixated on New York’s Gotti family.
As far as the American public is concerned, the fascination with the Mafia is a response to social needs. The Mafia is seen as the incarnation of the American dream, the self-made man. During the Great Depression, when the American dream seems to fail, the Mafia is the group in charge of reviving the economy or fighting a brutal society that doesn’t allow the individual to climb the ladder anymore.
It was surprising to North Americans to see the Mafia trials in Palermo in the late 1980s, when Mafiosi were held in cages rather than sitting on the defence stand.
What struck our imagination was the way the tribunal was arranged and the architecture, the way it was built. It was like World War II bunkers. All around the court there was a strong military presence, cannons, machine-guns. That was more powerful than seeing the accused in cages. The streets of Sicily were seriously under military siege. In Palermo, it was impossible to circulate. It was not only military police but regular soldiers and conscripts who had to make sure nothing happened to the judges.
Italians have a different perspective on the Mafia than Canadians. It wasn’t until the show The Octopus was aired in Italy in the 1980sthat Italians began to consider the terror the Mafia created. They began to realize how far it intruded into their business (Roberto Calvi, “God’s Banker,” who had a relationship with the Mafia) and their politics (Giulio Andreotti, the former prime minister of Italy, who was believed to have deep Sicilian Mafia connections).
The Italian perspective on the Mafia did change over time. At first, after the country was unified in the 1800s, there was a feeling of loss about the chivalric spirit that had dominated during independence and was lacking in the new Italy. The Mafia presented men of honour. They were passionate men and this was a supplement to the lack of passion and lack of sentiment that dominated the life of post-unity Italy.
Italians first read about the Mafia in 19th-century novels by Giovanni Verga, after the fight against the Bourbons when Italy was united. The aspiration that had arisen during the fight for unity needed to be put somewhere. After the Second World War, the Mafioso incarnated the spirit of rebellion. In quite a few movies the Mafioso provided positive characters and models.
The Mafia infiltrated the Vatican bank and the central government. How do you eviscerate an institution that has fingers in every pie?
How do you do that? That’s probably not a question I have the expertise to answer. The involvement of the Vatican bank is still a vexing question. There has been no legal determination. There are rumours and hypotheses. But Judge Giovanni Falcone’s and Judge Paolo Borsellino’s attempts to stop the Mafia by blocking the circulation of money, by looking at banks, didn’t go well either. Falconi, his wife and three bodyguards were blown up on a highway just outside Palermo. Borsellino was killed by a car bomb. The Mafia are hard to stop.
You note the legends of Robin Hood-like Mafia justice, including the myths of honour, loyalty and family that “had been essential in maintaining cohesion within the Mafia ranks. The sense of omertà as an almost chivalric virtue in defence of a secret brotherhood, and even a public acceptance of the Mafia as an honourable society, largely depended on the credibility of those myths and legends.”
The idea of the Mafia being a Robin Hood-like organization in defence of the poor had a long life in Italy. But the sheer brutality of the war against the state put the validity of the myth in question. There was so much violence and Mafia brutality. That is when the myth of the good Mafia dies. It enters into a period of crisis.
We like the Sopranos because in many ways they are just like us. They live in suburbia, Dad sees a shrink, the parents are worried about getting their daughter into an Ivy League university. Is that what Italian gangland has come to?
I don’t think so and I hope not. The Sopranos for me is the quintessential cultural product for Americans. It was hated by Italians. Italians couldn’t identify with the Soprano family the way the Americans could. Americans are seen as not elegant, not polished, not real Italians. Ask any Italian who has moved to New York about Italian food in the United States; they would say spaghetti and meatballs is not Italian food. There is even an adjective in Italian, americanata. It means something that tries to be European or sophisticated but doesn’t succeed.
You conclude it’s difficult to separate the real Mafia from the fictional version.
I’m not sure that is precisely what I am trying to say. It is easy to separate the real Mafia from the fictional one. The real Mafia is the one that corrupts; the real Mafia is the one that kills. The fictional Mafia is the Mafia of the Robin Hoods, the self-made man.
Why do we like watching movies about the Mafia? The fascination can only be explained by understanding what real needs these Mafia movies represent. In the case of The Godfather, the Mafioso is perverting itself to represent growing business at a moment when social mobility in the United States is declining. In theory this business is subordinated to the interests of the family and not the other way around. The Mafia becomes a foil for the discontents of civilization.
The first Godfather film was successful at the box office in Italy but it never got good critical reviews. It was seen by the cultural establishment as not kosher, not to be promoted.
In Italy, a man like John Gotti was considered gaudy, flashy, with no class. Why Gotti was so popular, that is a more difficult question to answer. He represented the man against the system, a Robin Hood figure. For Italian Americans he was a man who was fighting for their honour.
The movie Casino with Robert DeNiro did a good job of portraying the glamorous side and very dark side of the mafia lifestyle.
The Netflix series Narcos does a good job of that with lifestyles of the drug bosses and cartels too.
The Netflix series Narcos does a good job of that with lifestyles of the drug bosses and cartels too.
It's a vicious self perpetuating cycle. People make movies that glamorize gang/mafia lifestyle, wanna be gangsters see the movies and think they can make it into their real life, everything escalates, so someone makes a movie that glamorizes their lifestyle ... and so on.
To get to be a Marlon Brando type you have to be a really bad guy.
The guys in the mafia are guys that took the easy way out in life ( illegal or not ) and now they know nothing else.
1 helped common folk out
2 got shot by a bad bad guy for refusing to go into heroin trade
OK, so he likes cats and chopping heads off of horses but what else is so bad about him?
The US government could greatly decrease the mob's power if they legalized all drugs tomorrow. Make hard-drugs like heroin, cocaine....etc available by prescription that addicts can get filled at the local pharmacy every day.
Like this: https://www.thestar.com/news/canada...scribed-in-severe-opioid-addiction-cases.html
Then the mob's profits would be greatly reduced, and they would only have illegal gambling, prostitution and a few other rackets left
Like this: https://www.thestar.com/news/canada...scribed-in-severe-opioid-addiction-cases.html
Then the mob's profits would be greatly reduced, and they would only have illegal gambling, prostitution and a few other rackets left
If the mob had their regular streams of revenue cut off they might start to horn in on lesser known avenues of illicit revenues like the guys that skim coins from pay washer/dryers in slum high rises buildings.
The Betrayal of Jesus - …At this, one of Jesus’ companions drew his sword and struck the servant of the high priest, cutting off his ear. “Put your sword back in its place, Jesus said to him. “For all who draw the sword will die by the sword." - Mathew 26:52
"By the sword you did your work, and by the sword you die."
— Aeschylus's Agamemnon 450BCE
That's because they supposedly hire professional hit men. Now with respect to that shooting in Vaughan a few weeks that resulted in the death of a young woman in her 20s who might have been at the wrong place at the wrong time with the wounded guy in the back of the SUV, maybe the killer had to do her too to eliminate her as a witness?
I doubt those guys were true professionals.
You know who was a professional hit man, the guy who did this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicola_Rizzuto
Assassination[edit]
On November 10, 2010, Rizzuto was killed at his residence in the Cartierville borough of Montreal when a single bullet from a sniper's rifle punched through two layers of glass in the rear patio doors of his Montreal mansion. His death is believed to be the final blow against the Rizzuto crime family.[1][6][7]
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