I’m guessing you guys thought the Italian-American
mafia was a thing of the past. You thought we were like the dinosaurs, creatures that walked the
Earth and preyed on guys like you, and then just went extinct. You should have known better...We
never went anywhere. We just became ghosts, ghouls, wise guys that you once wrote stories
about, guys you made famous in the movies. But “This Thing of Ours”, it never stopped, we just
went underground, and got much better at avoiding detection. We kinda realized that bloodied bodies
splattered on the streets was bad for business. We quit beefing with each other all the
time and said “"fuggedaboutit” a lot. The wise guys got wiser, and you my good
friends, were none the wiser…and then…and then it all went to hell. The once extinct dinosaurs
became hidden in plain sight. Let me explain. My name is James “Jimmy” Ardizzone, and on
account of me being blind in one eye after a fight with some schmuck in a bar, I got the
nickname, “One-eyed Jimmy.” I had that fight before I joined the mafia, but I caught up with
the guy later. He’s now resting at the bottom of the Hudson in a pair of cement shoes.
You don’t think that still happens? Oh, if you only knew how many missing persons
were people whose location we know all about. I was born in the late 90s on Arthur Avenue in
the Bronx. That’s New York City to all you guys on the other side of the world. There was
nothing special about my childhood. My ma worked part-time in a local bakery, and my
pa did double shifts as a warehouse packer. In the great scheme of things we were poor,
but not dirt poor. My folks are good people, they’re honest, down to Earth, hard working
citizens. But night shifts and calloused hands, for what, to pay the rent and pay
off debts, that wasn’t for me. I first heard about mafia stuff during that “Pizza
Connection" thing that happened back in the late 80s, you know, when a bunch of our guys got done
for selling huge amounts of heroin and cocaine from pizza parlors. My pa told me all about
it. He even knew guys that were involved in it. You know what, those damned
feds had hundreds of wiretap conversations. Wise guys acting like shmucks,
talking on the phone about trafficking and murder like we’d talk about our kids’ birthdays.
Wire taps…try that now, and see where you get. When I was coming up in the 2000s, when
we did business, we did it face to face. We even covered our mouths at times just in
case any cameras were on us and someone might try and read our lips. We were careful, very
careful, but like I said, it all went to hell. Let me tell you about that, and then I’ll tell
you something about the work I currently do. You see, in 2019, we lost our boss, and I mean
the real boss, the head of the Gambino crime family. That was one Francesco "Franky
Boy" Cali. He was the man, the main man, and he was what you might call the mainline
to Italy’s Sicilian mafia.The guy had blood ties over there, and that was good for business.
Seeing our guys dead on the streets had become a thing of the past before that happened, long gone
were the days we slit guys’ throats in a barber’s chair or we riddled cars with bullets.
The thing is guys, we really stuck to that peace agreement for the most part…we remained
ghosts…but then when Franky Boy’s body was found with seven bullet holes in him outside his Staten
island home, we kind of came into focus again. At first everyone thought this had to be us,
whacking a boss. That’s not a small thing, as you know, and since business was good,
why would anyone want to clip the big man? We had no idea who'd done it. Had word been sent
from Italy? Was it another New York family? Was it the Russians? It made no sense, we had
good business with all organized crime and taking out a crime boss would cause a war. A boss
hadn’t been clipped since the 80s for God’s sake. It turned out the hitmen was just some kid, a
jamook (idiot) from Staten Island who thought Franky Boy was somehow involved with that thing
called the Deep State. That’s a term for the alleged invisible hands behind the government. The
kid thought killing Franky would somehow save the President from this secret cabal of powerful
people. Can you get any more crazy than that? Before they knew it was the jabroni that did the
hit, the media started shooting off its mouth, asking if the Five Families were once
again at war. So-called experts on organized crime said there were rifts
between Franky and the Gotti family, the previous bosses of the Gambino crime family.
Experts…experts telling tall stories, that’s all they were. At least some cops said a hit like that
is not how the Mafia does things. Outside a boss’s house, c’mon, we have more respect than that.
We’ve been in the spotlight since then, and that means I’ve had to be extra careful. That
damn lunatic kid has caused us a lot of trouble. I’d been working occasionally with the Mexicans,
mostly getting cocaine and babania, heroin to you, and moving it in the U.S. or abroad.
That’s the thing with the drug business, it doesn’t dry up. Americans are avid
consumers and there’s always a market here. I’ve always wondered why such a
developed nation wants so badly to get out of it all the time. Pursuit of
happiness…pursuit of High-ness more like. The war on drugs can set you back a bit, but never
for long. We call it the War on Schmucks, because once they’re locked up we can still get the
stuff to them. Ok, they got El Chapo locked up, and look what happened after that. That’s
what they call a “Pyrrhic victory”… look that up if you don’t know what it means.
So, there are about 3,000 of us in the U.S. or thereabouts, and a lot of us
are in New York. As one writer said, all Mafia activity leads back to New York.
No longer is our “bread and butter” just murder and racketeering, but we still do the odd
bit of extortion. Our other main enterprises are illegal gambling and loan-sharking…and
like I said, feeding people’s insatiable appetite for drugs, mainly heroin, but a
bit of coke and at times ice and ecstasy. Sure, we’ve got old school ventures, like
running strip clubs, but we’ve got modern, too. That illegal gambling we do, the operations are
all online and we keep our money off-shore in shell companies like all the rich folks do.
To make sure our gambling websites aren’t closed down, we operate them from countries
where they are legal, such as Costa Rica. The bets are made in the U.S….we use multiple
servers in Costa Rica, and then cash goes off-shore. FEDs, stick that up your culo.
We’ve used Craigslist, too, to find young women who we then trafficked into
various states to work as prostitutes. I’ve actually done something like this in New
York. I recruited a pretty woman, and then I put an ad on Craigslist. When she got the message,
I took her to her client. I kept half the cash, of course. If you think because personal
ads were banned we can no longer do this, think again, there are ways of getting those ads
on the site. Anyway, that kind of thing isn’t really a big earner, it’s more like a hobbie.
Yep, that doesn’t sound quite as grand as what happened in the Godfather, but
sometimes you gotta make ends meet. We can still do things like offer
protection, but it’s not like we go into places guns-blazing anymore.
I’ll give you an example. Let’s say we’ve got a guy running a
heroin business out of a pizza parlor – you didn’t think we’d just stop all
that, did you – and then some wannabe street gangsters clean the guy out one day.
Well, we then tell the guy that on top of the cost of the drugs, there’s a protection cost,
too. Hey, maybe we paid those gangsters to do him over. The outcome is he won’t get his
stuff taken again and we get more money. The same goes for regular folks. Let’s say
their store keeps getting held up, and or their factories somehow seem to keep getting
broken into, their trucks stolen, etc. Well, we can make that stop, because we were ones
doing it in the first place. That’s what you might call protection-extortion. We make
those guys an offer they simply can’t refuse. Then we’ve still got some of the construction
unions. We get involved in the unions, and then start making money by controlling
the materials the construction company needs. We’ll start our own union if one doesn’t exist.
We can then start siphoning off funds, or create benefits schemes and then defraud
benefit fund assets. It’s a sweet deal, but to be honest, this is one area
where the authorities have won the war. Saying that, every time you see a building
going up in New York city, bear in mind we might have sub-contractors on that job or have a
union behind the workers. We get huge kickbacks from these massive construction projects.
But what do we do with all our ill-gotten gains? Well, as I said, we keep our money off-shore, but
we also buy real estate through third-parties, and we’ve even done our bit for the environment
in Europe. Ever heard of the “Eco-Mafia’? You see, wind energy is all the rage in Europe,
but the industry is not that regulated. Thanks to our beloved deceased boss, Franky Boy, and his
connections in Italy, we’ve been able to launder money into the wind energy industry in Europe.
We’ve even muscled out our competition in Europe, and taken over a good chunk of the industry.
Not bad eh, for a bunch of guys that used to shoot each other over squabbles
and talk business on the telephone. We’ve also been able to launder cash and make cash
through Italy since those Sicilians own hundreds and hundreds of restaurants and bars and cafes in
Europe. Make no mistake, those wise guys in Sicily still have a lot of power.
Ok, back to basics. We might not do hits in the street anymore,
but mark my words, if you have the cash and you want someone gone, we can make them
go missing, at a cost of course. We might take out a knucklehead who’s been getting in
the way of our drugs business, or we might secretly take out one of our own affiliates
if he’s not doing what he’s been told to do. We work with other organized crime, such
as the Japanese Yakuza, the Russian mafia, the Albanian mafia, and Chinese Triads, and for
the most part things run smoothly. Then you’ve got disorganized crime, what you might call street
gangs, and we try our best not to get involved. Talking about my main job, let’s say I want some
opioids on the streets, maybe some Fentanyl. Well, through my connections with the Chinese
Triads I can get that from China to the USA. If you want ecstasy, well, I’ve got my man
in Amsterdam. Take out one Sammy the Bull, and there’s a man very happy to take
his place and there are millions of American ravers waiting with open hands.
You could say I am in charge of operations. And the drugs operation is one of our biggest
money-spinners. I don’t need Mexicans for all my drug business, far from it.
This is how it goes: Some of the raw opium is produced in Pakistan
and Turkey or parts of SouthEast Asia. It’s then refined into morphine in countries where
corruption is rife. Local politicians, police, the army, you name it, all take a cut. Just look
at what that Thai politician said, the one who was arrested for heroin trafficking back in the
day, he said he’d been working with soldiers. So, I use these corrupt countries and then the
Sicilian Mafia can get it over to America where I will collect and distribute. I get involved
with the cocaine trade, but heroin and other opioids are my bread and butter. There are just
too many hands in the cocaine business. Plus, being connected to gangs such as the Mexican
Mafia or MS-13 is just not our style. We did for a while do deals with the Mexicans, and
traffic cocaine back to the Sicilians for European consumption, but since Franky Boy, the darling
of the Sicilians, was taken out by that paranoid bonehead, that’s kinda fallen flat on its back.
We are not animals, we are highly organized now, in spite of what you might have seen on the
Sopranos. Like the Russians, or the Chinese, we keep our heads down. If violence has to happen,
it will, but we’ll try and make people go missing rather than leave blood on the streets.
Ok, so we made a mess of a prison cell when we took out the grass James “Whitey”
Bulger but that only goes to show we stand by our code of conduct and we’ll get you
if you cross us. If snitches get stitches inside prison, for us, rats get splattered.
As one of my colleagues, a captain in New York, said recently in an interview, “In this
life there are three choices: you can rat, you can go to jail, or you can die. That’s the
only way you get out. There is no quitting.” That says it all, really, we haven’t gone
anywhere because when you get into this life there’s no getting out. We just don’t make the
headlines because we eke away in the background, trying to keep things friendly and usually staying
away from the violence that comes with crime. I know we’re still under the radar, but when
you look at what’s happening down at the border, we think the authorities have
got much bigger fish to fry. Now we think you need to have a look at the
era when the mafia ruled the underworld, in this fascinating video, “Most
Horrific Crimes - The Italian Mafia.” Maybe you’re not in the mood for
that, so have a look at this… either way click one now before we
make you an offer you can’t refuse.
