WASHINGTON – They wore old guns in the new economy world. They believed that the stock exchange was like rubbish, whores and drugs, goodfellas, good guys with guns and the Italian surname. They imagined that the course of action could be manipulated like garbage cans, shipyards, the harbor front, little street pimps, the greengrocer forced to pay for lace or Las Vegas. In the long agony of an Italian Mafia who dies in America, suffocated by new, stronger and more ruthless Mafias, the confused and scattered remnants of the five Cosa Nostra families had thrown themselves on Wall Street, to recover the myth, the power, with financial frauds and the money of a time that is now ending. The arrest of 120 “good guys” caught with their hands in the bag is another sign, after so many, that the days of the Godfather are numbered. If we did not know how much blood the myth is imbued with, we would almost feel sorry for the now defeat of this Empire of Evil. It is the third time in three years that the New York State Attorney and its tireless and ambitious unions, Mary Jo White, fit Italian mobsters surprised to manipulate the course of small companies listed on the stock exchange, imposing by force, with the knife throat of agent and houses, of pump and dump, as they say in the jargon of change, to “inflate and download” titles. But no one had ever attempted an operation on the scale of this infiltration of Wall Street and the Nasdaq decided by the Gambino and the Columbus, to return strong. Cosa Nostra, in New York, has been in retirement for years, since the government approved the “Rico”, the special anti-mafia law that allows hasty arrests and incriminazioni spicce, the prosecutor Giuliani made a name by persecuting big and small mobsters and, above all, the classical sources of wealth and therefore of power, began to run out.
Police, magistrates, prosecutors and ambitious prosecutors, such as Rudi, like Mary Jo, boast of having demolished Cosa Nostra, but Cosa Nostra has been demolished by itself, when the new generations of chiefs, soldiers, godparents have not known, not could, replace the Old Sicilians, the old ones. Tracing today a precise map of what remains of the Italian Mafia in New York is not possible. There are no more territorial borders, those that once triggered “mattress wars” when they were violated. The names of the “five families”, Genovese, Gambino, Lucchese, Colombo and Bonanno, are often empty and dry shells entrusted to dried up “don” seniors. The old cash cows, the money cows that nourished the organization, guaranteed silence and could buy judges, policemen and politicians in sacks, dried up. Restaurants and shops no longer have to pay bribes to squat masters with nicknames such as “Senza Collo”, “L ‘Uncino” to get the trash taken. The district of the packaging of Manhattan, where once was not sewn a petticoat and did not deliver a cut of cloth without the Five Families “wet a little beak” is now completely cleaned up. The “Russian Mafia” has also terrified the Italians, because, as Sammy said “Il Toro” Gravano, lieutenant of the last Don, John Gotti in jail for 10 years because of the betrayal of Gravano, “we Italians killed you, if you did the asshole.The Russians kill you, your wife, your mother, your children, your grandmother and your dog. ” Money, and the new levers of immigrants willing to do anything, are the fuel of criminal organizations. The Cosa Nostra can no longer feed on the fresh and desperate flesh that the ships overturned on Ellis Island. The proceeds of criminal operations are a stream, no longer a river. According to the Prosecution, the illegal gains made by this last hit on Wall Street in six months have reached 50 million dollars, 100 billion lire, a ridiculous sum that the US stock gains and loses in a few minutes: Bill Gates it has come to lose 24 thousand billion lire in one day. Nobody knows who is, if any, the “don of the don”, the head of all the leaders, now that John Gotti is in prison, suffering from cancer, and his son, said Junior, is not taken seriously by nobody. The other mammasantissima are like him in prison, or they work for the “federals” as “repentants”.
Vicente “La bazza”, Gigante is old and ill. Gravano writes memoirs, turning quietly around the city after having his boss condemned, Gotti. Carmine “la serpe” Persico, a legend of the Colombo family, is in a retirement home. Dominic Cirillo, called “The silent” has broken the silence and is also “a pigeon on the stool”, one that chirps for the police. The days of Joe Bonanno, of Lucky Luciano, of Anastasia and of the Anomima Omicidi “are literature, ancient history”, says Howard Abadinsky, president of the International Association for the Study of the Mafias. The new generation is made up of “psychopaths, fools, violent youngsters who in a few months pass from being a simple soldier to the rank of caporegime”. Gotti Junior, who at the age of 33 assumed the nominal leadership of the Gambino family after his father’s conviction, is described by a repentant as a vain, greedy boy, “a minchione” who got into trouble for annoying two policemen on the street, a idiocy that certainly none of the old men would have ever committed. The old ones are always older and only Gotti, “‘u minchione”, was born after the Second World War. His main advisor, the real brain of the family, “Little Nicky” Corozzo is also in jail. The head of the Genovese family, Mickey Domino Generoso is 79 years old. The godparents of the Bonanno and Lucchese are over sixty and the number of their “soldiers” has decreased in the 90s, due to lack of reliable recruits. Alfonso “Little Al” D ‘Arco, considered for years the head of the “Lucchese Family” revealed that many families had frozen the “assumptions”, because they could not trust the new ones. The Bag, with the air of crime clean by “white collar” and the immense potential of profits was the last “territory” that the remains of Cosa Nostra tried to infiltrate, without understanding that too many eyes look at it, too fortunately sheriffs the monitor. Against the new and legitimate mafias of finance, the old Mafia of guns had no hope