Ok its 1985, cocaine is a huge racket. Who sets up a relationship with a guy like Escobar , which family? Too much $$$ to be made not having a supply of pure coke sent to you every month in the 1980s.

I imagine the Gambinos for example had a crew based in Florida to make this happen and set up their own transportation to get it to New York. Escobar had his own crew based in Miami as well which would have created the opportunity for mob guys to build a business relationship with Pablos.

https://www.risetopeace.org/2018/11/11/the-mafia-and-the-latin-american-drug-trade/rmalta/

Ties between the Sicilian Mafia and Colombian drug cartels have been suspected for years, with one FBI informant, Antonino Giuffre, linking the Sicilian Mafia to Pablo Escobar. Giuffre, the former right-hand man to the chief of the Sicilian Mafia, leaked to the Italian press that the two groups had close relations. He detailed how the Cosa Nostra advised Escobar’s Medellin Cartel on military tactics and business practices for expanding the drug business and related criminal activity.

Escobar sent drugs to Sicily in exchange for advice. These drugs were forwarded to the American Mafia, which would exchange them for weapons and money. This created an efficient and highly prosperous global supply chain that was hard to track.

I recall the Cuntrera-Caurana clan (including the Rizzuto’s) and the Gambino’s had some connections when a lot of them weee living in Venezuela for awhile. Lots of coke comes through the Port of Montreal and has for a long time.

in 1987 a load of 600 kg of cocaine landed in Sicily on the ship "Big John" and established links between the Medellin cartel and Cosa Nostra, at that time Cosa Nostra also controlled the cocaine market in Italy, not just heroin

Pannunzi started to contact Colombian traffickers in Venezuela, Amsterdam and Madrid. He moved to Colombia where he would become one of the most important cocaine brokers for both the Sicilian Mafia and the Calabrian 'Ndrangheta with the Colombian cocaine cartels.

At the height of his criminal career he was trading 1,500 to 2,000 kilograms of cocaine a month. On a tapped phone, he was overheard boasting of the ease and confidence with which he handled his Colombian suppliers. To reinforce the bonds with his Colombian suppliers, Pannunzi arranged his son Alessandro Pannunzi's marriage with a notorious family from the Medellín Cartel.

I remember seeing a video when then senator Joe Biden was part of a panel asking questions to an American linked to the colombians, and it was established that the colombians (back in the late 80's) did not like doing business much with the 5 families because they would often kill their guys and steal the coke.

How the fuck do they even get away with that? A guy as Powerful as Escobar during that time easily could have sent guys and created a blood bath of mob guys being whacked left and right.

This is the reason Chris was killed by Roy Demeo after he robbed the guys for their cocaine. Roy had no choice but to do it because of the consequences he was facing if it wasn't done.

I don't believe for a second that Escobar didn't like dealing with the Italians. The Italians had guys down in Florida making deals to get shipments sent up to New York.

He was powerful in Colombia, not New York. No one has ever killed mob guys "left and right" except other mob guys.

First of all, those guys were Cuban, not Colombian.
And Roy had to do it because he was ordered to do it by Nino and Paul. And the reason he was ordered to do it was because Chris was a complete nobody. Why would Nino, much less Paul, give a shit about Chris? Why wouldn't they they give him up at the slightest inconvenience?

That aside, from what I remember from the book, Chris killed 4 of their guys and El Negro's girlfriend/mother of his child. And rather than kill Chris themselves, maybe torture him etc. the Cubans asked the Gambinos to kill Chris. And then waited and waited and tried to sound tough and waited some more, until Roy finally killed Chris.

That's 1 body for the price of 5, and again, Chris was a nobody. How do you spin that into "the Gambinos were scared of the big bad Cubans"? But anyway that's beside the point since they weren't Escobar's guys.

Ok I'll ask you this....

If the Gambinos had robbed Colombians in Miami, does Escobar send a hit team to take those guys out? I understand maybe not send them all the way up to New York but Escobar was powerful as fuck in Miami during the 1980s and had lots of soldiers living there at the time. Griselda Blanco was working for Escobar and god forbid anyone tried to rob her of her cocaine and harm her men. She would have made sure they were taken out and it wouldn't have been very pleasant. She wouldn't have given a fuck they worked for the Gambinos or any mob family for that matter. Eye for an Eye, she was ruthless and brutal and didn't put up with that bullshit.

I'll just answer my own question.......... If it happened in Miami not only would they have been killed, their fuckin heads would have been shipped on a silver platter up to John Fuckin Gotti.

God's Banker Linked to Pablo Escobar

Roberto Calvi, who earned his nickname for his close ties to the Vatican Bank, was found hanged beneath Blackfriars Bridge in London amid strong suspicions that he was murdered.

Ayda Suarez Levy, the widow of a Bolivian druglord, claims that Calvi was laundering drug cartel money through an account in Nassau, in the Bahamas, on behalf of South American drug lords.

The Cocaine King sheds new light on Calvi's death, which remains one of the Vatican's darkest chapters and most contested mysteries.

Mrs Levy, the widow of Roberto Suarez Gomez, claimed in an interview on Italian television on Monday that Mr Calvi was her husband's "Italian contact".

"He said he could vouch for us," she told Italy's Channel Seven television.

"He said by vouching for us at such a high level, business would go well for us. I imagine he was talking about cocaine. He was not explicit but I imagine that is what it was about."

Ms Levy recounted an encounter involving her husband and Gunter Sachs, a multi-millionaire German playboy who was the third husband of Brigitte Bardot.

She said that six months before Calvi's death, she and her husband met Mr Sachs on a trip to Switzerland and they discussed the Italian banker.

Mr Sachs, who committed suicide in his Swiss chalet last year at the age of 78, reportedly told the Bolivian drug baron: "Calvi is very scared because Pablo Escobar wants his money back from the bank in Nassau."

The Bahamas bank that he was referring to was an affiliate of Banco Ambrosiano, which was Italy's biggest private bank when it collapsed in 1982.

It was headed by Mr Calvi, who had close ties to the Vatican's bank, formally known as the Istituto per le Opere di Religion – the Institute for Religious Works.

The claims made in the book could "completely revolutionise the interpretation of Calvi's death," said Philip Willan, the author of "The Last Supper – The Mafia, the Masons and the killing of Roberto Calvi".

Until now the speculation was that Calvi was murdered by the Cosa Nostra mafia of Sicily, possibly with complicity by Italian politicians or the Vatican itself.

"If Escobar wanted his money back and Calvi was not able to pay it, he would have had a motive to kill Calvi. There is evidence suggesting that Calvi may have had direct links to the laundering of drug money in the Caribbean," said Mr Willan.

The evidence was enough to persuade the US Customs Service to launch an investigation into the alleged laundering of $34 million through the Bahamas affiliate of the Banco Ambrosiano in the late 1980s.

In 1988 Suarez Gomez, the Bolivian drug trafficker, was given a 15 year prison sentence for drug crimes, but was released in 1996.

By then he had accumulated a huge fortune. His widow recounts in the book how his men produced around two tons of cocaine paste in jungle laboratories in Bolivia each day and then sent it to Escobar's Medellin cartel.

At the height of its power, the cartel, headed by Escobar, was smuggling 15 tons of cocaine into the US each day.

Based on what? Griselda actually had 6-8 killers that were the core members of her crew like Rivi Ayala, not hundreds of guys. And most Colombian and Cuban crews in Miami at the time were the same. Guess what, all the New York families at the time had dozens of guys who were shooters too, and plenty of young guys behind them who were willing to step up.

What does it matter anyway, it's not like they were all going to meet in a big parking lot and have a firefight.

People make out the Colombian narcos of the 70s and 80s t0 be more than they were. Yes they made a lot of money because coke is the biggest moneymaker and they had "power" in their shithole country because it was poor and corrupt and any moron with 100K could buy an "army" of wild indians, but on the street in the US they were the same as any other group. They weren't the only gangsters that had guns lol.

It's the Mexicans who are unmatched in terms of muscle and that mostly after the Zetas popped up that the cartels started having their huge military wings. And even so they can still be robbed. The PK crew in Chicago robbed cartel stash houses and nothing happened to them.

The DEA demanded that Venezuela hand over the Cuntreras, according to the Italian press

Rome - 16 SEPT 1992 - 00:00 CEST

The Italian courts decided on Monday to maintain the detention of the Cuntrera brothers Paolo and Gaspare, who were handed over by Venezuela on Sunday, even though no charges were pending against them in Italy. Now, these two brothers are already accused of mafia association and drug trafficking. Pasquale, the third Cuntrera, the head of the family known as Cuntrera-Caruana, had been accused of similar charges since 1984.

Italian involvement in the cocaine trade even pre-dates the rise of the Colombian cartels, with records of mafia members arrested in Brazil for cocaine trafficking as far back as 1972. But at first, cocaine was a minor part of a broad criminal portfolio that included everything from international heroin trafficking to local waste disposal rackets.

When Colombia’s Medellín and Cali cartels began to ramp up cocaine trafficking into Europe in the 1980s, the Italians were among the main wholesale buyers, moving and selling the product that Galician smugglers brought in for the Colombians.

But the Italians’ experience in the heroin business offered them a major competitive advantage over other European mafias getting into the cocaine trade.